Published in the Albany Times Union, Voices of Faith Column
Making our way through the election season has its stress on our bodies, hearts, and souls. Especially during the party conventions and ongoing national politicking, it’s easy to get worked up, disoriented, and anxious. Just staying informed with a steady diet of cable news where the talking heads of each side battle to the death, makes it easy to feel lost, despairing, and hopeless, no matter what the eventual out come of the election. We start to loose touch with ourselves. Our tender human hearts can only take so much of the endless bickering and yelling emanating from the our flat screen TVs. Our hearts are burdened.

So what does a person do in such an environment? How do we maintain the strength to live through these stressful times? How do we keep our personal center amidst the tumultuous state of the world? One way that works for me is to stop and sit down for meditation. During meditation I can let myself relax and experience a deeper connection with myself, the world around me, and the ever-changing flow of life. I surround myself with silence. I focus within and let it all go. When I meditate, I get my larger and deeper perspective back. When I mention meditation to many people, they have heard of it but don’t know how to actually do it. Meditation has been part of religious traditions for thousands of years. Today there are many forms of meditation being offered by various teachers and traditions. I want to share three very simple, basic meditation practices that anyone can do to come into a peaceful state of centered awareness and relaxed presence in the here and now moment.

The first is a simple meditation you can do whenever you need to reconnect with yourself. Sit in a straight-backed chair or on the floor on a cushion. Let your body relax and breathe fully and naturally. Take a breath into your belly and up into your chest, and exhale deeply. Invite yourself to relax. Focus your attention in the belly area. Invite yourself to sense whatever is present there. Stay with this. You will feel your own presence. Presence is an embodied state of deep connection to oneself in the moment.

A second form of meditation is a walking meditation in nature. As you walk, relax and focus on your belly center, and your heart, in the middle of your chest. You can repeat a phrase on your breath, and synchronize it with your walking. One good phrase I often use while walking is to think, “Toward the One” while breathing in as I take four steps, and then “United with All” while breathing out as I take four steps. Another type of walking meditation is to walk without a goal or an agenda, sensing your presence and being with whatever is there in nature around you.

A third form of medication is to find a piece of music that is peaceful and inspiring. Lie on the floor and let your body relax and be supported by the floor. Let yourself merge with the music. Breath into your belly center and heart and feel your presence. Give yourself the space to be right here and now with the beautiful music. If you develop a regular meditation practice, you will benefit from an enhanced sense of peace and well being, a sense of being connected to your authentic and actual self, and a lessening of fear and anxiety. You will also have more strength to function in the world and be with the suffering and hardships of the world, and the stress and disharmony of our time. And, you will have moments when you feel a communion with the Divine, the All and Everything.

Instead of becoming agitated or anxious with the latest news report, take a different course. Go for a walk in nature and give yourself space. Breathe. Walk without a goal, doing nothing except being in the present moment. Lie down on the floor and let some beautiful soothing music flow over your body and heart. Or, sit, and relax into presence. Feel the All and Everything hold you and feel yourself merged with all of creation. Then, let’s talk about what is happening in our world!.

Do you believe in God?
This is certainly a question we have all been asked and asked ourselves. For some, the answer is an unequivocal yes or no. Among the many voices we hear are those who claim to know with virtual certainty not only the existence, but also the true nature of God, and God's intention for humankind and the world. Others assert that belief in God is not only mistaken and irrational, but potentially immoral if used to cause harm.

For many, the answer is not so simple and absolute. After years of reading and hearing the accounts of contemporary religious seekers, I can report that the real question for many is: "Who or what is the God I can believe in?" Those who ask this question seek a conception or image of God that is true to their own experience of the divine and satisfies the demands of heart and mind. The search for new images and stories about God is, in fact, one of the most dynamic features of contemporary religious experience. New concepts of God are emerging that incorporate the profound developments in knowledge and changes in values currently transforming humankind's understanding of itself and its place in the world.

The quest for a God I can believe in begins, for many, when the notion of God received from their religious tradition, family, or culture is no longer persuasive, comforting or inspiring. There is a "death of God" experience. Sometimes this results from the absence of God in a time of critical need - that is, God appears to be either uncaring silent or non-existent. Other times it is a response to a profound experience of sacredness, beauty, or love which calls for a new understanding of God. The quest for a new image of God manifests in two different - but complementary - ways: as the "God of form" and the "formless God."

