The road

The last poem David read was "Santiago," which he said was about "the arrival place." There is a lot of reference to "the road." Of course I thought of "the road not taken" (Robert Frost). And Bilbo Baggins' poem, "The Road Goes ever on and on"  (from the poem by J.R.R. Tolkien).

When I heard these lines:

so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach

I thought of Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" and how the good witch told her that, for her whole journey on the yellow brick road, all along she had the means to go home.

Then, perhaps a silly thought when I heard these lines:

and turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse

I thought of the children's song "The Bear Went over the Mountain." "The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see...he saw another mountain, he saw another mountain he saw another mountain, and what do you think he did?...He climbed the other mountain..."

The reference to finding "just a simple reflection" of "the face looking back" made me remember Mom telling Dad, "Wherever you go, there you are."

Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like a person and a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.

-- David Whyte
from Pilgrim
©2012 Many Rivers Press

What do you think you don't deserve?

On our last day of A Weekend with David Whyte, he gave us a list of things to think of in order to live a deeper, fuller life. He talked about trying to figure out what you want in life. That made me think of the Jesuits asking the question, what is the desire of your heart? God wants you to have the desire of your heart. David said to explore what you think you don't deserve in life. It can help you figure out what you want.

I don't deserve...

Farewell letter

FAREWELL LETTER
(For All the Mothers Who Have Passed Away)

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
nor 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 of your intuitions are true.
...

FAREWELL LETTER
in River Flow
New & Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press © David Whyte

David said that when you lose someone, you have this ancient feeling that they're just about to visit. He told us he wrote this poem from a dream he had after his mother's death. The poem describes what happened in the dream.

As he read it, I imagined Cori, Luke, and Zach reading this letter, as if it were from me to them. It made me cry. It's good, though.

David said his friend John O'Donohue lived believing, "Wasn't it amazing to have been in the world together at the same time?"

Let the dead have their own life?

This poem had a line that has remained with me ever since, "so you can let the one you have lost alone, so that you can let the one you have lost have their own life and even their own death without you." Let the one you have lost have their own life? Let the dead person have their own life? It sounds kind of strange. I believe there is life after death, but it's all a mystery to me. I don't imagine them going about life in some similar way to what I do every day. But what do I know? Nothing about that!

David told a story about a dream he had about his dad, who had passed away. In the dream his dad was busy doing something (I can't remember what) and seemed almost too busy to talk to David. This morning I finished reading A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis*, and at the end he wrote about something that seemed like a visit from Joy (his wife, whose death and Lewis' grief is what the book is about), although he would not use such concrete words to describe it. He wrote:

And more than once, that impression which can't describe except by saying that it's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness.

And:

It's the quality of last night's experience--not what it proves but what it was--that makes it worth putting down. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own...

Not at all a rapturous reunion of lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement...No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even, in our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so--well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy.

Business-like. Intriguing, isn't it?

WINTER GRIEF

Let the rest
in this rested place
rest for you.

Let the birds sing
and the geese call
and the sky race
from west to east
when you cannot raise
a wing to fly.

Let evening
trace your loss
in the stonework
against a fading sky.

So that
you can give up
and give in
and be given back to,
so that you can let
winter
come and live
fully inside you,
so that
you can
retrace
the loving path
of heartbreak
that brought you here.

So you can cry alone
and be alone
so you can let
yourself alone
to be lost,
so you can
let the one
you have lost
alone, so that
you can let
the one
you have lost
have their
own life
and even
their own
death
without you.

So the world
and everyone
who has ever lived
and ever died
can come and go
as they please.

So you can
let yourself
not know, what
not knowing
means.

So that
you can be
even more generous
in your letting go
than they
were
in their leaving.

So that you can
let winter
be winter.

So that you can let
the world alone
to think of spring.
…
WINTER GRIEF
From
THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD
Poetry by David Whyte
APRIL 2018 © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

*C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, HarperCollins, c. 1961. Pp. 71, 73.

Friendship - multiple forgivenesses

I bought the book Consolations at the Weekend with David Whyte. He takes a list of 52 words and writes about them - short reflections rather than poems. I keep remembering what he said about friendship, and in particular that "friendship only survives with multiple forgivenesses." It pleases me to hear "forgiveness" made into a noun like that. Each forgiveness (or less poetically, each act of forgiveness) like a stone of a path, multiple forgivenesses creating a beautiful path through friendship.

