Sacred Necessaries

[Image: “Four Rock Formation,” by Nicollazzi Xiong (discovered at the Pexels free stock-photography site — thank you!).]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Funny Strange 

We are tender and our lives are sweet

and they are already over and we are
visiting them in some kind of endless
reprieve from oblivion, we are walking
around in them and after we shatter
with love for everything we settle in.

Thou tiger on television chowing,
thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical
roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom
of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.

Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean’s
harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce
a vineyard of grapes from one’s apron
and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up
bread and offer up one’s armful to the throng?
Let us live as if we were still among

the living, let our days be patterned after
theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

…and:

Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry
(excerpts)

Under the storyteller’s hat
are many heads, all troubled.

Rowing across the lake
all the dragonflies are screwing.
Stop it. It’s Sunday.

Only today
I heard
the river
within the river.

I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

Nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
The moth just drowned
in the whiskey glass.
This is heaven.

Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.

(Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.

(Anne Lamott [source: nothing canonical; possibly a specific edition of this (but it’s not in the copy I own)])

Not from whiskey river:

There are times when we each have sacred blessings to learn. These are the lessons that will push us to the limit of our greatness… No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to do, say or be what others expect of us. We can’t. The harder we try to pull others to us, the farther they move away. The more we try to fix things, the worse they seem to get. What we must do at these very sacred times is pull back, withdraw and prepare to grow. Our lessons are very sacred. They are the basic ingredient of our greatness. To accept them we must be open. To receive them we must be willing. To understand them we must be alone.

(Iyanla Vanzant [source])

…and:

Child in Big Toy

They were calm because it had never happened before,
because they thought it had, it must have, when designed,
a tunnel to fit the child but not the adult. Then how
if a child crawled there and curled and closed her mouth,
how to get the child out? Send another in. Send in
someone small. They were calm because everyone
finds reasons to be calm when there is wind or sun or
this coat at the base of the slide, it must be the child’s,
Come out. It’s fine. Come on, now. Come out.
They were wrong. All of them were wrong. Some thought:
a saw! Some thought: calm down! They were getting
somewhere with their thoughts. Part of the crowd grew
angry with the other part for making a crowd,
so one crawled up into the tube until his chest stopped
like his breath and he saw something wrong:
the sun made blue in the tube. Something about the sun
and black streaks from shoes. The crowd saw the half of him
left out kick then kick wild, so they pulled the other
half out. They sat him up and someone groaned,
someone said Enough, now, come on. Sweetheart, enough.
Come out. Then another crawled inside, left her coat
by the slide, passed the streaks, saw the blue, smelled the plastic
in her mouth that comes from plastic having caught
the sun at noon, the burning soon night-cooled,
a thousand black-streak tallies to mark the cycle of shoes then
wider shoes of older children pressed inside by two
to touch and make the space between them small—
this one heard a sound. Someone’s calling me she thought.
I’m found. So she crawled back. Remembered all.
Moved aside. Another tried. Lost. Another tried.

(Mario Chard [source])

…and:

A Great Wagon
(excerpt)

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

[…]

Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

(Rumi [source])