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MOVING POETICS BLOG
Yehuda Amichai, “A Pace Like That”
I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted. A year ago. I need a different pace, a slower one, To observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open. I want a pace like that. Not like reading a newspaper But the way a child learns to read, Or the way you quietly decipher the inscription On an ancient tombstone. And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses, I do each day in haste or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side. The longer you live, the more people there are who comment on your actions. Like a worker in a manhole: at the opening above him people stand around giving free advice and yelling instructions, but he’s all alone down there in his depths. “A Pace Like That” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books. Joy Harjo, “Speaking Tree” I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree. --Sandra Cisneros Some things on this earth are unspeakable: Genealogy of the broken-- A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre, Or the smell of coffee and no one there-- Some humans say trees are not sentient beings, But they do not understand poetry-- Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by Wind, or water music-- Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft-- Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth Between sunrise and sunset-- I cannot walk through all realms-- I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark-- What shall I do with all this heartache? The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway-- To the edge of the river of life, and drink-- I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down: Imagine what would it be like to dance close together In this land of water and knowledge. . . To drink deep what is undrinkable. From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used with permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of” This one thinks, let me be the slender bow of the violin. Another, the body of the instrument, burnished, the color of amber. One imagines life as a narrow boat crossing water, a light mist of salt on the prow. And still another— planed down to planks, then hammered into shelter toices vibrating through the rafters. We do not notice their pleasure, the slight hum of the banister beneath our palms, The satisfaction of the desk as we tap our pens, impatiently, upon its weathered surface. They have ferried us across rough seas to lands that smelled of cinnamon housed our senators, who pace the creaky floors, debating, carried arrowheads to pierce our enemies. We have boiled their pulp, pressed it into thin, white sheets of paper on which we describe all of the above in great detail. And when we die they hold our empty forms in bare cedar until the moment—and how they long for this, when we meet again in the blackened soil and they take us back in their embrace, carry us up the length of their bodies into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves. Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of” from The Moons of August. Copyright © 2014 by Danusha Laméris. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org. POETIC THEMES The Jewish New Year of the Trees marks the revival of nature in Israel, falling on the Hebrew calendar somewhere between late January and early February. The reason I’ve chosen it for our focus this week—besides the fact that there ain’t too much happening in the long, cold soup of January—is because we would do well to take our cue from an ancient faith that has managed to enliven a holiday to match our current ecological crisis. To be clear, nobody said Tu Bishvat is a major Jewish holiday. The holiday has created an environmentalist buzz globally, adopted across the diaspora as a day of agricultural awareness and tree planting. The needs of our planet beg us all to resist capitalism’s extractive approach to the earth and rehabilitate our intimacy with and reverence for nature. These three tree poems offer a range of modes of imagining the interrelationship between humans and the natural sphere. Although Yehuda Amichai is perhaps the most celebrated Israeli poet globally, “A Pace Like That” is hardly the most obvious choice for a reverential poem about a tree. Its frank, un-precious style underscores that Amichai is very much a secular poet. Nature here provides a practical model for human behavior: the speaker simply wishes to mimic the slower pace of his lemon tree. But there’s a slip-slide between the sacred and the profane: trees model a way of being whose slow deliberation is likened to the care we take with sacred things. Not the perfunctory daily flip of the newspaper, but the deciphering of an inscription on a tombstone. Not the troubled movement of rolling from side to side in our sleep, but the deliberate slow unraveling of a Torah scroll over the course of a full year. Then Amichai flips the script with his final metonymic link: the secret underground force of renewal and vitality coursing through the tree’s roots is like… a worker in a manhole. He fuses the quotidian—the people above him who “stand around giving free advice / and yelling instructions”—with the profundity and solitude of the final line: “he’s all alone down there in his depths.” In a glorious upset of our expectations for attributing soul wisdom to natural forces, the mysterious workings of nature are compared to the methodical, practical, skilled industriousness of a manual laborer. Compare this way of modeling human behavior after the livelihood of a tree to the mutual push me/pull you of Joy Harjo’s “Speaking Tree.” To speak the language of tree (which for Harjo is related to poetic language) is to understand the longing not only to root down but also to move. To hear the singing of trees is to understand yearning. But the human “longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth” first appears as the inverse of what trees long for: “The deepest-rooted dream of a tree / is to walk.” This dream, as Harjo translates from tree speech, is to walk not as a human walks, but away from the human: “even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway— / to the edge of the river of life, and drink.” So the animism expressed here doesn’t show nature mirroring human emotion, but instead longing for independence from the realm of people to get closer to some primordial source. Unlike the human longing for tree-ness, conveyed in the epigraph quoting Cisneros—“I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree”—the trees dream of dancing with one another: “Imagine what it would be like to dance close together.” Free. According to Danusha Laméris, trees dream of something different. “What Trees Dream Of” is the very opposite of Harjo’s animism, where the natural realm craves its freedom from humanity. Laméris’ trees dream of nothing but humanity. They want to be our musical instruments, our boats, the beams that construct our shelter. The desk is satisfied with our tapping pens, the banister loves our sliding palms. In the form of benevolent protectors, they ferry us around and provide the material on which we write our histories. This comforting view of parentified nature reaches its apex in the poem’s glorious ending, about endings. Trees, in their afterlife as coffins, embrace the human corpse until there’s an elemental co-mingling: “and how they long for this, / when we meet again in the blackened soil.” These lines bring humanity into a deeply corporeal union with nature that is also transcendent, as the trees take us back, embrace us, and “carry us / up the length of their bodies / into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.” Here in the dead of winter, I like this tree dream of becoming a kind of posthumous human humus. PRACTICE Perhaps to find our own animistic intimacy with the natural surround, we could revisit our broken genealogies for older ritual systems that regard trees with reverence. Are there approaches to trees as bearers of the numinous? Tree ceremonies for quarrel settling. Divining rods. Hearts planted in acorns. Griots in baobabs. The shunned oak. Perhaps we could all dip into a little research on how animism shows up in our ancestral histories and devise our own tree ritual this week! Alternately, you might revisit your personal history and call to mind your very favorite tree. What were the contours of your relationship to it? The birch tree grown from the spot you buried your first dog denotes one set of relational properties and powers, the huge pine whose branches held the tire swing another. Still another set of powers are to be found in the protective dark of the Japanese maple screening your windows from the world. Whatever you value in and draw from your tree friend is a good place to begin building your personal version of the numinous. In meditating on this, you could jot down a word description of the tree, or write your tree’s history, or a fairy tale where the tree is the protagonist. Or perhaps try to embody this tree, envisioning the central axis of your trunk, the rising sap, the symmetrical explosion of roots below and branches above. If you were to breathe like a tree, would you inhale from the foundation of the body that’s rooted to the ground, upward to the glittery, trembling leaves of uplifted fingertips, with the exhalation drifting down all around you? Or would the inhale pull from the skin of the scalp to feed some central ring deep in your trunk and then radiate out in every direction? Whichever exercise helps you concretize what you value in nature, what would integrating those needs into your daily life look like, and how can you commit to establishing a practice around it?
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Y'all, I just couldn't figure out a way to make a video of a cold shower without getting sued. So here's a photo of my last polar bear plunge. Ever!
