Poem: "One Day"

Photo courtesy of Pixabay. In the public domain.

One Day

One day, before the earth grew old

and mostly bald and full of stink,

one day I woke to music, to a chirrup

in the trees that rose and fell

like exhalations of the earth itself―

a gargling of the morning air

in bright polyphony, in crisp staccato.

And I knew the birds were prophesying―

knew I heard the voice of God,

sweeter than the earth itself,

rising like a counterpoint, an arching,

aching tremolo―

heard the wild of Him that we have tamed

come bursting forth in feathers

and arpeggios and yearnings inexpressible,

too large and small for syllables that slip

into our narrow ears;

and so I stood and listened to the world

as He described it, listened to the reveling,

and knew that I was born for this―knew

that doves, that sparrows sing epiphany

at dawn each day, and breathe

the earth’s core in and out, and feather

all that breathes and flies and sings,

and I must sing, must sing, must sing,

and this is my arpeggio, my only syllable.

Amen.

© Judith Deem Dupree 2017

                        

Beyond the Cock-Crows

Public domain image courtesy of Pixabay

Reprinted from the Ruminate Magazine blog, 29 September 2015

Up with the roosters this morning. And yes, I can hear one of those feathered alarm clocks―his voice far greater than his body warrants―ratcheting his endless observations through this dark and drowsy neighborhood. Does this remind us of the current political scene?

Ah, human nature has not changed since satan shaped his body and his lie to the contours and contents of a tree. He still slithers up our spine, our trunk, to reach the hidden source of all thought: our cerebrum. The crown of our own Tree of Life―The Eden of our every intent, that  incomprehensible core of us that births the comprehensible . . . over and over each day.

And ah, again: the enemy has entered our garden with new and poisonous seed. Fruit that we have known forever―for we have always tweaked the message to fit the equivocation. But there's something shrewder happening in this Time, this edgy, edgeless season, this strange new world we live in.

We are assaulted, continually, by crushing changes in social contract. The welter of ways of our time-tested "role playing"―the nudge-wink-wink of flawed and fatuous discourse―is almost "quaint" today. Humanity's thoughts, and tongues, are honed to lethal verbal weaponry. And primped with a litany of obfuscations that distort the realities beneath their promises.

"The world is too much with us..." William Wordsworth, commenting poetically (at the dawn of the 19th century) on "the decadent material cynicism of the time." A prophetic insight. The seeds have sprouted, replicated endlessly.

Some mind-shift largely inexplicable―often unperceived, even unpredicated on such a scale―is ripping through communal relatedness, and indeed, rippling across our larger earthlife. It is shattering our histories, our stories, our ancient inter/intra-societal algorithms. Something ingeniously crude is tweaking the long-established, heart-felt empathies into ersatz niceties and/or nasties. It births and preens a strange hybrid of smooth double entendre and a razor-rough hide.

Tensions escalate and boil over. Now, across continents, great uprooting, wars of tortured words becoming bloodbaths. And now, across continents, the homeless, the forsaken tread their via dolorosa on the way to nowhere.

We who watch, hearts in our throats, are left groping consciously for the known that has staked our own perimeters like a pivot point. What does all this mean? What is the why of it? What do we do with such misery? It has torn the very fabric we are wrapped in.

We are all in shreds. It is, yes, too much with us.

The cock has crowed over this broken world. We are all akin to Peter, retreating in fear from the sight of his bloodied Master, denial his only defense.

There is only one Voice louder, fuller than the roosters of this chicken-little world.

In the beginning was the Word . . .

We cannot know anything pure, ultimate, bounteous beyond the Word of that mysterious, ineluctable, unfathomable Primer Mover who reigns beyond the stars―and deigns to harbor in our tiny cranium. We know nothing beyond and aside from His preternatural act of defiant mercy: the birthing of the Son who was born of our blood-line . . . and lived in our skin. It must have chafed. Badly.

But this earth-shaped-One had His Father's genes. He decoded earthlife just as preternaturally. He spoke into the blatant hypocrisies that shaped the theses and postulations, the smiles like scythes, the lies that wreathed Him like a troubled cloud. He knew each forgery of truth, each  vanity . . . and named them.

He is waiting. Forever waiting in the wings of this great, rickety teatro oscuro. He is the author. All the roosters of the world will go hoarse when He edges back onto Stage Earth.

But here―ah, here is a thought I gleaned unexpectedly, just after the next-door rooster gave up. Ordinary, simple, uncannily powerful words. From the front of a birthday card!

"Forever stay open, curious, fearless, transparent, and willing to be and love being exactly who you are." *

This has dropped like ripe seed upon my sterile soul-soil. How pertinent to everything! Words of YES to carry with us, into the gulf of grief around us. To fear not, and deign not to accept the small, the pinched, the shrewd and slanted forever forced upon us. To break through barriers of pretense we sense around us. Fearless and transparent before the great deceit. The deceiver.

