Happy New Year!

Grow Mercy’s Year-End List of Gentle Propositions and Modest Confessions

Posted on by stephen t berg / 25 Comments

The heart is a wineskin that can accommodate any authentic shape: grief or ecstasy, even despair gets a hammock, as joy gets an astral chamber.

The heart is a spotted fruit — there’s no getting through without some bruising.

The heart is a full moon, beautiful, haunted, magnetic.

Despite the crazed magnificence of our vanities, our screwy, clingy, messed-up lives, our deepest desire is to be each other’s joy.

Grass pierces pavement at its own peril — still it grows on;

A flash of insight, some clearing suddenly lit up by love or beauty or forgiveness can rocket your life, then flop back down like an expired fish. Faith is simply (simply?) about fanning the embers of that first flash.

I’ve had intellectual convictions overturned by spiritual experience, but I don’t go slagging science.

Why has it taken so long to see how my privilege is also my particular blindness?

Individual is a phantom: for in wonder and blunder we receive our selves through the eyes of others.

We are lonely pilgrims, bottles in smoke — proven by our obsessions and addictions — we search, we travel, only to discover that what is most alive is in our own home (an ancient story).

Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you want to find meaning, love the earth and her array of inhabitants.

Gender is both river and riverbed, and as enigmatic.

Beauty is a basket of grapes, happiness is champagne and laughter the bubbles.

Our favoured certainties should routinely be set on the sill of an open window.

A tincture of cynicism is good for you but a full-meal is constipating; doubt is a red-apple-daily but the spell of skepticism is a hospital bed.

Poetry liberates paradox — that bright burning tiger of insight.

Theology attempts an ocean while poetry is content with a boxfish yawing through coral.

Art enlarges our existence, cultivates imagination, which is why despots of commerce and public affairs de-fund it.

Science, religion, technology, are humble in theory, but never when monetized.

Things repair themselves if they are unplugged for a while, including humans.

God, like love, like dance, is a verb; Jesus the singer, painter; and the Spirit a poet of the divine feminine.

Time is a line that winds, folds, bends and swirls — vain to clutch it or try to stop it.

Death is hard, hard, hard and every explanation unfitting.

And love? that embattled radiant thing: sometimes a gleaming gem summoning from the crown of a mountain, sometimes arms that reach for us through the grief-fractured layers of our lives.

Yesterday I knew a few lauded maxims of life; today all I know is that kindness heals and mercy is a hug from a friend.

Happy New Year! and always, Thank You for stopping by!

Christmas/Grace/Grief/Resiliance

If I write you a poem for Christmas

Posted on by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

If I write you a poem for Christmas
it will have dragonflies and lilies and something
made with barn-board.
That’s because I’ve consulted a close friend of yours
and discovered a few of your loves.

The poem will avoid poinsettias,
unless of course you like poinsettias
(we couldn’t cover everything)
in which case it will be rife with them.

It will attempt some light-hearted talk of Santa,
perhaps a comic twist on ageing and chimney navigation,
unless your children are enamoured —
which will make me change direction immediately,
and with some revised line I’ll poke my eye and grimace
with such drama as to make your kids laugh at me,
leaving Claus changeless and saintly.

Having heard this other thing about your life
I’ll hope to cheer you with a stanza about singing
carols in church and how my aunt Irma — with gusto,
in full-throated falsetto — would launch, Joy to the World
into the rafters, if not heaven, and we, crusty little adolescents,
unable to contain our mirth, would bust out un-Baptist like.

Mistaking, perhaps, your smile for encouragement
I stumble on to scribble out my favourite Christmas,
the one we conspired to celebrate in mid-January
after the pressures were off. I write: Tradition
forsaken, still a house full of gladness, 
and watch your eyes for connection.

But I am an ox, and you a garden of grace.
Undone by your patience you bid me closer
and tell me your Christmas story:
the walks you take with grief,
the special pain you endure,
and yet, serving a holiday meal at the centre for refugees,
how despite the line-up of tears and loss —
the potential for survival.

For you, dear warrior, my heavily edited poem
will come through the post
wrapped in sturdy brown paper, grainy as wood,
cross-tied with butchers twine,
your name in bold radiant script,
address in permanent marker,
wax seal in vermillion.

