Pearls of Wisdom

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from http://www.sunsetshoesonline.net/index.php/catalogsearch/result/?q=pearl+bracelet

A friend read this aloud to me recently. When she sent me the link to where she had found it, I was delighted to see that its author is Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. 

It appears on the website, Living Life Fully.

-o-

Some of the oldest and most delightful written words in the English language are the collective nouns dating from medieval times used to describe groups of birds and beasts.  Many of these go back five hundred years or more, and lists of them appeared as early as 1440 in some of the first books printed in English.  These words frequently offer an insight into the nature of the animals or birds they describe.  Sometimes this is factual and sometimes poetic.  Occasionally it is profound:  a pride of lions, a party of jays, an ostentation of peacocks, an exaltation of larks, a gaggle of geese, a charm of finches, a bed of clams, a school of fish, a cloud of gnats, and a parliament of owls are some examples.  Over time, these sorts of words have been extended to other things as well.  One of my favorites is pearls of wisdom.

An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable.  Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive.  But oysters must open their shells in order to “breathe” water.  Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.

Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft nature because of this.  It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel.  It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live.  But it does respond.

Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over time, it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain.  A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering.  Not every oyster can do this.  Oysters that do are far more valuable to people than oysters that do not.

Sand is a way of life for an oyster.  If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.

Disappointment and loss are a part of every life.  Many times we can put such things behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.  But not everything is amenable to this approach.  Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way.  These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us.  It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us.  It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.

Something in us can transform such suffering into wisdom.  The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process.  First we experience everything.  Then one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.

-o-

May 2015 be your best year yet!CAM00323

Readers’ Anonymous

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My name is Bethany and I am a read-aholic.

As addictions go, not a bad one, I know. Even if you buy all of your books, reading costs way less than heroin or even marijuana (well, I think it costs less, and you definitely can’t borrow drugs from a library and then return them!).

And, after all, books teach us about the world and about ourselves, if we’re lucky (if we’re conscious!). If you don’t believe me, check out Nina Sankovitch’s TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR, which is sort of about a woman reading a book a day for a year; or try Will Schwalbe’s THE END OF YOUR LIFE BOOK CLUB, about the author and his dying mother and the books they read in her last year or so of life.)

Being a reader, most of the time, feels extraordinarily lucky to me. I can’t imagine not reading. Even so, being asked to not read for a week, and — more or less — complying, forced me to be more aware of the extent to which I use reading as an escape from my family, from stress, not to mention from almost every other other possibly interesting activity. The museum? A movie? The zoo? Couldn’t I just drink a latte and read for a couple of hours?

And it’s not just one book — I am one of those readers who keeps several books going at once. (A week ago, when I finally plunged into Week Four of THE ARTIST’S WAY, I was somewhere in the middle of a Maisie Dobbs mystery; Rebecca Solnit’s new paperback of essays, THE FARAWAY NEARBY; a book about Alzheimers, which I seem to have now misplaced; a very short novel by Japanese poet Tikashi Haraide called THE GUEST CAT [it was supposed to be passed on as a Christmas gift, but its true owner won’t mind waiting a week]; Louise Desalvo’s THE ART OF SLOW WRITING; and, oh yeah, THE ARTIST’S WAY.)

I was not entirely faithful. I picked up the newspaper as I ate breakfast almost every morning. For the first few days I kept checking my email and text messages obsessively for something I just had to read. For the first day and a half I continued listening to a book on CD (another one: THE SCARLET LETTER). When the new issue of THE SUN arrived in the mail, I read one article — very very quickly, like an alcoholic gulping down a glass of scotch before anyone could catch me at it. I read my own pages on the days that I worked (which was less than usual as it was Christmas week, but still).

No matter, even with these lapses and negotiations with Julia Cameron’s goal of not-reading-pretty-much-at-all, the week of reading deprivation made a difference. I took my dog and my daughters for a walk on a nearby beach on Christmas day. I listened to Bon Jovi and Joan Baez while I drove. I people-watched. I did a very little bit of decluttering. I watched several movies I had been wanting to watch but not getting around to (including Violette  and World War Z — eclectic tastes). I called a couple of friends who had called me recently and left messages. On Sunday, determined to take a book-less nap with the dog, I instead decided to go back to the beach with him for a walk (a really wonderful walk) and when I came home I gave him a bath.This morning, when my reading fast was up, I was, weirdly, a little disappointed. And then I read.

