field notes:

7.12.2003

It is sometimes difficult to hold all of the contradictory shades of thought and flavors of the heart that go on inside, especially in trying times. Being me, I want to sort it all out, get to the bottom line. I want answers. But life isn't like that, is it? Life is messy, there are few clean starts and fewer clear endings. It's rare, at least for me, when the choice between two paths is illuminated by truth. My friend J and I talked about this yesterday.

Poetry, art and music help us to carry the mad emotional maelstrom of being alive. On the days when I don't write in this space, but post a poem, it isn't because I'm not engaged. Rather, it's because I am fully engaged, it's because I'm working something out that the poem gets at in a way that nothing else can. If I could post drumming, there are many mornings when I would do that. Sometimes I'd just like to sit you down with me and drum together, and share the things that go on.

I used to be a tennis player. There were times when I played that I fell into a kind of thoughtless grace. I felt at once that I was my best self, and also that I was out of my self. Every movement of my body had my full awareness, my very cells were charged with purpose, and I could do little wrong. But in a way, these states had nothing to do with me. They weren't about trying harder, in fact effort was their enemy. That state was a marriage of two things: playing the game to win with everything I had, and at the same time not caring about winning, only caring about the visceral: the yellow fuzz on the ball as it hit the strings, the spring of my legs as I bent to a volley, the idea that carried the ball to its destination.

I don't play anymore. But a good poem can take me to the same places. A poem like this can carry the full range of emotions from the depths of mud to the watery reflected sky and back again:

Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron
--William Stafford

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from dawn or the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.

It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

from The Way It Is

posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:37 AM link | comments []

7.8.2003

Her Longing
Theodore Roethke

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare's tail, the floating frogbit,
Among my eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback, --
A thing quiescent!

But now--
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 6:59 AM link | comments []

7.6.2003

It's not simplicity I seek in the rise and fall of tides on this slivered shore.
In the heave and breath of the water's breast,
in the salty bath I share with creatures seemingly gentle or fierce
but really only recognizing the fact of themselves,
it's an equally clear path I hope to glimpse.
Nobody knows why the thrush sings, and I suspect that he doesn't know himself, beyond the singing.
I swim because I swim, because
once I give way to the waters' soft form the body wants more than any other thing to keep moving through it.
I don't know my destination, but trust the movement, and take comfort from the moon's constant care.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 9:15 AM link | comments []