Photo by Sylvain Mauroux
Welcome to week three of our practice. I’m excited to continue offering these excerpts from my new book, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Please allow this week’s poem to spark your own joy, delight, memory, and imagination in whatever ways it will. As much as you can, I encourage you to create some quiet space to sit with this offering and see what it brings up for you.
Notice what you feel drawn to and honor how you feel moved to engage with the poem.
May you find delight and inspiration in this week’s practice.
With hope and love,
Eagle Poem
by Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
You can find a printable version of this poem as part of our poetry collection.
Option 1: Stop here. Allow yourself to sit with this poem and let it live in you. Notice how and when it enters your awareness over time. What surfaces for you? If and when you’re ready, you might continue your exploration of the poem with option 2.
Option 2: Deepen your relationship with the poem with the following suggestions: You might begin by reflecting on your sense or interpretation of the poem, reading my reflection of the poem’s meaning as it feels helpful for your own reflection. Engage in the suggested practices to cultivate an embodied experience of the poem’s words and images.
James’s Reflection
In this poem, Joy Harjo—the first-ever Native American U.S. Poet Laureate—calls us to another kind of prayer, urging us to “open our whole self” both to the natural world around us and “To one whole voice that is you.” While participating in nature, and not merely observing it, she implies that we encounter untold mysteries and feel ourselves held in “a circle of motion” that goes beyond this one life. She offers the example of sighting an “eagle that Sunday morning/Over Salt River,” sharing that the way it flew with “sacred wings” and “swept our hearts clean.” Many of us may find a similar reprieve in deeply receiving the gifts of the living world around us.
Joy Harjo invites us into that space of sacred connection, telling us to “Breathe in, knowing we are made of/All this,” and encouraging us to know that we too are “blessed” simply “because we/Were born.” In this way, she implies that finding beauty in nature allows us to find the natural beauty in ourselves and our own lives at the same time, proving what Lynne Twist has written: “What you appreciate appreciates.”
Invitation for Practice
Go to a favorite spot where you feel more deeply connected to the natural world, even if it is just a window looking out at a tree or a few potted plants. Sit quietly, watching your breath and absorbing all of the physical details of the life around you. After doing this for a while, you might now write about that experience of presence, defining or perhaps re-defining prayer for yourself. You might also begin with Harjo’s words, “To pray,“ and then fill in the blanks, seeing where that phrase leads you as you let your imagination take over.
We invite you to share your reflections in the space below the author bio.
Enjoy the full four-session How to Love the World poetry practice.
James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Crews teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Vermont. jamescrews.net.
disbelieving joy at you present
on the threshold of my room. Half seen,
just beyond the corner of my vision, you whisper
a question across the front of my mind.
do I dream you? do I fabulate you into being?
in my here and my now? can I pray you
into my body, into the bone of misery sitting
beneath my shoulder’s blade? I arc
against the weight of ache, the wait
to feel you in all senses, the desire to watch
you sit and eat, juices of lemon and thyme running
down under your chin, dripping blessing all over me.
When we enter into awareness of all that surrounds us, we can stop making ourselves the center and we can start seeing how we are an integral part of it all and it all is an integral part of us. There is so much of it all we cannot and don’t know and the same is true of our own self. We are vast and part of a vast and beautiful cosmos. Prayer invites this kind of awareness.
To pray…
Is to submit my whole being to something more, holy and sacred
Is to dare to hope
Is to receive an ethereal embrace and immerse in the grace of the cosmos
Is to reveal what is hidden and hurting and frightened
Is to join with a dying, homeless man who is terrified
Is to imagine I can dance in the air like a hummingbird and leap in the ocean like a dolphin
Is to harmonize with the stars
Is
The world of nature invites awe, invigorates one’s being, deepen one’s capacities to hold hands with the wind, the snow, the rain, the sunlight and the night.
I always feel that Native American writers have such a deep and unique connection to nature. I am more an observer, grateful yes, but a little distant. To connect with a circular motion of the eagle this poem’s author recognizes that motion in her body and psyche as well as her soul. How fortunate she is.
mid-may 2020 Show Low Arizona White Mountains
The Conversation
I’m having multiple seizures a day probably due to a lack of oxygen at this altitude. My only joy is derived from walking Abbey Schnauzer early every morning.
This morning, we turn the curve that leads us back to the main road. Abbey stops dead in front of a pine tree less than 3 feet ahead of us. She’s staring up, into it. There’s a perch angling out across our path from the main trunk, less than 10 feet above the ground. I tell you these details to impress upon you how close we were to. . .a golden eagle.
I felt I’d been beaten in my mid-section by a baseball bat. This eagle that surveilled us was the largest bird I’d ever seen. Squatting as he was on the perch, he was more than 3 feet tall. His body/folded wings approached 2 feet. And I was in panic mode. I was used to 15lb Abbey being scoped out by ravens, groups of hawks and crows. Even a barn owl who was known to abduct dogs her size on their walks at sunset. But this! I’d never met a bird that I was certain could do damage to Abbey.
