Night Howl, Deep in My Bones

Tags

Consciousness, memoir, Nature, poetry, sailing, universe

Last month around this time when the moon was full, our nights were filled with howling. Almost every night we could hear the mournful cries of coyotes in the fields behind our house, along with ecstatic barking, yipping, chortling–as if they were celebrating a kill, or worshipping the moon, or engaged in some wild orgy.  Or perhaps they were merely giving voice to the irresistible life force pumping through their blood and brains and hearts, a force of nature too wild and fierce to hold back.

The sound, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, echoed long in my mind afterwards, like ripples of water moving away to the edge of consciousness and reverberating back again. Like something heard long ago deep in my bones, from an evolutionary or primal past.

They say we humans carry in our genes the imprint of life-forms going back to when the first cells emerged on earth.  Deep in our blood, our bones, our very atoms, lays some faint memory of our ancient beginnings. Phylogenists call it our “vast evolutionary tree.”

If we go back even further, traces of that time when the morning stars first sang together may still be felt when we look out on the night sky. We are the stuff of stars, after all, so say astrophysicists.

Carl Jung envisioned our Collective Unconscious as a reservoir lying deep within our psyches containing our evolutionary memories.  While they lay below consciousness, they break through in dreams and myths and fairy tales, in primitive urges, the call of the wild, in our more-than-human yearnings.

Sometimes we feel this wildness rising within when witnessing powerful displays of nature: thunderstorms booming across the land, waterfalls careening over cliffs, huge waves crashing against rocks, hurricanes lashing at trees, lightening forking across a dark sky,  earthquakes heaving beneath our feet.   It frightens and excites—creating both the desire to escape and to embrace that primordial power.  One wild howl elicits another—the urge to howl back, to voice our own wild yearnings—to sing or dance, or paint or play, or grab words from the air and fling them onto paper. I heard that howl and answered back one night on anchor watch in Pago Pago.  A hurricane was blowing a few miles off Samoa and we were set to ride it out if it blew into the bay.

I stood at the bow of La Gitana, hanging onto the staysail as the deck lurched beneath my feet like a wild stallion while the surging waves rose and fell and the chain from the anchor rooted deep in the mud below grew slack or tight.

Overhead a torrent of clouds crashed against a full moon, sometimes swallowing it whole, then washing away streaming moonlight. All around me the night raged while the anchor held tight, and I held tight, the terror and exhilaration pumping through my blood and brain.  The wild urge to let go and be carried away by the night was fierce. Later I tried to capture what it felt like.   Here’s what I wrote:

NIGHT HOWL

(Anchor watch in Pago Pago, Samoa)

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I watch,

                            moonlight and clouds wind-tangled across the sky.

Suddenly I am loosened, lifted, flung far–

fingers raking stars, mouth howling moon, mind mooning time

my heart-beat

riddles the universe.

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I stand, astonished,

gaping into the maw of some vast mirror.

It’s close to capturing what I felt, but the last two lines trouble me. “Gaping” and “maw” keeps the visceral effect I’m looking for, capturing the sense of trance-like awe and terror.  But mirror moves it away into something more philosophical or intellectual.

I’m tempted to stop with the line “my heartbeat riddles the universe.” That captures the physicality of my wildly beating heart breaking out of my body to become the heart-beat of the universe.  And it also hints at the mystery of human heartbeat itself being a riddle, the riddle of the universe, that the evolution of the universe over eons led to the creation of a human being, whose heart—its essential being—is the ability to reflect back upon the universe, to take it all in.

Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.

That’s a lot to howl about.

[Reposted from July 2012]

Stepping Barefoot into Reality with D.T. Suzuki

Tags

books, Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, spirituality, Zen

I love this photo of the Zen sage D.T Suzuki. He was one of my first “gurus” if I, or he, believed in such things. His “Essays in Zen Buddhism” certainly was a huge influence in my life, as he was for so many, including Martin Heidegger, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and John Cage.

So I was excited to find this photo and article about him on Maria Popova’s fascinating website Brainpickings. Many of the quotations she includes were ones I highlighted in my dog-eared copy so long ago. I highly recommend you reading her article on “How Zen Can Help You Cultivate Your Character.”

What I love about Suzuki’s approach to Zen is its emphasis on the psychological and the practical, and the turning away from the merely logical and rational, or verbal.

“The truth of Zen is the truth of life,” he writes, “and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.”