It struck me that we need multiple forgivenesses in our church life, too. Brad used to say that one of the good things about going to church is that you spend time with people you otherwise would not touch with a 10-foot pole. Yes, and we all have to forgive each other over and over. Nadia Bolz-Weber said that when she welcomed new members to her church, she would tell them, "We're going to mess up. Someone is going to say something that hurts, someone is going to do something stupid. I hope you'll stick around to see the beauty God makes of this mess." Multiple forgivenesses will create beauty.

FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.  ~~from Consolations by David Whyte

Turn sideways into the light

Isn't that a beautiful line? "Turn sideways into the light." It's from a Celtic myth about some amazing tribe of people who went into battle knowing they would be defeated. They stood facing the enemy and as the enemy charged toward them, they turned sideways into the light and disappeared.

I also like "Be impatient with easy explanations / and teach that part of the mind / that wants to know everything / not to begin questions it cannot answer." More and more it gives me peace not to try to solve everything, not to try to find the answer to every question. That place where you live in an unanswered question is often called tense, but it seems like there can be a point of balance where the tension goes away.

David wrote this poem after visiting "the well of Patrick overlooking Galway Bay." He said it is a favorite spot of his and many others, "a place of silence and respite, inviting you to make a friend of silence, the spaciousness of silence."

TOBAR PHADRAIC

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live
.
But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.

TOBAR PHADRAIC
In RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Simply breathing

We heard an Indian flutist. Before he started he said he offered "the easy prayer of simply breathing."

Cori

Cleave

by David Whyte

To hold together and to split apart

at one and the same time,

like the shock of being born,

breathing in this world

while lamenting for the one we’ve left. 

No one needs to tell us

we are already on our onward way,

no one has to remind us

of our everyday and intimate

embrace

with disappearance. 

We were born saying goodbye

to what we love,

we were born

in a beautiful reluctance

to be here,

not quite ready 

to breathe in this new world,

we are here and we are almost not,

we are present while still not

wanting to admit we have arrived. 

Not quite arrived in our minds

yet always arriving in the body,

always growing older

while trying to grow younger,

always in the act

of catching up,

of saying hello

or saying goodbye

finding strangely

in each new and imagined future

the still-lived memory

of our previous life.

Anyone in my family who read;

...like the shock of being born,
breathing in this world
while lamenting for the one we’ve left...

and

...We were born saying goodbye
to what we love,
we were born
in a beautiful reluctance
to be here,

not quite ready
to breathe in this new world,...

would know why I named this entry "Cori." It is a well-known family story that Cori screamed when she was born (and any time she cried thereafter, for about 4 months). The nurses in the delivery room had to yell to each other as they weighed her. I always said Cori did not like being taken from that warm womb, and she let us all know.

May what I'm about to say be a gift

Easter Blessing
(For John O’Donohue)

by David Whyte

The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place you know and have known
in the darkness and that that carries all you need.
May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may that hidden darkness be your gift to give,
may you hold that shadow to the light
and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,
may you join all of your previous disappearances
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new and newly alive.

from The Bell and the Blackbird

At the Weekend With David Whyte, David told a lot of stories about John O'Donahue, his beloved friend, also a poet. I learned of both David Whyte and John O'Donohue from "On Being." This poem is in memory of an Easter blessing John gave at a sunrise service in Ireland. David said that it is very unusual to have sunrise services in Ireland -- "no one wants to get up that early."

My notes show that during this talk, David said, "What has not yet been said in you, may it become as gift to give." I thought it was part of the poem or of John O'Donohue's message. But I do not see it in either. I don't know where it came from. It pierced me. If only my words could be a gift, always. So often I have regretted my words. I need this blessing.

Easter Blessing
by John O'Donohue

"On this Easter morning, let us look again at the lives we have been so generously given and let us let fall away the useless baggage that we carry -- old pains, old habits, old ways of seeing and feeling -- and let us have the courage to begin again. Life is very short, and we are no sooner here than it is time to depart again, and we should use to the full the time that we still have.

We don't realize all the good we can do. A kind, encouraging word or helping hand can bring many a person through dark valleys in their lives. We weren't put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously. The dawn that is rising this Easter morning is a gift to our hearts and we are meant to celebrate it and to carry away from this holy, ancient place the gifts of healing and light and the courage of a new beginning."

