I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it,
And all preparation is for it…and identity is for it…and life and death are for it.
—Walt Whitman, “To Think of Time”
Of this I am sure: the journey we make writing poetry is a spiritual journey, though others might give it a different name—deep psychology, personal mythology, self-actualization— there are many ways of saying the same thing. Each person finds or invents his or her own language for making the journey. The great seventeenth-century Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, four times in his life gave away or detached himself from his home and his possessions in order to take an unencumbered “spiritual walk” around his home island of Japan, each time seeking a deeper and truer experience of the Self. The “poet of Amherst,” Emily Dickinson, made perhaps an even greater journey into transcendental awareness— without ever leaving her room. For both, the spiritual journey and writing poems were inextricable, perhaps even synonymous.
In writing poems, inevitably the circle of our awareness grows and grows. From the simple manger of our first poems, following roads we each must travel for ourselves, we come eventually to the royal road of our being and the recognition of the divinity in ourselves, in others, in all things, and in all experiences. It is in the nature of writing poems and what is called forth within us that this is so. Along the way, each person on the path of the poem finds his or her own vocabulary, his or her own metaphors for recognizing and naming the experiences. The journey begins in childhood long before we are even aware of poems.
In my adult poetry writing workshops, I sometimes ask my students to consider the following proposition. What if you chose all the circumstances of your birth—your parents and family, your physical body or form, your “handicaps,” your talents, and, of course, the place and time of your birth and of all your childhood years—for the purpose of fulfilling a certain destiny and for gaining the wisdom and lessons of certain experiences?
A woman in one of the workshops, who was born and grew up in a part of northern England, protested that she could not possibly have chosen such things, that everything in her childhood world was made of cold, hard stone—stone walls, stone towns, stone landscapes, and parents who were emotionally as cold as stone. Her childhood had been a misery to her. Why would anyone choose such things?
I replied that it was not necessary to actually believe the proposition in order to gain value from the exercise, that its purpose was simply to assist us in finding greater meaning in the constellation of our experiences.
As we moved into the first writing exercises with poem-sketching, the woman at first found the writing difficult. Understandably, she did not like the metaphor that the word groups were like Michelangelo’s marble stones, with poems hiding just beneath the surfaces. Her first sketches did not produce anything of much interest to her, but at some point she chose a word group with the word stone in it. As I remember it, her sketch contained the lines, “My shoulders feel the stones. / Whispers enter me.” With this one word group something more personal began to appear in her sketches. (“Whatever the Self describes, describes the Self.”) She then proceeded to incorporate the word stone into all of her selected word groups. All at once, she looked up from her writing with tears in her eyes. “What’s going on?” I asked. “It’s true!” she said. “We do choose our experiences. My path is to know all about stone. My life’s purpose has been to learn how to transform stone! How could I have accomplished this without such a deep experience of it?”
The path of the poem is indeed profound, offering up integration, and more than that, revelation and even deliverance. The poem has in it the tooth of truthfulness that gnaws continually at our imprisoning false concepts. I have read that the First Law of Spirit is acceptance (meaning, recognition of what is so)—beginning with the acceptance of our own childhoods as the source of all of our “seed experiences” (for some, that means with all its hurts and sorrows), without which we would miss out on the harvest of transformational knowledge and the flowers of appreciation that are the hallmarks of self-realization and adult fulfillment.
It has been a joy in my workshops to see Catholics use the tool of poetry writing to explore and express themselves more fully as Catholics, for Protestants to explore and express themselves more fully as Protestants, Mormons to express more fully as Mormons, Jews to express more fully as Jews, Unitarians to express more fully as Unitarians, Buddhists to express more fully as Buddhists, Muslims to express more fully as Muslims, doubters and agnostics to express more fully as doubters and agnostics, and so on. Truly, the divine has many faces and many messengers and is everywhere in our midst in myriad forms. Everyone, I have come to believe, is on the spiritual path perfect for them, perfect for their soul’s experiencing. The atheist, I believe, is on a spiritual path called “what is the experience of believing there is no God” so the soul can know that experience, have that as one of its reference points (I was an atheist myself for a whole day once).
Raised as a Methodist by my parents, I grew up with a love of Bible stories. In college I encountered the writings of William James and the liberating concept of “varieties of religious experience.” C. G. Jung enriched the artist in me with the concept of archetypes and symbols and with a deep respect for the work and realms of dreams. The poetry and prose of Thomas Merton built a bridge for me between Eastern and Western philosophy and thought. Today, my own spiritual life is made up of many interwoven strands— my spiritual teachers, the Christianity of my childhood, Taosim, Zen Buddhism, the wisdom of the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz, the writings of the Transcendentalists, the poetry of William Blake, the poems of countless poets, and, most important, the harvest of my own meditational life and my personal experiences of God and of Spirit. All of this has somehow given me again the heart of a child. A grown man, I live in simple wonder and unending gratitude.
