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What Ties You to Where You Live

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Coast above Santa Cruz at Año Nuevo

It’s a beautiful day here in Santa Cruz, California. The sun shines off the oak trees as I sit in front of the post office, observing the wonderful kinetic sculpture at the front of the mall, Santa Cruz’s main downtown street, with its silvery wheels inside of wheels spinning, turning, and reflecting the morning sun coming down. If you stand at the ocean’s edge on West Cliff Drive, you can see 50 miles across the bay to Monterrey. Further up the coast you can walk along the cliffs near Wilder Ranch and stare out past the waves into the plain of stretching water and the fabulous sense of freedom it evokes.

photo-31I’m sure that people love the towns and counties they live in for a variety of reasons. Santa Cruz is a wonderful place to live and to spend time. Something I especially love about the area is the wide variety of people here. The town has a strong sense community, and you can also enjoy diverse outdoor activities in the area: hiking, kayaking, surfing, biking. I love books, and Bookshop Santa Cruz in downtown Santa Cruz, with its wide variety of reading choices, is a fantastic place to while away several hours. Also, the presence of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College offer additional character and interest to the town. Shakespeare Santa Cuz is held every year at UCSC, and Cabrillo College has its music festival. Additionally, there are many choices of restaurants to try and several farmers markets to buy locally grown food.

Temperatures in the area tend to be mild–not too hot, and not too cold. The mountains with redwoods are only minutes from the beach, allowing for micro climates and micro plant communities as well. As you can see, there are many things to like about this town, but there are things to like about many places. Delhi has it’s historical monuments and ancient history. Japan, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, New Zealand, Zimbabwe–the list could go on and on, all have amazing monuments and each their unique beauty, so, what is it that bonds me in particular to this location? I think it is my connection to and interaction with the natural world here. Wild sweet peas and California poppies shine their sunny faces along the roadsides, oaks dot the hillsides and grassy meadows, redwoods grow in the hills 15 minutes inland from the beach. Their presence is something that has grown in importance to me over the years The trees on my land seem almost like part of my family. I love to stand in the yard and suddenly smell their enigmatic perfume drifting by. When you visit a place, it may be beautiful, but you’re just passing through. When you repeatedly come back to a place or live in an area, you see it in all it’s moods. It grows inside of you and becomes part of the geography of your soul.

photo-28More than this, I am working on the land here, getting my hands in the soil, digging, weeding, planting, watering, harvesting fruit, herbs, and vegetables from the garden. Bit by bit the garden grows, and I am watching as plants surprise me, like the red flame grape that is taking over the arbor and currently has a hundred clusters of grapes on it, and the blue berries that have given us several bowls full of fruit since arriving home. They are beautiful to see in the morning with the dew gathering on their dusty blue fruit. The sun shines through the grape leaves, and they glow like stained glass. Each plant has its own character and habit, and as I work with them and care for them, I learn from them. I previously felt bad about cutting back the lavender, for example, but now that I have, it is growing more profusely and seems much happier, making me think that a limitless pruning might  be good for all of us at certain times, whether that means minimizing our possessions according to what no longer helps us become our best selves, or learning self-control, not giving in to all of our desires, again, so that we can be more of the person we most want to be in the long run–the bigger picture of our lives.

At night here in the Soquel hills just south of Santa Cruz, a myriad of stars illuminate the sky. It is a rare and wonderful thing to be so enveloped in nature as I am when I am here, to constantly be aware of the earth’s gifts, to be able to walk out on to the earth instead of a sidewalk, to be able to smell the air’s sweetness–air without smoke or chemicals. It seems a miracle here every day in my home county. I suppose if you lived here every day you might start to think that this is the way the earth is. In reality, I think places like this, communities that still have open space and nature around them are becoming more rare. Living in a place that allows me too connect with nature on a daily basis feeds my spirit, brings me a sense of peace and renewal, and is deeply satisfying. Maybe this is because I grew up in a rural area and it is part of the geography of my soul, something I long for after living in so many large cities in my adult life. Is it the same for others? What connects you to the place you live?

