Category Archives: poetry and prose

To Be or Not to Be

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“To be or not to be, that is the question.” That famous observation of Hamlet cuts to the heart of everything, “Do I ‘be’ or do I opt out and choose to no longer ‘be’” Actually, I think this decision is made very early in our embryonic development as our identity, i.e. our be-ing, begins to formulate. Sometimes in that early stage of our life we choose to “not be” and step back into the void that begat us. And even after our birth, as our tenuous ego begins to constellate, I think there are occasions when some people decide, “Hmm. No, don’t think I want to do this” and SIDS takes place.

But most of us opt to decide to “be” and join the human race. But that “be-ing” is very fragile so we must put on a suit of clothes, an ego, and that ego will help us bear those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” So each day we wake up, quickly don our ego once again, and go out into the world and hope and pray, “Please world. Mirror me. Validate me.”

An Humble Prayer

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Here is a simple poem by Louis Untermeyer on the subject of prayer that I really like. Oh, if I could only write poetry!

Prayer
God, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight – and lose.
Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.
Open my eyes to vision girt
With beauty, and with with wonder lit –
But let me always see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring’s first flutes and drums –
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
From compromise and things half-done,
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride;
And when, at last, the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.
– Louis Untermeyer

Handling Intense Emotion

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I recently posted about intense feelings and quoted the following poem by Marianne Moore.  Today I want to emphasize one line from this poem, “He who feels strongly behaves.”  Intense emotion is often an excuse to not behave and indeed tense emotion at times makes “behaving” impossible.

Shakespeare said of one of his characters, “He cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.’  “Distempered cause” refers to a basic life force which I construe to mean energy or feeling.  Shakespeare was saying that regardless of how we feel we must keep it within “the belt of rule”  I think art and music are two means whereby this intense emotion is kept within the “belt of rule”

What Are Years?
By Marianne Moore
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,—
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Elif Shafak and Difference

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist who is brilliant, insightful, and….yes, dare I say it, beautiful!  She has a TED lecture available on the internet which I strongly recommend on the subject of the Politics of Difference.  (See link below)

In this lecture she begins by telling of being raised by an educated and Westernized, single-mother in Istanbul.  She also tells of the influence of her mentally unstable grandmother who was somewhat of a natural-healer in the community.  One of the grandmother’s antics was to remove warts with prayer, incantations, and then drawing a circle around the wart with dark ink.  And Shafak declared that this procedure worked!  She once asked her grandmother about what the secret was and her grandmother told her, “Never underestimate the power of circles.”

Shafak then takes this image of the circle and developed the notion that anytime we draw circles, and do so rigidly, we kill anything within them  She explained how that when groups, for example, draw rigid boundaries around themselves they eventually do themselves great harm.  She argued that when we cocoon, when we ghetto-ize we are isolating ourselves and denying ourselves the necessary feedback from the world outside of ourselves.  Furthermore, she noted the obvious—when we are barricaded within our safe confines, we are prone to demonize all those on the outside, all those that are different, and at times we even seek to eradicate them.

And I close with my daily dose of W. H. Auden who noted, re this isolationism, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html

Shakespeare and Self Restraint

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“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking  makes it so.”  This is one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare.  He recognizes the role that reason had in ascribing value to our behavior and formulating social parameters so that we did not ever retreat to our violent, primitive past.  (Oh, let me be honest!  He saw that we could with reason sublimate our nastiness and pretend that we are civilized!)

Where would we be without this filter, though  I’ll take sublimated violence any day of the week over murder and mayhem.  I heard someone quip recently that the U.N. ought to solve recurrent outbreaks of tribal violence by giving th0se tribes N.F.L. franchises.

In another one of Shakespeare’s plays he attributes the beastly behavior of one of his characters to having his passions “outrun the pauser reason.”

And I’ll admit that my “pauser” has not always been operative and it has sure led to some poor decisions.

Rumi and Barriers to God

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Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Rumi

Something similar can be said about the love of God and even God Himself. Our task is merely to “get out of the way” and the love of God will abound, indeed God Himself will abound. But the challenge is finding the gift of discernment which allows these barriers to become conscious; and this step alone is often all it takes to allow the barrier to fall.

These barriers are always some form of ego, some insidious self-aggrandizement which has ensconced itself as an essential part of our identity.

Make The World Go Away.

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I was recently going through a difficult time, experiencing multiple stressors, most of which could be attributed to having been out of my daily orbit, away from the comfort of hearth and home. I had done some traveling abroad and though I enjoyed it immensely, it had been stressful. Upon my return home, I was heading into town to get a new driver’s license (to replace the one lost when my wallet had been lifted in Rome) and I was contemplating several other stressors in my life that had accumulated as a result of the trip abroad. A line from Hamlet flashed through my mind, “Oh, if I could be bound in a nutshell and there be the king of infinite spaces.”

