There is a great loneliness of spirit today.

There is a great loneliness of spirit today.

We're trying to... cope in the face of what seems to be overwhelming evidence that who we are doesn't matter; that there is no real hope for enough change; that the environment and human experience is deteriorating rapidly, and increasingly, and massively. This is the context, psychically and spiritually, in which we are working today. This is how our lives are reflected to us. Meanwhile, we're yearning for connection with each other, with ourselves, with the powers of nature, the possibilities of being alive.

When that tension arises, we feel pain, we feel anguish at the very root of ourselves, and then we cover that over, that grief, that horror, with all kinds of distraction --with consumerism, with addictions, with anything that we can use to disconnect. We've been opening ourselves to the grief, to the knowing of what's taking place--the loss of species, the destruction of the natural world, unimaginable levels of social injustice and economic injustice that deprive so many human beings of basic opportunities. And as we open to the pain of that, there's a possibility of embracing that pain and that grief in a way that becomes a strength, a power to respond.

John Robbins

Diet for a New America

entering into the serpent

Four years ago a red snake crossed my path as I walked through the woods. The direction of its movement, its pace, its colors, the "mood" of the trees and the wind and the snake--they all "spoke" to me, told me things. I look for omens everywhere, everywhere catch glimpses of the patterns and cycles of my life. Stones "speak" to Luisah Teish, a Santera; trees whisper their secrets to Chrystos, an Native American. I remember listening to the voices of the wind as a child and understanding its messages. Los espiritus that rides the back of the south wind. I remember their exhalation blowing in through the slits in the door during those hot Texas afternoons. A gust of wind raising the linoleum under my feet, buffeting the house. Everything trembling.

We're not supposed to remember such otherworldy events. We're supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul's presence and of the spirit's presence. We've been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We're supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it.

Like many Indians and Mexicans, I did not deem my psychic experiences real. I denied their occurrences and let my inner sense atrophy. I allowed white rationality to tell me that the existence of the "other world" was mere pagan superstition. I accepted their reality the "official" reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is connected with the external reality, the upper world, and is considered the most developed consciousness--the consciousness of duality.

The other mode of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination. Its work is labeled "fiction", make-believe, wish-fulfillment. White anthropologists claim Indians have "primitive" and therefore deficient minds, that we cannot think in the higher mode of consciousness--rationality. They are fascinated by what they call the "magical" mind, the "savage" mind, the participation mystique of the mind that says the world is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become "objective," Western culture made "objects" of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing "touch" with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.

--Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza

The Watchful World

Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature--however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be--is never alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must, at every moment, be treated with proper respect. All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful.

"I remember, when I was a boy, walking alone into a huge, beautiful, darkened cathedral. My entire body was alive with a sensation of being watched--by the walls and windows, the pews and pulpit, by the air itself. Now I have felt that again, but this time when I was traveling alone in the forest.

Perhaps many of us have felt what the Koyukon people describe from their experiences in nature. The surroundings are different, but the sensations may be alike. The ultimate source of these feelings is less important than the fact that they exist, for what each of us learns to be real is completely real, regardless. [Huslia journal, February 1977]"

Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, Richard K. Nelson

Thunder by Elizabeth Bishop

And suddenly the giants tired of play.--

With huge, rough hands they flung the gods' gold balls

And silver harps and mirrors at the walls

Of Heaven, and trod, ashamed, where lay

The loveliness of flowers. Frightened Day

On white feet ran from out the temple halls,

The blundering dark was filled with great war-calls,

And Beauty, shamed, slunk silently away.

Be quiet, little wind among the leaves

That turn pale faces to the coming storm.

Be quiet, little foxes in your lairs,

And birds and mice be still--a giant grieves

For his forgotten might. Hark now the warm

And heavy stumbling down the leaden stairs!

