Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday, May 4  – from Santa Clara CA

A busy day here,  an Advisory Board Meeting for the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurs, a board I have come to love working with.  Helped by another great poem, passed along to me by a Detroit Mercy faculty friend.   You may like it as much as I have learned to while reading it a few times.   The poet invites attention to a powerful and subtle wisdom.  Ordinarily, we find it a greater stretch to be still within happiness than to be still within grief.

Back home tomorrow morning.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s post – “So Much Happiness”
Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Professor Nick Rombest emailed after reading today’s post:

“Thank you so much for posting this, John.

I had remembered hearing that Berrigan had taught here in the 1970s, and found this from the Library online database of our yearbooks, from 1975:

http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/tower/item.php?record_id=53&collectionCode=tower_tyb&start=40#control

And I’ve attached an image, just in case the link doesn’t work.

What a great poem.

All best,
Nick”

p.s. Here’s the one page article about Dan B in 1975, standing at a black board while teaching here.

Monday May 2 —  Dan Kerrigan sj – a prophet for his moment in time

It’s safe to say that no US Jesuit of my generation or the next ignored Dan Berrigan, sj.  He died on Saturday at 94, a prophet relentlessly called to name the violent evasions of the 2nd half of the 20th century, at home with prison, a source of fury to some in leadership positions — government officials and bishops come to mind this morning after his passing.  He wrote, and spoke, and created symbolic acts so vivid that — love them or hate them — you could not ignore their presence on the landscape.   One of my favorite thinkers of that era, the child psychologist Robert Coles, held extended secret conversations with Berrigan while Dan lived in hiding, hunted by the FBI.   Some  agents finally caught him.  While Dan was in prison, Coles edited the transcripts from their hidden talk and so the two of them co-authored a great and demanding book , The Geography of Faith: conversations between Daniel Berrigan, when underground, and Robert Coles  (1971)  The book revealed my youth to me, opening depths in my imagination that I was still learning to live with during my early 30ies.

Yesterday, thinking ahead to this morning’s post, I looked for one of his poems that got it about his fierce presence in the world: flint-hard words.  Pax Christi’s eulogy offered “Some.”  Like many poems that have graced this list, it will want you to read it several times,  out loud with pauses.

Have a blest week of deep spring time.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Some”

Some stood up once, and sat down.
Some walked a mile, and walked away.

Some stood up twice, then sat down.
“It’s too much,” they cried.
Some walked two miles, then walked away.
“I’ve had it,” they cried,

Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools,
they were taken for being taken in.

Some walked and walked and walked –
they walked the earth,
they walked the waters,
they walked the air.

“Why do you stand?” they were asked, and
“Why do you walk?”

“Because of the children,” they said, and
“Because of the heart, and
“Because of the bread,”

“Because the cause is
the heart’s beat, and
the children born, and
the risen bread.”

Some, by Daniel Berrigan

May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016

Wednesday, April 27  –  Mary Oliver and Pine Ridge, SD

A friend sent me a Mary Oliver writing, new to me.  It doesn’t quite read like a poem.  More like two small essays connected.  They remind me of a saying-set I wrote ten years ago or so imagining Lakota (Sioux) wisdom opening places in my imagination.  Living on Pine Ridge for much of my twenties and now for about a week late in May each year, I spend time with Lakota friends and visit 5 or 6 sacred places there:  meadowlarks, prairie grass and badlands, the profile of the Black Hills 60-70 miles to the west, thunder and lightning storms,  horses running free.    I’ll head out there this May 25 for 7 days.  A restorative time.

Mary Oliver’s two paragraphs began today’s post. Thanks to a soul friend who introduced me to this new piece of her writing.

Enjoy the day.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Foolishness?  No, it’s not.”   Mary Oliver

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count
the leaves on a single tree. To do this I
have to climb branch by branch and
write down the numbers in a little book.
So I suppose, from their point of view,
it¹s reasonable that my friends say: what
foolishness! She¹s got her head in the clouds
again.

