Prayer - the Reverend Gretchen Haley - "Bless today"

Bless today
your hesitancy
your shy shrug
your behind the scenes skepticism,
your sweet stoicism.

Bless your boredom
and your anxieties,
those worries that will not quiet
no matter the mantras,
the mettas, or
the meditating moments.

Bless your impatience and
your butterflies
your brash tone
and your desire to talk to no one
to care about nothing,
to be invisible and invincible
to be already perfect
and with ease, of course

Bless your shame
your self-doubt
your inner critic
and your coping techniques -
all of them,
whatever they may be.

Bless
most of all
your broken heart
and all the longings that made it so
bless your grief
your anger
and your still pressing hope.

All of these,
we bless -
All of ourselves,
we bless -
in this gathering made holy by our wholeness
this community made sacred by our scars
Let us be blessed

Let us be a blessing

Song - Busca el Amor - Salvador Cardenal Barquero

Revisa tu corazón
Para hallar el amor en un rincón.
Pero busca el amor.
Ni placer ni passion.
El amor lo que hace al otro bien

Chorus:
Busca el amor en ti.
Se multiplica si lo repartís.
Busca el amor en ti.
Sólo él que ama puede ser feliz.
Busca el amor en ti.
Se multiplica si lo repartís.
Busca el amor en ti.
Sólo él que ama puede ser feliz.
Busca el amor en ti, en ti.

Registra tu camaleón.
Cuando cambia el color del corazón
Y te estalla la flor.
Un pétalo del sol.
El amor lo que hace al otro bien

English translation:

Examine that heart of yours,
As you look for the love on your high shelf,
Past the pleasure and passion
for your own self,
for the love that’s reaching someone else.

Chorus:
Seek out the love in you,
And find the joy that comes to those who care.
Seek out the love in you.
It only grows whenever it is shared.
Seek out the love in you,
And find the joy that comes to those who care.
Seek out the love in you.
It only grows whenever it is shared.
Seek out the love in you, in you.

Your heart’s a chameleon,
Ever open to change like any flower.
Spreading out for the sun,
petals bursting with power.
To be love that’s reaching someone else.

Ultimate Grace by Maria Teresa Gustilo Gallardo [prayer]

Ultimate Grace, the heart of every matter, in every perfection and imperfection, in all senses and: tenses, in moments of every right and wrong, presenting choices to inquiring hearts. You are in the purpose and the journey of mishaps. You are in moments of understanding and misunderstanding. We have but to seek and invoke you, and enable the work of your spirit. As prayer is but an articulated common dream, we invoke our ultimate concern for the work of faith. We long to be hand in hand, creating a world where everyone belongs.


Free us from our hindrances. Make invisible things visible; the voiceless heard; lay what is hidden before us; make the chained unbound; the doubting believe; what is confusing let clarify; as hardened hearts grow soft to the touch. May we come in fullness, with gratefulness, in faithfulness to one another. May we speak in kind conversing, disclosing our truths with care, expressing our practical wisdom to learn of its practical limits. For the world was not meant to be possessed by a singular truth, but to be built together upon revelations.

O Universe, with stars in your hair, you have shown that great things emerge from humble beginnings, no matter how flawed and lacking. That one story, in a stable, in prison, in the cave, in destitution, in abject poverty, if lived in all sincerity can liberate from darkness the many.

May our eyes seek to appreciate, our breaths to dedicate power, our hands to warm each other. When loving fearlessly, we are invincible. When free will is deliberate, we are pivotal. When dreaming together, we are infinite.

Remind us of the very questions that we have turned away from, that we thought could not be answered, or are impossible to realize. Dear Universal Intelligence, your embrace contains everything but confines nothing. In the ever insistence of existence, may this one moment count. Amen.