Many of us are familiar with the wide variety of forms in which God is depicted in the world's religions. People enter into a relationship with the God of form as partners in an ongoing I-Thou experience of seeking and finding, support and intimacy. For such a relationship to be possible, the God of form must embrace qualities meaningful to the seeker. Religious feminists, for example, seek images of God which include the feminine dimension - for a "God who looks like me." Likewise, different images of God around the world embody the diverse values and identities of various cultures.

Religious traditions also affirm a formless dimension of God which is ultimately mysterious and beyond all descriptions. St.. Augustine advises, "If you understand God, it is not God you understand." For the fourth-century Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa, "True vision consists in seeing that (God) is invisible."

For many, the discovery of the formless God begins with an experience of wonder, awe, or deep meaning which reveals a sacred dimension of reality. It may arise while gazing on the beauty of an autumn forest, sitting under a star-filled night sky, in a moment of love or creative inspiration, or simply marveling at the wonder of existence itself. In these experiences, God is a mysterious ground or presence within and behind all things, not a concrete form or being.

The notion that there is only one true image of God has been the cause of religious strife throughout history. Religious conflict may well decrease when the humility and openness we experience before the wonder and mystery of life encourage us to see belief in God as more complex than a simple yes or no question. In the contemporary quest for new images of God, we realize there is always a sacred dimension of mystery in which all forms dissolve and which also gives birth to a rich diversity of forms.

Many today are living what I call "mystical spirituality." By this I mean a spirituality grounded in some form of mystical or "peak experience" of the ultimate unity and wholeness of reality. From the mystical view point everything is inter-connected and inter-related, all part of one great community of being. Many of us have had such a mystical experience while in nature. In fact, one of my annual pilgrimages is a trip to Yosemite Park, California, to hike in the High Sierras. On one of these trips several years ago I had an experience which has stayed with me ever since.

Imagine a late August afternoon in high granite mountains, the sky is clear blue with a few white clouds drifting in the distance, the sun is bright and pleasantly warm. I hike for several miles up from the valley, along the bank of a rock-strewn Bud Creek - its water tumbling downhill over huge boulders or settling into deep, hollowed-out rock grottoes. I follow the stream to its source high up in Bud Lake, where melted snow catches in the chalice formed by the surrounding hills. Circumambulating the lake I stop to rest for a while in the shade of a stand of hardy pines at the edge of the tree line. Something inside calls me and I continue uphill, toward the sheer rock face pushing almost straight up, too steep and solid for even the hardiest plants to take root. I walk through a landscape of delicate white, red, and yellow flowers springing from the green carpet of the alpine meadow. I reach the base of the cliff at the boundary where mineral and life meet, where the wandering fingers of yellow and green reach up into gray granite. I find a comfortable spot to lie down among the rocks and look out over the lake and the mountain peaks in the distance. I rest a moment in peace, suspended; open to the vast blue sky and the majestic power of the stillness. In this moment there is no effort, no seeking, no thought, no care - there is simply the awareness of being present, here and now, in this place. Nothing moves. An all-pervading presence fills the space and radiates through the sky, the rocks, the living earth. I relax and the feeling deepens into quiet, unbroken awareness. I am here, in the landscape, part of the scene, nothing more, nothing less. Then in an instant, unexpected but entirely natural, a revelation comes. A voice deep in the sky - or is it deep in the heart? - proclaims: "I am a God of beauty, and this is how we pray."

An ecstatic thrill courses through my body - pure affirmation and joy. Yes, yes! "I am a God of beauty and this is how we pray." The open sky, the towering white cloud above Cathedral Peak in the distance, the dark blue lake below, the green life all around bear witness to the revelation. Yes, it is absolutely clear, true beyond any doubt, obvious, self-evident. This is it! This is what I have been searching for! In this I can rest! Yes, life is beautiful and, in this moment, perfect. Nothing lacking, nothing sought. I am part of this vast universe of beauty, not something foreign, other; but no, I am not just a part, I am this vast universe of beauty. "Thank you" wells up from the core. Thank you for all this beauty, thank you for the body and its senses that make this experience possible, thank you for the whole mysterious flow of life I am blessed to share in, thank you for this saving gift. I have seen the "answer" and I will not forget.

