Author Archive for Robert McDowell
In the Forest
Build a house in a gorge where mountains meet.
People together are as powerful as the sacred place
Where two rivers become one waterway.
In that place the chi is strong, the people resilient.
Practice the riverhead and the calm, abiding pool.
Practice the sacred air, let the breath grow shallow,
Soft, even cease to be. Let Timelessness blossom in you.
Take the hills as effortlessly as you cross a room.
Meet at the Dragon Points. Gather at the Celestial Gate.
Turn the Key.
Echo and Narcissus and the Villanelle
Remember the story of Echo and Narcissus? Echo shadows the gorgeous youth through the forest one day. She yearns to speak to him, to connect with him, but she is not allowed to speak first. Finally, Narcissus hears footsteps behind him. “Who’s there?” he shouts. Echo answers, “Who’s there?” It goes on like this for some time until Echo, unable to control herself any longer, rushes from the shadows and throws her arms around Narcissus. The vane beauty does not reciprocate, however. He rebuffs Echo, orders her away, and she spends the rest of her life in sorrow, pining for her beloved, for her completion in connection with an Other.
The love of echoes is a love of mystery and the ever-evolving, transfigured voice. It’s a love of the big room or cave we just have to explore. It’s the love of the soothing racket we find in a conch shell we pick up and press to our ear at the beach. It’s a love of old barns and the vast, starry night, and it’s the sound of liturgy, of mantra. Villanelles are well suited to a practice focusing on connection and completion, on mystery, listening, forgiveness, grace, and goodbye.
Many poets have said, often ruefully, that a villanelle is an easy poem to write as long as you come up with two great lines. As we all know, that is easier said than done! Yet it is not impossible. It is fascinating that the form, like the couplet, so playfully and defiantly celebrates our preoccupation with pairs. The form mentors us in subtlety and musicality. Given the appalling behavior of Narcissus, perhaps the form mentors us in humility as well.
Here is a villanelle I wrote while contemplating a new decade of multiple wars in my life, in the life of my country and the world.
War
The sun comes up, an eye detects alarm.
The field erupts with thunder, running horses
While men drive us, intending to disarm
The pestilence that bears down on the farm.
The breakfast curdles in its steaming courses
As the sun comes up and eyes detect alarm.
Survivors gather round a hilltop cairn.
The children wail, their blocks all in pieces,
While far below men struggle to disarm
The terror. The undead appear. They roam
The country roads. The scent of apples teases.
The day warms up, a bird detects alarm.
At last, the only sound a windblown can,
Then quiet so sudden the air inside it freezes.
Some men showed up but failed to disarm
The thing that flattened them. A worldly harm
Is the only thing the ticking clock discloses.
The sun goes out, no ear detects alarm,
And none arrive intending to disarm.
What I learned about bears at the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota
Bears have soft, considerate mouths, softer than horses. Bears like eye contact. They have beautiful, expressive eyes. Just don’t look at them with anger or meanness in your own eyes. Bears are affectionate. Bears will attack a human for only two reasons. One: if they feel cornered. Two: If they’re hungry and you’re trying to keep food away from them. Like sea otters, bears will use part of their bodies as a table for food. Lucky, the young black bear, used the back of his forearm to support the grapes he delicately picked at with his other paw/claw, then savored them with what looked like a bearish grin.
I also learned that those commonly portrayed images of ferocious, roaring bears are phonies. They’re either doctored on a computer, or they’re snapped when a bear has been enticed to stand on its hind legs and open its mouth with food being dangled at the end of a long pole out of camera vision. The fact is, according to Donna Rogers at the Center, bears never naturally make that facial gesture in the wild. It’s all a dramatic human concoction.
Why do you suppose we do that to animals? To sell magazines to outdoorsmen and hunters, certainly. But how does that explain National Geographic, whose editors know better, using a “ferocious” bear on a recent cover? Well, I guess to sell magazines, too. It was restorative to spend close to three hours last week with the bears. I was keenly aware of how far their world, even at the Center, was from our own.
We live in a whirlwind of schedules and deadlines, of rushing about. In this culture, we hurry. That’s the single word mantra we often run to—hurry hurry hurry. The poet Theodore Roethke expressed it so memorably in his lines, “I run, I run to the whistle of money/Money Money Money/Water water water/How cool the grass is…”
Our hurry is the antithesis of contemplation, reflection, self-awareness, meditation—and yes, the inner life of bears. Back in California now, I miss the bears. But soon I’ll be spending three hours with three different fourth and fifth grade classes in Fairfax, and I know I’ll meet among them the uninhibited, dancing energy of Roethke’s bears. Before that, though, I must work diligently to inhabit my own primal, shaggy body shambling through the wild, big-breathing brush and woods of my untethered, on-this-blessed-earth plane of existence.
