Archive for March, 2010
Only the Past, Over and Over
Like millions of others, I’m feeling hung over from the more-than-a-year process of passing some version of healthcare reform. I’m with the legions who believe the bill is flawed, but I’m also with those who believe that some reform is better than none at all. And for all those 32 million who will have insurance rather than nothing at all, I feel joy.
So, despite politicians of both parties doing their best to sully and stamp out efforts that aim to improve the lives of all Americans, I am momentarily content. Something has been done. Obstruction politics has momentarily failed. The greedy at the top have been forced to give up a sliver of their profits for the greater good.
So far, the country hasn’t collapsed. Nobody I know has had her taxes raised. No bogeymen have popped out of closets to destroy our very system of government.
It pretty much looks like business as usual, and we are all rats in our wheels chasing our tails. The arguments used against the proposed social security in the ’30s are the same ones used against medicare in the ’60s and healthcare reform today. We learned great lessons from the Vietnam War, and then forgot them all to scurry into its twins in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, we learn our lessons, we really do, but we learn so staggeringly slowly.
And yet, I believe we are evolving even as it seems we so often lose our resolve and our way. I take heart by recalling poems like this one by Gretchen Fletcher. I love the thought of dying (and living) with poems in my head, and the realization that the poems, once encountered, live on as energy, well past our capacity for remembering. So we share a moment’s revelation that nothing truly ends.
We have work to do, effort that won’t end at a wall, door, or accomplishment. The journey is long and terrifying and beautiful.
Recitation in Clover
My mother died with poems in her head,
the verses nothing more than electrical
connections no longer able to be made.
The lightning storms inside her brain that lit
her eyes are now become a firefly’s flash.
I wonder: Where has all that Whittier gone?
All those lines of Shelley she had learned?
Could Robinson and Guest be now just grass,
their energy released into the soil
as food to grow the oak beside her stone?
I will go now to sit beside her grave
and hear the locusts sing Wordsworth and Keats.
I’ll hear her voice in bees above the clover
and know my mother’s recitation is not over.
Before the Moon
How this ache stops me, old teacher
that it is. Often on the way home
when the wiper won’t clear it away.
Or after a call with a friend who longs
for something he can’t quite name.
After utter companionship, not knowing
what to say, when everyone has gone to bed,
and the moon has stopped being shy, I put
my tongue on the table like a paper weight
and walk wordless through the night.
The place where beauty meets pain
is where we bend, not break.
Interview with Robert McDowell
I had the privilege of interviewing Robert McDowell this afternoon. I hope you’ll take 11 minutes to listen to some of the things that inspire him, including what poetry as spiritual practice means.
I look forward to bringing more interviews to the site in upcoming months. Here’s to the first of many.
Cheers.
Gift
The following poem is by Czeslaw Milosz, a Lithuanian born Polish poet, prose writer and translator who was born in 1911 and died in 2004. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.
Gift
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
This poem, to my ears and heart, is very much like the hummingbird it describes in its third line: delicate, balanced, magical, and as light as a summer breeze. It’s like the foam on my cappuccino, a dab of whipped cream crowning a perfect strawberry, a father lightly kissing his five-year-old’s cheek at the playground.
Listen to the poem again. In just nine lines there is such an opening up to life, such joy in the simple pleasures that are often missed. The fog lifts. The work in the garden feels good and the hummingbirds stop by.
This peaceful, joyful landscape brings the poet to simple, profound revelation:
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
The seeds of grasping and envy will not grow today and all thoughts of revenge have been laid to rest. How often do you yearn for just such a state of mind? In this condition, it is possible to accept even yourself at your worst (To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me).
This poem creates and exists in a state of grace. What better than to realize that you feel no pain, and what more is there than straightening up and seeing the blue sea and sails? Life’s magic is all around us, beckoning to our senses.
Read the poem one more time.
Here is a writing prompt, a contemplation prompt. Limit yourself to ten lines and write a poem about your inner joy. Write it several times. As much as you can, switch off your analytical being and open your heart.
Breaking Trance
It is raining lightly and the sheep are
standing still in the wet field, stopped
by beads of water from the sky on their
ears, their eyes, their mouths. They look
like statues breaking their trance. Alive
for the first time, they wonder, what is
this magical place where the very air
kisses you everywhere. Falling in
love with the world is like this.
Dream Connections
This week I dreamed I was having a conversation with an old neighbor of mine who passed away several years ago. He was very much a grandfather figure to me growing up. My brother and I spent a lot of time at their house, and their door was always open to us.
In the dream he was as vivid and alive as he was when I was a kid. He was gruff and stern. He smoked a pipe and tried to pretend like we kids were upsetting his peace, but his compassion and delight for children was hugely transparent underneath that flinty front.
I’ve had dreams about people in my life who have passed before. As a kid I had a recurring dream where I was sitting on my grandmother’s knee in the graveyard where she was buried. I touched the mole on her chin and she smiled down at me. It was a peaceful and comforting dream.
I haven’t dreamed about Don since he died. I miss him, and I never got to say goodbye. He died unexpectedly, a little too young, I thought, although he was in his ’70s. I dream about the house I grew up in a fair amount—I think those dreams are supposed to be representative of your psyche—but when I think of the house I grew up in I almost always think of Don and Sherlene and the space they held for us to just be kids.