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A Closer Look–Three New Poems and Due Artisti

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I am happy to share that three of my poems appear in the spring issue of the on-line literary journal, phren-z. Take a look, the journal is from my hometown, Santa Cruz, California, and has a pleasant diversity of art represented over its history of publication, and an excellent variety of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

I also recommend you take a look at the artist web site, Due Artisti (Two Artists) of Arvid and Virginia Olson. The site displays the beautiful countryside of Italy, with many paintings of Venice. I especially love the realistic quality of the water in Virginia Olson’s Venetian paintings, the ripples and reflections, and the rich color Ms. Olson’s work contains. Arvid Olson’s watercolors have fantastic detail both in the architectural scenes and in those including nature. Enjoy!

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Poetry That Speaks to Our Times: Nicholas Samaras’ New Book, American Psalm, World Psalm

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We move through our days, reaching toward whatever it is we have set our minds and hearts on, doing our work, making our plans, joining in with the life of family and friends. In between the routines and the larger movements in our life’s story, however, lie the quiet moments where the deep wonderings and emotions of being whisper to us. These are what Nicholas Samaras’s writing does in his new book of poems, American Psalm, World Psalm. They lay open the yearning we experience at the deepest level of our mind and being. When reading Samaras’s poems, the reader senses the open heart resting beneath them, the vulnerable place from which the words rise and speak. The poems in this volume reach into the fabric of who we are as modern people and wrestle with difficult questions, addressing them in a way that is both personal and powerful.

One of the things that especially spoke to me while reading American Psalm, World Psalm, is the space on the page and inside the poems. There is breath in the way Samaras uses the white space on the page. The “Psalm of the Quietest Wailing,” for example, is a sectioned poem where the first section contains only one line, “It is attention that makes worship.” The rest of the page is empty. I read the line, and I notice it on the page as if it were a stone lying in a Japanese garden surrounded by the wide space of raked sand. The next page reveals the poem’s second section where the poem’s speaker describes listening to “the rubble of history,” how he stands with it, his breath bearing witness to what its stones declare. Here, as throughout the volume, I sensed the humility, born from standing in this place of listening openness out of which the poet speaks. The poem’s third section contains two lines. Then, once again, the remainder of the page is open, leaving space for the reader to take in what is being said, space to reflect on the words. “What is virtue,” the poem’s fourth section asks, “but whispering, Who am I?” This is the very question the book’s poems bring me back to repeatedly. The poems call me out of a noisy world where a myriad of things crowd and clamber for attention, and they bring me into a garden where words are given back space to breathe in, where they regain a sense of themselves because of the honesty they are spoken in. Over and over while reading the poems I found myself leaning into the words on the page, listening deeply, drinking in the lines from a place of thirst hidden inside me the poems had found a way to name. “The writing from my hands is the quietist wailing,” writes Samaras, “the witness of breath against a listening wall.” With spare words and deep beauty, Samaras captures the essence of the hard places we live in.

The psalms that Samaras writes in American Psalm, World Psalm, like the Biblical psalms, are a deep cry of the heart trying to make sense of how to live in this world. From the topic of global warming, to a call for readers to consider what is actually enough, versus constantly concentrating on what our consumer driven world suggests we need, the poems in the book are not about religion in the cultural sense. These poems move into a deeper place. “Believing in God after the Holocaust is political,” writes Samaras in “The Political Psalm,” just as “Writing a sonnet after Dachau is political.” How do we find that place where we can move beyond words and into a relationship with the Divine that is beyond the stale words and religious routines that culture and time have deadened and beaten the spirit out of? Through a space of stillness, suggest the poems in American Psalm, World Psalm, where we open ourselves in waiting.

We live in a monetized world where transactions are shadowed by the awareness of how even every day actions, such as the subjects we speak of in an e-mail are pieces of data collected and used as reference points to sell us something. “I grieve to live in a country where a verdict/of “not guilty” doesn’t equal “innocent,” writes Samaras in “Psalm for Public Grieving.” The poems in American Psalm, World Psalm describe a variety of desert places we are living in, encouraging us to look at them closely. One of Samaras’ poems invites the reader to not take breath for granted. Another tells how it is in our emptiness and brokenness that we may find what it is to be blessed. Samaras describes in “Psalm for the Soul in Depression,”

…I don’t want
a preacher in expensive suits. There is
no salvation by slogans. There are no sound-bites
to bring us home. We don’t work
with the aim for conversion. We only
witness…

The weight of the light shining on the desert places in us grows through the book, bringing the reader into an awareness of her own unsaid longings. “Speak to me/ about the presence of absence” writes Samaras in “Sacred Air.” “Not everything created/ can be seen.” Samaras’s poems remind us that life is much more than this narrow space in our minds we’ve confined ourselves to. The poems in American Psalm, World Psalm speak to all who long to live in a world that still contains wonder. A universe filled with mystery surrounds us still, and we are invited to partake in it. As Samaras says in “The Psalm of Give and Let”

Let our mortal bodies be so crowded
by the unseen seen
that we go home changed forever,
finally attendant in prayer.

