Being Direct.

So what will it take?

See, I’m already avoiding it.

I can tell there is something that I really do want to say.  It is like canvas.  I can see it is tan, like canvas.  I can see it is different from the silvery, shapely thing I wanted to express two hours ago.  Why do I see what I want to say as colors in my mind’s eye? Why is it canvas?  Durable.  Something that can handle mud and vigorous washing.

Do I want to be outside in the chill air getting muddy?  Maybe that is all.  But here I am in the late evening writing on my laptop.  I’ve no chance of wearing overalls in the garden now.

I like art that is like canvas.  Not that the art is like a blank canvas.  No.  I like art that is durable; it can handle some mud-slinging.  I like art that is useful, too.  I like when a song can travel with me through a day like clothing.  It alters the impact of the day on my mind.  That is why it is important to be picky with art, including songs.

Why is one thing good for you but not for me?  That’s an old one.  Well, if I’m stuck on an elevator, I like the tool that opens the doors, frees me from that narrow space.  If you’re stuck on a rooftop, you like the way out that leads to an enclosure, a stairwell that lets you get back to more options.  I think this answers the question.  We all want art to help free us, open up more options in our minds.   We value what suits our particular predicament.   Sometimes we need to see what is going on more clearly.  Then we need art that reflects our own state of mind.  Sometimes we need an encounter with something evocative.  A piece of art can summon a certain quality that balances you or helps you face your life.

We tire of things when they no longer have the timely effect.  Even the sappiest song can open up a fantasy in the mind that seems like a way out.  But then the effect wears off.  You realize it is a fantasy.  There is very little art that does not wear off, that keeps opening doors.

Now I am back to the manila-colored Carthart canvas.  I want to get to work, too.  Arrive.  I want to make art the way I garden:  kneeling, okay with grittiness, quiet.  There is no part hanging back.  All of me holds the clippers.  All of me is okay with yanking that weed.   When I don’t know, I stop for the moment.

I think I need to watch my life more carefully, like a plant, and see what it needs to grow.  I will know subtle things directly.  And I hope there will still be poetry.

Interlude: The Busker Bruja

She stands by a brick wall, near the corner. The wall was once painted with advertisements. It is an old city. She has a patchy cloak and a half-mask whose rude nose is pasty white. Her real eyes sparkle and she wears wrappings of candy in her hair. She circles her hips under the cloak and, conjuring, lifts her strong fingers. She leers but without lust. She sings for coins but when we pay the spell flashes through the conduit: song – hat – coin – finger – heart – ear. It arrives and begins an interlude of enchantment.

I gave her a quarter. Now I hear more as I walk away, up the street. I hear the walls with their proud but dusky pitches. I hear the edifices of commerce say, “We keep out wolves. We meet the needs of people. Lovers lean on us. Birds nest in our eaves. We patrol the earth with pleasures. But you pay. Think,” they whisper, “of who owns us. Think of who we displaced. We are not altars. We shed the rain and guests may not stay. The world is ours for the taking.”

There are light wells in each arched opening and the rain is silver flashes in lamplight but warm. I am still in the thrall of the busker bruja. The sewer discs with their inky holes look like shields ready to be heaved into battle by heroes. I see muscled women and men bend and raise the sewer caps, fingers through the holes. I feel a battle coming that could raise them. They are the poor but brave, the poor but cunning who know the streets. They have no leader but make the city into their armor. They take back the tongues of roads and where the water goes. It changes.

Her song is water changing direction, changing its placement. Tears changing faces. The peaks and valleys of power are known to her liquid phrasings. Her face, cast back and smooth, is the glass of windows, reflectant of the road. She twists a heart like an old dry pod and out shoot black songs, slippery and wry. Who wants one?

“I Conduit”, Part I

This morning we have been playing chess.  This game comes after a week of study.  I have identified the plants in the front garden, planted by our landlady’s daughter years ago.  I know when to prune each of them.  I have also been reading about card games, especially their objectives.  What guides the action is the objective of the game.   In chess, we all know it is the overthrow of one ruler by another’s army.  “Get the king!” my daughter declaims.

