the truth in my truth

"the sounding foam of primal things"


in the yoga classes i take, and even in those i now teach (frighteningly enough!), students are reminded to live yoga is to live with integrity to one's truth. the subjectivity of truth is thereby acknowledged obviously, and yet subtly, without room or reason for contestation...the multiplicity of "truth" as it exists has fascinated me for as long as i can remember, when i realized that the way in which i experience something, even my family, is very different from the way in which someone else (other family members included in the case of my example) might...it's sort of this mind-bending, potentially heavy existential question and i don't mean to make this into a post that bores or goes too much into abstractions for people to follow a really very simple idea... but i've been wondering a lot about this notion of truth lately and, inspired by the ferocious swells of the foamy, frothing ocean today, decided to share this fantastic carl sandberg poem and a photo of the fierceness (above)...


Who Am I?

by Carl Sandburg


My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off."


My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

~~~

truth is all around us, within us, and yet IT cannot be captured, only interpreted subjectively and guessed at...yet it's real. how is this so?

exploring in order to return...with an open heart and clear eyes

as i wrap up my time in southern california, watching the weeks slip by in the sneakily slowly(speedy)way that time seems, at the close of a chapter, to do..., i find myself getting unhelpfully nostalgic, but also perhaps productively reflective...the uncertainty of the coming months sends me scurrying to uncover the truths in my past, the places and people and experiences that have shaped themselves into the map of who i am...and i find myself wondering: from this distance i see mostly what was good in these moments, in these circumstances that in their PRESENT seemed often less than perfect, even empty; in which i found myself always searching for more-- seeing surface beauty dismissively but really focusing on that which needed fixing, alteration...

what if i could go back to each of these moments, in mapping them retrospectively through the places i've called home, and just experience them with full appreciation for the first time, with the sense of perspective i've gained from moving beyond them into newness...but then again, can i ever stop exploring? maybe this "revisitation" needs to actually happen in stages...but i'll let t.s. eliot express musings around this notion with much more eloquence ever could...



from t.s. eliot's little gidding

we shall never cease from exploration
and the end of all of our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.


so perhaps this is life, this ever-working toward knowing places and spaces, outside and in...

spot-on star readings...

speaks for itself. [from Free Will Astrology]


Aries Horoscope for week of May 13, 2010

What happens when someone "sells out"? Typically, it refers to a person who overrides her highest artistic standards or her soul's mandates in order to make a bundle of money. But I want to enlarge the definition to encompass any behavior that seeks popular appeal at the expense of authenticity, or any action that sacrifices integrity for the sake of gaining power. I think you have to be especially on guard against this lapse in the coming days, Aries -- not only in yourself but also in those you're close to.

contemplating bars, wings, and song...

Sympathy

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!


I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!


I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Caged Bird


by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.


But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.


The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.


The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.


The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

we are all made of stars

nothing is perhaps more exciting than finding a surprise of a poem that quickens one's pulse and opens one's heart with a joy in hearing, seeing, feeling that one's own, perhaps until now inarticulatable experience, amorphous but oh so real ideas, have been not only shared by someone else, but captured in a way that sings truth...


i had this wonderful surprise this morning when i opened my inbox holding my poem of the day email from poetryfoundation.org...a new one, from a poet unfamiliar to me. i apologize if any of you subscribe to this email list as well and already got this dose of poetic beauty today but i couldn't resist including it here!





Imagining Starry
by Marie Ponsot


The place of language is the place between me

and the world of presences I have lost

—complex country, not flat. Its elements free-

float, coherent for luck to come across;

its lines curve as in a mental orrery

implicit with stars in active orbit,

only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.

The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite

air of imagination that stirs immense

among losses and leaves me less desolate.

Breathing it I spot a sentence or a name,

a rescuer, charted for recovery,

to speak against the daily sinking flame

& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.


~

how beautifully ponsot speaks of the way in which we can use language and imagination to understand and heal our own internal landscapes. amazing how true it is that by letting go of the will, letting it expand into new dimensions of unexplored size and shape and scope through breath [inhale, exhale] we can alleviate feelings of isolation, of loss. here it is that we map the constellations of our relationships with others and with the larger universe, the "rescuers" who connect us once more by helping us to focus not solely upon what is "daily" or "mortal" but what in us is infinite...

tracking the winds, charting a course...

since moving here, i've noticed that people in these beach cities are a bit preoccupied with weather vanes...where back in new jersey these, serving both scientific and artistic functions, are typically reserved for the handful of quaint old barns and farmhouses nestled into the once-open rolling hills of a present-day housing development complete with golf course, here these trackers of the wind's whimsy are decorative elements on nearly every third or so home...those i've included in the photos above and directly below follow the most common trend of the nautical theme...a whale's nose or a swordfish tale pointing out the source and the course of the current breeze...




but this one here is a favorite of mine...a desert scene, complete with the sombrero-sporting, guitar-strumming caballero and some coyotes...



with the winds that are characterizing these recent days at the seashore, and inland as well, as blustery ones, i've been thinking about the wind's power, literally so of course, but also of the way in which it serves to indicate, metaphorically speaking, direction and the mapping of the future and its course...the phrase "the winds of change" holds within its meaning a connection between humans and the elemental...our destinies tied up with these cosmic forces...the markers on the weather vane spin, a recognition of a shift from east to west, or vice versa, or to the north or to the south... bringing us perhaps a complete one-hundred and eighty degrees from where we began that very same morning.

it's easy to imagine, maybe comforting even, that one's fate is determined by the winds, even by that measured by a wrought iron sea creature...it makes an allowance for the blaming of circumstance for any given outcome and lifts the sometimes staggering weight of individual responsibility...but what if one chooses not to be moved by the wind, not to take the direction upon which it decides and instead, charts one's own course in spite of the challenge that comes with this conviction...

i include today a poem by ella wheeler wilcox that expresses just this possibility, but at nautical fact...

THE WINDS OF FATE

one ship drives east and another drives west
with the selfsame winds that blow
'tis he set of the sails
and not of the gales
which tells us the way to go.

like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate,
as we voyage along through life;
'tis the set of a soul
that decides the goal,
and not the calm or the strife.



~
how empowering a concept! to imagine that circumstance, as something external, does not write one's story, and that everything one needs in order to follow one's heart is to believe in and listen to that "selfsame" unique and individual heart.

owl wisdom...

this weekend, emily surprised me with the loveliest necklace from a local thrift store; i'd had my eye on it, tried it on, but had decided against buying it-- sneakily, she scooped it up and purchased it for me, presenting it bubblingly as we mosied home on sunday afternoon...this little owl with sparkling eyes is my favorite new accessory, an accentof beauty and a talisman of wisdom that i wil take with me into the newness of my coming adventures!




this little fellow has gotten me thinking about the owl, one of my favorite birds..., in poetry and in literature....i've included two poems today where the wise creature is featured, captured elusively and precisely simultaneously....

first is~



A Barred Owl

by Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur
The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl's voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
"Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks for you?"


Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
& second is one of my favorite poems of all time; the owl is only mentioned, but i think he plays an important part in creating the magic and the mood of the piece...

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas


Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.


And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.


All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.


And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.


And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,


Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.


finally, if you haven't yet read GWINNA, please do!the owl wisdom here is transformative....

less is sometimes more...abundance in simplicity

i have the totally delightful pleasure of hosting emily and her gorgeous "love-bug" of a golden this weekend...and as a result, it has been a weekend already bursting with love and joy and delicious food and long walks and fabulous company & conversation...

em brought me this poem to perfectly encapsulate the essence of what i am realizing is true wealth, true abundance in this life...and this is, essentially, wonderment over the essentials, the simple miracles. the meaning of this poem by kay ryan (the current poet laureate of the us), "that will to divest," is perhaps a little different in its intention than what i am taking from it; she talks about the fact that so much poetry is excessive and in reality, she believes that less is more-- precision is the key...applicable to everything though...

Meaning:once
you've swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to
divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what singleness

poetics of a parisian breakfast...

breakfasted with bree at our normal thursday spot-- la galette creperie, right across from the pacific ocean, and simultaneously on a paris street corner...


"why, sometimes i've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!"








BON APPETIT!

breathing deeply, sans insect ingestion

today, a quotation from tom robbins' ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION, so generously given to me by the beautiful and talented and brilliant emily graves! here, one of the central characters, amanda...a free spirited lady who is herself described as having "native curiosity [that] popp[ed] its buttons" [! delightful!], digests and experiments with a new concept...


"among the haida indians of the pacific northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe."such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted amanda, and she vowed that from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem. she was as good as her word, and her new style of breathing added to her warehouse of personal charm.

once, while breathing an especially strenuous stanza, she sucked in a stinkbug that had been bumbling by. 'what a rotten rhyme,'she gagged. 'i think i'll go back to prose.'" p.168

if this made you giggle just a little, then it has served its purpose. :)

joni wisdom & love, via e.e.cummings

in my mailbox today. enough said.

love to this phenomenal woman!

animal dreams

this exuberant pup goofily engaged in a rowdy game of fetch with his indulgent twenty-something tattooed male owner down at the beach this evening...seeing this makes me miss such uninhibited joy and uncomplicated love in my own day-to-day...luckily, though, fellows such as my friend in the above photo are a strong presence in the community; i get to share some of the doggie goodness this way :)

he got me thinking, though, as he ran after that ball again and again, charging over the sand and stones, plunging when required into the oh-so-chilly waves~ 'what is he imagining, feeling, right now? moment to moment?' i've always been curious about the shapes and scopes of the mental maps of animals; in a way, they seem so much simpler, blissfully, than my own. but at the same point, couldn't they just be that much more tangled? or more sophisticated?

