Tag: E.E. Cummings

poetry

In a Community of Gentleness

annacitrino
“It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break…You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it’s the soft things that can’t break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!”  –C. JoyBell C.
Igor Mitoraj’s Icarus at Temple of Concordi, Agrigento, Sicily

After the recent shootings in Florida, the U.S. president stated “We have to harden our schools, not soften them.”  When difficulties happen, people are often encouraged to toughen up and get hard, to take charge, gain control. Strength is associated with toughness, power and the ability to fight back and win battles. I’m more interested in a different way of being in the world, though, the way of gentleness and humility. The world is full of so many hurts–people have lost homes, their health, their loved ones, and more. From bullying to physical abuse, humans suffer in innumerable ways. From what I observe, the world doesn’t need more hardness. There is already so much suffering everywhere we look. When we are hurt by others or are less than we hoped we’d be, what we want is to be comforted. When we suffer, we want someone’s soft words or arms. We want gentleness.

It’s rare, though, to hear of those who aim to become more gentle, making me wonder what needs to be in place before we are able to respond to each other from a state of what might be called willful kindness.

To be gentle means to be tenderhearted, kind, to be soft. Soft things are supple, can bend and are less likely to be brittle and break. As I reflect on the foundation necessary for gentleness to thrive between people, it seems a first thing needed is a foundation of trust, and trust involves a recognition of what it means to be in relationship. In Western culture, we have the idea that the world is full of inanimate objects available for manipulation and use. Overall, our awareness that we’re a part of a great life web, part of each other is somewhat shallow. Too often, it seems, people feel free to act without concern for the impact their behavior has on the larger community, including the community of the natural environment.

One recent example of this failure to see oneself as part of a larger community is in the me-first behavior of the drug firm executive Martin Shekreli. In his lack of respect for the larger community, Shekreli defrauded investors and increased the price of a life saving drug by 5,000% per pill. Dominic Rushe, writing for The Guardian quotes John Coffee of Columbia law school regarding Shekreli’s general attitude while in the courtroom, ‘“His behavior during the trial was arrogant, and he treated the judge as an irrelevancy. Every defense counsel I know, and I know a lot of them, instructs his client to be respectful and modest because ultimately the judge is going to sentence you. Your arrogance can cost you a very high price.”‘ Shekreli’s arrogance in response to difficulty is very different from a group of doctors in Quebec. Robin Levinson-King in her BBC article, “Why Quebec doctors have rejected a pay rise,” reports that the Québécois doctors asked for their salary increases to “be cancelled and that the resources of the system be better distributed for the good of the healthcare workers and to provide health services worthy to the people of Quebec.” These doctors are are aware that what they do and the attitude they demonstrate affects the lives around them. How utterly refreshing to be part of a society where people recognize their actions affect the greater good and willingly respond accordingly.

When we confront difficult experiences in our lives, rather than getting tough, perhaps it’s better to act with gentleness, and to draw closer to the suffering in order to listen to what it is telling us so we can find the clues for how the suffering can be addressed or possibly healed. To do this, we need to be able to understand how we’re interconnected with others. Charles Eisenstein in his book,  The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, writes about interbeing and its defining principles. The first two of these principles are: “That my being partakes of your being and that of all beings. This goes beyond interdependency—our very existence is relational. That, therefore, what we do to another, we do to ourselves.” In family dynamics, as well as in personal love relationships where we are in close proximity with each other on an ongoing interactive basis, our awareness of these principals of interbeing are heightened. If one person becomes upset, everyone feels it and responds. If people are relaxed or focused on a particular activity–this, too, affects everyone’s behavior. When everyone in a group is in tune with each other, the air is suffused with gentleness, and you function on a foundation of trust that people are doing their part. It’s like participating in an orchestra–each person plays their own notes but the notes relate to each other rhythmically and melodically to create music.

E. E. Cummings writes beautifully about interbeing in his love poem “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”

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i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

 

For ill or for good, how we respond to events affects others. Humans are social beings, and because of what we now understand about how mirror neurons function in our brains, we can say that people do, in a real sense carry each other’s hearts in their own hearts. When we observe someone else feeling sad, we see the emotion in their facial or body gestures, and our own brain cells connecting to what that person is feeling light up.

When we allow ourselves to be a channel for wellbeing, doing what we can to relieve other’s suffering, we tend to feel more centered, more in love with life. Our fears diminish, and we come to sense our connection to what Cummings names as “whatever a moon has always meant/ and whatever a sun will always sing.” Cummings names so well the awareness of interbeing brings: wonder. We can regain a sense of awe and an awareness of our place within the greater cosmos–a place of humility, but also that allows us to feel more alive, whole, more content–and as a result, more gentle.