What I heard yesterday has made me philosophical about objectives.  I had to pick up a few necessities from the co-op and listened to a snippit from the NPR program “Radio Lab”.   Scientists and scholars were discussing  the creation of sentient beings from ‘scratch’ (biotechnology) and the limits of science.  When I tuned in the interviewer was saying something like, “Don’t you think there are just some things that cannot be done, some domains that are inaccessible to the mind?”  The scientist answered something like “No, not really.”  They went on to discuss the slowness of evolution and the potential for harm when ‘new’ organisms are plopped down within an existing ecosystem.  Antibiotics are cited as a solution gone awry.   I could almost see the nodding heads.  Yes, there can be extremely dangerous results, unforeseen results.  Yes, we hardly know what we don’t know about life.  But what do we do?  Do we tell the scientists not to research further in this direction?  No, no.  This is the quandry.  We are Homo ludens, man the player, after all.  That was where the show concluded.

To intend to understand life seems beautiful to me.  To have the objective to create new creatures or duplicates via biotechnology is different.  To have the objective to control living creatures is different.  To have the objective to become immortal is different.  These are applications of that understanding that have immense implications.  And the first question is why, why would one want to create a new or duplicate living thing, be able to control it, or make a living thing undying?

Perhaps for many the answers are obvious, right?  But are those beautiful reasons?  Are they reasons that lead to a culture of peace?  Or are they reasons based on imbalance and disharmony, wanting to stay on top?   Remember this is important; what guides the action is the objective of the game.  In life, one chooses one’s objectives.  The objective comes from values.

How are values cultivated?  Through self-inquiry, education, family, socializing, products and marketing, religions, arts, and entertainment, including games.  In many ways, play permeates all of those aspects of culture but the connection between play and games is obvious.  Right after Radio Lab came a piece about the educational power of video games.  I only caught ten minutes of it on the drive home.

A psychologist spoke about the repetitiousness of games.  Over and over again the player is trained to choose firing the gun, to practice choosing to punch.  This sort of practice creates much more of an impression than a single viewing of a movie.  It trains violent responses, trains the mind to override resistance to violent acts.

To be continued…

Superblog II

As a child I had an imaginary friend who was both a young girl and a pillar of extraordinary light.  She could enter the darkest situations, encounter demons and dark lords, and emerge unscathed.  Often she would transform the dark ones by sparking open their hearts with love.

Naturally, I loved “Star Wars” when it came out and Glorfindel in The Fellowship of the Ring.  But I realized in fifth grade, faced with bullies, that I was not that girl.  I spoke as if I was and did manage to stop a fight but I felt frightened.  I realized that the blazing light did not protect me.  It was itself and I would become it completely but only after I died.

With this awareness came timidity.  I felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the games in the world.   I did not want to play those games.  I wanted to burn with love, like a mantle that holds the light in a lamp.  I am sure many people feel or have felt similarly.

Faced with the tangle of interests at play in questions such as global warming and corporate influence, I have wished to be fearless, radiant, and informed.  I have been something closer to bitter, overwhelmed, and frustrated.  I do  my best to steady my own mind and even that is less successful lately.

So, this week I offer a prayer for fearlessness.  That is the SUPER I want to be.  I am reminded of the bloom the goddess Durga holds in one of her many hands.  It is a weapon, too.  The power of emergence, the link between seed and plant, the processes that cannot be forced, these provide limits to the power of greed and fear.  I stand with those who occupy Wall Street.  I stand with those who bring awareness to any situation where power is used to increase fear and desire and conceal abuse.

 

Superblog, Part I

When I close my eyes I see large bare feet.  I want to stare at them.  They are the feet of fearlessness.  They have articulate ankles that flex and root.  They are slightly luminous though in no way ethereal.

I could sit and stare at them but my husband keeps cackling, gasping really, in disbelieving laughter in the living room.  I hear the shrieks from the movie he is watching.  I am getting distracted.

Before I came to sit here before the computer, we had talked at length, with the movie paused.  He told me that everything I had just said to him could be in a blog.  I balk at this idea.  When we are speaking, I respond.  When I write, I am attracted to essays and articles.  I don’t like to write in a casual tone and I realized that I  don’t know what I want from a blog.  I chose this format because I do not have time to research and contemplate enough to write essays and articles right now.   But that is what I’d rather do.