The poems in Samaras’ American Psalm, World Psalm demonstrate the power with which poetry can speak to us, and to our current lives and culture. Music moves us, and the music of Samaras’ psalms call us out of ourselves, out of our habits and routines into a different way of being in relationship to the world. “Only when you find yourself lost/will you confront what you value,” says Samaras in “God of the Desert.” Through finely etched words, like shadows drawn by bare branches across the sand, the words in these poems scratch on our souls. I feel deeply grateful for the gift of these poems to my life and to the world of poetry. These are poems to be lost and found in.

Nicholas Samaras’ book is available at Ashland Poetry Press, as well as on Amazon.

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Letting Love Find You

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“We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.” –John O’Donohue

We want our lives to be meaningful, to give something of true value to the world and those around us. To be certain, none of us are pure. We try to live well. We want to be whole, but in our incompleteness we are bound to do things that were best left undone or have hurt others we meant not to hurt. We are given choices to make and sometimes none of the options seem acceptable, yet we still must choose.

Maybe we chose the practical way through a dilemma the first time around, or a way that seemed safe. Maybe we wished afterwards that we were more courageous, but we just didn’t have it in us at the time. Too much seemed at stake. Nevertheless, we made our decision as we could, and on we went, thinking there was no turning back–the die was set, the nail hammered in.

Further on down the road a similar dilemma presents itself. Once again, we ask ourselves if we have the courage to follow what our hearts tell us is right–the way you did when you found the one you love, for example, and said “yes” to him or her, even though you were unable to see into the future. Do we follow the path that will change our life even though it may be costly, or do we continue on, trying to keep things as they were even though we know this is a defining moment?

So, you make your decision once again as best you can, step by step moving out into the darkness. “Here I am,” you say to that place of unknowing, each step a prayer that love will find you and carry you into a safe place–as safe a place as there is in a world with shifting boundaries.

Robert Frost wrote in his poem, “The Road Not Taken” about choices and the two roads diverged in a yellow wood. The roads he described were both equal and fair. Sometimes the roads we must choose between is neither. We will all be telling our stories ages and ages hence, and when again I am faced with a difficult choice, I want to be traveling down a road that I know has made a difference, at least to me in my own heart.

The safest place I know is is in the arms of those who love me. When we need to know the way to go, maybe the best thing is to stand still and simply say, “I am here,” and listen to what love tells us.

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Traveling Out to Travel In

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Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” One of the reasons I have chosen to live abroad is to be able to see the world from different perspectives. Walking in a different world can make you come face to face with the reality that what you may hold dear and precious others may not comprehend. Alternatively, you may be able to see that there is another way of living and being that makes very good sense in the context it exists, or perhaps a very good way of interacting in the world that you could benefit a great deal from if you followed that path.

Sometimes there comes a time, though, when you’ve been journeying out for a long time, and you realize it’s time to come home. Coming home, however, doesn’t always necessarily mean coming back to the same place. It could mean that you need to travel out in order to change. Change is a constant factor in our lives. Life is a river, an energy source that wants to flow, and we need to let it flow through us. We are meant to experience life’s wonder, and live in awareness of it. If we dam river, silt begins to build. Alternatively, if we siphon off all the water into a hundred channels, the river loses its energy flow. Similarly, sometimes coming home to yourself, means traveling out in a new direction, remaking yourself or removing from yourself the things that are blocking the water’s flow so that the silt that has been building up can enter the river and once again flood the land with the nutrient rich soil that allows life to grow.