What do I take from this experience? What are its implications? First, I am reminded to be aware of the beauty around me and how much beauty adds to the enjoyment of life. Second, I realize my true human identity as an inseparable part of all things, which brings with it a sense of compassion and responsibility. Third, there is an undeniable sense of being embraced by something larger than myself, that I sometimes encounter as an I-Thou, but which is also not "other" to me. Finally, sometimes amidst the many activities and challenges of life I simply stop to recall the view of Bud Lake and Cathedral Peak beyond as a kind of prayer that sustains me, and sends me on my way again.

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.

-- Thomas Berry, Catholic priest and theologian

Imagine: 15 billion years ago the universe was hidden in a state of potentiality, possible but not yet actual. Then for some reason -- beyond science's understanding -- the universe bursts forth from nothingness, exploding into being in the Big Bang. In an unimaginable moment of expansion the universe blossoms from a single seed -- smaller than a subatomic particle -- that contains all the matter and energy that has ever been or will be.

Through a dynamic process billions upon billions of galaxies, stars and planets arise and populate the night sky. Five billion years ago, a planet forms around an unremarkable yellow star in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Less than 1 billion years later, the planet's wondrous physical and chemical processes make the emergence of self-sustaining organic life possible.

Over the course of 4 billion years, life evolves, transforming and being transformed by the planet's environment. Millions upon millions of species of plants and animals are born, abide and disappear. And the process of transformation goes on.

In recent terrestrial history, a new creature arises, which is a continuation of its evolutionary ancestors but also introduces new features to the planet (and perhaps the universe). This creature -- humankind -- is distinguished by its consciousness and self-awareness, its emotional richness, aesthetic sensitivity and creativity.

With consciousness comes language, rationality, the possibility of a spiritual life. Human beings seek meaning and develop "meaning stories" that tell about their nature and place in the universe. Human beings seek to unfold their individual potential to its fullest extent in a life of richness, satisfaction and enjoyment. Human beings seek love and nurturing in ever-widening circles of family and community. Human beings seek salvation, some form of resting in the embrace of a Great Yes that supports and guides the individual through life.

By the dawn of the 21st century, a new meaning story is emerging. It arises to answer the deepest questions, needs and concerns, and to satisfy the longings of the heart and mind. The new story is based on a transformative experience of the sacred unity and continuity of all things.

Humankind is celebrated as an integral part of the beautiful earth-community, not its adversary or master, subject to the same physical laws and natural processes as all other life. Human beings discover a species-identity of care and connection, more fundamental than religion, nation, race or gender. This new identity provides a basis for ethical action that promotes the maximum unfoldment of each individual life in the context of the larger whole. The new story calls humans to humility, awe and reverence before the Beautiful Mystery at the heart of existence and present in all things. Humans experience the wide-eyed wonder of the child at the vastness, deep intelligence and breathtaking beauty of the natural world.

The path of the new story values curiosity, openness and questioning, the longing to know and understand. It affirms celebration and sacredness, and the impulse to creative expression.

The individual life journey is enriched by humankind's collective wisdom, the stillness of contemplation and time for beauty. The path carries the seeker beyond dualities of heaven and earth, spirit and matter, body and soul, and self and other into the presence and wholeness of the here and now. The practice of the new story is to honor the blessed privilege of life, its challenges and fulfillments, its mystery and discovery, and to share one's unique gifts with others.

Is this possible or just a dream? In the end, the only answer is that it comes down to each person.

THE NEW STORY:
GOD AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD
PART 1
By John O'Neill

Your voice is gone now; I hardly hear you.
Your starry voice all shadow now
and the earth dark again...
Now, everywhere I am talked to by silence *1

For many human beings God does not appear to be real. God seems ineffective, and deaf, or at least speechless.... Many still call on God, but few expect a response.... If one cannot properly speak of God because God is a mystery; if one cannot call on God because God does not respond; if second causes are all monopolized by scientific explanations of the present or the future; if the sorrows of the human heart are better remedied by human love than by the divine... then what function remains to that which so many traditions have called God?... The God at the acme of the hierarchy of beings appears impotent, and from that moment forward is silent. Human beings discover, with great pain, their own isolation. *2

Somehow, despite the miraculous technological feats that provide us with a comfort and security of life that other ages could only dream of; despite the astounding discoveries of modern science that have revealed the fundamental secrets of the physical and biological universe; despite the exponentially proliferating knowledge in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology that endeavor to unravel the mystery of human nature; and despite the intoxicants and the constant stimuli intended to entertain and divert us from our cares and anxieties - something (or someone) seems to be missing in the modern world. We have only to look around to realize that there is a "spiritual devastation" prevalent in our time.

