I flew back to L.A. on Monday. Liza and I drove from New Jersey to Boston on Sunday afternoon. We didn’t stay until the end. It was rainy and chilly and Liza was feelin’ a bit under the weather. We had a lot to talk about on the drive through the quickly turning autumn leaves–Tony Hoagland’s morning talk on the craft of poetry was fresh in my mind, as was the early session of reading Rumi and Hafiz with Robert Bly and Coleman Barks. I sat up front for both of these presentations and even though I was shivering (my thin California blood), enjoyed every minute of the two very different experiences. Bly and Barks have a trio of musicians with a cello, flute, and drums to accompany them and they trade off reading poems or stories of their own, of Rumi or Hafiz or Mirabai. Bly likes to throw in his own little comments as he’s reading the pieces and the spirit is very high as the wisdom of the mystical Sufi poets fills the giant tent. I’ll share a couple of photos with you of the two of them (apologies for the fuzziness), plus one of Tony Hoagland.

Tony Hoagland on Sunday

Robert Bly

Bly & Coleman Barks reading Rumi, Hafiz & Mirabai

I always enjoy the mixture of the spiritual and humor that the Sufi poets bring to their poetry. They encompass the ecstatic, the tragic and the comic.

Backing up to Saturday–it was my longest day at the festival. I started at 9:30 with panel of Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Kurtis Lamkin and Brian Turner with the subject of “Going Public with Private Feelings.” All three of these men are so very different in their backgrounds, subject matter and style. Ekiwah (his name means courage) is 19 years old and has cerebral palsy, Kurtis Lamkin is an African American poet from New York City who performs his poetry playing a stringed instrument called the kora and Brian Turner, who is a veteran of the Iraq war and wrote his first book of poems, Here Bullet, during the time he was in Iraq. After their talk I cruised the Border’s bookstore tent and picked up way too many books to list here.

Kurtis Lamkin playing his kora while Ekiwah reads a poem

Liza, Becca and I took our lunches into the main tent where we waited for the feature poets to read from 12 to 3. We all enjoyed the reading of Andrew Motion, the poet laureate of England, who read a fantastic poem about the passing of his mother when he was a young child and one about his father who passed away not long ago. I don’t have any good pictures of him but you can go to his web site at andrewmotion.com. There was also a very powerful reading by a Bangaldesh woman poet, Taslima Nasreen, who has been exiled from her country for speaking out for the rights of women. Lucille Clifton wound up the afternoon with grace and style. Becca and I dashed off right after the readings for a panel discussion on “Finding Poetry’s Inner Music, Saying the Unsayable” with Toi Derricotte, Jori Graham, Tony Hoagland and Linda Pastan. Becca had been following Jorie Graham around since the first day, fascinated with how she approached the art of poetry and I was getting my first taste of her. I found her to be insightful and incredibly intelligent. She also spoke of connecting with spirit and seeking a higher source as a participant in her writing.

The crowd under the big tent.

Lucille Clifton

Tony Hoagland, Toi Derricotte, Linda Pasten, Jorie Graham

It’s only 6:30 pacific time right now but my body is still thinkin’ east coast so it’s getting late and I’m yawning and my mind cloud over. There are still a few more pictures and thoughts to share with you but I’ll get to it tomorrow or the next day. I haven’t begun to really digest all of what went in over those four days and how it will affect my writing and reading of poetry in the future. Here’s one last photo I took on Sunday at Waterloo Village.

It rained all night. No gale force winds or torrential downpours but it did rain on into the morning enough for us to pull out our umbrellas and raincoats. Didn’t stop us though. We arrived at Waterloo Village at 8:45 for the 9 a.m. poet conversations. Liza went to hear Tony Hoagland on the main stage and I decided to listen to Ko Un, a Korean poet who was born during the Japanese occupation of his country, lived through a wrenching war, was a Buddhist monk for ten years then a militant activist who was jailed for ten years, and is now married with a college-aged daughter. This morning he spoke of the rain as being our “guest” and how it was important to have rainy days in life, not always sunny, that it was good to struggle against the elements, how it built layers of resilence and character in the landscape.

