Author Archive for Robert McDowell
Pay Attention
An older woman fell outside a coffee shop in Jacksonville, Oregon, today. She’d fallen just a few minutes before my friend and I arrived. We came around the corner chattering about the old brick buildings that would most likely collapse in an earthquake, and we were moving at such a brisk clip that the scene on the street didn’t register right away.
The woman was sitting up on the sidewalk, her legs straight out before her. A young woman crouched at her left side, supporting the injured person who leaned into her. Someone else pressed a towel and icepack to the back of the old woman’s head.
I was so much in my masculine, going, going, that I stepped right over the woman’s legs and took two steps on before a brainvoice said, Whoa! What did you just do?
I stopped. My friend, more present than I’d been, had already stopped and was looking down at the fallen person with compassion and sympathy. I bent forward, my features softening, as I tuned into what was happening at sidewalk level. I saw that the towel was bloodstained. I heard the injured woman speak, and that was good. I noted that three people kneeled around her, so I held my space and concentrated on sending calm, healing energy to her.
But I was embarrassed. Every day my lack of awareness startles me. How could I miss for one moment the spectacle of a woman injured on the street right in front of me? How can I miss so many things?
But I do. Every day. I walk on by, drive along, or push my way through a crowd. Sometimes I’m acting aggressive, and other times I’m just oblivious. As hard as I practice toward being awake and aware, I slip back over and over again.
The difference between now and years ago is this: I take note. I review my actions, and I practice all the more. By doing so, I believe that I will step over the fallen less and less until the day comes when I’ll be the fallen and the comforter all at once. That’s the glory I’m going for. How about you?
Why leave home?
Driving through downtown Ashland, Oregon, the other day, I was startled to witness a couple of gangs of young bucks, their antlers still soft and fuzzy, cruising Main Street. I’m used to seeing deer in town because we’re situated in an alpine valley hugged close on all sides by mountains. The deer and other critters virtually live in our yards, and local motorists are always on the lookout for deer on the streets. Usually, though, one spots does, not bucks, or a small group of does with one or two young bucks. Why were all those teen bucks hanging out together?
“They’re coming into their first mating season,” my outdoorsy, thirteen-year-old daughter informed me. “They stick together until they find females, then they split up.”
That made sense, and thus relieved, my imagination traveled to thoughts of leaving home. Not so many months ago, those purposefully strolling bucks lay cuddled up against their mothers in the shade of some backyard glen. But now they’d left home to satisfy a biological contract.
And you and I—why did we leave home? Why do we leave home? Do we leave because we’re curious? Stupid? Ungrateful? Reckless? Hungry and thirsting for adventure? In a way, leaving home contradicts our herd instinct. We like safety, regularity, routine. Don’t we? Or do we desire constant change, the stimulation of danger and the unknown? At this point in our evolution, it’s surely a bit of both for most of us.
No matter how we describe it, we leave home to find ourselves and to claim our independence. Whether the experience turns out good or bad, we do it because we want to. We leave to find ourselves, and we return to share the new, the more complete people we’ve become. We come back to share the news.
Leave-takings and homecomings…sadness and celebration, the unknown and the remembered place. Much of our inner debate is consumed with these matters, and then one day, perhaps, we understand that we never really leave home at all. Home is inside us, and no matter where we go, no matter where or what or who we call of associate with home, they’re really all add-ons to the perpetual home within.
Funny that those adolescent bucks led me to think about home. I’m grateful to them, and surely to the hearth and home that is still burning and holding sacred space in my heart.
Write a poem or journal entry about home, or leaving it, or returning. If you feel like sharing, please send it along.
Heroes
Who is your hero? Do you have a new one every day? Have you had just one for as long as you can remember, or do you have many? Is your hero real or a fictional character?
What do heroes really do for us? Do they delude us with unreasonable expectations, distract us from the real world where prosaic things plod along as they are? Maybe they’re sensational emotional filler, like cotton candy in place of a warm, nourishing meal.
