Hello all
Hope you are well.
In today’s ‘Press Pause’, or these mini-creative retreats, I am bringing you two poems, which fit snug and adjacent, and speak to what is it to turn our gaze towards, to hold grief and love with tender intrigue, and to find softness in our witnessing.
Before I get there, a reminder that the very first Wild Edge Summer Camp. ‘Focus and Flow’ is starting this coming Monday 14th July. I’ve got some treats in store. It’s five days of creative prompts and nudges, and five days of live events, including creative practice circles, a poetry salon, an ideas to action cafe, a showcase of work in progress and a few other surprises. I’ve curated a bumper summer playlist to go with it. The Summer camp is for paid members of The Wild Edge. There are lots of ways to engage- from full attendance to responding to prompts in your own time and rhythm. Come along to one or some, or just dip your toe in.
More on it all in this post:
Also to say, my latest ‘Library of Interesting things is also available, a round up of reading, links and resources. You can read here.
Twin Poems.
A while ago, I wrote about the Irish philosopher John Moriarty’s invocation, or invitation of towards. ‘To be, is to be towards’, he had written, gesturing to the act of orienting to sacred ground, of the earth, and in ourselves. As I wrote,
To Moriarty, a man of soul and soil, to be towards was to be facing sacred or holy ground, not in an ecclesiastical sense, something vaulted or religious, but the divine ground of the earth, the holy ground of stone and branch, river and salmon, bird and bloom. To be towards this ground, was, in his mind, also an orientation towards the sacred in ourselves. It was an ordination too, in recognising the indigenousity of each human’s interconnectedness with the earth, inextricably linked. We are part of this ground as much as inhabitants on it; we are made of and by this earth; I am only I, because of the blackbird and the blackthorn; I am because of the billions of tiny organisms which make them too. We each are a multitude.
It’s a similar gesture I find within the poems I am sharing today; a movement towards facing the truth of our lives, in all their griefs, loves, losses, delights, experiences, multitudes.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about what it is to orientate ourselves to the bare truths of the world too; the pain, the grief, the losses, but the delights, joys and loves also; a turning towards as a act of radical witness and deep aliveness, as an insistence on possibility. The poems hold some of this movement too, and a gentle nudge towards, with the twin aids of care and compassion.
The first poem, The Thing Is, by the US poet, Ellen Bass.
The Thing Is
by Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.Within ‘The Thing Is’, by Ellen Bass, we find that gaze of towards, here now with acceptance and without fanfare or polish, to hold what we see and still love, despite the flaws and the cracks. The body, in this movement towards, knows how to hold, and in that gesture is a way forwards, through, beyond. To be towards is also to hold dear.
The second poem, Love after Love, by the St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, may be familiar to many of you. It’s one I read in class frequently to students, as an invitation to the great feast of their lives, and a turning towards even the stranger within us.
Love After Love
By Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.To feast on our lives. Not to dine gracefully, or in morsels. But to feast. But before we do that, we offer something to the table : the wine, the bread, our heart; returning ourselves to ourselves through our love letters and desperate notes, the scrawled tenderness of our lives.
The gift of the grief, or the love, or our life, as echoed through Moriarty, Bass and Walcott, is this choice of orientation. To be is to be towards. To love is to hold. To feast is to peel our image and to witness the fullness of the stranger and the friend in ourselves, in each other.
To feast, to really feast, on our lives.
…
So, this week, I have two questions for you, snug and adjacent. You may want to walk with them, write about them, draw or doodle, or just sit with them. Whatever your choice, notice what shifts and alters as you do. Notice how the act of noticing changes things…
What might it be to feast of your life? What’s can you turn towards?
Thank you all, and looking forward to Summer Camp on Monday. Camp timetable is here. Times in Irish/UK time. You can find local timezones here.
Thank you all, and looking forward to Monday.
Clare
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