Finding Our Place in the Family of Things

Tags

Despair, inspiration, Mary Oliver, Nature, poem, poetry, Solace, Wild Geese

I often turn to the poetry of Mary Oliver when seeking solace, when trying to negotiate a path through the cares and sorrows of this world and its grace and beauty.

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” she says, simply.

As if she and me and despair are old friends. As if despair, with all its sharp, broken edges is as common as grass, as remarkable as wild geese shrieking across the sky. Just another thing among the many that make up a life.

Not to be avoided. And not to let drown out the other voices that call to us, or whisper up from deep within.

Here’s one of my favorites.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

Life’s Sweet Longing for Itself

Tags

children, Family, grandparenting, inspiration, Kahlil Gibran, Parenting, personal, Philosophy, spirituality, The Prophet

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not from you.

I first read these words from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet when still in high school, a child myself, although I did not see myself that way. His words moved me then, even as they do now, so many years later, when I am raising a granddaughter.

Then I truly was “life” in its earliest stages “longing” for the life that was to be, that stretched out before me in what seemed an endless and exciting unknown potentiality.

I didn’t want to be hemmed in by the hopes and expectations of my parents, nor by their fears and warnings. I didn’t want to “learn from their mistakes,” as they cautioned me. I wanted to live my life as an adventure, learning from my own mistakes, not theirs. My life was my own and no one else’s. I wanted to risk all, moving at my own direction, and good or bad, I alone would take responsibility for the life I chose. Such were my longings then.

So I found Gibran’s  parenting advice immensely inspiring,  both for myself as I was moving beyond my parents into adulthood, and also for the kind of parent I wanted to be to my own children.

He goes on to say:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Now, as the mother of a grown son and the guardian of his child, The Prophet’s words still move me . . . and admonish me.

How I wish now my son had heeded my warnings, and that they had been louder and clearer. How I  wish he had chosen paths more safe and sane, had lived up to all the potential I saw in him then and see still.

But those are my fears, my regrets, not his. I must loose him and let him go, and see the direction in which he flew as his own choice. It was never mine to make or change or regret. I had longed when young to make and learn from my  own mistakes, and so must he. But that learning is his alone to make or forsake in his own good time.

As for his child, my little granddaughter, she too is an arrow who will fly beyond my bending, beyond my ability to see or guide her life’s flight. Will my warnings to her be louder and clearer? No doubt. Will she heed them, or long to learn from her own mistakes, as I had, as her father must? We shall see.

She, as her father, is in the Archer’s hand. And I must trust, trust, trust that each will reach that mark upon the path of the infinite toward which the Archer aims with gladness. They are, after all, Life’s sweet longing for itself.

As am I.

Resting in the Grace of the World

Tags

Addiction, comfort, Family, grandparenting, greif, Nature, opioid crisis, personal, spirituality, Wendell Berry

“Crystal Light” by Erin Hanson

“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” ~ Wendell Berry

I have not lain down where the wood drake rests, but I am coming to find a kind of grace in letting loose, more than letting go, in pressing steadily forward without attachment to the outcome, in a kind of letting be, come what may.

My granddaughter came to live with me at the beginning of summer and she is with me still, having started first grade at a nearby school in which I enrolled her. I am petitioning to become her legal guardian. This comes with the blessing of my son, but not the child’s mother, who will fight this. Both are struggling with addiction, both victims of this opioid crisis.

I grieve for my son and my heart breaks for the mother, even as I fear for my granddaughter. Sometimes it seems overwhelming.

Then I take a deep breath and do what must be done, regardless the outcome.

I move toward “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief.”

I rest in “the presence of still water,” and feel “the day-blind stars waiting with their light.”

I cannot say I “am free.”

But I do feel the grace of the world, and love of God, surrounding me and mine. I lean on that, and it comforts me.

Michelangelo’s Pieta & Saint Peter’s Basilica

Tags

art, inspiration, Italy, Michelangelo, Pietà, Rome, sculpture, St. Peter's Basilica

I have always been drawn to and moved by images of Michelangelo’s Pieta, his sculpture of the Mother Mary holding the body of her son in her lap after his crucifixion. Seeing it in person when I visited Italy last year did not disappoint. To me it symbolizes that  perfect all-embracing, unconditional love that transcends time and space. Her son is dead, beyond her comfort. And yet she holds him with such tenderness and devotion that I don’t feel despair or grief. I feel the power of an undying love and that spills outward, encompassing her and her son and all who behold them.