Religious and non-religious people alike share a deep distress over the meaninglessness of modern life, the shallowness and fragmentation of contemporary culture, and the loss of a sense of transcendence. Angst and ennui are two foreign words we have come to know well. In desperation, people have sought meaning and identity in nationalism, religious fundamentalism, racism and ethnocentrism, and ideologies as disparate as Marxism and fascism, producing in the process death camps, killing fields, and ethnic clean sings too numerous and disturbing to list. Behind all this is, in the words of a recent popular song, a "God-sized hunger underneath the laughter and the rage." All of these phenomena are the traces of the One who is missing. The silence and absence of God felt by many is summed up most powerfully in the anguished cry of Lie Diesel: "Where was God at Auschwitz?"

An inquiry into the wide-spread experience of the death of God shows that this event is not merely the result of an abstract intellectual process. It is first and foremost a lived experience. One of the most paradoxical aspects of this experience is that just as a person who is absent may be more present in the minds of a group of people gathered in a room than they are to each other, God is often a far more living reality for those who have lost God than for those who continue on in simple belief without confronting the absence. American poet W.S. Mer win captures this experience beautifully in a short poem:

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Perhaps in no other time
has the longing for God been more powerfully or puissantly felt
and the need of God so absolutely clear.

The recognition of the historical phenomenon of the death of God is not necessarily a call to atheism. For many, the death of God does not mean the loss of the God-experience, but, rather, the failure of a culturally transmitted image of God that no longer rings true. In any case, the experience of the death of God is the defining religious event of our time. It marks the revolutionary eclipse of one world view and opens the possibility of a new one. The central importance of the death of God in understanding our age is affirmed by theologian Robert Alters: "If there is one clear portal to the twentieth century," he writes, "it is a passage through the death of God." The proclamation of Nighties - who saw himself as the Christ-like prophet of our age - captures our situation: "Whither is God?... I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers.... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

This event, which became a central theme in the twentieth century, could hardly have been imagined a couple of centuries ago. To speak of the death of God is to utter what is, for many, still a blasphemous untruth. Quite clearly, God is very much a living reality in the lives of billions of believers around the world. In fact, these faithful share a deep conviction of, and a great investment in, the ongoing survival of God. For believers in our day, to speak of the death of God may name an external cultural phenomenon or the ideology of atheists or secular humanists, but it does not seem to name a condition shared by the religious believer.

Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that gods do die when they no longer speak to our experience of existence, our thirst for being, our quest for meaning, our need for salvation; when they become silent in the face of the deepest challenges of our lives; when their absence becomes more apparent than their presence; when the concept of God that we hold, or have been given, no longer matches our experience of the world.

In the midst of the wide-spread experience of the loss of God there remains the deep and innate human longing for self-transcendence, for the assurance that there is some larger Realty to which we belong, and that this larger Reality is holy, sacred, and good. Even if the overly anthropomorphic form of God transmitted by traditional, orthodox religions no longer speaks to many people's hearts, the quest for God goes on. Perhaps the longing for God is felt even more deeply and strongly today than in the past precisely because of the challenges it faces in the modern world. Discovering the nature of the ultimate Reality we call God and finding our true relationship with that Reality is no longer simply a matter of accepting culturally transmitted conceptions and doctrines. We are, in fact, each on our own personal quest for ultimate Reality. We have the richness of the teachings of the past and the ever-proliferating knowledge of the present to draw on, but in the end each of us must find out the secret of this Reality for ourselves.