In a world clambering for position and recognition, to be gentle takes courage. To stand inside the sharpened razors or heat created by living alongside people struggling for prestige, territory and power and yet remain gentle is difficult and very challenging. To survive in these contexts requires actively and routinely grounding ourselves in something wider and larger than our own intelligence, achievement or privileged place. We can ground ourselves with a wider foundation through developing a purposeful connection to community. Participating in a community that nourishes our spirits and building connections there can enable people to find ways to sustain themselves through difficulty and to become more than they could be by themselves. Research shows us, according to Robert Waldinger in his TEDTalk, “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness,” that those who are happiest in life fare the best are those who “lean into relationships with family, friends, and community.” Deep relationship requires taking time for trust to grow enough that people feel free to open themselves. Some possible ways to begin this journey with others are to share dinners, go on walks, listen to music, read books, essays or poems, attend plays, do art, share jokes, tell stories or to simply sit silent beneath a tree gazing up at the branches and the sky together–anything that creates spaces of being where lives can unfold naturally, and differences can be valued. In this context of relationship with a desire to keep the bond between each other, a natural kind of respect develops.

In community we can become free to begin to live beyond the fear of each other or the threat of being bulldozed by someone clambering for attention, position or power, we can let go of competition and focus on being present with each other. Gentleness can emerge. We can create time and space to hear, see, and know each other. Though he doesn’t name it as interbeing, E. E. Cummings intimates it in his poem; interbeing is the secret–the bud, root, tree and sky–the essence of everything. Our lives are intertwined. “I carry your heart in my heart.” To know this, to live in this gentle awareness, is what brings us into the presence and wonder of existence itself–the mystery of what it is that holds up the stars and keeps them in balance.

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Italian-American, poetry, Uncategorized, writing

Worlds Inside of Words

annacitrino

“Quite a few years of life have strengthened my conviction that each and everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others: life is not time merely passing by, life is about interactions.” ~Pope Francis

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Market in Catania, Sicily

I’ve been working on writing and revising a manuscript I’ve titled A Space Between, a series of linked narrative poems about southern Italians immigrating to San Francisco at the turn of the previous century. I started this series of poems about four years ago, set them aside for a few years, and have recently returned to them. The writing began as a result of listening to Gabriel Faure’s Apres un Reve (“After a Dream”), sent to me by a colleague I worked with in New Delhi, India who played the cello beautifully. Because I like to write poems in response to music, I suggested he play a piece of music on the cello and I would write a poem to go with it. As I listened to Faure’s piece, I pictured Naples’ wide harbor as I had seen it at sunset on a trip to southern Italy–the sky a brilliant, burning orange with a single boat sailing off into the far horizon. The music embodied feelings of deep tenderness and loss—how I imagine it  felt when my husband’s grandparents left Calabria to sail for America at the turn of the previous century. To lose the ones you love is to lose a world. How enormous the feeling must have been for immigrants as the boat they sailed on pulled away from shore and they realized they might never again walk on the land that shaped them or see once more those they hold dear. This experience of departure is where my manuscript began.

The process of writing A Space Between has been simultaneously like looking through a telescope into a deep space of ever expanding worlds, as well as peering down into a microscope at the fascinating details inside one life, event or moment. After I’d written the first poem, I discovered I had many questions about the Italian immigrant experience, leading me to research for answers. A wide range of writers have helped me developed a sense of life in both Calabria, Italy, and San Francisco, California in the early decades of the last century. Bit by bit, the research expanded both my understanding and my questions, motivating me to write more poems. As I continued to research, read and write, I eventually realized that along with the immigrants who left their country and struggled toward making a life in a new place, I too was on a journey. Now, approximately ninety pages later, I’ve got a completed draft, though I realize there’s much more to understand. My questions and interest in immigrant stories continues.

A Space Between unfolds through a series of narrative poems told from different characters’ perspectives. In creating a world through story or poetry, as in a mosaic, writers, and readers, see how worlds are interconnected— the interior life of characters with the physical world and with the social setting. In creating a narrative, you create a world. Language is a central mode of finding and making meaning. I feel deeply grateful for how writing the story in poems has changed me, not only because of what I learned through what I read, but also for the way the act of writing brings me deeper into the heart of humanity and the worlds we share.

Stories occur in a setting that shapes the narrative. In addition to the physical geography of a location, place is also created by how we name the world we are a part of, and how we use language to talk and write about it. Place is an integration of experience, imagination, thinking, emotion, and the words we give our experience about a place. Employing your imagination to write a story or a narrative poem moves a writer beyond the facts into a felt experience. Through the process of writing, I see ever more clearly how intricately interrelated events and lives are–how worlds live inside of worlds, touching each other in deep and powerful ways, affecting all that comes after. That changes how you think, feel, and respond to the world around you.