“OMG, omg,” he sobs from the other room.  He is watching “Super”.   It stops and he appears at the door, “It is still gory but it’s brilliant.  It’s turning into a Monty Pythonish commentary.  It’s what we are turning into as a culture.”

Super.  Now this word is in the mix.  I have been thinking about cultivation.  I can’t get anywhere because the word ‘cultivation’ spreads sideways through everything.  There are the choices one makes in the garden, the fencing off of space from wilderness.  There is the cultivation implicit in culture.  There is the cultivation I know in poetry.  Revision and practice.  There is the Law of Maximum Entropy Porduction that asks how the universe cultivates itself, keeps itself forming, reforming, and even evolving.

But I have not concluded anything, in part because I want it to be ‘super’.  Super thorough.  Super smart.  Super integrated.  Super-exactly–what-needs-saying-in-a-super-quirky-but-accessible-way.  I have scoffed at the culture of Super foods, stores, cars, houses, arsenals, and egos.   But when it comes to blogging I have been constipated by a diet of oversized aspirations.

Now, outside, one of my neighbors is remonstrating someone in a thick, grieved voice.  I hear a slamming door again.  I choose the word remonstrate for the monster in it.  I know it means to reason forcefully but there is a slur of alcohol in that man’s voice, a pleading viciousness that comes from feeling unable to open up any more.  When he reasons he shows the monster, the barred teeth, the barrier.  And I hear fear.  I feel afraid, too.  I feel he might barge into our house.  He feels closer than he really is.  He trespasses with his beer-battered voice.

When I sat down to write the word boondoggle had come to mind.  It is hard to bring this all together.  The soundtrack of the movie from the other room lurches from silence to violence.  The neighbors’ vitriolic, desperate exchanges appear out of the cricket-wash of night sounds.  My own desperate need for something beautiful to rise up out of me like those feet I imagine, fearless and peaceful, is still present.   I am still learning how to cultivate.  I barely know the plants in the yard.  I barely understand the landscape around me.  I barely see my part in this living process.

To be continued…

Enigmas

I had many enigmas in mind, until my daughter pounced on me and announced it was time to get up!  Where do those ideas go?  That is another enigma.

I want to know why the clouds that moved across the moon three nights ago absorbed my attention so completely.  As I watched from bed, I tried out words for the speed at which they crossed the moon and its ring.  They dashed.  That was too hasty.  They sauntered?  I couldn’t picture sauntering without feet.  The clouds were constant in their flow.  They processed across the sky.  That was as close as I came that night.  Then I crawled out of bed and took the pictures that bookend this blog.

As I write about it, the whole scene seems superficial.  It would be easy to say that the moon is pretty and leave it there.  But that doesn’t fully describe why that particular moon appealed to me so much more than usual.  Why do I hover before it again and again like a hummingbird?  On some level I already understand the thing in question.  I perceive the thing intimately but cannot yet articulate what I know.  What is the difference between what is known without words and what can be articulated?

Recently, I got my elder daughter a Rubik’s cube.  I felt no attraction to it.  My husband did.  He had solved it often as a child.  He knew it on some level and wanted to make that understanding practicable again.  For several days, he kept reappearing from his studio with the cube completed.  Then we’d mess it up for him again.  Then he’d practice certain algorithms back and forth until he’d understood.  He integrated what he could do almost unconsciously into his consciousness.

I am like this about other things.  Often, I weed through the enigmas to find the most puzzling, the ones that will create the most complex or powerful integration of material.  Then I puzzle them out, usually through poetry, sometimes through this blog.

That said, these last few days I have been appreciating the sensation of staring at the enigmas.  It feels good to recognize how little I know.  In this world of instant trivia, quick decisions, and heavily reinforced conventions, the unknown can seem too frightening or tedious to engage with sincerely.  We are so often talking together about the American Dream.  That is also an enigma.  Let’s face it.

 

Titanic

My body is not my true home.

This body will die.

These skyscrapers are just waves cresting.

They will crash.

All these objects are crashing waves,

formed and ending.

That black, cold water will come

one day.

There is no raft of immortality.

The only raft is love.

I will find out where it goes.

I am going to die in love.

