A Short Anthology for Ellen

A couple of years ago, my friend Ellen and I decided to celebrate birthdays a little differently. Having visited Rwanda and made close friends there, and feeling very keenly the abundance of our lives and the scarcity of resources elsewhere, Ellen requested that friends and family who felt compelled to give her a gift simply make a donation to the African Great Lakes Initiative. Each year since then, I have done just that.

But we also have a tradition of giving small things, inexpensive or not involving money at all: a used book or a favorite recipe, for instance. Because Ellen is a fan of poetry anthologies, and because it’s been a long time since I added any links to the poetry page on this blog, I’m posting a mini-anthology in honor of Ellen’s birthday.

“Passing Through” by Stanley Kunitz

“Found Letter” by Joshua Weiner

“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton

A Yellow Tree

Photo by Jeff Hire

I had planned, some months ago, a quiet few months after graduation. It has been a hectic year, and I was looking forward to winding down towards the end of it. Reality has been very different. Work has taken its toll. There is much to do for the holidays. On top of that, if I am even going to consider the possibility of more graduate school, I need to get applications finished in December, which is a tall order. Last month I found myself with a free day, a bunch of applications essays to write, and nothing but resentment about having to write them. In a effort to change my attitude, I went to the park near my apartment and found a beautiful yellow tree to sit under with a notebook and a pen. 

After a few minutes of silence, I asked the tree, why do I have to do this, anyway? What if I just give up, decide to shut this particular door altogether? The tree answered me, you can do that, but it is in your best interest to write these essays anyway. What are they really asking you to write about? It’s about what  you want to do, and why graduate school is a good place to do it. It would be good for you to know that, to have to write about it.

So I opened my notebook and started to write, as if I were writing to the tree, about what I wanted to do. When I got home, I had some translating to do. What a yellow tree will understand, a graduate admissions committee may not. But I left some of it as-is. I didn’t give in too much. If I’m not honest, how will I know if acceptance by an admissions committee really means I’ve found a place where I can pursue real, meaningful work?

Today, I have only one more application, and then I’m free… for now. It’s cold outside, and a bit icy, and I miss my tree. I would be a very good day to go sit under her branches, and ask her to remind me, again, why I need to do this.

Theseus and the Minotaur

In ancient Crete, mythology has it that King Minos built a labyrinth to house the Minotaur, a half-man, half bull, to whom the youth of Athens were sacrificed every seven years. The Minotaur was the direct result of Minos’s greed and defiance of the god Poseidon; Minos had prayed for a white bull, whose appearance was to be a sign of approval. Poseidon granted the bull, with the agreement that Minos was to sacrifice the bull in order to return it to the god. But upon seeing the animal, Minos found it beautiful and defied the agreement by keeping it for himself. Poseidon exacted revenge by making Minos’s wife fall in love with the bull. The result of their union was the Minotaur.

The hero who slayed the Minotaur, Theseus, did so by volunteering to take the place of one of the youth who was to be sacrificed. He was aided by Ariadne, daughter of Minos, who gave him a ball of string so that he could find his way out of the labyrinth and shared with him the knowledge that Daedalus, architect of the labyrinth, had given her: go forward, never down, right or left. Once inside, he found the Minotaur and beat it to death, then escaped with all the young Athenians.

Our culture is dealing with multiple Minotaurs at the moment, in multiple labyrinths constructed to house the consequences of our old mistakes – greed, poverty of imagination, hunger for power. The war in Iraq is a maze that devours young men and women on a daily basis. The financial crisis sacrifices the elders and robs the young ones of a future.

The myth of the Minotaur gives us some clues about what is needed to defeat the monster: love, cooperation, humility, stealth, a willingness to listen those who know. How wonderful would it be if instead of assaulting us with sound bites, our presidential candidates told us of swords they have hidden to carry into the labyrinth, what they have learned from battles with other devouring monsters, and the Ariadnes and Daedaluses who will provide them guidance and knowledge.

Poverty of Language

In writing about his work in the ER recently, the Nurse said this of the people he cares for:

“…most of the people I see are sick but often they are diseased with frustration, hopelessness, despair, anger, sadness and loneliness. These diseases are epidemic. It is a poverty that we call all of this depression.”

Because our collective reality is created through the language we use, it is poverty indeed not to call experience by a meaningful name. Like the Nurse, I see many people who suffer from “depression” in my therapy office. It often takes weeks to get past that word, which renders it clinical (and therefore, they hope, understandable) and into the the words that can really speak to the experience.

In the therapy process, we call this “unpacking.” I like this idea. I imagine my clients bring suitcase into my office, one with some artificial label on it. Often, therapy becomes the simple process of naming what is inside.

 

Magic

I mentioned in a previous post that I have been reading the Harry Potter series. I’m on the last book now, dreading being finished, since the story has so captivated my attention, and yet, rushing to find out what happens next.

I have fallen completely in love with the idea of magic. In Rowling’s books, magic is both a matter of having the right tools (a wand, for instance) and using oneself in the proper way. In the third book, Harry learns that in order to create a Patronus, he must conjure a happy thought. It isn’t enough to hold the image in his mind; he has to feel it wholly, immerse himself in it. Likewise, the Cruciatus curse doesn’t work properly unless the person casting it can actually take pleasure in inflicting pain.

In other words, in order to perform magic, a person must know mind and self thoroughly, and to have access to many different parts of self means having a wider array of magic available, more power. I actually think of this now when doing psychotherapy with my clients. What type of magic can be brought to bear on this situation? What aspect of self can I help this person access so that he has the power he needs? I’ve noticed that when I’m working with someone deeply, and we are actually getting somewhere, the therapy hour seems to draw out, and I lose track of where we have been, so much so, sometimes, that I have trouble writing notes at the end because it seems like so very much has happened that I’m unable to summarize.

I’m using magic as a metaphor here, not a simile. It’s not like magic; it is magic. Time slows down. Impossible things happen.

Ice Storm

Yesterday I was on my way to meet a friend I had not seen in a long time. A nasty winter storm was coming through, and perhaps because my everyday mind was busy with the task of driving in the mess, some other, less often awakened aspect had room to speak to me. It wondered about my friend and what news he would tell me about his life. Then it answered itself: He’s getting married. I considered where this thought had come from. Had I heard a rumor? Was I confusing him with someone else? But there was no explanation; the thought remained there like a flower blooming in the middle of the ice storm, something that shouldn’t logically be but undeniably was. I had no rational way of knowing, and yet, I knew.

I met my friend and asked him what was new. I’m getting married, he said. I listened as he told me not about what had been happening in the last 6 months, but about marriage itself, his history of relationships, why this one, and why now. He constructed an entire history of his understanding of love, fitting this new piece into an old, ongoing story, watching a new picture come together.

I listened, smiling, happy for his news, helping his story along in the space between us by adding pieces to it, reflecting on previous conversations about his struggles with love, his relationships, how he had grown and how this was now possible. Beneath that, my mind puzzled through the suddenly fragmented pieces of its own story of how it comes to know things, regarding the bizarre flower, trying to answer the baffled question: How did I come to know this?

Lily Briscoe

The Virginia Woolf novel To the Lighthouse features the character Lily Briscoe. Lily stands out in the book’s social context; she’s a young unmarried woman in the late 1920’s with no aspirations for husband or children. She’s also a painter.

This book contains one of my favorite passages in all of literature, near the end of the book, when Lily is working on a painting. She’s attempting to paint the family around whom the book’s plot revolves. She hesitates to begin. She stands there, brush in hand, contemplating the possible mistakes.

“One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.”

And yet she continues.

“Still the risk must be run; the mark made.”

I love that part of the book because it encapsulates the fear that so often comes up when we try to create something. While an idea or a work of art is still in my head, it’s perfect, abstract, and alive in a way it will never be again once I bring it as fully as possible into the world. Often that thought is enough to paralyze or exhaust me.

Lily Briscoe feels the fear, names it, and then proceeds. How wonderful.

On Poetry

Noticing that a number of my posts were beginning with excerpts from poems, I thought perhaps the subject of poetry deserved its own page: On Poetry

The Darkness Around Us

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep

- William Stafford, “A Ritual To Read to Each Other”

Recently I had a breakthrough in a longstanding conflict with a close friend. The situation had been eating me up; we were both walking through it on eggshells, trying not to spur any further conflict, and we were not too successful. The issue at stake is unimportant. What it came down to was, she had a rich inner life and a deep sense of spirituality that we had never spoken about. Perhaps I had always sensed that it was there. Something, certainly, drew us together to begin with. But each of us, having learned through bitter experience that trying to put words to anything outside of ordinary, consensual reality is a very risky venture, spoke to the other in the language of the surface of the world. We were logical, intellectual, caring and problem-solving. We listened actively. We spoke safely. We translated for each other.

I have always chafed at having to do that translation. I go through a series of negotiations in each new relationship, testing the waters to learn where it is and is not safe to go, pushing the boundaries and hoping the person I’m speaking to will not, as my friend put it, prescribe an antipsychotic and suggest that I should not be allowed to work with children. My insistence on safety is the very reason, as Stafford put it, that “a pattern that others made may prevail in the world.”

But the question remains: How do we engage with people in such a way as to honor the possibility that they do not require such delicate and limiting translations, still protecting ourselves by acknowledging the probability that they do?

Lilacs Against White Houses

A man says lilacs against white houses, having seen them in the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence,….

Robert Hass, “Spring Drawing”

In New Mexico last year, there was a woman I adored who talked in beautiful incomplete sentences, confused poetry, rich with imagery but often empty of discernable meaning. I didn’t miss the meaning; I gave up the need to understand. It took me two days of wilderness solitude and fasting to break the hold of the sentence, to get to where she had been with language all along, where my thoughts only told me what was. Sitting on a mountain the third day, they said only: Fast moving sky. Hawk circling. Coyote prints in fresh mud.

Because all week I had been longing to break my mind open, and because all week it had been steadfastly and resolutely linear and unyielding, I drove yesterday to a favorite hiking spot and climbed the steep ridge overlooking the river. I leaned back on a rock facing and watched vultures circling above, six or seven of them. Because my mind was still in its everyday mode, associations formed instantly, and I thought of last year, in California, when my brother, the Deacon, got married. Out the windows that formed the backdrop of the ceremony, vultures circled and swooped. Later, at the reception, my brother, the Nurse, said that vultures were the animals charged by God to tear away the dead, the old, making room for the new.

I waited there on the rock. It started to rain. The vultures circled above me. Below, a train roared past. I stayed still. I waited.