Who we are, and choose by the moment to become, and Who we listen to, and choose to rise up and follow―openly, gently, fearlessly―across this great, crumbling stage . . . this is our constant, whatever-the-circumstances YES to life!

This is the mending of the broken mind, the healing of our broken heart. A steady and sturdy Gift of hope for our broken world. 

*(© Legacy Art Studio, Sunrise Greetings)

Seeing Sideways

Originally posted on the Ruminate Blog on 1 February 2017: "Seeing Sideways"

It was raining again when I walked out of church—a slow spritz that would invoke a guffaw in the saturated NorthEast. But in California it was, Oh yay, rain! I smiled, raised my umbrella, and headed across the street.

And I saw him standing there. Facing the church, holding a ragged cardboard "help" sign. My first thought: Panhandling, of course. He knows how to 'guilt' people! Get them coming out of church, stoked with a good sermon on 'doing unto others.'  But he was directly between me and the parking lot, and to evade him would have looked obvious. Yeah, evasive. We know it well.

So I walked directly up to him. I was almost surprised to look into the face of someone as alert and "normal" as other folks zigging past us. Not one of the usual street people. His eyes were intensely blue, clear, observant—the word benevolent occurred to me. Strangely, because he was seeking our benevolence. Here he was, slightly shivering, damp and uncovered, and he might have been handing out bonbons or tracts, for the look on his face. 

Not a tinge of down and out.

"Hi, my name's Jerry.* I'm an ex-Marine, on disability, and the checks quit coming. I'm trying to get through the legalese and straighten it out. I'm supposed to have more surgery." His declaration was quiet, well-modulated. He stopped and lifted the cuff of his knee-length khakis. His leg was distorted, and a thatch of scarring ran from ankle to mid-thigh, where it disappeared under cover. He looked straight at me. "Afghanistan. I survived. Got patched up, discharged. And lost my home, lost my address, pension, medical . . . lost it all." It was matter-of-fact, direct. "I need a bus pass to go get help. A monthly pass—so I can go back and forth and deal with all the government paper work and stuff."  He explained it all carefully, his reason for asking.

"Where are you staying?" He obviously wasn't rumpled and unbathed, unshaved.

He gestured behind him. "Oh, there's a shelter a few blocks down. No computers, nothing but a free bed. Me and 250 other guys." He smiled ruefully. And then he grinned. That surprised me—the way he shrugged off the hardship of his predicament.

"God knows where I am. The bus will take me where I need to go." He said it quietly, carefully. He was watching me closely.

And I knew: He was a believer. Jerry came to us, to believers—not complaining, but directly presenting his need. Directly focused on what we could do to get him through. Our brother.

We talked a bit more about that—the Connection. I dug in my wallet and handed him a small wad. My husband came by, assessed the basics and added another bill. A sister scurried over, carrying a jacket, and helped him into it, adding a bright purple "girlie" umbrella and a quick hug. We all laughed at "purple." With a suddenness that amazed me, we were a small, brief family—HIS people standing there, damp and undampened by weather or "whethers." It was a meeting of Minds, of mindsets that were timeless, that were set in Place, in focus, over 2000 years earlier.

This man wasn't a beggar wheedling. He was our brother, setting himself before us, whole and broken, trusting in our broken wholeness. Jerry was our unfamiliar friend who needed a daily ride to the right place for the right reasons.

Because God knows where he needs to go.

Our adult class this morning focused on indifference: What it has done to the world we live in, to the people we live with—nearby or distant. The Jerry's of our world have been defeated by indifference. By bureaucracies that regularly ignore/avoid too many "Jerry's." By nations preoccupied with real or supposed exigencies, and cities that have grown apathetic about the "dregs of humanity" that litter their sidewalks and make everyone uncomfortable simply by being. And we, by our preoccupation with the nitty-gritties of our own lives, and yes, by our own care-less-ness. I have often been guilty.

The Good Samaritan comes to mind here. His inner eyes weren't focused on his own pending situation—the why's and wherefore's of his journey, the occupation and preoccupations of purpose. The man, a pariah himself, had "sideways vision" too.

He checked the ditches, walking by.

The things that compel us, distract us, attract us, and fret us—these effectively bind our larger thoughts, blind our wider vision, dim our compassion, our rightful determination. The barriers to our benevolence. We do not clearly see the peripheral "other." Not really. Only smelly, messy, chronic, dysfunctional other. We measure lives by what they have become, and seldom wonder how they got "there," how their lives unraveled, how the right people crossing the street at the right moment (one infinitesimal example) might have changed the outcome.

We overlook the poverty that hovers over the Appalachia's, the dead-end tenements in too many cities, the hovels adjoining crop-fields, the wretched encampments that metastasize beneath freeway overpasses and spill onto our urban avenues.

