Dec

10

Our Sacred Lady Emily

December 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Our Sacred Lady Emily

Today is the birthday of Emily Dickinson, the mother of fierce eccentrics and American poetry. I met her in the winter of 1866 in my past life as a clergyman from the neighboring town of Deerfield. Emily always had a soft spot for men of the cloth, a habit she called “dancing with my shadow.” She far exceeded the dance floor abilities of any woman I ever knew.

The first time I saw her she was enacting an iconic image—lowering a basket of baked goodies to children in the garden from a second story window. On the path I paused, interrupting my conversation with an acquaintance, Deacon Hazlip, to ask the identity of the exquisite benefactress of those clamorous, fortunate children.

“Oh, the myth! That’s mad Emily, Austin’s sister.” He walked on a few paces, paused, and returned to my side with a quizzical look. “What are you staring at?”

“She!” I surprised myself, almost shouting. I was amazed that my companion apparently missed the intense, divine energy and light that emanated from that astonishing creature. Unfortunately, she must have heard my outburst because she glanced once our way and swiftly disappeared inside. I felt my heart constrict, causing me to wince. Meanwhile, my companion observed me with disbelief and mild irritation. Reluctantly, when I was convinced she would not likely appear soon at the window again, I walked slowly on, aware that my carefree, animated gait before my vision had now become a gallows walk. The conversation we were having before had also gone completely out of my head.

“Why did you call her mad Emily?”

“Because she is,” my companion snapped.

“In what way?” I pressed him.

He gave a great sigh, tagged me with a glance of weary aggravation, and explained that she stayed in her home for months at a time. She was known to hide on the landing and speak to visitors out of sight around the corner. Rather than come out to the garden to greet children with her sweets, she lowered them in a basket, just as we’d observed.

“Everything you list is eccentric, perhaps, but mad? That seems extreme.”

“She writes poetry, but have it your way,” my companion said dismissively, as if I could not possibly offer anything relevant in discussing her.

Not many months before this encounter, I lay alone on a green summer hillside above Amherst. With calm heart and empty mind, I stared into a disheveled expanse of blue and fast-riding, fleecy clouds. Suddenly I felt my spirit, my own essence, pouring out of my body in a great pillar of light and energy. It raced into the clouds, joining their own boundless life energy that was suddenly visible to me. It was so liberating I wept. Happily I lay there, weeping softly, my arms outstretched, one with the clouds and the sky and all the life force energy that envelopes us every moment that we’re alive. I was timeless, one with myself and the sky and all the world. That’s how it felt to be in Emily’s presence from the first time I saw her at her window till our last goodbye at her deathbed.

In between I enjoyed the most glorious hours of my life—of that life. When I could get away to visit her, or she me, we plunged into conversation or the woods, into baking or bed, and achieved an elevation of being that no language but her own, perhaps, can contain. To love Emily was to Go with her. She never wandered into anything but rushed ever onward, Urgent! Hearing her speak on any subject was like listening to God (this pleases her even now, I see her smiling). No one ever revered The Divine or fought “God” with more ferocity and courage. Certainly she was transformed, but in the end I believe she actually succeeded in transforming God.

“In other lives,” she told me once between bites of a chicken sandwich, “I’ve been a butterfly, a hummingbird, and Joan of Arc. “ She was fearless always, even of fire. Though the deaths of so many loved ones weighed heavily on her in her last years, especially, nothing ever broke her spirit or humbled her headlong quest to know. If there were a word at her core, just one, I believe it would be Freedom. She was all natural essences. Like her peers the greatest poets, she empathized with and became every human being who ever walked this planet.

So, today, perhaps you can sit for a few moments with her poems. Savor them. Allow them to enter you. Meet the moment.

*

Here is a poem I wrote after visiting Emily’s grave in this time of year in 1975. It was then that the veil parted and I reconnected with my—with our—earlier life. In celebration, I wrote this poem:

Emily’s Courtship

The visitor stands at the grave in knee-high snow.

