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MOVING POETICS BLOG
Joy Harjo, “Map to the Next World”
for Desiray Kierra Chee In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet. The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit. In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it. Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace. Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep. Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger. Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear. We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names. Once we knew everything in this lush promise. What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood. An imperfect map will have to do, little one. The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another. There is no exit. The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge. You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way. They have never left us; we abandoned them for science. And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry. You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing. Fresh courage glimmers from planets. And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns. When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us. You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder. A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction. Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds. We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said. Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map. Joy Harjo, “A Map to the Next World” from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2001. Copyright © 2002 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with permission of WW. Norton Press. Wendell Berry, “The Wild Geese” Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here. Wendell Berry, “The Wild Geese” from New and Collected Poems. Copyright ©1973 by Wendell Berry. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Counterpoint Press, counterpointpress.com David Whyte, “The Journey” Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again Painting their black silhouettes on an open sky. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart. Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. Even as the light fades quickly now, you are arriving. David Whyte, “The Journey” from House of Belonging. Copyright © 1997 by David Whyte. Reprinted by permission of Many Rivers Press. Evie Shockley, “anti-immigration” the black people left, and took with them their furious hurricanes and their fire-breathing rap songs melting the polar ice caps. they left behind the mining jobs, but took that nasty black lung disease and the insurance regulations that loop around everything concerning health and care, giant holes of text that all the coverage falls through. the brown people left, and took with them the pesticides collecting like a sheen on the skins of fruit. they went packing, and packed off with them went all the miserable low-paying gigs, the pre-dawn commutes, the children with expensive special needs and the hard-up public schools that tried to meet them. the brown people left, railroaded into carting off those tests that keep your average bright young student outside the leagues of ivy-lined classrooms, and also hauled off their concentrated campuses, their great expectations, their invasive technology, and the outrageous pay gap between a company’s c.e.o. and its not-quite-full-time workers. they took their fragile endangered pandas and species extinction and got the hell outta dodge. the black people left and took hiv/aids, the rest of their plagues, and all that deviant sexuality with them. they took their beat-down matriarchies and endless teen pregnancies, too. those monster-sized extended families, the brown people took those. the brown people boxed up their turbans and suspicious sheet-like coverings, their terrifying gun violence, cluster bombs, and drones, and took the whole bloody mess with them, they took war and religious brow-beating tucked under their robes. they took theocracy and their cruel, unusual punishments right back where they came from. finally, the white people left, as serenely unburdened as when they arrived, sailing off from plymouth rock with nothing in their hands but a recipe for cranberry sauce, a bit of corn seed, and the dream of a better life. there were only certain kinds of people here, after the exodus, left to wander the underdeveloped wilderness in search of buffalo, tobacco, and potable water, following old migratory patterns that would have been better left alone. Evie Shockley, “anti-immigration.” Copyright © 2019 by Evie Shockley. Used by permission of the author. POETIC THEMES Changing this week’s holiday from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day marks a clear redirecting of America’s energy and intention. Evie Shockley imagines a more extreme redirection, in “anti-immigration.” Fed up with the discourse about immigration policy and who gets to quality as authentically American, Shockley wryly portrays a mass exodus of unamerican Americans right on out of this country. The last stragglers are left to wander—and here the poetic tone is no longer edged, but earnest—and follow the old ways, “that would have been better left alone.” These old migratory patterns have been scattered and destroyed, and the “gift of reading the land” nearly forgotten, as Joy Harjo tells her “little one.” A map, one made of sand that “can’t be read by ordinary light” must be drawn from scratch, in order to “climb through the hole in the sky.” The few suggestions the poem is able to give for beginning this process are all deeply physical—rooted in mother’s blood and voice and song, father’s semen, the wall of intestine, the membrane of death, red cliffs, corn soup, deer meat. “Once,” she writes wistfully, “we knew everything in this lush promise.” The atrocities of the decimation of a people slice through this poem. The maps that need to be drawn after a genocide cannot be compared to the way that children of imperialists might find their way, on sacred stolen ground. It seems presumptuous to co-opt Harjo’s recipe for building a world map out of entrails and landscape, even or especially since most of our awareness of the patterns of nature are sourced from Indigenous wisdom. So in the interest of staying in my lane, I want to offer a “way-finding” practice that’s closer to home. It’s kind of a stretch to find Quaker themes in Wendell Berry. But one internet search reported that Berry’s love for sacred silence led him to confess, “maybe I’m a Quaker of sorts.” I’ll take it. He certainly shares the conviction among Friends that divinity exists in all of nature, “God’s second book.” Quaker modes of discernment rely on a quiet heart and a clear eye to listen intuitively for direction. In this season of quickly fading sun and ash, and the closing sky, there’s a sense of urgency to the discernment process. The light is dying. But what we need, he reassures us, is here. Perhaps Whyte thought of “The Wild Geese” when he wrote “The Journey,” importing Berry’s awareness of a twilight now-ness. The final line—“you are arriving”—similarly presses us to re-direct our focus to what is here and now, to discern our path. Both Berry and Whyte promise new life after loss—the taste of persimmon after the harvest’s end, and the “something new” to be found in the ashes of our lives. Both poets coax us urgently to find our way, to intuit our natural path like the wild geese. Whether we continue in our clear V and the sky closes, or we turn around into the light and the sky opens, we need to figure out where, individually and collectively, we are being called to move. Both poems incite us to look within for a small, secret message reflecting the broader changing natural world around us. Berry finds the macrocosmic tree’s imprint in the marrow of a seed—as above, so below. Whyte perceives a mysterious message about openness and freedom written in the heavens but promises that we can find it mirrored in our hearts. The bones of black sticks, according to David Whyte, carry an inscription written by--someone. We don’t need to know where the message comes from, we just need to be willing to drop down into the ashes of our lives to look for it. Berry’s theology is more explicit: we can only perceive the message from the universe when we surrender to the divine, which is a process as natural—and sometimes as hard—as abandoning ourselves to love or sleep. In discerning our steps, we will make mistakes. We were never perfect. We must make our own map. PRACTICE These broad themes of finding direction, intuitive listening, and reading the secret messages in nature open all kinds of possibilities for physical practice. Dancers might crave graceful, open-armed balances. The feeling of air in expansive, floating movements with lots of airtime in the transitions can mimic flight. Big geometric shapes with limbs extended can help evoke the silhouette of dark bird wings against light. The skeletal shape of the future tree in the seed could be expressed splayed out with bird wings spread, looking for the message written in the “wedge of freedom” under the line of the sternum. Here’s another way to awaken our awareness to secret signs. I’m not sure who began transposing the monastic practice of Lectio Divina into the worship of nature, “God’s other book.” My mother first taught it to me, and she learned it from Quaker teacher Nancy Bieber. Traditionally, Lectio Divina referred to scriptural reading, meditation, and prayer to promote communion with the divine. It does not treat scripture as texts to be studied, but as the living word. It takes in the word in four separate steps: read (bite); meditate (taste); pray (savor); contemplate (digest). In answering Oliver’s call to love this world through devoted, reverential attention, stop whatever you are doing and look, feel, smell, taste, listen. Allow your attention to be called to something beautiful (the word beauty is, after all, etymologically related to “calling”). Try not to penetrate or study what’s around you, instead try to adopt a passive role where you receive the call of beauty. Chew on it: Approach what calls you, BE with that bark, blade of grass, bug, or crack in the cement. Touch it if you can. Savor it: Suspend any preconceived idea of what it might have to tell you. Try to free yourself from composing an idea in your mind, and instead truly listen with a mental blank slate. Digest it: What is the nutrient-rich, life-giving message or substance this phenomenon relays to you? In contemplative stillness, consider: what is the line written there, and how does it speak to something in your own heart?
