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Seeing Wonder

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For those living in the US or other places in the world within the temperate zone, it is spring, a time of flowering and vibrant green leaves emerging from winter’s dormancy. For us living here in Delhi, spring happened back in February. The earth now is about as dry and dusty as it will be all  year. Temperatures rise to over 100’s F/4o C, the air fills with a powdery dust so light that it hangs in the air for days without settling. It is the kind of weather that scratches the eyes and lungs and makes you long for the monsoon rains to come.

But the dust and dry air are only one reality. There are other worlds to know, whole worlds inside of this world. We walk by them, unaware, every day. Some people like Louie Schwartzberg, make it their life’s work to help us notice, to really look at the world around us so we can see its wonder.View his TED Talk on the hidden beauty of pollination and you can discover for yourself. Even house flies are beautiful, I realized, as I watched them hovering over flowers here in his film where a hummingbirds pivot through the air chasing an insect, monarchs and bees fill the heavens as if moving inside a surrealist’s dream, and bats plunge their heads into the rich  liquid red center of a flower.

We need people with hearts to see the world with eyes like Mr. Schwartzberg’s to help remind us of what Fredrich Buechner speaks of in Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

The world is full of beauty, even if I feel I can’t see it from my window. Do you, like me,  long to touch wonder? How will I make space in my life to look for beauty, for wonder today? That is a question I am asking myself this morning.

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Remembering How to See

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“But what the poets sees with his always new vision is not what is “imaginary”; he sees what others have forgotten how to see. The poet is always inadvertently stripping away the veils and showing us his reality. Many poets, as we know, go mad because they cannot bear the worlds of illusion and falsehood in which most human beings spend their lives.” – Karl Shapiro, “What is Not Poetry?”

Writing is a way of getting to the truth of what I see, a way to peal back the layers, to ask what is this I have experienced,  how do I name it, what is its essence? There are two kinds of knowing–the experience itself, and then the re-experiencing when in the act of writing. Writing  allows me to burrow in to the original experience and know it more completely. The experiences I have nurture ideas for writing, and the writing enriches and deepens the experience. The two things are intimately intertwined.

Writing poetry is a way to keep alive, to keep in touch with the mystery. Wanting to name the mystery doesn’t lessen it, instead it helps to increase its wonder. I want to always be filled with wonder like I was as a child looking out the window of the house my father built at the sea of fog as it filled the valley below leaving islands of hills. The hills and the fog were not just objects with names, they were part of a geography that absorbed me into itself and defined me.

“The poet,” Shapiro says,”sees what others have forgotten how to see. “How do people arrive at the place where they forget how to see? How do I live in such a way that I am not asleep, so that I nurture the eyes and ears of the heart?

When I write, I am try to see with eyes open, to understand, to touch the live nerve where life touches the bone so that I know what my experiences are trying to say to me about how to live. If I want to write well, I must listen intently to the life around me and live with an attitude of vulnerability and humility. I can’t allow myself to get wrapped up in the desire to have a name, status, power, or be concerned with the competition or what others say about my work. Focusing on how people might perceive me or my work, would drain the real strength of my work and effort. It would distract, from the goal of writing itself, and get in the way of seeing and understanding that makes for good writing. The important thing is the work of writing, and to find as I write how to draw closer to being able to say what can’t be said–to stand inside the holy space of life. I must live leaning in to my experiences, looking, listening–then write what I see and hear, including the questions.

Our culture is very interested in competition and position, making it difficult to keep focused on the work of living deeply and writing honestly. A poet must be fully immersed in the world, seeing it, knowing it, but at the same time outside of it. As Shapiro goes on to say in the same essay, “Whenever the poet is not “oned” with the experience we can always detect the forcing, the insincerity.” It is this oneness with our experiences and with the world that allows us to know we are alive, and opens the door for us to experience meaning.

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Trying Something New

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I joined Michael Citrino’s art night at school this spring and made my very first bowls from clay. I loved being able to go on Thursday evenings and immerse myself in an activity that is so completely tangible and yet so fully engages the mind at the same time. There is something wholly wonderful and restorative about letting go into the experience.