I think these kinds of dreams are opportunities to say goodbye. I woke up feeling as if I’d just seen him. Dreams can be spiritual experiences. This dream was like a quick walk to the other side, a quick soul connection with someone across the divide. When we notice dreams like these and take time to let them touch us, they can and do stay with us as intangible and invaluable gifts.
I welcome comments and would love to hear other people’s stories of dream connections.
Inspiration
Like willingness, inspiration is a color that engages our Spirit intelligence or energy. Inspiration accompanies vulnerability and learning as one of three colors of Trust. When our Spirit intelligence is inspired, it gives us a spark of energy that feeds and motivates our passion and creative commitments.
Inspiration cultivates our self-trust when it is aligned and founded upon the Primary Colors of willingness, courage, and curiosity (see the color chart here). An example of that alignment in my life occurred recently during the Olympics. I was inspired watching the athletes, and even wished I could be as fit as they are, but when I checked in with my priorities (and realities!) and attuned with my Primary colors, I found that my willingness (Spirit) had a clear energy of desire of acceptance and peace; that for me, courage (Heart) was about being patient rather than pushing; and that I have curiosity (Mind) around listening to my heart. So my inspiration was really about “slowing down,” rather than going out and run five miles. And how do I know that’s true, rather than the Con Artist letting me off the hook? It’s about attuning to our creative consciousness rather than fixing ourselves, and for me I could feel into the truth of what’s important to me now. It’s a process of building greater trust and sustained progress toward that which is truly important.
We all know what it’s like to be inspired to do something and then we aren’t able to follow through or sustain our commitment. This happens because the thing we’re inspired to do is not supported by the Whole IQ. When we build our inspiration from the Primary Colors, we are more likely to feel a flow of sustained creativity rather than a yo-yo experience of our energy commitments.
In the past couple weeks, slowing down has connected me to the integrity of my Spirit intelligence. Perhaps tomorrow my willingness will reveal an energy desire that leads me to different place. Go ahead and find your source of inspiration today by first connecting with the Primary Colors. Notice how choosing what truly inspires you each day influences your ability to trust the fluctuations of your energy rather than forcing it to be the same every day, or a way that fits a circumstance in your life.
The First Poem We Hear
The first poem we hear, the first poem we breathe in, memorize, and exhale is our mother’s heartbeat in the womb. It’s poetry in our bloodstream, poetry creating the streaming energy bridge between heart and brain.
Early science knew this perhaps even better than modern science. Ancient Egyptian doctors wrote poems on papyrus, which was then dissolved in a solution and given to patients to drink. It’s fabulous, isn’t it? Drinking poetry for what ails you. Let us return to this practice as quickly as possible!
Even where we are, it’s no surprise that poetry evokes and embodies the Divine Feminine, including the warrior. It was an Irish queen who once defended her homeland by prevailing over her Scandinavian counterpart (male) in a poetry shout-off as the invader waded ashore.
Poetry is love’s body—perfect and imperfect—mother tongue, and heron cry. Poetry is the nickering sound a horse makes, the loon’s cry across the water at dusk. It’s the sound of lapping and rushing and still water. It’s wind in the trees. It’s the face and body you love, the face and body you dream of. It contains cross-dimensional information. It delights us and helps us to live more useful, beneficial, happy lives.
Poetry is healing. If we truly succeed in birthing a new age of global peace and green sensibility, it will be through the resonance and the stories of poetry written by all and told over and over in grateful communities. May the poems you find lodge in you and awaken you.
Evolution in Couplets
Hail cataclysm! At first the single cells
Resist with all their mini-might,
Edgy in a dream of fractals, waking
To an orgy of creaturely life forms.
Imaginal cells channel the new world,
Whisking us through heaven and hell to ourselves
Clumping together after infinite explosions,
Surrendering in a field of riotous blossoming.
Lesson Plan
The lost bird remembers how to sing
as it splashes in a puddle
and forgets how to fly.
This was the teacher’s answer
to his student’s complaints
about living on earth.
Learning
We often consider learning as means to achieving academic accolades. However, in the Life Artist color palette, the color of learning is about listening for the thoughts that truly support our best energy and true feelings.
The Primary Color of Curiosity keeps the Mind intelligence open rather than needing to be right or be an expert, and this supports our Mind intelligence to build trust by activating our learning around what truly inspires us energetically and makes us real emotionally.
Our Mind intelligence is the great air traffic controller of our Whole IQ, and the more we learn about the uniqueness of each intelligence, the better equipped we are to direct our lives from the clarity of our gifts and wholeness.
The colors stimulate a creative lifecycle in an intentional order—from energy (Spirit) to feelings (Heart) to thoughts (Mind), and then into form (Body). When your Mind intelligence uses the color of learning to support your unique energy and feelings, you create a clear landing for your thoughts to support you rather than distract your with chatter. When your Mind intelligence is confused, or isolated from the other intelligences, is when the Con Artist shows up—the creative nemesis of the Life Artist—to take the Mind into the bar for several shots of fear and doubt.
Our pure Mind intelligence is really quite chivalrous, and when it serves the integrity of your Whole IQ through learning, you start to create alignment with the outcomes in your life and they reflect your most natural inner resources. If you notice a situation in your life where you are trying to figure something out in your head—Should you stay in your current job or relationship? Should you take that trip or sign up for that class?—use these six colors—willingness, courage, curiosity, inspiration (next week!), vulnerability, and learning—to explore the issue. Your Mind intelligence will be pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s not all up to it alone! It has a great inner team to help make that decision, and one that can and will reflect the integrity of your Whole IQ!
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