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Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow. Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow” from Mortal Acts Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980, renewed 2008 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Jennifer Rahim, “Saint Francis and the Douen” After reading Galway Kinnell The head sheltered by a great mushroom hat holds the secret of all things beginning and the wisdom of all their endings. Hidden there is the knowledge of mysteries unbaptised, tiny, faceless creatures-- those knots of possibility are the dread beneath the hat. Hidden there is a mouth crying in the forests, calling the living to step beyond the boundary of their seeing; but sometimes it is necessary to reach out and cradle the child, and tell again in touch and sweet lullaby of its loveliness and wonderful promise; as Saint Francis did when he followed the small voice that beckoned him from the darkness, then stooped low to where the infant sat naked on a wet riverbank, swaddled in the mud of all things beginning; and reaching to take the child into his arms he saw a face look back at him, right there, from the water’s surface, and in that moment’s recognition found again the gift of self-blessing-- for all things rise to life again, from within, in the waters of self-blessing; so that Saint gently removed the hat in a sun-bathed spot witnessed by the river, the earth, the trees and the passing breeze, and with healing touch and soft song sang of the infant’s perfect loveliness; from the tender head and troubled brow, the shy, half-formed face and the small wounded heart, he blessed the whole length of the body; from the upstretched arms to the strange, backward turn of the feet, he blessed their high intelligence to brave the abandoned places only to save what was theirs alone to give, blessed again and again that perfect beauty until the child became sunlight, forever shining within-- of self-blessing. Jennifer Rahim, “Saint Francis and the Douen” from Approaching Sabbaths. Copyright © 2009 by Jennifer Rahim. Reprinted with permission of Peepal Tree Press. POETIC THEMES If you came to classes this week you'll know much of our somatic play has come from study I'm doing in a collaborative I'm working with, convened by Bayo Akomolafe, whose thinking about embodiment, non-identity, and activism is at the heart of my learning right now. Last week, in addition to Bayo, three teachers offered their resistance the thrall of "wellness culture" and the boundaries of the individual self: -V (formerly Eve Ensler) reframed trauma as a portal in discussing her book, "Apology," written from the perspective of her abusive father. -Sophie Strand troubled our cultural approach to healing, reading from the book she's writing at the moment, a meditation on the importance of decay, composting, and death to our cultural moment. -Marinés Cordoso, a somatics teacher from Mexico, guided improvisatory movement that transformed us from rain droplets to a bag of water hanging from the sky to a seed to a flower and back to fluid. What interests me about this work is the invitation to question simple notions of identity, wellness, and healing, instead acknowledging how the soma is constantly in flux. For example: at least half of the cells in our body are microbes that influence our brain and our immune function... these "foreign" residents in our body contribute more gene functions than our own genome! We hold otherness inside the boundaries of what we've assumed to be our "self" - for example, DNA can be incorporated from lovers (terrifyingly for some of us- eek) or from our mothers (look up feto-maternal microchimerism)... we're a monstrous, chimeric mash-mash of us and not us, human and the more-than-human. And we are all on our way to somewhere and something else. This week's short practice video lingers with "Saint Francis and the Douen," using the warm-up technique to Marinés Cordoso's transformations. It is a practice, like the poem, about expanding and the boundaries of self and body to encompass the more-than-human. It tapped into (haha) the body as a way of opening us to be opened further, becoming something rich and strange. I hope you dig it. And here's a bit more from Thinking Feelingly, about the relationship of that poem to its source, "St. Francis and the Sow." Yom Kippur marks a return to innate goodness, casting off whatever detracts from that natural state. Many synagogues mark this time of purification with the blessing of animals, as with the concurrent (and much less important) Christian holiday of St. Francis Day. Galway Kinnell’s “St. Francis and the Sow” re-minds us of the bud of goodness in all things, the opportunity for flowering at any point, and the potential for self-blessing that is only impeded when we forget our true nature. He intentionally mishmashes the wrinkled brow of a pig with the more enigmatic “brow” of a flower-bud—one that “stands for all things.” The pure physicality of every earthy blessing is one hundred percent that of God, as Quakers say—even the curl of the tail is spiritual! The celebration of fleshiness in fodder and slops and earthen snout and spurting teats offers a nice balance to the practice of fasting this week. At the same time, the poem takes us in through the flesh to the center of our core, dropping through “the hard spininess spiked out from the spine / down through the great broken heart.” Blessings of earth are told through these touching words. At the center of each of us is the great broken heart we share with Kinnell’s sweet, lovely sow. And if we can touch it, the promise is that we will remember our loveliness and the world will come back to color. Blessings of earth indeed. Jennifer Rahim’s haunting rendering of the poem is not so simple. The Douen, a mythological figure from Trinidad and Tobego folklore, is a creepy figure with backward feet and knees, no distinguishable facial features except for a mouth, and a big, floppy hat. Said to embody the wandering souls of children that were not christened before death, they lure unsuspecting children deep into the forest until they are lost. These liminal creatures are figured as more mischievous than evil—they are, after all, innocent—but they double as a warning to kids not to wander after strangers and to parents to be sure to baptize their children. This lends something more sinister to the poem’s act of blessing, as part of a colonial history of control, domination, and cultural genocide. These slip-slidey nuances extend our sense of who and what these creatures really represent, with their “high intelligence / to brave the abandoned places / only to save what was theirs alone to give.” The celebration of resistance to imperialism seemingly implied here lends a fuller scope and thrust to the poem, “calling the living to step / beyond the boundary of their seeing.” I mean, who is redeemed here, after all? Rahim troubles the waters in the scene of baptism: surely the face the Saint perceives at the riverbank is his own? The pronouns get, so to speak, muddy: “reaching to take the child into his arms, / he saw his face look back at him, / right there, from the water’s surface.” This is a “moment of recognition,” not the discovery of an “other”—and what Saint Francis “found again” is a gift of self blessing. Even so, the child is the focus of the poem, from the first lines describing its head and the secrets, knowledge, and wisdom held there, to the last lines bursting into sunlight. Rahim lures us into the wilderness with these uncertainties, which is maybe the only place from which to begin to see things differently. When we return, the familiar is suddenly layered with deeper, fuller meaning, whether it is the postcolonial current or the kerfuffling of the human with the more-than-human. As we are touched we might consider the nuance of what, precisely, is being recuperated in the blessing. In this sun-bathed spot by the river, with its breeze and trees and earth, we witness a co-mingling transformation... someone who might or might not be a saint, and a banished, exiled creature, who is changed into actual sunlight. The poem touches this child so gently, sings the song of healing so softly, that we can almost feel the infant’s “tender head and troubled brow / the shy, half-formed face / and the small wounded heart.” All these wounds, going back for generations... Blessings of earth on sow, and Saint, and Douen, and us all. PRACTICE Here's a simple self-blessing practice. The progress of touch in both poems, from the brow down the length of the body, lends itself to a physical practice that might fall in the interstices between penance and self-forgiveness. You could begin by just holding a fingertip to the “troubled brow,” behind which churn all the horrors in your personal and ancestral history. If that sensitive spot between the eyebrows awakens you to feeling, you might, like the Douen, reach your “upstretched arms” overhead (perhaps with palms touching, if it feels organic to you), and draw them in slow motion down to the crown of the head, micromillimeter by micromillimeter. When your prayer hands hover just over your “tender head,” you’ll feel the warmth of the scalp and the tickle of hair, and you might have the impression of the head lifting toward the hands. Spend some time perching the hands on the crown before moving down to the addled forehead, then the “small wounded heart,” and then down the “whole length of the body” with a lingering touch anywhere along the central axis of the torso that feels especially tender or resonant. To emphasize your grounding in earth, “swaddled in the mud of all things beginning,” like the full prostrations only practiced on Yom Kippur, you might close each pass by folding forward. Bowing to the mystery. man. it's been a hell of a last few weeks... call it astral, call it political, call it weather or allergies or covid, call it coincidental - everybody's feeling trammeled. here's your favorite poem this month with some lymphatic massage to free up the body for the equinox to bring in something new. This cycle of decay and regeneration isn't as much the topic of my thoughts on the Equinox in Thinking Feelingly, which focuses more on circular cycles... but the vibe I got from you in classes all this week was definitely that the letting go right now is really, really hard. So I'm attaching the Equinox chapter excerpt, but thought for the practice video, I'd focus on the poem that gave you the most comfort this week - Forman's "On This Day."