Julia Cameron in Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity, says, “The human being, by definition, is a creative being. We are to make things and, in the old phrase, to “make something of ourselves.” When we lose interest in ourselves and our lives, when we tell ourselves dreams don’t matter or that they are impossible, we are denying our spiritual heritage…We become depressed and drained, even physically ill. We become snappish, irritable, high-strung. We call ourselves neurotic – this is not the case. We are not neurotic, we are miserable – miserable because have stifled our creative selves. Those selves are well—and too large for the cage we have put them in, the cage we call “normal.” (57)

Making a clay bowl is a long process and there are many different skills involved, from how to roll out the clay and get the bubbles out of it, to shaping the clay, to painting the under glaze on in a pleasing way and shape that communicates what you intend, then there is all the knowledge needed for how to fire a kiln and how to let it cool. Each part of the process requires a separate bank of knowledge. Making a piece of pottery takes a lot of patience. If you rush the process, there’s a much higher chance that it won’t turn out. At the same time, there are many variables along the way which can make your piece not turn out so well that are not really under your control–such as what will happen in the kiln once you finish the smoothing. It’s wonderful having the final product of the finished bowl, but there is something equally valuable about being involved in the state of making.

I was inspired by the Italian Majolica pottery, and wanted to make a pomegranate and a lemon bowl because I love the rich colors in the Majolica designs. Since I never had an art class in school, it was challenging to draw the shape of the fruit, and painting with a glaze color is not like painting with the color the object will be after it is fired. You can’t be too tied up in the end product because there are so many variables that could go wrong along the way. Like many creative endeavors, what the end product would actually turn out like was a bit of a mystery, and I looked forward to discovering what that would be. Yesterday evening, the pomegranate bowls I made were “born.” Below is one of the results. I am happy.

Pomegranate Bowl

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Three New Poems

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In January, I created writing goals for each month, spurred on by an online conversation with Lisa O’Hara, long time friend from graduate school at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. One of those monthly goals was to send out some poems for publication. The first result of that effort is that three poems were accepted by phren-Z the on-line journal from my hometown, Santa Cruz, CA. I’m very happy to be published in a journal in a town that has  so many fine writers. In the same issue, my friend, mystery writer, Vinnie Hansen has an essay appearing in the issue exploring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Check it out here!

The spring issue launches May 15, and I have three new poems appearing there. “She Sings” is for Skye Sanford, one of the singers in the Delhi band, the Paisleys, that my husband, Michael plays harmonica with. The other two poems are about working in the garden and on our property in the Soquel hills above Santa Cruz.

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Origin of the Chapbook

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My friend, Carolyn Boyd, recently published, The DNA of Sand, a chapbook of poems set in a variety of locations from Turkey to Texas, with poems that will surprise, delight and help you to see the world from a variety of perspectives.

Did you ever wonder about the origin of that slim volume we call the chapbook? If so, check out its history on Sam Riedel’s blog post, “Chapbooks: A Short History of the Short Book”.

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Productivity vs. Presence

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“Many of us have a mind that measures self-worth in terms of productivity. If I did not produce anything today, if I did not write a book, give a speech, bake bread, earn money, sell something, buy something, get a good grade on a test, or find my soul mate, then my day was wasted and I am a failure. We give ourselves no credit for taking “being” time, for just being present. “Waiting” is thus a source of frustration.

 

And yet, if you asked the people you care about what they would like most from you, their answer is likely to be some version of “your presence” or “your loving attention.” Presence has no measurable product except positive feelings, feelings of support, intimacy, and happiness. When we stop being busy and productive and switch to just being still and aware, we ourselves will also feel support, intimacy, and happiness, even if no one else is around. These positive feelings are a product that is much desired but that cannot be bought. They are the natural result of presence. They are a birthright that we have forgotten we have.”

