Luminous and Compassionate: Good Goals

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How did my daughters get so old?

Today my twins–Pearl and Annie–those tiny babies that we brought home in 1993–turn 26.

I have been reading old notebooks that I scribbled in when they were much younger (playing soccer, needing rides to friends’ houses and to the swimming pool), and I found this passage from the introduction to Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop:

Poetry, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small-minded. To write poetry is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s poems are full of rage, lamentation and despair. To write poetry of a higher order demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our art with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.

You could substitute parenting–and though I wish I could deny the moments of rage, lamentation and despair, there they are, inked across the pages of my notebooks. So, with my apologies to Kowit:

Parenting, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small minded. To be a mother or a father is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s family life is sometimes buffeted by rage, lamentation and despair. To parent in this higher way demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our interactions with our children with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.

You could substitute teaching, or…anything. How can we, today, imbue our lives with a luminous and compassionate spirit?

My friend Louise says to her sons (and sometimes to me), “I’ve really enjoyed being on this bus ride with you.”

They are 26 now, and their baby sister will be 20 in 10 days. I can see them, still trying to figure out their lives, to become who they are. But I’m also a work in progress–still learning how to parent them. And I’m still working at that “luminous and compassionate” thing.

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

-Stanley Kunitz

 

 

Writing the Labyrinth

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Some experiences seem beyond words. That’s how I’m feeling about my week in Chartres. And yes, I know it was a writing workshop, and that I should be perfectly at home, writing about it. But.

So I went to Chartres for a writing workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. I wasn’t expecting a  spiritual workshop focused on Chartres Cathedral and its nearly 1000 year old labyrinth (and its 2000 year history, pre-current cathedral). Even had I known that the labyrinth would be a central aspect of our week, I don’t think I could have fathomed how profoundly meaningful this location was going to become for me.

I’ve walked labyrinths before, and I have always found meaning in them. At a Courage to Teach retreat years back (my youngest daughter wasn’t yet in school, so I know it was at least 15 years ago), I encountered a lavender labyrinth and one of the reasons I remember the event is because I wrote a poem about a conversation I had with a friend while standing in that labyrinth. (Did we “walk it”? Did we know that was a thing?)

Thanks to my dear friend Janet, I attended an Episcopal Women’s retreat in 2015 and again (I think) in 2016, at St. Andrew’s House on Hood Canal, and walked their labyrinth. At the first retreat I learned about the history of labyrinths, even about Chartres, though I had still barely scratched the surface. At St. Andrew’s, the labyrinth is outdoors, in a wooded area, and it’s lined by white rocks and shells. I wrote about this labyrinth, too. (Not a successful poem, but one I put through numerous drafts.)

When my mom was in care, I sometimes stopped at a nearby church, St. Hugh’s,and walked their labyrinth. It was always comforting and peaceful. In Ireland I walked a number of stone circles, and at least one actual labyrinth, on my mom’s 85th birthday, as it happens (and, yes, tried to write about it).

This past April during Holy Week my church put down a canvas labyrinth in the sanctuary (apparently, they had done this before, without my clocking it), and I signed up to facilitate a 2-hour slot, and I walked it, of course.

So I am not unfamiliar with the labyrinth structure and spell and movement.

You can find labyrinths all over the world, by the way, by searching this link: https://labyrinthlocator.com/home.

If the other labyrinths were difficult to get into words, the labyrinth at Chartres is proving impossible.

But here I am, typing away and…trying.

I think the best experiences in our lives are exactly like this. I’ve never been able to do a great job, for instance, in writing about my daughters’ births, and I know I have much to do before I’m finished writing about the deaths of my parents. Perhaps some people can be glib about world hunger and climate change and homelessness and the current state of American politics…but I find them daunting. Does that mean I shouldn’t write about them, that I have nothing to say? Or that what I have to say doesn’t fall out of my pen, polished and perfect?

That a subject calls us to write about it and yet proves difficult to capture, is not a reason for us to avoid it. If anything, that’s how you know that you must keep approaching, keep circling, keep trying to put the words down.

Maybe it isn’t a blogpost. Maybe it’s a 30-page essay about tears and healing. Maybe it’s a book.

If you feel called to write it, no matter your conflicting feelings, then I want to encourage you. I am willing to bet that there’s someone out there who needs to hear it.

Me, for instance.

 

 

 

Wait, what just happened?

