Word of the Week - 138

From "Letters to a Young Poet," by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Joan M. Burnham. New World Library: 2000.

Word of the Week:  FERVENT



Yes, "completely baked" as spoken by Benjamin in THE GRADUATE would qualify as fervent.  Definitely feverish.

Fervent is never half-baked, never tepid, never neither-this-nor-that.  It is passionate, fiery hot,  may appear obsessive.  Heartfelt.

What is the point of showing up with indifference?  Let them talk.  "She seemed, well, awfully intense.  I'm not sure that is considered good manners."  Probably not.  This is life we're talking about.  As Mary Oliver says, "your one wild and precious life."  Be a shame to get over-excited about that and all the wonders it contains.  Perhaps I need to sit back down with a cool cloth to my forehead.

As I write this, we are having oddly balmy winds, none of the chance of showers forecast as late as this morning, and the neighborhood Amazon parrots are shrieking through the skies as though warning us of something.  They do a lot of jabbering so we don't take them seriously.  The point is that I sit at my table on the second floor, amid the trees where I can see no cars nor dwellings.  An hour ago a crow with a wingspan of several feet found delicacies in the palm tree just beyond my window.  His departure sounded like an old window shade that had been yanked down, then let go to flap and shudder.

Rilke knew that our ordinary moments are filled with texture, brilliance, joy, sorrow, sights and events to make our hearts leap or thud.  Best to take nothing for granted, to see it all as miraculous for the everyday is our most intimate universe, the room in which we spend the most time, the place it all happens.  Even peak events are cushioned by the everyday.  It is that with which we most surely need to fall in love, if we have not.  I had a stamp made that says, "Fall in love with everything," then I realized there are some situations in which that is difficult, many in fact, but as a goal, an aspiration, it seems a not bad fit.  I use the word love more and more, realizing that I do love so much.  I do, in loud and giddy and probably unladylike ways.  The list is longer every day.

I occasionally visit the Jet Pens website, perhaps to look at bottled inks.  Some of the colors, with names like Apache Sunset, Heart of Darkness or Dragon Catfish Pink, make me think of fervent correspondence.  Is there really any other kind?

Word of the Week- 74

"Arthur and the Triplets Waiting for a Letter from the Mailman."  (from the Babar stories)

Word of the Week:  WAIT

Patience, more a virtue than ever.  The willingness to wait for whatever is desired but not yet here seems to appeal to very few.  We wait for so much.  Mostly I feel as though I wait for myself.

I wait for guidance, for information, for clarity.  I've stopped hurrying.  I allow matters to unfold in quiet and calm, if possible.  If my inner wisdom is not a shrieking, "DO IT NOW, " I will do it later.  There was an article this week - somewhere - about procrastination not being only the refuge of slackers and layabouts.  The article suggested there was wisdom at work when decisions were postponed, immediate action deferred.

(From the album, "The 2,000 Year Old Man" by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks)

Carl: Sir, could you give us the secret of your longevity?

Mel: Well, the major thing, the major thing is that I never, ever 
touch fried food. I don't eat it, I wouldn't look at it, and I 

don't touch it. And I never run for a bus. There'll always be 

another. Even if you're late for work, you know, I never run 

for a bus. I never ran. I just strolled, jaunty-jolly, walking 

to the bus stop.

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It seems the popularly-held belief is that we miss so much by delaying, delaying anything.  I don't understand how this can be a universal truth.  Since we have no way of knowing what even the next moment holds, how can we be certain that not taking the trip, not seeing the movie, not rushing out in pursuit of 12 seemingly essential activities will cause us lifelong regret.  I have no "bucket list" and the name itself gives me hives.  We can be led astray by our wants, just as we can be inspired by them.

I am not one of the universe's bold children, I never have been.  Yes, I've done rash and foolish things, been incautious in dangerous ways.  The luck of fools or an army of guardian angels.  Haste is not my ally.  Answers DO come, or if they don't I assume there is no answer.  Rilke's* urging that we live the questions is my norm.  At times it seems to be only questions held loosely together by gravity.  Wait, is what I interpret him saying.  Wait.

* “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Word of the Week - 58

Art by Lynda Barry.

Word of the Week:  MULL

"How is a thought like an iceberg?"  Ponder, contemplate, consider, weigh, think.  Good thing I'm not a zealot for quantifying.  I don't want to know how much of any day I spend asking myself rhetorical questions, posing conundrums, seeking answers where perhaps none exist.  It is not time wasted, however.  If we don't wonder about things, we are marooned.  Mulling gives us bearings or at least tells us where we are not.

"My apologies to great questions for small answers."  From her poem "Under One Small Star" by Wislawa Szymborska.

Painting by Quint Buchholz.

The moon often appears, or plays a leading role, in the art of Quint Buchholz.  The moon is an attractive object for mullers.  Mystery is attractive to mullers, or more accurately, is essential.  If we knew the secrets we would have no need to ask the questions.

To mull is not to deconstruct (shudder).  If I arrive at any truths, ever, it is by widening the screen, not narrowing my focus.  It seems to be a process of allowing rather than intention, clearing space on a shelf then leaving the room to see what comes to settle in the empty spot.  Mulling, contemplation generally, is similar to my approach to writing fiction.  I stand at the curb waiting for a car to pull up, then watch to see who gets out.

