Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage
A journey through words into life
We write because we love the process of creation. But we read because it means something to us—a chance to escape, live another life in another world, experience conflict and successful resolution, discover new meaning, truths and insights we can apply in our own lives.
–Julie Luek
How do you know when you have come to the end of a cycle, when it’s time to move on to something new? Today I read this poem by William Carlos Wiliams,
Winter Trees
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
—
There are small cycles and routines, and then there are bigger ones that hold the smaller cycles. The arrival of winter heralds the ending of a yearly cycle, where there have been many occasions of “attiring and disattiring”, to use Williams’ phraseology–of days and seasons, and it’s time for the cycle to come to an end. Nature never tires of repeating the cycle. The cycle varies a bit from year to year, but there are predictable ocurrances within the cycle. We fit ourselves into the cycle and adjust by changing clothes and routines. Sometimes, however, we want to escape the cycle– to leave winter, or summer, or whatever season it is, just for a few days even, and enter into a different cycle.
Maybe it’s why people want to parachute or dive, or travel. For a few minutes, or days or weeks, in the case of traveling, these experience allow you to be totally yourself, yet enter a completely different reality, and being in that reality frees you to see how you can drop old ways and habits and become something else. It is a subtle, and liquid light, a gentle movement, and it prepares you for the freezing, the stillness that allows something new to enter in. Somehow all those changes, over and over the routine, allow wisdom to come.
More and more science is revealing the importance of sleep. Lack of sleep over time can increase risk of diabetes, heart problems, risk of some cancers and even death, according to the article in the Huffington Post, Lose Sleep, Lose Your Mind and Health. Sleep, recent studies show, allows our brains to get a kind of cleaning sweep, as described in the New York Times article, “Good Night. Sleep Clean.” to get rid of toxins, allowing the brain to function better when we are awake. So it is literally is a wise thing to do on a physical level to sleep.
On a different level of wisdom resulting from regular rest, it’s interesting to note that the brightest places in the universe are caused by the darkest things. Quasars, the brightest objects in the universe, are caused by black holes at the centers of galaxies, an illustration of how darkness and light are part of each other in a larger whole. This is something to remember when going through yet another cycle of attiring and disattiring, and while waiting for the moon to enter.
Looking at death in the eye isn’t a favorite pass time for most anyone, but considering that we will all have to face death, I thought it might be helpful to look at what it means to die well from the different perspectives of the world’s major religions. These findings below are brief, and not necessarily representative of the major thought in those religions, but they give a variety of insights. The thing that stands out for me in these various perspectives is how each one finds contemplating death a valuable thing to do in order to live meaningfully.
Hinduism: From Sadhguru, Huffington Post
If you are afraid of death, you will only avoid life. You cannot avoid death. And it is not that beyond a certain age you should look at it; every day of your life you need to be aware that you are mortal. There are certain meditations that are conducted where everything that you consider as “myself” will become nothing; it is as if you die. Again, when you open your eyes, it is all there. If these methods are practiced consciously, when the time to die actually comes, it will no longer be a big issue.
The process that you refer to as life is something that can be constantly improved upon. It is a project that will never be over; that is the beauty of it. Not everybody is living with the same quality. Whether in doing simple physical things or in how people are keeping themselves, in everything, not everybody is living at the same level of understanding and gracefulness.
If you remind yourself every day that you will also die, you will naturally move towards knowing higher dimensions of perception. If you are aware of the mortal nature of your life, is there time to get angry with somebody? Is there time to quarrel with somebody? Is there time to do anything stupid in life? Once you come to terms with death and you are conscious that you will die, you will want to make every moment of your life as beautiful as possible. Only people who believe they are immortal can fight, and fight to the death. Those who are constantly aware of the mortal and fragile nature of existence do not want to miss a single moment; they will naturally be aware. They cannot take anything for granted; they will live very purposefully. This is a simple way of becoming aware.
Buddhism: At the April Conference in Lusanne, Switzerland, the Dalai Llama said the following about death: “Death will come because it is a part of life,” he said. “People who avoid the very words old age and death will be caught unawares when it comes. In some of our meditation practice we visualize the process of death and the associated dissolution of the elements every day, so that we may be prepared for the actual event. For those who believe in a succession of lives, death is just like changing your body. If you have led a meaningful life, when death takes place there’ll be no need for regret.
Also, the Dalai Llama has said in his book, Advice on Dying: And Living a Better Life” by Dalai Lama, and posted on DailyOM: It is crucial to be mindful of death — to contemplate that you will not remain long in this life. If you are not aware of death, you will fail to take advantage of this special human life that you have already attained. It is meaningful since, based on it, important effects can be accomplished.
