Poetry 120: Second Wind

Second Wind

"Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

All my life I’ve been seeking
the highest peak to climb,
but never quite known
why.

Perhaps it is because,
the perspective, from up above,
gives me a gentle reminder
of just how expansive the universe
actually is- compared
to my quarantined square of carpet
called rumination.

Or maybe, it is because

up here, all alone,
I never feel alone-
it feels like belonging.

Today, I go to the hilltop

because I need to meet
god.

Up close.

I wonder, did Jesus need the same?

Mounting the mountain,

I push until I can ascend no more.

I pick this quaint little spot,

referred to in a modest  way
as “the summit.”

I take my seat near the edge

of a cold, round rock
overlooking  the western ledge
of my old friend.

Then, the ritual is always the same.

I take in a long slow breath of clean, fresh air,
and allow the deep quiet of
the upper atmosphere
to penetrate
my many layers of thick skin.
I gently close my eyes,
and make contact.

Sitting amongst the tree tops,

at the moment of looking down
on the tall pines and leafless maples
of New England,
I am able to embody the dual perspectives
I carry deep inside.

Once again making me feel unified and whole.

Once again offering me a second wind.

And I take it-

with gratitude.

It feels like purification,

in which I grow lighter for
having lain my burden down.

Time passes.

I pick up my walking stick,

and turn toward the path made of ice and mud
to prepare for my descent.

I know I will be back

again soon.

-Me

Kindred Spirits: Mary Oliver, Part II

A couple of years ago, in the midst of a period of a deep investigation and practice of mindfulness, I wondered aloud gleefully: why is there always so much poetry present whenever someone is writing, speaking or teaching about mindfulness?

At the time, I liked many of the answers I received from my peers who were also involved in the same deep engagement with mindfulness.  They included references to mystery and mysticism, the right brain, and that which is unnamable.

This past weekend though, upon reading the second chapter in American poet Mary Oliver’s (1935-) 2016 book Upstream,

I found one more:

Poetry teaches us how to inhabit the moment through the practice of inhabiting a poem. 

It was in her chapter called “My Friend Walt Whitman” in which she wrote:

First and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak- to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

I can’t tell you how quickly my sense of separation dissolves when someone else articulates an experience I have yet to put words to...

What a blessing to know I'm not alone.

Because at the same time I was starting to read Upstream, I had also been reading and re-reading (almost compulsively) a poem called “Moving Ahead” by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).

It’s like I just wanted, needed even, to exist and dwell inside this poem--to inhabit the poem--for reasons I know not why.

This poem, previously unknown to me, truly had felt like “a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel," just as Ms. Oliver had depicted in her book.

Having had this shared experience, I have now been re-inspired to look for more opportunities to inhabit the moment, which I imagine would have the unifying sensation of feeling into.

And just because I mentioned it, here is also "Moving Ahead" by Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by  American poet Robert Bly (1926-).

Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,

as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.

Trees and stones seem more like me each day,

and the paintings I see seem more seen into:

with my senses, as with the birds, I climb

into the windy heaven out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the blue sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Poetry 119: A Woman’s World

A Woman’s World

There is a raging fire 

inside of me

that I rarely can explain. 

A fire so hot 

that I must stand 

outside under the stars,

in below freezing temperatures

with my bare skin exposed,

as to not burn up inside. 

All the while,

I do not pass go 

or collect two hundred dollars 

as I sit cross legged 

on my living room floor

playing monopoly

through the afternoon. 

All the while,

I wash, dry and fold 

another load of laundry. 

My daughter yells from
the back seat,
begging me to open
the car window
as we race down the highway
in the middle of our Arctic winter.

“It’s too hot!
I can’t even stand it!”
she insists.

It must be that scorching
feminine energy
I concede,
as I feel the bitter cold
finally reach my cheeks and fingertips.

-Me

Spiritual Lessons From Nature Part X: A Time To Stay

Yup, you are reading that number correctly, recently the temperature outside my door was -14 degrees Fahrenheit!

Though by no means an average temperature for us in New England, even in the deepest part of winter, nonetheless, this year, we have had some VERY cold days.

We have also had quite a few snow days- days when the snow falls consistently throughout the day, leaving most of us gathered up in our houses until the roads clear.

Today is one of those days.

As an adult, historically snow days have been quite challenging for me.

As a biologically and psychologically restless person by nature, long periods of time when I am (or feel I am) restricted into a closed in space, I am called upon to use my toolbox of coping strategies in order to remain sane(ish) as I move throughout the day.

Some New Englanders might call this restlessness "cabin fever," and it is to a certain extent.

"Cabin fever" is a phrase we use in our neck of the woods to describe a growing sensation of frustration (we often say that we are beginning to "climb the walls") due to long periods of time spent inside over the course of the winter.

And I do get cabin fever, particularly several months into winter during those snow storms that come in late February and early March when I and everyone else in New England cannot stand the thought of shoveling our driveway even one more time.

But for me, it is not always about cabin fever. 

It is about the difficulty I still come up against with stillness; it is the agitation I can experience when I have fewer distractions, and I am left with tolerating that which is myself.

Therefore, not unlike meditation, by way of the cold and snow of winter, nature offers me an occasion to practice learning to stay; which at times can feel beyond impossible for someone who can be as ill as ease  as me.

I know I'm not alone in this though.

I've long taken to heart this particular passage from Western Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chodron who writes:

The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay.

Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog...

So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down.Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay!

That is how to cultivate steadfastness.

(Oh, and keep in mind, she advises that we "stay" with kindness toward ourselves.)

So on this snowed in day, despite the abilities of my 4 Wheel Drive truck that is just sitting out there in my driveway, begging me to take her out for a spin, I will instead take this opportunity to remember that there is a time of stillness, there is a time to stay.

