…remembering
the time you, only twenty, a first-aid man
in a mill town, delivered a baby up north,
that slipperiness, the shout the baby gave
when he took in the whole world with his breath.

– Patrick Lane, from The Quiet In Me

Sometimes the mystery of existence
gets so embedded in utility,
that language, life, the world itself, feels
an abstraction, calcified.
Then, at the checkout, you see an infant’s hand, clasp
her mother’s little finger,
and something upends your loneliness.
And what you’d conceded to the weeds
blooms open, and you’re captive
to all that is.
Everywhere you turn sends a charge: the wire cart,
the parking lot, the dent
in your Chevy, the pitted driveway,
the fading fence, Tabby
scooting through the patio door, the basil
in the kitchen window,
so green it’s barbaric,
the blackened kettle, the oolong tea,
all anointed—holy.
And now you know why a mortal wears a moonstone,
or cross or crescent, gets a tattoo,
carries a shell or a crystal in their pocket.
Not to seize, or repeat, but to remember, keep faith
with that moment,
your breath was deliverance, your heart
was a shout,
I am here! I am here!

 

 

Walking through a hayfield in south Saskatchewan, and sage
fills my head, and bromegrass and timothy—leaning toward autumn—
have turned rust-brown. And the toadflax and nodding thistle
laud the ground they’re on, and use the breeze to hum,
and chokecherries praise the meadow,
and paint my mouth a fervent purple,
then shock it dry. And the field says,
do not sigh for something else,
dwell in this world as it is.

In Saskatoon we meet, at long last, our great-granddaughter, Elise.
We sit in the backyard. Sun shines through the cottonwood
and spreads over her tiny bonnet. Her little hands pull up bits of grass
and find her mouth, and she smiles, so wide, adding light to light,
and the ceaseless wheels of a troubled world come to rest.
And the cottonwood says,
do not look for something else,
dwell in the world as it is.

Driving west now, along fields of ripe barley,
through the inglorious histories of the Battlefords,
and further on, a horizon of pump-jacks and ordinary industrial blight.
At sundown we stop and stealth-camp in Kitscoty, which is not Kyoto
and the slough at the edge of town is not the shining waters of Biwa,
but even here, deep calls to deep; the marsh wren is a benediction;
and Everywhere is inscribed by the indelible chorus of a loon.
And the horizon says,
do not clamor for a future Kyoto,
dwell in your world as it is.

Red Deer morning. I look across the flowered backyard into the alley
to where my father-in-law left this life. On the mantle there’s a picture:
his beamish smile and a rose in his lapel. Yesterday. Rundle Park.
A dragonfly lands on my shirt, very near my heart, it clings there
while I go about setting the picnic table with pizzas and fizzy water.
The kids of nieces and nephews spare no energy on the jungle gym,
spread their delight and passion through the park.
And I am caught by the untellable love of “a living flash of light,” *
all my possessions and yearnings unclasp,
and I am released,
free and alive,
into this needful world.

---

* from The Dragonfly, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

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Because this is a world I didn’t make, and it is real,
and the realer it feels, the more mysterious;

because one day, walking with my dad on a willow-lined trail
toward Good Spirit Lake, I was lifted out of the boy into a swirling world
of joy, and I’ve yet to fathom a why;

because reason is too weak to raise what is dead;

to honour the life of a sparrow;

to attend the spell of a dead star, whose light we still see;

to throw a wrench into a world geared up for business;

to feel,
down to the bone,
the quantum foam,
we flail in;

to convince you of your own divinity;

to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one;
not even the hater;

because over the years, I’ve fallen in love with a monk,
quite a few teachers, and a dead philosopher;

because I’m angry, envious, resentful, and fearful,
and still, there’s all this love in me;

because there’s a language within language always waiting—
like a silent cry;

because our glossary of mockery needs a funeral,
and the lexicon that’s left, needs new anointing.

because, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God, and how else do you plumb that?

to let failure, discouragement, suffering and death, have their say,
without any spoon of bromide;

to thicken compassion and thin out aggression;

because there’s an old notion called vision, that religion,
under natural sunlight, might be cause for unification;

meaning: Love spells the end of religion;

to find a way to say, welcome your existential dread,
for it drives the search for Spirit;

because the most primitive (and abusive) form of comprehension
is literalism, and dear Lord, see how we’re slipping back!

to un-mire the mind, liberate the kidneys, and activate
the open hand;

because faith,
without resisting moneychangers in corporate temples,
is dead;

because poetry is political, and kindness is its administrative wing;

because, hatred into compassion, revenge into forgiveness—
eclipse all other miracles;

to find a thousand ways to say we are not our true selves,
until we sit, and eat, together;

because perennial amazement needs constant oxygen;

because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of Christ
on the ‘full body suit’ of my heart;

meaning: look around, the boundaries are gone, everything points to unity—
and we must hurry to catch the new reality—
the original, incarnate, emergent, reality;

for in the end, if joy has a why, it is harmony.