We'll Shout and Go Round, Shout and Go Round...

Oh, I wish I had written William Carlos Williams' wonderful poem, "The Dance." (See below.) It just makes you want to get up off your sorry seat and move.


The Dance

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

So I got thinking about things that make you want to get out of the chair and onto the floor and I remembered this great old spiritual, "Zion's Walls" for which Aaron Copland wrote some music. I figured I could take a quick listen and return to my otherwise tomb-silent house. What I didn't count on was Jack, a sleek black wizard of a dog I'm caring for, bounding up off my yoga mat to soulfully howl along with the singers, tail wagging, nose-lifted heavenward. See, sometimes you just can't keep still!

Jack, post "Zion's Walls" performance

So take a listen and imagine Jack (post performance in this picture) singing along. (You can, too!)



(Jack says, "Every time I feel the spirit, moving in my heart, I will howl!)

As Is

On the cover of this month's Yoga Journal I am promised many things: EIGHT building blocks for practicing at home, SIX best foods to fuel my body, FIVE poses to bring me into deep relaxation and FOUR steps to help me cut through stress and think clearly. PLUS, yogic wisdom for decluttering my life.

I'm exhausted just thinking about all the self-improvement I should be pursuing. And though the yoga world pays lip service to self-acceptance, there is a hortatory and judgmental quality to much of what passes for 'yogic wisdom.' You should be juicing more; you shouldn't be eating meat; you should wear organic cotton clothing; you shouldn't eat pizza. This is okay, though it can get preachy. And all of this thinking is largely self-focused, as if the individual is the measure of all things. I suppose this could make you feel either very good about yourself--if you happen to be an adherent to these exhortations or very bad about yourself--if you find yourself in violation of them.

But the point is, it's ends up being about individual self. And that flies in the face of what it means to develop spiritually. Chogyam Trungpa's term, 'spiritual materialism' pretty much describes it--this upward-striving, ultimately ego-centric effort at self-improvement in the avoidance of suffering.

Edited by George Appleton, 2002

Yet all religious traditions acknowledge such suffering--or sin--as central to our embodiment as humans. We live, we suffer, we die. We are creaturely and what the great religions teach is not so much a way to escape from our creatureliness, but a way to unite with the divine beyond us. In other words, faith strives for union with the other that is sacred. (Of course 'yoga' means 'union,' but our American understanding of yoga rarely explores that concept, with its emphasis on yoga as a fitness movement.) That is why so many prayers from so many different traditions sound desperate and a bit like love poems--which is what they truly are. And it is also why so many prayers sound like frenzied pleading for a release from suffering--because true faith ackknowledges genuine suffering.

And so when we encounter an anonymous prayer from the Indian tradition, we can see the yearning and devotion that transcends a belief in mere self-improvement: "Like an ant on a stick both ends of which are burning, I go to and fro without knowing what to do and in great despair. Like the inescapable shadow which follows me, the dead weight of sin haunts me. Graciously look upon me. Thy love is my refuge."

An early Hassidic song sets the soul's priority with a kind of ecstatic repetition: "Wherever I go--only Thou! Wherever I stand--Just Thou; again, Thou! always Thou! Thou, Thou, Thou! When things are good, Thou! When things are bad--Thou! Thou, Thou, Thou!"

Prayer from the Muslim tradition equates God with an incomparable brightness, as in Abu-I-Hussain al-Nuri's poem, "Though knowest well the heart's design/The secret purpose of the mind,/And I adore Thee, light divine,/Lesser lights should make me blind."

What the world's religions share is that sense of our created-ness, imperfect, of course, but loved nevertheless. Loved, as is. And this theology, common to so many faiths, doesn't negate the need to do good in the world and to use those deeds to bring glory to the divine. But there is an absence of an ego-driven competition to somehow better oneself (or to be better than somebody else).

Perhaps the guilt I was raised with in the Lutheran tradition is a less destructive one than what I feel when I read Yoga Journal (less than good) with its personal disciplines set forth as spiritual virtues (less than perfect). Maybe when all is said and done, self-improvement is just no substitute for the hope of a divine love. And hating the self--which happens when self-improvements fail--is, itself, a kind of blasphemy.

Of put more simply, perhaps it's what the sixteenth-century mystic, John of the Cross said: "My spirit has become dry because it forgets to feed on you."

The Lamplighter

As light gives way to evening, I stand in my bedroom looking out across the Union College campus. The sun is setting almost in one color, a matte fuchsia broken by the black leading of winter branches. And I notice something new: the neon splash of the giant and iconic GE sign atop the old brick headquarters building that is Schenectady's calling card to the world. From here's it's just an indeterminate punctuation mark of color against the sky. But such a contrast, the waning, purpling light, the darkness of the barren trees and the early twentieth-century symbol of progress and illumination.

I turn from the window to go back to other tasks--folding the laundry, putting on my socks (the floor so cold). But the light reminds me of a poem from my childhood, one that made me melancholy, even before I knew what melancholy was. (But I am a Dane, so I may not have known such a time!)

I used to read Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Lamplighter" to myself, sitting on our living room sofa. It was in a Peter Pauper Press book called A Child's Book of Poems, one of a series of the Peter Pauper Press books we had, one of the many, many books we had, all given to us by a man who may or may not have been my mother's lover and who may or may not have smuggled drugs (as my mother believed he did) inside the contact-paper-sheathed volumes, all right under my father's unwatching eyes.