He goes on to explain:

“In the actual living of life there is no logic, for life is superior to logic. We imagine logic influences life, but in reality man is not a rational creature so much as we make him out; of course he reasons, but he does not act according to the result of his reasoning pure and simple. There is something stronger than ratiocination.”

“Zen is to be explained, if at all explained it should be, rather dynamically than statically. When I raise the hand thus, there is Zen. But when I assert that I have raised the hand, Zen is no more there.”

“Zen therefore ought to be caught while the thing is going on, neither before nor after.”

We must see directly into the thing in itself as itself, into the “suchness” of life: “responding to a call, listening to a murmuring stream, or to a singing bird, or any of our most ordinary everyday assertions of life.”

To do this: “We must first of all acquire a new point of view of looking at things, which is altogether beyond our ordinary sphere of consciousness.”

When we do: “The old world of the sense has vanished, and something entirely new has come to take its place. We seem to be in the same objective surrounds, but subjectively we are rejuvenated, we are born again.”

Yet this new “sphere of consciousness” must be grounded in our practical, ordinary lives.

“Psychologically there is a most intimate and profound relationship between a practical turn of mind and a certain type of mysticism .  .  .  If mysticism is true its truth must be a practical one, verifying itself in every act of ours, and most decidedly, not a logical one.”

He goes on to quote the Zen poet Hokoji:

“How wondrously supernatural,

and how miraculous this!

I draw water, and I carry fuel.”

This too is what I love about Suzuki’s approach to Zen, his emphasis on work, and on work as love.

“For the soundness of ideas must be tested finally by their practical application. When they fail in this–that is, when they cannot be carried out in everyday life producing lasting harmony and satisfaction and giving real benefit to all concerned–to oneself as well as to others–no ideas can be said to be sound and practical.”

“The fact is that if there is any one thing that is most emphatically insisted upon by the Zen maters as the practical expression of their faith, it is serving others, doing work for others: not ostentatiously, indeed, but secretly without making others know of it. Says Eckhart [Christian mystic], ‘What a man takes in by contemplation he must pour out in love.’ Zen would say, ‘pour out in work,’ meaning by work the active and concrete realization of love.”

Throughout his essays he quotes generously from Zen masters and poets, and from Christian mystics and other Western thinkers and philosophers. Thus he weaves together common threads as well as pointing out differences between Zen and Western philosophies and spiritual practices.

Popova calls his essays “a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.”

I would have to agree with that. Certainly I used it as a “toolkit” for my own own understanding of Zen and its application to ordinary life.

Suzuki writes:

“Life as it is lived suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow.

Zen . . . must be directly and personally experienced by each of us in his inner spirit. Just as two stainless mirrors reflect each other, the fact and our own spirits must stand facing each other with no intervening agents. When this is done we are able to seize upon the living, pulsating fact itself.

That is what I work to do:

To grasp the fact of life and its sufficeness with bare hands.

To “step barefoot into reality” as the poet puts it.

Although, too often this is forgotten in the busyness of things, the turmoil and petty pleasures that swirl around us all and steal our attention.

But I’m beginning to understand that even these upsets and petty pleasures have a place within the larger scheme of things, if only we would see them as such:

Oh, how wondrously supernatural,

and miraculous this!

The spilled cup, the dime novel.”

In a life that suffices, nothing is wasted.

 

 

Water with a Razor’s Edge

Tags

beauty, Creative Nonfiction, cruising, Essay, inspiration, liveaboard, memoir, Nature, ocean, paradox, sailboat, sailing, sculpture, water, waves

Photograph by Sebastião Salgado

One of my favorite pastimes when we were sailing was watching the wake the boat made slipping through still waters. The glassy surface of the ocean rose up creating a razor-sharp edge as it continuously slipped along beside us, like a wave that never breaks.

Not every wake was like this and so fascinated me. It came only under perfect conditions. When the sea was clear and still, smooth as a mirror. When the wind was non-existent or so light it was like a baby’s breath. When we were sailing lightly on a zephyr’s breeze, or motoring through calm, still waters. When the wind rose and rolled, the wake would change, shot over with foam, its curl not so distinct, its edge not so transparent.

