springtime annunciation in-spir-ation

Denise Levertov, “Annunciation”
 
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
 
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
 
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
 
____________________
 
 
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
 
 
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
 
____________________
 
 
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
 
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
  only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:
 
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–
 
but who was God.
 
 
This was the moment no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
 
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
 
____________________
 
 
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.
-Denise Levertov, from A Door in the Hive, copyright 1989 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Bloodaxe Books, UK.
 
 
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. As there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”
-Martha Graham, in a quote remembered by Agnes de Mille
 
POETIC THEMES
            Of all the major Christian holidays, the day marking the visitation of the angel upon Mary is the only one centering around a woman. Levertov’s insidious first line: “We know the scene.” Oh, and how.
            Let me just say now: to wrestle with this poem is hard. Really hard. It’s a Christian poem celebrating the ostensible power of consent in the idea of a virgin mother. The costs of this myth, with its violent regime of white female purity, have been catastrophic—part of the weaponry of colonialism that has left so.many.people.destroyed. Lingering with this poem uses more parts of me than I’m comfortable using.
            I want to join Levertov in disrupting the narrative of Mary’s “meek obedience,” in favor of the notion that God “did not enter her without consent.” I really want to. I want to believe that “She was free / to accept or to refuse,” and I wholly agree that this freedom is a “choice / integral to humanness.” But y’all… it feels like such a stretch, in spite of the beauty of her languaging.
            An ethic of toughness shames us for turning away “in a wave of weakness” from what we might not want to take on. Levertov associates “no” with despair and the relief of the ordinary. To blunder through the hard questions about power and yielding, we could revisit our own stories of pressured consent. After all, most of us would respond in the affirmative to Levertov’s central question: “Aren’t there annunciations / of one sort or another / in most lives?” How could we design some fresh strategies for imagining openness, receptivity, and the power to take in otherness?
            Levertov reconfigures Mary’s consent to bring something sacred into the world as the power of creativity. The visitation of the divine is muse-like, an instantiation of literal inspiration: taking in spirit, breathing it in, to gestate it and birth something new. There is something so soothing about this reconfiguration of openness. It’s a recognizable, gender-neutral experience of being “opened…utterly” by a form of power that is distinctly outside of us - "other.”
            Speaking of “courage unparalleled,” I’d like to bring Martha Graham to the stage. Isn’t it ironic that the movement legacy of this non-procreative woman is the contraction? Creativity requires radical openness, for Graham as for Levertov. Maybe we could divorce the idea of creation from actual pregnancy and childbirth, to reconfigure springtime themes that inhere in the Annunciation. Mary is known, in Christian thought, as the Queen Bee, the ubiquitous symbol of fertility, rebirth, and a transition from rest to work. Listening for the buzzing of the divine voice in our ears might sound like Graham’s “vitality” or “life force” or “quickening that is translated through you into action.” It’s a call to listen, a call to “keep the channel open,” “clearly and directly,” to stay “open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.” This is, for Graham, the divine visitation. Graham and Levertov lead us to consider what we are being asked to open ourselves to.              
           What is the work we are being called to undertake? Sometimes the call to create appears as Levertovian “moments when roads of light and storm / open from darkness,” and other times it appears as an itch that needs scratching, Graham’s “queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest.” This is more like the feeling of something waiting to get free of us. Either way, if we don’t respond to the call of our work in the world, we are given the stakes. Levertov’s assertion that “the gates close, the pathway vanishes” is echoed by Graham: “it will not exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.” This is an angle that configures creativity from a process of output to an art of input. Perceiving the generativeness of the spring in this way draws the focus away from producing or amassing resources, and toward openness and receptivity.
            I want to witness Queen Bee Mary as a figure who reinvigorates time-worn clichés about fertility with a courageous openness to our work in the world. I really do. But it’s not easy to neutralize the painful associations that attend a figure who has caused a world of harm, even for someone like me whose religious upbringing didn’t feature Mary. But if we can listen for the divine buzz, maybe with practice we might come to witness openness and receptivity with new eyes. Perhaps it could even help revise the idea of a “work ethic” as a collaborative, celebratory promiscuity: pollinating and cross-pollinating sweet, sticky stuff to spread more life around!
 
 
PRACTICE
            I began offering humming as a closing practice in my somatics classes before I learned that it soothed the vagus nerve. I just knew it was helpful to bridge the gap between the quiet mindfulness practices and the way we show up in the world. Opening eyes, greeting one another, and making sounds in the space seemed to help us all import the qualities we were cultivating into the rest of our lives and interactions. So I settled on humming together—no wrong notes, no scripted rhythm, just humming for the length of our exhale and then starting again.
            Yoga calls this practice “bee breath” (brahmani pranayama). Much of the power of Sanskrit, particularly the “Om,” is attributed to vibration, and when we hum, we actually feel it vibrating the skull, the sinus cavity, and the brain—our second womb. To summon our bee powers speaks to all the themes I’ve been playing with here. It’s pretty empowering to watch, over time, as a practice builds our capacity to calm our inner state, sedimenting a fresh foundation from which to put something new out there. Over time, the clean categories of input and output get kerfuffled even further: the quiet buzz of a hum is a form of output that, when removed, makes us aware of all that inhabits the silence that we didn’t take in before. When the avant-garde composer John Cage first entered an anechoic chamber (a room designed to deaden sound), he identified two distinct concurrent sounds, and the engineer told him that one corresponded to the nervous system, the other to blood flow. This can be a whole practice unto itself. 
            Would you be willing to test out humming, perhaps at different registers and tones, as a way of clearing fresh inroads to the brain? Then you might pause in the stillness and listen to the white noise until you hear not just the static buzz, but a lower register, like a bottom-end bass tone. It can be deeply centering to toggle the attention between the bass and the “treble,” if that’s what you want to call the static sound. It can also allow for an experiential reconfiguring of what’s inside and what’s outside the soma. Deep listening is a practice of opening up to the messages that might be reaching out for us. Might you then differently hear the messages reaching out for you? What else in your life helps clear the pathway for visitation, inspiration, communion? Are there other ways you might cultivate the openness and receptivity that invite spirit in?