Anam Cara

Ripe red and dark purple fruit.

In his mind, his fields become presences;

The feel of their colors, the brace of their walls

Have greened his thought and tempered his heart.

His eyes can read the animal atmosphere;

And see through their silence to sense their minds.

His skilled hands can guide calves and lambs to birth.

Out among his animals, in rain, cold, and snow,

Talking to them in affectionate callings,

Something in him tuned to their rhythm.

In these times when geography becomes virtual

And developers urbanize the earth,

May the farmer continue to hold true ground,

Keeping the intimate knowing of the clay alive,

Nourishing us with the fruits of the earth,

Serving as custodian of that precious threshold where

The rhythm of nature with its serene pulse

And sublime patience restores our minds.

FOR A NURSE

Your mind knows the world of illness,

The fright that invades a person

Arriving in out of the world,

Distraught and grieved by illness.

How it can strip a life of its joy,

Dim the light of the heart

Put shock in the eyes.

You see worlds breaking

At the onset of illness:

Families at bedsides distraught

That their mother’s name has come up

In the secret lottery of misfortune

That had always chosen someone else.

You watch their helpless love

That would exchange places with her.

The veil of skin opened,

The search through the body’s night

To remove tissue, war-torn with cancer.

Young lives that should be out in the sun

Enjoying life with wild hearts,

Come in here lamed by accident

And the lucky ones who leave,

Already old and in captive posture.

The elderly, who should be prepared,

But are frightened and unsure.

You understand no one

Can learn beforehand

An elegant or easy way to die.

In this fragile frontier-place, your kindness

Becomes a light that consoles the brokenhearted,

Awakens within desperate storms

That oasis of serenity that calls

The spirit to rise from beneath the weight of pain,

To create a new space in the person’s mind

Where they gain distance from their suffering

And begin to see the invitation

To integrate and transform it.

May you embrace the beauty in what you do

And how you stand like a secret angel

Between the bleak despair of illness

And the unquenchable light of spirit

That can turn the darkest destiny towards dawn.

May you never doubt the gifts you bring;

Rather, learn from these frontiers

Wisdom for your own heart.

May you come to inherit

The blessings of your kindness

And never be without care and love

When winter enters your own life.

FOR THE TIME OF NECESSARY DECISION

The mind of time is hard to read.

We can never predict what it will bring,

Nor even from all that is already gone

Can we say what form it finally takes;

For time gathers its moments secretly.

Often we only know it’s time to change

When a force has built inside the heart

That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul

Or the love where we once belonged

Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere

Until we stand before a threshold we know

We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step

Into the unknown that beckons us;

Trust that a richer life awaits us there,

That we will lose nothing

But what has already died;

Feel the deeper knowing in us sure

Of all that is about to be born beyond

The pale frames where we stayed confined,

Not realizing how such vacant endurance

Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

FOR THE UNKNOWN SELF

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye’s affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind,

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discrete glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic