That I couldn’t help but remember the day I fell into
A neighbor’s pool at the deep end.
All the mothers were laughing and talking
At the other end,
To this day I don’t know what finger tip
Lifted me out before I drowned
Which cannot be avoided (death I mean),
But only, if we are lucky, delayed.
With respect to death
It doesn’t matter
Whether we are ant or human.
The fact is, we are both
Remarkable forms of life
Equally loved
By life and death.
………………….
I want to explain how I can seriously be affected by the drowning of an ant. Empathy is something you have or you don’t. That sounds harsh, but empathy is an ability, the ability to feel what something or someone is going through, and there is the catch. When you feel what an ant is feeling, that ant is no longer a “thing”, it is a tiny being, a “someone”. In Braiding with Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer has a lot to say about this in her chapter “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”. In this chapter she is sharing the joys and revelations and struggles of learning the language of her Native inherited culture, (as a member of the Potawatami Nation) which recognizes most of creation as a world of living beings, including objects and places and spaces that, to most folks of European descent, are essentially, if not “dead”, just somewhere between dead and alive. For instance, she gives the example of a “bay” which, to us, is a place embellished by adjectives. If we like or love the bay, it is “beautiful” or “wild” or “relaxing”; we associate it with good-times, good eating, the nightlife, or we like that it is undeveloped, or, the opposite, there are great shops, a nice boardwalk. In other words it is a mirror for us. If we like it it is because of how it makes us feel. While in Potawatami, the language is a mirror for the innate ability to “see” the animacy of the world.
As a poet with only a quantum of Native blood (my mother always said that we have Native blood, which she prized as much as our quantum of Irish), I am committed to breathing life into English. Kimmerer is doing the same thing, by, for example writing Braiding with Sweetgrass, but she is also committed to owning her much deeper linguistic rootedness in her Native language before it disappears, as Native languages have a history of doing. So, I have used language as a way of explaining how empathy is more than just an inborn ability to see the life in everything, it is also a language, or maybe what I am saying is, empathy is more than just seeing and feeling what a tree feels or what a drowning ant feels, it is the first wave of a whole culture, which is language, art, dance, music, visions, dreams, clothes, praying, teaching, learning, initiating!.
That English is a language of things is a step in the right direction, but my advice is, don’t get lost in a world of things and adjectives. Sit with a tree or a rock or a private spot in a park and try to open to the animacy of where you are and what is around you.
Back to the question of whether empathy can be a learned ability. Short answer is, yes. There are lots of ways to learn empathy (such as read empathic writers, listen to empathic singer / song writers, take a mushroom journey. . . but you have to be open to it. You have to agree that empathy is more than just a word or just a synonym for compassion. At the end of the chapter, “learning the grammar of animacy” there is an encouraging anecdote: “I remember the words of Bill Tall Bill, a Cheyenne elder. As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. “They love to hear the old language,” he said, “it’s true.” “But,” he said with fingers on his lips, “You don’t have to speak it here.” “If you speak it here,” he said, patting his chest, “They will hear you.”
(Also quite upsetting if it only happened to you),
But as long as it’s just animals, I’m OK to let it be,
To turn my sights on other news, say, a continent away
Such as Russia Defiant Over US Aid To Ukraine
Or Three Suspected Spies Arrested In Germany,
Or Wild Fires Out Of Control In Human Brain.
The latter is just my imagination
But burn out is a real thing, as real as hyper-tension.
The real story is the plight of the beasts and deforestation.
Some incredible madness has co-opted our attention.
But the truth is all these stories doth intertwine.
I can only hope that someday soon our souls will come online.
……………….
How I started writing sonnets late in life
I know I must have tried my hand at writing sonnets throughout my years of writing poetry but I never enjoyed it as much as when I began to experiment with the form half way through my sixties, inspired by John Hawkins who writes reviews for and is a frequent contributor to OpEdNews. He is a very smart, extremely well read, bitingly funny man. His writer’s persona is a unique unlikely concretion of intellectual and anti-intellectual, which makes me wonder what he is really like as a person to sit down with across a small table on a back deck. He announced (I think it was right before Covid) (If John sees this, I hope he corrects me) that he would write a sonnet a day for a year?? . . . As I write that, it sounds incredible, and super-human . . . I believe he almost succeeded but had to space them out before the year had passed, but I think he got over 200 sonnets out of the self-dare. Anyway, I found myself inspired by his audacious quest. What I learned was, sticking to the sonnet form (AB / AB, CD / CD, EF / EF, GG) seems to have a paradoxical affect on my brain: It bridles my imagination while giving it free rein. (The expression “free rein” originated as horseback-riding jargon referring to the act of holding the reins loosely so as to allow the horse to freely move along at its own pace and in its desired direction.) So, within the strict form I found greater freedom than when I am writing in free form. The horse takes the lead. In a free form poem, I would never compare the poem to a horse. The poem wouldn’t stand for it. The poem is just the poem, a process. With the sonnet, what you wind up with is a sonnet. That is, when I write a sonnet, I am climbing onto a horse and what I am riding continues to be a horse. It’s not a chimera. If you don’t experience something like what I have described in my own process of writing a sonnet, but just something boring, to show off that you can do it, that is just about the form and you. What would be the point? So, thanks John, for waking me, albeit late in life, to the joy of writing sonnets.
In writing this poem I was influenced by Einsteins account of an early dream:
Einstein: ” My entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream.”I
“I was sledding with my friends at night. I started to slide down the hill but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.” (Dreamed around 1890-95)
On March 30 I posted a poem, “The teaching of the rainmaker” where I wrote:
One tree
One dirty sock
One small garden
One well
One view
One life
One dream
One house of salt.
The story of the rainmaker is that there is a devestating draught, and, as a last resort, the rainmaker is summoned. The rainmaker is centered — he lives in Tao. He agrees to help. All that he requires is a little hut, a garden and to be left alone. After he has been living there, in a very short time, the weather returns to its natural cycles. This was a favorite teaching story of Jung’s to help people understand what it means to be centered. It means to be in Tao. What I am describing above with this list of one tree, one life, one dream, one house of salt, is the simple Taoistic life-style of the rainmaker. This list comes from a poem I posted March 30, “the teaching of the rainmaker”. The rainmaker only needs the basics. In the poem “Absence”, Tao is missing: the birds do not return because there are no insects, so there is no song, and the tree (the one tree, which we might interpret as the archetypal or world-tree) has been cut down. In other words, the world, as depicted in “Absence” is off-balance. It is not centered. The rainmaker is not there, so the rain, instead of falling, moves on. The assumption here is, the human world, by itself, is not enough to initiate the harmony of existence that is Tao.
Three lanes of citizens obediently blinking to pass
For fear of being stopped by a patrol car,
We / I feel like an ant among ants
Creeping along the vein of a leaf
Through a future-petrified swamp.
I thank the many gods of
Our nameless numbered highways
That these newly hatched nymphs
Do not devour us alive. Thank god they are
Just obsessed with tearing up the highway
And that to them we are just obstacles.
In the back of my mind of course
Is my far greater dread
Of the last stage of their metamorphosis.
We have all seen the adults,
Meganeuropsis permians,
Prowling the skies, wings ablur
Heading for the war counsels,
Those top secret meetings
Where our fates are decided.
…………
In this poem I am venting my feelings, the feelings that roar through me that I stuff every time one of those little shit cars or two or three careen past the rest of us on the interstate. They are always small because they have to maneuver around us to play their game of high stakes. A friend was explaining to me what he learned from a conversation with a state trooper at a cookout when the trooper was off-duty. He admitted, they don’t generally chase speedsters anymore unless there was a suspected crime committed and even then, not always, because high speed chases endanger innocent bystanders. Duhh. I was never a fan of high speed chases, which always reminded me of the old silent films with the cops chasing the bad guys to a rambunctious piano score where anything goes. But what is happening on the highways with these speedsters playing chicken in our midst, while we are just trying to get somewhere in one piece, isn’t a movie, but it is a little like living in the Wild West and although I am not a fan of law and order on steroids I am a little worried that the future is going to written by crazies who think that life is nothing but a damn game.
The news of the Israeli military murder of some of the staff of the World Central KItchen really felt like a punch below the belt. Sacred lines are always crossed in war. That is to be expected; it’s the nature of the beast. But the cold blooded murder of people who are there to feed a starving population, even though also not new, was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I am having my own back problems these days and am feeling vulnerable, so this story caught me off guard. I couldn’t deflect it, but thought about my mother, one of the most positive people I have ever known. I could picture her, in the spirit realm, looking perplexed. Here is what I think is going on: This story clobbered me, in the second and third chakra, below my heart, the energetic center where I am connected to my birth, my origin, my mother. All those years my Mother fed me, she never asked for anything in return except to grow and thrive. So I can really picture her being upset by this cold-blooded murder. Israel must be held accountable. I can’t resist saying that if feeding people is a crime then my mother would have been a terrorist, because she fed us selflessly until the day we could feed ourselves. Feeding people is sacred work. If you murder someone who is feeding starving people I am quite sure that you will pay, karmically, for that is a crime of crimes. I know this: because I register it in my 2nd and 3rd chakras and chakras do not lie.
“Hansueli Etter’s article, ‘The Rainmaker of Kiauchow,’ from which the title of this issue is taken, is an interpretation of the most famous story of synchronicity in the Jungian tradition—the Rainmaker. Etter, who for more than 10 years maintained a close and collegial relationship with von Franz, and whose life was deeply touched and shaped by her wisdom, places synchronicity squarely at the heart of Jung’s opus. Referencing Robert Johnson’s claim that ‘C. G. Jung once said that the story of the Rainmaker illuminates his own approach to psychology, or his own personal view of life, more completely and appropriately than anything else that had been said about it up until then,’ Etter emphasizes how understanding synchronicity is essential to understanding Jung: ‘If one has understood the story of the Rainmaker, one has understood Jung’s psychological school of thought.’ ” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00332925.2023.2210993
Be sure to bring your Prozac and your Zantac and your kayak
And your yak.
The camel will be so happy to see the yak.
You can sleep in the boardroom
Which has been heavenly quiet since the break-up.
Bring your Bhagavad Gita;
We love it when you read in Sanskrit.
It quiets the monkeys down.
Oh and we will make sure the trick doorbell works.
Ha, ha.
And don’t worry about the things.
They all returned to Carmel in January,
And we are just dying to hear about your new job
On the moon. We are so proud of you.
So proud! Crazy proud, aren’t we sweetheart. .
Oh, and we tuned the gamelon.
Yes, yes, really.
It’s never sounded so . . . mystical.
……………………
I think this poem is making light of how the veil of maya is beginning to disintegrate these days. Who’s crazy? Who’s investing in the unraveling? Who’s birthing new visions and who’s going down with the ship while the band plays ? Who’s adapting to climate change and who is waking in a sweat in the middle of the night asking, “What are we doing?” “My god, what can I do?” Who’s drinking the cool-aid and who’s making kombucha? Who’s throwing away their credit cards and who’s shopping at Target for whatever is on sale? Who’s picking up litter and who’s littering? Who’s saying American First and who’s saying, Humanity First? The family in this poem is a family that has no grip on reality. Their world is a melange of values, a jigsaw-puzzle of cultural oddities. I’m making fun of how people dabble in spirituality and other cultures without dealing with their own troubled souls.
The point of this poem is to enjoy a laugh at these ridiculously out of touch people who are “crazy proud” of their visitor who is “coming down” from his job on the moon to spend his vacation with them and bringing his kayak and yak, only to realize that most of us are living lives that are, say, to someone from an older non-materialistic culture, off the wall, surrealistic and utterly unsustainable.
This war is like a strong wind blowing through my brain
This war has made me feel alone and hollow
This war has made me let the phone ring
It has turned me into a news junky
This war has stung me, shocked me,
Bruised me, cudgeled me, numbed me
Beyond tears, I sometimes I feel like the living dead
Because of this war
How will we ever forgive this war!
This war has forced me to do the math
It has made me not care how I look
It has made me drink more wine
And bolt my door when I go to bed
This war has brought violence to my sanctuary
It has made me hear voices in the wind
It has made me miss my mother
It has made me nostalgic for the bad old days
It has made me renew my passport
It has made me forget to water the plants
It has made me harder to talk to
This war has made me watch more sh*t TV
It has made me lie awake listening to my heart
It has made me forget to take my supplements
It made me purchase a blue light
It makes me prowl on rainy days
It has made me feel like an animal in a cage
It has made me feel worse about climate change
It has made me feel worse about any kind of change
It has made my brain fog, my heart freeze
It almost made me get a tattoo
It made me feel like I was in a tragic play
A movie that was going to end badly for my character
It made me cry when I hit a squirrel
It made the traffic on the bridge sound angry
It makes me choose sides
It makes me feel that it could happen to me
It has taught me that it doesn’t take much
For people to do terrible things
It made me clean the basement
It made me eat more ice-cream
………………
It feels like being in limbo, to me, to be living with another war that invades one’s sanctuary and stirs up a powerful response that has no where to go, so one begins to feel beaten up and hollowed. Of course we would like to put an end to such wars but we can’t so we just eat more ice-cream. Being in the war, literally, would be a different kind of ordeal. This poem is about living with the war in me.
A friend calls these my list poems, and he doesn’t particularly like them, but sometimes they are the only kind of poem I can write when something is neither within me nor without me. It helps as a way to organize or separate my emotions so that I can get on with my life in “this world of woe”.
The phrase “traveling through this world of woe” comes from “The Poor Wayfaring Stranger” (written some time in the early 1800s). “It is categorized as Gospel, Bluegrass, American Folk, Spiritual and my favorite, Gothic Country. Books have been written with the same title as well as poems and even plays, such is The Mystique. The powerful, yet simply written words, grasp one’s attention bringing thoughts about a world to come.” (Click Here)
I draw on this evocative phrase because I believe that many of us feel like “poor wayfaring strangers / traveling through this world of woe”. And there is a spiritual yearning in the way I use it here except for me the “world to come” is not heaven, but the better world that we could have right here if we could just hack the pathology in human nature that, not only makes war, but tolerates it as a woeful fact of life.
I remember the red in the markings of the carapace
Of my painted turtle.
I remember the red of the fall leaves
And the cover of Fahrenheit 451, 1972.
Between ’68 and ’72,
I thought a lot about the draft.
Then something in me caught fire.
I was a pacifist on fire,
Red hot.
My road was red.
Dawn was red,
The whole horizon.
……………..
This poem reminds me of The Giver (by Lois Lowry, 1993), a young adult dystopian novel about a futuristic world in which everything is black and white and sort of stuck in time. And nobody has any memory of the world being any different, except for one person in the community who lives apart from the others, known as The Giver. The Giver preserves the memories, or the ability to remember. I don’t think even the Giver perceives color. But, at the very end, the protagonist, a boy, is on a sled, sledding downhill, when he catches a glimpse of the color red. To me, this presages the return of color to this dystopian world, but the question is, will the revelation of color be accepted by these somber, traumatized survivors of the human race.
The Giver (the book) strikes me as being the next generation incarnation of the message of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which tells the dystopian story of a future in which all books are being methodically burned. (fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper ignites). In the world of Fahrenheit 451, there is an underground society of people whose sole purpose is to each memorize a great work of literature verbatim, so they become the book. If they die, the book dies. I don’t remember if there was color in this world, but the color of my 1960s copy was red. Red carries a lot of connotations and symbolizes passion, violence, the blood of life, the red road of Native American wisdom, and, when I was growing up, Communism, “the Red scare”, Mao’s “Little Red Book” that was making the rounds.
In my poem “seeing red” I am playing with the idea in The Giver , that the preservation of memory isn’t enough to salvage the spirit of life, for the someday (hypothetical) healing of a human race that was so traumatized that it collectively repressed its history, along with its sense of belonging to any story except perhaps the story that it has no story. Only the Giver remembers, but the burden of remembering apparently drains him of his will to engage with others. He is special in a very limited way, but he is no redeemer and he is no shaman.
To me, and this might be offensive to some, the story in The Giver is the story of the Jews. What happened to them (in the Holocaust) was so traumatic that it bleached their vision of the humanity of anyone who isn’t Jewish. (Holocaust means sacrifice by fire in which the whole of the sacrifice is consumed.)
My poem, “Seeing red” is a poem about how, during a bleak period of my life, which, as I look back on that time, was prematurely aging my psyche and blanching my spirit, I started seeing red (in the flying horse of the Mobil sign and in the carapace of my painted turtle, but it was when I stepped into my pacifism, that red became the lens through which I saw the world. I was a peace-warrior, both incredibly angry and anxious to blaze my own path. The whole horizon was red.
The 60s was my holocaust. It burned up my childhood to a cinder. But like the protagonist in The Giver, at the end of the 60s, my spirit was rescued by the color red — the red of my anger and my “red-hot” pacifism.
A friend sent a link to Psalm 83:Prophecies Part 2. Here is my knee-jerk response:
The idea of a field of probability is certainly something that has fascinated me, especially in light of my delving into Maya. What he says about cycles of time, and history together with what I understand about maya (the resilience of the human existential illusion of the continuity of linear time), together with what we know know about how consciousness co-creates human destiny, depending on the archetypes it enshrines and lives by, does help explain how the prophets (who lived back when the archetypes of the Judaic era and dawning of the Christian era and mythos, which spanned two great cycles covered by the Old and New testaments, representing about 2500 years (BCE) were percolating) . . . how they (those prophets) were tapped into great algorithms and Dreamings and visions that were generating prophecy and coded predictions that have come true, (to the detriment of the likes of the oldest Earth-keepers, such as the Australian Aboriginies). (The Hopis are a prophetic culture whose predictions are much older than Christianity and Judaism and have also come true.)
This is where it gets muddy for me. Many but not all (of humanity) are swept up by this cycle of fulfillment of ancient prophecy and the inevitability of a certain time scale by which certain wars and other momentous events, such as the Great Rapture are potential / probable.
Take the Rapture, which is easier to debunk than the fulfillment of prophesied wars. The believers who bet on the Great Rapture, many of them, by my estimation are blithering idiots. Why would people of their caliber be saved? (I think they are just wanna-bes, as I say, idiots.)
I’m a bit at sea when I try to comprehend how someone as evil as Hitler came to power, which could only happen in a complete spiritual vacuum, and yet out of that Hellish event emerged the Zionist state which became Israel. Do the stupidest, shallowest, most self-centered or delusional, narrow minded, sickest people make the most history? If so, it then makes sense that artists and spiritually grounded folks and nature-lovers and lovers in general would lose out to those other archetypes that the sickest of us enshrine. But falling into the vision of the followers of prophecy is a way of jumping out of our own individuation to latch onto an impersonal story that essentially sucks all the meaning out of life. In sum, I can’t go there, even though I see how seductive it is, it ain’t for me.
The invisible “cloak of teeth” of the spell of science is very real to me and unnerving . I have known people in my life who have used science to ward off reality by explaining away experiential keystones of human consciousness, such as miracles and visions and great dreams, as if science had the right to discredit the intrinsic coherence, autonomy and suprahuman impunity of the numinous!
And the old into the opacity of absolute occlusion
Leaving a man on the platform
Who is the incredible shrinking man
The way a bitter god might view us
When tired of receiving the same old prayers
Through the small end of a telescope
And when I was done
And your playing subsided
Speaking for myself
We were much less sure about anything
Than we were when we started
But what were we hoping for anyway?
And if there was such a thing as hope
What would that sound like?
After all, our ears are lonely flowers
Waiting for that bee that never comes.
……..
This is a poem that I wrote about a recording session that I did with a friend, a brilliant cellist. I was prepared to read a handful of poems — read — while he, on a separate mike, would play his instrument as he was moved, in the moment, spontaneously. Out of respect for his process , there was no rehearsal. My friend (I think I am right about this) had never read any of the poems, although there is a chance that he might have, once, because they were all posted on my blog, to which he receives a link. In any case, the way we were set up, there was no shared monitor: He couldn’t hear my performance of the poems except as background but I could hear him pretty clearly. This created a bizarre dynamic for me that felt unbalanced, even though my friend is highly intuitive and “wired” to other more subtle inputs than oral expression. He was able to hear my voice if not the words (and certainly not the metaphors). If I had been singing my poetry like a libretto as opposed to a scripted oration, I would have felt more on an even footing during our session. As it was, our respective performances felt separate, even on different planes. In one of my poems, about Ukraine, a bomb explodes in the distance which, in my reading, was signified by the word “boom”. Following the explosion there is a brief dialogue between a mother and her child where the mother tries to calm her child while she herself is losing it. I did not detect any indication that my friend was aware that a bomb had gone off, and I think it was at that point that I began to feel alone. And it was then that I began to second guess what we were hoping for as collaborating artists. I even began to feel sad at a much deeper level because my poem about war started feeling distant to me(!), like the damn war in Ukraine itself, and I began to feel that our inability to come together in our session was somehow a microcosm of the whole human race not being able to come together to condemn war. If we couldn’t hear each other in a studio and to communicate as sensitive artists, surrounded by expensive equipment finessed by a sound engineer, what are the chances of hearing what is important to each other in this runaway world where it seems that bombs are always going off somewhere. The two lines at the end express this sadness, the sadness I feel when I am surrounded by flowers but there are no bees in the garden.
There is always more to say but I am satisfied that I have made my main point. As a follow-up I would like to add that I have no doubt that, if my friend and I try again, the bee will show up. I am absolutely sure of it.
This poem is based on a friend’s sharing of a nightmare she had. She heard something coming up the stairs that sounded like their old dog but in the dream she remembered that their dog had passed away, so what was ascending the stairs had to be something else. What came to me was Robert Frost’s “The Witch of Coos”. There is a skeleton climbing the stairs from the cellar. That poem made a lasting impression on me when I read it in junior high school.
“And then someone Began the stairs, two footsteps for each step, The way a man with one leg and a crutch, Or a little child, comes up. It wasn’t Toffile: It wasn’t anyone who could be there. . . It was the bones.”
My young imagination was perfectly capable of hearing what Frost was describing, but I was tacitly grateful that he took the trouble to put those words down. Of course a skeleton would find it hard to ascend a staircase! Same holds for old dogs.
The rest of the poem is about rebirth out of fear, but not just rebirth, but “living large”, filling up the screen. We had just viewed a a documentary that was very powerful, where the director took advantage of the pregnant gaps in the dialogue to focus in on faces. In this poem I am picturing the face of the person the poem is about becoming the whole story. So, in my mind, the poem becomes a documentary.
Pen carcasses, toothbrushes without bristles . . .
Some plastic turns brittle like eggshell
As if waiting for any kind of human contact to disintegrate.
There are spoons and forks from take-out,
And straws that seem designed to last forever.
(Let me dwell on straws for just a minute.
Almost weightless, they roll and float with ease,
Putting up no resistance, allowing
The sea to flow through, as if sipping eternity)
Bottle caps are close runner-ups
For riding out the Apocalypse.
Their work of sealing long forgotten
They seem to be enjoying their retirement,
Contributing points of unnatural color to the beach:
Primary colors and black and white.
It does not escape me that my bucket is made of plastic
As is my bathing suit and T-shirt.
And my shoes and my socks and my crown
Which is a composite of ceramic and plastic
And my hearing aids.
I started out contemptuous of those of us who litter
But I ended up feeling like I was in a haiku:
I choose to pick trash
From the beach without judgment,
My crown of plastic.
………….
This poem plays on the double meaning of crown as a cap of a damaged tooth and the imagined plastic crown of my pseudo superiority to the trash I am picking from the seaweed from my favorite beach. Sure, I am privileged to be able to spend time in Florida and visit my favorite beaches. And I am literally from a “land far away” from this giant conservative paradise. I truly see myself as something of a foreigner down here in this politically backwards state where I obviously don’t belong. My closest friend is a banyan tree that I visit every few days and open my heart to. I’m sure there are plenty of nice people in Florida who would like and accept me as I am, but my wife and I are happy just hanging out together at the beach, our choice being the one at John D. MacArthur State Park that you have to cross an estuary to access. The park provides buckets and litter nabbers for anyone who wants to clean up the junk that seems to be getting worse each year. My plastic crown is my pseudo immunity from being counted among those low-lifes who trash the ocean. Sure, I sort and recycle and I like to think that the amount of junk that we contribute to the landfill is minimal compared to what the average person is throwing out. (Americans throw out 4.9 pounds of trash per person every day — that’s nearly 1,800 pounds of materials per American every year. Our contribution is probably a third of this, but that is bad enough.) The thing is, although there are no statistics, my guess is that when there is even a slightly higher surge in the tides (not talking storms here, just an abnormally large surf and an onshore prevailing wind), the saltwater finds stuff that even slobs wouldn’t leave behind when they pack up their beach chairs and roll up their towels to evacuate their outposts in the sun. (Also there are those who toss litter off boats for turtles and fish and dolphins to sample — may they rot in the hottest circle of Hell.) My point is, I think most of the litter that winds up in the sea and in the seaweed is coming from a new source — hedges and dunes that used to be high and dry, beyond the pale of the surge. Florida is basically a big reef. The highest elevation in FL is 300 feet, a couple of miles from Alabama but most of the state is just a few feet above sea level. When the seas really start to rise within the next decade, there is going to be a lot of litter on the beaches. I sadly predict that at some point even people like me won’t see the point. So, how about you? Are you wearing a plastic crown?
Five or so wars ago I almost lost you To a great war, my father. (That would be my soul talking) Five wars from now I might be gone, We all might, but who’s counting? (Who’s even listening?)
2 A hundred wars ago
A hundred wars ago, god said, “This can’t go on, this is crazy.” Every hundred wars He says that. But a hundred thousand wars ago He wasn’t alone. Nature was also asking. Nature was grumbling. The underwater mountains grew angry. The sea sent up waves of protest That reached almost to the heavens. Barnacles began to grow on god’s toes. God said, “Don’t look at me I’m just the Grounds Keeper.” Mountains said, “Yeah, right! What happened? This used to be a nice neighborhood!” (Mountains have no short-term memory.)
3 God said
God said: “In the beginning There was no war. An alien showed up and planted his seed. I didn’t think it was a good idea, But he had a big ship. And he was all-powerful. He said, ‘Do you want a piece of me?’ I said (god said), ‘I don’t want no trouble.’ But he (the alien) read my thoughts which were: ‘How many planets Has this a**hole fathered?’ The alien said, ‘Legion’. (The alien said:) ‘Humans are here to stay. Make the best of it. Take credit if you want. I don’t give a sh*t. I have no feelings, no conscience, no plan.’ And then (continued god) he disappeared. But he left his calling card Floating on my prize creation, the sea. It simply said “War Inc.”
4 God was quiet
God was quiet. The mountains were quiet for a thousand wars, And then they said “Oh”, and then they were silent again. They have been silent ever since.
…………..
I’m making a funny story up but the point I am trying to make is . . . Something must have happened way-back-when, to the world that made it not safe. Something broke or cracked or went haywire with “the plan”. I’m not a religious person, otherwise, if I was a Christian, I think I would have been a monk. No, I know I would have! Because I would have had to commune, to the best of my ability, with God, and ask what the hell (He, She, It), had or has in mind. Let me cut to the chase. I realize there are religious explanations for why evil is a constant contender for the soul of “Man”. But religions are great stories told by human beings. The human beings who told the stories are / were extraordinary human beings, but if religions can be written down, then they morph into stories, and whatever Spirit inspired them is no longer in them.
No, I am not religious, but I am spiritual, which means I try to stay with Spirit, and the way I do that is, for example, to focus on the life or the being of a “tree”, or the living-spirit of a place, or of the “ocean”. If you get lost in the story, or the language, imagining that language is “the thing itself” then you are objectifying the beingness of everything, essentially “killing” it by denying its beingness. Humans have not always done this! They haven’t always been anti-creative, or “killers” of the Dream time.
My brother sent me an article about who the Neanderthals were. Neaderthals disappeared 40-50,000 years ago, but they didn’t disappear without a trace. Apparently Homo sapiens absorbed Neanderthals, who were a different species of human. Neanderthals were, for a time, sharing the planet with Homo sapiens. They were very different. In fact, to my way of thinking, they were more human than Homo sapiens. They were more creative and more individualistic in their approach to living . . . this was reflected in how they crafted tools (and other objects). Here is what I gleaned from this article before I include the link:
This article suggests that the Neanderthals (who disappeared 40 – 50,000 years ago) but, whose DNA was absorbed into the DNA pool of Homo sapiens) were primarily creative. Homo sapiens (we) were more competitive and efficient than the Neanderthals, by nature, not “evil” so much as, well, what the name suggests – “the same”, all the same, whereas the Neanderthals valued individuality and individual expression. The article also suggests. . .at least to me, that our (Homo sapiens) proclivity to value sameness is what makes us project sameness on the world and Nature, which explains why we see everything as a type instead of seeing everything as unique, and, by extension, therefore “alive”. This article offers an objective lens through which we might peer into our original nature — and it’s not pretty!
So, I hope you enjoy my little story about how an alien introduced the seed of war into Creation, and tempted god to take credit for his handiwork. The alien just wanted to father war-like worlds because he was a sociopathic asshole.
The first stanza is asking, “Are you ready, and are you with me?” Because once we make contact, (mind to mind or heart to heart), we can jump together “from mind to mind”. The working pronoun in this stanza is “we”, you and me. The poem’s voice asks you to join me. Here, minds are like steppingstones.
2 Stages of mental development
Principles that mirror
Immersed in self-experience
The second and third lines are saying the same thing, except now the stepping stones (of minds) are stages of mental development. No matter how we develop mentally we are stuck in the existential prison of the self. . . until we aren’t! This fits the earliest roots of the word “mind” as memory = thoughts that “revolve around the mind”. If we put these two stanzas together, what is being described here is an outward journey (from mind to mind) that is also an inward revolving of memory, which connotes reflection, so, an inward journey. We might expect both introverted and extraverted movement: progression and introgression or regression.
3 Friendly little mountain
That is how it looks
An image brightened in her mind
Working backwards from the third line in this stanza, the mountain comes up as a light-bringing image in “her mind”. It is a transcendent image, a healing image.
4 Moss growing on things
Wind blew through the enclosure
Powers and patterns
The “friendly little mountain” is only an image in stanza three, something to look at or contemplate. In stanza four we might imagine ourselves on the mountain. Since the mountain has come up, that must be where the moss is growing and the wind is blowing. The “wind blowing through the enclosure” sounds like a ruin of some sort in nature, moss-covered, perhaps where we / she is sheltering from the wind. The last line in the stanza is telling us that underneath the manifest reality (the mossy mountain-scape and the enclosure) there is an energetic, archetypal flux of endless potential (powers and patterns). (For me, this conjures Donovan’s lyrics, “First there is a mountain / Then there is no mountain / Then there is.” I think Donovan was singing about this conundrum of human consciousness: If I see a mountain (out there), is it really there, or is it just in my mind, i.e, an archetypal image of a mountain?
5 The hole in the drum
Above my pay grade
Once we make contact
The hole in the drum is a problem. A drum with a hole in it loses its ability to resonate and amplify. If a Native American or African drum, you might say it loses its power and its spirit is compromised, its ability to connect us with the sacred. “Above my pay grade” means something like, I am not qualified to fix it. So I live with it, taking it in as a zen-like riddle or koan. Nevertheless we are making contact, we are . . .
6 Heading toward the molten core
Where they might have moved it
Sensory deprivation chamber
. . . getting closer to the core. “The molten core” makes me think of the core of the planet. I can’t think of anything else that has a molten core. The idea of a drum as a chamber that contains and amplifies a beat, has metamorphosed into a “sensory deprivation chamber”. The idea here might be that we may not be able to repair the drum but we can seal our own inner space. In this stanza we are heading for the core, our inner core.
7 As debris flies in arcs
After a couple of years
Crossed elevated walkways
Stanza seven continues without pause “As debris flies in an arc”. What occurs to me is, this line is a visual of the aftermath of an explosion, without the sound, which is consistent with the “sensory deprivation chamber”. If we are remembering a violent blast that we might have witnessed or survived in the past, we might keep remembering it, but would we relive the shock wave and the percussion of the explosion? Perhaps not. So, there is the hole in the drum. There is no percussion in our chamber of traumatic memory, and perhaps other elements of the event are missing.
8 I’ve traveled so far
What do you mean?
Reality filled her body
The statement “I’ve traveled so far”, is questioned by a female voice, Perhaps it is the voice of the same woman whose mind was “brightened by the image” of the “friendly little mountain” in stanza two. Now her body is “filled with reality”. She is being enlightened or she is being transformed, but the transformation is somatic as opposed to esoteric. Or the question, “What do you mean?” might be the poem’s way of getting us to reflect on the meaning of “traveled so far”. There is the mute explosion followed by the passage of years, and the crossing of elevated walkways, which I picture as walkways skirting hazards. In other words the muted explosion is some violence that was survived. It happened in the past and it happened far away.
9 Runes were bought on-line
Thoughts would differ in Spanish
She touched the dint
“Runes were bought online” implies that there is something artificial about this process. Runes are an alphabet used by an ancient Germanic people almost two thousand years ago. often associated with divination. The mention of Spanish for me negates the possibility that something profound is happening with this woman. (For this interpretation I am remarking on the leap from runes (which hover, for me, outside of European or Western history) to Spanish. a modern / European language. Runes suggest divination whereas Spanish, in this context, connotes a shallowing of thoughts.) With “she touches the dint” I am back to recalling the koan of the hole in the drum.
