The Winter of Listening by David Whyte

 

This poem by David Whyte haunted my memories today, I felt like sharing it, particularly for those friends who live where " the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense round every living thing".

THE WINTER OF LISTENING

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
 nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

David Whyte

.......From River Flow

New and Selected Poems

©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Photo by Steve Curry in Afghanistan

 

The Lonely Paradox of being "Connected"

 

 I have a two fold conundrum.  One is that I kind of feel I've said in this Blog pretty much everything I have to say, for 13 years now, and just keep repeating myself.  Which is ok - I do not believe one has to be continually "innovative" and "radical" and "new".  I think that can really mean "shallow" and "teenage immature".  

The other is that, although I began this Blog as a personal Journal of an art journey,  it really has rarely allowed me to feel free to be particularly "personal".  I've faithfully and often doggedly recorded the progress of projects and the inspiring and important work of my colleagues. But I often feel it's not the place to rant or disclose much of my less positive, less hopeful, less informed self - I guess it could be said I've become rather "branded".  Which has a way of happening in our world.

One of the alternatives I've considered, since I really do seem to want to create a more personal Blog, is to create a new one that is more of a "memoir"............ I think, if I do, I'll call it "A Passing Parade" or "All Pieces of a Legacy".  It would be mostly private, and therein I could remember, rant, and meander through my life's stories to my heart's content.  Do some weeping and grieving, and some celebrating and praising too, share some secrets and be occasionally politically incorrect too.  I do love Blogs, I have to say.  I'm very glad someone invented the Blog, along with ice cream and water heaters.

SO........................ Back to repeating myself, HERE IS AN ARTICLE FROM 10 YEARS AGO that seems even more relevant to me now.  

Dec. 12, 2013

"Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox................We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information."

"(Vickers’s) web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment...............Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation."

Stephen Marche **
"Is Facebook Making Us Lonelier?"

I feel very sad that the Blockbuster Video down the street, along with all Blockbuster Video stores, is closing.  I've had a relationship with them for years..........like going to a library, I knew the people there, would ask them about new arrivals, sometimes buy popcorn, and then settle down to enjoy a movie with my mother, who I visit at assisted living now.  I guess the internet, Netflix, and those obnoxious red boxes  in front of at every pharmacy were the end for this once ubiquitous business.

And I was also struck by the article I quote from above by Stephen Marche.  I don't know about others, but for myself, on a personal level, I have often found that the Internet has made me feel lonelier, certainly, more disposible.  I seem to be going through one of my "dancing on the table with a lampshade on my head" phases (again), and it's not even New Year's Eve.  I'm irritable, and know that I'm going through a kind of re-evaluation, and possible re-invention,  of my life.  But meanwhile,  I think it's a damn shame that Blockbuster is no more.  And I also think Americans have a deeply unconscious, buried,  "shadow" urge to feel interdependant and affiliated.  I hope.   More on this after my rant............

The video rental stores had real human beings behind the counter to talk to you about the movies you browsed for.  Unlike the "red boxes", which are similar in concept to the "self checkout" at grocery stores.   Not only is it another loss of many jobs, but it's yet another way in which Americans can, once again, avoid the messiness, eccentricities, and germs of  human contact with a click and a card.  What's next? Total virtual reality immersion?  

 "Individualism finds its roots in the attempt to deny the reality and importance of human interdependence.  One of the major goals  of technology in America is to "free" us from the necessity of relating to, submitting to, depending upon, or controlling other people.  Unfortunately, the more we have succeeded in doing this the more we have felt disconnected, bored, lonely, unprotected, unnecessary and unsafe."

Phillip Slater

In my mother's day the movies were a big deal - you went to the theatre,  which meant gathering with a bunch of friends, or dates, for a night out,  dinner as well.  A social occasion, which videos changed by making it a more private affair.  When she was a young working woman in Los Angeles in the 40's, even an  urban breakfast was less "private".   There was no "fast food" to speak of.  Breakfast meant a cafe, which had a cook, dishwasher, waitress and fellow breakfasters.  Every morning, a community of people was connected to  her eggs and coffee.  There were also no  disposable forks, spoons, cups, or plates - that idea, which we take so completely for granted, had not arrived yet, although it was looming just around the corner. 

And now we have the next evolutionary step:  Starbucks!  Instead of the inconvenience of a sit down restaurant and familiar breakfast faces, we have a lineup in our cars, greeted by a hand with a  paper cup, soon to end up in a landfill, and a universal litany of "welcome to Starbucks find everything you're looking for have a great day".  

I spent many personally evolutionary days in Cafe Society in the 60's and 70's in Berkeley and New York and other places, and have a great fondness for them.  They really aren't the same any more, or at least, I'm not.  Most of the Cafe's I can go to here in Tucson look  something like this:  

Now my true senior curmudgeon-ness is showing, along with my long winter underwear.  Because I remember Cafe Med, or Cafe Trieste, in pre-laptop days, as looking something like this:

 

or this:

Or this:   (ok, that's Alan Ginsburg and Company, and I wasn't there, but wish I had been....)
 

Yes, I know.  There would have been obnoxious cigarette smoke in those days.  And sometimes obnoxious people.   But there were also poets, regulars, friends, bead sellers, spare changers...........all the color and texture of human beings.  