Analysis of death is not for the sake of becoming fearful but to appreciate this precious lifetime during which you can perform many important practices. Rather than being frightened, you need to reflect that when death comes, you will lose this good opportunity for practice. In this way contemplation of death will bring more energy to your practice.
However, if you do not wait until the end for the knowledge that you will die to sink in, and you realistically assess your situation now, you will not be overwhelmed by superficial, temporary purposes. You will not neglect what matters in the long run. It is better to decide from the very beginning that you will die and investigate what is worthwhile. If you keep in mind how quickly this life disappears, you will value your time and do what is valuable. With a strong sense of the imminence of death, you will feel the need to engage in spiritual practice, improving your mind, and will not waste your time in various distractions ranging from eating and drinking to endless talk about war, romance, and gossip.
Copyright © 2002 by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
For further insights from a Buddhist perspective on how to be with a dying person, the article :
How to be with someone who is dying:
Sogyal Rinpoche describes how he would be with someone who is dying in his book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, “I would have sat by his side, held his hand and let him talk. I have been amazed again and again by how, if you just let people talk, giving them your complete and compassionate attention, they will say things of a surprising spiritual depth, even when they think they don’t have any spiritual beliefs. I have been very moved by how you can help people help themselves by helping them discover their own truth, a truth whose richness, sweetness, and profundity they may have never suspected”…“Bereavement can force you to look at your life directly, compelling you to find a purpose in it where there may not have been one before.”
Qualities Rinpoche says are invaluable at a deathbed are: a sense of humor, and the ability to not take things personally when/if the person dying expresses anger, which he says can be quite common. Additionally, emphasizes the importance of expressing unconditional love, and telling the truth with love. “To be able to deal effectively with the dying person’s fears, it is important to introspect and be aware of one’s own fears about death,” Rinpoche says. Also, “The dying person must be given permission to die with the assurance that his loved one(s) will be taken care of in the aftermath,” and he advises that those left behind be open to grief and try and learn from it, rather than try and repress it.
You can read more of his thoughts in his article, “Insights into living and dying”, by Dr. E.S. Krishnamoorthy and Niranjana Bennet.
Christianity: Henri Nowen on Dying Well
We will all die one day. That is one of the few things we can be sure of. But will
we die well? That is less certain. Dying well means dying for others, making our
lives fruitful for those we leave behind. The big question, therefore, is not “What
can I still do in the years I have left to live?” but “How can I prepare myself
for my death so that my life can continue to bear fruit in the generations that
will follow me?”
Jesus died well because through dying he sent his Spirit of Love to his friends,
who with that Holy Spirit could live better lives. Can we also send the Spirit
of Love to our friends when we leave them? Or are we too worried about what we can
still do? Dying can become our greatest gift if we prepare ourselves to die well.
Surviving after death, we hope, is surviving as a thought of God…Death is not understood as the end of being but rather at the end of doing… Humanity without death would be arrogance without end.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972)*
The sunset, the bird’s song, the baby’s smile…the dreams of the heart, and my own being, dear to me as every man’s is to him, all these I can well trust to Him who made them. There is poignancy and regret about giving them up, but no anxiety. When they slip from my hands they will pass to hands better, stronger, and wiser than mine.
— Milton Steinberg (1903-1950) “To Hold with Open Arms”*
Say: “Behold, my prayer, and [all] my acts of worship, and my living and my dying are for God [alone], the Sustainer of all the worlds.”
— Qur’an 6:162
Say: “Behold, the death from which you are fleeing is bound to overtake you – and then you will be brought back unto Him who knows all that is beyond the reach of a created being’s perception as well as all that can be witnessed by a creature’s senses or mind, whereupon He will make you truly understand all that you were doing [in life].”
— Qur’an 62:8
I’ve done a number of challenging things over the years, at least they were challenging for me. One summer I biked up the west coast of Ireland with my husband, nephew, and two other friends. The most difficult day was biking from Galway to the ferry take off point for the Aran Islands. When we started out, it was raining hard. We crouched behind a bus stop wall as we left the city, watching the rain blow horizontally, hoping it would let up. When we could tell that it wasn’t going to, we pushed out into the wind, riding against it the whole way, making it to the ferry five minutes before it took off. After another fourteen miles of riding once we landed on the islands, we arrived at our bed and breakfast. There, I opened up the bicycle guidebook to read that the ride we had just done should the easiest day of riding up the coast, as it was flat. Obviously, this statement didn’t account for riding into a fierce oncoming wind and driving rain the entire way. What seems like it should be easy can actually be quite difficult.