The contemporary quest for a God who can speak to our time must pass through the dark night in which no answer to our question of God is satisfactory. In that sense, we must each experience the death of an inadequate conception of God in order to experience the living ness of the true God who embraces our lives and speaks to and through our hearts. In the powerful
words of the 20th-century Sufi mystic Hazard In ay at Khan, we must be prepared to shatter our ideal (that is, our concept of God) on the rock of Truth (that is, the omnipresent but ultimately mysterious reality of God). The concept of God that has died for many people is what the philosopher Martin Hildegard termed the "onto-theological God." By this term he means a God who has been turned into a being among beings, a thing among things - God as the Supreme Being. The modern experience of the death of God is, in fact, a profound deconstruction of the God conceptualized as the Supreme Being - God as anthropomorphic, monarchical, patriarchal, static, all-controlling, and "Wholly Other." For some, the silence of the onto-theological Supreme Being is the silence of absence and death, but for others it is the silence of mystery and a new kind of presence. This mysterious presence requires a new and radically different expression in symbols and metaphors that point to an ultimate Reality that is experienced in a form other than God conceptualized as the Supreme Being. The path of loss is, therefore, also the path of discovery and of affirmation As the American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote:

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future of the world depends.

A prophetic understanding of our present time passionately affirms that the future of the world truly does hinge on discovering the God who can speak to our modern human situation. The intensity of the search for the God for our time means that we are living in what is very probably one of the most spiritually dynamic and revolutionary times in human history. What we could call the "Old Story" about God no longer satisfies many, leading to the "death of God" announced by Nighties At the same time, with the worldwide emergence of fundamentalism and sectarian religious intolerance we see the Old Story being used as a justification for violence, injustice, discrimination, and oppression. Clearly, what is needed is a new religious vision for our time, a vision that affirms the centrality of the spiritual, sacred dimension of existence while also providing a profound sense of how to live as full human beings, embodied in physical form and embedded in the natural world around us. What is needed, in short, is a New Story. As contemporary theologian and ecologist Thomas Berry observes: "It's all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story."

THE NEW STORY

The conviction that we are living in a time when a New Story is emerging is shared by many around the globe. Some have called this the New Age, others the Message in Our Time, the post modern era, or the Aquaria Age. Regardless of what name may be used, the world view communicated by the New Story cannot be merely another philosophical or theological system. It must reach deeper into the human heart than rational arguments; it must enthrall the imagination through an all-encompassing creative vision. It must take the form of a new my tho poetic story. This New Story must give meaning to human life by describing our place in the universe and also guide us in creating a positive future. The emerging New Story addresses all aspects of human existence - nothing is left out, nothing is "unspiritual" or "beneath" its concern. The New Story embraces modern science with its wondrous new creation story (the Big Bang) and its dynamic, evolutionary view of the cosmos and terrestrial life. The New Story affirms the ecological movement's call for humankind to awaken from the anthropocentric that has caused so much destruction to the natural world and, instead, to celebrate our place as natural creatures embedded within the exquisite web of life on planet Earth. The New Story echoes the longing of feminism for the full equality of the masculine and feminine dimensions of life, for the validation of the body as a sacred temple, and for the healing of artificial dualities that lead to separation and oppression. And the New Story seeks a new God Ideal that can speak to people of our time.

The New Story is not a once and for all revelation that descends complete and fully formed from above; rather it is arising from the earth, from the deep roots of the human heart. The New Story is being expressed through the longing and insight of millions upon millions of individuals around the world who have answered the challenge of the Sufi poet Geraldine Rummy:

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth...

The millions of new myths about God - each true in their own way and each limited by the limitations of their human creator - are, in fact, the millions of faces of the One Being who is both revealed in these many forms and also hidden in the transcendent mystery beyond form. What, then, does the New Story have to say about the God for our time?

*1. Louise Luck, "Vespers" in The Wild Iris, Hopewell, NJ: The Echo Press, 1992, p. 55.
* 2. Raymond Pinker, The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha, translated by Robert R. Barr, Mary knoll, NY: Orb is Books, 1989, x-xi.
* 3. The Gift: Poems by Hi-fis, translated by Daniel Lad in sky, Penguin Arc ana, p. 277

©2004 John O'Neill

THE NEW STORY:
GOD AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD 
PART 2
By John O'Neill
THE QUEST FOR GOD