Calves
Nothing magnifies the great wheel like calving season. Driving north on Interstate 5 the other day, enjoying the fields that overnight (it seemed) awoke wearing emerald green, I noticed a pasture bedazzled with cows, and more than cows, calves—dozens of them.
Oh, what a sight! Taut bundles of energy, not much bigger than big dogs, they leaped and tumbled, darted in diverse directions as if coaxed by invisible play guides, butted heads, and eagerly burrowed under their mothers for milk. A happy tribe, a blessed season.
But even the gray expanse of winter and the laying in are blessed. It’s all in how I look at it; it’s all in how I see. So, while it lasts, I’ll pause for a few moments when I’m blessed by the new cows with their energy and divine eyes, and I’ll be thankful for them. I’ll wish them well on their journeys across the green fields of spring and early summer, the yellow fields to come.
Ever-changing, I myself am crossing an ever-changing landscape in ever-changing weather. The conditions are always surprising, even when we see them coming, when we see them changing. Perhaps surprising is too easy, though. Maybe it’s wonder. Yes, that’s the word. May I cultivate my capacity for wonder. May I call it up alchemically, may I nurture it spiritually, and may you do the same.
Left
This morning I imagined my children skipping away from me down a country lane. They were beautiful in their joy, laughing and giggling, calling out to the nervous, alert quail and the invisible but always watchful red fox.
They skipped and they laughed, and soon they were out of sight around a leafy bend. I was far behind, walking slowly, smiling, then tearing up and feeling irrationally lost and afraid. What if they disappear? Suppose I never make the bend up ahead. How long before they’d realize I was missing?
I looked up at the sun through fluttering cloud-veils, felt the breeze come and go on my face and bare arms, connected in some alchemical way with the hidden, the observant, and the long gone.
Everything I felt and saw was like that. I balanced my fear by filling my ears with the hum of bees in the blackberry thicket. It’s pointless to grieve because joy is fleeting. So is grief if we breathe, if we open our ears and eyes and mouths, and the intricate sensors in the tips of our fingers. Always in motion, everything passes, circles in ever widening arcs through the stars.
I will come to the bend or I will not. The children will return, not as they were in the moment I started this, or they will vanish, surprising even themselves as they go. There will be a moment, for each of them, wondering where I am, but swept up, they’ll keep moving, moving, just as I am, here awhile, always in and out, then long out of sight.
Waiting
April is almost here, but the weather in southern Oregon continues cold and wet. Snow rings the Rogue Valley, and all of us are waiting, waiting, waiting for spring’s sweet exit visas.
Meanwhile, I practice waiting, or rather, I make a practice out of that which has been forced on me. I am tired of winter, weary of the cold, and fed up with the lingering head cold I can’t seem to shake.
Still, I’m happy to be breathing, happy to wake up and simply be. I make effort to get warm. The effort is for inner and outer warmth. So I medicated my cold as much as I could and braved the ordeal of air travel to go to St. Louis last week to honor a dearly departed friend and mentor, George Hitchcock. George would have loved the irony of the Midwest weather. I walked outside on my first day into 35 degrees. The next day reached 80. The third day went back to 35, and the fourth day zoomed to 80 once more. Dress in layers, indeed! Our poor bodies had no idea what to make of it.
Meditation helped. Meditation always helps. I can feel the waiting rise up in me; I can see the waiting flit by. I can hear it’s chatter, I can smell it (like dry grass on a hot summer day), and I can feel its weighty embrace. At last, at some point, I settle into it, the waiting, and it just is. I just am. It’s not spectacular. There are no fireworks. There’s just a moment of awareness, a jolt of being wide awake.
Picking Cotton, Washing Windows
On my way to the St. Louis airport yesterday, I rode the hotel van alone with the shuttle driver. I suppose we were both in a conversational mood because I found myself asking him about where he was born (“little town, about a hundred miles away), how long he’d lived in St. Louis (since 1960), and I listened as he told me about picking cotton as a boy.
He was good at it, just took to it, he said. He could do 300 pounds a day while other good pickers might make 180 to 210 pounds a day. He talked about picking cotton like a ceramist talking about clay, or a painter her palette. He talked so vividly I could see him as a boy out in the field, picking three rows at once, scorning the knee pads that were provided for pickers if they wanted them, picking so efficiently he was soon way out front. I learned the difference between picking clean cotton and dirty cotton (he picked dirty, meaning some weeds and stems went into the bag, and that way he picked faster), that his boss always had a line you could go up to but not cross when picking dirty cotton. I learned that you wanted to know where the pick-up truck was. You didn’t want to be on the wrong end of the field with a full 85-pound bag of cotton. You needed to be mindful picking cotton.
“Of course,” he said, “machinery’s replaced all that now.” He sounded almost wistful. As if answering my silent question he said, “I liked it, being outside, picking. I made 50 cents per hundred pounds. That was good money then, especially for a kid.”