10 But it quickly reemerged
Broken into two parts
Still a conspicuous absence
Whatever it is that is damaged, whether it is a drum or something else, now it is clearly broken and in two parts. With the line “still a conspicuous absence” I think of the drum and the sensory deprivation chamber and how the spirit of the drum is absent in a damaged drum and, in the sensory deprivation chamber, our senses are absent or missing, as in not hearing the sound of the explosion (first line, stanza 7) that sends debris flying.
11 Deranged from incarnation
Restaurant menus appear
But that doesn’t really matter
I think the “deranged” incarnation refers, not to the woman, but to something that is in the process of manifesting or being embodied and the process of creation or embodiment isn’t going well; it is disheveled or incomplete, a hybrid. The menus that appear don’t “really matter” because the creation is incomplete. There is nothing to feed yet.
12 A long way very quickly
I knew the story already
We began in the ruins
“We began in the ruins” sounds to me like “we began with the runes”. So, we are back in the ruins, and we are back to reading the runes, which reveal something about our journey, something that we needed to know or understand in order to mend our drum. With this stanza, the process of (manifestation, birth?) is quickened. This echoes the first line in stanza 8, “I’ve traveled so are”. “So far” could refer to the long distance equated with many lives that have led to this incarnation, recalling both the stepping stones of mind to mind and the stages of development associated with reincarnation. And we are back to the thought that the self is an inescapable mirror — until it isn’t! Some people are blessed with being able to recall their previous lives or the journey of their incarnations, and it might be said that those people knew or know the story (their story). The line, ”we began in the ruins” for me implies that when we began, however long ago, the ruins were not ruins but places full of life, in the present tense. (And the runes (in the ruins) were not “bought on line”. In other words, we started when our incarnations started. For those of us who recall or are able to relive our previous incarnations, we might step into a ruin and it comes to life for us. (This happened to me in Ireland when we were spending time in a 5th century ruin of a monastery. I found myself in a split reality where I could hear the voices of the monks and was aware of the “shades” of monks going about their duties. (Was I once one of these monks in a previous life?)
13 Forms of spiritual communications
Into a single network
A juvenile saved his life
Stanza 13 (lines one and two) introduces the notion of a confluence or coming together of spiritual communications, not the Internet (a network of networks in which users at any one computer can [with password clearance] get / share information from other computers or directly with other users at other computers), but a spiritual interconnection independent of technology. The last line of stanza 13 and all of stanza 14, although funny, pick up on the last line of stanza nine “She touched the dint” , stanza 10 and the first line in stanza 11: the dint she touched “quickly reemerged” (meaning it just needed that healing touch to manifest or embody, but it is not one thing. Its incarnation is a concretion of two parts, “deranged”).
14 Dressed up as a dolphin
With one arm in plaster
With the help of a druid
. . . But “deranged” or not, it is a savior. It is young, “juvenile”, part dolphin, a hybrid savior, injured (broken) but healing (becoming whole) ”with the help of a druid”.
15 The theme of the oneness
Womb of any living creature
The revelation of truth
“The theme of the oneness” carries forward the image of the single network or streaming together of spiritual communications. From the “womb of any living creature” is a way of saying that all of life is pooling its generative power for the “revelation of truth”. In these three lines there is “the theme of oneness”, the womb of all Life, and the revelation of truth, a confluence of sorts.
16 An enormous room is packed
300 years on the cold water
After the day of rest
What this revelation is, is apparently on the order of a new or renewed Creation. There is “an enormous room that is packed”, which to me is an analog of the womb that is ripe to deliver the new (whole? healed?) creation. The last two lines are not linear, but neither is most of this poem. As with all sand-blasted poems, each stanza is fractal and unless the poet intervenes by forcing a linear ending, the poem must end fractally. In this case, the second to last line seems out of place. But, let us consider, not just the Christian Creation story but many creation stories start with the spirit of the new creation moving on the cold, dark waters of chaos, which is an image of the world before creation, whereas the last line seems to be describing the day after creation, a “day of rest”. In the end, this poem reads as prophetic. This might just be me, but I think we are currently passing through those “300 years on the cold water”.
………………
Poet’s note: If you dive into this, remember that everyone’s interpretation could be different . . . but I submit that most interpretations would be different and the same. And some might be more informed than others, while weaker translations might be missing something important. It is the same with dream interpretation except with dream interpretation, due to the archetypal underpinning, there is a little less wiggle room.
What is a “sand-blasted” poem? The fragments of this genre of poem are randomly lifted from books randomly pulled from my library, with certain lines repeated. I see the underpinning metaphors as archetypal patterns which loosely structure the interweaving narratives. If one of the narratives took over, it would become a linear or conventional poem and the multidimensionality of it would be forfeited. Also the synchronistic factor, which is strong in sand-blasted poems, would be diminished.
In recent years I have been trying to break down the partition between poetry as a written art form of metaphorical expression and those who read and love poetry. I know that I am not the easiest poet to read. Just know that I have spent countless hours pondering what makes a poem “good” and worth reading or just an obscure artifact of someone’s confusion.
When I read a poem by W.S Merwin (1927 – 2019) I often find myself scratching my head. He seems to be in a different universe: The poem “A Sickness at the Equinox” is as good an example as any.
(Second stanza:)
I sat in late sunlight hoping to be healed / shadows of leaves slip along me / crossing my face my chest / toward the east
(Third stanza:)
to each of them / in turn I say Take / it with you / take with you
(Fourth stanza:)
leaf shape / little shadow / darkness of one leaf / where you are going /a brother or sister / you were afraid was lost for good
(Fifth stanza:)
a mother a father / a lover / a child / from under there
In the second stanza he must be facing the east. He is sitting. But in the third stanza I don’t know what “it” refers to, so how can I understand the rest of the poem? But now he is addressing “you” who I take to be me.
He is saying take with you the leaf shadow. Take it with you “where you are going”. Is the leaf shadow a vestige of a brother or a sister you thought you had “lost”? (To death? To distance?).
He is saying, Don’t see the shadow of the leaf as a shadow of the leaf but as a shadow cast by someone familiar, and perhaps loved, who cannot be physically present, and he adds to the list of who that might be, to include a mother, father, lover, a child . . . that pretty much covers the whole nuclear family, plus a lover. Gone.
But you were only “afraid” they were lost for good. So they may not be lost for good. Take the shadows of this nuclear family and the shadow of a lover “where you are going”. Wherever that is — he doesn’t say.
The last line drops a little more information, that these loved ones whom you thought were lost are “from under there”.”-Now, let’s consider the title: “A sickness at the Equinox.” Equinox is when “the sun crosses the equator and day and night are everywhere on earth of approximately equal length.” So you might say it is when dark and light, the passage of time itself, are at a still point but also a tipping point. He is at a tipping point in his life and so is the world, so we are sharing this still point, this tipping point, with him by reading his poem.
In the first line of the first stanza, he lets us know it is September. And, if we leave out his description of the yellowing and fading of the late summer flowers, he is saying “September yellows . . . as when I was born / and the days before”. The “days before” is the poet’s acknowledgement that there have always been Septembers and Equinoxes and tipping points when death is close and life could easily slip away. So, within this setting he “sat in the sunlight hoping to be healed”.
He wrote this around 1973 – that is when the book was published -“-so obviously he was healed because he lived for 46 more years. But when we are seriously sick and depressed we might reflect on our mortality (I know I do) and if summer is officially over, sometimes it might feel like we’re on the way out, and we might even contemplate what it would be like to pass, to die, to be laid to rest, perhaps to be reunited with those we lost and love.
As he sits in the old light, caressed by the shadows of leaves, he might side with the shadows of the leaves, imagining them to be the “shades” of the deceased. (A shade (Gk, AKIA, Latin, umbra = a spirit from the underworld.) But now that I get the picture, that he is contemplating death, I started asking myself, is it possible that anyone could lose everyone in their family to death except in the worst of catastrophes such as in Ukraine or Gaza, or natural disasters such as the fire that burned Lahaina, Hawaii to the ground. I read over the second to last stanza and I see that the leaf shadow that he is inviting “you” / me, us to take with us, where we are going, might be any one of those we might have “thought we lost”, i.e., a brother, sister, mother, father, lover, child. . .not all of them. If he dies he will see again the one he thought he lost. That is the consolation of this poem. Not an easy poem.
Merwin’s poems are like onions. My interpretation is just one layer. I contend that for what he wanted to say, he could not have written this poem any differently. And, judging by his fame, this is understood by people who love and depend on poetry. They know that he is not being needlessly abstruse. They trust him.
Alongside the tracks What would he be wearing? Last piece of the great puzzle
I found it on the road His hands were red We painted them white
Road signs are in English I regained my balance Made the kill
New things can emerge and grow Make my own conversions The firefly accepts its life
Turned toward the window The true ordinary mind Any new invention
Was not worth it, she said If i passed i’d advance Our hands were red
We painted them white How did this happen? Where did they go?
We passed the fruits around The next gust of wind It’s that simple
Aesthetics of the art Just a glint in the dark During the famine
After reading the comics The true ordinary mind Put them into an envelope
The bed was empty Tiny footprints in the ash Where did they go?
Our relationship to fire What happened to your bow? It is that simple
Every night in the barracks He worried about his father She remembered to write
Ancient stars in our eyes The fire pits of Neandrathals The firefly accepts its life
She tossed the rope down Come on over The way she was dancing
We were looking at the stars A lone coyote in the hills The firefly accepts its life
Make my own conversions The last bag of sugar The dream shadow of impermanence
Hot casseroles out of ovens Standing in line at the movies But is power listening?
Let’s say that I was there We used to dream of home Figures moving behind curtains
Climbed into the nkhaze tree The burning down of his house We were from the same city
He said he was fine That’s a nice scarf That is what she would do
Tiny machines on the table Never go out there again Something about strawberries
Wood smoke, oranges or rain What happened to your smile? Stack of dead batteries
A firefly accepts its life The light illuminated everything Laughing at something
Handful of oil executives There was no other building She remembered the candy
People started blaming magic While I weeded the fields She called her dog Lotus
The light illuminated everything Climbed into the nkhaze tree This tiny expression of gentleness
She would meander guilelessly She sat down in the front section Our back against the wood
The cricket’s rhythm beats I get all the birds you kill Blacked out by censors
Virtually nothing left to lose Galvanized by repression For most people it happens
A gap, a crack of space What if he goes far away That rock becomes our teacher
Last piece to the great puzzle We received your letter Between me and the hills
Tiny sentient seed beings Now the wind above the rooftops This made me laugh
In front of the bathroom mirror What needs to be destroyed In our delirium
That rock becomes our teacher The light illuminated everything Climbed into the nkhaze tree
For those who want to deep-dive into “The last piece (a kind of New Years poem)”, here is my stanza by stanza interpretation. This is a sand-blasted poem meaning it did not come from me exclusively. I have explained my process for writing sand-blasted poetry is to pick fragments of sentences from books in my library which I then Ilst and shuffle and then arrange into stanzas which I do not mess with except to juxtapose certain themes and repeat certain lines to serve as echoes. So, my interpretation is only one interpretation. It is like interpreting a dream. When a dream is interpreted by, say, four people, the interpretations will most likely be similar but not identical. I have a dream group where, after listening to the dream as a group, we take turns “borrowing” the dream to walk through it as if it was our dream. When we share our own versions of the original dream, we wind up with different stories because different things stand out for each of us. You may agree with my interpretation or you may take it in a different direction.
The last piece ( a kind of New Years poem)
Stanzas 1 and 2:
1
Alongside the tracks
What would he be wearing?
Last piece of the great puzzle
2
I found it on the road
His hands were red
We painted them white
Tracks represent one-track, linear thinking or the linear mindset. This mindset might be good at problem solving but the “puzzle” that needs solving these days requires a non-linear mindset. So what would “he” be wearing, the one who walks the tracks?. The question is rhetorical. It is an invitation into a poem that is written like a nonlinear puzzle. The poet, who may or may not be the one who walks “alongside the tracks” is saying he found the “last piece” of the great puzzle on the road. His “hands were red” implies that “he”, perhaps the one walking the tracks, was involved in a violent act. We “painted them white” means we are covering the evidence. White = a pass, a cover-up, whitewashing.
Stanzas 3 and 4:
3
Road signs are in English
I regained my balance
Made the kill
4
New things can emerge and grow
Make my own conversions
The firefly accepts its life
“Road signs are in English” means this reality is mono-cultural. The poet regains his balance (within this culture) by “making the kill”. Kill echoes the violent red hands in the second stanza of the man following the tracks but the inference is, this “kill” is not a red-handed kill but a balanced kill, perhaps of an animal, for food. Now that balance is restored, “new things can emerge”. The poet can make his “own conversions”. Conversion = the process of changing or causing something to change from one form to another. Perhaps this means converting to a nonlinear, more balanced way or reality. The last line of stanza 4, “the firefly accepts its life” is a line that is repeated several times throughout the poem. The firefly is a creature of light. Light = consciousness. The firefly is the, let’s say, the avatar, of the poet. The firefly represents the poet. The poet is autonomous. The poet brings light.
Stanzas 5 and 6:
5
Turned toward the window
The true ordinary mind
Any new invention
6
Was not worth it, she said
If i passed I’d advance
Our hands were red
The “true ordinary mind” turned toward the window, is inside, meaning it occupies a limited psychic space. It might be inventive, but whatever it invents is not what is needed, It is or was “not worth it”. (For example, is the invention of electric cars going to alleviate or mitigate the effects of climate change?) “She” is the one who is not stuck in the linear mindset or mono-culture. “If I passed I’d advance” expresses the linear, Darwinian mindset, that hard work and pulling one’s weight and striving to advance in one’s job or career is a worthy ethic, but “our hands are red”. It is this thinking,linear, Darwinain thinking that throws us off balance, and results in red-handed violence.
Stanzas 7 and 8:
7
We painted them white
How did this happen?
Where did they go?
8
We passed the fruits around
The next gust of wind
It’s that simple
“We painted them white” = we lived as if “passing” and “advancing” was the whole point of life, but, it was a violent way of life. There were casualties. Maybe cultures were wiped out, maybe animals went extinct or suffered. We painted our hands white = we covered up. The question is asked, “How did this happen?” In other words, How was this allowed to happen? “We passed the fruits around” is saying, we, with the white-painted hands, passed the fruits around to our own. But now the wind is moving, gusting. “It’s that simple”. The wind is the quickening non-human spirit of Nature. It moves around us and with or without us. It can move us or remove us, it reflects the eternal moods of Nature. It’s “simple” in the way that the elements of Nature are uncomplicated, unaffected or uninfluenced by the “aesthetics of art”.
Stanzas 9 and 10:
9
Aesthetics of the art
Just a glint in the dark
During the famine
10
After reading the comics
The true ordinary mind
Put them into an envelope
We, on the other hand, we, in our ordinary minds, might read a comic while there is a famine, somewhere. Often we read about a famine or a war somewhere in the world, but as long as we aren’t in crisis ourselves, we read the newspaper, we read the comics, we go about our lives without much consciousness, “just a glint in the dark”. What is the “true ordinary mind” / “putting in the envelope”? The idea here is that the ordinary mind files things away. Out of sight out of mind.
Stanzas 11 and 12:
11
The bed was empty
Tiny footprints in the ash
Where did they go?
12
Our relationship to fire
What happened to your bow?
It is that simple
The bed is empty. Who isn’t there? The “Tiny footprints in the ash remind me of a Native American custom I read about, of burning everything that the deceased left behind so that the spirit has nothing to hold it back from crossing. After the flames have consumed everything, maybe the next morning, the ashes are inspected. If there are no footprints in the ashes, it is safe to assume the soul has moved on. But in this stanza “where did they go?” refers to those who lived here before us. Or where did our ancestors go, and the knowledge of how to live in balance, how to work with fire, how to make the kill? The poem is saying, there was a time when things were simpler and we knew these things.
Stanzas 13 and 14:
13
Every night in the barracks
He worried about his father
She remembered to write
14
Ancient stars in our eyes
The fire pits of Neandrathals
The firefly accepts its life
Now who I’ve been calling the poet (protagonist, subject) is in a barracks, a building or group of buildings used to house laborers, prisoners or soldiers in austere conditions. A barracks would be the opposite of “home”. He is worried about his father. To me this means that “the father”, or the loving, caring, perhaps protective father or a caring father-figure, is missing. But “she”, perhaps a lover, a sister or his mother, remembers to write. Stanza 14 jumps to the image of “ancient stars in our eyes”. This image begins to answer “where did they go?”, or where did our ancient knowledge go? (how to live in balance). There are “ancient stars in our eyes”. The father, the protagonist’s father, is weak or sick, but the protagonist / poet is connected to the woman (who remembers to write) and to the “ancient stars”. And to the fire pits of the Neadrathals, an extinct species of human that lived in ice-age Europe between c. 120,000 – 35,000 years ago. They stand-in for what we picture as true “cavemen”. They hunted megafauna like the mastodon and the sabertooth tiger and giant sloth using stone-weapons. We imagine them as being everything that we are not – self-sufficient, merged with nature, suited in every way to survive in a menacing and harsh environment where one mistake or misstep might mean death, but they lived in exquisite balance with the elements. Here again is the line “The firefly accepts its life”. Maybe the firefly is the “glint in the dark” of stanza 9. But it is also (quoting the interpretation for stanza 4) “a creature of light”. Light = consciousness. Again, the firefly is the avatar, of the poet. The firefly represents the poet as an autonomous bringer of light.
