Living in the Liminal—Permeable and Transparent

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creaitvity, creative process, inspiration, Jane Hirshfield, liminal, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, poetry, spirituality, transitions, writing

Makoto Fujimura, Images of Grace

I’ve been reading (again) Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, a collection of essays on the art and craft of writing poetry. There’s so much here to mine for writers of any stripe, or for anyone engaged in the creative process.

My favorite essay—and certainly the most underlined and annotated—is the last, “Writing and the Threshold Life.” It’s here where she speaks of the liminal, the time and space of transition integral to all rites of passage. It’s where, she writes, “a person leaves behind his or her old identity and dwells in a threshold state of ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy.”

Most people dip in this space only temporarily for specific purposes. But for some “the liminal becomes their only dwelling place—becomes home.”

This was true for me when our family sailed around the world. The sea was our home. We were in a constant state of transition, travelling within the circle of an ever expanding horizon, with no landfall at all sometimes for weeks, months, at a time.

The sea was “a threshold state of ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy” as we sailed upon its surface or dived beneath it, weathered its storms and doldrums, watched lightening forking the sky and striking down all around us, greeted herds of dolphins rising up from the deep to play by our side before dipping back into the world from which they rose.

Our world was in constant motion as the waves rushed past our hull during the night and the stars circled over head while the boat rocked us to sleep. One after another port or cove, island or atoll, would disappear behind us new ones came into view.

When our travels ended, coming back to a so-called conventional life ashore did not dispose me of this deep sense of the liminal, of living always within a state of transition, for so many transitions I’ve made between then and now.

When I deeply examine the fabric and construction of this world we live in, I become more and more convinced that we all are living within a liminal state all the time. For nothing stays the same, nothing is as it first appears, everything is always becoming something else.

We pass through one doorway to another, one room to another, one place to another—so many thresholds we pass through every single day. Dusk to dawn, toddlers to teens, acorns to oak trees. There’s no end to it.

But the poet or any person on a creative or spiritual journey lives this liminal life even more keenly, or at least more consciously, more deliberately, perhaps, than others.

Hirshfield quotes from a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

Ars Poetica

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
How difficult it is to remain just one person,
For our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
And invisible guests come in and out at will.

She elaborates: “Speaking from the point of view of multiplicity, betweenness, and visitation, the writer can become a person in whom both individuality and community may ripen into true expression.”

When writing, she tells us, we assert who we are and what we think, but we also surrender those things “to stand humbled and stunned and silent before the wild and inexplicable beauties and mysteries of being.”

The writer’s task is to become “permeable and transparent.”

It’s about “stepping past what we already think we know and into an entirely new relationship with the many possibilities of being, with the ultimately singular and limitless mystery of being.”

“Above all it is about . . . the affection for all existence,” the hawk as well as the rabbit it hunts.

But isn’t this, or shouldn’t this be, the task of all of us as we transit this life? To stand humbled, stunned, and transparent as we move from what we were before this life began to what we will become when we travel beyond it?

Hirshfield’s book ends with this poem by Gary Snyder:

On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again After thirty-One Years

Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year,
I am still in love.

Me too.

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Between Dusk and Dawn a New Year Appears to Appear

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2022, 2023, inspiration, life, Metaphysics, new year, past and present, personal, Philosophy, reality, time, Wholeness

by JMW Turner

And yet we know it’s all just one continuous unfolding as one day or year slips seamlessly into the next. This marking of time is an illusion and has no more weight than what we give it.

In reality, there’s just this present awareness of the here and now before it too dissolves into what we call the past and evolves into what call the future. But what we call the past and the future are just part of one continuous, seamless, whole.

What we experience as the passage of time is simply the process by which we come to know that wholeness—intimately, inch by inch—as it reveals itself to us through it unravelling. As if the totality of existence is one huge ball of yarn that we are experiencing as it unfolds, moment by moment. And yet we too are woven into that wholeness, each of us separately and together. And what we are witnessing is our own self-revealing.

Nothing we cherish is lost. Nothing we aspire toward is unfulfilled. It’s all part of the one Whole.

The longer I live, the more I see things this way, and see myself as an essential part of it—as ever fresh, and as ancient as time itself. A time out of mind, or mind out of time.

2022, I embrace all you revealed to me of what forever is.

2023, I welcome all you will unfold of what was and will be.