He’s been calling your house sine 1962

Asking for you.

Is he a distant or close relation to

That man in Baltimore who annually visits Poe?

Certainly you would know.

And if this man who calls you should break through,

What loneliness, time, and pain must he endure

At your father’s door?

Brushing aside that meddling sister of yours,

He calls upstairs, “Emily, my darling, my dear,

There is nothing to fear!”

Don’t greet him in the frills and curls you acquired late,

Long after the Romantics claimed you,

But come down as you

Always were, your hair tucked in a tight bun,

Your limbs loose in  drab, light summer dress

The color of afternoon sun,

The armpits and a flare up the back darkened with sweat

(for you have been sweeping all morning), your shoes

Dusty, impossibly small.

Come down to the parlor, dear, and rest.

Don’t talk around the corner like a ghost,

Or too sly a host;

That ploy worked well enough on disabled Higginson,

And on ancient Wadsworth, so stiff with God

He couldn’t bed you or bend.

Do not descend in a cloud of impossible cadences

And punctuation like slaps to the face-this one is yours,

All man and boy, your poetry toy

Who loves your jokes, and your laughter

Like water lapping in Heaven,

Who would take you as you are.

Still you test his devotion, serving the heavy cake

You made from scratch the night (or half-century?) before;

Your sister returns, the bore.

Sipping bitter tea she claims each word you say,

Or worse, presumes to say them for you.

That just won’t do!

Your caller whispers in her ear, “Get lost! Your Sis and I

Need time alone, comprendé?” With your taste

For the exotic, the far away you’ll never see,

That single, foreign word rings like a wedding bell.

You shoo your flesh and blood away,

If only for a day.

*

Here’s a prompt. Write a poem or journal entry about a past life relationship you had with a writer.

And another: write about a writer you would have liked knowing.

*

May your holidays be blessed, happy and healthy and present, and may you journey safe home to the new year.

Robert McDowell

www.robertmcdowell.net

December 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Sep

27

Healthoween

September 27, 2009 | 1 Comment

While our elected officials persist in acting like unruly, unattended children in the great health care debate, I want to share a close up, personal plunge into the heart of the matter.

Three weeks ago, I had a heart scare that plunked me down in the ER of a Kaiser hospital in San Rafael for nine hours.

I was working in my office at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It was late morning. I bent down to pick up some papers I’d dropped and suddenly felt as if a 90 mph fastball had crashed into my chest. After a couple of what the? minutes I was able to stand, but I was wobbly, and I felt a numbing, tingling sensation the length of my left arm. I had to take the papers across our campus to the Earthrise Retreat Center office, but all the time I was there I was thinking, should I say something? Should I go to the hospital? I had a can’t miss meeting in two hours.

Still woozy, I stopped by my colleague’s office to let her know I might not be able to make our meeting. Her back was to me as I entered, but she responded to my voice with “how are you today?” Then she wheeled around and saw me. “You don’t look so good,” she said.

I sat down and began sweating. I turned very pale. Deborah called Kaiser, described my symptoms, and soon we were in her car and on our way to the ER in San Rafael.

Once there I was quickly stripped, gowned, and laid out on a table. A nurse apologized for jabbing me as she inserted an IV in my right arm. Another nurse took blood, while a third attached metallic stickums all over me. An attentive and reassuring Dr. Bateman asked me a series of questions.

In no time at all we discovered that I was in a-fib (rapid, irregular heartbeat). Something to slow that down and smooth it out was poured into the IV. It worked quickly, and I lay back for the rest of the day, awaiting test results.

Every hour or so, one of two doctors would check in on me for a few moments. Yes, I’d had an episode. Early blood tests looked ok, but there appeared to be something they needed more time with.

That was a relaxing hook to dangle from for another two hours.

