pilgrimage – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

Wearing Away Into Newness

December 31, 2020December 31, 2020 annacitrino

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.

–Pat Schneider, from “Instructions for the Journey”

Some changes are volcanic explosions creating enormous, sudden upheaval. Other changes floods our lives, rising slowly, then carrying us away in a torrent of heavy water. Some changes, however, happen slowly–an erosion that alters through perseverance, grain by grain changing the fabric of what we are to reveal what lies beneath.

Taking a break from the task of deleting folders and papers to create more space, I took a short drive north to explore a new location north of Santa Cruz. Walking the path along the edge of the cliff overlooking the coast, I came upon an area water had eroded into honeycombed textures, lines and shapes creating a fabulous miniature landscape.

Every few steps revealed new perspectives as shadow and light played inside crevices and cracks. Rippling across the sandstone’s face, it was clear everything I stood on had participated in an enormous process of ongoing revision–a perpetual becoming. Through eons of time, water and wind had rushed and rubbed against the shore, slowly changing it, a reminder that though we may not be consciously aware of it, the world and universe Earth is a part of are also constantly changing, revising, wearing away and being made new.

“Come into being as you pass away,” states the Gospel of Thomas, saying 42, and this is the experience of life. Like the earth we stand on, our bodies and our minds are in constant change. Every single grain of days can seem so precious. As a result, it can be very difficult to let the rub and rush of time change and reshape what we once were–what felt so stable and sure–to let that life flow out into an ocean of experience and be carried away into the vastness of eternity.

Like Earth’s ongoing process of revision, we, too, never arrive. Michelangelo for all his stunning achievement and accomplishment, at age 88 speaking his last words as he transitioned into his death stated, “I’m still learning.” We’re never finished with the effort of our own life, the imagination and dreams that carry us to another plain or into a wider circle of being. As everything is in continuous movement, we can recognize we are part of a great cosmic dance the universe’s music is listening to.

Nature’s rhythms are immensely complex. Age and time working in accordance with their own internal rules, combined with the interactions of all that exists within and beyond our spheres, who can say exactly where life might take any of us? A practice of cultivating an attitude of letting go some of what once held us can be beneficial, allowing the possibility of creating something else in our lives equally as beautiful or meaningful.

The journey between birth and death is meant to expand us. If we don’t voluntarily revise our lives at certain points, time will eventually require us to do so. As we age, we accumulate losses, and loss can be deeply disheartening and painful. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, in her poem, “I Celebrate My Body,” describes the difficulty of living with the body’s erosion time carries us into,

that body that suddenly couldn’t move,
the hand that couldn’t hold a pen or open a cap,
that body that couldn’t turn over in the bed.
Each new thing I can do—
close my hand around the pill bottle,
hold a book,
write my name—
I celebrate.
I even celebrate my faltering step,
my one leg dragging.
These and other movements we take for granted
until we can no longer do them
and only then, do we learn gratitude

Loss, as Gillian wisely understands, can also deepen our awareness of life’s gifts. When it becomes nearly impossible for the body to do what you wish, as Gillan points out, each small gesture the body allows, can also increase awareness and gratitude for the body, in spite of its limitations. Though difficult and painful to live with, loss of the body’s previous abilities can also cultivate greater depth of spirit.

Life is a pilgrimage, a journey toward understanding and awareness, every day a kind of birth and a death, an ongoing transformation like grains of sand streaming their way through eternity’s great ocean. Pilgrims want to arrive at their destination, explains Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, in her piece titled “Arriving With Every Step” on Emergence Magazine, but the journey itself is what is of central importance. When setting out, “…allow point A and point B to give way to possibility, to mystery. You are meant to allow the journey to do its work on you,” she writes. When pilgrims begin a journey, they set out with an intention. Every moment is an arrival and a departure, and our intentions and observations during the journey help shape reality of the experience. Physicist and chaos theorist Robert Lanza in his article “How Do We Collectively Determine Reality and the Structure of Space Time Itself,” writes, “…a single conscious observer can completely define this structure, leading to a collapse of the waves of probability, largely localized in the vicinity of the cognitive model which the observer builds in her mind throughout her lifespan.

