Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Not Yet

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch—
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured; not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

 

                - Jane Hirshfield

 

The homing spirit

Words expressive of spiritual experience — especially our very conceptions of psyche and spirit, God and religion — but also others to which I've devoted attention in Reckonings, such as sabbath, pilgrimage, prayer and redemption, tend to suffer in our popular culture from constrained and reductionist conceptions that fail to do justice to their richness of meaning and distort our awareness of the interconnectedness of things. In conventional usage and understanding they deny us access to the fullness of experience available to us.

The very religious traditions in which many of us were immersed in the formative years of our childhood too often set the pattern for such impoverishment, leaching into our adult lives. It's often useful to put aside conventional notions of belief and existence in order to dwell on the importance of attention. In doing so we can remind ourselves of and become more alive to what we've missed, and of that for which, knowingly or not, we yearn.

Poets whom I have invoked in Reckonings, like Stanley Kunitz, Wendell Berry, Denise Levertov and Mary Oliver, have often written of this opportunity for redemption. Here, for example, is Mary Oliver's short poem on prayer, from her book Thirst.

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

I have been moved over the years by the writing of John S. Dunne, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. In his many books (perhaps most richly in The Way of All the Earth), Dunne has been engaged in what he calls "passing over and coming back": passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into his own.

The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne writes of "the homing spirit" of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."

Note Dunne's imperative language — "I had to find" — "I had to pass over.... and come back again." To neglect such journey or pilgrimage, to abandon the nourishing companionship of Sabbath, is to invite spiritual homelessness, fearful isolation, a dark and perilous opposite of "the homing spirit." 

Dunne found kinship, as have I, in J.R.R. Tolkein's incomparable trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and drew from it from time to time in his exploration of life's essential journey of pilgrimage. He was particularly fond of a poem drawn from the trilogy:

 

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can.
Pursuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

 

In the following parable, Dunne contemplates a related pair of journeys, ours towards God and God's towards us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the holiness of the everyday mundane world.

Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them.

 

If our faces are set toward the valley of love and war, toward the real living that is meeting, if we stake our existence on our willingness to experience and explore, our consciousness may truly open to what we sought on the mountain — to God, or we might say to the deepest and most capacious truth, to the eternal in us as we move through the phases of our lives from childhood to youth, adulthood and age. "The eternal in us," Dunne writes,

is the person going through these phases. It is the vertical dimension of the life, as in the title scene of War and Peace where Prince Andrei lay on the battlefield looking up into the peaceful sky, perceiving peace in the midst of war. If the horizontal dimension is time and the vertical dimension is eternity, then eternal consciousness is awareness of the vertical dimension. What is more, the vertical dimension carries through the horizontal, as the person walks through life upright instead of being dragged through in ‘quiet desperation.’ Willingness and hope, accordingly, is willingness to walk through upright with hope in the face of death and darkness.

 

Martin Buber

Martin Buber, in a small and lovely gem of a book entitled The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism, writes in a complementary vein of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Judaism. The Baal-Shem Tov, wrote Buber, taught that

no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farm work, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true.

The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being.

 

 

William Stafford's poems

All of my grown children and most of their families live in the Pacific Northwest, the land of my birth and where I now live myself, as I have at several other times in my life. The Pacific Coast, say from San Francisco to Seattle, feels more than any other place my home ground.

So it was with particular pleasure that I discovered this morning that one of my most admired poets, William Stafford, had been Oregon's poet laureate and that this year is the centennial year of his birth. I also like to think that he passed to me his habit of writing in the quiet early morning hours before sunrise.

I recall the final line of "Vocation," the last poem of Stafford's 1963 National Book Award-winning book, Traveling Through the Dark. "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be." 

 

An extension of what he called his "questing imagination," in Steve Garrison's view, "seeks to take the reader to the frontiers of his own imagination, to the edge of what he knows, and then to induce him to explore farther."

One of Stafford's students, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, wrote, “In our time there has been no poet who revived human hearts and spirits more convincingly than William Stafford. There has been no one who gave more courage to a journey with words, and silence, and an awakened life.”

One can hardly wish for better inspiration. So it seems a good day to share a few of Stafford's poems I carry with me.

 

 

 

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am 
and I don't know the kind of person you are 
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world 
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, 
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break 
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood 
storming out to play through the broken dyke. 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, 
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty 
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk: 
though we could fool each other, we should consider-- 
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

For it is important that awake people be awake, 
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; 
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe-- 
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 

 

 

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 

A lifeline, I imagine, but not in the sense of a saving preserver at one end. More a thread whose weave precedes consciousness and remains supple, both strong and fragile, and requires conscious practice as one grows and ages. We might call it character or grace. The last line's "don't" perhaps is intended as a puzzle. "While you hold it you can’t get lost" implies you can get lost if you lose it. Letting go of the thread is thus a real possibility, holding on to it a matter of awareness, a practice of awakening. So this poem and the previous one, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other," may usefully be read together.

