Category Archives: mindfulness

Wordsworth and a “Big Thought”

A Man’s View of Maternal Connection

One of my blogging friends posted observations about motherhood a couple of days ago and this prompted very touching discussion on the “mama and child” phenomena, And what a beautiful sight that is, to watch a “mama and child” do their thing together at school, or at Wal-Mart, or church. They are beautiful, a lovely dyad for at first the separateness that we see is not really there.

And I often think of my dear mother who struggled so hard to raise six children in Arkansas poverty in the Fifties and Sixties. My heart is deeply troubled as I reflect back on those years and I so wish I could have offered her more compassion in her later years than I did. She was a “mother hen” and indeed often used that image to describe how she would like to keep her “brood” underneath her wings and protect us from what I would later hear described as those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

I remember one vivid image from my childhood which reveals the attachment issues I had with her, issues which will never completely leave me. I was about two and a half and we were in a department store doing what mother loved to do when we “went to town”, walk through the bolts of cloth at West Brothers Department store and pine for the brightly colored patterned cloth. I was very much in tow, almost literally hanging on her skirt hem, but I must have been distracted because I suddenly looked up…and then around…and there was no mother! I vividly remember that moment because it must have been sheer terror and revealed how I would handle difficult emotion throughout my life—-I kept perfectly calm, rational, and under control to size the situation up and did so in a matter of a few seconds. I knew that I could not make it without a mother so, I looked to my side and saw a woman who would do and reached my hand toward her to ask her to be my mother when my dear mother came around the corner. In that split second of time “a plank in reason (had) broke(n)” and terror gripped my soul but I “categorized” the experience and was about to make a “good” decision though one that spoke, and does speak, volumes about me. In that moment of terror I experienced what Jacque Lacan was describing in France at the time as “the lost object.” And, I can today discourse at great length about that subject but I don’t know much about the experience.

But, I offer a poem from another man who I think does know something about the experience or he could not have written such a powerful poem about the maternal connection.

Taung Child by Alan Shapiro

What led you down, first mother, from the good
dark of the canopy, and then beyond it?
What scarcity or new scent drew you out
that day into the vertical-hating flatness
of the bright veldt, alone, or too far from
the fringes of the group of other mothers
following the fathers out among the herds
and solitary grazers, the child clinging to your back
when the noiseless wing flash lifted him
away into the shocked light as the others ran?
Two million years ago, and yet what comes
to me, in time lapse through cascading chains
of changing bodies, is not the tiny skull
I’m holding, not the clawed out eye sockets,
his fractured jaw, but you, old mother, just then
in that Ur-moment of his being gone,
what I’ve felt too, on crowded streets, in malls,
if only briefly, in the instant when
the child beside me who was just there
isn’t
before he is again, that shock, that panic,
that chemical echo of your screaming voice.

“Failing Boldly” Has a Place!

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Once again, one of you blog-o-sphere friends has issue a “word fitly spoken” to me. In fact, several of you did that today! Here I am sharing a post by The Journey Home (http://elizabethsjourneyhome.wordpress.com/) in which she describes the anguish and reward of “failing boldly.” I can so relate to her experience on the stage as a youth though I have never found the courage and humility to dive into the morass of my own subjective world as she did that day. (I shared with her a brief poem on the subject of failure by E.L. Mayo, “Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.”

FAIL BOLDLY by Elizabeth

My first memory of failure is from Grade 9. I failed a Science test. I’ll never forget the shame I felt. Like I was stupid, unable to do anything well, an idiot. That’s how failure made me feel that first time.

I think I was always kind of afraid of being a failure. I think we all are.

I spent high school watching my step and setting unreachable goals. And hoping I’d never fail again.

Then, I started university. And they told me that I had to fail to pass.

I don’t remember when they said it — whether it was during orientation, in my first acting class, or when I went for my advising session. But I know I heard this strange and impossible quote: Fail Boldly time and time again throughout September, October, November, and December.

I didn’t get it. Failure wasn’t good. I’d spent my life striving for just the opposite and I couldn’t imagine why anyone else wouldn’t.

Maybe they meant that you just had to be able to admit your mistakes and show that you were humble. Maybe failing boldly was just being able to laugh at your self. Maybe it wasn’t really “failure.” Perhaps it was just an artsy phrase or a figure of speech, I convinced myself and continued to hope for perfection. Because I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would ever want to fail on purpose.

I didn’t get it. My first monologue mark in the beginning of second semester reflected that. And I hated my work, felt like a failure, and considered giving up. I just couldn’t really, flat on my face, fail boldly.

The rest of the semester unfolded in a weird, tearful mess of beauty and growth. And slowly, I learned. I began to undo, to understand, and to fail.

I can’t explain it completely. But I do remember when I willingly failed boldly for the first time.

It was the end of March. The day had been bright and spring like. I’d memorized and learned and cried over a monologue for weeks. And now I stood, a bit breathless, a bit tired, a bit nervous, after the group audition, in the middle of the stage. I was alone and absolutely vulnerable. Right there, I lay one of my greatest hopes out and put myself on the clothes’ line. And as I opened mouth and began the text, I lay everything I had down and just let it go.

