as intimately as if it were your own body

When I start to write, I’m not a guide or teacher; I’m not even a poet. I’m a person far out at sea, and the poem is a raft made of whatever floats past in the water. Those almost accidental rescuing pieces are words, rhythms, musics, ideas, the memory that is mine and the memory that is all of ours and the memory that is held in language itself. The experience of writing, for me at least, isn’t confidence or wisdom; it’s closer to desperation. You are naked as Odysseus when he’s lost his ship and all his men, before he’s met by the courageous young girl Nausicaa—a version perhaps of the rescuing muse, who helps us find our way back into the world shared with others but only if we bring our own resourcefulness to the situation as well. There is some faint memory that this raft business has worked before, some memory of knot-tying, of the intention to live. There is that in us that recognizes: “this is water; this is land.” A poem is land found, as if for the first time. If I already knew what it would hold, I wouldn’t need the poem, and if what it holds were knowable by any other words or way, I wouldn’t need the poem. 

 You have to welcome both your own strangeness and your own fierceness. And you have to have an ear, an eye, that will recognize when a poem has stumbled in its music, seeing, courage, or path, so you can know that you need to work with it further, to ask of it more.

[Poems offer] A door. One that stands outside our usual addresses and maps—or more truly, perhaps, many doors at once, that lead simultaneously outward and inward, into both the life we share with others and the privacy in which self can take stock with original eyes. I hope my poems might offer: “Here is one experience of life, of its possibilities, exhilarations, bewilderments, griefs. Enter. Now, here is another.” When we bring that spirit of openness, permeability, exploration, and courage into our lives and our hands, everything else follows: a deeper saturation and compassion, a recalibrating sense of proportion, an increase of the possible. Good poems make clarity without making simple. They do not erase darkness; if anything, they open into it.

It's odd perhaps that many of the moments in my life I'm most grateful for are those in which nothing seems to have happened. Yet everything that followed was changed by those moments outside of eventfulness, because I was changed. Thought takes time, feeling takes time. The deepest thought and feeling stop time entirely. You disappear into the poem, the painting, the mountain, the music, the idea, the emotion, the loved person. You disappear into action, even, as every athlete or dancer knows. And by that disappearance, you become your own fullest self, unlimited by ego or skin. Something in us recognizes the sanity of not being so worried about periphery and center. You emerge from those time-stopping moments more able to take care of both your own life and the lives of everyone and everything, which are also yours. If a slope in Patagonia is ruined by toxins or erosion, that's felt as intimately as if it were your own body.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from an interview with Kim Rosen

spirituality & health

opening

~ Coleman Barks and Robert Bly

with Bill Moyers

on Rumi

near field

This is not something new or kept secret

the tilled ground unsown in late spring

the dead are not separate from the living

each has one foot in the unknown

and cannot speak for the other

the field tells none of its turned story

it lies under its low cloud like a waiting river

the dead made this out of their hunger

out of what they had been told

out of the pains and shadows

and bowels of animals

out of turning and 

coming back singing

about another time

~ W. S. Merwin

from The Shadow of Sirius

photo by Kathleen Connally

there is no poverty

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must," then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. Do not write love poems, at least at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers. Beware of general themes. Cling to those that your every- day life offers you. Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful. Describe all that with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity. In order to express yourself, use things in your surroundings, the scenes of your dreams, and the subjects of your memory.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant. Even if you were in a prison whose walls would shut out from your senses the sounds of the outer world, would you not then still have your childhood, this precious wealth, this treasure house of memories? Direct your attention to that. Attempt to resurrect these sunken sensations of a distant past. You will gain assuredness. Your aloneness will expand and will become your home, greeting you like the quiet dawn. Outer tumult will pass it by from afar.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet  (the first letter)

translated by Joan M. Burnham

5 Japanese songs

~ Kathleen Battle

clarity and confusion

VII. 

There are, in fact, moments when a person stands out from his grandeur in clarity and silence before you. These are rare festive pleasures that you never forget. You love this person from then on. In other words, you work to retrace with your own tender hands the outlines of the personality that you came to know in this hour.

VII. 

Art does the same thing. For art is a farther reaching, more immodest love. It is God’s love. It cannot stop with an individual, who is only the portal of life itself: it must move through that individual. It cannot tire. To fulfill its destiny, it has to appear where everyone is — a someone. Then it bestows its gifts on this someone, and boundless riches come over everyone.

