Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

 

"You cannot teach accountability to someone who's built their identity around avoiding it. Growth requires discomfort, and some people would rather sacrifice relationships than face themselves.

People build their identity around avoidance when accountability feels unsafe. If responsibility was met with punishment, shame, or withdrawal, they learned to survive by deflecting, blaming, and controlling the narrative. Avoidance, in many ways, became their armor.

As adults, the same defense shows up as denial, minimization, or justification.

They rewrite events to stay the victim. They intellectualize their behavior instead of feeling it. They distance themselves from the impact they've had on others because facing it would unravel who they believe they are."

How to Live by Todd Dillard

 

Depravity begins with thinking of love 

as a radical act. I quit loving 

with difficulty. I love

easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders.

They’ll fly away if I move. So I move.

I love flight. I love cages

left wide open. I am not a window.

I could be a window. Open me,

you’ll find a dense wood,

children wandering inside it.

Not lost children. They know the way.

They live the way horses run.

If they each had a bird in hand

they would open their hands.

 "Some people aren't speaking to you because they owe you an apology. Avoidance is often how unprocessed shame shows up, because sitting with the impact of their behavior would require accountability they're not ready for."

The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska

 

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Spider by Andrea Gibson

All of my pain is a spider 
I’ve learned not to crush 
with the heel of my shoe 

but to guide with a page 
of my journal 
into an empty glass. 

I ask questions about 
its life, its purpose 
as I walk careful 

out to the garden and rest 
it down on the earth. 
My pain—how happy 

it is to leave me 
whenever I treat it 
kind.