First Snow

After weeks of late-autumn twilight, we emerged from a birthday party, to discover the first snowflakes falling, transforming our world into a snow globe, which some invisible hand had shaken.

As we sat inside, surrounded by warm Indian tapestries, with fragrant curries and steaming naan, the edges of the city became softened by snow, its air cleansed with snow crystals, the staccato rhythms of traffic written into flowing lines, like poetry...




At night, I composed Solstice cards, using images of Hiroshige's prints. In the morning, I walked through these prints-- the campus gardens having exactly these firm lines, indigo sky, and glittering light...

May all things know and be known in me
May all things move and be moved in me
May all creation dance for joy within me
--Chinook Psalter

Chapel Angels

Every once in a while, as I enter the multifaith center for our sitting, I walk through the chapel. Today, after two weeks, the sun emerged from behind clouds and flooded all with its brightness-- and again I realized, this is a beautiful place.

On Angels

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

Day draws near
another one
do what you can.

Czeslaw Milosz

Anne, with the young Mary: knowing which comes about through relationship.

Deer, Cranford

This week I sat at the banks of a river
twenty deer crossed, just thirty feet from me--

Does with fawns,
older fawns, in pairs, glancing back, curious
young bucks, elder deer with many antlers, all crossing

I was silent,
they were silent and did not startle.
For an hour, this time out of time--
infinite communion.

The next day, I went back and reflected on this spot--
considering their myriad hoofprints in the mud, a proof and scripture.

Thanksgiving Muppets

Every Thanksgiving I think of my Muppet friends. And it has been a little while since I posted, Graduate school and soul necessities requiring luminous awareness and highest energy--
So it is now time to play. Please enjoy this video--
with joy and gratitude

Perception

Today I feel the energy of earth shifting subtly,

with the new moon, as if tectonic plates, somewhere, are meeting--

I feel the vividness of the last yellow leaves,
and understand they also, are harbingers,

part of this cosmic dance.

Praising my good fortune--
to be a poet, in the tuition of the green earth

and not need to know how I know.

Good and evil have no self-nature.
Holy and unholy are empty names.
In front of the door is the land of stillness and light.
Spring comes, the grass grows by itself.

Zen Master Seung Sahn

Lama Tsultrim and Prajna Paramita

This week I realized a dream-- Lama Tsultrim Allione, who I deeply honor as one of the first wave women in American Buddhism-- visited our community at Wellesley. Lama Tsultrim's grandmother graduated from Wellesley, and was one of the first women to graduate with a n Ivy League Ph.D. Here is Tsultrim, returning to the same building in which her grandmother prayed, as a renowned teacher. So clearly there is an energetic conversation going on, across generations.

Prajna Paramita, nondual wisdom, and Sophia, the Judeo-Christian feminine archetype of wisdom, are actually sisters. The jna sound in Prajna has the same root as gn in gnosis, the western spiritual lineage which held that Spirit could be experienced directly, before words. The stupa of Prajna Paramita, at Himachal Pradesh, where the earliest Prajna Paramita text was found, also contained Alexandrine Greek coins. At that moment our wisdom traditions were part of the Silk Road ecosystem, influenced by and influencing each other. Some time later, the roads diverged: the Christian church moved away from gnosticism, towards models of insight which require intermediaries. Buddhism continues to lift up Prajna Paramita: the matrix of interdependent origination, the womb of totality.

Transformations

a moment- poem, written with a few friends:

Impractically,

water becomes 

roses.

roses create vessels

for spontaneous

collecting

clouds.

we slide between--

effortlessly.

Knowing we are:

water

roses

vessels

clouds.

swiftness of water

unfurling of rose

glorious as raging ocean

shifting   mutable

thunder:

change of migrating birds

storm petrels--

the wayfarer

journeys 

home.