single words together

one. Given the brevity of life, how can we want to do anything other than love?

two. Saddam's execution: problem solved? Does killing bring peace? Help us to feel better? 

three. Given the brevity of life, how can we want to do anything other than eat good food (a facet of loving)?

four. Almost 3,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, not to mention the wounded. A weighty price for a vague vendetta.

five. Even though I'm different than my family in many ways, I still love being with them, and all the laughter. I'm very lucky.

six. Given the brevity of life, it seems silly to be cynical, hopeless, passive, too deliberate, too serious, or tyrannical. 

seven. I love warm weather and being warm. I miss that right now. 

eight. I love friends and also people who you barely know, but it seems like you've known them all your life. What a wonderful surprise.

nine. I love being surprised.

ten. It's a bittersweet thing to realize that you will never be able to congregate all of the people that you love all together in one room, in one place. That all of those meaningful connections may never converge with each other, and that some of them will never continue beyond what they have been for you just that once. 

eleven. Some obituaries are much better written than others. How do you summarize an entire life?

twelve. Does one have the ability to choose the direction of her heart? Or does it just move without prediction or direction, to leave only the choice of rejecting the direction or moving with it, like a river? 

thirteen. What is the point of MySpace?

fourteen. A book I read today said there are three types of boredom: passive boredom, active boredom and liberated boredom. I thought that was a pretty glum view of life. It implied that we're all always bored in some way. I thought that was stupid. I'm having a great time.

fifteen. One superpower that would be useful to me would be the ability to cut onions without crying. (so long as I didn't have to wear spandex and a cape).

sixteen. new year's resolutions: to be more hopeful; to be more patient; to hang out with kids more often; run, hike, backpack, and play soccer more; to fall in love; to write regularly (to make it a discipline).

seventeen. Given the brevity of life, it seems counterintuitive that spending more time riding the bus would actually slow your life down in a positive way. But it does. I promise.

eighteen. Dogs have a way of making you feel loved, and giving you something to love. My parents' dog, Tonto, is a good example of a little creature to love.

I rode past a suicide jumper under the Aurora bridge this fall too, while I was out on a bike ride. Like the man in this article, it was quite traumatizing to me, and I still distract myself with other thoughts any time the image pops into my head. I'm glad to hear there are crisis phones on the bridge now. Hopefully they will be used.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/296391_jumps19.html

From an Essay read on Morning Edition, 
December 18, 2006 · 
by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan. 

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.

I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. "Hints and guesses," as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don't scare me anymore.

When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe -- I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.

Whenever I think there's a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say "only" or "always," someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like "principles of uncertainty" and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of "faith"! How strange that the very word "faith" has come to mean its exact opposite.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do. People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is -- quite sadly -- absent from much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

(Richard Rohr is founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M. He took his Franciscan vows in 1961, and was ordained as a priest in 1970. Rohr is a frequent speaker and writer on issues of community building, peace and justice)

To listen to Rohr read his essay, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6631954

Gratitude

For waking up to morning light and birds outside my window,
For friends who persistently call me, even when I withdraw,
For dark chocolate,
For a warm touch,
For my physical therapist,
For the opportunities to do meaningful work,
For my bicycle,
For my health,
For coconut popsicles,
For the reasoning of children (me: what are you doing? little boy: oh, I'm just running around.)
For the human languages, and when people respond,
For silence and the mystery of no response,
For the gentle task of washing dishes by hand,
For hiking in the rain,
For buildings that were constructed thoughtfully,
For my little studio apartment,
For my parents,
For my sisters,
For my brother,
For orchids and succulent plants,
For warmth and beaches and tropical places,
For massage,
For hip hop and reggae music,
For people of all different colors,
For Ethiopian food,
For sushi (and miso soup),
For unexpected laughter,
For unintended connections,
For my daily metro bus commute,
For the person on the bus who always wants to share their life's congregate wisdom within ten blocks,
For flip flops,
For water,
For breath,
For all the grace that emanates from ordinary things,
if you have eyes to see
or ears to hear.
Gratitude for that grace.


Happy Thanksgiving!

p.s.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/293132_suicide21.html
Oops. It's hard to imagine any crisis line phone workers ever putting anyone on hold. I don't even know where the hold button is on my phone. This was an unfortunate bit of PR, but hopefully won't shadow all the good work the King County Crisis Line does in helping to prevent suicide and other harmful actions each year.

Sing on

From the language of your ancestors and

Sing on

Be playful in your inner senses

Lift your head up high and rejoice for all you see without your eyes

Sing on

Like a bird that’s making love in sunset skies

(Crazy, Crazy, Crazy

I’d like you, sadness, 

to tell me

something that perplexes me.

I will not ask you how

it is that I was destined

to be slaughtered in this fashion!

Nor will I ask

what your purpose is

in having made me so—

to fall like kingdoms

and crack like the walls of volcanoes.

I will not plead with you to tell me

why you’d have me

scatter like clouds

and collapse

like the eagle’s features.

