Archive for the ‘All My Stories are Peace’ Category

Direct Talks

Great is teshuvah*, for it brings healing to the world.
*Teshuv[ah] – the restoration of the Hey

I turned it around –
whatever it is I did
undone

at least the intentional became unintentional.
Sins to errors,
sins to advantages even.

I felt you staring out at me
from the past.

I felt you looking into my soul
gazing into my tent –
I know what you saw.

Something broken in the past
only the future could repair –

a correction,
something wrong
only the future could right

– the future has arrived.

jsg

Haiti: a Prayer

Taino Indians
Of the South American
Arawaks
You called the western third
Of the Island
Ayiti
Mountainous land

Europeans arrived –
Columbus landed on your
Island
December, 1492

You are the only
Free country
In our time
Created from slave
Revolt

And the world’s first
Independent
Black republic

You have been long time
Crushed
Your land saturated with blood
Spoiled by your own
Leadership

And others

Abandoned you were
Long ago

Now –
You are tragic

If we believe in justice
It is a double course justice

If we believe in compassion
There is no stranger

Or we are all strangers
Not just then
But always

If we believe in people
There is no one outside the camp
Tonight
Who cannot be brought
Within

If we believe in good
Then there is good
And only good

If we believe in wholeness
There is no broken
No partial
No incomplete

No land too ruined
To be repaired

O G-d –
You are endlessly patient
Compassionate

When will You abandon us?

Never

james stone goodman
united states of america

Two Thanks-giving Stories

There was a contest on the radio. Write or speak your gratitude on this Thanksgiving. What are you grateful for? the radio announcer asked. Send in your story.

I heard the winners. It was a tie. Two women, one from California, one from Massachusetts.

First, the woman from California spoke. She was a sheep rancher, she raised sheep on a ranch in California. Her father before her worked the ranch. The ranch had been in her family for several generations.

She was, I imagine, a woman in her late forties. Her husband now also worked the ranch, along with her eighty year old father. They all lived right there on the ranch.

She spoke of the difficulties in running such an enterprise these days. The cost of harvesting and processing the wool is for the first time greater than what it can be sold for, in addition to which there has been five years of drought in her area. “There’s dust in everything,” she said, “and the grazing land is parched and cracked,” her flocks thin and diminished, her father old and tired, herself and her husband frustrated.

I waited for the punch line. What was she grateful for on this Thanksgiving? I wondered.

The night before telling her story, it rained. It rained an inch and a half. The dust liquified back into the earth, the earth smoothed and healed off some of its cracks, but this was not the source of her gratitude. Certainly all the difficulties of running a sheep ranch in these days were not solved by an inch and a half of rain. This was a bonus, a sign, a clue, but not a solution, not even a temporary one, it may have been a joke: God writes straight with crooked lines. Rain, as if that would make a difference.

What was she grateful for had to do with her tired 80 year old father who has seen so many seasons come and go on the ranch, something to do with herself and her husband working the family ranch scouting the sky week after week, month after month, year after year for rain. It had to do with the shared judgment about their business which is fragile, outdated, bound up with the shared destiny of one family, one plot of land, one generation after another, being in that thing together, the tenderness as she described her father waddling into the farmhouse after a long day of work and the brave possibility that the ranch would yet turn a profit somehow. Another season. The possibility, the hope of a future, measured not only in rain but in the dignity of these human beings who hope, who imagine it working, again — for the sacred possibility of the future — hope, hope, hope. Hope sustains.

The second woman tied for first prize in the radio contest. She was from Massachusetts, a Jewish woman I imagined, from her name, from her brand of humor. She was very funny. About the same age as the other woman, late forties. This was her story: It has been almost a year since he died, she began, and still she hasn’t set up a tombstone for him. It was a marriage no one thought would work — he had been married 3 times previously, she several times herself. Neither looking to get married ever again, they met. Against all advice, against their own better judgment and plans for living, they married anyway. Out of the chaos of two lives and ex-wives and kids and step kids and recriminations they found deep love, love that outlasted the complexities of their lives, and tamed them both.