Stanzas 15 and 16:
15
She tossed the rope down
Come on over
The way she was dancing
16
We were looking at the stars
A lone coyote in the hills
The firefly accepts its life
Now the woman (the feminine), is the rescuer, the one with the life-line. She tosses the rope “down” and invites the protagonist / poet to “come on over”. In the third line of stanza 15 she is dancing, and maybe the poet is dancing with her. “We are looking at the stars”. The lone coyote in the hills is ambiguous. For me it underscores how, even though the protagonist is dancing with the woman, he remains alone or autonomous. He is still the firefly.
Stanzas 17 and 18:
17
Make my own conversions
The last bag of sugar
The dream shadow of impermanence
18
Hot casseroles out of ovens
Standing in line at the movies
But is power listening?
In the first line of 17 he even says, “I make my own conversions. The last bag of sugar means there is no more sweetness left in the world. In the book Iron and Silk (Salzman) the protagonist is advised by his sensei to learn to “taste bitter” or he won’t progress to the next level. I think this helps explain some of the meaning here. There is a lot of bitter in the world and the protagonist would do well to taste it, assimilate it, not sugar-coat it. The “dream shadow of impermanence” is a fascinating phrase to me. The shadow of impermanence would be the projection or illusion of permanence, just as the shadow of sweet would be bitter. “Hot casseroles out of the oven” in a world that is so out of balance is suspect for me, surreal. The next line confirms this suspicion. We are “standing in line at the movies”. Maybe we are waiting to see “Hunger Games”. The last line of stanza 18 asks: “But is power listening?” I think that the answer to that is obvious: No.
Stanzas 19 and 20:
19
Let’s say that I was there
We used to dream of home
Figures moving behind curtains
20
Climbed into the nkhaze tree
The burning down of his house
We were from the same city
The poem takes a personal turn, but the adverb includes all of us: “We used to dream of home”. If we read between the lines, the question is implicit. Why don’t we dream of home anymore. Why is it just “figures moving behind curtains”? Now the other line that is repeated comes up: “Climbed into the nkhase tree”. I couldn’t find out anything about the (African) Nkhaze tree except that it has thick, thorny branches and its sap can be harmful to the eyes. So we might see it as protective of the one who is sitting in it. Maybe the protagonist is climbing it because he is escaping danger. His house is burning down. The line “we were from the same city” signals another jump, the way a dream jumps to another scene, unless “we” refers to another person who is in the safe space of the Nkhaze tree.
Stanzas 21 and 22:
21
He said he was fine
That’s a nice scarf
That is what she would do
22
Tiny machines on the table
Never go out there again
Something about strawberries
The conversation is light: “He said he was fine.” Someone says, “That’s a nice scarf”. For me I am back to the first stanza: “What would he be wearing?” referring the man “alongside the tracks”, the one with the red hands. (Is he the alter ego of the protagonist? Personally I want to know if the white paint that we painted his red hands with has worn off yet.) I am thinking that (stanza 2 and 3:) the “Last piece of the great puzzle / I found it on the road” is not the answer to What was the man alongside the tracks wearing?, but, rather, the last piece of the puzzle is this whole poem which seems to be composed of fractals, and really the whole poem is fractal. (It doesn’t have to end; it could be infinite.) Line 3, stanza 21, “that is what she would do”. I want to know Whatis what she would do? There are “tiny machines on the table”. Are those our indispensable devices, our phones, our laptops, our computers? “Never go out there again” underscores how the world “out there” is a dangerous place. Nowhere is safe except maybe in the Nkhaze tree. “Something about strawberries” seems to be the first word in a list of what is “out there”:
Stanzas 23 and 24:
23
Wood smoke, oranges or rain
What happened to your smile?
Stack of dead batteries
24
A firefly accepts its life
The light illuminated everything
Laughing at something
. . .”wood smoke, oranges, rain.” The question: “What happened to your smile” fits with the idea that the world is bitter and dangerous, too dangerous to go out. (Maybe the strawberries and oranges are Round-up ready and laced with glyphosate.) But the danger is creeping into our space. If our batteries are dead, then we lose power, the internet goes down. Where do we find our balance, or grounding? Now the line “A firefly accepts its life” is repeated. But now the little glint of the fireflies light is magnified to illuminate everything. With the expansion of the firefly’s light there is a return to “lightness”. We can laugh at something.
Stanza 25 and 26:
25
Handful of oil executives
There was no other building
She remembered the candy
26
People started blaming magic
While I weeded the fields
She called her dog Lotus
. . .And what we are laughing at is a “handful of oil executives. “There was no other building” means, there is no mistaking it – We’ve got them where we want them, to laugh at, to mock, to find guilty. The woman “remembers the candy”. She remembers the sweetness, now that we can laugh. I picture us dancing, with the stars in our eyes, knowing how to taste bitter and taste sweet. But “people” started “blaming magic” points to a problem. The protagonist and the woman are making their own conversions (possibily into light beings), but “people” are still in the dark, “blaming magic”, while I “weeded the fields”. “Weeding” = clearing space for food-plants to grow. I love the line: “ She called her dog Lotus”. Lotus = strength, resilience and rebirth. The luminus lotus grows out of the black silt.
Stanzas 27 and 28:
27
The light illuminated everything
Climbed into the nkhaze tree
This tiny expression of gentleness
28
She would meander guilelessly
She sat down in the front section
Our back against the wood
Now everything is illuminated. We are back in the Nkhaze tree, which is thorny and poisonous but not to the one it is protecting. To whom it is protecting, it is gentle. Now, for her (whoever “she” is, the anima?) the world is a life-affirming place were she can “meander guilelessly”. Let’s say she winds up at a theater, i.e., in the “front section”. Is it a movie theater? A dance theater? A musical theater? The protagonist is with her, “our back to the wood”. I think this means, the woods has our back.
Stanzas 29 and 30:
29
The cricket’s rhythm beats
I get all the birds you kill
Blacked out by censors
30
Virtually nothing left to lose
Galvanized by repression
For most people it happens
“The cricket’s rhythm beats” is a reference to the pulsing rhythm of insects at dusk in the country. The insects sing, sometimes loudly when “all is well”. If there is a disturbance or a loud sound, they grow silent. But the poem makes an ominous curve here, with the statement: “I get all the birds you kill”. When the protagonist said, “I make the kill” in the beginning of the poem, that was interpreted as a return to the balanced old ways of our ancestors, but this kill of the birds doesn’t sound balanced. This is followed by “Blacked out by censors” and “nothing left to lose” and “galvanized by repression”. These lines signify a dramatic down-turn. The line: “For most people it happens”. I think this means that the poem wants us to remember that even though the protagonist is shining his light and that this light is magnified and there is a feminine character with whom he shares it and with whom he is able to lighten-up, for “most people”. . .
Stanzas 31 and 32:
31
A gap, a crack of space
What if he goes far away
That rock becomes our teacher
32
Last piece to the great puzzle
We received your letter
Between me and the hills
. . .there is a “gap, a crack of space”. The poem asks, what if “he”, the protagonists goes “far away”? Then “that rock becomes our teacher”. We are almost at the end of the poem now, and the “last piece of the puzzle” is mentioned again. This time the last piece is associated with having “received your letter”. Is this the letter from the woman “who remembers to write” to the man in the barracks who is “worried about his father”? The last line of stanza 32 seems to anticipate the first line in stanza 33.
Stanza 33 and 34:
33
Tiny sentient seed beings
Now the wind above the rooftops
This made me laugh
34
In front of the bathroom mirror
What needs to be destroyed
In our delirium
This is my favorite stanza in the poem. “Tiny sentient seed beings” blowing in the “wind above the rooftops / made me laugh”. And it would seem that the protagonist is laughing “in the bathroom mirror” to or at himself. He is shining his light on himself. He is “seeing himself” and likes what he sees. He accepts what he sees. “What needs to be destroyed” when one is seeing oneself, truly seeing oneself, in the mirror could be referring to our false selves, maybe our alter egos need to be destroyed..
Last stanza:
35
That rock becomes our teacher
The light illuminated everything
Climbed into the nkhaze tree
This stanza is composed of three repeated lines and for me all three are luminous: “That rock becomes our teacher.” This means, nature becomes our teacher, but the rock is one of the oldest beings, our oldest ancestors, so its wisdom hearkens back to the beginning of time. “The light illuminated everything”: The light is spreading indiscriminately to the world. Now it isn’t just the light of the firefly-poet, but the light that illuminates the “delirium” of the tiny light of the poet-protagonist. “Climbed into the nkhaze tree.” In the Nkhaze tree, we can find sanctuary. We are safe. I suggested that this (or any) sand-blasted poem is fractal and could be infinite. By grouping three repeated lines together for the final stanza I am artificially ending it. That is the only stanza where all three lines are there by intention.
What are we guarding? Frozen on the salt flats Purple or blackish seeds
Then the lights shifted Silence. Juniper green. Cannot be coincidence
Handful of stones I’ll never forget the telegram Flocks of magpies
Gradually increase speed We’re going to be late Removing glass from her hair
Purple or blackish seeds Plastic tubing to untangle Dandelion-like
Same floor different room Stroking her hair Bind the feathers
With starlike pattern Squeak among the rocks Old clear-cut areas
She handed me a present We walk single file Mimi talked about mother
What are we guarding? Frozen on the salt flats Purple or blackish seeds
Then the lights shifted
………………………….
Note: This is a sand-blasted poem meaning that the fragments that comprise the stanzas were randomly selected, in this case from two books.
First and second stanza:
The first line is a question: “What are we guarding?” The setting is stripped down to a salt flat so there are no distractions, hinting that everything in this poem is important to the poem. We are “guarding seeds”. Salt is a preserver as is freezing. Then the lights shift, signaling a shift in perception / consciousness, a shift in orientation. No sound. (Line 5) Green = life. Juniper represents strength, longevity; juniper is a survivor in harsh, often arid climates. The poem says, this “cannot be coincidence”. In other words, this is not random. We are on a journey with this poem.
Third and fourth stanza:
“Handful of stones”. This is a minimalist image of hands holding small stones, which carry forward the idea of the seeds we are guarding. (Small stones, seeds ofMother Earth.) “I’ll never forget the telegram” underscores that something important is happening or happened. The magpies increasing speed is a sign or augur. “We’re going to be late”, makes me think of Alice in Wonderland”, where Alice is following the White Rabbit, her unwitting guide through the Dreamtime of her quest, who is always checking his watch. “Removing glass from her hair” is an ambiguous image. With the destruction of Gaza on our radar, is this a little girl pulled from the rubble? Is she alive or dead? Or is she an adult or an old woman?
Fifth and sixth stanza:
Now we are back to the seeds that we have been “guarding”. The implication is, maybe we have failed to protect the seeds – the seeds of life. The tangled plastic tubing evokes the tubing in a bombed-out hospital and the line after that compares the tangled plastic tubing to the “tubes” of dandelion stems, which are hollow exactly like tubes. “Same floor different room”, the line of the title, is conveying that the tangled tubing of the bombed-out hospital and the tangled stems of dandelions are sharing the same reality, the same “floor”. They are just in different rooms, which a Jungian would understand to be different psychic spaces but sharing the same psychic structure or overarching reality. In other words, the destruction of the hypothetical hospital is the same “hospital” where a wounded nature is being drawn into the nightmare of endless, expansive war. Now, at least for me, the two lines of the sixth stanza: “Stroking her hair / Bind the feathers” suggests that the little girl or woman has, in fact, died. Stroking and binding her hair with feathers is a gesture of love for someone who has passed and a way of ritually honoring the body of the dead, both beautifying the body and preparing the dead for passing into the afterlife, the spirit realm.
Seventh and eighth stanzas:
Putting the last line of stanza six and the first line of stanza seven together, “Bind the feathers / With a starlike pattern” there is no mistake that someone has died, the one who had glass in her hair. (The shards of glass, which signify her violent end, predict the stars in the hair of her corpse which signify an abiding cosmic pattern of light.) With “Squeak among the rocks” we are back to the minimalist landscape of the salt flats and the high desert of the juniper, back to the journey that began with the first line of the poem. Now the landscape is a succession of “old clear-cut areas”. Someone named Mimi hands “me” a present and this Mimi is talking about mother. What is the present she hands me? Is it “mother” who died, whose hair was being stroked and bound with feathers in a star-pattern? (Mimi = (Mira), “loveliness”, a beauty that radiates from the inside out.)
Ninth stanza and last line:
The poem comes full circle to the question: “What are we guarding?” Back to the salt flats and the seeds, that we are guarding, that hold the possibility of life, the renewal of life, in spite of inhospitable conditions. The poem ends with “the lights shifted” = potential change in perception / consciousness.
Books used:
Tom Brown’s Field Guide: Wilderness Survival
Refuge: An Unusual story of Family and Place Terry Tempest Wiliams
“As we edged closer to the checkpoint we saw more soldiers above us in a tent on a hill. . . . they managed the checkpoint remotely from there, watching us through binoculars and using loudspeakers to tell us what to do. There were two open-sided shipping containers near the tent. All the men had to pass through one and the women through the other, with cameras constantly trained on us. When we had gone through, . . . Soldiers asked to see our IDs and we were photographed. It was like judgement day.” I can’t let this pass. I can’t ignore the parallels to a nightmare that stalks us all
oppressors and oppressed alike.
It wasn’t a long time ago. Try yesterday. It just depends on where you are. It just depends on who you are. The nightmare of judgment. The nightmare of division It stalks us. We will all get our turn, at judging. At being judged until it dawns on us that we are all the same. And yet, thankfully, the light returns. ……. The quote is from BBC News Arabic’s Abdelrahman / Abutaleb in Cairo.
Today, Solstice Eve, I went for a walk at dusk. A medicine walk. When I take a medicine walk I talk out loud to Creator with whom I have a personal relationship. It always helps. I lay out my concerns and my fears, all my issues. When I am done and at my door, I breathe my prayer into the air and I say a Lakotan phrase that means “All my relations”. When I say that phrase, which I have been saying for 30 years, it means, “we are all connected” or “we are all related”.
On this walk I realized something I want to share that maybe some of you can identify with. Well, I feel I have been holding a lot these days, taking on a lot, dealing with a lot. But on this walk, I realized that it is hard being a human being and it is hard being a man and it is hard being a partner and it is hard being a father. And it is hard being Gary.
OK, that’s a lot and some I do better than others, but it is important that we differentiate between these “roles”.
“Roles” is the best word I could come up with but it falls way short of what it is to be human or be a man or be a partner etc. So I looked up “role” and here is what I got:
Roles become hollow places to occupy if we are not clear and in alignment with our purpose. Your purpose is about your intent, your raison d’etre (reason for being) as the French say. As we examine our roles, the real, underlying question is, why are we doing what we are doing?
When I was writing the book I just self-published I discovered that hollow (or hole) is related to Hell (the root is “hol”), which is the opposite of whole, which is related to “heal”. Heal and whole come from the same root. So living a hollow role would be like a taste of Hell. We don’t want to live hollow lives, but whole lives, full of healing experiences.
I think you will agree with me that that is food for thought. We are all, hopefully, living intentionally but which of our roles are the ones that are most meaningful for us and which of our roles are exhausting us most? These are good Solstice questions!
Depressed? I wish we all had a practice of some sort that would help with that. That is what “healers” are for. People have skills and gifts. If you are open to it, you could find someone.
There is sauna-ing, to release toxins from the body, like a detox.
There is dreamwork of course (my forte), but it’s hard to find a good (affordable) dream-worker, (my word for Jungian analyst).
You can treat yourself to a deep massage.
Meditation helps but not for everyone. There is a learning and experiential curve for that. I am not good at it, but I can do it and I know it works. Many of us don’t have a very good sense of what meditation is so we dismiss it. If you are like that, you could find someone who would show you how to meditate. (That would be a good Christmas present to give yourself.)
Even acupuncture can help. It depends on you, what your body responds to. You might be surprised. Sometimes acupuncturists bring other gifts to their work beside just sticking silver needles into your meridians.
We are not just physical bodies. I write about this all the time, hoping that people can begin to open to what I’m trying to say. We are emotional beings. We are energetic beings. We have a soul.
With shamanism, there is soul-retrieval. Parts of our soul get lost or split off by traumatic experiences and a shaman can help retrieve bits of our soul. The beauty of this is, you don’t even have to believe that it works. You just find someone, a shaman, who does soul-retrieval and let them work on you. If you find someone who does shamanic work, ask them questions about their approach to healing. See if it resonates.