A few months back I observed a snake hidden beneath the miner’s lettuce growing in the blueberry box in our garden. It sat very still as it hid beneath the shade even though I was weeding around the blueberry’s base. The snake was molting, shedding its skin that was too small for the snake’s body that wanted to grow. When we know it’s time to change, we may need to travel out on pilgrimage, so to speak, into a space without distraction, a place for walking and wandering where we can see ourselves differently and anew, where we can reflect on who it is we are or want to become. Like the snake beneath the miner’s lettuce, we need to be able to lie still long enough, that even though someone else may be pulling out the weeds around us, we can do the work of letting go our old skin so that the new skin can grow, and so we can grow into it.

“Before tourism there was travel, and before travel there was exploration,” wrote Paul Fussell, explaining that in exploration there isn’t a specific path set out. It’s an exploration, a discovery. The path to our new selves may not be a well lit path. How do you know the way? What is closing in behind you? What is opening before you? The children of Israel fleeing Pharaoh’s army as they left Egypt didn’t necessarily know the way through the wilderness to the promised land, but they left anyway. When they got to the sea, they didn’t know how they would cross the water. The way behind them was most certainly closed off, but the way before them opened, even though it appeared there was no way it could occur. Maybe the story is a metaphor, or maybe it’s what really happens to us when we set off into new territories in our lives. It takes courage to begin such a journey.

When we are young, we have marked points of transition, a driver’s license, graduation, college, a first job, marriage. When you grow older, there are no fixed points for transition, yet we all go through them. They are subtler, more fuzzy around the edges. Maybe we all need to invent ceremonies for ourselves, rituals that physically demonstrate the fact that like the snake in the garden, we are molting. We are changing, or have changed. We are entering a new era, we see things differently, or we want to–we want to understand how to re-envision who we are so we can integrate all we have been and done in our lives, what it is we have become so we can give it away.

Maybe during this transition we start to let go of things we have lived with. I’ve noticed how a number of people getting ready to make transitions clean out their closets and garages. It’s a natural part of moving, and in the process, we realize we don’t need everything we thought we did. We see newly that we can live with less and actually have more. What matters most are those we love, and how we can give away who we are, what we’ve taken our lifetime to become. As our eyes weaken, they are opened to the understanding that time is a kind of Holy Land, and we want to live in it by sharing it with others. We want to give away what it is we have created through the whole of our days so we can become ourselves, so we can become whole.

Thoreau, in his essay on walking describes the word saunter as those who were seeking the holy land, the “word is beautifully derived, ” he says, “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la saint terre” — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a sainte-terrer’, a saunterer — a holy-lander.'” There isn’t enough sauntering in this sense of the word these days it seems, and yet I think we long for it even as the literal wilderness around us diminishes daily.  It would do us good to saunter out on literal walks, or interior ones, but walks where we wander out into a wilderness, where we create silent space in our minds and hearts, or even a small space where we can lie in the shade and do our work of molting. Moses, after all, lifted up the snake in the wilderness for the children of Israel, and when they looked on it, we are told they were saved. Those bitten by snakes did not die. Maybe we will not die either in the process of our transition, even though we fear such journeys, such changes.

Do you recognize that you are on a journey, or do you realize you’re getting ready for one? Eventually, we will die someday. That is a journey we must prepare for with smaller journeys out into the wilderness where we discover who we are and what we are here for. Time is passing. I ask myself, am I living the life I want to live so that when I get to the end of my life and am accountable for my days, I will know I have used them well? I want to have made of my life something that is beautiful, to give an offering back to the world as best I am able.

We journey in order to come home. We leave the garden in order to be able to come back to the garden and know it for what it is. In the words of Thoreau from his essay, “Walking,” “So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.”

Where are you now? What is your journey?

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Coming Home

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Gerald Stern’s, “Let Me Please Look Into My Window” is such a beautiful and powerful poem in the understated grief he describes in leaving home, “Let me walk up Broadway past Zak’s, past the Melody Fruit Store,” he says, listing the small details of his home and street, “past Stein’s Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.” As you read on, you recognize Stern is describing more than leaving home, but leaving life itself–

Let me leave quietly by Gate 29

and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.

Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light.

For many of us who have lived away from their home countries for decades, there comes a time, though you didn’t necessarily think it would, when it’s hard to leave, hard to head back across the water again. You just want to stay home and rediscover all the small details of the world there that you didn’t know when you lived there–to walk up your own home town’s Broadway or Melody’s Fruit store in all its wonderful commonplace richness. But you have to leave–you have commitments to meet. Quietly, you walk past your own gate 29, leaving the light behind to sleep in the airplane’s cocoon, and wake up on the other side of the world.

