from the fera files...

[feranaja]

how's that for some unintentional alliteration?

I was sent this today and thought it was wonderful.


In A Handful of God

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,
When your fears surrender to your strengths,
You will begin to experience

That all existence
Is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians

Who are acting stoned
For very intelligent and sane reasons

And of course are becoming extremely sweet
And wild.

In a handful of the sky and earth,
In a handful of God,

We cannot count
All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there
Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void
Or darkness.

There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic
In this luminous, brimming
Playful world.

~ Hafiz ~

[feranaja]

I love the poetry of Wendell Berry...here's an offering for today, not as bleak as I thought it was upon first reading.
_______________________
No Going back

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~

[feranaja]

What's In The Temple?

In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow.
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
If she stands still it will catch up with her.
Pause with us here a while.
Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are very still.

If I say the word God, people run away.
They've been frightened--sat on 'till the spirit cried "uncle."
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can't name.
They know he's out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
But there is all this stuff in the way.

I can't talk about God and make any sense,
And I can't not talk about God and make any sense.
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.

I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
You see there the consequences of carelessness,
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.

We don't build many temples anymore.
Maybe we learned that the sacred can't be contained.
Or maybe it can't be sustained inside a building.
Buildings crumble.
It's the spirit that lives on.

If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?

Go there now.

~ Tom Barrett ~

[feranaja]

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

~ e.e.cummings ~

(Complete Poems 1904-1962)

[feranaja]

One of my alltime favourites, from Rabrindranath Tagore




I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and re-made the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours-
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

[feranaja]

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free

~Wendell Berry~

[feranaja]

let it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love

~ e.e. cummings ~

[feranaja]

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

~ e.e. cummings

[YsetEternal]

yet again, youve got great taste f...

[feranaja]

Thank you darling - I love you, don't I?

[YsetEternal]

I think so :D

[feranaja]

Forever Oneness,
who sings to us in silence,
who teaches us through each other.
Guide my steps with strength and wisdom.
May I see the lessons as I walk,
honor the Purpose of all things.
Help me touch with respect,
always speak from behind my eyes.
Let me observe, not judge.
May I cause no harm,
and leave music and beauty after my visit.
When I return to forever
may the circle be closed
and the spiral be broader.

-- Bee Lake (an aboriginal woman)


(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThePossibleCanine)

[YsetEternal]

Ooh. That ones lovely...

[feranaja]

I have it memorized and use it as a daily prayer of sorts.

Another favourite:
A BLESSING

May you awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path.
May the flame of anger free you from falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may anxiety never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

~ John O'Donohue

[feranaja]

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.


~ Joy Harjo ~

[feranaja]

Letter of Retainer



The heart was made to stammer.
How I wish it weren't so.
By moonlight, even the stars
have a grammar. Before we are
deleted from these paragraphs of snow,
I'd hold you

harmless from and against all losses

if I could,
but Earth is unforgiving.

In the samovars of night,
where all love's litanies repeat,
when grounds settle
and the time is right
we brew hope
like a small fluid contract.
So, if you wish,
we'll set forth upon an understanding,

that far rich wild trip
so dangerous to complete
which, in the suburbs of a glance,
on any avenue, begins in risk,
where all best journeys start,
with the half-lit hieroglyphics
of the heart.

~ Diane Ackerman ~

[feranaja]

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.


~ John O'Donohue ~

(Echoes of Memory)

[feranaja]

The Lovers

Psyche spends three warm nights with Eros
they lie together uncovered and entwined
and watch the fireflies out the open window -

the first night is a tumult
when she awakes, he is gone
so she changes the sheets
has seconds on bacon and eggs.

the second night is sweet, languorous
full of tenderness
every question she asks
he stifles with another kiss

The moon is reticent, discreet
a thousand years ago or a thousand miles away
the ocean turns over smiling in its sleep

when Psyche awakes, he is gone again
but she finds a note propped up against the coffee pot:
"I love you!"
she makes the bed with troubled eyes
would he, if he really knew?

the third night he is late
but hungry, it seems, for more and more of her -
they knock the clock over
time scatters in little pieces on the floor
would he? Psyche asks herself.

Eros sleeps, his breath tickling her ear
the sweet spice of him engulfs her
but Psyche cannot sleep

she gets up, stumbling over the
fragments of eternity which cut her feet
she curses softly
an owl warns in the distance
she goes to the bathroom door and without thinking
turns on the light
Eros wakes

he is far younger than she!
a mere boy with sleep caught in his lashes!
she stands in the doorway
feasting her eyes on the beauty of him
but not Eros
"You fool!" he hisses, "you fool! What did I tell you!"
then he pulls on his pants, ties his shoes with emphasis
without another word
he lets himself out, slamming the door.