Inside will be the breathing wings of winter sparrows,
dark moles who glance up at stars
and barn swallows who rebuild their homes
one mud pellet and bent straw at a time.

Family/Memories

Blue Bird School Bus

Posted on by stephen t berg / 12 Comments
My kid sister – 1966 (Happy Birthday Joanne!)

My little sister and me ran across the parking lot to the train station. Waiting in line a careless man holding a lit cigarette crowded my mother. Her best and only flower-print traveling dress carried a small black-rimmed hole all the way from Melville, Saskatchewan, to Montreal. That was in 1966 and my uncle and aunt took us driving over a bridge to the island where they were building Expo. That night we went to a Chinese restaurant and we sat on red cushions with tassels and I pretended to be sick so I didn’t have to eat what wasn’t meat and potatoes. Later, walking down ceramic-tiled stairs to the car park a thin man was reaching for a swaddled baby that was held by a mother in a tan coat. She was swearing at the man and my uncle Johnny stepped between them and in a hard low voice he warned the man with words I couldn’t hear. The stranger’s head jerked back and strands of hair leapt away from his face and I noted his eyes weren’t right. The next day I saw people on their knees going up the cement steps of a giant church named Notre Dame Basilica. Most of them were old, some seemed sick, one had grey bandages tied around a dragging foot. Behind the church was a small stone hut where a person in a robe told us an odd story full of what he called adversity about the first priest, which is like our preacher. And then we took a Greyhound to Brandford, Ontario, where my father pushed open the swing-doors of a brand new Blue Bird School Bus and we got in and drove it all the way home. On the highway my little sister and I made a game of waving at people in cars and trucks and I remember being very happy even though my sister always got more waves than me. And I thought how lucky to be driving miles and miles with mom and dad at the front, occasionally chatting, and my sister and me by ourselves in a 54-seat school bus with all this space to run — safe from strangers and free of adversity.

New narratives

The Recovery of Curiosity

Posted on by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

Where, is a necessary word for those of us who need guidance.
When, is also critical should we desire life’s rich, hot, savory soufflé.
Who is almost inestimable in its value for us as relational creatures who
supra-consciously mimic our way into becoming human.
And if these three are crucial, imagine the gold mine of How.
But if I were to pick winner-most-essential it would have to be Why.

That’s because losing your Why
(and the longing to find it),
is like entering a flat dry wilderness without
language to name it or make sense of it.

And while I’m here, consider: there’s no noun
for the way a childhood,
of isolation or humiliation,
can break and carry a weight for so long, for so far.

There’s no verb for accidentally dropping a confidence,
and betraying a friend.

And can anybody find the particular expression
for a receiving a predawn phone call from police?

or for seeing your lover — the one you knew would last —
laughing with another
after a still-fresh separation?

or for the way your brother tried to say what it was like
sitting with mother on her last night?
how time swelled then collapsed in a single sigh.

But then, (wondrous paradox!)
there’s no idiom for resurfacing —

no line for how the sun can peek over a ridge
part the mist and inch along the rug beside your bed
to climb those few remaining feet to your covers,
which you lift, set aside and rise to your feet —

no participial phrase for noting the kind eyes of a counsellor,
friend or partner; and the way a fresh narrative can flood
the body’s millions of cellular rinks
to where a lowercase Why begins to form
on the far banks of a veiled lake.

No clause or even colloquialism for ordinary new days,
and the way a fledgling faith takes you out walking —
returning home with a growing list: colours
of arbutus trunks, white water reappearing from a cracked culvert,
a mix of rain and sun on your tongue,
a conversation in Safeway with a custodian named Joan.

Clearly, there’s no accurate adjective for what seems like an accident:
the strengthening of a heart
through the gradual recovery
of curiosity.

And permit me to add, there’s no one word
(in this fear-fuelled world of loss and aggressive indifference),
for deep listening —
and for a tough devotion to speaking —
to knowing when —
even if few are listening.

This was inspired by Tony Hoagland’s, Special Problems with Vocabulary, and by a course in ‘deep listening’, and a conversation with my wife Deb. 
The photo was taken this summer on some corner of a mid-western American city.