in her novel ANIMAL DREAMS, barbara kingsolover characterizes the dreams of animals as being rooted in the ordinary, in the quotidian, saying that animals, humans included, can only dream that with which they are familiar... here is an exchange between codi, the book's main character, and loyd, her sort-of "suitor"...i love the idea behind it, that we can control our destiny through our dreams...

Codi says..."So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
& Loyd says in reply..."Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

this is perhaps one of my favorite novels, but i think b.k. may have underestimated the magic of the mindscapes of animals...the following poem presents some answers to the questions on my own mind in regard to this curiosity...so many surprising words and bizarre turns-of-phrase...this is one upon which to sleep, to dream...

Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals
by Susan Stewart

1. Is it true that they dream?

It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly.
The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants.
The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea.
We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood.
The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking.
The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain.

2. Do they dream of the past or of the future?

Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers.
Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk.
Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk.
As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon.
Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger.
I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand.

3. Do they dream of this world or of another?

The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead.
A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep.
There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes.
Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so.
Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.
Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us.

4. How can we learn more?

This is all we will ever know.


...

healing in a spring garden...

"just simply alive,
both of us, I
and the poppy."

by issa [painting and poem, from "in a spring garden" edited by richard lewis, artwork by ezra jack keats]


during my contemporary poetry class at rutgers with the brilliant harriet davidson, i did an in-depth study of a collection by amy gerstler, a fairly fresh but established poet of today...it was mere luck really that i stumbled upon her work-- even harriet hadn't heard of her when i proposed doing my project on her book, an entrancing and haunting collection MEDICINE...i just dug out my paper, a review of the book, and i'll included some quotations from my own writing here to help set up my poem for today, a welcome to may! please, forgive the hyper academic "mumbo-jumbo" [as green gables gilbert would say to anne!] of some of it!

"the concept of 'medicine' is immediately dependent upon two conditions: the possibility of sickness and the concurrent possibility of a return to health. in this sense, these terms, in their bookending, serve to define life as limited by finite mortality. a comprehensive interpretation of amy gerstler's collection thus entitled illuminates an artistic manifestation of highly personalized, yet undeniably universal, interior grappling with these vastest of paradoxical issues of multilevel human experience. in this existential anxiety, gerstler explores through her poetry the ironically simultaneous realities of a vital mortality defined by an inevitable end and the perpetuation of a cyclical natural continuity in their interactive tension with the notion of faith. gerstler's MEDICINE complicates both the definition of disease and the understanding of healing in the possibilities for and limitations of cure. these poems collectively are a meditation on what underlines human lives physically, mentally, and spiritually. further, the material upon which this poetry dwells and that its composition attempts to capture circle around that which makes us at once fallibly human and infinitely immortal. through the cathartic process of poetic transformation, gerstler does not seek to uncover an anesthetic for both physical and psychical pain. rather, she creates a language with which to demonstrate that the reimagination of that pain of loss, of love, and of life, is a type of medicine in itself..." ~g. n., 2006

In Perpetual Spring

by Amy Gerstler

Amy Gerstler
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.


Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.


~

as someone who is craving her own garden space, this is achingly appropriate in this fresh spring season...

and here's just a little tid bit i found in my most recent yoga journal issue-- goofy, a bit, but fun...certainly takes this idea of healing in the garden quite literally...enjoy! :)

http://www.yogajournal.com/practice/2752

may day! [a reflection]

waldorf schools, as those of you for whom this is not unfamiliar territory know, celebrate each MAY DAY, the first of the month, with an annual MAY FAIRE-- a beautiful festival centered upon this welcoming of the new season in all of its full blooming glory. the main event revolves around the may pole dance, in which all of the grades participate [either in the intricate and gorgeously choreographed dances themselves or as the musicians from whom the dancers take their rhythm!]at princeton waldorf, if i'm not just falsely remembering this, the teachers also took part in this dancing themselves...i was absolutely and unexpectedly enchanted by the whole scene this year...walking on to the flowering campus, transformed by garlands upon garlands of woven blossoms and leaves and vines of all colors and intoxicating scents...a sea of smiling, almost sprightly people, young and old, clad in soft white clothing, many barefoot, and crowned with flower wreaths...the may pole at the heart of the grassy expanse, its ribbons of white and red and pink billowing in the breeze as they meticulously were wound together by those dancing them into an intricate and stunning pattern while recorders and cellos and violins and drums and voices harmonized....the pictures i've included in this post capture just a touch of the magic of the day, but i hope that it translates...


fifth grade, perhaps my favorite class with whom to work, kept their dignity in spite of the hysterical title of their musical selection "lady hepburn belches"!




here, the second grade adorably, and incredibly successfully[!], dances into an organized weave...





maybe my favorite photo from the whole day...can you think of anything more delicious than dancing barefoot in lush green grass???







and just a couple more snapshot moments of the morning....



don't know this guy but apparently the little llama found him VERY interesting!








three of my bounciest and sweetly fierce fourth grade girlies, peacing out



& this, well, it simply speaks for itself!

HAPPY MAY, EVERYONE!