She spoke her story touching, funny, sad. A year after they married, he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, given not much hope for even another year. He lived six, living with cancer, with dignity and joy and living more deeply than ever before because everything was so precious. Every moment.

Now he was gone. She was broke. Public aid in Massachusetts had all but dried up. She had not been able to find full time work, she was substitute teaching in Boston. What was she grateful for? I was waiting to hear.

This: first, many friends. They called her regularly and invited her to meals, she usually declined but loved the invitations. Someone brought over a load of firewood to heat her wood burning stove as winter came on. She was grateful because she had felt her heart unlock to life so freely that it would never close again, the great gift of love that changed her permanently.

The last thing she said: I’m alone, broke, but not unhappy, not in the least afraid. As a matter of fact, I’m rather content, she said, because I believe something, my little way of thinking about things, that may sound wacky but I really believe this –

I think of him as if he has gone away somewhere ahead of me, as if to find the perfect apartment, you know something near a bookstore, where there is a cafe that serves fresh raspberries all year round. He has gone there ahead of me to find the perfect place for us, she said. I am as certain of this as I am of anything: we will meet again, and because I believe this, I am full of gratitude this Thanksgiving, content and not at all afraid of the future. Everything is possible when you believe in something.

These are the two American stories of gratitude that I heard on the radio just before Thanksgiving.

I listened and then I wrote my own tale of gratitude. It had to do, like the ones I had heard, with loving somebody, with what I believe that gets me through the long nights, with a vague sense of possibility that everything is going to be all right, of hope, I suppose, that accompanies all our lives like a sense of something fine arriving from the distance, something good, hope, that’s it.

In the distance, it’s God you are discerning, or love, or nature, or whatever it is you believe in that animates your life. This is what you are hearing bearing down on you:

be grateful, it’s going to work out, somehow
It’s going to be just fine.

james stone goodman
united states of america

A small Thanks-giving Prayer

1. Personal Installation

A small thanks-giving
for the common gifts of your life
the expected ones
the ones you receive if you live with others
your family
a livelihood
the works of your hands
the good you have done in the world
the good done you
these first fruits
the model from the first Thanksgiving
when the Pilgrims and others
brought down the Biblical festival
Sukkot as their guide:

When you enter the land, [Deut.26:1-3]
go to the holy man,
take baskets of first fruits,
go where God tells you.
Give your baskets to the holy man,
then – tell him what happened, in brief:
we have been lost, we are coming home.
End the story with gratitude
for having been brought to this place.

Bow down and sit together with
the holy ones
and the strangers among you.
Have a meal together.

Set up large stones,
inscribe the teachings,
every word,
on the stones.

Today you have become a people of
God.
Live in that for a long time.

2. Thanks-giving Installation

When they entered the land, they were grateful, the Pilgrims.
They landed December 11, 1620, the first winter devastating –
46 of the original 102 who sailed on the Mayflower
died.

There was no thanksgiving that first winter. If there had been
a way back, I imagine a good number of them would have taken it,

But when you’re in the thick of it, when you wonder if
there are better days ahead
that’s the time for thanks-giving
when it’s the least likely emotion –

The next year — they had a bountiful harvest
they celebrated the first successful harvest
with a meal
1621
they only had to wait a year
I imagine it was a long year
but by that second year –
a great harvest, the earth
had been waiting in incipient
fecundity for tending, respect,
intimacy. The survivors celebrated
with a feast, the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims
ate together at Plymouth Massachusetts. The
Pilgrims invited 91 Natives who helped the Pilgrims
survive
after the shock of the first winter.

I haven’t been there – to Plymouth Massachusetts
I have been to Plymouth Michigan
Next to where I grew up
I used to wonder –
why is it called Plymouth?
What pride is there in this story –

3. How Plymouth Michigan got its Name

The first settlers in Michigan met 25 miles west of Detroit
February 26, 1827, the downtown then was officially called
Podunk. Podunk was already the term for a mythical American
Town, derived from a group of natives who settled
around the Podunk river in Connecticut.
Podunk became code for small American town
throughout the century
the Buffalo Daily National Pilot newspaper ran
Letters from Podunk — a series beginning January 5, 1846.