Or maybe they’re the most important role models we’ll ever know. Hasn’t everyone at times felt this? Gee, I wish I was . . . instead of me. This can be a healthy fantasy because there are times when you need to take a wee vacation from yourself. Imagining being someone else is a convenient and inexpensive way to do that.
But it’s nothing to build a practice on. Heroes are mirrors of the compassion, humility, and greatness inside each of us. Heroes are archetypes that measure the span of years each of us has to travel across before we morph into something else.
Today, I’m honoring everyday heroes: the firefighters who keep busy this time of year in the west, and public school teachers who are beginning to look ahead to the fast-approaching first day of school. I’m also thinking of the father I know who took a day off from work to hang out with his twelve-year-old daughter, and my friend who was laid off from his bakery job last week. He sweetened a lot of people’s lives over the last fourteen years.
Who are your heroes? Make a list. Talk to some. Write to one. Connect, connect! We have good and valuable stories to share with each other.
Diotima and Memory
A friend recently wrote me about her husband’s memory loss. Faced with this challenge, she has taken it on herself to provide leadership and direction. The most helpful thing, she wrote, is to read poetry to each other, and to write poems back and forth, sometimes collaboratively. In this way she finds the antidote for estrangement, she tends the fire. Along the way, she’s discovered that poetry is the spiritual glue between them. It is the same energy that is at work in this poem by Frederick Pollack.
Diotima
Regrettably she has no sponsor
in our world, and when she applies
for a visa, it’s denied—
bureaucratic fingers
balk at “Purpose of Visit.”
(How thick the walls of our embassy,
its windows narrow, blank, and barred.)
Then Diotima shrugs,
turns. Beret, trenchcoat,
perfume again pass
our guard (it is her imperturbability
he loathes), re-cross the boulevard,
reclaim her table on that street of tables.
There, unbothered—
nobody tries to pick up Wisdom
though all desire her—she takes out
her notebook, reflects.
With Plato she was an enabler.
For Hölderlin, a joy just out of reach.
What might she have whispered
to me, if Immigration had let her through?
She fills a page, removes and crumples it.
At the edges of the street,
fast-food joints have begun to replace
the cafés, but for the moment
it’s four o’clock; trumpets sound from the castle;
a carriage brings a smiling and waving archduke.
Diotima is the mentor of Socrates, whom he credits with having taught him all about love. She is also the Greek goddess of love. In this poem we meet her as a refugee without sponsorship or visa. Dressed like a spy, she coolly returns to her outdoor table and makes notes in her notebook about Plato and Holderlin, while all who pass desire her but cannot make effort at picking her up.
Suddenly, the narrator stands in for all of us asking “What might she have whispered/to me, if Immigration had let her through?” There is information—Wisdom—one could benefit from if only a connection could be established with this woman/goddess. There is also the missed opportunity for deeper understanding of love, but in this scene only frustration and the threat of impending disaster seem possible. Diotima writes in her notebook but tears it out and crumples it.
At the street’s edges the cafés are giving way to fast-food joints. The disconnected, sleepwalking future encroaches, but in the strange, pre-twilight moment of the poem, the veils between worlds and times flutter, and it is still a fragile moment of time when a member of a royal family can be assassinated and spark a devastating world war.
Writing Play
Imagine meeting the classical Goddess of your choice in a contemporary setting. How would you go one step further than the narrator in Pollack’s poem and connect with her? What would you say to her? What would you ask her for, or what would you ask her to do? Write a poem or journal entry about it.
Terri Glass’s “The Fox Path”
The fox is clever, stealthy, swift, familial, independent, hearty, and very beautiful. In Spanish the word is zorro, a noun affixed to a dashing fictional hero of early California.
The fox’s path is a road for independent souls, wise familiars, rogues and rebels. The fox’s path ignores walls and fences, makes use of ditches, switches back on itself countless times, and winds through thickets and farmyards. The fox on its path wears out the dogs.
Sometimes foxes find us. Then they always seem like familiars. I saw one come out of the brush to the water’s edge at Coole Park in Ireland to take a happy, long drink. Another spoke to me in my barn from the pages of a long poem I wrote. Recently a woman told me a fox visited her deck for several months to sleep nightly on her chaise lounge.
