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Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies. Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” We were made to understand it would be Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful Dream. The worst in us having taken over And broken the rest utterly down. A long age Passed. When at last we knew how little Would survive us—how little we had mended Or built that was not now lost—something Large and old awoke. And then our singing Brought on a different manner of weather. Then animals long believed gone crept down From trees. We took new stock of one another. We wept to be reminded of such color. Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” from Wade in the Water. Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. POETIC THEMES Ah, New Year’s Day: Lucy with the football. All of us experience at times a sense of staleness in the routines of our daily life, the monotony of our psychological issues, the desire to wake up as new. January first, even if it’s a fake-out, marks at least the hope for renewal. If you’re hunting around for a poetic reflection of the earnest, hopeful resolutions we make each January, you might go back to the wild and wooly list of “what you shall do” in Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass. But now that I’m mentioning dead white guys, I’m thinking instead of the sober ending of Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” set in this dark time of year: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything.)” This might be more in keeping with the reality of a pandemic age. The tortured five sections show a man haunted by virtue misunderstood, bungling action, folly, mistaken humor, and harm done. By the end of the poem the midwinter fire has refined all of it, burning the speaker down to simple. Part of our own refining process is the collapse of time back to source, and the ouroboros of future and past in coming to know presence: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” To honor this week as the meeting place of beginnings and endings, let’s abandon the old and turn to some more current poems on how past and future intermingle. Maybe we could find a new way to explore the simple, somewhat broken hope of the New Year: that we could be different. In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Burning the Old Year” the old and the new are like two sticks that, when rubbed together, create a kind of burning friction. We are called closer to the flames to reconsider loss, regret, and what simple elemental truths stay around. Turning something material into sheer air is not just subtraction—beginning again “with the smallest numbers”—but distillation, separating the flammable from the enduring (and sparse) stone. It reframes what kinds of things we can celebrate, teaching us to reimagine even the most devastating loss as capable of creating a new open space for potential. When we are contracted in on ourselves, burdened, crowded in, there’s a need for mental/psychological space to breathe. With so much flammable material in the course of a year, we are invited to distill our lives down to what’s most real. And something else remains: the ominous crackling that also hangs around “after the blazing dies” is what we have not done. Regret lingers. Tracy K. Smith’s meditation is about something slower. The rebirth of old phenomena in a new form is like the reappearance of a soul in a Garcia Marquez novel. The slow undergrowth of invisible things eventually emerges. Sea changes over decades and centuries can soften even the most “rageful dream.” We need something “large and old” to handle what we’ve been handed. Smith’s epic, livid, broken land seems more like a description of Sumerian or Egyptian myth than a modern-day city. And with plagues, fires, and tornados, these days we actually seem to be in some kind of Biblical old story. So can we stagger dazed through the heart of winter, anticipating the possibility of green again? The concluding line—“We wept to be reminded of such color”—leaves us with a reminder of how we can be moved by all that is familiar, as it courses through new beginnings. Humanity has made it through plagues before; how can we be changed after this time of destruction? Ours is a fragile, urgent kind of hope. PRACTICE One popular lesson in teaching Sanskrit is to place dukkha, or suffering, in relationship to sukha, which translates to mean not just sweetness, but also space. Yogic practices offer some ways to approach the turning of the calendar year as purification—burning up what’s stale and ready for release to make space for the new. But also there’s the potential reincarnation of the old in new form. These themes give us plenty of work to do physically, although not necessarily the easiest or most relaxing work. Targeting the solar plexus, the seat of digestive fire in the body, might help us channel the element’s purifying properties. A kriya, or cleansing technique, called “Breath of Fire” by yoga practitioners (at least in America) builds heat in the solar plexus and then disperses it to create new spaciousness. A way of stoking the fire is to add a challenge to big muscles like quadriceps and “glutes” (your butt). You could stand in “chair pose,” with knees bent and torso angled forward on the high diagonal or place your back against a wall as though sitting in a chair, with knees bent as close to 90 degrees as possible. Depending on the intensity appropriate for your body (google counter-indications if you’re unsure, but best to listen to and honor your body’s responses), you might practice pumping air in a punctuated rhythm in and out of the nostrils, feeling the solar plexus snap back toward the spine with each exhalation. To up the challenge, you could amp up to a quicker pace. Notice, when focusing on what you’re ready to burn up, which moments, people, actions, or qualities come to mind. Heat is considered a somatic expression of anger, so keep tabs on your internal temperature: if swollen hate rises like Smith’s “epic wind,” take a break. Pause to listen to anger’s message, often a wise part of you requesting some kind of change. Based on the associations that rise to mind, discern whether to fan the flames or to squelch the fire. You can do the latter by straightening your legs and imaginatively saturating the chest cavity with the greenest of greens. Imagine a coloring book, and you’re filling in all the tubular branches of your lungs with your very favorite shade of green. When you feel well-cooked but not burned out, slow down your breath practice and fold forward at the waist, flooding the brain. I like to imagine (to mix my metaphors) cleaning a dirty fish tank: after the breath practice churns the stale water, the forward fold feels like dumping out all the gunky, swirling algae into the earth. Observe any imagery sparked by this inversion practice, and be sure to stretch out your quadriceps or any other “hot spot” before coming to relax and allow the breath and pulse to regulate. Is there any renewed sense of internal space? If so, what parts of you remain after the fire? Metaphorically speaking, wait for the soft little animals in your psyche to come back out, perhaps welcoming them with names.