I am going to die in love.

I wrote this poem in 2002, months after 9/11.  I still think that the most difficult and most healing stance is to acknowledge that forms are impermanent and still love the world.

A Conversation with “Outremer” by Fanny Howe

St. Frank

Outremer,

I have spread your pages across my bed.

Let’s talk inspiration.

You return to this word several times.  You even begin, “Inspiration is usually a coincidence.”  And your sense of coincidence has a layer of chance, of the “mercurial”, and of that which cannot be home.   I see the sadness that comes of this.  Again and again you refer to leaving and being lost.  You have chosen to quote that mysticism “provides a path for those who ask the way to get lost.  It teaches how not to return.”  You dip into the word suicide at the beginning.  It is not the plan, but you, yourself, “come without a plan…” to the “long strange space” of the monastic wing.

I find this at odds with the passage that most clearly describes what St. Francis and Asad seek.

“For Asad, as for Francis, the urge to fuse the outer

with the inner life was the great drive,

for if they did fuse, there was meaning.

Asad left his European roots and went east to Islam.

For Francis, there are no others, no inner, no outer.

There is being-with.

That is why he addresses fire as “you”.”

I am with you here.  Yet looking forward and back to the brackets of suffering with which you open and close your discussion, I wonder how you reconcile “being-with” and “a wish to leave this earth.”

I see mysticism differently.

I want to return again to inspiration and its connection to mysticism and poetry.

In my experience, inspiration may be cultivated and does not require evacuation from the world.  It requires a receptive attitude.  The part of the land that is conducive to rainwater becomes the stream or river.

I recall a turn that happened in my mind back in 2001.  I shifted inside from author to receiver.  The word that came then was “follow”.  I began to follow a sweetness in my mind.  It has a current or multiple currents.  The more I focus on it, the more it swivels around on itself to shape consonants and vowels.  Yet these words are never closures, never the end of that intoxicating flow.  What is this vibrational underpinning of my thoughts?  I have wondered.  Yet I have seen that by listening to it, following it, reason can serve revelation.

Sometimes, I come for a poem.  Then I come with a seed in my mind: an image, a charged network of images, a question, a memory, a phrase from another person’s work.  I listen to that seed in my mind open and grow into sounds and rhythms.

Sometimes I listen and cast away any seed that comes into my mind.  Then I am meditating.  I listen to the current by itself.

But none of this is passive though it is receptive.   When you say that you have come “empty-handed” to “see what would be revealed to (you) by circumstances” I might think we agree.  I might think you intend “being-with”.  But already I doubt this.  In the first paragraph you call the ego luggage to be left at home.  You want to leave yourself.  On the next page you juxtapose your own choices with “those acts I had not chosen, but which had chosen me”, and favor the latter.  It sounds as if your will is suspect in your own mind.  There is something else that occasionally coincides with you, inspiring your actions.  As you return to the question of why Francis mortifies his body, you again dismiss the ego, this time aggressively with the phrase “want to kill your ego.”  It sounds as if you imagine an annihilation of the self that would lead elsewhere, outremer.  And could that strange land of revelation be disconnected from the prosaic one?

I do not think it is necessary, or possible while alive, to kill the ego.  The mystical shift is in the vision with which one makes choices.  In my poetry practice I feel it the most.  When I am following then my ego is expanded.  It is driven by an unlimited will, a will that drives everything else, too.  That will makes use of who I am.  I do not disappear and neither does pain and loss.  They pass like flavors, or words, when I am in the resting place– the vantage from which things inside and out are joined.

When the body is stiff, it is hard to breathe deeply.  It is hard to let that feeling be the passing flavor.  I think of what you say, that Francis looked to the sky.  Perhaps it helped, especially when the pain in his body was intense.  Life becomes a poem at this moment.  When the life is felt intensely and yet felt from a place that can still respond, still has a choice, and very creative ones at that.  When the will tends toward be-attitude, then loss is also home and the next breath is inspiration.

Fami cantar l’amor di la beata, quella ke de Christo sta gaudente.

Dami conforto madre l’amore,

et mette fuoco et fiamba nel mio core:

K’i’ t’amasse tanto a tutte l’ore

k’io me transmortisse spessamente!