Matters such as these,

undoubtedly,

concern me,

but I have become addicted to them

and now I’d like to let them rest,

as fear, sometimes, begins to doze

and seeds seem to drowse…

I won’t even ask you

when,

where,

or how you came

to settle like this

in the palm of my hand,

a trained falcon

whose memories come

in waves like the sailor’s weeping—

whose wings in the night

are blue daggers,

whose eyes are like two lovers,

their lids resembling

two green imploring arms…

What baffles me,

my sadness,

is why you’re so much

greater than I am—

deeper than my wakefulness,

and more remote than all my dreams!

Your fingerprints are more complex

than my identity.

And your visage resembles

a vast desert:

before it the path loses heart.

Ports refuse it!

What confuses me is

that you are bigger than my day,

greater than my past,

and larger than my tomorrow…

Are you my private sadness?

Are you truly the sadness

of a single person?

Is it conceivable that you are mine alone?

Excerpts from “The Falcon”

by Taha Muhammad Ali,

in So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005

Sometimes, when alone, I get uncontainably poetic. This is a dangerous state of things. It isn't generally helpful to anyone, least of all to me. Reading poetry is inadvisable at these times as well. The best thing to do is something tangible and active, such as:

- riding my bicycle 
- and, if available, jumping into a large body of water halfway through the ride
- talking to a friend
- pulling ivy (this alleviates a lot of aggression) or other non-native invasive plant species
- helping my friend(s) move or clean their apartments or garden
- watching children play in the fountain or at the beach
- hiking or backpacking and camping

Why is poetry such a dangerous undertaking? Why should we be very cautious about WHEN and WHERE we are poetic? I feel like it's this very powerful, very raw weapon, almost (to use militaristic language). To quote a friend: 
"Wouldn't it be cool if we could send poets to the frontlines, and they
could read poetry so beautiful that the combatants on all sides would
just drop their weapons and hug?"

Or another poet (whose name I can't remember): 
"Let us fill the air with poems so thick that even the bombs can't get through."

There are times when I'm so emotionally or mentally on edge that I know I cannot handle my own poetic expression, and I have to turn it off. It's so strange to observe yourself coming to that edge, the break between stability and falling, and to look over it and know that if you keep going, you will drop off. And then what? It's somewhat disheartening that we can't remain in the "poetic state" all the time--that it would drive us across the edge. What is it about it that's so dangerous? Is it too true? Too honest? Too vulnerable? (One of my co-workers says, "I don't write things down. It's too Goddamn vulnerable.") 

There are times that I vow never to write another line again, and at the very least, to never share another written line again. And so I take in the silence. But then things come up, which, if they remain unspoken, seem to be a terrible silence. There is a beautiful silence and there is a terrible silence. Wendell Berry's poem strikes me as poignant:

Words

I. 
What is one to make of a life given
to putting things into words,
saying them, writing them down?
Is there a world beyond words?
There is. But don't start, don't
go on about the tree unqualified,
standing in light that shines
to time's end beyond it's summoning
name. Don't praise the speechless
starlight, the unspeakable dawn.
Just stop.

2. 
Well, we can stop
for a while, if we try hard enough,
if we are lucky. We can sit still,
keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,
the river, the stone call themselves
by whatever they call themselves, their own
sounds, their own silence, and thus
may know for a moment the nearness
of the world, its vastness,
its vast variousness, far and near,
which only silence knows. And then
we must call all things by name
out of the silence again to be with us,
or die of namelessness.

In another poem, Berry says, "make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." 
So poetry seems to be formulated in stillness, in silence. And then it is a responsibility for the words to take shape and come from the silence. If they remain silent--the words that need to take shape--then it is a tragedy or a missed opportunity. 

I'm thinking of Rilke's poem that captivated my mind last year and since then: 

Being-silent. Who keeps innerly
silent, touches the roots of speech.
Once for him becomes then each
growing syllable victory:

over what in silence keeps not silent,
over the insulting evil; 
to dissolve itself to nil,
was the word to him made evident.

Basically, what I unpack out of that (please correct me where I'm failing to get it) is that we speak from the silence in order to highlight what disturbs the silence, so that we can return to the peaceful silence again. That is, if silence represents peace in this case, then we must break the silence when the peace is broken, so that we can correct or address what it is that has broken the peace. If we remain silent even when the silence is disturbed by something distructive, then we are allowing the destruction to happen. We have to speak from the silence sometimes if we want to return to it. "To dissolve itself to nil / was the word to him made evident." The word was formed so that it could return into the silence.

Omigosh. I'm a bit overwhelmed by poetry right now. If you haven't seen or heard of it, you should check out the Voices in Wartime project, which deals with wartime poetry--mostly by veterans. This is an example of poetry that has to be spoken from the silence in order to (is it possible?) return to peace. How can such violence ever return to peace?

Check it out. www.voicesinwartime.org You should also look at www.poetsagainstthewar.org if you're so inclined.

Hmm. So that's what I've been thinking about in my alone-ness. I need to go ride my bike...