UUA Website

Accent Shortcuts

 

	Alt Shortcuts	Ctrl Shortcuts
á Á	Alt 0225 Alt 0193	Ctrl+’, a
é É	Alt 0223 Alt 0201	Ctrl+’, E
í Í	Alt 0237 Alt 0205	Ctrl +’, i
ñ Ñ	Alt 0241 Alt 0209	Ctrl+~, n
ó Ó	Alt 0243 Alt 0211	Ctrl+’, o

The Unicorn Poem - Tony Mares

On Seeing a Detailed Map
of Old Town, Albuquerque

I notice the empty space
where there is no map,
only theater of man and myth,

where there is no path
to the wild mesas,
the shimmering fields of the unicorn,

a great land of dream and memory,
where less lovely beasts pursue
and try to corral him.

El unicornio
malherido por la cadena que rompió
y el coral puntiagudo
que saltó, corre por los campos
rumbo a . . .
los sueños y el recuerdo.
Ya vienen los perros.
El unicornio sangra, sangra.
Se vuelve pura espuma del sufrir,
un leve humo blanco.
Se vuelve pura esperanza.

The unicorn,
badly wounded
by the chain he broke
and the sharp-tipped picket fence he jumped,
runs through the fields
toward . . .
dreams and memories.
The unicorn bleeds, bleeds.
He becomes the lather of suffering,
a thin white smoke.
He becomes a pure hope.

To the east are the Sandia Mountains
where Apaches hidden by time
look down on the great city
stretching far to the west
and all along the Rio Grande valley.
They are beyond the old pain now,
the shrinking land and the suffocating sky.
Once in a while they recall
the good times and as a jest
they send a bear
scampering down into Albuquerque
to test the state of the laughter
there on the asphalt streets,
the surface of the smoothed-over rift.

Enormous caterpillars called "Eucs"
have cut a swath
across the Sandias
gouging deeper than any book
has ever made a furrow
through my mind.

Tourists speed by
perhaps not sensing the scar tissue,
the plowed-up land,
not likely to see the aspen,
cedar, deer and wild goat
above the limestone ledge.

It is not where logic and tools
conspire to simplify the land
that a poem
snares the fish of light
in a shadowed stand of pine.

I choose the forest
and the peaks behind my eyes
above the road cut,
where a hobbled unicorn cries
and a white whale breeches
through El Greco's tumbling skies.

From those heights
the city down below forms a bowl
whose center is Old Town;
not the make-believe Old Town,
the Hollywood Old Town,
but rather as it was then called,
Alburquerque,
where it all began
in the unhurried nights and days
a long time ago,
where the small ranches
spread out along the river
and slowly the plaza formed
a diminutive stage,
the center of my universe.

Boxes on the map
are meant to be houses made of words.
Discrete squares,
loops and rectangles
form this world of ink.
It would become cluttered, messy,
to try to show the details
inside the make-believe worlds
these lines on paper represent.
Straight lines suddenly veer
or curve to follow some unknown contour
of the mind or of the land.

They are roads made of words
obscure as the kingdom
from which they come.

En el reinado de la palabra
todo puede ser.
El rey absurdo ni apenas
se vista de tinta.
Los vasallos andan por allá
entre las sílabas.
Y los demás,
es decir el pueblo,
como es ahora
y siempre ha sido,
forma el fondo escuro
del reinado de la palabra.

In the kingdom of the word
everything is possible.
The absurd king is not even barely
dressed in ink.
His vassals scurry around
through the syllables.
And the rest,
that is to say, the people,
as it is now and always has been,
form the obscure backdrop
for the kingdom of the word.

Roads are words
leading to

silence

where the map falters,
becomes the screechy note on the violin,
the musician blinded by the desert sun,

where the map stumbles
into a whiteness
as total as death.

He cruzado caminos
en los sueños.
Caminos que dan a la muerte.
El letrero de un camino dice "Roma,"
pero a Roma llegan
muy pocos caminos de aquí.

Son caminos
que se parecen mucho
a los caminos despiertos.

Son caminos
donde hay poca gente.
Caminos que dan a un parque
o a una vega placentera
en medianoche
con un jardín que pronto se hace
camposanto
con cruces
bajo luz blanca,
y todo esto
envuelto en la niebla que lleva
el barco del sueño.