I had that actor’s moment where you don’t feel memorized and the words just slide out of your tongue as if you’re saying it for the first time. I stopped thinking about my audience or how I looked. I let myself be, for a moment. I felt a strange peace in my soul and my stomach, instead of the butterflies that usually reside there. I think I let the Holy Spirit in and it felt like He carried me on His wings.

And I think I failed. Boldly.

And I realized that failing boldly isn’t really what I thought it was after all. Failing is allowing yourself to be human. Its giving yourself the freedom to live and breath and let yourself move. Failing boldly is finding rest and growing and trying again. Its submitting yourself to the gift of Jesus and letting him take control of your life and future. Failing boldly is about grace and peace and life.

I don’t know if this is really what my professors meant about failing boldly. But this is what I learned when I tried. And as I think about this coming year, I hope to stay in this state, to tumble a bit, and fall on my face and then get back up again.

I hope you’ll try it too — failing boldly isn’t so bad as we thought

A Maya Angelou Prayer

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Here is a prayer by Maya Angelou which I recently came across, demonstrating the “non-duality” approach to spirituality that I have come to appreciate.

Prayer

Father, Mother God,

Thank you for your presence

during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence

during the bright and sunny days,

for then we can share that which we have

with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence

during the Holy Days, for then we are able

to celebrate you and our families

and our friends.

For those who have no voice,

we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy,

we ask you to pour your love out

in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain,

we ask you to bathe them

in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask

you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed,

we ask you to shower upon them

the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless

sea of substance, we ask you to give all the

world that which we need most — Peace.

— Maya Angelou

Showers of Blessings!

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When I awoke this morning, lightening, thunder, and blowing wind greeted me. I peeked outside and found that this time the weather forecast had been accurate and a generous rainfall was coming our way. I then got to do one of my favorite things—take my laptop and cup of coffee to the open garage and watch “Showers of Blessings” visit me again.“ Showers of Blessings” is an old hymn that I loved in my youth and in the past couple of years as drought as beset my part of the country I have employed the image as I feel and express my gratitude for refreshing rainfall that breaks the drought occasionally. This is part of a new emphasis of my life these past few years, experiencing and voicing gratitude for the many blessings that come my way, so many of them usually taken for granted. And this experience and expression of gratitude is no longer perfunctory but now has an authenticity it used to lack as I truly “feel” grateful.

Another dimension of this experience…of this “awakening”…is that I pay better attention to the whole of the world around me, the social world but also the natural world. The entirety of the world “speaks” to me in a way to which I was once deaf; for I am less guilty of “having ears to hear but hearing not, having eyes to see but seeing not.” This parallels another important discovery of mine—the “Word” of the Judeo-Christian tradition is more than these “squeaks of ours” that we usually think of as the only means of communicating. This “Word” is found in the whole of Creation such as was suggested in the Old Testament when the writer declared, “The heavens and the earth declare the glory of God.”

I used to take this “Word” business literally and how could I do otherwise when at that time I took “words” literally, taking the word to be the thing-in-itself, mistaking the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. But now I see words as being inherently ephemeral just as are we humans that use them. But grasping this ephemeral nature of human experience and of the world, I now see and feel how powerful these words are as they can do more than merely denote, but can connote…or better yet, evoke. Words can reach into the heart and evoke a response but only if they come from the heart and only if there is a heart to receive them. If they are merely those “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness,” they will only denote and will never evoke. It all depends on having a heart and having one that is alive. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described a heart that was dynamically alive as “full of penetrable stuff,” not “bronzed o’er” with the “dull speech of habit,” those aforementioned “well worn words and ready phrases.” A heart full of “penetrable stuff” can be “penetrated.”

A key issue is merely paying attention, being “mindful” of what is going on around us and in our own heart. We have to have awareness of the capricious “monkey mind” which so often holds us captive, imposing a template on the whole of our experience and keeping us from paying any attention to anything but the template itself, which is to say, to anything but our self. This insight allows me to glory in the trivial things I used to ignore—a summer morning rainfall, a beautiful flower, lovely birds cavorting in my yard, or two lovely dachshunds arguing with each other over who loves me the most!

Charlotte Joko Beck and Disappointment

Stanley Kunitz on Reason’s Limits

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The lunacy of reason unchecked is one of my concerns, owing in part to the fact that mine has gone decades trying to remain “unchecked.” But reality always wins out in the end and reason, like all human contrivance, has to meet its limits. Stanley Kunitz addresses this issue in the following poem, “Organic Bloom,” in which he declares the life always escapes “closed reason” and notes in conclusion that those who fail to learn this are making a perilous mistake. This is true for individuals and for groups. Remember my oft-quoted note from Goethe, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

ORGANIC BLOOM
By Stanley Kunitz

The brain constructs its systems to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense;
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell,
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our charted hell,
A guilt not mentioned in our prayers, a sin
Conceived against the self. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster.
Enormous floats the brain’s organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.