In the other world you live in, you try out new things, learning new skills, go new places. Explore. It is a good world, too, but something hidden in you longs, after a while, to come home to yourself. To be whole. Perhaps it is the longing that enables us to recognize home, and what it is we need in order to be whole.

I’m wondering, what does it mean for you to come home to yourself? What do you need to feel whole?

Read Stern’s full poem here, on the Writer’s Almanac.

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Happy Easter

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A Celtic Blessing

May the hills lie low
May the hills lie low,
May the sloughs fill up,
In thy way.

May all evil sleep,
May all good awake,
In thy way.
—(Source: “Mystery on the Isle of Skye”

My new pottery piece just came out of the kiln today, an angel plate.  (Click on the image and you can see it larger.) I thought it could make a nice Easter greeting, along with this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

God’s World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, — Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, — let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Presence, spirtuality

Confronting the Essential

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Washington TreesSome time back I remember listening to Naomi Shihab Nye talk about what it’s like writing a poem on Bill Moyer’s Language of Life series. Sometimes you set out to write your poem and you think you know where you’re going. “You think you’re going to church,” she explained, “but instead your poem takes you to the dog races.” When writing, you have your ideas, you practice writing, but you also don’t want to make a  habit of forcing the work. It’s also a good idea to follow where the muse leads, and  sometimes a more powerful piece of writing results. You want to pay attention to the inner voice that suggests, maybe this other thing is a better idea.

Recently, I’ve been noticing how many other kinds of situations in life arise that are similar Nye’s description of what happens when sit down to write. You go to work each day enjoying your job, for example–finding it interesting and productive, and then people come along with a different ideas–a whole new system, for instance, of how things should be done. Suddenly your plans, your way of seeing things, are altered. Or perhaps you are out exercising regularly, doing what you can to stay healthy, then you go to the doctors for your check up and discover you need a biopsy for what might be cancer. Another possibility is that you spent your life working at your job, being responsible and saving your money for your last years so that you can spend them enjoying your retirement, but then one of you has an accident and the other one spends his or her final years caring for the one who fell ill. The business you work at might unexpectedly be sold and  you might suddenly find yourself out of a job. A different possibility might be that the person you’ve been married to for 20 or 30 years, had children with, the person whose life history you know and whose foibles you love and accept comes home one day and tells you, “I don’t think this marriage is going to last.” All these stories and more like them have happened to people I know. You think you’re on track, you know what you’re doing, but then something else happens and you’re heading for the dog races. What then?

There is an old Zen story about a farmer whose horse runs away. All the neighbors tell him, “Oh, such bad luck! That’s terrible.”

The farmer’s reply is, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Next thing you know, the horse returns to the farmer’s land, and not only that, he brings seven more horses with him.

“Wow, that’s wonderful,” his friends and neighbors tell him. “Look at what you have now! You’re so very lucky.”

The farmer hears their words, and simply replies, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Because the new horses were wild, they needed to be tamed, so the farmer’s son went out to tame them. In the process, he was thrown from one of the horses and broke his leg. “Why, that’s terrible,” the farmer’s friends and neighbors said as they gathered together in the evening over tea. “What bad luck you have again,” they said. “How are you going to get on now?”

The farmer just looked at them and said, “Who knows? We’ll see.”

A short time afterwards military officers arrived in the village looking for able-bodied young men they could find to fight in a war the government was involved in. They looked throughout the village for all those young men who were fit and conscripted them into the army. When they came by the farmer’s house, they saw that his son had a broken leg and couldn’t fight, so they passed him by.

Yet again, the neighbors gathered round the farmer to tell him, “How lucky you are! Your son doesn’t have to fight in the war.”

Once again, the farmer replied, “Maybe.”

As you can see, this story could go on at some length, event after event looking first good, then alternatively terrible. I think there comes a time in all of our lives when we are confronted first with things that look absolutely terrible. Maybe we will lose our sight, or the use of our limbs some day. Maybe we will get Alzheimer’s. Maybe we lose our house. Maybe the country we are living in is suddenly moves toward a situation of unrest, or a natural disaster occurs that is devastating. We develop our plans for our lives. We have our dreams, and we want things to go a certain way. What can we do to prepare ourselves for loss, for enormous change, or even just inevitable change? How can we be open, however, to the possibility that when our future or even our day takes to the dog races instead of to church, we will know what we need to hold on to, and what let go of?

