weekly Reading

One or Two Things
Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.

The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.


The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.


One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning — some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.


But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,

and vanished
into the world.

~Mary Oliver

Weekly Reading

  I Pray to the Birds

I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward.  

I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin 

and end each day–the invocations and benedictions of Earth.  

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear.  

And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

~Terry Tempest Williams

Weekly Reading

I will not die an unlived life

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I will choose to inhabit my days.
To allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible, to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live as that which came to me as a seed goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit.
~Dawna Markova

Weekly Reading

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was
a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun
so they were, in part at least, golden. I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us
as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,
but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.
The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

Weekly Reading

This World

I would like to write a poem about the world

that has in it nothing fancy.

But it seems impossible.

Whatever the subject, the morning sun glimmers it.

The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.

The ants bore into the peony bud and

there is a dark pinprick well of sweetness.

As for the stones on the beach, forget it.

Each one could be set in gold.

So I tried with my eyes shut,

but of course the birds were singing.

And the aspen trees were shaking

the sweetest music out of their leaves.

And that was followed by, guess what,

a momentous and beautiful silence as comes to all of us,

in little earfuls, if we’re not too hurried to hear it.

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs

even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,

and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,

so happy to be where they are, on the beach,

 instead of being locked up in gold.

~ Mary Oliver

The Healing Time

Finally
On my way to “yes”
I bump into all the places where I said “no” to my life

All the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again.
Where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them one by one close to my heart
and I say “holy, holy.”
~Persa Gertler

Weekly Reading

What I Believe

I believe there is no justice,
but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man, but that his wife will remarry.
I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when allthe clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever pulls us under,
will do so gently.

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in.
~Michael Blumenthal