 

__________________

 

The poem below stirs memories of traveling through the dark, sometimes when I had the care to swerve and think as the poet does, more often when I did not, but blundered on. Another, early memory is evoked, too: as a child driving with my parents around a mountain turn, frightened by the sudden appearance of a large antlered buck running directly at us. It was the buck who swerved. Instinct rather than thought served him—and us—well, but that moment left in my mind a memory of one disaster averted when I knew, even then, others would come.

 

Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river. 

 

The Stare's Nest by My Window

"The Stare's Nest by My Window" is the sixth of seven sections of Yeats's poem, "Meditations in Time of Civil War." The civil war was Ireland's in 1922-23, following upon Irish independence from Britain. I've long found compelling this part of the larger poem, with its contrasting emphases on creative domesticity — honey-bees building in a starling's empty nest — and violence abroad in the land. The poem itself compels in the repeated final line of each of its stanzas. Beside enmity, brutality, destruction and killing, there endure as well building, rebuilding, tenderness and love.

 

 

 

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

 

The year after he completed "Meditations in Time of Civil War" Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Seventy-two years later the same prize was awarded to his countryman and fellow poet, Seamus Heaney. In his lecture on that occasion in 1995, Heaney reflected on these same stanzas of Yeats:

 

"I have heard this poem repeated often, in whole or in part, by people of
Ireland over the past twenty-five years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded towards life itself as St. Kevin was, and as tough-minded about what happens in and to life as Homer. It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time, but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and, on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust."

 

Dividing the Spoils

Editor's note: I've long admired Bill Moyers's perspectives on politics and literature, including his current — and alas shortly to conclude — Moyers & Company program on PBS. The subject he and Michael Winship address below, money in politics, is at the center of American democracy's strong tilt to oligarchy. Since the following short essay is more attentive to what's wrong than to those working hard to moderate or redeem the damage, I suggest reading it alongside another short piece prepared by the Moyers & Company staff, "8 Things You Can Do to Help Get Money Out of Politics."

 

 

Dividing the Spoils

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Moyers & Company

Friday, November 21, 2014

We’ve been watching Congress since the mid-term elections and reading Zephyr Teachout’s terrific history book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. That snuff box was a gift from King Louis XVI of France. His Majesty was a good friend of the American Revolution but when he gave Benjamin Franklin the gold box, featuring the monarch’s portrait surrounded with diamonds, some of our Founding Fathers objected. They worried that the gift would corrupt his judgment and unduly bias Franklin in France’s favor.

The framers debated the meaning of corruption at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and Americans have been arguing about it ever since. Today, gifts to politicians that were once called graft or bribes are called contributions. The Supreme Court has granted corporations the rights our founders reserved for people, and told those corporations they can give just about anything they want to elect politicians favorable to their interests. Diamond and gold snuff boxes are as outmoded as the king’s powdered wig. Now we’re talking cash — millions upon millions of dollars. Quadrupled, quintupled and then some – and it’s not considered corruption.

Consider the new report from the watchdog Sunlight Foundation: From 2007 to 2012, the two hundred most politically active corporations in the United States spent almost $6 billion for lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in US government contracts and other forms of assistance. That’s $760 for every dollar spent on influence, a stunning return on investment.

Peter Overby at National Public Radio reported that “Military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.” Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin – all of them made hefty political donations to Republican campaigns. Not coincidentally, this year the Pentagon is due to spend $163 billion on research, development and procurement.

Then look at who’s expected to be the new Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee – Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Breathlessly, The Washington Post writes, “This could mean additional funding for the Navy to modernize its fleet and potentially benefit contractors such as shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls.” Guess what company describes itself as “the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi and a major contributor to the economic growth of the state,” not to mention a major contributor this year to Thad Cochran’s re-election campaign? Why, shiver our timbers, it’s Huntington Ingalls.

“The other dominant corporate sector is finance,” Overby said. “Some of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others — are the top recipients of federal aid. That’s because it cost so much to rescue the financial sector after the 2008 market crash.”

Throw in the health insurers, media and telecommunications, retailers, Big Pharma – no wonder Washington’s K Street is lobbying’s road to Paradise. But it runs in both directions. NPR’s Overby talked with political scientist David Primo, who thinks Congress may be spending more time studying The Godfather than Robert’s Rules of Order. Primo told him, “The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns. But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses that if they don’t change their policy, or if they are not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them.”

It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business. Our government has become a clearing house for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation. It’s all pay for play, and look the other way. Partisans of the system say, hey, it’s just business as usual, but that, of course, is the problem. We were struck by this headline in The Washington Post after the November elections: “Parties head back to Capitol to begin carving up spoils, remains from midterms.” Right: Not only leadership posts and committee chairmanships, but carving, dividing up the spoils also means divvying up the loot. And those contributions were not made for the sake of charity.

Once upon a time the GOP stood for Grand Old Party — now it stands for Guardians of Privilege, and this is payback time for everything from fracking to getting the big banks off the hook; from doing away with the minimum wage and coddling off-shore corporate tax avoiders to privatizing Medicare and Social Security; to gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, even the US Postal Service.

And that’s just for starters. House Speaker John Boehner, his majority now greater than ever, will govern as you might expect from the man who once handed out checks from the tobacco industry to members on the floor. And Mitch McConnell, finally in his ascendancy as Senate Majority Leader, will manipulate more powerfully than ever the Capitol Hill and K Street mechanisms that he has mastered – helped along by the clever placement of loyal former staff members in positions of influence. They assist him in the dispensation of favors to donors from on high. “We’re very excited,” one Republican lobbyist told the Post, the understatement of the century.

Democrats, meanwhile, are so compromised by their own addiction to Big Money they have forgotten their history as champion of the working stiff, the little folks down there at the bottom. The great problems facing everyday people in America – inequality, stagnant wages, children in poverty, our degraded infrastructure and stressed environment — are not being seriously addressed because the political class is afraid to offend the people who write the checks — the corporations and the rich. Everyone else can be safely ignored.

Ursula Le Guin on the writers we need

 

At the National Book Awards ceremony last evening, Ursula Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her remarks, she spoke of the role that writers and writing must play in our culture:

 

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It’s name is freedom.

 

 

 

Revisiting stories

There are stories told and retold that become part of one's personal narrative, adding a richness of dimension that narrative would otherwise lack. Jesus's parable of the prodigal son is such a story for me. I've retold it and reflected upon it earlier in Reckonings, some seven years ago, here. 

 

 

With such stories that have grown within, there comes alertness to their appearance, glancing or direct, in other lives, particularly in the consciousness of others reflected and refined in their art. I imagine the prodigal son returned, awakening the morning after, lying in that numinous time of transition, knowing yet wondering whether he had really come home, imagining what awaits him. 

 

Today I came again upon Rita Dove's poem, "Dawn Revisited," delighted with the prodigal companionship of a son lost and found and the smell of biscuits.

 

Dawn Revisited

 

Imagine you wake up

with a second chance: The blue jay

hawks his pretty wares

and the oak still stands, spreading

glorious shade. If you don't look back,

 

the future never happens.

How good to rise in sunlight,

in the prodigal smell of biscuits -

eggs and sausage on the grill.

The whole sky is yours

 

to write on, blown open

to a blank page. Come on,

shake a leg! You'll never know

who's down there, frying those eggs,

if you don't get up and see.

 

How to be a poet — Wendell Berry

 

Let your life be the poem you write. -- Bokonon

 

How to be a poet

(to remind myself)

 

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work, 
doubt their judgment.

 

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens. 
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

 

Sunrise today

On an early morning walk, a moment of grace.

 

 

A Zen story: radical openness

A Zen Story

Paradox — or the appearance of paradox — seems to be at the heart of a lot of Zen stories, which also often take the form of a short conversation between two monks — though it could be any two of us.

For example, here’s a story about a conversation in which two men get off to a bad start, and emerge realizing not conflict but the simple (and elusive) fact of being. They both forgot themselves and knew themselves. They came to life in the midst of death. How can that be? How can we reconcile those apparent contradictions?

Let’s imagine two people meeting — rounding the same corner on the same narrow mountain trail, rock on one side, an abyss on the other. They are walking in opposite directions. So they literally bump into each other.

At first, let’s say, they’re surprised and then irritated. They both want the other to get out of the way. But under the circumstances, that’s not practical.

“Where have you come from?” one asks, not politely.

“From India,” the other one replied, “I assume you haven’t been there.” 

“If I had, I’d be there,” said the other, testily and enigmatically.  “Tell me something more interesting.”

“You wouldn’t get it if I did tell you,” his partner replied.

Then, somehow, a turning point. Mysterious, but a turning nonetheless. They might have come to blows, but both realized that might well lead to a fatal fall. So instead, something begins to change between the two. Instead of taking the bait, the partner found himself saying,

“Maybe I’d get half of it, and you’d have the other half, so together we’d have the whole.”

That seemed intriguing, and they were silent together, contemplating. No more words for a while.

One then said, “If we said it, no one will get it.” The implication perhaps being, not even us.

So more silent contemplation.

Finally, the other one answered, “It’s not that they won’t get it, but no one can say it.” There are no descriptive words, theirs or anybody else’s.

With that, the first monk reached out and touched the second gently on the side of his head, and in that moment both experienced a shiver of simply being — in their bodies, minds and hearts.

Each went on his way with livelier step, less self-conscious, feeling more awake, not having the slightest idea what happened.

So let’s say it’s up to us.

What happened? Perhaps some kind of radical openness. Is there anything in your experience, your life, of which their experience reminds you? I have a hunch we’re not going to figure it out. Meditation may help.