I’ve searched everywhere for a photo of a wave or boat wake that captures what so fascinated me, but the closest I can find are images of sand dunes with that razor-sharp edge following the undulating line of its crest. Sand dunes have their own haunting beauty and they too shift over time, but even so they don’t do my memory justice, for the wake I watched was alive, vibrant, constantly moving, a steady companion.

It was sculpture in motion, the way it  curled up continuously creating that sharp, transparent edge. A slight undulation along the lip as it held its form was mesmerizing. Watching it, I thought, I never want to be anywhere but here. And, I never want to lose this. I sought to etch it in my mind so it would always be part of me.

Of course, it wasn’t just the sight of that never-ending curl, that razor-sharp edge trembling in the sunshine that moved me. It was the whole experience. The still sea stretching out forever, the soft swish of the hull parting the seas, the whisper of the wind against the sails.  It was the tang of the salt in the air and the balmy breeze stroking my skin with silk gloves. It was me, bare-legs stretched out against the warm teak decking, sitting absolutely still in a sea of motion.

It was my family tucked away with me within our living, moving, breathing home, miles and miles from anywhere, safely embraced by the sea and sun and breeze.

If anything clearly captures the essence of what it was like to live aboard La Gitana all those years, it was the poetry of moments like this, repeated over and over again, like glittering pearls strung along a string.

I think now what fascinated me then was how this was such a clear example of the ever-changing changeless: The constant subtle variations in the wake’s shape that made it so mesmerizing to watch and yet changeless in its constancy, it never-ending formation. And while it lasted for hours, it was ever a new thing, newly created moment by moment.

I wanted to reach out and touch that razor’s edge, but I knew if I did it would  dissolve beneath my fingers.  How could water, so malleable that it melts through your fingers, create such a sharp, clear edge and hold it so long?

These things fascinated me then as they do now and fed my interest in the sublime ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this beautiful world we live in.

“Writings from Wild Soul”

Tags

Blogging, blogs, books, Creative Nonfiction, Nature, nature writing, poetry, Wendy Sarno, Writings from Wild Soul

The first blogger I ever followed and the first to follow me back was Wendy Sarno.  What drew me at first was the name of her blog “Writings from Wild Soul” since the word “wild” is also featured in my blog.

But what made me follow her and keep on reading her all these years was the deep, soulful, way she writes about her encounters with nature, which are always rich with detail.  When I read her posts I am swept away to a green, lush, world that humbles and excites me, and I always learn something new. A new way of seeing, a new way of being. I come away feeling blessed.

She calls herself wrensong, and says:

I am a poet who collects stones. I am a wanderer of creek beds and forests, canyons and high desert who, coming home, sometimes finds words to tell the story. I am a companion with others in the search for Deep, Wild Soul. I shape containers in time and space for others to come together to write, to tell their stories, to hold each other in the telling. I am a grandmother and the companion of a cat named Alaya. I often travel out into open country with a man who calls himself Dunewalker who has hung his hammock in my heart.

She has now collected her storied essays and poems in the book “Writings from Wild Soul.” She writes of this experience:

A friend just wrote to ask if I felt a glow of accomplishment. Well, not exactly.

Years ago I remember reading about Pueblo potters, mostly women, and how after they had made a pot and were preparing to put it in the fire they gave thanks to the clay and to the newly formed vessel saying simply with honor, “Now you are a made thing”. That’s how I feel when I hold this book. Not a glow exactly at all but a simplicity of wonder “My goodness, now you are a made thing”.

Here’s just a taste of the kinds of rich, satisfying meals she serves.

From “Into the Silence”

My husband and I just got back from the Pacific Northwest. We spent two weeks nestled under those great tall trees on Bainbridge Island and went off roaming the region. One day, out on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, we hiked into the Hoh Rainforest over a rooted and winding trail along the Hoh River.

There the Sitka Spruce grow eight feet in diameter, two hundred feet tall and the great Western Cedar even larger. In that damp world everything grows thick with lichens and moss. The forest floor is strewn with moss covered fallen nurse trees, licorice fern, sword fern, lady fern, salmonberry and huckleberry. The huge big leaf maples cover their trunks with epiphyte mosses and drip with long beards of moss. It is a lush, moist realm of old tree life blessedly preserved from the ubiquitous clear-cut logging fields.

We went in search of silence, one square inch of it. No, really, there is one, sort of. On Earth Day in 2005 Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, dedicated this spot he had chosen in the Olympic National Park as a sanctuary to silence. He calls it One Square Inch of Silence.

