Fall Together

Friendship will teach you that someone is more than you thought they might be, that time moves faster than you imagined it ever could, and that grace is a fragile chalice to grip lightly, but to hold firmly in a steady grip, even as we all fall together towards the light.

Greylocks

Greylocks - by MRM

April 15th & 16th, 2024

I remember reading a book about Greylocks when I was a young child running barefoot and tanned through the Sonoran Desert. Greylocks was a cool cat protagonist who spent some time trying to catch a fat robin.  

I was learning about local birds - using a paperback Golden bird guide my mother had loaned me. I knew the mocking birds and the mourning doves, the pigeons and the house wrens. We didn’t have robins in Yuma. Greylocks’ color pencil-sketched robins on fibrous pages were vivid and alive in my imagination. 

We had roadrunners in Yuma; we’d see them running across the tops of houses. They’d jump from one roof to the next, scurrying so fast - they looked like a long dark streak with sharp eyes and a beak. They zipped along as if their feet were burning; maybe they were. 

I knew what a cactus wren looked like, though I hadn’t seen one. But we didn’t have robins, and I wished that we did. Robins lived where there were tall green trees and thick, woodsy undergrowth - where vines climbed tree trucks like I did back then. Robins were a sign of a place that was more alive. 

My sister and I kept lists of all the birds we spotted and heard, early mornings when we went walking before the desert sun rose. We made lists of pre-dawn birds, insects spotted under street-lamps,  secret places to hide, the names and occupations of stuffed animals and Little People. 

Bishop Blocks and Lincoln Logs could build and destroy whole worlds in a day. Some of those towns lasted for weeks, or even years, rebuilt by the victors and the victims from memories made in the good times and the bad. 

The sun scorched its way through orange groves and alfalfa fields we ran without a single thought about the future or the past. Its cycles etched cracked earth the Colorado River-fed canals flooded daily with a richness we could scarcely fathom - without a care in the world. Always there. Never ending. 

Robins are a fixture in our yard and at the city park in the town where my wife and I live now. They hop and peck, often seem plump and happy, more contented in appearance than many of the other birds that scurry more, fight more, seem desperate more. Many robins have rich, perfect feathers like the ones in that old book did, but not all do. Some are much more tattered and worn - those tend to be thinner - not as contented - yet here they are being their best robin selves just like all the rest, each one happy to find a worm. 

This afternoon while I was sitting on a park bench, a mourning dove cooed from somewhere not far away as a woodpecker climbed and darted, pecking its way up a tall, dying tree trunk. There is something new here to see when you’re looking for it. I see robins everyday now. They’re everywhere. They were a symbol of all that I wanted but could not have. 

A brother and sister walked through the sand cliffs at sunrise, to see a burrowing owl mama with babies in a hole. As vivid as if it were just this morning, golden sun rays spill over the bluff and bathe that memory in a soft, warm glow. A child spirit visited me in a whisper of the wind - he said that perhaps I should cherish these robins - and that desert - more.

Poems Worth the Time

I will continue to add to this list. 

If you have a suggestion, please feel free to share in the comments.





If 

Rudyard Kipling

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In a Handful of Sky and Earth

Hafiz

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Invictus

William Ernest Henley

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"Hope" is the Thing With Feathers

Emily Dickenson

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That Which Has No Clue
Rumi

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A Psalm of Life
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Some Fill With Each Good Rain

Hafiz

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Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

 Mary Elizabeth Frye

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Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Dylan Thomas

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The Pig
Roald Dahl

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Warning

Jenny Joseph

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An Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins


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Roman Histories - by MRM - 1 March, 2014

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Then there was
Mr. Titus Livy,
Who wrote of recent Roman truths,
To which he was privy.
Rome's once virtuous glory
Had been quite a blast.
But that was then, and this was now.
It could not last.

Tacitus
Was not at all so taciturn...
Was he watching Nero fiddle,
  Back when Rome was burned?
"Power makes men immoral,"
Is what Tacitus said.
The moral of this story is:
They're all now dead.

