FALLOW TIME in the BUCKET

The fields are fallow and soon will be frozen.

  And that is how  Winter feels and that is how winter is. Especially if your ancient furnace that your  mother installed in 1972 falters and fails.
 The house inside temp drops rapidly to  40 degrees and we are  left to sit and shiver and drink lots of hot tea while wrapped in blankets and wearing jackets and knitted caps inside the house.

Can you get your mind around that??  It happened  during the PATRIOTS game last Sunday and was  finally over today on the Feast of Saint Andrew.
A miraculous event unfolds when we throw the lead of our personal story into the transformative flames of creativity.
Our hardship is transmuted into something golden. With that gold we heal ourselves and redeem the world. As with any spiritual practice, this creative alchemy requires a leap of faith. 

When we show up to make art--

we need to first get still enough to hear what wants to be expressed through us, and then we need to step out of the way and let it. We must be willing to abide in a space of not knowing before we can settle into knowing. 

Such a space is sacred. It is liminal, and it’s numinous. It is frightening and enlivening. It demands no less than everything, and it gives back tenfold.

The muse rarely behaves the way we would like her to, and yet every artist knows she cannot be controlled. Artistic self-expression necessitates periods of quietude in which it appears that nothing is happening.

Like a tree in winter whose roots are doing important work deep inside the dark earth, the creative process needs fallow time. 

We have to incubate inspiration. We need empty spaces for musing and preparing, experimenting and reflecting. Society does not value its artists, partly because of the apparent lack of productivity that comes with the creative life.

  Art begins with receptivity.
Every artist, in a way, is a mystic and a political creature. Making art can be a subversive act, an act of resistance against the deadening lure of consumption, an act of unbridled peacemaking disguised as a poem or a song or an abstract rendering of an aspen leaf swirling in a stream.

SOFT LANDING NEAR THE LEBANON MILLS IN THE BUCKET

POEM OF A CHILDHOOD MEMORY OF ROLLING DOWN THE BANKS OF THE BLACKSTONE 

Writing inspired by the Rain Meditation and the Paintings by Rachel at Poetry Workshop at FORGET ME NOT in Pawtucket in September 2018 as part of Galway Kinnell Poetry Festival. I led the workshop and here is  one of the products of  trying to make haiku from  lines of  a poem  we wrote that day.

Poems and lines by Norma Jenckes

Inspired by painting of green –poem about rolling as a child in the wet grass down a hill on the banks of the Blackstone in Pawtucket.

SOFT LANDING NEAR THE LEBANON MILLS

Soft hiss of rain fills every pore

of dry earth,

Spring peepers roar

to new life.

Haiku version: soft hiss of rain fall/Spring peepers roar to new life/filling every pore.

Spinning down the slope

dizzies me,

overhead the sagging rope

of high wires

Haiku version: spinning down the slope/ overhead the sagging rope / high wires dizzy me .

scares me with lightning's flash.

Rolling under

sparking lines to high grass,

I come full stop.

Haiku version: rolling under lines/ that scare me with lightning flash/ high grass brings full stop/

My ear pressed to earth,

I hear storm drains

pour dark broken births

into surging cisterns.

Haiku version: My ear pressed to earth/ hear storm drains pour broken births/into dark cisterns.

After the reading of lines inspired by the paintings and imagery, Patti McAlpine presented an evocative lesson on Haiku. And encouraged us to try some in 5-7-5 form from the lines we had just written.

I was reminded of Haiku of Basho which I wrote in a rough adaptation.

How clever he is

who does not think life is brief

when he sees lightning. 

Basho

Clouds burst over head

Etta James cries out “At Last”

I push re-play—Wait.

Jenckes

I want to end with a reminder from the Master Basho of the importance of the poetic process over the product when we write Haiku: “Haiku exists only when it is on the writing table. Once it is taken off, it is just a scrap of paper.” Basho

Thanks to Rachel, for her work, to Patti, for her dedication and talent, to Denise for her organizing skills and willingness to try something new, and to the select few who were with us.