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Carl Dennis, “To Plato”
I’m writing this for a friend, a painter, Who wants to thank you for the contrast you’ve drawn Between the frail beauty at hand and the beauty enduring eternally elsewhere. It’s helped her to give a name to the challenge she feels In confining herself to the facts before her. To thank you and then to suggest a correction To your attempt to connect the two By calling the beauty at hand a shadowy copy Of a bright, timeless original. To her it’s clear that they're wholly separate, One class containing no example she knows about, The other containing them all; One indifferent to whatever she thinks of it, The other relying on her to protect it, For a moment at least, from oblivion. She wants to thank you for explaining the impulse To climb the ladder from particular instances To general truth. Can you thank her For practicing the vocation of climbing down To dwell among entities local and doomed? Step close and look at her painting of peonies In a Chinese vase on a cherry table. Try to imagine why she considers this subject Worth the effort, why she's given these items The time required to catch the light As it falls on glaze and petal, water and wood, So that each surface looks cherished. Open yourself to musing awhile on the difference Between a longing for the eternal and a longing To hold what vanishes in a grip that time, However patient it proves, has trouble loosening. Carl Dennis, “To Plato” from Poetry, vol. 185, no. 5, Poetry Foundation. Copyright © 2005 by Carl Dennis. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Bathroom Song” I was only one year old; I could tinkle in the loo, such was my precocity. Letting go of Number Two in my potty, not pajama, was a wee bit more forbidding —and I feared the ravening flush. So my clever folks appealed to my generosity: “What a masterpiece, Evita! Look! We’ll send it off to Grandma!” Under the river, under the woods, off to Brooklyn and the breathing cavern of Mnemosyne from the fleshpotties of Dayton-- what could be more kind or lucky? From the issue of my bowels straight to God’s ear—or to Frieda’s, to the presence of my Grandma, to the anxious chuckling of her flushed and handsome face that was so much like my daddy’s, to her agitated jowls, Off! Away! To Grandma’s place! As, in Sanskrit, who should say of the clinging scenes of karma, “Gaté, gaté, paragaté” (gone, gone, forever gone), “parasamgaté; bodhi; Svaha!” (utterly gone—enlightenment-- svaha! Whatever svaha means), Send the sucker off to Grandma. Gaté, gaté, paragaté; parasamgaté; bodhi; svaha! Reprinted with Hal’s permission (smooches). POETIC THEMES If like me you’re allergic to this month’s hedonistic thrall to “stuff,” maybe we could look at our perception of materialism and tweak it a bit. Philosophically speaking, materialism is a physicalist orientation uninterested in the spiritual plane, which corresponds to the yuck of December’s focus on objects during a time that’s supposed to be sacred. The opposite of materialism, in this sense, might be the kind of ungrounded, escapist spirituality that refuses to acknowledge or reckon with the real world; what many of us think of as “woo-woo” spiritual bypassing. Might we find a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationship of material and spiritual planes? We could start with Plato. Carl Dennis writes his direct address “To Plato” to re-imagine the relationship between matter and what matters. This elegant defense of artistic and intellectual work is an act of generosity—a kind of gift—upholding the vocation of his friend, a painter. Representing worldly phenomena on paper is a way of preserving the “frail beauty at hand.” Time’s grip won’t loosen, he explains, so everything in its clutches can only be saved by our witness and our care for it. The work of an artist is not to climb up toward the Eternal but downward into the cave of this world’s fleeting, earthly objects, “To dwell among entities local and doomed.” The poem argues for a shift in perspective away from an orientation upward to the spiritual plane of which our reality is merely a copy, and toward a celebration of human efforts that bring divinity down to earth. Perhaps Dennis shares Eve Sedgwick’s preoccupation with Neoplatonism, which is all about this shift. It wouldn’t be a stretch to read obscure philosophical influences into poetry by a guy who has written about Nietzsche and Hegel. And Dennis’ take on rebirth, like Eve’s, is also pretty Neoplatonic (in poems like “Former Lives,” “Eternal Life,” and “The God Who Loves You”). In any case, this school of philosophy is a useful one for reframing the aims of holiday shopping. From the thrall to high art in early thinkers like Plotinus, to the later, weirder rituals incorporating physical tokens, it’s all about pulling the divine down to our earthly gifts. Might we give new life to gift-giving by adopting a Neoplatonic view? What happens when we relate to concrete objects as talismans, elemental nature as manipulatable substance for ritual, and language as incantation? I want to borrow a word from Dennis, who argues that we save the material plane from oblivion by cherishing it: the paintbrush catches the light “So that each object looks cherished.” I’d like to linger with that word for a moment. My parents joked that they couldn’t figure out why the marriage vow would include both “to love” and “to cherish.” Redundant, no? In searching for a distinct meaning for cherishing, my mother decided it must mean that whenever the cat brought some gross, dead rodent to the door, it was my dad’s job to pick it up. And so small, furry corpses became “cherishes”—as in, “Sherman, there’s a cherish on the back porch!” There’s wisdom in this joke, as in most of their weird marital rituals: in learning to cherish our nearest and dearest, it’s helpful to practice on small things like fallen leaves and coffee cups. And half-eaten mice. In the place of grand expressions of art or thought, we can build our cherishing muscles through small, local actions, rituals, and practices that enact our care and concern in ways that make them real to us and to our beloveds. The low grounds the high: a 4-inch corpse stands in for a sacred vow. And according to the laws of symmetry in the Neoplatonic system of correspondences (as above so below), the lower the low, the higher the high. It makes sense, then, that Eve’s “Bathroom Song” uses potty training as a metaphor for the release of our mortal coil(s). This is a poem about dying. Convincing toddler Evita to surrender to the U.S. Mail her miraculous creation of “Number Two” required the perfect recipient on the other side: Grandma, the paradigmatic (Proustian) figure of the infinitely adoring, invested, tolerant fan. Its final lines borrow from the Heart Sutra, recalling the parable of crossing the ocean of ignorance to reach the banks of Nirvana. Jason Edwards, a British Queer Theorist and my favorite Facebook friend, gives a brilliant reading of the Buddhism of this poem in a book entitled Bathroom Songs. I’d like to add that this reference to Nirvana’s far shore ties back