How others become refugees....

 

A Poem By Steve Cline And My Reflection On That Poem

One of the more difficult barriers to get over in religion or spirituality is the difficulty so many of us have in holding several opposing notions in mind at the same time. We can be pretty set in our ways and unwilling to consider other opinions when what's needed is just that ability to deal with dualities and contradictions and living with some mystery for a time. 

Think about how we might see things: sinner versus saint, good versus bad, others versus me. Most of the time these constructions are convenient ways of justifying ourselves and damning others, or they are concessions to an unjust social order. "What a coincidence it is that God hates the same people and the same things that I do!" we might say. "That woman up ahead in line should have planned her shopping ahead of time and shouldn't be holding me up looking for money she doesn't have!" we might say out of a place of being judgmental and self-centered while waiting in line with our groceries. Maybe being too set in our ways reflects past disappointments or loss or abuse, or perhaps for some of us it's an easy way of giving in to the conditions we live under rather than trying to change things. Some folks attach themselves to holding one set of opinions or one worldview to the exclusion of all others because something has hurt them in the past and now they want order and control over something or themselves.   

I am not saying that there are not sinners and saints and good and evil or to argue for a world in which everything is relative and that human beings do not have choices and power. I am not saying that human kindness and solidarity do not have their limits. I'm not objecting to people with good ideas or lots of questions being passionate about what's on their minds. I do want to suggest that there is another way to frame our experience in the world.

What I want to introduce is another thought and a change in direction when we consider dualities and contradictions. Think about how God may see things. God is All-Knowing, but God is also approachable. God is Absolutely Pure, but God took human form and dwelt with us in our messiness. God is Almighty, but God suffered and died on the cross, and that cross holds all of our sins. God is All Powerful, but God is alongside us and shares in our weaknesses. God exists outside of time, but contains time and is The All-Responsive One who bestows mercy to us within time.

There is in God a necessary comprehension of duality and contradiction. It is not that God has to or may contain this, or that God chooses to love and not hate, but that love is God's nature and that in love there are spectrums and possibilities and mysteries. Time as we know it is the space or place or event within which (or during which) we cross spectrums, work through possibilities, resolve contradictions, and come to freedom with others and within God. You can test this next time you're in line at the store by looking around you and reflecting on God's presence in the people you see, in their very faces.

My friend Steve Cline recently posted a comment and a poem on Facebook that may open a door to considering what I'm saying here. I don't think that Steve is a universalist, as I am, but his comment and poem speak to how our lives develop in the context of God's creation. The poem speaks to change as being a constant within that creation, and a constant that gives us choices. Here is Steve's comment and poem:  

I whole heartedly feel like this was given to me from the Lord a couple days ago, I just started writing.

Many broken branches
Many trees with shallow roots,
When they were young, they flourished,
but now have become dry and brittle
A day has past and still no thirst for life
Tomorrow darkness comes, then the rain
Will any trees soak up the water
Or will death consume them?
Fear of the Lord is the way to Freedom
Some of you have lost your First Love
It's time to return
Don't hesitate, make haste, REPENT

"The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean..."

 Please click on the image to make it larger if needed.

Eight haiku from Sarah Rohrs

My friend Sarah Rohrs is on an interesting spiritual journey and doing the good work that comes with being on that path. I don't want to intrude on that by describing what she is up to, but I do want to share with you that she is writing haiku daily as part of her spiritual practices and that this flows from her recent engagement with the rosary. Sarah has many gifts----writing, photography, curiosity, the ways in which she touches others and serves good causes. She graciously consented to me posting eight of her haiku here. I like these and I hope that she will share more with us. I appreciate the knowing/ unknowing and the lessons carried in her lines.

In dark morning doubt
Word sounds flow in shallow stream
Steady bird listens

Dark candle flickers
Who hears these prayers sounding here
Stone to stone. Silent tree

Whisper drift rose song
Same words pressing air, blue beads
Feeling and presence

Mind wandering sound
Open slowly these petals
Light flickers onward

Silliness of time
Chase white clouds in mind chatter
Mercy in slow eyes

Quiet morning words
Laying down bricks of judgment
Oh world. Oh life. Take me with

Come to love darkness
In winter rest leaf, sun, soil
Children of green dream

Joy comes to follow
In moss grace of worms singing
Your hem in my hands

Photo by Sarah Rohrs

"Solidarity Forever"

History records that the labor anthem "Solidarity Forever" was first published on today's date in 1915. Ralph Chaplin began writing what became "Solidarity Forever" in 1913 while covering the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, or the Paint Creek Mine War, in West Virginia for a publication issued by the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. It was completed two years later in Chicago at the time of a hunger demonstration there and gained its early popularity during a lumber workers' strike in Washington State.

