"You Are Living in A Poem"

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye says that she often tells her elementary aged students that they are "living in a poem”. A poem is not something you read or write, but it’s a way of perceiving in the world.  Then she asks them to write about their life inside a poem.

This week, I happened upon a translation of a verse from the book of Ephesians in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.  Ephesians 2:10 proclaims “We are the poems of God”.  I just love that idea!!  What would it mean in my life if I understood myself to be a “poem of God”.  --- or of the universe, or of the goddess, or of “Mystery” or the Universe…. What is the purpose of a poem?  What kind of poem do I want to be?  If I am a poem, are the trees and birds and ocean waves also poems?  Presumably so.  In any case, I like imagining that world!

And then, this month, my friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Kathy Hurt has a new book out;  “Psalms for All our Days and Ways”.  (See it by clicking HERE ).  The book is a collection of rewritten Psalms.  These Psalms are not directed to God, but rather to the reader.  Psalms about everyday life and experience.  I love the idea that we could envision our experience as a Psalm.  The word Psalm means a sacred song or hymn. 

What a juxtaposition of all of these ideas – we are a poem, we live inside a poem, we are a sacred song or hymn.  It does change the way I think of myself in the world!

Borrowing liberally from all these sources, I have written my own poem;

All around us,

a poem is being spoken,

a song is being sung –

in the way leaves rustle

against one another

and another wave arrives

on every shore on earth.

And the birds, oh the birds

are reciting poem-songs

every dawn, every dusk.

The rhyming of the

church bell, the clock tower,

the whispered poems of buds

becoming blossom,

the ode of every-changing light,

and, of course, the stars reciting

their tiny haikus all the time.

Your own untethered breath,

a steady ode to life,

a repeating pantoum.

The world offers us poems,

why not learn them by heart?

            ~Penny Hackett-Evans

Disclosing your own divinity

Jan Phillips, in her book, “Stop Seeking, Start Finding” talks about how it is not enough that we find “spirituality” for ourselves and keep it to ourselves.  But, that our most important task is to disclose the divinity we find within ourselves to the wider world.  We have an imperative she says to “dance it out with our lives” – to reveal our inner sense of holiness through our art, our words, our movement in the world. 

What does it mean to “disclose” our inner divinity?  Phillips says it means “To be most oneself.”   To live authentically in the world.  To not hoard our private sense of an inner holiness, but rather to live it loudly. 

I know I sometimes feel that I need to couch my interest in and experience of holiness in my life.  It’s a bit vulnerable to go around admitting that one is seeking “holiness” or a sense of divinity here in this life.  Mostly I imagine that others are busy paying bills, taking out the garbage and trying to remember their passwords… as I am much of the time.  If I experience “divine moments”,  is that Divinity?  Or, is it me?  Phillips says the answer to both those questions is YES.  If we do not share our own searching and finding, we continue to feel isolated in our experience.  I yearn for settings where it is permissible to seek for and to talk about one’s spiritual searching and finding. 

Phillips talks about the “hereafter” being right here, right now.  I love the title of her book,  “Stop Seeking and Start Finding”.  Click HERE to find out more about this book.

Here is a poem from the book – reprinted here by permission of the author.

DIVINE HERE, DIVINE NOW

~by Jan Phillips

Why all this talk

about the hereafter and Heavenly Father?

The flames of the cosmos

burn in our cells,

atoms from the First Fire

swirl and spin in our livers and lungs.

What do you think “the kingdom is within you”

was meant to convey?

You waltz with the Beloved

every second of the day

yet you speak like the Holy One

is light years away.

Put away the pictures from grammar school.

Disinherit voices that led you astray.

Drop your fears of blasphemy and say it:

I am one with the Father,

one with the mother, one with creation.

[and I, Penny, would add – one with the goddess”]

Look in the mirror to find what you lost.

The hereafter is in the kernel of NOW.

There is nothing to find, nothing to earn.

The entire banquet is spread out before you.

Big stuff/ Small stuff

My friend and colleague Rev. Dr. Kathy Hurt today posted this reflection on Facebook and has given me permission to repost it here. WHAT a great response to the "big" news; bombs, invasions, war. and the "little" news -- salamander, leaf, hawk... Thank you for this, Kathy...

After listening to news of bunker busting bombs, bloviating leaders justifying their actions, and bellowing brags on social media about how big and powerful this country is, I needed a reset. Because being in nature can accomplish such a reset, I headed out to hike up an adjacent mountain with plans to sit in a spot on top where views of mountain vistas, jewel-like water, and gliding hawks are always available. I slogged my way to the top and reached my destination--only to find a salamander perched on the very boulder I had planned to use for my much needed reset. I noisily dropped my pack and my trekking poles, muttering things like "OK, you can move along now, there are plenty of other places for you to recline but I want this particular boulder, I need this particular boulder, so get lost."

   Nothing doing: the salamander seemed unfazed by my noise, my sweating presence, my stream of words that, for all the salamander knew, might have been curses aimed at salamanders. The creature stood fast. And while I could easily have smacked my palms together and shouted, or brandished one of my poles and chased the salamander away--and I almost did all of that--I paused. Recent hours (and long before recently) have demonstrated that bigness, power, noise, all carry the day and therefore can be counted on to get us what we want. And getting what we want, especially when we use bombs and threats and our great big presence, do the best work when aimed at someone or something small. Big beats small almost every time.

   But perversely or not, I wanted the small salamander to win our competition for that boulder. I wanted to see smallness get the better of bigness. I wanted a different dynamic just for that moment when the big people are not pushing aside the small people.So I hoisted my pack, picked up my poles, and walked a bit farther along to another good spot for the view and the reset I wanted, though I no longer seemed to need that reset quite so much. Perhaps paying less attention to all the big stuff and more attention to the myriad small creatures and experiences and people all around me, will keep me more balanced when the next round of big stuff comes along.