micki: (Default)
A few poems from A Thousand Mornings:

Poem of the one world
This morning
The beautiful white heron
Was floating along above the water
And then into the sky of this
The one world
We all belong to
Where everything's
sooner or later
is part of everything else
Which thought made me feel
For a little while
quite beautiful myself.


If I were
There are lots of ways to dance
and to spin, sometimes it just starts my
feet first then my entire body, I am
spinning no one can see it but it is
happening. I am so glad to be alive,
I am so glad to be loving and loved.
Even if I were close to the finish,
even if I were at my final breath, I
would be here to take a stand, bereft
of such astonishments, but for them.

If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.



I happened to be standing


I don't know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half asleep in the sun?
Do the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
Along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self attendance. A condition I can't really
Call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe it's their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm.
I don't know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe
Or whatever you don't. That's your business.
but I thought, of the wren singing, what could this be if it isn't a prayer
So I just listened, my pen in the air.
micki: (Default)
It's the weekend again, so finishing up Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons . The poems move through the year, and I was in the winter section, so I suppose it's not surprising that they often focus on loss, death, and the indifference of nature. For example, on called "Beaver Moon--The Suicide of a friend" ends with "That night, you turn in your bed/to watch the moon rise, and once more/see what a small coin it is/against the darkness, and how everything else/is a mystery, and you know/nothing at all except/the moonlight is beautiful--/white rivers running together/along the bare boughs of trees--and somewhere, for someone, life/is becoming moment by moment/unbearable."

A similar one, called Neutralities, talks about a friend seriously injured in an accident on the icy road, and "By morning a sunrise bright as blood. I wake/hoping for my friend's life, go out/to Blackwater Woods to see what daylight makes of it,/ and find the ice hardened, children skating,/the small gospels of the fields--/dry stalks of goldenrod, tansy--whispering/la la la."

Probably the one that hit the hardest for me was "For Eleanor," since my friend Sharon just died on Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

For Eleanor

December, and still no snow in sight.
Only this slowly lashing rain
Dashing down the last acorns in the oak tress
Over our heads, here in Massachusetts.
In Ohio, where we both were born
They have taken you back to the hospital
Where, because of things like injections
And life sustaining-fluids, and your husband
At whose urging you eat a little food
Painfully, twice a day
You will probably last until Christmas.

Miles away, under the stinging rain,
In my youth, in my vulgar good health,
I am thinking of you. I am thinking:
Enough is enough. You have a tender face.
I am your godchild and there are no gods.

Probably, sooner or later, it will snow.
The white flakes will fly over the hillsides
Smoothing out everything, settling
Calm as a sheet over a tired body.
Probably, sooner or later, you will die,
And men will find the cure for cancer.
Meanwhile, you breathe on toward Christmas--
the birthday, they say, of charity and hope.

Still, after all of the death and despair and indifferent world, the book ends with a beautiful poem about the hope of spring:


Worm Moon

In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

2
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

3
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

4
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

5
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

6
and probably
everything
is possible.


I think I especially love the fourth stanza: Born of clay,/how shall a man be holy;/born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;/born of the seasons,/how shall a man live forever? That's the fundamental paradox of life, I think.
micki: (Default)
So the major themes in the poems I read today were humans transforming because of nature, the general transforming power of nature (especially death to life/life to death), and what happens after death. I like a lot of these so I'm including them in their entirety:

Harvest Moon--The Mockingbird Sings in the Night

Harvest Moon - The Mockingbird Sings in the Night - Mary Oliver

No sky could hold
so much light -
and here comes the brimming,
the flooding and streaming
out of the clouds
and into the leaves,
glazing the creeks,
the smallest ditches!
And so many stars!
The sky seems stretched
like an old black cloth;
behind it, all
the celestial fire
we ever dreamed of!
And the moon steps lower,
quietly changing
her luminous masks, brushing
everything as she passes
with her slow hands
and soft lips -
clusters of dark grapes,
apples swinging like lost planets,
melons cool and heavy as bodies -
and the mockingbird wakes
in his hidden castle;
out of the silver tangle
of thorns and leaves
he flutters and tumbles,
spilling long
ribbons of music
over forest and river,
copse and cloud -
all heaven and all earth -
wherever the white moon
fancies her small wild prince -
field after field after field.

