Tag: Michael L. Newell

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Between Nets of Light and Topographies of Grace

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Janet Eichelman, Renwick 1.8

“You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
–Rumi

On a recent visit to the Renwick Gallery I wandered through the enormous room displaying Janet Echelman‘s Renwick 1.8 art piece. Gargantuan fabric nets draped across the vaulted ceiling and hung in giant latticed ladles drooping in transparent overlapping layers of vibrant, ever-changing colors. The description on the wall states, the art piece is Echelman’s way of examining the “complex interconnections between humankind and our physical world, and reveals the artist’s fascination with the measurement of time.” The piece was “inspired by the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and tsunami…The lines on the carpet trace the topographic patterns of the three dimensional form above.” Whether standing in the middle of the room or circling the room’s edges, I felt both grounded and suspended at the same time–alternately shifting between the earth’s surface and under the sea or, as the colors in the room changed, drifting over the earth and through waves of sunlight.

Topographic carpet pattern under changing colors of light

Echelman’s piece is meant to be a meditation on the “contrast between forces we understand and those we cannot, and the concerns of our daily existence within the larger cycle of time.” I felt I’d entered a magical door and was floating inside an enchanted room. The prodigious size of the work, both mammoth pendulous nets as well as the massive length of contoured lines reaching across the carpet, everything bathed in prismatic color, carried me into a place of awe where beauty’s presence suspended time and wrapped me in wonder. Indeed, I felt a power at work in the art piece that can be experienced but not fully described.

In our every day world, we move through time responding to needs and concerns, following rings of repeated activity and the topographical patterns outlining the shape of our culture and the ground we build our lives on. Moving between and within waves of sound, light and energy, we live and walk inside layers of physical wonder. As in Echelman’s dangling nets bathed in light, everything in the physical world steeps in a spectrum of moods, actions and reactions, our own, as well as that of the world around us. Eichelman’s piece allows viewers to observe and experience a relationship between physical form, light and energy. As the folds and shadows in the layers of nets suggest, there is a lot of subtleties and mystery in what we experience as well.

Like visual art, music and poetry can also take us to a place where through heightened sensory awareness time seems to suspend movement. Akin to Echelman’s art piece Renwick 1.8, Michael L. Newell’s poem, “Spiritual: Listening to Charlie Haden and Pat Methany” in response to Haden and Methany’s piece, “Beyond The Missouri Sky, – Spiritual,” (worth listening to while reading this post) carries readers into a space of deeply felt attentiveness. The first portion of Newell’s poem describes a journey on a “boundless sea,” and “a never ending progression of waves,” and lengthening night

…as we

bob up and down and up again
the only sounds the slap and splash
of water and our breathing hushed
though it may be seems sacrilegious
time loses all meaning we forget our names
to be certain our flesh still exists we touch
our faces our arms our legs

As Newell writes, carried away by the music, we touch ourselves and know we are fully physically present, but we are also in a world beyond physicality or words. As Newell goes on to write,

This journey is beyond comprehension
this is a world whose existence
does not lead to prayer it is prayer
the ending silence of the music
is the definition of awe and we sit silently
for a time and then dive again deep
into this world beyond words

Enveloped in the prayer of music, we enter into and become part of the prayer itself. Music can transport and transform us, bring us into a state of rebalance and peace, as does Newell’s poem.

The exchange and transformation of energy is integral to the creative process. Often in the natural world, something is destroyed or dies allowing something new to come into existence. Natural events often demonstrate this. The 2011 Tohuku quake created a tsunami whose effects were felt all the way across the Pacific and Echelman’s piece illustrates this interactive process in the waves of netting and waves of topographic curves on the carpet. As an art piece, we can see the exchange of energy in dramatic events with equanimity. Emerging from the experience of beauty great art immerses us in, however, we often step back into an unpredictable world and are faced with challenges. Imperfect beings as we are, we’re not always certain how to respond effectively or compassionately to great change and difficulties we encounter. We tumble, fall, make mistakes. Sometimes we harm others unknowingly, and sometimes because in our own incompleteness we can’t help it. When such challenging events occur, music, art, and poetry are there to remind us that while we carry out our daily activities, we also participate in a wider plain of existence, a larger field of grace that holds and enfolds us, even though we may sense a part of us dying or falling apart. As Arundhati Roy writes, “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget… another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
 

“Spiritual: Listening to Charlie Haden and Pat Methany” appears in Michael L. Newell’s newest book, Diddley-Bop-She-Bop, published by Bellowing Ark Press.

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Hidden in Plain Sight

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Depending on the lens we look at the world it appears to be an entirely different place. Years ago, I read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where the explorer Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the features, people, culture, and history of cities in Khan’s expansive empire. In reality, however, though each city depicted is seemingly distinct, they are all actually different versions of Venice, the city where they live.