The Pieta was commissioned to be “the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could best.”  It is truly that, even today, and is considered by many to be Michelangelo’s greatest work of art, even besting his sculpture of David, and his painting of the Creation of Adam.

St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City is a magnificent setting for the Pieta. Many masters of the Renaissance contributed to its creation, including Michelangelo, Bramante, Raphael, Donato, and Giacomo della Porta.

After the narrow, crowded spaces of the Vatican museums, it was a pleasure to move within the spacious grandeur of the Basilica. I loved especially the lush details in the decorative grilles and arches, and all the beautiful and varied colors of marble found in the tiled floors and walls, as well as the stunning sculptures.

Religious Art, Old and New at the Vatican

Tags

art, Italy, museums, Paintings, Rome, The Vatican, travel

Visiting the Vatican Museums while in Rome is a must if you love art and history. The vast richness and splendor of the long halls and chapels, along with the stifling crowds, is almost overwhelming. Too much to really take in. But I found a quiet refuge in the Modern Art gallery tucked away in the middle of the Vatican, where I was able to move at leisure, uncrowded. There I found religious art by Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, Redon, Picasso, and so many others.

The place I was most excited to see was the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo”s painting of the Creation of Adam, with God’s finger touching Adam’s. But when I reached the place after being herded through so many countless rooms, I did not recognize it at all. While I found a place against the wall to actually sit and rest my poor feet, I gazed up at the magnificent paintings on the ceiling, not realizing I was in the Sistine Chapel. I was shocked to see the Creation painting, one small rectangle among dozens. Can you find it in the image below?

For some reason I expected that to be the dominant painting covering nearly the entire ceiling. Not so, as you can see. It is almost lost among the others.

Photographs were not allowed in the Sistine Chapel, so the images of the Creation painting featured  above are not mine. The photos below are.

The Sistine Chapel was not the only room where the ceilings and walls were covered in paintings.

But for all the splendor of the long halls and chapels, my favorite rooms and artwork were more intimate and modern.

Sometimes for me, the simplest drawings are the most moving.

These time-worn tiles below . . .

. . . and this little faded alcove above also touched me.

But of course, my favorite is still the Creation painting. Even as small as it is and almost lost among the many, it moves me like no other.

Letters From Beyond the Grave on Memorial Day

Tags

David Whyte, death, inspiration, Memorial Day, poems, poetry, renewal, Rilke, spirituality

While neither of these poems have anything in particular to do with remembering those who have given their lives to defend our freedoms, they are reminders that death is not an ending but another beginning. So my heartfelt prayer for them is that they fell into the arms of that great Mothering and are being nurtured and renewed there.

Farewell Letter to My Son

She wrote me a letter
after her death
and I remember
a kind of happy light
falling on the envelope
as I sat by the rose tree
on her old bench
at the back door,
so surprised by its arrival
wondering what she would say,
looking up before I could open it
and laughing to myself
in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time
for me to leave you.
I am afraid that the words
you are used to hearing
are no longer mine to give,
they are gone and mingled
back in the world
where it is no longer
in my power
to be their first
original author
not their last loving bearer.
You can hear
motherly
words of affection now
only from your own mouth
and only
when you speak them
to those
who stand
motherless
before you.

As for me I must forsake
adulthood
and be bound gladly
to a new childhood.
You must understand
this apprenticeship
demands of me
an elemental innocence
from everything
I ever held in my hands.
I know your generous soul
is well able to let me go
you will in the end
be happy to know
my God was true
and I find myself
after loving you all so long,
in the wide,
infinite mercy
of being mothered myself.

P.S. All your intuitions are true.

By David Whyte

To Leave One’s Own Name Behind

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. – Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar

By Rainer Maria Rilke
from Duino Elegies, The first Elegy
translation by Stephen Mitchell

I found both of these poems and the photo by Edward Steichen on Beauty We Love, a wonderful source of inspiration I turn to often.

