Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday August 26    —  “the soul laughs . . . “

It’s not difficult to hear brutally contentious and contemptuous language flung about in the world’s various public forums.  At the moment, too, it’s hard to avoid other signs of distemper and anxiety, like this week’s stock market plunge and the uncompromising positions playing out in the US Congress.  Hard times incline people to choose words that trend gloomy, anxious, bitter, cynical, hostile.  In hard times it can be a stretch to imagine words that are patient, kind, playful, tender, mutual and brave.

Yesterday, freshman move-in day on campus stirred in me an alternative energy to Hard Times’ Blues.  It’s like the buildings on campus are waking up from the dreamy days of summer, when there was more time to do untended maintenance and long term planning, and sitting on the beach dreaming of a soft pace to life, dreaming of the loves of our lives.

Suddenly:    wham! . . . energy!  . . . curiosity!   . . .   playfulness!   Students everywhere!    But just because the freshmen students are mostly late teenagers does not still mean that they, too, must work at finding a balance between gloom and delight.

Today’s post from 14th century Europe takes all this energy and fear and ambiguity and hope head on.

Best to read it out loud, with pauses.   Maybe try dancing it.

Happy new year.

john sj

Today’s Post

“Indeed I say, the soul will bring forth Person
if God laughs to her and she laughs back to him.
To speak in parable, the Father laughs to the Son
and the Son laughs back to the Father;

And this laughter begets liking,
and liking begets joy, and joy begets love,
and love begets Person,
and Person begets the Holy Spirit.”

{attributed to Meister Eckhart}

Meister Eckhart, a German Dominican, theologian, philosopher and mystic, was known along with his writings for sermons addressed to ordinary people as well as to  women and men more more visibly engaged in Church life.   Eckhart died just twenty years before the peak of the European pandemic known as “The Black Death” which killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s people.  One might be inclined to see his intuition about the identity of God as embodied in laughter and affection as an antidote before the fact for the terrified and violent fears that convulsed  Europe in the mid-14th century  as the living worked to bury some 100 to 200 million of those who died around them.  A grim time badly in need of a rebirth for Europe’s sense of humor and  playfulness.

Eckhart von Hochheim O.P. (c. 1260 – c. 1328^[1]), commonly known as Meister Eckhart [ˈmaɪ̯stɐ ˈɛkʰaʀt], was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia in the Holy Roman Empire.

Monday August 24 –  “to face in the wind’s teeth”

            About 35 new freshmen arrived in the residence halls yesterday.    They came early to travel together to a retreat center outside the city for a 2 day retreat, a preparation of their souls and imaginations for the challenges that wait for them when classes begin.  All three campuses change when students bring their energy and hope and fears to a year long encounter with ways of thinking that will stretch them.   All of the rest of us who work here, faculty and staff and administrators, probably take a few deep breaths and square our shoulders.  “Here we go.”

The poet William Carlos Williams understood life-weariness and beauty’s restorative powers.    It’s very brief.   Try reading it aloud once or twice, with pauses.

Happy new year.

john sj

Today’s Post:

The Manoeuvre

I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they

turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.

William Carlos Williams

Monday August 17 – “All this tripping about” Catherine McAuley

Getting very busy around the university; lots of fast walking and flipping from thought to thought and task to task. Except today when President’s Convocation opens a space to tell each other stories from our summers, play and adventure, joy and sorrow. Catherine McAuley could have been writing about UDM as the new year cranks up in this memorable saying from her over-busy life leading the fledgling Sisters of Mercy. The Mercies were born in an Ireland made brutal by the Industrial Revolution of British textiles and the Enclosure Movement which evicted subsistence farmers from small plots to open broad spaces for sheep grazing, Dublin a city where wealth flourished in the center while its growing periphery packed in desperate poor driven off those small village plots. She named her fast walking and flipping from task to task times “tripping about.”

“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.”
Catherine McAuley (December, 1840)

Catherine McAuley 1778 – 1841
Foundress: Sisters of Mercy 1831

Lovely expression, “triping about.” Better to trip about, I guess, than to just trip. Better to hustle and scramble with a moment of breathing here and there in the day. Here’s a short poem to open a space for breathing on this first official work day of the academic year. I’ve posted it three times before; must like it, eh?

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post “Enough”

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.