Jane Kenyon, “Taking Down the Tree” “Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it’s dark at four, and even the moon shines with only half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel, My Darling on its collar, from Mother’s childhood in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack my brother and I fought over, pulling limb from limb. Mother drew it together again with thread while I watched, feeling depraved at the age of ten. With something more than caution I handle them, and the lights, with their tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along from house to house, their pasteboard toy suitcases increasingly flimsy. Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop. By suppertime all that remains is the scent of balsam fir. If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant. “Taking Down the Tree” by Jane Kenyon from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man” One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Source: Poetry magazine (1921). This poem is in the public domain. POETIC THEMES Christmas wraps up somewhere between January 6th and 19th, depending on where you are. Some places celebrate Three Kings Day, marking the visitation of the Magi; others focus on Jesus’ baptism. Even though most Americans don’t observe Epiphany, in the second week of January any small American town will be littered with mangy discarded trees by the side of the road: not-so-evergreen needles, residual tinsel or none. Something about this speaks to the psychological moment of the season. Earnest New Year resolutions clash against the holiday hangover. We dip into the leftover spice cake, reencountering the annual defeat of sudden transformations based on a randomly designated date on the calendar. After and in spite of all the shiny wrapping paper and blinky lights, we are faced with stark, barren reality: cold, darkness, solitude, and nature’s death. Acknowledging these winter realities requires a different spiritual skill set. For some of us, it feels like permission to release. We can let go of the ruse, among other things, and quiet the clamor toward something that is simply not there—at least not right now, in the dead of winter. Hamlet’s Denmark offers an apt psychological setting for early January. Jane Kenyon nails it. “Taking Down the Tree” takes us down into the Shakespearean closed world: maddening mental solitude, excruciating bereavement, cold betrayal, loss after loss, and a darkness where “even the moon / shines with only half a heart.” We are, for sure, taken down. The “closed world” is the term my father coined for the tragic corollary to Northrop Frye’s “green world.” These two paradigms are so user-friendly as to have been employed to describe contemporary phenomena as diverse as Cold War political discourse (in Paul Edwards’ book The Closed World) and digital bot taxonomies (in Mark Sample’s blog, samplereality). What’s recognizable, aside from any religious framework, is the closed world’s inward spiral imploding toward oblivion, a nightmarish perversion of cozy winter hygge. The movement of Kenyon’s poem from a desperation for light to the delicious ending—having extravagant darkness for dinner—is like the release of the insistent, exhausting cultural expectation for an optimistic holiday disposition. Slowly, piece by piece, like the “tick tick tick” soundscape of needles falling off the tree, we let our need for light fall off our shoulders and fingers and feet. I like to reverse the syllables of the word, and think of needles backward, as “less-need.” Dropping my need. To do, to change, to strive, to shine. At the same time, Jane Kenyon’s whole poetic oeuvre is a fight for optimism. Kenyon’s brand of depression is a furious, doomed hunt for light, especially in her late poems, which scour reality for any tiny quotidian detail with the potential to fend off despair. In “Notes from the Other Side,” she describes God as “mercy clothed in light.” “In the Grove: The Poet at 10” depicts a kid so worked up by the battle between the sun and a cloud as to feel a violent joy “hard to distinguish from pain.” That’s a pretty good description of the feeling state of Kenyon’s poetry. In a section of “Having it Out with Melancholy” entitled “Once There was Light,” Kenyon visualizes herself as part of the human family in the form of a “speck of light in the great / river of light that undulates through time.” But melancholy descends on her and yanks her out of the “glowing stream.” After this, she weeps for days. Sometimes divine light only appears in Kenyon’s poem as some kind of joke, as in “Dutch Interiors,” where the Holy Ghost only appears on gleaming cutlery or pewter beakers of beer, leading the poet to decide sourly that “Christ has been done to death / in the cold reaches of northern Europe.” And so we return to the frozen north of “Taking Down the Tree.” Our own desperation for light and change in midwinter is as fragile as the flimsy pasteboard case that holds the Christmas ornaments. And yet, in spite of their delicacy, the tin-reflected lights and ornaments reappear each year: the spaniel marked “My Darling,” older than its owner, and the jumping jack that survived dismemberment. They are testimonies to the durability of the memories we move “from house to house.” We handle them “with something more than caution”—perhaps we could call it reverence—then tuck them safely away again till next December. The tin-reflected lights and idiosyncratic, storied hanging objects are just markers—symbols of our stubborn, renewable hope. Christmas is made of our longing, and the echo of it remains like the residual scent of balsam fir, the actual earthy substance from which the little jumping jack was made. The ornament never falls far from the tree. I inherited from my mother a worldview I find in Kenyon’s poetry, characterized by a simple and definitional state of yearning. Some might call it depressive, particularly if they were fond of Melanie Klein. The first real theological battle with my father, at the dining room table when I was a tween, was about Milton. Not yet thirteen, just tasting the fruits of independent thinking, I wanted to defend the choice to pick the fruit. I argued that humanity only fully became human when we acquired separation from the divine. At thirteen, I probably didn’t reference Michael’s promise of a “paradise within thee, happier far” in Book 12 (12.587), but I think of it now. I still think that longing for contact with the divine creates the internal ethical and spiritual compass that defines our humanity. The human condition is literally woven out of yearning, a truth I could feel in my bones, even (and especially?) at that age. My dad countered with some very Christian interpretation and stormed away, which was anathema to his so-very-sanguine character. But what’s remarkable to me is that the next day my father, knowing that his green world was not mine, gave me Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I can’t afford to reprint this poem, but man oh man, the extravagance of its theology! It’s not an existential declaration about human potential in a godless world. It’s not about humanity bowing to a higher power, be it God or Nature, or reflecting its power through art. The “plungings of water” are meaningless in and of themselves, Stevens tells us, and the “high horizons” with their mountainous distances are merely theatrical. The poem’s scope is wider, encompassing a merging and a transcendence “beyond the genius of the sea,” beyond “the outer voice of sky and cloud,” beyond “the heaving speech of air.” It’s about the alchemy of longing, the melding of “the ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea” with the person singing to it, creating a sublime universe larger than both. The (feminine, my father would point out) mortal not only expresses but creates a whole world out of longing, spoken in “the dark voice of the sea.” The poem not only asks, but self-referentially remarks on its repeated asking, “Whose spirit is this?” The woman singing fuses with the originary Word of creation, as the chaos of ocean and deepening night organize themselves to become “the self that was her song.” I remember how my father would watch my mom saunter off alone to walk by the sea. He wasn’t part of it, this union, and he watched from the beach with a version of Stevens’ reverential wonder: “As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” Stevens’ complement to this seascape of a woman entering the heart of longing is “The Snow Man,” a man entering the emptiness of cold. This poem is a celebration of “a mind of winter,” a perfect illustration of Stevens’trademark stance on the role of art (“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”). Instead of superimposing human notions of misery onto the cold or the sound of wind, we are encouraged to practice being “the listener who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” This decimation of the self, of imagination, and of our personification of nature relates to Stevens’ negation of transcendence in “Sunday Morning,” which places Jesus within “the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish.” There is no beyond. Stevens’ winter mind finds expression this second week of January, exploring the porous line between pain and violent joy: in the cold reaches of Hamlet’s Northern Europe, folk celebrate Epiphany with ice swimming. Wim Hoff, known as “The Ice Man,” used cold exposure as a remedy for grief as his wife spiraled deeper into depression. As the darkness permeated her psyche, he says in his book, he moved his four children closer to her family to get parenting support. He was leading a trip in the canyons when she threw herself from the eighth story—freeing her from her demons, he writes. Hoff is not sure whether he was healed by his children or by the cold water that led his mind to stillness and functioned as a mirror to face himself. Anyway, that’s the context in which Wim Hoff’s school of cold exposure was born. I was born into a family whose genetics are riddled with depression and whose New Year tradition is ice swimming. Each January my daughters and I choose whether to join the ice swimming contingency. I’ve always felt torn. As someone who finds a way into spirit via the senses, I want to celebrate this gritty and stoical approach to pain and mortality. I do think, as Hoff claims, that the experience helps us enter deep parts of the mind. The cleansing rush, the feeling of total renewal, the symbolism of starting fresh in a culture sorely lacking in rituals with a physiological component—how can one resist? And it does seem logical that sensory extremes train us to withstand suffering. But might they teach us, instead, to transcend it? Is this alleged entry into the belly of what-it-is-to-be-mortal just one more version of spiritual escapism? As my teenage daughters wrestle with the epigenetic demons I gave them, it seems more courageous to prioritize