She has several poems about how nature transforms you. In Sturgeon Moon: The Death of Meriwether Lewis, she talks about Lewis (from Lewis and Clark_ and how "During the years/Jefferson thought the whole expedition/had vanished, he must have been feeling/the sharp, the fatal exchange/of his life as it flowed forth into/the world around him--as he became/the rivers, the plains full of drak/beasts browsing peacefully/by the thousands. The trees/felt his hand upon then and tried to let/their secret of longevity sift forth/ sprinkinling it into his eyes. He returned/from that wild green America,/but hardly what he'd been--more river water/in his veins than blood, more leaves/than flesh, more earth/than ego."

In one of them, the transformation possible seems also to be perhaps talking about suicide? Which I suppose fits with the theme of death in transformation in the book as a whole:

At Blackwater Pond:
You know how it feels,
wanting to walk into
the rain and disappear —
wanting to feel your life
brighten and grow weightless
as a leaf in the fall.
And sometimes, for a moment,
you feel it beginning — the sense
of escape sharp as a knife-blade
hangs over the dark field
of your body, and your soul
waits just under the skin
to leap away over the water.
But the blade,
at the last minute, hesitates
and does not fall,
and the body does not open,
and you are what you are —
trapped, heavy and visible
under the rain, only your vision
delicate as old leaves skimming
over the mounds of seasons,
the limits of everything,
the few shaped bones of time.


Another poem about bones, and how nature transforms things, life to death and death to life, is "Bone Poem:"

The litter under the tree
Where the owl eats -shrapnel

Of rat bones, gull debris -
Sinks into the wet leaves

Where time stirs with her slow spoon,
Where we becomes singular, and a quickening

From light-years away
Saves and maintains. O holy

Protein, o hallowed lime,
O precious clay!

Tossed under the tree
The cracked bones

Of the owl's most recent feast
Lean like shipwreck, starting

The long fall back to the center -
The seepage, the flowing,

The equity: sooner or later
In the shimmering leaves

The rat will learn to fly, the owl
Will be devoured.
************
I wonder if the focus on death and transformation is because of her father's death? There is a poem about him, too:

Poem for My Father's Ghost

Now is my father

A traveler, like all the bold men
He talked of, endlessly
And with boundless admiration,
over the supper table,
Or gazing up from his white pillow—
Book on his lap, always, until
Even that grew too heavy to hold.

Now is my father free of all binding fevers.
Now is my father
Traveling where there is no road.

Finally, he could not lift a hand
To cover his eyes.
Now he climbs to the eye of the river,
He strides through the Dakotas,
He disappears into the mountains. And though he looks
Cold and hungry as any man
At the end of a questing season,

He is one of them now:
He cannot be stopped.

Now is my father
Walking the wind,
Sniffing the deep Pacific
That begins at the end of the world.

Vanished from us utterly,
Now is my father circling the deepest forest—
Then turning in to the last red campfire burning
In the final hills,

Where chieftains, warriors and heroes
Rise and make him welcome,
Recognizing, under the shambles of his body,
A brother who has walked his thousand miles.
micki: (Default)
It is the weekend, so a break from Buddhism. I was trying to decide whether to read Mary Oliver or Annie Dillard this morning--I wanted to select one of them because I have been observing spring arriving in my morning walks to campus, and thinking about the duality of nature. The sheer profligacy of spring--all the flowering trees, blooming abundantly and showering the world with rains of petals sometimes makes me think of divine providence, of the sense of nature caring for and supporting us, being a source we can always return to. And yet on an evolutionary level all these strategies are really trees competing with each other, struggling for survival, and thoughts of evolution really do challenge anyone's concept of benevolent providence or gentle Mother Nature. Annie Dillard is good for thinking through these issues, but this morning I felt more in a poetic mood, so I went for Oliver instead.

I read a bunch of poems from Twelve Moons , but I'm not sure I found relief from the destructive aspects of nature! To be sure, several of them conveyed one of her perennial themes, that true sacredness is found in nature, such as "The Fawn": Sunday morning, and mellow as precious metal/the church bells rang,but I went/to the woods instead./A fawn, too new/for fear, rose from the grass/and stood with its spots blazing, and knowing no way but words,/no trick but music/I sang to him. /He listened./His small hooves struck the grass./Oh what is holiness?"

