Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Tiger Woods and Barack Obama as Persons of the Year?

Why did I imagine - admittedly with a touch of fear - that this sharp piece on Tiger Woods and our culture of marketing and deception (by Frank Rich a week ago in the NY Times) would end with at least some speculation about Barack Obama? 

This president walks so many tight ropes that the soles of his feet must feel like those struck by the ropes of interrogators. Thus far, though, he has been true to the character and intent of the man portrayed in his books and, on the whole, in the 2008 elections. Those who feel betrayed have misread, or simply not read.

We should still be celebrating - and praying for the safety and integrity of - the man we voted for last November and watched with lingering disbelief and unalloyed pride in Grant Park and on the Washington Mall a year ago. And praying and working for a larger Democratic majority in Congress next November  - against the odds, perhaps, but progressives are used to that, and it's a little early to calculate them securely.

Op-Ed Columnist - Tiger Woods, Person of the Year - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com

"Tiger Woods, whose sham beatific image was questioned by no one until it collapsed, exemplifies the decade of Enron, in which most of us have been so easily bamboozled."

Wild Child, Wild Elder

Two poems came over the transom today, as every day, and sometimes one or both are wonderful examples of synchronicity at work, coincidence whose meaning is far more than accident. There are deep and special connections between two of C.G. Jung's most fruitful concepts, synchronicity and active imagination. Both come especially alive when I think, as I have been recently, of teaching young children. 

I've begun to think again upon the wild child, not in the popular sense of Tarzan's early years, or a child raised by wolves, say, who encounters a human community later and inevitably with problematic consequences. I'm thinking of a more ordinary child -- but still extraordinary, perhaps now in our urban and electronic culture, more rare, even among the endangered species? If so, here is one that belongs on the list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and WorldWatch. 

Because the child I imagine is simply he or she who grows even from infancy with an experience of the natural wild, the wilderness, in and around him or her. The wind and the rain, the arcs and play of light of sun and moon, the other species with which symbiotic relationship -- inter-being is a Buddhist term -- is less and less a matter of assumption, more and more a matter of necessity. 

The climate crisis slips from our consciousness, yes, because we fear for our economic security and our safety, but more deeply because we've lost, or never truly have known, our membership in the natural world, our wildness. As life has literally disappeared - died - from hundreds and thousands of square miles of once fertile earth and river and sea, we do not experience that loss as a loss of home, a loss of soul, as it is.

So nourishing the wild child, passing on the wisdom of the wild elder, teaching wildness in our families, kindergartens and colleges, as a critical dimension or domain of our human development, is an urgent need. I want to know -- I am hungry to know -- who does it and how.

Here are the two poems that floated into my space today. 

The first (afterward, check out the astonishing picture attached) reminds me of my love of Annie Dillard, who is a wild elder. I don't know Lynn Ungar yet, except through this poem, but it is a perfect example of the wild spirit, grown -- more, clearly, than that which we all begin, our experience of yearning. The wild spirit is now largely counter-cultural. it needs to be learned, and learned well, taught by those who are themselves taught, taught in the wild and taught, maybe we could say something like the prince tames the fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, to tame the wild also (not really, not like a pet), to bring it indoors, to bring it into conversation and companionship with other realms and ways of being. 

Hawks

by Lynn Ungar

Surely, you too have longed for this -- 

to pour yourself out

on the rising circles of the air 

to ride, unthinking, 

on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life, 

that you have never leaned toward 

the headlong dive, the snap of bones,

the chance to be so terrible, 

so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding 

is the same breath as your own. 

How could you not remember? 

That same swift stillness binds 

your cells in balance, rushes 

through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it -- 

the flash of feathers, the chance to rest 

on such a muscled quietness, 

to be in that fierce presence, 

wholly wind, wholly wild.

  

And then the second poem, as startling in its way -- harder to see in "the ashy city." The cry follows the sustained sight, breaks through the felt absence of imagination: "Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us," even here, even now.  We need wise elders to teach wise children, or at least to teach those who teach wise children, and Mary Oliver is that kind of wise elder. This is the wise elder's sight, and a wonderful example of bringing that sight, that energy, indoors, as it were, into conversation with grief, into encounter with existential pain: the poet's "heart pumping hard," like "the pulsing circles of your blood."

Starlings in Winter

by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers, 

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can't imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots 

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

A winter's tale

A few weeks ago a friend and I, inspired by our similar responses to Scott Russell Sanders's wonderful essay in Orion magazine called "Mind in the Forest,"  decided we would try an experiment of finding a particular tree in our respective necks of our woods, hang out with it regularly as the seasons change, and see what kind of relationship began to develop. Here is part of my most recent report, which turned out to be a reflection on a poem of Ranier Maria Rilke as well:

Winter has come here in Norway, with cold, several days of soft snowfall, and sometimes a little wind, more darkness. My own habits are slower to change; I am not leaving my room as easily; I find reason to linger in the house, even beside the low circle of paraffin flame of the little stove in the front hall. (My coat and boots are right there, in the closet.)

So today I began to be an animal in winter, just as light was beginning to fade around 2:30 in the afternoon. I found my good winter gloves under the cake pan (where else?), my boots, vest, jacket, watch cap in the closet, and I set out for my tree. Of course it was there, at trail’s end, in a place long ago—probably 300 years or so—named “the end of the world,” I imagine because the farms and fields ended there; only wilderness—trees—stretched beyond, and one could see far into the distance. “The last before the infinite.” (See below.)

