Poet Galway Kinnell said, “To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
Someone—Abraham Lincoln?—once remarked that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around in the far ethers—somehow, somewhere—and if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now.
Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms, sometimes a single word the furniture on which to sit . . . each day we could open the door, and enter, and be found. These days I wonder—was life always strange—just strange in different ways? Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can’t solve or change it?
Where is my map—where are we, please? Can voices that entered into our thoughts when we were little help us make amends with the strange time we’re in?
William Stafford, great twentieth-century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. They’re flexible, for one. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding? Or not surprised at all?
When I see a highway sign, “No Right Turn onto Whirlwind Drive”—Stafford comes to mind. He carried a decisive calm.
Peter Matthiessen, the only American writer ever to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, is still standing out on his Long Island beach, staring at the sky, asking us, Did you see that? Flying over just now? Did you catch the span of the wings, the rosy tip of the head?
Might we pause on our way to everywhere we are rushing off to and hear something in the air, old or new, that would make sense?
Not so long ago we were never checking anything in our hands, scrolling down, pecking with a finger, obsessively tuning in. My entire childhood did not involve a single deletion. These are relatively new acts on earth.
In those archaic but still vivid days, there might be a meandering walk into trees, an all-day bike ride, a backyard picnic, a gaze into a stream, a plunge into a sunset, a conversation with pines, a dig in the dirt, to find our messages. When we got home, there was nothing to check or catch up on—no one speaking to us in our absence.
Recently, when I had the honor of visiting Yokohama International School in Japan to conduct poetry workshops, student Juna Hewitt taught me an important word—Yutori—“life-space.” She listed various interpretations for its meaning—arriving early, so you don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. (Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord for your phone is long enough to reach the wall socket.) Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori—a place to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.
I love this. It was the best word I learned all year.
Not that sense of being nibbled up—as if message minnows surround us at all moments, nipping, nipping at our edges.
Perhaps we have more voices in the air now—on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos—but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?
Can we go outside and listen?
In 1927 Freya Stark, an English writer born in Paris in 1893, who would become known for her astonishing travels through even the most remote parts of the Middle East, paused for a picnic near some Roman ruins outside Damascus. She wrote, “We ate our food with little clouds of Roman sand blown off the hewn stones and thought of the fragility of things.” Near Baghdad she wrote, “. . . in the morning all is peace, and all went out to pasture. The camels, looking as if they felt that their walk is a religious ceremony, went further afield; they are comparatively independent, needing to drink only once in four days; the sheep and goats stayed nearer. And when they had all gone, and melted invisibly into the desert face, the empty luminous peace again descended, lying round us in light and air and silence for the rest of the day.”
Freya Stark’s light and air and silence feel palpable in her paragraphs. Her respect for people unlike herself, her fascination with worlds very different from the European ones she had grown up in—yet fully recognizable in their humanity and hope—heartens me when my own time feels too odd to bear. Her curious voice traveling through the air is more comforting than people currently claiming power, demanding recognition, trying to make others feel as if they don’t belong. Literature gives us a home in bigger time.
But how do we find our ways home? Continually, regularly? With so much vying for our attention, how do we listen better? Reminding ourselves of what we love feels helpful. Walking outside—it’s as quiet as it ever was. The birds still communicate without any help from us. In that deep quietude, doesn’t the air, and the memory, feel more full of voices? If we slow down and intentionally practice listening, calming our own clatter, maybe we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Take a break from multitasking. Although many of us are no longer sitting on rocks in deserts watching camels, sheep, and goats heading out to pasture, we could sit. In a porch swing? On the front steps? In a library or coffee shop? On a park bench? Quiet inspiration may be as necessary as food, water, and shelter. Try giving yourself regular times a day for reading and thinking—even if just for a minute or two. Mindfulness, many agree, is profoundly encouraged by regular practice. A different sort of calm begins feeling like the true atmosphere behind everything else. If you’re an “I read before I go to sleep” sort of person, why not add a little more I-just-got-home-from-school-or-work reading? In the modern world, we deserve to wind down. Or perhaps some morning reading, to launch yourself ? How long does it take to read a poem? Slowing to a more gracious pacing—trying not to hurry or feel overwhelmed—inch by inch—one thought at a time—can be a deeply helpful mantra. It’s a gift we give our own minds.
The melancholy, brilliant singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt died suddenly on New Year’s Day 1997. His many fans were stunned and saddened. That was the first day our son showed me I could “enter the world wide web” to read obituaries and stories about Townes rising suddenly from all over the world—Nashville, London, Berlin. Incredible! How had this happened? Everything was now—available? The searching process felt exotic, haunting, and comforting—fans around the world, grieving for Townes together. His song lines kept rising in my mind for months afterward. “If I needed you, would you come to me?”
I think they all would. All the voices we ever loved or respected in our lives would come. And they would try to help us.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
San Antonio, Texas