certainty and doubt

claws or nails?

 

My goal isn’t to take away your confusion. Confusion is a fertile field
in which everything is possible. If you think you “know,” you’ve just
calcified again. Ram Dass

 

Is there something exciting out on the raggedy edges called Perhaps?
What sorts of certainties stifle curiosity? What sorts of sureness make
life livable?

 

I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty.
Mary Oliver in “Angels,” Blue Horses

 

Hope keeps me from calcifying

Angels teach me “perhaps’

Curiosity  makes imagination grow

and

the wild horses keep running!

The Sweetness of Dogs

Camden in Sedona

“The Sweetness of Dogs” by Mary Oliver from Dog Songs

What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. It’s full tonight.
So we go

and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself

thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s
perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up
into my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.

Satchmo:

About the song, he said: “Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That’s the secret …”

The Song of the House Wren

on our front porch

in the apple tree

on the bird-house roof

perches this song-ful bird

She occupies the whole front of the townhouse!

Mary Oliver:
 “To Be Human Is to Sing Your Own Song.”

Everything I can think of that my parents
thought or did I don’t think and I don’t do.
I opened windows, they shut them. I pulled
open the curtains, they shut them. If you
get my drift. Of course there were some
similarities – they wanted to be happy
and the weren’t. I wanted to be Shelley and I
wasn’t. I don’t mean I didn’t have to avoid
imitation, the gloom was pretty heavy. But
then, for me, there was the forest, where
they didn’t exist. And the fields. Where I
learned about birds and other sweet tidbits
of existence. The song sparrow, for example.

In the song sparrow’s nest the nestlings,
those who would sing eventually, must listen
careful to the father bird as he sings
and make their own song in imitation of his.
I don’t know if any other bird does this (in
nature’s way has to do this). But I know a
child doesn’t have to. Doesn’t have to.
Doesn’t have to. And I didn’t.

So much wisdom and tenderness, so much resistance and surrender simultaneously, so much awareness that in the second half of our lives there is more room for grace within ourselves and those we love than we ever imagined.

I’ve Been Made

I’ve been maid
And I’ve been made.

I’ve been stayed
And I’ve been staid.

Some words God
will never speak.
(no matter how hard you listen)

Beauty can both
shout and whisper
(Still it says nothing)

You are you
and will always be you.
(made by Him)

“Some words God will never speak
no matter how hard you listen,”….

“Beauty can both shout and whisper.
Still it says nothing.
You are you and will always be you.”

Mary Oliver in Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way

Definition #217 My Song

This is what we do, reach for what we love the most, and practice everyday.

What we are striving for emerges as something singular to the creator–

your own song.

-Laurie Doctor

“Until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.”

Martha Postlewaite, Annunciation

Mary Oliver’s The Return:

I do not want to be frisky, and theatrical.
I do not want to go forward in the parade of names.
I do not want to be diligent or necessary or in any way
heavy.
From my mouth to God’s ear, I swear it; I want only
to be a song.
To wander around in the fields like a little reed bird.
To be a song.