to Eve’s early mention of Mnemosyne, not only the Greek goddess of memory but also the name of another body of water to be crossed in the afterlife. This metaphysical sprawl reflects the 19th-century European mishmash of traditions that fascinated Eve, with its proliferation of deities from Asia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. The Neoplatonic brushstrokes on this poem’s Buddhist canvas are part of Eve’s distinct way of drawing correspondences between complex psychological processes and the material plane. Poop, low on the manifest totem pole, relates to enlightenment, the top rung on the ladder of spiritual ideals. “Why would it be a scandal,” Eve asks, if the work of dying and toilet training were “not so different—were, so to speak, molded of the same odorous, biomorphic clay?” Just as with potty training, in order to let go of this world, Eve needed something intellect alone couldn’t provide her. Her “very hungry” hands found in silk cords and shibori dye what she couldn’t find in theory-making or even poetry. She called it a convergence between “making and unmaking.” Her interest in fabric art dated back to childhood, and it’s unclear (I join Jonathan Goldberg in wondering, as he does in his recent book Come as You Are) if Grandma Frieda was the same grandmother who taught Eve to weave. In any case, these later textile practices were a form of rendering thought in 3D. Jason Edwards notes the continuity between her poetic flare (for enjambment, parenthetical sentences, and strings of clauses or dangling ones) and her experiments with textile practices like marbling and enfoldment. I have written elsewhere about the profound transformations of self that couldn’t be enacted through thought alone, but instead had to be fondled and woven and stained and sculpted. Rather than focusing on Eve’s cognitive habits and elemental intimacies, we might instead borrow her process of transforming abstraction into real artifacts and experiment with what needs of our own might be met by “making stuff.” PRACTICE One Christmas Eve, still inside the post-divorce shock of being without my children, I decided to make stuff. I cobbled together a Christmas tree ornament out of glitter and cardboard: a miniature package wrapped in parchment leaf, complete with a silver bow, inside of which I glued a kidney-bean sized stone wrapped in metallic wire, like a little silver Evita poo. It helped me reckon with letting go of the nuclear-family-holiday scene I’d always had, to make way for whatever divorced Christmas looked like. If material objects can stand in for subtle forms of human experience and connection, how might you craft, however crudely, some kind of talismanic gift? It might be for someone important, concretizing your connection, or it might represent a psychological task for transition, serving a more abstract function (like my weird ornament on the family tree). If the end of the calendar year resonates as a time of release, you might in fact work with excrement. And by that I mean, of course, silk, because, in the words of Eve’s therapist: “the silk and the shit go together.” I remember when I was writing about Eve’s obsession with silk, I fell into a fascinating abyss, down deep in the bowels of the Columbia library where I combed through factoids about mulberry silkworms and salivary enzymes and molting and stuffing and boiling and harvesting…. Here I’ll just say that if you want to work in the ur-medium of strange and otherworldly elemental transformation, work with silk. You could look into slow stitching, or if you need a straightforward idea, you might create an eye pillow, sewing a piece of silk (or silky cloth) into a sleeve for filler, which could also be symbolic (like pebbles from the creek behind your mom’s house, or sand from your favorite beach, or rice from your friend’s wedding). Whatever you craft, what different faculties are recruited in this kind of play? Remember, this is not painterly high art, but process-driven work that’s serving a ritual function. Resist the drive toward perfection and stay down here with the idiosyncratic, flawed entities of this realm, local and doomed. Allergic to art? Only got 3 minutes? Here's a combing practice to elicit an energetic shift down out of the head and back into the guts and groins, to reinhabit your materiality. James Wright, “The Jewel”
There is this cave In the air behind my body That nobody is going to touch: A cloister, a silence Closing around a blossom of fire. When I stand upright in the wind, My bones turn to dark emeralds. James Wright “The Jewel” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Wright, “Trying to Pray” This time, I have left my body behind me, crying In its dark thorns. Still, There are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness Of women's hands that touch loaves. The spirit of a tree begins to move. I touch leaves. I close my eyes and think of water. James Wright, “Trying to Pray” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Wright, “A Blessing” Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. James Wright, “A Blessing” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood-- A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is-- Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. POETIC THEMES At the darkest time of the year, we can reorient toward light, or we can delve into the transformative power of darkness. Pagan traditions hold midwinter as the most sacred time of the year, with the most potential for mysterious, secret processes of spiritual change. I love the gem-like precision of these tiny poems of Wright’s, which condense their ingredients into crystal form, like the pressurizing force in metamorphism. In “The Jewel,” the wind turns our bones to emerald. The air behind our body is a cave. A cloister. A closing silence. A fire blossom. Wright goes spelunking around in a sensual underworld menagerie, all murk and glorious riddle. I want to reference “A Blessing” mostly for contrast. This poem, probably Wright’s most famous, is atypical in its all-over sweetness. Barely a pinky finger is dipped into the darkness that most of his work swims in. Hanging out with a couple of lonely ponies by the highway, something becomes real to him: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” Those final lines are a barebones layout of one view of body and spirit: one must be transcended to reach the other. Nowhere in his other work do you find that kind of facile reading of the body’s place in the realm of spirit. These two shorter poems are in many ways more challenging. Both are working through something more complicated than body transcendence. In “Trying to Pray,” Wright proclaims, “I have left my body behind me, crying / in its dark thorns.” But then he lifts the poem from despair with a list of Good Things, all sense-based: good darkness, women’s hands kneading bread, the leaves of a tree being touched. In Wright’s poetry, the amalgam of our senses interacting with the mysteries of nature sparks a kind of transformation. Sense experience nudges our conceptual faculties toward the mystical. Wright’s focus, as per “The