BEAUTY AND THE SPRINGTIME OF POSSIBILITY

Unfortunately, my postings since the beginning of the year have been few and far between. This has been a disappointment for me because I derive great nourishment from the beauty, wisdom, and inspiration that I discover in my conversations with friends in the blogging community.  From time to time, however, the pressing demands of everyday life escalate to a level that leaves little breathing room for either pleasure or reflection. 

With the demands in my own life compounding lately, rather than abating, I woke up and came into my office around 3:15 this morning, intending to post a note stating that I would be taking a sabbatical from blogging until things improve.  As soon as I retrieved  my blog, however, the banner of current postings by others reminded me of how much I need these conversations in order to meet the challenges of life. That caused me to pause for a moment and pick up the book I have just finished reading, namely, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, by the late John O'Donahue, a fine Irish writer and one of my favorite  navigators of the human heart.  Turning to a dog-eared page, I reread a passage that I read a couple of nights ago and which has resonated deeply with me since then.  I quote that passage below because it speaks more eloquently than I can about the terrain through which I have been passing for several months.  The depth and power of these words convinces me that I must not allow the distractions of the day to divert me from the sources of strength that I will require for the journey.  Thus, rather than take a sabbatical from postings, I am going to redouble my efforts to post on a more frequent basis.

From Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, under a subsection titled "The Lost Voice" — 

A time of bleakness can also be a time of pruning.  Sometimes when our minds are dispersed and scattered, this pruning cuts away all of the false branching where our passion and energy were leaking out.  While it is painful to experience and endure this, a new focus and clarity emerge. The light that is hard won offers the greatest illumination.  A gift wrestled from bleakness will often confer a sense of sureness and grounding of the self, a strengthening proportionate to the travail of its birth.  The severity of Nothingness can lead to beauty.  Where life had gone stale, transfiguration occurs.  The ruthless winter clearance of spirit quietly leads to springtime of possibility.  Perhaps Nothingness is the secret source from which all beginning springs. 

There are also times of malaise, when life moves into the stillness of quiet death. Though you function externally, something is silently dying inside of you, something you can no longer save.  You are not yet able to name what you are losing, but you sense that its departure cannot be halted. Those who know you well can hear behind your words the deadened voice, the monotone of unremedied sadness.  Your lost voice cannot be quieted.  It becomes audible despite your best efforts to mask it. Sometimes even from a stranger one overhears the pathos of the lost voice: it may speak with passion on a fascinating topic, yet its mournful music seeps out, suggesting the no man's land where the speaker is now marooned.  Put flippantly, no-one ever really knows what they are saying. The adventure of voice into silence and silence into voice: this is the privilege and burden of the poet.

Since first reading Anam Cara, I have long treasured O'Donahue's insights into the spiritual landscape of the human heart.  I did not discover O'Donahue's meditation on beauty, however, until after reading Fireweed Meadow's wonderful posting, Beauty by John O'Donahue, which I heartily recommend to other readers.   Thanks, Fireweed, for bringing this book to my attention and inspiring this post. 

RABBIT HOLES, REAL ESTATE, AND REALITY

Homestead Near Keld, U.K., Taken During My Coast to Coast Walk Last June


Where thou art—that—is Home.

Emily Dickinson

With the exception of a few sporadic comments here and there, I have been largely absent from the blogging community for about a month.  This all began rather innocently as my wife and I embarked upon a house search, thinking that we would like to relocate from Maryland to South Carolina later this year.  In a matter of days, however, I fell into a rabbit hole and descended into the chaos and confusion of today's real estate world.  

After considerable hand-wringing, debate, and prolonged negotiations with the owners of a particular house, we signed a contract to purchase the property, subject to several contingencies.  As soon as the ink was dry, however, we were visited by a plague of problems, some of which were legal in nature (e.g., perceived violations of setback requirements) and some of which were structural in nature (e.g., a malfunctioning septic system).  While we attempted to work toward the resolution of these issues, the sellers eventually decided that they preferred to have the contract cancelled, rather than provide the additional time necessary to address these matters.  In the end, it was much ado about nothing, except, of course, the wear and tear on the soul, which is what I want to talk about in this posting.

