The way to the eternal passes

through the doorway

of this very

moment. Just now

my eyes took in a tree blazing

with golden fire.

My heart followed

and for a time

I stood in all eternity

awash with thanks

for this tree whose

planet I share.

                                                                 JDG

“Bless those who challenge us. They remind us of doors we have closed and doors we have yet to open.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                               – a Navajo saying

This is for you, my dear friend, who challenged me concerning yesterday’s post on Occupy Oakland. At first I was just annoyed and almost immediately began marshaling  arguments to support my position and rebut yours. Then I was overwhelmed with a sense of the futility of such an effort. This was quickly followed by a deep feeling of fatigue and a desire to avoid discussing the matter any further.  But because of the work I have been doing in  Nonviolent Communication and in Mindfulness Meditation, I decided on a different course.

Rather than focus attention on the initial thoughts and feelings your e-mail evoked and amplifying them, I turned my attention instead to the physical sensations I was feeling in my body. It was only then that I realized that my heart was racing and that was when I became aware that below the annoyance, sense of futility, fatigue, and desire to avoid further discussion was fear. I resisted  the temptation to mentally expand on all the fears I have related to the unchecked use of force and power and simply kept my attention gently focused on my racing heart. Gradually my heart returned to its usual rhythm and, as I continued to sit with my attention softly focused on my now steadier and slower- beating heart, I felt connected to all who are or ever have been afraid for whatever reason or circumstance.

I didn’t realize until then that, in closing the door to my own fear, I had closed the door to others’  fear as well, and thus had closed the door to a common aspect of humanity that connects us all. I do not doubt for one minute, my friend, your care for me nor mine for you. Strangely, the bridge back to my own heart and to you was through a recognition and acceptance of fear unadorned with explanations,  justifications, or desire to persuade.

So, let us sit, my friend, with our fears and speak them to one another. My strong intuition is that our fears, simply and honestly spoken, will lead us to common ground from which new possibilities may arise for us both.

I find myself thinking about something Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, said several years ago. If any of us were walking along a river bank and heard a baby cry and looked down and saw it precariously floating all alone down the river, we would, of course, jump in and save the baby. And, he said, if another baby came floating by, we’d jump in again, and if that other was followed by still another and another after that until there was a steady stream of babies floating down the river, we would also round up other people and begin to organize in order to save all the babies. But finally, he said, someone has to go up the river and see who’s throwing them in.

The question for me is what do you do when you get there, when you’ve gone up river and you encounter, not the thrower of the babies, but the confused, angry, and hardened faces of those called upon to defend a face they do not clearly see and a process they do not understand. What do you do when you are showered with rubber bullets, when pepper spray is aimed at your face, and tear gas falls all around as you rescue a fallen comrade?  What do you do with your outrage?  What do you do when you find you have joined those others who have “gone up river”  before you in Selma and Birmingham, in Tiananmen Square and Cairo, in Bombay and at Kent State?  How do you remember to stand your ground, to not fight back, to place flowers in gun barrels, to sing in the face of tyranny, to lock arms and stay the course?  How do you remember, as Scott Olsen lies in an Oakland Hospital, that ” the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice “? And what do you do when those who throw babies in rivers refuse to acknowledge what they’re doing,  won’t let themselves be seen and won’t allow themselves to be addressed?

I wrote this poem in response to a dream in which I, who never felt pretty,  appeared in  a swirling skirt. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to be pretty.

You came to me late.

In a rush of wind and joy, you came.

You raised the dead

and stirred the still sleeping,

You charmed us all.

Through the silver-edged days of spring

you danced.

In the softness of summer, you held my hand

and led me back

over roads not taken when

time was ripe.

You used a finely honed and delicate knife

and the pain you brought

was almost pleasure.

You plunged deep and carved wide.

You hollowed out

an emptiness, a living space

and filled it with golden apples

with only a hint of green.

You didn’t stay. You couldn’t.

But you left behind

your dance,

your golden apples,

and you bade me eat.

                                                                      JDG

                                                                        1982

Caught in creation’s knot, I groan

and weave another kind of web,

a shield, a screen, a surety,

a stay against reality.

