but smaller.

Not the page of the New Yorker
memorialized behind glass
with my name at the end of the poem.

Or the microphone, cold friend in my hand,

the sea of upturned faces,
my voice cast out—
changing everything.

Maybe there is no grand finale,

when the timpani
and cymbals have their moment.
Maybe the stories and symphonies were wrong,

and even sex and birth were a bit misleading

with their compelling rhythm,
rising action, come point,
birth scream—

Is this how it all turns out?

The body wilts around what shines
inside it. My hands become speckled
and bent like my father’s. Sometimes,

in the morning now, I have to use a cane.

Yesterday I forgot the name
of my street and some wise refrain
I used to teach. A scattering of poems remains.

But these days I am not so interested in thought

and the muscular acrobatics of the brain.
Something else that was always here –
as hidden as the sky – is laying claim.

What is it that shines through this withering?

Through the black hole in the center
of the mourning dove’s eye. Through the white space
around the fading letters of my name. Through these fingers,

tapping their marks, for a time, into time.

Each morning arrives with its allotment of breath.
From my rocking chair I can see the chickadees
at the feeder. The small triangles of their beaks

poke seed into each other’s mouths. I don’t know why.

They tip their black caps
this way and that. Their skinny legs
launch them into sky.

by Kim Rosen

I’ve shared the video of Kim Rosen saying this poem with a few elders in my life and they have all been touched. She has made an art out of learning and speaking poems by heart as explicated in her book Saved by a Poem. She knows how to embody and then transmit the truth of a poem straight to another heart.

I think Grand Finale is such a poignant ode to the profound human passage of aging. Starkly honest because, I guess, not seeing what is creepingly more apparent with each passing day, can be more burdensome than the relief of truth telling. She looks at the withering squarely. She looks at the dying promise of a grand finale with a clarity that somehow bequeaths nobility despite it all. Yet Kim also illuminates with her words, the glowing mystery of the mature heart. It’s as if a withering body, like threadbare cloth, becomes more likely to let the light through. How raw and beautiful.

‘The body wilts around what shines inside it’. This one line on its own is heartrendingly moving. ‘Something else, that was always here – as hidden as the sky – is laying claim’. This one invites for me an expansive surrender, a release of owning self in preparation for the final letting go perhaps.

And then at the end, the return to the sheer present as all there is. To the flutterings of the birds on the feeder, themselves a mystery in their activity. And those last lines – skinny legs – as frail as a worn-out body perhaps – become the delicate vehicle that launches us into the sky and the vastness beyond life.

Ps. If you would like to learn how to receive poetry mindfully as a living contemplation try our Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry course.

Photo by Rohit Dey on Unsplash

You must be still and offer
your palmful of secrets
like delicate seed.

As she eats your secrets
no longer secret
she glows
and you lighten
and her voice
which only you can hear
is your voice
bereft of plans.

And the light
through her body
will bathe you
till you wonder
why the gems in your palm
were ever fisted.

Others will think you crazed
to wait on something
no one sees.

But the clear bird
only wants to feed
and fly and sing.

She only wants
light in her belly.

And once in a great while
if someone loves you enough
they might see her rise
from the nest
beneath your fear.

by Mark Nepo
This seems to me to be a companion poem to the Bluebird by Charles Bukowski of earlier this month. The metaphor is the same – both speak of a bird in the heart, a beautiful bird that is untouched and sings the truest song of who we are. Yet, for me, the feel of the two poems is different. Bukowski’s one is melancholic, full of pathos. The man, perhaps Bukowski himself, is only relating to the bluebird under cover of darkness and there is a shadow of grief at the edges of the poem. In Nepo’s poem we are being deliberately tutored on how to be in relationship with our bird, it feels hopeful – there is an instruction to follow.

What is the instruction? To feed seed to our ‘clear bird’ heart. To give her life and light through an intentional ongoing relationship of nourishment. It’s striking how the seeds are also gems, gems of precious potential, that we have until now ‘fisted’ – enclosed and hidden from ourselves and the world. Now in the poem, they are being shared and brought to light.

Don’t we all long for this? To open our long-tense fist and find within the life-giving gems of our true selves, so to feed the starved innermost being within? Can we release the burden of shielding our true face from the world – like how in the poem the bird ‘eats your secrets no longer secret’?

I like how, in a commentary on the poem, Nepo describes the heart as ‘the aliveness that lives below all names’. Perhaps we are all on a quest to find the seeds that awaken our aliveness – the mystery and wonder of who we are. In my experience I’m always following a trail of seeds. My heart comes alive here and there, then is quiet a while, then I stumble upon something or remember the way and that aliveness is back, and gradually I’m knowing myself better so that I can follow Nepo’s instructions more faithfully. Knowing my own particular heart enliveners means I can bring in that intentionality. I can seek them out and can give time to them. What are your heart enliveners? Could you devote yourself to them sometimes?

To finish, let me allow Nepo to explain more deeply:

‘Under all our plans and goals and secret desires, the heart only wants to inhabit its aliveness. This is the seed of our deeper self. And whether we get what we want or not, the life-force within us only wants to stream from Source to mouth, the way a river doesn’t really care where it goes or how long it takes for its water to get where it’s going.’

Ps. Would you like to embark on an in-depth journey to bring your heart alive? Check out our 4 Level Meditation Training here.

Photo by Vince Veras on Unsplash

There is endless room in
the heart of this lover,
infinite space for whatever
foolishness we may
toss her way.

