Tag: noticing

A Prayer for Being Here

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Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.
~David Budbill “Winter: Tonight: Sunset”

I strive to remember, each day,
no matter how things feel,
no matter how tired or distracted I am,
no matter how worried, or fearful or heartsick
over the state of the world or the state of my soul:

it is up to me to distill my gratitude
down to this one moment of beauty
that will never come again.

One breath,
one blink,
one pause,
one whispered word:
wow.

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The Dew Looks Up

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Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
~W.S. Merwin “Dew Light” from The Moon Before Morning

A walk around our farm in October is
more or less, before or after, now and then,
a timelessness of shifting seasons and fading days.

A prayer becomes like dew from above,
me looking up to the God
who was, is and ever will be,
who already knows what I am about to say.
He knows I don’t tend to say anything new.

He blesses me with the light of His dew.

I write every day to explain myself to people I will never meet. Perhaps, every day, I am trying to explain myself to God.

God is,
(if I stop to look and listen),
yesterday, today, tomorrow –
more or less, before or after, now and then,
but most especially
forever and ever.

Amen.

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The Hidden Mystery

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A poem waits
for the mystery
in you—
girl at the window
apple blossoms, orchard
the horses you don’t own
Hope at the way station
the sail you have not found
the dance you have, as yet,
only done in dreams.

Pour in what calls,
“Let me out.”
The gift. The limb. The sun. The moon.

A poem waits
for the mystery
in you—
Pour in, pour in.
Nothing can break the delicate
glass of its
holding.
~L.L. Barkat “Delicate”

Vermeer–Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window

I’ll tell you a secret: poems hide.
In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping.
They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings
the moment before we wake up.
What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.
— Naomi Shihab Nye

Poems were hidden from me for decades.  I was oblivious a hundred times a day to their secrets: dripping right over me in the shower,  rising over hills bright pink, tucked under a toadstool, breathing deeply as I auscultated a chest,  unfolding with each blossom, settling heavily on my eyelids at night.

The day I awoke to them was the day over twenty years ago when thousands of innocents died in sudden cataclysm of airplanes and buildings and fire — people not knowing when they got up that day it would be their last.  And such taking of life happens again and again; our world continues to weep.

Now poems don’t hide themselves as often. I begin to see, listen, touch, smell, taste as if each day would be my last. I am learning to live in a way that helps me discern the mystery and it overwhelms me. 

Poems are everywhere when I look.

And I don’t know if I have enough time left to write them all down

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Reading the World

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Hear me: sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter,
by which I mean not the days we have left,
but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth
and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see
a therapist who mentioned that, at play,
he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain.
Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.
Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.
~Danusa Laméris “Night Bird” from Poetry

These days, I tend to read meaning into nearly everything.

Somehow, I imagine a purpose for whatever takes place, whether quotidian and mundane, or the dramatic and unforgettable. It seems to me I should derive meaning from all around me, learn from it, be inspired by it, or grieve over it.

How do we live out the days we have left – an unknowable number?
I want to not miss a thing, knowing, through inattention and distraction and carelessness, I have missed so much over the past seventy years.

Even so, here I am now, reading the world for all it has to offer – even the fine print – trying to make sense of the messiness, the orneriness, the unexplainable, and the breathtaking.

Surely it is the only way to know what is true. I need to witness it all, and wonder.

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Our Foot in the Door

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Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam
Acquire the air

Nobody sees us
Stops us, betrays us
The small grains make room

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles
The leafy bedding

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves
Our kind multiplies

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth. 
Our foot’s in the door.
~Sylvia Plath from “Mushroom”

This overnight overture into the light,
the birthing of toadstools after a shower.
As if seed had been sprinkled on the compost pile,
they sprout three inch stalks
as they stretch up at dawn,
topped by dew-catching caps and umbrellas.

Some translucent as glass,
already curling at the edges in the morning light,
by noon melting into ooze
by evening, a complete deliquescence,
withered and curling back
into the humus
which birthed them hours before.

It shall be repeated
again and again,
this birth from unworthy soil,
this brief and shining life in the sun,
this folding, curling and collapse
to die back to dust and dung.

Most inedible and dangerous,
yet they rise beautiful
and worthy,
as is the way of things
that never give up
once a foot’s in the door.

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Each Thing Noticed

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The Old Testament book of Micah answers the question
of why we are here with another:
“What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
We are here to abet creation and to witness it,
to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach
but we notice each other’s beautiful face
and complex nature so that creation need not play
to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from Life Magazine’s “The Meaning of Life”

I started out a noticer,
a child who crawled on the ground
to follow winding ant trails from their hills,
then watched nests bloom with birds,
sitting still as a lizard sunning himself on a rock.

Next I was a student researcher of great apes,
following wild chimpanzees deep into an exotic forest
to observe their life in a community so much like our own.

Then came a profession and parenting and daughtering,
with mounting responsibilities and worries and cares,
and I stopped noticing any more,
too much inside the drama
to witness it from outside.

Creation played to an empty house
and the empty house was me.