All of this supports a profound shift in our everyday worldview―a change from the long-held belief that the physical world is a pre-formed entity that just exists “out there” to one in which it belongs to the observer. As we and other scientists continue to explore this new line of research, it is becoming increasingly clear how intimately we are connected with the structure of the universe on every level.”

We are connected to the physical world, are influenced and shaped by it and can learn by observing it. The world is full of wonder, but wonder is also made of more than light glistening off the ocean’s surface at sunset. Earth is wild. Falling rock, earthquakes and tsunamis are all an integral part of what forms the world and shapes its wonders. The slow wearing away of earth can be treacherous, leading to a calamitous fall.

Similarly, trauma humans suffer can affect one’s future. Andrew Curry reports in Science magazine, that a biologist at Washington State University in Pullman, Michael Skinner’s recent studies hypothesize that trauma people experience affects the behavior of our cells and can be passed on in ways that affect parents’ offspring.

Pain, sorrow and death are inevitable, yet it is our vulnerability with others that allows us to enter into deep relationship, and to nurture life that regenerates. What we think or observe and the trauma we experience affects not only our lives, but the generations coming after us as well. Enduring through unending erosion is not guaranteed to be pleasant. To prepare ourselves ahead of life’s erosion, we can gather resources: favorite films, poems, photos, art, pieces of literature, and nurture relationships that hold us up and give us hope. We can learn skills of gardening, drawing, dance, or music. We can create and practice rituals we use to sustain us and feed our spirits. Our daily walks can become pilgrimages we set out on with specific intentions, perhaps leaving behind a gift or token, or perhaps we will choose to participate in longer pilgrimages. Always, we can practice gratitude.

It’s easy to miss the instructions for how to carry on through life’s many changes, Schneider says later in her poem, “Instructions for the Journey.” We have to listen and look with careful intention in order to fully notice what’s happening and what it means for us. “And if all that fails,” she writes,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

In other words, carry on your daily work, be present to the physical experience of the world around you. Live each moment aware that you are living.

Each of us are eroding into something new. But we are also participants in creating our lives. What we observe and attend to gains solidity, and expands.

pilgrimage, poetry, Uncategorized

Journeys to Widen Our Lives

February 27, 2019March 8, 2019 annacitrino

Anna biking the Camino de Santiago de Compestela, Spain

“We do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of our self.” – L.M. Browning, in Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations

Some journeys are external others internal. Pilgrimages are travels we make to places that we feel hold spiritual significance—that will speak to our inner selves and transform us. We might travel to a place where grandparents were born, to a significant site connected to our history or a religion we practice. Pilgrimages connected to poetry attract me. The year I lived in the UK, I wanted to follow the Stanza Stones poetry trail. Located in the Yorkshire moors of England, this 47 mile trail contains six Stanza Stones, poems written by Simon Armitage and carved into stones naturally found in there by Pip Hall. Armitage collaborated with the Ilkley Literature Festival organizers to create the poems for the trail. To walk a landscape is to absorb the land’s language. Arimtage’s poems connect walkers to the landscape with words as they encounter the poems as in these lines from his poem, “Snow,” “What can it mean that colourless water can dream such depth of white?” Though I wanted to walk at least part of this trail, I wasn’t able to find a good way to connect to it without better transport the weekend I had free to visit the area, so let go of the idea of this pilgrimage.

Walking Basho’s poetry trail is another pilgrimage I dream of going on. Following this pilgrimage path, walkers can hike the 17^th century trail where the great haiku poet, Basho, traversed through northern Japan’s mountains to the Sea of Japan, passing by Shinto shrines, through pine covered islands, and hot springs along the way. I don’t know if I will be able to get to Japan any time soon to make the journey that inspired many of Basho’s poems. I look at photos of it on the Internet, though, imagining the quiet joy of walking for days beneath bamboo forests and among ancient trees.