But she is also
crafty, this one-
a thief who will steal away
everything we ever cherished,
all our beliefs,
all our ideas,

all our philosophies,
until nothing is left
but her shimmering
wakefulness,

this simple love
for what is.

by John Astin

It’s nature that is teaching me the most about awareness at the moment. Something about just being in nature seems to make resting in awareness enticing and effortless. This feels like the blessing of summer: the giving of myself to moments each day where I let expansive awareness embrace nature’s fluttering, chirping, green, wet, sunny, warm and changing display.

Nature beckons from outside the bubble of the thinking world. So much of our experience is filtered through layers of thought that become tightly woven together over time, creating a kind of enclosure through which we perceive both ourselves and the world. If we allow those layers to lose some of their grip, and as confidence in simple presence deepens, awareness may reveal ‘herself’ as a ‘shimmering wakefulness’ in John Astin’s words.

Then there is an ease that comes. There is less need to defend or reinforce a fixed idea of me, and more room for a lighter relationship with selfhood. This is what Mingyur Rinpoche describes as the ‘Mere I’, which is a self that functions fluidly and is less tightly held in a solid position. This is in contrast to the ‘Reified I’ that is the default for most of us.

John Astin’s poem makes no pretence about awareness – yes, she may melt our cherished and trusted fixed identities, opinions and ideas. But what if this melting could give us back our natural open heart? Would it not be worth it?

Ps. Find out more about awareness and the Mere and Reified I in our Insight Training (prerequisites apply). If it’s practicing in nature that allures you check out our Nature as Refuge weekend in July.

Photo by Austin Schmid on Unsplash

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

by Charles Bukowski

This poem came to me in one of those moments that stand out as transcendent. I was bumbling along in my day, and then out of nowhere there was a moment that seemed luminous and timeless, before the bumbling along resumed. Have you had any such moments?

In this case I was standing in a bookshop, listening to the poem being read to me by the shop keeper. We had been chatting about poetry and I’d asked him what his favourite poem of the moment was. Reading me Bluebird was his answer. I listened rapt, and heard the words in his voice, with his feeling coming through them. It brought tears to my eyes, for all the bluebirds within us all, usually hidden beneath the layers of toughness and self-protection. But paradoxically, in that moment, our two bluebirds were both ‘singing a little’ in the sharing of the poem and I knew we were both hearing them.

Moments like this are truly ‘poetic’. What I mean by this is that perhaps there is a poetry to life, if we have the presence to be there for it, the eyes to see it and the heart to appreciate it. Basho, the Japanese haiku poet said ‘Seen truly all things are poetic’. I wonder about seeing with poetic eyes, the eyes that don’t pass over life and instead fully receive the mystery, wonder and teaching in everything. And this may include all the feels – from the gritty realism of a city backstreet to the serenity of a moonrise, from cooking at home in the kitchen, to an overwhelmingly sacred moment like meeting your newborn.

Perhaps there is a great risk to living poetically – the same risk as the one that would allow the bluebird to be free and seen. It is undefended and this is scary, even terrifying. And yet it’s what we all long for. Let’s embrace this contradiction and start where we are – in loving the poetry of our defended selves, like Charles Bukowski does.

Ps. If you’d like to engage with poetry mindfully and experiment with living life poetically check out these two Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry opportunities: a online day retreat on 4^th July and a 6 week evening course beginning in November.

Photo by Vijayalakshmi Nidugondi on Unsplash

You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.

I’ve been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.

I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out into the open.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart–
oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God — spend them however you want.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Original Language German, English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I’m conscious as I write that there are times in our lives where we can engage easily with positive ideas such as those often expressed in this blog, and there are times when this feels so very far away from where we are. At those times it can feel like the rest of the world are on another planet that is worlds away. It’s a very lonely place to be. Perhaps this poem is for those who feel this loneliness and devastation. It’s a gift from Rilke for anyone living one of those times now, from a man who knows that place.

The poem is incredibly creative and vivid in how it describes the feeling of this. A heartbreaking description of despair and the journey of compassion. The scattered pieces remind me of the story of the Tibetan Buddhist deity of compassion Chenrezig (Avolakiteshvara) and his moment of shattering into a thousand pieces at the foot of the mythical Mount Meru. After witnessing the suffering of countless multitudes of beings for eons, so it is said, Chenrezig was devastated and his body literally shattered. In the poem the brokenness, the scattering, the toxic, gutted and torn self is conveyed as the starting point, a ground zero – and also the ground of the prayer. In the story of Chenrezig he shapeshifts. His thousand shattered pieces become 1000 arms with an eye in the palm of each of his hands making him a supercharged force for compassion in the world.

On a more personal level Rilke is suggesting that, rather than clinging to a sense of self that is broken, perhaps we can surrender, placing the fragments of our broken self in the great hands of the Awesome One (or whatever name you choose).

For me it is the last few lines that pierce my heart. A feeling I know as compassion floods in. Deeply painful yet utterly and exquisitely human, a humble unbearably tender love that looks raw reality in the eye. I know how important it is to let myself feel this.

Questions are openings, beginnings and possibilities. Here are some questions that you may like to sit with:

Could you imagine placing the fragments of your life in the great hands of a Universal Heart?

Could you find yourself again, amongst the pieces of your shame?

Could you imagine letting go so deeply, that you allow the truth of your lack of control over yourself and your life to be as it is?

And from here, might a different kind of possibility for choice and action then come into view?

Ps. If you feel drawn towards compassion practice and have a previous training in mindfulness you may like to join our next Level 2 Responding with Compassion course.

If you’d like to connect with poetry in a mindful way there are two upcoming opportunities available. Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry 6 week course and Mystical Poetry for Slow Time retreat day.

The image is a detail from here.