Any place on earth, not only Calvino’s Venice has multiple histories and innumerable layers to its identity. As peering through a microscope reveals, there are worlds reside within worlds. Believing we know a place and why things look or function as they do, we explain them to ourselves and to others, but many things nevertheless remain outside of our comprehension. Much of what makes up who we are remains hidden beneath our skin and inside our thoughts.,

The southern most active volcanic area in the Cascade Range, at Mt. Lassen National Park in northern California, visitors can get a glimpse of nature’s hidden hydrothermal world. From approximately three miles beneath the surface rises a deep huffing sound like an enormous, arhythmic drumming can be heard while climbing the hill approaching the fumarole at Bumpass Hell. According to the US Geological Survey, Lassen Peak was formed approximately 27,000 years ago after erupting for several years and rising to a height of 2,000 feet, becoming one of Earth’s largest lava domes. The dome went to sleep for 27,000 years then woke up on May 19, 1915, when it erupted destroying a three-square mile area, created mud flows, a new crater at the mountain’s summit, and an avalanche of volcanic material, only to erupt again a few days later, on May 22 the volcano exploded again, blowing down trees, houses, ejecting pumice, and spewing gas and hot ash 30,000 feet into the air.

I sat on the hillside beyond the edge of the white mineral deposits ringing the thermal vents, watching as the vent hurled chunks of rock some thirty feet into the air, spewing them out into every growing pile. Further down the road in the park, mud pots burble up from deep below, painting the earth in tones of ochre and, rust, mustard and gold. 

Not a geologist, I don’t know how to read the landscape’s history. Much of the land’s story was hidden to me. In the park, we can now walk on what was once buried beneath a volcanic cone covering. Though the earth’s crust feels solid when we travel across it, inside there are oceans of molten, liquid earth. So much is hidden from our everyday view. 

It’s not only the land that holds and hides its history. We are an embodiment of our history, as is everyone we meet.

I am no one,
I am
everyone I have known:
all those voices coming on the wind,

writes Michael L. Newell, in his poem “Self-Portrait” from his new book, Making My Peace. As the poem goes on to say, all we’ve experienced and all who we’ve encountered have helped to make who we are. As Newell goes on to describe,

from the past, the aching, haunting past,
the faces barely recognizable in browned
and curled photos found tucked in old books,
in crumpled letters scattered among old poems,

in boxed up bric a brac long forgotten;
who, I ask myself, am I, if not these forgotten ones
who whisper in my head every second of my life,
whose words have shaped thought, deed, laughter,

As Newell indicates, the moments, places and people that have influenced and shaped our lives may be hidden from direct sight, but they are present, similar to the hidden activity beneath the earth we see glimpses of while sitting in front of a fumarole. Newell concludes the poem stating,

We are the dreamed, the dreamer, the stranger who became more
and then vanished, the intimate who disappeared into the long night,
but left behind words, images, and the tilt of a head which remain
in memory’s ever expanding pouch where nothing is ever completely lost.

While Newell’s poem describes the legacy of other people’s lives on our own, Robert A. Johnson, in his book, Living Your Unlived Life, explores playful ways to bring to light unseen aspects of ourselves such as writing a note to the Eternal Youth that continues to live in us whatever our age, and to put it by our bed or computer. My thought is that the focused awareness of what brings us joy and the dreams that live inside of us reflected in the letter will more easily help to bring that dream forward into life. Johnson suggests asking what is keeping you from stepping out and exploring a new path or the next part of your journey, how fear might bind you to ways of living that no longer serve you. Quoting Gilbert Murphy, a Greek translator, Johnson says, “Live in the service of something higher and more enduring, so that when the tragic transience of life at last breaks in upon you, you can feel that the thing for which you have lived does not die.”

Johnson has a variety of other exercises such as writing in a journal once a week or more and using black ink to record thoughts and a different color of ink to represent feelings, and a third color of ink, such as blue, to represent when you are writing about physical sensations. Over time, this gives you an idea of how you process experience, suggests Johnson, and writing in the journal can help you notice repetitive patterns such as what happens repeatedly when you’re stressed, what you tell yourself when you wake up every morning, what you do with intuition, as well as internal messages that shape decisions and how you evaluate reality.

Rob Knight, a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, on his TED talk says, “The three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you might be more important than every single gene you carry around in your genome.” A person’s gut bacteria can influence things such as anxiety, stress, and mental health, among other things, according to Medical News Today.

From the Peter Wolden’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, and Susan Simard we learn how trees communicate and share nutrients with each other underground through fungal networks, information about the network of life that has only recently come to light.

