I took the last three days off from the world, chugged through Friday afternoon traffic, with my friend Siri Ved driving, leaving L.A. to climb into the mountains to Big Bear Lake. Even though we were bumper-to-bumper for half the way and it took an additional two hours to get here, we are both glad we came. We’re staying at a friend’s cabin that is cozy inside and surrounded by pines and fir trees outside. When we got here we started a fire, put our groceries away, unpacked a few things and made some tea, before showering and slipping into dreamland. The quiet is always the most blessed nourishment I receive when in the mountains; the relaxation that seeps into my tight city muscles, the slowing down of my thoughts and rapid-response mechanism, the way my eyes soften, how the tension in my face begins to melt like snow on a spring day.

One thing I notice right away when I’m in the mountains or at the ocean or desert, is how much more engaged my senses become; how the fragrance of the pines fills my nostrils, the spray of the ocean waves is salty on my skin, and the thin air of the desert brings everything into sharp relief. It is not that the senses disappear in the city, quite the contrary. I believe they are completely over stimulated, bombarded with such an array of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch that there is barely enough time for the nervous system to sort one out and send the message to the brain before the next one piles on top of the last. It’s simply the nature of living with thousands, or millions, of other humans, all doing what they do.

I’ve been reading the book, Western Wind, a poetry textbook that is a treasure trove of knowledge; organized and written in a way that is easy for the novice poet to grasp, engaging as well for the more experienced. It is chock full of poems written in an incredibly wide range of styles and spanning the full pantheon of poetry from Sappho to Li Young Lee. I’ve had this book for a couple of years and because of its length (over 600 pages) I have been reluctant to really dive into it, really just scanning a chapter now and again or reading some of the poems in the anthology section. I brought it with the intention of at least settling down and reading a chapter or two, priming the pump for when I return home, where I plan on continuing the practice of reading a chapter every day or two. The very first aspect of poetry addressed in Western Wind is “The Role of the Senses,” and how images are created in writing through attunement of the senses. When a writer is adept at expressing what is felt through imagistic writing, the reader is able to have an emotional response to the poem, not merely an intellectual one. This ability to place images on the page, to create metaphor, similes, the bridges from concrete objects to ideas, this is what separates literature from purely expository writing. Involving the imagination, allowing the reader to “sensorize” (this is my own made-up word, by the way) what is being expressed in a poem or story is where the universal connection is truly experienced, it is where one soul touches another.

In order to regain a deeper connection with the sensory world, if you do live in a heavily populated area, I find you must first have the desire to do so as well as a practice to slow down the internal mechanisms of thought, to practice a mindful attunement to the environment. One way I’ve found that works is to sit and breathe long and steadily, to focus on relaxing my body and mind until I’m at the point where my thoughts are like a stream passing by and I am on the shore simply watching them. At this point I tune in to one of my senses, for example hearing, and allow my ears to separate the sounds I hear, to isolate them one by one. Right now, for instance, I can hear the refrigerator, a pulsing kind of rumble, with a bit of a whine. I can hear a plane passing overhead, a muffled roar; two people talking animatedly next door; a bird chirping in regular rhythm; my friend turning the pages of her book. I find it a beautiful thing, a kind of reverence I feel when I pay attention to these individual sensory experiences, so very different from lumping them all together, where they lose the power to affect me with their unique voices. This mindful kind of exercise works with all the senses and has the power to enrich not only one’s writing, but much more importantly, one’s experience of the world in which we live.
 

Quotes from Western Wind:

"I no sooner have an idea, than it turns into an image."   Goethe

"To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit."   William Blake

" The poet is a professor of the five bodily senses."   Frederico Garcia Lorca

"The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment."   Ezra Pound