The Earth's good mercy

This week I have been thinking about the human place in the natural order and all of our Sisyphean efforts to get some place or make some improvement and bring about change, or just survive. The struggles are real---millions of people are now out of work and edging closer to the streets, the Iraq War continues, Bush and his cohorts are working furiously to dismantle federal environmental protections. I guess they want to see just how low his approval ratings can get. In the midst of this chaos of hopeful action and outrage, the world goes on. Life is still a mystery, our fellow creatures offer us more than we accept, and kindness heals the wounds of body and spirit. Hisrchfield's poem brings this together for me and I hope you like it too.

Finally, as you make your Thanksgiving plans for family and friends, please extend the circle and make a donation of food or money or time to feed others. Yes, yes, we must "teach a man to fish," but let's not make him do it on an empty stomach.

Happiness

I think it was from the animals
that St. Francis learned
it is possible to cast yourself

on the earth's good mercy and live.

From the wolf who cast off
the deep fierceness of her first heart
                                 and crept into the circle of sunlight
                                in full wariness and wolf-hunger,
                                and was fed, and lived; from the birds
                                who came fearless to him until he
                                had no choice but to return that courage.
                                Even the least amoeba touched on all sides
                                by the opulent Other; even the baleened
                                plankton fully immersed in their fate---
                                for what else might happiness be
                                than to be porous, opened, rinsed though
                                by the beings and things?
                                Nor could he forget those other companions,
                                the shifting, ethereal, shapeless:
                                Hopelessness, Desperateness, Loneliness,
                                even the fire-tongued Anger---
                                for they too waited with the patient Lion,
                                the glossy Rooster, the drowsy Mule, to step
                                out of the trees' protection and come in.

---Jane Hirschfield from The October Palace (NY: HarperPerennial, 1994).