Art that Mirrors the Inner Essence

Tags

archetypes, art, books, Joyce Tennyson, Light Warriors, painting, photography, spirituality

I found this photo on the cover of Sun Magazine some years ago and fell in love with it. It’s from a book by Joyce Tennyson called Light Warriors, with photographs of 21 women from all over the world. The author writes in her introduction:

I was drawn to photograph the people in these pages because I saw something in them, an inner power or radiance that resonated with my unconscious. . . . By trying to reveal their essence, I want to celebrate the beauty and complexity of what it means to be a spiritual warrior–to offer oneself to the world authentically, to flex the courage muscles, to share what it means to be human.

The woman in this photo is Dasha, from Russia. She told Tennyson about a reoccurring dream in which a bird flew out of her heart. Tennyson had similar dreams herself. She tried to photograph the doves flapping their wings around her heart, but didn’t like the way it looked. Then unexpectedly the birds landed on Dasha’s shoulders and she was able to get one shot before they flew away.

Dasha says of herself: “I don’t know who I am, I’m just trying to figure it out. But for me, being a woman is about bringing warmth, beauty, and love from inside you to the those around you. In the United States, people don’t speak about the soul and the heart the way they do in my country. But they are always talking about the past now in Russia. There is sweetness and sadness and nostalgia all mixed together.”

This photograph, for me, beautifully expresses that warmth, beauty, and love inside her. I also see the courage, and vulnerability. I see her—the way she’s dressed and holds herself, the direct gaze, the doves—as an acolyte or priestess in training. Each photo in the book reveals some feminine archetype or psyche.

Tennyson did not pose the women. Instead she encouraged them to express themselves by providing “a safe place for them to be open, to let down their external shields, and to expose an essence or kernel of their being that is normally secret or hidden.” By doing this they were “holding up a mirror to the viewer’s own inner experiences.”

I was so taken with this photograph I saved it for many years, not knowing why. Perhaps because it did mirror some felt experience. But once I started painting I knew I would have to try to capture her in my artwork.

Recently I had an opportunity to do that for an art class project. While I always imagined doing so in soft pastel, I created the piece below in acrylic, not my best medium. Still I like the way it came out. The woman in my painting bears only a mild resemblance to the lovely Dasha, but for me she does capture the spirit of what I see in her and find so inspirational.

Tennyson writes: “For me photography is a kind of visual diary–it allows me to probe emotions and inner realities that by their nature are invisible but are powerfully present in all of us nonetheless.”

I think that’s what I’m trying to do with my own artwork, my writing as well as my painting, and what I’m drawn to in other’s work.

Maybe we all are holding up mirrors to each other.

 

Mary Oliver, Washed in Light

Tags

death, inspiration, Mary Oliver, Nature Poetry, poet, poetry

Georgia O’Keeffe

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, died last week. I do not have the words to tell you how much her words meant to me, and so many lovely eulogies have been written already, I won’t try.

But the best eulogies were written in her own hand, or so it seems to me.

She did not shy from death. She studied it, stalked it, even taunted it at times. But mostly she used it as a spur to live more deeply in the moment, to become “a bride married to amazement,” a “bridegroom, taking the world” into her arms.

And finally she let it swoop down to wrap its white wings around her and carry her away to that river of light where she is “washed and washed.”

She lived her “one wild and precious life” with exquisite purpose, and I am certain beyond words her journey will not end.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Poppies

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful,
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—
and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow—

and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking,and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

 

 

O Holy Night, Images Sacred & Sublime

Tags

art, Christmas, Christmas music, inspiration, O Holy Night, photography, universe

Star_birth_in_Messier_83_(captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope)

I’ve gathered some images, sacred and sublime, to scroll through as you listen to “O Holy Night“, one of my favorite Christmas carols.

I love this song, not only for the haunting melody and beautiful  lyrics, but also because night has always seemed holy to me.

When I walk out beneath the stars on a cold or balmy night, I’m awestruck by such beauty and mystery and magnificence. I feel humbled and incredibly grateful, as if witnessing the hand of the divine writ large across the sky.