Psyche sees him out the window one last time
the match flaring his face
as he angrily lights a cigarette

she puts on her old pink chenille dressing gown
gathers the broken clock pieces philosophically
into a black dustpan
in her broken-down slippers, she goes to let out the cat
takes in the paper and sees the grey dawn
but by the time the water has boiled for coffee for one
she is already bent over the table
weeping

a thousand years or a thousand miles away
the ocean heaves again and sighs
for it is full of such tears.
a. o.howell

[feranaja]

For m1thr0s


Pythagoras, of old
heard in his waking dream
the ancillary prographs of the golden word.
the petty petitions of the worm-eaters
as yet deferred
were as the dust unformed on my piano
wrapped in its plastic sheet
lest the music escape
and make this heart more wretched
to lose its unsung beat.
space to him was iridescence
a scale of ordered rhapsodies
spiraling with half-furled wings
in the chromathematics
eternal being sings
with such grave and sweet restraint.
when he had reached the tower of his reasoning
he found the steps back down
were black and white
triangles and ringed with fright.
what was the Greek for the coming do, re, mi?
he must have cleaned
his trembling fingernails
to remind himself that he was mortal.
Pythagoras of old
saw in his waking dream
the universe - a cosmic harp
with stars for streaming notes
and space for non-existent things:
the precessions of the equinox
the cadence of planets holding hands
in their stately dance of epoch
which demands
converging rays of every circle
sun-centered in wonder
his thought yet thunders down the centuries
as some wild exultant Pegasus
scattering bright hoofprints
in our wincing minds.
let me tell you that
his eyes in death became light mirrors of fire
and in his visions and his desire
he was blinded and could not speak
yet we see ourselves reflected
in the square of his hypotenuse
singing mutely do, re, mi
though not, of course, in Greek.

[feranaja]

The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like a fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

~ David Whyte ~

[feranaja]

Throw Yourself Like Seed -- Miguel De Unamuno



Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

~ Miguel De Unamuno ~

[Okazaki Castle]

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit

Agreed, agreed. The clearing process proceed apace nicely I think regarding the old karma of position in age. Lots of it coming thru very fast, to express one last time as it exits the system. Then, the way is clear for newer, more desired roads and paths. Least, that's what I've been picking up on where you're at what you're going thru these past couple of months or so. Does it make sense to you? How are you doing with things overall btw? It's been a while since we chatted...

all the best,
Oazaki.

[feranaja]

Hello sweetie,

How am I doing? I'm very, very sad. Without Luke, its as if "all the oxygen has been removed from the air, but I still have to breathe."
(Thank you, Pat McConnell)

And - I'm very, very blessed. With Lil and my Hurricane Daniel, its like every moment offers fresh possibility; love is something I just now discovered, and life is lived in between Christmas, bdays, Sabbts, Easter, St Valentines, and lets-celebrate-Tuesday afternoon.



But that's ok - tit's part of the challenge and beauty of life. Love is eternal but the body is not. Alongside this deep sorrow is so much joy, and I can live with paradox. Isn't that the whole challenge of the pillars? To unite and live between them? To embrace paradox, clear out the intellect and - dance??


Life is beautiful and tragic.

Mine is filled with love and promise, regret and sorrow... the loves I lost, the ones I have, the many yet to come.

how are you doing?
xxoo fera

[Okazaki Castle]

Well, on the sadness and the eternal body thing, might if I work on that for you? I'd like to, and it suits my purposes and strategies in many ways also. Think I can do things fast as well on these two, if you'll flow with the ride for me on them... ;)


Alongside this deep sorrow is so much joy, and I can live with paradox. Isn't that the whole challenge of the pillars? To unite and live between them? To embrace paradox, clear out the intellect and - dance??


I understand that relates to Kabbalah somehow, left and right pillars of Strength and Mercy or smtg close to that, am I right? I do work with the same energy routes but do it on Taoism where they're called the 'thrusting channels'. I always found that name kind of funny, in a fairly juvenile humour way. Yes though, I agree most definitely on the paradox being emobdied and mastered, and then dancing. And yes also, it does work best, only in some ways in fact I'd say, when done on no-mind. It's one of the reasons I think why Venus recommended to me back in June last year that I become an airhead to see what it's like. Far more fun in fact, and doesn't make you stupid as some peopel think, when done correctly...


how are you doing?
Waiting for the loves to come. They need to be pretty, arrive and get into bed easily first though. Generally good and chilled though, things moving along nicely, so all cool. Detached, going thru motions, usual space for me last few years really... Waiting for the party to start you could say, and till then working towards it on the path that leads there. I've always held that it's not really the journey which counts but arrival at the destination. Then, after the destination is arrived at, you can unstrap your pack, kick back and chill, and go see what there is to do that's fun in the place you're at. Bit like that, my space and attitude...

bacci, and hugs,
Seb.

[feranaja]

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte ~

[feranaja]

Walk Alone
If they answer not to thy call walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou of evil luck,
trample the thorns under thy tread,
and along the blood-lined track travel alone.

If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
O thou of evil luck,
with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart
and let it burn alone.

