September's End

We sit with our backs to the east.

A small house in a small town, overlooking

a small valley,

homes on the opposite slopes

looking back.

Mornings—if early enough—you can trace

the sun’s progress by looking west—hill tops first,

the softest touch. Then the slow pushing down

of shadows out of the way reveals

flashed signals of the sun’s rising presence

igniting east-facing windows like bursts of light

shining out from the earth itself.

There was a window out there

morning last

with strength enough to light the whole of our interior

with warm-glow—made me to turn and to smile

in silent amazement

into the source. The sun, you know,

has its own sense of time, its own sense of space,

its own sense of our individual contours. And although

we are a part of its broader concerns,

the best we can likely do is as best we can to attend

to its finding us. And to rest

in that attention

to where we are and to when.

**

Ah, good friend, you’ve set me free

in sun-soaked by-ways, along wind-stroked hills,

and narrow corridors of shadow graced with light.

Namaste

**

There is intensity of focus that comes of us

as natural and as certain and as easy as winds

that drench the face and the edge, the back

and the very end point

of every needle of every pine

within their reach—and then to all the rest,

they breathe the wish that blows behind

their rivered and rippling kiss.

**

Vows we find we’ve made:

looking back, I’d have to say,

a long-standing inclination toward silence

and the solitary, from birth even, yet always as these

are drawn through the intimacies of the few, the nuclear

and as carried on within the broad strokes and patch-work

of the greater quiet—the urge to acts of mutuality,

of respect and consideration and the wish to understand

these enduring visions of love at play

in the daily comings and goings that define the ordinary,

the universal, the connecting groundswell of commonness

that is our collective humanness—and this,

it seems for me, is the center-less center to which

I have leveled my most heart-felt claims

of citizenship.

           

**

Near-ecstatic revelation

The lift of our living within

              the firm embrace of holy name

is found

not on the in-breath,

                    but of the out-going.

Namuamidabutsu

**

After far too long a time

trying to prepare for seventy,

I’ve somehow come to let it go

to itself—this turning grace

called aging—and, 

as it does what it does and what it is,

to use the best of all I have as such,

and as I am, to see it through

all the way through its grace filled,

self-fulfilling way.

**

Whose voice is it

you think

you hear,

yours?

And so

of the words,

yours too?

**

Often after the fact, I pull back in wonder

at the somewhat frantic nature of the search

for that which I already know to be there, yet

nonetheless continue to need to reconfirm,

like seeking out the earliest cast of the sun’s rays,

as if to assure myself the warmth remains

there in the light where last left—and for us,

the spoken name is like this too,

the emergence and re-emergence

of the warmth of embodied memory

made manifest; no less a flicker

than passing thoughts, but tangibly so.

**

And…

implies connecting and also connection,

it implies greater numbers of, and so,

addition, so then, progression

and causation, relation and variety—

it implies abundance…

and so in such a world

might well then serve

the preferred expression

of gratitude, of praise

and of prayer…and…

**

And

the deep

silence

bottomless

well

embodied

here

in this one

sustains

forever

resonant

tremors

of our

collective

living-dying.

**

John Muir Wilderness

                   Fleming Lake--Elevation 9,700 feet

The mountains here drop their shadows

just as the rays of the coming sun begin to arrive,

water offers ripples to the first gentle gusts,

and pines ruffle and wave. To follow the urge

to sit at the edge in a place like this is an act of faith,

a free-fall ride on the wakes

of star-streams—birds swoop and twitter, answers

brittle and fall, frames and reference shift

to the boundless possibilities of the humbled few

who discover the truly praiseworthy.

Here, it’s not asked, how old one is,

but exclaimed: How far we have come!

Here, the wise are those who hold their tongue.

Listen to the rest.

Friend to Friend

Arrogance—yours or mine no difference—

always misguided, rarely instructive of anything

other than itself, and often simply meanness

cloaked in good intentions,

like building character, in someone else.

Though at the lake that day, it clouded

crystalline waters so, what might have been

rebuke, instead glowed with the clarity

of genuine kindness, a flash amongst shadows,

not so much unexpected, as from one unfamiliar,

now known from the inside, out—a gift.

**

We cannot know for certain,

but the effort, beyond all reason,

the effort so fruitless reveals nonetheless

continuous, even uncalled for delight

and richness—reason enough then,

reason enough.

**

Take your teacher by the throat

and listen—it’s the gurgle

that’s most important.

**

We think

as we live, the promises

we make ourselves, vows,

intentions, grand plans, sweeping vistas,

like so many heart-felt leaves blown

to tremor, even before their saying is done—

bud to spread to color to mulch,

all returned to the earth sustained

and richened within the blanket embrace

of the myriad workings of the sun in its sky.

**

Place specific, local,

as in heart beat—how the universe conspires

continuations of each and all throughout their time,

questions of purpose, intention, of direction,

value added, or allowed, all implode

right here—seamless, seem-less wholeness,

each complete in place and time, rightful roles

forever fulfilled—inevitable—amen.

**

They say, just before death arrives, life

sometimes surges, energies push the furthest

reach, new horizons replace the old, space awakens,

shadows fall, imagination stretches to follow the light

to the other side...

**

In the steadied silence of a Sunday morning

begun before the promise of a spoken sun, the roses

on the altar slump, and the two of them, cloaked in clouds

of circling smoke of incense burned to dust,

take their turn to cry—for Buddhas forever gone

and for those about to come.

**

The way it is

There are times when, despite myself, I raise my voice,

when the thrust of my heart pushes through the words and past,

leaves them limp on the empty air, only to fall

to the floor, ill-spent.

And I know, it’s the breath

that words ride that makes them all they are

and its absence that undoes them.

I know.

**

On trust and praise

It’s the urge to engage through syllable and sound

the shadowy horizons of awareness

not simply our own.

It’s the desire to use all that we have

and all that we cannot hold, to articulate the wish

that we cannot speak.

It’s the depths of our need, though not so clearly seen,

to affirm the connections, to return as community,

as is already given.

**

Thresholds of sorts, arise

as we identify what is no longer essential.

Letting that go, of itself lightens

the next step and wherever it may lead.

**

As the chest rises and falls

almost imperceptibly, we conceive

the body alive with the flow of breath—

Buddha’s Name as utterance

makes real the potency of language

as a vehicle of awakening…

NamuAmidaButsu

**

The desire to make something happen

will make

something happen—while all the while,

the world

inevitably delivers

the inevitable, 

making us wonder,

perhaps,

which end of the effort

we’re really on.

**

The ancients speak

of clear and certain vision

amidst that most certain ambiguity

that is the foundational reality of our humanity.

How to live unruffled in a ruffled universe?

Allow each answer its flutter

before letting go…

**

Morning fog rolls in over the ocean

that lies west of here,

shoulders inland hills,

then tips and pours toward the bay,

leading puffs tinted pink.