Cowboy Haiku: Poetry of Ron McFarland

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Least a tear for Fukishima

I cry for you, dear Fukishima, for you, the earth and the wind.

But, be it known by man that Earth does not brag nor boast or mourn for beauty lost.

You, earth, are the bedrock and the foundation from where I stand.

A deep presence is concealed by your vast landscapes.

Surfaces textured with grass and stone cover your soul, my bedrock.

All the while, you sing from wind-shaped crevices, and hum from a gurgling brook.

Tears of joy gently fall to your surface and lately cries are felt from heaven’s arms.

As we continue to tame your wild frocks.

The land, your land given on lease to me.

Was once understood by the ancients, yet now lie barren.

Are we all but yet exiled?

Out of the reach of our original soul, blind to outer worlds of light and form from where we arrived?

Least a tear for Fukishima that lays into the ocean, tainting and taunting.

Bending Light

The light bends over the new horizon of a welcoming new dawn.

Light coaxes the dark slowly away.

Shadows of the night roll up and the morning sun fingers its way under the pines.

The trees, mountains, and open spaces are once again released from the cloak of darkness.

Each day is another face of God.

I am but a soul made of clay and the ground that I silently walk on.

My ancestors walked this path once before and now silently step with me in my exile in this forest clothed in Aspen and Ponderosa.

The colors of an early autumn bleed unto the canvas lay before me as I carefully place each foot on the path destined for my next journey.

It is the heart of nature that I seek and the soul of the presence that I long for.

I look for you, my companion, my love, in this side of the escarpment from where I find solace in bending light.

Friday, June 07, 2013

A Moment, A Pearl

A Moment, A Pearl

Notes from the mountain top…

What decade will you die? And in which moment? We will, ultimately, slip from today into memory.

When spirituality is discussed, the subject of death surfaces, as it must. I once passed through the wells of sorrow with the loss of my father. I, again, traveled that jagged path with my sister. We each share this common course. And, living long enough signifies the future prospect of grieving the death of someone you deeply love. Sorrow will find us and will offset our world. It is also in these moments, this interlude, when the metering of time becomes ill-paced. Time is flat. It signals a time of deep contemplation and prayer.

But while we are misled to think that death is two-dimensional, I propose that it lives in a three- and perhaps multi-dimensional space, not unlike your hand. Bear with me. While your hand has both a front side and a back side, isn’t death also in a dance with life? Each the front-side of the hand and death co-exists in partnership with its respective dance partner. In order for us to live, we must also certainly die. In remembering that the helix of life is rife with orbs of untold sorrow that we each brave, recall that it also has spheres of joy that we mostly take for granted. Moments of death brings contemplation. Moments of joy often brings about forgetfulness. But they dance together, moment by moment.

When examining our lives, isn’t life but a string of multi-colored pearls? Moments strung side by side? Grey with white. Silver with pink. Life with death. Sorrow and elation sharing the same strand? Remember that moments are as a verb in a sentence forming a paragraph in our individual stories; we must take each pearl with love. Each moment with care. The dark with the light. The subtle with the defined. The challenge for us as spiritual beings is to rise up and to the outer surface taking each brackish instant, each moment that we are afforded, into an opportunity to deeply love. Do this in every moment and in every pearl.

Frequently Forgotten Open Heart

Notes from the mountain top ...

Flagstaff and caring friends. While I reach the end of my grueling week, is it alright to tear in the mornings about lost moments forgetting the embrace by Mother Earth, Father Sky? An embrace by a friend? Beauty surrounds us and stands majestically upward on the San Francisco Peaks. A kind smile. I often forget to look. Aren’t we just an odd lot?

You wander from room to room
Hunting for the diamond necklace
That is already around your neck!
-- Rumi

Lest I remember that beauty can find us in the subtle pause between inhalation and exhalation. A daily epistle like the slight rolling shift offered by the waves at the beach. I have re-committed my breath, the inhalation and exhalation and the pause in between, to the cause. This short musical interlude, the recess between, as a minor entr’acte, a grace note to remind me of the love that resonates in a soft harmonic to the day is here. It always has been.

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I frequently forget. But last night, the evening sky feathered a cold breeze on my cheek as softly as a lover’s touch and chilly as a spray of snow. A quirky contrast to awaken me. Oh winter’s eve, do you play with each of us? Thank you, four times over, for another day.

And so continues my personal challenge to walk a bit more softly on this craggily earth while raising my thoughts to the open sky. To the mountains. Opened heart to love. Have you also tried this?

And, by the way, my friends, it’s okay to cry in the morning.

The Blessing

Notes from the mountaintop...

