WALKING FOR HAITI

Today in Boston with Walk For Haiti was thrilling. I feel so happy.

I feel connected to the Haitians, in gear and ready to do what I can.

And I feel part of the giant beating heart of Partners in Health.

I told them I plan on doing a tag sale fundraiser on May 2,

and they were very encouraging, gave me a stack of literature to share.

I have been needing this part of my life for quite a while now,
kind of walking around a bit in a fog, feeling in a bubble, not
connecting to the world in a way I want to, where it is urgent.

We almost all had the red Walk for Haiti t -shirt on, which made us
a long lei of red poppies bobbing along the banks of the Charles, all smiles.
I had the Haitian flag tied over my shoulders like a cape.

I feel like I’ve just woken up from a long time asleep in a barn.
Clicking on a donation button on a website is like a dream. It’s
still a good thing to do, but connecting physically in time and
place feels like it turns a giant water wheel, generates power.

You could feel that the part of us that could do what was needed,
that was willing to risk something, that side was rising to the surface,
and that was a beautiful thing.

I tell you, reading ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains’ saved my life.
I feel like I was a dog on 3 legs and now I have 4 and am ready to run.
Or maybe better to say I was a boat in a shipyard, waiting to be put in the
water. I don’t want to let go of this feeling. Selfishly, for me. I have signed on
as a regional representative for PIH, and look forward to being as active as
I can be, with keeping this part of the commonwealth informed and engaged.

I keep remembering one of the traffic cops assigned to the walk today. He was
Haitian. As he held the traffic back on Memorial Drive so the march could cross over
to the banks of the Charles, he chanted in creole the Haitian version of ‘Many hands
make light the work’, and got us all singing it. He was our conductor, our cheerleader.
He was the happiest person there, his whole body radiating hope and joy. Hope and joy.

A pause spring brings

“If anyone should ask me what God is, I should answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all with one accord essay to love his loveliness, whether they do so knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.”

–Meister Eckhart

Spring today. Into life again, then, by choice, it seems to say. The sudden expanse of big warmth after narrow cold. The cardinal’s crystalline notes, cheering on life over still brown hills.

Life after death after life. Heart of the universe. Equinox today a stanza break in the ode we live.

pause/breath        change of voice        turn/ counter turn/ and stand         she lifts the mask

Reading near-death experiences, noticing all without exception speak of the love that renders old worries so petty upon returning, the love we may in this life discover, knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.

Joy and sorrow doors in the house of the heart. Without them, a tomb. Sealed/

We do not come back seeking refuge from oblivion, asking for protection.

We know we are camping here in our skin tents/ to ride horses across the steppes/
hear the first flute notes of the cardinals in spring/ fall off mountainsides in love/
fight with our selves.

The word love is more naked than our nakedest body parts.

We choose again to return, like spring, to rebloom the given, unhusk the absolute, crack open the speckled blue eggs of the inescapable.

“But who would count eternity in days? /
… (I measure time by how a body sways).” 

Theodore Roethke, ‘I Knew a Woman’

Mud and Flux

A gray wet windy middle of March in New England. Both inside and outside feel like they’re in flux.

I’m starting this blog as a net to catch the images that are barely there. Driving alone, the way the curve of the road opens a funnel of sky between the hills that lifts you into an exalted memory, from this lifetime or another. Like the two beats of the bald eagle’s wings you see crossing over the highway, not quite believing, the feeling is a brief visitation, a message that can’t be written down.

When it comes, I am sure it is common as sneezing. Human self-righting design. Sneak peeks at a spiritual GPS while on a quest called Life, across the steppes of Amnesia. It doesn’t matter how long someone holds back the curtain. In a split second, one has seen the Outside.

Something is coming into view and I don’t know what it is.

“I do not know what it is I am like,” the Rig Veda remembers as the impetus for the world. In the few precious moments of death-defying clarity I’ve stumbled upon in  my life, that which saw through my eyes would have said such a thing. But it wasn’t speaking.

Under the saddle bags of strategies for physical survival, I feel my horse spirit ready for more wind.

Mud and flux.