We don’t have to be a writer, however, to sense the power of our words. We might begin simply by telling our memories to a friend or child. It’s good to tell our stories as well as to say yes to listening to others’ stories in order to enter into their worlds. I knew little about the Italian American experience of those who came to San Francisco before I began the journey of trying to their stories in poems. Their history wasn’t taught at schools I attended as a child or found in textbooks; neither was it a shared family story. By trying to learn the stories of that era and finding the words that might bring them alive, whole new worlds have opened to me–including having a better understanding of what it might be like for those in our own era whose worlds have fallen apart causing them to leave their homes and all they’ve known to enter strange worlds with hopes for a better life.

In his poem, “Love is a Place,” E. E. Cummings explains this interconnectivity.

Love is a Place

love is a place
& through this place of
love move(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds

Love is the ground we walk on, the atmosphere we breathe, the space we move in. Love is the place we all want to live in. We might read a lot about a subject, travel the world looking at facts and scenes from the windows of our own experience, curious about ways of being that puzzle us. When we enter the arms of one we know loves us, though, we intuitively feel we belong. To say yes to love is to say yes to a deeper place of knowing and belonging. As Pope Francis says, “life is about interactions.” To say yes to love is to recognize relationship is a life source. We sense we’re home. Humans are meant for relationship. Relationships with others, with ourselves, and with the natural world help us find our purpose and express what we find meaningful.

We have the ability to create worlds and places of love with our words. Words are a kind of magic, and are powerful in their ability to heal or to harm. Writers think carefully about what words make the world they want their readers to experience. Similarly, in making a place of love in our lives, we want to be aware of choosing words that evoke the world we want to live in with those around us. The recently reported news story of how two Lebanese twin brothers, Mohamed and Omar Kabbani, created a project called “Operation Salam” is an illustration of this idea of the power of words. Selecting a neighborhood in Tripoli, Lebanon, a previous war zone during Lebanon’s civil war between 1975 and 1990, the brothers painted rooftops a bright lime green so that from above, the word salam, or peace, could be read. The project brought the neighborhood together, as approximately 50 people worked to find places in the neighborhood where the brothers could carry out their painting project. “…The people from both sides want to live peacefully,” explained Mohamed. This single word, salam, literally proclaims from the rooftops this Lebanese neighborhood’s desire for peace. Interestingly, by saying “yes” to their roofs being painted, a larger world of “yes” took place—a kind of healing and making of a world they want to live in. Through the physical embodiment of the word as well as neighbors cooperating with each other where previously sectarian violence had occurred, the artists, with this single word, moved people once enemies further toward living peacefully.

To write about something is to enter a door inviting us into a deeper relationship with our subject and the possibility of falling in love with it. When we are in relationship with someone or something, we are listening for what the other is communicating so we can respond. Several times now, I’ve thought I was finished the manuscript of poems about Calabrian immigrants to San Francisco, but then I learn something more about the immigrant experience or Italians in America, and I want to reconsider what I previously said or thought. Keep listening, the story seems to tell me; there’s more to understand. Around us everywhere are worlds that beckon for us to listen. Inside of words, entire worlds exist. Stories, even a single word we share with another, can open a space for understanding and connection, and writing is a way to enter into a place of love.

 

community, spirtuality

What Makes Love Last?

annacitrino

-how fortunate are you and i,whose home  is timelessness:we who have wandered down  from fragrant mountains of eternal now  to frolic in such mysteries as birth  and death a day(or maybe even less)

E.E. Cummings, “stand with your lover on the ending earth-” 

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Redwoods, Nisene Marks State Park, CA

I will soon be celebrating the marriage of one of my family members that has lasted several decades, 40 years to be exact, and I’ve been giving some thought as to what it is that enables a love relationship to endure over such an extended period of time. When my parents were in their 60’s, I interviewed them about their lives, asking how it was they met and married. My parents married during the Great Depression and it was a simple affair–no party, no special wedding dress, no photos. It was a regular day except they got married, and that event changed their lives. Neither of them emphasized the romantic aspect of their relationship in relating their history to me, and yet I never doubted that they loved each other and were committed to the relationship even though there was a period of years that my father lived away from home managing jobs in other states and came home once or twice a month. What was it that enabled their love to endure through time? Communication seemed an important key to my parents’ connection to each other. I remember hearing the low hum of my parents’ voices through the walls in the mornings and after we children went to bed. There was also a a commitment to the relationship in the bigger, long-term sense–that they were there for each other and for their children, even when apart. During WWII Dad worked in Hawaii, and also worked out of town for a number of years when I was in junior high and high school–but my parents wrote each other letters frequently and regularly made trips to be with each other. Dad wrote stories and poems that he shared with us as well.

My parents were also committed to being there for people in the larger community–to helping neighbors, friends and other people that they came in contact with or learned about that needed help. Dad built and repaired things for many people, and brought people turkeys at holidays, for example, while Mom sewed quilts and clothes for others. My parents didn’t live simply to improve their own lives, they contributed to their community. Helping others was an important part of living. Together they embodied what Martin Seligman in his study of the science behind of what creates a meaningful life has found–that people who feel their lives offer them a deep sense of meaningful fulfillment are those that use their personality strengths for a purpose larger than themselves. Much of this kind of caring, this love, can be carried on without words. It is a way of being together. Love is given in the tone inside and underneath the words, and is the mood inside the actions spoken with the body. As one of my friends told me, “A lot of what love is is simply showing up–being there for each other.”