And the why's and wherefore's escape us. The endless poverties spin on and out―all for 

the want of a horseshoe nail.**

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. 

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

"For want of a battle the Kingdom was lost?" Yes! Yes, it was, is that. His Kingdom lost.

Indifference is the missing nail. We fail to see sideways, and then perceive attentively, the deteriorating state of humanity—the poverty, home-grown and world-wide. Here, it has become simply a familiar backdrop to daily life. Across the barrier of seas, the tide of refugees rises and never wanes. It begins to engulf everything.

When humanity is ready, ultimately, to fight the right battle, to face the inner myopias, to call out—cry out to see through a glass less darkly, to wage peace against the war within and with-out . . . HE will raise us up from the dust of our ploys and pretensions, from the honest griefs and struggles that engulf us. His Kingdom will take shape before us, finally, our eyes clear-seeing.

This is my ultimate "take-away" from a brief encounter with Jerry, a solid-wounded man standing  in a drizzle on the curb across from where I worship. Where I head every Sunday to celebrate and petition the GodMan who sees everything—sideways and inside out. 

Everything.

The One Who rescues because He lay flayed and splayed in the dirt, finally, before the nails—helpless and spat upon. The Rescuer whom we abandoned at the cross. Who comes to us over and over to heal both our abandonment and abandoning, to awaken us, His hurting and hurtful world. To save us from this long indifference.

HE knows where and who we are, each of us. He will take us where we need to go.

                                                            *          *          *

*Name changed for the sake of privacy.

**This ancient proverb, in various forms, has been quoted and repeated for varying uses over the centuries, particularly in Early English writing. Benjamin Franklin also made note of it.

                                                                                                         

Poem: Road out of Aleppo

Photo of Aleppo courtesy of Asia News

Road out of Aleppo

Watching the evening news

He trudges along in broken step, pale

face frozen in a blank stare,

and all the long, long river of moving

bodies pass him by. Even the frail move

faster, framing him against their blur

of anguish, like a film that runs slow

motion, etching one small centerpiece

against the screen of the unwilling eye.

Upon his back―as if coupled there,

ribs fused to ribs—rides an ancient man,

more skeletal than fleshed, skull

rocking gently, rhythmically, arms

crooked absurdly over the hard-set

slope of shoulders, hands snatching at

the brittle air. Thin-stick shanks dangle

loosely over the young man’s arms,

bob against the plunge and stagger

of his legs—like metronomes that pace

the broken angle of each step.

Still they come, he comes—like a crab

caught in an unremitting tide—

this strange, two-headed creature

all its own, with its four unseeing eyes,

its single haunted soul. An awful

metamorphosis, a horror that we cannot

look upon, nor speak of, nor forget.

And still they come, inseparable,

inexorable, the dying and the young―

a ghost that rides the shoulders of the world.

© 2017 Judith Deem Dupree 

A Christmas Poem

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

There is a star above us,

merely one of a million-million glories

that absorb our awed perception.

But it flowers on our soul’s horizon

like a new-made moon, or the

primal  dawn of Truth—a singularity 

we may abandon all to follow.

We may camp here, shivering at the

edge of our heart’s own minor galaxy—

huddled suddenly against a star-strewn

hillside, lambs curled silently around

our feet. We will be shepherded;

we will hear the unvoiced universe

burst open and regather, singing

out—a counterpoint, a psalming.

A compline. Oh, an ecstasy of angels!

Alive, Alive, Ohhh! An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

This excerpt is reprinted from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, courtesy of Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

                                                   *  *  *  *  *

There are no funerals in Heaven. As a believer in the sacred History of faith, I accept death. It is the [often] hard shell we must break through to begin our flight into Life. It is moving from chrysalis to Chrisom, perhaps. Our ultimate birth.

To Christos. Truth is an upward spiral.

I despair of the despair that we wear so often as an arm band, the existential angst we endlessly proclaim, which leaves no room in the soul for resurgence, for resilience, for hope. And now I see that I also have done this! What a vast, a blind betrayal!

Those who cannot celebrate life destroy it―destroy others, who in turn destroy.

What they cannot celebrate, they desecrate.

And living must be, the soul insists, a celebration. To exult is to exalt. To proclaim the tender truth and rollicking affirmation of faith is to live beyond mere enduring. It unleashes the neurons that fire the thoughts that fuel the muscles that raise us up from indolence.

Such is the House that God built. Existential pleasure must bring a recognition, a small ecstasy of awareness―I am alive, alive, ohhh! And I am not a cockle, not a mussel. Living is surely meant to be an endless orbit of meaning-full, an upward cycle that siphons finally into that slender Passage which is not, oh no, a dark hole.

Entropy is a ravage only of the temporal and temporary and intemperate.