All of these encounters seem magical, and that seems to be a given with fox sightings. No matter how often you encounter a fox, you dream of meeting another and another.
A Bay Area poet with roots in the Northwest, Terri Glass, wrote this poem:
“The Fox Path”
I want to follow the fox path
and enter a different world;
become swift, light footed
wear an outrageous fur coat
aim like an arrow
toward my earthen home
dream fox dreams
in my hidden den
slip into the womb
of hibernation,
melodic and serene
and always in tune
to the perfect hues of spring.
I want to follow the fox path-
the unknown beckoning;
the ancient world of smell,
the true field of touch-
paw to ground, nose to wind
fur radiating out
north, south, east and west.
I want to follow the fox path
and forget my humanness.
I want to follow the fox path
every morning I awake.
Like a dream-catcher, Glass perfectly snares my desire to be transmuted into another form, the fox’s sly, unconquerable form. Like me, like Terri Glass, don’t you want to “enter a different world? Be faster, lighter, more outrageously beautiful? Haven’t you ever wanted to dream the dreams of another creature? And who would not want to be “melodic and serene/and always in tune/to the perfect hues of spring?” Do you feel the insistent yearning and the fierce desire in these lines?
I want to follow the fox path-
the unknown beckoning;
the ancient world of smell,
the true field of touch-
paw to ground, nose to wind
fur radiating out
north, south, east and west.
I feel a sense of joy and abandon, a running to and an embrace of the unknown, a mad scamper back to reclaim the ancient world and the true field of the senses. And when I read or hear these lines—“paw to ground, nose to wind/fur radiating out/north, south, east and west” I am in the field transformed, thrilling to the sensation of the wind gusting in all directions, riffling along my body.
Rather than end there, Glass reminds us in four closing lines that transformation requires intention and focus. It requires perseverance. It requires shedding what is restrictive, or human, and embracing the bold sprint to freedom not just once, but every day I wake up.
You might enjoy this writing prompt. What is your favorite totem, the magical animal you dream of. Is it an owl? A horse? A wolf. Write a poem about meeting, sharing an adventure with, or becoming this creature.
Truth’s Sweetness: A Guided Meditation
Truth’s Sweetness
In Pema Chodron’s No Time To Lose, her commentary on the verses of Shantideva, she refers to certain couplets in which Shantideva hears “the
sweetness of truth.” I read that passage over three or four times, then paused to
consider it.
Intellectually, consciously, I wondered what the sweetness of truth would
sound like. I understood that in Pema Chodron’s book, the moment she
described involved Shantideva’s perception and no one else’s. Shantideva told us
in his couplets what truth’s sweetness sounded like to him. How it sounds to me
or you is as unique as we are.
I considered not the essence of truth’s sweetness, but the sound of it. What
are the sweetest sounds I’ve heard?
Many singers and songs resonate with truth’s sweetness—Paul Robeson
singing spirituals, John Lennon with his simple, elegant anthem, Imagine, Tom
Waits in his ballads and Liam Clancy with anyone’s ballads, Bob Dylan from
1962 to 1980, Judy Collins, Lucinda Williams, and so many more.
I lived with a dog for ten years, a Familiar, who would lean into a speaker
when I played a 78 recording of Jeanette MacDonald singing “The Kerry Dance.” He
would lean into the speaker and harmonize, howling with joy. The sound of his
howling and MacDonald’s rendition of that standard had truth’s sweetness in
them.
A train passes near my home every morning between seven and eight,
and every night between ten and eleven. The chug-chug of wheels on rails and
the whistle blowing always make me grateful and feeling as if I’m hearing the
sweetness of truth. I hear it in the voices of loved ones, in bird song, in the breeze
that dances with the trees. I hear it in the heavy sighs of sleepers, in soundtracks
of favorite movies, and I hear it when I listen to a recording of Dylan Thomas
reading poems. I hear it in the buzz of bees coming into and leaving their hive, in
the whirr of hummingbirds at feeders, in the huzzah of ballparks and Vin
Scully’s radio play by play. I hear it in traffic and ocean surf, in lightning and
thunder, in horses munching alfalfa or nickering as you pass by. I know I’m
listening to the sweetness of truth while mesmerized by the speeches of Martin
Luther King, Jr.