Todo mar y camino
llegan al margen
de la nada
donde no hay ni huella que seguir.
Aquí el poeta con su pluma
dibuja imágenes
de su porvenir.

In dreams

I have come upon roads

leading to death.

A road sign says "Roma,"

but few roads here

lead to Rome.

These dream roads

are very much like wide awake

roads.

These are roads

with few people,

roads leading to a park,

the pleasant meadow

at midnight

and there is a garden

that changes into a cemetery

with crosses

bathed in white light.

And all this happens

wrapped in the fog carrying

the ghost ship of dreams along.

All roads and seas

lead to the edge of nothingness

where not even a clue 

is left to follow.

Here the poet with his pen

sketches out images

for his future.

Inside the boxes 

there is an incessant whirl.

People and their possessions

seek form,

the ultimate solidity of words.

Long before there were words,

the curious tracks they leave

across an empty space,

the only map

was in the eye of the eagle

gliding along the canyon walls,

or in the fine particles of sand

forming an undulating S,

the wake of the serpent 

sidewinding its way south

beneath the sun.

Once people formed by the light

became Aztecs wandering this land.

Their lips uttered words

and the words became gods. 

Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl,

Lord and Lady of Our Sustenance. 

Quetzalcoatl,

God of Life,

Creator of the People,

Lord of the House of Dawn.

Tezcatlipoca,

omnipotent God of Darkness,

God of Sorcerers and Highwaymen,

Lord of the House of Night.

We are not the Aztecs

who left ghost trails here.

We remember them.

We are the victims

of all the Aztecs--

Mexican Aztecs

Spanish Aztecs

Anglo Aztecs

Pick Your Own Favorite Aztecs.

We are the sacrificed

in this land

where the Lord of the House of Night

grows fat

at the Feast of the Flying of Men.

Reluctantly, we leave home and wander.

Sometimes our barrios

recall the family names of founders--

los Barelas, Martineztown,

los Candelarias--or the saints--

San José, San Felipe--

and we remember them 

on our travels

for we constantly move about

and we are far from Aztlán.

Words become seeds of maize
the healing herbs of the medicine man.
Words become mud villages
named with the flint edge
of cliff, wind, and star.
Tiguex, Alcanform, Isleta, Sandia.

Spaniards brought their words
for the shapes of horses, sheep,
metal plows, swords and crosses,
wheat, apples, peaches.
Franciscans offered up
their sales pitch--
sin, forgiveness, salvation,
the trade-in offer for the old
native gods.

Clouds of ivory

tinge the Spanish sky,

burst and fall in Mozarabic light,

a fountain spray

beneath al Andaluz sun

caught in some Alhambran

garden of my mind.

Evening toward Africa

and a dark muezzin

calls down the Moorish night

to the narrow streets of Granada.

Golden Age ballads

and a song

in praise of wine

by Samuel Ha-Nagid

drift through the olive trees

toward the sea.

Here an occasional Morrano

paused on the journey north,

seeing the Sandias,

seeing Granada in his mind,

and continued on up in the valley.

Spanish tongues

fleshed out the bare bones

of love and hate.

Indio

Mestizo

Española

Mexicano

Americano

whispered

the ritual words,

then parted the blessed thighs

In the name of the Father

and of the Son

who will be born of this union . . .

and of the Holy Ghost,

him, the spooky one,

the inscrutable tongue of fire

who threatened to burn me as a child.

Him, the ghost who may have been

the howling birth of strong men and women

who built

la Plaza de Alburquerque,

the Church of San Felipe Neri,

ad majorem gloriam dei.

Words of ancestors

spoke of fabulous islands and beasts,

fountains of youth,

cities of gold and heavenly utopias

where the saints would wait

for the second coming of Christ.

Words of ancestors

spoke of Hummingbird-on-the-Left,

an eagle devouring the hearts of men,

the sun who did battle with darkness

and arose every morning

from the pool of night,

human blood and tears.

Words of ancestors

spoke of Jesucristo and his mother,

la Virgen María, who intercedes

with God the Father

to have mercy on sinners.

Sephardic laments

of a lost tribe

carried the words of ancestors

who longed for Zion.