David Whyte, Where Many Rivers Meet

Friday August 14  –you recommended kind words to be the best type of alms for Muslims to give.” 

Wednesday, August 12, 2015  –  mid-week in mid-August

Monday August 10  —  “Through you we eat sunlight”

Laura Grace Weldon: “Rutabaga”

Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Aug 08, 2015 12:00 am

You darken as my knife slices
blushing at what you become. 
I save your thick leaves
and purple skin
to feed the cows. 

A peasant guest at any meal
you agree to hide in fragrant stew
or gleam nakedly
in butter and chives. 

Though your seeds are tiny 
you grow with fierce will
grateful for poor soil and dry days,
heave up from the ground 
under sheltering stalks 
to sweeten with the frost.

Tonight we take you into our bodies
as if we do you a favor—
letting your molecules
become a higher being, 
one that knows music and art. 

But you share with us 
what makes you a rutabaga. 
Through you we eat sunlight,
taste the soil’s clamoring mysteries,
gain your seed’s perfect might.

“Rutabaga” by Laura Grace Weldon, from Tending (Aldrich Press, 2013). © Laura Grace Weldon. Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: “Rutabaga,” unknown medium, by Lara Call Gastinger. © Lara Call Gastinger, 2004.

Wednesday August 5  “right behind the grill where,  .  .  .  she would block no one’s view”

Someone this summer introduced me to the poet Irene Zimmerman, O.S.F. through her poem “Woman Un-Bent,” about a woman who could not stand up straight.  The un-named woman in Luke’s gospel reminds me of a student from 30 + years ago in a course I taught, “The Politics and Ethics of Engineering.”  There were 100 + students in the room. I made an issue of rewarding students who risked debating important matters, with one another and with me.  After the final class she came up with a sly look of triumph:  “I did it!  I got through the whole semester without you calling on me even once.”  She said she had perfected the art of easing her body slightly to hide behind other students without being too obvious about it.  It was, I agreed, quite an accomplishment.

I hope that this student, these several decades later, has learned not to hide.   That takes more than artful dodging, something more like courage and playful hope — like the un-named woman of Luke 13.  UDM freshmen will arrive for orientation week almost before we know it and this new season of mentoring will begin all over campus.

Best to read the poem out loud, several times, with pauses.  Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post – Woman Un-Bent

{based on  Luke 13:10-17}

That Sabbath day as always
she went to the synagogue
and took the place assigner her
right behind the grill where,
the elders had concurred,
she would block no one’s view,

she would lean her heavy head,
and (though this was not said)
she would give a good example
to those who stood behind her,

That day, intent as always
on the word (for eighteen years
she’d listened thus), she heard
Authority when Jesus spoke.

Though long stripped
of forwardness,
she came forward, nonetheless
when Jesus summoned her.

“Woman, you are free
of your infirmity,” he said.

The leader of the synagogue
worked himself into a sweat
as he tried to bend the Sabbath
and the woman back in place.

But she stood up straight and let
God’s glory touch her face.

Irene Zimmerman

Monday August 3  – Another beginning for a year of grace and work

The first post of 2015-16; lots of options.  Some friends have found summer times to notice poems that had been asking for attention.   Readers will encounter quite a few of them over the next months.

Today’s post took shape last evening while talking with a soul friend who is spending this week at home, in stillness, tasting her life in its present moment.  Something in our conversation reminded me of still another from Denise Levertov, a late work in Sands of the Well (1996).  Wikipedia tells me that “Oneiromancy (from the Greek όνειροϛ oneiros, dream, and μαντεία manteia, prophecy) is . . .  a system of . . .  interpretation that uses dreams to predict the future.”  To me, the definition is a little undercooked.  Contemplating a dream that asks for my attention is less about the future than about what vibrates beneath the surface of my life now.

Levertov approaches this dream with the assumption that the characters reveal dimensions of herself, the dreamer —  the blind man and she who led him, uninvited, through a vast museum filled with beauty turned into hazards.

