Paused for Play

On hiatus until early November 2016. Until then, follow along at:

http://gypsynowagon.blogspot.com

The Canyon's Majesty

When you look across
this vast landscape
now, it’s hard to believe

that it could possibly
be damaged or lost
due to acts of man.

But each threat alone
is capable of eroding
a piece of the canyon’s majesty,

and together these threats will strip
the landscape of its ability
to do the thing that makes it unique:

to instill humility
by demonstrating that human beings
are tiny in relation to the forces
that have shaped this planet,

and that we are not the center of the world.

-- Roger Clark, Grand Canyon Trust program director
(arranged quote, from recent article on development in Grand Canyon)

I Think I Could Turn and Live With Animals

I think I could turn
and live with animals,

they are so placid
and self-contained.

They do not sweat and whine
about their condition,

they do not lie awake
in the dark and
weep for their sins,

they do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God,

not one is dissatisfied,
not one is demented with
the mania of owning things,

not one kneels to another
nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,

not one is respectable
or unhappy
over the whole earth.

- Walt Whitman

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.


--Maggie Smith

Prescription for the Disillusioned

Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud your vision.

Leave behind the stories of your life.
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.

Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty,
the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you,
new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.

– Rebecca del Rio

Speech of the Rain

What a thing it is to sit 
absolutely alone, 

in the forest, at night, cherished 
by this wonderful, unintelligible, 
perfectly innocent speech, the most 
comforting speech in the world,

the talk that rain makes by itself 
all over the ridges, 
and the talk of the watercourses 
everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, 
nobody is going to stop it. 

It will talk 
as long as it wants, this rain. 

As long as it talks 
I am going to listen.

-- Thomas Merton
“Rain and the Rhinoceros” in Raids on The Unspeakable
(arranged quote)

Facing the Flux

Your willingness 
to look at 
your darkness 
is what 
empowers you 
to change.

- Iyanla Vanzant

Loneliness' Golden Lining

When you wake up in the morning and 
out of nowhere 
comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, 

could you use that as a golden opportunity? 

Rather than 
persecuting yourself 
or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, 

right there in the moment 
of sadness and longing, 

could you relax and touch the 
limitless space of the human heart?

-- Pema Chödrön
(arranged quote, from article on Six Kinds of Loneliness)

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

- David Whtye

Cartography of Community

We die containing a richness 
of lovers and tribes, 
tastes we have swallowed, 
bodies we have plunged into 
and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, 
characters we have climbed into as if trees, 
fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this 
to be marked on my body
when I am dead.

I believe in such cartography - 
to be marked by nature, 
not just to label
ourselves on a map
like the names of rich men and women 
on buildings.

We are communal histories, communal books. 
We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
(arranged quote)

Herd Of Buffalo Crossing The Missouri On Ice

If dragonflies can mate atop the surface tension
of water, surely these tons of bison can mince
across the river, their fur peeling in strips like old

wallpaper, their huge eyes adjusting to how far
they can see when there's no big or little bluestem,
no Indian grass nor prairie cord grass to plod through.

Maybe because it's bright in the blown snow
and swirling grit, their vast heads are lowered
to the gray ice: nothing to eat, little to smell.

They have their own currents. You could watch a herd
of running pronghorn swerve like a river rounding
a meander and see better what I mean. But

bison are a deeper, deliberate water, and there will
never be enough water for any West but the one
into which we watch these bison carefully disappear.

—William Matthews

Prothalamium

Come, all you who are not satisfied
as ruler in a lone, wallpapered room
full of muted birds, and flowers that falsely bloom,
and closets choked with dreams that long ago died!

Come, let us sweep the old streets - like a bride:
sweep out dead leaves with a relentless broom;
prepare for Spring, as though he were our groom
for whose light footstep eagerly we bide.

We'll sweep out shadows, where the rats long fed;
sweep out our shame - and in its place we'll make
a bower for love, a splendid marriage-bed
fragrant with flowers aquiver for the Spring.
And when he comes, our murdered dreams shall wake;
and when he comes, all the mute birds shall sing.

-- Aaron Kramer
(introductory quote in Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver)

The Repeated Refrains of Nature

Those who contemplate
the beauty of the earth find
reserves of strength that will endure
as long as life lasts.

There is symbolic as well as
actual beauty in the migration
of the birds, the ebb and flow of the
tides, the folded bud ready
for spring.

There is something infinitely healing
in the repeated refrains of nature —
the assurance that
dawn comes after night, and
spring after the winter.