The best way to heal that I know is to ingest a little bit of the mushroom in the company of a trusted person, with head phones on, just a small amount, and chances are you will have a profound experience. The mushroom can re-set us. For every person it is different and the same. The mushroom appeared on the planet way before green plants. Its medicinal spiritual benefits are older than old and holistic. A mushroom journey can get us out of our ego-centric reality and we often experience that as an awakening or spiritual.
When we are depressed, shut down, our horizons close in, so it helps to have someone indicate viable options for helping ourselves.That’s a troublesome irony for me, that when we get depressed that is when we are least likely to seek help. Sometimes just the tiniest effort to reach out for healing is all it takes!
Money is a factor. When I do dreamwork with people I usually start out charging them nothing, or accepting some kind of barter. If they keep going I work something out, for example asking them to pay whatever they can, or what feels right. There are other practitioners out there like that, I’m sure.
If you are a practitioner, please consider adjusting your fee to a client’s ability to pay.
Hydrating. When our body (and brain) begin to dehydrate, that can lead to illness. Hydration literally gets us flowing. It’s worth it even if it makes us pee more.
This time of year (Solstice) can be very depressing. It is for me. I always feel some relief when I know that days are going to start getting longer. Circadian rhythms affect our mental health much more than we might realize. If you don’t ordinarily celebrate Solstice, try this little Solstice ritual where you light a candle when the sun sets on the Solstice and when you light it express your hopes and dreams for the coming year. People like me see Winter Solstice as a time for planting psychic seeds. You must have hopes and dreams, little seeds of light that you can tend to. Anyway, try that little ritual with the candle. It is a way of aligning yourself with the larger (cosmic) cycles, which is beneficial to your mental health. Remember, light it when the sun sets on the Solstice.
And if you have any pines around or evergreens, brew some tea. That can also lift your spirits.
I advised a friend, who is dealing with a serious health issue, to call in the ancestors for protection, guidance and healing. I have explained that the ancestral spirits are always watching our backs, but that doing ritual or going into prayer is like exercising a muscle that we all have, but we have to exercise it or it can atrophy. We can see it as a muscle, but the ability to pray and do ritual is also in all of our DNA. But then he asked, “When you say “ancestors”, what do you mean? Do you mean our literal, blood ancestors?
The reason for confusion is, our blood ancestors might have been bad people or messed up or nothing special and that confuses people when they do shamanic work. Why would I call on Uncle Jim or grandfather Joe who was so stingy with his money and treated Grandma so badly?
I happen to have had a wonderful Great Grandfather on my mother’s side and my Nanny, his daughter, was special to me, so I can evoke them to watch over me, but ancestors are everyone who lived before us, which is quite a pool of wisdom and DNA. In intact shamanic / indigenous cultures, that are also ancestral cultures, the lineages go way back, but we of the “modern” industrial and post-industrial world have to learn what it means to live shamanically and let the dreamtime into our lives.
My friend’s question about ancestors is honest, but also, because I have been doing this work for 25 years, naive. I have had experiences where stones have “come to life” when I needed help, or old trees have helped me at critical moments in my life.
Once, after a vision quest I was waiting for my ride by a little stream and I heard a male indigenous voice singing in the stream (in an indigenous language) and then I saw the warrior standing with his back to me with long braided hair singing to a semi-circle of young warriors. His song of power was endless and it made me weep. When I returned to VT from the rainforest in Peru, the evening before I got sick, I was in our hot tub for a chill when a Native American medicine man climbed into the hot tub in full regalia to deliver a message. When I was a kid, when I was having nightmares and was scared, Popeye would get in bed with me.
Let’s talk about that one: Popeye. Was it really Popeye? No, but spirits (ancestral spirits) are energetic beings. They don’t have bodies, so they can assume whatever appearance breaks the ice, because we need a visual. Their appearance can be stable, so they assume the same appearance for as long as we need them or they can change their appearance.
Ancestral spirits don’t need us to see them to be present or “real”. They have their own life or viability and autonomy. Please understand that my Great Grandfather, (my favorite blood-ancestor) doesn’t look like my Great Grandfather anymore, but when he shows up for me, I see him as he looked right before he died. That is this ancestral spirit’s concession to me.
Fact: Dreams are a dimension, a psychic dimension. Since ancestral spirits are energetic beings they can enter our dreams, because psychic energy is a form of energy and so our dreams are accessible to them. But ancestral spirits can also come in or on the wind or they can appear as (or in) an emotion, because emotions are also energy. So, ancestral spirits might be ancestors that are related to us from hundreds of years ago or they can be a Great Grandfather or anyone who died, like the Native American story teller who helped me on my first vision quest. As soon as he died he was an ancestor.
How are ancestors ancestors? How can a tree be an ancestor? Or a wolf in a dream? Or a hawk that shows up when I am praying in our field? Because we are made from molecules of Earth (and stars) that are as old as time. We are made of very, very ancient molecules (and all manner of sub-atomic quanta). To the extent that we identify with the new part of us, the ego, we are disconnected from our ancient, timeless nature, but, in fact we are all very, very old souls. So when the ancestors are helping us, they must be very amused because we are also ancestors.
The water molecules in me might have been in the wine of the first communion. So ancestors are also beings who preceded us, like the stone who came to life for me on a mushroom journey or the tree I was sitting under who showed me my path that seemed to open in front of me and came directly from her roots. But my ancestor can also be that hawk gyring over my head because the hawk, or any wild creature, is at one with its ancient, timeless nature and that translates into wisdom or medicine that we can access through ritual and dreaming
One other point is that when difficult people (relatives) die, death is like a car wash, so the toxicity stays on the gross material plane. Of course there is a lot more to it!, as the much older Hinduism and Buddhism teach, there are planes of karmic evolution, but in general, the point is we are here on this Earth Walk, as this person, to work on something — that is our karma. My father was here to work through some very tough issues that went to the core of who he was. That was his karmic work. My karmic work is different from his, but I also have core work to do. When my father died I had the vision, at a shamanic workshop, of watching him standing under a waterfall and a black ink flowed out of his body, downstream. That was what was left of his toxic psychological / emotional / spiritual issues that were preventing him from passing on to a “higher” plane.
Something similar happens to almost all of us when we die, so all of those dysfunctional, broken people, by this paradigm, get plenty more chances, and, so, when they become ancestors, because of what they were working on karmically when they were alive, they can serve as guides for certain problems that we are facing. They might show up because we evoke them or they might just show up gratis, in a dream.
One last thought: We were born with certain ancestral spirits watching over us, watching our back. They never leave us. That would be my ancestral spirit who showed up as Popeye when I was having nightmares at age five. It is one of the benefits of shamanic work to realize this, that we were born with guardian spirits watching our back.
Freeze frame / carnage / outrage This much was certain Without anyone seeing
If anyone here wants to help The story spread across the desert Like a vaccine
Earth went numb Like furious propellers Against his shoulder
Once they reached the ocean There was no more reason My father was standing there
In a matter of seconds The job is yours I can’t really walk
The room had no walls Why me? Wait there is a voice
My wife is sick You have to hold on Are you having a baby?
Is this shock therapy? The buckets come up empty When you get there
Come clean Cross the line of men in coveralls Here is your pass
Why me? The blinking lights The fountains of money
Scaled the tower Why me? Saw the animals struggling
All night long First of all I would like to thank Who believed in me
The taxi took us back home Which I’d never seen This shell served us both
He covered the book with jewels He said you can do better The parrot said
You can do better The fans were waiting Two radios talking talking
This is what I am doing You are the only human who applied. The parrot said ………………………… Book used:
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind William Kamkwamba
………….
This poem wrote itself. For 90% of the lines I used fragments from The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, but this does not qualify as one of my “sand-blasted” poems, such as “On the dying leaf”, because I was not trying to randomize the process of selecting fragments. For this poem I took my time and only picked fragments that attracted my eye for one reason or another. There is only one repeated phrase in the poem: “Why me?” The reader may wonder what the question refers to. I think I can answer that. It refers to the line (three lines back), “The job is yours”. Right after that line, the subject says, “I can’t even walk”. In other words, Why was I given this job?”-I can’t even walk! A good bit of the poem is fleshing out what the job is: He might be having a baby, is receiving shock therapy, is pulling up empty buckets, is given a pass, scaling a tower to witness the animals struggling, then he is seeing where he used to live but it is only a shell. There is a book that is being covered with jewels, but someone is telling him “You can do better”. At the end, the parrot has the last word, answering the question posed in the title, “Why me?”.Because, “You are the only human who applied”. The poem is a surreal journey through the bizarre world that we all inhabit, but which we all experience differently, as, not a “lucid dream”, but the lucid dream.
Sound of the bullets The room was dark Held his ground
You need not go
In front of the inevitable Gathered up a large handful Dreamed and planned and saved Feeling his way with caution
I went back to my room
You need not go
Turned out the light
It was the mother
An interesting transition Without restarting the bleeding And there is always one According to the fortunes of war
Hazy atmosphere Two / twenty / two hundred of them synchronized Eager to divert She stared upward
Sudden decision to return Almost meeting her now Restless to be by himself Resembling a wet bumble bee
A commentary on events Tried to read Sister, I am thirsty The buses are still burning
Indeed, there is nothing Affectionate and sociable On this pitted road Where is the pressure point?
A vastly disquieting smile The room was dark Hazy atmosphere Running about amidst the flowers
To rent a villa for the shoot Lay the child in the shade He finished as he had begun Asking the looking-glass
I have never heard of them I dip the brush in water But she always came back Felt something new inside
He was accused of stealing Whose are those twelve shirts? She began to feel very thirsty He spoke to her in all the languages
You are much mistaken Laughing, eating and sleeping The swellings in his legs went away There were things no one said
Flow in our bodies Her two month stay The custom of not falling I was a few months older
I was told to stand in front True meaning of yin Every day my mother tried to see him In the bomb clouds
Valley below the window In nameless valleys
Take trouble to the hills Her beautiful phrasing swirled
Losing his shoes and coat When that old metal tank blows There’s no intent to sting Putting my feet in the river
Enclosed by a stone wall The distance from here to there Kneel and kiss the ground Subject of much thought
The unafraid air A form of magic that delivered The rabbits march through the village She hears her heart over
Greased machinery of destruction Almost possible to believe She carries the water, milks the goats They made a pyramid
This was the right gate There I was cast adrift Look what you’ve done He’d walk from tree to tree
In the corner someone built a bed The shock of the night Monopolized the waters Where my legs used to be
Like small vicious birds After waiting in the streets Tangled bits of wire The way she was dancing
He refused to take it When Mondrian began Spinning generations of power The rhyme was “rod”
Bones of leopards and lions Painted the walls and pages I kind of stopped thinking This took me an hour
That was ten – eleven years ago Sweetish perfume of the boneset blooms Swallows sweep back and forth It confused me to see people
And I had no water Elsewhere in the trading center The faint shouts of children One of them ran away
Just once in his whole life He opened his mouth to speak He must have been immensely strong Vitality of a dragonfly
Again on the mountain side I focused on the Cecropia moth Beads of moisture stood out Aqueous breezes and underwater winds
The issue still struck her The beetles have been whining away Beneath the wide green umbrellas Here is nothing but trouble
Then there is silence Forcing her memory back Cowering deeper in the bed On the dying leaf
Books used:
The Near Horizons Edwin Teale Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind Kamkwamba Around the World on Sixty Dollars Robert Meredith Poets Against the War Sam Hamill Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Lisa See Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm Magnificent Obsession Lloyd C. Douglas That Quail, Robert Margaret Stanger Tiananmen Diary :Thirteen Days un June Harrison E. Salisbury
………………
Notes on this poem:
I describe this style of poem (genre?) as a “sand-blasted”poem because it is comprised of stacked fragments that tell a story that isn’t all there, but enough of it is there for our imaginations to stitch together a dreamlike narrative. How do I get the fragments? I pull 10 books from my library, books on diverse subjects. I open each book to random pages, selecting approximately ten fragments per book without controlling the selection process, which is 90 percent random. In other words if my eyes settle on a phrase, “the cat went after a leaf” I might select the second half of that sentence, “which (the leaf) seemed to relish the chase”, so, I am just saying, there is some cerebration involved but not much. After I have a list of 100 or more fragments, I shrink the font so I can’t distinguish any of the words and I shuffle the list so that no three phrases are in the original order. Then I divide the list into stanzas, this time stanzas of four lines. Only then do I read what I have. Usually there is story or more than one story, like a palimpsest, but also it is like a damaged spider web. The last thing I do is move a handful of lines around and repeat one or two lines that seem to stand out such as the line “you don’t need to leave”. And I pick an evocative line to serve as the title and call it finished. But the point is, the story or stories (sand-blasted stories) are not my invention, any more than dreams are the invention of my conscious mind. I use this technique when I am stuck, when I am high and dry, like someone marooned on a tiny island with one palm tree in the middle of a vast ocean. What I have always done next is search the internet for some music to accompany my sand-blasted poem. I used to call these “oracular” poems, but sad-blasted is much more appropriate.
In this poem, the themes are war, birth and rebirth, mother-love and soul-mate-love. The feminine pronouns (she, her) pertain the “the mother” in the beginning but as the poem plays out, the woman is a lover (the one who comes to “stay for two months”). In this poem, I would also like to point out that the subject (masculine) is the man who, in the first few stanzas, “held his ground” and “dreamed and planned and saved” but it is also just as much the one manifesting or making the poem, the “I”. as in “I went back to my room” or “Sister, I am thirsty”. It is up to the reader to decide whether the “he” and the “I” are the same person, or, for that matter, maybe (by Freudian logic) the mother and the lover are the same woman.
Other themes that come up are water / no water, thirst, children / baby, and trauma. (At the end, she is “cowering deeper in the bed”. (In the end, the bed is a dying leaf, which might suggest to some of us the she is a faerie person.)
It is possible, in some cases, to identify which books contributed which lines. One of the most obvious is: “The rabbits march through the village” (Grimm’s Household Tales) and the phrases “vitality of a dragonfly” and “The beetles have been whining away” (Near Horizons, Edwin Teale. Teale was the Thoreau of the insect world.) Lastly, this poem is not about war. That is only one thread. The poem is, by its own revelation, a “commentary on events”. War is only one of the events that the poem is commenting on.
From out of the door at the end of the narrow hall
Come home everyone
From along the jagged shore
From floating in smoke
From feeling farther and farther away
Come home.
At the moment of receiving sentence
From languishing in sodden tents
Come home
Come home from a thousand years of hearing the door lock
Come home
From believing that life doesn’t matter
Come home from searching for someone who speaks your language
Come home
From not being able to escape the smell of death
Come home everyone
Just come home
………………….
“garden of ivory flowers” from a poem by W.S. Merwin
Reflection:
I have a friend who calls poems like this “list poems”. For me when they work, like this one, it is because it works like steps in the sense of a stairway, up or down or first down and then up, but also steps in the sense of footprints that lead somewhere. The idea is to write myself out of stasis. The title line is a paraphrase from an article for BBC World quoting someone in Israel who is expressing a collective attitude of running out of patience. Of course everyone who was taken hostage should come home. None of this should have happened in the first place. But this poem is about how we all need to come home. We are all hostages in a world where individual autonomy is almost totally an illusion, where each one of us could, at any moment fall prey to acts of terrible violence which happen with virtually no warning almost randomly. Where / how / when does it end? Coming home is coming home to ourselves, to each other, so our senses, to sanity, to conscience, to our humanity, to a fresh start.
Just because of my mood I will assume your answer is yes.
If you said yes you can be in this poem.
I guess some people will say no.
They are welcome in the poem as well.
I take only partial credit for that.
The music is from “Avalon Sutra” by Harold Budd.
…………………………
Reflection (Dec / 2020):
My son read “Avalon Sutra” and responded: “Can I challenge you to rewrite it with more of a flow and without the stop-start lines with so many periods? That is difficult for me.” He wanted me to write a poem that was more tuned to the spirt and atmospherics of Budd’s compositions. I wrote back:
First, I hear your disappointment, that my poem did not do H Budd’s music justice. I was not in a place where I could write that poem.
With the one-line / one sentence poems (see”Mudslide”) of “Avalon Sutra” I have some control over the shaping of the poem but the structure of the whole-sentence-line-poem forces my mind to let down its guard and become playful. It sort of simulates a kind of simple-mindedness. In “Mudslide”, the simple-mindedness worked perfectly. It was a way of telling a story the way you might to a child, to hold their attention and there is a bit of magic in it. Each line is a complete image or thought. In the “Avalon Sutra” poem, by introducing the anecdote of John L. throwing the bricks through Paul’s window, I am making John an example of someone giving into anger. Maybe because it is John, we suspend judgment, but what he did was very violent (and in fact, Paul was in the house when the bricks came through the window!) But the movement of the poem is away from John’s lack of control and back to to the music which has no anger in it. “Avalon Sutra” for me (in real time) is about me tip-toeing around the awareness of how we do not have to give in to our violent impulses. John actually did change after the Beatles broke up when he took up meditation, so there is a back story to the poem, and most people know that John, even though he was a passionate emotionally expressive artist, succeeded in reining in his violent nature.