But quite a lot of them directly addressed death, like the "The Lamb," which is all about a lamb eating poison in the fields, or "The Black Snake," which is all about finding a black snake run over by a truck. Even several of the poems about encounters with nature seem to be metaphors for death, such as
"Sleeping in the Forest:"

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichen and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects and the birds
who do their work in darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.


I did really like the ending of "The Snake:" "I leave him under the leaves/and drive on, thinking/about death: its suddenness,/its terrible weight,/ its certain coming. Yet under/ reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones/have always preferred./It is the story of endless good fortune/It says to oblivion: not me!/It is the light at the center of every cell./It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward/happily all spring through the green leaves before/he came to the road."
micki: (Default)
Finishing Mary Oliver's Winter Hours, which seems appropriate since it is quite cold this morning. I always celebrate the cold in Chico; when spring warms too soon I fear the fire season and the endless days when I am trapped indoors by plus 110 heat. Though since losing so much weight I get colder easier and enjoy the winter walks somewhat less--I can of course layer up, but if the base layer is too warm I get more hot flashes in the heated indoors of work. The joys of changing bodies! I should appreciate a body that can change, I guess.

The chapters I read today were a mix of poems, reflections on the natural world, and reflections on the goals of her poetry. Sometimes her writing reminds me of Annie Dillard, another keen observer of the beauties and cruelties of the natural world. She has a chapter on a spider in her vacation house, laying eggs and eating a cricket, that to me was a call back to the chapter earlier in the book that made me ponder a theology of a Creator who set it up so beings eat other beings. That chapter ended with the sort of ethical dilemma I often experience: she didn't want to hurt the spider, but she knew the housecleaners would, so she contemplated relocating it. In the end she decided to leave it alone and tell the housecleaners not to clean the staircase--a temporary solution until the next residents arrived. But that is everything we do in life, is it not--a temporary aid until change happens. It makes actions both easier and harder to think that. We cannot anticipate all the consequences of what we do since the future is ever uncertain.

I want to pull out some of my favorite passages about her poetic process. "Morning, for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing, too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us." That is a fascinating metaphor for the self/the mind. If reason is an island, are the surrounding waters instincts? Emotions? Our connection to the natural?

"In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one's ear, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. Blake spoke of taking dictation. I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant. Every poet knows it. One learns the craft and then casts off. One hope for gifts. One hopes for direction. It is both physical and spooky. It is intimate, and inapprehensible. Perhaps it is for this reason that the act of first-writing, for me, involves nothing more complicated than paper and pencil. The abilities of a typewriter or computer would not help in this act of slow and deep listening."

This is such a fascinating description of the act of creation--deep listening that leads to something emerging from some aspect of the self that is part of a larger whole. It makes me think of the conversation about divine doubles we had in my reading group, where Vervaeke was trying to think of a "transjective" self, something that mediated between objective and subjective, participating in both. Or that there is something between the ordinarily perceived self and Atman. Not annihilating the small s self but listening to the capital S self to create, perhaps. The act of creation comes from listening the the Self, the world, the broader community, in a radical way.

"I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pales slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate the rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest....When I write about nature directly...I mean landscapes in which we are reinforced in our sense of the world as mustery, a mystery that entails other privileges besides our own, and also, therefore, a hierarchy of right and wrong behaviors pertaining to that mystery, diminishing or defending it."
micki: (Default)
Back to Mary Oliver, since it is once again the weekend. Today's chapters were on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman, both in their own ways mystical/spiritual poets, both who famously reflected on nature as a source of the divine. Since Mary Oliver is the poet who for me embodies finding the spiritual in nature, it is interesting to see her writing about poets who served that function for her.

I had no idea that Hopkins had destroyed all the poetry he wrote before he became a Jesuit, and only took up writing again when a bishop felt that some nuns who died in a tragic shipwreck should be remembered. That seems so reflective of a specific type of ascetic Catholicism, though, and Oliver points out that Hopkins was a Jesuit, who did (especially at the time) have very severe spiritual disciplines (more rigor, more prayer, more work, more abstinence) which "wore him to the bone" and she even implies led to his early death. In his Jesuit poetry, she points to different phases--the lyrical poems that we all know and love, and a darker period.