quieter, humbler holiday traditions. We find new lights at CVS to replace the broken ones, then we pull from the flimsy cardboard the three matching red balls with our names written in gold glitter script, knowing that the fourth is hanging at their dad’s house. The glitter catches the light from the replacement strand, and inevitably I cry, and nowadays they know I’m crying. There is sorrow in the hanging of stockings, and we hold each other through it. This is grit. PRACTICE Maybe we should just end with the fact of the sun’s return. We could simply remind ourselves that the light is increasing, a few minutes a day. Maybe what’s required to keep falling in love with life is out there. And for those we love, for the world that’s such a mess, we have to keep looking for it. What brightens us from the inside so that we might better help each other through the dark? I want to make an argument for a cold shower. Don’t close the book—just hear me out! I’m not asking you to Wim Hoff your way up Mount Everest in your small clothes. But the benefits of graduated cold exposure are not just scientifically proven, they are palpable with just one taste. If, part way through your next shower, you turn the water cold for just a few moments and then try it again after just a couple minutes, the second time feels so much easier. Compare this to most meditation strategies, which are for many people torturous for a significant period of time before sitting begins to actually feel good. Or the excruciating time it takes for foam rolling and massage ball mushing and Bengay burning to create any change at all. But in just one shower you can feel the changes in physiological processes like circulation and cortisol level. There is a palpable letting go, which seems to be the theme of January. Google the benefits of a cold shower, and just consider it, okay? IF ANYONE KNOWS WHO CREATED THIS GORGEOUS IMAGE, PLEASE CONTACT ME SO I CAN IDENTIFY THEM!!! This week I recorded a guided meditation (please note this is an AUDIO FILE, not a video). Please click below to listen: Audre Lorde, “Coal”
I Is the total black, being spoken From the earth’s inside. There are many kinds of open. How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open Like a diamond on glass windows Singing out within the crash of passing sun Then there are words like stapled wagers In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart-- And come whatever wills all chances The stub remains An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge. Some words live in my throat Breeding like adders. Others know sun Seeking like gypsies over my tongue To explode through my lips Like young sparrows bursting from shell. Some words Bedevil me. Love is a word another kind of open-- As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth’s inside Take my word for jewel in your open light. Audre Lorde, “Coal” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com. “This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless—about to be birthed, but already felt. …For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living, in the European mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-European view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches as keystone for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. …For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” From the essay Poetry is not a Luxury, published in the collection Sister Outsider, Penguin Random House/the Crossing Press; 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde. POETIC THEMES In a book about language and embodiment, it seems right to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerhouse poetic style by examining the revolutionary function of language. In Lorde’s turn of phrase, “poetry of illumination” transforms our dark, formless reserves of power into tangible ideas and actions. I’d like to lift Lorde’s alchemical process from its material feminist frame and examine it through new formulations in the field of Embodied Social Justice. Resmaa Menakem completely transformed diversity activism by introducing a trauma-informed lens, insisting that the perpetuation of racism in our culture can only be healed through a somatic approach. We all need, Menakem teaches, to metabolize the poisons of white supremacist culture that we have introjected into our bodies. This intervention imports into race relations the current shift in psychology from exclusively cognitive approaches like talk therapy toward body-centric healing modalities. It bears mentioning that the discovery of physiological centers with which we can retrain the nervous system predates the field of psychology. The West discovered the “wandering nerve” just like Columbus discovered America. In any case, a new body of race equity activism, like progressive psychology, now acknowledges that if we truly want to change, we need to work with more than the brain in our skull, but also other conscious domains of the body. The field of somatics has been developing practical applications for working with the seats of consciousness outside the brain, like the psoas, the diaphragm, the endocrine glands, and the gut. Leaning into change requires that we listen to the intuitive wisdom of other equally aware body systems. Here I want to borrow an approach I learned from Susan Raffo, which she calls the “three brain system” (not so very different from Aristotle’s rational, nutritive, and appetitive parts of the soul). The head brain focuses on executive function and individual knowledge. The heart brain focuses on connection, and the gut brain, on nourishment. Embryologically, these three brains were linked, and it’s worth speculating on how we each, individually, might put them back in conversation with one another. An elemental approach to the three primary seats of consciousness configures the low body as earth, the core as fire, and the head as air. A model for how the three systems collaborate in speaking truth to power is Audre Lorde’s poem, “Coal.” Doing what it describes, the poem is performative. The first stanza functions like a little microcosm of the poem’s big world: speech is compared to the process of taking the earth element and firing it deep within the earth’s core until it emerges as a diamond. The poem’s form begins with one letter in its first line: the element that is being fired is the “I.” Even as the first-person singular gains further definition in the second line as black, Lorde identifies the poetic/alchemical process as speech, originating in “the earth’s inside.” The earth element moves through the fire of glinting, gorgeous variations of what speech can look like in one long middle stanza about language. Words are tongue-roving gypsies. They sing out or breed like adders or break at the stub or burst from shells, knowing sun and seeking explosion. Word gems. And the earth-to-jewel process of the poem itself feeds us into the final stanza, whose subject is love. But not woo-woo huggybear love, but the deep internal fire of giving a shit, inside this unbelievably pressurized environment, until that which we care about explodes and our thoughts come out in the open. But lest things get whitewashed, Lorde hammers home the centrality of race; she states bluntly, “I am black because I come from the earth’s inside,” and reminds us that speaking up is “coloured by who pays what for speaking.” The level of risk required to speak up correlates directly to our responsibility to do so. So on this MLK Day, the only holiday celebrated through political action, what message is your gut, heart, and head gestating? PRACTICE To answer the injunction to speak truth to power, we might experiment with Lorde’s earth-to-gem alchemy. We linger with a query while placing our awareness sequentially on body’s three brains to listen for their wisdom. Could we practice, somatically, moving up through our roots through the fire of what we’ve been through and what we care about, in order that we might air our truth? It might be useful to preface the practice itself with some insight borrowed from Tema Okun about freeing our process from white supremacy cultural norms—like perfectionism and defensiveness. In our discernment, we might instead honor the slow and complicated processes of working through conflict. We need to prioritize how we do the work over any specific outcome. In keeping with the grace of a more compassionate approach, be gentle with your expectations. This practice will not necessarily generate a letter to your senator, although it might! What’s key is that you come closer to capturing a truth, your truth, the word-adders breeding in your throat. Part of the work for white folk is metabolizing our reactivity to race-related stimuli, to stay in the fight and continue to act as allies. But the queries below might show up really differently for people of color. Nkem Ndefo teaches a process of slowly building resources for facing adversity that she calls “Alchemical Resilience.” Rather than expecting folk to simply “bounce back,” those who have not historically had access to pleasure, ease, or joy have a chance to build their capacity slowly, over time. Integral to respecting the different needs of justifiably vigilant nervous systems in building agency is observing the right to recognize your own discomfort and decline any given practice. For marginalized people who have not had access to this right to stop, defending it is revolutionary. So I encourage you to tailor this practice in any way that feels protective of your boundaries and gentle with your wounds. The invitation is to begin at the root, with movements and postures that create sensation in the feet and legs, belly, and pelvis. Whether it’s sitting with one ankle on one knee or kneading the arches of your feet, find an intense but safe level of sensation in the area of your body that today seems to evoke foundations, origins, a sense of home base. As you make contact with gut feeling, consider: What was your first awakening to your own race identity? Stay with the feeling in your lower body as you paint the scene. Does this recollection bring about a change in pelvic tone, facial expression, or some other zone of muscle tension? How many different emotions are associated with this moment, and can you dip your toes into each of them without drowning? What is the tone, the color, the texture of your gut response? As you move to the feeling in the core, place your body in shapes that center your awareness here. Be with the rhythm of your heartbeat, admire the fancy tango of diaphragm and lungs, feel for the subtle burn of the digestive fire. Hone your attention on all the interactions of inner and outer worlds—blood going in and out of the heart chambers, the shifts in temperature and humidity taking place in the lungs, all the magical transformations you might intuit in the organs of purification and detoxification. Then call to mind an experience that shifted your thinking from one understanding about race to another. This could be a scene from later in childhood or it could be yesterday. What were the interactions at play, who was a part of it, what was the feeling state in this moment of change? Could you associate a color or type of weather or a musical tone with the time before and the time after? Bring your attention to the neck and head (especially the throat). Explore movements that close and compress the larynx, and then reopen and stretch it. Just be with the question of what you need to say, without any expectation that it be articulate or elegant. Typically, body wisdom emerges as something very, very simple. Take some time to listen, rather than sculpting or forcing a message. If you feel stuck, return to either of these two primary scenes and see if there is something you wish you had said. Try to speak it out loud, or if that feels hard, write it down. After a few minutes, whatever comes or doesn’t, let it go. Release it, take rest, chill, do something comforting and familiar and nurturing. Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies. Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” We were made to understand it would be Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful Dream. The worst in us having taken over And broken the rest utterly down. A long age Passed. When at last we knew how little Would survive us—how little we had mended Or built that was not now lost—something Large and old awoke. And then our singing Brought on a different manner of weather. Then animals long believed gone crept down From trees. We took new stock of one another. We wept to be reminded of such color. Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” from Wade in the Water. Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. POETIC THEMES Ah, New Year’s Day: Lucy with the football. All of us experience at times a sense of staleness in the routines of our daily life, the monotony of our psychological issues, the desire to wake up as new. January first, even if it’s a fake-out, marks at least the hope for renewal. If you’re hunting around for a poetic reflection of the earnest, hopeful resolutions we make each January, you might go back to the wild and wooly list of “what you shall do” in Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass. But now that I’m mentioning dead white guys, I’m thinking instead of the sober ending of Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” set in this dark time of year: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything.)” This might be more in keeping with the reality of a pandemic age. The tortured five sections show a man haunted by virtue misunderstood, bungling action, folly, mistaken humor, and harm done. By the end of the poem the midwinter fire has refined all of it, burning the speaker down to simple. Part of our own refining process is the collapse of time back to source, and the ouroboros of future and past in coming to know presence: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” To honor this week as the meeting place of beginnings and endings, let’s abandon the old and turn to some more current poems on how past and future intermingle. Maybe we could find a new way to explore the simple, somewhat broken hope of the New Year: that we could be different. In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Burning the Old Year” the old and the new are like two sticks that, when rubbed together, create a kind of burning friction. We are called closer to the flames to reconsider loss, regret, and what simple elemental truths stay around. Turning something material into sheer air is not just subtraction—beginning again “with the smallest numbers”—but distillation, separating the flammable from the enduring (and sparse) stone. It reframes what kinds of things we can celebrate, teaching us to reimagine even the most devastating loss as capable of creating a new open space for potential. When we are contracted in on ourselves, burdened, crowded in, there’s a need for mental/psychological space to breathe. With so much flammable material in the course of a year, we are invited to distill our lives down to what’s most real. And something else remains: the ominous crackling that also hangs around “after the blazing dies” is what we have not done. Regret lingers. Tracy K. Smith’s meditation is about something slower. The rebirth of old phenomena in a new form is like the reappearance of a soul in a Garcia Marquez novel. The slow undergrowth of invisible things eventually emerges. Sea changes over decades and centuries can soften even the most “rageful dream.” We need something “large and old” to handle what we’ve been handed. Smith’s epic, livid, broken land seems more like a description of Sumerian or Egyptian myth than a modern-day city. And with plagues, fires, and tornados, these days we actually seem to be in some kind of Biblical old story. So can we stagger dazed through the heart of winter, anticipating the possibility of green again? The concluding line—“We wept to be reminded of such color”—leaves us with a reminder of how we can be moved by all that is familiar, as it courses through new beginnings. Humanity has made it through plagues before; how can we be changed after this time of destruction? Ours is a fragile, urgent kind of hope. PRACTICE One popular lesson in teaching Sanskrit is to place dukkha, or suffering, in relationship to sukha, which translates to mean not just sweetness, but also space. Yogic practices offer some ways to approach the turning of the calendar year as purification—burning up what’s stale and ready for release to make space for the new. But also there’s the potential reincarnation of the old in new form. These themes give us plenty of work to do physically, although not necessarily the easiest or most relaxing work. Targeting the solar plexus, the seat of digestive fire in the body, might help us channel the element’s purifying properties. A kriya, or cleansing technique, called “Breath of Fire” by yoga practitioners (at least in America) builds heat in the solar plexus and then disperses it to create new spaciousness. A way of stoking the fire is to add a challenge to big muscles like quadriceps and “glutes” (your butt). You could stand in “chair pose,” with knees bent and torso angled forward on the high diagonal or place your back against a wall as though sitting in a chair, with knees bent as close to 90 degrees as possible. Depending on the intensity appropriate for your body (google counter-indications if you’re unsure, but best to listen to and honor your body’s responses), you might practice pumping air in a punctuated rhythm in and out of the nostrils, feeling the solar plexus snap back toward the spine with each exhalation. To up the challenge, you could amp up to a quicker pace. Notice, when focusing on what you’re ready to burn up, which moments, people, actions, or qualities come to mind. Heat is considered a somatic expression of anger, so keep tabs on your internal temperature: if swollen hate rises like Smith’s “epic wind,” take a break. Pause to listen to anger’s message, often a wise part of you requesting some kind of change. Based on the associations that rise to mind, discern whether to fan the flames or to squelch the fire. You can do the latter by straightening your legs and imaginatively saturating the chest cavity with the greenest of greens. Imagine a coloring book, and you’re filling in all the tubular branches of your lungs with your very favorite shade of green. When you feel well-cooked but not burned out, slow down your breath practice and fold forward at the waist, flooding the brain. I like to imagine (to mix my metaphors) cleaning a dirty fish tank: after the breath practice churns the stale water, the forward fold feels like dumping out all the gunky, swirling algae into the earth. Observe any imagery sparked by this inversion practice, and be sure to stretch out your quadriceps or any other “hot spot” before coming to relax and allow the breath and pulse to regulate. Is there any renewed sense of internal space? If so, what parts of you remain after the fire? Metaphorically speaking, wait for the soft little animals in your psyche to come back out, perhaps welcoming them with names. Carl Dennis, “To Plato”
I’m writing this for a friend, a painter, Who wants to thank you for the contrast you’ve drawn Between the frail beauty at hand and the beauty enduring eternally elsewhere. It’s helped her to give a name to the challenge she feels In confining herself to the facts before her. To thank you and then to suggest a correction To your attempt to connect the two By calling the beauty at hand a shadowy copy Of a bright, timeless original. To her it’s clear that they're wholly separate, One class containing no example she knows about, The other containing them all; One indifferent to whatever she thinks of it, The other relying on her to protect it, For a moment at least, from oblivion. She wants to thank you for explaining the impulse To climb the ladder from particular instances To general truth. Can you thank her For practicing the vocation of climbing down To dwell among entities local and doomed? Step close and look at her painting of peonies In a Chinese vase on a cherry table. Try to imagine why she considers this subject Worth the effort, why she's given these items The time required to catch the light As it falls on glaze and petal, water and wood, So that each surface looks cherished. Open yourself to musing awhile on the difference Between a longing for the eternal and a longing To hold what vanishes in a grip that time, However patient it proves, has trouble loosening. Carl Dennis, “To Plato” from Poetry, vol. 185, no. 5, Poetry Foundation. Copyright © 2005 by Carl Dennis. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Bathroom Song” I was only one year old; I could tinkle in the loo, such was my precocity. Letting go of Number Two in my potty, not pajama, was a wee bit more forbidding —and I feared the ravening flush. So my clever folks appealed to my generosity: “What a masterpiece, Evita! Look! We’ll send it off to Grandma!” Under the river, under the woods, off to Brooklyn and the breathing cavern of Mnemosyne from the fleshpotties of Dayton-- what could be more kind or lucky? From the issue of my bowels straight to God’s ear—or to Frieda’s, to the presence of my Grandma, to the anxious chuckling of her flushed and handsome face that was so much like my daddy’s, to her agitated jowls, Off! Away! To Grandma’s place! As, in Sanskrit, who should say of the clinging scenes of karma, “Gaté, gaté, paragaté” (gone, gone, forever gone), “parasamgaté; bodhi; Svaha!” (utterly gone—enlightenment-- svaha! Whatever svaha means), Send the sucker off to Grandma. Gaté, gaté, paragaté; parasamgaté; bodhi; svaha! Reprinted with Hal’s permission (smooches). POETIC THEMES If like me you’re allergic to this month’s hedonistic thrall to “stuff,” maybe we could look at our perception of materialism and tweak it a bit. Philosophically speaking, materialism is a physicalist orientation uninterested in the spiritual plane, which corresponds to the yuck of December’s focus on objects during a time that’s supposed to be sacred. The opposite of materialism, in this sense, might be the kind of ungrounded, escapist spirituality that refuses to acknowledge or reckon with the real world; what many of us think of as “woo-woo” spiritual bypassing. Might we find a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationship of material and spiritual planes? We could start with Plato. Carl Dennis writes his direct address “To Plato” to re-imagine the relationship between matter and what matters. This elegant defense of artistic and intellectual work is an act of generosity—a kind of gift—upholding the vocation of his friend, a painter. Representing worldly phenomena on paper is a way of preserving the “frail beauty at hand.” Time’s grip won’t loosen, he explains, so everything in its clutches can only be saved by our witness and our care for it. The work of an artist is not to climb up toward the Eternal but downward into the cave of this world’s fleeting, earthly objects, “To dwell among entities local and doomed.” The poem argues for a shift in perspective away from an orientation upward to the spiritual plane of which our reality is merely a copy, and toward a celebration of human efforts that bring divinity down to earth. Perhaps Dennis shares Eve Sedgwick’s preoccupation with Neoplatonism, which is all about this shift. It wouldn’t be a stretch to read obscure philosophical influences into poetry by a guy who has written about Nietzsche and Hegel. And Dennis’ take on rebirth, like Eve’s, is also pretty Neoplatonic (in poems like “Former Lives,” “Eternal Life,” and “The God Who Loves You”). In any case, this school of philosophy is a useful one for reframing the aims of holiday shopping. From the thrall to high art in early thinkers like Plotinus, to the later, weirder rituals incorporating physical tokens, it’s all about pulling the divine down to our earthly gifts. Might we give new life to gift-giving by adopting a Neoplatonic view? What happens when we relate to concrete objects as talismans, elemental nature as manipulatable substance for ritual, and language as incantation? I want to borrow a word from Dennis, who argues that we save the material plane from oblivion by cherishing it: the paintbrush catches the light “So that each object looks cherished.” I’d like to linger with that word for a moment. My parents joked that they couldn’t figure out why the marriage vow would include both “to love” and “to cherish.” Redundant, no? In searching for a distinct meaning for cherishing, my mother decided it must mean that whenever the cat brought some gross, dead rodent to the door, it was my dad’s job to pick it up. And so small, furry corpses became “cherishes”—as in, “Sherman, there’s a cherish on the back porch!” There’s wisdom in this joke, as in most of their weird marital rituals: in learning to cherish our nearest and dearest, it’s helpful to practice on small things like fallen leaves and coffee cups. And half-eaten mice. In the place of grand expressions of art or thought, we can build our cherishing muscles through small, local actions, rituals, and practices that enact our care and concern in ways that make them real to us and to our beloveds. The low grounds the high: a 4-inch corpse stands in for a sacred vow. And according to the laws of symmetry in the Neoplatonic system of correspondences (as above so below), the lower the low, the higher the high. It makes sense, then, that Eve’s “Bathroom Song” uses potty training as a metaphor for the release of our mortal coil(s). This is a poem about dying. Convincing toddler Evita to surrender to the U.S. Mail her miraculous creation of “Number Two” required the perfect recipient on the other side: Grandma, the paradigmatic (Proustian) figure of the infinitely adoring, invested, tolerant fan. Its final lines borrow from the Heart Sutra, recalling the parable of crossing the ocean of ignorance to reach the banks of Nirvana. Jason Edwards, a British Queer Theorist and my favorite Facebook friend, gives a brilliant reading of the Buddhism of this poem in a book entitled Bathroom Songs. I’d like to add that this reference to Nirvana’s far shore ties back to Eve’s early mention of Mnemosyne, not only the Greek goddess of memory but also the name of another body of water to be crossed in the afterlife. This metaphysical sprawl reflects the 19th-century European mishmash of traditions that fascinated Eve, with its proliferation of deities from Asia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. The Neoplatonic brushstrokes on this poem’s Buddhist canvas are part of Eve’s distinct way of drawing correspondences between complex psychological processes and the material plane. Poop, low on the manifest totem pole, relates to enlightenment, the top rung on the ladder of spiritual ideals. “Why would it be a scandal,” Eve asks, if the work of dying and toilet training were “not so different—were, so to speak, molded of the same odorous, biomorphic clay?” Just as with potty training, in order to let go of this world, Eve needed something intellect alone couldn’t provide her. Her “very hungry” hands found in silk cords and shibori dye what she couldn’t find in theory-making or even poetry. She called it a convergence between “making and unmaking.” Her interest in fabric art dated back to childhood, and it’s unclear (I join Jonathan Goldberg in wondering, as he does in his recent book Come as You Are) if Grandma Frieda was the same grandmother who taught Eve to weave. In any case, these later textile practices were a form of rendering thought in 3D. Jason Edwards notes the continuity between her poetic flare (for enjambment, parenthetical sentences, and strings of clauses or dangling ones) and her experiments with textile practices like marbling and enfoldment. I have written elsewhere about the profound transformations of self that couldn’t be enacted through thought alone, but instead had to be fondled and woven and stained and sculpted. Rather than focusing on Eve’s cognitive habits and elemental intimacies, we might instead borrow her process of transforming abstraction into real artifacts and experiment with what needs of our own might be met by “making stuff.” PRACTICE One Christmas Eve, still inside the post-divorce shock of being without my children, I decided to make stuff. I cobbled together a Christmas tree ornament out of glitter and cardboard: a miniature package wrapped in parchment leaf, complete with a silver bow, inside of which I glued a kidney-bean sized stone wrapped in metallic wire, like a little silver Evita poo. It helped me reckon with letting go of the nuclear-family-holiday scene I’d always had, to make way for whatever divorced Christmas looked like. If material objects can stand in for subtle forms of human experience and connection, how might you craft, however crudely, some kind of talismanic gift? It might be for someone important, concretizing your connection, or it might represent a psychological task for transition, serving a more abstract function (like my weird ornament on the family tree). If the end of the calendar year resonates as a time of release, you might in fact work with excrement. And by that I mean, of course, silk, because, in the words of Eve’s therapist: “the silk and the shit go together.” I remember when I was writing about Eve’s obsession with silk, I fell into a fascinating abyss, down deep in the bowels of the Columbia library where I combed through factoids about mulberry silkworms and salivary enzymes and molting and stuffing and boiling and harvesting…. Here I’ll just say that if you want to work in the ur-medium of strange and otherworldly elemental transformation, work with silk. You could look into slow stitching, or if you need a straightforward idea, you might create an eye pillow, sewing a piece of silk (or silky cloth) into a sleeve for filler, which could also be symbolic (like pebbles from the creek behind your mom’s house, or sand from your favorite beach, or rice from your friend’s wedding). Whatever you craft, what different faculties are recruited in this kind of play? Remember, this is not painterly high art, but process-driven work that’s serving a ritual function. Resist the drive toward perfection and stay down here with the idiosyncratic, flawed entities of this realm, local and doomed. Allergic to art? Only got 3 minutes? Here's a combing practice to elicit an energetic shift down out of the head and back into the guts and groins, to reinhabit your materiality. James Wright, “The Jewel”
There is this cave In the air behind my body That nobody is going to touch: A cloister, a silence Closing around a blossom of fire. When I stand upright in the wind, My bones turn to dark emeralds. James Wright “The Jewel” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Wright, “Trying to Pray” This time, I have left my body behind me, crying In its dark thorns. Still, There are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness Of women's hands that touch loaves. The spirit of a tree begins to move. I touch leaves. I close my eyes and think of water. James Wright, “Trying to Pray” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Wright, “A Blessing” Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. James Wright, “A Blessing” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood-- A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is-- Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. POETIC THEMES At the darkest time of the year, we can reorient toward light, or we can delve into the transformative power of darkness. Pagan traditions hold midwinter as the most sacred time of the year, with the most potential for mysterious, secret processes of spiritual change. I love the gem-like precision of these tiny poems of Wright’s, which condense their ingredients into crystal form, like the pressurizing force in metamorphism. In “The Jewel,” the wind turns our bones to emerald. The air behind our body is a cave. A cloister. A closing silence. A fire blossom. Wright goes spelunking around in a sensual underworld menagerie, all murk and glorious riddle. I want to reference “A Blessing” mostly for contrast. This poem, probably Wright’s most famous, is atypical in its all-over sweetness. Barely a pinky finger is dipped into the darkness that most of his work swims in. Hanging out with a couple of lonely ponies by the highway, something becomes real to him: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” Those final lines are a barebones layout of one view of body and spirit: one must be transcended to reach the other. Nowhere in his other work do you find that kind of facile reading of the body’s place in the realm of spirit. These two shorter poems are in many ways more challenging. Both are working through