Several years back my husband and I climbed Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Southeast Asia at 4,095.2m or 13,435.7ft. The climb up takes hours–most of the day, as I recall, and you pass through several ecosystems as you rise in altitude. Then you stay the night in bunks at the guest house, and rest up a bit before getting up at 3:00am to climb the rest of the way to the top so that you can be there soon after the sun rises, and before the mists engulf the peak. Because you are climbing in altitude, it can be slow and difficult walking once you are at about 10,00 ft. We made it to the top, and the views were truly stunning as the mists rolled into the sun and over the pointed granite peaks and saddles. We began the descent as the mists thickened into cloud, and the clouds began to rain. The walk up to the peak the second morning, and then back down the mountain again took nine hours, and was the most physically difficult thing I ever did. The trail up and down the mountain is made of steps of varying height, and we were walking down them in what eventually became torrential rain. For hours I didn’t know if I would be able to carry on putting one foot in front of the other. There were no rest stop areas, however. What could we do but continue on? So we did. It amazed me how when it had to, the body could move beyond what I thought was its absolute limit.
But challenging as these things were, these physical experiences were, they weren’t the most difficult thing to bear. The most difficult thing I’ve done was sitting by my father’s side day after day the month that he lay dying—knowing he was dying, and just sitting with him, being with him as he climbed the highest mountain, and continued on through the rain and wind, to cross over to the other side.
In California, it has finally begun to rain after months of winter filled with drought. In Montana it is truly winter. Today as I bicycle through our New Delhi neighborhood, the sky has a hint of blue after months of pollution and fog. I glide past smoke from burning heaps of garbage, and women crouched over blankets spread out on the sidewalk, sorting grain, and children playing cricket in the streets. I think of the estimated 100,000 who live on the streets in Delhi.
When someone we know is dying, or suffering, and we don’t know what the end of it will be, we feel open, raw, and especially aware of how frail our strengths really are—how fragile the line between life and death. All we have and are could change so easily, and it has made me realize how every day our very breathing is a kind of sacrament. Our life is and becomes day by day what we are paying attention to. It is what we open our hearts to, how we are listening to the people around us, to their spirit, and what is being said underneath the words.
Or not. Many people from developed countries are removed enough from the suffering in the world to remain comfortable while others in many other places suffer. Ilya Kaminsky in his poem “We Lived Happily During the War” talks about how those who are well off in the world hear the suffering around us, or see it, and feel badly about it—enough to protest, yet still we are able to sit outside on the porch in the sun.
In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
In this life there is suffering. We might be from the great country of money, but everyone suffers. We might be comfortable now, but in actually, we don’t know what the future will bring. We spend so much effort trying to make ourselves comfortable, aiming to fend off suffering. Suffering comes to all. How will respond when it does?
Recently, a friend of ours who seemed perfectly healthy began to have prolonged unexplained fevers. In the hospital, he learned a rare bacterial infection nearly claimed his life. We don’t know what is in our future. I want the people I ride by on my bicycle, and the people I meet to be well. I want those I love and know to be well, to be whole. There is so much suffering in this city, so many needy, and as I think about and see those who are suffering, I feel each time I’m being asked how am I responding to the needs of the world? Even the planet suffers. What is the suffering telling us? Can we hear what it is telling us about our choices? How can we be whole inside of and in spite of our suffering?
This past week I read these words by Henri Nouwen, “Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu…Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something.” As Nouwen suggests, ours is a society that admires toughness and roughness, values getting things done over being present with another, over listening. Do we counteract suffering by taking action, making change? Maybe the place to start is by being gentle, keeping an open heart, deep listening, presence—these are not easy qualities to cultivate, yet in our deepest selves, we long to know that we truly matter. So much suffering begins, continues on, and expands even into violence because people do not feel that they truly matter, do not feel that their life rests in the heart of someone else who holds them precious. Again, as Nouwen says, “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” Do we have the courage to be gentle? Can we hold it above productivity and success, above accomplishment? Can we learn to be humble? We don’t necessarily have to have answers, we can simply sit with another in shared awareness of helplessness. That can be powerful, even life changing.
How do we know what path to follow in the days we have remaining on earth to live, so that when we come to the end of our days, we will be able to climb the mountain, or find our selves able to keep peddling into the wind and the rain though we feel our legs are leaden, so that we can find the boat that will carry us onward? How easily we get thrown off track of what is important, pulled in to world of worrying about the uncertainties. Thomas Merton in his book, Thoughts on Solitude, suggests that we don’t have to have all the answers. In his prayer, he says, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” We don’t have certainty. Even Jesus’s own disciples asked who Jesus was. And they walked and lived with him. All of us are incomplete. The path we walk isn’t about achievement or accomplishment. It is about walking the path—the journey. It is in our reaching out in the intention to love, to be, and to be made whole that matters in spite of our questions and uncertainty, our incompleteness.
