Sea Chapel
Greetings and salutations from the sandy shores of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket! I woke up a little later this morning, and opposed to going down to Dowses Beach, I simply rolled out of bed and sipped some coffee on my deck here in Osterville. Something about a lazy Sunday morning on Cape Cod, where the sun is shining, the birds are calling out to their lovers and the cats and dogs that share my home, mill about peacefully, with purpose driven furry footprints that give us all a compass on how to truly live our lives in the present… With the largest man made disaster in the recorded history of the United States of America ongoing at this moment in “time”, I thought I might offer a prayer of sorts in the way of another submission by Mary Oliver, a noted poet here on Cape. Her simple words offer solace in an insane world of chaos and catastrophe, be it in our national psyche of racial intolerance in the great state of Arizona, the ongoing battle of the control of power via the broken banking “system”, the folly of harvesting fossil fuel when we know that black gold is slowly, ever increasingly, melting our planet, the desperation that exists in every town, village and city as policy towards the have nots becomes increasingly evident to the Ostriches who have kept their heads in the sand for so long, and the wars, yes, the wars that are nothing more than a manifestation of all of the above–fortifying what President Eisenhower warned us of, the “military industrial complex”, designed to perpetuate war, as they are now designed to keep the “business” of that endeavor alive and well, regardless of the consequences to our young men an women, not to mention the millions of innocent lives lost to the insanity of military conflict. These are monumental problems facing mankind at this very moment, and as we wait for an act of Providence to show us out of the cave that we created, let us take pause to reflect on the POWER of LOVE, and its properties of transformation and transcendence to the place where we all belong–for it will be revealed that we are all truly one, NOW and forever more–as it was written and thus, shall ever be. Enjoy your Sunday everybody and may the Grace of God be with you all…
Bone
by, Mary Oliver
1.
Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where it is hidden,
and what shape–
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something–
for the ear bone
2.
is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer’s head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long–
and I thought: the soul
might be like this–
so hard, so necessary–
3.
yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don’t we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom ,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it
4.
lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts–
certainties–
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
Peace~M