Jewel,” isn’t in what we can see with our eyes, the clear, controlled space in front of us, but in the mysterious zone behind or inside our body, which we can never see but always follows us. And the recognition of the mysteries one can’t quite see releases a kind of epiphanic clarity. Wind touches not skin, but bone. We have felt this—the wind down in our bones like the crystalized cold of emerald. This dark, mysterious, sensual tone is one Wright shares with Theodore Roethke (who was in fact his professor). Roethke’s hard-earned rendering of Immanence isn’t to be found in his most-anthologized poems, like “The Waking,” but in the deep dive of a poem like “In a Dark Time.” Roethke’s poetry is a relentless, inward probing, an introspection that picks at the scabs of the psyche’s machinations until they bleed again. Living just this side of madness may have thrown this poet in and out of the sanatorium, but arguably this threshold state is transformed into a “nobility of soul” by his art. It’s noble because it’s healing. At least it has been for me, having taken so much comfort in his companioning darkness. In my own dark times, I had someone to hold my hand, even “pinned against a sweating wall” or dying to myself in the “long, tearless night.” Living on the edge of what the mind can withstand isn’t so much a choice as a temperament—“The edge is what I have.” Those of us who resonate with the line “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire” do, in fact, see better “in the deepening shade.” But the involuted process of compression in Roethke’s poetry gives hope because it eventually goes so deep as to spin us free of the poem with a glimpse of the sparkling sublime. “The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind.” It's lines like this that help us climb out of our fear. PRACTICE Could you spend a half an hour in darkness? There is a summer program that leads clusters of people with blindfolds and canes along my block in Philadelphia. This is a simulation exercise to train people to work with the visually impaired by walking a mile in their shoes. I tried this out while walking the dog and decided it was better to leave the dog at home (sorry, Skunky). On my own, it was still brutally difficult, even without an enthusiastic fluffy thing tugging me around. It involves mentally projecting a parallel line to the movement of traffic, navigating uneven sidewalk, and using sensory cues to inwardly construct the geometry of an intersection to cross a street. I found that I was focused more on the practical challenges of being blind, as opposed to the psychology of darkness. So instead, you might simply try a half an hour feeling your way down the stairs, to the coffee machine, to your toothbrush. You can expect that few practical tasks will get done. What is the psychology of darkness for you? Does deprivation of one sensory pathway heighten others, and which? Is there any shift in your experience of the relationship between sense and spirit? You might even free-write from your own “steady storm of correspondences,” by keeping pen to paper, resisting the urge to pause. If you get stuck, you can always simply write one word over and over until your mind unclogs. Or, consider a blind drawing of any object or face you encountered in the darkness, without looking at the page and without lifting the mark of the pen from paper. This one-touch technique often alleviates any perfectionism or interest in reproducing reality, instead making manifest an impressionistic picture of something as it exists within you. If you just can't let go of the visual, here's a video. It's designed to entice you, through the visual, to enter more deeply into the auditory, with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer about turning your whole body into one big huge listening vessel. A yogic approach to becoming a tuning fork is to allow your attention to rest at the crown of your head, the third eye, and at the center of each palm. You might be enticed to close your eyes, when you feel the effects. Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself”
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic-decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity. “Advice to Myself” from Original Fire by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song” This morning, lemon seltzer cans all line up in the new refrigerator door preening for the cameras. Oh, the sweet joy of new beginnings in refrigeration! Soon enough though, spills, half-eaten burritos, and partial cat food cans will take over again, lurking in the back corners, hiding in hard-to-reach spots. Its stainless-steel skin shimmers in afternoon light, but the sheen of this cooling wonder is already dulled by a weekend of fingers opening its doors. And yet, even when bread and cheese turn moldy and milk transforms from liquid to a smelly solid mass, a white-throated sparrow’s welcome song can still reach your aging ears from its perch on the back gate. Smudged, dinged and damaged by the long slog of it all. Then daybreak again. Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song.” Copyright © 2022 by Ellen Skilton. Published by permission of the poet. All rights reserved. W. S. Di Piero, “Chicago and December” Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally pissed by jumbo wreaths and ribbons municipal good cheer yoked around their heads. Mealy mist. Furred air. I walk north across the river, Christmas lights crushed on skyscraper glass, bling stringing Michigan Ave., sunlight’s last-gasp sighing through the artless fog. Vague fatigued promise hangs in the low darkened sky when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees, switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing the bare wintering branches, black-on-black shining, and I’m in a moment more like a fore-moment: from the sidewalk, watching them poised without purpose, I feel lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things when from their stillness, the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing, smithereened back and forth, now already gone to follow the river’s running course. From Poetry (June 2006). Copyright © 2006 by W. S. Di Piero. Reprinted by permission of the poet. POETIC THEMES Just as the natural world is dialing down to darkness, this week we’re asked to rev up for the holidays. This can mean only one thing, sooner or later: whole body exhaustion. If you are a ball of goo on the couch, it’s not just social expectations this week; there’s a special kind of emotional fatigue at work too, especially for those of us for whom cultural and family traditions can be triggering. Setting limits on output isn’t easy. A somatic approach to the psyche insists that we don’t really have a choice about those limits. We can’t “construct” boundaries based on a cognitive construct or willpower; there are limitations that we quite simply have, and ultimately they will find a way to stop us. The choices we make about energy output have consequences because we have predetermined, finite resources. The “spoon model” of energy output, observed by those with chronic illness, is useful for all of us: each daily activity is measured by how many spoonfuls of energy it requires, and careful priorities must be set since we have only so much juice in the tank. To discern how much we have to give, we must go beyond what the dominant culture says we should give (since we are embedded in systems that are designed to exploit our resources to benefit the few. Disproportionally. Yay, Nap Ministry!). If we are to heal the damage done by compulsive patterns of mismanaging our energy, we must reexamine the toxic habits our culture has inculcated in us that teach blatant disregard for the needs of the body and psyche. Over time, as the messages from within are continually drowned out and silenced, we can lose touch with our own needs entirely. To repair this rift, we need to tap into physical feeling as we would attend to hunger or thirst so that we can sense again, and honor, the signals our body is sending. These poems offer different prescriptions for treating ho-ho-holiday exhaustion. We can allow for stillness, even stagnancy, or we can escape! Erdrich’s advice is to stop organizing, stop fixing, stop doing, as is epitomized in the poem’s mantra-like first line, “leave the dishes.” This principle is not just about repairing our culture’s tendency to overdo, it actually breaks down the “insulation” between the daily grind and who we really are. Beyond the ruse of necessity, according to this poem, lies our truth. But this poem’s specific strategy for touching truth is to toggle between depth and humor. The prescribed reaction to mold in the fridge: accept new life! And her irreverence helps us . . . well . . . relax. The instructions to welcome the dead who collect on kitchen jars might be dark and intense if they didn’t follow on the heels of her instructions to let everybody eat cereal for dinner. Some of us sink into this blend of morbidity and humor like a comfortable couch. The poem shifts us from “doing” verbs—throw patch mend buy sew invade worry pursue go after stuff sort answer weep break grow recycle read destroy pull strike shatter—to “non-doing” verbs: leave. let. drift. grow. And arguably: don’t? “Let the wind have its way” is such a lovely articulation of the ethic of allowing, which respects dust as a precious manifestation of the earth element. Each instantiation of rot, crumb, and crack is a holy testament to natural processes of death and decay. As a defense for non-doing, we are called to imagine the heart as a memento-stuffed closet we’d never want to clean. We’re invited into this inner chamber, away from the ruse of necessity and toward all that is authentic, genuine, gritty, true. Spending some time in stillness, we can sift through the dusty stuff tucked away in the corners of our heart. Allowing natural processes to have their way is a kind of unflinching esteem for the whole of creation as holy. And I just had to include a variation on the theme in Ellen Skilton’s haibun, a poetic form of prose interspersed with haiku that was originally used for travel narratives. And truly, there’s the promise of change that moves this poem along, from the pristine, cool wonder of now and the half-empty cat food cans to come. The old slogsong of awakening to newness each morning, only to watch the mold and milkcurdle take over, is the story of aging. And yet—yet! The white-throated sparrow still breaks through the “hard-to-reach” spots in our heart, like a haiku breaking up the prose. In contrast, “Chicago and December” insists that to escape all that is damaged, insincere, and affected, we need to fly toward whatever ragged, authentic form of beauty we can find. For those of us staggering through the end of the year“one-lidded,” the craving for something colorful in the gray Chicago fog is so like the way we hunger, viscerally, for something real inside aaaaall the cultural bullshit around us. Di Piero, an art critic herself, uses the art world to represent what is true. Looking out on the bling of Christmas lights all across the skyscrapers, we feel, more than see, the two museum lions guarding the world of art, wild and proud as pyramid sphinxes. We feel, more than see, their proud heads yoked with wreaths, ribbons, and “municipal good cheer.” From this “mealy mist,” our desire for escape, “worked up like neediness,” is granted by an explosion of starlings. Not pretty or nice birds, but “bunched scrawny” things. Real things. The pace of the poem picks up to a staccato rhythm, like wings flapping, till we as readers, as movers moved, feel galvanized. We too crave release from all the holiday ribbons and baubles; want instead to be “lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things.” Nothing strung with lights, just the rattling dance of nature “smithereened back and forth.” The snare-drum rhythm of movements is cadenced by unexpected rhymes: “switchback and snag / like tossed rags.” Enjambments both condense and stretch out a moment: “elated weather- / making wing-clouds changing.” It’s a relief to be for a moment “already gone” with them, following the river’s course, lifted out of the whole scene of bling and jumbo wreath and crushed Christmas lights. And so we pray: move us, lift us from out of it all, give us our wings back, our proud lion manes. PRACTICE An explosion of starlings, wrought physical, might inspire you to go for a run. If so: HUZZAH! YOU ROCK! Lift yourself out of the sleepy fog and awaken fire and flight and freedom. As an alternative (since I'm not much of a runner), you might want to move to this gorgeous video of a starling murmuration by Søren Solkær. That could be whole-body movement, but I like to sit and just free up my arms to move with the switchback and snag and smithereens. Or, your couch-huggin’ brownie-poundin’ booze-guzzlin’ body might have a whole lot to say about the prospect of a jog. In that case, you could instead explore Erdrich’s evocative models for non-doing: how might you experience physically the feeling of dust bunnies forming, the buildup of earth, new forms of life growing, old things drifting in through the windows of the mind? Find a weighted object to place on your chest and consider adding a source of heat, like a hot pad. Best of all is a “laundry bath.” I like to dump all the laundry hot from the dryer onto whichever kid happens to be prone on the couch, feeling low. With or without heat, allow yourself to recline on your back with your legs extended up the wall, or furniture, and relish the warmth of thoracic cavity, imagining your ribcage as a dark receptacle stuffed with sacred-to-you people or things, stuff you’d never throw away. The imprint of life lived, like the sticky fingers dirtying the fridge door with sacred smudges. Take yourself out of the long slog, and wait for daybreak. "Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking" - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth. Including the insects. Times three. Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief-- just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is, how it carries inside it the memory of collapse. How difficult it is to move then. How impossible to believe that anything could lift that weight. There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is the sheer miracle that we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars. One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed. 'Tis the season of thanksgiving, friends. Have you noticed addressing people as 'friends' has become the norm in leftist progressive circles? I've always thought it seemed kind of oogie when Quakers did it, but now that everyone's doing it (albeit without the Quaker capital 'F'), it feels easier to adopt, frankly. I always joke that in NYC (where I lived for the decade before moving to Philly), people would be like, "aaawww... you're a Quaker, like with the horse and buggy and the cute hats?" And here in PA, it seems like every little town has a street called "Meetinghouse Road." Increasingly, I hear Friendly phrases flying around like "holding you in the light" and "speaking truth to power." Every spiritual/healing organization is now integrating social justice into their offerings. I've even heard of the "Quaker pause" in equity circles. It makes me proud of this faith I was born into - one that isn't always easy to stick with. Part of the challenge is the sheer number of HOURS being a practicing Quaker demands each week: our business process is considered part of the spiritual life of the meeting, so every aspect of running the organization is done communally, rather than paying a staff. This, my friends (tee hee I get a chuckle each time) is *partly* why when you think "Quaker," you imagine a white, upper middle class, retired person. Who else has time? It's not a super easy path, especially for those of us who don't really consider ourselves Christian (that's a whole 'nother conversation), but I have continued with it because after some spiritual tourism, I believe that you'll always find problems if you dig deep enough, so the hole that's in your own backyard will probably be the deepest - or at least wrangling with the problems will be the toughest, most authentic and healing wrangling you do. Say, like, we wrangle with the famous 19th century painting "The First Thanksgiving," depicting the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoag peacefully sharing a meal, which is in keeping with the history as rendered by a Quaker (Edward Winslow). It's a lot like the way we've spun William Penn's "treaty" with the Lenni Lenape, disappearing all the violence. So maybe we should talk about colonization too. We've been doing more yoga in class, as our practice becomes more physical to balance the cooler weather. I don't want to paint a 5000-year-old tradition into some happy image of a Thanksgiving smorgasbord of offerings. But I should back up. My teaching has been a way of sharing the aspects of Quakerism most dear to me: making way for a direct, unmediated experience of the spiritual plane - one that happens from the inside. Cultivating a capacity and reverence for inner stillness. Practicing peace with ourselves and with one another. Discerning your next right step by listening for the still small voice within (whether you call that your conscience, The Universe, your tradition's word for the divine, or the IFS Self). And then experimenting with embodied ways of accessing all that in a syncretic practice that might best be dubbed Somatics, drawing from multiple traditions including yoga, modern dance, and polyvagal techniques. Let's take a moment to wrangle with the tough stuff about syncretism. If we're claiming to be a politicized space that is concerned with addressing oppression, we need to acknowledge some things about the lineage of Somatics - and here I'm drawing on the work of Marika Heinrichs. The term was coined in the '70's by Thomas Hanna, a professor of divinity and philosophy deeply interested in neurology and Feldenkrais' investigations of movement patterning. Most of the teachers clustering around Hanna were white, and most had BIPOC mentors emerging from traditions that weren't being credited. So the field of Somatics has at its origins a practice of invisibilizing black, Asian, and indigenous cultural traditions, stripping them of their spiritual elements to legitimize them as a science. One way we can address this decontextualization/colonization of sacred traditions is first to acknowledge it, and then to try to find ways to repair that harm. One reparative way to dismantle supremacist culture is to refuse the premise of stripping practices down to render them as "science." To refuse the separation of embodiment from the sacred is to re-infuse our own bodies with a sense of spiritual worth that predates white patterning towards domination and control. Ideally we'd pursue this through our own ancestral lineages, to place spirit firmly back in our own bodies, lands, and practices. The problem is that many of these traditions have been "lost" (by which we mean, burned, drowned, and tortured out of the largely female bodies that contained their wisdom). So we do our best, we search for teachings from our own traditions and hold our borrowed practices with reverent regard and blunder and own our mistakes and keep trying to reinvigorate our relationship to all life as holy. So on this Thanksgiving, I want to send you so much gratitude for bringing yourselves to this work and this beautiful community - and to my own spiritual home in the Meetinghouse! I often bust on my faith - it's my inner teenager's way of holding something precious at arm's length. But while she's busy over there in the corner with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, James Dean style, I want to share with you that I LOVE sharing it with you. I mention often the South Asian practice of covering your mouth, or whispering, when you utter the name of your beloved. It's like that. Too dear to shout about. So let me whisper in your ear, dear friend: thank you for companioning me through these incredibly difficult times, for showing up again and again willing to share your strength and heart with one another. Thanks to those of you who put up with "check ins" when they're uncomfortable and new, and to those of you who guide others through the discomfort, believing we need to dispel the shame about our bodies to re-engage with their wisdom and know what's really up, individually and collectively, and then proceeding in a way that authentically accounts for that reality. #runonsentence. Thank you for connecting before and after class about what it felt like to be hustled into a bomb shelter in Israel and how that Amichai poem landed in your body and what to do with the anger and how to acknowledge multiple wounds in the room and still work for peace. And still believe in peace. And still hold out for peace. And still... Thank you. These poems are rough, at such a tender time. I've kept the somatic practice of cupping the hands into a bowl to externalize pain, and replaced the poem on the practice video with a poem of peace by Aurora Levins Morales. Trigger warning that "Summons" might also bring up stuff for you, so please, as always, take CARE of yourself and feel free to get off at your bus stop. Sending strength in this crazy time.