Words of ancestors

sprouted from the lips of the dying,

gathered and hovered

over the rites of extreme unction

and the return of the camposanto.

From where it no longer is,

a star takes aim like a sharpshooter

right at my eyes.

Light scatters in all directions,

a pack of wolves on fire

running to the past and the future.

Bones walk through my shadow

and my body explodes

into a longing for wings.

Coyotes gather in the dark place

circling my path with cold fire.

I cannot answer their hungry jaws.

A bird, a hawk, is a shadow 

circling my future,

is carved into stone I cannot see.

Camposanto of words

uncoupling from flesh,

camposanto of words

seeking the lips of a lover,

camposanto of words

unmoved by time

scattering the tombstones,

camposanto of words

crystalline for the moon

fleeting and hard

as an obsidian butterfly,

camposanto of words

you yearn for a song.

The land is stark in New Mexico.

The sky comes right down to the ground

and stamps hard on the earth

insistent as a Jemez dancer

or the staff of a matachín.

It is a land of hunters

where men and animals

stand naked in a forest of light,

always taking aim,

always the target.

Between San Ysidro and Cuba

I come across a hunter,

a coyote killed by a truck in the night,

a spot of gore on the road.

His great head stands alone,

sculpture mounted on the desolate asphalt,

the jaws thrown open like the land,

the fangs bare to the immense sky.

This is his last and fitting comment

on the world of coyote,

the vast wilderness of death

he did not know 

would fix forever in my heart

this final, silent, and classic howl.

Capulín rises, a perfect volcanic cone,

near Folsom, at the edge of the plains to the east.

We drive round the base in a pickup truck

hunting for deer, our tracks crisscrossing

the ghosts of cowboys on the Goodnight Trail,

Kiowas on their fast ponies, and earlier men

who hunted the mammoth and the great bison.

Capulín rises, a white marker

in a green and cloudy sea

while we, like cavemen, repeat the pattern below

before we, too, complete the circle

into memory, into silence, and into stone.

Looking down from Johnson mesa,

Ratón is a scattering of cold seeds of light,

mirror to the stars in the black sky.

I remember I am a fawn on this sheer ledge,

an early man wandered over from Folsom,

or from the cool caves at Altamira.

There is a cold wind sweeping around the rocks

as at Stonehenge, and through my bones.

Before my feet, a sharp drop falls

to the deer below nesting down for the night.

I remember that I am a tired hunter

and that time has caught me on this cliff.

There is nothing can be done for it 

except let hunter and hunted sleep for a while.

Tomorrow we take up the chase again with the sun

here where the world breaks off,

snapped like a twig or a rifle shot

into the silence of the valley below. 

Here the earth, too, is a hunter

restless on its trail through the void.

Driving on Highway 90 

east from Silver City

crow crosses my path above San Lorenzo.

Gray squirrel does the same thing

in Gila Wilderness.

Halfway through Hillsboro

a whirl of cottonwood leaves

dances across the highway 

following Percha Kreek

down to Caballo Lake.

The Caballo Mountains to the east

rear up from the desert floor

shimmering in the afternoon heat,

horses trapped in stone;

much like unicorns,

they stretch their necks upward,

the great blue heads

neighing into the sky.

Rhythms of the hunt

demanding as the staff of the matachines

return to la plaza vieja de Alburquerque,

the boxes made of ink on paper. 

Ya vienen los indios

de Guarecimé,

son los matachines

de Guarecimé

Son los matachines

de Guarecimé.

Son los matachines

de Guarecimé.

Words of ancestors

remembered a castle in County Cork,

a leprechaun hiding in the glen,

the clean taste of whiskey,

a beloved violin in the evening breeze.

A Victrola of the heart

plays in each box on the map

letting fly voices and words

which sing of another time.

A box on a map

is a whirling dust devil,

a ghost dance in ink.

Each box forms

a history of the flame word,

a cry from the past.

Ghosts walk arm in arm

around the Old Town plaza.

A pale tourist yawns.

Mr. Devine plays

a waltz on his violin.