Six hours in I was informed that the upper left chamber of my heart was enlarged and that I should be admitted for the night for additional tests the next day. One doctor had already told me that the hospital had no cable, and I’d already discovered it offered no wireless access. “We want people to relax while they’re here,” a smiling nurse told me.

An hour later Alfonso came in on a gurney. I caught a glimpse of him before a blue curtain was drawn to separate us. He was in his 40s, I believe, and he screamed for the next hour like a brutally injured soldier on a battlefield. His suffering was horrific. I heard enough to know that his lungs were hemorrhaging; He’d been discharging blood all day; his gut was killing him; he had open sores on his back and legs. He really did not like being catheterized, a procedure that took fifteen excruciating minutes. He pleaded over and over to die.

Dr. Bateman’s voice throughout the ordeal was rock-steady and compassionate, as were three other voices. But two voices became ever more agitated until they were screaming almost as loud as Alfonso. They were aggravated, angry voices.

“We want people to relax while they’re here.”

I lay on my cot meditating, praying for Alfonso, and for patients throughout the hospital lying on gurneys in lonely rooms, or waiting long minutes in halls for someone to come, someone to wheel them somewhere, and I thought of the millions of us in this country who have no health insurance at all.

For more than two years, I was one of them. Recently, after all my tests were in, my new cardiologist told me I have a wounded heart. Yes, I do. It’s wounded by the realization that I live in and love a country that is so deeply conflicted about providing health care for every citizen. Bill Moyers recently said that we need to decide what kind of country we want to be, one of compassion, or one of self-interest and greed.

Compassion is not always easy or affordable. It’s just essential. If you’re conflicted about this, so be it. But all you need to do is think of someone you know without insurance. Lie down beside Alfonso for an hour. What does your spirit, your higher power, and your God require of you? That is all you need to know.

September 27, 2009 | 1 Comment

Aug

5

Inspiration

August 5, 2009 | 5 Comments

Inspiration

This weekend I taught two workshops at the 20th anniversary Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. The first was about sacred partnering through journaling and poetry; the second was called Poetry as Play. Serious Play.

As I always do, I enjoyed myself immensely, connecting with more than 40 practitioners and fellow travelers. Each had a special story to share, a unique a ha! moment of awakening to this or that truth. Time and again, I woke up to myself realizing how each exchange with someone made a bridge between us, a moment of sacred partnering. I delighted in the originality and energy of each person, and I marveled at the gift of inspiration. Where does it come from? Where does it go at night? Does it have a name? How many times have you met your own inspiration?

When I wasn’t communing and working at the Mendocino campus, I stayed at a lovely guest house on six acres overlooking the ocean. “This was Chuck Jones’s house,” my host said, “you know, the guy who invented Bugs Bunny.”

Wow! That was fun to think about. Every time I walked out the front door I felt myself a channel for Porky’s signature Eeebadeebadeeb That’s all, Folks! I wondered what it must have been like. Darn! Chuck Jones lived in this house.

There was a beautiful little emerald lawn surrounded by flowers and green shrubs right outside the back glass doors, and at dusk I detected movement. I watched closely, observing dozens of small bunnies hopping out of the shrubbery to munch on that delicious lawn. Of course. Bunnies. Lots of them. All at once, Bugs made a deeper connection with me than ever before. I was privileged to glimpse Jones’s source of inspiration, and I laughed till my sides ached.

I also felt humbled by the experience, and by the realization that inspiration is everywhere in this big, beautiful, imperiled world. Walk out in it paying close attention, or just look up from reading this. See? There! At the edge of sight, or perhaps just beyond. Isn’t it beautiful?

August 5, 2009 | 5 Comments

Jun

27

Death Thursday

June 27, 2009 | 4 Comments

This morning, not feeling especially lighthearted, I came across a Yahoo News headline: Fans Moonwalk, Hold Worldwide Vigil for Jackson, and I laughed so hard my hair became electric. I laughed so hard my sides ached and my eyeballs almost popped out of my skull.