The north end of Plymouth town was called Joppa
A Biblical reference to the port near Tel Aviv
somebody suggested Peking as a name for the town
their first choice was LeRoy
– but those names were taken
some of the early settlers came from Plymouth
Mass-a-chu-setts
so they called it Plymouth, Michigan.

We live in a great country.

4. Big Tent Country

Full of goofy stories
Big feelings
Gratitude
Thanks and thanks-giving emanating
from Plymouth Massachusetts
second winter

Here
in St. Louis, Missouri, where I sit down
I tell it to the wind with our hair wound long
Passing the story stick to craft and memory
Claiming the tale for honor and delight
And the last taste
gratitude
as taught by the elders
who wrote it on a wall
read it by flames
beginning in stillness
concluding in gratitude
come home brothers and sisters
you may dig yourselves permanent wells here
without fear
you may feel
thankfulness
like you have never known
live in that for a long
time

and for this Thanks-giving —
you may be as the Hebrew Bible holds
ach sameach [Deut. 16:15]
entirely
happy
in your fest-iv-al time

Amen.

jsg, usa

Thanks-giving
from The Case for Mendicants

Before Thanksgiving one year
Junior said, let’s invite a beggar to eat with us.
We don’t know any beggars, said Mother,
a mendicant is no longer an honorable profession.
Father said, We don’t know any poor people at all,
do we dear? How about a stranger?
They called Leon,
friend of monastics, beggars, and mountebanks.

I’ll send someone, said Leon.
The night of Thanksgiving
all around the table they went
each expressing thanks
and a wish, if only one were given.

Health, someone said right off,
money – honest from a kid,
a nice son-in-law, a good school for the children,
a brand new carpenter’s bench with new tools.
Then the beggar man’s turn:

I wish I were a powerful king
of a large important country.
One night, they would invade my country
conquer my palace with no resistance from my guards.

I would be awakened from a deep sleep
with no time to dress.
I would escape in my nightshirt.
Fleeing over hills, through a valley,

I would arrive right here, to this house,
and I would be sitting here with this family,
right now. This is my wish.

That’s nice, Father said,
but what good would that do you?

I’d have a night shirt,
the beggar man said.

jsg
usa

I Am A Turkey Merchant
[Good To Know St**]

This may be obvious but
why?
Turkeys (the fowls) are named
In English
After the country
Turkey.

They are indigenous to this continent
No?

In Hebrew, we call them hodu
Accent on first syllable
Referring to the country of India.

In French they are called dinde
A corruption of d’Inde
From India.

What gives?

Some time in the mid sixteenth
Century
The British named the bird Turkey
Thinking it resembled the
Guinea fowl
Which they associated with a trade
Of the eastern Mediterranean
– thus Turkey.

I began by the way
As a guinea trader
In the eastern Mediterranean
As did many of my ancestors –
I am a turkey merchant.

Benjamin Franklin thought
Turkey should be our national bird
Rather than the eagle
Smarter [??]
And indigenous — he said.

Other cultures linked the Turkey bird
To India in addition to Hebrew
In Arabic diiq hindi – Indian rooster
Polish indyk from India
Russia indjuk
Yiddish indik
Adjective indish –

The bird from India
Reflecting an Old World point of view
Imagining the bird as a animal
– The exotic East
Even in Turkish it is
Hindi.

A kind of generic exoticism
Of place.

Another theory –
Traced back to another one of my ancestors
Luis de Torres
The translator on Columbus’s ship
He spotted a large wild bird
with a head and body like a peacock.
The male even had a feathered display.

Luis familiar with Biblical Hebrew
Unfamiliar with large ungainly birds
Called the bird a tukki
[see I Kings 10:22 and II Chronicle 9:21]
(we use that for parrot)
Which became corrupted into
Turkey.

