Glenda Burgess's Blog, page 39

The Heart is Wide

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, -
No higher than the soul is high.

- Edna St. Vincent Millary, "Renascence," 1912

These lines by St. Vincent Millay are curious in that they speak to a simple truth - our world is shaped by the lives we live within it. A world as wide as the heart and as high as the soul. The poet reminds us we are essentially self-centric creatures: we live subjectively within the boundaries of ourselves. Interestingly, that means the world measures differently for each of us. Your world is not shaped as mine. There is no objective measure of this singular universe save the wholly personal measure of our own lives within a parenthesis in time.

If I think about that a moment, I observe that on some days the world changes shape on me. A day started with a hug offers more heart, perhaps. Another time more soul than heart. How wide the possibilities, how high the sky. Life varies with the expanse of my own perspective as I bounce around within the borders of my inner limitations and definitions. Lately, focused as I have been on the slow machinery of a bureaucratic drawbridge parting between someone I love and their future, I witnessed the world narrow. That one drawbridge came to symbolize a critical link in the grand scheme of things. And yet, as I've questioned my anxiety about these events, and reluctantly opened myself to the "perhaps" that is a "grander plan than as yet envisioned," I've felt the world once again widening. Widening as the soul expands, stretching faith into the furthest outreaches of possibility.

My puddle today feels wide and shallow. Much heart, constricted soul. On another day, perhaps it will reflect back to me something narrow and deep. A world of unlimited spirit, hungry on love. On a good day the world will expand full of heart and unlimited potential - an abundance of love and expression. A vista of grand expanse. What seems true is that this world is gently shaped by our innermost hearts and souls, and the translation this makes within us as we navigate our days. We follow our dreams and fight for our futures, dance with the ones we love, and the world changes as we do.

Static

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
- Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities," 1859

I am taken by the idea of our human nature, organic and eccentric, as "constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other." No wonder we find it hard to communicate meaningfully in our most basic, let alone intimate relationships. The mystery of what another person is feeling or thinking, or even why he/she acts a certain way, has made fragile human connection as staticky and easily unglued as a space walk over the blue earth.

Why is there not more overlap common to our nature? Why the mystery? Beyond such universal human inclinations as greed, sloth, lust, and one-day sales, shouldn't we all possess certain coding in our emotional-psychological core that would cover 75% of most necessary human interaction? I'm not asking for the moon here, just a template for the day to day: how to divide the sandbox toys; roommates and pizza boxes; a guide to the 9 a.m. product delivery beat-the-staff meeting; for sex, for love, for any combination of the two; holidays with in-laws; even navigating Costco with half the basket your spouse thinks you should have. (Such purchasing thoughts of course, arising on impulse and as full of mystery as the collapse of black holes.) What I trying to say is, shouldn't a race that lives nose-to-armpit have adapted the functional efficiency of a telepathic ant colony by now? What gives? Why is it so hard to understand the flag signals we shoot one another?

I am personally working on the use of shorter sentences. Analogies that speak to either popular sitcoms or greeting cards. Lip reading. Vegetable or mineral. There is bound to be a way to decipher the confusion and determine the meaning. To communicate with, say, the purity of birds. One note, times two. Unfortunately, I think this project make take considerable time. This morning when I asked my friend if he wanted tea on the way to the airport, the question was heard as "Do I want one more thing to juggle in my hand while trying to lock my bag, find my ID in this duct-taped, exploding wallet while fishing my ticket from the briefcase swinging south off my shoulder whacking my knee?" (accompanied by the wild, walleyed look of someone overwhelmed by baggage).

Umm, hold the tea. I'm working on an analogy here.

The Daily

CREDO
I believe there is something else

entirely going on but no single
person can ever know it,
so we fall in love.

It could also be true that what we use
everyday to open cans was something
much nobler, that we'll never recognize.

I believe the woman sleeping beside me
doesn't care about what's going on
outside, and her body is warm
with trust
which is a great beginning.

- Matthew Rohrer

Today a personal essay of mine, "Suddenly Solo," was published in AOL's My Daily online journal. You will find a live link to the essay to the left, and also on my home page under *FEATURED RELEASE*.

The photographic art chosen by the editors at AOL to accompany the story is both fitting and lovely. This essay describes a moment of my life and the winter it entwined with the story of an old swan, known to wilderness rangers here simply as "Solo."

The timing of this essay was completely unexpected - months and months from the time it was written and submitted, and honestly the essay was forgotten by me in the river of events that swept my life and probably Solo's as well downstream into new seasons and different geography. The thought I had when this essay resurfaced yesterday, and published today, was how all of life's currents travel in huge unseen eddies. We do not truly know when things will return to us, when people and history reconnect, intersect, bump up again in new elbows of time. All things and all time sweep forward through a great unknown. I find these deep unseen linkages to be comforting, an eternal mystery.

The poem, CREDO, by Matthew Rohrer reminded me today of the ways we simply wake up, love, and plunge our hands into the raw stuff of a given day. There may be something more. And possibly not. I believe there is. But what we do have is love, the "body is warm with trust which is a great beginning."

