Poetic lives and brushes

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then...

As you may know, poet Mary Oliver recently passed away, and while I did not know her work while she was alive, I am grateful to have read her verses as they have popped up in the media and on NPR. One is easily inspired to read more of her poetry, as her refreshing love for words and her in-tuneness with nature is refreshing and delightful, as sensed in poems like this:

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And then, the next poem, her four-poem series on her brush with death/cancer, strikes a nerve with me as I recently was at the Cancer Center and was told that they cannot tell me if I will have cancer or not--something I knew but only know the more I read. There has been a lot going on with the discovery of certain things that other FAP patients have had happen, things shared on our forum, and the growing concern over the polyps I actually have is... deafening at times. But then I read this poem, and I understand the overtones of grief AND hopefulness. 

But still... cancer has taken many great people, one of which was my aunt, for a sole example. Mary Oliver beat lung cancer: "It feels like death has left its calling card" and though she survived she was "all the same, kind of shocked." Having had a similar experience in beating cancer, in a way, I appreciate her words. It's hard to speak of, and that is perhaps why it is so important that cancer patients share their story if they wish--first because it is therapeutic. 

I would contend that the arts, literature, music--not to mention chanting hare krishna hare krishna--are the best for any patient, as it helps us look beyond the material, the terminal, the fatalism, the fear, and to hear something else. One can reflect on the end of life with writers and poets. With artists and musicians and good huggers. 

You can also listen to an interview with Mary Oliver as she talks about her cancer episode and reads the following poems aloud:

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac

by Mary Oliver

1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest

without a sound.

The hunter, strapped to his rifle,

the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.

2.

The question is,

what will it be like

after the last day?

Will I float

into the sky

or will I fray

within the earth or a river—

remembering nothing?

How desperate I would be

if I couldn’t remember

the sun rising, if I couldn’t

remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t

even remember, beloved,

your beloved name.

3.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

4.

Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,

all the fragile blue flowers in bloom

in the shrubs in the yard next door had

tumbled from the shrubs and lay

wrinkled and fading in the grass. But

this morning the shrubs were full of

the blue flowers again. There wasn’t

a single one on the grass. How, I

wondered, did they roll back up to

the branches, that fiercely wanting,

as we all do, just a little more of 

life?

The dash between the opening and closing dates of her life is a deeply poetic one. She seems to have gracefully lived up to her goal in life, a beautiful sentiment that she phrased so wonderfully: "When it's over, I want to say all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement." This quote is an invigorating source of inspiration, if recalled daily--and the world needs more of this perspective.

And to my dear aunt Robin, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your arm around my shoulder the other night. I thank you for the example of strength and the model of a courageous mother that you continue to be to me.

Thank you for your shining love, a bright star listening in on it all.

January is David Bowie month

There is a lot I could say about David Bowie, and particularly on connecting with his song Space Oddity before a scary eight-hour operation. (This was at a time when it was hard to connect to anything in the real world.) David Bowie was a unique outlet for many people. Imagine how much for his widow, Iman. I was recently touched in this month of his birthday (the 8th) and death (the 10th) to read here some of her beautiful sentiments about her late husband. They were a fantastic couple, and hearing either one talk about the other, the few times I have, was enough to be so glad that their stars aligned. It's moments like that make the world seem right, with all the quirky people and mess in it.

And if you're not Iman, you can still love the man who fell to earth. Not as much, and not loving him for the man he actually was as she did, but as a fan for his mind and the clever moves, lyrical words, and surreal aspects he brought to us when he strutted into the music world. What a unique splash in the world of rock-n-roll.

He was a brilliant individual talking about duality and duplicity and fragmentation, and if you don't believe me listen to him predict what the internet would be and do ("nihilistic" being just one of the terms he uses)--and see how the journalist is just boggled by the insights Bowie shares in the following, profound interview from 1999 where he says: "I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we are actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying." Brilliant. "It's an alien life form," he said, twenty years ago.

And now, this musical interlude....

If you have the chance, go see the David Bowie Is exhibit if it comes near you.
I saw it at the Brooklyn museum, and it blew my mind to see just how prolific and creative he was.