Outside of Bogota, Colombia, María Luisa Hincapié and her family work to protect the biodiversity of orchids in their Forest of Orchids, and around the world young people you may have never have heard of are working in their communities to carry on the work are doing to support their communities during the pandemic.

Like bees among the flowers collecting pollen, in every location there are embodied stories and mysteries that add to the greater web of life that uplifts and sustains us. As Newell said in “Self Portrait,” “We are the dreamed, the dreamer, the stranger who became more…” Life adds to life. As Lassen’s volcano exemplifies, land shifts, gets removed and remade, and “nothing is ever completely lost.”

If you’re interested, Michael L. Newell’s book, Making My Peace, is available here.

community, poetry, Uncategorized

Finding the Fragrance of Home

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Hills of Soquel, Santa Cruz County, California

…you and I each
carry the other in a gesture here,
a phrase there, a sudden burst of laughter,
and we have changed one another

in ways we may never recognize
and these mountains are our witnesses.

–Michael L. Newell, from “Of Goodbyes, Memories and Eidolons”

Sumac, horned toads, lizards, hawks, jack rabbits, and hills covered in wild grass strewn with granite boulders, these were inhabitants in the desert homeland where I grew up in San Diego County.

I spent many hours wandering grassy hillsides of pungent perfume with wildflowers as a child, looking out across a wide valley to hills in the far distance. Those moments in quiet solitude indelibly shaped my sense of home. The world I knew as a child was a narrow one. We didn’t go anywhere on vacations, and though we lived twenty something miles from the ocean, our family went there but a few times, and only occasionally visited the Cuyamaca mountains, though they, too, were only a little over an hour’s drive away. We were people who stayed at home. As a result, the natural landscape was our companion, a blanket we wrapped ourselves in—a place we repeatedly explored. It was an open space to wander and explore, a place of deep connection.

Hills of eastern San Diego County, California

There is much to be said for the wonder of desert lands—the Earth’s exquisite beauty is revealed there with such openness. Deserts bring us in direct contact with Earth’s elemental form, the magnificence of mineral essence. Nevertheless, listening to stories about other parts of the US and learning about the world beyond the borders of my understanding, my curiosity grew. With the wish to experience something of the way others lived and saw the world, I left Southern California, moved to the Midwest, then to Northern California, and eventually moved abroad, where I lived and worked in six different countries over a period of twenty-six years.

Western Desert, leaving Taif, Saudi Arabia

Each place I’ve lived had recurring scents unique to that particular location. In Delhi, where I lived for nine years, smoke, Hexol, and paint fumes were dominant scents. In a city of 20 million, where approximately 200 thousand are homeless, in winter months people burn whatever they can find to keep warm—including wood from the forest on the ridge near Buddha Park, garbage, dung, and plastic. The smell of smoke in evenings was strong, often overpowering. Because of difficulty breathing, in addition to running three air purifiers in the apartment at all times, each night we’d put masking tape around our doors and pushed towels up under the door to help keep smoke out. When my husband and I returned to California each summer after teaching in Delhi, we’d spend a lot of time weeding in our garden, renewing planter beds, watering, and generally nurturing things back to life again. On the far side of our planter beds a stand of redwoods rise up from a gulch. One afternoon, while hunched over pulling weeds in the blackberry patch, the redwoods’ loam released a perfume—a warm woodsy, clean fragrance that felt nearly magical. I stopped what I was doing, stood up, and inhaled deeply. The scent was light and hung in the air, an offering of only a few fleeting moments. Then it was gone. Awareness of beauty is often raised by experiencing its absence. Inhaling the redwoods’ perfume after living for years in Delhi where I would never find such a scent, my heart opened to this gift from the trees and held it as a kind of sacramental moment.

View from my apartment balcony in New Delhi on a bad day of pollution

One fallen redwood leaf by itself, doesn’t create the perfume that stopped me from my work to acknowledge the trees’ presence. Such perfume arises as the result of thousands upon thousands of leaves that have built up over time in collaboration with the afternoon’s heat. Deep presence is an accumulated practice of letting go, a perfume of spirit, blessing all who are near.

Deciding to return to the US after living abroad for nearly three decades, many people asked, “Why now?” One of the central reasons was to reconnect to the land in a more integral way. There was more life to be lived, different lives to inhabit, and I wanted to step inside a new way of being. Life overseas opened many wonders and offered new insights. Returning to live beside trees and near wild space, however, would allow me to let go of firmly fixed schedules, dig my hands into the earth, and allow myself time to discover a slower, different rhythm where I might encounter a deeper truth about living and inner space could expand.

In his poem, “Estrangement,” from his new book, Wandering, Michael L. Newell writes, “I have lived so long among strangers / that I have become strange to myself.” Returning home after so long a sojourn is to find myself in the words of Newell’s poem. Entering in again to life in the country I was born into, refamiliarizing as well as familiarizing myself newly with its history and land, I’m made aware, again, of the contradictions between America’s actions and its ideals.

