When Death Comes – A Poem by Mary Oliver

On my way back from Uganda now after a fantastic and very hot time. It was also a serious struggle with tropical intestinal parasites and a boda-boda (motorcycle) accident - wherein I somehow forgot my Aikido roll, which had saved me in past accidents, and landed poorly on my elbow. - The german doctors have me patched up now but all of this leads me to the clear realization that this body is impermanent. 

I am therefore revisiting one of Mary Oliver's poems that used to be pinned to my dorm room door at Sterling College in Vermont.  

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Messenger

Just back from Slow Food's Terra Madre in Torino, after the Organic World Congress in Istanbul, after the GlobE in Witzenhausen, after the Tropentag in Prague... phew! ...  All the work there is to do and all the inspiring people there are to do that work with!

Tom, Roberto, and Jim said it best "It's a sad and beautiful world".

Helping to settle back into Kleve, I listened to Wes Nisker, a teacher at the Insight Meditation Center, open his talk with this poem 'Messenger' by Mary Oliver and wanted to share it again, even if you've read it a hundred times, enjoy it slowly and may it inspire gratitude as a central theme.

--------
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam, deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth
and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,
over and over, how it is that we live forever.

--------

The teacher repeated that line again for emphasis "over and over, how it is that we live forever"

Our Island Earth

Anyone who has spent a significant portion of time looking at maps will probably agree that the Mercator projection is a poor representation of the globe. The Mercator projection is disorienting at best, it stretches Northern countries to look massive and places the north pole, Europe and North America as a kind of gigantic roof over the world.

Buckminster Fuller also found this to be a let down. He believed that this projection worked to further the disparity between the global north and global south and so he created a new kind of projection. He called his projection a dymaxion map, projecting the earths surface onto a grid of triangles and then laying them out flat (an unfolded icosahedron).


Looking at this realistic map of the earth brings great relief. One gets the feeling that we are in Pangea still. It shows all the continents stretched across with the north pole in the center, creating a kind of "Reunite Laurasia" or "Reunite Gandwanaland" map but in real time.

Here is a poem by Mary Oliver, not about about this amazing little blue planet of ours but about that giant orb of fire that makes all this blue and green possible.

THE SUN

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—

or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

-----
Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes

People Who Have Come Alive

Howard Thurman is a powerful example of human compassion and understanding.
He was a preacher who grew up in the segregated south and started 'Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples' the first non-segregated church in the US.
He was an incredibly hard working activist.

Gil Bailie was a motivated young person wanted to know how best to help in all the civil rights and spreading of compassion and teachings and asked Thurman 'what should I do'...

In a recent dharma talk at the Insight meditation center, Donald Rothberg suggested that Thurman probably had a million places where he knew that help was needed. - He might have sent Bailie to work in a community or to learn a special skill that was especially needed. But, instead, what he said was: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Made me think to write a little something in praise of the good people of the Insight Meditation Center and the San Francisco Zen Center who have been brave enough to challenge the 'voices around' and follow instead a deep spiritual practice. It made me think to write some words of praise, also to all the preachers out there who are still preaching the 'good news' that Jesus taught, though it has been used for 'spiritual materialism' and 'bought and sold and bought again' enough that it is hard to recognize as our spiritual tradition anymore.

To truly follow the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus, living a simple and quiet life in the midst of an increasingly materialist America is showing a real test of 'coming alive' and my hat is off to them. I am also deeply grateful for the podcasts so that I can glean the lessons of that struggle, while resting easy in simple quietude.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Ethnobiology and Conservation

Conservation through utilization. 

Work needs to be done that looks at ways to improve the relationship of people to nature through efficient and sustainable use of a diversity of species from native habitats. - I think of it as 'use it or lose it'. I also know that 'we will not fight for what we do not love' and that the cultural importance of native species has lead to much of the activism for environmental conservation. 

Work still needs to be done to find out how ethnobiology can best help with the maintenance of indigenous knowledge of native species, and what the challenges and benefits of this cooperation are. 

Here is a poem about work from Mary Oliver:

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.