Month: January 2021

Recently I stumbled upon this piece below by Brazilian Poet, Rubin Alves. Actually, “re-stumbled upon” is more accurate. In this life of so much online medium, I’ve been invoking “poetry interludes” as a way of shifting energy for myself and the people I’m meeting with. This poem below was one of those interludes, from a collection of poems assembled by educators, Teaching With Fire: Poetry That Sustains The Courage To Teach. This is a collection I go to often.

What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination
is more real and reality is less real than it looks.
It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality
of facts that oppress and repress us
is not the last word.
It is the suspicion that reality is more complex
than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not
determined by the limits of the actual;
and in a miraculous and unexplained way
life is opening up creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection –
but the two – suffering and hope
must live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté
and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates
even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
That is the secret discipline.
It is the refusal to let our creative act
be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience
and is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints,
the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hopes.

There is a lot that I love in this poem. The line that stands out to me now is, “So let us plant dates….” Because, I find that in all of the complexity in which we live, and I believe, that we humans should grow our capacity to be with, I still appreciate a simple line and image to lift my imagination and courage.

So let us plant dates.

Here’s to good interludes. And, here’s to any of the ways that we welcome poetry to guide us with more integration. Poems that are not just side material, but rather the central doorway in to the connection so many of us are craving.

I am meeting with a group for the first time. It is a group committed to doing good work and to growing community. This is a group of six people, various “leads” within one organization.

I learned long ago that meeting for the first time is not about planning. It is not about all of the details. It is not about fixes. Meeting for the first time is about making a connection together. It is a time to begin a deliberate pattern of listening, and of sharing. It is a time to begin a pattern of being spacious together.

I love the first meetings. I try to welcome and help shape a basic story line that we can be in together. It often sounds something like this.

1. You have things that you care about and want to do well. That’s great.
2. All of that doing well starts with connection and relationship.
3. Connection enables us to be in our learning together or to add to the learning that you are already in.
4. All of that, connection and learning, helps us to discern and imagine helpful experiments together that contribute to the things you care about and want to do well.

Of course, the path together will be about being in the nuance of this basic story. It will be about being in the joy of it, and the sorrows. It will be about being in the imaginative heart of it, and, in the implementing hands of it.

I know that none of it will happen in lasting ways if we don’t embody connection, if we don’t start with finding our way with honesty and imagination and welcome.

First generation American writer and psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes some of the why for inviting connection. Her passage moved me as I invited context with this group.

Pinkola Estes writes,

In the dark times,
there is a tendency to veer toward fainting
over how much is wrong or untended in the world.

Do not focus on that.

There is a tendency too,
to fall into being weakened
by persevering on what is outside your reach,
by what cannot yet be.

Do not focus there….

We are needed, that is all we can know.

It is this last line that most moves me. We are needed, that is all we can know. Because, I’ve learned, if we start with that kindness and clarity, then our encounter together with the mystery grows much, much good.

Here’s to good beginnings.

Last week I drove from my home to a nearby trailhead. It was nearing sunset, which now happens at about 5:20. On this day, I wasn’t looking for the hike along the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. Rather, I wanted to be still, seeing out over the valley. I wanted to see Utah Lake. I wanted to see mountains beyond lake. I wanted to feel the bigness of sky as part of my working day.

There is joy for me in remembering that moment last week. There is joy for me in feeling such expansiveness and such beauty.

I’ve been thinking lately about how many times I forget, and then remember again, that joy is a reliable guide and path for finding way in human life. Even the littlest of things, when welcomed through a commitment to joy, seem to invoke an extraordinary from an ordinary. A cup of coffee that warms and awakens. The feel of my sweater against my skin that tingles a memory of the person who gave it to me. The sun bringing light through my window that dances life. The sky colored and patched as it is that brings a bit of breathlessness.

Yes, in all of life’s complexities, I seem to forget, and then remember, that joy is a reliable guide. Or perhaps a relieving guide, expanding the way, for those of us that dwell with the best of intentions in fears and worries that can so contract the way.

I love my friend Sarah, now 79 years old, who’s eyes have particular clarity when she proclaims “joy as radical act.” It is fierce commitment that I feel from her, a stand against so much that deceives in media streams of blame and shame, thundering with their noise.

I love my friend Toke, now in his 70s, who smiles from the inside out when he speaks of “gathering the warriors of joy.” Like it is for Sarah, Toke has grown the muscular and emotional memory that is what happens with years of practice to a very simple thing.

Yes, I’ve been thinking lately about how many times I forget, and then remember again, that joy is a reliable guide. Not so as to prevent the difficult dives of descent that mature us individually or collectively, but rather to throw us a life line when it is time to come up again to see and celebrate the openness of sky.

Here’s to the joy that guides us, any of us, even if just for a moment at 5:20, out over the valley.

It’s all Shawna today, on this frosted-over Monday in Utah where I live.

Because pretty much everything about this post “turns up my soul,” as Shawna says. The poetry. The images. The questions. The wondering. The framing. The angst. The simple, unexaggerated choices that contribute to a world, or even a person, with the smallest amount of harmony.

Here’s a sample from her post, an included piece by American Poet Adrienne Rich:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

—Adrienne Rich

I’m grateful for the people that remind me of things soulful. Which, could arguably be most things. I’m grateful for other creatures that remind me of similar. Like my son’s Terrier that I’m tending for a couple of days. I’m grateful for the land forms near me that also remind me of similar. The way that the Wasatch Mountains unlock my sometimes tightly held breath.

Now go read Shawna’s post. Take your tea with you. The frost might just melt.