Reading about Whitman is an interesting contrast. In many ways they were very, very different, both in the forms of their poetry (I have never made it through Song of Myself, so I didn't realize it was 62 pages long!), and in their attitudes about self-discipline v. self-expression ("I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass" has nothing of the Jesuit discipline about it). But as Oliver points out, Whitman fits William James' definition of a mystic: "Whether WHitman had an actual mystical experience or not, his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud (62)." Later she says "Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of Grass advocates: the healthy, heavy seeded life of the soul."

I don't know enough Whitman to say whether or not that is true, but I do think that's true for Oliver's work: she sees spirituality in the erotic, the carnal, the life-affirming materiality of the world that bursts out with joy.
micki: (Default)
The two chapters I read in Mary Oliver this morning were on Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Frost. The Poe chapter was fairly heartbreaking; I had no idea he had lost so many people so young in his life, and as Oliver points out, that does explain a lot of his sense that the universe has an "imperial indifference" towards individual people's fate.

This is what struck me from the chapter: "For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe's narrators--beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace), we come to accept life's brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us--the part of us that adores another person--ah! that is another matter. In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen."

This points to the existential terror I'm feeling about Mom and Dad, as they get sicker and more frail. There's nothing I can do but pray, which seems like nothing, really. Every time I hang up the phone with them I have an awareness that it could be the last time. She's right that in certain ways it's so much easier to accept our own mortality than that of those we love.

She talks less about Frost's life (perhaps it just wasn't as traumatic/interesting), but has this interesting observation about his poetry: "In the lyrical poems of Robert Frost there is almost always something wrong, a dissatisfaction or distress. The poet attempts an explanation and a correction. He is not successful. But he has, often in metaphoric language, named whatever it is that disquiets him. At the same time, in the same passages, the poem is so pleasant--so very pleasant--to read or to hear. In fact, we are hearing two different messages: everything is all right, say the meter and the rhyme; everything is not all right, say the words.

That's a really fascinating observation! It makes me want to experiment with poetry that rhymes or has a meter, but that is so much more work than free form poetry, so we'll see.

It's interesting to think of the poetry that sticks with a person. We've returned to the era (that probably was the main way people learned poetry prior to the 1800s) where the most powerful poetry is songs, but there are still bits from poets that do cling to me. Every time I'm walking in late afternoon I think of Dickinson: "There's a certain slant of light, winter afternoons, that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes." Frost tends to crop up whenever I'm walking in woods (or in Chico, in Bidwell park): "Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow."

Ok, here's my attempt at poetry for today:


Preparing to Depart

I'm ironing a shirt for Sean,
as we make ready to depart
for Lizzie's wedding in an hour
assuming that the car will start.

The shoes are shined, the suitcoat pressed,
the fancy purses are brought out
I am of course already dressed,
But is there time? Of that I doubt

It's frigid cold outside today
And Mom wears boots so not to slip
We really should be on our way
I'm trying not to lose my grip.

Anxiety, my constant friend
when travelling with family
Of course we'll get there in the end
but maybe just not timely

I think of all the days like now
when we made ready to depart
the festive dressing, gatherings,
that I hold closely to my heart

How many more? If I but could
enjoy the chaos here somehow;
Life's fleeting and I know I should
Just stay here in the moment now.


Wow, that was hard. I know some of the rhymes are a little iffy, but I think with metrical poetry the meter has to trump rhyme, if necessary. It's interesting how the constraints of the meter affected the meaning I was going for, since I really wanted this to be more melancholy on reflecting on all the gatherings we've gotten ready for in that house, and that got compressed in less than a line, and instead we get the anxiety v. be here now theme. It's not bad, just not my initial goal. Maybe I'll come back and add a stanza someday.
micki: (Default)
It is the weekend, so a break from Chodron to read Mary Oliver. This section of the book Winter Hours is fewer essays but more poems. The one essay introduces a poem about swans and talks about some of the principles she uses in her poetry, which include having a sincere energy, having a spiritual purpose, containing some moment of earthly delight, and asking a question that the reader must answer. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to her poetry; the combination of the earthly and the spiritual really draws me in.