XI. 

Art has accomplished nothing, except to show us the confusion in which we already find ourselves most of the time. It has frightened us, rather than making us quiet and peaceful. It has shown us that we all live on different islands, only the islands are not far enough apart for us to stay solitary and untroubled. Someone on one island can pester someone on another, or terrorize him, or hunt him with spears — the only thing no one can do to anyone else is help him.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Notes on the Melody of Things 

found in The Inner Sky 

translated by Damion Searls

photo by ansel adams

transformed into love

~ Franz Peter Schubert

performed by Andrea Bocelli

Schubert at the piano - by Gustav Klimt

When I wished to sing of love,

 it turned to sorrow. 

And when I wished to sing of sorrow, 

it was transformed for me into love.

~ Schubert

heaven kicks away the blankets and sheets

that because of the wine's pureness

and the crystal clarity of the glass

the color of glass and wine were confused.

All is glass - or, no, all is wine.

All is wine - or, no, all is glass.

When the sky is tainted

with the colors of the sun

heaven kicks away the blankets and sheets,

the shadows of nothingness.  Day and Night

make peace with each other:

thus have the world's affairs been ordered.

~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi

from Divine Flashes

art by Lynda Lehmann

after the wedding

After the white balloons were swept away

on the wind that had swallowed

most of our vows, after the embraces

and tears, the flung rose petals,

after new friends and old friends and aunts

from all over, after you tossed

the bouquet, and the cries of the children

raised coyote cries on the rim,

after chicken grilled on juniper coals,

cold beer from the cattle trough

and hours of hot dancing to Beatles and Stones,

the last of us swaying arms on shoulders,

singing ourselves hoarse,

how good it is

to find you now beyond all

the loud joy, driving north in rain

and the lovely ease of our silence.

~ John Daniel

with thanks to writers almanac

three stanzas

1.

The knight and his lady

turned to stone but happy

on a flying coffin lid

outside time.

2.

Jesus held up a coin

with Tiberius in profile

a profile without love

power in circulation.

3.

A streaming sword

wipes out the memories.

Trumpet and sword belts

rust in the ground.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

from The Sorrow Gondola

translation by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl

photos of the tomb of Sir John and Lady Isobel de Sully
Sir John died in 1387 at the age of 106

gleninagh

The dark inside us is sistered outside

in night which dislikes the light of the face

and the colours the eye longs to embrace.

Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,

a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass

and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.

Something has broken inside this Spring night,

unconsolably its rain teems unseen

onto Gleninagh Mountain's listening depth.

Next morning the light is cleansed to behold

the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt

out of unknown pores in the mountain's hold.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

you can smell it and that is all

To acquire the habit of reading 

is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

His father was in Paris as a lawyer for the British Embassy. At eight years old, his mother died from tuberculosis. His father died of cancer two years later. He was sent back to England into the care of a cold and distant uncle, a vicar.  Miserable at his school. He said later: "I wasn't even likable as a boy. I was withdrawn and unhappy, and rejected most overtures of sympathy over my stuttering and shyness." He became a doctor and practiced in the London slums. He was particularly moved by the women he encountered in the hospital, where he delivered babies; and he was shocked by his fellow doctors' callous approach to the poor. He wrote: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face; I saw courage and steadfastness. I saw faith shine in the eyes of those who trusted in what I could only think was an illusion and I saw the gallantry that made a man greet the prognosis of death with an ironic joke because he was too proud to let those about him see the terror of his soul."

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. 

There is really nothing to be said about it.

It is like the perfume of a rose: 

you can smell it and that is all.

~ Somerset Maugham

from writers almanac

exposed

November's hunger strips the fields, its thin light

rifles the web and warmth of every nest,

allows the cold day to invade each secret,

absolves the ghosts of leaf that outlast autumn.

Now I can depend less and less on the grace

of spontaneity, talk quickly tires,

words become contrived as the eyes of others

notice my mind unravel in this sallow light.

Intense with silence my room waits for me,

the paintings and open books grown distant,

its window one huge eye on the tree outside;

in the mirror the glimpse of my face draws tears.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

photo by Christine de Grancy

taking the hands

Taking the hands of someone you love,

You see they are delicate cages . . .

Tiny birds are singing

In the secluded prairies

And in the deep valleys of the hand.

~ Robert Bly

why I write

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

To write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery.

Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

with thanks to national writing project