For me, clarity of intention has meant everything. Emerson wrote: “Go alone…refuse the good models, even those that are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” Early on—consciously from about the age of ten (though I wouldn’t have had the words then that I use now), and before I ever heard of Emerson—the question for me was this: Can I know God, not as a belief or idea, but as a direct experience? Can I know God so intimately that I know God’s thoughts for me, know them within me? In my heart I wanted the relationship with God that King David had. I began to identify certain experiences as leading me in that direction, and I became acutely sensitive to persons and institutions that tried to interpose themselves, that wanted to insist on mediating my experiences for me.
There were years of my life when I forgot about my question. There were years of my life when I was afraid of my question. Many people believe that the religious life or spiritual life is about adhering to and submitting to an ever-growing number of restrictions and prohibitions. Writing poems led me to a very different conclusion. The spiritual life—like the poet’s life—opens, expands, and thrives exponentially according to the number of permissions we grant ourselves. Today, I believe my God to be the God Blake knew, God the Poet and God the Artist, not apart from me but within me, closer than my breath. Though less so as time goes by, I notice I still feel a certain awkwardness and embarrassment in speaking about spiritual matters, and always think I use too many words or not the right words about such things. In an interview with David Frost, when asked to talk about his religious beliefs, Wynton Marsalis said simply, “God is.” The composer Mahler said all of his experiences had led him to know God only as “love.” The fewer words the better. A person very close to me had experiences early in life of religious people using the words and authority of religion to deliberately “kill her spirit.” For her, she feels closest to God and to things of the Spirit when no words or names are used at all.
With others I know, as with myself, the key to spiritual growth is simple: Live as fully as you can the path you have chosen and are on. Life, like the poem, is a mirror and gives back to us the image we present to it. It is up to us to uncloud and deepen the image of who we are. We do this, of course, through living as sincerely and as truthfully as we can. And we do this sometimes through writing. Each poem we write gives us, as the poet Wallace Stevens observed in the poem, “A Primitive Like and Orb,” an “apperception” of the greater poem at the divine center of all things. “The things that I have seen have led me to believe in all that I have not seen,” wrote Emerson in a similar vein. Spiritual growth does not necessarily change our lives in any dramatic way. The details of our lives may in fact stay the same; it is really the experience of the details, the appreciation in the details, that changes.
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I quoted this once to a group of fifth graders, and a boy raised his hand and said, “That’s not true. Every life is worth living.” And, of course, he was right, though he was doing just what Socrates calls us to do—examining everything that comes to us, everything said to us, with the truth-lens of our own heart’s experience. Writing poetry provides us with a reflective and contemplative life so that life does not escape us. “We are symbols, and we inhabit symbols,” Emerson also wrote. It is not so much about adding experiences as it is about adding value to our experiences. The simplest experiences will do. “Everyone must sweep the garden,” the Zen Buddhists say, a reminder that consciousness of the divine begins with the recognition of our ordinariness.
But where do you start? Again, you start where you are. The Taoists say, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” And we are told that the life of Jesus started with his birth in a stable. Here’s another little poem out of my own journal, a reminder I made to myself:
Whatever path you’re on,
walk it to the end.
Exhaust its dust and streams,
and seed the dividends.
Control is a worried thing
till surrender gives it peace.
Belief is a thing of sand
till knowing makes it glass.
It is important in our reading, I think, to seek out the poems that are meant for our own ears, and short of finding those poems, to write them ourselves, to discover the essential words within us, the words that ring true for us. “Argue not concerning God,” Whitman wrote. I think he meant that it is not to our purpose and advantage to change each other, nor to save each other. Each person’s spiritual path has its own compass and will work out its own meanings. Each person has his or her own relationship to God and the divine; and certainly we need not defend our own beliefs, our own choices. It is so clear to me in my workshops that many people see the world far differently from the way I see it.
My joy is never in finding people who agree with or are like me, but in seeing people give birth to the poems and awarenesses that are truly theirs, sometimes afterwards gratefully adding their awarenesses to my own. It is so interesting to me in the workshops to watch people discover (uncover) themselves in their poems. All of a sudden, in a poem, a person steps free of their concepts and beliefs to write what is really so for them in a distinctive and authentic voice.