I hadn't read any of the poems in this section before, and I'm not going to type them all out here, but there were a couple of lines I loved. In "The Swan," there is this line: "Said Mrs. Blake of the poet, "I miss my husband's company. He is so often in paradise. Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down it flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive the world". Poor Mrs. Blake, whose husband was occupied with contemplation of the beauties of the universe! An early example of a football widow, only with poetry. It does make me wonder if Oliver herself was married.

It also points to the idea that poetry is ultimately a way of seeing. I do love the corporeality of Oliver's spirituality; I think that's what makes her accessible, since many of use experience joy in the beauties of nature, and in a way she's just highlighting that.

The other lines I loved in this section were from "Moss:" "Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory but something far older--a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory. Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything. To perceive of the earth as round needed something else--standing up!--that hadn't yet happened....[W]hen I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly. sweet cousin."

I recently saw something on tumblr talking about how we share 25% of our DNA with trees, so we are genetically related to plants. I do love that idea of our fellowship with plants and animals.

Reading her process for writing poetry made me think I should stretch my own creative muscles a little.

Seeking the light:

Daybreak for me began, this sabbath day, with a phone call reminder to order my CPAP supplies,
then the little steel box that connects me to the world gave me a beautiful image:
the Northern Lights in Iceland.
Solar Storms brought the Northern lights here,
or so they said,
but only the camera's eye, not mine,
could see them.
Better to see on my little screen, where the line between illusions and reality is no longer clear--
is this a hallucination dreamed by a computer, or a hallucination dreamed by me?

Today my friend starts out on a journey to Yellowknife, Canada
to see the Northern Lights in person.
She's been to Iceland and eaten the rotting shark
but the lights eluded her then.
Perhaps she will find them now.

Is seeking the experience of the real worthwhile?
micki: (Default)
Still a weekend, so still reading Mary Oliver. I will probably return to Pema Chodron tomorrow.

This chapter of Winter Hours started out with Oliver talking about how she is mostly vegetarian, in part because the poet Shelley thought a vegetarian diet would render his intellect docile--though, she says, "I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider nature without this appetite--this other-creature consuming appetite--is to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work, that causes one thing to nurture another, that creates the future out of the past." I should have considered that a warning. I did not.

She then goes on to write poetically [of course] about turtles she sees on her daily walks with her dogs--about the dangers they face, their struggles to lay their eggs, the raccoons that follow and eat their eggs, and their general attempts to ward off predators. This all culminates in her account of witnessing a turtle dig a nest to lay its eggs, and Oliver returning to that nest the next day, digging up half the eggs and eating them! I have to say I was quite disillusioned.

Before she gets to that part of the story, she reflects a little more on animals eating each other: Speaking of a hawk she saw that had captured a pheasant, and her sudden desire for pheasant meat, she said: "I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same. Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachment to suffering. Who would disagree."

Part of me understands Oliver here. She doesn't draw a line between humans and other animals; both are holy and both have desires; both live by consuming others. Perhaps if she had started there (rather than starting with her semi-vegetarianism) I wouldn't have been shocked. Certainly I have read other semi-vegetarian observers of nature, like Gary Snyder, talking about how consuming meat in certain climates can be kinder to the ecosystem than eating plant foods that require lots of fossil fuels to ship, for example. And normally I do not count eggs as meat! Perhaps she just made me empathize with the turtle too much before talking about the eggs. There is a certain pragmatism of the small farmer, eating animals they have raised, that emotionally I find harder than factory farming. To eat something you have a relationship with seems (on an emotional level) worse than eating a strange animal, even if the relationship means the animal is treated more humanely. And not to have a relationship with animals you raise feels like a terrible sort of slavery.

Humans aren't obligate carnivores (barring certain health conditions), though I recognize in certain ways it is a privilege to choose not to consume meat. And plants have been shown to have certain sensations, even a certain kind of community life (like tree colonies communicating via fungus in their roots), so I suppose the bright light I draw between animals and plants isn't entirely clear. Still, I would like to reduce suffering, even if it is "unnatural."

It is a dilemma, though, because humans are part of nature, and Oliver is correct that part of the natural realm is different species devouring each other, which is kind of horrifying when contemplated in that light. One can make it pretty metaphorically with communion metaphors, but if Chardin (and Oliver) truly believe that to live others must die, it does give me a lot more sympathy for Jains who practice sallekhana (ritual suicide), even though a lot of the practices of Jains seem to extreme to me. I guess a modern analogue Jainism would be less concerned with wearing face cloths and carrying whisk brooms, and instead would be opposing all sorts of tech and human development that destroys the environment.

