So many thoughts running through my mind, running, racing, rumbling by: I’d planned on writing a memorial day piece, but spent little time on the train writing such things; I’d meant to write a piece on friendship, a piece on where I’m going, and why. But not tonight.
I’m thankful for the men and women who have died fighting for our freedom, for our peace, for our security and country. I’m thankful for the men and women who continue to fight for these values. Recently I read Iron John by Robert Bly, and a passage I’ve been thinking about is his passage on warriors. Our culture does its best to remove the warrior from boy-children as soon as possible. We medically diagnose rowdiness and antsy behavior with calming medications to stifle the warrior, the hero, the fighter in the child. If you’ve never seen a boy pretending he has a gun, shooting baddies, or wearing a mask and cape made of ribbon and a ratty blanket, or counting down the timer at a basketball court, making the shot that will win the greatest title in history, then you aren’t paying attention. Boys gobble these heroics up.
In addition, until proven wrong, little boys often think their dads are superheroes, capable of astounding feats of strength and mechanical aptitude. Did my dad just chop down that tree? Did my dad just DUNK that basketball? The warrior mentality is strong in the younger children, but we lose it. Schooling squeezes us dry, proving we’re being trained for desks and computer screens, not battlefields, horses, sweat, victory, and flight. Never is gravity so profound as that holding a boy to an elementary school desk, teaching him he can’t fly and will never do so.
And it’s not like we’re doing things any better for women and girls in our culture.
So I respect those warriors, those people out there fighting for something. Sometimes they are fighting for something internal as much as external.
But tonight, no more on that.
I had a rough week, but the end struggled to rectify the pains. I’ve had friends praying for me, with me, and I know the Spirit intercedes on my behalf. Yet now and then, life is just tough. At least the skies are on my side, alternating between sunny blue and dark, brooding clouds to simulate my emotions on a heavenly canvas. The firmament understands, and the seas reflect the skies reflecting me, and even I’m reflected in the waters, so the circle goes.
And my week ended so spectacularly, I’ve nothing to complain about, I think: pickup soccer, beautiful sunsets, mountain driving, family coming to town, a hilarious DnD adventure, and hope. Only two weeks until my best friend in the world gets married. Only three until my best friend gets married. Last week was the one year anniversary of my good friends. I don’t think I got the memo – I just want to explore the world, read, write, play soccer, run, hike, find secret rivers and splash and play, and pick my way up mountains.
Oh hey, I love you. Don’t forget it. Rest well this night.
(Did I ever write about my superhero dream? It's my favorite dream. I'm a superhero, and my power is I can turn into an oil slick)
http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/warriors/
Showing posts with label bly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bly. Show all posts
Friday, May 30, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Wordless Romanticism
everything just so, curtains closed
candles nipping at even's toes
tablecloth smooth as spilled milk
frozen at it falls -
food cooling on the stove
the wine plays with shadows...
just so, the bare-bones fractured
between dreary and romance
with words, as everything is arranged,
rearranged until worries are furrowed in
until all that is, is undone -
then fuss and muss
'til the moment's gone out of time,
and it's time to love or die trying,
grasping now the mystery
you've somehow always known -
the night now over, over and gone;
food cold, candles fizzled down,
love imperfectly or not at all
and such problems are never solved
in the smoothing of the linen cloth,
the music, the dim, dancing light,
or the vittles cold on the hearth
with no second, no time
or opportunity for words to work
alone, along with the silence,
fingers hover above an empty world
of keys never touched
I can't tell what it is about this one that I don't appreciate. Basically, I was having trouble writing, and, well, I wrote this instead of what I was intending to write. This is what I had been working on :
----
El woke under a tree, golden light sifting between the oaken boughs. Time had passed on, sometime. His clothes were soaked through, though the ground around him was dry enough, and that he'd managed to sleep was as mysterious as his current location.
Rolling hills stretched out at his ankles, gilded in the shafts of dawn light.
A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it
is anymore than he.
A thin river carved a sinuous line in the valley of two knolls, burning its crystalline path. A brittle bridge arched over the rushing waters, the leaves dripped with the remainder of the night's deluge, the grasses thick with prismatic condensation, the butterfly with wet wings on the stone, not ready, yet, to fly.
A butterfly with frozen wings, the early bird swooping over me; it's fly or die, and my paper lift flutters ineffectually. Out of time, yet, what have I ever lost by dying?
It was a dream; it must be a dream.
A doe nibbled at the grasses, her fawns lapping at the stream banks, thirsty as the morning trees whispering in the breeze. Wildflowers dotted the hillsides, punctuating every grassland question in colorful reply. The cotton clouds were in whimsy, wandering across the heavens with wonder, with the birds beneath singing, bringing in the spring and fashioning it into beds.
