Dialoguing with a Poem
Dear Readers, I am an apprentice to David Whyte’s Invitas: A Path to Conversational Leadership. I have followed his work for nearly 25 years now. I have learned to be in dialogue with any and everything , so too, with poems. In fact listening to David recite and riff on a poem puts one in a dialogue with their own sweet soul as well as their heart and mind.This morning I decided to do the dialogue on the page (blog) in honor of Valentine’s day and the celebration of love. Hearing this poem almost 25 years ago with Leslie Lanes, ushered in my first experience of an ecstatic moment. A moment where everything belonged, including me. Just as it was. Just as I was. If that is not Love I am not sure what Love is. To be able "to gather all our flaws in celebration” is to truly unconditionally love all of ourselves, to love how we were made. To love how the world is made. In honor of Valentine's Day, I offer you this:The link for the poem without commentary can be found here. I suggest you read it first and then come back to the blog and read my dialogue with it. As you read it, note your own inner conversation. There is no single way to dialogue with a poem. There are as many ways as there are people.https://www.davidwhyte.com/where-many-rivers-meet/
The Faces at Braga by David Whyte
Commentary by Nancy C. WondersIn monastery darkness by the light of one flashlightthe old shrine room waits in silence. While above the doorwe see the terrible figure,fierce eyes demanding. “Will you step through?” Will I step through the glories of youth and a well-functioning body and quick intelligence into this new territory? The territory that holds decline, disease and disappearance? Will I? Good God this is hard. My mind knows I cannot choose anything else. I do not want my face to be the face of an old woman chasing a time that is decades gone. If that is what is behind door #1, it is not for me. It is humiliating. It is shame. I had so much of that in my youth at the mouths of my mother and the nuns. No, I cannot go that way. I cannot return to those youthful days when I barely appreciated the beauty of my form, the brilliance of my quick mind nor the grace of a body I did not have to pay attention to because it ran just fine! That is gone. But door #2? What waits there? And the old monk leads us,bent back nudging blackness,prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lampsand bow, eyes blinking in thepungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation,a hundred faces carved above,eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light. That’s true! So many more wrinkled faces than mine. So many more who went before me could I see them as … Such love in solid wood!Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the pastthey have been neglected, but throughsmoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growingthrough the dust of eroded slopes,their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain. So I too must turn my face toward the mountain of age, even with my youthful spirit, my body is asking other things of me now. It demands me love it, touch it, stretch it, move it.Carved in devotiontheir eyes have softened through age …oh please let me soften…please do not let me harden…and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand. Delight? There could be delight in this paring back? This essentialism. BUT my life mantra has been DO NOT MAKE ME CHOOSE and it would seem this aging stuff is all about choosing. AND I have a lousy picker (chooser). It does not want to choose. It wants everything and mostly all at once. Sheesh…how can I possibly walk this road? I truly know virtually nothing about this way of being. If only our own faceswould allow the invisible carver’s handto bring the deep grain of love to the surface. Shoot, I knew it, what is going to have to go is my ability to skim along, to flit from flower to flower. instead I am going to have to pay deep attention to what I want above all else moment by moment. To choose and abide within my current limits.I do not have time to read the NY Times or the Atlantic Magazine from cover to cover. I can no longer follow all my lovely random curiosities. Well actually I can, but I must accept that this means something else will need to be sacrificed. It takes me more time to do what I did on almost everything. "If only my own face would allow the carver’s hand (aging) to bring the deep grain of love to the surface."If only we knewas the carver knew, how the flawsin the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, my flaw: my mind that does not live within limits…how?we would smile tooand not need faces immobilizedby fear and the weight of things undone. It is true, I worry about this more and more, “what am I forgetting?” The constant backlog of work or home responsibilities not tended to yet? When we fight with our failing. This was the first of David’s poems that I fell hard for. I had a transcendent moment and it began on this line. I (and others I might add) have fought with how I am made as long as I can remember. And…we ignore the entrance to the shrine itselfand wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fightour eyes our hooded with griefand our mouths are dry with pain. So much unnecessary suffering from this all my life…even still. But there is slowly emerging a small voice that talks back a bit to that fierce figure…there is not yet an Archbishop Desmond TuTu (Made for Goodness) residing within me that is FOR me on a consistent basis, but there is something that says: "Don't talk to my friend Nancy that way, it doesn't help her." And that is everything. If only we could give ourselvesto the blows of the carvers hands, I wonder, what is it I refuse to give myself over too? What if it is a kind of faith/trust in these very things I am struggling with?the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the seawhere voices meet, praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away my face of productivity, of “earning,” of “the need to be deserving,” of competence…maybe if I could finally trust that as I am made, I am enough for my life…I could indeed grow youngeruntil we, growing younger toward deathevery day, would gather all our flaws in celebration to merge with them perfectly,impossibly, wedded to our essence,full of silence from the carver’s hands. May it be so." src="blob://www.nancywonders.com/1b966a48-e3cd-4ff8-8fd1-890eda11c993" alt="image001.png" class="Apple-web-attachment Singleton" style="opacity: 1;">
"What will you do, God...?"