Aurora Levins Morales, "Summons" Last night I dreamed ten thousand grandmothers from the twelve hundred corners of the earth walked out into the gap one breath deep between the bullet and the flesh between the bomb and the family. They told me we cannot wait for governments. There are no peacekeepers boarding planes. There are no leaders who dare to say every life is precious, so it will have to be us. They said we will cup our hands around each heart. We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water, a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping. The mourners will embrace, and grief replace every impulse toward harm. Ten thousand is not enough, they said, so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes. You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner. Let’s go. Dion Lissner O’Reilly, “Scavenged” what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future… Dorianne Laux When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back, ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone, I ran through the house, a contagion cindering couches and carpets. Flayed, my fingertips peeled back to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air, light, and the steel cot where they took me. Each day, they peeled me like Velcro from my sheets, left bits of my meat there. Lowered me into Betadine, scrubbed me to screams-- that became my history. Scavenged by the curious. They see my twisted fingers and are hungry for the tale. I’ve done the same, stared at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it, feel the cut bone under the knob, hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know how that man was alive, arms glistening playing basketball from a high-tech chair, making his shots. The body’s scarred terrain becomes consecrated field. We gather to pick through the pieces that remain-- an ear hanging from its hinge of skin, diamond stud in the lobe, ring finger shining with its promise-band of gold. Dion Lissner O’Reilly “Scavenged” from Ghost Dogs. Copyright © 2020 by Dion O’Reilly. Used by permission of Terrapin Books. Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” I’m the girl who smelled of kerosene & candy, who, once supine in a treefort & already forgetting the damp magazines slick with women the jinxed shag carpet under bucket seats pried from a junked Camaro, boys watching the boy on top of me, was unthinking breath that would be kisses, the pressure of a body & mine a fulcrum: of course— of course I can still feel a finger on my philtrum. An angel whispers plunk & I keep quiet, cleaving & knowing not to ask or tell, unwilling to risk turning my mother to ash, trusting only my strength to hold tight. Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” copyright © 2022 by Marion Wrenn. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” v. Thick coat. Black fur. Two russet horns twisted to stone. One night I was stuck on a narrow road, panting. I was pregnant. I was dead. I was a fetus. I was just born. (Most days I don’t know what I am). I am a photograph of a saint, smiling. For years, my whole body ran away from me. When I flew--charred-- through the air, my ankles and toes fell off onto the peaks of impassable mountains. I have to go back to that wet black thing dead in the road. I have to turn around. I must put my face in it. It is my first time. I would not have it any other way. I am a valley of repeating verdant balconies. Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” from The Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis, copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopt, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. POETIC THEMES I’m no astrology master, but as a Scorpio Rising, I feel I can say the attributes of this sign are uncomfortably intense. Scorpios like to get right down to the bottom of things, without necessarily driving at the speed of trust. I’ve never felt from the inside the watery aspects of Scorpios; hanging out with one is like being held to a flame, and being one is like... well... it’s like being fire. So I’d like to issue a trigger warning for these poems, which touch wounds that many of you may prefer not to poke and prod. But as the #MeToo movement showed, spitting out the stories we were all taught to choke down and swallow does hold potential for transforming the culture at large. If we want change, now is the moment to hold ourselves and one another to the fire. Maybe we can burn off what doesn’t serve. The progress of O’Reilly’s brutal poem “Scavenged” is as straightforward as it is generous. The first half is about the excruciating pain of being, essentially, burned alive. The second half hinges this unusual personal story to the shared morbid curiosity we all feel about other human wounds, our shared hunger for one another’s darkest stories. And the poem arrives, finally, by declaring all of us, our scarred living remains, sacred: our flesh is depicted as a “consecrated field” spangled in diamonds and gold. The kerosene girl of “Firebird” endures a more metaphorical, and more common, manner of scorching. The setting is like a movie rendition of ’80s Americana: a kid’s tree fort, damp magazines (ew) dating back to a pre-digital age, bucket seats pried from a Camaro, and the shag carpet, jinxed. The superstitions of the scene reflect the times, when we used to play with Ouija boards and ceremoniously lift one another’s as-if-dead bodies in the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” The plunk-whispering angel and the near-beatific Firebird (almost identical to a Camaro) wrap in dark magic the unspoken rule “not to ask or tell.” Here the code of silence ensures that the speaker’s mother won’t be turned to ash, kind of like “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” This is a telling reversal of the phoenix theme: nobody is going to rise from the ash in a circle of horny onlookers. The only thing to be trusted is the survivor’s “strength to hold tight,” minimizing the orbit of harm to a tight circle of one. Like you do with a fire. So, returning to the question from O’Reilly’s epigraph: “…what becomes / of us once we’ve been torn apart?” I think of the “torch-lit” girl in O’Reilly’s poem, “cindering couches and carpets,” the bits of her meat left on the sheets. A nightmare inverse of the phoenix is the myth of Parvati, a goddess whose punishment for immodesty is to be charred, dismembered, and scattered across the valley that bears her name. One of the purported sites where Parvati’s charred body parts fell from the sky is the setting for Robin Coste Lewis’ long poem “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari.” Zinging around this poem are the subtle crosscurrents of power and violence at work in South Asian tourism, not only in the scarred aftermath of British colonial conquest, but in Indian culture and mythology itself. The poem depicts an African American woman and a group of American college students traveling down the dark mountain, where they encounter a nomadic clan with a herd of water buffalo, one of which is giving birth. This is all taking place, we have to remember, at the very site of the