Rilke told us to love and to live the questions.  Do not forget that being comfortable with not knowing isn't the same as not asking.

Word of the Week - 16

Art, The Whale, by Terry Fan, works found here.

Word of the Week:  UNSEEN

In his short story, "The Night the Bed Fell on Father," James Thurber wrote of a character who piled her belongings outside the bedroom door at night with instructions that any burglars take what they wanted and not use their chloroform on her.  We are fragile vessels on endless, unknowable seas taking what precautions we can and hoping for the best.  Such a grain, a particle of what exists falls within our scope, so much is unseen.

On a solo Alaskan hunting trip in what I imagine to be a vast snowy wasteland, my uncle Ray was, after a number of days, picked up as had been arranged.  When the pilot landed, he told Ray that he could see from the air what Ray could not have known: that he was being stalked by a polar bear.  This may be family myth, I may have misremembered all or part of it, but the whale painting called it to mind.

I experience life as an act of faith, an unspooling continuum in which what we must know next somehow finds us, steps forward, states its name.  So much of the unseen is the good, which may leave itself like notes written in a spidery and nearly illegible hand tucked under a corner of the doormat.  A whiff of night-blooming jasmine, possibly imagined for the plant is no longer there, drifting through the second floor window.  Our sight is enhanced by distance of time and space.  I've heard often in 12-step meetings, "More will be revealed."  And it will, it is.  Meanwhile, unless we wish to suffer needlessly, we operate as advised by Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Note to self: befriend the unseen.  Think of ways in which to do this. 

One step on the curious path to Divinity

Sometimes when I awake in the middle of the night, returning to sleep is thwarted by internal lectures on self-improvement.  Just as in a childhood illness when I would wish for the grandmother who brought gentleness and gifts and instead too often received recommended treatments from the other grandmother, the one of mustard plasters and sheep dip, I want to be sung back to sleep by my angels wearing rose-patterned socks.  Alas, who arrives is the pitchman, bullying voice oozing confidence that any vexations would vanish if I just (fill in the blank).  Early this morning it was - and he/she meant RIGHT NOW, no shilly-shallying - lose weight and get hopping.  When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  I prefer the school of thought that tells me being emphatically imperfect is actually a sacred opportunity.  Later when I had fallen peacefully back to sleep, I was walking on a beach with Jerry Seinfeld.  Count on the unconscious mind to deliver a welcome bouquet when ordinary reality wants to put something ouchy on our boo-boos.

NOT the child's friend.

 

On Saturday I listened to a new-to-me podcast from Sweigh Emily Spilkin, during which she asked us to consider questions such as, "How can I be kinder to myself and learn how to forgive myself so I can open to the Divine?"  Gentleness and compassion are not hallmarks of the bootstraps evangelist.  All of you who know the perilous road from human train wreck, at least by our own perception, to someone we can accept and even cherish for surviving the journey, are familiar with the black-and-white dogma of the just-get-over-it school of thought.  Among the things which I believe to be a non-negotiable essential of human life is balance.   Balance travels with its companions paradox, ambiguity, duality, unknowingness and patience.  It is an all-star line-up, neither recognized nor valued by the mustard plaster school of how to be a better person.

This is material for a dissertation, a rant, a manifesto, none of which is going to happen today, if ever.  In a few weeks I will turn 69 years old.  I am still a novice, a newby in more realms than I can name.  I have so much to learn.  One of the things I spent years not knowing was that yanking on my arm and scolding me will not bring me closer to what I consider divinity, the ALL is how I think of it.  If anything, harsh treatment will block any sun that has managed to reach frozen emotional ground.  As you either know or, I hope, can imagine, we are here to love ourselves and each other into claiming our authentic beings.  Ms. Spilkin reminded that, "our deepest longing is to be ourselves."

In the small, dark hours my defenses are low, I am unarmed and groggy and have difficulty standing up to what I would see in other circumstances as absurd absolutes.  I forget what I know, that I have been invited here to lead a life of service and love, that I am here to surrender for, as Rilke said, "What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us."  It is our gift, that the ALL, the Divine wishes to shape us and use us, often reaching us through trauma, illness, pain, loss, the only ways to get our attention.  Rilke goes on to say, in his poem THE MAN WATCHING,

What we choose to fight is so tiny! 
What fights with us is so great. 
If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, 
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things, 
and the triumph itself makes us small. 
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. 
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews 
grew long like metal strings, 
he felt them under his fingers 
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel 
(who often simply declined the fight) 
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand, 
that kneaded him as if to change his shape. 
Winning does not tempt that man. 
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, 
by constantly greater beings.

Election day but no politics

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

I will not pretend that this election day has me light of heart and quiet of mind.  I wish to take nothing for granted.  Which may be why my words refuse to dance smoothly with each other, they seem to be glaring and rolling their eyes as the time comes for them to step out on the floor together and touch.  Why did my mother sign me up for this stupid Cotillion, each wonders.  Why would I ever need to know the waltz or how to be gracious when approached (or not approached) as the music begins?

With that knowledge, I am happy to yield to Rilke, mentioned by other bloggers recently - it may be his season.  It is surely the season of needing answers or perspective I may not always have, and not necessarily related to the election.  These are questioning times.  If asked, I would say that I wish to be understood, yet know that is not within my power.  I gesticulate, sputter, sigh and move on, hoping I left something other than confusion in my wake.

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet