Category Archives: poetry and prose

3 Replies

I share here a beautiful poem about death that a friend of mine posted on Facebook today.  It is stunningly beautiful and captures my sentiments that I have about death but also about life.  For, even in life we are all “one flesh” in some sense for that we are part of the fabric of the human species and even of the cosmos, “star dust” as Carl Sagan put it.  Yes, we live in time and space and must never lose our sense of identity and know that we are separate and distinct even as we simultaneously we realize that in some sense, “Oh, no we are not!”  I like his use of “Christ” as a symbol of the Unity of All Things, certainly stemming from the Pauline notion that “by Him all things cohere.”

 

Death Is Nothing At All – Poem by Henry Scott Holland
Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.

All is well.

Nothing is past; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before only better, infinitely happier and forever we will all be one together with Christ.
Henry Scott Holland

Chief Seattle Offers Wisdom for Today

4 Replies

My fascination with non-duality, the “unity of all things” continues. I stumbled across a letter from Chief Seattle in 1844 to President Franklin Pierce which suggested he had been reading the Eckhart Tolle of his day:

There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the leaves of spring or the rustle of the insects wings….

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected….

The whites, too, shall pass—perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will suffocate in your own waste.

But this “unity of all things” is so subversive, so much “non” sense! It rattles my cage and will do so for the rest of my life. The flux of life cannot be reduced to linear thought as much as our reptilian brain wants it to be. Life is a flow. I am a flow. We attach ourselves to stories to convince ourselves otherwise. But we are always merely a “process in a process in a field that never closes.” (W. H. Auden)

“The Closed Cab of Occupation”

3 Replies

THE CLOSED CAB OF OCCUPATION

W. H. Auden declared that “We drive through life in the closed cab of occupation.” Auden was, like myself, an alienated soul sentenced to life as an “observer” of life rather than a “participant.” But being an “observer” with the capacity to even “observe” himself, i.e. self-reflect, he realized that even his occupation of poet was a “closed cab” and he was fated to view life through the prison of metaphor. And I’m glad he accepted that imprisonment as his work has been a god-send to myself and to many others, though he suffered greatly under its torments.

My “occupation” from very early in my development has been to “observe” life rather than to experience it, a stance that eventually evolved into the “closed cab” of a diagnostician, a mental health counselor. In the comfortable confines of that self-imposed prison I could…and still can…categorize and label this beautiful mystery that we call life and keep myself insulated from its hoary depths which are often frightening. But, mercifully I have the gift that Auden had and can self-reflect somewhat even about my “self-reflection” and thus my clinical detachment is breaking down. Yes, the prison-bars are bending and with a “little bit of luck and a strong tail-wind” I’m gonna be able to slip between those bars at some point and come out to play for moment before that damn Grim Reaper has his way with me!

A recent phrase I stumbled across on a Paul Tillich Facebook page is someone’s observation that Tillich’s teachings had taught him “just how much I am embedded in my own thought.” This “embeddedness” is a critical dimension of life that is difficult to grasp; for, to grasp this nuance of life is to see and experience a schism in the depths of one’s heart and he/she begins to realize there is more to one’s “experience” that what can be “thought.” This insight can be the beginning of recognition of one’s “closed cab.”

I want to share with you the insight of John O’Donohue about this discovery:

Thought is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The way you see things makes them the way they are. We never meet life innocently. We always take in life through the grid of thought we use. Our thoughts filter experience all the time…Even your meetings with yourself happen in and by means of thinking.

 More often than not we have picked up the habits of thinking from those around us. These thought-habits are not yours; they can damage the way you see the world and make you doubt your own instinct and sense of life. When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception…In order to deconstruct the inner prison, the first step is to see that it is a prison. You can move in the direction of this discovery by reflecting on the places where your life feels limited and tight…”Heidegger said, ‘To recognize a frontier is already to have gone beyond it.’” (“Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong.”)

“Quintessence of Dust” We Are!!!