Intellectually, I know that all of these things include, for me, the sound of
truth’s sweetness. Spiritually, I’m pretty sure that hearing the sweetness of truth
occurs when I am in the moment and really listening. I am not overly concerned
with giving it a name, I just am. I am open, all ears, grateful for every wisdomchime
of blessed sound!
*
For this meditation, allow your intellect to be your triggering mechanism.
If you are angry now, use it here. If not, recall three-to-five situations in which
you were angry, even mangry. Now, come up with single words that rename
that anger. Remember, your anger was personal, so the new names you come up
with should be, too.
Once you have your new words (and yes, of course you can make up a
word, just like I did), write a short or long line r sentence for each one.
Contemplate the release of steam from a kettle as you recite the words, lines or
sentences in any sequence and combination that feels right to you. When you feel
it is appropriate, stop and remain silent in your natural state.
*
A second stage of this meditation includes a poem. Write one, in any form
or style, about a friend or family member who made you angry, or a friend you
angered. Many people write about their parents in this exercise, or their
relationship partner. Some write about their boss, their teacher. A woman even
wrote a poem once about her dog and how angry she felt about the dog’s
neediness! But right here, right now, it is important that you choose. Write your
poem, formal or informal, brief or long, and recite it three times, pausing for at
least sixteen long breaths for reflection between each recitation.
Here are four haiku I wrote for this exercise:
The tractor stalls again.
The farmer rests awhile, dreams
of plows and horses.
*
The night is bug bite
Heaven. Mosquitoes crave blood,
and girls to drink with.
*
He did it–Mickey
Mantle in bike spokes. A man
adds up his losses.
*
A poem impales
an editor. His head falls.
Someone dims the lights.
Each haiku speaks of things breaking down, of nature out of our control,
of bad choices and unwanted intrusions. Anger is quiet and tightly tethered, but
it’s there in every tercet. By the time I wrote these haiku and recited them in
practice a few times, my anger significantly subsided. Through my poem, I
released the steam building up in the kettle. Then I was able to hear again the
sweetness of truth.
Use your own poem now to do the same.
Thoughts on Sex and Language
We depend on poetry and story to enrich our courtships and partnerships, and to advance our sexual pursuit and eventual sexual partnering. Sexy language is inventive and fun. Sex and language combined create an intoxicating brew. One might even say that the Sextale and Sextini are the true love cocktail.
This use of language is not reserved only for partners or potential partners. Our history is equally long in using sexy language to address higher powers. Thousands of years ago, poets and worshippers routinely addressed deities to ask for advice and intervention in daily life. One supplicant was the legendary Sappho, poet of Lesbos. In her Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho achieves a marvelous balance between submissive and girlfriend as she pleads with the goddess to turn the poet’s spurned offerings to a reluctant lover into irresistible lures.
To fully appreciate the weight of this address by Sappho, remember that Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality (in Roman mythology, Venus) who was born when Cronus cut off Uranus’s genitals and tossed them into the sea; from the sea foam Aphrodite arose and was born. She is also the wife of Hephaestus (eternal cuckold) the lover of Ares, and later the lover of Adonis.
Here is my translation of the poem.
Hymn to Aphrodite, by Sappho
Glittering, deathless Aphrodite on your altar,
Zeus’s daughter, enslaver, I beseech you!
No, I beg you, dear Goddess, do not torment me
By grinding my spirit to dust.
If ever you’ve heard me pleading to you,
Then return to me now just as you did when
You left your father’s shining palace,
Yoking your faithful sparrows to your sky-car.
Humming down the currents of heaven’s airway
They delivered you to earth’s fecund black breast,
And there you rose with sudden radiance,
Goddess, before me prostrate in the sand.
With a smile that buckled my knees, you asked
What pain I bore, who had wronged me so,
And what would calm and comfort my racing mind.
Why, you asked, had I summoned you
To my side. “Who is it you are seeking
To satisfy your hunger? Who do you desire?