Walking through the airport, I was still thinking of him, of all he’d said about work he’d once enjoyed, and I paused for to admire a window washer waving his sponge and squee-gee over the huge windows.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found washing windows without leaving streaks next to impossible. I’ve been drilled in all of the conventional wisdom and have tried to put it to work, but I’ve never been satisfied with my results. Yet, here was this guy whipping through windows with effortless grace. First he’d apply the sponge, lightly but thoroughly, then spread the soapy mixture all over, then wipe it all away with perfect squee-gee strokes that resembled the shape of butterfly wings.
I was fascinated. I walked over and told him how good he was. He seemed pleased, so I asked how he did it—that squee-gee stroke.
“Practice,” he said. “It’s all in the wrist.”
I suspect it’s also all in the outlook, too. He looked confident, relaxed, peaceful. How often do you look that way when you’re working? I wonder the same about myself. Over the next few days, perhaps you can keep tabs on yourself, and tune in to others around you. What does work done well look like? Share your revelations in your journal. Who knows? You may even discover a bridge there to a poem you need or want to write.
Mothers are goddesses of the universal dance, aren’t they? As we first stir into being, we’re imprinted with rhythms and beats that emanate from the energy cores of mothers, so that by the time we emerge from the womb we’re already dancers whether we know it or not.
We dance like the blades of grass that weave and sway in the breeze. We’re tugged and pulled and reshaped by gravity, by the moon, and as we age we dance to the mysterious energy influences of moods. We create dances in our work movements and in all the relationships we form. We learn new steps every day, even more if we’re awake, if we’re paying attention. Even the trees and mountains are dancing, always dancing. The world, itself improbably dancing gorgeously in the vastness of space, hosts a pageant of dancing! Here is a passage from the poem Four for Sir John Davies by Theodore Roethke:
I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:
I take it and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
May dancing bless you in all that you dream about and do!
Brain Questioning
If, as Freud said, the mind is a poetry-making organ, then therein lies the answer to the question you may ask your brain: “Old friend, what is it you would have me do?”
Do you remember the times in your life when you’ve posed this question? How often has this answer come back to you?
The mind is a wagon, always rolling and rocking uncertainly to some Other place one can’t see clearly from the vantage point of the seat—the body. But the mind is also a home, your home, your sacred place. When you nurture that place, its air is sweet and warm, like the embrace of someone you love dearly. Its light is the buttery glow of magic hour, its breath is the exhalation of Buddha and Jesus, Mohammed and Brighid, Ghandi and Mother Teresa, the entire world.
What your mind would have you do is see, touch, breathe, taste, speak, and be poetry. Imagine the beneficial life you want and set out to make it so with a lightness in your step and compassion and love in your heart. You are the myth maker, the storyteller, the healer. You are the chair with an ear, the friend who willingly reads another’s heart. You are the new paradigm, everyone in the world together, serving each other.
Equal
“A few bright, unpredictable years,”
I read. That’s our portion,
Whether rich or poor, naked
In the media glare
Or one of the countless Unknowns,
We’re all together, identical
In the dust, in impartial air.
No earth says here, this clump is softer.
No wind offers a sweeter current because,
Well, because you’re just you. You and I
Are meaningless, sisters and brothers.
Isn’t it joyful, equals,
As we all go together?
The Smallest Thing
The Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote this verse about drinking tea:
This cup of tea in my two hands,
mindfulness is held uprightly.
My body and mind dwell
in the very here and now.
Like a drop of clear water, Hahn’s poetry slows us down, asking us to take stock, to see, to really see. No action is too small and no observation is too small for mindful recognition.
I see a spot on my kitchen floor. Rather than race by, ignoring it, I dampen a paper towel and wipe it clean. As I select a shirt to wear for the day from my closet, I notice a fallen hanger. I slow down, pick it up, and hang it from the rod. Then I notice all the hangers, wire, wood, plastic, some sagging from age or weight, and I give thanks for the ceaseless work they do supporting my clothes, keeping them wrinkle-free and in a state of laundered readiness. I see them, all of them, and I smile.
Out in the day, I observe a young staff member pausing on a path to bend down and pick up a piece of cardboard. He is very busy at the retreat center because we’re preparing to welcome 25 yogis tomorrow for a 27-day retreat, but he makes time to pick up a piece of cardboard. He sees something that shouldn’t be there, and he accepts responsibility for picking it up, for burnishing the path, for caring for the center as if it were his own. And indeed it is.
Each of us owns our job, our place of work, as deeply as we own ourselves. Slowing down, we perceive what is, and we accept responsibility. This is what Hahn means by “mindfulness is held uprightly.” This is what families need, what governments need. This is how we embody upright living and upright leadership.
So, slow down, just a little. Every second of every day is an opportunity to see, to really see.
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