There are many versions of the song, and I think that these different versions most often reflect the divergent opinions of who is singing and who is leading a crowd. The verses that promise a hopeful future in which the working-class takes power and establishes some form of socialism are left out when labor leaders and Democrats are rallying workers for immediate objectives. Leftists might sing one version of the song that is closer to their politics and leave it to another group to sing another version. Workers who join rallies and picketlines today hear the words and often grasp their meaning immediately. But there is more to be said about the song and what it means.

The poem that became "Solidarity Forever" was written at a moment when mine workers and their families in West Virginia were experiencing defeat during a period of prolonged armed struggle that we know today as the West Virginia Mine Wars. One would have had to be outrageously optimistic to have believed at that point that the mine workers' struggles would continue and that eventually something like justice would prevail even for a short time. The song has a healing power to it when all of its verses are sung with honesty, and I have wondered if this healing power and the positive message of what can be attempted comes from the very origins of the song.

I first heard "Solidarity Forever" as a kid when it was played on a mandolin by an old man during a house party. I purchased the album of labor songs done by The Almanac Singers and learned the words to every song on that album as a teenager. I have probably sung the song, in one version or another, hundreds of times on picketlines and at meetings over the years. "Solidarity Forever" has never grown old for me. I especially enjoy watching young people taking in the song and joining in singing it with others. I pray that they don't lose that light and fire in their eyes and in their hearts.

Here is the version by The Almanac Singers that I learned:

Singing Solidarity Forever, Passaic County, 1926

Description
Strikers raise their fists and sing as they march down a street during the Passaic Textile Strike, 1926. One striker wears a military uniform.

American Labor Museum / Botto House National Landmark

Persistent URL: https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3GH9K76

Today I'm holding some words from Maya Angelou close to my heart

Today I'm holding some words from Maya Angelou close to my heart:

“Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”

FOR A NEW BEGINNING---John O'Donohue

FOR A NEW BEGINNING

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

JOHN O'DONOHUE
From his books 'To Bless the Space Between Us' (US) / Benedictus (Europe)
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store
The Burren - 2022
County Clare, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

"From the top of Rattlesnake Mountain you can see the white hem of world..." A teaching from Alberto Moreno

I have once more been gifted with permission from Alberto Moreno to post one of his poems and teachings here. This one takes my breath away. It's cleansing.

From the top of Rattlesnake Mountain you can see the white hem of world. From these rock outcrops I can spot elk migrating. Once I caught a glimpse of two mated lynx below me.

The basin sweeps out and up to the greater Colorado Rockies. Beyond this a crown of mountains encircle this part of the world.

I come up here to take in the sloping shape of the world, to take in the shape and feel of this new life.
The rocks are covered in a blanket of snow today and I don’t know how long I can “sit” for today.
I came up here today to take inventory of a life lived. But also to surrender to this ancestral medicine which now asks for me every week or two. As if it were saying, time for a divine adjustment, my beloved child.

My job is to drag my body up here and to sit for three or four hours while the medicine does it’s work.
It’s uncomfortable. As medicine is likely to be. I try to be a good patient. To this divine physician.
I tuck in my legs and my chin and surrender to this divine process.

When I come to, three hours later, the snow under me has melted. The sun now slung low on the horizon.

The adjustment however painful always feels loving.

I unfurl my legs from under me and begin to gaze upon the valley below.

And in the distance I can see something moving. Its a lanky slinky dark creature making its way over the snow blanketed landscape below.

It’s Coyote. And he’s on the hunt in this wintry tundra.

Coyote who brought us here. To El Norte. To El Otro Lado. It’s an auspicious omen on this Christmas Eve.