From the great poet Ranier Maria Rilke...“What will you do, God, when I die?I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)I am your drink (when I go bitter?)I, your garment; I, your craft.Without me what reason have you?..."
It is true, for each of us. We are a little piece of God. A particular expression of the Infinite and if we pull back on that expression, when we judge that expression, we judge Divine, we doubt. We think we know best, but the part of us that is doing that thinking is the protective system called the ego or strategic mind. This part of us is on the defense. But if, instead of listening to it, we turn the other direction, we do and be what we love, we wholeheartedly move toward what we love, then we give God full reign. AND we “feel” like God…big "G" not small. Feeling like a small "g" god, is grandiosity and hubris. It may feel good in the moment but it is what Jungians might call being caught in an "inflation".BUT if instead we know, we actually experience ourselves as a particular expression of the divine, then we want to kneel and kiss the ground. We do not feel certain or powerful. We feel awe. We feel wonder. We feel humility. We feel like,“really, really? I get to be and do this? Oh goodness," or "'Beam me up Scottie'. When what you love, loves you back!”What if that is the secret? The really big well kept secret? What if that is God? What you love? Don’t settle for god, it’s like trying to live on only cake, or only adrenalin. It ends up leaving you empty, literally and figuratively. The ultimate high that drops you to the ultimate low. BUT there is another path, literally that puts allows you to move to another level.Einstein said, “you can’t solve the problem at the level of thinking that created it” so instead of HIGH and then LOW and then HIGH…etc. how about something that is not in between, or in the middle of those two, but rather of an entirely different order? That order is akin to the wonder and joy we felt as children, or on Christmas morning, or when watching a doodle bug curl into itself, or the first time we realize we are riding our bike without training wheels. That feeling the Infinite's way of giving us a green light to keep going in that direction. The direction of what we love. What if it is really that simply? And those doubting and critical thoughts? Well, they never enlarge us. They never call us to become someone we can truly admire. Instead they call us to play it safe. To stay separate and to protect and cling to what we have. They call us to distrust not only others but ourselves and ultimately our destinies.If like Rilke, above I truly trust the little piece of stardust that is me...well, then paradoxically I quit judging myself and focusing on myself and whether or not I am good enough. What I do instead, is simply go out and express my little piece of heaven. Just like the old song said..."this little light of mine...I'm gonna let it shine..."[audio m4a="http://www.nancywonders.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/03-This-Little-Light-of-Mine.m4a"][/audio]
They're really saying I love you...
They’re really saying “I love you”…Everyone who has heard this song loves it. It is a song of wonder and joy. A song of seeing deeply to the heart of what is happening. Yes, on one level that person that just reached out and said “Hi” or “What’s up?” or “How’s it going?” is following a customary greeting practice when we meet someone. But what Louis Armstrong knew, is that this was only the surface of the interaction. At the heart of the greeting was “I love you”, a desire for connection and community; an example of caring and kindness.I can almost hear your smart minds going, “How can s/he know that?” Or maybe it is saying “That is a sweet idea but really? Come on.” Here is what I know for sure: we are all a mess of different feelings and motivations and intentions. We are everything. None of us purely good or bad. That’s what makes us so interesting … and impossible to predict! For me it doesn’t matter if the idea that someone is reaching out to me is accurate or not. When I choose to see a greeting as a request for contact and connection, my better angels take over, I become someone I admire. AND the world becomes a little brighter, softer and filled with wonder! Just like the song says.So, where can you shift your seeing and hearing just enough to hear "They're really saying "I love you"? Often it is only those smart minds of ours that cover over our experiences of wonder and joy with the mind's need for predictability and control. Predictability and control are fine for machines and schedules but they can hurt living things, like relationships. The choice is ours moment by moment. This new year, I apprentice myself to wonder and joy. To turn my dial to the frequency of ..."they're really saying, I love you" I so hope you will join me.