My favorite book was A Child's Book of Poems. I knew I'd grow up to read As a Man Thinketh and The Way of All Flesh and Of Human Bondage and Crime and Punishment--other books my mother's friend had given her. They all seemed grown-up and vaguely erotic to me (though I was surely too young to know any more about eros than I did about melancholy). I'd get to them later.

In a Child's Book of Poems I could read about the brave pilgrims in Felicia Heman's bathotic tribute to them: Ay! Call it holy ground,/The soil where first they trod:/They have left unstained what there they found,/Freedom to worship God.

And I could read scary poems, like "Little Orphant Annie" and "An Incident of the French Camp" and sad poems, like "Oh Captain! My Captain!" I could laugh at "Father William" ("Be off, or I'll kick you down the stairs!") and intone the poem I came to recite for my daughters, "Wnyken, Blynken and Nod."

But no other poem in the whole book had the gravitas and wistfulness of "The Lamplighter." I hear it still in my mind. And I see a little boy by a window at dusk, small and frail, and the lamplighter in the cold and on his rounds, brokering with darkness.

MY tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,	5
And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;	10
And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light;
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!

The Emperor's M and Ms

The gangs all here....

You wouldn't think you'd need to eat a bag of M&Ms during the adagio movement of the Emperor concerto, what with all the 'shut-up' protocol that attends any classical music event. (They give out those free Hall's cough drops out for a reason.)

But evidently a fellow concertgoer had a sudden jones for a bag of M&Ms and a coffee. Now it's true that if Beethoven had been in the audience, he wouldn't have been able to hear and might not even have been bothered--being a fan of both Viennese coffee and chocolate. And soloist Efim Bronfman was on stage with a bunch of strings at his back. He wouldn't have been disturbed enough either to ask the man to desist or to share his stash. Classical musicians should be grateful for what they don't have to hear in the audience. And I mean in the audience.

Because my friend and I, seated next to Mr. M&M in the last row of the dress circle, sure could hear the rustle and crumple of his little brown bag (as well as that peculiar snap-and-slurp of the flap being flipped on a cup of take-out coffee and those subsequent  office-saving sips--which are all okay as the audible backdrop, Monday-Friday, 7:00-10:00 am).

What I'm saying is that right as the strings began their elegiac entry and Bronfman entered with his mournful,lonely descending phrases (think Hamlet pacing the palace at Elsinore, St. Anthony pacing the desert, Gregor Samsa--now a cockroach--pacing his room, wishing he'd come up with "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas" instead of TS Eliot), this nut-job with the M&Ms and coffee opened up both.

Am I being harsh? Yes, I am. I know that. Probably he didn't realize that a twenty-minute intermission is a goodly length of time for consuming whatever excess calories you need to consume during a two-hour concert during which you are sitting passively and doing nothing else with your body other than listening. Or maybe he wasn't listening. Or maybe he didn't realize that others were. Were trying to.

You see what's happening? I'm ending sentences in prepositions. Writing fragments. I'm over-exercised. And I'm just sitting at my desk.

BUT, on the off-chance you don't know the adagio movement of Beethoven's Emperor concerto, click on Beethoven's just-slightly John-C-Reilly-looking face and take a listen. And then, if you like it, Utube the third movement, which is just joke-upon-joke--the same theme served up again and again and again. It's wonderful. It's funny. It's goofy--how could a deaf composer be that goofy? That's why I love him so. And during that movement, feel free to break out the M&Ms.

Dipping into Falling Upward

So I'm not always a fan of spiritual writing because a lot of it is boring or irrelevant or just, I dunno, dumb, I guess.

But I've only read the first chapter of Falling Upward and I'm thinking maybe there is truly something here. Rohr posits that life has two projects--the first the creation of our 'container,' the self disclosing our identity, security, sexuality and gender. Though necessary, if we move no farther ahead than the creation and maintenance of this 'container,' then we remain an adolescent, which is how he describes our culture, generally.

The second half of our life's project is a changed consciousness. As Einstein said, "No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place." That process of change is the journey to the True Self, as Rohr puts it (I'd opt out of the capital letters, but that's just me). I'm interested in seeing where he goes, but wanted to share my early sense that, unlike much spiritual pablum and jargonizing, Rohr's got some creativity and sensitivity to offer in the service of the project of living life.

"No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you. If you try to skip the first journey, you will never see its real necessity and also its limitations; you will never know why this first container must fail you, the wonderful fulness of the second half of the journey, and the relationship between the two." --Richard Rohr

Taking Down the Candles

February 2, Candlemas

It is time to take the candles down, the window candles

--golden-flickering, soft beacons in hard winter

the house cold till I conjure dinner

with a purple globe of wine while darkness settles like ash

and night falls fast and silent

save for the blare and blaze of  passing ambulance.

I didn’t know today was Candlemas until the groundhog

saw his shadow, like Noah’s dove finding only snow.

Then I remembered: Robert Herrick:

Down with the rosemary, and so

Down with the bays, and mistletoe.

Forty days past Christmas, and all must be put away.

The candles are the last to go.

No waxy warmth in my hand, but stalwart still--

batteried batons of metal, plastic, capped with light.

I take each from every sill

and shadows grow a little deeper,

no jeweled reflection in the mirroring pane.

New things succeed, as former things grow old,

Herrick once more, summoning Isaiah’s brash hope.

I line the candles, side-by-side, on the oaken table

and leave the room, doubting newness, craving light.

And I forget, then I remember, when I return

That batteries don’t expire on Candlemas and the whole table glows.