It clicked up against his front upper teeth. He could taste the metal. His trembling exhaust from his nostrils lifted the salty taste of gunpowder to his pallet. His hand shook as he hooked his finger around the curve of the trigger. Convinced, he knew that it would be quick. Visits to the morgue and calls to suicide scenes in his shit-hole of a cross-border town confirmed it. As he tightened his stomach, slowly lowered his eyelids, David squeezed his index finger on the trigger of his service revolver deliberately towards his fist. The cylinder rotated and the hammer slapped. His head jerked back, eyes fully closed. But dead silence echoed.

A tear slid down his left cheek from the corner of his eye and he pitched the Smith & Wesson .38 across the room sailing into the dresser mirror shattering it. Disgusted, he screamed out “Fuck! I can’t even do this right!” He rolled into a seated ball and began to sob deeply.

Wailing unhinged parts inside that were bound tightly. He rolled onto the dirt floor of his 30 peso Mexican border town motel room that he rented for the day. Convulsive gasps rattled him as he wept for hours balled up into a fetal position.

As the southwest sun lowered its stark afternoon -- peering through stained curtains into a more forgiving early evening light. He lifted his snotty face and peered through swollen eyes at the pistol laying on the floor across the room. In a swirl of disappointment and relief, he gazed at the revolver for a seeming eternity. Oddly, thoughts about a Buddhist saying repeated: “I come from brilliance. I’ll return to brilliance. What is this?”

There are particular times when grace forgives us of our individual transgressions. These are personal moments of blessings.

The Early Morning Space

Notes from the mountain top...

There is a silent space in the early morning before the dawn which offers each one of us a glimpse into the holy lands. This quiet path unfolds each and every day, yet mostly goes unnoticed. Some don’t even know of its existence. But, I’m here to tell you that I’ve seen a glimmer of its silence and heard the quiet whisper of its song on a few lonely nights when my house slept and creaked its weary bones in those wee hours.

Listen closely when intuition softly whispers to you in the morning before the dawn. It is just over the horizon, beyond what the ears can hear, what the eyes can see and what the hands can gently touch. But, it neither shares the dark of the evening, nor the light of the morning, and stretches far beyond our hurried imagination.

If you listen along with me one very early morning, before the sun raises its sleepy gaze on the land, you will know the secret that I’m now whispering to you about. It’s the music of silence. The quiet space that lives between notes. The pause between each inhalation and exhalation. It’s in this moment where you may find a glimpse of God, the spirit, and love that is. And, once you know, you just might want to keep this a small little secret held on to, especially when the world presents you with a tumbling of chaotic days that collide like boulders sliding down the side of a mountain. Remember, there is a respite in the spaces that exist in our world. Seek those out in the early morning much before the dawn.

Can you hear my whisper?

What does the wind whisper to you? Listen to the song of the manzanita tree and the desert holly as we step down the trail towards the late afternoon spring. There is a lifting up of an accord to heaven on this wash of red sandstone and hematite. A distant drumming of our heartbeats that pulse together as we walk along the mesa’s edge.

I catch a glimpse into your eyes while the slightly peering sun squints between feathered clouds; I see the subtle song reflecting from a past that we shared in some distant foreign land whispering of times spent wrapped together in a blanket near the fire on a brisk winter’s evening and of moments that we danced together in the soft hush of the spring morn.

You later searched for me at the rainbows in the sky, watched for me in the thousand winds that blew, and met me in diamond glints of the snow when you thought I was gone. Turn my way and know that I am here and have always been with you.

Do you hear the whisper?

An Essential Element

A great Navajo tribal leader once said that the biggest risk to his nation’s spiritual culture was that of fundamental Christianity. The problem, as he identified further, was not about Christ’s message to love one another, it was in the arrogant approach that many Christian churches take. There is a repugnant aspect of fundamentalism, whether it is fundamental Christianity, fundamental Islam, etc. that I personally cringe at. It is the perspective that “My God is better than your god” (please notice the capitalization). The basic tenant of Christ’s message to “Love one another” (Bible, John 13: 34-35) is expunged by an exclusive approach of a fundamental approach which dishonors the path taken by other cultures in the seeking the divine.

Quite a number of years ago, I went into a fundamental Christian Church where a part of the program announced that there would be a discussion about a book entitled “I will kill for Christ” written by a local Arizona author who, in his writing, supported the justification of killing when it is necessary to show your love for God. While the author, in the excerpt printed in the program, went on to justify killing based on the weaving in of various scriptures into his rant, it made me wonder about how many people brought into his particular vitriol and venom because he happened to use Bible quotations in his diatribe. As a “consumer of information” of any type, not only should one look at how the particular item is written and referenced, but we should also view the spirit of the dialogue in which the author puts forward. And, in this case, what was put forward was not a message from God, but a note from darkness.