I was thinking about this invitation to silence this Sunday morning in July when I looked out and was struck by the intense green of the neighbor’s tulip tree against an intensity of blue sky, the etch of brilliant green against that fierce, endless deep blue. I was struck with my instant need to put words to it, to find words to say it, this meeting. I think it was Annie Dillard who said something like “God imbues the world like color”. This I have faith in, this imbue-ing god, the one who looks out at me from your blue eyes, from the red cherries, the gold finch, the grass, the moss covered Sitka Spruce. This god who offers the god-self as beauty, intensity, tenderness, who meets me silently the way the sky meets a tulip tree, the way an ancient rainforest holds its moist, mossy self. And for a few moments I’m enthralled, held in a large, sweet order to things, belonging to this encounter between tree and sky. All the while the sunlight spilling thru in silence. All in silence.

From The Bones of Winter

I had the sense all morning on this day between winter and spring that I walked at the edge of life and death. Wandering up the luminous green of a grassy trail that snaked thru the prairie blackened from a winter burn with its charred grasses and woody stems, I saw flocks of robins browsing listening to what stirred under the flattened mat of an old season. Here and there shoots of green emerged from thick tangles of old root hinting at the tall grasses that would wave here in a summer wind. It was there I found the bone -white shell of a box turtle lying belly up on the ground. Part of the lower plate was gone and it lay there like a mouth open to the sky where season by season it collected seeds and leaves and fallen petals and rain and snow and dust. The yearly stories shed by the land into this waiting cup.

All winter I fed the small birds from bags of old seed and I was as hungry as they were for something fresh and moist and alive. When I walk I tell my story. I whisper my hungers and my hopes to the grass and the wind. I share whatever arises in my wandering mind, memories or dreams. Sometimes poems. Sometimes tears. On this Sunday, as I leaned into the rising path and the wind, I felt my good, deep breath, muscles warming, a flicker of joy at the sight of green, and a sweet pleasure in the gift of a broken turtle shell like an offering, offering its stories and offering to hold mine. And as the hours moved my slow steps along this trail or that, I began to feel the gift that wild places always offer us, an easefulness rising thru my bones out of the moist earth, something around my heart unclenched, made room for delight in a pond chorus of frogs in their spring song.

From her website Listening to Stones which features her poetry:

Rain Like Fallen Grace

I’m cutting daisies in this rain falling over the quiet morning like Sunday Grace.

I’m holding utterly still breathing the scent of water and flowers

The cups of the small roses reaching up

Every leaf trembling

 green prayers

answered.

-wrensong

The Seeing

I’m on the phone with a friend who

is gazing out her living room window when

she notices a dead branch has fallen

across a live branch in a big pine

and formed a perfect cross.

In the center of the cross is a nest

and in the nest is a dove who is feeding

her three nestlings.

We were talking about how to keep

our souls alive in these difficult

political times and suddenly in

this seeing, and in her telling me

of what she sees, and in my seeing

thru her words the branches, the tree,

the nest and the doves,

we know.

This is how.

-wrensong

This is how we know, in the seeing. This is why I read her writings: that deep seeing, that deep knowing.

I hope you feel as blessed as I do today after tasting her rich offerings to the world.

 

5 Years Blogging from the Edge of the Wild

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, Ghost Stories, human consciousness, life, memoir, mystery, personal, Philosophy, writing

I began this blog five years ago, in July 2012. It’s been a wild ride, and I’ve loved every minute of it. My first post earned me one “like” and no comments, and now I have over 9000 followers, mostly due to being “Freshly Pressed” three times.

Still, it’s humbling.

When you start blogging it’s like tapping out a weak signal into a vast universe wondering if there’s anyone out there listening who will pick up and respond.

You feel small and alone at first, but powerful too, like that first explorer setting out into the wilderness, not knowing what you will find there, if anything at all.

And then you get your first ping back, a response. That’s all it takes.  You’re not alone after all. Someone is listening, someone like you, and community of like-minded adventurers is formed. Your little spacecraft has a purpose, and a grounding (a following), as you zip through cyberspace exploring what’s out there.

The purpose of this blog, as I wrote about in my first post , has not changed much, although the emphasis has shifted over time.

“I created this blog to explore what it means to be living on the edge of the wild.

 

We all are, in some way, living on the edge of the wild, either literally or figuratively, whether we know it or not.  We all are standing at the edge of some great unknown, exploring what it means to be human in a more-than-human universe.