A Spiritual Life of One’s Own

As Virginia Woolf noted in her 1929 classic book A Room of One’s Own that women writers require their own money and their own space in order to create, sometimes, being a working woman and  mother, I feel the same about the refinement of a spiritual life.

Despite our advances in gender equality, the reality is, in the United States in 2018 (and in most countries and cultures around the world) women still do the vast majority of the housekeeping and the caretaking of children and our elders--along with our other paid employment outside of the home--and this brings a unique set of challenges to the life of a female Seeker.

Strictly practically speaking, it means there is just less time for a Seeker who is a woman to engage in, and cultivate, her own spiritual life.

Now, on a different day I myself might argue: all aspects of our lives can be part of our spiritual development; from cleaning the toilet in our house to singing a hymn in church.  

And I actually do believe that.

I do.

Each time I am standing in front of a sink piled high with dishes, armed with sponge in hand, I do my darn-dest to invoke Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings from his classic book The Miracle of Mindfulness so that no opportunity is missed for spiritual, or mindful, connection.

And yet, what happens when the time it takes to wash all the floors in your house, or the distance you experience while walking back and forth in the back of the church when the baby is crying, causes you to feel more alienated rather than connected with the divine?

When do we as women, need to put the sponge down and give all of our undivided attention to that direct contact with the divine?

As a student of dialectical philosophy, I do not think this is actually an “either-or” -few things in life are.

No, it is more likely (yet again!) about balance, which always feels so out-of-reach.

It reminds me, I recently encountered these two pieces by Chippewa-German American author Louise Erdrich that captures these two vast, and paradoxical, tugs I feel inside of me as a female Seeker.

Always on a spectrum of all or nothing thinking, on the one hand I feel a pull inside of me to just drop everything "housekeeping"- like Ms. Erdrich’s poem “Advice to Myself” from her2003 poetry collection: Original Fire that goes like this:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

On the other hand, I also have another calling inside of me that lives at  the opposite end of my all or nothing spectrum-of-imbalance who’s essence is encapsulated in another selection by Ms. Erdrich called  “How a Mother Packs” from her 2006 memoir-esque book called Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country that speaks deeply to my desire to mother perfectly.

For a week before I leave on any trip, I am distracted and full of cares. Just at the last minute, I always find myself doing things that I have put off for months, even years. I always change my will, then clean out cabinets and file old letters. I make certain that we all have sufficient underwear, that money and phone numbers are in relevant hands, the dog’s vaccinated for Lyme disease, the manuscript of the last book is in production, the baby has her shots.

…I decide which notebooks to take along. Change the oil in the car. Make sure that my older daughters have postcards and shampoo. I go over plans for housesitting and financial reports and make sure that our bookstore doesn’t need me. There are so many small things. The small things will consume me...

 I tell myself that God and meaning are in the small things as well as the vast. On the other hand, none of this matters at all. The attention to details is just a way to stave off facing the truth. I hate leaving home.

So here I stand.  So imperfectly human.

But balance is rarely ever a 50-50, “Even-Steven” as my grandmother used to say. 

Where life is like a pie chart in which children get exactly this percentage, spouse exactly that percentage, home, work, friends, spiritual life, etc.

And I don’t want it to be that way; I want more moments of fusion and integration, particularly in my spiritual life.  Some might call this The Middle Path.

Yet I’m also realizing, that as a Seeker who is also a working woman and a mother, I do have a need for select times when my spiritual life is filling the vast majority, if not the whole, pie chart. Times when I feel like I have a spiritual life of my own.

On that note, I will close with Ms. Virginia Woolf’s words that come at the very end of her masterpiece, A Room of One’s Own.

If you yourself are a woman, perhaps you too may find worth and worthiness in her advice offered to women almost a century ago.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young…

Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.

For my belief is that if we live another century or so…and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves;…for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.

Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.

May it be so.

Kindred Spirits: Rebecca Solnit

Hopefulness is not optimism, that’s everything’s going to be fine and we can just sit back.

 

That’s too much like pessimism, which is that everything’s going to suck and we can just sit back.

 

Hope, for me, just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen, and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene.

 

We have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope, and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen.

 

-Rebecca Solnit, Author

At the start of this new year, there is much uncertainty about the direction of certain areas of my life.

Of course living in the United States, many Americans are feeling this way at a national level.

In fact a dear friend of mine sent me this text on New Years Eve: "Fuck 2017!"

But this uncertainty was amplified for me yesterday at a personal level when an important figure in my life said the following to me about my near future:

"I have a Plan A, B, C, and D for you.  But I can't tell you any of the plans until the 15th."

Living in uncertainty is always challenging.

Read anything by Western Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chodron, and she will soon be talking to you about "the groundlessness" of life; one of her books is actually called "Comfortable With Uncertainty."

It is for this reason that I like the above statement from an interview with author and thinker Rebecca Solnit.

I like that she offers a definition of hope that is so utterly stripped down and unromantic.  I like the link she makes between hope and uncertainty. I like that it is honest.

In a separate piece published in The Guardian in December, 2016, Ms. Solnit wrote the following:

The time when you don't need hope is when your hopes have been fulfilled.

Hope is for when you don't have what you need and for when things are not OK.

It is a belief that liberation might be possible that motivates you to make it more possible, and pursuing hope even when it doesn't lead to the ultimate goal can generate changes that matter along the way, including in yourself.

As we all grapple with our own personal, familial, community, national, international, and inter-galactic uncertainties, I challenge us, I challenge myself, to avoid the default mode of operation of anxiously seeking out secure ground to stand on, and to instead identify the possible places "to intervene."

May it be so.