Serendipitous Encounters

I recently read an article that said that serendipity was one of the hardest words in the English language to define.  One of the best definitions given was that serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding a farmer's daughter (or a farmer's son given your inclinations). 

Once upon a time I had a major crush on a minor poet. It was at a time in my life, shortly after I graduated from college, when I was trying to figure out what I was meant to do with my life.  I'd spent the spring and summer realizing what I wasn't meant to do-- get married way too young and go to law school.  And while I was fortunate enough after graduation to find a full time job that I could turn into a career, I knew that I wanted something more than the stability of a guaranteed paycheck for the next forty plus years of my life. 

So after work I hung around the fringes of the said poet's admirers-- at the club he managed, at his poetry readings, at his gigs.  (He was a much better musician than poet, which in hindsight wasn't saying much although I did walk into a record store in Warsaw almost a decade later and started laughing when I recognized they were playing one of his records.) Along the way I continued to discover what I didn't want to do but was still searching for the one thing I hoped would click. 


When a local press published the poet's first book, I headed to one of the area's independent bookstores-- when the DC area still had several independent bookstores-- to pick up a copy.  I knelt down by the shelf holding slim volumes of poetry by authors whose names fell in the first third of the alphabet and there, where the book by the object of my affection should have been, was a grey and black book called Raids on the Unspeakable.  I pulled out the misfiled copy with the intention of putting it back in the "Ms" where it belonged when I opened it up and started reading.  It wasn't even a book of poetry, rather some short essays punctuated by pages of Zenish brush stroke drawings.  I don't know what made me decide to buy it, but I did.  When I got home I read the essay on Flannery O'Connor as her name was one of the few familiar points of reference in the table of contents and then didn't think more about it until a few weeks later.

In addition to haunting poetry readings, in order to better understand the minor poet, I began reading more poetry.  His influences were Byron and Baudelaire (naturally) so I went to a used book sale in the basement of my public library hoping to find some volumes of their poetry to bring me up to speed.  I had to stand on my tip toes to reach the top shelf of the poetry section and as I was pulling down a dusty title a little  black and white picture floated down, seemingly from out of nowhere.  I caught it in mid-flutter and saw this image:

On the back it simply read, "Thomas Merton:  January 31, 1915 - December 10, 1968."  It took a minute for me to recognize the name as the author of the book of misfiled prose I'd purchased earlier in the month but when it clicked, I figured the universe was trying to tell me something. 

I went upstairs and checked out The Seven Story Mountain.  That led me to Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Mystics and Zen Masters, Wisdom of the Desert, and The Way of Chuang Tzu.  I did read some Byron and Baudelaire in there as well.  I also began to write poetry again myself, something I hadn't done since I was a child.

I decided to take a poetry course at Georgetown to hone my writing which led to the start of a graduate degree in liberal studies.  One spring break I took a few books to the Outer Banks in order to get some reading done for a paper I was writing for my comparative religions class.  As I sat on a deserted beach reading New Seeds of Contemplation the thing I'd been looking for finally clicked.  The question wasn't what I was meant to do, but rather who I was meant to be . . .

Of course, the pursuit of that did lead me to what I was meant to do.  But that's another story.    For now I just want to give thanks for the life of Father Louis, aka Thomas Merton, on what would have been his 98th birthday and leave you with these words of wisdom from one of his oft-quoted prayers.

MY LORD GOD,

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always

though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, from "Thoughts in Solitude"

Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated . . .

The title of this blog post isn't an allusion to my absence on these pages for the past ten plus days. Rather, it's a statement made on behalf of poetry.  Earlier this week, Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri wrote a post entitled, "Is Poetry Dead?" that's been generating a lot of conversation. 

I'm not going to critique that article point by point, primarily because it would take too long and I have a lot to do today.  Plus over 300 other readers of the post have done just that so you can read for yourself their comments, some of which are insightful and point to critiques on other blogs. 

For a much better state of poetry address, I recommend poet Dana Gioia's article from The Atlantic.
Although Gioia's essay is over two decades old now and predates the recent trend to move poetry out of the subculture of the institution as Gioia describes it, into the populist realm. Project such as Poetry 180, The Poetry Project, and Poetry Everywhere, the rise of poetry slams in the mid-1990s that made the form relevant to a new audience, even the blossoming of the blog-o-sphere are all signs poetry has a strong, healthy heartbeat if you know where to listen for it. 

And maybe that's Ms. Petri's problem, she doesn't know where to listen.  And, I daresay, she doesn't know what she's listening for.  In her article she writes, "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?"  I'd argue that in that statement alone she misses the point about poetry altogether. 

The better question to ask is not, "Can a poem change anything?" but "Can a poem change anyone?"

 

Trying to create light without a spark

The Buddha’s Last Instruction by Mary Oliver from House of Light  (Beacon Press)

"Make of yourself a light"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

 

 

Too bad Buddha's last words didn't come with step by step instructions.  I've been wondering these past several days how I make myself a light when I'm feeling well smoored. 

 

This feeling is due to some personal situations that are vying for my attention, demanding an investment of chunks of time and energy around which I have to find ways to work.  This fragmentation doesn't bother me nearly as much when I have time each day to write.  Putting pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard) is like weaving a slender thread that holds all the pieces together.  I need that time to sit down and work things out on the page, get lost in a character's story, or wrestle with a poem. 

 

Those moments allow me to hold everything else together so that even if the rest of my life is loosely bound, it's still anchored.  Without that tethering activity, I feel like it takes a tremendous amount of energy to hold onto the stuff of my life with both hands.  Yet I also realize that same holding on is what keeps me from making myself a light. 

