By Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian-American poet and author of fiction, essays and children’s books
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know Continue reading “Kindness”
By Neil Gaiman
Listen hear read by Amanda Palmer
Science, as you know, my little one, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe.
It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.
In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains
designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,
to hurdle blindly into the unknown,
and then to find their way back home when lost
with a slain antelope to carry between them.
Or, on bad hunting days, nothing. Continue reading “The Mushroom Hunters”
By Seth Martin, a folksinger, writer and activist from the Pacific Northwest, now living with his partner Lee Nan Young in Korea. He recently released a collaborative album, “This Mountain” (“이산”), celebrating grass-roots, land-based resistance to militarism and the machinery of US colonial politics and religion–in Korea and North America. You can listen to it here.
Teacher, is the earth alive?
“Sweet is the lore which nature brings.
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.”
-Wordsworth
It was May 18th in Korea. I was teaching English to elementary schoolers. The pre-assigned lesson was about “living” and “non-living” things.
According to the textbook, things that need air, food, water, and shelter are “living”, and they always “change and grow.” Continue reading “Tables Turned: A Reflection”
A poem from Sherman Alexie (thanks to elder Clancy Dunigan for passing this along):
My mother was a dictionary.
She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.
She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.
When she died, we buried all of those words with her.
My mother was a dictionary.
She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years. Continue reading “When She Died, We Buried All Those Words With Her”
By Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister liked to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.
Passed on by Journey with Jesus
By Talitha Fraser
you give
and you give
the emptying
is what fills you
you give
and you give
stretched and
outstretched and
enfolded
you give
and you give
and there is more
there is always more
From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Third Duino Elegy:
…Our loving is not, like the flowers’, the offering
of a single year. When we love, there rises in us
a sap from time immemorial. Oh my dear girl,
it is this: that we loved, in each other, not an individual
or one coming toward us, but brimming multitudes;
not a single child but the fathers
fallen to the depths of us like crumbled mountains,
and the dry riverbeds of ancestral mothers;
the whole soundless landscape
under the clear or clouded sky of fate:
all this, my dear, came before you.
By Ken Sehested, the editor and author of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action
Easter resurrection is never as assured
as the arrival of Easter bunnies.
Clothiers and chocolate-makers alike yearn
for the season no less than every cleric.
And yet, in my experience, the Spirit
rarely blows according to the calendar,
much less on demand. Continue reading “Easter’s Aftermath”
By Tommy Airey
The dirty little secret is that
we are the carriers of all the unfinished
Stories of our fathers. She qualified
the process for me: healing comes only
when we covenant ourselves to
the tireless work of
examining our past,
assessing the pain and
unlearning the patterns. Continue reading “The Dirty Little Secret”
From artist Juan Manuel Cisneros: a cairn nativity scene from the Ventura River Watershed.
