Practical Gods

                         It must be troubling for the god who loves you
                       To ponder how much happier you'd  be today
                       Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
                                   -- Carl Dennis, The God Who Loves You
   

 Awakening & Epiphany
               Our poet friend Dennis presented us with a copy of one his favorite books last year, Practical Gods, the Pulitzer Prize winning volume of poems by Carl Dennis (www.poetryfoundation.org). The book's publisher notes that many of his poems "involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate this into secular terms." These  are  poems, the publisher says, meant to help us name the everyday, available gods that are easy to ignore, both those that frustrate and those that sustain life and make it rewarding.  I think I would agree that this poet's work stands apart because it nudges us gently but firmly beyond accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving. Which is of course, why I am a writer and probably why you are too. Or why you want to be a writer. What's the point of poetry and prose after all, if we aren't nudging our readers and ourselves into some kind of awakening and epiphany?

Befriending The Gods
               Dennis (our friend, not the Pulitzer Prize winner Dennis) is about 68 years now and he used to be a hotshot healthcare exec in New York at a prestigious hospital/medical school. It was science by the book for him every day. Then he had a massive brain hemorrhage, had to retire to Arizona and relearn how to do everything from scratch. That's when he got into poetry. He began writing poems and joined a writer's organization that every year holds a national writing contest. So far he's taken several first prize awards and garnered seconds and honorable mentions too. His poetry is delightful and he himself is a very fine guy to be around, slower and not as steady as before but probably lots more compassionate and observant than he was in his high flying NYC days. He has a couple of parrots now that he dotes on and he can always be counted on to try something new and expansive. Dennis is one of those people who, despite a major health setback, is aging gracefully and well because he's learned to befriend the gods who sustain life and make it rewarding. Today I'm sharing with you one of my favorite poems from the book Dennis gave us and maybe you'll be as intrigued and moved as I was the first time I read it. Maybe you will seize upon one small but luminous thought and, like Dennis, maybe you will begin to open the door to your own epiphany today. I hope so.


 The God Who Loves You 
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week--
Three fine houses sold to deserving families--
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

    

In The Journal

            It is superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person: I create myself.    
                                                               -- Susan Sontag, On Keeping a Journal

Author and literary icon Susan Sontag believed that an organic flow of thought, feeling and ideas emerging over time meant that an individual life can be viewed as a path with a creative, cyclic nature. She wrote that who you are today may  very well be a different self from the you of tomorrow, and you have only to consult your journal over a period of time to affirm that this is indeed so. Sontag's notion is echoed in Mary Catherine Bateson’s  belief (Composing a Life) that our lives are at essence raw material, both past and present, which is being continually shaped and reshaped over time. The older I get the less fanciful this notion seems to be. In fact, it adds a whole new dimension of hope and inspiration because it shows me the way back home, to center, every time I think about it.  I know for sure that the life I'm living now holds the promise of a time and place wider, deeper, friendlier and fuller than anything I thought possible in the first half of life. And I'm open to the unexpected and unfamiliar in a way I never could have been before.

A Friendly Owl 
             For instance, after dabbling around with watercolors for a few years, I took up making art in earnest recently, just drawing and painting whatever came into my head on any particular day. I found myself becoming obsessed with birds and among other efforts, produced a somber but friendly looking owl who had in tow a perky turtle compadre sporting a multicolored shell who just kind of appeared at the bottom of the painting as if to say, "OK Boss, where do we go from here?" Why do I tell you this and what does it mean? I believe composing our new stories is a process not dissimilar to how that painting took shape. I didn't know that owl was in there when I started with an old unfinished abstract orange and purple watercolor sketch that had languished in a drawer for a couple of years. I just began to add details with charcoal pencil, livened the whole thing up with a rainbow of pastels dashed here and there and then added whatever else seemed to be calling to be made use of. My finished painting was, in the end, not that different from our second life stories: Composed of  bits and pieces of things gone missing in the relative wilderness of a previous existence (the drawer/the first half of life), we shape memories of people, places, things which are recovered, transformed and made new and whole again. I have grown to love this owl and I call it Wisdom. It is my muse and holds a regal place of  great honor as the only painting on the wall in my new writing studio. 

Speak Your Truth

Honing a heightened awareness and finding a new composition and meaning is possible by harvesting seemingly unrelated pieces and pages of the personal diary or journal.  Like the way I found a new shape, form, texture and meaning for what was in its first life an original, unfinished abstract watercolor painting. Distilling past and present,  you can honor future by paying attention in a very focused way so you can see the stuff of what your life really is, right now. With the pieces from your journal and diary, whenever you encounter even a small bit of awareness and intention, you can be sure you are embracing a singleness of eye, a purity of intention and a return to center.  To get to this new sense of meaning from seemingly unrelated bits and pieces, try the process of Reflective Journaling. It's a practice influenced by writers Dorothea Brandt, Brenda Ueland, Ira Progoff, Peter Elbow, Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron and especially Linda Metcalf and Toby Simon (Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice).  Putting it all out there in a journal without anxiety or judgment becomes pretty easy because you know this isn't a formal or finished piece of writing. At the same time it's not a sloppy, splashy, messy yadayada either. Rather it's a accessible but methodical way to befriend your writing as your muse, one you respect and listen to deeply and authentically.  To journal the way I am describing below is a sincere personal and intimate engagement with your own soul. The intention is to establish self trust, to find your voice an in the end, polish the glowing center, the essence of who you are and what you think. When you free yourself from the pressure of performance you naturally listen to our inner writer and that's how you get the connection between head and heart, thought and feeling. Which is just another way to say that's how you get to wisdom's edge.


What Do I Mean By?
              1. Light a candle, turn on a classical music piece of your choice and use clean, white, soft writing paper with a steady, clear pen. Have a timer handy, a digital clock is good. Now.

2. Write fast. Clean. Raw and open. Take 25 minutes. Don’t ask yourself to do more, this isn’t a competition.

 3. Now read it over and pick a word or phrase that jumps out at you. Follow it by playing with its meaning. See where it leads you. Ask the crucial question “What do I mean by?” as you write and read without any sense of censorship, analysis or intent. This is an encounter with authentic center.

4. You’ll begin to see that your thoughts have a direction, a life of their own, a purpose you can trust. This is your true writer’s voice. This is your center. This is your muse speaking to you. Later when you begin to write the essay, memoir or autobiography , you will know what it really feels like and what it sounds like to write from  this place.

5. Read your piece again, this time scouring for remembrance of things past or intimations of immortality (thank you Marcel Proust and William Wordsworth). Any indications that you are a creature living here, there and yonder all at once? That the veil between past, present and future a  little less clear than we typically believe? Notice and write. Your muse will thank you.