 

― Jan Chozen Bays from How to Train a Wild Elephant

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Finding Courage

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I receive weekly messages in my box from Joan Chittister, of Monasteries of the Heart, and this past week when I received her message, I couldn’t help but think she was speaking directly to me as I am seriously asking what am I meant to do with my life. Here are Chittister’s words:

“We are all on our way to somewhere, however undefined, however unconscious. Without really knowing it, perhaps, we spend our days looking for the way out of the maze of indecision, of discomfort, of unfinishedness that can so easily become the soul’s permanent residence. We struggle for the way to an egress that is not there. We live looking for something that beckons but is not clear. Why? Because we can feel it within us, that’s why. It never quiets; it never sleeps. It just keeps urging us on. But to where? Answer: to nowhere I know, to do nothing I can see right now. Sometimes closer than others, always tantalizing, always just out of reach; the feeling of being in the wrong place gets so strong it can be painful.

The problem is that without clear intention, without ever stopping long enough to determine where we will end up if we stay on the road we’re on now, the purpose of life can sink into the routine of routine and little more. We simply go along, turning with the turns in the road but never plotting a course of our own. Never facing the single greatest question of life: Why was I born? Meaning, what am I meant to be? What was I made to do?

If those questions are never dealt with, never answered, then we may be breathing but we are not fully alive.

We must come to understand that the residual dissatisfaction with life as we have shaped it for ourselves is the very essence of what we name “call.” Clearly, it is at the moments of dissatisfaction with life as we know it now that the door to the future swings open for us. There is something missing in the making of who we are meant to be that we are being goaded to pursue.”

I have chosen to be a teacher, and have truly loved what I do, but something is goading me these days from inside, making me wonder if I am really giving to my life the fullness of all I can be, all I am here on Earth for.  When I listen closely, I am hearing a still, small voice rising up saying there is something more to become and do, what you have been doing so far has just been the preparation. There is another life in the making, working its way slowly toward birth.

If you look at the flowers after they go to seed, like the lettuce that is currently turning to seed in our window box, you will see that before death, there is the seed. The seed can give birth to new life once planted. What especially intrigues me in Chittister’s words above is that the answer she gives for where to go when we are searching for our new direction in life. Of course most of us want that place we go to to be somewhere concrete and tangible, somewhere secure, but Chittister tells us the place we go to is “to nowhere I know, to do nothing I can see right now.”  This is the existential leap, isn’t it–the faith or courage to step out when you can’t see?

Anais Nin said, “Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.” Learning to live with courage is a bit like rock climbing. My husband Michael took me rock climbing in the early years of our relationship. When I did my first climbs, I wanted to cling to the rock and pull my body in close to it. The rock seemed so solid and safe, but in reality, to keep my balance when climbing it was better to stand up on my toes and give myself a bit of distance from the rock. That was non intuitive and a bit frightening, but when I did it, I could see how much easier it was to climb up the rock’s face.When we reach out for this new place we want to go with our lives, it seems intuitive to want to hold on to something secure and solid. Maybe this is the right thing to do if you want another version of what you already have, but what if you want a whole different way of living and being?

I don’t know. And I don’t know if I’m ready for the big leap into the dark at this point. Change that endures is, or needs to be a process of organic growth, a slow process of change over time. Can a person become more courageous through practice? I don’t know.  But I can practice going toward a place of change in small ways. I can use my mind and imagination to stretch out into the unknown. Arms open, I can sit quietly saying to the universe, “Here I am,”  practicing opening to a new way of living in my heart. I can lean in to life and listen for the way I should walk. As the Thai proverb says, “Life is so short, we must move very slowly.” Slowing down purposefully each day can help me to listen to what it is my life is telling me. I can pause purposefully each day and come home to myself in an attitude of openness to what it is I am being called toward in those areas I feel dissatisfied with, and simply listen for what is surfacing.

Since all of life is a journey and the process is just as important, if not more important than the end of the journey, while waiting to understand what the next direction of my life should be, it is important, in the mean time, that I go to work and let myself dwell with the questions and uncertainty as an important part of the process. There is deep value in living out the questions, as Rilke pointed out in his letters to a young poet, until you someday live into the answer. Living with the uncertainty in this way allows for the answer, when it eventually becomes clear, to be understood from the inside. The work I have now, and the way I give myself to that work is the seed of the work I will be able to do in the future, when I have transformed into a different way of working, living and being.

