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.

More-than-memoir and the co-arising of a book

The day before my writers critique group (we meet about every other week) I always feel a little edge added to my work. What I have been sharing these past many months is what I call my "more-than-memoir," using the multi-generational story of my family to open up some deeper reflection on the culture and the many layers of impasse and crisis at which we have arrived.

In this story of my parents and their ancestors, and what was passed down to my generation, I think I have found a key to why it is so hard for us to look at the mess we have made of our world - and change how we live accordingly before things really get out of hand.

My parents, Mary Rose & Steve

The mess is getting pretty serious now, as we know from two years of weather extreme after weather extreme, the infernos in the West, the deepening drought that is sadly only herald of worse to come, the changing economy that has thrown more people permanently out of work, depressed wages, and brought millions more of our own people into poverty, to join the hundreds of millions around the planet.

Can writing serve the purpose of helping us take an honest look at ourselves, how it is we have arrived at such a moment?

Truth sometimes comes hard...

Being truthful, having a voice that can be trusted - tried and true advice for the writer. But it don't come easy, as they say.

What I call my more-than-memoir doesn't come easy right now. You break open old stories, old narratives, and find them still laden with the intensity of the time in which they were composed. You realize why some of these 'truths' get buried in some deep dark place, those places where we try to make the pain, the fear, the embarrassment inaccessible.

Now you have to access them - in order to be truthful.

And yet you still play around with all that truth, because not all truth should be told to the world. One gets tired of some of that confessional stuff that can be rather indulgent or mean (or sometimes simply made up) that so often accounts for memoir these days.We are a self-indulgent culture in the extreme, and not all stories merit that space on our shelves or in our e-readers or in our psyches.

Stories reveal

Not only what we tell, but how we tell them, the vantage point we choose, the voice - all of this reveals.

And what stories reveal, of course, matters. They can reflect truth about the complexity of being human on this planet; they can offer insights, another point of view on life. They can also hide truth from us, or distort truth.

In recent years, everywhere I go people talk about the importance of sharing stories. Each of us has a store of stories buried inside. Sharing them can be some of the most vulnerable moments we will ever have in our lives. It is important to examine motives when airing them in public, because not all motives are equal either. Some personal story-telling has become voyeuristic, exhibitionist, and narcissistic. That, too, is part of an unhealthy commercial culture where even people's personal troubles can become profit-making commodities.

Writing at the edge of the precipice

I've neglected this blog for a bit. Sorry 'bout that. It's not for lack of things to write about, probably more like too many things to write about - and that meets life and overwhelms. That's what it feels like these days.

I'm putting off a necessary tedious task to post this morning. The tedious task can wait.

Source: UNISYS, found at Capital Climate

It's been a bit warm across the nation, a bit crisp, a bit fiery, a bit stormy, a bit dry - unless you're in Duluth or Florida's panhandle. In these places it's the deluge. How about that 'derecho,' straight line winds up to 90 mph suddenly building and blowing from Indiana to Maryland!! Oh, and up north, the annual Arctic ice melt is already a record, and it's only June.