Here's the excerpt from Thinking Feelingly: Joy Harjo, “Eagle Poem” To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear; Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty. From In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress Joy Harjo, “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars” (For we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live) Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind, I am amazed as I watch the violet heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth after dying for a season, as I have watched my own dark head appear each morning after entering the next world to come back to this one, amazed. It is the way in the natural world to understand the place the ghost dancers named after the heart breaking destruction. Anna Mae, everything and nothing changes. You are the shimmering young woman who found her voice, when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away from you like an elegant weed. You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars. (They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks on the corner.) This morning when the last star is dimming and the busses grind toward the middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you the second time in Lakota, a language that could free you. I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico, how the wind howled and pulled everything down in righteous anger. (It was the women who told me) and we understood wordlessly the ripe meaning of your murder. As I understand ten years later after the slow changing of the seasons that we have just begun to touch the dazzling whirlwind of our anger, we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers entered crazily, beautifully. From In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress POETIC THEMES The autumn equinox marks the point where the days and nights are nearly of equal length (from the Latin, aequus nox). It’s a time of balance, where growing things begin to die and, traditionally, harvesting winds down and folks give thanks and take rest. Migrations start. Hibernation plans begin. We accept the movement of nature toward dissolution because we know it is a part of regeneration. There must be death to make way for new life yet to be, like the larva swimming in its own soup before it can grow wings. I think of Mary Oliver’s “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness,” where our acceptance of death is an expression and extension of our love for the world. I imagine Mary Oliver on her beach walk in the sky, wagging her finger at us for being such babies about death. The invitation to reach past late September decay to intuit the promise of rebirth highlights circles (our movement around the sun), the balance of light and dark, and life and death. Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem” is a meditation on these mysteries, insisting on the secret, invisible messages we can’t see or hear. Meaning is conveyed through a language of circular motion. I think of this poem as an instruction manual for praying in circles, configuring the cyclical pattern of ruin and renewal as a kind of cleansing. The eagle manifests this cycle, flying in circles and “rounding out the morning inside us,” and at the same time is surrounded, “circled in blue sky / in wind.” As containers for the world and contained by it, we are asked to open ourselves and breathe, “knowing we are made of all this.” We are cleansed by the eagle’s circular flight, sweeping our hearts clean. Our perspective, too, is scrubbed clear, and we come to see that we are encircled in something much larger. We glimpse the ultimate truth that our little life is a wee blip in a broader circle of motion. It seems important to marry Harjo’s well-known “Eagle Poem” with the circle of decay and regeneration illustrated in “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.” Naming and telling the story of the murder of one woman who refused silence is part of a different cycle of continuance in the context of broader cultural genocide. This poem depicts all the same cyclical movements between this world and the next: each spring the crocuses erupt “after dying for a season,” each morning the last star dims and we re-enter this world from the spirit world of sleep. But in giving Anna Mae voice, this poem also illustrates a darker ghost dance, performed ritually to connect the living and the dead. The howling winds of this poem’s “righteous anger” pull everything down to the grinding buses in steely cities where “tattered drunks” lie frozen on street corners. This “dazzling whirlwind” of anger is an important corollary to the soft wind carrying the eagle through its blue sky circles. Harjo’s “own dark head” echoes not just the “heads of crocuses” but also the ghost dancers who “prance and lope like colored horses.” “For Anna Mae” performs another kind of ghost dance: giving voice to the heartbreaking destruction of a people is part of keeping that culture alive. PRACTICE Perhaps you could source your movement practice back to circular dance forms from your own ancestry. It’s not only Native American dance that manifests in flesh the way we orbit around a spiritual core, even as we move within broader circles of motion. Many other movement traditions sequence in circles, both within specific gestures and in the broader structure that turns the practitioner in a complete 360. The only circle dance I studied in any significant depth was a technique by Rudolf Laban, the Austro-Hungarian dance theorist. Laban devised a circular, spiraling sequences inspired by Sufi circling, where the body moves in a deliberate spatial polygon, on the vertical, lateral, and sagittal dimensions. Mary Anthony, a contemporary of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, taught me the traditional Laban circle, which I’ll simplify here into an accessible exercise. Imagine a figure 8 on the floor, and take eight steps to trace one circle back to the center of the figure 8, then change directions to trace the complementary circle. Keep your eyes at the spot where the circles merge, and do your best to make each step precisely even in length, so as to divide each circle of steps into a perfect, symmetrical octagon. Slow your pace. Begin to rhythm your breathing with your steps. As your concentration transitions to an effortless zone where you begin to move spontaneously, stay with the practice just a little longer. What is the feeling-state rounding out inside of you? Ruth Forman, “On This Day”
this is a day without chairs a day where all the rooms melt together and there are only corners/corners and humming wishes and slight breeze brushing you like palms this is a day of prayers a day of painful breaking/a day of peace beneath a day of arms of hands eyes and quiet windows i wish you love from your mother backwards i wish you deep tunnels without fear i wish you children’s laughter i wish you cactus flowers i wish you moonlight i wish you real eyes i wish you a hand across your back/soft like when you were a child i wish you tears i wish you clean i wish you angels in conference around your bed holding you so there is no space for me even to touch you/just watch i wish your mother watching i wish you abalone dreams i wish you peace i wish you doves in your kitchen moonlight in your bathroom candles when your eyes close and dawn when they open i wish you so many arms across your shoulders so many lips kissing your ears that you smile from the inconvenience i wish you all your babies’ love attacking the center of your heart just so you know they are there i wish you banisters, railings, and arms around your waist i wish you training wheels, i wish you strong shoes i wish you water o i wish you water through your feet flowing like a stream and i wish you hammocks and melon on your eyes strawberries in your mouth and fingers in your hand fingers in your hand all day through this house on this day with no rooms only corners and an uncommon breeze “On This Day” from Renaissance, copyright © Ruth Forman 1996. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. Thomas Lux, “Give it to the Wind” If the wind touches your cheek in a manner that pleases you, then to it give something back. Give some dollars, a good slice of bread, a phrase from a woman who loves you; open an ampule of joy and wave it, out loud. If you find a dime, then give two to a beggar, celebrate nerve endings, your soup. If whole minutes exist when to your left is a river with ducks and to your right a cathedral slashed by light, then carry clean bandages to a battlefront, swab foreheads in a contagious ward; if a few cells bloom, a synapse heals, then stab a thousand tiny flags into the graves of generals, then mourn a murderer’s childhood. And if, after furious sleep, the room is windy and cool air slides across the blank dunes of your sheet, then thank the night for the day and the day for what it is: liable to be. Thomas Lux, “Give it to the Wind” from New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux. Copyright © 1997 by Thomas Lux. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Ama Codjoe, “Slow Drag with Branches of Pine” Here I am, holding one more mirror. This time smoke, winding like a river. I close my eyes, not because the smoke stings—it does—but because it’s a way to examine myself, like looking at your face in a river certain it is not your face. The smoke combs like a mother through my hair or like searching the shoreline for shells unbroken. I sing to myself and the smoke drags my voice on its back just as the breeze heaves it. Here, in my half-singing, I’m reminded how to slow drag. I watch the pine trees creak and sway. Here, I am my own twin. I rest my cheek against my cheek; I barely move at all. From Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Ama Codjoe. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. Milkweed.org. Daniel Nester, “Künstlerroman, 1996” Before I moved to Brooklyn, I hopped on the L train and, I shit you not, interviewed the bohemians of Bedford Avenue, pen and pad of paper in hand. I asked if they liked living in Williamsburg. Most kept walking, ashamed to be seen with me. Some were nice. Even the glasses guy from They Might Be Giants stopped and talked. I lived in a sublet on Crosby Street, a fifth-floor walk-up frozen in time, heated from a brick on a stove, rent-controlled in a building filled with old men. This was 1995, and Williamsburg was no SoHo. We had the L Cafe, Planet (or Planeat?) Thailand, brunch at Oznot’s, open mics at The Charleston, Styrofoam cups of beer at Turkey’s Nest. And Joe’s Busy Corner, where the patriarch held court outside and cursed through his artificial larynx. Everyone in Williamsburg lived on borrowed money. We walked to the Citibank in Greenpoint just to use a bank machine. And our landlord never cashed our rent checks. Like, never. Months would go by on North Fifth and Havemeyer. Nothing. I’d watch my checking balance swell to four digits and start to think, this is my money, not his. So I’d shop at OMG Jeans or buy new Doc Martens. Then the landlord would cash the rent checks. A whole year’s worth. All at once. The whole building would shudder. I can still see myself a year later, on a summer morning by the East River with a Strathmore sketch pad, not very humble, wallet-chained, younger-looking, jaded, waiting for last night’s mushrooms to wear off and Tops grocery to open. A skinny boy bums a smoke. I give him a light. I smile. From Harsh Realm: My 1990’s Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Nester. Reprinted with permission of Indolent Books. POETIC THEMES This week is themed around the astonishing return to cool in autumn. Any seasonal shift sharpens our awareness of what’s around us, but especially so when we’re talking about suddenly perceiving something formerly invisible. September breezes make manifest an omnipresent force. This is not just the perfect metaphor for how the divine plane sometimes appears to us. (It’s no accident that the word spiritual is etymologically linked to breath.) It’s also a practical, straightforward analogy for mindfulness in general: there’s all this life surrounding us, calling us to pay attention. Being saved from our internal mental churn by awakening to what’s around us is, each time, an experience of being refreshed and renewed. Enter Ruth Forman’s breathtaking, breathmaking list of uncommon wishes. Riding the wind of our roving attention: humming palm-brushing breeze prayers fingers in your hands all day eyes quiet windows clean abalone dreams strong shoes…. “On this Day” pours blessings, and we are filled to overflow. The waterfall of ways we might experience the “uncommon breeze” of early