Does this make me a cynical, insensitive slob? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I was tearful yesterday as I read Deepak Chopra’s beautiful remembrance of Michael, his longtime friend, and became quite emotional again as I read an article about the fate of Jackson’s children.

I don’t think I’m lurching from one emotional extreme to another, so what is it? Why was I laughing? I’ve always held with Byron that ‘I laugh so that I will not weep,’ but it’s not that, at least not that completely. No. All through an intense yoga class, I contemplated this small mystery, and something came to me.

Where, I wondered, were all these mourners and moonwalkers during Jackson’s last decade or so? Except for diehard fans like the small, loyal group that communed outside Neverland every day during his last trial, where was all this worldwide support and love? In many quarters, Jackson was a joke, a punch line, a pariah. Until the day he died, when had the media last sung his praises as the King of Pop? How long ago was it?

What is it about us as humans that we can turn so quickly from malice to worshipful mourning? Why do we hold our love, if that’s what it is, so close to the vest? I’ve tried to come up with things we gain by doing so, but it all just feels like loss, disappointment, and missed opportunities.

Later this afternoon, as I walked along a country lane, I passed a county marker on which someone had written I Love Tina. This discovery made me smile, and my immediate reaction was We All Do. Rather than sweep the thought from my head with my rational broom, I invited it to stay with me, and through it, with it, I felt connected, compassionate. I smiled. I felt…love.

Whoever that road marker Tina and her admirer are, wherever they may be, I know they felt something good at that moment, too.

Maybe that’s what the world’s moonwalking mourners are up to. Failing to stand by or comfort Michael Jackson in his last decade filled with one personal disaster after another, perhaps they’re spontaneously doing what they can to ease his launch on his new journey. Fair enough. Some say it’s only human. But I wish we could release and share more of this compassion with others who so desperately need it  while they’re still traveling paths among us, with us. Wouldn’t that be a sweeter, grander thing to do than withholding our love and tenderness until after they’re gone?

 

June 27, 2009 | 4 Comments

Jun

19

Volunteerism

June 19, 2009 | 4 Comments

I’m writing from the Starr Marriott Resort in Tucson, Arizona where I’m representing the Institute of Noetic Sciences at its 13th international conference.

Yesterday, I led an indoctrination meeting for nine volunteers I’m leading. We are one of several set-up crews for the conference’s closing luncheon tomorrow, which will entertain 650 people. Our job tomorrow morning is to follow hotel staff around the dining room. As the staff completes a table’s appointments (linen, silverware, dishes), we are to follow them and place a program and a packet of seeds atop each napkin.

Our job will be relatively easy, and some of my crew members were almost apologetic yesterday about the fact that they weren’t doing more.

How we tend to whip ourselves in America!

I thanked them with deep, genuine emotion, and I awoke this morning with even deeper gratitude that these strangers from around the U.S., South America, Asia, and Africa would make themselves available to help us, the IONS staff, prepare a very important event.

I realized that all volunteerism is a Mother Teresa moment, an act of selflessness. Spiritual practice teaches us not to judge, and that’s a useful lesson when we find ourselves measuring the quality of our selfless acts.

In truth, there is selfishness, and selflessness. No matter what you do, if you volunteer you are joining St. Francis on the road at the moment he’s startled by a leper staggering out of the bushes directly in his path. In giving of yourself, you are getting out of yourself to kiss the leper full on the lips with infinite love and gratitude.

I celebrate you and acknowledge you for every act, small or large, that you are able to do in service to someone else.  I hope that others do the same, and that you acknowledge yourself for your service.

Bless you!