something more complicated than body transcendence. In “Trying to Pray,” Wright proclaims, “I have left my body behind me, crying / in its dark thorns.” But then he lifts the poem from despair with a list of Good Things, all sense-based: good darkness, women’s hands kneading bread, the leaves of a tree being touched. In Wright’s poetry, the amalgam of our senses interacting with the mysteries of nature sparks a kind of transformation. Sense experience nudges our conceptual faculties toward the mystical. Wright’s focus, as per “The Jewel,” isn’t in what we can see with our eyes, the clear, controlled space in front of us, but in the mysterious zone behind or inside our body, which we can never see but always follows us. And the recognition of the mysteries one can’t quite see releases a kind of epiphanic clarity. Wind touches not skin, but bone. We have felt this—the wind down in our bones like the crystalized cold of emerald. This dark, mysterious, sensual tone is one Wright shares with Theodore Roethke (who was in fact his professor). Roethke’s hard-earned rendering of Immanence isn’t to be found in his most-anthologized poems, like “The Waking,” but in the deep dive of a poem like “In a Dark Time.” Roethke’s poetry is a relentless, inward probing, an introspection that picks at the scabs of the psyche’s machinations until they bleed again. Living just this side of madness may have thrown this poet in and out of the sanatorium, but arguably this threshold state is transformed into a “nobility of soul” by his art. It’s noble because it’s healing. At least it has been for me, having taken so much comfort in his companioning darkness. In my own dark times, I had someone to hold my hand, even “pinned against a sweating wall” or dying to myself in the “long, tearless night.” Living on the edge of what the mind can withstand isn’t so much a choice as a temperament—“The edge is what I have.” Those of us who resonate with the line “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire” do, in fact, see better “in the deepening shade.” But the involuted process of compression in Roethke’s poetry gives hope because it eventually goes so deep as to spin us free of the poem with a glimpse of the sparkling sublime. “The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind.” It's lines like this that help us climb out of our fear. PRACTICE Could you spend a half an hour in darkness? There is a summer program that leads clusters of people with blindfolds and canes along my block in Philadelphia. This is a simulation exercise to train people to work with the visually impaired by walking a mile in their shoes. I tried this out while walking the dog and decided it was better to leave the dog at home (sorry, Skunky). On my own, it was still brutally difficult, even without an enthusiastic fluffy thing tugging me around. It involves mentally projecting a parallel line to the movement of traffic, navigating uneven sidewalk, and using sensory cues to inwardly construct the geometry of an intersection to cross a street. I found that I was focused more on the practical challenges of being blind, as opposed to the psychology of darkness. So instead, you might simply try a half an hour feeling your way down the stairs, to the coffee machine, to your toothbrush. You can expect that few practical tasks will get done. What is the psychology of darkness for you? Does deprivation of one sensory pathway heighten others, and which? Is there any shift in your experience of the relationship between sense and spirit? You might even free-write from your own “steady storm of correspondences,” by keeping pen to paper, resisting the urge to pause. If you get stuck, you can always simply write one word over and over until your mind unclogs. Or, consider a blind drawing of any object or face you encountered in the darkness, without looking at the page and without lifting the mark of the pen from paper. This one-touch technique often alleviates any perfectionism or interest in reproducing reality, instead making manifest an impressionistic picture of something as it exists within you. If you just can't let go of the visual, here's a video. It's designed to entice you, through the visual, to enter more deeply into the auditory, with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer about turning your whole body into one big huge listening vessel. A yogic approach to becoming a tuning fork is to allow your attention to rest at the crown of your head, the third eye, and at the center of each palm. You might be enticed to close your eyes, when you feel the effects. Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself”
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic-decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity. “Advice to Myself” from Original Fire by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song” This morning, lemon seltzer cans all line up in the new refrigerator door preening for the cameras. Oh, the sweet joy of new beginnings in refrigeration! Soon enough though, spills, half-eaten burritos, and partial cat food cans will take over again, lurking in the back corners, hiding in hard-to-reach spots. Its stainless-steel skin shimmers in afternoon light, but the sheen of this cooling wonder is already dulled by a weekend of fingers opening its doors. And yet, even when bread and cheese turn moldy and milk transforms from liquid to a smelly solid mass, a white-throated sparrow’s welcome song can still reach your aging ears from its perch on the back gate. Smudged, dinged and damaged by the long slog of it all. Then daybreak again. Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song.” Copyright © 2022 by Ellen Skilton. Published by permission of the poet. All rights reserved. W. S. Di Piero, “Chicago and December” Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally pissed by jumbo wreaths and ribbons municipal good cheer yoked around their heads. Mealy mist. Furred air. I walk north across the river, Christmas lights crushed on skyscraper glass, bling stringing Michigan Ave., sunlight’s last-gasp sighing through the artless fog. Vague fatigued promise hangs in the low darkened sky when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees, switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing the bare wintering branches, black-on-black shining, and I’m in a moment more like a fore-moment: from the sidewalk, watching them poised without purpose, I feel lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things when from their stillness, the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing, smithereened back and forth, now already gone to follow the river’s running course. From Poetry (June 2006). Copyright © 2006 by W. S. Di Piero. Reprinted by permission of the poet. POETIC THEMES Just as the natural world is dialing down to darkness, this week we’re asked to rev up for the holidays. This can mean only one thing, sooner or later: whole body exhaustion. If you are a ball of goo on the couch, it’s not just social expectations this week; there’s a special kind of emotional fatigue at work too, especially for those of us for whom cultural and family traditions can be triggering. Setting limits on output isn’t easy. A somatic approach to the psyche insists that we don’t really have a choice about those limits. We can’t “construct” boundaries based on a cognitive construct or willpower; there are limitations that we quite simply have, and ultimately they will find a way to stop us. The choices we make about energy output have consequences because we have predetermined, finite resources. The “spoon model” of energy output, observed by those with chronic illness, is useful for all of us: each daily activity is measured by how many spoonfuls of energy it requires, and careful priorities must be set since we have only so much juice in the tank. To discern how much we have to give, we must go beyond what the dominant culture says we should give (since we are embedded in systems that are designed to exploit our resources to benefit the few. Disproportionally. Yay, Nap Ministry!). If we are to heal the damage done by compulsive patterns of mismanaging our energy, we must reexamine the toxic habits our culture has inculcated in us that teach blatant disregard for the needs of the body and psyche. Over time, as the messages from within are continually drowned out and silenced, we can lose touch with our own needs entirely. To repair this rift, we need to tap into physical feeling as we would attend to hunger or thirst so that we can sense again, and honor, the signals our body is sending. These poems offer different prescriptions for treating ho-ho-holiday exhaustion. We can allow for stillness, even stagnancy, or we can escape! Erdrich’s advice is to stop organizing, stop fixing, stop doing, as is epitomized in the poem’s mantra-like first line, “leave the dishes.” This principle is not just about repairing our culture’s tendency to overdo, it actually breaks down the “insulation” between the daily grind and who we really are. Beyond the ruse of necessity, according to this poem, lies our truth. But this poem’s specific strategy for touching truth is to toggle between depth and humor. The prescribed reaction to mold in the fridge: accept new life! And her irreverence helps us . . . well . . . relax. The instructions to welcome the dead who collect on kitchen jars might be dark and intense if they didn’t follow on the heels of her instructions to let everybody eat cereal for dinner. Some of us sink into this blend of morbidity and humor like a comfortable couch. The poem shifts us from “doing” verbs—throw patch mend buy sew invade worry pursue go after stuff sort answer weep break grow recycle read destroy pull strike shatter—to “non-doing” verbs: leave. let. drift. grow. And arguably: don’t? “Let the wind have its way” is such a lovely articulation of the ethic of allowing, which respects dust as a precious manifestation of the earth element. Each instantiation of rot, crumb, and crack is a holy testament to natural processes of death and decay. As a defense for non-doing, we are called to imagine the heart as a memento-stuffed closet we’d never want to clean. We’re invited into this inner chamber, away from the ruse of necessity and toward all that is authentic, genuine, gritty, true. Spending some time in stillness, we can sift through the dusty stuff tucked away in the corners of our heart. Allowing natural processes to have their way is a kind of unflinching esteem for the whole of creation as holy. And I just had to include a variation on the theme in Ellen Skilton’s haibun, a poetic form of prose interspersed with haiku that was originally used for travel narratives. And truly, there’s the promise of change that moves this poem along, from the pristine, cool wonder of now and the half-empty cat food cans to come. The old slogsong of awakening to newness each morning, only to watch the mold and milkcurdle take over, is the story of