fall just keeps flowing: like baby hands like tears like lips kissing our ears like moonlight like children’s laughter. There are angels in conference around our bed, holding us, and we need only open our eyes to see them. This feeling of being held safely, wrapped up in the world, reminds me of the final lines to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God: Now, in her room, the place tasted fresh again. The wind through the open windows had groomed out all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness. She closed in and sat down. …Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. Catching life in the meshes of our awareness is a form of refreshment and solace. The more we can catch, the more we feel a sense of plenitude, and the more we have to give. This simple mathematics is the premise of “Give it to the Wind,” which offers (besides the wonderful line, “Celebrate nerve endings, your soup”) an equation for life’s give-and-take: if the wind touches your cheek, give something back! Responding to beauty, or luck, or a gift, by giving something back is such an obvious thing. It’s simple symmetry. Often gratitude practices can bring about guilt, inadequacy, or a kind of smug self-satisfaction. In contrast, Lux depicts the effortlessness of our natural inclination to give (bread, joy, succor) when we are full. The needs of the world are made known to us in tandem with and as a simple extension of our blessings. Or, to banish all preciousness and do-goodery, we could pop out for some air with Ama Codjoe. The seductive scene in “Slow Drag with Branches of Pine” depicts smoking as a form of self-companionship. Like the ragtime jazz and blues dance form referenced in its title, “Slow Drag” is hot—at least it is for anyone who has loved smoking and maybe for many who haven’t. Ada Limón, for example, confesses to having always wanted to be a smoker in her commentary on Codjoe’s poem for The Slowdown. She tells the story of playing Lauren Bacall as a kid with candy cigarettes and later “practicing” at smoking in her twenties, adding that it always made her feel that she needed to go to confession. This naughtydirtysinful vibe is what drags many of us to smoke, but for Limón, the smoke break is enticing as solitary reprieve, a chance to reconnect with self, breath, solitude. All this is currenting through “Slow Drag,” but at the same time, Codjoe refuses to jettison what might be considered profane from the realm of the sacred. As much as it’s a ritual of elemental rapture—smoke is wind is fire is a river is a mother’s touch is shells on the shoreline—it is (or was) also sexy. Cigarettes sting your eyes, which close as you lift your face to the pines, and you sway as the smoke, like a lover, “drags [your] voice on its back / just as the breeze heaves it.” Hot dawg. I have to pause here and linger with this poem from Daniel Nester’s larger künstlerroman, Harsh Realm. Back in the day, smoking was not only solitary, it was communal. The smile that greets the skinny boy bumming a light at the end of the poem is one of the few smiles in this volume of poetry. Smoking was a tribal observance back then, where rebels and gritty nonconformists could find one another out on the streetcorners of New York. I’m taken back to the seedy bars and coffeehouses where we’d all gather to share poems in not-so-earnest open mics, karaoke sessions, or Mad Libs-style collaborations—Dan, Greg Pardlo, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Kazim Ali. But to approach the poem with less solipsism (and name-dropping), it also captures a truth about smoking that’s nostalgic because it just may no longer be true. The owner of Joe’s Busy Corner cursing through his artificial larynx is from the same tribe as the guy on his way to buy Doc Martens with borrowed money, extending his lighter to a stranger. We were flipping the bird to responsibility, capitalism, ideas of health, and mortality itself. There are a million reasons that this particular subculture is dead, and nearly all of them are admirable, positive cultural shifts. But this sensual blessing of the breath really was a way of giving thanks for “whole minutes” spent near ducks or pine trees or Tops Grocery. We recognized acutely, and observed ritualistically, the lack of guarantee: each morning is only “liable to be”—a bittersweet, conditional non-promise. In whatever way you give thanks to the night for the day—whether it’s pulling the horizon from around the waist of the world and wrapping it around you, or watching the breeze rumple the white dunes of your sheets, or lighting up a Marlboro joy ampule, I celebrate your celebration. PRACTICE But really, I’m not inviting you to become a smoker. Those days are over. In this avalanche of metaphors for September’s uncommon breeze, is there one that’s dragging you in? How might you give the bodymind a physical experience of, say, Ruth Forman’s brush of palms or Codjoe’s pine tree sway? In this video, I went with seated cat and cow, set to Zora Neale Hurston's words. Another simple way to embody the mathematics of give and take is to lift and lower your arms, deliberately palpating the air as though pressing on a parachute. If this appeals, you might begin by resting your hands in your lap, palms facing up, as though holding something. As you lift the air up on the inhale, try to feel for its temperature and quality. When your arms are fully extended upward, turn the palms to face down, and as you breathe out, soften the hands back down into your lap. As you explore receiving and pouring back out, perhaps add a retention on the inhale with reaching arms, and at the bottom of the exhale, rest for a moment on empty, surrendering upturned hands into your lap. If one of these metaphors come to mind, like doves or wind over dunes, linger with it, as though feeling it with your palms. As your hands receive these prayers, what do they want to give back? Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is”
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” from Mules of Love. Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Bass. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd. boaeditions.org. Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels. Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessèd day, And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” Yet, as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.” “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” from Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. POETIC THEMES As per the commonality in the titles, this week is really about thingliness. Humidity and wind are among the few things that makes the air real to us. Like seeing our breath in winter, humid and motile air makes a real, palpable thing out of the invisible element that surrounds us always and permeates our being. Like any good anchor for mindfulness, the presence of humidity or breeze makes the familiar more real to us. For whatever reason, the body responds to the thick humidity of August by shortening and shallowing the breath, when we really need to cultivate a deeper and fuller breath to combat the feeling of drowning in water. A friendly way to welcome this breath is to envision ourselves, as Ellen Bass does, like fish with gills, sipping the air easily into our side ribcage as if we were in our natural element. This fishy play is sobered up by the poem’s likening of the air’s heaviness to the thick oppression of grief, weighting us down “like your own flesh / only more of it, an obesity of grief.” Acknowledging the discomfort is a step toward calling it like it is: grief isn’t comfortable, but we can learn to live with it, to love the world as is. You can drown in the thick humidity, or you can take life as it comes, “like a face between your palms.” What if truly learning to love the things of this world requires that we forego prettifying them? Wilbur shifts our airy focus from humidity to movement with a spectacular image of a morning “all awash with angels,” as laundry moves across the line and in the breeze. Air is likened to breath, as the laundry angels rise “together in calm swells / Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear / With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing.” The poem ends with a very different analogy, pulling the clothes from their gallows. In a way, this is the reverse practice of magicking fireflies and heat lightning into some ethereal otherworldly phenomenon. We move away from the tendency to romanticize the natural world. Like laundry off the line, we take our love down to this plane, for nuns and thieves alike. Both poems explore how the dynamics of air reunite body and soul, by reckoning with this world as it is. Wilbur takes his reader down from the angel dance to harsh reality—“the world’s hunks and colors.” (Somewhere Wilbur stated that “hunks” is his favorite word here, for its effectiveness is shifting to the real and the quotidian.) With clear, unidealized perception, we fall in love with the things not of heaven but of this world—lovers off to be undone. The soul, in the first stanza, “hangs for a moment bodiless.” From this disembodied state, the middle of the poem marks the soul’s resistance to heavy, grounded reality: “The soul shrinks / From all that it is about to remember” in a stanza riddled with contrasts between heaven and earth, blessing and rape. But the sun is warm, in the last stanza, looking down on this earth. There are colors among the hunks. The soul’s movement is downward, returning to earth: “The soul descends once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body.” We come home to this reality, this body, the things in this world of ours. PRACTICE In this video I'm playing with EFT to tap along with Ellen Bass' evocation of hands, heart, stomach, gills... feel free to let your fingertips explore free-form. AND/OR, to transform August’s watery heaviness into some kind of freedom, you could lift and lower your arms in angel wing mock-flight. We could also use a little taste of the joy in “impersonal breathing.” Liberating the breath in tropical air involves opening and softening the back of the throat to avoid any burning silt feeling. Imagine two bodily points as the ends of the laundry line, and, as though in a breeze, breathe as openly as possibly while waving and undulating the flesh between those points. For example, in many shapes the points might be tailbone and crown; for other movements it might be fingertips and toetips; still others might explore diagonal endpoints like one shoulder to the opposite hip point. When we imagine freedom between those fastened points, how does the breath rise and fill and move-and-stay and swell and swoon and fly and dance and float, to adopt Wilbur’s verbs? Inevitably, undulating between these points will involve sidebends—opening the intercostal muscles like bass gills in the humid air—and twists, feeling the skin and viscera crease in one place and stretch open to the breath in another. Whatever it is you do to embody these poems, in the end could we take our face in our palms and read its reality like braille? OK so I'll give this a try. This is a provisional and incomplete and very imperfect explanation for why I shaved my head.
