Chop wood, Carry water

Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.  

According to a Buddhist saying often attributed to Wu Li, the little rituals that serve to sustain us physically also nourish our spirit. It’s all about how you choose to enact these details, of course. You can choose to do them mindfully, as a means to be present, or you can back peddle your way through them rueing the fact you were not born to nobility. I have tried both methods. I find the former is more satisfying but I frequently forget this, relishing the fire of the second choice. The first nourishes but the second savages. It is briefly satisfying in the way that destroying something can be briefly gratifying: ripping up the fourteenth draft of a story that continues to have no resolution, writing another poem about killing off an abusive ex-boyfriend, losing patience with a partner and saying the first thing that comes to mind.

I named this site Turning into the Slide to remember not to resist necessary changes. Not only is resistance futile, it creates more suffering. Again, I write this with an extensive knowledge of spectacular spin outs and mind numbing crashes. Just a few moments have made me wiser, when I have chosen, whether through grace or fatigue, to do what seems contrary to self preservation at the moment: to observe the approach and presence of turbulence and let it pass by.

I took Latin in college and one of my favorite sayings became “Laborare est Orare,” to work is to pray. The discipline that it took for me to do well with the study of language was unlike many of my other school experiences. I had to work at it in a way that I never had to before. I learned to honor it for this reason. The recitation of conjugations and phrases was meditative, a newly discovered intimacy with the moment, a kind of prayer.

The daily practice of learning Latin gave me a glimpse into how the routine and ordinary can become a means of being more fully present, my means of chopping wood, carrying water.

I have never made resolutions for the new year…this year I would like to pay attention to doing the things that I feel nourish my life: to do more laughing, reading, writing, playing, seeing friends and family, walking, acting up for my beliefs, listening….to try to be more patient, be more present in the little rituals that sustain.

What can you give?

The post-Christmas litany: What did you get? makes it clear that the message of the season is often among that which wasn’t received. This morning, I discovered the following quote by Leo Tolstoy at the reflective blog of the coffee messiah: 

Everyone thinks of changing the world,

but no one thinks of changing himself.  

My hope for the coming year is that we all find a way to become more focused on giving. A wise banjo player recently referred to the aspiration to become an instrument of peace which reminded me of the poem by the Sufi poet, Hafiz: 

I am

the space in a flute

that the Guest’s breath

moves through.

Listen to this music. 

Let your aspirations for a better world guide you in your actions this year.
 

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.      Gandhi

Wage Peace

Poets Against the War, a volunteer organization, was started in 2003 by Sam Hamill and fifty other poets to collect poems that spoke out against the war in Iraq. The plan was to send the poems to the White House. Within days, 1,500 poets responded.

Now, Poets Against the War has a website which includes over 20,000 poems from poets all over the world.

Its mission is to continue “the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.”

One of my favorite poems, Wage Peace by Judyth Hill, can be found at this site. It begins,

*

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion
and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds,
clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages…

* 

 *

The rest of the poem can be found at this link.

*

A message forged by silence

     

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:   

they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys,

as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts

of their mothers.  But we, who do need such great mysteries,

we for whom grief is so often the source

of our spirit’s growth: could we exist without them?

Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,

the daring first notes of song pierced through

the barren numbness; and then in the startled space

which a youth as lovely as a god had suddenly left forever,

the Void felt for the first time that harmony

which now enraptures and comforts us.

*

*

*

Title and body:

excerpts from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, The First Elegy

Remembering John Lennon

October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980 

* 

Even though it was 27 years ago, a fact that is nearly inconceivable to me, I still get tears in my eyes when I hear Happy Xmas (War is Over), the song that was played repeatedly that winter and in the years that followed as a kind of memorial. I remember  gathering with a group of friends at school, how stunned we were that anyone would want to hurt John Lennon let alone kill him, how we stood there waiting for an unknown sign to clarify the loss. Then, we scattered home to listen to his music and observe a moment of silence.  

 

Today, when I heard the song Imagine, I remembered that day again. I am no longer in touch with most of the friends I knew then, we wandered off on our separate paths, but there is some constancy that music offers, some continuance through time that allows one to reconnect with the spirit of the past that cannot be taken away.

 

One of the most tragic parallels between his time and ours is the persistence of horrific and unbearably brutal wars. The most powerful tribute to his memory is to continue to speak out against these atrocities and get United for Peace and Justice.

War is Over….if you want it