The Space in Between

Lotus by Ruth Bidgood
Bryn, the round hill,
dips to a valley that accepts
others:  a place of joining.
No wind carries up
Conversation of rivers.
Old sheepwalks, hardly grazed,
Stretch to the verge of forest.
On this grey day
no smoke rises:
from the one gaunt house.
 
Surely the silent utterance
of this place is ‘Emptiness’,
its time ‘Never’?
Yet it is said
That not leaves, not petals,
but the space at the center
of the heart’s lotus
contains everything.

                                    Here
rivers out of sigh
have their rhythms,
like blood through the heart.
Stillness throbs with the flow
of unperceived lives.
 
This is a place of joining,
whose silent utterance is ‘Abundance’,
whose time is ‘Ever.’


A week from today I'll be in Wales.  I can't tell you exactly what I'll be doing,  but if it keeps raining there like it has been, chances are it will involve curling up with a cup of tea and a good book in this room:

or getting lost in my writing at a desk somewhere in this room:

 

Ostensibly, I'm going over to do some pre-scouting of some of the sites we'll be visiting in May on the pilgrimage I'm leading for Washington National Cathedral.  The recent floods in Britain might mean a little less hiking to neolithic stone circles and wandering around abbey ruins and a little more time spent sitting quietly inside ancient churches and old cathedrals. 

 

Earlier this week I was stressing  about not begin able to get everything on my "to do" list done during this trip.  Then I realized that the idea of having a to do list is itself counter-intuitive to pilgrimage.  Checking off sites is a trip for tourists.  For pilgrims, the journey is about creating space-- being in the landscape, settling into sacred places, opening up to the space, both literally and metaphorically. 

 

So that's what I will be doing next week.  And somehow it seems like a perfect way to enter into the first week of Advent, traversing a dark winter landscape,  looking for glimmers of light, listening, waiting.

 

 

Measuring Specific Gratitude

SOME THINGS THE WORLD GAVE by Mary Oliver

1
Times in the morning early
when it rained and the long gray
buildings came forward from darkness
offering their windows for light.

2
Evenings out there on the plains
when sunset donated farms
that yearned so far to the west that the world
centered there and bowed down.

3
A teacher at a country school
walking home past a great marsh
where ducks came gliding in --
she saw the boy out hunting and waved.

4
Silence on a hill where the path ended
and then the forest below
moving in one long whisper
as evening touched the leaves.

5
Shelter in winter that day --
a storm coming, but in the lee
of an island in a cover with friends --
oh, little bright cup of sun.

 

Alfalfa Fields in St. Denis, Seurat
 

I was looking for a poem on gratitude to post for this Thanksgiving week Mary Oliver Monday when I came across this little gem.  What I particularly like about this poem is its particularities.  So often when people talk about the things for which they are grateful they paint their canvas of blessings with large brush strokes-- family, friends, health, freedom, community, creation.  In this poem, however, gratitude is conveyed in precise points of color like a painting by Seurat or Pisarro.  Viewed together as a whole, they make up the portrait of a lifetime of awareness and gratitude.

I've been thinking about these particular moments as measurements of specific gratitude.  If you're like me, you probably learned about specific gravity in high school but chances are you don't remember much about it because unlike figuring out percentages (which comes in handy when hitting the seasonal sales at Lord & Taylor), determining the specific gravity of an object is a skill you've yet to use in life. But somehow it's an idea that seems relevant to this poem.

If I see my daily life as the standard material, particular moments become the substances being tested.  On days that I'm at my most dense, some of the lighter moments in life don't even break the surface.  I don't notice the sea of stars in the clear winter sky.  The encouraging words of a friend go in one ear and out the other.  I take for granted the warm bed I climb into each night.  But at other times the color blue of the autumn sky stops me in my tracks.  Witnessing a stranger offering a helping hand to a neighbor moves me to tears.  I savor every sip of a good cup of Earl Grey.  Gratitude settles in my soul like led sinking in 39.2°F distilled water.  

Haymakers Resting, Pisarro

Maybe then, it isn't so much those moments being measured as my life.  I don't know the scientific term for testing my own density on any given day but in spiritual terms I think it's called awareness.

 

Things I do when I should be working on my NaNoWriMo novel . . .