Everyone else can feel it when this happens; it becomes the thing we are all searching for in ourselves. The first moment it happens, that moment, consciously or unconsciously, becomes the beacon that guides the rest of the workshop. What is being said has no label except that of an earned and personal truth. Some deep permission has been given and taken within a person. Something within each listener is called to find that same place of permission and authenticity within themselves. “It is much that poetry has been written this day, under this roof, by your side,” Emerson said. Years ago, someone gave me a quote that I keep on my bathroom mirror and read every day: “Trust God to work his life in others as he is working in you.” In the workshops, I trust people to find their own way, trust that things are happening for them multidimensionally beyond my seeing.
And my joy in the writing, my own and others’, is certainly never confined to “polished” poems. The truth is, awareness does not always produce a satisfactory poem. It is the awareness that matters, not the poem. Sometimes our poems may discover things before we are ready to live them, but then the poems urge change upon us. We break an old habit, and a new space is created for us in our interactions with others and the world. The actual change may be immediate, complete and lasting, or it may be gradual or transient. The practice is the act, the act is the practice, as the Zen Buddhists say. The very nature of life is change, moving out of the old energies into the new, and like it or not, our consciousness grows and grows.
Great is today, and beautiful,
It is good to live in this age…there never was any better.
—Walt Whitman, “Great Are the Myths”
The earth is a good place to be. It will one day be a peaceful planet, a peaceable kingdom. My experience in writing poems and teaching others to write them tells me this is so. It is in our nature as human beings to write poems, if and when we choose to do so. And it is in the nature of writing poems to dissolve walls—first the walls inside ourselves, and then the walls between ourselves and others.
(WORD GROUP: cloud star border dust)
IMMIGRANT
His heart, a cloud;
his mind, a star;
his body, living dust.
What border
can hold back
cloud, star, and living dust?
The path of writing poems is a path of truth—and the truth one day pushes us toward the recognition that, whatever the purposes of our diversity, we are still one people, one family on this earth. All poets come to feel this way.
I have such hope. The earth is a classroom. It is designed to be so. In the classroom, all students have the potential to grow. The chief industry of the earth— rarely fully understood and appreciated, always undernourished and underfunded—is education. Someday, perhaps, we will know this: the principle task of education is lifelong learning— preparing students to care for and to know the Self, preparing them to grow their circles of awareness. Oh, the marvelous changes we will see in education when this is so!
In the spring of 1994, I was invited to be involved in a project in Lawrence, Kansas, called “Adventures in Imagination.” The purpose of the project was to impact the reading and writing literacy of all students in the Lawrence public schools. Initiated by Terry Boyer of the Mercantile Bank of Lawrence and enthusiastically supported by bank president John Elmore, the project was a partnership between the business community of Lawrence, the educational programs of the Lied Center for the Performing Arts of the University of Kansas, and the Lawrence public schools. Jim Tralease, well known for his “Read Aloud” initiatives and programs, was brought in to excite enthusiasm for the reading component. And I—to my great happiness—was brought in to introduce my poetry writing and journaling approaches systemwide into the schools.
Generously funded by the Mercantile Bank as a five-year project, we presented poetry writing workshops to teachers and students at the elementary, middle, and senior high school levels, to parents and family members of students, and to members of the business community and the community-at-large. The bank also provided beautiful hardback journals— writer’s studios—to all participants, young and old.
The question we asked ourselves was this: Do children introduced to poetry writing at an early age and sustained in its uses and practice throughout their school years grow up to be different, more reflective kinds of participants in the world, more compassionate, responsive, and responsible kinds of citizens? Intuitively, we believed that it must be so. There is actually a kind of historical model for this. In ancient China, the emissaries or civil servants of the emperor, his surrogates in the far reaches of the empire, were frequently trained in the arts of painting and poetry writing, for these were thought to instill in them an historical perspective and a certain practical wisdom and balance in handling the affairs of the world. In truth, the effect was far more than that, also awakening in these practitioners the powers of inward observation, compassion, spiritual insight, and appreciation for the mirrors of life and for the interconnectedness of all things. Within the strictly defined role of the emissary or civil servant, an unintended and far more profound consciousness was initiated and nurtured. It was just such a thing we believed might take root in the students of Lawrence. Certainly the beauty and power of their poems, collected into systemwide anthologies (and many of them in Soft Hay Will Catch You), gave us hope that it was so.