And so, today, I lay down this weight of timeless grief against the splendor of this day, against the altar of these rocks, this gravel I stand upon, with the incense of this morning still awaft like a certain holiness within my breathing.

I celebrate being. Despite the daily horrors, despite the anguish surging, despite the fire of grief that still looms, ever creeping, like the ghastly glow of holocaust beyond us. I celebrate because I must; because we must, because God hears and surely answers . . . or this maelstrom will consume us; it will be a prophecy fulfilled.

I celebrate what it is to be truly human, what it means to share the earth together, what it has been to us as home away from Home, what it must become within us and among us, and beyond us, for our children. What we must become, within us and among us and beyond us.

Celebrants. I celebrate the very fact of life, of seeing these shaggy carpets of green-and-ochre and the wild-painted skies that cover me, of hearing the chirrup and buzz and flutter of small life, of knowing earth-born labor and labors borne of the heart.

I celebrate the being of you who cross my path this day in thought or step, who share this swath of earth or one dissimilar, who grieve for its poverty and share its richness with me. Who enrich my poverty.

I thank God for my life, for giving breath to my halting aspirations. For your life and finest hopes. For His breath upon you, within you.

I thank you, oh God, who redeems me from myself in this small celebration! Who calls me to Rest. Who gives me today geraniums, and a new, eager flow of thought. For doughty ferns in pots, and doughty friends who force my rusty gates; for violet sage and stippled rocks to catch my eye, to catch my breath, my soul.

I praise the God who sprawls His name, and the signature of His Son, His Chronica Christos, across the bursting universe and weaves it deep within the spiral of our genes.

Who walks the waves still, always . . . stilling them, forever stilling them.

Truly the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Facing Toward the Light: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree. Copyright 2016, published by Wipf and Stock. Copies may be purchased from Wipf and Stock and from Amazon.  

LOCAL NOTE: An Author Talk featuring Judith discussing the genesis and publication of Sky Mesa Journal is being hosted by the Alpine Library (1752 Alpine Blvd.) this week on Thursday, October 20 from 6:00-8:00 PM. Judith will have books for sale and will be happy to sign copies. Please come support a local San Diego author and her work.   

It was not much past dawn when I slipped out the door and faced the great iron gate out back. In the slant of first light it resembled somewhat the “gates of hell”―heavy and formidable. Ah, but beyond lay Paradise! In lieu of unlocking and unwinding the heavy chain and shoving against its grudging “joints,” I climbed over the old monster. I always do―depositing whatever baggage I tote over on the other side.

Today I toted only a weight of weariness. The “world was too much with me.”

I am not an up-with-the-roosters person. I felt quite uneasy leaving my comfort zone so early―regardless of the discomfort that routed me. Testing my legs and blood sugar and ignoring the grind of an empty belly seemed like a bad answer to a bad question. Or quest. The gnaw of guts was only a mimic of the churn of thought that woke me.

But I was brought up short by the exclamatory. Earth-life stretched around me, hummed and chirped, exhaled its varied aromatic breath, each its trace of pneuma. The land was filled with freshness. I breathed vastly, enfolded in the small celebration before me.

The early light is a peach-hued wash against the umber earth. An incredible palette! This is the morning’s work within me, this facing toward the light. Too often I see the world darkly, see only the umber without the wash of ruddy gold. There are times, even in this become-sacred place, when melancholy overwhelms any sense of the mystery of nature, a denial of the spare and eloquent mastery of God. Scales creep over the spiritual retina I peer through―opaque, filmy, all the drab distortions that we know.

Probably it is much like the blindness that the Lord peeled away from Saul-become-Paul. I recognize this more often now, this clumsy and yes, futile shield―my fascia, a veneer against the callousness before me . . . and within me.

And against grief. There is a sorrow, a Welt-Schmertz, weeping up through me, a deeper grief than I can carry. Either to live without grieving or grieve without recourse bequeaths fatalism, begets tragedy. It is a betrayal of the faith we first consent to.

It is balance I need, and a robust vision. I am just beginning to face this truth: I must neither fear the darkness, nor accept it, nor shrug it off. I cannot fight the battle for earth-life unless I have fought the battle for my vision.

As a frail and sometimes fatuous human being, I balk at death’s increasingly harsh preliminaries―at the way it visits us at every turn, the ways it comes ripping through humanity, Grim Reaper that it is. It is my own creeping entropy I battle, and lose within the entropy of a world I gather up and mourn. It is attending a funeral endlessly repeated, a cortege of the helpless and the homeless.

And the heartless. That eternal death . . . 

Life today is often seen as something of a wedge between two vast intangibles―our very entity caught in a grind between the beginning and end, those eternal mysteries of being.

Nature denies such hopelessness. Every new morning, new spring, each rebirth from fire or flood or wind proclaims life’s frailty and strength, unwraps the earth from its grave-cloth . . . .

Celebrates its endurance, its stubborn resurrection.