1. Check e-mail
2. Check Facebook and like a link
3. Check the BBC news home page to see if any top stories have changed in the fifteen minutes since I last checked it
4. Surf the Internet looking for information on nineteenth century American children's fashions/whaling ships/plumbing/popular novels.
5. Make a winter reading list, including the books Winter and Cold
6. Drink lukewarm Earl Grey tea
7. Scrape  wax off the inside of the glass container so my eucalyptus spruce candle lasts a smidge longer
8. Stare at my vision board and think about redoing it since it's obviously not inspiring me to write
9. Clean out and reorganize my computer files
10. Read a few poems by David Budbill
11. Bake vegan apple spice scones

 In case you need to procrastinate as well, here's the recipe for the latter.

Apple Spice Drop Scones
2 c. flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 c. sugar
5 Tbsp. shortening (I used Earth's Balance)
1/3 cup apple sauce
1/3 cup nondairy milk (I used coconut almond)
1-2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves (yes Jeff, ground)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 450 and put cookie sheet lined with parchment paper in oven to heat.  Mix dry ingredients together.  Dice shortening and rub it in the dry ingredients with your fingers, a fork, or a pastry blender until crumbly.  Stir in the apple sauce then add enough milk to make a sticky dough that still holds its shape.  Add spices to taste.  Stir in walnuts.  Take the cookie sheet out of the oven and drop dough by spoonfuls onto the hot baking sheet.  Bake for about 12 -15 minutes (will depend on how big they are how long they take) until golden brown on the edges.  This should make anywhere from 8 - 12 scones depending on how big a spoon you use. 

Wheezing and Ticking

AUTUMN POEM  by Mary Oliver

In the last jovial, clear-sky days of autumn
the mockingbird
in his monk-gray coat
and his arrowy wings
flies

from the hedge to the top of the pine
and begins to sing — but it's neither loose, nor lilting, nor lovely —
it's more like whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges.

All birds are birds of heaven
but this one, especially, adores the earth so well
he would imitate, for half the day and on into the evening,

its ticks and wheezings,
and so I have to wait a long time
for the soft, true voice
of his own glossy life

to come through,
and of course I do.
I don't know what it is that makes him, finally, look
inward

to the sweet spring of himself, that mirror of heaven,
but when it happens —
when he lifts his head
and the feathers of his throat tremble,

and he begins, like Saint Francis,
little flutterings and leapings from the pine's forelock,
resettling his strong feet each time among the branches,
I am recalled,

from so many wrong paths I can't count them,
simply to stand, and listen.
All my life I have lived in a kind of haste and darkness
of desire, ambition, accomplishment.

Now the bird is singing, but not anymore of this world.
And something inside myself is fluttering and leaping, is trying

to type it down, in lumped-up language,
in outcry, in patience, in music, in a snow-white book.

Statue of Diana in the garden at Hillwood

I've always loved this particular fall poem by Mary Oliver.  I think it may even be the first of her poems I ever read.  It is certainly the one to which I most often return most often, and each time it greets me like a wise, old friend who  always has just the right words of advice or encouragement. 

The past several days I've been struggling with my writing-- feeling very much like it's all wheezing and dry hinges.   I've been looking for things to grease the wheels of my imagination.  A Friday wander around Hillwood helped a bit, as did being outside raking leaves in the sunshine for several hours over the weekend.  This afternoon I have a massage scheduled, which always helps loosen words and ideas knotted in my brain as well as my muscles.

But what I realize I need to do after reading Mary Oliver's poem this morning is to look inward, re-settle myself and then trust the true voice of my own glossy life to come through on the page . . .

Carpe Libris - The NaNoWriMo Edition

 So what is NaNoWriMo some of you may be asking?  Well, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month.  Each November intrepid writers from around the world (despite the word "national" in the title) pledge to write an average of 1666 words per day in order to have the makings of a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month.  Sarah Gruen's Like Water for Elephants began as a NaNoWriMo project as did Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.  This year after a story idea came to me in a dream over the course of two nights, I decided to give it a try. 