- Rachel Carson
(arranged quote)

The End and The Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

—Wisława Szymborska

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

 -- David Whyte
     from The House of Belonging

Winter Exposure

In the spring and summer 
I watched my plants flower, but 
it was, perhaps, in winter 
that I loved them best, 

when their skeletons were exposed. 

Then I felt they had more 
to say to me, were not 
simply dressing themselves 
for the crowds.

Stripped of their leaves, their 
identities showed forth 
stark, essential.

-- Pamela Erens, The Understory
(arranged quote)

Starry Conception

The fact that astronomies change 
while the stars abide 
is a true analogy 
of every realm of human life and thought, 

religion not least of all. 

No existent theology 
can be a final formulation of 
spiritual truth.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick
(arranged quote)

A prayer in the wind

Places have memories. It scares us

to think so. I am like bamboo, placeless,
transplanted somewhere new, staked
with foreign weather. But I

remember. We pause in our work, turn
our faces up to rain, our open mouths, one
after one. We think desire is enough.

It’s not. We build our privacies, impenetrable,
thin. We want places to remember us.

- Eva Saulitis, Prayer 28

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

- Mary Oliver

The Distances

This house, pitched now
The dark wide stretch
Of plains and ocean
To these hills over
The night-filled river,
Billows with night,
Swells with the rooms
Of sleeping children, pulls
Slowly from this bed,
Slowly returns, pulls and holds,
Is held where we
Lock all distances!

Ah, how the distances
Spiral from that
Secrecy:
Room,
Rooms, roof
Spun to the huge
Midnight, and into
The rings and rings of stars.

—Henry W. Rago

Sweet Servitude

A really efficient totalitarian state
would be one in which the
all-powerful executive of political bosses
and their army of managers
control a population of slaves
who do not have to be coerced,
because they love their servitude.

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
(arranged quote)

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- Mary Oliver

Advice for those starting out

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

—Ron Koertge

Moving

For my part,
I travel
not to go anywhere,
but to go.

I travel
for travel’s sake.

The great affair is
to move.

 – Robert Louis Stevenson

Everending, Always Beginning

I don't pay attention to the
world Ending.
It has ended for me
many Times
and began again in the morning.

-- Nayyirah Waheed

The onion-skin transparence of the living

The magician seemed to promise that
something torn to bits might be
mended without a
seam,

that what had vanished might
reappear,

that a scattered handful of doves or dust
might be reunited by a word,

that a paper rose consumed by fire
could be made to bloom
from a pile of ash.

But everyone knew
that it was only
an illusion.

The true magic of this broken world
lies in the ability of the
things it contains

to vanish,
to become so thoroughly lost,
that they might never have existed in the first place.

- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, p. 339
(arranged quote)

Reckless Poem

Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.

It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers

somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.

Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
      tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
      is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
      until I came to myself.

And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
      red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
      among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.

—Mary Oliver

Knowledge

My philosopher friend is explaining again
that the bottle of well-chilled beer in my hand

might not be a bottle of beer,
that the trickle of bottle-sweat cooling in my palm

might not be wet, might not be cool,
that in fact it’s impossible ever to know

if I’m holding a bottle at all.
I try to follow his logic, flipping the steaks

that are almost certainly hissing
over the bed of coals – coals I’d swear

were black at first, then gray, then red –
coals we could spread out and walk on

and why not, I ask, since we’ll never be sure
if our feet burn, if our soles

blister and peel, if our faithlessness
is any better or worse a tool

than the firewalker’s can-do extreme.
Exactly, he smiles. Behind the fence

the moon rises, or seems to.
Have another. Whatever else is true,

the coals feel hotter than ever
as the darkness begins to do

what darkness does. Another what? I ask.

—Philip Memmer

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

 - Kahlil Gibran, On Children (selection)

Freedom to Morph

I have returned from places
       where I beheld myself
and realised that it is mainly us
       that matters!

We are all a society, we all
       create the system and we
watch one another. We are all
       involved in the fear that keeps us at a
       standstill.

For all of us I entered the places
       that others fear to enter and perceived
the vanity, the absurdity of obedience.
       How frail and how easily abused
       is that which should serve us.

We are not numbers,
       we are not biometric data,
so let us not be mere pawns
       in the hands of the big players
on the game board of these times.

If we do not wish
       to fear our own face,
we must save it!

-- Zthoven, a Czech art collective,
describing it's recent undertaking, Citizen K
(arranged quote)

Where

The effort to know a place deeply is, 
ultimately, an expression 
of the human desire to belong, to fit 
somewhere.

- Barry Lopez, The Invitation
(arranged quote)