A Ritual to Read to Each Other--William Stafford

This poem has been with me lately--meaning it keeps coming to mind, wants to be read over and over, holds some kind of mystery I can't quite fathom. What does it make you think of? Or Feel? 

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER--William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

  Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert

What Remains

A couple of weeks ago I attended a four day writer's retreat in the beautiful foothills above Santa Barbara, led by my favorite professor from Pacifica Graduate Institute, with 40 other kindred souls in love with literature, mythology, philosophy, and Jung. It blew my mind, touched my heart, and got the creative juices flowing.

Now that the 'afterglow' of the retreat is starting to fade, what remains? The challenge of going to these gatherings is, of course, to bring something back to everyday life. Joseph Campbell called it the "boon"--the treasure of great value, that is hard won by the hero and brought back to the people. Although seeing the sacred spiral in Dante's terza rhima was a sparkling intellectual jewel, right now I can appreciate the dull but solid rocks I hold in my hands--a fledgling practice of writing and walking (nearly) every day that I actually WANT to do. I had been 'wanting to want' to write and walk for some time, so what's different now? I think I have faith now. Faith that if I just do it, boring and uninspiring as it may seem, something else will happen, something else will eventually come out of it.


Trust in that process had been lacking, even though I KNOW what Marie Louse von Franz had said about showing up every day to meet Psyche at the writing desk, even though I know what Marion Woodman has said about making your way to the river every day, because Sophia is making her way,too, from the other side. I knew these things, but couldn't live them. If you lack faith, you cannot be faithful, you cannot show up for self or Self.

The faith I feel, and the faithfulness I am showing now is still new and tentative, but seems more rooted than ever before. The experience of the weekend was a weaving together of threads I had been gathering for some time. Observing the patterns in my intimate relationships, I found the grief tied to multiple emotional abandonments--nothing dramatic or tragic, but subtle and pervasive. Getting beyond the mythology of being the victim, and through a fair amount of bodywork, I have seen the deeper pattern--how I routinely abandon myself in the subtle and pervasive decisions of everyday life: what to eat for breakfast, whether to take the stairs or the elevator, whether to sleep in or walk the dogs, whether to journal or spend 3 hours on Facebook, whether to REALLY take care of myself or keep looking for someone else to do that for me.

This is the boon I still hold in my hands. This is what I most needed to hold onto.

I Have Travelled for Miles

I Have Travelled for Miles

Something in me

has detected

Something in you

that resonates.

Sonar reverberates

around my bones,

signals the presence

of a Like-Mind.

I have travelled for miles

waiting for the tone

of Something

solid and trustworthy

in the deeper waters.

 

(About the image: Sound Engineer, Mark Fischer, has transformed recorded conversations between whales into visual art. http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-92.html )

You know

What you need.

Maybe that knowing sits

Right there on the tip of your tongue

Waiting to leap out loud

To someone who will smile.

Maybe it is sleeping,
Hidden
In a safe corner of your heart
Where it crept
back when things got really crazy.

Maybe
It is dancing inside your bones--
the aches and pains of not moving enough--
The hurt you have to listen to.

You know what you need.

The Antidote to Answers

I am ready to give up
the galloping
insatiable
desire to know.
The drive to find
the right answer
to whatever
perplexes
confounds
or confuses the mind.

This horse has ridden me long
and I must dismount,
fall,
really,
to the ground of my being,
rest in the soft loam of my uncertainty
and, like Rilke,
learn to love the questions themselves.

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Video on TED.com

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater Video on TED.com

Nero by Vladimir Kush

As a young college student in theatre, I performed the role she talks about from Trojan Woman. (Andromache is a young mother whose husband has been killed in battle and during the play, her young son is thrown from the top of the battlements.) I can still remember the level of visceral grief that performance called up in me, even though I was not yet a mother. I have not acted since college, but seeing this video reminded me of my experience of the truth about the ART of Acting--not to be confused with the BUSINESS of acting (the teeth and tits work she speaks of). Like other forms of art, as mentioned in the previous post, Ms. Rodenburg reminds us that it is about truth telling. And telling the truth requires a lot of a person--you have to be willing to feel and bear that emotional truth yourself, then you have to tell it whether your audience wants to hear it or not. Often, in the moment, they don't--like the man in the story--because it is painful. But later, it is a blessing to have heard it, to have some reminder that this, too, is a shared human experience.