Poetry Walk, Ravenna, Italy

Poetry post on poetry walk, Ravenna, Italy

We’re not always able to make the trek of our dream or travel to another land. Nevertheless, there are pilgrimages available to us all: quests through books, and our journey through time. A favorite journey I’ve been on since 2012 is one of the imagination. This sojourn began when I wanted to collaborate with a colleague I worked with who played the cello beautifully, and who was going to move away at the end of the year. I suggested a collaboration where I would write a poem for a piece of music he chose to play, and we would record the pieces together. The music he selected was Fauré’s, Après un rêve, (Op. 7, No. 1). The piece evoked a sense of loss and longing, transporting me to Naples Bay’s enormous circumference where I’d recently sat with my husband at sunset. As the sky burning gold-orange, we watched a boat pull from shore, heading toward the wide horizon. I thought of his grandparents departing Italy for America—how they left behind the world they knew as well as everything and everyone in their village of San Lucido on Calabria’s coast. They had no pictures of the world they moved to, didn’t speak the language, had little money and likely no maps. They never returned to Italy. Leaving was risky, enormously brave, and they would never be the same. Neither am I, as without their departure, I would’ve never met the man I married.

After writing the first poem, “Luisa Leaves Home,” in response to the music, I wondered many things: Why did they leave Italy? What was life like in San Francisco when they arrived? How well did different ethnic groups get along? What are Italian-Americans contributions to American culture? How did World War II change Italian-Americans? What does it mean to be Italian-American today? What does it mean to be American? Hundreds of questions surfaced, and I searched for answers. Paradoxically, the more I researched and wrote with the aim of unraveling threads from a century ago, the more mysterious and complex the world grew. The more questions I had.

I began listening to news items and other people’s stories with a second ear. I applied situations and information to the immigrants’ lives I was writing about, and reflected on how my experiences connected to their world. After sharing one of the poems with a relative, she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “That poem isn’t Noni. I don’t know who you think you’re writing about, but it isn’t my grandmother.” She was right. I never met her grandmother or lived in San Francisco. I didn’t grow up in an Italian American family or neighborhood. Neither do I speak Italian. Any of these qualifications would be beneficial in helping me write about Italian immigrants to America. The Italian grandparents were from a different time period and culture, and had little education. I had no way to access their lives or inner worlds and the family knew few facts. I couldn’t truly write in their authentic voices. Every writer has limitations of gender, culture, and time period, however. I felt drawn to understand and to journey inside Italian immigrants’ world, so I turned to research and imagination, constructing possibilities to embody a story. Research helped me to put the few facts I knew into a larger picture with a wider frame. Imagination created a bridge to a culture, time period, and people that gave me greater awareness of the complexities inside choices immigrants made.

We look in the mirror when we are at six, sixteen, or sixty. All that came in the years before is mostly hidden from view, disappeared, but still present beneath the surface, creating the life we see and experience. There are myriad stories inside one story. We’re many selves inside one body. It’s the same with cities. Years back I read Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan various cities, all of which are actually Venice. I began to see San Francisco in this way as well as I wrote—its subtle elements still present revealing the past or rising from a foundation into a remodeled version. When visiting the City, I recognized places I’d never been because I’d seen them in historical photographs and could recall events that took place there. It isn’t just San Francisco I see differently now as a result of searching for answers to my questions. The world I live in is larger and has greater dimension because of questions I’ve explored answers to. The walk into an unfamiliar world has been a pilgrimage that widened my perspective and has transformed me.

20180628_152554 — San Francisco from Twin Peaks

To step out on a journey into new territory can be unsettling for travelers. Today, people don’t think of Italians as the “other.” During the peak period of Italians immigration to America, however, Italians experienced prejudice. They were seen as lawless, treacherous, and having filthy habits. (See more at this CNN article, “When Italian immigrants were the other.”) Italians weren’t allowed to build a church inside Manhattan because city officials were fearful of Catholicism and the ceremonies they didn’t understand. The largest single lynching in America was of Italians in Louisiana 1891. Teddy Roosevelt, though not yet president, said of the lynching it was “a rather good thing.” The man who helped organize that lynching, John Parker, later became Louisiana’s governor in 1911.

Currently, similar to the time period one hundred years ago in America when Italian immigration to the US was at its peak, Americans’ fear of immigrants is heightened. Openness to new experiences, information and ways of seeing can enrich and expand our lives, and bridges that allow us to build deeper understanding of what is different can be helpful. Mahzarin Banaji co-author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People and Professor of Social Ethics in the department of psychology at Harvard explains in her interview with Krista Tippett that our minds are basically wired to distinguish differences in order to help us make sense of our world. This wiring creates biases and blind spots we’re not aware of. Tests created by researchers to help you see your biases at Project Implicit. People can, however, gain understanding of biases and blind spots by exposing themselves to ideas and people that stretch their boundaries of familiarity. Challenges to people’s preconceptions presented in contexts allowing them to continue to feel safe can help people grow in their understanding of others different from themselves.