I'll confess I'm not meeting my daily word quota so far. I wrote recently about how writing poetry is a different practice for me than writing essays or stories.  Well, I've discovered that writing a novel requires a different rhythm as well.  My two hour daily commitment is great for my non-fiction work but just isn't cutting it for the novel.  It's only been a week so hopefully I'll settle into a good rhythm soon.  Until then, here's what I've been reading to prepare for NaNoWriMo writing.

In the Heart of the Sea:  The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
This is one of those books that sat on the bookshelf for years and every time I came across it I'd think, "Oh I want to read that one day."  Well, last week that day finally arrived.  Somehow a book about a whale attack seemed like it might make good hurricane reading.  That, combined with the fact that the novel I'm working on is set in a 19th century New England fishing village, made me go downstairs to pull it off the shelf so it could do double duty as entertainment and research.

Philbrick's book tells the story of the ill-fated whaling ship, Essex, the inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick.  Although I haven't read Melville's tale, I find it hard to imagine it can be any more harrowing and fascinating than the real story.  From the very beginning of its voyage, the ship seems to sail from one challenge to another-- a novice crew, inadequate whaling boats, damaging storms, a leaking hull, mounting tension between the first-mate and captain. 

Then things really get bad.  In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the coast of South America, a perturbed 85 foot whale seems to deliberately ram the ship not once, but twice, the second time causing irreparable damage. The monster then swims away, never to be seen again.

Unlike Melville's tale which focuses on Ahab's pursuit of the whale,  Into the Heart of the Sea is more about what happens after the ship sinks, how the crew members who survived managed to do so.  Philbrick bases his story  not only on written accounts from two of the survivors, first mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, he also weaves in elements of physiology, psychology, history, and marine biology to create a lush narrative that is truly a page turner.

Miss Fuller by April Bernard
Last year when I thought I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo with a different story idea, I was doing a lot of research on Louisa May Alcott and her family.  During that time I came across the name Margaret Fuller and looked her up as she seemed to be an intriguing woman.  You gotta love a woman who stands up to Louisa's father, Brosnan, who was evidently something of a jerk.  I remember thinking after I read the Wikipeida article on her that her life would make an interesting story so when I came across Bernard's brief novel in the library I had to add it to the stack of books I was already balancing in my arms. 

Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American teacher, journalist and women's rights activist who was part of the circle of writers and transcendentalists that included the Alcotts, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne.  She spent time in Italy reporting on the revolution where she met and maybe married, maybe didn't, Italian revolutionary Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.  The couple eventually were forced to flee Italy.  On their way back to New York with their two year old son, the ship in which they were sailing ran aground just off Fire Island.  Despite being only a short distance from shore, the family didn't survive.  Thoreau was dispatched by Emerson to go attempt to recover the bodies and it's that incident upon which Miss Fuller, a fictional version of the story is based.

In addition to searching for Fuller's remains, in Bernard's tale Thoreau is also looking for a manuscript, letters that Margaret has written telling the story of her life in Europe, a story that is allegedly so shocking and scandalous (although tame by 21st century standards) that the person to whom the letters are addressed refuses to take them from Thoreau when he does find them.  Rather than destroy them, he puts them aside and in a fit of feverish delirium, reads them one night and immediately regrets his decision.  The letters are later left to Anne, a sister the author has invented for the purpose of her story and who serves as a narrative framework for the novel. 

While this character of Anne and her role seemed forced and was the part of the book that didn't work for me, I did enjoy Bernard's writing and found her insight into the relationships between Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau and Hawthorne interesting.  Also the description of the shipwreck and how the locals responded to it left me wanting to know more. I was left feeling, however, that the real story of Margaret Fuller was much more intriguing and inspiring than the one Bernard's imagination created.


Bird by Bird:  Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
The reason I haven't been able to get into a good rhythm of writing for NaNoWriMo is that my inner editor, who is usually content to sit quietly in a corner until I ask her for advice, has decided to look over my shoulder this week.  Every time I type a sentence I hear her voice asking, "Are you sure that's a jib sail?  Maybe you should look it up." or saying, "Don't forget to show not tell.  Why don't you go back and rework that paragraph." 

At this point I just really need to focus on getting the narrative out of my head and onto the page so she's not helping.  I've tried telling her to take a hike to no avail so I finally pulled out my well worn copy of Anne Lamott's book and am reading the "shitty first draft" chapter each day before I write to remind myself my goal now is to do just that--- write, not edit. 

