Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

~~ Mary Oliver ~~

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Pink Rose

So much of what we need…

 “So much of what we need, so much of what we want, is to be savored, cherished, cared for and cared about.  So much of what is missing is tenderness.” ~ Julia Cameron

Purple Petal Abstract

Walk Slowly

It only takes a reminder to breathe,
a moment to be still, and just like that,
something in me settles, softens,
makes space for imperfection.

The harsh voice of judgment drops to a whisper
and I remember again that life isn’t a relay race;
that we will all cross the finish line;
that waking up to life is what
we were born for.

As many times as I forget, catch myself charging forward
without even knowing where I’m going,
that many times I can make the choice
to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk
slowly into the mystery.

~~ Danna Faulds ~~

Pink Rose

Before We Can Unlearn

So far it’s the physical world that we speak of:
the red Frisbee, the sweet blackberry, the small pink ball.
She points to a tree. This, she says. Tree. I say. Well,
lilac bush. Already the world slips from its chain of syllables.
I want to speak with her about this filtered honey light
of a late April afternoon, and I do, but she brings me
a rock and says, This. And I say, Rock. Gray rock.
And even more, I want to speak of what comes next,
of the longing that this light begets—how it rouses in me
a deep wish to lose the physical world and be current,
be wave, be invisible flourish, to be warmth that drives flowers
to bloom. I want to tell her how sometimes the body
interferes, so material, so fleshsome, so brute in its hungers.
How beyond the red Frisbee there’s a pulse, a rhythm,
a tide that no words can touch, and it gathers us and connects
us to this all that is: one cosmos, one bloodstream, one river,
one art. How sometimes we get it—whatever it is—and all
that is concrete dissolves in the breath. How we’re twined
to this moment, and the next, and the next. Nest, I say,
as she brings me the small wreath of grass. Bird, I say,
as the small body wings past. She smiles and tries to fly—
half jump, half fall, all innocence. Yes, I say. That’s what
love is like. Oh golden light. Oh luminous task of losing
whatever we think we know: Tree. Rock. Nest.

~~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ~~

Rose Abstract

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit

 likes to dress up like this:

  ten fingers,

   ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

 at night

  in the black branches,

   in the morning

in the blue branches

 of the world.

  It could float, of course,

   but would rather

plumb rough matter.

 Airy and shapeless thing,

  it needs

   the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

 the oceanic fluids;

  it needs the body’s world,

   instinct

and imagination

 and the dark hug of time,

  sweetness

   and tangibility,

to be understood,

 to be more than pure light

  that burns

   where no one is–

so it enters us–

 in the morning

  shines from brute comfort

   like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

 lights up the deep and wondrous

  drownings of the body

   like a star.

~~ Mary Oliver ~~

Red Hibiscus