The old birch I had chosen grew there, with another grandfather birch that stood close by and as tall—I would guess 200 feet easily. Not so close that I could reach both with my arms spread, but if I stretch out on the ground (now wet snow) with arms extended I can feel one trunk with my feet, the other with my hands.

Now the fact that strikes me is that I can’t remember which I chose that first time. I have two trees, two hairy grandfather birches, covered with green gray lichen. And I stood with them quietly for a time, perhaps a little like Robinson Jeffers’s image of mankind as
 
a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...
 
On my walk back I thought, this is going to take a very long time, but perhaps there is one way of understanding Rilke’s last lines,

When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.

You—I—we—have as long as it takes, as long as we need. Done with our grasping, our will, even with its—our—meaning—tenderly we will let go.

Garrison Keillor tells us that yesterday was Rilke’s birthday, December 4, 1875. And Keillor also reprints these lines of Rilke, without saying where they came from in his poetry. Wherever, they served to move me from my room, into winter and into the trees, where discovery awaited.
 
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.
 

Going to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies

Leigh's and my invitations to the Nobel Peace Prize events next week arrived today. I did service in Norway at (and before) election time and on the evening before the inauguration in January -- I suppose as the closest thing to an Obama cousin as could be found. There was, particularly in those months, much interest here in Obama and inevitable comparisons to FDR, who is remembered and honored here with enormously high regard and gratitude. 

I'm still full of hope for this president, as well as pride in his election; I don't agree with those here and elsewhere who fault Obama's choice by the Nobel committee. The challenges he faces, the trade-offs that must be made in our deeply flawed system of oligarchical democracy, are daunting. I look forward to meeting him and to hearing his address. I feel honored to be invited.

Pigs as Angels

I've re-read once more today Galway Kinnell's poem, "St. Francis and the Sow," and thought again of why I love it so, and why it came to me again this morning, by chance and by email. 

I am moved by the blessing, the self-blessing from within, and our need and gift for both relearning and reteaching, "in words and in touch / it is lovely / until it flowers again of self-blessing." 

And I am moved to remember a friend last evening telling us a story of her serious illness some years ago, a moment of sitting still, tired, waiting in the seat of a car, surrounded by wind and rain, glimpsing in the bushes a small thing so covered with earth she could not recognize it. So she opened the door, walked a short distance in the wind and rain, picked up the small thing covered with earth, which turned out when washed - a blessing - to be an angel, made of stone. 

So this morning, reading Kinnell, I thought to myself, when have I written before of this poem, and why? I discovered three occasions, two and three years ago, and I decided to weave together something new today, but drawn also from each of those occasions. (You can find them in Reckonings if you do a Google search there - in the right column - for Kinnell.)

One more personal word. I normally send these occasional musings and gifts of poems to friends anonymously, using the bcc line, and I'll do that here as well.  But I want to send this message openly (To:) a small group of people I have known so well for so long they are as family, my fellow members of the board of directors of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation, because the spirit evoked here has intimately to do with our search for a way to focus our attention and resources on a deeper conception of sustainability and responsibility for the earth's health than is common. 

Galway Kinnell's A New Selected Poems appeared in 2000. He was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his first Collected Poems in 1980. In the autumn of 2001 he was interviewed by Elizabeth Lund, poetry editor of The Christian Science Monitor, and in her resulting account there is the following passage:

"Whether he's writing about his family or describing the loveliness of sows, Kinnell's work reveals affection for creatures both great and small. 'The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels.'

"A pig as an angel?"

"'I try to see past the usual clichés about things,' he smiles.  'Pig' is a pejorative word, but if you get to know them, get a feeling for them, you see that they have an extraordinary beauty. When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'"

On another occasion earlier in 2001 he said:

"I don't think of myself as a 'nature poet.' I don't recognize the distinction between nature poetry and—what would be the other thing?—human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth. All the creatures have their intricate ways of living on earth. Humans are unique in one respect: we've taken over. We've taken over so successfully that we've become a threat to many of the other creatures and even a danger to the earth itself, so that's why I don't think of myself as a 'nature poet.' Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us."

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

 

~ Galway Kinnell ~

(Mortal Acts, Mortal Words)

 

Imagine, in yourself, the expressions of consciousness - in St. Francis, in the sow - Kinnell evokes in the poem. Imagine the blessings you have received, and those you have given, by touch. 

Kinnell says, "The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels... When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'" 

So what  creature does not have an angel within, if we can see? How do we say or teach and learn the intimacy of seeing and being? How close is the consciousness Kinnell describes to that of his fellow poet Robinson Jeffers when he writes, 

..... I entered the life of the brown forest,

And the great lfe of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the

     changes in the veins

In the throat of the mountain... and, I was the stream

Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars

Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit;

    and I was the darkness

Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind

    also, a moving lichen

On the cheek of the round stone...

"I was mankind / also, a moving lichen / on the cheek of the round stone..." That is as lovely an image of homo sapiens as I know--as lovely and as necessary to absorb into our hearts, that we might renew ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy. There is a task worthy of our learning.