My primary teacher in grad school, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, learned so much from her experience of losing her hair during chemo that she recommended that every woman with a deep interest in gender shave their head. When I read that (I must have been in my late '20's), it drew me and also scared the shit out of me. So I put it aside and vowed to do it someday. Welp, here I am at 50, cognizant and a little surprised that it has taken me so long to feel strong enough and loved enough to undertake the experiment. But seeing Sinéad get eaten alive by the poisons of this world made me realize that there was something about *myself* that I was grieving, some way of being that I hadn't yet stepped into. So was it about politics? A hearty yes! I've always admired that brave radicalism shared by women like Ani DiFranco (for whom I named my firstborn) and Annie Lennox. I'm all about that kind of liberatory chutzpah to have "the courage of your convictions" - risking your own comfort to step outside normative beauty conventions, designed to keep us small, fungible, unthreatening to the status quo which undergirds systems of exploitation. So I did it! And it's been awesome! And fascinating. As a gender experiment, it exposes so much about our culture's preoccupation with femininity as a symbol of erotic power (and sources of power for women in this culture have been far and few), a kind of social capital or currency. It has also made me recognizable to a whole new set of people, and has made me either invisible or suspect to others. I have found my people in the pom-poms that have been waved, not just from change-workers fighting for liberation of all kinds, but also the hoop-hollering of free spirits from very different walks of life. And those who are scared cowed stuck obedient have been more than indignant... more like triggered! MY HEAD has, somehow, hit them very personally. So that all has been fascinating. And not precisely in alignment with my study of ease this month, since it has been pretty intense. But it required a certain amount of ease and open space to DO it, so in that way it's fitting. Meaning, I don't think I could have done it while in the rhythm of teaching, because there's a really fragile period where you want to be able to honor the pace of public exposure based on how vulnerable you feel on a given day. And of course beauty norms also keep us busy keep us running to keep up, and not having a huge unruly mop HAS given me new and unexpected forms of ease and spaciousness - omfg the amount of paraphernalia wrapped up in hair management! AND as much as pleasure is a cousin to ease, I can't begin to describe what it is to turn over on the smooth pillow in sleep, to feel the sun on my scalp, to swim - to swim! - holy shit y'all... to swim underwater. Anyway it's all part of the same process of healing from the more toxic presumptions lurking under the churn of American daily life. So that's kind of the political side of things. But I knew going in that shaking one thing up always shakes up others, and that's what really interested me. I wanted to move towards what's scary in order to unsettle what had become sedimented, tamped down, compacted in me, reshuffling into a new shape. Not a new "look"; a new INNER shape. Among the radical feminists, there was something unique about Sinéad that moved me, a part of myself that I wanted to get closer to. She was a mystic with one foot in this realm and the other walking with the divine. She existed in that liminal zone that I call home, that experience of existing "in the world but not of it." And THAT'S the heart of this experiment - stripping away the inessential, the surface image, to get closer to the essence of things. A purification. ACK! It's much, much harder to speak to the spiritual side of things, which I always feel very tender about, sometimes so much so that I put on a kind of cool-kid-teenager persona to protect hallowed ground. In certain parts of South Asia, one never utters aloud the name of one's beloved because it's that precious. I get that. It's hard to put into words the perspectival shift in leaning into surrender, tilting towards the Otherworld, out of a yearning to know God consciousness more deeply. And for me, the call of the divine has always asked for a kind of emptying of self that shifts me into this spontaneous authenticity where I don't will my words or actions, they simply move through me. My bodymind just this side of music. That's the place I teach from, which is why teaching is so healing to me, centering me inside my purpose, my connection to the divine. Which is *also* why I so rarely take time off! All to say: I miss you. But I feel super dropped in, and the mystery of this sacrifice/offering/risk - is part of that. It's the simple give and take of ritual, and I feel all these gifts pouring in, too many and too all-at-once to be able to name here or yet. So for now, that's what I got... This lil' film was inspired by the writing of Báyò Akómoláfé. One hot August day I felt a roiling, burning feeling of being pulled towards something scary, and I decided to make something in a medium I knew nothing about (that would be film). As a celebration of play, spontaneity, and experiment, as a resistance to notions of productivity, perfectionism, and the pressure to monetize all our passions. Below I'll paste the excerpt from Thinking Feelingly that includes more, but here are the lines that you hear in the film:
Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness without maps and without answers surrender to the journey let the loamy fingers of this dark soil envelope you unmake you fiddle with you disturb you unsettle you conspire with you and birth you. The world needs you to fly to wait for guidance from a tree to do something preposterous to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen. The future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come. This home that is a dance with exile drives us to find new kin the cow down the street the wet anointing she spills on everything the moon that nods as we stroll by. This play was a way of practicing, rolling around in his language and in sensation, that enabled me the following day to risk loosening my grip on the familiar to invite a new haunting by shaving my head. More on that in a bit! FATHER’S DAY Ashley M. Jones, “Photosynthesis” When I was young, my father taught us how dirt made way for food, how to turn over soil so it would hold a seed, an infant bud, how the dark could nurse it until it broke its green arms out to touch the sun. In every backyard we’ve ever had, he made a little garden plot with room for heirloom tomatoes, corn, carrots, peppers: jalapeno, bell, and poblano-- okra, eggplant, lemons, collards, broccoli, pole beans, watermelon, squash, trees filled with fruit and nuts, brussels sprouts, herbs: basil, mint, parsley, rosemary-- onions, sweet potatoes, cucumber, cantaloupe, cabbage, oranges, swiss chard and peaches, sunflowers tall and straightbacked as soldiers, lantana, amaryllis, echinacea, pansies and roses and bushes bubbling with hydrangeas. Every plant with its purpose. Flowers to bring worms and wasps. How their work matters here. This is the work we have always known, pulling food and flowers from a pile of earth. The difference, now: my father is not a slave, not a sharecropper. This land is his and so is this garden, so is this work. The difference is that he owns this labor. The work of his own hands for his own belly, for his own children’s bellies. We eat because he works. This is the legacy of his grandmother, my great-granny. Ollie Mae Harris and her untouchable flower garden. Just like her hats, her flowerbeds sprouted something special, plants and colors the neighbors could only dream of. He was young when he learned that this beauty is built on work, the cows and the factories in their stomachs, the fertilizer they spewed out-- the stink that brought such fragrance. What you call waste, I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again. In his garden, even problems become energy, beauty-- my father has ended many work days in the backyard, worries of the firehouse dropping like grain, my father wrist-deep in soil. I am convinced the earth speaks back to him as he feeds it—it is a conversational labor, gardening. The seeds tell him what they will be, the soil tells seeds how to grow, my father speaks sun and water into the earth, we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit. Copyright © 2021 by Ashley M. Jones. From REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021). Used with permission of Hub City Press. Gustavo Hernandez, “Marte” Around the time the first holiday billboards go up I raise a finger to a point in the night. To my eldest sister say, look that red light is Mars. We have been more than one year without him, and just now we are starting to see things again. So much of our knowledge about the skies is gone. Chart-blind, codices black—all questions we have forgotten to ask: the color of the orbs the slabs of moonlight. I tell her the planet has been floating there for weeks, and I really mean to say, we must try to hold on to everything we can still recognize, even the need to look for our fathers in the sky. “Marte” by Gustavo Hernandez, from Flower Grand First, copyright © 2021 Moon Tide Press. Used by permission of the poet. Báyò Akómoláfé, “Epilogue: Re/Turn” (A prose piece appearing here as a poem, with his generous approval) Home is such a slippery concept. Maybe there are no words to finally rope her in. In the stead of words, a gasp: home is then the moment when in a fit of sovereignty you would have given names to the glory-weary sun and to the council of mountains that hum gently in his praise and to the sea and the bulbous shapes that hang from trees names for all only to hear behind your ears the whisper of the world “You! We shall give you a name too!” It is not enough to find one’s way home. The things that stand in our way are aspects of our ongoing reconfiguration enemies, bottlenecks, seething memories, gnarling fetishes, haunting creeds, howling specters, grumbling boogeymen, careening splinters, frowning clouds, green giants, gaping holes, chuckling forests. A good journey is about dismemberment, not arrival. Look for the path with the dead end the unmapped one haunted by Sphynxian riddles And yellow slit-eyed peering shadows. Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness without maps and without answers surrender to the journey let the loamy fingers of this dark soil envelope you unmake you fiddle with you disturb you unsettle you conspire with you and birth you. The world needs you to fly to wait for guidance from a tree to do something preposterous to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen. The future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come. This home that is a dance with exile drives us to find new kin the cow down the street the wet anointing she spills on everything the moon that nods as we stroll by. For me, this feeling of home it looks like my father—your grandfather… Dear Dad, Mummy told us the week before we set sail that you might not come back with us to Nigeria the government needed you there in the raging wars of Kinshasa. But we knew. This heavy gravity that pulled down everything within as if I had swallowed a wrecking ball. We drove in the embassy’s Pajero SUV to the busy docks. We got on the ferry across the Congo River And when the boat started to drift away from the quay You stood there on the platform, your legs an actionable distance apart — a long cool figure cut out from the pestilence of the background, Silhouetted against he din of the ordinary. I feel your prickly mustache as you press your face into mine the anchoring hopes come undone and the ferry drifts out, dancing on the currents in the wake of other departing vessels. You did come home many times after that until the day you came home in a box. I have a daughter now. I'm sure you know that because you haunt me. I write you to let you know I see you standing on the quay even now when leaves rustle with passing wind when your granddaughter asks about you I see you when I remember the promise to think with her to listen to the ghosts that wander the streets as they whisper about world forgone, And to live in small places where I never forget that to be Alethea’s father is the deepest honor the universe bestows on me. I love you. Don't leave me alone. This, all of this, is how home feels. Home is your mother in whose entrails and dust I will be entangled long after memories are congealed into new stars. So take these letters pack them in a neat heap and burn them in a fire put the ashes in with us, where we now lie, in the single pot release us into the ocean wind let her carry us away so we will always be close to you. Run through the fields, my darling. Run to your new kin. To your new fathers and mothers. To the ones who hold you close as our dust churns a new night. Gather your children close—if you have any-- and tell them of your mother and me. Especially your mother. Tell them of your mother. And when you dance through the wisps of Thursday's bright morning know you will not dance alone. For we will haunt you. We are cool like that. Báyò Akómoláfé from These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home, North Atlantic Books. Copyright © 2017 by Báyò Akómoláfé. Rewritten as a poem here with permission of the author. POETIC THEMES Maybe we’re finally ushering in a time of “Parent’s Day.” If I try to hunt down what fatherhood is, somatically and essentially, I guess it might be rooted in a seed and then in the practice of cultivating its growth. In a beautiful bridge to Juneteenth next week, Ashley Jones’ poem recuperates the image of her father working the earth from its history in slavery and returns it to a “conversational labor” of love. Pouring elements of light and water into the earth is likened to speech, the soil has a voice, and the seeds speak back with what they want to become. In this ecology of heart work, there is a comingling of the elemental and the auditory. Our father’s voice grows inside us, so sown into us that we