My friend, Nick Santoro, wrote a letter to a couple of local and state publications in response to the Palestinian / Israeli war. He ended it with this pithy invitation:
“If you somehow pray, ask for forgiveness for our unending human barbarity and seek peace.”
I took that in As a kind of prayer. I know this man prays So it is not hard for me To picture him ending his brief but ardent Condemnation of the war With a prayer for forgiveness.
Beautiful.
But forgiveness from whom? I’m being rhetorical. I know there are people who Are almost offended by the idea of God. But, knowing this man As well as I do, I don’t think he is asking “God” To forgive us. But I’m not going to ask him Who or what He is asking forgiveness from. I don’t need to. I want to talk about prayer.
What is prayer? One thing I know is Prayer is completely misunderstood. People who pray, On a regular basis, . . . I think they know what it is.
People who don’t pray Or can’t pray, don’t get it. They completely misunderstand it. Of course they don’t get it! I’m not being smug here.
How much of the human race prays? I think most people pray, in some form. I feel for people who don’t understand prayer And I believe they are in a shrinking minority.
Most prayers are prayed in times of crisis. People pray when they are scared Or up against a wall. Or they pray to supplement their chances Of seeing something resolved Or of passing the burden of living On to some ethereal donkey!
And if something shifts for better or for worse They don’t think, Oh, praying worked. They don’t remember that they prayed at all. Crisis puts you in the moment. When you are scared or in pain That is all you have room for.
Prayer doesn’t require space.
And it doesn’t usually get instant results. But does it work?
What do you think?
If you pray you might say, I think it works. Or you might shrug and say That’s not the point.
So what is the point?
Praying is about a special relationship Between me and the universe. I have said this before: That as I get older my relationship with the universe Is becoming more personal. Spirit to me is the intelligence behind all of this.
I don’t think of myself as being in charge of much. I try to take responsibility for myself And I try to be accountable, But as for understanding how a flower works Or why a flower needs to be so beautiful Baffles me, in a good way. Why didn’t the intelligence of the universe Just create a perfect flower Or a perfect whatever, But thousands of varieties of flowers? It’s almost as if there was a moment When creation fell crazy-in-love with its own creation! And maybe that is the point of creation.
Creation for the sake of creation.
I don’t think perfection has much to do with creation. I think creation is about the ecstasy of infinite choices.
People can choose but their choices are limited. In the morning, as I face into my day I can choose between different ways to spend my day. If I was in a hospital bed because I was sick enough to be in a hospital, My choices would be very limited But I would still have choices to make.
Spirit / creator moves beyond choice
But I am imagining that the intelligence of the universe Is in the position to choose from an infinity of . . . Patterns? What? The kind of intelligence that creates on the scale of worlds Processes in terms of patterns. An infinite intelligence, Such as the kind of intelligence Behind the creation of a world like Earth . . . Must “think” in terms of infinite patterns.
Patterns of matter and energy Patterns of matter and energy in flux. That exist in time and interact together In unfathomable ways That cumulatively suggest a “creation”.
Prayer functions in the realm of energy. If spoken aloud it manifests as vibration. Prayer is itself creative. It is a creation. But just what kind of creation it is Depends on the feelings and sentiments That are carried by the vibration.
Sometimes when I pray A wind begins to stir And I imagine that the wind becomes a carrier of my prayer. But what if the prayer is just a thought Surrounding an emotion?
Is a thought real? Is an emotional real?
But if you ask the “average” person if these are real. . .
(Just humor me here, and let’s imagine That there are average people in our midst . . .)
They might say, Yes.
Or they might say, I guess so.
Or they might say, recalling a heated argument With a partner and how All those emotional exchanges sent The relationship into a tailspin . . . Sure! But not as real as an ambulance coming along With its siren blaring and lights flashing! There are different kinds of “real”. I think we can all agree on that. And we can agree that what I just said about Aloud prayers being real (emotion / vibration) Is credible.
But are silent prayers real? Are they effective?
That all depends on one’s relationship with Who or what one is praying to. How real is that relationship? With silent prayer it gets really personal Which works for me Because, as I say, as I get older Everything gets more personal, Including my relationship with spirit.
I would guess that most prayers are not silent. But that most prayers are quiet, Whispered prayers, with lips moving.
My friend’s letter, and especially his last sentence Inspired me to write about prayer. And his prayer, if it is a prayer, Was just a line of written words. But those words, that prayer Rippled out to me, And rippled through me. I hope it also ripples out to you.
And since I do pray (read my lips): Spirit / Creator / God / Intelligence of the universe hear me: Please forgive our unending barbarity and help us seek peace.
Grandfather in the living room dozing in the rocker.
There is great uncle oak and aunt maple
Over-reaching the dilapidated walls
That used to box pastures but,
Having lost their human purpose,
Seem to have found a greater purpose
In reminding us of our folly
Which we manage to escape
By walking on paths that we have names for
Somewhere between plan A and B.
Oh forest family tolerate us.
To you we are but children.
Children having children!
Let us earn your trust,
May our children’s children
Also know and love you
And walk these paths
That we have named.
………………
Conversation with a friend
My friend:
Don’t know about you, but I feel like the forest is happy to see us. I believe the forest can read our hearts.
Me:
Perhaps. Our personal experience is all we have to go by I suppose.
Me:
I hear what you are saying about the forest reading our hearts, but, for the sake of discussion, I’m sticking with my more tepid reading of the forest’s feelings toward us.
We are just beginning to understand what the forest is outside of our need for maple syrup and wood and pretty walks and places that we can depend upon for escape from our challenging lives, for contemplation and renewal. But the forest as family, trees related to trees, that are communicating with each other via the fungal understory . . . The forest that doesn’t need anything from us to continue just fine, that forest, to my way of thinking, would be hard-pressed to love us even if our hearts are open and full. We gain so much from being in the forest, but the forest does not really benefit from us in any way I can think of.
Not in the long-run anyway. As a species, we haven’t demonstrated that we can think in terms of the “long run” — 8 generations.
We are responsible for Climate Change, which we might visualize as cresting like a great wave. Climate Change is going to prove to be more of a threat than anything we have unleashed on the forest, including the ubiquitous clear-cuts of the 19th century and the 1950s. Those forests that were clearcut, including the forest in my poem, are back, different, but mostly healthy; not because of anything we did to heal it, but because we left it alone. Climate Change will change the ecology of our forests irreversibly. Climate Change is like inoculating the planet with a high fever from which it may recover, but if it does, it will not be the same planet that it is now.
The planet has undergone upheavals before during its epic lifespan, and it will survive Climate Change, but this poem is about this forest, where I walk every day. This forest is facing some tough times, and for that, the human race is responsible. Therefore, I cannot imagine that we deserve its love or that it would be happy to see us. But I do not believe that forests are capable of hate, so I choose to imagine that it tolerates us . . . that it forgives us, in advance of what is about to play out. To the forest we are children. Children make mistakes. Hopefully we will learn from our childish mistakes.
My friend:
My response to your email is a bit complex, just like the email.
You start off with the phrase, “for the sake of discussion” which means to me “I don’t necessarily believe what I’m about to say, but it will keep the discussion going”. In this case, a repetitive discussion and argument you’ve put forward many times before.
You say the forest tolerates us at best because of the enormous damage humans have done to the forest over the past 500 years. Although you sense the intelligence of the forest, you do not give it the ability to distinguish between humans: we’re all a threat. After all, humans created climate change, the greatest threat so far to the forest (as you and I both know and are fully aware of). I believe the forest’s intelligence is capable of reading the humans in its midst. When we enter and greet this being, walking through, enjoying it in our way, it must be pleased. Plants are here to support animal life, and we in turn are here to support the plants. If we hold back from taking on our role, the forest is abandoned by us. I’ve heard indigenous people write this. The pronouns, “we” and “us” conflate you and me with the rest of humanity. “We,” here, hold an attitude quite different from those humans who see the forest as a financial resource.
On the contrary, what I’ve heard (from others in this community) is a desire to support wildlife and enhance the forest’s health . . . (Your) email says the forest is “just fine”, but also facing tough times. I see a bunch of survivors and opportunists all thrown together and plagued by deer and insects. And I see a few humans who want not only to keep the forest intact (by ownership under current use), but also begin to counteract some of the negative pressures on it, helping it heal.
Overarching this entire subject, as we are approaching it in this discussion, is the question “how do we know what the forest wants, needs, and is thinking?” I believe
We both understand that as a species, humans have great capability for both positive and negative actions. It is most common for people to project their own attitudes onto the blank screen of “what the forest thinks” And I choose, at this time of great danger and unravelling, to live, act and think so as to project a vision of hope, survival, healing and health. A necessary part of this is trying to learn how to listen to the unvocalized messages from our forest (and the rest of Gaia). In this, I hear the advice of the herbalists: trust, do it, look for results, pay attention.
Preaching and teaching, directed at the dying mainstream culture, is important work. So keep on writing! As people wake up in greater numbers, the morphic field of a new vision is strengthened. For those of us who’ve heard the message, the important work is to prepare for the great unraveling and plant the seeds of eventual healing.
My friend:
Do you have a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass?
in the section entitled “Picking Sweetgrass”, under the chapter ” Epiphany in the beans” (pg 124 in the paperback), Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about an incident in her creative writing class. It’s worth reading, in reference to this discussion!
Starts “I sat once in a graduate writing workshop”
Me to my friend:
You wrote: You start off with the phrase, “for the sake of discussion” which means to me “I don’t necessarily believe what I’m about to say, but it will keep the discussion going”.
Me: Yes, I have come to see that most of the time I am not 100% sure of anything, but, if I am 70% convinced that I believe or feel the truth of something I will try to back it up or put it out there. You are right, I have put this forward any number of times, but each time I articulate it I approach it from a slightly different angle.
You: You say the forest tolerates us at best because of the enormous damage humans have done to the forest over the past 500 years. Although you sense the intelligence of the forest, you do not give it the ability to distinguish between humans: we’re all a threat. . . . I believe the forest’s intelligence is capable of reading the humans in its midst. When we enter and greet this being, walking through, enjoying it in our way, it must be pleased.
Me: This has 30% – 40% of my agreement. Most people do not know what the f–k you are saying here. Most people who step into a forest, well, they bring with them their anxieties and angst (which is fine), because they need the calm of the forest to help them center. The forest would read that (chain saws always sound angry to me!), but that is not what we are talking about, I realize. Take “forest bathing”. When people are entering a forest for a forest bathing, they are probably (psychically / emotionally) in need of an emotional cleansing, which the forest provides. There are sacred forests in Japan that are available just for that. That is probably the ideal use of a forest to my way of thinking. (Side: I have to be very strong to enter a badly managed or clear-cut forest, because I feel the forest’s distress!)
You: Plants are here to support animal life, and we in turn are here to support the plants. If we hold back from taking on our role, the forest is abandoned by us. I’ve heard indigenous people write this.
Me: side: Don’t forget the foundational role of the fungal understory. Fungi aren’t plants. They are like the forest’s microbiome. On Monhegan, the understory is returning even though the forest is mostly hemlock. This is partly because the forest has been left alone for 125 years — no camping and people stay on the trails. (Downside to that is the forests could burn and probably will some day, but that would probably be a good thing for the health of the forest’s evolution, just not for tourism.) Also they figured out 30 years ago that fertilizer was damaging the aquifer so they stopped using commercial fertilizers around the late 80s, early 90s.
You: The pronouns, “we” and “us” conflate you and me with the rest of humanity. “We,” here, hold an attitude quite different from those humans who see the forest as a financial resource. No one in our (neighborhood)
has indicated that they want to cut and sell trees. On the contrary, what I’ve heard is a desire to support wildlife and enhance the forest’s health towards climax growth.
Me: I feel you are mostly right here, but I also know that even when you want to experience the forest (holistically), there is a whopping learning curve to “get there” which, arguably, calls for spending solitary time in the forest and communing with it, which is not the same as going for walks with a friend or even a partner, because when people are together, being social creatures, they talk. To let the forest in, as you know, first you have to stop talking, and that is a learned skill these days.
You: (Your) email says the forest is just fine, but also facing tough times. I see a bunch of survivors and opportunists all thrown together and plagued by deer and insects. And I see a few humans who want not only to keep the forest intact (by ownership under current use), but also begin to counteract some of the negative pressures on it, helping it heal.
Me: This gets tricky. The down-grading of the eco-system is mostly human driven (farms and managed forests!). So, are you saying that we know enough to reverse that? That is probably our biggest difference in how we approach forest-care.
You: Overarching this entire subject, as we are approaching it in this discussion, is the question “how do we know what the forest wants, needs, and is thinking?”
Me: Also, can we even say what we mean when we say “the forest”. When I key-in to the forest, first quieting my thoughts, maybe sit somewhere and just be with “the forest”, each tree begins to appear as an individual. That is how I know something is shifting. But the forest is not trees (as you know), and it is not plants and trees and wildlife. Just was we really have more non-human DNA in us than human, the forest is a living breathing presence of incredible complexity, (micro and macro). Speaking for our forest, the topsoil is very thin due to massive erosion over the decades and centuries and even the millenia. So, how the trees interact with each other through the fungal “internet” and their communal root-systems, reaches far beyond our current understanding. (I am always fascinated when I see two trees, sometimes of different species growing intimately close to each other, I sense something synergistic in how these trees are relying on each other.)
You: I believe we both understand that as a species, humans have great capability for both positive and negative actions. It is most common for people to project their own attitudes onto the blank screen of “what the forest thinks” And I choose, at this time of great danger and unravelling, to live, act and think so as to project a vision of hope, survival, healing and health. A necessary part of this is trying to learn how to listen to the unvocalized messages from our forest (and the rest of Gaia). In this, I hear the advice of the herbalists: trust, do it, look for results, pay attention.
Me: I am with everything you just said.
You: Preaching and teaching, directed at the dying mainstream culture, is important work. So keep on writing! As people wake up in greater numbers, the morphic field of a new vision is strengthened. For those of us who’ve heard the message, the important work is to prepare for the great unravelling and plant the seeds of eventual healing.
Me: I agree. The forest is sacred and it is our hope. Blessings to you too. Thanks for having this conversation with me.
My friend:
Something to keep in mind: when we speak of “most people”, it distances us from the task at hand as well as our own blind spots.
We live in a time of “getting-close-to-the-end” Not only the end of our personal life in the body, but also the end of the current dominant paradigm. I feel a sense of, not quite urgency, but a desire to not waste time, rather, to be filling my time with acts leading to positive change. So efficiency has become more important to me. And spending my time well. And communicating clearly. My wife and I are working to cultivate a community that lives as if the Divine were right here, within all of us, making our world and all of us and what we do, Sacred. Respectful, Harmonious, Inclusive, Resilient, One great earthy being, Gaia, composed of gazillions of details, sometimes seen as body parts or ecosystems or species or individual organisms (is there such a thing?)
Many years ago I took on, with others, the responsibility of owning 80 acres of “undeveloped ” land and the responsibility that goes with it. I made it my responsibility simply to keep danger and damage away from the land. If I knew then what I know now…. Now that I’ve nurtured two children and the gardens for 30+ years, I just want to get things done – in the face of the firestorm I believe is quickly approaching us. When you read “community”, above, think of it as inclusive of all the diverse life that surrounds and supports us. In this thread, you and I have been talking about the local Ecosystem we live within, and specifically, the forest. (The social and human-constructed elements are grist for other conversations.)
What actions are within our power to take that will bring enhanced diversity, robustness and health to the forest that we’ve adopted? How do we make sure that the forest concurs; that we are not just following our own projections?
We can go slow and watch the consequences of our actions. This means spending lots more time, quiet, in the forest – like you were writing of earlier.
I would like to start by quoting excerpts from a recent article in the New York Times, “A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence from the Pentagon.” by Dave Phillips. (November 5, 2023)
“Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems.. . . (The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain. . . .)
“(And yet) the military struggled to understand what was wrong.
“When Lance Corporal Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil. . . He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.
“The 21-year-old Marine . . .knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.”
The Enemy Had Hexed Him
Deeply disturbed by the apparition that seemed to have followed him from Syria in 2017, but with no one to help him connect any of the dots, such as to suspect brain injury due to the relentless firing of massive artillery, he drew his own conclusion, that the enemy had “hexed” him. I can only imagine how cornered and frightened he must have felt when he took matters into his own hands, trying to purify himself by building a fire on the beach to which he consigned his combat gloves and deployment journal. But the ghost remained.
By October 2020, in his visions, ghosts were trying to pull him into another dimension.
In this dimension he has two children, is having trouble keeping a job and struggles to pay his bills. He has debilitating headaches and claims to be losing his memory. He still sees the ghost “and other things”.
The New York Times article quotes Dr. Perl, neuropathologist working for the Defense Department: “There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries , . . The damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it . . .”