1928

daffodils

William Wordsworth

Daffodils

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,	5
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:	10
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,	15
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,	20
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

childhood's end

. . . the Total Breakthrough generation is born on Earth and as mere infants they show powers of mind far beyond their parents' and they go off into a colony by themselves, not as individuals, however, but as one great colonial being, in the biological sense of the colonial animal, until, at last, the Earth, its mission complete, convulses, starts coming apart, and they, the children: "Something's starting to happen. The stars are becoming dimmer. It's as if a great cloud is coming up, very swiftly, all over over all the sky. But it isn't really a cloud. It seems to have some sort of structure---I can glimpse a hazy network of lines and bands that keep changing their position. It's almost as if it were alive... There's a great burning column, like a tree of fire, reaching above the western horizon. It's a long way off right around the world. I know where it springs form: they're on their way at last, to become a part of the Overmind. Their probation is ended: theyre leaving the last remnants of matter behind... The whole landscape is lit up---it's brighter than day---reds and golds and greens are chasing each other across the sky---oh, it's beyond words, it doesn't seem fair that I'm the only one to see it---I never thought such colors---"

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

-Galway Kinnell

31

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose

tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her

silent)

with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which

is a flower and not a face with

hands

which whisper

This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

in the mashed banana sunlight of Labor Day morning

"Amanda's mouth eased into a long slow smile. Her eyes grew as bright as violet silk. "Yes. Yes," she muttered. "The monarch." She stared at Ziller. He at her. They modified each other by their looking. Something almost angelic danced on the abrasive surfaces of his face. She carried her excitement lightly, the way a hunter carries a loaded shotgun over a fence. Warm chemical yokes burst in their throats. Ziller had the stink of Pan about him. Amanda heard the phone ring in her womb. In the magnetized space between them, they flew their thoughts like kites. At last he reached out for her. She took his hand. As they disappeared far down the riverbank, the ringmaster and the Apache sat stunned, in the kind of vacuum that forms in the immediate wake of an historic turn."

--Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins

Nude Interrogation, Yusef Komunyakaa, 1998.

Did you kill anyone over there? Angelica shifts her gaze from the Janis Joplin poster to the Jimi Hendrix, lifting the pale muslin blouse over her head. The blacklight deepens the blues when the needle drops into the first groove of "All Along the Watchtower." I don't want to look at the floor. Did you kill anyone? Did you dig a hole, crawl inside, and wait for your target? Her miniskirt drops into a rainbow at her feet. Sandalwood incense hangs a slow comet of perfume over the room. I shake my head. She unhooks her bra and flings it against a bookcase made of plywood and cinderblocks. Did you use an M-16, a hand-grenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands, both thumbs pressed against that little bird in the throat? She stands with her left thumb hooked into the elastic of her sky-blue panties. When she flicks off the blacklight, snowy hills rush up to the windows. Did you kill anyone over there? Are you right-handed or left-handed? Did you drop your gun afterwards? Did you kneel beside the corpse and turn it over? She's nude against the falling snow. Yes. The record spins like a bull's-eye on the far wall of Xanadu. Yes, I say. I was scared of the silence. The night was too big. And afterwards, I couldn't stop looking up at the sky.

ernest in earnest

"Sometimes, when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue they made. I would stand out and look over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write on true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." So finally, I would write one true sentence and go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written."

Sha-Clack-Clack by Saul Williams

If I could find the spot where truth echoes
I would stand there and whisper memories of my children's future
I would let their future dwell in my past
so that I might live a brighter now
Now is the essence of my domain and it contains
all that was and will be
And I am as I was and will be because I am and always will be
that nigga
I am that nigga
I am that nigga
I am that timeless nigga that swings on pendelums like vines
through mines of boobytrapped minds that are enslaved by time
I am the life that supersedes lifetimes, I am
It was me with serpentine hair and a timeless stare
that with immortal glare turned mortal fear into stone time capsules
They still exist as the walking dead, as I do
The original sulphurhead, symbol of life and matriarchy
severed head Medusa, I am
I am that nigga
I am that nigga!
I am that nigga!!
I am a negro! Yes negro, negro from necro meaning death
I overcame it so they named me after it
And I be spitting at death from behind
and putting "Kick Me" signs on it's back
because I am not the son of Sha-Clack-Clack
I am before that, I am before
I am before before
Before death is eternity, after death is eternity
There is no death there's only eternity
And I be riding on the wings of eternity
like HYAH! HYAH! HYAH! Sha-Clack-Clack
but my flight doesn't go undisturbed
Because time makes dreams defer
And all of my time fears are turning my days into daymares
And I live daymares reliving nightmares
of what taunted my past
Sha-Clack-Clack, time is beatin my ass
And I be havin dreams of chocolate covered watermelons
Filled with fried chickens like pinatas
With little pickaninny sons and daughters
standing up under them with big sticks and aluminum foil
Hittin em, tryin to catch pieces of fallin fried chicken wings
And Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are standing in the corners
with rifles pointed at the heads of the little children
"Don't shoot the children," I shout, "don't shoot the children!"
but they say it's too late
They've already been infected by time
But that shit is before my time
I need more time
I need more time
But it's too late
They start shooting at children and killing them!
One by one, two by two, three by three, four by four
Five by five, six by six, but
my spirit is growing seven by seven
Faster than the speed of light
Cause light only penetrates the darkness that's already there
and I'm already there
I'm here at the end of the road
which is the beginning of the road beyond time, but
where my niggaz at? (Oh shit!)