The place and earth we call home wants to be known, cared for and nurtured so it can continue to regenerate. Nevertheless, as reported by the National Geographic, among other things, the current US president during his office has given the go ahead to increased logging, reduced restrictions for clean air, and narrowed the definition of what constitutes clean water, as well as sold land belonging to national monuments to private businesses for mining and drilling, There is a long history of this way of thinking, as Lucille H. Brockway describes in her article, “science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic garden,” clarifying how Britain, (and the West in general) sought to manipulate plants and saw them primarily a way to advance their country economically and to control trade. The disunity we’re experiencing now in the US, resulting from centuries of ongoing oppression, fear and the anxiety reaches beyond the US borders to the world at large. Human oppression is not unrelated to Western culture’s treatment of the natural world.

View of the redwoods from our California garden

As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her talk on Emergence Magazine, when you nurture the land, it expresses back to you its love in the life it gives you. This is true in human relationships as well. One of the poem’s in Newell’s book, “That Hand Which Was Never Withdrawn,” describes a child’s heartbreak and anger after experiencing a painful fight between his parents the previous day. The father, picking the child up from school reaches out to him, still in pain.

“We must talk sooner or later.”  His voice
was barely audible.  “I hate you,” I said.  “I hate you
and will never talk to you again.”  I glanced at him:
his face caved in, his eyes lost down the country road.
His voice floated up from some deep cavern or well
where people go when pain is too great for daylight.

“Michael, you will be my son for years.  No matter
what you say or do, you will always be my son.
And I love you.”

The poem poignantly speaks to our humanness, to our loss and brokenness, how difficult it is to transform ourselves in the midst of painful events, challenges, and histories that have hurt and divided us. We can see this in the child’s harsh words, “I…will never talk to you again,” words whose pain echoes in the father’s heart as his eyes drift down the road, before his voice lifts from the depths of his own wounded heart. The beautiful thing that occurs in this exchange, however, is the father doesn’t react in anger or spite. Neither does he deny the wounding that has occurred. Instead, he extends his love and tells his child, ‘“…No matter / what you say or do, you will always be my son. And I love you.”’ There is such tenderness given here, such wisdom.

New grape leaf budding on the vine in my garden

Both our human relationships and the land we live on shape and change us, helping to create the home we live in in our minds and hearts. Whether speaking of human relationships or the natural world, renewal and healing requires us to look deeply at the conditions that bring destruction, as well as the causes of oppression, fear and brokenness in the world around us, and then to work to rebuild relationships on foundations that allow both humans the natural world to flourish. Affirming relationships, as the father did in Newell’s poem rather than feeding the pain and anger, creates a bridge  to meet each other on and begin anew.

Carrie Newcomer writes in her song, “Leaves Don’t Drop They Just Let Go,”

Leaves don’t drop they just let go,
And make a place for seeds to grow
Every season brings a change,
A seed is what a tree contains,
To die and live is life’s refrain

What needs to be let go of in our actions or way of thinking again and again like the leaves of the redwood? What hinders our fullness and prevents our lives from being like the redwoods whose accumulated fallen leaves release the perfume of our transformed selves so that on days when someone who happens to be near can unbend from the strain of their hunched labor and inhale life’s blessing?

At the base of a virgin growth redwood, Soquel, California

 

Note: Michael L. Newell’s book, Wandering, can be ordered through Bookshop Santa Cruz, as well as through Amazon.

art, music, poetry, Uncategorized, writing

The Incense of Fallen Leaves and the Seeds of Music

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Leaves in Nisene Marks forest, Santa Cruz County.

In his poem on the Jerry Jazz Musician site, “Paean for Coltrane,” Michael L. Newell writes,

Trane knew and blew rage
that was prayer prayer that was
rage engaged heart and mind
enveloped listeners in all
that could be
felt or known

in this miserable destructive
alluring astonishing enduring
world that enmeshes all
who pass through
conscious or unconscious
all is carnal spiritual joyous

In a world where words are so often manipulated and used in a way to distort or hide behind, music can move us into a place beyond words that enlarges the heart, becoming a prayer without words. Poetry tries to speak what is true, and to name what can’t be named. When experience becomes to large for words, music can become our poetry. As Newell so aptly describes, certain music in its melding of opposites–the miserable with the astonishing, the carnal and spiritual, the conscious and unconscious–is prayer as it moves beyond what can be articulated, and gives voice to the heart’s deepest suffering, joys, and yearnings.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.” Much of life is about loss, about learning how to let go. It is in this bitter sweet space of letting go into transformation–of not clinging to what is, but of opening our minds, hearts, and arms to all that is passing, that we find meaning. Loss helps us to identify how all we have is gift, and can thus provoke in us an attitude of gratitude and openness that allows our spirits to expand. The boundaries between the known and unknown is the space where struggles occur, and where change and growth unfold. It is the space where stories live, and stories can teach us how to live.

