Keeping Quiet - Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,

let's not speak any language,

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,

without hurry, without locomotives,

all of us would be together

in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea

would do no harm to the whales

and the peasant gathering salt

would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars of gas, wars of fire,

victories without survivors,

would put on clean clothing

and would walk alongside their brothers

in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused

with final inactivity:

life alone is what matters,

I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous

about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,

perhaps a great silence would

interrupt this sadness,

this never understanding ourselves

and threatening ourselves with death,

perhaps the earth is teaching us

when everything seems to be dead

and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve

and you keep quiet and I'll go.

-from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Enough - David Whyte

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

Eric's mom is visiting from Miami for the first time since Umea was 1 month old. It's strange, isn't it, how different people tax you? Each levies a unique fine. Some of course, give refunds. Others are like paying taxes for defense spending: a global calculus finely arbitrated, rather large bets against the odds.

We just watched Stranger than Fiction again with her. I think we watched it with her in 2007 after our wedding. She liked it then but didn't remember having seen it when we started it again tonight.

That movie transports me to a place where new is possible. A new screenplay by a new screenwriter that breaks the genre and somehow remains utterly charming and impeccably good. Makes me want to be brilliant with something.

I'm walking around like I'm waiting for the phone to ring. "Hello, this is your destiny. Turn right ahead."

Poised in my inbox are two job applications to complete. Three, actually. One part-time, one temporary, one a long shot with too little money to be enticing. Two other possibilities are floating in the ether, waiting for a yes or no to wend their way to me.

My work in this moment is to feel full, feel directed just by orienting my face to the sun.

On Belonging - David Whyte

We are the one part of creation that knows what it’s like to live in exile. The ability to turn your face toward home is one of the great human endeavors and great human stories. No matter how far you are away from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don’t feel at home in the world, to say exactly how you don’t belong, and the moment you’ve uttered the dimension of your exile, you’re already taking the path back to the way -- back to the place -- you should be. You’re already on your way home.

The Opening of Eyes - David Whyte

That day ... I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew ... life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
...

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

Everything is Waiting for You - David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone...

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. ...
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come; the doors have always been there
to frighten and invite you...

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink; the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Corner Talk

And suddenly after months of floundering, it arrives - a corner around which something else will happen. A boundary between the way things are here, and how they will be after.

I still know nothing of the separating event. I cannot see the turn or the angle of light once turned.

But there is a corner where none existed before.

And that is soul-filling enough to grow patience and gratitude for the time to enjoy the sun here, now, before the turn.

The Journey - Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Love After Love - Derek Wolcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

The Swan - Rainer Maria Rilke

This clumsy living that moves lumbering

as if in ropes through what is not done,

reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go

of the ground we stand on

and cling to every day,

is like the swan,

when he nervously lets himself down into the water,

which receives him gaily

and which flows joyfully under

and after him, wave after wave,

while the swan,

unmoving and marvelously calm,

is pleased to be carried,

each moment more fully grown,

more like a king, further and further on.

translated by Robert Bly

David Whyte asks, "What is the elemental belonging in your life?"

Personal Renewal - John Gardner

Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ
November 10, 1990

One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of the organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount of self-renewal. But to help you think about others is not my primary mission this morning. I want to help you think about yourselves.

...I'm not going to talk about the special problems of your kind of career; I'm going to talk about some basic problems of the life cycle that will surely hit you if you're not ready for them.

...

Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. ... "The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." For a good many of us, it comes to that.

We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.

One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people -- feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.

I'm not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can't all get to the top, and that isn't the point of life anyway. I'm talking about people who -- no matter how busy they seem to be -- have stopped learning or growing... I don't deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. ...

...How many people whom you know well -- people even younger than yourselves --are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said "There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives." ...

I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.

Such self-assessments are no great problem [when] you're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to... I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead...

...

The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well. ...

...When you hit a spell of trouble, ask "What is it trying to teach me?" The lessons aren't always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn't a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

We learn from our jobs, from our friends and families. We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can't change, by taking risks.

The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

...
You come to terms with yourself. You finally grasp what S. N. Behrman meant when he said "At the end of every road you meet yourself." You may not get rid of all of your hang-ups, but you learn to control them to the point that you can function productively and not hurt others.

...

You come to understand your impact on others. It's interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others. ...In some measure we create our own environment. ...

...

One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we've piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.

So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.

You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.

But life isn't a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it -- as some suppose -- a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.

Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

...

The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges --and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.

There's something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don't even know about? It's true. ...

...There is no perfection of techniques that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes from strong motivation, The world is moved by highly motivated people, by enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very much.

