Webs of Life
Hello friends, Spirituality has been widely enlarged for me by Buddhist and Daoist insights as well as by Muslim and Christian mystics. The carpenter bees of aging are further clearing the field for me, bringing me down to experience the simplicity of God in every molecule of the universe. This doesn’t mean less connection with the terrible pain and oppression on earth, only an even keener awareness of it. Saints and seers grasped this linkage more fully than I.
I look out my study window at our barn in all its solidity. I invite you to find bigger connections in these small poems. Watch for the hawks, the mockingbird, the red fox, the geese, the owls along the Oconee River and see our garden as well as Siamese Max, master of the reclining zendo, who since his passing in 2019 has gone on ahead to scout new territory for me.
Here is a poem from my 2014 book Chewing Down My Barn: Poems from the Carpenter Bees. You can read about all my books by clicking on the links to the right. Best, Gene
Webs of Life
As I approach the end of my journey
after eight lucky decades of a long dance,
I notice small stuff ignored in a faster day.
This morning I walked up the driveway
to collect the Times between showers
as sunlight at a perfect angle hit the spider web
strung across the road like a pendant of
lacy wet crystals with the orange-brown
arachnid builder waving her go-slow sign
(nor did I want that net slung across my face).
So I stopped to look and marvel at
this art piece defying gravity and expectation.
Then I bowed to its beauty to avoid unseen
tie lines that kept the godly apparition suspended
like a fragile model of our inner and outer linkings.
We pride ourselves on mind as our unique gift
without respecting patterns of life deeply set
by the unifying matrix of the lovely and not.
So, forgive if I wander too far in musings
of an amateur entomologist and talk about
my old friend a large cockroach who has
lived peaceably in a corner of my kitchen
minding his own business, as they say.
If you are now grossed out ready to
throw this poem against the wall in disgust,
pause, dear reader, and defer at least to
the longevity of his ancient tribe
scrambling around the feet of dinosaurs,
and observe our parting after a long encounter.
He wandered out slower than usual to say hello
and scoffed at the roach box with small holes
near the phone which rarely rings for him.
He seemed to pray for liberation, moksha,
wanting to return to the damp forest of liriope
knowing his time had come for the trek.
So I wrapped him gently in Kleenex and we
processed like two old sadhus on pilgrimage
to the banks of the Ganges, to the edge of the garden
where he scampered off perhaps to meet the spider.