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Japanese maple leaf

Autumn is a season between a world of fruitfulness and emptiness. Today, in an early afternoon amble around my neighborhood, the perfume of the redwood’s fallen leaves lifted from the earth beneath my feet as I walked. Much is dry and fallen at this time of year. The garden has gone to seed. Though the garden isn’t as beautiful as when it’s wearing its lush spring foliage or when offering its summer fruit, the seeds it produces as it lets go its life are beautiful for all the potential stored there, and for the promise of what they will bring. The memory of how to grow is embedded into their very fibre, each seed a storehouse of physically embodied knowledge. They know how to absorb nutrients, how to grow, how to create and recreate.

Some years back, while visiting Italy, I sat on a balcony overlooking Naples Bay at sunset as a boat pulled across the water into a flame of orange and red sky, and disappeared beneath the horizon. I thought then of how like this scene it must have been for  my husband’s immigrant grandparents when they journeyed from Italy to America–the feeling of deep longing and loss, as the shore of their homeland vanished from across sea, and they recognized they were leaving everything they knew for a world they knew little about. What an enormous risk it was. Their decision changed their lives and the future of all the descendants who came after them. From the point of departure, their lives were lived in the space between two worlds–the one they were born into, and the one they adopted in coming to the US. They never again returned to the land of their birth.

The lives of our ancestors are the seeds of our lives. Rising from the loam, the choice they made is the perfume of life now lived as a result that journey they took.

Citrino Naples Bay Cover idea
Naples Bay at sunset. (Photo, Michael Citrino)

Art in general, and music in specific, can bring together body and spirit to create an interior spaciousness where we are more willing to widen the heart’s boundaries.  Art arises at the intersection of loss and the need to find meaning and beauty. Art lives in the borderlands, in the space between where struggles exist. Music educates the heart. When I first heard Après un rêve, by Fauré, sent to me by a colleague I worked with in New Delhi, India, it evoked for me a sense of deep loss and a longing unable to be articulated in words. Immediately, the image of the ship I’d seen leaving Naples Bay and the journey my husband’s grandparents took in their hopes of finding a better world sunset came to mind. Imagining myself into that space sparked questions leading to research and many additional poems. That journey of imagination changed my world. 

Words are written thought. They have no physical weight, yet they can transform lives, can create or destroy worlds. Imagination is a seed. In searching to find, sense, hear, visualize and name the moments that defined and embodied the grandparents’ loss and their immigrant journey–the world they loved and left, as well as the new world they found–an entire world opened that was previously hidden. Whole histories were unveiled that I never before knew. 

Performed by Renata Bratt on cello, and Vlada Moran on piano, and recorded by Lee Ray, Faure’s Après un rêve on the link below is a gift to all–prayer without words. You can listen to the music, then listen again while while reading the poem below, “Luisa Leaves Home,” the initial poem I wrote in the series of poems that eventually unfolded into my newly published book with Boridghera Press, A Space Between. Maybe you will sense how the music inspired the poem, and perhaps it will be for you, too, a seed of some sort that opens for you a world. 

 

Luisa Leaves Home

Footsteps on the hard cobble last twilight—
harsh echoes that clattered through the brain

while I sat at the window, listening
to a child calling “Papa, papa,”
from a window above as his father

wended his way up the steep hill from the sea,
coming home from work.

Wind pushes the walls, and I unlatch
the door to narrow streets, barren hills
sloping abruptly into sea.

It is morning now,
and I am leaving this life’s empty cupboards,

going out of the stony house, the sun’s
lemon heat, the salted fish,

out from the familiar rooms and names, out
of all I know.

Down to the water, light rising
on the last day from the white shoreline
as it greets the ocean’s immensity, I go.

Slowly, the boat pulls from shore,
the hull breaking open the vast
expanse. From the sky’s broken
window, birds cry.

Father, mother, a silent photograph
held in my palm,
I lean forward over the stern,
into the rain,
and cutting wind.

