Before the poetry reading, she introduced herself to me. “I’m a contemplative,” she said in passing, knowing I would understand the implications, knowing I was one of these, too, adding “I’d like to e-mail you.” I’d heard her read from her work-in-progress several months before, knowing somehow that one day we would meet, and appreciating how good that it was this day.
How is it that we seek each other out, that we recognize each other? In one of Wolf Hardin’s songs, he says that we are connected by the great web’s strands----all of us who are sensitive, intuitive, in tune. What a wonderful realization that we are not alone here, that there are others not in competition with us, not wishing us small to appear larger themselves, but rooting for us as we are for them, to strengthen these ties so that we all may become stronger, more creative, more health-giving, more in tune with our greater selves and the whole of this world.
When I first arrived at the sanctuary, my mind was blank, open, that slate awaiting the writing, I thought. I walked around like a child, experiencing, not (as is more typical for me) explaining to myself or to my imagined future audience what I was seeing and feeling. What would be, would be.
Three days later, amazingly enough, I still had nothing to erase-----and I walked to the overlook with Wolf, staring down at the far bank of the river where beavers had downed some of the “children” he’d nurtured these past 30 years----gnawed down in a day. Sadness sat beside us on the edge of the high split-rock, the ancient circular inscription on the cliff’s face behind us marking this holy place as we talked and laughed. “Be decisive,” Wolf admonished, and at that moment, “decisive” was the perfect word to describe how I’d not been. Even though I thought I was decisive and had claimed to despise those who are not, apparently I’d subconsciously included myself with the indecisive, circuitously thinking that if I punished myself, I’d already made amends and made myself a better person----all without any positive action, though.
But how is it that this sort of self-flagellation has come to be so important to many of us trying to get along in this society? Somehow we seem to think that if we can explain what is wrong, if we are aware, then that is enough-----we do not need to DO anything. I think this lack of action is what kills many of us----snuffs our spirits into grey smoke that disappears and merely leaves a dirty smudge. We become distracted by all of the calls to inaction-----living vicariously through escapist films, working for more than we need, wasting this moment while expecting to have many more.
From the corner of my eye, a flicker caught my attention. On the outer edge of the boulder I sat on, a small moth, one wing tattered, managed to land quite smoothly, flapping rhythmically, yellow with purple veins of furry color. When I was a teenager keeping one of my first journals, I drew a moth in it, delighting in its wings’ complex patterns, and accompanying it with Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel’s poem, “Lesson of the Moth,” the lines most important to me including “it is better to be happy/ for a moment/ and be burned up with beauty/ than to live a long time/ and be bored all the while.”
Sometimes I think that I knew what was best for my life before I was 18 and have gone more and more wrong every since. . . until now.