“Catching Every Falling Cup” – A Primal Urge

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art, Deborah J. Brasket, inspiration, life, mantra, mindfulness, personal, poetry, Primal, spirituality, writing

Primal Swimming by Anthony Grootelaar

This phrase from my poem Brimless Being is becoming a mantra I turn to often these days.

It’s about the need to catch every falling cup “with soft hands” and fill it to the brim “with brimless being.”

This happens sometimes when writing poetry. A phrase will swim up from some primal depth, like a gift or some pressing urge—a fuzzy felt-sense of something that wants to be known, and, in the writing, becomes clearer, although not fully plumbed. Thus it returns, as if it has more to teach.

It means different things to me at different times. Sometimes it connotes a deep kindness that reaches out to save things that seem to be lost, fallen, ready to shatter—to hold them gently in our hands, our minds, and cherish everything good about them so much they become full to overflowing.

Other times it seems to suggest catching every moment before it disappears and just holding it gently in our awareness, feeling its fullness to such a degree that the moment stills and becomes its own kind of forever unending.

Doing this when it’s still and quiet is like stepping into a pool and swimming luxuriously through it. Steeping ourselves in every sound, texture, color, scent of that still moment—breathing it all in.

Trying to do so in those harried moments when you’re full of feeling—perhaps stressed, anxious, in a hurry and rushing around—is harder. But even then, the attempt to do so creates its own magic. Even as everything around you is in a rush, the moment slows and softens as the mind merges with its surroundings, savoring its suchness. That moment melts into the next in a never-ending stream. Nothing is lost. All remains full.

Me, you, our lives, each passing moment—We are the cup that must be caught with soft hands and filled to the brim with brimless being. That’s the urgent need.

Image by Anthony Grootelaar

Listen to Your Life, the Holy, Hidden Heart of It

Tags

An Immense World, books, Frank Wilczek, Frederick Buechner, Fundamentals, life, mystery, reality, Science, Ten Keys to Reality, The Man Who Found His Inner Depths

Alix Ayme, 1894-1989

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —Frederick Buechner

I never heard of Frederick Buechner before reading The Man Who Found His Inner Depths by David Brooks in the New York Times. He was a novelist with a “religious slant” who died last week at the age of 96. This quote struck me as “true” in an existential way—this need for each of us to listen to our life, our own particular life, as well as to Life in the more expansive sense. To touch “the holy at the heart of it”. And to realize that “all moments are key moments.”

I’ve been doing a lot of that “listening” lately, and looking back at key moments of my life, as well as those that fall in between. Perhaps because I’m of a certain age when there are more years on Earth behind me than before, or because at this stage I have the time and leisure to contemplate such things. And with the contemplation of life, alas, comes also that of its twin, death.

Buechner had some interesting things to say on this subject as well: “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

Interestingly, that aligns with something a scientist said, when explaining how abundance is a fundamental truth of Reality.

[A] full human lifetime contains far more moments of consciousness than universal history contains human lifespans. We are gifted with an abundance of inner time.—from Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize winner in physics

This “abundance of inner time,” of time without end, seems fundamental to my own experience of “time” these days. Even as my own timespan here on Earth would appear to be narrowing, it feels like a widening, an opening up into something larger. Timeless, you might say.

Which brings me to something else Buechner said. When imagining a conversation with his late aunt, he asks: “You’ve already set sail. What can you tell me about it?” To which she replies that it’s misleading to think of people as having passed away. “It is the world that passes away.”

Is it we or the world that passes away? Perhaps its only this limited way of perceiving the world that passes away. Perhaps we simply slip from one perceptual experience—one sliver of reality—-to another that is just as real, just as holy. Another hidden heart to explore. This idea too may have a hidden scientific corollary in what the newer sciences are telling us about the nature of reality and its fundamental truths.

“We like to think that we humans, with our five marvelous senses, are in full receipt of what this world has to offer in all its glory. But in reality, like all creatures, we tap into but a tiny slice of its vast fullness.”

So I wrote in Slivers of Reality in a More-Than-Human World, after reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World about how animal senses reveal hidden realms around us. Breakthroughs in science and technology are showing us more about the vast reality that lies outside our physical ability to perceive it. And who’s to say there aren’t hidden realms outside our physical bodies to experience beyond this world? As we do in our dreams when we see and touch and feel things that have no physical form. Or as people who have had near-death experiences claim. Experiences that scientists are beginning to study seriously. And those who have are questioning whether the brain is truly the source of consciousness or merely a temporary conduit through which it passes, operating in reaches far beyond that.