Let me sing the love of the blessed one

that rejoices in Christ.

Mother, give me comfort and love,

and put fire and flame into my heart

that I may love you so much always

as long as I live.

                                  St. Francis of Assisi

Hear this portion of the song sung by Altramar on Saint Francis and the Minstrels of God here:

http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1065921/a/St.+Francis+%26+the+Minstrels+of+God+-+Altramar+Medieval+Music.htm

Read the complete lyrics here:

http://www.naxos.com/sungtext/PDF/8.557637%20Oni%20Wytars%20Texts.pdf/

Enjoy the text of Outremer by Fanny Howe here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/242512/

Watch a beautiful video of Outremer here:

http://vimeo.com/16145484/

Thank you, Fanny Howe.  Your poetic essay was a treat.

Tapas and the Light Meal

I have just come in from lying flat-out on a quilt in the backyard for a ten-minute ‘power-sprawl’.

There are times in my life when indulgence isn’t possible or even attractive.  After giving birth, all I had to do was watch my baby.  The demands of the present were clear, moment by moment. I knew what was necessary even if that only meant asking the right question.  Twice in my life, I have helped a person whose life was in danger.  Then, too, I felt quiet inside.  The situation absorbed my attention completely and I knew my part.  Also, when I lived in an ashram just after college, the daily schedule was rigid.  I had few choices except how to greet the routine.  In my poetry practice, the limits of a form or subject have required me to shed tangents, recognize what serves.  In each circumstance, the restraint of the mind to avoid distractions generated heat throughout my body.  In yoga, this heat is called tapas.

Sometimes I feel like a star.  I feel that all that heat flows.  It has nothing to burn.  I recognize this, then this, then this is what I need to do.  Words come or don’t.  It is impossible to fake this sort of inspiration.  And today I am not in this state.  Today I feel there is plenty obstructing the blaze.

Today, I am up against the limits of what I can provide for my family when I am timid.  What is clear is that my fearfulness has to go.  Before the sprawl, I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to draw a goddess for our new “family lampshade”, made of wire and paper.  The old stained-glass shade broke during our move.  But every goddess I drew had a glob on her nose or eyes.  But I wanted to do it… right.  My daughter wanted me to do it.  I feared I might not have time later, tomorrow, to finish the project.  I have been feeling overwhelmed.  I felt hungry.  We have been eating less.  But in spite of having less, I know I have more in me.  Just not “perfect” goddesses.  I couldn’t see one in my mind.   I saw, instead, a tower of anger and sadness.  I saw I couldn’t keep drawing goddesses.   I tried one hag and when that, too, was blighted, I got up.  This was not for me.

I went out to the sunshine.  For a while, I felt evened-out.  The heat was everywhere and there was no longer anything to do but breathe.  I looked at the empty blue sky and felt the knobby dirt under the blanket, and the dry grass.  I felt like sobbing but there was nothing to tip it over into happening.

Then I heard the playful shrieks of my two girls coming closer.  They were crossing the living room, heading toward the sliding door.  I knew it was time to get up.   I didn’t want to go back inside.  But it was getting closer to lunch and I needed to choose what to make.  The heat of necessity.  Get up.  It is time.  Like a yank.

I make crepes.

Now I am in my room after lunch, thinking about tapas.   I go to a book I have been reading intermittently, The Artful Universe by William K. Mahony.  It is a scholarly book on the Vedic imagination.  I know I’ve read something there about tapas.  With its transformational power Prajapati, the “Lord of Creatures”, creates the universe.

“He did so by cultivating his inward heat (tapas) and, bursting with that blazing energy, exploded outward, just as a well-stoked fire produces innumerable sparks that rise into the darkness.”

He also is exhausted.  He no longer exists, except in his creations.  His creations miss him, though.  He was the foundation of their being and ordered their world.  Together they resurrect him, returning some of his own tapas to him.

A week has passed.  We are able to eat more but I miss the focus the light meals brought.  I see how quickly the wadding of unnecessary indulgence dulls the fire.  I cannot see the moment.  I am busy wanting or fearing something for the next or remembering the past.   My will is not ablaze.  I need more “light” meals, where I see my food as light, where I resurrect my own creator.  I need that sort of tapas.  It is necessary now.