Slowly now,
I’ve returned to noticing again~
buying my ticket, finding my seat,
smiling and nodding
applauding
hooting and hollering
begging for an encore.

It’s a non-stop show of the miraculous
where I’m an appreciative audience
preparing to write a great review.

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Something Changed in the Night

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You wake wanting the dream
you left behind in sleep,
water washing through everything,
clearing away sediment
of years, uncovering the lost
and forgotten. You hear the sun
breaking on cold grass,
on eaves, on stone steps
outside. You see light
igniting sparks of dust
in the air. You feel for the first
time in years the world
electrified with morning.

You know something has changed
in the night, something you thought
gone from the world has come back:
shooting stars in the pasture,
sleeping beneath a field
of daisies, wisteria climbing
over fences, houses, trees.

This is a place that smells
like childhood and old age.
It is a limb you swung from,
a field you go back to.
It is a part of whatever you do.
~Scott Owen “Arrival of the Past”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up
and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and
complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly
washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through
the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver “A Summer Day”

Because something changed in the night,
so have I ~

I come to kneel in the field,
look at the world from the point of view of the grasshopper,
uncover what I may have lost or forgotten
in the midst of years of striving:

a chance to witness what I missed.

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Holding Your Heart

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The main thing is this–
when you get up in the morning
you must take your heart in your two hands.
You must do this every morning.
Then talk softly to your heart, don’t yell.
Say anything but be respectful.
Say–maybe say, Heart, little heart,
beat softly but never forget your job, the blood.
You can whisper also, Remember, remember.
~Grace Paley from “The Art of Growing Older” in  Just As I Thought

Approaching seventy, she learns to live,
at last. She realizes she has not
accomplished half of what she struggled for,
that she surrendered too many battles
and seldom celebrated those she won.
Approaching seventy, she learns to live
without ambition: a calm lake face, not
a train bound for success and glory. For
the first time, she relaxes her hands on the
controls, leans back to watch the coming end.
Asked, she’d tell you her life is made out of
the things she didn’t do, as much as the
things she did do. Did she sing a love song?
Approaching seventy, she learns to live
without wanting much more than the light in
the catbird window seat where, watching the
voracious fist-sized tweets, she hums along.
~Marilyn Nelson “Bird Feeder”

I’m learning to let go by relaxing my grip on the controls on the runaway train of ambition. This is a change for someone driven for decades to succeed in various professional and personal roles.

I’m aware who I am is defined by what I haven’t gotten done and what I managed to do. And now, nearing seventy, I have some time to explore some of those things I left undone.

Reflecting the calm I feel.
Holding my heart gently.
Humming as I go.
Just sitting when I wish to.
Watching out the window.
Loving up those around me.

It’s sweet to remember why I’m here.

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Why Not Stop and Do Nothing For A While

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You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.
~Billy Collins “The Chairs That No One Sits In”  from Aimless Love

I don’t take enough time
to do nothing.

I think about doing nothing all the time
but then I do nothing about it.

Too many lonely benches on porches
so many empty chairs
too many vistas unnoticed
so many birds singing with no one listening

all deserve an appreciative audience,
someone who is simply there to see and hear and be.

Perhaps today.
Possibly today.
Maybe, just maybe,
today.

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The Secret of Life

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Two girls discover   
the secret of life   
in a sudden line of   
poetry.

I who don’t know the   
secret wrote   
the line. They   
told me

(through a third person)   
they had found it
but not what it was   
not even

what line it was. No doubt   
by now, more than a week   
later, they have forgotten   
the secret,

the line, the name of   
the poem. I love them   
for finding what   
I can’t find,

and for loving me   
for the line I wrote,   
and for forgetting it   
so that

a thousand times, till death   
finds them, they may   
discover it again, in other   
lines

in other   
happenings. And for   
wanting to know it,   
for

assuming there is   
such a secret, yes,   
for that   
most of all.
~Denise Levertov “The Secret”

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price.
If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever
I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.
But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.

The literature of illumination reveals this above all:
although it comes to those who wait for it,
it is always, even to the most practiced and adept,
a gift and a total surprise.

I return from one walk
knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms.
I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name.

Litanies hum in my ears;
my tongue flaps in my mouth.
Ailinon, alleluia!
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket, or under a bed, and not on a stand?  
For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest;
nor is anything secret except to come to light…
Mark 4: 21-22

We all want to know it: learning the elusive secret that would resolve the mystery of our existence. Why are we here at all and for what purpose do we live and breathe?

Some are untroubled by not knowing. They live out each day one step at a time, not looking back and not too worried about what is coming up around the bend while others are always looking for meaning, evaluating the significance of each moment.

Some of us seek middle ground. I am eager to have life’s mysteries cleared up, but content to give the unknown the time it demands. Each day I search for something that asks for my complete attention, whether a line of poetry or a slant of light in the sky, or my grandchild’s arms around my neck. That is enough for me to settle in with gratitude for simply being here. And it feels right to share what I see and read and hear and experience.

So here is one person’s secret of life: don’t give up the search and share what you find along the way…

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