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Forest Path, Nisene Marks State Park, CA

Being there for each other. What does that look like? The Buddhist leader and monk from Vietnam Thich Nhat Hahn in an interview with Oprah, explained when asked if he meditates every day, that he is also meditating “while drinking, while talking, while writing, while watering our garden, it’s always possible to practice living in the here and the now.” (Read more on the Oprah website “Oprah Talks to Thich Nhat Hahn” here.) Thay (as Thich Nhat Hahn is also called) goes on to say that when sitting with someone, “Darling I am here for you,” is his mantra. He explains. “When you love someone, the best you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? ” This attitude of a listening heart is what I mean by showing up for the ones you love: in your full being you are intentionally, consciously present. You are listening not just to the other person’s words and actions, but to his or her heart, to the silences and things the person can’t quite articulate, even if you’re not sure what everything means that you are hearing or noticing. You are present for the other with your full self, and you work to know who you are so you can give yourself in a caring, open way.

Pamela Dussault in her The Huffington Post article, “5 Essential Steps to a Happy, Enduring Relationship” suggests that couples need to know their purpose for being together. The base for the relationship rather than focused on fear or the desire to control, has the focus of sharing life of companionship. Also, she describes that enduring relationships are those where partners have the ability to give and receive without having expectations. Lastly, she says partners in happy relationships connect with each other both emotionally and spiritually, appreciating the partner’s uniqueness.  A key, she suggests is that “your partner must be seen, loved, appreciated and cherished for who they are, as they are.”

Romantic love has been central to the idea of marriage in the Western world since the time of the Middle Ages and the troubadours when knights accomplished their deeds for the love of their lady. While enduring love can include romance as well as traditions, negotiating between both passion and what makes a love stable, creating a relationship of lasting love encompasses a larger territory than romantic love or tradition alone. To ask what makes love endure is to ask what is the source or foundation of the love. To ask what creates love’s foundation is to ask what is it that makes love meaningful. To ask that is to ask what makes life meaningful, and to ask what makes a life. Is life just going through the days sharing food and shelter? Is it doing a sport or if talking about a relationship, is it participating in a sport or (any other activity) together? Is it having children together or accomplishing tasks at work? Certainly, these are parts of what life is, and some of these things could be called necessary elements of life, but if that were the whole of what it was, life could still feel empty. If life were composed of going through certain actions, or saying the right words at the right time in the right way, that also wouldn’t be enough to make one feel he or she was really living life.

E.E. Cummings’ poem at the start of this post begins with the line, “stand with your lover on the ending earth.” The earth is a physical object, and all objects wear out or wear down over time. At some point the earth and everything on it will end. Cummings begins this love poem in the awareness that all is at the “mercy of time.” We will die. The earth will die. But love is somehow beyond time. The home of all love abides in a mysterious essence beyond time. It is part of what Cummings describes as “the fragrant mountains of eternal now.” We frolic in the mysteries of birth and death, but acts done in love, living done with love, time where we sit with someone with the attitude and heart that communicates both with words or without them, “Darling, I am here for you,” that lives on in a place both in and beyond time. That love allows us a taste of eternity. Annie Lighthart’s, poem, “The Second Music,”  elaborates on this idea where describing the everyday events of life she says,

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing, one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard yet always present.

There is the world we live in–all the wondrous sights our eyes have seen, our ears heard, our bodies felt; the wide oceans with their ten thousand colors of blue, the forests of intense greens, the smiles of a child, birds in flight, clouds drifting by in the vast sky, the hollows and hills of everywhere, rain splashing on stone streets, the icy lace clinging to trees, the laughter of the ones we love, the last touch of a hand from one who is leaving us, all these experiences, and so many, many more wonders known while walking in this world, these are ours, and inside of them “If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,” Lighthart goes on to write, there is a “second music” that she stops to listen to that is underneath and through all these moments, sights, sounds and experiences. She ends the poem by saying “I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.” This is the love that is living–I could say hiding–inside of the physical world. We perceive it with the heart because what is known with the heart is what lives on. That is the love that endures–the part of life when we are fully present with another. Love that endures connects to this larger love. That is the love that weaves the world together.