Maybe you have heard of Sue Austin, a woman in a wheelchair goes diving. To hear her speak is inspiring, and to see the photos of her swimming underwater is truly beautiful. You can watch her TEDTalk, and you will see for yourself. Ms. Austin’s goal is to change the way we see a person in a wheelchair, and to show how a wheelchair can also liberate and open up new possibilities in a person’s life. As the tale with the farmer illustrates, what looks so terrible might not necessarily be as bad as it seems when put into a different context. Maybe the thing that looks like the worst thing that ever happened to us could become the thing that saves us, similar to how the farmer’s son didn’t have to go to war because of his broken leg.

On the other hand, it could be that what happens to us might be worse than we could ever imagine. Nevertheless, again, as the story illustrates, things always change, even the terrible things can change. It’s true that we could lose our jobs. It’s true we could lose our health. These kinds of difficult changes make me wonder: what am I doing with my life? Am I living the way I want to be living in order to be accountable for the gift of life that God has given me? What motivates me? What is calling to my spirit to follow it? Am I bold enough to pursue it? What would happen if I did?

There is a wisdom of the heart, and there is practical wisdom. What is the wise thing to do? What do you want to get to the end of your life and say you lived for. Henry David Thoreau went to live at Walden pond as an experiment in living simply, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I am thinking very seriously about his choice. How much of what I am doing is noise and clutter getting in the way of what life is really trying to tell me about? You hear or perhaps have seen or known people who have had what has been termed a mid-life crisis where they are asking themselves what they are really doing underneath all the actions and choices they have made thus far in their lives. What have they built with their lives, they wonder? Who am I? Maybe we need to be asking ourselves these question all along in our lives so that we can live more authentic lives throughout our lives and not have to come to the point of a crisis.

We want to live our lives from the center of who we are, and that means taking time all along to know who we are, to listen. This is why it’s valuable to take time each day to pause, to offer gratitude, to reflect. Richard Rohr in his CD Healing Our Violence Through the Journey of Centering Prayer says, “All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect.

That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .”  In some way, most of us are afraid to let go of the security of our jobs, our houses, our hometowns–the things that have formed our identity. Rohr, in Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer has an interesting insight, however, regarding those who leave the beaten path, those who begin their experiment in living to confront the essential facts of life in order to live intentionally. “The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.” Is this true? Seamus Heaney’s final words to his wife were “Don’t be afraid,” and losing the one I most love is going to be the hardest, most fearful thing some day. ““The most common one-liner in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid.” Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times,” says Rohr in Falling Upward.

photo-20Things change. What we think we are standing on may move. At some point we are going to lose everything–we will lose our own life and the ones we love. But we don’t have to be afraid. How am I going to get to that space? I’m thinking hard these days about what I’ve held on to thinking that it will bring me happiness. But what is real? What are the essential facts of life, that if we learn them when we come to die, we will know we have lived? That is what I want to have the courage to live for.

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This Day We Are Living–An Experiment in Noticing

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Sonnet 73, That Time of Year When Thou Mayst in Me Behold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

—–

It’s late spring in Delhi, which means the leaves are falling from the trees. Yellow leaves, and gold gather on the streets, pile on curbsides in drifts. The flowers that the city plants in the parks so that that were in full bloom in February and early March, are now growing spindly as stalks lean into each other, heads droop, and their bodies begin to turn to seed. The seeds are their gift for the future, the brown, withered looking things that hold the future generosities of spring. After the six or eight weeks of flowers, fall arrives. Then the months of monsoon–the floods of rain. That’s the season we’re in now, the season between seasons–between the dry and the wet.

When I was attending what was then called Bethel College in St. Paul, MN, my poetry teacher read Shakespeare’s 73 sonnet to us, and asked us to go out and look at the fall leaves–the fiery Dutch elms that grow in profusion throughout the city’s streets, and that crowd along the Mississippi’s river banks. Leave your books, she suggested, and go out and notice them before they are gone. They don’t last long.