HOW MITHRIDATES DIED--NOT IN THE BUCKET

HOW POET  RICHARD HOWARD IS AKIN TO  MITHRIDATES

When I first had the immense pleasure of meeting RIchard Howard, I was a newly tenured Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati.

Amazing poet Richard Howard was visiting  the University to see if he could be lured to the mid-west from Manhattan as a visiting Elliston Professor.  The hiring committee members were taking him out to dinner and I was part of the entertainment--  I guess!
,
As I opened the back door of the car to sit next to Richard, I heard that the conversation was about the Italian restaurant we were headed towards. Being from Providence where you cannot buy a bad pizza and  which has only excellent Italian restaurants, I chimed in "The food will not be good here--too few Italians"

Richard reached over to take my hand as I sat and said  "Don't worry, my dear, I have been Mithridatized."  SILENCE  broken only by my laugh as I got the joke. "oh yes, I had  forgotten you are from Cleveland."  Everyone  chimed in and we went on to our jolly  dinner of  mediocre food and a friendship had begun-- because I got Richard's joke

Some details about the historical figure MITHRIDATES:.

After Pompey defeated him in Pontus, Mithridates VI fled to the lands north of the Black Sea in the winter of 66 BC in the hope that he could raise a new army and carry on the war through invading Italy by way of the Danube.^[10] His preparations proved to be too harsh on the local nobles and populace, and they rebelled against his rule. He reportedly attempted suicide by poison. This attempt failed because of his immunity to the poison.^[24] According to Appian's Roman History, he then requested his Gallic bodyguard and friend, Bituitus, to kill him by the sword:

Mithridates then took out some poison that he always carried next to his sword, and mixed it. There two of his daughters, who were still girls growing up together, named Mithridates and Nysa, who had been betrothed to the kings of [Ptolemaic] Egypt and of Cyprus, asked him to let them have some of the poison first, and insisted strenuously and prevented him from drinking it until they had taken some and swallowed it. The drug took effect on them at once; but upon Mithridates, although he walked around rapidly to hasten its action, it had no effect, because he had accustomed himself to other drugs by continually trying them as a means of protection against poisoners. These are still called the Mithridatic drugs.

Seeing a certain Bituitus there, an officer of the Gauls, he said to him, "I have profited much from your right arm against my enemies. I shall profit from it most of all if you will kill me, and save from the danger of being led in a Roman triumph one who has been an autocrat so many years, and the ruler of so great a kingdom, but who is now unable to die by poison because, like a fool, he has fortified himself against the poison of others. Although I have kept watch and ward against all the poisons that one takes with his food, I have not provided against that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends." Bituitus, thus appealed to, rendered the king the service that he desired.^[25]

• The poet A. E. Housman alludes to Mithridates' antidote in the final stanza of "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff" in A Shropshire Lad:

There was a king reigned in the East:

There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
–I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

AND RICHARD  SHARES THAT LONG LIFE --  HE  STILL PROSPERS -- STILL WRITING AND PUBLISHING HIS  INTRICATE AND DEMANDING POETRY.

WINTER IS ICUMEN IN.

I like the tone of this poem that I came across just  recently. 
The  idea that it  expresses reinforces one of the key mantras that kept my mother and my Aunt Anna going through some very rough patches. 
 Let's face the music and dance.

Reel

by Barbara Crooker

Maybe night is about to come

calling, but right now

the sun is still high in the sky.

It's half-past October, the woods

are on fire, blue skies stretch

all the way to heaven. Of course,

we know winter is coming, its thin

winding sheets and its hard narrow bed.

But right now, the season's fermented

to fullness, so slip into something

light, like your skeleton; while these old

bones are still working, my darling,

let's dance.

 “Reel” by Barbara Crooker from The Book of Kells. Cascade Books, © 2019.

I think that it does express an attitude that is IRISH to the  ground.

It recalls  my favorite advice  that is attributed to BERNARD SHAW:
"We all have skeletons in our closet- the trick is to make them dance."

We are heading into winter but today was bright and sunny and  yes, a bit chilly.