It is no surprise that I still hunch in embarrassment when people ask if I am a Christian. My embarrassment is because of the horrific fundamental stance that is not founded in love by many self-described "Christian" churches. I am a Christian, but please only associate me with Christ’s message of love and not the fundamentalist movement that has overtaken Christianity in America. It is no wonder that “In Christ’s name” wars have struck at the essence of cultures that “are different.” Remember that there was an Indian (Native American) holocaust of 100 Million souls in our country.

The Divine Spirit is seen and felt in the face of nature, is expressed by many poets and authors, and is a basic foundational part of many indigenous cultures. And, in particular, this foundational part runs thick in many native American tribes. The essence of God, the divine Creator, is emphasized in this brief statement by an Iroquois leader:

“Everything that is negative will lead you away from the Creator. Everything that is positive will guide you on your path to the Creator.” Tadodaho (Iroquois leader).

Continue to seek out the positive in people that you meet, their divine essence, and live out Christ’s true message to love one another, including those who do have a varied perspective of the divine. It's an essential element.

White Buffalo

White Buffalo

There is a legend around here by the Hopi about the White Buffalo. As the Hopi recount, one summer around 150 years ago the sacred council of the Lakota Sioux gathered near sacred fires. In an area that we now know as South Dakota, the late afternoon August sun was strong and beat down on the land and the people followed by a blood-red early evening sunset when fires were lit. It had been a long hot summer of drought preceded by an exceptionally arid and unusually warm winter. The parched land yielded little food or game for the Lakota that year. The sacred council sought guidance from the Great Spirit on their fate as a nation.

Early next morning, two young men prepared to hunt. The brothers, Chayton (the falcon) and Tahatan (the hawk), were young men known for their hunting prowess and abilities. Their father bid them farewell and they set off to the hills with an intended goal to bring their tribe some food.

Upon awakening the following morning, the young brothers set out to find their prey. Over the rise of a hill, the two young brothers met a stunningly beautiful woman. The woman seemed to walk on a carpet of air about a foot and a half above the ground. Chayton, the older of the two brothers, envisioned his desires for the stunningly beautiful woman. He told Tahatan “You stay here. Wait.” Chayton walked slowly towards the woman, reached out and touched her. Immediately he was consumed by a white cloud. His desires led to his ill-fortune. The cloud dissipated and all that remained of Chayton was a pile of ashy bones. Tahatan’s jaw dropped and eyes widened as he looked at the pile – his brother. The woman set her gaze upon Tahatan and said “Return to your people. Let them know that I am coming.” Tahatan turned and ran as fast as he could back to his tribe.

The next morning, the tribe was awakened by a bright white light over the horizon. The woman that Tahatan and his brother met the day prior appeared. In her arms was a wrapped bundled that she offered to the chief. The chief accepted the bundle from the holy woman giving her a slight bow of respect. The chief opened the bundle to find a pipe. The holy woman said “With this holy pipe that I give to you and your people, you and your people will walk in an honorable life as a living prayer. Value the land, value the moon and stars and value the buffalo,” she continued. “Value life, your children and families. Trust Mother Earth and Father Sky to bring you blessings. You are from Mother Earth and by living a life in peace and honor is as great as what warriors do.” As she began to turn away and leave, she glanced back. “I will return one day.” Turning away again, she rolled over four times and in a swirl, turned into a pure white buffalo calf, then disappeared. It has been said by the Hopi that this is when the Lakota began to honor their pipe of piece, honor their land and families, and prayed for the return of the holy woman.

It’s been nearly 150 years since this legend was born. In June of 1994 on a ranch in Janesville, Wisconsin, a white buffalo was born. Distinct from an albino buffalo, the white buffalo is seen as an omen of change. Since then, there have been nearly a dozen other white buffaloes born near Flagstaff close to the San Francisco peaks -- holy lands for the Hopi and Navajo Nations. Perhaps this signifies a change that will arise with Mother Earth.

White Buffalo Link near Flagstaff:

http://www.sacredwhitebuffalo.org/

Cowboy Haiku: Poetry of Ron McFarland

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Least a tear for Fukishima

Bending Light

Friday, June 07, 2013

A Moment, A Pearl

Frequently Forgotten Open Heart

Frequently Forgotten Open Heart

The Blessing

The Blessing

The Early Morning Space

The Early Morning Space

Can you hear my whisper?

Can you hear my whisper?

An Essential Element

An Essential Element

White Buffalo

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