The Kingdom of Enough

The Road to Chateauneuf

Photo of Chateauneuf, tower seen through a window — Chateauneuf 2012

Drop me off here, I tell Tom and Serge.

During a long day together in Beaune —

the medieval hospital, tasting wine

in a dim and loamy cellar –

company curtailed my noticing

and drew attention I gladly gave away.

Just as gladly now, I’ll walk alone

these last few kilometers

back to our inn in Chateauneuf.

Summer’s hay is already baled,

and the slow sinking sun paints

fields saffron where deer creep

from the forest edge to nibble grass

and white Burgundian cows

low their elegy for the day.

Now, as I eat blackberries

from untouched vines,

a symphony of cowbells calls my attention

back to me. My true travel happens here

on this quiet country lane, a horse

approaching the pasture fence

to beg a windfall apple,

and all I want to know of France

is this late summer day,

this last golden light

on the road back to Chateauneuf.

Pursuit of Happiness

I shouldn’t be happy

till everybody is,

Boddhisattva postponing bliss,

but let me be honest.

I take pleasure in a mocha,

seek like a cat the sunny spot

in my garden to read a book.

What do I pursue?

Rest after labor well done,

mirth among friends,

the way my sweetheart looks at me

when I make him laugh,

and laugh still more,

fleeting communion a foretaste

of what the Boddhisatva

is waiting for.

Page by Page

This notebook is therapy and breviary,

wailing wall and garden of delight.

It keeps my secrets

and catches my dreams.

As wind sighs among branches

where jays chitter

and squirrels chase joy,

this notebook is the sap

in my heartwood

drawing on Source

like roots on groundwater.

Leaf by leaf

it tells me my thoughts.

Page by page

it supples my soul.

Portable Convent

(On Leaving New Camaldoli)

Let me take the silence

of this cell with me

when I go,

not as armor

but a spring inside me

fed by ever melting snow.

May it ripple and reverberate,

contained in the perfect

acoustics of my heart.

I want to hear it in the world,

and if people sense a certain something

when I do, let them wonder what it is.

I will let it spill out –

I can be profligate –

it is an everlasting flow.

Sunset from the road to New Camaldoli Hermitage

Angel’s Trumpet

At the corner of the garden

brash blossoms as big as my head

fill the sprawling datura.

Are those exuberant upside-down flutes

yellow or orange? I don’t know –

they’re sunshine, egg yolks,

fresh churned butter

from a happy, meadow-grazing cow.

All day long they hang like unrung bells

till setting sun coaxes a farewell,

cascades of perfume flowing

over the garden as if a band of angels

had been keeping vigil just to trumpet

this sun-washed scented goodbye —

no desire to hold darkness at bay,

instead, a vespers explosion

of thank you,

bless us, adieu.

Come moon, come stars now,

roses and rhubarb await their rest,

kohuhu and calla lilies too.

Come, my love, to our pillows and bed.

The window stands open,

my arms await you.

So you think angels are fiction;

come sail on their fragrance

into sleep with me anyway.

Let your REM-induced

atheist reveries mingle

with my hermit dreams

and what we both believe in,

roses and rhubarb,

kohuhu and calla lilies,

the garden we tend

and that tends us too.

Dichotomy

Sitting in this quiet library,

looking out at redwoods

taller than its four stories,

it’s hard to imagine

bombs falling on Tehran,

blood and rubble,

the terrified cry of a new orphan.

Harder perhaps for her

to picture this —

crows instead of missiles

flying across blue sky,

a town so lovely

monarch butterflies

choose to winter here,

mothers and fathers

like mine

who grow old.

Fire Doesn’t Lie

Born from friction

or sun or lightning kindled,

it is warmth in winter,

light in the darkness.

It is the great destroyer too,

burning the old

to make way for the new.

Given oxygen, given fuel,

it burns as it will,

always burns true.

Seek that flame.

It lives inside of you.

Image courtesy of Sarojani Rohan, “Year of the Fire Horse”

Poor in Spirit

Palm Sunday ashes being burned for Ash Wednesday ashes

I live on the largesse of the One

Who breathed life into me

even when I forget it and credit

my own hard work instead.

I may congratulate myself

on daily exercise and a nutritious diet,

but this body is a blessing,

good health a gift.

My blind mother and deaf friend

show me how lucky I am

to see and hear a willow tree

billowing in wind-blustered rain.

I walk miles in the storm,

lungs and legs doing the work

they evolved for,

unlike my friend with COPD,

my father with arthritic knees.

Waning moon and winter’s empty fields

tell me my own story.

I am earth

for a little while

breathing Spirit,

ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Let my repentance be surrender

to this wild fragility,

let me be humble as an acorn in oak duff

at home in the Kingdom of Enough.

Photo courtesy of Sylvia Deck

Refuge

Ask for one wild word,

A portable convent.

In the desert what seems empty is actually full.

Can I let what isn’t essential or nourishing wither?

A portable convent —

What if I were as quiet and spacious as the desert?

Let what isn’t essential or nourishing wither,

Honor the gifts.

What if I were as quiet and spacious as the desert?

In the desert what seems empty is actually full.

Honor the gifts.

Ask for one wild word.

This poem was inspired by an invitation to create a pantoum in the book Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year by Christine Valters Paintner. She explains that the “French pantoum is a poetic form with a circular structure that comes from the ordered repetition of lines.” Following her suggestion, I re-read my journal for the month of December and copied down lines that shimmered for me, then put them together according to her template, so this is in a way a found poem — like a mandala made of driftwood collected on the beach.

In Praise of Nature Writing

The narrator of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Sentence keeps a stack of Hard books and Lazy books by her bed. Unlike Tookie, I have only one pile somewhere in between. I learned long ago not to read a juicy novel right before bed at risk of staying up too late and being a zombie at work the next day, but in the vast realm of nonfiction it took me ages to discern what sort of books might soothe without being soporific. Philosophy is too demanding at the end of the day, politics and much history too potentially distressing; literary criticism put me to sleep too soon. Then The Hidden Life of Trees found its way onto my nightstand bookstack. The ways that trees communicate with each other are so fascinating I stayed awake till the end of each chapter and then drifted off to sleep with images of the forest in my mind. Nature writing turned out to be the ideal genre for my bedtime reading.

Imagine my dismay then when I learned that some critics consider nature writing a “bourgeois form of escapism.” In reply I could point to the solar panels on my roof and the electric car in my driveway to show that I’m not fiddling while Rome burns, but that might just seem like bourgeois environmentalist bragging. Still, the nature books I read before sleep are more than the literary equivalent of chamomile tea. They feed a soul that has found solace in the outdoors since childhood, a woman who hikes and gardens. From classics like A Sand County Almanac to contemporary essay collections like Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, these books do more than put my mind at rest before bed. They stir in me a reverence for nature that plants me firmly on this earth and makes me want to protect it.

Nature writing also puts daily life and the very real woes of the world in a different perspective. Though not a replacement for being outdoors, it helps me feel connected to something larger than myself, a web of life in which I have a home – and at the end of the day a place to rest.