From the Belly of the Whale

My latest volume of poems will be out in a few weeks.  It includes Yosemite at Fifty: The John Muir Poems. I am including one of the poems from the John Muir selection.  I am hoping to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship this summer to work on a collection of poems on conservation and the endangered species of Yosemite.  These is such a need to bring awareness to a deeper level.  We need to feel the suffering of the earth and creation if we are to mobilize and change the way we live.

Reaching Out From the Chest

Everything in my chest

reaches out to bathe itself

in the chestnut colored loam;

strewn all about

with burnt and blackened

pieces of bark and wood.

I mingle with earth and

needles as if I am living from

the basement of my days.

My insides reach toward the

the forest floor that has

been asleep for the winter

of my adult life—building up

warmth and food for my soul

against a hollow detachment.

My wholeness is drawn out by

the heat of an age old woods;

by the heat of everyman’s

journey through these days

of finding a voice—finding

a central home in the me—one

of comfort and uncluttered

belonging to itself.

I find myself relaxed in my own

aging. Coming to myself like

a moist, sunlit bed of needles on

the dirt of thousands upon thousands

of aeons, and winters, flowering blooms

of gentle-life growth.

Cones pepper the view and

thick blankets of retreating snow

withdraw their reach to the bottom

of the hills; uncovering all that has

fallen and died since autumn; all

that is in there—that

I have forgotten until now.

My days have pulled in

a bit lately, retreating back

to the bottom of meaning

and the corrugated layers

of place and thing.

I find pieces of myself

scattered on the floor of my

life, and see wonder in the

ripening of passages

and aimless ambling turns.

The compost of my days is rich

with dank, wet, dark expression;

holding itself against the leaner times.

I have found more life in me

than I knew I had held.

The darkness holds no absence

it only hides the view. Flowers and

blooms for a future glory

lay dormant in the tubers

and roots of all life’s meandering

of imagination and place; of

time and space.

Standing on the remnants

of all that is past,

tenderness rises like the

scent of fresh dirt.

Tilled and open, it awaits

the planting of

the second half of life.

A raven sings this same song

from the other side of this vista.

I can hear it, but he escapes my view

Reiteration and Rumination

"Reading, to the fathers, always meant doing so in an audible voice and was called reiteration.  The word of God is reiterated in an audible voice and relished in our inner consciousness.  In this manner, it can find rest in our innermost recesses.  Reiteration here is like rumination.  After a while the words actually become one's own words.  Man, then, becomes the faithful storehouse for the word of God.  His heart becomes a divine treasury for it."  Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life: the Interior Way, SVS Press.

Anyone who has been to a poetry reading or poetry slam knows the power of the written word being spoken.  It is a process of speaking things into palpable being and existence.  The words on paper have one level of power, the words on paper spoken into the air have a deeper and more rending power to open you up and split you in half.

We have had the good fortune of being able to save the stories verbatim - since the advent of writing and even more so with the printing press.  We have lost the magic of reiteration and rumination by individualizing the act of digesting words.  We read by ourselves and silently in the head.  The power of words exists in the sounds they make, the echoing they perform in the cosmic play of echolocation, and in the clarifying of the geologic landscape of our interior life that they reveal.

It is words and they sounds they call us to that take us further outside of ourselves and simultaneously deeper into ourselves.  Words pronounced.

Getting into the habit of muttering out what you are reading adds a layer of cementing those words to the heart that would not occur if they are only scanned and cognitively digested.  The scanning and cognitive digestion of words is only one layer of the meaning they offer.  The sounding and cadence of words has a heartfelt and soulful task to fulfill as well.  Not only faith but depth comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Check out Matthew the Poor's volume and start to mutter while you read.  It'll deepen you (and keep people away cause they'll think you've finally gone of the ledge).  Also, try to develop a sense of the sound of words, of a practice of reiteration and rumination not only in your reading of spiritual texts and scripture, but of all the words you have gathered around you to inform and comfort you and the life you are carving out in this present life.

Ciao!

tjm+

The Dream of the Rood

Medieval literature is chocked full of examples of piety that challenge us to view the horror of Christ's death in terms of victory in battle.  One of my favorites is a poem of Anglo-Saxon ilk.  It is called the Dream of the Rood.  It is a meditation that is filled with Lenten duality.  The agony and triumph of faith is very difficult to capture in one place.  This poem is a fine example.  Find HOPE in this Lenten Meditation - a hymn of anticipation - as we await the coming glory of our Jesus in His Resurrection.

As a Medieval Studies major, I spent many an hour in the poetry of the Angles and Saxons.  This poem is what sparked my interest in specializing in the Medieval time period.  It was the first poem I studied at length.

Dream of the Rood text at: http://faculty.uca.edu/jona/texts/rood.htm