Contemplation

It was an offering…

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Arabic Coffee

It was never too strong for us:

image from coffeemarket.com.au

image from coffeemarket.com.au

make it blacker, Papa,
thick in the bottom,
tell again how the years will gather
in small white cups,
how luck lives in a spot of grounds.
Leaning over the stove, he let it
boil to the top, and down again.
Two times. No sugar in his pot.
And the place where men and women
break off from one another
was not present in that room.
The hundred disappointments,
fire swallowing olive-wood beads
at the warehouse, and the dreams
tucked like pocket handkerchiefs
into each day, took their places
on the table, near the half-empty
dish of corn. And none was
more important than the others,
and all were guests. When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes. The coffee was
the center of the flower.
Like clothes on a line saying
you will live long enough to wear me,
a motion of faith. There is this,
and there is more.

Naomi Shabib Nye

from Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Columbia University Press, 1992

Hunger Satisfied…

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Continuing this month’s meditation theme of sustenance, here is a quote from the great mid-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher on the connection between food and love:

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love,
are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
So it happens that when I write of hunger,
I am really writing about love and the hunger for it,
and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…
and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…
and it is all one.”
— from the The Art of Eating (1954).

mfkfisher

Blessed be carrot and cow…

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On grey January days when the snow steadily drifts down and the winds blow, I’m thankful for a warm house and a steaming bowl of veggie and bean stew.   In honour of winter crockpots, this is an excerpt from a poem by poet and Episcopal priest  Alla Rene Bozarth.

Blessing of the Stew Pot

photo from diabeticfoodie.com

photo from diabeticfoodie.com

…Blessed be carrot and cow,
potato and mushroom,
tomato and bean,
parsley and peas,
onion and thyme,
garlic and bay leaf,
pepper and water,
majoram and oil,

and blessed be fire —
and blessed be the enjoyment
of nose and eye,
and blessed be color —
and blessed be the Creator
for the miracle of grean bean,
for the miracle of fawn mushrooms,
and blessed be God
for the miracle of earth:

ancestors, grass, bird,
deer and all gone,
wild creatures
whose bodies become
carrots, peas, and wild
flowers, who
give sustenance
to human needs, whose
agile dance of music
nourishes the ear
and soul of the dog
resting under the stove
and the woman working over
the stove and the geese
out the open window
strolling in the backyard…

Starlings in Winter

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Starling image from wired.com

Starling image from wired.com

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to be a guest minister at the Peterborough Unitarian Fellowship.   My reflection was based in part on Starlings in Winter; Mary Oliver’s beautiful and astute observations on that marvellous “wheel of many parts” that is starlings in flight.  Watching that dance renews my spirit as Oliver captures so well.

 
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard.  I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

 

Related articles

Hatching the Wondrous

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But when we begin to tell stories,

our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again.

Suddenly, the trees along the street are looking at us,

and the clouds crouch low over the city as though they are trying to hatch something wondrous.

We find ourselves back inside the same world that the squirrels and the spiders inhabit,

along with the deer stealthily munching the last plants in our garden,

and the wild geese honking overhead as they flap south for the winter.

Linear time falls away, and we find ourselves held, once again, in the vast cycles of the cosmos —

the round dance of the seasons,

the sun climbing out of the ground each morning and slipping down into the earth every evening,

the opening and closing of the lunar eye whose full gaze attracts the tidal waters within and all around us.

David Abram  excerpt from Storytelling and Wonder

Returning to the root

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This Monday’s meditation is Ursula Le Guin’s translation of Chapter 16 from the Tao Te Ching.   Her interpretation of the Tao Te Ching’s ancient wisdom is the one I return to again and again.  This chapter fits the moodiness of November as the northern earth sinks homeward in anticipation of winter.  I like the notion that peace comes from taking the long view and in taking the long view, we can open our hearts.

Be completely empty.
Be perfectly serene.
The ten thousand things arise together;
in their arising is their return.
Now they flower,
and flowering
sink homeward,
returning to the root.

The return to the root
is peace.
Peace: to accept what must be,
to know what endures.
In that knowledge is wisdom.
Without it, ruin, disorder.

To know what endures
is to be openhearted,
magnanimous,
regal,
blessed,
following the Tao,
the way that endures forever.
The body comes to its ending,
but there is nothing to fear.

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

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Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain –
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

Mary Oliver from What Do We Know (2002)

Natural

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Beautiful, mesmerizing hyper-lapse images of nature and civilization.  I don’t agree with filmmaker Reid Gower’s argument that because people are part of the natural order everything we make is part of nature.  This film speaks more to me of how fast and out of touch current western civilization is with the larger whole, fast yet dangerously enticing.

Enough to merely be…

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by Tom Thomson

It is only here in… Canada that wonderous second wind, the Indian summer, attains its amplitude and heavenly perfection, — the temperatures; the sunny haze; the mellow, rich delicate, almost flavoured air: Enough to live — enough to merely be.
Walt Whitman, Diary in Canada

Loving the World

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Pasture, Conestoga, Ontario

Messenger    by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.