Of Being
I know this happiness
is provisional:
the looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of the sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery:
– Denise Levertov
“I have just begun to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of my life, of all our lives. Not young, not old; not betrothed, not alone; thinking back, looking forward; not broken, not quite whole anymore, either. But present.”
-Dominique Browning, Slow Love
From the lovely blog Slow Love Life (also by Dominique Browning). Thank you, Robin, for sharing this marvelous site with me – I feel I have found a kindred spirit for sure.
My mother and I went to hear Mary Oliver read last night. She read in the chapel at Wellesley College, which was full to capacity – hundreds of people, standing room only. Katrina had described Mary Oliver as “elfin” to me and she is. Tiny and sparkling at the same time, wearing plain black, she commanded the entire room from her spot at the front of the room. The crowd was spellbound, mostly silent, but occasionally breaking into murmurs of emotion, particularly at familiar poems like Wild Geese.
The silence in the chapel had a tangible quality to it, like reverence, or grace. Through the window behind me I could see the sunset, and I kept looking back, watching the sky grow more and more glowingly pink, sliced as it was into small pieces by the dark-wood-detailed window panes. It was the kind of sky that I recently told a friend makes me believe in God, where the clouds are lit from beyond the horizon, by beams from a world beyond the curve of the one we live in.
Watching the incandescent world, the fall leaves blotted against the sky, alive with beauty, and hearing Mary Oliver read her words about ways that holiness inhabits the natural world, I felt something substantial settle deep inside me and something billow to life at the same time. Somebody in the audience asked Oliver what the role of beauty in the world is, and she replied, simply, “Beauty gives you an ache to be worthy of it.” And that was precisely what I was experiencing, right then, with the sunset and the words and the ineffable quality of the silence in that chapel.
Someone else asked her about her childhood, and whether she writes much about it. She laughed briefly, and then said she had not written much about it but planned to. She said, then, that she had not wanted to write about her childhood until she “took true title of her life.” This phrase has been with me for hours: isn’t that what I’m engaged in, here, in some ways? Taking true title of my life, assuming ownership of my experience, growing comfortable asserting my own mastery over my own story?
One other question struck me: asked what physical conditions she writes best in, Oliver said that she writes often outside, always with paper and pen. She said you can’t write poetry on the computer, because when you change a word you need to erase it and write over it. This brought to mind the notion in painting of pentimento, and I wondered how it might operate in poetry: all the words that were thought of before exist, erased but still faintly visible, on the page beneath the final word. What texture this provides to the final verse. Is this true of our lives, too? Do we still have, running through us, all the versions of us that preceded who we are right at this moment? Aren’t we all made up, after all, of layer upon layer of personality, experience, loves, losses, the accumulated detritus of our years on earth?
Oliver read an assortment of poems, some old favorites and many from her new book, Swan. I loved one new of her poems the best. The room rippled with emotion, faint gasps, and wide-eyed wonder as she read the final line. I share the poem in its entirety here.
Whispered Poem
I have been risky in my endeavors,
I have been steadfast in my loves;
Oh Lord, consider these when you judge me.
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Loved this book when I read it, and found this beautiful quote tonight. Robinson has put into crystalline words one of the themes I find myself returning to, which is the impossibility of fully knowing even those we love best, the inescapable loneliness at the heart of life.
I can only add my voice to the chorus – the more eloquent and beautifully-expressed chorus – celebrating Karen Maezen Miller and her Mother’s Plunge in Boston on Saturday. It was a lovely day, one that I know will continue to seep into my spirit over time. I won’t forget Karen’s animated face, her contagious bursts of laughter, and the simple but powerful message that she conveyed with her words and, even more compellingly, with her very spirit.
I struggle, actually, to really put into words what Karen shared. Her message is as essential as air and as ineffable as the meaning of life. How is it that something so very simple – how to exist peacefully in the world, how to love others and ourselves – is so complicated? This paradox is at the heart of everything I wrestle with. And, I suspect, that’s true of all of us.
So, what did I learn from Karen? In fact, I think what Karen does is to remind us – lovingly, inescapably, life-changingly – of those fundamental truths we already know.
What we pay attention to flourishes. Attention is love. It is, after all, the only true thing of value we have. This is, in my opinion, another way to say that the way we spend our hours is how we spend our lives. Instinctively, we turn the radiance of our attention, the laser beam of our gaze, both spiritual and literal, onto that which we love.
Love = compassion = non-judgment. The moment we start judging, or investing our energies into what we expect or want from a situation or a person is the moment we stop loving. And yet we all do this – at least I do – a hundred times a day. A critical task of our lives is to truly see those we love for who they are, even when that means accepting that there are mysteries inside of them that we will never understand. To release them from the cage of what we so desperately want them to be, so that they may flourish into who they are.
Karen herself is a joy – somehow calm and enthusiastic at the same time, radiating both an infectious joy at the basic fact of life and a palpable calm. She set an atmosphere of acceptance and warmth, and I felt hugely relaxed in the room and in the sunlight at the Charlestown seaport. Surely the attendance of so many kindred spirits helped – I was honored and thrilled to meet such kindred spirits as Jena and Katrina, and to see again new-but-feel-like-old friends like Denise, Corinne, and Tracy. The biggest disappointment of the day? That I did not realize that Meg – whose words I adore, quote often, and hear in my own head – was in the room. I’m sure her presence contributed to what a marvelous day it was for me, but I wish I’d met her face to face and hugged her in person.
We were all immensely fortunate to have Katrina Kenison with us too. Katrina sat in front of us, in a space that felt nothing short of holy, and read from her most recent writing about sharing her dear friend’s journey towards the end of life (the quote that inspired yesterday’s post was from this reading). Katrina’s presence is a balm and she has already become a very important person in my life. Having her there was a gift.
Thank you, Karen, for such a moving and thought-provoking day. I can feel your words and your example sinking into some deep place inside me. Your words had already had a profound effect on me, and meeting you in person was even more than I imagined it would be.