Rumi

Last summer, a friend who was moving lent me (and eventually told me to keep) his copy of The Essential Rumi. I was interested enough to figure I would read it one day. There's a pattern in my relationship with books: I acquire or become aware of one, and let it sit. One day it occurs to me to read the book.

The longest time between purchase and reading, so far, is about 10 years. I had bought Beat Not the Bones, by Charlotte Jay, from the Quality Paperback Book club. It had the combined lure of being a mystery, and being about an anthrolopologist. My first attempt found it too dry, and it survived four home moves in a box before I rediscovered it. And loved it.

Wise, interesting friends have posted snippets of Rumi, on Twitter and on other sites that I frequent. Finally, today, I pulled the book off the shelf and began to read. As is so often the case, the book came into my hand precisely when I was ready for it. Rumi wrote on "the howling necessity" and finally I understand, this tendency to do what needs to be done but to bitch and moan the whole way (as a very loving friend has put it).

Cry out! Don't be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of loving flow into you.

This year, the past few years, I have been on a journey of loving. Committed to one form of love, in which I have worked at a friendship with my exhusband, for the benefit of our children and for his growth as well as my own. I have loved someone else, too, who is not part of my life - loved enough to be willing to learn to love myself better. I have changed because of this love, regardless of its outcome, so it is real. That simple statement comes of many months of struggling with blaming myself for things not going as I'd hoped, living with the tendency I've had all my life to mock myself for imagining something good would come. I am come through that darkness to a place where I can see how much I have grown.

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming
through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
Be your note.
I'll show you how it's enough.

[Rumi, from "Each Note"]

It happens far too often to be a coincidence, that a book I finally read is exactly on topic for the personal journey I have been taking. I don't know if some phrase from the cover blurb hides out in the subconscious and prompts the mind at just the right time, or if it is a prompting of the Holy Spirit (reading Marianne Williamson's reflections on A Course in Miracles has given me a much higher comfort level with speaking of the Spirit). The Tao puts it simply, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

E.M. Forster wrote, "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves." Rumi seems to have taken my paths much further, but comes back along them through his writing, to renew my hope and to point me to joy.

Brilliance

Thanks to Twitter's #haikuwordgame, I wrote a poem today. It's the first in quite some time. Energies seem to have been going to the daily grind, securing a new job (starts in ten days), doing the work of another group in the series at Women in Transition. The words for the word game today are brilliance, night and fragile. I attempted a haiku, then tried gogyohka and finally realized that the combination of words called up something I have finally processed through to its end and needed more room.

Writing through something is always healing. Maybe for a time I didn't want to be healed, I just clung stubbornly to a vision I had. In sharing this draft, I am also posting to this blog for the first time in five months. I would say that I'm ashamed, but I am not. Post-divorce changes, work, parenting and exploring writing in different forms all take time and energy. I commit, however, to posting regularly or to making the decision to close this blog.

Here is the draft (work property of the author):

Brilliant

At last, one night I spilled it all,
and your lips speaking what I spoke
and that kiss, they shocked me.
The brilliance stopped my breath.

You were aware of that, the sudden
suck of air and the fierce joy as you
paused, listening. And I wonder if it was
my intense response that turned you.

The months that followed have
served their own shock, your silence
a ban that speaks shame
into my mouth, where lips met, where

tongue greeted your gentle, testing
tongue, where a sigh took voice
as it rose. Maybe it was too much.
Maybe too much of me repels.

Months of self-delusion have turned me
from myself, as I found one memory
more real than the silence, less fragile
than your arm's grip of my hips. At last

I am able to remember myself without
an assumption of you. Less jubilant
but centered. No memory matters
more than this moment.

Destinations

I was looking through one of my journals for the Carolyn Heilbrun quote, because I can't stand to misquote someone. I came across one of the first excerpts of poetry that I'd copied down:

How far is it?
How far is it now?
The gigantic gorilla interiors
Of the wheels move, they appal me -
[...]
What do wheels eat, these wheels
Fixed to their arcs like gods,
The silver leash of the will -
Inexorable. And their pride!
All the gods know is destinations.
-- from "Getting There," by Sylvia Plath

At the time, I really didn't even understand it, I felt it. The rhythm and the words got under the surface of me and made things move. I am glad I developed the habit of writing things down that have that effect; I begin to get it now, fixed to the arcs of wheels, knowing there are destinations I would not have chosen for myself, but for which I am bound.

Incidentally, I think if I can ever use the word "inexorable" in a poem successfully, I will have arrived at one destination, at least.

Poems for Fun

Last year I was reading Best American Poetry 2005 and discovered "Hate Poem" by Julie Sheenan. I don't know that it will ever be a classic, but I absolutely love it. I keep a printed copy on my desk at work. You can find the whole thing at www.loc.gov/poetry/180/127.html, though it is slightly different from the version that appeared in BAP. When I'm furious with the incompetence or indifference of a colleague, I meditate on a line from this poem, such as "A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you". I shared it with a friend at work who is not a poetry fan but is open-minded enough to have taken a look. We laugh over it when something gets our goat at work or at home. The poem succeeds in riding that crest of petulance of the nth degree, where it is exactly how you feel and yet you know you are being ridiculous.

So maybe I haven't yet convinced my friend to love poetry in general, but she has at least commented that she had no idea the poetry can be so real, so current and fun. I started telling her about one of Ntozake Shange's poems from her 1978 collection, Nappy Edges but that one was a little too racy for the office. Maybe when we're out having a drink sometime...

I hadn't thought I would write at all today. A panic attack seemed imminent this morning as I looked at everything that needs to get done NOW. I asked some friends to pray for me, and have been calm and even steadily working through the piles. A few minutes for a quick post suddenly seemed doable, and thought I would make a plug for poetry in general. It's a fairly private passion; it is daunting to try sharing something that is part of your most basic energy only to watch people's eyes glaze over. It's not for everybody and I know that, but it is amazing when someone else taps into a little bit of the excitement. Every now and then I will share a poem or fragment of a poem that might be a pleasant surprise to non-lovers of poetry.