Earth's crammed with heaven
"Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God;" This could have been written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning about my son Zachary Robert Dearing who is celebrating his 23rd birthday today. Since his arrival he has grabbed for this earth as if it were indeed crammed with all things divine. At age 2 in the grocery store checkout, he would stretch away from me to watch the cashier, mesmerized. (He received a toy cash register for his next Christmas). At age 5, he pursued T-ball, basketball and any other sport with such focus and determination that he was typically the coach's example to the other five year olds. At early as 3 years old when he was giving his new birthday roller blades a trial, he fell. Then promptly picked himself up with "Good fall, Zac" and went back after it again.Zachary has treated this world as if it truly is sacred, as if it were indeed created by God, (whether in 7 days or via the big bang and evolution), matters not so much to him as loving planet earth well. Loving it though, not with a mother's or father's love, but as lover. He devours this world and is the most present person to each of his experiences I have ever known. He expects to fall in love with all aspects of earthly life and so he does and has; now for 23 years. You know with all the focus on saving this planet I wonder if we are really present to it? Do we truly experience it? Do we love it and more importantly our own precious lives as if they will never come again? Because each moment will never come again. Somehow Zachary, from the moment he arrived (he slept only 10 hours a day as an infant... until he was 14 years old) has intuitively known how to love this world and his life here as if he had only this one shot at it.I know something about loving one's life. I was raised by a man who truly loved his life. Zachary's grandfather, Robert Wonders loved all the days of his life. But more quietly than Zachary. Zachary's enthusiasm for the world can take one aback, especially in his younger days. He takes up space. He has big ideas and pursues them and most importantly he does not focus on outcome. He focuses on the hunt. He celebrates each achievement, mourns his losses but never for more than 24 hours, then on to the next pursuit. It is clear that victory is not the point. The point is life. The point is being "all in" his life. The point is being truly alive.What does this have to do with you and with me?Ask yourself,"Where am I concerned with outcome?" or"Whether something makes sense enough to give it a shot?" or"How will I look doing it?" or"What so and so might think of me?"or some other form of doubt that is distracting you from channeling your inner Zachary Robert Dearing and simply loving this "earth crammed with Heaven?" Happy Birthday, Tiger boy!
Down with Self-improvement
“God's admiration for us is infinitely greater than anything we can conjure up for Him.” St. Francis of AssisiFor centuries St. Francis has been one of the Catholic Church’s most popular saints. Do his words go straight to your heart? They certainly did mine. Maybe because this change and growth business I am in is a bit tricky. It can leave us over-focusing on flaws or imperfections, which actually from a larger perspective are essential to our true beauty and can well be a distraction from the meaning and purpose or our lives.If your philosophy of life doesn’t include a monotheistic God, you might rewrite the words to say “love”. For example: “Love’s admiration for us is infinitely greater than anything we can conjure up for Love.” But whatever word you use, I think this is a great and abiding truth. There is something much larger than our strategic or left brained understanding and perspective. That something makes things whole. It renders us whole. And whole includes our flaws, so maybe our beauty actually needs our flaws?In the David Whyte poem, Faces at Braga, the poet tells us:If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,we would smile, too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone.When we fight with our failing we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.When we fight with our failing, when we focus on self-improvement — on how to make things or ourselves better — we miss the entrance to the shrine itself the poet says. That means we miss the point of our lives. We are sacred. Our lives our sacred. This world is sacred.What happens if we trust that our flaws are essential to our brilliance and our goodness? I believe what happens is that we come alive, truly and wholeheartedly alive. And, in the face of such aliveness, “...even the gods speak of God.”