lines inside

This being in relationship is not the imagined string tied to a young girl's finger, tugged by a future mate clutching the other end. If two hearts pull at equal strength, drawing themselves up from the darkness with every intention to travel closer to something encompassing and lasting, what of the beautiful web that the spider weaves in all directions to catch the sun, disappearing eventually in the breeze? 

Is that not love, delicate strands fixed to the wind? 

Sometimes [all the time] the string frays. 

And then we are to weave once more with the silk inside, 
tethering to a locus of tenderness. 

Let me be the web: 

strong as high-grade steel

long enough to encircle a heavenly body

capable of stretching four times my length

tough enough to suspend this heart over the world.

The Journey - 

David Whyte

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

small, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life. 

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

calculate

These things marked on the abacus sliding down hemlock trees between PA ridges today -

0) infinite number of times the dog finds bear droppings to smear over her recently bathed self
0) infinite places to stand in sun - stand under grey skies
0) infinite heart flutters corresponding to water over rocks
0) infinite cravings for burned marshmallows over flames illuminating friends
0) infinite acts of kindness when someone makes their home your resting place
0) infinite ways of counting what it means to make life matter


Zero
Hafiz, translated Daniel Ladinsky

Zero
Is where the Real Fun starts.
There's too much counting
Everywhere else!

this is the world

At the occupy wall street protest weaving down broadway street in nyc, a man encouraged those watching on the sidewalk "Come, join us." It sounded audacious. Join this world - step from there to here. But where is here? And where is there? We are so small, we are so infinite, we are nothing and everything.




Mary Oliver, “October”
1

There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2

I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:

little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.

3

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes—
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.
Near the fallen tree
something—a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down—tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.

4

It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5

Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6

Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:

so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

see straight through

What if we never knew ourselves, the greatest gift to be transparent like a jellyfish and not assume that the world sees the same stuffing, the same heart, the same soul, the same breaking, the same joyful yelping. But instead, looks at our composition; all of those connective tissues, swirling into patterns that form us again and again, unrecognizable and yet the same. For you who make parts of parts, whole. For you who are windsprints.

Now!

Becoming student is not what I want from school.
Becoming certified, credentialed, scholarly - none of it.
Becoming a seeker of the unfamiliar and infinite, that would be lovely.




Someone should start laughing
Hafiz, translated Daniel Ladinsky
 

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?

If you think that the Truth
can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean

Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,

O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing --
Now!