God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

That you were born
and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

That you will lie
if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.

That you will live
that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.

That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes even better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constricting.

That you will probably be okay.

That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.

So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.

To pause and give thanks
is to pay attention to the parts of living
that bring delight,
turn us from what destroys
and make life rich –
whatever else may also be.
This practice of intentional remembering
helps realign our perspective
with the whole truth of our lives.
When bitterness,
or fear,
or grief,
become the whole view,
gratitude points us to
the beauty-also
and the love-anyway
and the simple-pleasures that surround.
Our steady companions in life’s complexities.
We honor the Sacred,
we honor each other,
we honor the earth and our creaturely companions
when we remember this web of life that holds us.
All its terrors.
All its gifts.
Gratitude paired with denial
about all that calls for mending and repair
will not satisfy for long.
But gratitude that is alive to all that is,
a sibling of sorrow, cousin of rage,
so aware of the ache and the loss and injustice –
but still seeing cause to pray:
“thank you, thank you, thank you”
is to feast on the nourishment of God.

We are grateful for children
teaching us that gentleness, care,
play, and imagination are our birthrights.

We are grateful for elders—
human, flora, & fauna—
who hold stories of our belonging.

We are grateful for the wisdom of the land
who shows us there is enough for all
when we take only what we need.

We are grateful for those who mend, lend, and collaborate
their way into abundant living—
teaching us the richness of divesting from corporate greed.

We are grateful for dreamers—
Singing, dancing, and planting forth
the world to come.

We are grateful for organizers
whose strategies and historic memories
shake loose chains of violation.

We are grateful for the courageous
whose solidarity has teeth,
whose compassion risks something.

We are grateful for comrades
who throw sand in the cogs
of the machine of oppression.

We are grateful for
Truth Tellers, Truth Yellers,
Way Makers, Pattern Breakers.

Our gratitude is not a flippant thing,
it does not gloss over violence,
it does not forget about grief—

it holds in its trembling hands
the preciousness of living,
feels the weight of all that has been lost,

draws us to a deeper connection
with all that could be,
blooms us into better ways of being.

Meanwhile the world’s still doing spring
like nothing’s happening. There was sunlight
on the forest floor today, and the sounds of birds

welcoming themselves home to another place
they still belong. My fear found no corroboration
in the old growth Douglas firs, who seemed

as steady as ever. Not even the swarms
of little hemlocks clawing towards the light
echoed my alarm. They all just let me be there

with all the hornets buzzing in my chest.
Some mirrors are big enough to show you
how even the end of the world really isn’t.

If only I could give you
the gift of Adventure.
If only I could box her up
for you,
That big red bow on top,
glimmering.

But this cannot be.
Adventure is not
given or earned.
She is a breath that is prayed,
a force that is found,
found in the soul of everyone
and everything

But maybe, just maybe,
if I cannot box her up for you,
I can at least point you
in her direction.
Maybe, at least,
I can tell you where I saw her last,
what I prayed when I was alone,
waiting in a forest under the pine trees,
waiting for her to appear.
Maybe that will be
your Beginning.

You see, I didn’t learn for a long time.
For years, as soon as I began
searching,
hid behind fear,
all the while,
Adventure waiting for me
with a lantern and a wildflower.
All that time, I only wanted
pictures of her,
without knowing her presence,
her warmth,
her smell.

But when I met her,
I found myself.
When I prayed,
I found God.
If only I could teach you
not to be afraid.
If only I could tell you
that it’s okay if you don’t
have words left
to pray.

If only I could point you
towards that lantern
and that wildflower.
If only I could show you
the way to God.

But God cannot be given or earned.
No, God is found.
So, in that soul of yours,
there is the greatest opportunity.
You.
The world.
Breath and prayer embodied.
Everything sacred.
These things would never fit
into a box
with a big red bow on top,
glimmering.

There is no difference between
healing your body and healing the Earth
or helping another to heal.
It is all the same Body.

There is no difference between
healing Earth’s body and healing your own
or helping another to heal.
We are all the One Body.

Begin anywhere.
Begin with one tree,
or a bird.
Begin with your own heart
or skin, clean out your liver,
clear your mind.
Begin with the growth of a child,
your family’s food.
Then continue to include
one small part at a time.
You will be healing the Whole.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Women share pain like a potluck dinner.
We come together, each carrying a steaming
dish, unafraid to lift the lid and say:
dig in
how do I make it better?
let me know what you think?

It’s a necessary magic–this gathering
the ache and making it into a meal.

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
in the trees in the silence of the fisherman
and the heron, and the trees that keep the land
they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.

This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
and how to be here with them. By this knowledge
make the sense you need to make. By it stand
in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.

Speak to your fellow humans as your place
has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
before they had heard a radio. Speak
publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
from the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
by which it speaks for itself and no other.

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

You that give new life to this planet,
you that transcend logic, come.

I am only an arrow.
Fill your bow with me and let fly.

Because of this love for you
my bowl has fallen from the roof.
Put down the ladder and collect the pieces, please.

People ask, but which roof is your roof?

I answer, Wherever the soul came from,
and wherever it goes at night, my roof is in that direction.
From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground,
from wherever searching rises in a human being.

The looking itself is a trace of what we are looking for,
but we have been more like the man who sat on his donkey
and asked the donkey where to go.

Be quiet now and wait.
It may be that the ocean one,
that we desire so to move into and become,
desires us out here on land a little longer
going our sundry roads to the shore.

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.