I am finding the  time and energy to return to my poetry .  The inspiration?
Two days ago the members of OCEAN STATE POETS came to my home for an afternoon poetry workshop.  I just applied  to that group and was accepted a few months ago. However the only person I met was a poet named Bill who, like  me, participated in the Galway Kinnell Poetry Festival in September in Pawtucket. 
So it was very exciting when six poets came through the  door and we  have a feast of  reading and talking about each others poems.  It was  an unusual and stimulating afternoon.  The poems were of a high quality and I was grateful to be included. 

I guess that writing poems and an occasional play is my form of dancing.  It is usually a solitary endeavor 
but this was a rare group experience.

Winter is  coming so there will be more wintry thoughts and moments in my days and more likely in my writing.  So get out your winter coats and boots and  prepare to enjoy what this season brings.

LIMERICKS IN THE BUCKET

Garrison Keillor just inspired  me with his attempts at  the LIMERICK  form.


     Farewell to life on the links!
     The game is over! It stinks!
     The great plaid butts
     Bending over the putts,
     The hike to the clubhouse for drinks.

     Instead I will write at my desk
     Limericks, cool, humoresque,
     And if I need dough
     I'll go do a show,
     Either radio or strip burlesque.

As you can see it is a five line form in the rhyming pattern  of A-A_-B-B-_A

Pawtucket and the  bucket seem to cry our for use in this form.

There once was a girl from Pawtucket
Who left and then came back to the Bucket
What was I thinking? 
It's worse and it's shrinking!
Time to set sail for Nantucket.

Well that is my first attempt..

UNIVERSAL CREATIVITY in THE BUCKET

WHY  DID GOD BOTHER TO MAKE EACH  HUMAN BEING UNIQUE, IF WE WERE NOT MEANT TO BRING THAT UNIQUE ASPECT TO THE TABLE OF LIFE?


I often talked about universal creativity when I was teaching. 

So few students self-identified as creative and it was as if I had to re-introduce themselves to their essential creative self. 
I could see in their sad refusal to cherish and  explore their creative selves  the results of years of being told that creativity was for the few artists and that many of them  had seen teachers link creativity with madness and who wants that.

My  understanding of creativity has been  deepened by the  growing discoveries of DNA and the genome and the uniqueness of each individual.

Mirabai Star sees the Divine connection in  Creativity.
"When you were a child, you knew yourself to be cocreator of the universe. But little by little you forgot who you were.
 When you were a child, everything was about color. Now you pick black as your automatic font color, because that is the coin of the realm. 

When you were a child, you traveled from place to place by dancing, 
and now you cultivate stillness, which is great, but you are forgetting how to move to the music of your soul. You can hardly even hear that inner music over the clamor of all your obligations. . . .

Yes, you are worthy of art making.
Dispense with the hierarchy in your head that silences your own creative voice. . . . 
It is not only your birthright to create, it is your true nature. 
The world will be healed when you take up your brush and shake your body and sing your heart out. . . .

The part of our brains with which we navigate the challenges of the everyday world is uneasy in the unpredictable sphere of art making.

 We cannot squeeze ourselves through the eye of the needle to reach the land of wild creativity whilst saddled to the frontal cortex, whose job it is to evaluate external circumstances and regulate appropriate behavior.

 Creativity has a habit of defying good sense.
 I am not arguing, however, that the intellect has no place in the creative enterprise. The most intelligent people I know are artists and musicians. Their finely tuned minds are always grappling with some creative conundrum, trying to find ways to translate the music they hear in the concert hall of their heads into some intelligible form that others can grasp and appreciate."

What a creative life demands is that we take risks. 

They may be calculated risks; they may yield entrepreneurial fruits, or they may simply enrich our own lives.

 Creative risk taking might not turn our life upside down but, rather, might right the drifting ship of our soul. 
When we make ourselves available for the inflow of [Spirit], we accept not only her generative power but also her ability to [overcome] whatever stands in the way of our full aliveness.