One terrific way to do this is through reading, as reading allows us to learn from others without having to take personal risks as we step into their lives. Scientific American’s October 23, 2013 issue reports social researcher, Emanuele Castano and PHD candidate’s research evidence showing how literary fiction, delves into characters’ thoughts and interactions. In literary fiction, explains Kidd, “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations.” As a result, readers have to imagine characters’ inner thoughts. This kind of thinking nurtures empathy as it leads readers to understand the complexity in characters’ lives and to reach for why they might do things differently than expected.

20161218_150059

If reading literary fiction helps break down stereotypes and prejudices, enabling readers to develop empathy with those different from themselves, it follows that writing fiction could further expand this capability as authors not only step inside character’s minds, they create their thoughts and build contexts from which they flow. As a writer, you immerse yourself in your characters’ lives, become familiar with their setting, social context and way of seeing so that you can portray their world. You reveal your characters’ weaknesses and blind spots, and come to understand your own as well.

While most people aren’t fiction writers, we’re all creators of our own life stories. We can consciously aim to expand our understanding of new contexts and situations. Simple things like taking a new route home, listening to or playing a different type of music, going to a lecture on an unfamiliar topic, trying a new sport, hobby or food can all help us expand. We can learn a few phrases in a new language, take a class in a unfamiliar subject, learn about plants in our yard or types of architecture in the neighborhood, experiment with art or try building something. When meeting new people, we can ask questions to bring out their experiences or ways of seeing things. These actions may not seem like large leaps for some, nevertheless they can open new paths in our brains to carry us on journeys widening into new vistas of understanding.

Some journeys start before you know they’ve started. I’d written quite a few poems about Italian immigrants experiencing earthquakes, crossing the Atlantic, learning about the largest lynching in America, and Italians being removed from their homes to be taken to internment camps before I realized I was actually on a pilgrimage with them. I’ve made the pilgrimage with them as I could through writing, and the trek has caused me to view my own place in the world with greater humility.

Not every story is ours to tell, but this one called to me and I felt compelled to take the writing journey to tell it. A Space Between to be published by Bordighera Press (date to be determined) describes this journey, and I look forward to sharing it with you. If you want, you can read more about the book here.

poetry, Uncategorized

Flower Pilgrimage to Crete

July 10, 2017July 11, 2017 annacitrino

Sensation

On blue summer evenings I’ll go down the pathways
Pricked by the grain, crushing the tender grass—
Dreaming, I’ll feel its coolness on my feet.
I’ll let the wind bathe my bare head.

I won’t talk at all. I won’t think about anything.
But infinite love will rise in my soul,
And I’ll go far, very far, like a gypsy,
Into Nature–happy, as if with a woman.

—Arthur Rimbaud

Over a decade ago, I browsed through a book with photos of Crete at a friend’s house. The abundance of wildflowers depicted in the photos amazed me, and I hoped someday to be able to visit Crete in the spring. That day arrived this past April. I came to Crete on a pilgrimage–a journey seeking renewal through connecting with a fleeting seasonal aspect of nature that offers so much joy to so many: wild flowers.

Driving to the ancient site of Aptera, just west of Chania, I wandered the hillside above the sea. Meadows of marguerites stood chest high. Red poppies boldly waved their colors beside the buttercups sprinkled across the grass. The entire world shimmered in spring petals. Bees, legs laden with pollen, drifted from flower center to flower center, their hum filling the fields. Lying on a rock surrounded by blossoms the sky wide above me, I felt I was buoyed up by beauty, floating on time’s wide sea. Alive. Replete. I knew I’d arrived at my journey’s destination.