If we consider how we come to our own personal conception of God, we realize that nearly every human being is brought up with an image of God that is given at second hand by parents, religious traditions, and the larger culture. This initial God-concept (what Hazard In ay at Khan calls "the God Ideal") is not a product of a person's own direct experience. Many people remain attached to the God-concept inherited from childhood with little recognition of the inherent complexities and paradoxes and inadequacies this concept entails. For some, however, a time comes when the received God-concept is no longer adequate - there is a failure of the God-concept to satisfy one's need and to speak to one's direct experience. A time comes in our lives when we seek to discover the form of ultimate Reality that is authentic to our own experience. In describing the awakening of this quest, Hazard In ay at Khan writes: "The seeking for God is a natural outcome of the maturity of the soul. There is a time in life when a passion is awakened in the soul which gives the soul a longing for the unattainable, and if the soul does not take that direction, then it certainly misses something in life for which it has an innate longing and in which lies its ultimate satisfaction."

I sit with you just before morning
You seem not to be person but silent presence
Filling the room like air
Or the invisible mist
              on an ocean morning
              cool against my cheeks
The warm light of the candle flame
Pushes back the night and
Calls the waking sun just below the horizon
The hands in my lap come together instinctively
              thumb against thumb
              palms resting one on another facing the sky
A circle
For a moment I allow my life
As the tree outside allows the fall
Friend, I don’t think I’ve said thank you enough

UNIVERSES

One by one
newly discovered
solar systems
populate
our celestial metropolis;
they click on
in our star charts
and imaginations
as the stars themselves
flicker on
in the approaching night.

Scientists debate
the chances of life
on these
distant globes
hugging their own suns.
Are we alone, unique?
Or is life – stranger
than we can imagine –
easy,
assembling
its molecules
from the fertile soup
of heaving oceans
and weaving clouds,
the order
of protein
and DNA
asserting itself
like a law:
their fragile, spiraling strands
replicating themselves
forever,
if allowed?

Does this cosmic
instinct
drive itself
into consciousness like ours?
Do others,
light years away,
see

and know they see?
Do their lives count
for anything,
and does
a God
watch over
their fate?
Where,
I wonder,
does this leave me
as I sit
a few
moments
this quiet morning
alone,
and ponder
my own life,
so minute
and so magnificent?

 PSALM: BEING HUMAN BEING

The answer for angels is not enough –
the earth of flesh and death and love
has its own law and its own joy.
 
  Praising God is done in a body,
supple and fragile,
part of the same fabric
that nurtures it and takes it back in the end.

Our common human bond
runs through the pain of birth,
the longing for the mother’s safe arms,
the father’s brilliance and security,
the independence of the first steps, the first “no.”

It winds through dreams of what could be,
attended by satisfaction and disappointment,
the inevitable losses and gains
that challenge and sustain us through the seasons of life.
The path traverses the fear that shakes our inner cosmos
and the hope that arises yet again as each breath.

This precious human birth is not easy,
sometimes its only support is sheer inertia,
the unconscious wisdom of the stomach
with its churning acids extracting what we need to live,
the ceaseless pulsing of fluids through veins and tubes;
survival and endurance inscribed in every cell.

But then there is shattering beauty,
the mouth shaped by awe, the eyes glowing in wonder,
the heart springing into blue heavens
even as it descends deeper into the core.

The ground of this earth is what is shared,
our species knowledge,
the birth, love, joy, hope, fear, sorrow, loss, death,
the wisdom and foolishness that are our history and destiny.

Our song arises from this ground:
to the angels and our God above
to the earth and our God below

to all who come this way, our ancestors and children
to all things animal, vegetable, mineral
to the ones beside us and the ones we miss
to the ones easy and hard
to our Mother and Father God and what is beyond.

Surely no song without the notes –
just as surely no notes without the song.
To sing our lives, smaller almost than nothing.
To sing what is larger than all size.
To sing with depth and joy
because we have no choice but to sing.

A KAYAK ON THE HUDSON

Each stroke sends a tiny whirlpool down the river’s flow,
the water turns a moment inside the funnel
then returns to the unbroken brown-green stream.

 A spring breeze glides over the Hudson water ’s face,
slides south with the current, over
the ocean tide pushing north up to Troy.

The double-headed paddle slices the water right and then left,
with a small twist of the wrist – right and then left –
a familiar ordered pulse ticking the morning hour away.

