angel sighted in Plaza La Paz, Guanajuato, Mexico

 

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

March 6, 2025

 

We are loved by trees.

 

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love, p. 5

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The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

 

—John Milton, from “Paradise Lost”

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Paradise, and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old

Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be

A history only of departed things,

Or a mere fiction of what never was?

For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe

In love and holy passion, shall find these

A simple produce of the common day.

 

—William Wordsworth, from “The Excursion”

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Ken Margolis sent this poem:

 

Bee! I’m expecting you!

Was saying Yesterday

To Somebody you know

That you were due–

 

The Frogs got Home last Week–

Are settled and at work–

Birds, mostly back—

The Clover warm and thick—

 

You’ll get my Letter by

The seventeenth; Reply

Or better, be with me–

Your’s, Fly.

 

–Emily Dickinson

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Jill Littlewood sent this poem:

 

The Opera Singer

 

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief 

that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil 

dragging from my neck as I swim 

through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,

which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry 

snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion 

worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say: 

I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means. 

 

And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café, 

and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket 

as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No, 

I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness 

in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise 

when my self-absorption gets usurped 

by the sound of opera streaming from an open window, 

and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl, 

and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the 

delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue 

which means a language more beautiful than my own, 

and I don’t recognize the song 

though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s 

breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me 

two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch 

leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face, 

staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee 

and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention 

the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers, 

some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers 

and training wheels and nearly trampling me 

when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress 

blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway 

and friends, it is not too much to say 

it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea 

and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles 

of love and every name of the unborn and dead 

from this abuelita only glancing at me 

before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby 

and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding 

makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here 

and tell you I said thank you.

 

—Ross Gay

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Elizabeth Domike sent this poem:

 

Joseph Sleeps,

 

his eyelids like a moth’s fringed wings.

Arms flail against the Ninja Turtle sheet

and suddenly-long legs

race time.

 

Awake, he’s a water-leak detector, a recycling ranger

who bans Styrofoam and asks for beeswax

crayons, a renewable resource.

He wants to adopt the Missouri river,

write the president

to make factories stop polluting.

 

They’re old friends, he and George Bush.

He writes and scolds

the president, every month or so,

about the bombing the children of Iraq

(he made his own sign to carry in protest),

about the plight of the California condor and northern gray wolf,

about more shelters and aid for the homeless.

The lion-shaped bulletin board in his room

is covered with pictures and letters from George,

who must be nice,

even if he is a slow learner.

 

Joseph is a mystery fan, owns 54 Nancy Drews.

Nancy’s his friend, along with Jo, Meg, and Amy

and poor Beth, of course, whom he still mourns.

He also reads of knights and wizards, superheroes,

and how to win at Nintendo.

 

The cats and houseplants are his to feed and water

and the sunflower blooming in the driveway’s border

of weeds. He drew our backyard to scale,

using map symbols, sent off to have it declared

an official wildlife refuge, left a good-night

note on my pillow, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

 

In my life, I have done one good thing.

 

—Linda Rodriguez

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I love this poem by Walt Whitman!

 

Beginning My Studies

 

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,

The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,

The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,

The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,

I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,

But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

*

 

While in Mexico, I’m reading the poetry and prose of the English Romantic poets, and critical writings about them—in order to better understand who they were, the times they lived in, and what their ideas were. Kathleen Raine is one of my guides:

 

[Shelley] is the poet of apokatastasis, the restitution of all things to their essential perfection. In his belief that this possibility lies latent in man and in all  creation, Shelley has the unanimous teaching of tradition, both pre-Christian and Christian, with him; besides the interior assent of every spirit not quite dead. Nor was he wrong in believing that love is the transforming principle which alone can bring this about, uniting what is divided, transforming…the hateful into the beautiful….

 

Love is the agent of apokatastasis; a truth which the Christian church itself acknowledges in the sacramental nature of marriage. His vision of the harmonious co-existence of all things in the state of Paradise (to which love, in whatever form, gives access) he has perhaps communicated (in “Prometheus Unbound” especially) more perfectly than has any other English poet….We can no more object that such poetic evocation of the state of beatitude itself lacks “the sense of evil” than we can make the objection to Mozart’s D-minor quartet. It might be said that the arts exist, finally, for no other end than the holding before us of images of Paradise.

