There’s a rock the size of an armchair high up on Holland Creek. It rests, touching the water, beside a slow bend, down from a granite ledge. It’s a proper hike, usually I take my e-bike. I sit on that rock (the armchair), it’s smooth and I can sit for a long time and look at things, and that’s what I do. (I listen too, and revel as the burble overtakes my tinnitus.) I look at all the things around me. I’m not known as methodical, but here I’m methodical. Stridently so. My eyes pierce, no, touch — touch every crook and beck, gill and cranny, in those stones strewn over layers of gravel. My eyes are like that bird, the American dipper, or water ouzel, searching and finding aquatic larvae everywhere. My eyes bob and dip, God is everywhere. The game, at this point, is searching for a place where God isn’t. I start over, from the top. My eyes search upward through the boughs, past the crowns of cedar and fir right into the blue imaginings of stars; then sweep slowly down the trunks to the understory, the salal, the salmonberry, the fiddle ferns, the moss, lichens, the micro forests, right to the edge of the creek, that speaks in tongues, but like nothing you’ve heard coming out of some Pentecostal church. I give up. God is everywhere. Everywhere the exterior solacing majesty is laid upon me like a feather comforter. But here’s the problem: after 20 minutes or so, I involuntarily begin to look inward, and I think of Wallace Stevens, searching the mystical frontiers for, “the God who must be found in me, or not at all.” But my inner eyes are only half grown, old as I am, and what I see inside are dim outlines, and it’s dark and cloudy like before a heavy rain and my eyes are troubled in that murk. I sit on the rock until I’m tired and I pray: Lord, help me see, make of me, something more. I look, listen — inside, silence, and I see nothing but the flashing of tiny white feathers on the eyelids of a dipper. I cast a glance over the creek, hear its thousand mourning doves, and see a fall leaf, rising in the breeze of the brook. I take it as a yes. Why not? Then I get up, stretch the cramps out of my legs, and leave.

All loves are bodily. I read these words
and they strike within, a deep note of truth.

Something entirely comprehensible, when, as a child
I ran through green willows, heard music,
and knew the world was built for happiness.

And now, too, as one aging into life’s narrowness,
I move through slants of light, from dawn to twilight,
and feel: the closer to death, the more I love this earth.

This earth, where each thing stands for nothing
but its own wondrous and inexplicable existence,
yet is wind-pierced and wave-washed by a Presence.

Like the sand and crushed shells beneath my back.
Like the keening call of an eagle, atop a hemlock.
All animal, all spirit, all holy.

Love Note

– After Walt Whitman

I may appear to you as a “tattered coat upon a stick,”*
my gate, like a comic, tripping over a rake,
my luckless visage, a vacillating army of lumps,
but what is that to me? Should your amusement
be full and friendly, I will celebrate you, and me, and sing,
“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

It is hot August and my birthday is in cool November
but birthdays, for me, come every day, when
I arise before dawn and see the wonder
of my splayed-out partner,
and by my mind’s eye, see the beauty of our grown sons,
their partners, all together, like a choir,
a single breath, a Kyrie, a hymn to greet the sun.

I walk down to the mystical margins of the sea,
where the shore shakes itself like a wet dog,
and there, hardly surprising, is a love note,
written in seaweed, addressed to me,
addressed to you.

*W. B. Yeats

May a recognition of our essential oneness turn the tide away from our current polarization and give us the grace and space for differences and diversity.

Like many today, I practice my faith privately,
I go to the church of Shell Beach, Hart Lake, and Slack Point.
I’m greeted by sister Maple, and cousin Douglas,
and by a small but wondrous, assembly of Arbutus.

I have kneeled in moss among sword ferns and lifted my eyes
to the conifer boughs, through to the greenish blue of a patterned sky,
and said, aloud, the heavens declare the glory of God, and felt
the presence of Love, the Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Sacred Heart.

Despite all this notable company,
I don’t look for greatness in myself, how can I?
but simply, for a generosity of heart.

For we are made, I have read, not much inferior to the angels,
which gives one hope, yet I fear that that distance
is greater than my will with its hidden desires.

It cuts me quick and lays me open, that gospel of peace,
and forgiveness.

And I see, behind a heavy veil, within myself, there lies
a kind of malignancy, that darkly delights
in whatever news confirms my prejudice —
that hollow height, that, like hatred,
can only thrive when context is ignored.

As context calls for time, and a breath of humility,
to see one’s self from a distance, as one among many.

And in that distance, I hear the bells in steeples,
calling me to quit the forests, lakes and beaches,
and reenter the splintered community of souls,

where, Mary and task-full Martha, Judas and cunning Caiaphas,
the wasted prodigal, the jealous elder, the fine Samaritan,
ruthless Herod, hand-washing Pilate, Peter and the struck-blind Saul,
are all, well represented in the local parish.

And all of us, discretely drawn, to follow Mary Magdalene,
to that ancient tomb, and wait for the unknown gardener,
to speak our names.