Dawn Mass Reflections at Corcomroe Abbey

Walking on the Pastures of Wonder
John O'Donohue in conversation with John Quinn
Corcomroe Abbey

You are the Potter, I am the clay.

The Faces at Braga

by David Whyte

In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight,
the old shrine room waits in silence.

While beside the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, “Will you step through?”

And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.

We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,

see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the handheld light.

Such love in solid wood—
taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.

Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers

we have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.

Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand.

If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver’s hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.

If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,

we would smile too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.

When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.

And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.

If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver’s hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
everyday, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver’s hands.

At A Weekend With David Whyte, David told the story of his walk up a mountain in Tibet where there were carved faces in a cave. He and his companions persuaded a monk to let them in to cave one night. It was so dark David did not see a statue he was standing right by. It startled him when there was light and he saw a stern guard pointing as spear right at him. When he writes of "butter lamps," he is talking about yak butter lamps. He said when you hike in Tibet you are accompanied by the smell of burning yak butter.

As he spoke about the carver's hand forming these faces in the cave, it reminded me of the verse and song about God, "You are the Potter, I am the clay." I was also reminded of the statue we saw in Paris, The Burghers of Calais, by Auguste Rodin. I have never gotten over the poignancy of the story of that statue, and the incredible emotion in the figures. How could someone evoke that in stone?

I like the line, "full of silence from the carver's hands."

What's the step I don't want to take?

Start Close In
by David Whyte

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice

becomes an
intimate
private ear
that can
really listen
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

A David Whyte poem from
River Flow: New & Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press

As he began this poem, David said, "Like all great truths, this is simple. Where else to start?" He ended with asking us, "What is the step you don't want to take?" I don't know.

A Song for the Salmon by David Whyte

For too many days now I have not written of the sea,

nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands.

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn.

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.

At this Weekend With David Whyte, he read the poem above, about salmon. Because he is from the Pacific Northwest (he lives on Whidby Island), I waited for him to talk about how the salmon are holy to the Indians there. I had learned about that from Sherman Alexie when I heard him speak on his book tour for You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. David did not bring that up, though.

It made me think about Sherman Alexie. I liked the movie "Smoke Signals" based on a book by him. I liked You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, too, and I greatly enjoyed hearing him talk about it. Besides being eloquent, he was very funny, and I learned a bit about the Native American tradition and their lives now. I wrote about that in this blog.

Shortly after I saw Alexie, he was caught in the Me, Too movement. It seems he had importuned women on his speaking tours. It's a hard thing. I like him. I like his writing, his humor, what he professes to believe. It reminds me of Garrison Keillor, also caught in the Me, Too movement. How stupid they were to have treated women that way. I experienced some of those kinds of things and I hated it. I want it to stop. At the same time, I want to forgive those who repent of that stupidity when it was not as harmful as some, when it was stupid crassness as opposed to bodily or other harm. Even those who did worse, if they're truly repentant, if they pay the consequences, I want them to be re-accepted into society.

You don't have to be good.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver (Mary Oliver reading)

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.

I just got back from "A Weekend With David Whyte," at Asilomar (near Monterey). It was the anniversary of Mary Oliver's death, so David began by reading this poem.

That first line is arresting, isn't it? You do not have to be good. And then, You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. What does that mean? I like the image of the soft animal of my body. It sounds so kind to my body. A soft, warm, cuddly animal. Love what it loves. That's kind of a mystery to me. Maybe like the Ignatian thought that God wants us to have the desire of our life.

And ending in my place in the family of things. I belong. Belonging is what we all want.

Mindful by Mary Oliver

Everyday
I see or hear
  something that more or less

kills me
 with delight,
  that leaves me
    like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
  It was what I was born for —
    to look, to listen,

to lose myself
 inside this soft world —
  to instruct myself
    over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
  Nor am I talking
    about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
 the very extravagant —
  but of the ordinary,
    the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
 Oh, good scholar,
  I say to myself,
    how can you help

but grow wise
 with such teachings
  as these —
    the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
  the prayers that are made
    out of grass?

“Mindful” by Mary Oliver from Why I Wake Early. © Beacon Press, 2005.

An analysis here.

On Children by Kahlil Gibran

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 to you.

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.

Source: The Prophet