Leave a reply

Emily Dickinson is one of my soul mates. She was a spinster, living in her father’s attic, making observations about life with her brilliant poetry which would not be appreciated here on earth until she got to heaven. One of her pithy little quips that I really like is, “Life is over there, on a shelf.” Cloistered there in Puritanical New England, she dared to explore her own soul and at the same time pay attention to what was going on out there “on the shelf.”

I can relate so well. For, I too am an “observer” and in some way I too have spent my life cloistered in some spiritual attic. I think Shakespeare also lived in one of these little self-imposed prisons and from that vantage point could offer such brilliant wisdom about the human condition. He referred to humankind as the “quintessence of dust” and that pretty well sums us up, though considering our “dustiness” is very difficult for our ego. It is for mine. I am DNA’d to take myself way too seriously which is what we little dust bunnies tend to do.

One of my Facebook friends is apparently also one of these observers though he is blessed with brilliant poetic skill. He lives only five hours away (in Denver) and one of these days I’m gonna meet this kindred spirit. I want to share with you here one of his poems which so astutely captures the essence of being a human. His name is Randy Welch and you can find him on Facebook.

HUMANS
(BEING HUMAN)

Being Human
Is As Far From Being A Spider
As It Is From Being God
It Is To Live In The Past
While Fretting About The Future
Barely Aware What’s Going On Right Now
Being Human Is Feeling Alone
Amidst A Crowd
Yet Crowded By The Presence
Of Just One Other Human Being
Being Human Is Wanting
To Save The Children
To Save The World
But Being Too Busy
Getting The Car Tuned Up
Or Spreading The Latest Gossip
About Other Human Beings
To Actually Do Something About It
Being Human Is Being
The Most Glorified Presence
On The Planet
Yet Constantly Wishing
We Were Anything But Human
It Is Having The Gifts Of
Conceptualization And Visualization
Of Logic And Reason
And Refusing To Use Them
In The Face Of Raw Emotion
Being Human Is Knowing
The Beauty Of The Ocean
And The Fear Of Drowning In It
It Is The Tragedy Of Living
In Complete Ambivalence
Most Of The Time
Being Human Is Something
That May Not Continue
For Very Much Longer
On Account Of
Humans Being Human…
-randini- (aka Randy Welch)

Shakespeare’s View on Madness

Leave a reply

One of my readers responded to a recent post about collective insanity with the observation that “we are all crazy but some are crazier than others.” And Shakespeare certainly felt this was so, describing life as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

I have studied and taught history and practiced as a mental health counselor. These experiences have given me an opportunity to utilize my Enneagram 6 “observer” skills and I often pine, “Why do they do what they are doing? Why don’t they see they are making such poor choices and simply ‘stop it’”! But fortunately I have always been self-reflective and turn the same focus on my own self and see that I too am my own worst enemy and, when practicing as a therapist, should have taken the advice of Jesus who told us, “Physician, health thyself.” But I knew that I couldn’t and that I, like my clients, was doing what W. H. Auden said we would do, spend our life, “Waging the war that we are.”

I, like you and the rest of our brothers and sisters, are driven by forces that we can never truly understand and we are often merely “the toy of some great pain.” This subterranean energy that pulsates through our lives at its deepest level contains a dimension of sheer insanity. But, most of us are lucky and are able to sublimate this madness into mere neurosis and muddle through our lives and keep this “idiotic tale” under way. We seem to follow the mantra, “The show must go on!”

I have come to realize that Shakespeare understood madness so well because he had a “tad” of it himself. “You spot it, you got it!” Hamlet noted, “What’s mad but to be nothing else but mad.” Shakespeare knew that to be truly mad there was only madness without the “pauser reason” which could check thoughts and impulses that are beyond the pale. He knew all of us are mad but some of us have that gift of that “pauser reason”, that neo-cortical capacity to self-monitor and give consideration to other people. Without it we are “nothing else but mad.” And to be “nothing else but mad” is really very comfortable; for those ensconced in that self-imposed prison are cut off from concern for external reference. Criticizing them is, to borrow an expression from my dear mother, “like pouring water off a duck’s back.”