Masked thus I search for wisdom’s gold

and blown by every rumored vein,

I wrap myself in borrowed clothes

and hold at bay the enemy’s hand.

Until at last at Peter’s booths

I stand fumbling with my mask

and shedding ancient, carrion truth

I leave creation’s debt a coin.

                                                                                        JDG

                                                                                         April 1984

Recently I read Richard Merryman’s biography, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, and was moved by his portrait of this complex man. He writes:

“This tenderness for unappreciated people reduced by life – his reverence for self-sufficiency and perseverance – is a fundamental energy in Wyeth’s work. He has said,  ‘ I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.’ He has also said, ‘Love is not nearly as useful as hate.’

The opposite energy – ‘hate’ – is a coadrenaline driving the intensity he pours into each painting. It is his word for the free-floating rage and fear – and the profound seriousness – he hides beneath a puckish irreverence. Ricocheting between love and hate, he is a thicket of opposites – kind, weak, tough, selfish, insecure, egotistical, poetic, wise, elegant, vulgar, naive, and ruthlessly determined. A mischievous anarchist, he is excitable to the point of wildness; his square, boyish face – below wiry, close-cropped light brown hair – is as rubbery as a clown’s. Laughter puckers the corners of his bright blue,  hooded, conspiratorial eyes into crow’s-feet. He clicks his teeth as he cackles with delight.

Yet this intricate sprite is drawn to simplicity, to the understatement of winter, to white, to the restrictions of realism, and the driest, most lapidary of all mediums – egg tempera – a compound of powdered pigment, distilled water, and egg yolk that hardens on the panel almost instantly. He says,  ‘I begin with emotion and am excited to the point where it affects my stomach. That’s where I’m odd to paint the way I do, these immaculate pictures, closely done. You’d think you’d find a very calm mathematician.’

…In the winter of 1945,  Andrew painted the dilapidated interior of Archie’s [Mother Archie’s Church]. Its name was a mispronunciation of its founder, Mary Archer, a stocky, quiet woman of mixed blood who wore a black bonnet and preached in a black dress with white lace around the neck…[In the painting] a jagged hole shows black in the battered plaster. Beneath an oil-lamp chandelier a white dove flutters. Talking about  Mother Archie’s Church, he tells of an Easter Service when the climax was to be the Holy Ghost released in the form of a dove. The cue was sounded, nothing happened; a long pause. Then a voice called through the trap door, ‘ The cat ate the Holy Ghost. Shall I throw down the cat?’ “

What stays with me is  how lovingly Merryman captured the many, often contradictory,  facets and layers that made up Andrew Wyeth. If only we could all see and be seen so wholly and so well.

Gray mist rises on rolling hills.

Six horses graze.

Lone tree glows gold

in morning haze,

softly signaling change is here.

Go slow. Go slow.

You never know

what is coming

around the curve, what it could mean.

A tree?  A call?

Take it slow. Graze

on all this green.

                                                              JDG

No one understands

how a butterfly is made.

Yes, we can name the stages:

egg

larvae

caterpillar

butterfly

But, how does a caterpillar know

to shed its skin and be wrapped

in self-created darkness?

How can it let itself liquify

in order to be made anew?

This we do not understand.

But, we know how essential

the chrysalis is,

this place that holds,

gentle and firm,

for the mystery to play out

until  we get our wings.

                                                                                                   JDG

Sometimes responsibility

sucks. Enough of

this character

building and all.

I’m practically a monument

already, which is

not how I saw

this late season.

What I had in mind was fooling

around, being

no account, a

joyful deadbeat.

                                     JDG

To Get Home

Laser focus each day

on one pure joy-

a vivid red maple leaf,

sun dazzling layered pine branches,

a purple beauty toad lily,

the touch of a gentle breeze,

the melody of a garrulous brook,

tangled thick vines encircling a tree,

an utterly naked sycamore,

fuzzy moss creeping up an oak,

flickering candles at a Celtic service.

                                                                                                                  by Betty Williams