can taste it: “we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.” “Photosynthesis” helps us see how one thing becomes another, across generations. Sharecropping transmutes into a mode of dropping worries like grain. Great-granny’s love of color shapeshifts from hats and flowers into food. Work becomes power becomes energy becomes a heartbeat. If “Photosynthesis” inspires us to listen for our fathers in the earth, “Marte” invites us to look for them in the sky. In fact, this poem is more than an invitation—it’s a plea. The poem’s jagged lines seem to be shaking us, jostling us back to an awareness of the old ways of our fathers, and ancestors further back. The grief of loss leads us into a kind of blindness, a forgetfulness that threatens to take away our maps, our customs, even our questions. Hernandez encourages us to “hold on” to our need, squinting to find traces of “everything we can still recognize”… even our fathers in the sky. Which leads me to Báyò Akómoláfé’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. In the book’s foreword, Charles Eisenstein adopts the metaphor of a crystal for the way home refracts prismatically in Akómoláfé’s letters: “It isn’t like the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home.” I feel fatherhood, too, in Akómoláfé’s work, as something exploded, expanded, and dissolved into the sense experience of the whole world, from the humming mountains to the “loamy fingers” of the soil to the nodding moon to the wet-anointing cow to the “bulbous shapes that hang from trees.” The universe gives us our name. Fatherhood is bestowed like a gift and then re-gifted generously. Nurture must be shared with new kin, those who will hold us close when our “real” parents are turned to dust. This beautiful paradox of holding on to our hauntings (his own father’s ghost, waving his tall and noble goodbye from the quay), and the need to let go of the finite (the ashes of our parents and the proverbial letters they have written us) is the mystery of Báyò's worlding project. We must release our tight grip on the past so that we can open ourselves to being haunted in new, just as intimate ways: “let [the ocean wind] carry us away so we will always be close to you.” Kinda like his response to me when I sheepishly apologized for presuming to re-sculpt a prose passage so personal to him, so foreign from my own experience. He responded, No, you are not writing to me about my own daughter or my own father’s death; you are writing to me about yours, about his, hers, theirs. Somehow, in re-presenting those lines to me like a poem, you brought it to me in a new way—in a way that wasn’t mine to begin with, but was and has always been a collective, affective, sociomaterial swirl of homemaking/place-sensing becomings. I say yes to this, sister. #goals: to be, even for a day, cool like that. Báyò is doing what he describes, by unsettling, disturbing, and dismembering fatherhood as a home-base. He destabilizes any single, static, in situ ground or moment—even the image of his own father on the quay—and sets it into a movement migration. The ferry, the ashes, invite us to configure our own, tentative, temporary definition of home, in turn to be disturbed, burned up, and recycled. PRACTICE How do we invite homemaking/place-sensing becomings into our daily practice? Maybe we could call up a seed memory of a paternal figure and consider an associated sense experience. This might be one of the five senses like listening for a heartbeat in a garden or peering out at the night sky to find Mars, but it also might be a subtler sense impression like the feeling of being ferried away from a static figure. Look for this perceptual experience in your world right now, this day, this week. If we could shift a parental memory from a moment into a whole field of perception, we might feel more cared for in this world. Right after my dad died I had to walk the dog, and I felt companioned by his spirit in the open horizon of the playing fields by my house. For a while, every morning and night I would visit with my dad at those fields. Now every big open sky carries his imprint, every horizon holds me. We need these re-homing patterns—what’s yours? This one is for Sinéad, y'all. This loss is for many, but certainly for gen x feminists, a catastrophic blow to the abdomen. Head heart and gut, she stood for everything we wanted to be. She walked the walk we only dared dream, her brave skull rising while we were hair-flipping, her combat boot stance wide and clear while we were teetering on heels that shrunk our dignity. She howled, she strutted, she camera-stared with eyes clear as the sky. The wind-filled sail of her solar plexus, like a cobra hood flaring, fucked-you-ed every possible form of invisible power-mongering, oppression-rehearsing, capitulation to the daily regime of our culture's practiced cruelties. The defiance to stand inside her vulnerability, her heartache, her loss, her pain was unlike the familiar expressions of strength we'd known. Holy shit, you can strip yourself of protective armor and still sing a war song! She lifted us into who we wanted to be when we got enough breathing room to step into our power.
Here's an excerpt from Adrienne Rich's explanation in the LA Times for rejecting the National Medal for the Arts - so much like Sinéad calling bullshit on the Grammies: My 'no' came directly out of my work as a poet and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and public experience. I had recently been thinking and writing about the growing fragmentation of the social compact, of whatever it was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy: the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the people, for the people. ...Like so many others, I’ve watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusations against our teenage mothers, the selling of health care--public and private--to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to our working and poor people. ...Many of us today might wish to hold government accountable, challenge the agendas of private power and wealth that have displaced historical tendencies toward genuinely representative government in the United States. We might still wish to claim our government, to say, This belongs to us--we, the people, as we are now. We would have to start asking questions that have been defined as non-questions--or as naive, childish questions. In the recent official White House focus on race, it goes consistently unsaid that the all-embracing enterprise of our early history was the slave trade, which left nothing, no single life, untouched and was, along with the genocide of the native population and the seizure of their lands, the foundation of our national prosperity and power. Promote dialogues on race? Apologize for slavery? We would need to perform an autopsy on capitalism itself. ...What is social wealth? How do the conditions of human labor infiltrate other social relationships? What would it require for people to live and work together in conditions of radical equality? How much inequality will we tolerate in the world’s richest and most powerful nation? Why and how have these and similar questions become discredited in public discourse? And what about art? Mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby’s, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities, it dies into the “art object” of a thousand museum basements. It’s also reborn hourly in prisons, women’s shelters, small-town garages, community college workshops, halfway houses--wherever someone picks up a pencil, a wood-burning tool, a copy of “The Tempest,” a tag-sale camera, a whittling knife, a stick of charcoal, a pawnshop horn, a video of “Citizen Kane,” whatever lets you know again that this deeply instinctual yet self-conscious expressive language, this regenerative process, could help you save your life. ...There is a continuing dynamic between art repressed and art reborn, between the relentless marketing of the superficial... to reach through armoring, resistances, resignation, to recall us to desire. Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find. ...I wish I didn’t feel the necessity to say here that none of this is about imposing ideology or style or content on artists; it is about the inseparability of art from acute social crisis in this century and the one now coming up... In the long run, art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society without throwaway people, honoring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is never-ending. For that to happen, what else would have to change? - Adrienne Rich To read the whole article, paste this link in your browser: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-aug-03-bk-18828-story.html Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium” Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind. Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium” from Collected Poems: 1950–2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1971 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Adrienne Rich, “August” Two horses stand in a yellow light eating windfall apples under a tree as summer tears apart and the milkweeds stagger and grasses grow more ragged They say there are ions in the sun neutralizing magnetic fields on earth Some way to explain what this week has been, and the one before it! If I am flesh sunning on rock if I am brain burning in fluorescent light if I am dream like a wire with fire throbbing along it if I am death to man I have to know it His mind is too simple, I cannot go on sharing his nightmares My own are becoming clearer, they open into prehistory which looks like a village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine! “August.” Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1973 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, from Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Susan Stewart, “The Forest” You should lie down now and remember the forest, for it is disappearing-- no, the truth is it is gone now and so what details you can bring back might have a kind of life. Not the one you had hoped for, but a life —you should lie down now and remember the forest-- nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,” no the truth is, it is gone now, starting somewhere near the beginning, that edge, Or instead the first layer, the place you remember (not the one you had hoped for, but a life) as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea, nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,” which we can never drift above, we were there or we were not, No surface, skimming. And blank in life, too, or instead the first layer, the place you remember, as layers fold in time, black humus there, as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea, like a light left hand descending, always on the same keys. The flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before no surface, skimming. And blank in life, too, sing without a music where there cannot be an order, as layers fold in time, black humus there, where wide swatches of light slice between gray trunks, Where the air has a texture of drying moss, the flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before: a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds. They sing without a music where there cannot be an order, though high in the dry leaves something does fall, Nothing comes down to us here. Where the air has a texture of drying moss, (in that place where I was raised) the forest was tangled, a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds, tangled with brambles, soft-starred and moving, ferns And the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac-- nothing comes down to us here, stained. A low branch swinging above a brook in that place where I was raised, the forest was tangled, and a cave just the width of shoulder blades. You can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry-- and the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac-- as a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there (. . .pokeberry, stained. A low branch swinging above a brook) in a place that is something like a forest. But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered (you can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry) by pliant green needles, there below the piney fronds, a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there. And quickening below lie the sharp brown blades, The disfiguring blackness, then the bulbed phosphorescence of the roots. But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered, so strangely alike and yet singular, too, below the pliant green needles, the piney fronds. Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike and yet singular, too, but the truth is, it is, lost to us now. “The Forest” from The Forest. Copyright © 1995 by Susan Stewart. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press. POETIC THEMES The month of August is associated astrologically with the sun, and I have to go personal for a beat here, and not just because Adrienne Rich is my poetic sun. My dad was in a poetry class with Rich at Harvard, and I remember him describing how everyone was struck dumb when she first read aloud. I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Rich’s story was like mine—an upbringing pressured by her dad’s intellectual ambitions for her—and like my mom’s, marrying a professor. She did divorce him to carve her own path, and she wrote “August” in the throes of processing his subsequent suicide. The poem begins with an image of the sun’s yellow light illuminating two horses quietly eating apples under a tree (with all this creature’s ancient association with the sun, in Greek myth, Hebrew Scripture, and Vedic lore). But the poem breaks quickly from this sunny scene, as summer burns itself out in the solar flare of August, with its staggering milkweeds and ragged grass. The progress of the poem can only be autobiographical, trying to break from the nightmare entrapment that opens from her own story to history, or rather a prehistory, of separations marked by paternal claims and blood. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Rich’s departure from traditional marriage was also her departure from patriarchy, launching her into position as a leader in second-wave feminist thought. Diving into the Wreck, her most famous collection, in which these poems were published (along with others from the three years following her divorce), established her true voice. Margaret Atwood described hearing Rich read from it: “It felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer.” Tantamount to a solar explosion, she blew everyone away. We found in my dad’s study a note from Rich saying, essentially, “Thanks for last night.” He declined comment. When I met her at a reading and asked her about the note, a coy grin stretched across her wrinkled face and she said, “Yep. Sounds like me in college.” Maybe my dad reminded her of hers. The descriptions of her father sure remind me of mine: a literary snob who gave her daily writing assignments and lauded her poetic achievements especially when they best replicated Western canonical form. Her departure from her father’s language to find her own brilliant, blinding voice was like Minerva bursting from Zeus’s head. I’m still trying to get there. When I can afford it, my plan is to tattoo the final lines of “Planetarium” onto my heart, in some kind of outward-spiraling explosive shape: “Iamaninstrumentintheshapeofawomantryingtotranslatepulsationsintoimagesforthereliefoftheboddyandthereconstructionofthemind.” Maybe it will help. “Planetarium” is dedicated to the famous German astronomer Caroline Herschel, whose biography is a lot like Rich’s, struggling with typhus as Rich had struggled with arthritis, relegated to assisting her brother’s scientific work and struggling to emerge as an astronomer in her own right all the way until he died, and after his death, busily cataloguing nebulae and star clusters and comets. Herschel’s gravestone reads, “The eyes of her who is glorified here below turned to the starry heavens.” One might say the same of Adrienne Rich. In “Planetarium,” looking up at the night sky, Rich sees “galaxies of women, there / doing penance for impetuousness,” until the poem encounters a nova, an astral phenomenon that expels solar masses of material at the speed of light and sends shock waves that can even trigger the formation of new stars. That’s a pretty good way to describe Rich’s effect on the world. She captures the experience of finding her “untranslatable language” so viscerally: “every impulse of light exploding / from the core / as light flies out of us….” The heart, here, is configured as its own sun, exploding outward. Compare this vivid description of the effects of heat, light, and blinding sun to the conditional uncertainty of “August.” She has yet to truly know her burning brain, throbbing dream “like a wire with fire.” She seems to crave the knowledge of how her flesh threatens the patriarchy. The poem’s description of the sun’s power could be describing the effect of Rich’s own, neutralizing the protection of magnetic fields to pierce right through to the bone. And she does. I go back, again and again, to the explosive last stanza of “Planetarium,” my future tattoo. Maybe to live in the shadow of the solar event that was Adrienne Rich is to strive to digest the impulses of this culture and transform them for the liberation of others. To seat feminine power in the solar plexus, reclaiming the sun from its association with masculinity, is to conceptualize feminine power as the capacity for transmutation, the witchlike translation of one thing into another form. But in the burning heat of summer, perhaps we could marry this with a cooler model. “The Forest” is the perfect mulchy answer to the call to ground down and cool off in the heat of August, beginning with its direct order: “You should lie down now.” The language that captures a new quiet in the air, a new stillness and movement toward the end of summer—“disappearing,” “gone now,” “lost to us”—is joined to the hint of nature’s changes in early autumn: the air’s “texture of drying moss,” something falling from “high in the dry leaves,” and the increasingly covered ground. The forest floor is such a useful and evocative image for the ground floor of our being to which we need so badly to return. We settle down into the poem’s musical repetitions, like a chorus returning again and again, “light a light left hand descending.” The layers of grounding, going back and back, “fold in time,” grounding us in the places we remember. The forest floor as “the first layer” calls up the physical reality of the pelvic floor whose layers are crisscrossed. As the source of life, the pelvic floor issues a call to remember, to go back to beginnings, again and again—root, family, origins, home, tribe. This covered ground is the home turf of Mama Earth, eternally feminized. It is both an entry, a doorway back to our early lived experiences, and a “kind of limit,” as we are unable to change or truly inhabit them. A lovely image for the grounding principle is the left hand on the piano, regardless of what tinkling upper keys the right hand might be playing. This is such a useful way of imagining the two hemispheres of the body. With the heat of this month, its fire and solar flare, we need the balance of the left side, always present, associated in myriad traditions with the moon and the grounding principle. So perhaps Susan Stewart’s forest floor is a model of female power that balances Rich’s solar flare. The strength of the pelvic floor is in its layering and its multi-directionality, strong enough to hold not just the content of one body but more than one. As a metaphor, this would claim the capacity for holding multiple views, experiences, and truths without having to choose one, sustaining not just one person but guaranteeing the survival of many—a departure from the zero-sum culture of competition and dominance. Perhaps you resonate with one of these models more than the other. In any case, they are not mutually exclusive to our experience: the two can hold hands with one another. PRACTICE The two diaphragms, solar plexus and pelvic floor, move together like a dance. Both naturally lift up when we breathe out, and both drop down when we breathe in. If this diaphragmatic tango is new to you, try lying on your belly with a pillow under your abdomen. Gravity accentuates the feeling of the belly pressing into the pillow in the inhale. Picture the diaphragm dropping into the abdomen, stretching the striations of muscle around the solar plexus like sunbeams. This, in turn, helps us ground, as we naturally align the pelvic diaphragm with the abdominal diaphragm, dropping downward on the inhale. If it’s elusive, consider placing a hand on the pelvic floor, receiving the added pressure when your belly swells. If possible, spend a little time reflecting on the experience. Does one or the other of these muscle groups feel more familiar, toned, or powerful to you, or do they feel balanced? Do you relate to one or the other as home-base for some material/essential (pun intended) quality of femininity? Are there any recurrent images or thoughts emerging? Natasha Rao, “Old Growth”
Backward crossovers into years before: airy afternoons licking the wooden spoon, pouring soft blades of grass from a shoe, all ways of saying I miss my mother. I wish I could remember the gentle lilt of my brother’s early voice. Instead I hear clearly the dripping of a basalt foundation. What gets saved-- My father fed my sick goldfish a frozen pea and it lived for another six years. Outside, pears swathed in socks ripened, protected from birds. Those bulbous multicolored days, I felt safe before I knew the word for it. But how to fossilize a feeling, sustain it in amber? I keep dreaming in reverse until I reach a quiet expanse of forest. The dragonflies are large and prehistoric. Mother watches from a distance as I move wildly, without fear. Natasha Rao, “Old Growth” from Latitude. Copper Canyon Press/The American Poetry Review. Copyright © 2021 by Natasha Rao. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Marilyn Kallet, “Fireflies” In the dry summer field at nightfall, fireflies rise like sparks. Imagine the presence of ghosts flickering, the ghosts of young friends, your father nearest in the distance. This time they carry no sorrow, no remorse, their presence is so light. Childhood comes to you, memories of your street in lamplight, holding those last moments before bed, capturing lightning-bugs, with a blossom of the hand letting them go. Lightness returns, an airy motion over the ground you remember from Ring Around the Rosie. If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies again, not part of your stories, as unaware of you as sleep, being beautiful and quiet all around you. Marilyn Kallet, “Fireflies” from Packing Light: New and Selected Poems. Black Widow Press. Copyright © 2009 by Marilyn Kallet. Reprinted by permission of the poet. POETIC THEMES Here we are in the heart of summer. If you can’t feel Rao’s torrent of summery muscle memories this week, you never will—from “back-crossovers” (as we used to call it) on rollerskates, to dumping grass from our shoes, to time enough for batter-licking. But the summer memories are troubled in “Old Growth,” playing in the tension between freedom and safety, fearlessness and protection. The poem recollects a feeling of childhood safety that evades the adult, attainable only in dreams. “But how to fossilize a feeling, sustain it in amber?” This, the poem’s central question, expresses a frustration we can all relate to, hoping for more in the category of “what gets saved” in our memory bank. But the frustration of this wish appears when, in the place of a beloved’s voice, the speaker gets stuck with the sound of dripping basalt. The slow drip that builds a foundation is a powerful image for accruing memories that stick. We use the foundation of memory to build a safe structure. The unwieldy, dangerous flow of memory, like lava, is cooled into basalt, an igneous rock. These are all ways of keeping things forever frozen, fossilized. And yet... and yet! When one approaches memory in this way, things get lost, like the lilting, motile voice of a loved one. Rao’s poem is perfect for describing the ache of wanting it all back. Kallet offers us an alternative. Adult fireflies live only three to four weeks; by mid-July firefly season is already fading fast. As if bioluminescence itself weren’t mysterious enough, the transience of these little phosphorescent dancers makes them all the more magical. Fireflies have been likened to ghosts in many traditions, although perhaps most poetically in Japanese haiku. So no surprise when the poem first compares these ephemeral, vanishing sparks to ghosts. But then! Kallet extends the analogy to encompass the flashes of fleeting memories that fireflies can themselves spark in us. Anyone who experienced fireflies as a kid is visited by the ghosts of memory with the glimpse of the summer’s first firefly. The use of the second person—“your street in lamplight”—includes the reader in this shared memory of catching lightning bugs, holding them in our hands even as we were “holding the last moments before bed,” and “with a blossom of the hand / Letting them go.” Like Proust, Kallet offers a model of