I watch the kayak floating lightly on the water with hanging white clouds above:
I know my life will end, and my children’s, and their children’s too.
I know this flow will continue as it has for centuries

before we thought this earth is ours.  I imagine ancestors I share no blood with –
my relations, still – who took time from fleeting lives to sit by this river,
to feel April trees quickening again, before turning toward home.

 UNIO MYSTICA: THE DARK NIGHT

My love, be patient with me and wait.
I don’t want this time to end –
I love this passing moment,
I love this bitter-sweet pain I refuse to surrender,
I love these tears that Buddhas never cry.
You insist and pull me toward you,
into the solitary, motionless night –
so dark and sweet, and so terrifying –
but I rise to flee back into bright
time, my second home.
 

Like all nights we have met together –
aroused in the thrilling rhythms of two in love
or finally still in the sleep of union –
I know this night will turn to light again,
as I know this dark heart of all light
never moves.
 

My love, you are here now,
I would fuse with you in a perfect embrace,
I would vanish with you in the dark flash
of final delight between memory and expectation.
But, my love, something in me doesn’t want to die yet;
I want to prolong this deepening twilight,
I want to marvel at our exquisite disguises
as lover and beloved a while longer.

    INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS 1: EARLY MORNING

Let us converse now,
you and I, in silence;
let it be a prayer between two.

Yesterday the bud
on the rose bush in the garden
was hard as a small red stone;
this morning it is open to the sun.

Last night the milkweed pod exploded
and cast its white stars
into the slowly brightening sky;
I watch them drift free,
searching out a fertile spot,
carried on the same cool morning air
that fills my bay window where we sit.

Believe me, I don’t love the gravity
that warps everything inward,
like a black hole swallowing itself forever.
My friend, let me unwind before you,
let me unwrap the miles of self,
peeling away the layers to find the core:
it is the meat of the nut that is sweet,
that nourishes, and grows itself again.

I know you hear me,
but you are mostly silent;
I feel your breath warm around me
like the breathing spring that opens flowers;
you wait for me to bloom in my own way,
assure me that patience
is often greater than will.
There is no hurry to end this time,
no need to prolong it either.
So be it.  Let the day begin,
I am awake now.

              WHAT SHOULD I DO?

A Buddha sits
under the green shelter
of a white-barked tree,
the sky is beautiful blue
with wispy white clouds,
the air is mild,
the fingers of the breeze
caress yellow and purple flowers
and carry a small bird
through the waiting space,
grasses all around
bend their heads in prayer,
a small spider moves on many legs
across his lap
as it goes on with its spider life,
a leaf falls,
a brown horse with rippling muscles
and long, dark tail
laps up the tender grass,
as farmers work their fields in the distance

A perfect moment –
tender, sweet, still –
he sits content,
his hard journey finished,
fulfilled in this moment,
nothing lacking, nothing sought,
his satisfied eyes close gently again,
his body part of the solid green earth,
part of the sky overhead

Ah yes, he thinks,
at last I am at home,
I don’t need anything more,
nothing can be better than this
I never want to leave
I have found my joy, my satisfaction, my life  –
What should I do?

His eyes open gently again,
his gaze falls upon a
small yellow flower –
one bud wide open,
others still to bloom –
they smile at each other

And then he knows:
somewhere there is someone
who seeks this beauty too,
I will take this precious flower to him, to her
and he will smile, she will smile, too –
that is all

He bows to the earth, the tree, the sky
and with a solid, unhurried step
begins walking the path back
to where his friends are waiting.

  PASSAGES

I admire the passages
of family and friends –
critical moments,
precious times,
hard decisions,
a year of changes, for sure

Some go looking for new adventure,
some for what seems missing,
some need freedom to grow, and space
some seek what has been lost so long
and some move forward with light step

For some, the time of fulfillment comes
and the calm after,
not always comfortable
because of the stillness –
I am, after all, a person of action!

What to do next?