And the eagle sat, sizing us up. His eagle’s eyes pierced mine. Motionless, I swallowed. Took a deep breath. To collect my wits. And then I spoke:
Well. Hello there! How are you? (hungry, I’m thinking)
He stares at me. I start again. Telling him what a beauty he is. How I’ve never encountered a bird like him. And something told me to shut up.
His turn. He cooed. For a couple of minutes. Low cooing sounds breaking the cool mountain morning air. A calm about him. Regal. And those eyes, penetrating me. He became quiet. He was trying to allay my fears. About him.
I told him how pleased, how awed I was that he had revealed himself like that, sitting in the forest parlor with me.
He spoke again. This time it was to tell me not to be afraid. Not of him. Not of my seizures. Not of the uncertainty and dread that accompanied those seizures. He no longer cooed. He was my teacher, giving me important instruction in how to deal with what truly rattled me most about those seizures. He was insistent. Making the same set of sounds over and over like he was tattooing them into my heart. Making me memorize what he said. I repeated his message. Thanked him.
His last words to me were about the nature of the uncertainty of life. He said as I learned to live with the seeming uncertainties and aberrations of life, I would reach the heavens like him.
And with that, he hopped off his perch while spreading his great broad wings. Here was his last opportunity to swoop down and grab Abbey. Instead, he made a beeline straight into the morning sun.
Copyright Lorraine Pester April 16, 2021
Whirling floating whiteness of snowflakes
Frozen siblings of soft warm spring showers.
Sparrows tight rope sitting in the winter chill
Sandhill cranes feasting on burgundy sorghum
Dawn painting cirrus gold on aqua background
Dusk frosting layers of stratus with orangey reds.
To pray is
Standing still
Like the
Tall cypress trees
Bordering the small quiet brook
The birds high
Up above in the tall treetops
Not visible
But heard
Here and there
One to another
Speaking their
Own language
Tiny drops of rain from
The sky cause
An unexpected “blip” sound
One here and another there
Bringing your attention to
The ripple it causes
As if the small quiet stream
Was trying to get your attention
And it does
Sonya
To pray is to watch chickadees and juncos flit in the garden your partner spent years encouraging, from the moment he sowed wild seeds to the subsequent eruption of so many flowers neither of you recognized. Faith in the unknown. You both waited to see what would arrive and now it’s here: flower stalks that have stood through winter, their offerings enough to feed the masses. Enough to teach you how to wait.
To pray is
Standing still
Like the
Tall cypress trees
Bordering the small quiet brook
The birds high
Up above in the tall treetops
Not visible
But heard
Here and there
One to another
Speaking their
Own language
Tiny drops of rain from
The sky cause
An unexpected “blip” sound
One here and another there
Bringing your attention to
The ripple it causes
As if the small quiet stream
Was trying to get your attention
And to hold you there…
And it does
How Not to Take in Fear
Find a quiet path to walk alone.
See how ocean waves roll
with the pull of a capricious moon,
and the ancient oak holds
ground in a thrashing wind.
Fling praise up to vultures
circling overhead.
Bow like nature to the coin
tosses of circumstance.
Consider a tree for a confidante.
If the journey leads to water,
count on faith to help you
swim safely to the far shore.
Climbing a tall mountain
is a great remedy for fear;
stride upward until you feel
the generosity of Mother Earth.
New muscles will evolve gently,
proving you are stronger than any fear.
to pray is to know
that we come and go
like clouds moving
across the landscape of our lives
to pray is to join the pleas
of our endangered wild relations
in the hope we will awaken
to the power of harmony
to pray is to listen
for the voices of wisdom
calling us into the future
with the old ways
to pray is to enter Mystery
willing to be unsure but
certain of the sovereignty of Love
🦋
©tuckerdinnes
I sit near Mobile Bay beneath pewter skies that glisten freshly washed by the rain and shine as the lightning polishes them in any given moment. The bay waters shimmer sameness like the uplifted face of a child who wants only to please you by mirroring your likeness from her eyes.
Some wait for the rain to stop. Something within me embraces it for all the many elements that have conspired for it to be here. The constancy of the rain, the continual drum rolls of thunder, the flickering then dimming of the lightning that almost gently pierces through the clouded sky join to make me wonder: might this be forever, this rain?
As I drove here, I noticed the lamplights on in so many homes—the light as invitational warmth, an escape from the dreariness likely found in the rain and the darkness of this day. I, though, have been driven to it. So this is today, I say. You are beautiful to me, abundant rain, expansive sky. I wonder, have we given you just too much to hold? Is it time for those of us here upon this earth to share all that has been gathered within you?
Let it fall, Precious Sky, let it fall.
The symphony of birds singing this morning, the river rushing near the house, the chilly fresh air delight of early morning, effortlessly gave themselves to this reflection, as I sit wrapped in blankets of prayer and fabric. The practice offered here wove itself into this morning’s glorious circumstance. True circling. Thanks to the life that Circles.