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The ancient Pali text of “The Five Remembrances” says, “All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.” The grandparents’ journey of a hundred years ago parallels journeys people of our own time in various locations are taking now at great risk in order to create a better life for those they love and those that will come after them. May we all find the music that carries us into a wide place of being, and may the actions we take create consequences that allow the lives of those who come after us to have greater access to love and fulfillment. 

art, music, poetry, spirtuality, Uncategorized

Enlarging Our Hearts With Music and Michael L. Newell’s Poetry

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Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and turn my back to loneliness. — Maya Angelou

Music moves and swells inside the pages of Michael L. Newell’s new book, recently out, Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge.  From the fiddler’s bright allegro at a local dance, to childrens’ “symphony of shouts echoing across fields” when released from school in the poem “Celebration,” to nature’s melody in the “songs of streams” trailing across stony earth in the poem “Voice of Waters,” the touch of music’s many moods thread through Newell’s work. Having spent much of his life abroad, Newell’s poems spread the wide spaces between the Andes, Saudi Arabia, London, and Rwanda, and music features as a central theme threading together the distances.

One of the most moving poems in Newell’s collection, “Serendipity,” is a narrative poem written during his time in Rwanda. The poem begins with the poem’s speaker walking down a dirt road, headed home from work past laundry drying on the lines outside houses with corrugated metal roofs, bricks placed on top to hold them down, when a choir singing in Kinyarwanda captures his attention.

voices rising and falling from the home’s
living room, a beautiful repetitive melody
enhanced by constantly shifting harmonies,
counterpoint melodies, and one male voice
chanting or speaking underneath the rise
and fall, the same voice lifting in ecstatic

soaring flight above the others, a song at once
celebratory and deeply sad, the melody ascending
and tumbling, repeating itself again and again, every time

Newell describes the music so distinctly that when reading his words, I, too, am standing on the pathway caught up in the harmony and sweep of sound. “I stand still,” writes Newell, “eyes shut, and listen, nearly weeping.” People passing by on the path where he has been standing for ten minutes join in, pick up the melody, and carry it out into the neighborhood as they move on, music drifting through the air as they go.

The poem continues with someone in a large vehicle stopping by to ask if the poem’s speaker is okay. Upon learning he is standing there because he was caught by the choir’s beautiful singing, the driver, fully understanding what is implied, turns off his truck’s engine to give the choir his full attention. By now, though, the music has fallen silent. Here Newell takes the moment and expands our understanding.

I do not know whether the music was religious,

or folk song, or political, or celebratory, or grieving,
but hours later I still hear the music
as I go about my nightly ablutions. I realize
I have been changed without ever seeing those
responsible for the change. I have heard
on a dirt road from a ramshackle home, music

rough hewn, homemade, finer than I could find
in a concert hall while entertained by highly trained
professional musicians. I have heard music
from the blood and marrow of people singing
because it defines who they are. I have
listened to the heartbeat of a people.

The music described here is not merely people singing to get the notes down, the rhythm tight, the harmonies smooth. This music emerges from the very center of the self, “from the blood and marrow of people singing/ because it defines who they are,”as Newell says, resulting in the deep expression of being that carries us into a wholeness where time stops and we are simply present and fully alive. Whether our lives are surrounded by joy or submerged in pain and grief, listening with full attention, we know we are in the presence of something shining, and are replete. This is what Newell can do in his poems–take us out of ourselves and immerse us in life. This is why it’s worth reading poetry in general, and why you will want to read Newell’s Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge.

“Poetry is rooted in sound,” says poet, musician, and editor of Prairie Schooner, Kwame Dawes, and neuroscience backs up this statement. In the February 2017 article of Neuroscience News, “Is the Brain Hardwired to Appreciate Poetry?” the research of professor Guillaume Thierry and his colleagues at Bangor University has shown that even though we might not be able to say why, something in our brains responds positively to poetry’s construction and its stress patterns repetition of consonant sounds. Sensuous and beautiful, focusing and intensifying emotion, not only Newell’s poems, but poetry itself is a kind of music whose play of sounds can draw the reader to it.

Though poetry’s effect on us is different from that of music, (see more about that in this study, “The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles”) since ancient times, poetry and music have been linked. Containing rhythm, meter, repetition of sounds, euphony, and sometimes rhyme, poetry uses words with a focus on its auditory element. NPR has a page where you can listen to the interesting effect of poetry blended together with various jazz musicians with, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art,” sung by Nancy Harms with composer Jeremy Siskind’s piano, or Amiri Baraka’s poem, “Yes We Can,” with David Murray’s composition, among other examples.