It helps to read the poem out loud,  more than once, with pauses.   Blessings on the first week in August.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Uncertain Oneiromancy”
Denise Levertov

I spent the entire night leading a blind man
through an immense museum
so that (by internal bridges, or tunnels?
somehow!) he could avoid the streets,
the most dangerous avenues, all the swift
chaotic traffic . . .          I persuaded him
to allow my guidance, through to the other
distant doors, though once inside, labyrinthine corridors,
steps, jutting chests and chairs and stone arches
bewildered him as I named them at each swerve,
and were hard for me to manoeuver him
around and between.  As he could perceive nothing,
I too saw only the obstacles, the objects
with sharp corners; not one painting, not one carved
credenza or limestone martyr.     We did at last
emerge, however, into that part of the city
he had been headed for when I took over;
he raised his hat in farewell, and went on, uphill,
tapping his stick.  I stood looking after him,
watching as the street enfolded him, wondering
if he would make it, and after I woke, wondering still
what in me he was, and who
the I was that took the long short-cut with him
through room after room of beauty his blindness
hid from me as if it had never been.

Denise Levertov   Sands of the Well  (1996)

I know the poetry list is on vacation until August, & so am I, sitting in my tiny 1896 wood frame bedroom looking out over Sunset Lake (see the ps below).  However, I just read a piece in today’s Crain’s Detroit Business, a blog by  Cassie Mattheis, one of the c. 30,000 Lutheran high school students who came to town this week.   I love what she wrote about Detroit so I am passing it along.

http://cassiesrandommusings.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-letter-to-detroit-from-national-youth.html?m=1

john sj

p.s.   Yesterday (July 23)  I began my week’s vacation at the 1896 Jesuit non-winterized wood frame villa looking out on Sunset Lake from our 100 year plus c. 100 ft long veranda.  I nap, work out, read, nap some more, play Sheepshead (look it up) with long friends, swim in the c. 90 ft glacier lake, one of 22 lakes in The Chain O’Lakes.  We got here first, back in 1896, when the only other buildings on the lake were the Veterans Hospital for the wounded of the Grand Army of the Republic,  so we have c. 500 feet of shore line, a fine ridge c. 50 ft above the lake.  Like that.

Each morning except Sunday (closed, alas) I come down to the Library about 9:30 for c. 90 minutes and read my emails + some of the world’s best newspapers.

from here .  .  .

You see the lake, the little island on the right is “Esther Williams Island.”   She may have owned it back in the day.

The steep c. 50 ft bank on the east end of the mile long lake, brings prevailing westerlies up over the bank, following Bernouli’s principle, speeding up a bit and cooling the whole house most days.  Yes, we have toilets and running water and wireless.

Tuesday June 16  —  summer break

This May and early June seemed to dance right by.   Six weeks ago spring arrived, cooler than usual; this week’s mid-June rains, more dense and frequent than usual, bring some flooding and surging leaves and grass and flowers . . . lush early summer.  It is one of summer’s arts to notice beauty as the pace of life eases back.    During a week on Pine Ridge, a Lakota friend reminded me of the 25 year old who, fifty years ago, earned a nickname, “half fast.”  Lots of affection and amusement encapsulated there; a sign of welcome for me I didn’t recognize at first, while I scrambled to keep up with my job and, hardly noticing, lived into adulthood.  Nobody told me about the nickname until years later.  Some beauty, so St. Ignatius teaches, appears while remembering already-lived times and places, tasting them again and letting them teach you what you did not notice at the time.   Some beauty requires standing still and listening to beauty in the present moment.   Remembering and listening, summer is a good time for both.

I come to Pine Ridge each spring to listen to the Meadowlarks sing, and to renew graces of life in this place of beauty and laughter and grief.  The Rez slows my steps and my breathing.  And reminds me that the normal work year has ended and summer has begun.  There’s still plenty of work time but the pace is different.   For you too, I hope.

This is pretty autobiographical for a workday post.  I write today by way of announcing that the Work Day poetry list begins its summer break now, offering me time for gardening, baseball, nordic trac, visiting soul friends, and for reading some poetry.

See you the first Monday in August.  When the posts will begin for the coming year.

Have a blest summer.

p.s.       a recording of the song of the Western Meadowlark.

p.p.s.  Tagore may have written this prayer-poem with summer in mind; I don’t know for sure but it works for me.

Today’s Post –  Gitanjali # 5

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side,
The works that I have in hand
I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows
no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil
in a shoreless sea of toil.

Now is the time to sit quiet, face to face with thee
and to sing dedication of life
in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Rabindranath Tagore