Joanna Macy

I've featured the ongoing effort of Joanna Macy before. Macy is a scholar of systems theory and Buddhist thought. Her decades of work, helping people find inner resources for dealing with global crises, interfaces between social action and spiritual breakthrough. The preface from her and Anita Barrows translation of poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours/ Love Poems To God includes this:

"That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or try to escape into private "spiritual" pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and the courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to "love the things/ as no one has thought to love them" (I, 61).
My own stubborn, wild love for the world was summoned, and I learned to recognize it in others, too, in the movements for peace, global justice, and ecological sanity. Rilke confirmed my sense of a deep passion at the core of life itself, which I could come home to, the way sheep come home at nightfall, "the dark bridge thudding' (I,40). I could die into that passion, as into a lover's arms, trusting its ongoingness and its vast sufficient intelligence."

The 100th anniversary edition of Rilke's Book of Hours is vital and relevant. The present moment that we are a part of is designed for change in the world as is Macy's larger work. Additional web information is linked to in the title of this piece.

I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ Walt Whitman

I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday
morn I pass'd the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walk'd the woods at dusk I heard your
long-stretch'd sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard
the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through
one of the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells
last night under my ear.