But it¹s not. Of course I have to give up,
but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder
of it – the abundance of the leaves, the
quietness of the branches, the hopelessness
of my effort. And I am in that delicious
and important place, roaring with laughter,
full of earth-praise.

a wisdom-saying born on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation

“Time spent baking bread follows the pace of yeast”
“Motorcycling alone; I move as a  tiny person in a vast world”

“If I pause long enough, I  hear the sound of grass growing,  and trees, each at its own pace.”

Monday,  April 25   Rabindranath Tagore # 2   {Gitanjali}
“When Thou commandest me to sing  .  .  .  .

Finals week, fatigue, worries and self-doubt.  Finals week, courage, the joy of intellectual engagement.   Final exams reminded me of Tagore’s great poem which often reminds me of the courage at the heart of students encountering their university.

“We are a university, where people listen, take each other seriously.  Teachers listen to students.   When I taught full-time, some students told me one day that I was most scary when one of them would say something and I would turn around and write her/his words on the board, circle one word then turn around and ask: ‘Why did you choose that word?’”

Teachers do that:  listen for the voice, call it forth; expect respect for words.   Not only teachers though.  Universities call on students to listen to each other, to expect meaning from each other.     Administrative assistants,  staff in the registrar’s office,  nurse practitioners in the student wellness center,  campus security officers, coaches;  lots of listening.    On good days, each of us knows that.  And on hard days, maybe one of our peers will notice our distress and ask how we are doing, and listen to our story.

Rabindranath Tagore writes of God expecting a song from human beings, thrilling us by sacred attention.     {Posted before on February 5, 2016}  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post   Tagore # 2   Gitanjali  # 2

When Thou commandest me to sing
it seems that my heart would break with pride
and I look to Thy face
and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life
melts into one sweet harmony
and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird
on its flight across the sea.

I know Thou takest pleasure in my singing
I know that only as a singer I come before Thy presence
I touch by the edge of the far spreading wing of my song
Thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing
I forget myself
and call Thee friend
who art my lord.

Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore  –
রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর

May 1861  – August 1941

Wednesday  April 20

I’m traveling the rest of this week, to Denver for a Board of Trustees meeting at Regis University.   It makes a good opportunity for re-play two late April posts from last year, both guest edited.  Today features Detroit Mercy professor Mary-Catherine Harrison, who along with lots of creative entries into the learning process typical of a passionate faculty member, is the founder of Rx For Reading Detroit.  Her 2015 post recorded the installation, across the street from Detroit Mercy’s campus, of another  “Little Free Library” for children.

Emily Dickenson’s “There is no Frigate like a book” takes the instinct of Rx for Reading Detroit back c. 150 years.  The photos of children and college student tutors are more recent and completely beautiful.  Check the Rx facebook site for up to date pics.

Another guest editor Friday.  Back home next Monday.

john sj

Monday, April 18   —  leaves, & flowers waking up
Must be spring.  I checked Weather.com’s allergy tracker this morning, a respiratory seasonal ritual for me and for many others.  Worth it, though,  Today’s dawn might be the seventh glorious morning in a row.  Campus trees and flowers begin to show their stuff.  Adults and children skip and laugh.    Yesterday, two girls (8 years old?) played among older people come to watch Detroit Mercy’s women’s softball team play Green Bay’s.  The girls, one African American, one Caucasian, ran and laughed with reckless abandon and filled our urban space with . . .  with Spring.

A year ago on a similar morning the season’s sheer beauty led me to Gerard Manley Hopkins, s.j.   “The Windhover’s beauty of word and sound  match these days.  Even if it takes two or three readings to adapt your ear to his word play, it’s worth it.   Hopkins is  [in]famous for the packed meaning of his vocabulary.    His life-long friend Robert Bridges often ground his aesthetic teeth at what seemed to him to be GMH’s unnecessary complexity.   On November 6, 1887, Hopkins wrote Bridges, attempting to explain the density of his language.  Try reading GMH’s explanation out loud.   Did GMH tease his frustrated Poet Laureate friend by creating a single sentence that never seems to run out of breath?

“Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite thought on a subtle and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection in the end,  something must be sacrificed, with so trying a task, in the process, and this may be the being at once, nay perhaps even the being without explanation at all, intelligible.”

Have a blest week,

john sj

Today’s Post:   “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!  then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle!  And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it:  shéer plốd makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, a my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889
Posted on May 13, 2015

Friday, April 15 “These things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world.
They were there before you looked;
they will be there after you go.
None of it depends on you.”

I came across this short essay in the NY Times yesterday (posted in the Times last Sunday).   This marks a rare occasion for the Work Day/Hard Time poetry list.  No poem.  Instead, another great literary form, the short contemplative essay.   Sam Anderson’s essay, which I’ve read slowly twice so far, makes me cry in its final paragraph.  Settle in and let his English prose sing to you.

I think of this as a wisdom read to inch us readers into what looks to be a spectacular spring weekend in Southeast Michigan,  a great time to look out the window, breathe in and out, and be glad for one’s eyes and lungs as the season changes around us with drop-dead beauty.

Have a great weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post   “Looking Out the Window”

“But this is the power of windows: They contradict your easy assumptions.”

Photo

The view from the writer’s office in upstate New York. Credit Noah Kalina for The New York Times

Our windows keep shrinking. Our vision narrows and narrows. Mine roams, for much of each day, in a space roughly the size of a playing card: the rectangle of my phone’s screen. The view through that piece of glass is not out onto the actual world but inward, down a digital depth over which I exercise near-­dictatorial control. If I want to see a bird on my phone, I see a bird. If I want to see a manatee captioned by a motivational slogan, I see that. This means, of course, that my phone is not really a window at all. A real window is something that frames our fundamental lack of control.

Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool: a patch of the world, arbitrarily framed, from which we are physically isolated. The only thing you can do is look. You have no influence over what you will see. Your brain is forced to make drama out of whatever happens to appear. Boring things become strange. A blob of mist balances on top of a mountain; leafless trees contort themselves in slow-­motion interpretive dance; heavy raindrops make the puddles boil. These things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world. They were there before you looked; they will be there after you go. None of it depends on you.

Sometimes what you see can be astonishing. One day, I was taking a nap in the red chair in my office when I woke up to the sound of a car crash. I sat up and looked, immediately, out my window. Across the street, in a parking lot, a car had just backed into a chain-link fence. The car must have been moving fast, because it was in bad shape: Its hood had popped up, its windshield wipers were snapping back and forth under a perfectly clear sky and part of its bumper was sitting on the ground. The fence was mangled, bent out in exactly the shape of the car’s back end.

I couldn’t believe I was seeing this, on an otherwise ordinary weekday morning, out of my office window. I watched the driver get out of the car. He was stocky with a shaved head; he wore cargo shorts and a flannel shirt unbuttoned to expose his chest hair. I disliked him immediately. After a few seconds of assessing the damage, he walked around the car and opened the passenger door — from which a very small child scrambled out. A toddler in the front seat! My disdain for this man increased exponentially.

As the child ran around the parking lot, the man tried to repair the damage he caused. He attempted to tug the ruined fence back into place, but it wouldn’t move. He tried to shove the fallen piece of bumper back onto his car, but that only made the rest of his bumper fall off too.

Average number of windows in an American home: 22
Children injured by window falls per year in the U.S.: 15,000
Bird deaths caused by windows per year in the U.S. (conservative estimate): 365 million
Bird deaths caused by windows per year in the U.S. (liberal estimate): 988 million

I sat in my red chair, looking out my window, silently cheering.

The man tried, a little harder, to fix the fence. He grabbed its vertical support pole, which was wickedly bent, and pulled against it with his full weight. The pole suddenly broke, and the man fell hard onto the blacktop. The entire fence fell on top of him, and one of his sandals flew off and landed 10 feet away on the sidewalk.