Who has abused you now, Sappho? Who is it
That treats you so unjustly?
“Abide. She evades you now, but soon she’ll pursue.
Rejecting your gifts, soon she’ll rush to give gifts.
She says she doesn’t love you, but soon all she is
Will burn with desire for you and only you.”
Come to me, my Goddess, and comfort me.
Remove this bitterness from my heart, my mind,
And give me what I hunger for. Goddess,
In all my wars, I beg you, fight beside me.
There is nothing coy or secretive in the exchanges between the rebuffed poet-lover and her goddess. There is no question as to who is in charge, but the two meet as friends. There is unmistakable affection between them, and one has no doubt that the resisting object of Sappho’s affection will have no chance against such a potent love-combination as the ardent poet and all-powerful goddess.
Our Measuring Lives
It’s not news that many of us appear to be most talented at shattering things. In every culture we learn early. In the west our house is better than the neighbor’s house. Our part of town is superior to someone else’s neighborhood. Our family car is cooler, our school clothes sharper, our teachers smarter than yours. Even our God is more righteous than other gods. As we grow older, we attach our feelings of superiority to our jobs and choice of partners, our appearance (our teeth are whiter, our waistlines slimmer), our cars (again—cars are lightning rods all through our measuring lives). If we make more money than someone else, that’s all that really counts. We are better than that person. We spend our lives, it seems, defining
ourselves and those we care for as superior and apart. We like the warm glow that comes of the conviction that we are separate and outstanding, chosen by a higher power to bask in spotlights while the less fortunate plod along elsewhere.
This would all be pathological enough, but we don’t often stop there. Troubled in mind and spirit, we also build walls to keep others out. We dance our celebrative dance of the self in our houses of mirrors and attack the safe havens of others. We want them to be like us, or even better, to serve us. If they hesitate in honoring
us, we want to tear down their walls and houses, their art and history. We want to tell them how and what to worship, what to eat and wear, where to work, and how often (and in which ways) they can have sex. We want the wrinkles that make them unique and intriguing ironed out. If that doesn’t work, we want to kill them, erase them. We want to leave no trace of them to remind us that there are obstinate. Others who will not be just like us. We want to be rid of the cold heat that their mysterious presence fans in us.
We do these things because we don’t feel right. “We have just enough religion to make us hate,” Jonathan Swift said, “but not enough to make us love one another.” No matter how many creature comforts we accumulate, no matter how secure we think we are, we know that something is wrong, terribly wrong. The cause cannot be
us. It has to be them. It has to be.
That others disappoint us can be conveniently explained away, or enough so that we needn’t trouble ourselves much with responsibility. It must be their tragic flaws that make them fail to measure up in our eyes. If it is their fault, then we can avoid the hard look inward that reveals the tragedy, not of individuals, but of the Us/Them scenario we compulsively create.
Working with Your Partner
In this age of entrepreneurial opportunities and Internet-fueled cottage industries, it’s not all that odd for one to be in business with a significant other. It’s a richly rewarding scenario. The two of you get to spend lots of time together every day. You are equal partners in your family’s economic adventures. You see each other in commerce roles, which are very different from traditional family and relationship roles.
Of course, the same strengths inherent in this model can be perceived as dangerous weaknesses. In the heat of business battle, you may not like what you see in your partner’s behavior. Perhaps you and your partner become increasingly competitive, even to the point where you begin to feel (and act on) genuine irritation for each other. Workplace tension in a relationship quickly manifests at home, breaking many families and partner bonds to pieces. One must be present and ever vigilant against going to sleep where your conduct towards your workplace and life partner are concerned. Sometimes, you will need to be imaginative to maintain balance and stoke the fires of love.
Writing Prompt
You and your partner work together in a business. For this exercise, write short poems to each other that flirt. Write them as if you don’t know each other very well but are really attracted to each other. Write several of these poems, growing bolder, more suggestive. Make a special dinner with each other, or go out to a restaurant you both love. Odds are you will talk a lot about the poems you wrote to each other. And after that? Well, you may want to write about that, too.