Every morning / the world / is created. / under the orange / sticks of the sun / the heaped / ashes of the night / turn into leaves again.
El stood, shaking free the swamp attached to his being; as it fell, the droplets stopped and started in staccato, time juddering as a dying machine. The birds, too, stuttered in a broken song, and the doe raised her head in slow segments.
The world is breaking around me, in a whimper.
The bridge - a small dirt path wound around the hills, leading to the rickety bridge. El began walking.
tread softly because you tread on my dreams
------
this is part of the free-writing I was doing this afternoon that I got stuck on.
(pieces of quotes used from Mary Oliver: Morning Poem, TS Eliot: The Hollow Men, Rumi, Robert Bly: Rumi Translation, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass, Yeats)
candles nipping at even's toes
tablecloth smooth as spilled milk
frozen at it falls -
food cooling on the stove
the wine plays with shadows...
just so, the bare-bones fractured
between dreary and romance
with words, as everything is arranged,
rearranged until worries are furrowed in
until all that is, is undone -
then fuss and muss
'til the moment's gone out of time,
and it's time to love or die trying,
grasping now the mystery
you've somehow always known -
the night now over, over and gone;
food cold, candles fizzled down,
love imperfectly or not at all
and such problems are never solved
in the smoothing of the linen cloth,
the music, the dim, dancing light,
or the vittles cold on the hearth
with no second, no time
or opportunity for words to work
alone, along with the silence,
fingers hover above an empty world
of keys never touched
I can't tell what it is about this one that I don't appreciate. Basically, I was having trouble writing, and, well, I wrote this instead of what I was intending to write. This is what I had been working on :
----
El woke under a tree, golden light sifting between the oaken boughs. Time had passed on, sometime. His clothes were soaked through, though the ground around him was dry enough, and that he'd managed to sleep was as mysterious as his current location.
Rolling hills stretched out at his ankles, gilded in the shafts of dawn light.
A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it
is anymore than he.
A thin river carved a sinuous line in the valley of two knolls, burning its crystalline path. A brittle bridge arched over the rushing waters, the leaves dripped with the remainder of the night's deluge, the grasses thick with prismatic condensation, the butterfly with wet wings on the stone, not ready, yet, to fly.
A butterfly with frozen wings, the early bird swooping over me; it's fly or die, and my paper lift flutters ineffectually. Out of time, yet, what have I ever lost by dying?
It was a dream; it must be a dream.
A doe nibbled at the grasses, her fawns lapping at the stream banks, thirsty as the morning trees whispering in the breeze. Wildflowers dotted the hillsides, punctuating every grassland question in colorful reply. The cotton clouds were in whimsy, wandering across the heavens with wonder, with the birds beneath singing, bringing in the spring and fashioning it into beds.
Every morning / the world / is created. / under the orange / sticks of the sun / the heaped / ashes of the night / turn into leaves again.
El stood, shaking free the swamp attached to his being; as it fell, the droplets stopped and started in staccato, time juddering as a dying machine. The birds, too, stuttered in a broken song, and the doe raised her head in slow segments.
The world is breaking around me, in a whimper.
The bridge - a small dirt path wound around the hills, leading to the rickety bridge. El began walking.
tread softly because you tread on my dreams
------
this is part of the free-writing I was doing this afternoon that I got stuck on.
(pieces of quotes used from Mary Oliver: Morning Poem, TS Eliot: The Hollow Men, Rumi, Robert Bly: Rumi Translation, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass, Yeats)
Monday, February 24, 2014
Nights reading Bly and not writing much
Today, I started reading some of Robert Bly's prose-poetics collected in: What have I ever lost by dying?The title originates from a Rumi quote (adapted by Bly) and the works inside are beautiful interactions with natural things. He has an elegant simplicity in his writing that is refreshing. I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop lately, and she tends to be deliberately ambiguous AND hesitant. Like she's putting on a shadow show behind a curtain with a weak light.
In contrast, Bly's easy naturalistic writing doesn't create a war within me as I claw at the words to understand them. (I love doing that, don't get me wrong - sometimes it's nice when poetry doesn't require such a commitment)
I love monday nights. First: it means that monday is finished, which is always a bit of a relief. Second: monday nights are often quiet nights where I have the opportunity for reading, playing guitar, writing, and avoiding electronic devices for the most part. I know some people who crave the simplicity of screens after a long day of work. Not me. After spending a full day of work at the computer (sorta. I do like to work on paper, even for coding), I eschew screens if at all possible.
Since I already spent a good portion of today editing, journaling, and discussing writing, I'm not particularly exciting tonight. Apologies.
So, to console your weeping eyes, here's possibly my favorite ee cummings poem, posted for the n-billionth: (it's the last stanza that breaks my heart)
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
E. E. Cummings
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