I noticed the trees were filled with leaves today as I rode down the streets, biking not necessarily to anywhere, just weaving back and forth along the pavement, practicing what it is to move, to be alive in this moment just as it is. Breathing in, I said to myself, “peace,” as I lifted my leg on the pedal. Breathing out I thought, “blessings.” Blessings on those around me who suffer. Blessings on the world that suffers because we don’t know how to be gentle. Blessings to all of us traveling from uncertainty to uncertainty.
William Butler Yeats said this about poetry: “It is blood, imagination, intellect running together…It bids us to touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrink from all that is of the brain only.”
A friend of ours will soon turn 50. We’ve known each other for years, and he will be having a party to celebrate. When my father turned 50, he let us all know he was half a century old. That seemed old at the time, but Dad didn’t really seem that much different than what he was when he wasn’t yet that age. When are people actually “old”? That probably differs from person to person, and from era to era, but something changes in the way you feel in the world when people perceive you as old.
In a capitalist culture where what’s new on the market drives people’s perception of what is “cool” and worth noting, old things are generally considered passé–out. People change their Facebook profile pictures sometimes daily. The new computer or phone model comes out and people discard the old one. The average American, for example, replaces his or her cell phone every 22 months, according to Scientific American. Following along with this mindset, Mother Nature Network reports that “[t]he U.S. produced 11 million tons of e-waste in 2012.” It’s expected to grow 33% by 2017. Maybe the capitalist consumer perspective affects the way we look at old people and causes them to be seen similarly to old products. They aren’t “cool” anymore, and are put on the back burner or are tossed out, even though they still might have much to offer–and though throwing them out, so to speak, creates toxicity in the way we relate to each other.
Researcher on aging and consumption patterns, Michelle Barnhart from Oregon State University says on the University’s News and Research Communications site “Our society devalues old age in many ways, and this is particularly true in the United States, where individualism, self-reliance, and independence are highly valued.” This may account for why our thinking about older people is mostly negative, she suggests.
The general public’s thinking about old people is erroneous. Why should it be true that if you’re old, you’re obsolete as well–that your ideas and ways of thinking, perhaps even your being, doesn’t quite count for as much? As democratic societies, we say we value human rights, but how do we demonstrate the value of what older people give to society? The Guardian describes a study by the Royal Volunteer Society in the UK in 2011, and notes that older people are in fact an asset, not a drain to society. “Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring responsibilities and volunteering effort of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.” In an effort to make visible the positive and tangible impact of the caring and volunteering that elderly people do, the study goes on to say that the “calculations on the net contribution of older people have been made by economic analysts SQW. It estimates that older people benefit the economy to a total of £175.9bn, including delivering social care worth £34bn and volunteering worth at least £10bn, compared to welfare costs of £136.3bn.” This is a considerable influence in monetary terms, even more so in human terms. Instead of fading away into irrelevance upon old age, the elderly make significant contributions to society–contributions that are not necessarily recognized.
Additionally, contrary to the cranky, negative stereotype many have of older people, elderly people are actually more adept than younger people in social emotional skills according to Helen Fields, in her article “What’s So Good About Growing Old” on the Smithsonian magazine’s site. Fields explains that, “Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises.” It takes decades to learn how to manage social skills, Fields asserts, and older people are on the whole actually happier than younger people. Psychologist Laura Carstensen, at Stanford “led a study that followed people ages 18 to 94 for a decade and found that they got happier and their emotions bounced around less.” There is a stereotype that persists regarding older people, says Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, “and that stereotype is typically incorrect.”
Forgetfulness is something often associated with old age–forgetting the name of an author you read some time back, or the name of the book, the name of a co-worker, or a place visited. Billy Collins’ poem “Forgetfulness” describes a number of these incidents, and how little by little, the numbers, figures and names depart,
“as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”
I love the way Collins’s poem brings us to a new view of forgetfulness–
“No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”
In fact, some new research emerging might change the way we understand aging and the mind as well. NY Times blogger Benedict Carey, in a recent post, “The Older Mind is a Fuller Mind”, quotes the lead author of recent research about memory and aging, Michael Ramscar from the University of Tübingen in Germany, that puts into question how steep the age-related decline for cognitive processing is, as well as bringing into question some of the research measures cognitive scientists have used. According to this study, “the larger the library you have in your head, the longer it usually takes to find a particular word (or pair).” The amount of information in long-term memory might be affecting the retrieval of short-term memory. “It’s not that you’re slow. It’s that you know so much,” suggests Carey.