 

The Kestrel

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My darling husband says that I got the poem almost right, but that Hopkins didn’t mean a large hawk like a red-tailed hawk–his Windhover was the smaller kestrel, a falcon.

Driving to my parents’ farm, out highway 6 in Lewis County, you can sometimes see a kestrel. A colorful, beautiful bird.

I borrowed the pictures from Bird Web (which is worth a look).

In my peregrinations, I learned that falcons and hawks are not even in the same family, and I found that our American kestrel is not (of course) precisely Hopkins’ kestrel. I think.

I also found a blog called The Broken Tower (which I am now following…does this count as reading?), which has another lovely, and even more detailed description of “The Windhover.”

The Windhover

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This is my Christmas gift to you.

After a friend emailed a circle of friends with news of Avian flu and its effects on raptors in Whatcom county (and on a particular, beloved keeper of raptors), we shared amongst us a number of falcon references, and I offered Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Windhover.”

It’s such a gorgeous poem. I memorized it years ago, and it’s one of the poems I often recite to myself when I’m troubled. Its meaning is not self-evident, and I’ve had students admit that they found it baffling; but the sound of it alone is worth the trip. Aloud, Hopkins seems to be writing in an extremely musical foreign language. (Just saying aloud “chevalier,” “lovelier” or “rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing” will demonstrate this, as will noticing the odd line breaks and juxtapositions.) But here’s the poem itself:

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

          To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

*
[Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)]
*
I borrowed the text from Poetry Out Loud (where you can listen to Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”), a site on which it is asserted that if you wish to memorize a poem, it helps to understand it. I’m not sure you have to understand this poem to enjoy it, but here is my brief explication — not to explain away the beauty of the poem, but to offer a little guidance through perhaps unfamiliar territory.

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who lived in England from 1844-1880. In the first stanza I like to imagine him on a walk in the early morning, catching sight of one of those big, soaring birds (I think of our region’s red-tailed hawks and ospreys), which he calls “morning’s minion,” minion as in messenger (bearing news of something, perhaps, for Hopkins, of Christ), and feeling that he was witnessing the prince of the dawn — “daylight’s dauphin” — as he admires the bird’s dappled underside (imagining the movement of a skate in the ocean — think of the big flat fishy skate, not an ice skate), then, as one does when overcome by unexpected beauty, feeling his own heart soar. The “heart in hiding” always suggests to me depression and a protected, hidden heart, now coaxed out of hiding.

The second stanza is all sound magic. (Read it out loud to yourself!) The heart isn’t just coaxed out of hiding, but rippling like the hawk’s wings against the sky, and “buckle” always makes me think of a sheet of tin shaken and reflecting sunlight. The “chevalier” as a knight in armor reinforces that notion.

The final stanza brings up an image even stranger to our own era: “plowdown sillion.” This was explained to me as the earth turned up by a plow and — it so happens (having been raised on a farm) I know this phenomenon. I didn’t walk behind a plow, too young for that, but I rode on tractors with my Dad and looked back to see the furrows opening and gleaming. The plow of course is another shiny metal image (like the tin I imagine above) but the earth itself shines when it’s first turned up, with moisture and maybe mica in the soil. Sillion is an archaic word referring to the slice of furrow itself, but it makes me think of silicon, another silvery, shiny word. Plodding behind the horse and plow (“sheer plod”) would reveal this unexpected beauty, just as (with the next image) staying until the fire is dying down reveals the beauty of its end.

And those endings (“blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, fall, / Fall, gall themselves and gash gold vermilion”) makes this a poem about endings, about how staying with something — or someone — is worth the trouble, and even death has a beauty for those brave enough to face it.

Finally, to augment my own reading, here’s a link (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/182786) to a Poetry Foundation essay by Ange Mlinko about her experience with the poem, “a love poem to life.”

May you have a restful, shop-free day, a day that includes a walk, people you love, and some unexpected beauty.