And that is the message of the story of Solo, who I hope returned once more with spring.

Pause and Reboot

There are no second acts in American lives
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Friday has arrived. I have a terrible head cold. All I want to do is lay on the couch and watch the tennis ball pummeled in the French Open finals. Outside the sun is curtained behind a high strata of clouds that say today is off sides. Not in the spot lights. Not today.

A day to pause and reboot. To catch a nap and a moment's reflection. When Fitzgerald made his famous quote, he was referring to the grandiose characters that inspired "The Great Gatsby." A story of lives lived large and to the limit. When you crashed, you failed. When you stumbled, it was the end. No second acts.

Great tragedies often spool out this way - high stakes games without a catch-net. Yet I recently watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," from the eponymous book of the same title by Jean-Dominique Bauby. This intense and unforgettable true story is a tale of fierce determination and imaginative adaptation. When everything is taken from a man at the peak of his life, leaving him only the movement of the blink of one eye, he faces within himself a choice - give up and die, or engage with the world on his own terms. This book, and the deeply moving film directed by Julian Schnabel, is a result of Bauby's decision to confront within himself the crushing skid of tragedy, to describe and express the coming-to-terms his soul was now forced to engage in. And in that process, he discovered what his life really meant to him. In loss, perhaps an unexpected gain. Pause, and reboot.

I think its wise for all of us to occasionally reassess the rhythm of our days, the compass setting we plot our goals by. Sometimes, like Jean-Dominique Bauby, reassessment is forced upon us by drastic changes in life circumstances. I like to think the human soul is the most resilient of sails - where there is a will, a wind will arise. I put my faith in second acts.

The Light Gets In

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen

I have thought on this idea of the balance of the extraordinary and the ordinary in our lives, and found myself drifting to contemplating the concept of construction in the chaos of unexpected de-construction. We rise instinctively from the debris of the accidental, the tragic, the disaster. Images of the citizens of Joplin, MO standing and singing Sunday hymns in the tornado wreckage of a community church inspire me. When lives unravel, are we not compelled to engage in rebuilding, to work our hands? The picked apart stitches, re-rolling skeins of yarn rethinking the design, starting over with the raw materials at hand.

"There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen's words possess a sureness of fundamental truth. Light permits seeing with clarity. Light comes through in unexpected openings. Behind broken dreams, the closure of opportunity and breaks in faith. Fresh vision like the rainbow shimmers in shattered paradigms. Creation embodies all that is new, born of necessity. And sometimes I think Destiny arrives in the midst of chaos like a fallen star, an explosion of fractured light that reaches deep into the corners of our darkest moments.

I invite you to ponder a wall that truly forced a turn in your life; a disaster that inspired a better life. Consider the shut door - a disappointment that forced you to turn around and become aware of the wide world behind you, open to exploration. What crack in the pattern of your days, in the dream once pursued so avidly, what crack in that perfect world held tight within your grasp led to this moment's sense of completion and satisfaction? Disappointment, chaos, disaster, misfortune...cracks open in our hearts that let the light of compassion in. And inspiration. Signs of life truly lived.

Memories on Memorial Day

And still it is not enough, to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the immense patience to wait till they are come again. For the memories themselves are still nothing. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

My husband is buried above the wild and tumultuous Spokane River, down from the high train trestle bridges we call the "wishing trains" because we so often whisper secret wishes as we cross under the train cars suspended high above. They thunder overhead on their way across the continental U.S., great diesels hauling container goods, crops, oil and chemicals, slatted stock cars swaying down the tracks before they disappear through granite cuts into narrow pine valleys. My husband quite liked the idea that he would have a view of the river and the trains. Nature and commerce. Chaos and fortune. Our lives are ruled by them.

Today, cemetery breezes wave ribbons of color along narrow paths that are lined with the stars and stripes. Families with lost looks on their faces, clutching plot grids, wander the acres under the ponderosa looking for the buried but not forgotten. Children's hands are tucked in the adults', and in the little fists more small flags, bunches of lilacs. America does not forget its loved ones. It does not forget its soldiers. Yet the numbers buried in the green shade seem to be a continuous sea of monuments. A new engraved stone, a simple bench, stands next to my husband's - a nineteen year old boy, lost in Afghanistan. Somebody's son, someone's brother. There were two flags flying in his honor, the gift of a baseball mitt.

Bending low, I place a flag in the ground the requisite distance (a boot length away) from my husband's marker. A Vietnam era Air Force veteran, he was proud of his service. He met men in those years who were friends and mentors. I couldn't help but think of our own boy, now twenty, at the US Naval Academy. His life is at a crux point as well. What direction will it turn? How will he think of his service, years from now? National service opens us to the community beyond family - opens us to the identity we share as Americans. Whether in the military services, the Peace Corps, Teach for America, the USO, the Red Cross - take a moment to thank the next young or old person you meet giving of themselves to all of America.

