Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way: A Poem

BY MARY OLIVER

If you're John Muir you want trees to 
live among. If you're Emily, a garden
will do. 
Try to find the right place for yourself. 
If you can't find it, at least dream of it. 

                                             •

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, 
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow. 

Anything that touches. 

                                             •

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible, 
entirely. 

                                             •

Some words will never leave God's mouth, 
no matter how hard you listen.  

                                             •

In all the works of Beethoven, you will 
not find a single lie.

                                             •

All important ideas must include the trees,
the mountains, and the rivers. 

                                             •

To understand many things you must reach out 
of your own condition. 

                                             •

For how many years did I wander slowly 
through the forest. What wonder and 
glory I would have missed had I ever been
in a hurry!

                                             •

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still
it explains nothing. 

                                             •

The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps.

---

This poem is excerpted from Mary Oliver's latest collection of poetry, Felicity, published by Penguin Press in October, 2015.

Mask Making Workshop, November 10-13, 2016

Before the Flood - Movie by Leonard Dicaprio and National Geographic

This is so important. It says it all, so clearly.

 
https://youtu.be/D9xFFyUOpXo

"Do Not Lose Heart"

I love this article by Dr. Estes, and take the liberty of re-posting it again.   I confess I am struggling with depression and bewilderment at this time - her words give strength.

DO NOT LOSE HEART

By Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

Mis Estimados: Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in the world right now...Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is - we were made for these times. 

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement...I grew up on the Great lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind...Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold it's own, and to advance, regardless.

We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over brought down by naivete, by lack of love, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme. We have a history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially - we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection. Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered can be restored to life again.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn't you say you were a believer? Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn't you ask for grace? Don't you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner core - till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again. One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or desperation thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl.

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip towards an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take "everyone on Earth" to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

 

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall:

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes ©2003 All rights reserved

 

Farewell, America by Bill Moyers

I cannot stop crying. For the America I believed in,  the real "American Dream", the diversity and  freedom that really did make America great. We are grown small, mean, and ignorant indeed if this election means those forces of oppression and hatred now have open season.  I cry for the Earth, in the face of an America with a president "who doesn't believe in climate change". Thank you Bill Moyers, for saying out loud  what many of us are crying for.

Farewell, America

by Bill Moyers 

(http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/)
November 10, 2016

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:

“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”


I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.

No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things.

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived.  Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.

With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.

What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.

This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.

For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.

Election Day.........

Eight years ago I celebrated the election of the first black President of the United States.  Now I am pretty sure we will celebrate the first woman President of the United States, and I am also hoping that the polls will demonstrate that the misogyny, intolerance, utter disregard for the environment and humanitarianism, and  fascism Donald Trump represents is not what the majority of Americans are.

Huzzah Hillary!

Realists of a Larger Reality

"Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.  We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries, - realists of a larger reality."

 Ursula Leguin, from  Acceptance Speech of National Book Foundation Award

Recently  I attended a poetry reading at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona by an acclaimed poet - I love poetry, the "Bards of our time",  and am very pleased that the Poetry Center is in existence.  She received an impressive audience, and an impressive introduction.   But I walked away from this reading disappointed, even a bit angry.  And yes, as I sat to contemplate my response, out popped two of  my favorite quotes from my favorite wise woman of letters Ursula Kroeber Leguin, whose worlds and words I have inhabited for many long years.  

Without introduction last night's poet did a long, very long, free form verse.  I felt like I sat through an hour long tantrum, perfected over a 40 year career, but ultimately elegant in its obscurity and  meaninglessness. Perhaps that was the rather nihilistic point itself, I don't know. Here and there a few good lines/images emerged from the rant, but to me nothing hung together enough to embed them into my mind and heart, nothing ever wove into some kind of basket of meaning, whether dark or light.   Was I "disturbed" by this stream of "raw, disturbing, honest, evocative"..... whatever?  No, I was bored.  

The audience, after she finished, looked rather blank as they clapped.  I found myself wondering, how many felt moved by (what I experienced as a  tirade) or how many, like me, were secretly  happy it was finally over.   I wondered how many sat there nodding while inwardly feeling confused, a bit depressed.  

And I thought of the times I've been at poetry events that brought tears to the eyes of those present, of how poets like Drew Dellinger, or Mary Oliver, Alice Walker, or many  far more obscure and local as well...........can bring us into a far greater sphere of meaning,  of connection, of empathy, of awe, of grief, of magic, even, heaven help us, that of Hope and Beauty.  

These are among  the "realists of a larger reality" we so ardently need now.  In this time of the calcification of  soul to capitalism, the loss of species and habitat, this time "before the flood".......we do not need artforms  that teaches nihilism, despair, or ennui.  We need visionaries, we need pathfinders who can help us see and connect the links, who can help us to  weave the "medicine baskets" of new stories.    There, I said it, a highly subjective, politically incorrect, comment.   

We live in a time when the arts continue to be eliminated from primary education, when students are pressed into the universities (and lifelong debt) desperate for educations that will "get them a job" instead of the fortunate liberal educations my generation enjoyed, when the art districts are disappearing to be replaced with trendy restaurants and no one seems to notice, when actual conversation with people and the actual immediate and physical  environment around them  cannot possibly compete with  the instant and consuming  escape of cyberspace........those moments before a painting, those quotes that linger from a poem for a lifetime, may be fading into obsolescence.

All the more need for translators of the imaginal language.  Poetry, art, are often a language that many need to be taught in order to ignite an appreciation, and I sense that more and more people are not learning to  speak that language.  Sometimes I feel that  few people have even noticed that it is disappearing from the common vocabulary, consigned to obscure enclaves like the Poetry Center.  As an AIRBNB host, I have had many people come into my home, which is also a gallery, over the years, and it's been disillusioning to see how very few of them notice the art; certainly they do not engage me in conversation about it.  I've often joked to friends that I could just as easily hang mops on the walls for all that most people would notice  (Tom Wolfe, author of The Painted Word,  might reply that such an exhibit would be more  "conceptually significant"..........)

Well, I wander off somewhere here.  Masks  aren't for everyone.  But I  do believe the for most people, without a  meaningful education in the arts  it is hard to have an appreciation or even curiosity about what is "spoken in a language one doesn't know how to speak" .  And so the conversation is left one sided, or unanswered.  And very lonely sometimes.    But..........this does not let artists, the poets, the visionaries and shamans and myth makers of our time.......off the hook.  

You are needed, you have work to do.   Even if it seems like  no one is noticing.  Even if you don't get paid in dollars.    You have heard the Call, and for better or worse in your personal or financial  life, responded.  

Last, I have to reflect that  the ubiquitous celebration of the dark,  the "shocking", the naively cynical,  has become predictably  "de regueur"  in our jaded, de-sensitized world.  In the halls of the High Art world, the word  "beauty" is almost an obsolete anachronism, something we think of as too fluffy to be serious art.  But if not Beauty, what?  Beauty is not just a saccharine flower painting in a dollar store, beauty is the vitality, poignancy, and power of the lifeforce endlessly creating itself, in the world, in our own lives.  

If I were to create a Manifesto that anyone would ever listen to,  I would say as Leguin said:  "Become a Realist of a Larger Reality".  

 “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” 

― Ursula K. Le Guin,

 The Ones Who Walk Away from  Omelas