The wind begins to howl and I gather my things from the cold rock beneath me and begin to make my way down Rattlesnake Mountain, to a life waiting…

A.M

Wolf Moon and another poem by Mary Oliver

Wolf Moon

Now is the season of hungry mice, cold rabbits,
lean owls hunkering with their lamp-eyes
in the leafless lanes in the needled dark;
now is the season when the kittle fox
comes to town in the blue valley of early morning;
now is the season of iron rivers, bloody crossings,
flaring winds, birds frozen in their tents of weeds,
their music spent and blown like smoke to the stone of the sky;
now is the season of the hunter Death;
with his belt of knives, his black snowshoes,
he means to cleanse the earth of fat;
his gray shadows are out and running – under
the moon, the pines, down snow-filled trails they carry
the red whips of their music, their footfalls quick as hammers,
from cabin to cabin, from bed to bed, from dreamer to dreamer.

SLEEVE of CARE by Norman Baxter

SLEEVE of CARE

It comes round again,
that moment when despair
stirs in your thoughts,
wraps its stony fingers
around your heart.
Begins in a droplet of disappointment
a growing flood,
finally a slough, a morass, still and dark.
The low point
where sorrow and discouragement
come to a searing, fetid pool.
All the injuries that throttled your soul,
the ones others gave you,
the ones you gave yourself,
begin a painful parade through memory
while the heart writhes.
And when the mind finally wears
through those black days,
Weariness drives you to emptiness and sleep,
knitting up the raveled sleeve of care.

Norm Baxter's poem speaks to something that so many of us are experiencing just now. This poem felt immediately recognizable the first time that I read it. I think that most of us know this, but I also think that we know it by feeling it first. The poem takes me from feeling to knowing to articulating something deep inside me. I hope that you will recognize something of your self in it as well. 

Two Poems And Poets: Bill Gallegos And Alberto Moreno

It has been a very long time since I could read and appreciate poetry. I set aside reading Nazim Hikmet, my favorite poet, because the hopes that sustained him and animated his poetry---hopes that I share---have become too difficult for me to read and recollect. These hopes seem so far from where we are now that it is painful for me to consider them. And so much of modern poetry seems full of irony or tragedy or is written in the contexts of cultures and times that I don't understand that the poems are lost on me. It took Diane Gilliam's book "Kettle Bottom" to once more locate a poetry that speaks to me.

The two poems below rock me. The first is by Bill Gallegos, who I hope will count me as a friend or comrade. He is a great thinker and activist and I have learned much from him. The second poem is from Alberto Moreno, an especially gifted poet and mystic who I once had the honor of meeting and watching. I thought then that I was watching someone who was moving in another world.

There was a time---and it was not too long ago---when I considered Bill Gallegos' activism and Alberto Moreno's Sufi-like mysticism as opposing tendencies, as contradictory. That was in my ignorance. What is going on here is that both poets are holding up lamps in a world that sometimes feels quite dark. Light doesn't contradict light in a world in which darkness causes us to stumble. Please listen to both of these teachers.


Maceo Orlando -- My Lost/Found Treasure (Bill Gallegos)

Watching you jump from mother's womb/wet and loud/tiny lips telling the world .. that Maceo Orlando had landed ...
in Tinsletown

You so quickly ran the ragged edges of wonder/father chasing just behind ... And 'buela's hands leading you back to the soothing realm of tenderness.

You always shared that kinda moon smile/soft and warm/the funniest kind of sly. An easy laugh/like quick sips of joy ... from the warm/warm waters of your heart.

Always unafraid to touch/fast besitos on the old man's cheek/lighting up the dark spots of long, hard days.

You love to love/giving out the velvet embrace/easing the crazy befuddle of middle-age jefitos.

You are a diamond my son/shining ever brighter from the hits and misses of my own unsures: "Am I too hard?" "Am I too easy?"/"Should I do this?"/"Should I do that?"

You wandered sometimes lost in the complex labyrinth of adolescence.

But its all good now m'hijo/because you found your way/your heart led you home .... and healed the unhealable/relit the cold ashes/breathed life into tired lungs emptied by fear and loneliness.

That is the treasure you bring my son/shining like a cat's eyes in the darkness/chasing away the shadows that chill the heart.

Maceo Orlando, you are the answer to the why/the lyric to the song/the mystical phrase from the poem/the ending to the story/the warm hand which walks us through life.

Pops

***

Would you believe
That I once kept a secret
From myself
For fifty years?!
I tell you this in case you are keeping the same secret from your own heart
The secret that you are unconditionally and irreparably
Loved!
---Alberto Moreno

Two poems by Stewart Acuff

 

Bright, brilliant blue battles with white and gray for space on a wide ceiling
Big, puffy but delicate clouds slide silently
Across the sky so easily
It's a live action movie or TV show being made and watched above our heads
It started soon as we got out of bed
The wind has lost its edge
And moves over the river gentle
it's a sweet easy day for relaxing after the feast of Thanksgiving
Every day is a great day to give thanks even if a myth is the beginning.

