Re: On the Subject of Close Friendships

I jotted down some impressions based on Caroline Myss' notes from her Facebook page titled On the Subject of Close Friendships. Perhaps you can find that note here: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=118428954859&ref=nf So be warned, these are rough and consequently unpolished thoughts offered in consideration Myss' words as well as in light of my own circumstances.

We will all in our lives trespass against others. And then, after some time they forgive you or risk the ruination of the friendship. But the offer of forgiveness is contingent on recognizing that stepping/crossing other's boundaries, no matter how clearly marked, is an existing condition of living life among people.

Sometimes trespasses are committed carelessly, deliberately, innocently and/or maliciously. How often I have said or done something offhand, seemingly small only to find out that for someone else, it was BIG.

Sometimes it's best to hang back or hold off in the aftermath and give them space to reconsider their boundaries or themselves. Sometimes there is nothing to be done. Perhaps what will unfold is beyond our ability to affect beyond the original trespass.

As long as we are alive, we will trespass. We may take a seemingly pleasant hike into the hills of a new country, only to find, miles from any help, that you have crossed over into hostile territory, as what has happened recently in Iraq and Iran.

What is true is that those we hold most dear to ourselves also hold the ability to wound us most deeply. And all that we can ask when we trespass, all that we can hope for, perhaps, is forgiveness.

Resolve--not the carpet cleaner

Away, away, away I'll fly from you
from your wounds and jealousies
petty insecurities
criticisms and fears,
beyond the reach of your
indelicate protestations
to a place you'll never think to find me:

Deepening, ever deeper into me.

A Breath of Eco-terrorism

I stop to see the breathing of a bird
beside my car window
perched on a small stump
or was it a mile post
a songbird whose whole body
her breath above two legs.

No singing but only watching
counting cars or monitoring carbon emissions,
set to defile the next one,
a tiny eco-terrorist targeting
one at a time
the breath filled her entire body
rapidly
if there was space in her ankles they
would have expanded too.

An entire body of rolling pulsations
beginning again almost before the last one finished
and then a car horn brought me back to myself
and I had to leave the tiny activist to her selection.

Propitious Alignment

We are two orbiting planets
in our celestial bodies
catching sight of each other from time to time
coming into view from a great distance,
half of us always bathed in light
and bouncing it in general directions
forever dancing
toward and retrograde
destined to stay in our own preordained courses
taking turns following and then preceding
while balancing gravity with forward motion
and once--
coming into a propitious alignment

I'll put a little wobble in my pushmepullyou
just to see if I've got your attention.

A garden party

I answered the invitation
from the shy and whispering flowers and
standing in her garden as the heat of the day
began its increase I thought to myself that
the air in July feels more willing to accept and
promote the heat from the objects it surrounds,
more than the winter air.

As the yellow flowers unfurled
their secret hearts before me, the strawberries
with their thousand mouths
confessed that my presence was required
from an invitation of the Honeybee.

The tomatoes leaned closer in their cages.

“Oh no,” I had remarked to Mme. Honeybee
while baptizing glebed-floral mouths
in a diurnal effluence from the hose,
“Please don't sting. Just as you dance
within the floral cup, serving life
through your buzzing ministrations,
so too with dousing water wand in hand and
a humming-way, do I.”

And that, I gather, is how the radiant flowers knew,
toiling as they had these warming months
in their soiled excavations
all for the very moment
before the heat became unbearable
to offer back all they had borrowed
from the sun:

That I could bear their loveliness
and that some of it is safe in me.