Like poetry, music changes us. I remember listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for the first time years ago, transfixed by its haunting beauty, the emotional intensity it evoked–how it could plummet into the depths of human soul, climb to the penultimate heights of spirit, whisper the heart’s tenderest thought and longing. Tom Barnes’ April 23, 2015 article in Mic, “Scientists May Have Finally Discovered Why Humans Make Music,” discusses Leonid Perlovsky’s research at Harvard University where he explains, “music’s power comes from its ability to help human beings overcome cognitive dissonance, the feeling of emotional discomfort we feel when we learn novel information that contradicts existing beliefs.” Barnes explains how a variety of research shows people most often respond to dissonance by tossing out the new information or pushing back the old. Music, however, “soothes the difficulties involved in processing conflicting information.” Additionally, Barnes’ article goes on to report, “neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in a 2013 meta-analysis of more than 400 neurochemical music studies, found that listening to music had a more measurable effect on people’s anxiety and cortisol levels than did anti-anxiety drugs,” a significant observation. Music has the ability to break down walls between people, to soothe tension and unite them. We can see this ability exemplified in the choir directed by Mica Hendler in Israel, bringing together Palestinian and Israeli young people, as well as in the inspiring music collaborations found at Playing for Change where musicians and singers from around the world are recorded in their various every day environments and then woven together into a unified piece.

Life is a journey we’re all on together, each of us affecting the other as we co-create the world around us in all its complexity. When differences divide us, we are challenged to find ways to communicate and connect that enable us to reach beyond the things that divide us. Poetry focuses the reader on the specific moments and details of life, and we need poems like Newell’s “Serendipity,” that cause us to listen from the inside out. Music moves beyond words into the enlarged world of spirit, a place beyond sharply defined boundaries and ramshackled habits of understanding. Art can heal. We need music, poetry, and art that rises up from our blood and marrow joining us together in a larger place of being. We may be worlds away from what feels like home either mentally or physically, as was the person standing in the middle of the road in Newell’s poem. We may have differences in opinion that may not be resolved, but music can carry us to a larger place where we can at least listen to each other with soft hearts, allowing ourselves to shut off the motors of defensiveness–where we can wait on the roadside for the music to rise up.

Expanding the vehicles that nurture our awareness of being and nurture our ability to greet each other fully can help us avoid traveling through our lives without ever hearing the beauty in others’ voices different from our own. Both music and poetry are gifts of this kind. They help us express and experience our lives more fully. Poetry asks to be read slowly, wants us to pay attention to the implicit, to touch the difficult and complex, feel the tears beneath the beauty, see the human side of experiences. Poetry enables us to look with greater gentleness, sensitivity, and kindness at the questions that rise up between us. While recently attending the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, I met the poet, Betty Neals. We spoke about the connection between music and poetry. She is the voice speaking on this link to Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s jazz piece, “Theme for the Eulipions” from the 1976 album, Return of the 5,000 Lb Man. The music opens with Betty describing the desolation of a railroad station at 2:00 am on a weeknight. As I hear her speak, I picture myself in a cold and isolated train station with insects circling florescent lights, flakes of suspended particulate matter from city smog caught in a night sky, empty tracks leading out into the obscure dark. Poets, artists and musicians are Eulipons, Betty explains as she reads. Music, “the duty free gift for the traveler.” Then the music rises and takes off, and we are carried away on a journey far beyond loneliness and despair. May we all find and perhaps join the Eulipons.

If you’re interested in a copy of Michael L. Newell’s book, Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge, contact me and I will put you in touch with how to do that.

Uncategorized

For Want of Wonder

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20160913_122212“He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn’t so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

What would it be like to live life in a state of uninterrupted marvel? Have you known such a person? This past week I heard the words above describing the poet Jack Gilbert read aloud from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic, Creative Living Beyond Fear. I felt a little jolt immediately, as I recognized in the words a way of being I want to draw nearer to–a person who amidst suffering and difficulty is still able to broaden my vision so those nearby enter a place of wider heart and greater receptivity to life’s wonder.

To live life with an attitude of uninterrupted marvel requires a certain capacity to walk in the world with a sense of expectancy, arms open to what one might encounter. It requires vulnerability. I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to my poem, “Puja for Sarswati,” recently published in the online literary journal, Canary. The poem describes a perfunctory religious ritual I saw on the Yamuna River banks while bicycling in New Delhi, India. The puja was for Saraswati, the goddess of the arts, wisdom, and learning.

…stocking-footed, the men held

the goddess above the bank, “Ek, do, teen,” a shove,
and in she fell, face first, kerplunk into the water
and mud. Then, splat, splat, splat, just like that,

three plastic bags stuffed with marigolds followed.
The men climbed into the rickshaw and drove away. Done.

The poem continues on from there, but as I recall the experience itself, I think about the ways of living in my own culture where efficiently completing duties is valued. Often, I see people walking down the street, phones held out as if they were an electronic cane or comforter. Living by the clock, obligations press against us and worry preoccupies us while we at the same time we long for affirmation and relationship. We move through one event to the next. We get things done, but how much do these behaviors allow us to feel we’re alive? Do they open us to wonder? At least once a day do we find ourselves marveling at the world, at the life we are given? How can the spirit breathe through us, moving where it will, while we live inside a Mondrian painting, so to speak, squeezing our lives into straight lines and corners–when so many of the aspects of our day are aimed to fit into a tidy containers? We are organic creatures. Rivers don’t run in straight lines. Inside, we long for expression and relationship–to be wrapped around and inside the world we flow through. We might want to consider more carefully how we want to live the rest of our days.