Quite a few years back when my husband and I first began living overseas, we used to often spend the evening with an older couple we worked with at a school in Turkey. They were probably 25 or more years older than us, but we loved being with them. They would share the unique foods they scoured the markets to find. We’d share stories, and laugh with them for hours. We traveled with them as well, driving up the Turkish coast to visit Troy, and then on up to Alexandropolis in northern Greece—the area where the Cyclops from Homer’s Odyssey is traditionally believed to have lived. This older couple inspired us in our journey of reaching out to understand and explore other cultures, to step inside history, and to connect to it anew. They had a deep love for the culture we were living in, had returned to live in it a second time, and helped us to love it in all its variety and uniqueness. The role this older couple played in our lives was an important one, influencing the direction we moved into with our lives, and I am very glad for that friendship and its lasting effect on who we have become.
Old age might, for some, be seen like a foreign country, with different reference points and ways of living, thinking, and being. When we encounter older people, do we really see them? Do we notice them and allow ourselves to know them, and to learn from their perspectives? Age and death will surely come some day. How are we living now that will enable us to be the person we want to be when our own end comes? This is a question Joan Chittister explores in her book The Gift of Years. The pain of the wrongs that occurred when we were young is the thing older people must come to terms with, she says in the YouTubes, part 1 and part 2 about the ideas she presented in her book. We must go down into the innermost part of ourselves and learn how to find peace, she explains. Old age is the time to look at ourselves in the light, and come eye to eye with the mirror of who we are. “If we’ve been dishonest,” Chittister asks, “can we face the truth of ourselves? Can we see ourselves as the small part of the universe that we truly are, rather than the center? Can we speak our truths without having to be right?” Chittister says life isn’t about age. “It’s about aging well and living in to the gifts offered in every stage of life.” We all must come to terms with growing old. More than that, we can use our life to learn how to live well between whatever age we are, and whatever age it is when we realize, that “yes,” we are old now. Is it because it is hard to look closely at our interior selves that our culture has difficulty appreciating old age or valuing those who are older? The end time of life, Chittister says, is the time to “put down the remnants of the past and to learn from the present moment, and find it enough. It is the time to live with life as it is, and find it, too, is enough, to live with ourselves as we are and find it enough.” This is challenging, but something that seems worth doing at any age. Noticing, listening to, and cultivating friendships with older people seems a wise thing to do to set us on that path.
Is poetry relevant to us today? Do poets speak to the questions we live with? When I read writer Nicholas Samaras’s poetry, I say yes. Samaras’s new book is coming out this spring, American Psalm, World Psalm, and I can’t wait to read it. Samaras’s previous book, Hands of the Saddlemaker, received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. About that book, Laurence Lieberman said, “Hands of the Saddlemaker earns all of late James Dickey’s enthusiasm, and then some…truly an overwhelming masterwork; the whole work is a transcendent marvel.”
Taking a closer look at some of Nicholas Samaras’s poetry found on Connotation Press, “Metaphor As Identity”, “Old Calendar”, and “Petition”, I love the way these poems create space between the images and lines, opening a space for the reader to step inside.
“Metaphor as Identity” uses images that are vividly alive and felt. The stanzas describe a self that reaches below the surface into the dark space of creation where we live. This is a place where presence and becoming co-exist, a place of longing, reaching, and deep yearning to connect to the Mystery. “I am the exact space between bell-tolls to chapel” Samaras writes, and continues later in the poem to say, “I am an ascetic who cannot pray. / I am a prayer in slow making.” These images, like others in this poem, are both present and absent at the same time. They open a window into a way of seeing that enables readers to notice and step inside the ephemeral nature of our being.
If you’ve ever visited historical monuments, you will have noticed the names written in stone with dates, kings and queens, perhaps, who ruled a country, but whom you know nothing about other than their names. Obituaries list what people have done, their accomplishments. Family trees list who married who and what their occupations were–lines leading back into time. But who were these people? What was the essence of their lives, their spirits? What was it to stand in their presence? Can a whole of a life really be summed up in these references? No. What we are is some deeper mystery, and if we ask our selves who are we, and keep asking, we will eventually move past the labels to a place where we stand wordless, a place of knowing and not knowing at the same time, and this is the place that Samaras’s poem, “Metaphor As Identity”, brings the reader to. This place of knowing-not knowing is where we meet our selves, in the place between naming and not naming.