I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.

The nature of one's personal commitments is a powerful element in renewal...

...You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a nervous breakdown. Or is puzzling about the meaning of life.

Humans have never mastered that kind of complacency. We are worriers and puzzlers, and we want meaning in our lives. ... [W]e are so designed to cope with [anything] if we can live in some context of meaning. Given that powerful help, we can draw on the deep springs of the human spirit, to see our suffering in the framework of all human suffering, to accept the gifts of life with thanks and endure life's indignities with dignity.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.

It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you're doing. There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are --and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they're behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.

...

We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. ...People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. ...

...I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, "I'd be a pessimist but it would never work."

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don't really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome.

...We have to believe in ourselves, but we mustn't suppose that the path will be easy, it's tough. Life is painful, and rain falls on the just. ...[F]ailure is simply a reason to strengthen resolve.

Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-fought. We need to develop a resilient, indomitable morale that enables us to face those realities and still strive with every ounce of energy to prevail. You may wonder if such a struggle -- endless and of uncertain outcome -- isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world.

....

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."

Faith (Poem) by David Whyte

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself.
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

(glimpsed in Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results because of David Whyte's tour of corporate America based on his book The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.)

The R-Ws at Home

To be of use (poem) by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Grace

And in my angst, here is the quote that found me:

"[W]hen you are following ... [a] plan in community you'll never be an expert, just a person who can notice grace in earthy places."

--Lillian Daniel, from This Odd and Wondrous Calling

A Commandment

The Oracle at Delphi said: Know thyself.

And even if you give yourself the wiggle room to say that this is an ongoing approach to life (a continual process) and not an afternoon's activity or a "You are here" X on a map you carry around, it seems a lot to ask.

I mean, so much has happened -- and more every day.

And in a bigger sense, what has really happened? It certainly makes no sense. There is no spine, no scaffolding, no progression. There is a series of days that happen to line up backward for years. So how can this explain now? Or me, now or then? Or help me recognize the me of tomorrow?

Is this why people go into therapy? Or is this why people have friends? To help remind you who you are, where you've been, what you love.

Is it just me, or is this self-knowledge quest getting harder to do in today's warp-speed world?

The Distance to Success

Quiet tiptoes
in the space
confidence
should fill.

Disoriented,
my ambition
hesitates
at unfamiliar crossroads
indistinguishable
from the decision points
that got me here.

Xeno’s paradox
in reverse
means every step
marries me
to a destiny
I do not choose
and can never recognize,
since there is no “there”
to which to arrive.

In another time
faith would frame
the space
where confidence
dwells.

Hard-won knowledge
would scaffold my belief,
and the success of surviving each day
would catapult me
headlong into the next.

Instead
I lean into
the solidity
of sunshine,
pace forward
with the dread
of anticipated regret
for all that I am not doing
to get to where I don’t know
I want to be.

Authenticity

What does it mean to feel authentic these days?

In a society where you have to have a license to drive, a degree to do pretty much anything, but no qualification whatsoever to be a parent, why is it that so many women still feel they're faking it?

Even when I'm good at what I do at work, I'm half waiting for someone to question my right to be there. "You don't really know how to do this," they'll accuse. And they'll be right. I don't. And somehow if I were a guy or a different kind of a girl, that would be okay. Or more okay than it is with me.

I have a running debate with many of my grad. school friends about who's more qualified for employment - them or me. It seems the grass is always more qualified on the other side of the fence!

I have a fantasy about being hired just because I'm smart, competent, and hard-working. I can't be hired for any other reason, because I swear to you I don't know anything about anything!

I started my college career wanting to know everything about everything. Somehow along the way, I learned only about context, not content. A postmodern dilemma, perhaps. Postmodern education to blame, probably. A postmodern lack of capacity for retaining information. My generation likes the shape of knowledge, not its heft. We understand the landscape of a theory - its genesis, the range of its applicability, its broad outlines. This mapped, we turn from it to the next big idea that we can sketch out and abandon.

And so my generation knows software - what technology can do, not what it should do. We acquire religious understanding voraciously but believe very little. We are full of empty boundaries.

Hermes was the messenger god in the Greek pantheon. He was also the god of crossroads, of borders, of humor (because what is humor but the intersection of 2 incongruous ideas?). He was a trickster, hard if not impossible to pin down. Hermes could get you out of a scrape with his ingenuity, the wings on his feet, yet few would pray to such an immutable, insubstantial, whimsical god. In this way, my generation is the Hermes generation. We map, we trade, we barter. We exist on the edges, eschew the possibility of center.