Is Oliver's egg-eating just embracing the destructiveness inherent in living and going for a lesser version of it?

I did start--and abandon for really tedious writing--a short volume on the natural theology of Oliver. Certainly those seeking theological lessons from the "Book of Nature" have to grapple with issues like why God did create a universe where life has to feed on other life. Sure, I suppose Christians might say this is a product of the Fall, but while it is only after the Flood that humans were officially given permission to eat animals (though the Noah story talking about 7 pairs of clean animals implies otherwise), animals still had to eat each other, leading to the dilemmas of vegan cat owners everywhere. For the record, I do not endorse torturing an obligate carnivore by imposing a vegan diet on them. I suppose in the future I might support feeding them only lab-grown meat, assuming the environmental costs of it are not exorbitant, but I don't think one should impose a harmful diet on one's dependents.

Tibetan Buddhists, who traditionally do eat meat because lots of the Himalayas are above the tree line and even in the lower elevations the growing season is very short, solve this problem by offering their bodies to vultures when they die, so completing the cycle of life. I am too Catholic in my respect for bodies (and also too squeamish at the thought of being devoured) to embrace this, though, and still enough of a theist to wonder about what this all says about God. Clearly the God of nature is different than my traditional notion of God. Does God love lions more than gazelles? Hawks more than pheasants? Raccoons more than turtles? While I resist it theologically, this does help me understand the ancient theologians who came up with the concept of a hierarchy of being.
micki: (Default)
For the weekend, I am taking a break from Buddhist meditation and instead reading Mary Oliver. I tell people Mary Oliver is my favorite poet, since I've never read a poem by her that I didn't love, but I've never read her work in any kind of systematic way. I grabbed a pile of her works from the library, though it turns out that the one that seemed thematically appropriate for today--Winter Hours--is actually essays rather than poems.

In the first chapter she talks about building a house. As one does when the same message occurs from two or three different sources, I wondered if the universe was sending me some sort of message. Of course I know that this is just the peculiar human habit to make patterns of things, but I don't think it hurts to find hope where one can. As I believe I may have mentioned in one of the earlier journal entries on Pema Chodron, lately I've been using some of the idle time I used to spend scrolling social media on youtube watching an Australian man's "Primitive Technology" channel. It's absolutely mesmerizing watching him start with nothing but sticks, stones, trees, dirt and water to construct more and more elaborate huts and eventually shelters made of brick. While he does clearly need the natural resources of the area he's in, which may be threatened by climate change, nevertheless watching him gives me a type of hope that comes from faith in human ingenuity and labor.

I don't think this is exactly a survivalist fantasy (though it could be)--certainly romanticizing the primitive and individual masculine labor plays a role in that sort of narrative, and true survival in the ancient world and today relies on community. But I think the part of me that is drawn to the youtube series is the part of me that feels helpless as an individual to effect the world. Building something literally with one's own hands (since that is the primary tool he uses in the videos) is a really concrete and psychologically satisfying way of affecting the world.

That's what Oliver talks about in her chapter: the small house she built in her backyard mainly of recycled materials, with her own hands. She saw it as a kind of response to/reaction against years of the mental labor of poetry, which was mostly indoors, sitting and writing. She wanted a form of labor with her body, with her hands, and she is proud of the little house even though she never used it for much.

It does make me think that I need some sort of creative hobby, and one that uses my body more. Ideally both. But the obviously ones (e.g. gardening) repel me--I literally hate getting my hands dirty in that way. I watch the Australian man digging in dirt to make clay and forming the brick with his hands and think about how my fingernails crack badly just from doing the dishes if I don't wear gloves. Carrying something wrong makes me ache all day. Given the diabetes, small injuries on my feet make me terribly paranoid, especially since I get everywhere by walking. I thought perhaps bicycling, but my balance issues worry me. I'm sure Pema Chodron would have something to say about these fears, but I think many of them are sensible, considering I have little safety net.

Even Oliver talks about personal aging and the beginning of descent, and how that affects her desires to move the body. Sigh. Maybe pickleball? I shall have to think on it more.

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