This place of not naming and naming, connects to another one of Samaras’s poems, “Eve Naming Other Animals”, found on the Adirondack Review‘s site, where Samaras describes Eve observing animals. Eve notices the way the animals move and behave, and this deep looking enables her to define and name them. Definitions separate us from the whole. They name what sets something apart from other things, and they shape the mind by calling us to notice specific elements. The very language we speak and use shapes the mind in this way, and this poem calls attention to the process. When I was an undergraduate, I had a biology teacher that took us on a walk to notice plants. Students would ask him the names of plants. He refused to tell us the name, saying if he told us, we we wouldn’t look at it longer. We’d think we knew what it was and we’d turn away to another plant, or simply walk on. Instead, he wanted us to observe closely, ask questions, notice–to really see, not just take a snapshot with our brains. Samaras’s poem shows us Eve doing the opposite, she is looking long, noticing, and calling out the essence of what she sees.
Slender horns approach, and I find
my touch makes them shapely: fronds
of opaque light that dances from angles.
I like their intimacy more than angels,
more than that shimmer that stays in place.
Into the meadow of limbs and motion, I trace
the bent wheat to be with them there.
Like a gesture moving through the air,
it is a gesture moving through the air.
I find this given language spare,
suddenly. It leaves too soon in breath.
The poem goes on, but you can see how Eve, and the poet as well, are living with the animals as presences, taking them in, not merely naming them in a random act and walking on. She notices the animal’s gestures, and how it is a kind of language it uses to name itself, she is calling attention to what its essence is, and using that to name the animal. We live too much in a world where being seen, the way you present yourself and how you are labeled, how you brand yourself–as if you are a commodity, is given considerable weight, and the actual substance is hidden somehow underneath. It’s as if we have been taken over by a media presentation. The poem, “Metaphor As Identity”, however, takes us back into that place of mystery, where we can rediscover we are more than what we have branded ourselves as or how we have been labeled. We are like Eve again, looking into the face of the animal, noticing who and what it is before we name it. We are first of all being, the Samaras’s poem reminds us. We are presence, and we stand in a presence that is hidden from obvious view, and wondrously rounded in silence–“the dusty path out of sight.” We are more than what we have labeled ourselves as. We are enigma. We are mystery.
Our lives are the crossroads of all the other lives from which we come, one of the knots in the great fabric of being that we are connected to. This is part of the mystery, and we carry the history of those people and places in our bodies, even though we may be unconscious of it. We are ourselves, and we are part of the others who came before us as well. Samaras’s poem, “Old Calendar” carries the reader into myth, and into the ways we are connected to time–our own lives, but also to history in ways we don’t necessarily understand, but can feel the presence of if we listen in the dark silence. The clock, his poem suggests, may be ringing out the years of time, but we come from a place of darkness, and go back to it. The ancient Celts started their year in darkness. Out of darkness, the place of unknowing–the great void, so to speak, comes all that is. This is the wisdom of the ancients. “You sleep in darkness, and rise in darkness,” writes Samaras in “Old Calendar”. We grow used to the clock tower ticking on satisfactorily, as Samaras says, but,
You hold on to the silence and chanting filters up to stars,
You hold to silence and let the years come.
Samaras’s poem shows us we live in time, but know we are part of the silence as well.
Another of Samaras’s poems, “Petition”, is utterly beautiful, so beautiful it makes the heart ache in the way it portrays the silence, the emptiness. But the silence this poem speaks of is one that opens the heart to awe, and allows us to see ourselves more clearly, humbly. There is almost an existential quality to this poem in its opening stanzas in the way the poem poem points us toward our aloneness in the universe, but it is not an empty darkness.
Ask the night to let you not be lonely.
Ask the night to heal your heart.
Step out into the black eve of winter
and breathe in the clarity.
Let the scarcely-seen stars glimmer
their small mercies on you, the air
The darkness and cold here are not hollow. Instead, they enable us to see ourselves more clearly, they offer us “small mercies.” I love the lines that go on to say, “to push a little past weariness is a good thing.” When we have pushed ourselves into weariness is when we are especially able to understand the intrinsic value of stillness, the absence of activity that enables us to regenerate. It is this stillness, the sabbath time, where we learn in our bones the “blessing of silence,” and where dialog with silence can begin.