As Ms. Rodenburg mentions, theatre originated with the Greeks as a religious event. It was considered an event that could heal the psyche or soul. We still have theatre that heals, but it is harder to find. It seldom occurs in big, splashy, overpriced venues. It sometiems occurs in small, underfunded black box theatres with an unpaid cast. This is the beauty of live theatre.

Art for Love

This post is about the connection between art and healing and Love. I use the capital L to mean Agape, the unconditional, enduring, spiritual form of love most of us aspire to, and can only achieve in short bursts, rather than the Eros kind of love that only exists in short bursts. So let's look at the creative process as a path toward psychological healing and wholeness, shall we?

First you have to pay attention to yourself in order to see/feel/sense what is in there to begin with. And it can be pretty frightening, even if you are a typical American without any trauma, which is to say neurotic. Yes, I mean you. If you do anything that is contrary to what would be good for you, like eat sugar and McDonald's french fries, not exercise, pick the wrong men, pick the wrong women, drive too fast, etc. then you are at least somewhat neurotic. Don't argue with me, just nod and smile.  

Next, you have to be willing to bring it out into the world in some way, which means you have to REALLY see/feel/sense it. Even when this happens suddenly and without your conscious permission, there must be some part of you willing to let it happen. Often when I am singing in a semi-meditative state I will suddenly started to cry for no discernable reason, sometimes it is an unexplained grief. I can only explain this as having tapped into something 'down there' in my psyche that I have been unaware of. Sometimes a poem will be suddenly available in my brain, and I'm not even sure what it is about until I write it down and work with it a bit. Novelists talk about characters telling THEM what to write. I see these experiences as disowned parts of the self making themselves known, and I do my best to let them speak.  

Then, if you have any artistic leanings in any medium, and some amount of courage, you can put that experience into some kind of form--let people see or hear it. Every time I let someone read one of my poems, I feel anxious about what they are going to see about me that I may not have seen myself, and do I really WANT them to see that part of me. Professional artists take the time and have developed the skill  to refine and edit the raw expression into something less personal and less revealing, but you can never completely hide yourself. And if you could, what would be the point? The need to be seen is generally what drives all artistic expression, and must be stronger than the desire to remain hidden. But WHY are we compelled to expose ourselves this way? How does it help us?

You could certainly point to lots of creative artists, past and present, who were gifted and prolific, and yet died as messed up and unhappy as ever.

My light bulb moment on this ocurred years ago when a professor pointed out that it is not the mere act of creating a work of art that heals the psyche. What heals is the act of being witnessed by another person who sincerely cares about you, the person, enough to take in your work and respond with caring curiosity. This caring curiosity could also be described as the desire to understand another's experience, or empathy. That, he said, was the healing element, and is very different from critique or acclaim.

This idea is a foundational truth for me--witnessing someone, with the explicit desire to understand their experience, their perspective, their truth, is a healing act. James Hillman, in Healing Fiction, talks about psychotherapy as a place where this is happening, since we are creating and telling our life story in every session, and the therapist is receiving and witnessing that expression. It is an act of Agape, of Love. And that Love heals.

The trippy thing is that we actually now have scientific evidence that Love really does heal...listening with empathy to someone activates mirror neurons that facilitate an interaction between both people that then rewires the brain so that it functions better, which in turn improves relationships and everything you can list that defines an emotionally healthy and happy person. (read Dan Siegel for more on this)

The downside: It takes a long time and does not require pharmacology, so insurance still refuses to pay for Love. (sardonic laugh). Oh, and you have to be witnessed by someone capable of empathy and some measure of unconditional positive regard, so beware of sociopaths, in this regard.
Which brings me to my thesis statement: Creative self expression, and ultimately Art, occurs because of the artist's need to be loved. Like all human beings.
 
Discuss.