June 19, 2009 | 4 Comments

Jun

9

Remembering Bakersfield Poet / Teacher Lee McCarthy

June 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I remember so many things about Lee McCarthy. I remember her irreverence, of course, her vulnerability, loving-kindness, and generosity. I remember and continually return to her talent, which shimmers in her published poems and unpublished prose manuscripts. I remember a thousand intimate, funny, and unfunny things she said, did, and shared with me, but mostly I remember her fierce love of principles. When she thought she was right, she was a warrior to the end. This ferocity informed her devotion and love for her only son, who truly was the brightest, most important person in her life. Her concern for my own children, who were much younger than her son, made me a better parent. That’s a beneficial act one doesn’t talk about much when adding up the ledger of someone who has moved on. Wherever she arrives next, those who know her will be blessed.

June 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Apr

21

Writing Is an Explosion

April 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

Writing Is an Explosion 

Jack Kerouac wrote that “writing is an explosion of interest, it is not something that gets done one by one gravely, and the explosions of interest arrest themselves with a crafty expectant grin.”

I have been thinking of this as I go through what feels like an arid writing stretch, and in the last few days I’ve experienced a few ‘explosions’ and have been delighted by that “crafty expectant grin.” 

It’s like seeing someone clear for the first time, or after a long time, or like noting the smallest details all around you—the odd nodes of a tree, the impermanent shape of a wispy cloud, the feelings that rise as you listen to a tape a dead friend made for you twenty years ago—as you make your way. 

And so, I celebrate the explosions of interest, the crafty expectant grins, and I wonder what your own are like, what you make of them and why. 

April 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

Mar

4

The Green Hills, the Rain

March 4, 2009 | 2 Comments

I’m beginning my third week as a resident of Marin County and Sonoma County—I say both because I am right on the border—and for someone who has lived for most of the last twenty years in Oregon, I’ve been amazed by the torrential rains here!

It’s good, of course. Drought conditions were terrifying Californians who dreaded summer not so far off in the distance, and so every day we’re pelted by nail rain, by windblown rain, by sideways, umbrella-defeating rain, we’re thankful. Well, mostly! I’ve grumbled every now and then, and so have my co-workers.

But this morning I remembered a poem by Langston Hughes:

 *

April Rain Song

 

Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullabye.

 

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.

The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

 

And I love the rain.

 

*

 

Is the rain for you a messenger of gloom? Of worse than gloom? Is it God crying? Or do you dance in the rain? Do you lift up your face to the rain and laugh? Do you love the rain?

Add your thoughts, or a poem here, or a fine intention.

 

May all sweetness and blessings be yours!

Robert

 

March 4, 2009 | 2 Comments

Feb

8

Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

February 8, 2009 | 2 Comments

Isabelle Alzado is working on a theatre event for Oregon Stage Works in Ashland, Oregon on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. She wrote to me about her experience:“This poem may come from the violence of the news, the wounding head lines, the tangible deaths behind the words. It is my inner, painful contortion wanting to scratch it all – as though my bloody fingers could change a thing… But I do see – and yet, in my silent, anonymous soul I need to  infuse some Light on these enormous sufferings, I need to blow some warmth on the aching hearts.

Just a quiet, unknown breeze of love traveling so far away to reach one child’s hope and wonder.”

 

Here is her poem. After you read it, please share your thoughts in any form you wish.

 

*

 

When The Written Words Ache

 

I want to catch those words

Those cathedrals of emollient faith

Those steels that break my heart

 

I want to pamper their corners

Calligraphy adorned

To calm the pain behind.

 

I want to scratch the bars

That make me stumble

Against a human throb

 

A hidden cry in sullen cave

A lost scroll of flesh

Covered in dirt and sorrow.

 

I want to catch those words

Those bridges and sirens

Consonants in my third ear

 

Pulling my head to their toes

To pray and kiss their day

To erase and wash their sounds.

 

I want to squeeze those words

Those signs of terror

Those majestic black inks

 

I want to dislocate their vowels

To render some other news

Alchemy forbidden on the page

 

 

I want to add some peg legs

Deviate the design of the phrase

And slice those words into dots

 

And close my eyes

And run into dictionaries

To create the new parchments

 

 

 

I want to scream invented words

Those fairytales with feathers

Those galloping hopes

 

 

Licking my wounds behind my heart

With a penholder and a nib

And the tongues that don’t know me.

