Why hold back?
Why should we hold ourselves back from working on the big issues: global warming, economic meltdown?
:- Doug.
Archive for October, 2008
I am pregnant
These are our children, yours and mine, and I am pregnant, you are pregnant, love is the impregnation. Love impregnates.
Love births life. It is gravity-field gathering us together to meet and meet again for here we take the action of love, here we come alive, here is born the third person in between.
Here is the narrow ridge, running from you to me and back, if we but climb it rather than see it as barrier, the narrow ridge upon which we can play as on a mountain meadow knowing and being known laughing and holding hands spinning till the tears come and we fall down in the soft flowers and get up to plant our grandchildren’s forests.
We are planting our grandchildren’s forests: fresh oxygen-creating forests, dark undergrowth forests, hidden paths and sunlight shining in, forests full of life and death, dark and light, mystery and generation, shelter and storm, things that wriggle and crawl and leap, and our voices calling Take my hand.
:- Doug.
Getting to the depths of law
We are starting to get to
the depths of the law.
How do people get along together?
What is lawful?
Whatever the answer,
truth, reality, must be part of it,
so chaos and complexity,
good and evil, light and dark
must claim their rightful roles
So too money and love,
work and play, enemy and lover
We are, we do, we meet
:- Doug.
Business is river’s current
Business is river’s current,
flowing, racing,
spinning in the backwaters,
carrying flotsam and commerce,
doing the work of the furnace and anvil,
computer and test tube,
telephone and banker,
touching, moving, running over,
never the same twice,
always the same in
movement and reaching, grasping,
allowing little time for reflection except
what we extract,
its largeness being in its rush,
its smallness too,
and we, we the ones
who must make large
:- Doug.
A Will is a story
A Will is a story
Mother or Father telling
of love, of dreams, of hopes
An Estate is the next scene
The scroll unrolls with
unseen beginning and ending
Each person a jewel on the string,
sparrow in the storm, or wind itself
Each chooses a role,
each role chooses a person
Then the person is Mother or Father telling
of love, dreams, hopes
Jewels, sparrows, wind
:- Doug.
A Will is a want
A Will is a want, a desire. I will for you…loving, laughing, whole-making, dreaming, praying, working, playing, staying, moving, dancing, image-making, poem-making, song-making, touching and being touched, story-making, story-telling, people-birthing: all this is love, life!
:- Doug.
Deep Wills
Deep Wills
Who are my children?
Who am I?
Grandchildren learning to walk
Learning to talk
Have we yet learned to talk
About what is at our foundations?
Money does not speak to Honey
Instead, tell stories
Yours: How did you get here?
How did you meet?
Whom have you become?
These help me figure out who I am
Whom I might become
What I can do in this world
For my loved ones
For loving the peoples
Instead, write poems
Poems might be stories
Of our family, tribe, people
Of our humanity
Poems might be songs
To remind us we are artists
Divine, capable of the universe
Poems might be found among lists
Grocery lists, to do lists, lists of families
Of what you see
Of what sees you
And whom
Of what is of significance
Or suggestive, evocative
Of significance
Of how meaning-filled our lives are
If we write poetry
Instead, get to work
What is your work?
Why have you chosen that work?
What work do you choose now
In this epoch of your life?
What is the most important thing
We can be working on, Now?
Instead, tell us:
What is important
To you?
To the long road of Life
History
Memory
Whom we are
Whom we can be
Leave this to us
And then we fulfill
Your Deep Will
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 899
Footprints in the Windsm # 899
I wish I were an autumn leaf a-fallin’
Floating up and down across the sky
And to all boys & girls I’d be a-callin’
Fall and leap and giggle dream and sigh!
Please pass it on.
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You cannot understand my poetry
My poetry is not for understanding
For putting into a cubby hole
In your brain, your mind, even your universe
But for crawling inside
Falling into a larger world
You cannot understand my poetry
It is not made for understanding
Instead for
Come inside
:- Doug.
Does taking it larger scatter us?
Does taking it larger scatter us? But no: we circle. We grow larger, more able. For these people too are larger than we first thought. They have gifts for us.
:- Doug.
Many comings & goings
Many comings & goings
Themes arising and dissipating
Odd conversations
Twos and threes of people
Edges of chairs
Bumping, making music, sparking
Rhythm, birthing, bubbling
What the dance?
What the aroma?
What the colors?
:- Doug.
Are we falcon, storm, or song?
Like Rilke, we each, and in each movement, live our lives in widening circles, touching more and more and hopefully being touched and we still don’t know—are we falcon, storm, or song? We are these by turns: sometimes the lone lookout and signal, sometimes gathering power, sometimes expressing the heart of the peoples.
:- Doug.
A white hurricane
A white hurricane of connected action
Forming
Out of many lights
A center in common holds
Spawning tornadoes at its edges
& at its center
Calm silence generating all the rest
Purpose-filled conversation is
:- Doug.
Bubble Badminton
There are times when we ought to approach our conversations as if they were a game of high stakes Bubble Badminton. The object is not to win, but to keep the bubble in the air and growing and have fun! Surely this is high stakes, for the ideas we are birthing are as fragile as this bubble, as fun as the game, and as challenging as keeping this bubble in the air at all costs: blowing, diving for saves, laughing when we are splashed.
:- Doug.
fireflies can light the world
A few fireflies can light the world, or at least the part that needs light at any time. I can never know what firefly I have set free. So I will carry my jar and open it whenever I can: Find the lights and carry them where they are needed.
:- Doug.
I am writing you this note so that
I am writing you this note so that you will live, so that you will embody your divinity, so that you will seize divinity and not let it go till it bless you, which means not just leave its mark on you, but take over your life.
O how much bigger this is than sacrifice and dedicating one’s life and having little ideas of what divinity is all about! G*d you are so much larger, so much more dependent, so much more in love with us! We thought we owned you, or that you owned us! But you are lover!
:- Doug.
