Being Informed . . . by Poets
Last night something was troubling me. This morning another shared in a simple way about her challenge and I took heart. I saw that, just as is true for her, I have permission to own my challenge and deal with it my way.
Dealing with difficulty is simply part of what happens on the road and it’s not personal. I could call it difficulty or I could even take delight in the hardship - as used to happen often on camping trips. I exulted in the physical hardship. I felt alive being gloriously exposed to the elements.
I can’t share my friend’s words but I can share some thoughts from a file of quotes I've been accumulating for years. These are thoughts from others I didn’t want to leave behind and forget - it’s now at 73 pages on my computer. I didn’t know till recently that such a book is known as a Book of Commonplace. It can include personal observations and wisdoms but mine is quotes only. I use a journal for everything else.
Here are some excerpts from it about how others bravely faced trouble, shadow and challenge.
I’ll start with wonderful Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).
Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
our season in our inner year--, not only a season
in time--, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil
and home.
(Rilke)
In a very different vein, here’s American writer Henry Miller.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
A Mexican psychologist friend told me that Tibetan monks delight in reading Miller, though how he knew I don’t know! I wouldn’t be surprised. Miller is a life-loving voice and at the very opposite end from orthodoxy.
Here’s Miller again . . .
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
Miller is of the artist archetype, with all the excesses that have gone with that calling in our age. Who would he have been if he’d been able to learn from the monks?
A very atypical artist (and the only one on my short list that’s living) is Wendell Berry. He is also a Kentucky farmer, and that closeness to the land informs all that he writes:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
A whole post could be offered exploring that! The word “informed” is interesting here. By how much are we informed by the daily detailing of tension in the world? Etymologically informed is related to shaped. How much are we shaped by current news - as opposed to being shaped by our relationship to larger truths?
Christian monk, Thomas Merton from Thoughts in Solitude.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Merton died too young, traveling in Thailand to meet with Buddhist monks.
Eleventh century Sufi Rumi, the most read poet in America is always a source of cheer to read . . .
This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor…Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
As many know, Rumi didn’t compose poems but rather he spoke out loud into his Sufi community, a spontaneous poetry as it came to him. His beloved disciple and scribe Husam wrote it down. Rumi’s vast work, known collectively as the Mathnawi, was the source which numerous others, most notably Coleman Barks, have arranged into wonderful poetry, a kind of universal tonic for what ails you. In Barks’ translations, Rumi appears as an ageless and appealingly hip modern. Husam writes: He never took a pen in hand. He would recite wherever he was: in the dervish college, at the Ilgin Hot Springs, in the Konya Baths, in the vineyards. When he started, I would write, and I often found it hard to keep up with his words. Sometimes he would recite day and night for several days. At other times he wouldn't compose for months. For a year a period of two years he didn't speak any poetry. As each volume was completed, I would read it back to him, so that he could revise it.
Here Rumi is again, giving permission in this case to think big AND go home.
Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
Good information!
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Practice
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Your friend on the journey,
Andrew