The images below are my gift to you. They reflect what this season is all about for me, a sense of the sacred and sublime–scenes of the birth of Christ and families celebrating Christmas.

Photos of spectacular sunsets and winter wonderlands–nature in all her glory.

And finally, images of an infinite universe stretching out and wrapping about the earth as if we were a holy gift just waiting to be unwrapped.

Enjoy!

 

Walters – The Adoration of the Shepherds

Peter Paul Rubens – The Adoration of the Magi

 

Paul Gauguin – Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen)

Attributed to Carel Fabritius

Heilige_Familie_und_Hirten_im_Stal

From Christmas throughout Christendom – The Christmas Tree

Viggo Johansen – A Christmas Story

Waiting for Father Christmas – Theodor Hildebrandt

Glorious Sunset

A White Christmas

Blackbirds flock at Nightfall

Frosty Trees in Winter Wonderland

Cosmic Skies over Bali

Northern Lights over Greenland

Stars trailing through the night

Earth Rises in the Night

Hubble_Directly_Observes_Planet_Orbiting_Fomalhaut

Night Mist as seen by Hubble

Cartwheel Galaxy

Orion as seen by Hubble

The Milky Way Galaxy

Our home Earth wrapped up in the Milky Way Galaxy

(First posted in 2012)

“The Secret of Happiness” – A Coda to My Last Post

Tags

happiness, inspiration, life, spirituality, Zen

After my last post on “happy endings” for our novels or ourselves, I’ve been thinking a lot about what exactly constitutes happiness and where it is to be found. Is it a goal worth striving for? Or should our life journey have a more practical, or grander,  purpose?

Is it to become fulfilled, to live up to our potential? Or simply to be “good,” to live what most would agree to be “the good life”?

Maybe it’s to “do no harm,” or to leave this Earth better than we found it, or to alleviate suffering wherever we find it?

Perhaps our journey is to find God, to become enlightened, to fathom the mysteries of the universe?

Or simply be present, bearing witness to all we encounter, the good, the bad, the ugly, the pain and suffering, the laughter and joy?

Maybe it’s just to gaze up at the stars in awe, and wonder what it’s all about.

But where does happiness fit into all this? Can it be found at all?

In my novel I have a chapter called “The Secret of Happiness.” Two characters, a young wife and her husband, are arguing about it. She’s come to believe that the secret of happiness is simply to stop thinking. To give the mind a rest from all its encircling doubts and fears and uncertainties.

He has another idea. “There is no secret to happiness,” he tells her.  “It’s all out in the open. You just have to grab it on the fly.”

I like his answer, as well I might, being the author of it. And I know where it came from.

There’s an old Zen story about a frustrated student who accuses his master of keeping the secret of enlightenment from him. The master claims that’s not true at all. “Do you not pour my tea for me? Do I not drink it?”

Still the student thinks the master is being deliberately obtuse. Then one day when they are walking through the mountains steeped with the sweet scent of trailing arbutus underfoot, the master turns eagerly to the student and asks, “Do you smell it?”

When the student says he does, the  master replies, “You see, I haven’t been hiding anything at all.” It was always right there, ready to be crushed underfoot.

So could it be that happiness, like enlightenment, isn’t hidden at all, but must be grabbed on the fly? Not because it’s elusive or evasive or enigmatic. But because in our headlong rush toward whatever hopeful ending we imagine for ourselves, which is always in the future, just out of reach, we overlook the abundant pleasure of life lying at our feet. Sometimes these pleasures seem too lowly, too humble, too ordinary to even note, let alone grab onto. Yet the self-so-ness of this unobtrusive good would fill our lives with such sweet moments of happiness, of warmth and well-being, if only we would have the presence of mind to note it.

It comes even in the midst of all our troubles, our worries and resentments, pains and hungers. Not “in spite of,” as I put it in my last post. But right there in the midst of it, that unconditional goodness permeates life and is woven into the fabric of reality.

A happy ending for my novel, or my life, is beside the point. Allowing our lives and our life’s work to be to infused with these sweet, rare essences is enough.

Photo of trailing arbutus by Justin Russell, public domain.