Mindful

Every day

I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight, 
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen, 

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy, 
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional, 

the fearful, the dreadful, 
the very extravagant — 
but of the ordinary, 
the common, the very drab, 

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar, 
I say to myself, 
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world, 
the ocean’s shine, 
the prayers that are made
out of grass? 

- Mary Oliver

A Shadow of a Nest

The Human Cannon Ball climbs down into
      the barrel of the cannon, safe in the tube’s
darkness, waiting, like me, for the film to punch
      him up the metal shaft and into the canvas

air, down-tent, to the inflated landing bag.
      I’m holding my breath because a pair
of purple finches have nested in the exploding
      fuschia next to the door and are gun-shy

when anyone comes or goes, so their young
      are fed more on my family’s comings and
goings than their own hunger. Mother
      flits from the willow to the box elder,

waiting for evening, for a lull long enough
      to poke a seed into a new throat. So I
ask everyone to use the back door which is
      easy to forget to do and not to scent the nest

with our kind, out of curiosity or the wish
      to kiss a berry into one of the four blind
gaping mouths. Father, rosy and raspberry,
      not purple, stays on a near branch, as if

standing on a spring, waiting to see if I will
      have the courage to breathe, when the Human
Cannon Ball is launched into the air
      and turns himself like a maple leaf, a snow

goose feathering into a corn field, toward
      the arms of the audience, which can never
take the place of the pink blown-up plastic
      bag that will save him a few frames and words

from now – if I can stand here, still as a shadow
      of a nest, breathing like the wind that flies
through the weedy branches of the box elder,
      here, empty as the air that needs to take him up.

—Gary Margolis

Nature Teaches Us How to Be

The scenery, when it is 

truly seen, reacts on the life 
of the seer, 

how to live, 

how to get the most 

of life, 

how to extract its honey 
from the 

flower of the world.  

Nature spontaneously keeps us well. 

Do not resist her!

~ Henry David Thoreau
(arranged quote)

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)

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)