You do not always have to suffer for art. 
You are not required to sacrifice everything for beauty. The creative life can be quietly gratifying. The thing is to allow ourselves to become a vessel for a work of art to come through and allow that work to guide our hands.

Once we do, we are assenting to a sacred adventure. We are saying yes to the transcendent and embodied presence of the holy. 

Often I  seem to think I am  too “old” to create something “new,” which is really too bad.

Self consciousness, ego and the fear that I will make myself ridiculous all get in the way of my free and joyous exploration of my own creativity.

THESE ARE ALL EVIL MANIFESTATIONS OF FALSE PRIDE.  I WILL PRAY THAT  YOU, DEAR READER, DO NOT LET THESE PETTY FEARS INTERFERE WITH YOUR CREATIVITY, IF YOU PROMISE TO PRAY  FOR ME AND A FREER  AND YES--WILDER -- EXPRESSION OF MINE.

THINKING OF RICHARD HOWARD IN THE BUCKET

Like Most Revelations

Richard Howard - 1929-

• 
• 
  

(after Morris Louis)

It is the movement that incites the form,
discovered as a downward rapture—yes,
it is the movement that delights the form,
sustained by its own velocity.  And yet

it is the movement that delays the form
while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact
it is the movement that betrays the form,
baffled in such toils of ease, until

it is the movement that deceives the form, 
beguiling our attention—we supposed
it is the movement that achieves the form.
Were we mistaken?  What does it matter if

it is the movement that negates the form?
Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,
it is the movement that creates the form.

When I  read this poem by Richard Howard it both pleased me and dismayed me. 

 I  began to read it again and first  I was stopped by the fact that the poet announces that it is "after Morris Louis."  I knew that Louis was a painter and an abstract expressionist but I did not know much more than  that.

The poem has always seemed to me to hold some profound truth-- LIKE MOST REVELATIONS.

The poem keeps declaring something about the relationship between movement and form and them questions or even negates  the declaration. 

The lines that I kept coming back to are in the  last stanza :

Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,
it is the movement that creates the form.
For the past month I have been thinking a  great deal about Richard Howard. I met  him  in the late 80s when I was teaching  at the University of Cincinnati and he was a visiting Elliston Poet.  We became  good friends and even team-taught a course together.
Richard is a sublime master of wordplay. 
Notice just in the lines I quoted .  He notes  that we both give and give up  in what he then characterizes as  "this mortal process of continuing."
 What a  deep way to characterize what life and time  do to us all --they  both  unfold and  mature us and  finally end us.

Mystery of Poetry in the Bucket

AM I A POET?

"Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write?" – Rainer Maria Rilke

HOW AM I A POET?

My first memory of poetry besides the nursery rhymes that my mother read to me and I recited back to her is my love for the poem THE HIGHWAYMAN. 
She read it to me once and after that I asked for it every night. I started to memorize the melodic opening lines and I would sit with the book on our couch and recite it to the book and believed that I was reading it.
 I did this several times a day and was relentless in it . When my mother saw and heard, she sat with me and just pointed to each word as I recited it and after many tries I suddenly got the connection and I was reading it.
 And I believe that I taught myself to read because I so loved the poem and wanted to read it any time that I wanted and not need to wait for someone to read it to me.

Listen to the wonderful cadences

The Highwayman

BY ALFRED NOYES

PART ONE

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.   

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.   

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

Re-read it and see how it  feels in your mouth and in your mind

I loved the word pictures and when I looked at a moon in a cloudy sky, I said the line from the poem.

Since I knew it by heart it became a kind of party piece—I could recite it to friends and amaze them.

Also I loved the sad romance of the lovely Bess who dies to warn her lover of the waiting Redcoats.

My second favorite romantic poem was the tale of Fair Ellen and the gallant Lochinvar.

 Here is the text  first two verses of that poem which I also memorized and would recite often at the request of my Uncle Joe.