And another question, for 2013,  might be, why would I need  to go to a cafe in the first place, when I can make gourmet coffee and bagels at home?  Don't I have a French Press and a toaster?   Could it be I, like  a few others, enjoy the sense of mutually  breathing bodies around us, a chance to eavesdrop on an interesting conversation, maybe even get to talk to that person with the intriguing book, or flirt with the guy who looks like he might be a fellow artist?

But notice one thing in the photos above, from the '60's.  The people generally look like they're talking to each other, or looking at each other at least.  Now look at photos from a contemporary coffee shop with wifi.  What you will see predominently   is a row of laptops, each at separate small tables.     If you're hoping for human contact,  there is nothing more impregnable than a laptop.  The fellow in the first photo on the right even has his earplugs in - about the only way you could get his attention would be to spill coffee on him.  Now that's privacy.

(I do have to note here a great article from the Huffington Post about coffee shops in San Francisco that have intentionally dropped wifi as  "part of a growing trend among San Francisco restaurateurs to reclaim the coffee shop as a place for face-to-face conversation among caffeinated human beings instead of just being a remote office for people silently tapping away on their laptops."  Huzzah for them!)

Do we really need all this "privacy"?  As Philip Slater, author of  The Pursuit of Loneliness, wrote in 1970 (I was very sad to learn this visionary writer died this year) - all this privacy and pursuit of individualism is not only sometimes bad for our health and personal prospects of longevity, but it is now increasingly clear that it's very, very bad for our planet's health and longevity.

"It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which we attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.  We seek a "private" house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind.  an enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.  ..........we seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it.  What accidental contact we do have, furthermore, seem more intrusive, not only because they are unsought but because they are unconnected with any familiar pattern of interdependence."

He continues with: 

"Our servility toward technology, however, is no more dangerous than our exaggerated moral commitment to the "virtues" of striving and individual achievement.  The mechanized disaster that surrounds us is in no small part a result of our having deluded ourselves that a motley scramble of people trying to get the better of one another is socially useful instead of something to be avoided at all costs.  It has taken us a long time to realize that seeking to surpass others might be pathological, and trying to enjoy and cooperate with others healthy, rather than the other way around."

Philip Slater

So.....it seems like it should be lucidly clear that a paradigm that is based on awareness of interdependency, not just human interdependency but virtually every other species, is the base from which a sustainable future of any kind can grow.  A "webbed vision" of interdependency and co-evolution is our solution. 

"The three variables we have been discussing - community, engagement, dependency - can all trace their suppression in American society to our commitment to individualism......We are so accustomed to living in a society that stresses individualism that we need to be reminded that "collectivism" in a broad sense has always been the more usual lot of mankind, as well as of of most other species. "

“What might we see, how might we act, if  we saw with a webbed vision? 
 The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate 

as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, Theologian

 From a Broken Web

**
"Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside." 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/

"Persephone".............. a synchronicity remembered

"Persephone/Triad" (2005)

I told this story recently  to a friend, Trish MacGregor, who, with her husband Robb, has spent many years exploring and writing about Synchronicity.  Seemed worth remembering here as well.  I think it demonstrates that very strange way we can be so interconnected, linked, I believe especially when creativity is involved.

In 2005 I was at an artist's colony in Woodstock, NY called Byrdcliffe.  I had come from presenting a workshop earlier on masks and the Goddess, and THE GODDESS WITHIN was an important book I used as reference for that class.  Some of the writings in that book  were also deeply emotionally significant to me, in particular what the authors had to say about the "Persephone woman".  It is a beautiful book.  I had thought I would try to write to  Jennifer Barker to see if she would talk with me about the Goddesses in an interview (I was still collecting interviews for my "spiritual art" book).  I had not thought of trying to contact Roger Woolger, as because the book was about women and the Goddess,  Jennifer Barker Woolger seemed more appropriate.  But I had no idea where she was or how I might contact her.  

It happened that Byrdcliffe was having a big party while I was there (and, of course, one of the pieces I was working on had to do with Persephone, and the book was significant in its creation).  I got to talking with a woman there and it turned out we both had a great interest in feminine mythology, so we agreed to meet for lunch the next day.  And over lunch I mentioned the book and how I would like to contact one of the authors.  The woman (whose name I don't remember now) said "Oh, you mean Jennifer!  She moved to Vermont after her divorce.  Would you like her number?"  Just like that!  Turned out that my lunchmate and Jennifer had been good friends, and when she divorced she left New York and moved back to Vermont, taking back her maiden name, Jennifer Barker.  And I learned she did, among other things, offer gatherings dealing with the Persephone Archetype.  

I called her and she actually agreed to meet me if I came to Vermont!  I am embarrassed to say that I did not do so - things got chaotic, and I guess I also felt insecure about it as well, and I did not take the opportunity that was given to me.  I've regretted it since.  It seems she wrote a book on Persephone at some point in the years since, but I can't seem to find if it ever got published, certainly I can't find where to purchase it.  And I think she has passed on.

But that's my story................I think it's what Bill Moyers called "invisible means of support".  Above is one of the "Persephone" pieces I did while at Byrdcliffe. 

         

Byrdcliffe Arts Colony,   Woodstock, New York.