 

I want the colors’ inks

To blend into races

And open a new vortex

 

The strident nature’s cry

To remind me that life is safe

And that God wrote on my knee,

 

Pulling my soul to His eyes

To chant and dance His day

To revive with love, my words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 8, 2009 | 2 Comments

Jan

15

2009: Dying? Or Divine?

January 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

2009: Dying? Or Divine?

 

New Year’s Dawn, 1947

 

Two morning stars, Venus and Jupiter,

Walk in the pale and liquid light

Above the color of these dawns; and as the tide of light

Rises higher the great planet vanishes

While the nearer still shines. The yellow wave of light

In the east and south reddens, the opaque ocean

Becomes pale purple: O delicate

Earnestness of dawn, the fervor and pallor.

Stubbornly I think again: The state is a blackmailer,

Honest or not, with whom we make (within reason)

Our accommodations. There is no valid authority

In church nor state, custom, scripture nor creed,

But only in one’s own conscience and the beauty of things.

Doggedly I think again: One’s conscience is a trick oracle,

Worked by parents and nurse-maids, the pressure of the people,

And the delusions of dead prophets: trust it not.

Wash it clean to receive the transhuman beauty: then trust it.

 

This poem, written by Robinson Jeffers to commemorate a new year sixty-two years ago, is all about temperance, and it has eerily echoed in me for a week or so.

Even stranger is the fact that I keep thinking of this poem as I consider the crumbling world economy. Fingers are pointing everywhere, and I really don’t want to dissipate energy by joining in. I’m more interested in facts. Don’t we all know now, for example, in situation after situation in the last ten years, that greed trumped common sense and measured conduct? We observe, if we are paying attention, that banking officials, despite steering trains off tracks, off cliffs, continue to receive unjustifiable perks and huge bonuses (presumably coming from the first giant bail-out package, meaning our tax dollars, because where else could it all come from?). We can see that our elected officials still have shown no moxie or mettle, not really, in offering any solutions or startlingly new paradigm. These are facts, not speculation, and they should be clicking into place in our consciousness as surely as the vacuum-sealing, scything sound of closing coffin lids.

When you’re already dead (and aren’t you, if the system you continue to serve is dead?), it’s ludicrous to point bony fingers at the contentious corpse lying to the right of left of you. Isn’t death the end of right or left? It’s certainly the end of wealth and poverty. It’s the end of money! Perhaps we’re all just getting a head start on that new paradigm so many like to imagine coming soon.

If it does, it will have to come from us. Not from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi, but from each and every one of us who refuses just a little, then a little more and more to be mute slaves of a system that rewards the few with insane riches while grinding everyone else into paste, until a global momentum lifts us up to a new place.

The French Revolution ushered in a paradigm shift accompanied by bloody retribution (some would say “cleansing”). And though we have many heads in high places today that seem to be worthy of the guillotine, again, what good does finger pointing do? Acts of retribution turn us into our enemies, but sustained spiritual practice transforms us and positively changes everyone we connect with.

Isn’t this what we hunger for? We need businesses and corporations to do more than nod and say, yes, we need to change the way we’ve been doing business. They need fewer studies and reports. They need to take fewer meetings and take a leap of faith instead. We need them to talk the right brain talk, and we need them to walk the right brain walk! We need this now, not next year or ten years from now. We don’t have time to wait, and neither do businesses and corporations.

            Nor are our leaders exempt from the kind of new thinking that’s required of all of us. I pray that the spirit of poetry blossoms in the hearts and minds of our elected officials, and that it leads them to discover the courage they’ll need to create and launch new models for business, service, and diplomacy. We are in the midst of a very public dying. What takes its place is in our hands.

 

January 15, 2009 | 2 Comments


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