Srila Prabhupada

A. C. Bhakti Vedanta Swami Prabhupada

"We don't learn in 5 minutes, 10 minutes. It requires time."

Q: And can we really undo the karma of all our past lives in this one life? 

A: "It takes one minute"

"What Krishna says to do?" ...quoting the Gita...

Full surrender; then you come to me without any doubt.
Everything is there. Krishna has given everything fully.
If we accept it, it is very simple. There is no difficulty."

"A diseased man if he doesn't care for medicine, he dies, he suffers, that's all."

Lyrics: "When I see his love I know
I have a long, long way to go
When will I taste the love he is feeling inside?"

The following text en rose is taken from a blog I stumbled onto called The Door Ajar to Vraja, and is dated February 3, 2018: In the imaginary scene of the poem Krishna is speaking confidentially to a friend sometime after Kurukshetra, in a mixture of reminiscences and emotions, from Dwarka, to the rasa dance, to the meeting in Kurukshetra. In doing so Krishna reveals the secret depths of his love. Krishna never puts his devotees through something which He does not take also upon Himself.

SD 32.21 "Even when I removed Myself from your sight by suddenly disappearing,
I never stopped loving you."

GC 23.39 "O dearest Gopis! The first separation has been most difficult for me."

My solitude nestled
in the recesses of the night,
and like shadows that come forth
with brighter light,
its agony too appeared,
by moonlit memories
of their love for Me.

With the ardent desire
for a tidal wave
of this ocean of their love and my love,
to flood the hearts and the stars,
I disappeared,
causing their lamentation,
and thirstily I drank from the same (1)
chalice of longing emotions
welling up from purest love.

Spying unseen
upon their absorption and tribulation
while they searched for Me,
with breathless glances,
in incessant meditation
unwavering, on Me only,
I also endured separation, (2)
and could wait no more
for their embraces (3)
as the tears of love,
furrowing their faces,
were gushing like ecstatic rivers
of their sweetest love.

And impatient,
covetous of the mellows
flourishing in their hearts,
in that innermost hollow I stood,
a restless spectator of their total love,
incapable of repaying
the wealth of devotion
of my most beloveds.

In the most famous and also infamous (4)
state of Godhood of being self-satisfied,
no one could fathom why I cried,
why my heart sighed,
breathless from feeling separation,
dragged and dependent on
their selfless adoration.

I smiled anew
to soothe their hearts,
and hiding my anguish,
asked for forgiveness.
They offered their fragrant ghee of love, (5)
and the dense honey
of sulkiness,
thus plundering my love,
so that I, delighted, sold myself. (6)

Transcribed below is a salient quote from Prabhupada's lecture in the video just below:

"I, you, everyone of us, we have the trouble at the time of death and at the time of birth, birth and death. We are living entity, we are living soul. Birth and death take place of this body. The body takes birth and the body is vanquished. Death means sleeping for seven months, that’s all. That is death.

The soul is when this body is unfit for living, the soul gives up this body and, by superior arrangement, the soul is put again into the womb of a particular type of mother and the soul develops a particular type of body[.…] So, it is a great science: How the soul, the living soul, is in contact with this material body and how he’s transmigrating from one body to another. The example is given just like: We are just like when the garment or shirt or coat becomes too old, we give it up and we accept another shirt or coat. Similarly, I, you, every one of us, we are spirit-soul. We are given a type of body and shirt and coat by the arrangement of material nature. That particular body is given to us for our particular type of standard of living. Just like you: European, American, Australian… You have got a particular type, and you are given an opportunity, a particular standard of living.... So if an Indian comes [to your city--Melbourne, Australia--in this case], they will be surprised by this standard of living [....] 
'I am suffering! Why you have to accept birth? Why you have to accept death? Why you have to accept disease? Why you have to accept old age?' These are the problems. There are the problems and these problems can be solved in human form of life--not in the life of cats and dogs. They cannot. So our only request is that you make your life successful, come to the real understanding of your existence, and this is possible simply by chanting Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare”

 

This last video may produce an impression, a disclaimer for sensitive viewers. It is of Prabhupada preparing to depart, as devotees chant and give love.