Absolutely Clear

There are some poems that just stay in my head in the form of fragments or simply vague ideas, and this is one of them. I can't really say why I am drawn back to it again and again. But I resonate with the message about loneliness. It's a very radical idea not to surrender loneliness but to let it cut more deeply into our hearts. I like the imagery of a person being fermented and seasoned by loneliness. How liberating to think of loneliness as simply one spice, one ingredient in the kitchen cupboard. It seems that in our culture we have a deep fear of loneliness. It is something to be avoided at all costs. It is embarrassing, shameful. I like this gentle idea from Hafiz that loneliness might have a higher purpose. Loneliness can make our need for God, for the divine, absolutely clear. I think that is lovely.

Absolutely Clear
by Hafiz

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let in ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

Learning to live whole-heartedly

Half Life

by Stephen Levine

We walk through half our life
 as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.


 I had never heard of Stephen Levine until I read this poem. Then I did some research about him and learned that in addition to being an author and a poet, he did a lot of work in grief counseling. This makes sense to me based on reading this one poem. I have struggled with grief over the last few years, not knowing that it was grief for a long time. But one of the symptoms of grief as described by Levine, is a tendency to "armour our hearts." This is probably a very common experience. In the past year, I've had many realizations related to my heart and how I treat it. For most of my life, I've tried to protect and shield my heart from feeling anything uncomfortable. For anyone who has ever thought of trying this, let me give you a head's up -- it can't be done. Or rather, it can be done for some time, but exactly as Levine says, eventually the heart will not settle for living in this manner any longer and will start protesting.

The heart will start demanding attention. It will start demanding nourishment. And what the heart needs for fuel is love, of course. It turns out that the heart doesn't want to be shielded from experiencing life in its full range of emotions. Because the other half of pain is pleasure. If we constantly fear the uncomfortable, we also limit our ability to experience a whole spectrum of wonderful emotions. When we close our hearts, when we live in fear of having our hearts injured, we live half lives.

I am slowly, slowly, slowly in tiny baby steps, learning to let my heart experience a whole life. It is not easy. It is not especially fun. It requires more faith and more humility than I'd ever expected. But once we start to awaken from our fever dream of grief, the heart will not allow us to go back to living in half-measures. There is no choice. Or rather, the only choice is more love.

Sweetness

I needed this poem today. Sometimes the body just needs more sweetness. Thank you, Pablo Neruda. You really understand that.

Sweetness, Always

By Pablo Neruda

Why such harsh machinery?

Why, to write down the happenings

and people of every day,

must poems be dressed up in gold,

in old and grim stone?

I prefer verses of felt or feather

which scarcely weigh, soft verses

with the intimacy of beds

where people have loved and dreamed.

I prefer poems stained

by hands and everydayness.

Verses of pastry that melt

into milk and sugar in the mouth,

air and water to drink,

the bites and kisses of love.

I long for eatable sonnets,

poems of flour and honey.

Vanity keeps nudging us

to lift ourselves skyward

or to make deep and useless

tunnels underground.

So we forget the joyous

love-needs of our bodies.

We forget about pastries.

We are not feeding the world.

In Madras a long time since,

I saw a sugary pyramid,

a tower of confectionery—

one level after another,

and in the construction, rubies,

and other blushing delights,

medieval and yellow.

Someone soiled his hands

to cook up so much sweetness.

Brother poets from here

and there, from earth and sky,

from Medellín, from Veracruz,

Abyssinia, Antofagasta,

do you know how to make a honeycomb?

Let’s forget about all that stone.

Let your poetry fill up

the equinoctial pastry shop

our mouths long to devour—

the mouths of all the children

and the poor adults also.

Don’t go on without seeing,

relishing, understanding

so many hearts of sugar.

Don’t be afraid of sweetness.

With us or without us,

sweetness will go on living

and is infinitely alive,

and forever being revived,

for it’s in the mouth,

whether singing or eating,

that sweetness belongs.

Don't over-think it!

Hamlet said, "...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I agree with this because I've seen again and again in my life how I can turn a good experience into a bad experience simply by thinking about it too hard. My poet-crush, David Whyte, reminds us in his poem, Start Close In, that we shouldn't "smother something simple." This is indeed one of my bad habits.

 I am a big-time over-thinker. I over-think situations so deeply that often times I cross the line into brooding. And brooding is all well and good for characters like Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre and Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice and just about every hero in every romance novel, but it's not good for me. I've been trying to cut back on my brooding and the best solution I've found so far is distraction in the form of humor and peppy music. In much the same way that in order to lose weight in our bodies, we need to eat lighter foods, I've been trying to feed my brain lighter, happier material to reduce heavy thinking. I pretty much thought there was no way to over-think pop music until I saw this bit of brilliance from my comedy-crush, Stephen Colbert. Words cannot describe how much I love this!

The song that Stephen is making fun of by One Direction is actually a song I really like. No apologies, nation! I love it for exactly the reason that the lyrics are NOT incredibly complex. It is just an upbeat song that distracts me while I run on the treadmill. I've decided it's time to stop being apologetic that my taste in music and movies is highly superficial. I like movies that make me laugh and music that makes me want to get up and dance. For this time in my life, I am consciously exposing myself to art that doesn't stir up deep emotions within me, but just gives me a rush of joy.