 

And there's the rub. 

 

Almost every creation myth begins with an element of chaos so maybe it's time to let go, to let my life shatter so I can begin the process of picking up the pieces and see what emerges from the rubble.

Wishing I could arise and go . . .

LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE by William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.


I've been craving some slow dropping peace lately.  I have this ongoing fantasy of escaping to a tiny cabin in the middle of the wintry woods or a cozy cottage nestled among snow covered mountains.  I want to go to a place where silence settles like a blanket and I can spend endless hours reading and writing with the only interruptions coming from the need to warm my cup of tea or put another log on the fire. 

To fodder my fantasy I started surfing the web for images of snow covered landscapes and discovered this website, very aptly named.  There are 55 pages of cabins (alas, only some photographed in the snow) so there's sure to be something to appeal to every solitude seeker in their collection.  I'm kind of fond of this little gem . . . a perfect place to enjoy a second breakfast!

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit . . . "

A Word for the New Year

We Shake with Joy by Mary Oliver from Evidence (Beacon Press)
We shake with joy, we shake with grief,
What at time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.



The practice of choosing a word (or having one chosen for me) for the new year began several years ago on the first-ever New Year's Eve retreat I attended.  After we'd finished reflecting on and letting go of the year that had passed, the retreat leader went around to everyone gathered and offered up a basket with little folded rectangles of stiff paper with a single word printed on each. As we chose one and opened it, we were invited to share with the circle our guiding word for the coming year. 

I remember being impressed and inspired as people shared their words-- grace, forgiveness, healing, courage, transformation.  It seemed like everyone was pulling out weighty words.  Powerful words.  Words that could echo like thunder or shine like a beacon in the year to come.  The basket finally made it to me and I expectantly unfolded my paper and read, "Beauty." 

I was miffed.

Beauty seemed like such a fluff word compared to all the others.  I felt like the universe had armed everyone else with a treasure trove of virtues and sent them off to boldly explore and conquer the new year while I got a pat on the head and a lollipop.  But I stuck with beauty throughout the year and, as it turned out, the universe knew what it was doing.  

One November I was on a train traveling through the Grampians in Scotland, a gentleman in the seat across from my showed me how to spot the herds of red deer that were grazing in the burnished heather.  It took a while for my eyes to distinguish the shapes of the deer in the distance but once I got the hang of it, I discovered the mountains were teeming with the creatures.  Beauty opened up to me in much the same way that year.  Once I had the word and started learning how to recognize it, I soon discovered it was all around me, despite what the trials and tribulations of the previous year had left me thinking.  

The next year I was back at the same retreat center, with many of the same people in the circle, when I chose the word gratitude, which opened me up in a similar way.  The year after that the word was discipline.  That was a word I consciously chose for myself feeling I needed it . . . an experiment that didn't go so well.    The next year I didn't choose a word but the year after that I was given the only word left in the basket after a New Year's retreat I helped planned but couldn't attend due to a family emergency:  Risk.  The retreat leader apologized but I knew that was the word I was meant to have.  That was the year in which my full time job ended, I spent the summer traveling to distant shores (often on my own), I started working for myself, I completely discarded my dissertation research and topic and began work on a new project, and I finally decided to take my writing seriously . . .  and more importantly, telling people I was doing just that.  (Accountability is another word I need but haven't chosen yet.)

In 2010 my spiritual director chose my word for me-- spontaneity.  In 2011 the word was gift, a word received as a gift in a dream on New Year's Eve.  In 2012 I was back to picking a square of folded up paper and got love.  (And, in hindsight, I did get a lot of love last year, albeit none of the romantic nature.)

And this year, this year the word is joy.  Thus the Mary Oliver poem above. 

Joy is actually a good word for this year.  Last year ended on a wave of sorrow swept in by the events in the world.  In recent years I wouldn't  have allowed myself to feel grief or joy or any intense emotion in between.  Somehow along the way I had come to confuse detachment with non-attachment. All the great spiritual traditions have a component of non-attachment to them-- not holding onto the things of the world too tightly.  But I wasn't just not holding on, I kept my fists ungratefully closed.  I thought that if I didn't let myself feel any extreme emotion, life would be better, easier . . .   By avoiding pain though, I also missed out on elation.  And you can't have one without the other.

So this year I'm ready to shake myself up a bit.  I've been letting myself succumb to moments of pure, surprising, joy in simple things: an abundance of my favorite apples at the farmer's market on Saturday, the splash of yellow from a solitary persistent dandelion blooming in the frost covered grass in the park where I walk, an email from a friend whom I haven't been in touch with for far too long, the start of season three of Downton Abbey, and the tentative end to the NHL lock out.  I'm holding all these things lightly,  just trying to enjoy them when they happen and not expect too much (especially in terms of that last one on my list).  I'm simply keeping my hands open to receive all that 2013 will bring.

 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Curious as to what your word for 2013 is?  Here's the list I used for the New Year's retreat I led this year.  To find your word, look at the number on the list that corresponds to the day of your birth.

1.      Faith

2.      Balance

3.      Transformation

4.      Delight

5.      Grace

6.      Patience

7.      Compassion

8.      Gratitude

9.      Adventure

10.   Courage 

11. Forgiveness

12. Intention

13. Discipline

14. Creativity

15. Abundance

16. Openness

17. Love

18. Integrity

19. Healing

20. Generosity

21. Play

22. Joy

23. Trust

24. Listen

25. Harmony

26. Simplicity

27. Inspiration

28. Healing

29. Peace

30. Please

31. Awe