If Ortiz had consulted a shaman he would have received a different diagnosis. One big difference would be, the word “hallucination” would not have come up. But the word “spirit” would have.
Remote killing (whether by firing massive artillery shells at distant human targets or guided missiles), could actually affect our emotional health more violently than close-up killing, and it is a wonder to me that that wasn’t considered during examination of those distraught, haunted young men. Not everyone was visited by a ghost. Another marine saw a black demon standing by his bed.
Who in our military would be qualified to consider that Ortiz was seeing a ghost and who in the military would be qualified to guide him through a healing . . . to see what the ghost / spirit wanted and respond in some fashion that would allow it / her to return to wherever she heralded from – the bardo? Does the Pentagon hire or consult with any shamans? Most allopathic doctors in their right mind would not tread there. This kind of work is what shamans do!
A “New” Brain?
When I returned from 12 days in the Peruvian rainforest in 2016, from an intensive retreat working with ayahuasca, I was not quite the same person that went down there. For one thing, I knew that my identity, that is to say, the person I identified with, “Gary Lindorff”, was only a small part of who I was. And the other thing I learned was, spirits are real.
I came back with more or new neuro-connections.
Up until 10 years ago it was thought that the brain begins to start losing neural connections after around age 25, and we do lose neurons as we age, but now we know that the adult brain can create new neural connections and even new neurons from neuronal stem cells. In additional to neuronal changes in the gray matter, changes in our white matter (made up of a large network of nerve fibers [axons] that account for the exchange of information and communication) can continue throughout most of life in a healthy brain.
Neuroplasticity is the process by which the brain adapts structurally and functionally as the nervous system responds to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli, but it also reorganizes its structure, functions or connections after injuries. . . such as trauma or brain injury. The brain is plastic. (Plastic, originally from the Greek word, “plastikos”, meaning to grow or form, was first used as an adjective meaning “formative”.)
Not everyone sees ghosts, but those who do may not be crazy, they may be special; their brains may be more plastic or adaptive, than, for example, their doctors’ brains. A shaman might have been able to help Ortiz to find out why the ghost showed up. Perhaps his brain was irreversibly damaged but it is also possible that his sense of reality was augmented by his injury.
Ortiz, Phillips reports, was other-than-honorably discharged. “‘I gave the Marine Corps everything,’ he said. ‘And they spit me out with nothing. Damaged, damaged, very damaged.’”
The wounded healer
I think it is accurate to say that most powerful healers are in some way themselves wounded. The journey from woundedness to wounded-healer can be long and circuitous and full of daunting challenges but, even though it might not seem like it to the one making that journey or that crossing, it is an archetypal metamorphosis for which there is ample precedence.
Does Ortiz have it in him to become a healer? Sadly, the question is rhetorical. All we can do is speculate.
Not knowing anything about Ortiz except what was reported of his battle experience, that he suffers from PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), that he was treated unsatisfactorily by military doctors, discharged with limited benefits and that he was, as of the writing of the article, still being stalked by the ghost of a victim of the massive shelling that he participated in, I can’t presume to prescribe, but I do imagine, what a deep healing program for him might include, considering that an Indigenous healer might characterize someone with a similar history and symptoms as having been separated from his soul.
I will be drawing on my own experience of having worked with two powerful plant-spirit medicines under master shamans. I refer to them as master shamans because they were both veteran-healers (one an ayahuasquero, the other a Roadman of the Native American Church), steeped in ritual-based sacred traditions that have grown up around plant-medicines long-honored by their respective Indigenous cultures – namely peyote and ayahuasca.
My speculation is that Ortiz would likely benefit from one or more sessions or healing ceremonies with either one or both of these plant-spirit medicines. I am limiting myself to one example each of how peyote and ayahuasca benefited me on my healing path by causing a profound shift in my awareness.
“In this fireplace, there is no illness.”
Ten years ago I participated in an all-night Native American Church ceremony that took place in a large teepee with over twenty individuals attending. This particular ceremony was convened for the purpose of healing a woman with stage four cancer. (The facilitator of the ceremony, referred to as the Roadman, sat in the West quadrant opposite the tent entrance, the fire was tended by the fireman and his assistant and the Roadman’s wife fulfilled certain sacred observances in the early morning.) The host (the one seeking healing), sat in the south quadrant. Peyote was consumed at certain intervals during the 13 hour ceremony as a sacrament.
After we were all in, and everyone was settled the Roadman spoke words I have never forgotten: “In this fireplace”, he said, “there is no illness”. He pronounced this with impeccable authority. Throughout the ceremony I was completely enveloped by the sense that we were in the hands of (under the protection of), Grandfather peyote. As I sat there, basically without changing position the entire time, it was like being held by a superior consciousness in which my self-awareness diffused into a larger more inclusive awareness that was the corollary of the ceremony. And, indeed, no illness was conceivable or stood any chance of surviving the palpably intensifying field of love and community that crescendoed at some point during the passage of the night but never dissipated; It merely softened and diffused as the light of dawn found us.
For this next example of deep healing I would like to set up the context: I was one of a small group at a remote location in the Peruvian rainforest on a 12-day retreat. We were there expressly for healing. At this retreat there was a boiling river passing through the camp. In short order I got into the habit of sitting close to the stream on a secluded shelf of ledge, letting myself be wrapped by the baking steam rising from the rushing water where I would pray, releasing waves of emotion. Now I would like to quote a passage from my field journal: “Today I am doing the diet of rice or oatmeal and boiled plantain in preparation for tonight’s ceremony. When I was steam bathing, thinking about the ceremony with a little apprehension about having a repeat of my last (daunting) experience, of not being able to find my place, I imagined the huge chunk of (rock) I was on, breaking away. I leap up onto the ledge and bedrock and then that begins crumbling. The whole landscape is falling away, including the maloca (ritual longhouse) and other structures, so I flee up into the woods . . . as the land crumbles behind me. Finally I manage to get to a high spot. . . the land (completely) disintegrates. I am standing on the flat top of a giant peak of obsidian that is grounded in the center of the earth and I am perfectly safe. A voice says, “That is your core.”
This was more than a fantasy. It was on the order of a waking dream. It was a couple days after our last ceremony with ayahuasca and ayahuasca was still in my system as the shaman had informed us that ayahuasca keeps working on us for a week or two after taking it into our bodies.
Like the words of the road man, “There is no illness in this fireplace.”, the voice that announced, “This is your core.” has become my personal medicine as a healer. I have often shared this anecdote with my clients as a powerful medicine story.
When someone works with ayahuasca or peyote, in ritual, approaching these ancient plant-medicine-spirits as sacred doctors, under the guidance of a master shaman, the treatment that that person receives will be as unique as that person and whatever happens, it is just part of a great journey. Speaking for myself, I am still wounded, but I can also say that I am a healer. I would, without any hesitation, recommend this journey to Ortiz and anyone else, for that matter, who has been separated from their soul.
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A synchronicity: A few days before I spotted this article in the Times that I extensively quoted as an opening tom article, I posted a poem “For spirit’s children”, the last lines of which I will quote as a last word:
. . . Many children are dead Many more will die
They are spirit’s children now
No hardened room In which to shelter
People Are abandoning the land
Listen That is the sound of grief They are saying
This very moment No more wall of hands
Dynamite the dam Watch the babies cry
First chance
Second chance
Third chance
They’re doing it again Take this medicine bag
Be a doctor For spirit’s children
Beyond Anger Grief Fear
They are watching They are watching
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I want to document a brief exchange between me and my brother, Dave Lindorff, after he read the above piece:
Dave: I hope you are correct that a shaman could help a person like Corp. Ortiz, but I doubt it. If his brain was that damaged that the myelin sheaths of his brain’s neurons were hanging off in tatters, he was beyond help, much like the guys who were exposed to the smoke from military burn pits in fhe two Iraq wars who are now suffering from such connective tissue diseases as ALS, Parkinson’s Disease and MS. There are therapies that can stop the progression of these kinds of diseases, but not that can reverse them. The best hope is a study that has developed, with the new mNRA technology for developing targeted vaccines for diseases like Covid. The scientists on this research have developed an mNRA vaccine that can be used to attack the specific proteins that attack the body’s nerve tissues causing those debilitating and ultimately fatal auto-immune diseases. They’ve learned how to tweak the vaccine to attack specific antibodies, fo example for arthritis, or parkinsons and can actually cure them. There is thus hope for cures for neuropathy, sarcoidosis, Graves Disease, MS, ALS etc. It’s working on mammals like mice and rates. Humans can’t be far behind.
My response to my brother: Your point about the damage to the nerves being irreversible is compelling, but working with a shaman and with plant-spirit-medicines like peyote and ayahuasca can and has resulted in some impossible-to explain results. This is where reading the literature helps. and also, (hard for many), you have to trust other’s experience. Every time someone works with a master shaman, in their element, like I did, the results are unique. So you can’t say, “this, this and this worked for this percentage of patients with such and such a condition.” The healing relationship is between the patient, the shaman and the medicine.
When I was growing up, therapy was stigmatized. If you saw a counselor or a psychiatrist, you kept it quiet. People had nervous breakdowns or they had a “drinking problem” or “he hasn’t been himself lately”. But, again, when I was growing up, the whole f-king United States was suffering from a collective psychosis. Kids were going to schools where, if the school had a basement, it doubled as a bomb shelter. And you know how most people dealt with the terror of imminent nuclear annihilation? They didn’t. They self-medicated. They worked themselves silly, had “a few” when they got home, took a sleeping pill and slept a dreamless sleep.Then they woke up, had a warm poptart, a glass of tropicana and coffee with a couple of saccharin and went back to work. They called it the “rat race” in my mostly white f-ked up community.
But what I am writing about here is not those bad old days of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s but now, because not much has changed about the world, sorry to say, I mean how the world is run and how nations go at each other, what has changed is people, how people think. It’s subtle but I have lived long enough to notice. I don’t need any data or research. Trust me here. (In a recent post I wrote “trust other’s experience”.) My experience says this: People aren’t the same as they were just 40, 50, 60 years ago. Thank god! (God here = the infinite intelligence that made the universe).
Not everyone has changed. Some people have dug themselves deeper, like those razor clams I remember on Cape Cod, that, when they felt the pressure of a barefoot on the sand would shoot up a little spurt of sea water out of their breathe-hole that would jettison them deeper into the sand. (How they got out again, not sure.) I just read that people in 6 swing states who normally tend to vote democratic would vote for Trump, showing that, if we had the election today, Trump would win. Those people need serious therapy.
Anyone who would vote for Trump needs help. It reminds me of the dreamless collective psychosis of the 50s and 60s that overshadowed the world in which I came of age.
Vote for Trump and live with so-called Climate Change. That is the stuff of delusional psychosis.
Anyway, moving along . . . Roughly the same number of people who are psychotic or borderline psychotic in this country are waking up. (Not “woke”, but “waking up”, meaning, coming to their senses.) Seeking counseling or therapy, and I mean talk therapy, with the goal of learning something about themselves, maybe even what a dream means!, is no longer stigmatized. Licenced counselors are popping up everywhere. Some folks I know who see clients, remotely or in person, have more clients than they can book! This is an excellent sign. It is very good news. It doesn’t stop governments from bombing the sh-t out of each other, but it says to me that human consciousness is making headway in terms of healing its traumas.
You can stop reading here if you have indulged me this far. That is my main point except for one last thing: A little advice. Because there are so many analysts and counselors and therapists out there (and some might even be affordable), or accept third party payment, how do you choose one? The way I would approach this is, come up with three or four questions that address what you want to heal or explore or resolve in yourself, in order to make it easier to live your life. Have these questions handy when you interview a prospective therapist. That’s it. You may have to do a little soul-searching to come up with these questions. Have your questions cover your bases. The therapist may be strong in one area, but they may not be your person when it comes to one or more of your other questions. Good luck. There are some amazing, loving, highly professional, even empathetic and kind folks out there who can be of service.
Now I want to dive just a little deeper. I’m going to share something I wrote to a friend who is a father, and struggling.
What I have discovered over the years (and have been able to fine tune), and find as a useful model for working with people 1:1 is that we have 5 “bodies”: our 1) physical body, our 2) energetic / light body (chakras),3) our psychic body (our dream body), our 4) emotional body and our 5) karmic body.You might also say we have a social body, but that is tricky because a social body is a collective body. (You have heard the phrase “the body-politic”.) The social body behaves similar to a personal body in how we either fit in or are ejected, as by an immune system, and it’s very hard to find our way back, especially if we were always on the outside. (Ask a veteran poet what that feels like.) I have known lots of folks who been through that ordeal of being ejected from the social body.
Basically, the physical body is the body we wash and feed, that we dress, that works for us, shits and pees, gets sick and needs 7 hours sleep. The energetic body is the light body that is organized around the chakras and meridians. (My most telling experience of that body is after my hernia surgeries and repairs that damaged my 2nd and 3rd chakra-area years ago. It was after that that I discovered I could feel a spiral of energy turning clockwise around my navel. It was a physical sensation, like a whirlpool. So those botched surgeries (they used to install a mesh) opened that energy center up for me, and it is always open — so a mixed blessing.) The psychic (dream) body is the one I know most about. You can be literally f-ked up but your dream body can be, potentially, healthy, and that is a big plus for someone trying to heal. In other words, maybe the physical body smokes but the psychic body doesn’t. Or the psychic body can fly or the psychic body of someone who is wheel-chair bound might be able to run or climb a mountain. The psychic body is the easiest body to heal! It still takes work (with someone who knows something about dreams), but one can heal the dream-body overnight! The emotional body is the body that takes a lot of hits from life, starting at birth, if the birth is a difficult one. I can work with the emotional body via dreams, and now-a-days there are more and more social workers and counselors who have training working with early trauma.(For many of our young people, just heading into adulthood in the world at large can be traumatic, even a young White person who has been loved and received a good education. It depends on lots of factors obviously. Lastly, our karmic body. Karma is our inherited work, the path we were born on, and karmic work (our soul-work) can have to do with healing ancestral trauma or even the trauma of our parents. If the person is an empath . . . Well, they need to find a mentor who knows what they are facing. Empaths (and there are more of them these days than in the past) are very special, but if they aren’t protected when they are young, the world can suck them up like a shredder, especially the world of this country. Same with a child of color. Karmic work doesn’t wait for someone to grow up and say, “OK, I’m ready!” It starts down-loading at a very young age. (I know, it’s not fair).
This is a basic overview of these bodies. Some people are blessed with 2 strong bodies of the 5. Like a young man I know who wins marathons, but he doesn’t dream or he doesn’t think his dreams mean anything, so his psychic body is weak. His emotional body seems to be healthy. Eventually our karmic body will require attention, but sometimes I have seen folks accomplish some karmic work simply by doing something they are good at or passionate about that unwittingly heals ancestral energy. Healing of ancestral trauma is soul-work.
That’s it for now. Conversation is always welcome.
Gut reset: aim to restore the balance of the microbiome:
Note: Always choose organic whenever possible to reduce glyphosate exposure. Glyphosate is in most mainstream foods, including dairy. Glyphosate kills gut flora and causes gut-wall inflammation, chronic bowel problems and food allergies.
Research chocolate that is cadmium- and lead-free.
Program outline:
Remove foods that feed harmful bacteria and cause inflammation, such as sugar. If alcohol, moderate.
Maintain healthful practices: get enough sleep and exercise and stay hydrated.
Diet essentials (“Eat the rainbow”):
leafy green vegetables, preferably dark, such as spinach or kale
brightly colored vegetables, such as peppers, carrots, or eggplant
fruits that are lower in sugar, such as berries, apples, or avocado
olives and olive oil / coconut oil
nuts and seeds
oily fish and if red meat, lean (Go for responsibly fished and farmed animals for your sake and the industry’s.)
Complex carbohydrates can provide slow-burning energy throughout the day: Brown rice, quinoa, oats, beans, sweet potatoes, peas.
Hydration. Adequate water intake is essential for the body to function, including the brain! A person can tell if they are drinking enough water by the color of their urine, which should be the color of pale straw, also pressing on a finger pad, the flesh should push back out. (Especially essential for those with poor circulation.)
Best to avoid or reduce caffeine and alcohol and replace them with water or herbal teas, such as peppermint, chamomile, or fennel.
Sleep can impact the microbiome, as well as cognitive function. Try making time to wind down in the evening and establish a regular time for sleeping and waking. (Check out new research on benefits of settling into circadian rhythms: syncing body with natural light cycles. If waking with alarm use a gentle, natural sound that arouses the brain gently.)
Adding additional high fiber foods to the diet can provide beneficial gut flora with more to eat. Examples of high fiber foods include: raw vegetables and salads, green juices or smoothies, ground flaxseeds, beans and lentils
Exercise has a beneficial effect on the diversity of the microbiome. Regular exercise can also help relieve stress and maintain a moderate weight.