We encounter the “wild” not only in the natural world, but in ourselves and our daily lives, if only in our own strange dreams, our own unruly minds and rebellious bodies, our own inscrutable families and weird and wonderful pets.

We encounter the “wild” at the edges of science, the arts, and human consciousness.”

I started out with a series of “Sea Sagas” about when we went sailing around the world, most posts on the why and how of it, not getting very far in our journey, and I’d like to get back to that again.

The wildest, bravest, and most romantic thing I’ve ever done was to fully embrace my boyfriend’s dream of sailing around the world and make it my own.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why I married him.

I also wrote a lot about the art and craft of writing, and my own writing experience. The two-part series about writing with Annie Dillard is one of my and my followers’ favorites.

When I look at the things I write about, that I’m drawn to write about, that seize me, here’s what I see, what I’m drawn to explore:

The gap between appearance and reality; between what’s real and what’s not, and how we can ever truly know for sure. If it’s possible at all.

The dark and the light, good and evil, beauty and brutality, the foolish and profound: how they play together, how they are all wound up in each other, how it’s almost impossible to tear them apart, as least in our ordinary, daily experiences. They lay side by side, or one on top of the other; they copulate over and over, and we, this life itself, is what they give birth to.

Some of my most “viewed” posts explore those darker edges of human consciousness. Hardly a day goes by where the following post does not get several views:

A Deer’s Scream – Beauty and Brutality at Home and in the Hills of Vietnam

The most horrifying sound I’ve ever heard came one night soon after we moved here.  A scream of pure terror that seemed to last forever.

Although I wrote it five years ago in October 2012, it got 106 views last month and 93 the month before, even though it was never freshly pressed. It was one of the hardest posts to write and one of my favorites because of that, I suppose. It spawned a similarly hard post The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry,

Perhaps at the very end, when there finally is no escape from death, like that deer, like my mother, and that awful inevitable conclusion chasing us down grabs hold, something unimaginable happens.  Some unseen hand plucks us like a ripe strawberry from the jaws of death and swallows us whole, savoring all the sweetness of our brief lives, and reaffirming with a sigh, “Oh, so delicious!”

A prose poem followed, based on my experiences caring for my mother when she was dying: 13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After.

IV
“Come here. I want you to sit on my lap.”
“No, Mama. I’m too heavy. I’ll hurt you.”
“Come, I want to hold you, like I used to.” She pats her lap.

Her hands are all bone now, her nails long and yellow. Her pajama bottoms are so loose there’s almost no leg to sit on. I balance on the edge of the recliner and she pulls my head down to her chest.

“There now,” she says, “there now.”

I feel like I’m lying on glass. Like any second I’ll break through. Like the long sharp shards of her body holding me up are giving way, and I’m being torn to pieces in her arms.

Another popular series of posts began with True Ghost Stories, Part One, Growing up in a Haunted House. One of the most popular in that series was about A Demon Sitting on My Chest. The series ends with me questioning whether all I experienced was “really” real, and evoking the voice of one of my favorite GOT characters.

So are the ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings that have haunted humans through the centuries, that make brief appearances and then disappear, “real”? I do not know, and I’m not sure if it even matters. They are real enough to those that experience them, as least while they are experiencing them, and then afterwards, one wonders.

Each of us makes but brief ghostly appearances in this world we call real. We apparently spring from nearly nothing–a few multiplying cells, and then disappear into nothing as our bodies disintegrate after a short visitation that can last a few days or a few decades. Are we “real”?

“You know nothing, Jon Snow!” So claims the wilding Ygritte in the Game of Thrones series, a saying that has become a popular catchphrase for fans. And rightly so, I believe. It has the ring of truth about it.

Author George R. R. Martin created a soft-edged, constantly evolving world that surprises and delights and dismays us at every turn. And if we become too comfortable in believing we know who the good guys and bad guys are, or who has power and who is powerless, what is real and what is not real, we are sure to have it turn topsy-turvy in no time at all.

It is a world that feels very much like our own, psychologically, emotionally, if we would only admit it.  Perhaps we are all Jon Snows, grasping to know for certain, what can only be known tentatively at best. And this is true when considering the limits of our own private, personal lives, as it is when considering the Big Questions about Life and Death and Reality.