Oh shit, don't tell me my niggaz got lost in time
My niggaz are dying before their time
My niggaz are serving unjust time
My niggaz are dying because of.. time

we met teddy macker yesterday and he brought me to tears

sycamore canyon

for vaughn montgomery

The dead doe on the Pacific Coast Highway
was lying on her left side. She was almost
the same color as the dirt around her.
Whenever a car passed—it was Sunday
and people were driving the coast—
the fur on her neck would rise in the wind.
Her eyes were dry and cracked; they looked
like the skin of baked apples. They did not shine.
Her left hind leg was so broken it looked absurd.
A car must’ve hit. At contact the doe defecated.
Windblown pebbles stuck to the shit. The hooves
were dusty and large. They did not seem like the hooves
of something dead. When I reached down
and picked up a front leg I could feel the clarity
of her old running. She made me nervous.
I was afraid she would stand up and come alive.
How many cars will pass tonight, I wondered,
and make the fur on her neck rise?
It saddened me no one would be there
to document every time this happened,
that no one would say, There, look.
The fur on her neck, it’s rising in the wind.

written on my childhood refrigerator

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

--william carlos williams

Sestina by elizabeth bishop

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton

There is joy

in all:

in the hair I brush each morning,

in the Cannon towel, newly washed,

that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook,

each morning,

in the outcry from the kettle

that heats my coffee

each morning,

in the spoon and the chair

that cry "Hello there, Anne"

each morning,

in the godhead of the table

that I set my silver, plate, cup upon

each morning.

All this is God,

right here in my pea-green house

each morning

and I mean,

though often forget,

to give thanks

to faint down by the kitchen table

in a prayer of rejoicing

as the holy birds at the window

peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,

let me paint a thank-you on my palm

for this God, this laughter of the morning,

lest it go unspoken.

The joy that isn't shared, I've heard,

dies young.

the bare arms of trees by John Tagliabue

Sometimes when I see the bare arms of trees in the evening

I think of men who have died without love,

Of desolation and space between branch and branch,

I think of immoveable whiteness and lean coldness and fear

And the terrible longing between people stretched apart as these 

branches

And the cold space in between.

I think of the vastness and courage between this step and that step

Of the yearning and fear of the meeting, of the terrible desire 

held apart.

I think of the ocean of longing that moves between land and land

And between people, the space and ocean.

The bare arms of the trees are immovable, without the play of leaves, without the sound of wind;

I think of the unseen love and the unknown thoughts that exist 

between tree and tree

As I pass these things in the evening, as I walk.

ee cummings

nobody loses all the time

i had an uncle named

Sol who was a born failure and

nearly everybody said he should have gone

into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could

sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which

may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable

of all to use a highfalootin phrase

luxuries that is or to

wit farming and be

it needlessly

added

my Uncle Sol's farm

failed because the chickens

ate the vegetables so

my Uncle Sol had a

chicken farm till the

skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol

had a skunk farm but

the skunks caught cold and

died so

my Uncle Sol imitate the

skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the watertank

but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor

Victrola and records while he lived presented to 

him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a

scrumptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with

tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and

i remember we all cried like the Missouri

when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because

somebody pressed a button

(and down went

my Uncle

Sol

and started a worm farm)

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

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 pebbeles of the rain

anr moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep tress,

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.