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Bridge, Nisene Marks State Park, CA

Recently, we had a guest visiting our house who is approaching her 80th birthday in September. When I asked her what is something that age has taught her, she replied, “Your age isn’t who you are. You are more than body, emotions or thoughts, more than any of these or all of these together.” None of us loves perfectly. Loving someone, anyone, is more than what we do or say, more than time together, more than body or emotions shared. Love is a journey, just as marriage is a journey, a pilgrimage toward love. You have to get out there and walk the trail. Sometimes you take a road you think is the right one but you get off track. Sometimes you might walk a long way through dry, flat land. You walk in rain and sun. You walk up hill. Sometimes you get tired. Nevertheless, love begins each day living in attitude of walking together. You walk and you listen to each other. Thoreau said, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put the foundations under them.” This is the work of enduring love: you practice being present in small moments (and most of life is lived in those small moments, the daily acts) so that we will be able to be present for the big moments when they come. Our giving ourselves to learn to walk together and to listen to each other is what carries marriage across the threshold into the sacred and allows us to taste what is eternal.

place

Love is a Place–How Place Shapes Us

annacitrino

Two weeks ago as I rode home from the airport, Delhi was enveloped in smoke, the city’s signature perfume. One evening later the skies were full of lightning with rain pouring down heavily. Since returning from a trip to the Czech Republic and Austria, I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes a place. Some time back, when I first moved overseas, my husband and I sat in our Izmir, Turkey apartment, explaining the culture to ourselves–as we understood it at the time–our first experience of living in a foreign country, through using the designs in a carpet on our floor. It was world full of life, energy, color and sound, but still contained and shaped by tradition’s forms. Turkey is still the favorite place I’ve lived outside of my own home, still holds wonder and happiness in my memory.

Years ago, I visited Spearfish, South Dakota a small town where my parents had lived for some time, and where I still have relatives. While exploring the downtown, I came across a book in the bookstore window titled Dakota, A Spiritual Geography.  At the time, I didn’t know the author, Kathleen Norris, but noticed that she was living in Lemmon, South Dakota in a home she had inherited from her grandmother. Lemmon was the same town my father was born in. I had come to South Dakota for the purpose of getting to know a bit more about my family’s background. I had grown up in California, far from relatives except for my father’s parents who lived at the time lived nearby in Lemon Grove, California. I knew little of my family history except through the descriptions of my parents. I was drawn to Norris’s book and its subtitle in particular, because for some time I’d held the belief that the geography we grow up with shapes us in mysterious ways we don’t quite understand–affecting the way we think, what we value–shaping our souls. A few days previous to discovering the book, I had gone with my Aunt to see where my grandmother’s family was buried. My Aunt’s friend was an oral historian whose family knew my great grandparents. She had shown me the graves of my great uncles, and before walking back to the car, I went to stand in the middle of a field nearby. There, I found myself surrounded by the green wheat, an ocean of grass, the sky above infinite and blue. No sound pierced the silence as the earth’s  scent earth and the weight of its quietness seeped into my feet. This was my parents’ homeland, a geography they knew and that shaped how they saw the world–its colors, sounds, rhythms. My body felt the quality of its presence, affirming my sense that the land speaks to us. Dana Gioia’s poem, “Palabras,” talks about this idea as well. “El mundo no necesita de palabras. Sabe expresarse/en luz solar, hojas y sombras,” Gioia writes, “The earth doesn’t need words. It knows how to express itself/ in the sun, the leaves and shadows,” and it’s true. There is a kind of voice inside of the material world that speaks without words–something akin to music, but more abstract. Though Nature speaks volumes to us in its vast library of sound and movement, one artist has tried to show this voice visibly in an interesting way, attaching pens to a willow tree’s branches, making visible the branch’s movement, a fascinating idea. Small scratchings embodying the language inside the leaves’ dance.

My belief in geography’s affect on humans was affirmed some time later when I came across an article in Discover Magazine “Are the Desert People Winning?”  by Stanford anthropologist Robert Saplosky, where Sapolsky explains how anthropologist Robert Textor in his 3,000 page book, A Cross-Cultural Summary, written in 1967, noted after examining 400 world cultures and classifying them into nearly 500 traits that a “striking proportion of rain forest dwellers are polytheistic, worshipping an array of spirits and gods.” This pattern, Textor points out, can be observed in places like the Amazons, and Borneo, whereas “desert dwellers—the bedouin of Arabia, the Berbers of the western Sahara, the Kung of the Kalahari Desert, the Nuer and Turkana of the Kenyan/Sudanese desert—are usually monotheistic.” Sapolsky goes on to point out how there is a kind of singularity to the landscape in desert locations, where the world is reduced to essentials. Rain forest people, on the other hand, live amidst an abundance of plants, herbs, and animals. “Letting a thousand deities bloom in this sort of setting must seem natural,” states Sapolsky. Every place and culture has its uniqueness, and each place touches our lives and shaping us. We live in a place, and we respond to it, interact with it.

