Tag: Nature

Mud

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Continuing with a sequence of Mary Oliver poems for autumn. A lot of wind and rain here yesterday and overnight. Plenty of mud…

Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof.
It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the
trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with
its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and 
makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some
spirit, some small god, who abides there.

If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing
continuously. 
I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this
holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming
back from wherever I went.

Forgive me.

Mary Oliver, Forgive me

Always at home

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Someday we’ll live in the sky.

Meanwhile, the house of our lives is the world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks — surely they are the
     children of God.
The feistiness among the tiger lilies,
the hedges of runaway honeysuckle, that no one owns.

Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.

One jump, and I’m home.

Mary Oliver, Boundaries (Extract) 

Letting go

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Human beings are made of water.

we were not designed
to hold ourselves 
together,

rather run freely
like oceans,
like rivers.

Beau Taplin, Run Freely

There are no wrong seasons.

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It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…

 I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…

 But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.

For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)

Applying the lessons of autumn

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We all carry these interior lists and shoulds…

Dropping all we carry – all our preconceptions, our interior lists of the ways we’ve failed and the ways we’ve been wronged, all the secret burdens we work at maintaining – dropping all regret and expectations lets our mentality die. Dropping all we have constructed as imperative allows us to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered being

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

 

Sunday Quote: Being comfortable with change

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Apprentice yourself to the curve of your own disappearance

David Whyte