Meditation - Connections Are Made Slowly
Writing about today's meditation made me remember a meditation from the first service Rae and I attended at Eliot Chapel this spring. It was the poem "Connections Are Made Slowly" by Marge Piercy (also called "The Seven of Pentacles"). On a day when I was wide open to possibilities, wondering if somehow the religious might help me reconnect to the spiritual, it clearly was a sign of sorts. It was the meditation - the sanctuary was quiet except for Reverend Daniel's voice, so quiet that all of the little noises of the congregants were amplified and yet not intrusive, somehow a part of the reading. It had been ages since I could recall sitting quietly and just listening; and the words were pouring through me, not in one ear and out the other, not without force, not without leaving their mark; they were pouring through me and finding and filing spaces I had all but forgotten about. It was exactly what I needed to hear at exactly that moment. In the long silence that followed the meditation, my mind kept grabbing at words, and feelings evoked, at the strands of my inner being I had all but forgotten about. It was the first step towards making (remaking) connections - and it felt good.
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.