So when people ask me now if I believe all this stuff I’ve written about in this series of ghost stories, I can hear Ygritte’s mocking voice challenge me:  “You know nothing, Jon Snow!”  And I wisely keep mum.

But lately my posts have been more about exploring the world of art, and my adventures playing with watercolor, than about writing or exploring the darker corners of consciousness.

I don’t know where this little blog-craft will take me next, and that’s the fun of it, that not-knowing: The mystery that lies beyond the edge of the wild and beckons us onward.

Thank you for taking this ride with me, for reading and responding, and for allowing me to be part of your lives as I follow you on your adventures.

Nothing But Miracles

Tags

inspiration, life, miracles, poem, poetry, Walt Whitman

 

Miracles

Walt Whitman, 1819 – 1892

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the
water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer
forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so
quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the
same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

[Many thanks to Writing Without Paper for providing a link to this poem.]

Can You Paint a Poem?

Tags

art, Blogging, creativity, inspiration, painting, poetry, the creative process

It’s a question a blogger friend asked one day in response to my comment that I would like to try to paint my poems.

Often my poems start with a strong visual image, and as I’m reading them I’m seeing these images flash through my mind.

When I wrote “Hot Hills in Summer Heat” I was travelling on Highway 101, looking up at the golden hills profiled against the blue sky as they cascaded down to the sea.

I watch them every summer, the hot hills

Crouched like a lion beside the road.

Something masculine and sensual about that image gripped me, and a poem was born.

I’m not sure if my poem “A Pleasing Design” was inspired by, or inspired, an abstract drawing of the male and female forms that I created long ago.

Both appeared around the same time. I don’t remember which came first.

I like the intricate pattern we create,

Stripped bare and essential,

The piling planes and lacing lines,

The way we meet and mingle.

My poem “Walking Among Flowers” was inspired by the image at the top of this post, drawn by a Zen monk from the 17th century. Something about its blunt beauty, or stark un-beauty, struck me fiercely, as if tearing open something deep within.

Walking among flowers

Drowning in scent

Petals assault me

Cool and bent

But the poem itself was written as we lay anchored in a bay in Moorea, looking up at a house on the bluff with a garden spilling over the edge. I wanted to roam that garden, to let the deep, dark beauty I imagined there tear me apart so I could be reborn. I wanted to swoop down from the high garden wall and swallow it whole.

Even now, I want to paint that garden with the rough, blunt strokes of Pa-ta Shan-jen.

A poem, after all, is just a vehicle to express something deeply felt, some emotion or insight or new way of seeing. And a painting is another way to express the very same things. Each would be distinct, it’s own unique creation. And neither would ever quite capture what you wanted to share. Both mediums are limited.

Poems inspired by paintings are common. But the other way around less so.

Recently, though, another blogger friend led me to the website of Lena Levin, an artist who does just that. She’s  created a whole series of paintings inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Her blog on the Art of Seeing is well worth reading as well.

I don’t know if I will ever paint my poems, or how successful they might be if I try. Words and images tangle in my mind, and it’s hard to sort them out. In the past the only way I could capture what I was seeing/feeling was through poetry. Now I want to see if I can use color and contours, images empty space like words, shaping them into phrases to be felt and understood.

Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to the works of the French Symbolist,  Odilon Redon, and his “Mysterious and Poetic Paintings.” Viewing them is like reading between the lines of a poem. It says more than words can tell.

I don’t know if I have the expertise at this stage of my learning curve to be able to do such a thing. But I do know I want to try.

You can read the full text of the poems mentioned in this post at the links below:

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

“A Pleasing Design” from The Geometry and Geography of Love

Walking Among Flowers

 

Celebrating Poetry: Music of the Spheres

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, inspiration, music, National Poetry Month, poetry, sailing, Sailing Among the Stars, starry night, Troy Armstrong

The first poem I shared on my new blog five years ago was scribbled in the starlight on a moonless night while crossing the Sea of Cortez.

A few months later I received an email from Troy Armstrong, a classical composer who said he had set my poem to music to be performed by a choir. As I listened to the music, tears were streaming down my cheeks, for I knew this is what I would have heard that night had I ears to hear, sailing among the stars.

Poetry, as well as music, has the power to capture that state of wonder we all feel at times when confronting the beauty and majesty of nature, and its power to move us beyond ourselves.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’m sharing the original post below with the poem and a link to the music.