What kind of world is now coming into being? What does it mean that a traditional bank generously funds and sponsors a universal program for writing poetry in its community? I have made the point in every way I can think of in this book. In writing poems, our awareness grows, ultimately toward an awareness that we could call the divine consciousness within the human, the consciousness of the oneness of all things, and of the right place of all things in the world.
Writing poetry is about seeing patterns, seeing resemblances, seeing symbols and metaphors; it is about seeing connections. Writing poetry is about a deeper appreciation and deeper discernment, about respecting our own individuality and the individuality of others. Writing poetry is about economy, about bringing order out of chaos, about fine-tuning the aesthetic sense; it is about nurturing our sensitivity to beauty and preserving the beauty of the world. Writing poetry is about making hidden things conscious and healing wounds from the past. Writing poetry is about making community and seeing things whole. Hemingway said that fishing is the opposite of war. Then “fishing for poems” is also the opposite of war.
The businessman or businesswoman, the lawyer, the government worker, the architect, the developer, the social worker, the bus driver, the laborer, the secretary, the programmer, the scientist, the principal, the teacher, the doctor or nurse, or the soldier who takes a fifteen-minute poetry writing break during the workday is not the same person and will not make the same decisions as the one who has never read or written a poem. The poet becomes sensitive to the web of life and cannot ignore it. Of the poet, Whitman wrote: “He sees eternity in men and women…he does not see men and women as dreams and dots.”
In 1994, a wonderful movie appeared in the theaters—Il Postino, or The Postman. It is a miracle of a movie in many ways. First and foremost, it is the fictional story of a simple, marginally educated temporary postman, Mario Roppolo, who delivers the mail to the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who is living on the postman’s island in political exile. It is the story of the postman’s discovery of poetry, of the power of metaphors; it is the story of a man’s journey to a deeper, more awake truthfulness, and to the writing of his own poems, and to a deeper appreciation for both the beauties and the injustices of the world in which he lives. And it is a journey of transformation, the growing of an empowered consciousness in an ordinary man. It is a movie I hope you will see. The actor who played the postman, Massimo Troisi, literally gave his life for the film, postponing heart surgery to play the role, and dying mere hours after the completion of the film. The significance of the movie, of course, is that it is about each of us—the claiming of our place in the story of life, finding our own particular voice, announcing to the world what we have lived and discovered, reshaping our lives so we live in accord with those discoveries.
Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is a sad truth, but there is hope. In an interview on National Public Radio, poet David Whyte, author of The Heart Aroused, a book on the intelligent and creative uses of reading and applying the truths of poetry in the workplace, said the following: “In the future, corporations must make themselves over so that individuals may fulfill their destinies there.” When I have introduced the writing of poems in corporate or organizational settings, an interesting thing always takes place. The writing of poems produces an unavoidable level of intimacy between the participants. Inner walls begin to dissolve, and the walls between people begin to dissolve.
If you ask the participants how this changes their vision of their workplace, they say that what they want most—more than higher pay or increased benefits—is for their life to be seamless and whole. They want the person they are in their private or home life (in the part of their life that most belongs to them) to be the same person they are in the workplace. They don’t want to have to drop that person when they walk in the workplace door. In every area of their lives, they want to be fully awake and to feel fully alive. As human beings, we need time for family and community. We need time for solitude and natural beauty, for spiritual practice and growth, and for acts of service. It can happen. In many places, for many people, it already is.
We are Whitman’s children. And we are living in a pregnant time, a time of transformations, a time filled, I believe, with the blessings of Spirit. In a very real sense, a great shaking is taking place. We all can feel it. If I step away from the slant of television and the newspapers, it seems that recent world and national events actually seem designed to draw us together, to involve us with one other, and to separate truth from lies, all this on both a local and a global scale. The challenge is to live in the recognition that Spirit every day makes everything new. The energy of Spirit is creative energy; it lets go of yesterday and is always in the now. “Tradition” can mean “betrayal of the present moment.” We can see what happens— what doesn’t work—when people, policy-makers and decision-makers, cling to the ways of the past, the old paradigms. The call is to make things new. For the many who adhere to traditional forms of security and expression, yes, that is a troubling thought; for others, it is nourishment for the soul. The poet William Blake wrote:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
The spiritual life is always a life of movement and change. In a real sense, Spirit works to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed—whatever will initiate movement in our consciousness, break up our patterns and habits, set us free to be awake, open, and aware. And Spirit is always practical, always economical. It will never use something big or grand for change when something small will do. It will even use something as small, as simple, and as common as the writing of poems.