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/danny2023.jpg

[Zifiriskenoxa]

When the seer is too blind to see the light
Do not try to increase the light
It's a flame within
Some will see some will not
Take your time to evaluate what's really right

[feranaja]

A Map to the Next World -- Joy Harjo

A Map to the Next World

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map
for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields,
from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light.
It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land,
how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money.
They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a fog steals our children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the monsters are born there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here,
how to speak to them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map.
Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us,
leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood,
your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine --
a spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death,
smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast
of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X,
no guide book with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history,
a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers
where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth
who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

~ Joy Harjo ~

[feranaja]

The Winter of Listening -- David Whyte
(for Lila and Danny, who help me to listen)


No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

~ David Whyte ~

[feranaja]

Sabbaths 1999, VII

Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

With the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.

The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.

What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.

~ Wendell Berry ~

[feranaja]

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

~ John O'Donohue ~

[feranaja]

Another Spring -- Kenneth Rexroth


The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Northern Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

~ Kenneth Rexroth ~

[feranaja]

SELF-PORTRAIT

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned,
if you can know despair or see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eye,
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

~ David Whyte ~

[feranaja]

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(House of Light)

[feranaja]

For Daniel and Lila

Testimony
(for my daughters)

I want to tell you that the world
is still beautiful.
I tell you that despite
children raped on city streets,
shot down in school rooms,
despite the slow poisons seeping
from old and hidden sins
into our air, soil, water,
despite the thinning film
that encloses our aching world.
Despite my own terror and despair.

I want you to know that spring
is no small thing, that
the tender grasses curling
like a baby's fine hairs around
your fingers are a recurring
miracle. I want to tell you
that the river rocks shine
like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death,

I want to remind you to look
beneath the grass, to note
the fragile hieroglyphs
of ant, snail, beetle. I want
you to understand that you
are no more and no less necessary
than the brown recluse, the ruby-
throated hummingbird, the humpback
whale, the profligate mimosa.
I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness",
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.

~ Rebecca Baggett ~

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/Easy20Waves.jpg

[feranaja]

The Leaf and the Cloud (excerpt) -- Mary Oliver

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will wither or not.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

~ Mary Oliver ~

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/not_despair.jpg

[feranaja]

My Prayer to Gaia

by Sedonia Cahill

Great Mother, I am your daughter and I call to you.
Teach me courage and kindness and how to love myself
Help my heart be pure and my vision clear Show me how to live without bitterness and blame Let me know nature which is always true
Fill me with your silence as I learn the art of patience
Teach me of my own power and purpose
Send me your light as you guide me into your dark cave
Hold me when I am afraid
Help me to see there is no fault in the Universe, only life dancing
Reveal to me that timeless space inside
Where the dance has no beginning and no end
Fill me with wonder as I touch once again the delicate magic that is life
In my heart there is much longing
I am ready to face whatever your Mystery may unveil...

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/ATT6.jpg

[feranaja]

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!


Honeymoon with Big Joy!



http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/cid_148701c7798a8af5f0d00200a8c0sea.jpg

[feranaja]

For the young lives lost and dreams unfulfilled -
may we honor them by making good use of the days we are given,
for it might be otherwise....

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning down to its black water
to the place that we can not breathe

will never know
the source from which we drink
the secret water cold and clear

nor find in the darkness
the small gold coins
thrown by those who wished for something else


http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/stabat7E1.jpg

[feranaja]

This is what you should do --
This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people...
reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your flesh shall become a great poem.

~ Walt Whitman ~

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/10285895.jpg

[feranaja]

Bone

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape -
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something -
for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer's head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long -
and thought: the soul
might be like this -
so hard, so necessary -

3.

yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn't see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don't we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts -
certainties -
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.

~ Mary Oliver ~


http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/brian-jungen-cetology-whale-bones-p.jpg

[feranaja]

for my beloved dogs, all of them past and present, who have shown me God inside and out, over and over, taught me to be kind, and perhaps even, at least some of the time, good.



Book of Hours, II, 22 -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Love Poems to God, II, 22

You are the future,
the red sky before sunrise
over the fields of time.

You are the cock's crow when night is done,
you are the dew and the bells of matins,
maiden, stranger, mother, death.

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
that rise from the stuff of our days---
unsung, unmourned, undescribed,
like a forest we never knew.

You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.
To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

[feranaja]

Visitation

When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale
-exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven-

cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

- Holy Infant, Little Marie -
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
- a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice -
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

~ Mark Doty ~

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/humpback-whales-singing.jpg

[feranaja]

THE SEA -- David Whyte


The pull is so strong we will not believe
the drawing tide is meant for us,
I mean the gift, the sea,
the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,
how the great receiving depth
untamed by what we need
needs only what will flow its way.

Easy to feel so far away
and the body so old
it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?

What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our

wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.

~ David Whyte ~

(Where Many Rivers Meet)
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33/feranaja/when_the_tide_goes_out.jpg