Sailing Among the Stars

Last night I swam among the stars. The air and water temperatures were both 78 degrees, so it felt like I was moving from one warm atmosphere into another more dense when I stepped in my pool. There was no moon and the Milky Way was strewn across the sky like scattered bones of light. When I lay on my back to watch them, it felt like I was floating among the stars.

And then I realized–I was! We all are.

We sail across the universe on the back of a tiny planet at the edge of a galaxy that swirls around us. Too often we forget that–how embedded we really are in the universe.

I became acutely aware of this one night when we were crossing the Sea of Cortez from Baja to mainland Mexico. There was no wind, no moon. The sea was perfectly still like the surface of a dark mirror, marred only by our trailing wake.

Above us the bare mast stirred a billion stars, which were reflected in the sea’s surface below. I felt like we were on a starship sailing through the cosmos.

Later that night I wrote this:

Night Crossing, Sea of Cortez

The sea appears so simple

With a dark, indulgent face,

The stars there twice reflected

Like a world spun out of space.

Our sloop shoots through the cosmos,

Through a mute and moonless night,

Our wake a fiery comet

Streaming effervescent light.

With all the universe inert

We slip from star to star,

Then reach across the Milky Way

Toward galaxies afar.

Eons swirl, light-years unfurl

And none can still our flight,

Leaping toward the infinite

To apprehend the light.

I’m not alone in seeing the overlap between the ocean and the night sky. Various artists are fond of depicting whales and dolphins and other sea creatures swimming among the stars. The ocean and the universe stand at the edge of the wild, the last two true frontiers we have to explore, except for the human consciousness, of course.  The ocean and the universe have become symbols for consciousness as well as adventure.

We seem to grasp that there is something that connects all three—some deep, dreamy, ever-flowing, ungraspable, powerful yet nurturing element in which we all are steeped. That calls us to move beyond ourselves, beyond the safe and familiar, the already known. That inspires us to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp.

You can listen to the haunting music Troy Armstrong wrote at this link:

http://troyarmstrong1.wixsite.com/troyarmstrong/swimming-among-the-stars

Celebrating Poetry: Blown Away By Matthew Dickman

Tags

Blogging, Matthew Dickman, National Poetry Month, poetry, Zen

Matthew Dickman

In celebration of April as the National Month of Poetry, I’ve been looking back at posts on poetry that I’ve written over the years, and thought that I’d share two “firsts” with you:

• the first poet I blogged about back in September 2012, and
• the first of my own poetry that I shared in July of that year, which, coincidentally, was turned into an exquisite piece of music by a classical composer.

I’ll save that one for next time and start with Dickman under the original title.

Wild Poet, Talking Nerdy: Matthew Dickman

I stumbled across him by accident.  One thing led to another and another, the way it often happens surfing the internet. And there it was, a video of Matthew Dickman reading at the San Francisco Zen Center.

And I was blown away. Yes, I actually was. The same way Emily Dickinson said poetry affected her—as if the top of her head had been removed—“blown away” I believe is the expression we’d use today.

Now, Dickman’s poetry isn’t Zen, or even spiritual. It’s earthy, sometimes crass and crude, lightly humorous. Hip, you might say, in the way the beat poets were hip, so clued into the “street life” of their age, with such insight and understanding, that they could be said to speak for that generation.

So I think is Dickman’s poetry, though since I’m not from that generation, and don’t normally speak that language, I may be wrong.

So please listen and tell me. Am I right? Does he capture something from today’s youth that expresses its particular angst and yearning , love and loss, in a way that both elevates and exemplifies it?

I’m trying to figure out just what captivates me in listening to him read his poetry. It’s so unpretentious and unassuming:

Like a scrap of paper blown down a dirty sidewalk that takes on a beauty of its own without meaning to.

Like that paper bag being blown around and around in the film “American Beauty.” Remember? It’s like that.

In this way, it may be Zen-like, after all. In that his blunt, sometimes unbeautiful images strike you as an unexpected blow, like that “thwack” from the Master’s stick on the student’s head, that makes you wake up and “see,” but you’re not sure yet what you’re seeing, only that this quick-silver clarity is already fading, while something solid and meaty seeped unawares into your bones and shored them up.

If you’ve felt this way before, you know what I mean.

If you haven’t, don’t stress, you will.