Though part of me wants to know what the next phase of my life is, I recognize that I don’t need to know the plan. I can just walk step by step toward knowing. I don’t have to become all at once. At our wedding ceremony, Michael and I had a friend read the passage from The Velveteen Rabbit where the rabbit is asking the skin horse about what it means to be real and the horse tells him, “Real isn’t how you are made…It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long, time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” Maybe you need to love your questions, need to live with, walk with and love them, so that when you live into the answers, you can speak them from the heart.The journey is as important as the destination. We have the gift of time to learn. Each day is our gift. I want to see the questions as a gift.

Buddhist priest and author, Thich Nhat Hahn in a conference for educators here in India in September of 2008 spoke about how important it is that headmasters at schools take care of the teacher in order to take care of those they are educating. I am not a headmaster, but I want to discover more of what I can do as an educator in order to take care of myself so that I do not pass on to my students a sense of over-activeness. Deep understanding arises from a calm mind. Feeding the mind, body and spirit the nutrients and qualities it needs in order to nourish our own spirits and those of who we meet–that is the foundation I want to act from.

In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton, quoting Quaker professor and theologian, Douglas V. Steere said:

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

I belong to a culture of activism where doing is important. But perhaps there is too much of life given over to doing. Without pause, without a balance of being, the doing looses impact and meaning, and I want to live a life of meaning–to live with more weight given to being. I can’t learn how to live this by myself. I am not strong enough to pull against the tides of culture. There are others who seek greater balance between doing and being. How can we together walk our way toward a different way of living?

Today it is hot, the air, still, as I look outside my living room. But the monsoon wind and rain is sure to arrive soon.
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What is Our Real Work?

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The Real Work
Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

—–

May in New Delhi, India, and the heat grows beyond 100 degrees.  Monsoon season is on its way. Eliot said “April is the cruelest month,” but in New Delhi, India, it is May. Dusty, and dry, shabby, the earth is forsaken of the flower blossoms that a month ago brought thousands out to Lodhi gardens and the presidential palace to gaze in awe as they glowed under the sunlight. May is difficult. It the ending of the school year, the end of a cycle, and it makes me reflect on my work as a teacher, so when I came across Berry’s poem a few weeks back, and read the line, “the impeded spring is the one that sings,” it made me consider how what I perceive as difficulties might be telling me about what the real work of my life is. Difficulties can be an opportunity to practice thinking and living differently from the habitual ways. They can also point us in a new direction. Maybe the hard things in our lives are really pointing us toward something new that wants to be born, something we have not been noticing or paying attention to.

My first year living in Delhi, my husband Michael and I noticed how all the trees on our street were losing their leaves, and we thought that they were dying. We felt very sad to see them go. Little did we know the trees were merely losing their leaves so that the yellow blossoms could break forth. The trees have to lose their leaves so they can do the next part of their work–make blossoms. I’m looking forward to the blossoms, but first I need to go inside those things that seem difficult and ask myself what they are telling me.

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The Mandorla

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Recently I read renowned Jungian psychologist, Robert A. Johnson’s book, Owning Your Own Shadow, Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, where I learned about the mandorla. Most people know what a mandala is, but a mandorla, Johnson explains is “that almond-shaped segment that is made when two circles partly overlap…This symbol signifies nothing less than the overlap of the opposites…the overlap of heaven and earth.” Many of Europe’s cathedrals have mandorlas and often either Christ or the Virgin Mary is framed in the mandorla. Johnson says that the mandorla is the place of poetry. Johnson explains that the mandorla can help us when we no longer know how to live between the pull of opposites in our lives. It can help us rebind what is torn apart.

“It is the duty of a true poetry to take the fragmented world that we find ourselves in and to make unit of it…All poetry is based upon the assertion that this is that. When the images overlap, we have a mystical statement of unity. We feel there is safety and sureness in our fractured world, and the poet has given us the gift of synthesis.

Great poetry makes these leaps and unites the beauty and the terror of existence. It has the ability to surprise and shock–to remind us that there are links between the things we have always thought of as opposites.”