It’s good to know sh**.

I am your double coursed
Sister

My modal figure –
My yearning for voice.

I am a single line
I am the melodic snake
Advancing by half-flats.

I am the hands of Ziryab
The blackbird
The one born in Baghdad.

I am oud player to the Umayyad court
Cordoba
8th century,
Ziryab
The dark one.

I am your hands
I am the reeshi in your hands
The eagle feather
As you pluck the strings.

I am the fifth course of strings
Introduced by Ziryab –

The soul –
Added to the four courses
The four humors of Aristotle.
I am the soul –
The fifth course.

I am the hands of the old man
Sitting by the Seventh Well

I am the sixth course
A single string
I am resolute
The absolute
The sixth course.

I am your hands
Rescuing you.

jsg, usa

kabbalah of age

At fifty six You Are

For Will Soll on his birthday

Lamed is thirty
Mem is forty
Nun is fifty

In your thirties you were the acquiring mode: lamed, learning.
At mem, the source in the Crown flows into Wisdom
the flowing stream, the source of wisdom,
the beginning of consciousness, at forty –
there are thirteen channels of flow,
like the thirteen attributes of mercy
and the thirteen principles of understanding.

The lamed soars into the above but the mem
is folded over onto itself, it has a completion
the lamed lacks, it has a self contained quality
that begins with mem, with forty.
Before forty it is false,

now with fifty you are nun
swimming in your wisdom,
like the fish, one with your medium
coursing through your wisdom
as natural to you now as the water is to the fish
you have earned it –
by being alive.

Six is the vav*
The up and down letter in form
Linking heaven and earth –

The holy And in content
Last year the hey
Opened up ever so slightly
But the vav –
The holy And
Me and you
You and God
The world stands on And
It’s an And world.

When we cannot find the And
We are lost
There is no We without And,

Above all there is the connection in form
The upper and lower worlds.

Let’s stir up the lower and the upper worlds
let’s whip up the wisdom from below.
We are taught
the upper worlds will not respond
until the lower worlds bestir themselves.

Stir it up.

From the kitchen
wisdom will rise
from the dinner table
the true peace
integrative peace
from the hidden sources of wisdom
knowledge will plump like the moon.

This could be the year
the sign of vav, conjunction
the power of language to integrate
the perfect vav before its brokenness
words to make peace out of the pieces
to lift up the lower union
the deep story.

Vav the necessary connection
up and down, vertical.
Also horizontal, the holy and
vav ha-chibur.
In the beginning
God made the heavens
and the earth.

This could be a wonderful year,
And

as always
– life is a commentary on the text of God.

james stone goodman
united states of America

*The vav is the vertical blessing, upper world lower world, in form,
also the horizontal blessing, the holy And, vav ha-chibur, in content.

From Psalm 121

A song of ascents

I lift up my eyes unto the mountains

From Ayin will my help come.

[Esa ei-nai el he-ha-rim

mei-Ayin ya-vo ez-ri]

From Ayin

From Nothing

Consult the silence

The name beyond names

Nothing.

I am Nothing

In Nothingness

Salvation,

If you were thirst

If you were hunger

Your waiting

Would keep the world for peace.

jsg, usa

Jeremiah’s Plan for Peace

Behold, the days come says God
– Jeremiah 31:30 ff.

A new agreement
a starting over always
My teachings shall I place
in your deepest –
in your hearts.

I will be God
you will be human beings
we will each live
up to our dream
of one another,

Certain knowledge
no one will blame
accuse or intimidate –
everyone will know Me,
from the littlest to the
highest
starting now.

The past –
entirely forgiven.
I have forgotten it
we will cease calling it
past.
it is now
– the future.

Who lights the fires of the future?
Who writes the stories?
The sun by day
The passing of the moon
the lights by night
who stirs up the Sea?

If you can measure heaven above
search out the earth below
– just as likely
I will abandon you.

Never.

jsg, usa