Flowers have a way of opening our hearts. They unfold their petals, and our hearts unfold with them. Previously, on this blog I’ve written about forest bathing, an activity that is now gaining momentum in the US, as studies, according to this recent article by Meeri Kim, “‘Forest bathing’ is latest fitness trend to hit U.S. — ‘Where yoga was 30 years ago,’” have demonstrated how it helps to lower blood pressure, heart rate and reduces stress, among other benefits, including helping elderly patients with COPD, according to another study done in China, reported in the Natural Medicine Journal. The insights this research gives got me wondering about the effects flowers might have on the mind and body. It turns out that flowers, too, bring us numerous benefits. One study shows how office workers grew more relaxed when viewing roses. Flowers, studies have found, reduce stress and speed healing. They also change our behavior. The University of Florida website, in their post, “Flower power: ‘Brain Awareness’ lecturer to discuss flowers’ positive effect on emotions,” explains how research done by Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and director of the Emotions Laboratory at Rutgers University, unexpectedly found that “people who got flowers performed much better in memory tests than those who did not get flowers,” suggesting that flowers may effect memory functions. Louie Schwartzberg, renowned for his phenomenal time-lapsed photography, tells audiences on his TED Talk, The Hidden Beauty of Pollination, that flowers’ beauty is connected to survival. “We protect what we fall in love with,” says Schwartzberg. These examples illustrate some of the new understandings about the effects the natural world, including flowers, have on our physical well-being.

Asphodel

Beyond the beauty flowers bring, however, I’ve been thinking how flowers are important reminders of the value of gentleness. A flower’s life is brief, all its beauty spent in a single season but flowers are an important antidote to life’s hardness. We live in a world where power over others is often respected, where we’re encouraged to be a leader, and to take charge of our lives or of the situations we’re connected with. Get tough and be strong. Climb mountains, push your limits, and go farther. These are saying and ideas commonly found in our culture. Flowers are an antidote to this kind of thinking.

Though they can also hold their faces to the sun all day, absorbing its heat, flowers aren’t known for their toughness. Their petals are soft and tear easily. We appreciate them for their bold blossoms, their illusive, sweet scents and sassy colors but we love them for their softness. Flowers, in their gentleness, remind us that we, too, are human. Their petals are flexible, fragile, vulnerable, even, as they bend and turn with the wind, and in their softness, they allow us to speak from the tender parts of our own lives for which we often can’t find words–the part where we allow others to enter when we want to be in relationship–when we want others to know us. Tennessee Williams helps us understand the importance of flowers’ softness in his line from his play Camino Real, “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.” We see the flower growing in the stony crack, and find its softness a relief. Life is not all hardness. There is a strength in softness that moves in a different mode. Flowers touch our souls the way music does, reaching past the stony walls of reason we protect ourselves with to lift our spirits, and let us know we are more than struggle. We are alive, joined to all that is–including joy.

Rimbaud’s poem, “Sensation” illustrates this idea of how allowing ourselves to be touched by the soft things of life can transform us. Rimbaud begins with the poem’s speaker walking into a blue summer evening. It is a vivid image, perfectly depicting the tranquil essence of summer’s calm depth. Though in the next line the poem’s speaker is “pricked by grain” and “crushing the tender grass,” we understand we’ve entered a soft world because the grass is tender. The grain that pricks us serves to make us aware that our senses are enveloped in a world that is delicate and alive, and therefore breakable. As we continue reading the poem, the words bathe the reader in a scene of natural beauty–coolness caresses the feet; wind immerses the head in its essence. The poem’s speaker doesn’t resist the blue evening he enters. Instead, he surrenders himself to the wind’s caress. The head is bare, unprotected, open to experience. There is no need to talk, to reason or ponder, yet there is an exchange. Like a flower opening, as the poem’s speaker gives himself to her, Nature reveals herself to him. The sequence is worth noting here. Infinite love arises in the soul as a result of opening to the relationship. In the poem’s last lines, Rimbaud brings the reader into the heart of the most intimate of connections– one that joins human to human and human to nature. The poem’s speaker describes himself wandering deeply into nature, connected to it as if with a woman. “And I’ll go far, very far, like a gypsy,/ Into Nature–happy, as if with a woman.” Going on a flower pilgrimage can bring a person to just such a place–to arrive at a destination of softness that lets us know we are alive and in union with the perfume and color of all that is.