Augustine
Was the Bishop of "Hippo-land:"
If he lived in that place today,
He'd be an Algerian.
  He wrote of "The City of God"
vs. "The City of Man."
Augustine said that, "In the end,
It's all God's plan."

To Augustine,
Time was linear,
(As opposed to merely cyclical)
Derived from his understanding
Of all things scriptural.
His idea of predetermination
Is "Teleology."
"God already knows the ending
Of His story."

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Parricide

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In Napoleon's France, 

You'd want to hide, 

If you'd committed parricide. 

For at that time, 

In Bonaparte-Land, 

Once you were caught, 

You'd lose your hands.

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Orographically Speaking

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Orographically Speaking - by MRM ~ January 31st, 2014

Warm air holds a bit more water.
Orographic rain begins life in air that's hotter,
As moisture held inside the air,
Where you can't see it (but it's still there). 

Winds push warmth "UP," over the mountains,
  Warm air cools down. "ON" come the fountains.
Cold air does not like to be so moist.
The waters inside are left with no choice. 

They condense, form clouds, and then snow or rain.
Once over the mountains, the air lowers again.
The air then gets warmer, and what happens next?
The rains stop falling; the people are vexed. 

It's rain shadow desert, this side of the hills,
While their neighbors, o're the rise get their bellies filled
With veggies and fruits from orographic rains,
While the folks on this side see naught but dry plains.

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Favorite Rumi Quotes

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“What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.” ~ Rumi

“Shine like the whole universe is yours.” ~ Rumi

“You are the Truth from foot to brow. Now, what else would you like to know?” ~ Rumi

 “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” ~ Rumi

“Whatever purifies you is the right path, I will not try to define it.” ~ Rumi

 “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” ~ Rumi

“You are so weak. Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave till it gets to shore. You need more help than you know.” ~ Rumi

“Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.” ~ Rumi

 “God picks up the reed-flute world and blows. Each note is a need coming through one of us, a passion, a longing pain. Remember the lips where the wind-breath originated, and let your note be clear. Don't try to end it. Be your note.” ~ Rumi

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.” “The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” ~ Rumi
“I searched for God among the Christians and on the Cross and therein I found Him not. I went into the ancient temples of idolatry; no trace of Him was there. I entered the mountain cave of Hira and then went as far as Qandhar but God I found not. With set purpose I fared to the summit of Mount Caucasus and found there only 'anqa's habitation. Then I directed my search to the Kaaba, the resort of old and young; God was not there even. Turning to philosophy I inquired about him from ibn Sina but found Him not within his range. I fared then to the scene of the Prophet's experience of a great divine manifestation only a "two bow-lengths' distance from him" but God was not there even in that exalted court. Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.”  ~ Rumi

“Some Hindus have an elephant to show. No one here has ever seen an elephant. They bring it at night to a dark room. One by one, we go in the dark and come out saying how we experience the animal. One of us happens to touch the trunk. A water-pipe kind of creature. Another, the ear. A strong, always moving back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg. I find it still, like a column on a temple. Another touches the curved back. A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain. He is proud of his description. Each of us touches one place and understands the whole in that way. The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant. If each of us held a candle there, and if we went in together, we could see it.”  ~ Rumi

“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.” ~ Rumi

“There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don't think all ecstasies are the same. Jesus was lost in his love for God. His donkey was drunk with barley.” ~ Rumi

"I didn’t know love would make me this crazy, with my eyes like the river Ceyhun carrying me in its rapids out to sea, where every bit of shattered boat sinks to the bottom. An alligator lifts its head and swallows the ocean, then the ocean floor becomes a desert covering the alligator in sand drifts. Changes do happen. I do not know how, or what remains of what has disappeared into the absolute. I hear so many stories and explanations, but I keep quiet, because I don’t know anything, and because something I swallowed in the ocean has made me completely content with ignorance.” ~ Rumi

“There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body. Seawater begs the pearl to break its shell. and the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling! At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language door and open the lovers window. The moon won’t use the door, only the window.” ~ Rumi

 “When soul rises into lips, you feel the kiss you have wanted” ~ Rumi

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