Tag: Poetry

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Five Precious Gems – Poems I Love

I shared with a friend that I had hundreds of poems memorized, and I described them as poems I “carry with me.” She asked me, if I could only pick five precious ones to carry forward, what would I pick?

It’s an impossible task to really pick five – I carry so many with me for a reason. They all are great for different reasons. But, if I had to pick just five, here’s what I’d choose.

  1. Wild Geese
  2. The Peace of Wild Things
  3. Stonehouse 31
  4. Tao Te Ching 53
  5. Sonnets to Oprheus II, 29

Wild Geese

Mary Oliver
(Mary Oliver’s reading)

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 pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
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.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry
(Wendell’s reading)

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Stonehouse 31

Stonehouse, trans. Red Pine

This body lasts about as long as a bubble
may as well let it go
things don’t often go as we wish
who can step back doesn’t worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
we gather and part like clouds
I stopped thinking about the world a long time ago
relaxing all day in a teetering hut

Tao Te Ching 53

Lao Tzu trans. Red Pine

Were I sufficiently wise
I would follow the Great Way
and only fear going astray
the Great Way is smooth
but people love byways
their palaces are spotless
but their fields are overgrown
and their granaries are empty
they wear fine cloth
and carry sharp swords
they tire of food and drink
and possess more than they need
this is called robbery
and robbery is not the Way

Sonnets to Oprheus II, 29

(Let this darkness be a bell tower)
Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy
(Joanna’s reading)

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

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Clipping my Nails Gatha

Gathas are short practice poems that we can use to bring mindfulness into daily activity. I wrote this for clipping my nails, but really, this could be used for any form of body care. Including trimming my nose hairs and ear hairs, two new activities I find myself having to undertake in middle age.

Clipping my nails,
I am aware that this body
is always changing
Impermanence is the way of the world

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My Waking Up Gatha

For many years, I recited several poems immediately upon waking:

  1. Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Waking Up” gatha
  2. The Dalai Lama’s “Today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life…”
  3. Haim Ginott’s “It’s my personal approach that creates the climate, it’s my daily mood that makes the weather…”

I tried to combine the essence of these three into a single practice poem.

Gatha

Waking up this morning,
I smile.
I am alive,
I have a precious human life,
and I am not going to waste it.

I will use my energies
to heal myself,
deepen my connection with others,
and build a beautiful continuation.

I will offer peace to others.
I will not lash out or attack others.
I will benefit other life as much as I can.

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Flossing my Teeth Gatha

Flossing is a difficult habit for me. My parents didn’t model good tooth care (my father died with no teeth), and it’s always been a slog for me. Which is why I have developed several different practice poems!

Flossing My Teeth I

This is the first one I came up with and taught to my young children.

Flossing my teeth 
and strengthening my gums
I improve my overall health
I know that even the smallest detail matters

Flossing My Teeth II

Between each tooth,
space for patience.
By caring for this body,
I care for the Earth.

I deeply want to care for the Earth, and my body is not separate from the Earth, and so it deserves my patient care too.

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Gatha Practice

Gathas are short practice poems. They can help us bring mindfulness, concentration, and insight to daily activities.

Practicing with Gathas

The basic form of practice is to: pause before you undertake some action, come back to your breathing, recite the gatha in your mind or out loud, and then initiate the action with mindfulness. Another method is to keep the gatha flowing through your mind while you perform the action, tying one line to an in breath and the next to an out breath.

I find that gathas, especially when practiced regularly, can wake you up to things you take for granted, expose habit energy, and steadily retrain your inner voice. I also find that my days are more beautiful when filled with poetic reminders of the practice and the wonders of life.

My Gathas

Writing your own gathas is a longstanding Zen tradition. I take great inspiration from my teacher in this, using gatha-crafting as a way to personalize and deepen my practice. Writing gathas makes the practices meaningful to me, and it helps me to reclaim areas of my life that I am less present to (for me, flossing is a great example of a rich area of practice.)

Here are some of mine:

References

Articles about gatha practice:

Sources of gathas from Thich Nhat Hanh:

  • Present Moment, Wonderful Moment
    • A gatha-focused book, containing 49 gathas and Thay’s commentary
  • The Energy of Prayer – How to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice: See Appendix 2, “Buddhist Prayers and Gathas,” pp.145-155.
  • Stepping into Freedom – An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training: This book is not just for monastics but is for everyone. It begins in Part One with 68 gathas.

Other sources of gathas:

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The Peace of Wild Things

In these chaotic times, I find that I am increasingly drawn to the wilderness. Wendell Berry perfectly captures the feeling of nourishment that comes from spending time in nature.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound 
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought 
of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars 
waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

WENDELL BERRY

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The Great Wave

What a marvelous blessing
to participate in this life
this wave of consciousness
rolling and roiling through space and time
billions of years in the making

This experiment will not end even when we do.
it will keep rolling on
as YOU will roll on along with it
(even if it’s in a different form)

Connected Thoughts

  • It’s amusing to think of this great wave in the context of things like people complaining about how much time someone spends on a video game. The universe worked for billions of years to develop video games – maybe it’s not such a waste after all.
  • The Book by Alan Watts

    The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body.”

    the constant awareness of death shows the world to be as flowing and diaphanous as the filmy patterns of blue smoke in the air—that there really is nothing to clutch and no one to clutch it. This is depressing only so long as there remains a notion that there might be some way of fixing it, of putting it off just once more, or hoping that one has, or is, some kind of ego-soul that will survive bodily dissolution.

  • Does it Matter? by Alan Watts

    From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible.

  • This Is It by Alan Watts

    My own feeling, and of course it is nothing more than an opinion, is that we transcend death, not as individual memory-systems, but only in so far as our true identity is the total process of the world as distinct from the apparently separate organism.

  • The Lady of the Lake by Andrzej Sapkowski

    ‘There,’ said the elf. ‘The ancient snake Ouroboros. Ouroboros symbolises eternity and is itself eternal. It is the eternal going away and the eternal return. It is something that has no beginning and no end.
    ‘Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.

  • “Desiderata” by Max Erhmann

    You are a child of the universe,
    no less than the trees and the stars;
    you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you,
    no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.
    Be cheerful.
    Strive to be happy.

  • Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

    It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death.

  • The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts

    Buddhism has frequently compared the course of time to the apparent motion of a wave, wherein the actual water only moves up and down, creating the illusion of a “piece” of water moving over the surface.

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Apollonia Chalee

This is a poem which I received inside a bag of coffee. I cannot escape the character of Apollonia Chalee – wise beyond what her rational employers might choose to believe.

Apollonia Chalee
by John Canady

Maid

Mrs. Fisher’s superstitious. She
believes machines clean better than
human hands. She scolds me when
I miss an opportunity
to haul her caterwauling vacuum
room to room, as if my broom
might dirty her linoleum.

Mrs. Fisher still insists her new
electric washer’s quicker than
a tub and mangle, though I mopped
all day last Tuesday when it chose
to spew soap suds and dirty water
down the stairs. I tell her discontented
spirits live in these machines, but

Mrs. Fisher twists her husband’s arm
to buy more gadgets from the catalogs
Sears sends her. Mr. Fisher is
a scientist. A scientist
I think should know a little better
than to let his wife invite|
devils in metal skins into his home.

Appolonia Chalee grew up near Los Alamos and worked as a maid during WWII for families of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project.

From Critical Assembly