Lest there be any doubt, my purpose here is not to whine about losing this particular house.  Indeed, I am somewhat relieved that this affair has finally come to an end. What I do regret, however, is the loss of the time and energy wasted on, of all things, a material possession!  It wasn't just the money spent on experts, surveys, and inspections; it was the forfeited time that would have otherwise been spent in solitude and gratitude, time for listening rather than talking, time for watching herons and egrets meditate upon the edges of these coastal marshlands.  Take these hours from a person and you have essentially shortened a life.

One of the great ironies of modern life is that we must function in a world that is undeniably competitive, capitalistic, and ego-driven, while, simultaneously, we are called upon by virtually all spiritual wisdom to transcend that world.  It may be, as F. Scott Fitzgerald stated in The Crack-Up," that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."  I, for one, however, find this extremely difficult when it comes to remaining transcendent through the day to day challenges of living in a materialistic world.  Transcendence works best for me when I am immersed in art, nature, solitude, or some form of meditation.  Place me in the center of commercial negotiations, however, and I become a hopeless recidivist, trying to nail down my security in an insecure world and attaching myself to desirable outcomes.  It is only later — after diagnosing my dis-ease — that I return to the centering wisdom of my teachers, those who have repeatedly warned me that control of one's fate is an illusion and that attachment to desirable outcomes is a set-up for suffering.

Almost two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder cautioned us that "home is where the heart is."  If that is true — and I believe it is — my home is in a place that has no measurable metes and bounds.  It is a place where art and creativity flourish, where ideas are more valuable than money or property, where kindred spirits become fellow pilgrims in the quest for better selves and a better world.  It is, among other things, here in this blogging community where I have returned to find inspiring poetry, spiritual insights, and heartfelt commentary on matters of ultimate importance.  When I see the tracks of my fellow pilgrims, I know that I am out of the rabbit hole, back to reality, and on my way home.

THE WISDOM OF BIRDS

Snowy Egret

Like my late father, I find birds to be endlessly fascinating.  At some level, I suppose, we are all like Daedalus and Icarus, harboring a latent desire for wings that will liberate us from the narrow confines of the world's labyrinth.  At another level, however, I simply feel a personal connection with many birds, especially the large birds with whom one can establish and maintain eye contact.  With these birds, I always sense a kind of mutual empathy, a mutual awareness that, for better or worse, we will need each other for the journey ahead.  Maybe it's a mutual respect for each other's solitude, coupled with  a  recognition that even solitaries are interdependent in the greater scheme of things.

Whatever the case, I have been spending a great deal of time in recent weeks observing the abundant bird life that inhabits this part of coastal South Carolina.  A few photos of my friends are set forth below, together with some relevant observations by writers who have discovered the wisdom and metaphorical values of birds.

Great White Egret

With an eye made quiet by the power

of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

we see into the life of things.

Wordsworth

Great Blue Heron

I am looking at a great blue heron who is building a nest in the pine tree next to my father's home.  Every once in a while she stretches her long neck and points her head toward the heavens, and I feel the stretch in my throat.  She stands immobile for long periods staring into the eastern horizon and then floats to the canal below for some food.  I have seen this heron mother for years in the same pine tree.  Winter is her season to nest.  She stands like a blue-gray guardian of the past, not seeming to take notice of the flow of traffic on the highway . . . 

This great heron reminds me that storying is a kind of root medicine, a way for us to enter our depths and derive nourishment from the fruitful darkness.  For her life to succeed, this big mother heron needs her old pine tree and her dark inland water.  She needs continuity, heights, and depths for her life to be complete.  It is this way with tellings, with stories, with myths, with prayer, prophecy, and song.  They call forth the firmness of the tree and the yielding deep water in moments of transmitted inspiration.

Joan Haliflax
The Fruitful Darkness 

Great White Egret

                                        Birds make great sky-circles

                                        of their freedom.

                                        How do they learn it?

                                        They fall, and falling, 

                                        they're given wings.

                                                    Rumi

Great White Egret

I studied the bird, deeply impressed that she seemed to know instinctively that in stillness is healing.  I had been learning that too, learning that stillness can be a prayer that transforms us.

Sue Monk Kidd
When the Heart Waits

Great White Egret Egret

                                               Birdsong brings relief

                                               to my longing.

                                               I am just as ecstatic as they are,

                                               but with nothing to say!

                                               Please, universal soul, practice

                                               some song, or something, through me!

