Tag Archives: poetry

gratitude songs

May 2014 end well for you and 2015, fed with gratitude and attention, flourish.

All living growth is emergent, arising from a previous state as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which it is —  though of course the new state of being is only one option among many.

In recognition that each moment fuels the moments to come, each action opens opportunity for other action, each phase of being is the child of that which came before and the parent of what is yet to exist, I hope for a beginning of a year that naturally unfolds and leads toward greater fulfillment.

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For a New Beginning

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

– John O’Donohue

"String Web" woven sculpture by Machiko Agano

tracking Story through imaginal lands

I will tell you something about stories
(he said)
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here
(he said)
Here, put your hand on it
See. It is moving.
There is life here
for the people.
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.

– Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony)

* * * * * * * * * *
"String Web" woven sculpture by Machiko AganoIt’s an odd time we live in, relative to the time humanity’s been humanity. We’re different in the stories we tell, in our demand to be entertained.  We don’t recognize stories as Story, we call them Truth or fiction (lies), we pick them up and drop them again.  Our stories come and go so fast that we don’t learn them, we call them news. We learn to ignore them. It’s hard to see if ritual and ceremony are still “growing in the belly.”

Who passes down stories in families any more?  I don’t mean family stories, per se, but stories of ourselves nonetheless.  Maybe it’s a result of being a literate society, we find our stories in books. Or on TV. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but I think it causes us to think that deep stories are separate from ourselves – they have to be in print, on paper or pixels, in order to be meaningful. How much is memorable, though, in the end? Is there life “here, for the people”?

Meanwhile, among the small talk, we learn to tell small stories to ourselves about ourselves.  My self-story, for some reason planted early into my psyche, was that my life had no story. That I was just a product of 1970s American suburban upbringing. Nothing to see here, move along.

“We are…less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us,” says James Hillman in The Soul’s Code.

But what about those of us whose childhoods seemed boring, fruitless, not full of trauma (real or imagined) except in how being given only the surface of things is traumatic?  I think Hillman is right to say this, “Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.” The 1970s and 80s, suburban sprawl, school days, highways – all imagined, all imaginal and as such, full of Story. I have long denied them their right, have denied meaningfulness out of distaste.

I think I write merelCarry Me in Your Dreamsy to find Story. Every story I tell, whether in fiction,  non-fiction, poetry or drawing, is a search for a line, a thread of meaning, for something coherent. I believe that somewhere there must be signal in the noise.

As of today there are 6.8 million google hits for “I am a writer.” It’s the most commonplace thing in the world, it seems (almost one hit per ten existing human beings). Some writers become authors, some make a living at it. Some are entertainers, others keep their writings private (by choice or by inability to overcome the celebrity-to-crowd ratio).  Part of me sees the rightfulness in there being many story tellers, many makers of Story, and in the proof that we’re all creative. Part of me quivers at what it perceives as my lack of imagination (to create) and gumption (to share, or to promote)), at the sense that this has to be a competition for market value. Oh dread.

Meanwhile, the thread holds and I keep writing, here, in journals, notebooks, computer files.  Aren’t there enough words out in the world already? Maybe, but Story needs to be told.

***

I finished re-reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony yesterday and am encouraged to keep finding my own ways of telling stories – telling the story in the way it needs to be told, even if it’s not the way it would have been told in the “old days” IS the ritual and the ceremony that can heal and make whole.

I needed to be reminded.

***
What do you know about stories and Story?
Can you hear what it is we’re whispering to ourselves? Does our entertainment tell us something deeper about ourselves?
What stories about your life have you had to let go?
Do stories help?

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image sources : Creative Commons License Dominic Alves via Compfight
and Phoebe M-H via Compfight

the season’s by-heart-poem

Learning poetry by heart is seeing a bit of a renaissance these days. It seems it’s being touted as a palliative to educational woes, a harkening  to earlier times when the canon of what children were taught was much more narrow and less defined by notions of performance, but it’s also being put forth as a good personal practice, as a way to improve one’s general lot in life, not least through encouraging brain health.  It’s true, too, that there are a lot of detractors to memorization, in vocal numbers online, usually stating that it’s a waste of time, that it’s too difficult and unrelated, really, to life.

I’ve found just the opposite.

I simply approached it because it sounded right. The situation in which the notion came to me is a topic for another day. Today, I just wanted to introduce the subject quickly so as to get to the point, which is the poem I’ve most recently learned. I’d come across it last year, wrote it out on an index card and carried it around for a little while. Then, this year, in August when the light shifted from one day’s full-summer sun into the start of autumn, I knew it was time for this:

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

–by Stanley Kunitz (via The Poetry Foundation)

 

“The language has a way of gesturing toward it.”

There’s a lovely 75 minute documentary video about Seamus Heaney, called Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous, available here for the next two weeks.

I’d never had the occasion to hear Heaney read his own poems and this video combines moments of that with an extended conversation about his writing and personal life. It’s threaded throughout with a lovely soundtrack by Stephen McKeon.

In the course of the interviews one gains a sense of the man whom mourners called “irreplaceable” and “an exemplary human being,” and about whom they said, “there are very few human beings like that.” The Irish News published a lovely tribute  upon Bellaghy’s receiving his body for burial, and the Belfast Telegraph wrote of his legacy as well.

I can’t help but think I would have liked to have learned from the man, to just simply have known him, not least because he was someone who understood, from having experienced it himself, how to blow a heart open. The poem below is being quoted everywhere, its last lines having been read at his funeral mass. I include it here because it seems just about right.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

From THE SPIRIT LEVEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)