Potpourri
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Subject: Potpourri
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 12:57:24 CDT
Received two really terrific reviews of the poem "Off the Top of My Head" from two poets whose opinions I greatly respect. Strange. I had not thought all that much of it, but apparently they do. This, of course, makes me rethink the whole thing. I am sometimes so closely involved with something I've written that I lose all objectivity. In such situations, your perceptions help bring me to clarity. Thank you, dear ones, again.
Mindy wrote to the effect that it's amazing how a person can speak one way and yet write in a totally different manner, and that I was a prime example of that. That is so. She is one of perhaps three or four within the Circle who know me personally, who have been there in a group of people with me present, and has observed me within such a situation.
And I am *not* some kind of charismatic conversationist in such a setting. Put me one-on-one on a good day with something which touches me, and it's a different story. But in group situations I tend to be on the periphery, diffident, more of a listener than a talker
.
Perhaps this little whatevah-you'd call it might...um...whadevvah, illustrate that:
"Reading My Latest in JavaBreak"
When I hold up my hand
For attention
And clear my throat
For attention
Eventually they turn faces
To me.
Attention,
Of a sort,
Is granted.
I read
With dramatic pauses
And lordly inflection
And thrill myself
If no one else.
When the poem
Ends
Their eyes are fixed
Elsewhere
And I cough,
Cough,
To bring them back.
And they come back
Sort of
And clap.
~~~~~~~~
LOL. I wrote that one yesterday immediately after reading "Off the Top of My Head," and it's interesting that, love them though I do, they didn't *get* what my two poet-friends *got.* And that is not to criticize anyone, aside from my own lousy writing. It's just the way it is.
~~~~~
Yestereday Dalila began translating something from the Portuguese for me, something of rare beauty, and I was transported by the innocence and loveliness of her translation, English being both a second and a difficult language for her. Yet her translation came across as something shining and splendid. I *got* it, you may say.
She was talking about each character in the Bible being an archetype, something eternal, which may be looked at from that vantage point to great advantage. I have know this for decades, since being in Kapiolani Park at the foot of Diamondhead Crater.
It was there that an idea suddenly came to me, that so much of the Bible and NT might well be interpreted from the standpoint of "dream interpretation." Homeless at the time, I found that idea obsessing me and it was months later when I discovered that the Freudians had already thought of that, beat me to it. Yet it had taken them over 50 years to come up with that, with incredibly intense training, whereas I had been given it with such scant and cursory reading.
I have always know that, I would like to say, inaccurate though that might be.
Synchronicity. "Though all being blind/The way to go shall glimmer in the mind." I cannot recall the poet's name just now, but the same poet who wrote "I must go down to the sea again." The path may well be blind, yet the way to go "glimmers" through such things as the so-called "accidental" coming upon such strange so-called "coincidences." In AA we have a saying: "Coincidence is how God maintains [Her] anonymity." I have come to believe that.
I mention this because within the past day or so, synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) has been glimmering all about me, and the path now gleams ahead, whispering, come, come. Frisson! And I must tell you that I need these little "GodShots" from time to time. They feed me even as the ravens fed Elijah. We do not live by bread alone, eh?
~~~~~~
One of you asked how in the world I ended up in Reform School, and I must say that I didn't "end up" there at all, but passed through, and was greatly blessed by the experience. There was violence there, yes, and there were sexual assaults coming down about me, but somehow I passed through it all basically unscathed. It was there that two women teachers first recognized some tiny spark of ability and began to encourage me to write. One of them gave me a book by Michener called, "Hawaii," and that changed my life. There came a time when a homeless bum was sitting on a bench in a park in Honolulu, and a lovely Japanese woman walked up to him and asked him to take her picture. And that the two of them somehow came together, as there were three lovely souls needing to come into this world who could only do so through these two. And so it was that one link in the chain led to another which led to another. And one of those souls is reading this just now. (I love you, Kathy.)
It always so amazes me how something so small and seemingly insignificant can so often have such incredible ramifications, changing the trajectory of a person's life. Would I have gone to Hawaii without Michener? Probably not. What would I be like had I not experienced loss of freedom, long weeks in solitary confinement, beatings by the guards? To one who is imprisoned within the freedom of the Spirit, everything eventually works itself into pattern, the pieces of and by themselves seem somehow magically to form a gestalt, something meaningful. I would not give up that experience, just as I would not care to repeat it.
As the writer wrote, Perhaps you would not be who you are without having gone through that.
Yes, I believe that.
Soon I want to begin sharing with the Circle some of the miracles which have visited me on the journey. Not just my everyday life here in Lawrence, but the angels of coincidence who have shaped, touched, molded me into the person I am. Complex and yet simple. Homely and yet with a certain beauty (I'm told). Middle-aged and yet young. I am a seething roil of contradictions, paradoxes, just as I suspect so many of you are, also. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...
We are all moving through this wonderful journey of life, adventure, promise, obstacle. I have long believed that Life itself operates from a matrix of sheer mythological underpinning, that myth is the skeleton upon which Life fashions itself, and that myth is the core of our experience. There is always struggle, there is always challenge. There is always the damsel or prince in distress, the dragon always breathes fire, the road is never smooth for long but comes with canyons and chasms built-in. Is it not so for you?
I may not be able to write much in the next few days. Weather permitting, I am to go out to Nancy's Farm tomorrow and resume painting the house. Nicoletta told me she loved reading about the painting, so perhaps there will be an ongoing and unfolding saga there. And tonight Mike Bell and I are supposed to meet with Nancy regarding the remodeling of her daughter Sarah's basement. Possibly a few hours tonight drywalling.
And I will have plans for the weekend which will keep me preoccupied and busy, so we shall see...be patient with me.
The weather remains cold, bright, brilliant, little mares' tail clouds floating way up there. Ice crystals, I was told once. I prefer mares' tails.
I feel utterly at peace, held within the arms of an unfolding destiny which I cannot avoid nor escape. Ninevah is there on the one hand, Damascus on the other, as my DreamVision in Tulsa so vividly told me. I remember Father X describing his vision of Christ on the battlefield of Viet Nam, holding up His hands. Instead of stigmata, there was Egypt on the one hand, Jerusalem on the other, in flames. Christ said to him, "Set the world on fire from Egypt to Jerusalem." That happened so long ago, yet remains vivid in my mind, as the synchronicity begins to gleam, gleam.
This path can be utterly spiritual. It can also be completely scientific. Just as light is both wave and particle, so is Life of two natures. I love that. I would abhor a world of cold metallic fact. I inhabit a mythic world of Spirit, and Life sprinkles cold metallic fact now and then as one would season meat and potatoes with salt. That's how it is for me.
Last night at a meeting I heard a Native American man with 12 years of continuous sobriety ask, "What is my Purpose?" He seemed very sad, wistful. And not two days before that I had seen him dandle upon his knee his little grandson, with the boy's head lolling back against Grandpa's big chest. I had felt the love emanating, the boy asleep in the arms of love. I thought back to that most incredible of bonds I was given with my own loving Grandpa, and that hand of memory suddenly squeezed my heart and my throat grew narrow.
There's your Purpose, I thought, if nothing else. Let that little boy know he's loved.
And surely part of my Purpose is to let you know, all of you, that *you* are precious, loved, beautiful. Just the way you are.
I even tell myself the same thing, sometimes.
Keep dancin'....luvya's.
Dickens