Carried by the wind,

the music rising

from the bandstand in the square.

He dreams his children.

The old photograph

shows dark Irish eyes and hair.

He sees his grandson.

When she was young,

Rebecca Gutierrez sang

and danced in these streets.

Grandmother looks subdued.

Not at all like when she prayed 

the endless rosary.

Another photograph,

family portrait, dated 1898.

Cristobal Mares,

patriarch of the family,

prosperous ranchero,

his eyes are the shade of history.

He remembers his grandfather's stories

about the long cattle drive

north from Guadalajara,

the throat-searing crossing

of la jornada del muerto

(the dead man's journey)

to arrive in the rio arriba country,

green mountains north of Santa Fe

then Taos and home.

Trinidad Pacheco de Mares

endures the eternal Taos winter,

the struggle etched in the set jaw,

the pursed lips.

She is the matriarch who bears

for her husband Cristobal six children:

Laureano, Porfiria, Isabel,

Fernando, Lupita, Eduardo--

my grandfather who is about fifteen

in this photograph, stubborn enough

to survive the loss of land,

the Great Depression,

slaving in the sweatshops

for the Santa Fe Railroad.

He will live long enough

to wrestle me as a child,

that strength of his still there

for me to draw from until now.

These Mares and Martinez stare

from the cold eye of winter 

into the eye of the camera,

into the eye of death,

that bony-faced woman,

la huesuda, who smiles

and points her arrows at them

from my century,

from my eyes starting into theirs.

I turn away toward the future,

also found deep in the eyes

of David, as Goliath discovered

in a painting by Jaro Dedina.

David, confident as a man

delivered from the jaw of the lion

and from the paw of the bear,

ruddy and handsome,

his face the color of the earth,

takes up the foreground.

A visage as of a mighty power

to the right and above David's head

looks down from the sky

over the valley of Elah.

There seems to be no place

large enough on this canvas

for a Goliath to stand

against the steady gaze

of David's eyes.

Goliath, 

seen only in the eyes of David,

sees a graceful motion not his own,

a dance he fears he cannot do.

For forty days

the Philistine came forward

large and clumsy as a doomed empire.

Morning and evening

he shouted defiance of the spirit.

Trapped now by these eyes,

his great bulk

reduced to pitiable smallness,

Goliath can do no thing

but murmur the ritual slogans

and lurch forward to the battle.

David's eyes will not let go.

Goliath, held fast to is footnote in history

by the eyes in this painting,

does not see the onrushing future,

the small stone

cast from the whirling sling of David.

A third photograph shows my grandparents and their red brick house

on First Street in New Town.

It was the harsh thirties

and the photo tells

the old story of the Crash,

the land blowing away to Texas.

Grandpa is dressed in a cheap suit,

Grandma in what finery she could salvage.

Grandpa was bound

as my father was then bound,

hand and foot

by iron and steel and debt,

by the railroad "shops" 

where men were sliced in half

by the indifferent tools.

The "shops," layered with grime

so dark and gloomy

a worker could lean over a stairwell,

piss on the foreman below

and never get caught.

A train whistle

cuts from east to west

through a child's memory

that first flew and circled

high above some Andalusian plain,

or took flight on a fluted note

in the court of Texcoco.

Far away across the lake

and the floating gardens,

the ram's horn 

called to yet another sacrifice.

The child cannot remember

what he remembers now

here in Old Town,

here with this map,

right here in the Rio Grande valley

where extinct volcanos

guard the west approach

and the Sandia Mountains to the east

sculpt the memories of stone age men.

Another camera has caught 

the ghost in the KiMo Theatre.

Early 1930s, clean

New Mexico sky,

small town downtown Albuquerque

KiMo Theatre marquee:

Glen Tryon in Hot Heels,

Five Acts of Vaudeville.

Years later, Uncle Elfego

took me to see Roy Rogers,

Gene Autry, the Cisco Kid,

and all their epigones

who fought the good fight

against the ubiquitous bad guys.

Now, Uncle Elfego

sings in his grave.