Who were you before your parents were born?

This is an old Zen koan, whose study is meant to break students out of their limited way of thinking about themselves or experiencing reality. It’s another way of saying the fundamental key to reality lies within.

Listen to your life. Experience for yourself the “fathomless mystery” of Life’s “hidden heart.”

Wonder & Worship, Poems for Easter

Tags

Easter, inspiration, mystery, poems, poetry, The Sun, wonder, worship

The Sun, by Edvard Munch

Primary Wonder, by Denise Levertov

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

O Sweet Irrational Worship, By Thomas Merton

Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.

By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light,

Bird and wind.

My leaves sing.

I am earth, earth

All these lighted things
Grow from my heart.

A tall, spare pine
Stands like the initial of my first
Name when I had one.

When I had a spirit,
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of fresh air
You spoke my name
In naming Your silence:
O sweet, irrational worship!

I am earth, earth

My heart’s love
Bursts with hay and flowers.
I am a lake of blue air
In which my own appointed place
Field and valley
Stand reflected.

I am earth, earth

Out of my grass heart
Rises the bobwhite.

Out of my nameless weeds
His foolish worship.

Romancing Life in Art, Poetry & Music

Tags

art, Jacob Guretvitsch, Joaquin Sorolla, life, Love, Lust for Life, music, Pablo Neruda, poetry, Romance, Spanish guitar, The Potter

The Siesta by Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla

I’ve been in a romantic mood lately. Both in the sensual and spiritual sense. This lust for life. This sense of wanting to “crack open our ribs and merge with” . . . well, everything.

After writing my valentine for lovers in my last post, I’ve been reading more of Neruda’s love poetry. The one below inspired this post. It too speaks to that sense of being one with what one loves.

I’ve paired it with two other Spanish romantics, Sorolla’s art, and the Spanish guitar music of Jacob Gurevitsch. His song “If Da Vinci Was a Girl” is a favorite, and the accompanying video speaks to that tender regard for the everyday beauty so often overlooked. As does the painting above of the artist’s wife and daughters at siesta. Those lush sensuous lines falling across a cool grassy knoll. Sigh! Makes me want to curl up beside them. Enjoy!

The Potter

Your whole body holds

a goblet or gentle sweetness destined for me.

 

When I let my hand climb,

in each place I find a dove

that was looking for me, as if

my love, they had made you out of clay

for my very own potter’s hands.

 

Your knees, your breasts,

your waist,

are missing in me, like in the hollow

of a thirsting earth

where they relinquished

a form,

and together

we are complete like one single river,

like one single grain of sand.

 

—Pablo Neruda

 

Burning Bushes Everywhere, The Art of Makoto Fujimura

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abstract art, art, Art + Faith, artist, Christianity, creativity, faith, Makoto Fujimuro, spirituality

“There are burning bushes everywhere, burning yet not consumed, and our lives can be just as miraculous. Our Making can be a visible marker of God’s gratuitous love.”

So writes Makoto Fujimuro in his book “Art + Faith” about what he calls a “Theology of Making.” I knew nothing about his artwork when I bought his book. But, always interested in the way art and faith and spirituality intersect, I wanted to see what he had to say.

Then I discovered his paintings and was stunned by the beauty I found.

He practices the ancient technique of Nihonga. His pigments are semi-precious stones crushed, such as azurite, malachite, cinnabar pigments, coarsely grounded. He writes:

“I use them not just because they are beautiful, which they are, but because they have this wonderful lineage. I use them because of the specific symbolism attached to them. For me, mineral pigments have significance as symbols; they symbolize God’s spiritual gifts to people and the glories of the saints in the Bible. In Solomon’s temple these precious stones were embedded in the walls as well as in the garments of the high priest. When you look closely at these paintings you see that they have a peculiar surface–they glitter and shine. Crushed minerals, therefore, symbolize gifts both from heaven and earth, and point to my deeper struggle to return the gifts given to the Creator.”