                                                                            Rumi

Great Blue Heron

EMERSON AND SELF-RELIANCE

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 - 1882

One of my oldest possessions is a two-volume set of the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  From the first serious reading of those essays as a college freshman, I knew that I had discovered a friend to whom I could always turn when searching for guidance on issues of ultimate importance.  Now, more than five decades later, my admiration and respect for Emerson remain the same.  His observations on the nature and potential of mankind are as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century.  As philosopher and writer Jacob Needleman states in The Spiritual Emerson, a new compendium of seven of Emerson's essays —

Reading Emerson can awaken a part of the psyche that our culture has suppressed.  And when this part of our human nature makes itself known to us, we are, for that moment, no longer hypnotized by the black dream of a dead universe or the hellish dream of a vain and angry God.  Nor, for that moment, are we under the spell of sudden illusions or arrogant fantasies about what human beings are and what they can become: illusions that deny the true metaphysical nobility of man; fantasies that blind us to how far we actually are from that nobility.

In keeping with what has almost become an annual ritual, I have been re-reading some the Emerson essays that influenced me as a young man seeking liberation from the stifling conformity of my southern background.  These essays inspire me now as they always have, and I would like to share some of Emerson's thinking with you on my blog, beginning today with some excerpts from "Self-Reliance."  As I read this wisdom, I continue to ask myself if there is anyone writing today who not only possesses such a penetrating mind, but who also has the power to summon us to our better natures.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.  Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost . . .

* * * * *

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. 

* * * * *

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

* * * * *

Trust thyself:  every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Accept the place the divine providence has found for you . . .

* * * * *

The virtue in most request is conformity.  Self-reliance is its aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. . . . Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

* * * * *

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. 

* * * * * 

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

* * * * *

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

* * * * *

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

* * * * * 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

* * * * *

To be great is to be misunderstood.

* * * * *

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exists with God today.  There is not time to them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. . . . But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

* * * * *

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

* * * * *

Insist on yourself; never imitate.  Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

* * * * *

Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart . . .

* * * * *

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Emerson's Study

ART: WHERE WE SPEAK OF HOLY THINGS

Dish of Apples (ca. 1875-77)
 Paul Cezanne

Frederick Buechner is a novelist, spiritual writer, and former minister who has wonderful gifts of insight into life, art, and other matters of ultimate importance. While perusing a collection of Buechner's writings last night, I came across a discussion of the role that art plays in our lives.  I share it with you today because I believe it will resonate with those who read this blog on a fairly regular basis.  As you read this excerpt, you will discover the relevance of the paintings I have chosen to accompany this post.  Enjoy.

Portrait of the Artist's Mother (ca. 1629)
Rembrandt

Excerpt from Meditation for February 20

 Listening to Your Life, by Frederick Buechner

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention.  Pay attention to the frog.  Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

The painter does the same thing, of course.  Rembrandt puts a frame around and old woman's face.  It is seamed with wrinkles.  The upper lip is sunken in, the skin waxy and pale.  It is not a remarkable face.  You would not look twice at the old woman if you found her sitting across the aisle from you on a bus.  But it is a face so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably just as Cezanne makes you see a bowl of apples or Andrew Wyeth a muslin curtain blowing in at an open window.  It is a face unlike any other face in all the world.  All the faces in the world are in this one old face.

Unlike painters, who work with space, musicians work with time, with note following note as second follows second.  Listen!  says Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky.  Listen to this time that I have framed between the first note and the last and to these sounds in time.  Listen to the way the silence is broken into uneven lengths between the sounds and the silences themselves.  Listen to the scrape of the bow against the gut, the rap of stick against the drumhead, the rush of breath through reed and wood. The sounds of the earth are like music, the old song goes, and the sounds of the music are also the sounds of the earth, which of course is where the music comes from.  Listen to the voices outside the window, the rumble of the furnace, the creak of your chair, the water running in the kitchen sink.  Learn to listen to the music of your own lengths of time, your own silences.

Literature, painting, music — the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot.  In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Wind from the Sea (1948)
Andrew Wyeth

THE SEA IN WINTER

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.

Rilke

Here on the coast of South Carolina, where my wife and I have come for the winter, I devote much of my time to walking the magnificent beaches that define this part of the Atlantic coastline.  Gone are the sunbathers of summer, with their beach chairs, their overloaded coolers, and their colorful umbrellas.  This is now a place where one can find solitude, a place where memory deepens, a place where we can seemingly reenter the womb of nature from whence we began our journey.