aging. And yet—yet! The white-throated sparrow still breaks through the “hard-to-reach” spots in our heart, like a haiku breaking up the prose. In contrast, “Chicago and December” insists that to escape all that is damaged, insincere, and affected, we need to fly toward whatever ragged, authentic form of beauty we can find. For those of us staggering through the end of the year“one-lidded,” the craving for something colorful in the gray Chicago fog is so like the way we hunger, viscerally, for something real inside aaaaall the cultural bullshit around us. Di Piero, an art critic herself, uses the art world to represent what is true. Looking out on the bling of Christmas lights all across the skyscrapers, we feel, more than see, the two museum lions guarding the world of art, wild and proud as pyramid sphinxes. We feel, more than see, their proud heads yoked with wreaths, ribbons, and “municipal good cheer.” From this “mealy mist,” our desire for escape, “worked up like neediness,” is granted by an explosion of starlings. Not pretty or nice birds, but “bunched scrawny” things. Real things. The pace of the poem picks up to a staccato rhythm, like wings flapping, till we as readers, as movers moved, feel galvanized. We too crave release from all the holiday ribbons and baubles; want instead to be “lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things.” Nothing strung with lights, just the rattling dance of nature “smithereened back and forth.” The snare-drum rhythm of movements is cadenced by unexpected rhymes: “switchback and snag / like tossed rags.” Enjambments both condense and stretch out a moment: “elated weather- / making wing-clouds changing.” It’s a relief to be for a moment “already gone” with them, following the river’s course, lifted out of the whole scene of bling and jumbo wreath and crushed Christmas lights. And so we pray: move us, lift us from out of it all, give us our wings back, our proud lion manes. PRACTICE An explosion of starlings, wrought physical, might inspire you to go for a run. If so: HUZZAH! YOU ROCK! Lift yourself out of the sleepy fog and awaken fire and flight and freedom. As an alternative (since I'm not much of a runner), you might want to move to this gorgeous video of a starling murmuration by Søren Solkær. That could be whole-body movement, but I like to sit and just free up my arms to move with the switchback and snag and smithereens. Or, your couch-huggin’ brownie-poundin’ booze-guzzlin’ body might have a whole lot to say about the prospect of a jog. In that case, you could instead explore Erdrich’s evocative models for non-doing: how might you experience physically the feeling of dust bunnies forming, the buildup of earth, new forms of life growing, old things drifting in through the windows of the mind? Find a weighted object to place on your chest and consider adding a source of heat, like a hot pad. Best of all is a “laundry bath.” I like to dump all the laundry hot from the dryer onto whichever kid happens to be prone on the couch, feeling low. With or without heat, allow yourself to recline on your back with your legs extended up the wall, or furniture, and relish the warmth of thoracic cavity, imagining your ribcage as a dark receptacle stuffed with sacred-to-you people or things, stuff you’d never throw away. The imprint of life lived, like the sticky fingers dirtying the fridge door with sacred smudges. Take yourself out of the long slog, and wait for daybreak. "Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking" - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth. Including the insects. Times three. Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief-- just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is, how it carries inside it the memory of collapse. How difficult it is to move then. How impossible to believe that anything could lift that weight. There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is the sheer miracle that we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars. One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed. 'Tis the season of thanksgiving, friends. Have you noticed addressing people as 'friends' has become the norm in leftist progressive circles? I've always thought it seemed kind of oogie when Quakers did it, but now that everyone's doing it (albeit without the Quaker capital 'F'), it feels easier to adopt, frankly. I always joke that in NYC (where I lived for the decade before moving to Philly), people would be like, "aaawww... you're a Quaker, like with the horse and buggy and the cute hats?" And here in PA, it seems like every little town has a street called "Meetinghouse Road." Increasingly, I hear Friendly phrases flying around like "holding you in the light" and "speaking truth to power." Every spiritual/healing organization is now integrating social justice into their offerings. I've even heard of the "Quaker pause" in equity circles. It makes me proud of this faith I was born into - one that isn't always easy to stick with. Part of the challenge is the sheer number of HOURS being a practicing Quaker demands each week: our business process is considered part of the spiritual life of the meeting, so every aspect of running the organization is done communally, rather than paying a staff. This, my friends (tee hee I get a chuckle each time) is *partly* why when you think "Quaker," you imagine a white, upper middle class, retired person. Who else has time? It's not a super easy path, especially for those of us who don't really consider ourselves Christian (that's a whole 'nother conversation), but I have continued with it because after some spiritual tourism, I believe that you'll always find problems if you dig deep enough, so the hole that's in your own backyard will probably be the deepest - or at least wrangling with the problems will be the toughest, most authentic and healing wrangling you do. Say, like, we wrangle with the famous 19th century painting "The First Thanksgiving," depicting the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoag peacefully sharing a meal, which is in keeping with the history as rendered by a Quaker (Edward Winslow). It's a lot like the way we've spun William Penn's "treaty" with the Lenni Lenape, disappearing all the violence. So maybe we should talk about colonization too. We've been doing more yoga in class, as our practice becomes more physical to balance the cooler weather. I don't want to paint a 5000-year-old tradition into some happy image of a Thanksgiving smorgasbord of offerings. But I should back up. My teaching has been a way of sharing the aspects of Quakerism most dear to me: making way for a direct, unmediated experience of the spiritual plane - one that happens from the inside. Cultivating a capacity and reverence for inner stillness. Practicing peace with ourselves and with one another. Discerning your next right step by listening for the still small voice within (whether you call that your conscience, The Universe, your tradition's word for the divine, or the IFS Self). And then experimenting with embodied ways of accessing all that in a syncretic practice that might best be dubbed Somatics, drawing from multiple traditions including yoga, modern dance, and polyvagal techniques. Let's take a moment to wrangle with the tough stuff about syncretism. If we're claiming to be a politicized space that is concerned with addressing oppression, we need to acknowledge some things about the lineage of Somatics - and here I'm drawing on the work of Marika Heinrichs. The term was coined in the '70's by Thomas Hanna, a professor of divinity and philosophy deeply interested in neurology and Feldenkrais' investigations of movement patterning. Most of the teachers clustering around Hanna were white, and most had BIPOC mentors emerging from traditions that weren't being credited. So the field of Somatics has at its origins a practice of invisibilizing black, Asian, and indigenous cultural traditions, stripping them of their spiritual elements to legitimize them as a science. One way we can address this decontextualization/colonization of sacred traditions is first to acknowledge it, and then to try to find ways to repair that harm. One reparative way to dismantle supremacist culture is to refuse the premise of stripping practices down to render them as "science." To refuse the separation of embodiment from the sacred is to re-infuse our own bodies with a sense of spiritual worth that predates white patterning towards domination and control. Ideally we'd pursue this through our own ancestral lineages, to place spirit firmly back in our own bodies, lands, and practices. The problem is that many of these traditions have been "lost" (by which we mean, burned, drowned, and tortured out of the largely female bodies that contained their wisdom). So we do our best, we search for teachings from our own traditions and hold our borrowed practices with reverent regard and blunder and own our mistakes and keep trying to reinvigorate our relationship to all life as holy. So on this Thanksgiving, I want to send you so much gratitude for bringing yourselves to this work and this beautiful community - and to my own spiritual home in the Meetinghouse! I often bust on my faith - it's my inner teenager's way of holding something precious at arm's length. But while she's busy over there in the corner with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, James Dean style, I want to share with you that I LOVE sharing it with you. I mention often the South Asian practice of covering your mouth, or whispering, when you utter the name of your beloved. It's like that. Too dear to shout about. So let me whisper in your ear, dear friend: thank you for companioning me through these incredibly difficult times, for showing up again and again willing to share your strength and heart with one another. Thanks to those of you who put up with "check ins" when they're uncomfortable and new, and to those of you who guide others through the discomfort, believing we need to dispel the shame about our bodies to re-engage with their wisdom and know what's really up, individually and collectively, and then proceeding in a way that authentically accounts for that reality. #runonsentence. Thank you for connecting before and after class about what it felt like to be hustled into a bomb shelter in Israel and how that Amichai poem landed in your body and what to do with the anger and how to acknowledge multiple wounds in the room and still work for peace. And still believe in peace. And still hold out for peace. And still... Thank you. These poems are rough, at such a tender time. I've kept the somatic practice of cupping the hands into a bowl to externalize pain, and replaced the poem on the practice video with a poem of peace by Aurora Levins Morales. Trigger warning that "Summons" might also bring up stuff for you, so please, as always, take CARE of yourself and feel free to get off at your bus stop. Sending strength in this crazy time.