 

Pretty Bimba, A First Blong about Healthy Luxury

“No yacht is so super, nor any wine so expensive, that it can soothe the soul or guarantee one’s children won’t grow up to be creeps.”  (Graeme Wood, “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich”, The Atlantic, April 2011)

This was in an article about the woes of the very wealthy.  The author invoked Siddhartha’s story, too, to suggest the door at which the super-wealthy are knocking their exhausted senses.  As a thrifty householder and mother-of-two who enjoys nondualism in her philosophy,  I felt a response coming  on, like agents sauntering down darkened streets to meet and, dossier to dossier,  match the facts.

While referring to the Pratyabhijnahrdayam (The Heart of Self-Recognition) later in the day, I came across the Sanskrit term pratibimba.  In that context, the term means literally “the reflection of an object.”, a mirrored form.  Everything qualifies as an object except the one watching, the subject who is conscious of all the rest.  So thoughts, a bad smell, the skunk, the night, the time, the wish for the smell of that skunk to go away, associations with skunks (medicine animal, Flower in Bambi, Reeko), and what the skunk was seeking in the night; all of these are objects.  The kicker is, though, that in the context in which I found the term pratibimba, all objects are consciousness.  Consciousness is both the creator and the vibratory substance of the universe.

I flashed back to the article on the wealthy.   It was really about objects and how to relate to them; what is healthy luxury?

I also immediately noticed how close bimba is to bimbo and I thought about what ‘bimbo’ means to me.   I think of a bimbo as an objectified woman, albeit one who does it to herself.   Bimbos seek attention generally.  From any male.  Or female, I suppose.  I find the bimbo-approach ugly.

Why?  It lacks self-reflection.   It places value outside of oneself.  It is stupid because it only leads to misery, especially the misery of feeling unable to connect more than superficially.  There is no quality in a bimbo.  A bimbo is an object that is pimped out and is all about attracting you to it.

A link formed.  Unlike a bimbo, a bimba really satisfies.  Pretty bimba.   An object that is a reflection, a beautiful reflection.  I knew the reflective part had a lot to do with the pretty part and vice versa.

Earlier today, I ate three kinds of ice cream.  Four were offered by my mother in the presence of my children on a hot afternoon, and I filled my bowl with three fairly modest scoops.   I felt I had done well, made it through somewhat unscathed.  Then twenty minutes later my belly felt PACKED and I regretted all but the chocolate scoop.  I had thought of taking only that one scoop (it was organic, high quality ice cream unlike the others) but it had seemed a shame to pass up the opportunity to flavor hop.   I also felt the weight of a variety of (internalized) expectations.  So I had given myself this seeming luxury:  three, f r o t h y, AMPLIFIED, saweet!  flavors.  But.  It makes, me, vague, and slow(and later, fatter), when I eat, too, much.

You might say, “Let yourself off the hook!  Live a little!  What’s a little excess?”  Or at least, “Forgive yourself.”  Well, I did forgive myself even though I felt, at first, like an ugly bimbo flirting with her sugar daddy.  So. This is not bimba.  Here is another story.

My husband is Dutch.  Before we married, we went to Haarlem to walk down certain streets known for jewelers.  Halfway down the first street we chose, we saw a store and stepped inside.  The look of the room was neat, angular, silvery, slim.  The jewelry was unappealingly industrial but as we spoke with the jeweler, we pointed out what we did like.  The red and white golds.  The smooth, unembellished surfaces.  We asked if one of the designs could be adapted.  She was open to this.  We sat at a pencil thin black table and slowly we crafted a design all our own.  The red gold met the white gold without blending.  They were of equal amounts.  Where they met, on one side, the white tapered and the red waxed.  One the other side, the white waxed as the red tapered.  We vowed to let each other have our moments of dominance while affirming our overall equality.   I remember how our eyes were shining, how easy it felt, how free and clear the process was, and how deeply happy we both felt with the final design.   I have never doubted that process.  I still treasure my wedding band.  It continues to be beautiful to me, regardless of how simple it may look to others.   Its form reflects its own creation  and our vows beautifully.

That band is a pretty bimba.   What are some of yours?