As we travel from one place to another, we carry with us the other places we have been, and the memory of those places. I have often wondered if this is why I enjoy countries very different in landscape from those similar to where I grew up, but am emotionally drawn to countries like Greece, Spain, and Italy, or the state of New Mexico in the U.S., because they remind me of where I grew up in the dry southern California desert with rolling hills and yellow grass spotted with granite boulders and chaparral. Dana Gioia in his TED talk about place explains that “the world looks different depending on where you see it from and who you see it with. It sounds different. It looks different. It tastes different.” He goes on to describe how until recently, people had to pay attention to the local landscape to provide them with the means to live, and that people visit foreign cities today because they enjoy the diversity that local art, architecture, soil, produce, weather, presents in any particular place. Related to this idea, the biologist, E.O. Wilson has written about biophilia–how humans have a natural affinity for nature. It is our source of life. Today, however, we often don’t know the names of the trees outside their windows or the plants we live beside on a daily basis. Gioia asserts that the standardization of the world in its architecture and foods, clothing, and other numerous effects of globalization on cultures, while increasing affordability, creates a loss in diversity. This is a “huge impoverishment of human spirit”–a loss in connection to where we live, Gioia stresses.

We are always changing and so are places. When I first moved to Santa Cruz, California from San Diego County, I wore sweaters most the summer long until about noon each day. It was cold! The world looked different–there were so many trees, and the coastline was rocky, and it didn’t seem to matter how you casually you dressed. These were small things, but many small things put together create a sense of place. During the Creativity Workshop I recently attended in Prague, the workshop leaders asked us to sit in a cafe and draw the soul of a person–not the physical features, but the soul. That was challenging. I observed a mid-aged woman with blond hair and noticed how calm she was. Her voice was quiet, as were her manners. She was in no hurry to eat or to make her point with her partner. I envisioned her to be the shape of a cloud, all edges soft, content to wrap around objects without having to take control. She would glide from place to place without rushing. She contained no sharp edges. She could float above the world and see things clearly. It was interesting to think of visualizing a person’s spirit embodied in material qualities. When I came back to Delhi, though, noting the city’s distinctive differences from where I had just been, I wondered what a drawing of the soul of a place would like–specifically, what would a drawing of Delhi’s soul look like? I’m still pondering that question, but the art piece would need to be kinetic with glints of glass, a mosaic of colors swirling, moving, rising out of dark space then turning into smoke, the scent of smoke filling the room.

Leaving a place you have known and loved and lived always carries with it a grief. A place grows inside us, we have a relationship with it, and to let go of it is loss. We mourn. I remember my dad standing on the path outside my house when he came to visit me just before I moved overseas. “You’re never coming home again,” he said, crying. I had never seen him cry but once before. I was looking at the move as the adventure of my life. He was looking at it as loss. Even though I’ve been living and wandering abroad for years now, I still carry the longing for open space, wide and wild space–the kind of landscape the western part of the United States still holds. I’ve lived in mega cities for many years. I enjoy tidy gardens where they can be found.  They are wonderful to behold with their shaped and contained designs, especially when greenery is rare, but to feel truly alive, I need wild space. E.E. Cummings writes in his poem, “Love is a Place,”

Love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

Not only is love a place, but I say place is also love. Through our connection to place our understanding of the world and of love begins. Last summer as I lay on the floor with the doors open so the sun and breeze could float in while I did my exercises, the sudden subtle perfume from the redwoods wafted in through the door and tears welled up in my eyes. The absolute perfection of that clean,  woodsy sweetness. There are more dramatic places in the world to live, I’m sure, and I recognize different people need different things. What is it about a place we call home that makes us want to go back to it? There are people, the familiar routines, the memory connect to place, but there is also something fundamental–the physicality of the place itself. You are in love with the land, you want to know it, care for it, understand it and its mystery. When you find the home of your heart, as I felt I had lying there on the floor inhaling the afternoon’s quiet and perfumed air in California’s Soquel Hills, you know it’s where you belong.

I look forward to the day when I can go home.

Uncategorized

Finding Space–An Invitation

annacitrino

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing further research about Italian immigrants in San Francisco, San Francisco in the early 1900’s, reading some of Billy Collins’ poetry, editing a couple of articles to send out for possible publication, barbecuing pizzas with my husband and friends, listening in Spanish to some cultural programs about food in various regions of Spain, along with various other things important for me to keep abreast of things at my work, which this year, again, includes totally new systems and ways of approaching things.

photo-35
Just One Thing—Simplify.

About three times a week I get to the swimming pool, the gym about twice, and I aim to go on walks, though recently these have been fairly short. While I’ve done a number of things I want to do, drawing, as I was doing during the summer months, has now diminished to less than one page of drawings a week in my sketchbook. Books I want to read wait on a table. The clarinet I finally got out of the carry case last year with the intention learning to play currently sits on the shelf. I want to feed the things I’m passionate about. The reality is that each of these things takes time. To sum it up, there are many more things I want to do than I have time to do. Whatever it is we want to do or be takes practice, and this includes reshaping our life to live in a way that enhances our own well-being and sense of wholeness. For decades, I have pondered Thoreau’s quote from Walden, “Simplify. Simplify.” This still isn’t easy to do.

