Update: I learned today of a friend’s sudden passing. I feel shock and sadness and a heavy heart – noticing how loss hits hard and fast, then freezes, then seeps in very slowly, subtly shifting the landscape. We’re traveling a short journey here, and I am renewing the intention to hold the people in my life (you) with gratitude and to share how I am nourished. Thank you for reading this, for witnessing my journey and for connecting here.
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
~Meister Eckhart
That’s my Pops.
The past couple years I’ve offered poems to my family members as Christmas gifts. It’s a gift for me too, taking the meditation, holding them in my mind and heart and asking for the words. I feel closer to both them and myself.
When I held the image of my dad this time, I saw a vision of an Indian man too, with six feathers in his hair. I imagined him and my father are not so far apart in the grand scheme of Iowan millenia.
Here’s what I found in the dig.
a hundred springs
and the blessings will
still swim from under rocks
in the ice-fingered stream bed,
as the resurrection of that april frog
made known,
the rocks themselves can sing.
a thousand springs
and the taste of peace
still paints the cheeks
of the man with six feathers
building fire inside the sacred hearth
of family fed;
his family beats a drum
in the bark of a tree
now alight,
sending signals of
children no longer cold.
enough springs
and what came before will
insist there is no space or time—
leaves of rust and saffron
up on the farm
blown here,
still telling us the scent
of home under these early wet flakes—
insisting to the man with six feathers
they know the harmonies of now.
the first spring or the last,
and his elder hope
for simple people
remains as pure as the shout
of the robin
just there:
for these blessings to
be known by his children,
and theirs,
in the resonant sky
of our season
holding spring.
The Bird Sings 