Prescription for the Disillusioned by Rebecca Del Rio
Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,
The notion of knowing,
The beliefs that cloud your vision.
Leave behind the stories of your life.
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what- ifs waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty,
the plans and planned results of the life you’ve
Imagined.
Live the life that chooses you,
New every breath, every blink of your astonished
eyes.
Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The Bud (or Saint Francis and the Sow), by Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Start Close In, by David Whyte
Start close in, don’t take the second step, or the third,
Start with the first thing, close in,
The step you don’t want to take.
Start with the ground you know,
The pale ground beneath your feet,
Your own way to begin the conversation.
Start with your own question,
Give up on other people’s questions,
Don’t let them smother something simple.
To hear another’s voice, follow your own voice,
Wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear
That can really listen to another.
Start right now
Take a small step you can call your own.
Don’t follow someone else’s heroics,
Be humble and focused,
Start close in
Don’t mistake that other for your own.
Start close in, don’t take the second step, or the third,
Start with the first thing, close in,
The step you don’t want to take.
Host, by Shayla Paradise
Invite it all.
Invite the discomfort, the messy, even the icky.
Invite the exposed, the embarrassing, the not-so-graceful.
Invite the miscalculation, the unrealistic, and the sass,
Invite the dramatic, the poor-form,
And don’t forget the hypocritical.
You might as well laugh . Do more than laugh. Enjoy it.
I’d say invite the go, but it already invited itself,
So rather, treat it nicely.
Give it a seat at the party, like anyone else.
Invite fear. Be kind to it.
It never meant to hurt anything.
It just loves you a great deal.
More than it can stand, sometimes.
Invite the ache. In fact, give the ache the comfiest chair.
Keep its drink full and hang on its words.
This is your guest of honor.
We owe this whole party to the ache.
That’s where we strive from. It’s the emptiness we fill.
That’s where we’re raw.
Where art is put on canvas. Where songs are born.
Invite the blood. It's full of life. Edgy. Inarguably real.
Be a good host. Invite it all.
Maybe courage will show up.
I hear it loves a good party.
Maybe wisdom will recognize the opportunity.
Maybe peace will be drawn to the gathering.
Maybe.
May be.
Outside, the owl is watching. Content. Full of love.
Invite it all.
Sleeping in the Forest, by Mary Oliver
I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
Sometimes, by David Whyte
Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest,
breathing like the ones in the old stories,
who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves
without making a sound,
You come to a place whose only task
is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what you are doing right now
and to stop what you are becoming while you do it.
Questions that can make or unmake a life,
Questions that have patiently waited for you,
Questions that have no right to go away.
What to Remember when Waking, by David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk.
Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
The Swan, by Mary Oliver
Across the wide waters
something comes
floating—a slim
and delicate
ship, filled with white flowers---
And it moves
on it’s miraculous muscles
as though time didn’t exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness
almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns it’s dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings
it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.
Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet
I miss my husband’s company--
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! The path to heaven
doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
with what you perceive
this world.
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
white wings
touch the shore?