This fall my daughter will run her first half-marathon for Team USO - proud of our soldiers, her brother, her father, and all those whose names she does not know who came before her and follow her now. Service requires only that we show up, hands open and ready to do whatever work needs doing. Let the poems of your memories carry the day.

And finally, as I think of my son and how proud his father would be of him, as I wonder about his future, I think of Eric Greitens, the decorated Navy war hero and author of "The Heart and the Fist - The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Seal." Eric penned a personal note to my son on the title page - "Follow your heart and continue to live with courage." Words that might inspire us all I think.

Morning Coffee

so early it's already too late
to say I never wanted to cross
into a wholly rational state,

to upend the coffee grounds like a sand
castle into the sink and rise
to the occasion of day, another

- from "Wreckage," Mary Jo Salter

Back from one of life's grand moments - the peak of accomplishment, the dizzying ledge of the "Big View"- I find myself rising early this drizzly gray morning and tending to the tasks of simple living, all the while wondering at this balance between the extraordinary and the ordinary.

We build our roads brick by humble brick. We pack our shoulder bags with provisions for the day - food, water, compass, shelter, warmth, book and song. We then head out into the hours of unknown, hopeful and determined. The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tse is often quoted, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." And so it is in these early mornings, standing by the sink with our cups of steaming coffee, that daily we mark our lives. Not poised at the grand mountain tops, but on the wandering trail that takes us there. We leave these magnificent view points along the way. Set course for the next adventure before us. And in this way, sand castles rise to the occasion of another day.

Hello, Sun

WHY I WAKE EARLY
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety -

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light -
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
- Mary Oliver

I'm leaving for New Haven on Friday. Flying east across the continent. Excited to sit in the sun and celebrate my daughter's joyful achievement; watching, with the other parents, the first beat of a garden of wet new wings, brilliant as butterflies from the chrysalis. I will hold my breath to hear the music of her future unfolding before her as she walks the lawn to shake the hands of the scholars and educators who have made such a tremendous impact on her life. I will be sitting beside my son, and for the three of us, this moment will mirror a future we never could have imagined the day we lost Ken. He would be so proud. He is part of all that has made this moment possible. And although the physical world is our boundary - it both giveth and taketh away - on this day spirits will soar. For we are the promise of the morning.

Against the Bland: An Unexpected Answer

Expansion occurs when I open to a new thought or idea, or when I allow a question to attract an unexpected answer.
- "Daily Word," May 16, 2011

Change of wind on the weather vane today. In a week I will watch with a bursting heart as my daughter earns her college degree. I will sit in the sun on a folding chair in the company of other silently proud parents observing similar cornerstone moments in the lives of cherished sons and daughters. A recent opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times addressed the seemingly unfounded optimism of college graduates. What is it about this moment that poises us all on the brink, believing, fully, in a future of unlimited possibilities? It is an authentic moment of expansion. We are in the crux: witness to the intellectual power of young minds that will unleash unimaginable potential. Unexpected answers to old problems. Fresh solutions to our generation's dogged failures. Where we ourselves have stalled out solving the great dilemmas of the world, the young carry the hopes of the many forward.

"The Key Lime," writes Campbell McGrath in his pithy poem - "Curiously yellow hand-grenade/ of flavor; Molotov-cocktail / for a revolution against the bland." Young minds are the explosive key limes of our times. Let us celebrate that bright tang of intelligence and enthusiasm. Let us wish them well as the graduates of 2011 take all we have saved of the lessons of the past and invent new answers for the future. Shatter old paradigms. Let us be proud of the next generation, proud of continuity, and remember, for a moment, we ourselves were once the sharp bite on staid thinking. It's never too late to rethink the question and find an unexpected answer.

Been Here Feeling

So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget, and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
- E. M. Forster

What Forster has to say is rather interesting to me, as he refers to transitions and memory. Do we actually remember anything of our gestational or early years? Might experience be imprinted in our memories but overlaid with ensuing experience, layers deep and rarely accessed? Or do we simply feel our way into the world, retain nothing, and as we end our years think of "What next?" with a certain curiosity with nothing else to go on?

I think the idea of faith is frequently thought of as a belief system that marries the principles of a religious teaching to whatever personal confidence we bring to that which we cannot prove but believe is true. I prefer just the latter idea, belief skinned from any religious instruction or ritual overlay. Faith as just the bare bones of believing in what as yet we cannot confirm. What is interesting to me is that we do anticipate the unknown, however shaky that faith may be. There is something in human nature that strengthens with hope, and embraces it. We hold hope close in the heart, throughout life. I imagine faith is strengthened when hope is renewed, and tested when it is not. But the full consciousness of human life - who and what we are - does not travel lightly through this world. We bring all that we are to the finish. I like what that says about us, our souls, that we live and age with anticipation. We are about growth, about transformation. Our souls are primed for evolution. Why would this be so if there were no purpose in the design? Here I am again, at that "Been Here" awareness, bumping up against what I feel and do not know.