Samaras’s poems speak to the deep places in the mind that we find ourselves wandering in as we try to understand who we are and how to live, and these are poems that teach us to listen in the silence and live inside the questions. I feel grateful for these poems, for the way they call my attention to what it means to be alive. The poems in both structure and content create a kind of space where learned answers are left behind, and we enter a kind of holy darkness that allows us to touch questions of existence and feel them in a tangible way. Reading them is like listening to the fine notes of a flute drifting across a winter’s meadow on a starry night from some distant place, crisp light outlining the tips of branches, and drawing shadows on the sides of buildings. You hear your feet crunch through the snowy meadow as you walk toward home. Just before you step inside your house, you turn and look at the sky–the myriad points of light, both faint and bright. You see the immensity of all that is, and know the wonder that you are alive amidst it all.
If you want to read more about Nick Samaras, you might want to check out an interview on the blog, “Just My Eyes”, or on the Antler blog here.
To continue to nurture the creative life, it’s good to read what others have to say about art, writing, and creativity. The quotes here resonate with me. How do they speak to you?
“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” — Frederich Neitzche
“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”–Dylan Thomas
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” –Stella Adler
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”–Ansel Adams
“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” ―Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”–John Keats
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”–Albert Einstein
““The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”–Albert Camus
““I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ”–Joss Whedon
““After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”–Philip Pullman
For several months now I’ve kept a sketchbook as I attempt to learn to draw. When I examine the pen and ink drawings in the book I’m using as a guide, Rendering in Pen and Ink, and as I try to draw what I see, over and over I notice how one small squiggle on the page, one tiny turn of the pen can either make something feel real, or make an object look distorted. Details matter, and learning to get them right will take years of practice. I have to face the fact that most of what I’m going to make will look wrong, and will probably continue to do so for sometime. If I’m going to learn to draw, that’s something that must be accepted. This isn’t what drawing is really about, though, seeing well, and getting the details all down correctly.
So, why do I want to learn to draw anyway? What’s the motivation? It’s something about that when the pen is in my hand, I’m living right there in the tip of the ink flow on to the page. I am in the texture, the line, each turn of a curve. It doesn’t matter so much to the direction the world is moving in that I learn to draw. Of course the world will go on. It always does. Will it change the course of my life or anyone else’s for that matter? Who knows, really, if something we learn will directly lead to something else significant in the future. This will certainly be true in some cases. But this is not necessarily the best measure of the value of all things—their practical use. There are a number of things I am trying to learn that don’t necessarily have an immediately understood practical value: playing the clarinet, learning to speak Spanish. These could have utilitarian value at some point, but not in my immediate circumstance, and that is not why I want to learn them. Some things just call to us for mysterious reasons, and have value in themselves. The act of learning, just being with that process is somehow intrinsically engaging. Maybe these kinds of motivations are akin to playing in the mud when a child. Something about them just feels delightful. We don’t have to understand why we want to do everything we do; we just know we feel more alive, more human, or more full when we participate in them.
Over the past few days I’ve spent a few hours pulling weeds from the garden walkway. My husband offered to use the weed whacker to cut them back, but I preferred to pull them all by hand, sitting quietly in the sun, picking out the tiny blades of grass between the thyme I planted last summer. Slowly, the thyme plants reemerge from beneath the weeds. Even though the pathway looks very pleasant after the weeds have been pulled out, and it might have been a waste of time to pick weeds by hand, it somehow seems better. It’s satisfying. You can pull out the roots, not just cut off the top of the plants, and the thyme will have an easier time growing in the long run.
Like many other people, I work in a job where pretty much every moment counts, or you want to make it count for something. When I am drawing, or pulling weeds, however, I do not think of time. I’m not trying to make every moment count. Instead I’m gliding inside of time like a bird turning in an updraft of air at the edge of a cliff. I’m waiting there in space, doing some kind of mysterious thing soil does when it regenerates itself while sitting fallow. There is something wonderfully rare and precious about such moments. They are moments of being balanced against the moments where everything is measured out tick by tick. I don’t think I am the only one in this world hungry for such moments—for the space inside of time that existed before clocks. They keep me well, and as I peer forward into the new year, this is what I wish for, for more space in my life and of those around me to be found and given to unmeasured moments of being.
May you, too, be well.