Begin something new
let desire have scope –
there is a call that guides,
gives strength and hope
and the peace that moves with all

I mark my own seasons
I watch the rise of passion and calling
open wider to my horizon –
holding the exquisite
hearing and believing the wonder
setting off again

The Hudson River tide moves, going in and out
days flow by the moment
Earth turns once again around the Sun
change carries everything along

Is it a play? A great song?
Composed, or playing itself?
I know the rhythm from the beginning
this rhythm we share, this slice of time
moving together, my friend,
at your side

              PATTERNS

The water that flows
even as it yields
its surface to the wind

the plants that grow green,
the hawk and the moon,
the walls of tile and brick

there is an order, a pattern,
wisdom and light,
there is love behind it

the flow is an ecstasy
that moves through air
and rock

something simple,
something complex,
of cells or stones composed

born of man or God
or the irrepressible
force of life

that forms itself in greens and golds,
in the blue of water, snow, or sky,
in dark shadows across the land

steeples and minarets reach up
as do trees and rock,
their longing reflected in form –
the eye of beauty sees

GROWING THE BODY OF RESURRECTION
For Hadiya

We grow ourselves day by day
mostly hidden from view ­–
deep in the mountain's veins –
like the crystal's silent accretion
one molecule at a time.

We grow ourselves day by day
like the butterfly
whose orange and black wings
are hidden in the silky sheath,
hanging seemingly unchanged
from a branch in the garden.

Have faith in the wounds
that penetrate our opaque shells –­
as the farmer's plow
opens the earth for seed –
the wounds that turn
our guarded insides tender
and fertile for growth.

Have faith in the power
that pushes fragile seeds, sun-seeking,
through the dark and heavy earth.

Have faith in the light
that fills the new moon's darkness,
the sliver that grows, almost imperceptibly
night after night,
into its true form.

This is the way we grow:
by choice, by chance, by design,
by fate, by faith –
in all ways our life is rendered
into an undying fragrance,
the sacred fragrance that perfumes eternity.

   THE COURSE OF LIFE

In predawn silence, empty and full, I
Welcome fresh snow-fall, the river's deep flow
Even under thick ice, while through dark sky
Waves of birds pulse before the coming glow;
New day calls me from winter sleep and dreams,
Back to my place upon this circling stage,
To the rhythm in veins and bones that seems
More real than stone or the advent of age,
Back to family and friends turning too in
An unceasing fire that lights memory
And hope, and warms all our days from within,
Back always and only to one story:
Spread these arms round what they can never keep,
Bare this heart to all life and final sleep.

   THE TURNING

We sit in our bay window before dawn
Looking out over the tops of the trees,
Beyond the church steeple in the park across the street.

A fresh wind blows in from the east
Hinting at the sunrise to come.

The stars breathe their waning light into the night sky
And sparkle off the white blanket on the ground
As the sky dissolves from deep purple to crimson.

Hand in hand we watch the never-ending turning
Silently circling with it ourselves.

The quiet current of blood, the steady pulse of breath
The eyes’ fleet blink to cleanse the windows of the soul
Everything moving with a wisdom of its own
We are ready for another year, another day, another moment.

Eternity Now

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.
Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.
Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it.
The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing;
it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years more it will still be only a moment.
To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever in now.
-- Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

"The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world."
-- John Burroughs (1837-1921)

I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my heart to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earthÕs firmness -- I felt it bear me up... I thought of the wandering air -- its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea: ...I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul equivalent of his light and brilliance.... I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness.... Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower, breathing the earth-encircling air, thinking of the sea and sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to touch it, ...thus I prayed that I might touch to the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity.

With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean -- in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written.... The great sun burning with light; the strong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought of ocean; the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, and ecstasy.... I held out my hand, the sunlight gleamed on the skin and the iridescent nails; I recalled the mystery and beauty of the flesh.... I hid my face in the grass, I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away.
-- Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

"Your real lover of Nature does not love merely the beautiful things which he culls here and there; he loves the earth itself, the faces of the hills and mountains, the rocks, the streams, the naked trees no less than the leafy trees, -- a plowed field no less than a meadow. He does not know what draws him. It is not beauty, any more than it is beauty in his mother and father that makes him love them. It is something much more deeply interfused--something native and kindred that calls to him.

A great many people admire Nature; they write admiring things about her; they apostrophize her beauties; they describe minutely pretty scenes here and there; they climb mountains to see the sun set, or the sun rise, or make long journeys to find waterfalls, but ... Nature is not to be praised or patronized. You can not go to her and describe her; she must speak through your heart. The woods and fields must melt into your mind, dissolved by your love for them." -- John Burroughs, Riverby, 1894