Lochinvar

BY SIR WALTER SCOTT

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

He staid not for brake, and he stopp’d not for stone,

He swam the Eske river where ford there was none;

But ere he alighted at Netherby gate,

The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

There was another  brief poem by Wordsworth that my mother often chose to read in those Poetry Saturday  nights when all baths were over, my sisters were  sleeping soundly and Anna was out dancing

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

THE WAY HE ENDS THAT  NEXT TO LAST LINE WITH THE-- oh--
 ANGUISHED OUTPOURING OF HIS OWN HEART.

AT LAST THE SPEAKER OWNS HIS HIDDEN BELOVED AND HIS  PERHAPS HIDDEN LOVE.

ORIGINAL GOODNESS--NOT ORIGINAL SIN

DID YOU CHOOSE THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED --AND HAS THAT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE?

In the past few months of being home bound and watching more  TV than is

probably healthy. One show has grabbed my attention THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED on AWE channel.

 The main person on this show travels around the world -- often walking or using a bike or motorcycle, and I have liked the way he finds and takes us to unusual places and people. 
 It came to my mind that he was on a spiritual quest, but until today that  idea never surfaced in the show. 

Today he travels to Kashmir and it becomes  clear that he is exploring some  stories that Jesus Christ visited India both in his youth and then he returned there after his death.  

I was startled and gripped by this sudden shift in the show. I realized that I have my self wondered what Jesus of Nazareth was doing  before he took up public life when he was 30.  His entire public life as described in the  4 gospels was over in three years.

What was such an exceptional person doing in his  20s? 

We talk about how we  are made in the Image of God.  But when Jesus was born in that stable, he also took on himself the Image of our humanity.

ANOTHER WAY OF TALKING ABOUT HOW WE ARE MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD

LET RICHARD ROHR EXPLAIN:

Eknath Easwaran (1910–1999) was an Indian born spiritual teacher and author, as well as a translator and interpreter of early Hindu texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. I was personally introduced to him during a visit from Henri Nouwen in the late 1980s. He encouraged me to spread his teaching, which I have not done enough until now.

 Easwaran writes:

We are made, the scriptures of all religions assure us, in the image of God. Nothing can change that original goodness. Whatever mistakes we have made in the past, whatever problems we may have in the present, in every one of us this “uncreated spark in the soul” remains untouched, ever pure, ever perfect. Even if we try with all our might to douse or hide it, it is always ready to set our personality ablaze with light.

I find that paragraph fascinating and almost ecstatic. READ IT AGAIN!

What did [Meister Eckhart (1260–1328)] teach? Essentially, four principles that [Gottfried] Leibnitz would later call the Perennial Philosophy, because they have been taught from age to age in culture after culture:

• First, there is a “light in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable” [1]: unconditioned, universal, deathless; in religious language, a divine core of personality which cannot be separated from God. Eckhart is precise: this is not what the English language calls the “soul,” but some essence in the soul that lies at the very center of consciousness. As Saint Catherine of Genoa [1447–1510] put it, “My me is God: nor do I know my selfhood except in God.” [2] In Indian mysticism this divine core is called simply atman, “the Self.”
   
• Second, this divine essence can be realized. It is not an abstraction, and it need not—Eckhart would say must not—remain hidden under the covering of our everyday personality. It can and should be discovered, so that its presence becomes a reality in daily life.
   
• Third, this discovery is life’s real and highest goal. Our supreme purpose in life is not to make a fortune, nor to pursue pleasure, nor to write our name on history, but to discover this spark of the divine that is in our hearts.
   
• Last, when we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all—all individuals, all creatures, all of life. . . .

A mystic is one who not only espouses these principles of the Perennial Philosophy but lives them, whose every action reflects the wisdom and selfless love that are the hallmark of one who has made this supreme discovery.

 Such a person has made the divine a reality in every moment of life, and that reality shines through whatever he or she may do or say—and that is the real test. . . . [A mystic is marked by] an unbroken awareness of the presence of God in all creatures.

 The signs are clear: unfailing compassion, fearlessness, equanimity, and the unshakable knowledge, based on direct, personal experience, that all the treasures and pleasures of this world together are worth nothing if one has not found the uncreated light at the center of the soul. [3]