“Being in Love is Cool” her t-shirt read. The statement surprised me. It’s not the kind of statement you generally see often. The woman wearing it was probably in her mid forties, and it made me happy to know that there are others who are publically willing to affirm the value of a love relationship. I remember interviewing my father about meeting my mother after they had been married nearly 50 years, asking him what it was like when he first met her and if he remembered the feeling of falling in love. He told me how he would run 16 miles through the woods after work in order to see her on the weekend, but he didn’t use the words “in-love.” Neither did my mother. Life in those days required people to think about relationships in more practical terms, she explained. My parents may not recall feeling like they were in love, but they most certainly loved each other, and were dedicated to each other to their last days. They helped each other make it through the difficult years of the Great Depression, working together to make money by hanging wallpaper. They scrimped every penny they earned. Later, Dad worked away from home running jobs for a painting contractor for a many of years while Mom kept the house going—sewing our clothes, making all our food from scratch, doing extra ironing and babysitting for neighbors. As a child, I knew my mom and dad were partners in all they did, and they held on to each other through whatever came their way. After my parents had grown older, and all the children were out of the house, I recall how they sat on their back porch swing holding hands in the evening after dinner, the picture of contentment. That is no small thing to have arrived at in life.
Loving someone in a relationship of commitment, admittedly, is not necessarily the same as being in love. To love someone in a relationship of commitment, such as marriage, is to say “yes” to life and to open one’s self to knowing the other—to being fully present with that person day after day, decade after decade, through weakness and incompleteness, both theirs and your own. Loving someone with a commitment to a relationship means to listen to and stand by the loved one through times of both joy and difficulty. On the other hand, being in love might not necessarily involve a commitment to relationship, though it could. I believe my parents at the end of their lives after decades of marriage with all the trials and uncertainties life brought during those years, found they had grown together so as to feel they loved each other and were in love as well. When there was a question of opinion, Dad would say Mom “agreed with him 100%,” which she did, though that might also be because she had lost nearly all language at the end of her life, and this was one of her last sentences she could speak. Nevertheless, they happily to sat side by side in their last days, wanted to be in each other’s presence as they ate together or watched the hummingbirds that came to their window to feed. In their final years when dementia and Alzheimer’s had worked their way into their way of being, they still recognized and valued each other’s presence and seemed fulfilled by it.
The ancient Romans celebrated Saturlina, a celebration of the sun at the time of the winter solstice—December 25, on the Julian calendar was the date for the solstice, and early Christians celebrated Jesus’ birth on that day in symbolic awareness of the light given in the darkness. This is the Christmas season, and if we look at what John tells us about why Christ was born, it was because he loved us. Love in any relationship is given in darkness, without the ability to see the future or know if all will work out well. Love is an act of imagination—imagining life together, and how you can live in a way that allows you to come together in wholeness. In the act of loving, daily giving ourselves to each other, we are made whole. Christ encouraged us to “Love one another as I have loved you.” To love one another leads us to ask ourselves what does it take to become whole? How do we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the world in order to be whole? Love is a way of relating to the world that enables us to care for it and for each other. When we live in this way, doing the daily work of learning how to care for each other, we find ourselves catching glimpses now and then through windows that enable us to see that we are connected to a greater mystery in which the whole of nature is doing its work to sustain us—through the water cycle, the biospheres, the life cycle, so that we can be here and experience relationship.
When we are in love, we feel alive, sensitive to our interconnectedness with someone else. The whole world is imbued with wonder. The sense of being in love, then, can be connected to the awareness that we are walking around part of this great web of being. After decades of being together and working through the rough spots in relationship, it’s possible to see, as my parents did, the preciousness of the small moments, for in them the universe is found. William Blake, in “Jerusalem” wrote,
“Labor well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones,
And those who are in misery cannot remain so long”
It is in the minute particulars and attending to them that we learn how to live in relationship. When I was first out of college and working as a waitress, a particular older couple would often enter the restaurant. After a short conversation, they would inevitably end up in an argument. One might throw down the menu after a few angry words, or stomp out. I never understood what kept them together through so many years. How did they grow into that way of being together? When I told my mother about them, she explained that how people respond day by day to the little things in life is a link in the bigger chain of who you become. That older couple had become what they had practiced becoming over many years, and I realized I would rather not be married than to be married like that. If I want to be happy and whole in this world, I need to practice what I want to become, and that practice comes with the small choices I am making day by day, moment by moment. Do the work in the small moments, the minute particulars, as Blake suggested, and misery will not linger.
Every so often people mention to my husband and I that they can tell that we care about each other as deep friends and partners. Sometimes they laugh at us for the fact that we hold hands as we walk. We know it’s not in vogue to show you’re in love when you’re old, but let them laugh. We’re happy. Early in our relationship we realized that if we could learn to love each other through the years and the difficulties we were sure to face and continue to say “yes” to each other, then we could be giving something good back to the world because who we are together affects the lives of those around us. It takes practice to make relationship, but it is good work, and satisfying. Being in love is cool, like the t-shirt said, but learning how to love someone in a long-term relationship of commitment is more than cool, it is deeply fulfilling.
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