One poem that gives me a rush of simple joy is this famous one by William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

In searching for this poem, I stumbled upon this link with different interpretations of the poem. Ordinarily, I would eat this kind of stuff like candy. I adore picking apart poems (hence this blog), searching for the deeper meanings hidden in each line, the symbolism, what the poet was REALLY SAYING. But today on my low-brooding diet, I could only skim some of the interpretations and then leave the page. I'm sure there are some very good opinions about what William Carlos Williams was really saying in this poem. And with all respect to those opinions, I choose to ignore them today and stick with my own belief that this is a simple poem with a simple message. I believe this poem is actually just saying that so much depends on utter simplicity, the beautiful colors of a red wheelbarrow next to white chickens. Let's not smother something simple. Or rather, go ahead if you want to. Analyze it to pieces. While you do that, I'll be outside running and listening to this song:

Patience vs. Passion

I wrote an initial post for this blog about how starting new things is hard for me. I included a poem from my poet-crush, David Whyte. Then I proceeded to start redesigning the colors, pictures and fonts for the blog and in the process deleted that first post!

Rather than rewriting that post and trying to get back into that train of thought, I'm moving forward and embracing my thoughts of today. Today, as on many days, I've been spending too many moments trying to plan my next moves in life rather than focusing on the tasks at hand. The main topic in my head is this: is it time to make a big change in my life, follow my illogical passions and take a risk or do I continue to exercise patience, spend time planning and saving resources, meanwhile slowly making changes? I've recently had two conversations with two different people and, not surprisingly, got two different answers. One person urged me to go for it, stop waiting, stop making excuses. The other person cautioned me to think before acting, to remember how much I value financial security, to be more specific about what my plans are before uprooting.

I read this poem by Maya Angelou today and it seemed to fit perfectly with my thoughts.

Seek patience 

and passion in 

equal amounts.

Patience alone

will not build the temple.

Passion alone

will destroy its walls.

I am equal parts annoyed and impressed by this reminder about how at every moment, no matter what the situation, we are always faced with the task of balancing extremes. As for my thoughts about my life, the answer is that there will be no answer just yet. Patience is winning again today, but we'll see what tomorrow brings!

True Gratitude

If you've read any of Mary Oliver's poetry, I hope you agree with me that she is one truly awesome lady. If you haven't, check out this video of Mary reading three poems, including one of her most famous, Wild Geese.

 

I've loved Wild Geese for a long time and often return to it again and again to hear that first line, "You do not have to be good." So simple, so reassuring. It seems like I can't hear that message enough. 

But when I watched this video, it was the first time I'd heard Tom Dancer's Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone. My reaction to the poem was very strange. At first, I was just kind of confused and tickled. A poem about eating a pine cone that was found in bear poop? I must be missing something. I quickly searched for the text of the poem online and read it, thinking I might be able to understand the poem better if I could see the words. I read it once and then read it again before it hit me: this is a poem about supreme gratitude. 

Only a few times in my life has a situation or experience struck me in such a deeply intense manner that I cry and laugh hysterically at the same time. It totally freaks my sister out. Luckily nobody was watching me when I had my moment of hysteria with this poem. Sometimes there can be no explanation for why a piece of art strikes us in exactly the way it does. This poem just brings me to my knees. It is so sincere.

Here is the text for those of you who like to see poems, as well as hear them.

Tom Dancer's Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone

You never know

what opportunity

is going to travel to you,

 or through you.

Once a friend gave me

 a small pine cone--

one of a few

he found in the scat

of a grizzly

in Utah maybe,

or Wyoming.

I took it home

and did what I supposed

he was sure I would do--

I ate it,

thinking

how it had traveled

through that rough

and holy body.

It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer

without words.

My gratitude

to you, Tom Dancer,

for this gift of the world

I adore so much

and want to belong to.

And thank you too, great bear.

 So to recap: Mary Oliver's friend found a pine cone in bear poop and mailed it to her, suspecting, correctly, that she would eat it -- and enjoy it. Here is a woman who literally ate shit then wrote a poem, almost a thank-you note! And that's just it: she saw this experience as a gift. She called that pine cone “a prayer without words” for crying out loud! This is indeed a rare soul. Probably most of us would not have the intestinal fortitude to attempt something like this. Metaphor is a big part of poetry, but I don't think Mary Oliver was writing metaphorically here. In my mind there is no doubt that she really ate that pine cone! This lady is not kidding around. But that of course, is not the point.

The point, at least to me, is that at one time or another we will all be at the receiving end of a pile of shit. We will all have some person or some situation that is giving us a hard time. We will all suffer. And during those times, it will be tempting to blame whomever we feel has delivered that shit to our doorstep. We will be tempted to blame our friends, our families, God, reality TV, Republicans, you get the idea. But this poem offers the notion of accepting shitty situations with gratitude, not blame. Mary Oliver suggests to us so innocently any experience is based on how we perceive it, what our attitude is. Instead of seeing bear shit, we can choose a neutral attitude and see a whitebark pine cone that journeyed through a bear's "rough and holy body."

You never know

what opportunity

is going to travel to you,

 or through you.

Mary Oliver recognized her friend, Tom Dancer, as the gift-giver who brought her the pine cone. But she also recognized the bear for his contribution. The bear had participated in making the gift what it was. And then she played her role by eating the pine cone and transforming it further. Here’s my take: we are all just doing our job in this life and sometimes we will have the task of delivering some difficult experience to another person. Sometimes we will be the great bear pooping the pine cone. Sometimes we will be Tom Dancer, mailing the pine cone to our friend. And then maybe sometimes, in those rare moments when we can see clearly, we will be like Mary Oliver, accepting the pine cone, eating it (metaphorically) and making our contribution to the pine cone’s journey.

The final thought: shit happens but we always have a choice how we relate to the shit. We are all just allowing opportunities to travel to us and through us, playing our part in the transformation of everything else.