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Astonished. That was the word I chose during our writing workshop in Chartres, to describe my journey — to France (how did I get so lucky?); through the 12th century labyrinth in the cathedral (frankly unexpected); and in my life generally. It’s a word that nicely describes my second week in France, too. Paris was astonishing and I was astonished. Think stunned. Think stoned. That was me.

I’m now home (3 days since — but when will I remember how to sleep at night and be awake during the day?) and I’m still feeling pretty astonished.

After months of anticipating my trip to Chartres and Paris, after years of thinking that someday I would go to France and see what all the fuss is about…it’s over. I’m still feeling jet-lagged (the nine-hour time difference has my days and nights mixed up), and a bit in denial that I’m really really back home. I’m still feeling the wave of excitement that came with the trip, and simultaneously feeling let-down. (Did I say I’ve not figured out how to sleep?)

No wonder it’s so hard to process.

Winged Victory, The Louvre

People ask me what the highlights were and — if I skip over Chartres (which was like a long tidal wave of highlights — and go straight to Paris, I get stuck again.

We. Did. So. Much.

We visited Père Lachaise Cemetery and saw the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Heloise and Abelard.

We had an amazing 2 hour personal tour of the city (enhanced by a moon-lighting rock-musician tour guide ).

We went to the Musee de L’Orangerie and sat in the oval rooms Monet designed to showcase his waterlilies canvases.

We couldn’t go inside Notre Dame, of course, though we visited Sacre Coeur and Saint Pierre’s at Montmartre (near our apartment), and stood in line to see (more) stained glass windows at Saint Chapelle, plus learned about the arduous and scientific process by which the windows are cleaned and restored.

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry (ca. 1500) at The Cluny

We went to the Rodin Museum, the Cluny, the Louvre (of course), and Musee D’Orsay.

How exactly do I even begin to touch on the highlights amid the art treasures I saw, when there were so many? Although I took several memorable Art History courses as an undergraduate, seeing the buildings, paintings, and sculptures in person was — just as my professors often said — mind-blowing.

Every day we rode the Paris Metro, and that, too, has to be experienced first-hand in order to be understood (so many trains! so many people!). I kept thinking of Ezra Pound’s couplet, “In a Station of the Metro” —

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:  Petals on a wet, black bough.

So many faces, such a press of bodies and odors and colors and sound.

What else? Of course we went to Shakespeare & Co., we ate a lot of terrific food, and we walked miles and miles (4-5 miles per day). We took naps (much needed, as our sleep was all cockeyed while there, too).

And, being writers, we wrote.

Oh, and we went to #spokenwordparis at Au Chat Noir and READ OUR POEMS on the open mike (it’s a gathering of mostly anglo-philes, but I still can’t believe we had the nerve to do this).

What else can I say? (So much.) Paris was not what I expected. (What did I expect?) It became clear to me by the end of the week that I could go back every year and discover another Paris. I’m grateful to my friend Francine for inviting me to join her (and who can parlez-vous Francais way better than I — though I did  figure out how to order coffee).

I really wanted to let you know how the trip went, so forgive me for giving it all in a rush and with so little detail. There is a lot more I could share.

But all I really want right now is to sleep for about 10 hours straight. Then maybe I’ll have the presence of mind to begin unraveling all the pages and pages I scribbled while on this astonishing trip.

 

The Poet in Paris

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Yes, that would be me — on my way to France for the very first time, using my very-seldom-used passport and packing my poems and leaving tomorrow morning! I’m traveling with my friend, poet and photographer Francine E. Walls (whose poem you may remember from a few weeks ago), and we’ll begin with a week in Chartres, for a workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. Then it’s on to Paris, and what Francine promises to be a fabulous introduction to the City of Light.

My daughters dared me to zip-line off the Eiffel Tower, and although they were responsible for my kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland, some dares you just don’t have to take.

Anywho, this is just a quick post to let you know I now have a better excuse for not being caught up with the blog. Over the next two weeks, you can follow me on Instagram to see daily highlights.

Here’s a poem in the meantime:

Mirabeau Bridge

TRANSLATED BY DONALD REVELL
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
          And lovers
    Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
We’re face to face and hand in hand
         While under the bridges
    Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
Love elapses like the river
         Love goes by
    Poor life is indolent
And expectation always violent
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
The days and equally the weeks elapse
         The past remains the past
    Love remains lost
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
Guillaume Apollinaire. “Mirabeau Bridge” from Alcools, English translation copyright 1995 Donald Revell and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Alcools (Wesleyan University Press, 1995)