Evidently I'm not the only one with this issue.  I recently started following Lamott's Twitter feed and it's reassuring to see how many times she Tweets about having to remind herself of the same thing. Of course, as I was raking leaves on Sunday I listened to a BBC World Book Club podcast  where Peter Ackroyd claims he never edits-- he just sits down and writes basically a finished product that doesn't need many, if any, revisions.  I just hope my inner editor wasn't listening. 
 

All Who Will Hearken

OCEAN by Mary Oliver from Red Bird:  Poems (Beacon Press)
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.

I'm in love with the ocean as well, although I'm ashamed to say I haven't visited her in a long while.  I was close last month and next month I intend to get a healthy dose of ocean air when I'm in Wales.  But this past week I've been reminded of the danger and uncertainty that those who love the ocean and live close by her often endure.  Although the DC area came through Sandy relatively unscathed, I've been thinking this week about those who weren't as fortunate.  It's easy to romanticize the natural world until something like a hurricane comes along and reminds us that awe can entail a profound feeling of fear as well as admiration. 

People often talk about the Celtic love of nature as one of the things that attracts them to that particular expression of spirituality.  While the Celts did have an affinity with nature, particularly as they looked to creation as the first book of revelation, it wasn't in a naive or idealistic way.  There was always an awareness that that same tree you were hugging one minute (or in the case of the Druids, worshiping among) could just as easily fall on you the next if a strong gust of wind came along.

Over the weekend, I was browsing my well-worn copy of the Carmina Gadelica and came across this poem which eerily echoes the events of last week.

POEM OF THE FLOOD
On Monday will come the great storm  
Which the airy firmament will pour,
We shall be obedient the while,
All who will hearken  . . .

On Tuesday will come the other element,
Heart paining, hard piercing,
Wringing from pure pale cheeks
Blood, like showers of wine.

On Wednesday will blow the wind,
Sweeping bare strath and plain,
Showering gusts of galling grief,
Thunder bursts and rending hills.

On Thursday will pour the shower,
Driving people into blind flight,
Faster than the foliage on the trees,
Like the leaves of Mary's plant in terror trembling.

On Friday will come the dool cloud of darkness,
The direst dread that ever came over the world,
Leaving multitudes bereft of reason,
Grass and fish beneath the same flagstone.

On Saturday will come the great sea,
Rushing like a mighty river;
All will be at their best
Hastening to a hill of safety.

On Sunday will arise my King,
Full of ire and tribulation,
Listening to the bitter talk of each man,
A red cross on each right shoulder.

Although I've read the prayers and blessings collected by Alexander Carmichael countless times over the past twentyplus years (I picked up my copy of the Carmina Gadelica on my first trip to Scotland in 1989), I don't recall reading this poem before.  After I finished the last verse I found myself disappointed.  I wanted a better ending, something more hopeful when it got to the Sunday stanza,some reference to the waters of chaos leading to creation or some nice, Celtic-y reassurance that the Lord of the elements will quiet the storm and bring peace.

I looked in the footnotes to Carmichael's text for some explanation of this poem but there wasn't one, which is a bit unusual.  The notes in the Carmina Gadelica are often more interesting than the blessings themselves as they tell the story of how the prayer was both received and used in context, as well as explaining some of the more obscure references.  Unfortunately with no help from Carmichael nor from Google, I'm left to my own devices to figure out what this poem means for me, which is actually true for any poem when it comes down to it.

So for me, the key is in that next-to-the-last line, "Listening to the bitter talk of each man."  Being removed from the situation it's easy for me to want that better ending I mentioned above, but from what I've seen on the news broadcasts and heard on radio interviews with those in the hardest hit areas, what many want is the reassurance that they haven't been forgotten-- that there is someone to listen to their pleas for help.  And maybe that's the first and best thing we can do for those in crisis-- listen.   

_________________________________________________________________________________

Of course, for those who want to do something more practical, there are several worthy organizations you can support with your donations.  The American Red Cross, Episcopal Relief and Development, and the Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.   The latter two organizations work world wide and will support relief work in all areas affected by the hurricane.