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Yehuda Amichai, “Wildpeace”
Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds-- who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.) Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace. “Wildpeace” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books. POETIC THEMES This entry was written for Veteran's Day, but I brought it into classes this week because we needed a lil' Amichai. Which is not to say there is some anti-Palestine statement here - fer Chrissakes. All this polarization, where one's duty is to make a grandiose proclamation about the rightness and wrongness of things, in order to feel we are adequately "doing something" about the state of the world... Bayo Akomolafe calls this "frontal solidarity," and argues for the importance of alternate political choreographies. In a moving, tearful 3-hour gathering yesterday, Bayo and Resmaa Menakem spoke to the importance of the pause, the importance of making space for halting, exploratory, uncertain, fugitive movements alongside the tensions of the moment. The sacred pause where we back off the inclination to DO as the only solution to upheaval, and instead take a moment to be with our grief, to listen to what it has to teach. So let's continue with our wayfinding crabwalk, allowing for complexity and always, always, making way for feeling first. Here are the affirmations we have been synching with our movements this week, adapted from a meditation by Chani Nicholas: "May I remember the ways I'm free. May I remember the ways I'm at peace. May I remember the ways I am safe. May I remember the ways I am loved." We have closed each class by expanding this supplication to encompass all beings in the familiar invocational mantra: "May ALL beings everywhere be free from suffering and have joy." This has been our version of the Tonglen practice described below. I am deeply grateful for your presence in class this week, and I am feeling the weight of the trust you've put in me, to create a holding environment for all this pain. May we continue with this prayer, casting its spell in our hearts and across the oceans. I don’t have a lot to say about Veterans Day. It gives me the same feeling I had in middle school when I encountered Randall Jarrell’s gut-punch poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Like the wind is knocked out of me and I can’t say much. Like when I threw up after watching “Gallipoli” with my dad (who was in the military). Maybe wartime losses should feel like that: nightmare and black flak. Animal. And Jarrell’s decimating last line that washes out the body with a hose. But the thing is, the jolt and shock of violence that America feeds on all day, every day has dulled us to the point of inaction. It serves to bolster Empire. So instead of rolling around in violent imagery all day, we could try for a little reparation. Amichai survived the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, then World War II, only to face his country’s future—endless violence with no promise of a ceasefire. Amichai’s perspective is the wisdom of a “great weariness,” when face to face with no aftermath, no healing for wounds. “Wildpeace” instead just hopes for some kind of rest, rest from the exhaustion of running a race where the baton passed from generation to generation is an orphan--an orphan whose baby doll is a talking toy gun. And isn’t exhaustion one way peace finally graces the body? Suddenly the fight goes out of us, and with no drama, no “big noise,” a sense of exhausted surrender descends “like lazy white foam.” Maybe instead of celebrating war heroes today, we might instead, “as in the heart when the excitement is over,” let our psychic field lie fallow to make a space for peace. “Let it come / like wildflowers.” PRACTICE It feels apt to embody the attrition of “Wildpeace” by fatiguing the fight-or-flight muscle (the psoas) until it releases. The psoas is more than the connection between upper and lower body; it actually becomes the diaphragm, which is in turn tethered to the adrenals, all functioning as a whole system to rev up the violence. In order to catch a moment of reprieve from the flood of stress hormones that amp up the nervous system, we’ll try to soothe the psoas by wearing it out. Stand next to a wall and rest one hand on it for a sense of orientation, support, and solidity. Place the foot proximal to the wall on a large book (or step on a staircase or yoga block). Swing the outside leg forward and back in a modest arc for a minimum of three minutes on each leg. Use minimal muscular effort, allowing the weight of the leg to provide the required momentum. Be sure to keep the hip points level and allow the rocking motion to tip the pelvis in its anterior/posterior plane. When you’ve pooped out the psoas, and hopefully its connection to the fight reflex, come to sit quietly and witness the mental field. One way to welcome the wildflowers is the practice of Tonglen, which is typically a kind of reversal of violence. Picture someone you know who is suffering. Holding their image very concretely in your mind, envision taking in all of their pain and darkness on the inhalation and sending them all your light, joy, and power on the exhalation.
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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? 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. |
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