This past week I viewed the program, “Killer Stress–A National Geographic Special with Robert Sapolsky.” Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist, biologist, and researcher at Stanford University, explores the effects of stress–how it ages us more quickly, reduces our health, and cuts into our well-being–and yet how multi-tasking and stress is actually valued and promoted in our culture. Stress is difficult to escape. We all live in a social system. How can we live as free people, rather than slaves to a system that positions competition, power and financial success as centrally important? Sopolsky’s research lead him to observe how a troop of baboons, animals that are known to be aggressive, combative and nonsocial, became peacefully cooperative and nonaggressive after the dominant males suddenly died off as a result of contracting tuberculosis. The encouraging news in this study is that even though aggressive and destructive habits had been the way the baboons had functioned for decades, when they entered a new social construct where the aggressive males died, the whole community was able to become peaceable, even when new baboons entered the community. (See more at “Warrior Baboons Give Peace a Chance.”) Maybe there is hope for us too.

In his essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Thoreau says, “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” In his essay, Thoreau admonishes readers to place their humanity before money, before laws– “policy is not morality,” suggesting that if we want to live humanely, we must place the way we relate to each other at the center. We must consider what it means to live wholly, what we mean when we say we want to live not as slaves to industry, but more fully.

photo-34
What are we industrious about? What do we want to harvest?

So, how does this hopeful change where baboons learn how to live together peacefully apply to our own lives? Many of us continue to live in aggressive societies where community and connectedness are not held as central values, where diverse ways of seeing, being and unique contributions are not seen or held dear because the system is rolling down the track like a locomotive train, intent on getting on with whatever its own vision is. In her recent article on Brain Pickings, “The Shortness of life: Seneca on Busyness and The Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long,” writer Maria Popova quotes Roman philosopher, Seneca “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested…Life is long if you know how to use it.” This is a stunning, paradoxical thought. We have time! As Thoreau suggested, it’s not that we’re busy doing something–what is it we are busy about that eats the time that would allows to understand we are living fully? Are we nurturing our passions–the things that makes us feel connected to our heart’s deep need and fully alive? If life is long enough if we use the time we have to fully live, how do we reshape our lives to do that. If, like many of us, we find we need to be on the institution train for a period of time, how can we still make use of the station stops? How do we open the window and feel the breeze and make sure to look up and notice the dragon flies swarming above the nearby trees?

In the hopes of recovering more life and a sense of space inside myself, I’m aiming to practice the act of purposeful noticing–looking for one small thing each day to connect myself more to the heart of the days I’m living–to the physical world, and to the life of those around me. I want to release myself from the world of walls, at least briefly every day, and every day remind myself that I am alive in a physical world full of wonder. I reside in a body that is allowed to wander and walk here on this earth. Walking, Ferris Jabr tells us in his recent article in the , “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” not only improves our memory, attention, and staves off degenerating brain cells, it also, through its rhythmic quality, creates a mental state that nurtures creativity and innovative ideas. Now that’s wonderful news!

I’ve decided to take a small, probably slow walk each day, and will couple it with a practice Naomi Shihab Nye suggests people consider–the practice of writing down just a few lines a day, maybe three, for example, of things I notice and observe. A short walk and three lines are manageable. I plan to try this for 40 days, a length of time long enough to notice change but short enough to feel doable. My desire is to observe how this small act might shift my thinking, perceptions of time, and way of being and living to allow me more of a sense of freedom and connectedness to the physical world around me.

I began my first observation yesterday, with noticing the tree in the school yard that was suddenly cut down. The tree has been a focal point of observation I’ve returned to many a morning over the last seven years as I’ve watched birds gather in that tree–crows and kites mostly. Last year, the tree was struck by lightning and was in distress. Its center branches had dead. Then, yesterday morning, I heard the sudden crack from my apartment as the tree’s center trunk broke apart–the result of the school’s gardeners pulling it down. Only this past Tuesday I had been standing next to it, noticing the sap dripping down its sides at various points on its trunk, as if it were grieving over the recent difficulties it had experienced. All day, the gardeners were cutting up the trunk and branches. Now the tree is half its original size. Everything changes. What was once present, is suddenly gone.

photo-33
Observation: Lime tree with fruit and blossoms

The photo here shows today’s observation, our lime tree, one year old and putting out an abundance of leaves, blossoms and tiny fruit. It is a happy tree, ready for a larger pot. We hauled up several new plant containers four flights to place on our balcony with the hope of enhancing our garden there. The lime tree is thriving. We had orange groves the entire time I was growing up. When I smelled the one blossom that’s currently open, I was reminded of my mother who always sent me orange blossoms in the mail after leaving home. Citrus blossoms are always sweet.