Johnson goes on to explain that if we make a practice of our effort to create poetry, we can find a way to see how the two worlds are really a part of each other, part of a larger whole. The space in the center where the circles overlap will grow larger and larger, until we see that everything is actually only part of a larger whole. Essentially, I see what he is talking about like this: We get born into a culture and we learn to place things in certain forms. We learn we are this, but not that. This is part of growing up and we function under the laws and ways of being of that culture. Our culture is just a form, a shape, and it is good to learn the rules for the ways of being that are given to us–it is part of being human. Then, at some point in our lives we go through a kind of crisis when things more or less fall apart or become very difficult, and we move out of that Garden and into the world. It is in this space where there are no clear cut laws that we learn how to have true relationship.

This struggle between opposites, the not heaven and not earth is where we learn authentic relationship and learn who we are–where we do the work of becoming. Maybe this is what St. Paul recognized when he encouraged the followers of Jesus to be in the world but not of the world. (Romans 12:2)  Johnson says that “to balance out our cultural indoctrination, we need to do our shadow work on a daily basis.” By this he means to consciously be aware of it and confront it ritually each day, and to spend time consciously letting it go of it. This has the benefit of not imposing our shadow side on others, which also enables us to do less harm in the world by not feeding the general unrest and conflict that is there. The other result, Johnson says, is “that we prepare the way for the mandorla–that high vision of beauty and wholeness that is the great prize of human consciousness.”  Ceremonies such as the mass of the Christian church, he says is one of the ways culture enables us to live out the unwanted elements symbolically so we do not live it out in real life.

Johnson’s discussion reminds me of Lorca’s essay on duende where Lorca describes how the Muse struggles with death, and in that tension is where great art is born.

As Lorca decribes it–

“ The true struggle is with the duende.

The roads where one searches for God are known, whether by the barbaric way of the hermit or the subtle one of the mystic: with a tower, like St. Teresa, or by the three paths of St. John of the Cross. And though we may have to cry out, in Isaiah’s voice: Truly you are a hidden God,’ finally, in the end, God sends his primal thorns of fire to those who seek Him.

Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline.

We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks, or strips Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer stark naked in the cold of the Pyrenees, or sends Jorge Manrique to wait for death in the wastes of Ocaña, or clothes Rimbaud’s delicate body in a saltimbanque’s costume, or gives the Comte de Lautréamont the eyes of a dead fish, at dawn, on the boulevard.” (Garcia Lorca, Theory and Play of the Duende)

What I especially love about Johnson’s book is in the way it clearly describes large and complex ideas in accessible language.  The work of our lives is to balance being with doing. Our culture strongly emphasizes doing–who we know, what we know, how accomplished we are, how we can market our skills, etc. Johnson is suggests that the more we can balance doing with being the more whole and healthy we will be. He quotes Jung as saying, “Find out what a person fears most, and that is where he will develop next.” Basically, living in the in between places is where we do our soul work, the work that will enable us to move to a greater place of wholeness. We are like Jacob, wrestling with our angel and the place where we can contact the duende is where the art of our life is born, it is where Spirit lives and where we work out our salvation.

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The Other Birthdays

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Recently, Adrian Juric of Inner Landscapes hiking retreats, suggested that we celebrate the other birthdays of our lives, not just the one where we entered the world on a particular day. I love that idea. 10 weeks ago I had one of those other birthdays–the day I began to take Sundays off, purposely choosing not to work. It is changing my life. I am growing more aware of the value of limitations, and more aware of how hungry I am for the part of myself where I feel most alive–when I am writing, or creating, when I am walking about,  bicycling out into the world, or when I am swimming. In the world we live in, what we do, how much we do, who we know, where we’ve been–all those external measurements, count. When I write, I go home to myself.  I get to explore the interior world and try and make sense out of the dissonant, the world’s disturbing and beautiful complexity in all its wonder. I get to focus on being. This is central thing that keeps me writing. It is a way to slow down and explore what this life is that I am living, to ask questions of it, to go inside it and poke around, to play. A writing practice can be a way to  make a commitment to ourselves to honor and nurture who we are, what we most value. Fredrich Buechner says, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

Starting this blog is a writing birthday of sorts, but this blog is also a way to invite others along on this journey of writing as a spiritual practice and an exploration of the world. I look forward to the conversation.