Hot air balloons

float above Albuquerque,

balloons for his funeral

to rise with his spirit

and carry his memory into song.

Frozen, these figures

face the camera

to be caught in pure form.

The university student

dressed like a thirties dandy

raises his hand and salutes me

from his time to my own.

Another man, then in his 20s,

stares at me dumbfounded

from the west corner just north

of the old Fords and Chevies

on Fifth Street

more than half a century away.

The American afternoon crowd

in front of the KiMo

caught then by the camera lens

is now what it must be,

the frozen images within

the reduced and still life

dimensions of a photograph.

Three young businessmen

who try to sell arid mesa

and blue sky

greet each other.

The shadows of the distant future

cast by the camera

are too thin for them in this brilliant sun.

Too  thin, also, for the heavy-set optimist

wearing the good suit

and smiling into the end of his era.

He stares like the last 

black-and-white buffalo

into the dispassionate camera,

the last of his God-fearing kind.

He stands on the hood

of the Pierce Arrow.

Beside the Pierce Arrow

stands the happy baker from Lola's Cafe.

A woman and her daughter pause

to smile at me before they, too, exit

to their own half century.

Another Pierce Arrow continues east on Central,

black arrow crossing the bright day,

black arrow in black-and-white photograph,

black arrow crossing before my eyes.

It is New Mexico, late '20s or early '30s,

black-and-white photograph of the KiMo Theatre

appealing to the history minded

except for him, the ghost, the one who didn't pause

for the camera!

He's the fast-moving blur

him the clown,

sideshow barker,

seller of popcorn and cotton candy,

well dressed, it is plain to see

from the cloud puffs of form

which caught his hands

and sport coat sleeves,

also the pant legs and spats.

It is for him I sing--

him, the ghost

walking smartly along Central

to the El Fidel Hotel

or perhaps on to Old Town,

him, the ghost,

too slick to be caught by the camera,

too much to do

to be trapped by his own time.

Bones pass through his shadow

every day in Albuquerque.

Him, the ghost who stares at Uncle Elfego and me

in the KiMo Theatre

watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies,

a shadow on an old photograph,

a hope solid but shapeless,

fleeting as faith.

Him, the ghost in the KiMo Theatre.

A train whistle echoes again

and is gone.

The train sits on a siding.

The rails turn into rust.

Weeds numerous as headstones

grow inside the roundhouse

crying like an old woman to herself,

longing for her dead children.

I am reminded of the whistle's

shrill lament,

the purpose-bound engine

coming down the tracks,

remorseless as memory.

To the west on the map,

Mr. McCarty's house

is the thick rectangle.

The square behind it

is the tin-roofed garage

where Donny McCarty showed me

how to parachute out of the attic.

It was our airplane

and it was our fortress

deep behind enemy lines,

our secret cave in a cliff

where our small bodies

became immortal shapes

of comic book and movie heroes.

Across the street

is the Manzano Day School

with its playground

open to the children

of the country club set.

We invaded that forbidden wonderland.

Once the watchman caught us,

Donny and me, talked of jail,

tossed us out of paradise

and warned us not to be caught here again,

warned us never to return.

I became an enemy of the state. 

Nearby is the large square

meant to be Old Town Plaza.

The little domino on the north side

is the San Felipe Neri Church.

The other large square is the stone castle

Bernalillo County Court House of the 1880s

that became San Felipe School.

Every gloomy room held for a child

the ghost of an outlaw,

a cattle rustler, a hanged man.

The short leg of the L-shaped building

on San Felipe Street

is where I lied for one year

with good songs and a woman I dearly loved.

That thin rectangle on Lomas Boulevard,

New York Avenue, as it was called then,

stand for the word which is my center.

The bird of memory comes winging back

strong as my child lungs

gasping for air in an oxygen tent,

strong as the coal and cedar

in the wood-burning stove,

strong as the fresh-based wild pheasant

my father hunted and killed,

strong as the July sun

across the worn linoleum floor,

strong as the outhouse stench

even in freezing December,

strong as the wind-and-rain-polished

adobe walls in the back yard

that stood broken and gaping,

strong as the horsehair and straw

mixed in those mud bricks,

strong as the vanished voices

that held together the singing vision.