I’ll post later the other things I observe in the coming week, and invite you to try this along with me and let me know what subtle things begin to shift in your own awareness over the course of time–what it is you discover through the practice? Do you feel an increased sense of health, awareness of nature, gratitude, wholeness, connectedness to life, your neighborhood, or the world? What is it that happens when we practice grounding ourselves in place, when we pay attention to the suchness of things? If forty days is too long for you, try 20 or four and see how that goes–whatever feels right for you in your desire to shift things in your life.

As E. E. Cummings writes,

being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land…

Love is the voice under all silences.

—

I want to listen inside that silence and notice the miracle of love that holds me up day by day.

Everything is miracle Peter Meyer explains in his song, “Everything is Holy Now.”

 

place, poetry, writing

Of Time, Demons, and Living in a World Called Yes

annacitrino

Back from a recent trip to visit family half way across the world, my  feels foggy headed from jet lag, as if it has been stuffed with cotton. There were many things I hoped to do today, but my mind was half asleep, or wanted to be. It’s difficult to travel between worlds. During my recent trip, I traveled between many worlds as we visited different friend and family member’s homes, slipping into their lives, conversations and way of living for a few days or hours. Indeed, there are many worlds inside of this world.

Currently, I’m reading William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, where he travels through the Middle East, exploring and explaining the remnants of Byzantium. In one section, Dalrymple explains how Gregory the Great was known to recommend making the sign of the cross over lettuce leaves so you wouldn’t swallow a demon who happened to be perching there. (p. 55) In that comment, it struck me how different that world, with its belief in demons, is from my own. Dalrymple mentions how across the Mediterranean today, the role of the priest as a “prize-fighter against Devil minions” is still important. My husband’s father, whose parents came from Calabria in southern Italy had a belief in these minions. Once, for example, one of his grandsons fell from a table, and he explained there was a demon who made him do it. Salt should be scattered at the door to keep them way. A ceramic pot my husband made had a lid that  looked like a fox head, and my father-in-law turned it upside down because he thought it was a demon. This unseen world, was definitely alive for him.

This way of thinking is different than my own, and of a mind from a different world. The demon of my world is the lack of time to do the many things I want to do during any particular day. It’s a demon of my own mind, a demon that wants, nevertheless, to control my mind and make me think that life is a river of things that need to be accomplished, rather than an experience to be savored. While visiting friends in the LA area recently, we were walking around Puddingstone Lake, and I became aware that I was not at all thinking about the list of things that needed to be done, I was simply walking in the late afternoon light, enjoying the way it turned the trees half golden. I was looking at the lake, breathing, and feeling completely whole without having to do anything. I felt the way I did as a child when walking through the dry yellow grass on the hills behind my house, climbing on boulders to lie back and stare at the clouds and feel my body absorb the heat from the stone beneath me–where time was a lake to go swimming in, not a clock with seconds that ticked by, click, click, counting out every moment. It was a world of being rather than doing, and that world is difficult to get back to. The path gets grown over by the grass and shrubbery of obligations, but it is a world I want to visit more often.

As an expatriate, I’m used to moving back and forth between worlds, to belonging to several worlds, and feeling they are home. Actually, many places are simultaneously home and not home. I’m reminded of the words to the song, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue…” Home is a state of mind, as well as a place. I feel at home in myself, and therefore feel at home in many places. What I want is to visit more, though, the world where time flows, and to do that, I need to purposefully walk down the path, open the gate and enter that place. The gate could look like quietness, or a walk out of doors, like a book I want to read, like singing and music, or like the face of friends and voices of loved ones. “Love is a place,” as E. E. Cummings says, and if we want to experience the awareness of love we must put aside the press of obligations.

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

——-

We see often, what we allow ourselves to see, what we set our gaze on. We grow toward and become what we spend time with. All day long I’ve heard the whine of train whistles in the distance, a reminder of the relentless motion of time moving down a fixed track in a busy city. If I want to live in a world where being is important, however, I must get off the train and go to that other world.

What do most of us want most in this world but to know we are loved? Love is a place we create as well as a place that is found, a place we come home to. There are many things I don’t understand about how to live fully, but if I want to learn, I must enter the gate that leads me there. That means time out from the schedule, some time each day to remember who I am, where I come home to myself, where I allow myself to enter the world of love.

As a writer, I know that giving myself a rule or a regular practice of writing can strengthen my work. This is the time of Lent. I didn’t grow up practicing Lent, but I’ve been thinking about what that might mean for me. Traditionally, it is a time of prayer, giving alms to others, fasting and/or giving something up–a practice of some kind of self-denial. Giving up a bit of the idea that I have control over everything, and that if I just keep working harder I will accomplish everything I think I should might be a good thing. If I accomplish everything on the list. But if I do, then what? Does that make me feel more whole? Will I simply add on to the to-do list? How long can a person keep doing that?

Perhaps there is a wisdom in the ancient traditions and practices that I can’t know because they aren’t part of my life. Maybe you have to give up some things, like always having too many things to do, to find other things– like a deeper, more meaningful and satisfying life.