"New possibilities of perceiving" - overcoming our cultural delusion

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner and outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The power of poems, and of the best creative writing, is this ability to alter perception - not just the perception itself, but the way of perceiving.

Words have often failed us. Words combined with rational thinking and mechanistic science (also much of academia) have fooled us even more. That combination has given western culture a way of perceiving reality, the world, Nature, that is destroying life on the planet at scales not seen since that asteroid crashed into the planet and wiped out millions of years worth of evolution. It is because that way of perception is delusional.

When words seem to fail...reflections on darkness and light

Winter solstice. We mark the longest darkness here in the north. But the promise of emergent sunlight heralds not yet warmth but rather the beginning, the deepening of the long cold of winter.

My  neighborhood...

How often here in Wisconsin that brilliant returning sunlight of January is accompanied by the coldest temperatures of the year. They go together.

Like today. I live along  Lake Michigan so we didn't get hit by the big snows here, mostly a lot of rain. Under the clouds all week long, our temps have hovered much above normal. The lake is unusually warm for this time of year, which is why we are having trouble turning precipitation into snow. When the sun reappeared just now, as if making a grand entrance on the stage of the solstice, I realized how long its been since we've seen it. And it comes on the tail end of the storm, on the howling winds of a night cast into cold, darkness, and silence as the power went out.

"Poetry's true perception..." - or memoir's

I struggle through memoir and poems these days. The memoir is in a hard place, the diminishment and long dying of my mother - an extraordinary journey we shared together. It opens up a raw, tender place - vulnerable, bursting with compassion and love...

And then I just miss her.

Since I started this writing project I also started writing poetry. That surprised me at first, now it doesn't at all. Now I begin to understand it.

What was freed up in the journey, what was let go, and then what the fierce concentration on that narrative opened even more, has freed up the place where poems are apparently born - at least, it appears, for me.

Opening the Gates...

I've been reading Jane Hirshfield's remarkable book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She is one of my favorite poets and the Buddhist spirituality that lies beneath so much of her work really resonates for me right now.

I don't claim to be a poet, and yet I have written poetry mostly to help open some of my own gates, to make me a better writer. There is something writing poetry does to you, if you are willing to plumb the depths, go to the depths fearlessly, or, if with fear, bravely, to see what you find there. The poetry that changes everything is the poetry that does what Buddhism invites us to do: it looks deeply. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh has written, "Looking deeply requires courage."

The poet must have courage.

What matters

That's one of the phrases I put in my blog description: the writing for me is about what matters. So much of what we read, view, entertain ourselves with just doesn't matter. Yet we live in a time when so much matters, so much of what we do, our life choices, how we go through our day, what we care about, what we pay attention to - really, really matters.

I don't mean that we should not experience laughter, lightness, pleasure, playfulness, and sheer joy. We should! Because these things matter - a lot. As a matter of fact, the dearth of authentic laughter, lightness, pleasure, playfulness, and joy is part of our cultural pathology. That's why we entertain ourselves in such manipulative, numbing ways, entertainment intended to deaden feelings, not awaken them, to hold authenticity at bay rather than delve into it for fear of what we might find there.

Those mystics, artists, and psychologists who have been saying for generations that we cannot experience joy if we cannot also experience sorrow, grief, and the rest have also been right for generations.