What I miss when I don't wake early

Looking, Walking, Being by Denise Levertov from Sands of the Well (New Directions)

"The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in."
Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.


I rarely wake up and know what poem I'm going to post.  Usually it takes some musing, flipping through volumes of poems, surfing poetry sites on the internet, and lots of typing and deleting until I find that something that plucks at my heart strings and vibrates in my soul.  But then again, rarely do I wake up early, jump out of bed, throw on clothes and am out walking on the beach by 6:30 am.  This morning both happened.  Maybe it was the inspiration of the big pink sun rising in the east.  Maybe it was the pod of dolphins accompanying me as I walked along the shore.  (They were in the water, not on the beach of course.)

As I was watching the sun unfold above a horizon of purple clouds, I didn't think about how far I'd been, how far I had to go.  I was only aware of the present moment-- looking, walking, being.

Standing Open-Mouthed at the Temple of Life or Happy Birthday Denise Levertov

PRIMARY WONDER by Denise Levertov from The Stream & the Sapphire (New Directions)
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

I had a different poem picked out for this morning.  If I had been industrious and written this post last night, as I thought about doing for . . . oh, about the first five minutes after I got home from my meditation gatherings, you probably wouldn't be reading this Denise Levertov poem this morning. 
But no.  I procrastinated, as I so often do.  And then I lost my motivation to do anything but take myself off to bed with a good drink and a mindless mystery.

So when I woke this morning and learned via The Writer's Almanac (the e-mail version, you know I don't get up early enough to hear the 6:35 am broadcast on WAMU) that today is the birthday of one of my favorite poets, I decided to post something by her instead of what I had planned.

I've been trying to figure out what exactly it is about Denise Levertov's poetry that resonates with me.  In doing so, I came across an essay on form she wrote for Poetry magazine in 1965.  In it she writes,

But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, of  
experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this    demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate;    words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes    from “templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur.” It means, not   simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to   keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a   word mean­ing “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breathe in. 

So—as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there  is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs in words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won’t work.

Entrance to the temple of Bacchus at Baalbek
I stood here open mouthed and amazed but
didn't write a poem about it . . . yet. 

It seems to me what she is describing here is akin to Lectio Divina, the spiritual practice of holy reading.

 Experience, Meditation, Poem = lectio, meditatio, oratio



Just yesterday I was wondering why I can sit at my desk for two hours and write the first draft of an essay or a chapter or two of a story yet I can't bring myself to write poetry during my daily writing time.  It's not that I don't write poetry, it's just that when I do, it does come from that place of standing open mouthed after a period of meditation. 

So maybe this is that ineffable in Denise Levertov's poems to which I relate, something akin to prayer that my soul recognizes, which it not only breathes in but also breathes out with a sigh.

Two Mountain Poems

WITNESS

by Denise Levertov from Selected Poems (New Directions)

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.


THE BIRDS HAVE VANISHED by Li Po from Endless Rivers trans. by Sam Hamill

The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.


I like these two poems together.  They're like salt and pepper shakers-- each containing their own flavor of what it means to be present. 


How may you be present this day?

 

Musings on Ordinary Time

Ordinary is largely a matter of perception. The other night, for example, was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday night for me.  I sat for a while in the nave of a glorious cathedral, listening to the dulcet strain of harp music and the shuffling of stocking feet slide across a canvas labyrinth.  Then I stood for a few minutes and noticed the way the light filtering through the stained glass turned the surrounding limestone from a fiery orange to a rosy red as a cloud passed over the sun.  I moved on to a quiet side chapel where I sat in a rickety wicker and wood chair as a gifted healer, a true channel for Light and Love, placed her hands on my head and surrounded me with the pulsating energy of prayer.  Finally, I descended into the crypt where I spent the next hour with a group of about thirty or so people reading, discussing and, perhaps most extraordinarily, writing poems about the ordinary. 

Part of my work for the past few years has included leading programs that use seasonal poetry as a vehicle for reflection.  Last night's program, exploring the poetry of summer, focused on the idea of the ordinary for, according to the church calendar, we're in the season of Ordinary Time. Without the anticipation of Advent, pageantry of Christmas, stripping away of Lent, and drama of Easter, the days of Ordinary Time seem, well ordinary.  They plod on, one flowing into another.  The liturgical color of ordinary time is green, which for those of us in the northern hemisphere is a pretty ordinary color at this time of year.  Summer is in full swing and to quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Earth's crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God."  German poet, mystic, healer and artist Hildegard of Bingen wrote about this fire in creation as viriditas-- the green-ness, vitality, fecundity that is an attribute of the divine, present in all creation. Barrett Browning goes on to write in her lengthy poem Aurora Leigh that only those who see recognize this viriditas in creation pause to take off their shoes, acknowledging the holy moment.  For those who are unaware it's business as usual.

This idea of seeing-- being aware, awake, in the moment-- is a great lesson we can learn from Ordinary Time.  For when we are awake and fully present in the moment we more easily recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary. 

The poems I chose for Tuesday's program focused on this idea of seeing-- as the task of the poet (Denise Levertov's Looking, Walking, Being and Mary Oliver's The Summer Day), as a challenge when our mind wanders (The Moment by Billy Collins) and how seeing can reveal the rich beauty in an ordinary object we often take for granted (Pablo Neruda's Ode to Tomatoes).  We began with a quick-writing activity by writing a modern cinquain on the subject of "ordinary" and then sharing what images or ideas came out of that.  After reading and talking a bit about the poems I selected, we shared in smaller groups a time we recalled when we were in the moment and paying attention, like Mary Oliver's example in her poem.  From there, I gave people a measly ten minutes (that's all the time we had left) to write a poem of their own, suggesting they pick an ordinary object and try writing an ode a la Neruda or taking an ordinary situation and see where writing about it took them, like Billy Collins did describing a June day. 

The results of writing about the ordinary were extraordinary.  We had a lot of odes-- to basil, clothes, cats, and a trustworthy car.  Commuting was a popular theme.  There was a witty rhyme about trying to get to work on time using public transportation and a musing about the ordinary scenes one encounters on the journey from one's door to one's regular seat on the bus.  I'm always amazed at these programs, not only at the creativity and thoughtfulness that comes out in people's writing, but at their eagerness and generosity in being willing to share what they have written with the larger group. 

After the program as I was back in the nave gathering up the dirty labyrinth socks to take home and wash (the not so glamorous part of my job as the coordinator of Cathedral Crossroads), a woman who hadn't shared with the larger group approached me and asked if she could read me her cinquain.  She was proud of what she wrote and wanted someone to hear it.  After she read her poem, she remarked that she was surprised that she wrote such a poem and thanked me for creating the safe space for her to open to the process. 

I've come to realize that as much as my path is about my own writing, it's also just as importantly about the ways in which I am called to help create that safe space and offer encouragement for others to discover how writing can open their own doors.  And that, is an extraordinary opportunity for which I am truly grateful.