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G.K. Chesterton writes, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” It’s true. Wonders abound in the form of the aurora borealis leaping to gargantuan florescent green heights in the northern skies, the thundering Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, the fish shoals swarming and swirling in the sea’s vast fields, the Grand Canyon’s brilliant red and ochre water cut sandstone, the cascade of stars piercing the moonless, clear night, the silence inside a deep woods, the medicinal scent of bay trees lifting from leaves after a rainfall, and the single silver dew drop held by a violet petal in the front yard. As a child, I sang the hymn at summer camp, “How Great Thou Art,” praising God’s natural wonder. My mother loved the song, and her love for it nurtured in me a love for the world’s wonders, made me notice them with wonder. Currently, however, we humans as a whole are poor stewards of the natural world and its wonders. According to Newsweek, air pollution cause 5.5 million deaths annually. Live Science using data collected by the World Health Organization reports that 40% of the deaths worldwide are, in fact “attributed to environmental factors, particularly organic and chemical pollutants that accumulate in the air we breathe and the water we drink.” That is 12.6 million people, or nearly on in four people, says the WHO–yet we go on this way, counting down, “one, two, three–” heaving goddesses face first, one after the other into the river in order to get on with the rest of the day. The hymn declares God is great, but wonder is dying.

Joseph Bruchac, in his poem, “Birdfoot’s Grampa,” describes an old man repeatedly stopping the car they’re traveling in order to get out and save small toads on the roadway. Over and over the old, white-haired man helps the toads to safety, until the one waiting in the car gets restless, telling him they can’t save them all, and to get back in the car. They had places to go. The poem ends with these final lines,

But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life,
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go to
too.

We can get to where we’re going to if these creatures can get to where they’re going to also, the poem suggests. The two events are related. The old man in the poem is aware of his fundamental connection to the natural world. Wonder is a companion to such awareness. Cultivating wonder engenders a respect for nature. It allows us to value and appreciate nature, and restores relationship to it. Wonder reawakens our spirit, allowing us to experience life as a presence within and around us. If we have a relationship with nature, as with other relationships, we value it for its presence. In our culture, we speak of natural resources. In particular, nature is valuable because we use it for utilitarian purposes. Distancing ourselves from nature, we’ve fallen out (of or at least short of ) our ability to wonder.

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We are meant to experience life as a relationship, not as processed product. Connecting with the natural world, however, can be challenging when living in a city, and according to the UN, 54% of the world’s population lives in cities. Though we’re meant to experience life as a relationship, not as processed product, many urbanites simply can’t afford to own a piece of land where they can put their feet on the ground and grow a connection to earth. As a result, those of us living in cities need to purposefully seek ways to connect to wonder. Often when we do, the natural world that before was invisible becomes more visible. Michael L. Newell’s poem “Epiphany,” published on Verse Virtual, speaks powerfully about this sense of wonder from one who dares to look out his window and see what is there. Living in LaPaz, Boliva, the poem’s speaker awakens in the middle of the night and opens the curtain to view

where lightning’s fierce scrawl
is written and thunder reverberates

among barely visible peaks
wrapped round in clouds and sprinkled
with faint lights winking upwards

in sprawling chains toward the Altiplano.
I suddenly realize that in this ancient
towering land, my presence is irrelevant.

Man comes and goes. The mountains
define this place. The storms inhabit it.
I am only a tourist, a passing fancy

imagined by the land and then forgotten.
All night I dream a vast sky filled with wings.
My throat fills with sound which predates man.

The poem shows us how when we stand in wonder, we’re restored to a relationship with the world that allows us to see our place in it as temporal beings yet also part of something much larger than ourselves. Recognizing our limitations is an important understanding, allowing us to know who we are, and to live responsibly as a result. Oddly enough, the humility wonder engenders opens an awareness of the mystery moving in and through us, to “the vast sky filled with wings.” We recognize in the core of our inmost selves who we are, and our throats fill “with sound that predates man.”

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Not all of us have mountains outside our window as does the speaker in Newell’s poem, but still we can find ways to educate our hearts. Many of us have the sky and moon to view. If we can’t see those because of pollution, possibly we have rocks, trees, morning’s mist. Something. If we don’t have practices that call us out of ourselves or places that cultivate wonder, we can look for them, allowing ourselves to move into a larger place of being.

As Newell’s poem reminds, the sky is vast. In the middle of whatever night we waken into, we can reach for the curtains that need opening so we can view the heavens filled with wonder.