A Perspective on “Enlightenment”

Leave a reply

 

WordPress and Facebook introduce me to so many interesting people from different walks of life who I would have never met otherwise. I would like to introduce you today to a young Korean woman, Wanyoung Kim, who can be found on Facebook and is stunningly intelligent and erudite.

Recently she declared on Facebook, “You can be mentally Enlightened, but it is really the power of Christ that heals a person.” I was puzzled as this declaration reflected a dimension of Christian faith that I had not noted before with her postings. So I responded, “I agree. But, I’m curious how you would define ‘Christ’? This is not a cynical question. I just know that you are a very thoughtful person.”

Ms. Kim responded with:

A friend of mine (name omitted here)once described Him as the Internet of all hearts and minds- I cannot say it more succinctly than this. To believe is to know that his suffering accounted for all grievances of every heart and mind that walked upon this Earth in world history. ‪Christ is a man of sorrows himself like me, one can say. The heart of Christ is to see Him in every human being including myself- to empathize with the pain I see of a stranger in the street and this empathy is a healing act where a collective feeling of sharedness which in itself is a unity to the Other reassuring them we all are part of this suffering of Christ. I become Christ my self.

Ms. Kim does not see Christ through the narrow prism that I was taught as a child in conservative Arkansas as a Baptist in the fifties and sixties. And as I read her insightful observations some ancient part of my soul…which I often refer to as “literallew”…wants to denigrate her thoughts immediately. But “literallew” is increasingly buried under the Light of what I now see as Spirit of God which wants us to interpret the scripture and not merely regurgitate it as we have been taught. And this is not merely an intellectual enterprise but a gut-level enterprise that cannot be taught with “book learnin’”. It requires a willingness to have a heart that is “petal open” as Toni Morrison once put it; or, in the words of Shakespeare, a heart that is full of “penetrable stuff.” And this is scary for it subjects one to the flow of life and deprives him/her from the cold, sterile “certainty” that I was told was available and strived for so desperately and never was able to obtain.

Christ is not a “thing” that can be reduced to our “ideas” and thus captured by our ideology, as noble as that ideology might appear to be. He was, and is, an expression of the “Wholly Other” and can be known only when we are willing to experience our own finitude which can only occur when we come face to face with the Otherness that faces us daily with each one we meet and even with this beautiful world itself.  Eckhart Tolle reports He is the “Presence” which is the only thing that “is” if we can separate ourselves from our compulsive thinking.

But seeing Christ in non-linear terms requires an ability to see ourselves in non-linear terms which for most of us requires a radical transformation in self-definition and view of the world. It requires a transformative shift of perspective which brings to my mind the notion from the Apostle Paul, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” It is much easier to just tenaciously hang onto the  way that we have always seen and experienced our world. As W. H. Auden put it, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But I’m aware that what I’m writing now is “nuts” to nearly anyone from my youth that might happen to read this. This does not make any “sense” to a linear mind that is confined to the time-space continuum. But I have learned that it is very possible to escape confinement in that prison and still respect it and those that live in therein. And I, too, can still live within its confines which is known as “reality” even as I revel in the freedom which Christ represented and offers today.

 

“The Joy of Being Wrong”

3 Replies

“Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” declared Hamlet though in modern English, Shakespeare would have had Hamlet call it “consciousness.” Shakespeare saw that the awareness that consciousness brings is stunning and tends to give us pause to the point that his projective characters Hamlet and Macbeth were often stymied into inaction with their “pauser reason.” Shakespeare had Hamlet note that his obsessive thinking, which created his hyper consciousness, was actually cowardice when he admitted that if all his wisdom were “quartered,” it would be, “three parts cowardice and one part wisdom.”

Shakespeare knew, as would T. S. Eliot centuries later, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” This is the reason that the gods graciously gave us blinders and we sure as hell better hope we never lose them for we will be face-to-face with what poet Wallace Stevens called, “the fatality of seeing things too real.” But I have found it very important to acknowledge that I have these blinders and to realize that this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he said that, “we see through a glass darkly.” Acknowledging our blinders is merely acknowledging our human-ness and that is so very hard to do.   Just ask Isis. Just ask the extreme right-wing of my country’s Republican Party!

