You Should Avoid Young Children

Because they fill their diapers
with reliable ease, sitting on your lap
or spread out on your best mattress.
Guilt is as foreign to them as vichyssoise.

Because they spread sticky fingers
over the piano keys, looking for you
to hoist them onto your lap. They slam
the ivories for the racket they can make.
Re-think your nap.

Because they are blank slates
on which so much waits to be written,
their eyes opened wide to take everything in,
including the lines around your eyes,
the pouches under your chin.

Because they manipulate the controls
on the TV, finger the holes in the electric socket,
stomp the cat’s switching tail only to smile
and gaze at you as if you held the keys to joy.

Because you can embrace them, but
you can’t bind them. Because they have nothing
to give you—and everything. Because
something loosens when they come around.
Something opens you didn’t know was shut.

--Claire Keyes

It Must Be

…It must be
we are waiting
for the perfect moment.

It must be
under all the struggle
we want to go on.

It must be,
that deep down,
we are creatures
getting ready
for when we are needed.

It must be that waiting
for the listening ear
or the appreciative word,
for the right
woman or the right man
or the right moment
just to ourselves,

we are getting ready
just to be ready

and nothing else.

Like this moment
just before the guests arrive
working
alone in the kitchen
sensing a deep
down symmetry
in every blessed thing.

The way
that everything
unbeknownst
to us
is preparing
to meet us too.

Just on the other
side of the door
someone
is about to knock
and our life
is just
about to change

and finally
after all these
years rehearsing,
behind
the curtain,

we might
just be
ready
to go on.

--David Whyte

Halleluiah

 

Everyone should be born into this world happy

and loving everything.

But in truth it rarely works that way.

For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.

Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

 

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes

almost forgetting how wondrous the world is

and how miraculously kind some people can be?

And have you too decided that probably nothing important

is ever easy?

Not, say, for the first sixty years.

 

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,

and some days I feel I have wings.

 

~ Mary Oliver

Appalachian Autumn

No, I'm not as old as the hills

that rise around me as I rest

amid the tawny grasses of this

holler.  But here in late October

of my seventy-third year, they

feel like age-mates to me.  The

greens of spring and summer

are long-gone from the trees.

Leaves of crimson, burnt

umber and amber flare against

the darkening sky, defying

with beauty the soon-to-end

cycle of one more round of

life and love in this long-

time landscape of suffering.

The ancient earth takes it all in,

compassionate and indifferent

in the same breath.  This is how

I want to live, my failings and 

lost opportunities forgiven

as they are under this sun--

released in their triviality,

resurrected as new life--

en route to dying with

thanks and praise and no

mind-begotten regrets.

--Parker J. Palmer

[Photo of Wallingford, VT]

The World I Live In

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
    reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
    what's wrong with Maybe? 

You wouldn't believe what once or
twice I have seen. I'll just 
  tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will
    you ever, possibly, see one.

- -Mary Oliver 

MANIFESTO OF THE BRAVE AND BROKENHEARTED

There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers Than those of us who are willing to fall Because we have learned how to rise.

With skinned knees and bruised hearts; We choose owning our stories of struggle, Over hiding, over hustling, over pretending.

When we deny our stories, they define us.

When we run from struggle, we are never free. So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye.

We will not be characters in our stories. Not villains, not victims, not even heroes.

We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings.

We craft love from heartbreak, Compassion from shame, Grace from disappointment, Courage from failure.

Showing up is our power.
Story is our way home. Truth is our song. We are the brave and brokenhearted.

We are rising strong.

--Brené Brown