Softest of Mornings and The Lifeline of Awareness and Gratitude

Softest of Mornings by Mary Oliver from Long Life:  Essays and Other Writings (DaCapo Press)
Softest of mornings, hello.
And what will you do today, I wonder,
   to my heart?
And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder,
   before it must break?

This is trivial, or nothing:  a snail
   climbing a trellis of leaves
     and the blue trumpets of flowers.

No doubt clocks are ticking loudly
   all over the world.
I don't hear them.  The snail's pale horns
   extend and wave this way and that
as her fingers-body shuffles forward, leaving behind
   the silvery path of her slime.

Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this?
How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers?
How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?


As I was paging through books looking for a poem for this Mary Oliver Monday  I was struck by this one. And not because it speaks to my experience, as is usually the case with what I usually write about; rather because this morning I hear the clock ticking so I haven't been looking at the leaves.

Instead of my normal oozing into the soft morning, today I jumped out of bed, barely glancing out the window and that only to see if it was raining yet, before making coffee and making my bed (in that order) so I could be at my desk and get an early start on work.  Maybe it's the charged air brought about by the approaching storm that has me humming and vibrating and active this morning. Maybe it's the energy behind some work projects that I want to hold onto and perpetuate this week.  Or maybe it's just the knowledge that the pages of my "to do" notebook are filling up faster than things are being crossed out.  Whatever it is, my focus this morning has been on my desk, not on the world outside my window.

And that got me to thinking about awareness and gratitude.

A friend and I were talking about this subject last week.  We'd both been in dark places recently and were sharing how we could to stop ourselves from sliding back down that slippery slope of self-pity and woe that often ends with a canonball into the pit of despair. He said that he has come to realize that lack of gratitude leads to those dark places.  If he holds in one hand something as simple as the blessing of sight and all that comes along with that, it far outweighs any misery he might be tempted to hold onto with the other.  Opening his eyes for a moment of awareness and gratitude each day have become essential for him.

So this morning I may not have spent time looking out my window yet but I can take a moment to be thankful for what I can see here at my desk.  A  soy candle that smells like cedar wood and pine needles reminds me of the trees when I don't have time to get out and walk among them.  The flame of that candle that I light as I sit down to work is an acknowledgment of the presence of the Holy and the Spirit that animates my work and connects it to something bigger.  Icons of Julian of Norwich, Brigid and Melangell  honor the legacy of wise women who have gone before me and the small stack of books on the corner is a nod to the creativity of contemporary women who inspire me.  The containers of Sharpies behind my computer remind me of a young contemporary woman who inspires me, Malala Yousafzai, and makes me ever the more grateful for the freedom and resources I have so often taken for granted in my own pursuit of knowledge.  And the pink and red apples in my grandmother's old milk glass bowl  . . . well the blessings that come along with that sight are far too numerous even to begin to count.

Beware or be aware when coconuts start falling

Timely Rain by Chogyam Trungpa from Timely Rain:  Selected Poetry of Chogyam Trungpa (Shambhala)

In the jungles of flaming ego,

May there be cool icebergs of bodhicitta.*

On the race track of bureaucracy,

May there be the walk of the elephant.

May the sumptuous castle of arrogance,

Be destroyed by vajra** confidence.

In the garden of gentle sanity,

May you be bombarded with coconuts

Of wakefulness.

 

 

Someone asked me recently how I find poems for this blog.  Some mornings I pull down a volume or eleven from my bookshelves and page through until the right poem jumps up and down and shouts, "Pick me, pick me!"  At other times a poem that I've read will float to the surface of my consciousness and I'll scoop it up and offer it.  Sometimes I'll be in the mood to hear a particular author's voice.  And days like today, when the weather seems to dictate a poem for a rainy day, I'll search the internet to see what I stumble upon. 

 

This morning I decided to try something new.  I went to the Amazon site and did a search for poetry and rain and then set about sifting and sorting through the results.  I considered posting a poem by another Buddhist poet but he was from the Zen tradition and a bit too nihlistic for a gray day.  Tibetan Buddhist poet and teacher Chogyam Trungpa, on the other hand, offered this blessing for balance that at first made me smile and then laugh out loud at the imagery. 

 

In the garden of gentle sanity/May you be bombarded with coconuts/Of wakefulness.

But don't drop your lollipop.