Maybe this bodes well for a war-free world in the future. Who would lose their life for an idea only loosely held, loosely sketched, easily abandoned? Who would find offense in someone else casting off such an idea when another seems to work better in their own circumstance?

Generational studies tell us that the new generation, the so-called millenials, are not paralyzed by prejudice in the way past generations have been. They have always lived in a world where diversity is celebrated, if not always achieved, where tolerance is demanded if not always granted. In some ways, this might make them more dangerous, more prone to repeating the atrocities of a history they don't seem connected to or inspired to learn.

And for me, it means angst about a career path shrouded in fog. Who will pay for my gifts? Is it enough to offer the skill of context, outlines, meaning without belief, without knowledge, without expertise?

The Space Inside*

“Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day” 

Pay attention (work hard), 

rest all that is not needed for the work, 

relax into the effort, 

feel how this pulse eases into hum, 

contributes to all others’ to make our lives more rich 

make us more joyful 

more alive to our gratitude 

more able to feel the ease from our troubles 

wash over us, 

leaving them sparkling, crystalline 

with salt. 

Invite them in, 

all those you think you cannot feed, 

who will fill themselves 

with exactly what you can give 

what they can receive 

from the basket of your compassion – 

your strengths, 

the limber moments 

between your daily plans – 

who will spice each bite 

with all you have learned 

to let go. 

Set the even table of your prayer for justice 

with the spirit you bring 

when flinging your loving arms 

to all you can reach, 

all you can harvest 

in this season that feeds us 

and the guests who bring us so much more 

than we can return. 

I will open the dark doors 

of my small home, 

feel the rooms grow 

as a vessel swells 

each time the water 

fills 

then hollows 

the space inside. 

*Interesting that I had forgotten a poem from 2005 called "The Space Between Us" Chapbook, anyone?

** I believe this poem was responding, in part, to the poems "To be of use" by Marge Piercy and "Love after Love" by Derek Wolcott.

Release

In yoga we learn that our thoughts and feelings line our joints like hard water deposits. I never give this much thought, partly because I'm so inflexible that I never get to that layer and partly because I'm too busy trying to match my perfectionist tendency to my woefully imperfect poses ("practice" be damned).

But late in May I committed myself to going to a hot yoga flow class every weekday through July, which I've done with few exceptions. There have definitely been changes -- things I can feel, effects I can see, progress in good directions on many fronts. In the past week, I noticed an opening in my hips that has certainly never existed before and almost immediately heard a concomitant litany of past voices -- my voices -- saying all the things I say to myself when things are hard for me: This is impossible. How can anyone be expected to do this? I can't stand it for another minute. It's so hard I have to stop, etc.

The memory associated most strongly with these messages was a summer swim team, my first swim team, without ever having learned "real swimming" beyond 2-week YMCA classes when I was little. A seemingly irrelevant yet probably vital detail: my oldest sister was one of the coaches. We swam lap after lap, and as I struggled to breathe, I struggled harder against the growing panic in my lungs that this just wasn't FAIR. I couldn't do it, so by logical extension no one could do it: it just couldn't be done and therefore asking it of me (and us, I rationalized desperately) was fascist. Did I mention I'm a perfectionist? Yes, the ugly side of perfectionism is the utter inability to deal with not being good at something, even when it's YOGA for god's sake, as though being good at yoga is anything more than practicing it intentionally!

I know this, yet the voices are so distracting this week that I cannot calm myself, cannot focus, cannot stay in that hot, unbearable room. Today, cooling myself like a nuclear rod in the shower, I realized this simple truth: I do not know how to be gentle with my ... what? failure? It's not that. Imperfection? It's not quite that either. With my own inner fascist demanding that only perfection equals even "practice." Trying means giving 100%. Not trying means skipping the pose, leaving the room, checking out. There's some subtlety here that I can't quite finger. Throughout the class, I modify the poses to be less difficult, but then I give 100% within the modification. What I can't do is approach a pose half-heartedly knowing I can do better and (gasp!) choosing not to.

This seems like a life skill that I should know by now. Yet the fact that I don't clues me into why I'm so baffled -- and resentful -- at the majority of folks who seem to be floating through life entirely unfazed at their lack of exertion and unapologetic about ignoring expectations and responsibilities that affect those around them. Who was your mama? I want to ask them. And maybe that's another clue that there's a voice other than mine distracting me in yoga.

So I need another way to think about effort - a valid middle ground between all or nothing. A new way to be gentle with myself and the chasm between my intention and the unforgiving hardness cementing my joints closed, tight, and unmoving.

These adjectives no longer serve me.