Aurora Levins Morales, "Summons" Last night I dreamed ten thousand grandmothers from the twelve hundred corners of the earth walked out into the gap one breath deep between the bullet and the flesh between the bomb and the family. They told me we cannot wait for governments. There are no peacekeepers boarding planes. There are no leaders who dare to say every life is precious, so it will have to be us. They said we will cup our hands around each heart. We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water, a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping. The mourners will embrace, and grief replace every impulse toward harm. Ten thousand is not enough, they said, so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes. You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner. Let’s go. Dion Lissner O’Reilly, “Scavenged” what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future… Dorianne Laux When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back, ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone, I ran through the house, a contagion cindering couches and carpets. Flayed, my fingertips peeled back to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air, light, and the steel cot where they took me. Each day, they peeled me like Velcro from my sheets, left bits of my meat there. Lowered me into Betadine, scrubbed me to screams-- that became my history. Scavenged by the curious. They see my twisted fingers and are hungry for the tale. I’ve done the same, stared at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it, feel the cut bone under the knob, hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know how that man was alive, arms glistening playing basketball from a high-tech chair, making his shots. The body’s scarred terrain becomes consecrated field. We gather to pick through the pieces that remain-- an ear hanging from its hinge of skin, diamond stud in the lobe, ring finger shining with its promise-band of gold. Dion Lissner O’Reilly “Scavenged” from Ghost Dogs. Copyright © 2020 by Dion O’Reilly. Used by permission of Terrapin Books. Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” I’m the girl who smelled of kerosene & candy, who, once supine in a treefort & already forgetting the damp magazines slick with women the jinxed shag carpet under bucket seats pried from a junked Camaro, boys watching the boy on top of me, was unthinking breath that would be kisses, the pressure of a body & mine a fulcrum: of course— of course I can still feel a finger on my philtrum. An angel whispers plunk & I keep quiet, cleaving & knowing not to ask or tell, unwilling to risk turning my mother to ash, trusting only my strength to hold tight. Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” copyright © 2022 by Marion Wrenn. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” v. Thick coat. Black fur. Two russet horns twisted to stone. One night I was stuck on a narrow road, panting. I was pregnant. I was dead. I was a fetus. I was just born. (Most days I don’t know what I am). I am a photograph of a saint, smiling. For years, my whole body ran away from me. When I flew--charred-- through the air, my ankles and toes fell off onto the peaks of impassable mountains. I have to go back to that wet black thing dead in the road. I have to turn around. I must put my face in it. It is my first time. I would not have it any other way. I am a valley of repeating verdant balconies. Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” from The Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis, copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopt, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. POETIC THEMES I’m no astrology master, but as a Scorpio Rising, I feel I can say the attributes of this sign are uncomfortably intense. Scorpios like to get right down to the bottom of things, without necessarily driving at the speed of trust. I’ve never felt from the inside the watery aspects of Scorpios; hanging out with one is like being held to a flame, and being one is like... well... it’s like being fire. So I’d like to issue a trigger warning for these poems, which touch wounds that many of you may prefer not to poke and prod. But as the #MeToo movement showed, spitting out the stories we were all taught to choke down and swallow does hold potential for transforming the culture at large. If we want change, now is the moment to hold ourselves and one another to the fire. Maybe we can burn off what doesn’t serve. The progress of O’Reilly’s brutal poem “Scavenged” is as straightforward as it is generous. The first half is about the excruciating pain of being, essentially, burned alive. The second half hinges this unusual personal story to the shared morbid curiosity we all feel about other human wounds, our shared hunger for one another’s darkest stories. And the poem arrives, finally, by declaring all of us, our scarred living remains, sacred: our flesh is depicted as a “consecrated field” spangled in diamonds and gold. The kerosene girl of “Firebird” endures a more metaphorical, and more common, manner of scorching. The setting is like a movie rendition of ’80s Americana: a kid’s tree fort, damp magazines (ew) dating back to a pre-digital age, bucket seats pried from a Camaro, and the shag carpet, jinxed. The superstitions of the scene reflect the times, when we used to play with Ouija boards and ceremoniously lift one another’s as-if-dead bodies in the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” The plunk-whispering angel and the near-beatific Firebird (almost identical to a Camaro) wrap in dark magic the unspoken rule “not to ask or tell.” Here the code of silence ensures that the speaker’s mother won’t be turned to ash, kind of like “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” This is a telling reversal of the phoenix theme: nobody is going to rise from the ash in a circle of horny onlookers. The only thing to be trusted is the survivor’s “strength to hold tight,” minimizing the orbit of harm to a tight circle of one. Like you do with a fire. So, returning to the question from O’Reilly’s epigraph: “…what becomes / of us once we’ve been torn apart?” I think of the “torch-lit” girl in O’Reilly’s poem, “cindering couches and carpets,” the bits of her meat left on the sheets. A nightmare inverse of the phoenix is the myth of Parvati, a goddess whose punishment for immodesty is to be charred, dismembered, and scattered across the valley that bears her name. One of the purported sites where Parvati’s charred body parts fell from the sky is the setting for Robin Coste Lewis’ long poem “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari.” Zinging around this poem are the subtle crosscurrents of power and violence at work in South Asian tourism, not only in the scarred aftermath of British colonial conquest, but in Indian culture and mythology itself. The poem depicts an African American woman and a group of American college students traveling down the dark mountain, where they encounter a nomadic clan with a herd of water buffalo, one of which is giving birth. This is all taking place, we have to remember, at the very site of the self-immolation of the goddess of fertility. When the baby turns out to be stillborn, the tribe ropes the mother buffalo, holding her down until she looks directly at the dark fur of her dead offspring. She finally gives up and stops bucking, to put her nose down in the “folded and wet black nothing.” The buffalo’s suffering overlaps associatively with the speaker’s own childbirth experience, and she describes feeling drawn back to the corpse: “I have to turn around. / I must put my face in it.” By the end of the poem, the speaker has a kind of clarity born from clear witness—of the bereaved mother animal, the charred goddess falling in pieces, the fetus, death, the smiling saint, the valley itself. The shadow work of Scorpio season beckons us all past the surface to dive down into our own darkness and history, put our face in the hard thing. It’s a form of consecration. PRACTICE If you’re down for some down-and-dirty shadow work, this is the week for it. If you are a menstruating woman, you could dive into the Parvati theme and scatter your blood as an earth offering. Or, if it’s your thing, you could make art out of it or ritual marks on your skin. You could study roadkill if you happen to pass it; that’s an ancient meditation. But maybe the true Scorpio practice would be to go back to a time you were wounded, if and only if you feel you can trust your strength to hold tight. Dr. Sarà King teaches a practice of holding pain. Nothing could be simpler: the practitioner simply holds their cupped hands, like a little bowl or container, in front of their chest. Could you hold your wound in this way or hold your body where it has been wounded, as a way of giving it a place that’s separate from you and also as a way of caring for it and, symbiotically, caring for you? What is the associative web of thoughts and feelings? Yehuda Amichai, “Wildpeace”
Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds-- who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.) Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace. “Wildpeace” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books. POETIC THEMES This entry was written for Veteran's Day, but I brought it into classes this week because we needed a lil' Amichai. Which is not to say there is some anti-Palestine statement here - fer Chrissakes. All this polarization, where one's duty is to make a grandiose proclamation about the rightness and wrongness of things, in order to feel we are adequately "doing something" about the state of the world... Bayo Akomolafe calls this "frontal solidarity," and argues for the importance of alternate political choreographies. In a moving, tearful 3-hour gathering yesterday, Bayo and Resmaa Menakem spoke to the importance of the pause, the importance of making space for halting, exploratory, uncertain, fugitive movements alongside the tensions of the moment. The sacred pause where we back off the inclination to DO as the only solution to upheaval, and instead take a moment to be with our grief, to listen to what it has to teach. So let's continue with our wayfinding crabwalk, allowing for complexity and always, always, making way for feeling first. Here are the affirmations we have been synching with our movements this week, adapted from a meditation by Chani Nicholas: "May I remember the ways I'm free. May I remember the ways I'm at peace. May I remember the ways I am safe. May I remember the ways I am loved." We have closed each class by expanding this supplication to encompass all beings in the familiar invocational mantra: "May ALL beings everywhere be free from suffering and have joy." This has been our version of the Tonglen practice described below. I am deeply grateful for your presence in class this week, and I am feeling the weight of the trust you've put in me, to create a holding environment for all this pain. May we continue with this prayer, casting its spell in our hearts and across the oceans. I don’t have a lot to say about Veterans Day. It gives me the same feeling I had in middle school when I encountered Randall Jarrell’s gut-punch poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Like the wind is knocked out of me and I can’t say much. Like when I threw up after watching “Gallipoli” with my dad (who was in the military). Maybe wartime losses should feel like that: nightmare and black flak. Animal. And Jarrell’s decimating last line that washes out the body with a hose. But the thing is, the jolt and shock of violence that America feeds on all day, every day has dulled us to the point of inaction. It serves to bolster Empire. So instead of rolling around in violent imagery all day, we could try for a little reparation. Amichai survived the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, then World War II, only to face his country’s future—endless violence with no promise of a ceasefire. Amichai’s perspective is the wisdom of a “great weariness,” when face to face with no aftermath, no healing for wounds. “Wildpeace” instead just hopes for some kind of rest, rest from the exhaustion of running a race where the baton passed from generation to generation is an orphan--an orphan whose baby doll is a talking toy gun. And isn’t exhaustion one way peace finally graces the body? Suddenly the fight goes out of us, and with no drama, no “big noise,” a sense of exhausted surrender descends “like lazy white foam.” Maybe instead of celebrating war heroes today, we might instead, “as in the heart when the excitement is over,” let our psychic field lie fallow to make a space for peace. “Let it come / like wildflowers.” PRACTICE It feels apt to embody the attrition of “Wildpeace” by fatiguing the fight-or-flight muscle (the psoas) until it releases. The psoas is more than the connection between upper and lower body; it actually becomes the diaphragm, which is in turn tethered to the adrenals, all functioning as a whole system to rev up the violence. In order to catch a moment of reprieve from the flood of stress hormones that amp up the nervous system, we’ll try to soothe the psoas by wearing it out. Stand next to a wall and rest one hand on it for a sense of orientation, support, and solidity. Place the foot proximal to the wall on a large book (or step on a staircase or yoga block). Swing the outside leg forward and back in a modest arc for a minimum of three minutes on each leg. Use minimal muscular effort, allowing the weight of the leg to provide the required momentum. Be sure to keep the hip points level and allow the rocking motion to tip the pelvis in its anterior/posterior plane. When you’ve pooped out the psoas, and hopefully its connection to the fight reflex, come to sit quietly and witness the mental field. One way to welcome the wildflowers is the practice of Tonglen, which is typically a kind of reversal of violence. Picture someone you know who is suffering. Holding their image very concretely in your mind, envision taking in all of their pain and darkness on the inhalation and sending them all your light, joy, and power on the exhalation. |
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