Gentle exercise is a good way to start. Try: walking, basic yoga postures, pilates, tai chi, stretches.
Fermented foods contain probiotics, which are live bacteria. A person can include in their diet: sauerkraut (the good kind needs to be refrigerated), kimchi, miso, tempeh, kefir / yogurt (no-sugar, add real fruit for sweetness).
As with high fiber foods, probiotics can cause side effects, such as bloating or gas. This may resolve on its own after a few days.
Introduce relaxation into their daily routine. This may involve: meditating or practicing mindfulness, taking a warm bath, getting a massage or doing self-massage
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In case you are wondering, yes, I am obsessed with the microbiome! but I am not a health nut. The reason I am so focused on gut health is, it has not escaped me that the American Diet is killing people. (The Europeans are not eating themselves to death at anywhere near the same rate that Americans are.) For one thing, obesity in the US is an epidemic, but it’s not so much how much we eat, but what we eat. We eat chemical additives, colors, preservatives and our wheat and corn-based food-products and dairy are laced with glyphosate.
Allowing glyphosate in food is a terrible crime, just as bad as the widespread spraying of DDT until 1972 was a crime, a crime that was never punished. (And they knew what they were doing.) There are untold numbers of people in our country who are dying because of illness that could have been prevented by eating healthier, glyphosate-free food. Buying organic does not mean that we can rid our bodies of glyphosate because even (most) organic food has traces of glyphosate in it. The environment is saturated with it. But the reason I am on this soap box is that two beloved people in my family died of complications that I suspect were caused by consuming food (mostly produce) that looked fresh and healthy but it was slowly destroying their microbiome.
So, I am committed to urging people to shift to organic.
Tonight is Samhain (Saw-wen), which spans Oct 30 – Nov 1. This is the time of year when the ordinary and non-ordinary reality are a veil apart. It is important to honor the helpful ancestral spirits, the ones who are here for our benefit, to teach and protect us, to ask those spirits to come around from behind us to watch over us. It is also the time of year when we need their protection most because there are spirits who are more predatory or who can harm us. Even a light smudge and a simple prayer for protection would be extremely timely . . . protection for you and those you love.
Samhain is the Celtic New Year and begins at sunset.It is the transition from Summer to Winter. Traditionally, anciently, the cows were brought down from the high pastures into the paddock, and they themselves were smudged (the animals that is). Nothing was harvested after today because the land belonged to the winter spirits. (i.e., if you harvest a squash after today, simply ask permission of the Winter spirits, that is the idea.) The hearth fire was symbolically lit, as a part of the Samhain ritual, but that could be a candle; once lit it can stay lit or be extinguished, it is the act of kindling the ritual flame that is important. While lighting the fire or candle, acknowledge and honor the house spirits and the home spirits, the ones who watch over the house and land.
The point is, (if you want to do more ritual) (Adapt these ritual elements to your situation:) Douse the house lights (and hearth-fire). If you are having a Samhain fire outside, light it when the sun sets. (This can be a modest fire.) Bring a stone to place it on a cairn, (breathing into the stone a prayer for the world, a prayer for family and community and a prayer for yourself silent or aloud). tell stories of ancestors while passing around apples to all present. (Remember that ancestors are not just blood-ancestors but all those who lived before us!) As you bite into the apples, while listening to stories (or silence) recognize the miracle of embodiment, being in a body, which the apple represents! To the spirits a body is a wonder and a blessing. The apple is the sweetness of life. Toss the core ritually as an offering to the animals who know all about the transition to Winter. Light a candle from the Samhain fire. You can blow it out but bring it into the house and relight it there. That represents the hearth-fire, the renewed light and warmth for the coming year and the Winter. This is all very propitious and auspicious, doing these very old rituals!!!
PS Even if you only half believe this, I recommend doing it. Trust others’ experience. I promise you, spirits, both ancestral and Nature spirits, are very real.
And now what will we do without the barbarians? — C.P.Cavafy
The emperor has no brains. His ministers, mentors and minions know the condition of our leader and administrate his mind with blatant tact, and no one, not even his cowed opponents, breaks the hypocritical code. The aura of silence about the emperor’s mind is mandated by expediency. No child calls out: The emperor has no brains!
And we seem lost. Maybe the word hypocrisy is severe to type a man who stumbled to his throne on an orange, and fear makes him popular. As regional crown prince he broke a record for executing hooligans, each time blessing God for his harsh mercy.The popular fears stay on. We’re united. Would you be profiled traitor?
The emperor depends on the holy barbarians who march in multitudes, who tremble the streets down to their tar intestines. These ancient furies tear their hair out and rip bras and blouses from their bodies. Our leader prays softly at barbaric hoots. They cry Idiot They shriek Face of Satan! Our monarch is pleased their wicked ways are loud.
Our people love a dumb emperor. He’s one of us a common man with vices who likes a pistol, a guy talking back to barbarians. He will bomb them before they smash us. He smiles and looks frightened yet it’s sweet to be an emperor and host premiers, athletes and heroes, and not live in a sewer but in a great white house circled by big cannons.
There is a melancholy in our land. And bad news. Russians claim barbarians live only in the Caucuses or have facelifts and own slot machine parlors. Are there no wild beasts in a desert once Eden? Our empoeror’s men have gone underground in panic but send up blueprints to create a goat-horned dragon roaring over the ocean.
Our mindless caesar lies on the ground and weeps. it is sad to live under a subnormal emperor. We are tanking and he bumps along in his golf cart. The barbarians were a solution. Another winter. What can we do? We’re obedient as Mongol ponies. The emperor’s minions haunt an underground city run secret courts and e-mail God for our next step.
We are waiting for the barbarians.Our emperor has memorized his speech. He has no brains yet our daughter comes home from school, saying: Our emperor seems crudely smart and wicked. Maybe our barbarians will not blow up the world or fling us all in prison. The sad one smiles. There is a terrible melancholy in our land. ……………. (from Wikipedia) The original poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (of which this poem by Barnstone is a take-off) is a poem by a Greek, Constantine P. Cavafy, written in November 1898 and printed around December 1904, as a private pamphlet. Cavafy’s poem falls under the umbrella of historical poems Cavafy, a Classicist, created in his anthology. Cavafy’s poem describes a city-state in decline, (modeled after Alexandria?) whose population and legislators are waiting for the arrival of the ‘Barbarians’. When night falls, the barbarians have not arrived. Cavafy’s poem ends:’What is to become of us without Barbarians? Those people were a solution of a sort.’
This poem by Willis Barnstone, by the same title, is Barnstone’s version of Cavafy’s poem. Willis’s poem was written over a hundred years later, about 15 years ago. (I can’t find a date for it.)
When we read Barnstone’s poem, we automatically cast Trump as the emperor, but for me the brainless emperor riding around in a golf cart is an archetype constellated by every president who has presided over our travesty of a democracy that I can think of. When we read this poem we might also cast the January 6 insurrectionists of the Capital as the barbarians, but there is a darker implication.The barbarians are the loud, violent ones who act out brainlessly, but for me the most disturbing line is in the second to last stanza:
The emperor’s minions haunt an underground city run secret courts and e-mail God for our next step.
. . . Not their next step . . . “our” next step.
Let’s stop waiting for the barbarians to displace our brokenness with a “solution of a sort”. I still believe we can do better than that.
If I were to die tonight or tomorrow I would need you to know That I don’t think we are done seeing each other So it would not be good-bye.
Remember when I told you How your moon-eyes bring tears to mine? That was many moons ago! I am sorry for all the times
Your moon-eyes were hidden by my cloud . . . Or maybe that was another life When I was a cloud and you were the moon. (sigh) My soul is tired of hearing me say, Sorry
So let me skip the thousand excuses And let this one stand for the rest Of the reasons I felt so heavy Climbing the back of the hill yesterday.
Not sorry for getting old before you. But sorry that I Iost my sense of joy Along the way! Sorry that I Lost my way to your smiling eyes!
Yesterday we started our walk together on the road And at the turn-around I decided to walk home Through the woods Over the back of the hill.
The sound of leaves Crisping under foot was my familiar along with The smell of last year’s fallen, penetrating To the deepest chambers of the nautilus of my brain.
Each noisy step a giveaway That I am coming, Large and clumsy, But harmless.
And then it was I saw the feather, A beautiful wing feather that hawk Dropped onto that thread of a path That I should never have taken,
It being bow season in Vermont And me in brown and black. Holding that magnificent feather I could picture it falling, spinning
Pirouetting from a high place in the sky. But as I walked down into more familiar woods Within that magical protection I imagined an arrow entering my heart.
And the hunter, following his arrow, Finding me with the shaft buried deep in my chest. And I am saying, Get my wife. Just go get my wife!
Such a strange poem to write About love and death And hawk and your crescent eyes! But I know why I wrote it.
I wrote it as a hunter Stalking his own life, With a hawk feather for my resurrection Chanting, Here I come!
Here I come!
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Longer poems are like power lines:
Does writing about a poem add anything to a post like this? Sometimes I think the poem is enough all by itself, but, in my experience such is not always the case. Sometimes a poem is like an attractive (for whatever reason) box, that the reader unwraps, appreciates, puts on a (mental) shelf and never returns to, or they share it a few times and forget it. We assimilate some deep or beautiful message or insight or image and that reduces the poem to a shell or wrapping. I would argue that poets do, often, write poems like that, using language (metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, story, and all the other elements of poetry) to wrap something up that is meant to be unwrapped by the reader. I make poems like this, but as a poet (as writer and reader) I need more. If the poet starts out knowing what the poem is about I would argue that that makes the poem into an object. And a poem should not be an object, it should be a living thing, with it’s own life-force, it’s own energy.
The kind of poetry I like to read and write is where the poet / (I, as the case may be) is not omniscient and not controlling everything. I don’t want to know ahead of time what my own poem is trying to say. I do want to know enough about the core or the spirit of a poem I am writing to begin to feel qualified to try to write it. The feeling going into writing a poem — that is, if this poem is to be written — should be, This poem needs me to write it. Not someone else — me! At least I have to be in awe of what I am trying to do!
In this poem there are stanzas that are like transformers, step-down transformers, to decrease the voltage, which increases the current, and step-up transformers that increase the voltage which decrease the current.
An example of a stanza that decreases the voltage so the poem can flow better, is a repeat-line like “the back of the hill” and an example of a step-up transformer that increases the voltage, decreasing the flow is a line like “It being bow season in Vermont” because there is voltage being added to the poem with this slightly ominous revelation but the reader has to pause to consider why that is coming up.
All I am saying is, that with longer poems, there is an electric current, a life-force and the poem is like a power line.
What about comparing a longer poem to a stream or river that is flowing down-hill, following a gradient, and like a stream it has momentum? I actually prefer the power line simile for this poem. Imagine it as a power line and try reading it noticing when the voltage is stepped up and when it is stepped down.
Me: Yes. But I’m dealing with the usual (for me) back issues, probably brought on by life-style — life of writing and too much sitting — which is hard to change (life-style I mean). What I am dealing with is that, with neuropathy (which I’ve had for 10+ years), my feet and legs would rather not be active, which means I have to willmyself to be more active. But if I don’t become more active in my seventh decade it could be my last, because my heart and other systems will be impacted. It’s easy to say I can change but change is hard when the body gets older. I can easily remember when it gave me a rush to climb a mountain or dive into a stream or even climb a cliff. I’m being honest. (One of my favorite things was jumping from boulder to boulder in a Vermont river bed.)
Not having been old before (at least in this life) I was not prepared for how it would feel “normal” to slow down. The trick for me is to recreate myself and step into a new less sedentary normal, but for that to happen I will have to find a physical activity that is as engaging for my aging body as writing is for my mind and imagination – the equivalent of boulder-jumping.
I invite us to answer honestly (as honestly as we are comfortable being) when a friend asks “How are you?” or “Are you well?” Answer honestly, for yourself, and then edit if you want to, but be prepared for your answer to surprise you.
One thing I have learned about myself, as a writer and thinker, is, we can’t draw ourselves out of our comfort zones. We need caring prompts.
One of the most common responses of someone being interviewed these days is “That’s a great question.” But you know what? Most of the time “That’s a great question” means: “Thanks for asking that question because I have a great answer to that question that will make me sound really smart.” If you are really asking a great question, someone will have to pause and think, and wrestle with language because it’s hard to be articulate outside of our comfort zone.
Also, often, whether a question is a great question or just a good question or just a pedestrian question depends on who is asking. How much do you respect the person asking the question?
How much do you respect yourself in answering?
These are just some things to think about to prepare for when someone asks, “How are you?” Or “Are you well?”
I drove through the whole city Can you imagine? All the way through that horrible city Just to get to my horrible job. My car was a small rusty thing, The bumper held up by a wire, The windshield splattered with old bug-juice, Smeared across my line of vision, The pitiful wipers useless. But what was windshield and what was lack of sleep? My coffee was only just beginning To kickstart my dream-besotted brain. Was I not peering through the wide end of a spyglass Into a world That I needed to keep as far away as possible? That was when he stopped me Like a wasp Even though I cannot explain All these years later How it was that I was able to keep living in a world Where a wasp can stop you Just to receive its sting, I’m rolling down the window And he’s just inches away All scrubbed clean and shaved and uniformed As if for an inspection And he’s asking, “Do you know why I stopped you?” “Ja” I say, in surprisingly perfect Hochdeutsch. “Du bist ein Stuckchen Sheisse.” “What did you say to me?”, he snapped. “Nothing”, I said. I think that was some kind of tipping point for me. I was 33.
Me (to God): Good morning God. Can you do anything about the war in Ukraine? Just joking, kind of. . . Thanks for healing that awful cut on my finger!
God: You’re not joking. So I will tell you Ukraine is not my problem. It is Your problem. (that’s a capital You) I created You humans But why You need to have wars is beyond me. There are lots of things that happen in the world That I can help with If I am in the loop But not wars. Wars may be the end of You. And as for the cut on your finger, I had very little to do with healing that. When you prayed to me to help with that last week The cut was getting worse It was infected And it had to take its course. But I was with you when you couldn’t sleep And you asked me to help. But I was deeper down the whole time Giving you dreams, spinning the back story of your life. To be honest Your infected cut was not that important to me.
Me: But it was super important to me! It hurt like hell and I was worried That the infection would spread . . . Like Ukraine. War is like an infection right?
God: Yes, I see that.
Me: So Ukraine is like a cut on the world.
God: Yes. The cut on the finger is your cut. The cut in Ukraine is the world’s cut. You exaggerate my influence. You project a lot onto me That doesn’t stick. I’m glad the cut on your finger is healed And the pain has subsided But to be honest, as your God I am more interested in your many lives. One life is just one life.
Me: Now you are talking about karma, right?
God: Yes, karma.
Me: How many more lives do I have to go?
God: That depends on you.
Me: Hey, how about answering this, God: Is it my karma to try to heal the open wound In the human race that is war?
God: Yes.
Me: How am I doing?
God: OK. You could be doing better.
Me: What else should I do?
God: You should heal the pain That hobbles your self And once you are no longer distracted By the pain of being Gary Then you can begin healing The pain of the human race.
Me: That’s good advice. But I’m 72. Do I have time to do that in the life I have left?
God: Time is irrelevant. I mean relative.
Me: If you are God Why do you struggle finding the right word?
Just because of my mood I will assume your answer is yes.
If you said yes you can be in this poem.
I guess some people will say no.
They are welcome in the poem as well.
I take only partial credit for that.
The music is from “Avalon Sutra” by Harold Budd.
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Reflection:
My son read “Avalon Sutra” and responded: “Can I challenge you to rewrite it with more of a flow and without the stop-start lines with so many periods? That is difficult for me.” He wanted me to write a poem that was more tuned to the spirt and atmospherics of Budd’s compositions. I wrote back:
First, I hear your disappointment, that my poem did not do H Budd’s music justice. I was not in a place where I could write that poem.
With the one-line / one sentence poems (see”Mudslide”) of “Avalon Sutra” I have some control over the shaping of the poem but the structure of the whole-sentence-line-poem forces my mind to let down its guard and become playful. It sort of simulates a kind of simple-mindedness. In “Mudslide”, the simple-mindedness worked perfectly. It was a way of telling a story the way you might to a child, to hold their attention and there is a bit of magic in it. Each line is a complete image or thought. In the “Avalon Sutra” poem, by introducing the anecdote of John L. throwing the bricks through Paul’s window, I am making John an example of someone giving into anger. Maybe because it is John, we suspend judgment, but what he did was very violent (and in fact, Paul was in the house when the bricks came through the window!) But the movement of the poem is away from John’s lack of control and back to to the music which has no anger in it. “Avalon Sutra” for me (in real time) is about me tip-toeing around the awareness of how we do not have to give in to our violent impulses. John actually did change after the Beatles broke up when he took up meditation, so there is a back story to the poem, and most people know that John, even though he was a passionate emotionally expressive artist, succeeded in reining in his violent nature.
Gary Lindorff - Nine Waves 