A native of southern California, I knew what it felt like to live through the Twin Cities long months of winter’s color deprivation and cold that followed September’s autumn.  For the most part, it seemed to me that Minnesotans loved their snowy winters. I had  heard various people I met there describe how they looked forward to winters–the snowshoeing and cross country skiing, the briskness in the air. But coming from the land of sun, where winters didn’t usually require much more than a light jacket and shoes that covered the toes, that anticipatory attitude was difficult for me to understand. I hadn’t learned to ski or skate, and for me getting bound up in sweaters and mittens, hats, thick socks any time you went out wasn’t something I looked forward to. Change is interesting, but I truly missed the freedom of wandering outside for a stroll, run, or bike ride. So, I followed my teacher’s suggestion, and went out to walk through trees on campus, and visited other campuses along Snelling Ave. whose campuses were thick with trees. I went down by the Mississippi as she suggested. It was glorious–all that color shining in the myriad leaves. All that sugar burning inside them as temperatures turned. The whole world a flame. As my teacher said, the trees were all the more beautiful, for knowing what would come next.

And what came next was winter. Dark branches silhouetted against white for months. Beautiful things often have a way of piercing the heart, of opening us–the last yellow leaf falling from a tree, rainbow color glistening from a spider’s web, the way clouds roll in low over the ocean at sunset. As Dana Jennings says in her NY Times article “Scratching a Muse’s Ears”, about Mary Oliver’s poetry book, Dog Songs, says, there are tears inside of things. Because we know this, it can make our heart ache when we see something beautiful. We’ve all eaten from the tree that lets us know we are not living in the garden anymore–but we know what it looks like, that last leaf falling from the tree before winter, and how it feels to watch it fall, joining the fire floating down the river or resting on the forest floor before it turns to dust.

So, all of you who have sat at your desk all day, I encourage you. Get up, leave your books or your office, you papers and your e-mail, and go outside and notice this day. Find what there is to love in this day, before you have to leave it. Notice life. What is it you are living?

THE TABLES TURNED 
William Wordsworth

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

___

Okay, so I took my own advice and got up and went out for a walk. I didn’t have a wood to walk in, so I took a walk around the block where I live. The wisps of clouds turning from pink to salmon against a pale turquoise sky–the kind of sky that is rare in Delhi.

It was a short walk around a city block. The first quarter of the block I couldn’t stop staring up in amazement. The second quarter of the block, I grew aware of the traffic noise as it hustled by.  As I turned the corner, I noticed a billboard that read “Platinum Living” with a sleek, blond-haired woman wearing an elegant low cut black gown and a long strand of pearls leaning back against a comfortable couch. I glanced down at the pair of abandoned black slippers at my feet on the sidewalk and wondered who this ad was aimed at speaking to in a city where a quarter of its population is below the poverty line, 30% live in slums, and in a country where the World Bank estimates that 21% of the deaths in India are related to unsafe water.  As I continued to walk, the acrid smell of burning leaves permeated the air, scratched at my throat, and made me cough. (Sadly, too many things here seem to makes me cough.) By the time I turned the last corner and entered my apartment door again, the sky’s color had drained away.

Wordsworth’s poem admonishes us to go out into nature with a listening heart, one that watches and receives. That is definitely the heart I stepped out of the door with, and is the one I want to hold on to. I live in a city, though. It’s not the same as standing at the ocean’s edge or walking amidst the redwoods. What was I expecting, anyway? In truth, I was just expecting to enjoy the early evening coolness and to take in the color-brushed clouds. I just happened to get the other experiences in addition because they are a part of this environment. The walk makes me wonder, though, can experiencing beauty motivate us to protect it, nurture it? Or are we so used to the traffic, the billboards, the burning leaves and discarded shoes, to the poor living in substandard housing, that we give up on beauty, that we forget to notice those gestures of grace nature gives us even in the city from time to time–those rare moments of clear sky and color-streaked clouds that open our eyes, move us out of our routines, the moments that call us to step out of our brokenness into the possibility of another way of being?

On the other hand, maybe its that very poverty and brokenness around me that encourages me to notice the way the sky sometimes opens into a canvas of shinning color, as it did this evening. Either way, I need those moments of open sky and color. They carry me through winters. The winters I’m talking about don’t always necessarily always come with snow and cold. They can look like a multitude of cities flung across this world, or any place where we are too busy to notice or take care of what nurtures us.