Listen to Dickman reading his poem “Slow Dance”, or read the poem “V” I’ve posted below the video. See if it happens to you. Tell me if it does or doesn’t do what I say. I really want to know. People either love his work or hate it, I’ve heard, so either way I’m open.

If you want more, pick up his book All-American Poem.

Or go to the blog where I first found Matthew Dickman reading at The San Francisco Zen Center. It’s about 22 minutes long, but well worth the time it takes to listen to it.

Matthew Dickman reads his poem “Slow Dance” at Narrative Night 2008 in Seattle, Washington.

V

By Matthew Dickman

The skinny girl walking arm-in-arm

with her little sister

is wearing a shirt that says

TALK NERDY TO ME

and I want to,

I want to put my bag of groceries down

beside the fire hydrant

and whisper something in her ear about long division.

I want to stand behind her and run

a single finger down her spine

while she tells me about all her correlatives.

Maybe she’ll moan a little

when I tell her that x equals negative-b

plus or minus the square root

of b-squared minus 4(a)(c) all over

2a. I have my hopes.

I could show her my comic books

and Play Station. We could pull out

my old D&D cards

and sit in the basement with a candle lit.

I know enough about Dr. Who

and the Star Fleet Enterprise

to get her shirt off, to unbutton her jeans.

We could work out String Theory

all over her bedroom.

We could bend space together.

But maybe that’s not what she’s asking.

The world’s been talking dirty

ever since she’s had the ears to listen.

It’s been talking sleazy to all of us

and there’s nothing about the hydrogen bomb

that makes me want to wear a cock ring

or do it in the kitchen while a pot of water boils.

Maybe, with her shoulders slouched

the way they are and her long hair

covering so much of her face,

she’s asking, simply, to be considered

something more than a wild night, a tight

curl of pubic hair, the pink,

complicated, structures of nipples.

Maybe she wants to be measured beyond

the teaspoon shadow of the anus

and the sweet mollusk of the tongue,

beyond the equation of limbs and seen

as a complete absolute.

And maybe this is not a giant leap

into the science of compassion, but it’s something.

So when I pass her

I do exactly what she has asked of me,

I raise my right hand and make a V

the way Vulcans do when they wish someone well,

hoping she gets what she wants, even

if it has to be in a galaxy far away.

 

Poetry: The Thing We Die for Lack Of

Tags

National Poetry Month, Pablo Neruda, poem, poetry, Wallace Stevens

Paul Klee, Versunkene Landschaft, 1918

Wallace Stevens once famously said: “You can’t get the news from poems, but men die every day for lack of what is found there.”

It may be hard to argue the truthfulness of that statement when we consider the widespread unpopularity of reading poetry. A recent study finds that “since 2002, the share of poetry-readers has contracted by 45 percent—resulting in the steepest decline in participation in any literary genre.”

Poetry, it appears, is less popular than knitting, jazz, and dance. Perhaps that’s why we need the month of April to celebrate poetry, to help curb the decline and rekindle a comeback.

But Stevens wasn’t arguing that we die from the lack of reading poetry, but from the lack of what is found in there, the thing that inspires poets to put pen to paper, and artists to pick up their brushes, and musicians to play their instruments.

The thing we find in poetry that saves us, that renews us, that keeps us from dying for lack of, is the “poetry” we find in life, in nature, in human experience. In our deepest feelings and highest aspirations. So much of written poetry is about that, discerning the poetry in ordinary life, in things forgotten and overlooked and dismissed, and unfurling it in words on paper for all to read.

The ability to see poetry in all the aspects of our lives is what saves us. We don’t have to be poets to see the beauty, symmetry, grace in our surroundings, the imperfect perfection of ordinary things; to discern the repetitions in patterns, the rhymes and rhythms that surround us, to hear the alliteration, and the way assonance and dissonance complement and complete each other; to understand the contradictions and similarities of things, the subtle differences and deep complexities, to appreciate the humor and irony, the paradox and profundity that weaves itself through our lives.

In all of this is the poetry that poets write about. It’s what makes life rich and diverse and meaningful. It’s what moves us toward compassion and forgiveness, and inspires us toward greatness, and fills us with hope and humility.

The discernment and appreciation of the subtle and glorious intricacies of this grand tapestry in which we are woven–this is what saves us.

And this is what we find in reading poetry, if it is poetry at all.

I’ll leave you with the following poem.

Poetry

by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age . . .  Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.