Through bare branches of leafless trees
And limbs alive in a sweet breeze
The blue becomes the brilliant sky
And welcomes the light
Of life lived full, open and generous
The light above shared by all, like our spirits of love.

39You, Pam Garrison, Stewart Acuff and 36 others

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The bridges that connect ideas across time

Sometimes ideas connect across time and cultures. Sometimes we feel the connection more than we know it. And sometimes the connection is more like one of those swaying bridges like the one above in West Virginia that connects a house to a main road than it is like anything else. 

My Facebook friend Kristin Kennedy, who has been mentioned many times on this blog, posted the following poem by Tom Hirons the other day:


IN THE MEANTIME

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all odds,
Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.

Light plays on the surface of water.

Grace occurs on unlikely streets

And we hold each other fast

Against entropy, the fires and the flood.

Life leans toward living

And, while death claims all things at the end,

There were such precious times between,

In which everything was radiant

And we loved, again, this world.

For some reason this reminded me of Nazim Hikmet's poem "On Living." That poem helped inspire me to start this blog a long time ago. The two poems meet somewhere but I'm not sure where exactly that is. Perhaps they meet at the points of optimism and taking taking the long view and loving life. Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) was a communist who died in exile. He is Turkey's most popular poet. Tom Hirons is English-Scot, a poet and a storyteller. Here is "On Living":

Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
		like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
		I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
	in your white coat and safety glasses,
	you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you've never seen,
   even though you know living
	is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
			from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
			about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
		for the latest newscast. . . 
Let's say we're at the front—
	for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
        but we'll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	  in pitch-black space . . . 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you're going to say "I lived". . .

Go here to hear Chris Hedges reading "On Living"

Go here to hear an interview with Tom Hirons

A new poem by Stewart Acuff

 

A poem from Stewart Acuff

 

Stewart Acuff: My spirit sings thanksgiving for the deep down

The Potomac River still runs green under the eternal sun

Shining brightest light over all of us

The polls and pundits red wave wasn't even a red ripple

We must push ever more for the will and wellbeing of the people

My spirit sings thanksgiving for the deep down

Work, effort and belief on the ground.

"The path to peace is never easy..." Another great poem by Stewart Acuff

I posted a poem from Stewart Acuff the other day. Here is another great poem and photograph from him. He's a deep thinker and a great poet. Look carefully around you with love. There is lots to learn in the world around us.

The path to peace is never easy
Love is action not just feeling
Justice requires vigilance and not letting go
Watch two or three songbirds mob a crow
To drive it from their eggs, babies and homes
The egret stands still and silent on stilt like legs waiting
Till its neck straightens from its snake curl striking
All day the egret waits and watches for every bite
Just as a hungry owl hunts through the night
Sometimes an entire people can act as one
When we act to defend our children and our folks' freedom.

A poem and photo from Stewart Acuff and some words about sharing and protecting the beauty around us

Stewart Acuff wrote this beautiful poem and posted it and the picture below on his Facebook page today and was then kind enough to give me permission to repost it here. Stewart lives in the West Virginia Panhandle and most every day he posts some wise words in the forms of poems and some photos. I find these helpful in getting through my days. It isn't just we get to enjoy the beauty around us, but that we have a responsibility to protect and spread and share that beauty as well, and I think that Stewart communicates that. Just as well, I look forward to the Facebook posts of the Friends of the Tug Fork in Southern West Virginia and Kentucky because they put this into practice in their own ways. I bet that you or others in your community are doing the good work as well.  

Just as the sun comes up
Waking our world
Rising right on time in the East
Dissolving the fog hanging in the trees
Lighting the leftover leaves
The truth makes its way
Rising in its own time to light a new day
Thank you for shining truth in the darkness of lies
Thank you for your voice that sometimes cries
But never consents to quiet
Or surrenders to silence
Gratitude grows for our folks fighting for one another
Because your burden belongs to all of us
We all struggle in this moment of confusion
Hold fast following those we trust
The sun, the sum of all of us
Rising right on time dissolving the fog.

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might 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 with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~Wendell Berry

"More than a Dreamer" by Professor Louie