a holy yes, a beauty inexhaustible...

"The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek."

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground."

- John O'Donohue

"We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter . . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing."

- Natalie Goldberg

I took Annie Dillard's book off the shelf, and opened to the quotation that begins this post. Marking the page was a receipt from The Book Company at Southgate Shopping Centre where I once worked. My 30 percent off discount was applied. May of 1997.

The place I took these photographs is no Tinker Creek. Just an abandoned stand of trees surrounded by suburban houses, apartments and town houses. Smack dab in the middle of it, in a cleared area, is a sign saying, 'NO LOITERING.' Usually some beer cans are thrown at the foot of the sign.

All I can do right now is to say a holy yes, to this light that I keep walking into, a holy yes to the green leaves in their abundance and variety.....a holy yes to this beauty inexhaustible.....

a cure for anguish

From Bachelard's Poetics of Reverie, where he is quoting the translator of the work of the psychiatrist J.H. Schultz:

"This translation is but a feeble approximation of the German expression 'Es atmet mich,' literally 'It breathes me.' In other words, the world comes to breathe within me; I participate in the good breathing of the world; I am plunged into a breathing world. Everything breathes in the world. The good breathing which is going to cure me of my asthma, of my anguish, is a cosmic breathing."


Walking, I'm breathing the scent of the blossoms, and they seem to be breathing too. We are participating in that cosmic breathing, the good breathing. A seasonal cure for anguish....

without you

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps have never been seen.

- Robert Bresson

Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.

- Meister Eckhart

a green fling

"Concerning trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air."

- Annie Dillard

"We continually look and hope for a new, special thing that is going to last or make us happy, fulfill our needs, answer all our questions. In actuality, what are we going to get? We will get more seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. That's it. That's what life is."

- Jack Kornfield

"Writing is a very, very unnatural act. Most people are out living - their bodies are, they're walking and they're talking and they're working and playing and they're interacting. Writing's very unnatural because you are not living when you write. But at the same time, what a great paradox - because you're all writers so you all know. You're all going, Oh but no, no, I'm most alive when I write. So are you more living or less, we can't use "more" or "less," it's just different. And this is the crux of any writer's life. It is the essential paradox and question and torment and joy. Are you writing or living and what's the difference and where's the line and how do we divide those activities?

I've spent my whole life thinking, Is this unnatural? Shouldn't someone be parading outside my apartment with a cardboard placard saying, "Insanity's taking place on the inside?" They really should, there'd be a point to it. And then, in other moods, I go, No, no, no, the insanity's taking place out there. And I waffle back and forth. And this waffling back and forth, when you yourself experience it, it's called life. And you are going to experience this waffling back and forth for the rest of your life. And whenever you do, don't think you're unnatural or broken or different. It's life, and we're living it, and that tension is life."

- Mary Ruefle

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

- Annie Dillard

I'm finding inspiration in the green fling, going on all around us. I'm finding inspiration in the way the trees re-make themselves. The green madness, the insanities of coming alive. Last week, there was little time for the 'real' writing. And this week will be even more splintered. And yet, I resolve to grasp my one necessity....no matter how much coffee will need to be consumed....

There is that line by Rumi, about submitting to a daily practice. And maybe it's strange, but of course you know, that this blog is part of my daily practice. There are very often a lot of thoughts that swirl around these posts - that don't make it in. But many of them go into the book I'm writing. I don't know that I could write another book in quite this way, but it seems to be working for the one at hand, my "Transactions with Beauty."

My practice in writing this blog - well, first the images. As I've said before, they act as prompts, and lead me to places and thoughts I might not otherwise have been led to. I often think I'll run out of things to photograph. They're usually taken within a radius of three kilometres. Often, they're taken in my house. And maybe this is the most important thing that this daily practice has taught me, and I've said it before - but the more creative you are, the more creative you are. Your seeing is continually refined, you begin to see things where you'd not before. Sure, there are the days when your seeing becomes dull, your mood squashes your ability to see the brightness of the world. There have been days, weeks, where I thought, well, there, I must be nearing the end as I'm feeling emptied out, done.

But then the light will change, the season, and one goes on. Replenished, somehow, which I think is also the secret of the daily practice. That you will empty out, refill, be renewed. You will fling your great green leaves, you will blossom, but also, you will winter, became spare and soft and sparkling. And that spareness, your winter seeing will inform your spring seeing. And so on.

being here is wondrous

TATTERS

by Shantaro Tanikawa

before daybreak
Poem
came to me

robed in
tattered
words

I have nothing
to offer him I just
gratefully receive his gift

a broken seam
allowed me a momentary peek at
his naked self

yet once again
I mend
his tatters




One day, scrolling through the poets on the Poetry International website, I came across a poem by the Japanese poet, Shantaro Tanikawa. It was called, "I Sit" and I couldn't help comparing it to a favorite poem of mine by the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. 

So first here is the one by Tanikawa:

I SIT

One afternoon with the sky covered in thin clouds
I sit on a sofa
like a shelled clam

There are things I must tend to
but I do nothing
simply sitting enchanted

Those that are beautiful are beautiful
Even those that are ugly
somehow look beautiful

Simply being here is
wondrous
I become something other than myself

I stand up to
drink a sip of water
water is also wondrous

And here, by Webb:

SITTING

by Phyllis Webb

The degree of nothingness
is important:
to sit emptily
in the sun
receiving fire
that is the way
to mend
an extraordinary world,
sitting perfectly
still
and only
remotely human.

It's interesting to read some biographical notes on Tanikawa {here} and to hear of the reasons why he stopped writing poetry for a time. And Webb, too, stopped writing, or at least publishing poetry, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, or that have been withheld.

As writers, we accept what comes to us, the Poem, in tatters - we'll take that gift. We sit, receive. We are enchanted by what is wondrous.

But the words may not always arrive, which is why it's important to receive them when they do. Sometimes there will be an abundance.

And then, there is this sudden spring abundance. (No wonder poets are always captivated by the spring...) It's impossible to keep up to all the changes, the beauty of it. The light changes every day. Several times a day. The blossoms, just beginning, in these photographs, are now in full bloom outdoors.

We begin with morning light on plum blossoms:

And then, afternoon light on plum blossoms:

It's a holiday Monday today, and so for those of you who are not working, for those of you who are working, I wish you some time to: sit emptily / in the sun / receiving fire....

one day a light

“One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.” 

~ G. K. Chesterton

“Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.” 

~Simone Weil

"Sit near someone who has had the experience.
Sit under a tree with new blossoms.

Walking the section of the market
where chemists sell essences,
you will receive conflicting advice.

Go toward kindness.
If you are not sure where that is,
you will be drawn in by fakes."

~ Rumi

I have been making pacts with myself again. Go toward kindness, stay away from the fakes. And most importantly, to increase my efforts of attention. I have identified in myself a genuine and insistent need to be quiet and attentive, more so than usual. To work. To be away from the noise of the world. To cultivate that inner quiet that is so necessary to the making of art. If I'm to develop a faith that my efforts will some day produce a light....then I need to go inward more deeply.

And also, I keep coming back to these lines by Rumi:

"It's a person's duty to get oneself in a position
where one can be generous with their time and silver.

Whenever you gather with friends or are in a crowd,
try to the be one least in need. For simply doing that 
is giving."


I think part of the reason I've felt so tired and disappointed and harbouring what I've been calling my 'literary depression' is because of the feeing of being in need. I'd rather be the person in the room who is least in need.

And anyway, my obligation right now is to listen to the utterances of flowers and blossoms. To walk along that path.