On such wings

the bird of memory flies

and then falls back to earth,

to silence, to velorios,

to all the weeping women.

Where the map leaves off

there is a great white empty space,

the rest of the world.

Beyond Old Town, la Plaza Vieja,

the old women in black shawls,

the old fires turning to white ash,

there is only terra incognita.

I populate these boxes and lines

made of ink on paper

as best I can inside my head.

Then I turn away

to my own place and my own time.

El unicornio

malherido por estos tiempos

corre al margen del mapa.

Bajo la luna llena

las blancas abejas

labran panal de luz

en una noche serena.

He visot pasar el unicornio.

Hechizado, lo he seguido

a la margen del ancho mar.

No sé si me quedo

para simpre dormido

o al punto de despertar.

Pero ya veo cristalizar

los granitos de sal

en el panal de las abejas.

The unicorn,

badly wounded by these times,

gallops along the margin of the map.

With the full moon above,

the white bees 

build a honeycomb of light

in the calm evening.

I have seen the unicorn pass by.

Spellbound, I have followed him 

to the edge of the sea

where I know not if I sleep forever

or if I am about to wake.

Still, I see

the salt grains crystallize

in the honeycomb of the bees. 

Song - Love Yourself - Linda Myers

Love Transcends

Love Transports

Love Transforms

Love Translates

Poem - The Vulture & the Body - Ada Limón

On my way to the fertility clinic,

I pass five dead animals.

First a raccoon with all four paws to the sky
    like he’s going to catch whatever bullshit load falls on him next.

Then, a grown coyote, his furred golden body soft against the white

cement lip of the traffic barrier. Trickster no longer,

an eye closed to what’s coming.

Close to the water tower that says, “Florence, Y’all,” which means I’m near Cincinnati,

but still in the bluegrass state, and close to my exit, I see

three dead deer, all staggered but together, and I realize as I speed past in my
death machine that they are a family. I say something

to myself that’s in between a prayer and curse—how dare we live

on this Earth.

I want to tell my doctor about how we all hold a duality

in our minds: futures entirely different. Footloose or forged.

I want to tell him how lately, it’s enough to be reminded that my body

is not just my body, but that I’m made of old stars and so’s he, and that last Tuesday,

I sat alone in the car by the post office and just was for a whole hour, no one
knowing how to find me, until I got out, the sound of the car door shutting like a gun,

and mailed letters, all of them saying, Thank you.

But in the clinic, the sonogram wand showing my follicles, he asks if I have any questions,

and says, Things are getting exciting.

I want to say, But what about all the dead animals? The Earth? Our trapped bodies?
But he goes quicksilver, and I’m left to pull my panties up like a big girl.

Somedays there is a violent sister inside of me, and a red ladder
that wants to go elsewhere.

I drive home on the other side of the road, going south now. The white coat has said

I’m ready, and I watch as a vulture crosses over me, heading toward

the carcasses I haven’t properly mourned or even forgiven. What if, instead of carrying

a child, I am supposed to carry grief? The great black scavenger flies parallel now,

each of us speeding, intently and driven, toward what we’ve been taught to do with death.

Instructions on Not Giving Up (poem) by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

THERE DOESN'T NEED TO BE A POEM by Tess Taylor

for sadness. Simply to breathe
next to a stream that slips to the gutter
near your house

would be enough. To see,
next door, in the graveyard,
the brown-and-yellow millipede

bury itself below one granite stone,
joining in the work of making soil,
just as now the faithful oxygen

still turns the copper headstone green,
oxidizing to patina despite all.
By luck, your own feathered alveoli

still redden your blood, your fine cell walls
trade oxygen for carbon,
and sift the windy mix we call the air:

This happens, going on invisibly,
even if no one remembers how
& even if it seems that pain

is a volatile molecule, grief
bonding unpredictably to things.
Now the late sun rims a cloud.

You, who watch that cloud:
Inhale. Exhale.