This coming week I’m participating in San Francisco’s Lotus Live at the Asian Art Museum–creating with others a human flower as an expression of the value of diversity and peacefulness that can be seen from the sky. If you want to spread the healing power of flowers, you might want to check out this video describing how Larsen Jay began the organization called Random Acts of Flowers or maybe you simply want to pick flowers to bring someone, anyone, even a stranger, and see how it changes them.

community, spirtuality

What Makes Love Last?

July 13, 2015February 4, 2019 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-”

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.”

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.

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.

gardening, poetry

Coming Back to the Garden

July 2, 2014February 6, 2019 annacitrino

I sit looking out over my yard while I write, the sun neither too warm nor too weak– a perfect gentleness for a summer afternoon. I see the stone steps under the grape arbor, and the thyme that fits between the cracks, and think of how those cracks are like the summer holiday, the space in my life that I am hungry for. The quiet. I sit here satisfied simply to absorb the green and the random dove or falcon call. At unexpected moments the scent of redwood or pine wafts through. Restaurants and movies can be good. Shopping for supplies is necessary. But many of us also need to walk in the woods, go down to the river or ocean, sit by flowers or a slab of granite, or get our hands in the dirt to find ourselves again. I am one of those. This morning I decided to read Rilke again, and pulled from my shelf the volume of Selected Poems From Rainer Maria Rilke with translation from Robert Bly. In his A Book for the Hours of Prayer, Rilke writes,

I live my life in growing orbits

which move out over the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years,

and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

or a great song.

—

As a traveler, I’ve circled around the globe exploring and discovering, but there is another kind of travel, that of the inner pilgrim, traveling within trying to understand what it means to live and how to live meaningfully so that we can learn who we are and why we are here on earth–what it means when we meet and greet each other, what it means to be in relationship to others, to the earth, to this place in time. Like Rilke, I don’t know if I will ever achieve this, but this is my attempt.

Here on my land while watering the garden, pulling weeds, or planting, I realize how deeply satisfied I am, how little it takes to make me feel content. I feel settled inside, whole. All the years of travel and exploration, these have been good. But the continuous striving that the workplace emphasizes seems irrelevant here in a garden that holds to an organic pace of being. Things grow according to the pace they were meant to grow at. The gardener nurtures them along by making sure there is adequate soil and light, plants the plants with others they are compatible with, tomatoes with basil for example, or strawberries with borage–but the true becoming is there in the mystery of biology and the seed. All the years of working and the practice of my work, reading, writing, and then I come home to the garden and sense I have found my true self, or it is at least a place I want to find myself in.

A metaphor for life, the garden has much it can help us understand about ourselves: that there are seasons and cycles for everything, the value of weeding to protect the life you are nurturing, that plants have personalities so to speak–some need more sun, others shade, which plants help them grow better, make them taste sweeter, and which protect. Gardens take work. If you want something to grow, you have to put in the effort by digging, planting, tending, and harvesting. Gardening can be a contemplative act. When you get your hands in the soil, you start to understand the connections to your own life. These are the connections I want to explore and know through our experiment in living here at Gratitude Gardens, a garden we are slowly building over the years here on our land.

At Gratitude Gardens we will raise our food and use the garden as a place to connect to the creative process in a variety of forms, for writing and art. We have planted herbs, flowers, grapes and fruit trees, and this summer are expanding the raised beds to make way for future food. Most anything we practice intentionally with our hearts can be a spiritual path that will teach us more of how to live if we are willing to view it in that way. For me, building a garden is an important part of that practice, and I want to believe there are others like me who feel hungry for the quiet, want to connect or reconnect to the earth and learn how to listen to what it has to tell us about life.

Adam and Eve left the garden. Everyone leaves. It’s the path of learning, knowing, of growing up. But we can come back too. We can make a garden. Yes, it’s made by the sweat of the brow, but that is an important part of learning what the gift of a garden is, and learning how to find yourself in one.

Maybe you, too, “have been circling for a thousand years,” or feel you have, and like Rilke, “still don’t know you “are a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.” Why not go on inner pilgrimage? Discover and claim your path so you can find through that work how it is you can come back to the garden.

Uncategorized

Traveling Out to Travel In

May 4, 2014April 30, 2021 annacitrino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are you now? What is your journey?