Journal of Sacred Work

   The thought patterns of young children are free of the narrow pathways of an adulthood they have not yet experienced. Their minds are flexible enough so that they can accommodate fantasy and embrace it. Adults have a different enchantment. We are seduced by the things to which we are accustomed and our thoughts travel well-worn grooves. It is so difficult to change adult thought patterns that it often requires either a traumatic event or extended therapy to acquire a new way of thinking.
   The arts are a marvelous way to awaken our creative muscle from its atrophy. Poetry waits patiently for those willing to encounter its different ways. One of my favorite poets is Robert Bly. Here is the startling first stanza of his poem, "Things to Think"…

Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

   If we accept Bly’s challenge, how would we think? Once, I was leaving a grocery store next to a mother
and her small child. A dandelion puff sailed past us. "Look, Mom, a fairy!" the child called out. The mother yanked her child by the arm, "Stop that nonsense," she shouted. "That’s just a dandelion."
   That incident was so long ago that that "child" would today be in her early forties. I’ve often wondered what has happened to her; whether her creative side was crushed so often that one day, like so many others and like her own mother, she simply gave up, yielding to the concrete roads of ordinary life.
   Bly’s poem continues:

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

   Is your thinking beginning to open or are you already finding yourself retreating back to ordinary prose? The concrete mind always asks about poetry (and other arts): What’s the point? and: What’s the practical use of this?
   My favorite answer to this kind of question came from the mouth of Inventor Michael Faraday in the mid-19th century when he was asked about the use of his theory of electro-magnetism. "What is the use of a newborn baby?" he replied.
   New ways of describing things cause us to see in new ways.
   Old ways of using words trap us on in old ways of thinking.
   "Awesome" was once a beautiful word. Recently, it is has been so overused, abused and misused that it has been drained of its power to describe anything in a meaningful way.
   How do life experiences change through the use of poetry? I can describe myself as tired. But what does it do to the experience of fatigue if I engage the language of poet Maggie Anderson: "…the fast horses of exhaustion pulled me." This is how a child might think, or an adult that has learned to rediscover childlike thinking and pass it through the funnel of adult discipline. When I think of exhaustion pulling me like fast horses, it changes my life experience.
   I can tell my wife I love her, as I have done thousands of times before. Or I could try to write a poem. If I thought I had to compete with Shakespeare, I would be paralyzed. Or I could try to find my own voice, as in the example at the end of today’s reflection.   
   First, here is the closing stanza of Bly’s poem:

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

   What a nice gift comes in these final lines. An invitation from a poet to all of us, especially caregivers, that it’s alright to rest. But what’s the use of poetry, or a newborn baby?

-Erie Chapman

Todays Other Poem: In search of my own way to express romantic love, I put together these words:

I
want to hold you 
the
way
small
birds should be held
by men with strong hands,

delicate but close;
not so tight that I would hurt you,
harm any of your soft structures
or make you want to escape;

not
so loose I would lose touch
with the feathery edges of your wings
or the warm contours of your
curved body, or your heart's quiver;

not so loose you would forget me, fly
from my hand at the first murmur of summer
thunder.