 

—Kathleen Raine, from “A Defense of Shelley’s Poetry,” in Defending Ancient Springs, pp. 154-155

 

—Johnny Stallings

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Upwelling

 

Dawn in the dark, dream in the mind,

whale in the sea, tree in the seed, seed

in the earth, leaf in the bud, fledgling

in the nest, pollen in the wind, rain in

the sky, pain in the past, love in the heart,

wonder in tomorrow, song in sorrow, song

at the tip of the tongue, mute poem coiled

in the pen aching to ooze forth to find

a reader in need, a listener long waiting,

a generation opening eyes, ready to rise,

birds in the trees singing “Here we are

and there you are and aren’t we all related?”

 

—Kim Stafford

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Jeffrey Sher shared this poem by Billy Collins:

 

The Lanyard

 

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

 

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

 

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

 

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

 

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

 

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

 

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

 

—Billy Collins

*

 

Hi Johnny.

 

Thinking about how we are often asked to show up to get-togethers with an open heart. Such a gentle request. 

 

Here in Santa Barbara where the flora and fauna are desserty and dry, the difference from NW rain effects wakes me with wonder.  

 

There was a refreshing rain recently, so lavender and herbs and bougainvillea are blooming in winter. 

 

Finches and warblers and hummingbirds flitter along with the tiny leaves of the old oaks and sunlight flickers through the tree tops along with them. Quail and chipmunks skitter about. The sudden abundance of new bird songs – feels fleeting  . . . .

 

I think about what I’ll miss not seeing my granddaughter for a week. She is taking her first walk without holding onto my fingers! Impermanence can be heartrending, but this is how it is.  

 

Brian Doyle wrote a book about the heart as a wet engine while he was worrying about his son’s heart health.

 

Here are some musings by him: 

 

“Our hearts are not pure:

our hearts are filled with need

and greed as much as with love and grace,

and we wrestle with our hearts all the time.

The wrestling is who we are.

How we wrestle is who we are.

What we want to be is never what we are.

Not yet. Maybe that’s why we have these

relentless engines in our chests, driving us forward

toward what we might be.”

 

—Brian Doyle

 

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words ‘I have something to tell you,’ a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”

 

—Brian Doyle, from One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder.  

 

“We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”

 

—Brian Doyle

 

May we show up with a healthy and open heart to what comes next. 

 

—Katie Radditz

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Hope

 

Peace love happiness understanding…and hope. What’s the opposite of hope? At the least, resignation; at the most, despair. I am not willing to accept either resignation or despair; it’s not in my nature. And how can you experience and live in those four qualities of PLH and U without Hope? Not possible, I’d wager.

 

So how do I live in Hope? First I think of the men in prison. We talked a lot about hope, and they were inspirational to me. I’d ask them to describe or explain their visions of hope. Initially the talk was not so optimistic, with good reason. The more we all talked, however, the more beauty arose—more examples of the four qualities of peace, love, happiness and understanding…and compassion and gratitude and reciprocity and joy, and…you name it, every positive quality of life, of living  rose to the surface as part of their mutual experiences. Those who were low on hope were lifted by others. I was lifted and illuminated by all the shared experiences. I was astonished and humbled; with my fortunate life compared to theirs, how could I be without hope? 

 

I was reminded of the centuries-old German peasant song of revolt, “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,”  “(My) Thoughts Are Free”:

 

My thoughts are free, I proudly profess them.

No fence can confine them,

No creed undermine them,.

They ring from on high:

Die Gedanken Sind Frei!”

 

I was reminded of Václav Havel: “Perhaps Hope is not something we search for, but something we let in.”  and “Hope is a feeling that life and work have a meaning.”  

 

Hope is the embodiment of peace, love, happiness and understanding, and just now we all need to let Hope into our lives.

 

And if all else fails to give you hope, just look outside right now at the snowdrops and daffodils, springing from the cold, dark earth into the light of day, again and again, year after year. That’s Hope. 

 

—Jude Russell