I knew what he meant. I wanted to retreat to my “nutshell”, which would have been my hearth and home, and if I could never, never, ever, ever leave those safe confines then all would be well. I could amuse myself with caring for my lovely dachshunds, my lovely wife, taking care of my yard and garden, feeding the lovely birds which deign to visit me each day, then all would be well. I would need no more! As some old c & w song goes, “Let the world go away…”

But, “mindfulness” immediately visited me and I noted what was going on, noting the lunacy of retreating to any private world, any “nutshell.” Escapism is never anything but escapism To be a human is to be engaged in the world and thus to be subject to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too” (Shakespeare). Retreating is always tempting but it is not reality

Yes, the world is ugly. But if I retreat to my “nutshell”, I am still face-to-face with a profound ugliness—my own. I’m reminded of an old bromide from decades ago, “A man who lives by himself, and for himself, will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”

An afterthought—I think the home-schooling people need to be aware of this issue.

Repentence And Shakespeare

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Shakespeare and other poets had something to say about repentence. Shakespeare in one sonnet lamented our tendency to let what Jesus would call “the kingdom within” go unattended while we lavish our attention on the external things, the “things of this world.”

Shakespeare lamented in Sonnet 126

O Soul, the Center of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array
Why doest thou pine with in
And suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward wall so costly gay
Why so large a cost,
Having so short a lease
Doest thou upon this fading mansion spend?

And he concluded this marvelous sonnet with the admonishment, “Within be fed, without be rich no more.”

Shakespeare was addressing the sin of misplaced concreteness, the human tendency to take for real that which was only ephemeral. John Masefield put it like this, describing us as a, “lame donkey lured by the moving hay, we chase the shade and let the Real be.”

The madness of our consumer society illustrates this sin of “misplaced concreteness.” We are so obsessed with “stuff” that we can’t slow down long enough to deal with our own inner emptiness, an experience which could lead to our discovery of our Fullness. I think the TV series on the Hoarders is a beautiful metaphor for this spiritual problem of our culture. True, these people are mentally ill…and grossly so…but they illustrate the profound mental illness of our spiritually bereft culture who daily “chase the shade and let the Real be.”

We need to….dare I say it…”repent.” That merely means we need to turn our attention away from the superficies of existence and focus on the kingdom which is within. And, when we do this we discover what Eckhart Tolle describes as The Power of Now, we discover that the best we can accomplish is getting “to be.”

Metanoia Strikes Deep

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Repentence became caricatured at some point in my life into the epithet, “Turn or burn.” That phrase had an aire of facetious over-statement to it even then but conveyed the angry, harsh, judgmental intent of many of my fellow believers.

Repent merely means to have a change of mind, a change of heart, a reorientation of one’s outlook on life. It means a turn about in word and deed but also in attitude and orientation. I think one could summarize the teachings of Jesus to say, “Hey, you guys been looking at things this way; take a break and look at things differently.” Just one illustration from the New Testament illustrates this. In the story of the “Woman at the Well”,(John 8) Jesus noted that he knew that she was an adulterous woman and he knew that the law called for her to be stoned to death. But he looked at things differently, did not view the law so rigidly on that occasion, and told her to “to go and sin no more.” He demonstrated a repentant point of view by approaching an individual with a mindset contrary to the conventional wisdom of his day.

In terms of today’s world, I think repentance can be illustrated in many ways. But a fundamental feature is that people who have truly repented…in the depths of their heart…have found the temerity to view the world in a different manner than they were taught, in a different manner than the prevailing culture would have them think. Repentant people, perhaps, will have come to see the glass half full whereas before they always say it half empty. They will see the world as offering hope whereas before they saw it as grim and ugly, bereft of any hope, with only apocalyptic doom in the offing. One who has repented might find the grace to see himself/herself has having intrinsic worth whereas before he/she saw only worthlessness and self-loathing. One who had repented in the depths of his heart may no longer see homosexuals as less-than-human, worthy of scorn and contempt and even violent persecution. One who has repented might see the other political party is more human terms, seeing them no longer as the personification of evil or devoid of any intrinsic value

“Meta-noia” is the word. Check it out. It is a rich concept.  An old rock tune included the lyric, “Metanoia strikes deep.”

“I Surrender All”

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“Running against the walls of our cage is perfectly hopeless.” I love a well-turned phrase and Wittgenstein knocked it out of the park with this observation. So much of my time in life has been spent “running against the walls of my cage.” It is comforting, now ensconced in my 7th decade…early therein, albeit…to be able to find the grace to not run so much. I am trying to follow the advice of the Beatles and, “Let it Be.”

It is so essential to learn to let it go, to surrender, to let come what may. But the ego fights this step toward maturity tooth-and-toenail.

Marianne Moore wrote a beautiful poem about this surrendering:

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

This is eternity.