Poem - Perceptive Prayer - Grace Bauer

The beauty of summer nights
is how they go on –
light lingering so long we can
imagine ourselves immortal.
For moments at a time.

And winter days –
their own kind of beauty.
Any swatch of color:
hint of leaf bud, sway
of dried brown grass, even litter –

a bright yellow bag
light enough for the breeze
to lift and carry,
can render itself as pleasure
to an eye immersed in gray.

May we learn to love
what is both
ordinary and extra.
May our attention be
a kind of praise.
A worship of the all
there really is.

Meditation - Hillary L. McBride

You are good
You have always been good
Right from the beginning
I’m sorry that anyone told you otherwise
This breath
This head,
These hands
This love
Those feet
That smile
Your ears
This heart
This breath
This breath
This breath
Good, all good. So, so, so good.
You are loved
You are so loved
You are lovable
You have been working so hard
I don’t have to know how, to know that it’s true
You are precious
You are not a mistake, you are so on purpose
You are not broken
You never were
I’m sorry that you might have thought that
I’m sorry anyone might have made you think that
You are enough
You are so so enough
You do not have to earn your enough-ness
You do not have to grovel for value, for love, for goodness
You already have it
You already are it
You are loved
You are loved
You are love
You are love
You are love

Quote - adrienne maree brown

We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves, in all kinds of relationships. And right now we need to be in a rigorous practice, because we can no longer afford to love people the way we have been loving them…What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life.

For My Daughter (poem) by Kim Moore

And later, when she asks I’ll say 

some parts of it were beautiful-

how in their brightness
and sudden opening
the faces of the neighbors
began to look like flowers.
I’ll tell her how we began
to look back at photos
of our younger selves
with our arm around a stranger
or leaning on the shoulders of friends,
and saw that touch
had always been a kind of holiness,
a type of worship we were promised.
I’ll tell her that in some ways
our days shrunk to nothing,
being both as long as a year
and as quick as the turning of a page.
I’ll tell her how she learned to crawl
in those days, in those times
when we could not leave,
when bodies were carried
from homes and were not counted,
that she began to say her first word
while death waited in the streets,
that though I was afraid,
I never saw fear in her eyes.

(Poem about COVID lockdown, Commissioned by Ledbury Poetry Festival)

Poem of the One World - Mary Oliver

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

Another question

 What else can I help grow around me?

Something to meditate on...

 What's the line between escape and a joy practice?

(What is numbing and what is resting?)

Sermon - March 27, 2022 - The Rev. Angela Herrera - "When Life Stinks"

"the logic of justice" 

Why is it that I agree that it's a myth that there is a logic of justice for any individual (i.e. you don't "deserve" the bad things that befall you through no fault of your own), but I also believe the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Maybe that's only true because we all are leaning on that curve. 

 

Quote - James Clear - Atomic Habits - January 2, 2020

"You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems."

Poem - Regret - Barbara Crooker

Regret 

nothing. Not those years 

when you were a single mother, 

bologna casserole, and not enough 

money for heat. Or the years before, 

the ones spent trying to please a man 

who couldn’t be happy, no matter how 

hard you tried to replicate his mother’s recipes— 

the marinara wasn’t sweet enough, the lasagna 

didn’t have enough layers. 

Don’t regret the years that went up 

in smoke, the glamour of the lit match, 

the first drag, the curls that rose 

to decorate the ceiling. Or the years 

as a waitress, the customers who stiffed 

you on tips, which were quarters 

and nickels back then, every thin dime 

counting. Instead, remember your friends, 

those hours on the telephone, the artery 

of the long black cord, a river of voice. 

Don’t tell me that broken places 

make you stronger, and I won’t mention 

silver linings. Sometimes, there are scars. 

 Sometimes, it rains. Stop looking for the friends 

who aren’t here, the ones whose faces you sometimes 

glimpse in a crowd. The past is the grass growing under 

our feet; the dirt beneath it, what feeds it. Remember 

that nothing is ever lost.

Meditation Mantra

 I will hold myself open.

Where I am closed, I am false.

When I am open, I can lead in love.