Acknowledging my blinders has been actually quite liberating! I no longer have to be “right” for I know that being “right” is merely self-deception. “Right” is a Presence in the human experience that visits us from time to time but none of us can claim it and pontificate about it. This is probably related to what the Catholic priest Charlie Alison had in mind with his book, “The Joy of Being Wrong.”

Mental Illness is a Reference Problem

2 Replies

It is axiomatic in clinical lore that mental illness is a reference problem arising from having formulated too narrow a field of reference, one’s decision-making guided by internal whims and fancies with little or no concern for external validation. In recent months I have “discoursed” re the extreme close-mindedness of the Republican Party in my country and yesterday’s post might make one think I had them in mind. Well, kind of, but only “kind of” for if I would deign to call the Republican Party “mentally ill” then I would be revealing my own “mental illness.” For they are not “mentally ill” though they do have a “mentally ill” dimension in their collective psyche just as do all groups, including the Democratic Party. This “mentally ill dimension” is the inordinate need to maintain and perpetuate group identity to the exclusion of any long-term, broad-based, inclusive agenda.

All groups function like individuals and have a need for homeostasis and go to great ends to achieve this objective. And this is good, if it is not carried to an extreme. When homeostasis becomes an inordinate concern for a group they will become excessively concerned with boundaries and self-definition. Inevitably a need for purity will emerge and one will see a tendency to threaten or exclude anyone who departs from the party line. This is reflects a profound insecurity in its collective psyche—the aforementioned homeostasis is perceived to be very tenuous and great energy is invested in shoring up its precarious internal sense of identity. The reinforcements employed to shore up this tenuous identity become profoundly important as without them the fear that “the center will not hold” and a beast will come “slouching toward Bethlehem.” (See W. B. Yeats poem at conclusion)

The key is for homeostasis…or the bedrock of identity…to be based on some belief system that finds unity in a whole larger than oneself. This belief system will allow the group identity to be maintained but without such inordinate emphasis that the larger context of which the group is part will be de-emphasized or even rejected. Such an impoverished identity does not see…and feel…its connection with the larger context (i.e., “the world”) as it cannot forego its pristine, private, “unique” view of self and opts to live in an autistic shell. It makes me think of Hamlet who pined, under his great duress, to “flee to a nutshell and there be king of infinite spaces.”

The following poem by William Butler Yeats conveys the terror of a group or individual who experiences existential insecurity and fears that “the center will not hold” and will fall prey to “the beast” of chaos:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

To Be is To Be Vulnerable

2 Replies

OUR JEOPARDY by Thomas John Carlisle

It is good to use best china
treasured dishes
the most gentle goblets
the oldest lace tablecloth
there is a risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or comment
or a fragile cup of revelation
but not to touch
not to handle
not to employ the available
artifacts of being
a human being
that is a quiet crash
the deadly catastrophe

where nothing is enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended
where nothing is ever
lived
loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost
or found.

My “Querencia” Exposed.

5 Replies

I posted last week about being confined in my version of Shakespeare’s “pauser reason” which I explained is a detached observer stance in life. One of my readers responded with a stunningly insightful response, “Is it a pause or is it a querencia?”

Well, I had to Wikipedia the term “querencia” but what I found out really gave me “pause.” It is a Spanish term for the “haunt of an animal, a favorite spot, the area of a bull-ring where the bull makes its stand.” The cartoon image immediately came to my mind of the beleaguered bull hunkered down, digging in at the heels, angry as hell, ready to wreak havoc on the taunting matador.”

“What an image!” I thought.   I knew that my “observer stance” served an ego function but I had not seen this dimension of it. I had not seen it as that extreme of a defensive stance one which included very definite aggressive intentions. I could see the “bull” in me ready to wreak havoc on the matador “out there” who has been taunting me all of these years!  So once again I receivedanother lesson in the Auden wisdom, “We wage the war we are.”

(See “Inthegazeoftheother” blog here in wordpress for the source of the feedback re “querencia.”)