“Mindfulness” in Blogging

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Like many other bloggers, I often wonder, “Why am I doing this?” It seems so foolish and even vain in some sense; for, “Who am I” to be holding forth as if he has anything to offer? It is, in a sense, an exercise in humility as I “put myself out there” when I post something. I have fortunate to have a very nice response from very interesting, thoughtful, “mindful” people from all corners of the world. I now feel a real connection with some of these people as we have engaged in dialogue from time to time, exchanged emails on occasion, teased and chided each other, and shared reading lists.

I do think the “mindfulness” is one of the key things that I seek now in the whole of my life, in real time and also here in the blog-o-sphere. And by this term, I do not mean merely intelligence…you can find that anywhere…but I mean a “presence” in their intellect which reflects a self-reflectiveness and sensitivity to their own subjective world and that of others. This quality reflects an “aliveness” that is so often not present in our modern, machine-produced world. This brings to mind a wonderful poem by Robert Frost which I will share shortly in which he studied an insect on a white sheet of paper and used its “antsy” behavior to poetically approach “mindfulness.”

And mindfulness is very much related to another primary motivation in my blogging—connection. I am fortunate to be well connected in my social circle and community, “well” in that I have meaningful friends and relationships. But, I am discovering that in this respect, and so many areas of life, I want more! I am discovering a hunger in my heart right now for the whole of life, a significant part of which is connection with other people and the natural world. And so I toss these words out into the void, always curious to see who if anyone will respond and what they will have to say in response; and, what are they offering on their own blog. I have noted before that, “Winds of thought blow magniloquent meanings betwixt me and thee,” (Archibald Macleish) and it is the “meaningfulness” that provides the sense of connection. For, with words, we can evoke a resonance in the heart of other like-minded souls and allow a reciprocal evocation in our own heart. This is what takes place when two, or more, people “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot)

And note what Shakespeare said about the power of words.

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote where thou dost stay.

He saw words as sublimated “flesh” and implied that if the whole of his body could be “sublimated”, he would be conveyed across distance into the presence of his beloved. Now, of course, he was not being literal; but, he was noting the power of thought and words to “carry us” beyond the “small bright circle of our own consciousness” (Conrad Aiken) and reach a hand across the abyss that separates all of us. But, for this to take place, these words must be “meaningful” and not merely palaver. This means dialogical engagement which exposes us to different ways of seeing the world thus broadening our own world view. In most people this is discouraged in favor of merely regurgitating “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) This brings to mind the pithy observation of T.S. Eliot regarding a family that was locked into a closed verbal world, describing them as, “Too strange to one another for misunderstanding.”

A Considerable Speck

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt–
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.
Robert Frost

Rumi Points Us to the Real!

Plucked by a Tulip????

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It was a lovely, cool spring morning in 1990 and I had just been married about 9 months. I was in our front yard and was greeted by a bounty of lovely tulip blossoms. I bent down to pluck one and as I did so, the notion fluttered through my mind, “Am I plucking or being plucked?” That was such a random, silly thought that just “happened” but it immediately caught my eye even before I knew about “mindfulness.” And it is no coincidence that this event happened shortly after my first and only marriage, each of us being in our mid thirties.

This was the beginning of the end for my rigid, “lost in the head”, concrete thinking though it would take another two decades and more for the process to get to the point where the “flow” of life would begin to take place in my heart. The boundary ambiguity noted in that observation flourished over those decades and I increasingly have become more adept at drawing less of a distinction between “me and thee.” Now I do draw distinctions; and failure to do so would be a serious problem for we do live in the “real” world where distinctions and ego-functioning is required. But I’m not trapped in the paradigm of “I’m over here” and “you are out there”; I’m more able to see my world, human and natural, in more inclusive terms.

Now, I must point out that “I” was plucking the damn tulip! But in so doing the beauty of the moment was toying with my heart, bringing to my mind and heart the notion of “being plucked.” There is such magnificent beauty in the world but we can’t see, and feel, this beauty unless we are able to let go of the rigid ego-identification which our culture always mandates. But the ego identification is so insidious that we can’t even see it without having already somehow escaped its clutches. This is relevant to an old philosophical bromide that I came across decades ago, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it” ; or, “Asking someone to see his ‘self’ is like asking a fish to see water.” Or, even better yet, one of my Indian blog-o-sphere friends offered, “Someone who has fallen into a vat of marmalade can’t see anything but marmalade.” I liked his observation because it was new to me and registered dissonant at first, thus communicating to me effectively as I quickly mulled it over.

This drawing of distinction between “me and thee” is intrinsically a spiritual process. And I’m not even address “Spiritual” here though it is very relevant. I’m referring to “spiritual” as a human enterprise in the depths of the heart, a willingness to look inside which is an enterprise that our culture discourages. And if we deign to venture “there”, we will eventually end up wrestling with “God” in the realm of the “Spiritual.”

literary lew

prose/poetry/philosophy/religion

Category Archives: mindfulness

Wordsworth and a “Big Thought”

A Man’s View of Maternal Connection

“Failing Boldly” Has a Place!

A Maya Angelou Prayer

Showers of Blessings!

Charlotte Joko Beck and Disappointment

Stanley Kunitz on Reason’s Limits

“Mindfulness” in Blogging

Rumi Points Us to the Real!

Plucked by a Tulip????