I wrote this poem as a grad student while living in that highly interior world of academia. I’d been feeling out of balance and needing to reconnect to the world around me. Then I saw a leaf tremble in a light breeze “and saw more life in it than in me.”
I wanted that. That ability to be spontaneously receptive and responsive to the world around me. To tremble deliciously in the breeze’s embrace.
Tremble of a Leaf
The tremble of a leaf awoke me.
So far inside I had gone,
Where id and ego threw
Long shadows across my mirrored face
To mystify me.
Where I dug odd relics
From a befuddled past,
Gazing long to find some answer
That escaped me.
Where men were but some
dark puzzle, pieces
I never bothered to make whole—
Only analyze.
Where Nature herself
Roused no awe in me,
Needing only to be computed
To comprehend.
So far inside I had gone
That when the wind passed over me
I moved not—
Only to see a leaf tremble,
And see more life in it
Than in me.
We are constantly navigating between the interior and exterior world, but sometimes one gets privileged over the other and we feel off-balanced. This happens in the world of academia with its classrooms and labs and libraries and constant reading and writing and talking. It also happens to us as writers, bloggers, gamers—this plugged in generation, with all the texting and tweeting, the TV viewing, internet surfing.
So often I see people, young and old, walking down the street wearing ear buds, listening to music instead of the wind blowing through the birches, talking to someone on a cell phone, rather than connecting with the children playing on the lawns they pass.
Sometimes we try to get out of our heads and into our bodies through sports or working out, yoga and dance, digging in the garden, taking hikes. Travel helps too, because it takes us into the unfamiliar and makes the exterior exotic, interesting in a way it has ceased to be at home.
But even then, if our heads are filled with constant chattering—thinking, worrying, weighing, measuring, planning, remembering, anticipating—we’re still in our heads, the interior dialogue is drowning out the exterior, acting as a filter to keep us from being as spontaneously responsive to the world around us as we could be.
That’s why I like to practice “no-mind,” having no thought, as I move through my day. Turning out the interior chatter allows me to experience the exterior world with no filters, nothing coming between me and it. Pure experience. It’s like when we try relaxing, concentrating on releasing the tension in each part of our body until we finally go limp. Emptying the mind is like that. The body is still there, the mind is still there, we are still there, but we experience a sense of clarity and peace that seems egoless, bodiless. A surrendering to “what-is,” not unlike surrendering to the water when floating on our backs, letting ourselves melt into its flexible support. Body, water, one thing.
Ironically, the letting go of the interior chatter, letting go of the filters that divide us into I and Other, this and that, here and there, this pure unfiltered experience of the exterior, enables us to realize that “in reality” there is no interior and exterior. It’ all one thing, one be-ing, not an “it” but a continuum and a spaciousness, a wall-less sense of self that includes everything around us. Interior and exterior merge into a single co-existence. Like moonlight on water. Interior and exterior reflecting each other.
This sense of oneness never lasts very long, alas. Like floating on your back or going limp, an orgasm or the scent of orange blossoms. It’s all fleeting. But it’s nice to know we’re not fleeting. We’re the flow. And all these fleeting things flow with us. Not two.
The tremble of a leaf woke me to the need to be responsive to the world around me, to experience it unfiltered by thought. But it’s nice to know that no matter how far inside we go, how interior we become, the exterior is only a touch, a glance, away. A mere turn of the head, a pause between thoughts that widens, a stillness that cuts through the clutter of our minds, and we feel that breeze, and tremble in its embrace.
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Your getting lost in academia, being cut off from nature, outside and in, reminds me of something Bob Dylan once said, I think it was about professors in college, and why he wasn’t interested in their definition of moonlight, i.e., two steps removed from the truth. We all hunger for transcendence, being in our essential nature, and seeing it around us. Your blog posts are an inspiration in that direction.
Thank you, Ken. I’m glad you shared that about Dylan. It underscores the point that the “truth” about something is usually far more than factual, or the sum of its parts.
Beautiful post about the tremble of a leaf. It struck a cord for me. Thanks for your eloquence. Laurie
Thank you. Means a lot to me.
Such an interesting read, Deborah.
So often we feel the need to share the what we are experiencing (the blog, the text, the call, the email) so that even if we are successful at tuning out the interior and exterior chatter we diminish it by sharing it while still in the middle of experiecing it. I am able to tune out a good bit when riding but often find I do some good thinking work at that time as well.
Thank you for this. I will practice!
Are the photos yours? They are lovely!
So glad you enjoyed. Only the last photo of the tree is mine, taken while hiking in Big Sur. The others I got online, either public domain or creative commons. Wait, the swimmer is from Fotolia, I almost forgot. I was offered free points to “buy” photos when I started my .com site, and got a few that way too.
Deborah, beautiful poem and post. I so know that getting lost in my head feeling in two different ways. One is the one in academe, where your thoughts are tied to some larger engine and you lose sight of yourself and your own unique voice inside. The other is just being too “in my head” from writing and reading. Thanks for the reminder.
Thank you, Luanne. I don’t really consider myself a “poet” but am finding the urge to share what I’ve written now and then. Sometimes what I want to share is just the germ of the poem, the thing that got me writing in the first place, what I wanted to capture and preserve.
I like the way you put it here–“your thoughts are tied to some larger engine and you lose sight of yourself and your own unique voice. ” So true.
You do a wonderful job for not considering yourself a poet! I love that idea of sharing what got you writing in the first place! Is that what writers are–people who want to preserve experience? Collectors . . . .
Having done the academic thing, I so know the feeling.
Reblogged this on jacquelineritch.
Thanks for the reblog, Jacqueline! And for introducing me to your blog.
The tree reminds me of the Angel Tree in South Carolina. The one with the white squirrels.
That sounds like a lovely tree. This one was too. One of my favorite photos. With a tree this beautiful, you can’t miss.
Reblogged this on loverunsafterus and commented:
So much to learn from practising “no-mind”. To be honest, it is quite difficult to reach that point. If you do, you are remarkable. But if we do, how do we actually feel like? I wish I would be able to experience it.
Thank you for reblogging this! And for commenting.
As for no-mind, when I am able to reach something that seems akin to that, it only lasts a short while, but the time before and after are also extremely peaceful moments, a feeling of being connected to everything–one with the universe as they say. You may have experienced something like that without labeling it as such.
“Only to see a leaf tremble,
And see more life in it
Than in me.”
That is so beautiful! And how you were inspired to write your poem, reminds me (almost exactly) of how I was inspired to write my poem “Falling Feather”. I was walking back from getting the mail, hoping for good news from an editor and finding none, when a leaf looped over the roof of my apartment complex, and fluttered in front of me. My mind exploded with words and lyrics. I sat down immediately to pen my poem, but change the leaf to a feather. And I imagined I was that feather (or that leaf.)
What an intuitive and inspiring post!
Thank you, Chrys! That means so much to me because I usually am dismissive toward my poetry, so when others find it moving or meaningful, it’s always an unexpected pleasure. I love that you had a similar experience that led to a poem too!