I think I laughed out loud. This was a slapstick masterpiece. It was brightening my whole day, the failure of this terrible man. He climbed out from under the collapsed fence and limped back to the apartment building above the lot, rubbing his elbow.

That, I thought, would be the end of it. The man — that villainous man — was going to leave all the chaos behind for someone else to clean up. It was only the middle of the morning, but I imagined him sprawled out on his sofa with a case of beer, eating horrible snacks, while his child played with fire and broken glass and battery acid near a malfunctioning electrical socket.

But this is the power of windows: They contradict your easy assumptions. They scribble over your mental cartoons with the heavy red pen of reality. The man emerged a few minutes later with some tools. He got to work immediately, detaching one of the fence’s bent support bars and hammering it straight on the asphalt. For the next hour, I watched out my window as he doggedly fixed the fence, straightening and reattaching its support bars, scrupulously unbending its bent chain-link. He even improved it. He stole a support bar from another fence farther back in the parking lot and added it to this one. Now the fence would be extra secure, stronger than before, impervious to damage.

This odious man was actually a hero. I was the lazy one, with my knee-jerk judgments and distant clichés, my superiority from three stories up. My window had taken a break, that day, from its usual programming — crows and squirrels roaming over a dead tree, cars piling up at a stoplight — to put on a little passion play for me, an allegory about the nobility of the human spirit. My ugly assumptions, I realized, were all about myself. I would never have fixed that fence; I would have panicked and run away. My window had woken me up from a nap to teach me a lesson in humility.

The incident changed my entire day. I went back to my shallow screens with new determination. Years later, I still look out my window at that fence almost every day. It still looks brand new. It makes me wonder what else that man has improved, and how I can make myself more like him.

Letter of Recommendation  By  SAM ANDERSON APRIL 7, 2016  Continue reading the main story

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-looking-out-the-window.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

Wednesday April 13  —   “We are reconciled, I think,  .  .  .  .  To too much.”   Mary Oliver

I posted this piece from Crain’s last year, April 29.  It entrances me, imagining c. 10 million walleye migrating each year from Lake Erie into the Detroit River to spawn. When I walk the city’s sparkling River Walk, the mile wide river continually refreshes my spirits, as if its beauty in my ears and eyes were its only purpose.  River refreshment offers many people, on many days, an anointing.  That same river hosts fast-boat with their rooster tail turns, water sports, party boats and bigger slower boats packing huge amounts of freight — the work and play and rest of human beings.

These Spring days, I am indebted to last April’s reminder from Crain’s that the river is home to much more life than us human beings.  Thinking all this I couldn’t resist running last April 29’s post again.   Mary Oliver’s “The Lark” provided counterpoint to the walleye last spring.  It makes a fine read this year too.

Have a blest Wednesday, the middle of the work week near the middle of April.

john sj

Monday, April 11 — “begin to pray from where you are”   

The lives of Catherine McAuley, RSM and Ignatius Loyola, SJ, Detroit Mercy’s two foundational spirits, offer similar advice about beginnings:  try to notice where I am and begin from there.  “Where am I?” can make a subtle and revolutionary question.  When I am frightened, I begin with that fear; when I am tender and accessible, begin there.  Same with my sadness, my anger, my joy.

Here’s a favorite from Ignatius in The Spiritual Exercises; notice the place talk:  “I will remain quietly meditating upon the point in which I found what I desire, without any eagerness to go on until I have been satisfied.” (Sp. Ex. #76)   Catherine, an exceptional traveler, writes in 1840:    “Amidst all this tripping about:  our hearts can always be in the same place centered in God, for whom alone we go forward, or stay back.”    Place matters.  When I notice where I am the place awakens me.

David Whyte has made regular appearances on this list.  Here’s one about beginnings and place that a friend pointed out this past weekend.  It makes a good start to the new week for me.  For you too, I hope.

Blessings on these days of spring, daffodils and baseball.

john sj

Today’s Post —  “START CLOSE IN“