 

Soon after I first started meditating on a regular basis, I went to an intensive Centering Prayer retreat.  About 36 hours into it, I felt like I was being carpet bombed with coconuts.  I was battered and bruised and in tears when I went to the retreat leader for spiritual direction.  The first words out of my mouth were, "I don't want to do this.  I just want to be normal like other people."  Normal being people who didn't meditate or go on week long silent retreats or allow themselves to be broken open in order to grow and change.

 

The thing was, I'd been lounging in the garden for so long that it did seem sane, normal.  Shaking the trees of transformation was scary.  And the turmoil my soul was experiencing was anything but gentle.  All those fears, insecurities, anger, compassion, love, joy were best left napping in the shade while I floated in the pool of status quo.  Or so I thought. 

 

I worked through some of my tears and some of my fears that afternoon but I still left the room with trepidation, willing to stick with it but not sure for how long.  That was over a decade ago.  Learning more about the psychological and physiological effects of what happens during meditation (which Thomas Keating and others call divine therapy) helped me realized that I what I was experiencing was normal, or at least normal for many who step onto this path. 

 

I realize now that when I said I wanted to be normal, what I really meant was that I wanted to stay asleep.  And some rainy mornings that still doesn't seem like such a bad idea, literally and figuratively.  But then a coconut hits me and I remember the benefits of being awake.  Because without a coconut falling, you can't have coconut cake.

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________

*  bodhicitta - "enlightened mind;" an awakening of a felt and lasting compassion; felt need to  

    replace others suffering with bliss

 

** vajra - the Sanskrit word for both thunderbolt and diamond; a symbolic ritual object that  

     symbolizes both the properties of a diamond (indestructibility) and a thunderbolt (irresistible  

     force)

 

Some Neruda for a Friday morning

The Poet's Obligation by Pablo Neruda from On the Blue Shore of Silence (Rayo)

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying, "How can I reach the sea?"
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.


I've been delving back into my volumes of Neruda lately.  There's something about reading the poems in their original language that is missing in translation, no matter how accurate and lovely those translations may be.  Although my Spanish is more than a little rusty, I find I can still get the gist of the poems.  Plus I have the version of Cien Sonetos de Amor that has the English translation on the page facing the original Spanish text.  Cheating you say?  Tal vez . . .

Anyway, I don't think it's a more accurate meaning I'm seeking when I read in Spanish.  Rather, it's the lilt of the poem-- the ebb and flow of vowels and consonants as they roll from line to line, break from stanza to stanza.  I think about the way the sound of certain words seem to embody the object and action themselves: foam, crash, castigation, sea, shuttered heart.  I often find myself fingering a phrase on my tongue like prayer beads. 

gather it up in a perpetual cup . . . gather it up in a perpetual cup . . . gather it up in a perpetual cup

Listening to the heartbeat of a poem helps me be more conscious of the rhythm of my own life.

What helps you become aware of the rhythm of your life?







 

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.

 

David Whyte Wednesday - The Poet

THE POET
by David Whyte from Fire in the Earth (Many Rivers Press)

moves forward
to that edge
but lives sensibly,

through the senses
not because of them.

Above all he watches
where he steps.
As if it matters
where he leaves his prints.

The senses overwhelm him
at his peril.

Though he must be taken
by something greater.
That is what he uses
senses to perceive

The poet's

task is simple.
He looks for quiet,
and speaks to what
he finds there.

But like Blake
in his engraving shop, works
with the fierceness
of acid on metal.

Melting away apparent
surfaces and displaying
the infinite
which was hid.

In the early morning
he listens by the window,
makes
the first utterance
and tries to overhear
himself say something
from which
in that silence
it is impossible to retreat.


Spring is a raucous season.  Although it isn't exactly early morning, I am listening by my window and there is anything but silence.  The twirls, whirls, chirps, caws, and rat-a-tats of a cacophony of birdsong almost completely drown out the noise from the cars whooshing down Connecticut Avenue during the morning rush hour.  Last night I heard the blossoming magnolia trees described as "riotous" and I dare say the daffodils could be considered rambunctious. 

At the start of each season, I am made aware of how the changes in the landscape and weather lead me to live "sensibly" according to the definition of the word in David Whyte's poem.  For the first few days I notice my senses shifting.  I am awake to the new sights, sounds, smells, sensations and I simply revel in this awareness.   Then, after a few days, I begin to look for what lies beneath-- for what I overhear being whispered to my soul in its silence. 

Unfortunately, this awareness is all too fleeting. If this spring is like others I've lived through, by the end of March I'll barely notice the birds as I get up and begin my day.  But for this morning, I think I'll make a cup of tea and sit and listen by the window for just a while longer.

How are you living sensibly this season?

What