self-immolation of the goddess of fertility. When the baby turns out to be stillborn, the tribe ropes the mother buffalo, holding her down until she looks directly at the dark fur of her dead offspring. She finally gives up and stops bucking, to put her nose down in the “folded and wet black nothing.” The buffalo’s suffering overlaps associatively with the speaker’s own childbirth experience, and she describes feeling drawn back to the corpse: “I have to turn around. / I must put my face in it.” By the end of the poem, the speaker has a kind of clarity born from clear witness—of the bereaved mother animal, the charred goddess falling in pieces, the fetus, death, the smiling saint, the valley itself. The shadow work of Scorpio season beckons us all past the surface to dive down into our own darkness and history, put our face in the hard thing. It’s a form of consecration. PRACTICE If you’re down for some down-and-dirty shadow work, this is the week for it. If you are a menstruating woman, you could dive into the Parvati theme and scatter your blood as an earth offering. Or, if it’s your thing, you could make art out of it or ritual marks on your skin. You could study roadkill if you happen to pass it; that’s an ancient meditation. But maybe the true Scorpio practice would be to go back to a time you were wounded, if and only if you feel you can trust your strength to hold tight. Dr. Sarà King teaches a practice of holding pain. Nothing could be simpler: the practitioner simply holds their cupped hands, like a little bowl or container, in front of their chest. Could you hold your wound in this way or hold your body where it has been wounded, as a way of giving it a place that’s separate from you and also as a way of caring for it and, symbiotically, caring for you? What is the associative web of thoughts and feelings? Yehuda Amichai, “Wildpeace”
Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds-- who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.) Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace. “Wildpeace” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books. POETIC THEMES This entry was written for Veteran's Day, but I brought it into classes this week because we needed a lil' Amichai. Which is not to say there is some anti-Palestine statement here - fer Chrissakes. All this polarization, where one's duty is to make a grandiose proclamation about the rightness and wrongness of things, in order to feel we are adequately "doing something" about the state of the world... Bayo Akomolafe calls this "frontal solidarity," and argues for the importance of alternate political choreographies. In a moving, tearful 3-hour gathering yesterday, Bayo and Resmaa Menakem spoke to the importance of the pause, the importance of making space for halting, exploratory, uncertain, fugitive movements alongside the tensions of the moment. The sacred pause where we back off the inclination to DO as the only solution to upheaval, and instead take a moment to be with our grief, to listen to what it has to teach. So let's continue with our wayfinding crabwalk, allowing for complexity and always, always, making way for feeling first. Here are the affirmations we have been synching with our movements this week, adapted from a meditation by Chani Nicholas: "May I remember the ways I'm free. May I remember the ways I'm at peace. May I remember the ways I am safe. May I remember the ways I am loved." We have closed each class by expanding this supplication to encompass all beings in the familiar invocational mantra: "May ALL beings everywhere be free from suffering and have joy." This has been our version of the Tonglen practice described below. I am deeply grateful for your presence in class this week, and I am feeling the weight of the trust you've put in me, to create a holding environment for all this pain. May we continue with this prayer, casting its spell in our hearts and across the oceans. I don’t have a lot to say about Veterans Day. It gives me the same feeling I had in middle school when I encountered Randall Jarrell’s gut-punch poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Like the wind is knocked out of me and I can’t say much. Like when I threw up after watching “Gallipoli” with my dad (who was in the military). Maybe wartime losses should feel like that: nightmare and black flak. Animal. And Jarrell’s decimating last line that washes out the body with a hose. But the thing is, the jolt and shock of violence that America feeds on all day, every day has dulled us to the point of inaction. It serves to bolster Empire. So instead of rolling around in violent imagery all day, we could try for a little reparation. Amichai survived the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, then World War II, only to face his country’s future—endless violence with no promise of a ceasefire. Amichai’s perspective is the wisdom of a “great weariness,” when face to face with no aftermath, no healing for wounds. “Wildpeace” instead just hopes for some kind of rest, rest from the exhaustion of running a race where the baton passed from generation to generation is an orphan--an orphan whose baby doll is a talking toy gun. And isn’t exhaustion one way peace finally graces the body? Suddenly the fight goes out of us, and with no drama, no “big noise,” a sense of exhausted surrender descends “like lazy white foam.” Maybe instead of celebrating war heroes today, we might instead, “as in the heart when the excitement is over,” let our psychic field lie fallow to make a space for peace. “Let it come / like wildflowers.” PRACTICE It feels apt to embody the attrition of “Wildpeace” by fatiguing the fight-or-flight muscle (the psoas) until it releases. The psoas is more than the connection between upper and lower body; it actually becomes the diaphragm, which is in turn tethered to the adrenals, all functioning as a whole system to rev up the violence. In order to catch a moment of reprieve from the flood of stress hormones that amp up the nervous system, we’ll try to soothe the psoas by wearing it out. Stand next to a wall and rest one hand on it for a sense of orientation, support, and solidity. Place the foot proximal to the wall on a large book (or step on a staircase or yoga block). Swing the outside leg forward and back in a modest arc for a minimum of three minutes on each leg. Use minimal muscular effort, allowing the weight of the leg to provide the required momentum. Be sure to keep the hip points level and allow the rocking motion to tip the pelvis in its anterior/posterior plane. When you’ve pooped out the psoas, and hopefully its connection to the fight reflex, come to sit quietly and witness the mental field. One way to welcome the wildflowers is the practice of Tonglen, which is typically a kind of reversal of violence. Picture someone you know who is suffering. Holding their image very concretely in your mind, envision taking in all of their pain and darkness on the inhalation and sending them all your light, joy, and power on the exhalation. 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. 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? |
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