remembering itself. She suggests that when we catch a memory, we first free it from our clutch and then stay with it, following where it leads. That is to say, when we hold onto our story too tightly, poking it repeatedly in the hope that it will light up for us, it becomes engrained in our psyche in one particular way. It loses beauty, spark, life. But rather than actively doing the thing that is remembering, as agent, we can instead soften our grip and just let ourselves be bewitched by recollection. When we let memory enchant us in this way, we are being remembered, or re-membered. If we allow a memory to fly free and simply linger with its natural drifting patterns, it can move and shapeshift into something new and different. Our stories are freed up to change, changing us on the way, not unlike a dream: “As unaware of you as sleep, being / beautiful and quiet all around you.” The key here, in our approach to memory, is in the pun of lightning/lightening. The independent life of a memory depends on a light touch. The metonymic chain of light witness sets the light presence of memory free from sorrow, remorse, and our heavy-handed recollection. We look up and around—rather than down at a captured memory—to follow the glancing movement: “Lightness returns / an airy motion over the ground / you remember from Ring around the Rosie.” Stephen Cope notes that the enthusiasm of a child, whose spirit leaps up toward the object of interest, is a perfect reflection of the word’s etymology (en theos, the god within). If we were to take our childhood mode of interest as a sign of divinity within us, how would our memories reach us differently? PRACTICE Maybe the dying of the fireflies suggests a reprieve from adulthood, where we instead linger with the simpler, more joyful moments from summers past to remind us of that childhood way of being—remembering who we were in those moments when we were lucky enough to feel safe and surrounded by quiet beauty. To be clear, this practice does not depend on a happy childhood. In fact, memories of lightness might be easier to find when they sparkle out from the rubble of trauma. “Do what you loved at ten” is a practice I learned from my mother. When she retired from academia, and found she was unable to calm her racing forebrain with anything but Tetris, she turned to the one activity that afforded her ten-year-old mind some ease and chill: collecting reptiles and amphibians in her backyard. Observing and tending to these animals calmed her. So she began, at sixty-four, to collect frogs, fish, and turtles. The turtles, especially, became her teachers, with their slow, steady, determined, dinosaur-ancient wisdom. She amassed twenty-three turtles, including Homer, a one-hundred-pound tortoise. Eventually her home became a state-certified turtle refuge. She duct-taped broken shells, tenderly handed frozen shrimp to their chomping beaks, constructed complicated homes for them, and watched. And watched. My mother learned a new way of being from her rediscovered enthusiasm for turtles. In her crone years I actually think she has achieved enlightenment, as en-light-ening. She was always a spiritual seeker; from her first book on spiritual conversion narratives to her last book studying the lives of foster parents caring for (and releasing) children with HIV, she hunted down the spirit within. Until she found it. A couple of years ago when I asked her about her current Quakerism she replied: I’m not really interested in spirituality anymore… I’m more interested in the weather The sun at every time of day, and rain I love rain. I really like weather. En theos finds us, dances for us, enlightens us, inside the simplicity of interest. So what did you love at ten years old? Picture yourself at ten and imagine a slideshow of photographs, real or imagined. What is an image in the carousel that stands out particularly vividly? Place yourself in the Star Trek beam and allow yourself to be transported. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? What are the conditions: the season, the color or tone of the light, any smells or ambient sounds, the weather? Can you identify any distinct sensations in the child’s body? A cliché in American yoga classes is that we hold our past in our hips. Let’s just try on a playful frame of mind, and some suspension of disbelief, for approaching this. Here’s a doozie I found online, whose author is unknown, about wanting to be a glow worm: “A glow worm’s never glum. / ‘Cause how can you be grumpy / when the sun shines out your bum?!” This practice video offers three minutes of humming, set to Kallet's poem. You might want to find an object that reminds you of childhood somehow, to bring more sensation into your revery (I chose a daisy, my favorite flower since always). Or, from the book's practice suggestions: What if you tried childlike movements like skipping, hopping, or galloping, but backward, leading from your firefly bum? If tush-centric actions aren’t calling you, consider the general area of the hips as your light source. As a young child of five or six, I learned dance professor Cheryl Cutler’s trademark movement style, which initiates movement from the hips. She taught us to imagine our hip points like headlights. You might quite simply take a walk, imagining the two bony protrusions at your hips steering and guiding your body. How does your state of mind shift with your gait when you initiate movement from the ground floor of the torso? Perhaps sneak in some earnest expressions of catching fireflies and setting them free. Just be sure to keep your exploration light (pun intended). Sometimes when we grant ourselves permission to play, those moments of lightness dip deep and scoop up poignant memories. Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. “Love After Love” from The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. And from Collected Poems 1948-1984, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. George Herbert, “Love (III)” Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing. A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat. “Love (III)” by George Herbert is in the public domain. POETIC THEMES The poem to celebrate the official beginning of summer on the 21st would be Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” a poem that begins with a question about God and ends with a recipe for prayer. We don’t need to know our creator; we just have to commit to feeling its creation, moment by moment. This is the religious imperative of Oliver’s oeuvre as a whole—an agnostic worship of the world. And I do mean worship in its etymological sense: what is worthy of our attention. We pay attention, like cash money; we devote our attention, the most precious of gifts. The poem is not about a summer’s day; it’s entitled “The Summer Day.” This one you’re in. It’s not just any grasshopper, it is a particular one. This difference could be illustrated via a longstanding debate about how to translate a famous (perhaps the most famous) haiku. The story is that Basho, the renown Japanese poet of the Edo period, was challenged by his Zen master with a Koan (or riddle), and he responded with a haiku about mindfulness. Here’s the literal translation: Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya, ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into) mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound). Do we liken the pond to the mind and the splash to a thought? If so, should it be a pond or the pond? A frog, or the frog? Is the focus on the water, the jump, or the sound? You can google the Basho translation debate and find a whole world there. But suffice it to say, the message of “The Summer Day,” like the frog haiku, is about presence. Our singular existence is not all human life, it’s this one we’re living. Every one of us is just as strange and complex, ethereal and earthy. And Oliver’s famous second person address to discern what you’ll do with your time on earth is exportable to every calling that brings us into the immediacy of what we are meant to be and do. We are challenged to drop to our knees and surrender to that calling, offering our lives like a prayer. But since Mary Oliver’s angle on devotion is pretty well known, I want to offer a slightly different angle in a poem by Derek Walcott. Why Walcott’s poem for midsummer? Well, first because hunting around for poems about this pagan-turned-Christian holiday (which takes place between June 21st and June 26th in various places over the globe), I found Walcott’s book entitled Midsummer. But then I swam around in the book’s Biblical allusions for a while—most beautifully in a scene of Caribbean yellow butterflies “stuttering ‘yes’ to the resurrection” in “Midsummer LIV.” The bitter, brilliant manipulation of Christian doctrine in Midsummer rang a bell. I was called back to “Love after Love” as the perfect poem for this tension between earthly and Christian love at work in this weird June holiday. Walcott is famous for his reappropriations of canonical Western texts. I’m not sure if anyone has ever noted that “Love after Love” speaks to George Herbert's “Love III.” This is the final poem in this 17th-century poet and priest’s collection about spiritual conflict, The Temple. God-as-Love issues an invitation to the poem’s sinful Everyman: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.” Herbert’s poem consigns human love to a Christian realm, from which Walcott rescues it. The holiday of Midsummer is rife with these tensions. The pagan focus on sexual bonds and romantic love (mating in midsummer means a convenient birth in spring!) become entangled with the birthday of St. John the Baptist and his divine bond with Jesus. This mishmash yields some mighty strange rituals. Somewhere, this week, lovers are jumping over a ceremonial St. John bonfire with their wrists tied together, to cement a bond said to be stronger than blood. Somewhere a man is eating snails to avoid being cuckolded (long story). Somewhere a woman is putting a beauty elixir called “St. John’s Water” on her face or placing a bouquet of carefully-selected magical flowers under her pillow. Some kinky stuff is happening in an all-night vigil somewhere —even in the U.S., according to Louise Glück’s “Midsummer”! Walcott adopts the dialogue form of “Love III” to concoct his own magical brew from these tensions between religious and earthly love. We reclaim communion to learn to love our own soul. The bread and wine serve to “Give back your heart / to itself.” What more could one ask of Midsummer’s purported capacity for lifelong bonds than a comingling union with our soul and heart? Body and blood returned to same. In “[The midsummer sea…]” Walcott asks, “Where’s my child’s hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf, / the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven, / as the Word turned poetry in its grief?” He provides his own answer: “Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!” Only love, Walcott teaches, can leaven the bread of our life. Maybe that’s the message of Midsummer. PRACTICE We might explore the embodied act of reuniting a self divided in two—body hemispheres, past and present selves, mind and heart, body and soul, thoughts and witness mind. We could use a mirror like the poem’s doorway, where one part of the self greets the other. In tandem with movements that strip down, like actions of “peeling off” layers or “taking down” imaginary facades, we are looking for somatic experiences of melting resistance in forms of surrender, like smiling, sitting, and receiving (gifts, food). We could unburden our shoulders or our neck or wherever we are weighed down by massaging them and flicking the excess tension off the fingers. We could peel off clothing or splay the limbs open to unpeel the core. What would gestures of receiving/feasting look like? Finally, to explore the act of mirror-gazing, consider this. I used to sit and touch noses with my dad. A quick google search reveals that the touching of noses and foreheads is an ancient greeting involving the transmission of spirit, practiced across many spiritual traditions: the Maori call it Hongi, the Hawaiians name it Honi; and it is practiced in certain parts of Scandinavia, among Tibetans, the desert Bedouins in Southern Jordan, the Inuit, and who knows where else. If it resonates with you that the eye could indeed be the window to the soul, stand with your nose and forehead in contact with a mirror, and as you stare into your own eyes, envision an exchange of power with the image you face. End in some form of relaxed rest, the stillness like a banquet prepared by the soma, to just be savored, “feasting” on your life. |
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