Fujimura quotes a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Then he says it’s the artist’s mission to listen to the mystery of things and to be touched by the “keen vision and feeling” of God’s creation. He says, “This experience ‘of the other side of silence’ is the timeful potential of art, which is what the Greeks called kairos, an ‘eternal time.’ “

He also writes about the artist’s capacity to know “both the depths of sorrows and the heights of joy.” To “feel deeply the wounds and agony of life with its explosive potential.” To reveal “the roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Fujimuro, in connecting art to Making, says he is broadening the word art to apply to every human being’s act of making. “We are all artists in that sense,” he says. “Let us reclaim creativity and imagination as essential, central, and necessary parts of our faith journey. Imagination is a gift given to us by the Creator to steward, a gift that no other creature under heaven and earth (as far as I know) has been given.”

There are burning bushes everywhere in our lives to inspire us in our Making, if only we would open our eyes and see. And remember to remove the sandals from our feet, for the place we are standing is holy ground.

O Holy Night

Tags

Awe, Birth of Jesus, Christ, Christmas, holiness, Magi, O Holy Night, starry sky

The single-most, salient symbol of Christmas, for me, is a shining star in the night sky.

It’s what wakened the shepherds and fell them to their knees, what mesmerized the Magi and led them across a wild desert with precious gifts in hand. It’s what shone above a humble dwelling, revealing a holy trinity–mother, father, child. It’s what revealed the Christ, a promise of hope, salvation, peace on earth, and goodwill toward all.

It’s what leads us each year away from our mundane, daily lives to a world full of wonder, magic, and mystery. It’s what drops us to our knees in recognition of the vastness and beauty of the universe, and our own humble and radiant place within it.

For me Christmas will forever be wrapped in the silence of a starry night, the background against which the beautiful pageantry and rituals and traditions of Christmas unfold.

All unite in igniting that sense of awe and wonder and delight, of humility and holiness:

The Christmas tree all aglow in the dark, pointing upward to the heavens.

The magical whimsy of that great gifter, Santa, driving his sleigh across a night full of stars.

The children tucked in their beds as their fondest wishes magically descend in the night to await the first light.

Whole streets full of houses ablaze in the night, inviting the gasps of wonder and delight in the young at heart.

Candles shining in a still, dark church as voices unite and rise in songs of joy and adoration.

All are mere reflections and whimsical mimicry of that first night of wonder so long ago. It’s what brought us, and still brings us, to our knees when we realize all that childlike wonder and delight, humility and awe, generosity and love and innocence, lies deeply embedded in each one of us.

It signifies a promise of hope, salvation, and wholeness. Of identity with out own Christ-like nature, our own unity with the divine.

We are that shining star in a dark night.

We are those humble shepherds and adoring Magi.

We are that infant cradled in the holy Trinity.

We are that promise of hope and salvation and holiness.

Christmas is the Christ, and a bright star in a dark night is what leads us to him, to our own humble rebirth full of awe and wonder: the recognition of the Christ in each of us.

May the peace and power and glory of the Christ be with you all this Christmas.

Painting ‘Adoration of the Magi,’ by Giotto, showing the comet in Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Veneto, Italy.

Field Notes From Within, Take Two

Tags

body, creative process, creativity, Deborah J. Brasket, Field Notes From Within, I AM, identity, Metaphysics, personal, poem, poetry, revision, writing process

by Odilon Redon, 1904

I’ve revised the poem I posted yesterday. I think this version better captures the heart of it. Let me know what you think.

Field Notes From Within

Our heart is a staunch defender of all

we are, beating with relentless passion

the wherewithal of our being.

Our bowels are alchemists skilled in

diplomacy, sifting silver from dross

passing peacefully away.

Our cells are seeds of pomegranates,

deftly designed for simple pleasures,

lushly dense and sweetly sated.

Our atoms are ballerinas, twirling

on ecstatic toes, arms flung wide,

faces like suns, dervishes of devotion.

Our body is like a tree full of leaves,

bark, sap, lichen—tiny worlds, seemingly

separate. Yet called to serve one

great and common purpose—I Am

–by Deborah J. Brasket (2021 – revised)

Wet, Raw, Unfinished

Tags

Aging, Instructions for the Journey, Pat Schneider, poem, poetry, renewal, self, transformation, unfolding

Instructions for the Journey

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,
wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

By Pat Schneider

This poem speaks to me. The older I become in years, the rawer and newer I feel, the more unfinished. The more expansive. As if there never will be an end to me, and I will ever be unfolding in some time out of mind, or mind out of time.

Yes, cold water running between my fingers.
I’m like that.
The cold, the water, the fingers.
The wet, raw, feel of it all.
Just like that.