From the inception of human thought, mankind has felt a special connection with the sea.  There is something about its rhythm and constancy that is both cleansing and reassuring.  When we stand at the sea's edge looking into infinity, we know in our hearts that we are part of something much grander and more complex than our individual, day-to-day lives.  We hear the surf rise and fall; we watch the tide deposit its gifts and then reclaim them; we see the light rise, then fall, only to rise again — and, like the light, we are born again into each new moment.  Perhaps it was best said by Pablo Neruda in the poem quoted at the end of this piece:  "Every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning."

While I often walk these beaches with my wife and my Zen master, Derry, I also spend a great deal of time walking alone.  Some might find this a lonely enterprise, but I do not.  Indeed, I find myself in complete agreement with that fine writer and lover of the sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who once said:

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive.  It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject.  It's a simulating loneliness.

Rilke is so right about the effects the sea on the human spirit.  The "great wide sounds" of the ocean drown out the "anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts," and "impose a rhythm upon everything . . . that is bewildered and confused."   When the rhythm is restored to our lives, we begin to hear the music again — and with the music comes the dance.

Set forth below are a few photos that I have taken during my walks of the past couple of days.  I have also chosen some insightful comments from others on the mystical connection between mankind and the sea.  Enjoy.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.

Henry Beston

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient.  One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Every time we walk along a beach, some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.

Loren Eisley

. . . for whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

E.E.  Cummings 

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.

Isak Dinesen

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach.  How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Why to we love the sea?  It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.

Robert Henri

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Jacques Cousteau




In every curving beach, in every grain of sand, there is the story of the earth.


Rachel Carson


Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.


Emerson

My Wife, Margaret, and the Zen Master at Play

I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because, in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea.  And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.  

We are tied to the ocean.  And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.

John F. Kennedy
  
                                                               

It Is Born

                                          Here I came to the very edge

                                          where nothing at all needs saying,

                                          everything is absorbed through weather and sea,

                                          and the moon swam back,

                                          its rays all silvered,

                                          and time and again the darkness would be broken

                                          by the crash of a wave,

                                          and every day on the balcony of the sea, 

                                          wings open, fire is born,

                                          and everything is blue again like morning.

Pablo Neruda

Derry

STARTING HERE, STARTING NOW

Now that the holidays are over, my wife and I are headed to coastal South Carolina, where the temperatures are a little more conducive to outdoor activities during the winter months.  Before departing, however, I want to post a few memorable quotes that have caught my attention in recent days.  The first two quotes are from Henry Miller and Thoreau, respectively, and the third is a poem by William Stafford.  The common theme in these quotes is the importance of surrendering to the beauty and mystery of the present moment — this day, this hour, this moment, NOW.  As Henry Miller states in the opening quote, we tamper with the universe at our own peril. 

When you put your mind to such a simple, innocent thing, for example, as making a water color, you lose some of the anguish which derives from being a member of a world gone mad.  Whether you paint flowers, stars, horses or angels you acquire respect and admiration for all the elements which go to make up our universe.  You don't call flowers friends, stars enemies, or horses Communists, and angels Fascists.  You accept them for what they are and you praise God that they are what they are.  You desist from improving the world or even yourself.  You learn to see not what your want to see but what is.  And what is is usually a thousand times better than what might be or ought to be.

If we could stop tampering with the universe we might find it a better world than we think it to be.  After all, we've only occupied it a few hundred million years, which is to say that we are just beginning to get acquainted with it.  And if we continue another billion years there is nothing to assure us that we will eventually know it. In the beginning as in the end, it remains a mystery.  And the mystery exists or thrives in every smallest part of the universe. It has nothing to do with size or distance, with grandeur or remoteness.  Everything hinges upon how you look at things.

Henry Miller 
"The Angel Is My Watermark"
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.  He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing of life in remembering the past.  Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated.  That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours.  There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, — the gospel according to this moment.  He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.  It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness as a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time.

Thoreau
Walking 




You Reading This, Be Ready


Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened 
sound from outside fills the air?


Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now?  Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?


When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day.  This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life —


What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?


William Stafford

Reed Life

PEACE AND JOY, HERE AND NOW!