Here is one of the poems he read (Ko Un read in Korean and the translation was read by Richard Silberg, co-editor of Poetry Flash):

The Poet

For a long time he was a poet.

Children

called him a poet and

women did too.

Surely he was a poet

more than anyone I knew.

Even the pigs and the boars

grunted him poet.

He died returning from a distant land.

In his hut there was not one word of poetry.

Was he a poet who didn’t write?

So a poet wrote a poem for him.

As soon as the poem was written,

the wind blew it away.

Then all the poems of the East and the West, old and new,

flew away, swish, swish,

every one followed suit.

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There is much more to say about this day but I will leave you with a few more pictures so I can, once again, get to bed and sleep well. Suffice it to say the days are filled with rich language and deeply expressed longings. There is vigorous conversation, tears of joy and sorrow and so much thought–contemplation on how words, language have the power to transform the human spirit–for better or for worse. This sacred trust is one the poet takes on as part of the mantle. It is no small thing and requires questioning and a willingness to forge into territory where one can err and come back to the page again and again to put thoughts on the page.

Linda Hogan and Gerald Stern

Billy Collins

Ekiwah Adler-Belendez (19 y.o. disabled in body–inspiring in his poetry and courage)

Brian Turner, an Iraqi vet who wrote about his experience of war

Main Stage Tent–After the sun came out

Becca (from Chicago) and me lookin’ good!

One of the buildings at Waterloo Village

There is beauty everywhere you look here

The geese who eat anything they can find (including candy wrappers)

The port-a-poddy. An essential (but not pleasant) part of the experience

It’s the first day of four of the Dodge Poetry Festival. The weather was cloudy, kind of tropical, with warm winds. Liza says it’s supposed to rain buckets tonight, but so far not a drop. I flew into Boston on Monday, took a cab to Liza’s where she had Chinese take-out waiting. Tuesday we went into Boston to Newbury Street and shopped, ate lunch at Joe’s and then toured Beacon Hill. Wednesday we drove to New Jersey and after eating at the Macaroni Grill settled into our rooms at the hotel to chart our course for the next day, then watch TV until the wee hours.

On Newbury St. in Boston.

It was a gorgeous fall day in New England. Liza loved it!

This steeple was so stunning.

Today we launched out of the hotel around 9:15 and arrived at quaint Waterloo Village where the festival is held, got our 4-day passes and headed straight for the main tent where Tony Hoagland was going to speak at 10:15. Tony’s been on my favorite poet list ever since I read Donkey Gospel, his first book of poetry. I so identify with his experience of growing up in the fifties and sixties. He talked about how when he first started writing poetry he knew he wanted to find and write about “truth,” to understand himself and his place in the world. He said a good poem has to move, has to struggle with itself, that it has to entertain and give pleasure to the reader. He read poems by John Berryman, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and Anna Akhmatova, as well as a few of his own.

Tony Hoagland speaking on the craft of poetry

The grounds are so beautiful. Waterloo was once a thriving village. It has a series of small canals where grain was brought to the mill on small barges. It has a blacksmith shop, a church, school, library, barns, and private homes set among the trees (have to find out what kind of trees they are) and ponds and sloping hills.

Thursday is student’s day at Dodge and 5000 high school students and their teachers descend in yellow buses of all sizes from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and beyond to get a dose of poetry. It’s inspiring to see them and hear them ask questions of the poets.

It’s getting late and I need to take a hot bath, drink some Bedtime tea, take my melatonin, meditate and get a good nights rest before another long day of poetry basking. So, I’ll leave you with photos from the rest of the day and a few tidbits from the talks.

Linda Pasten

Lucille Clifton

Find the myth in the human, the human in the myth. Remember when you are writing that “surely I am not the only one” who has felt this way. Feel into the other. When it comes down to it Lucille says she choses to offend the person rather than offend the poem.

Mark Doty

Poetry is juxtaposing the transcendent and the ordinary moments in life. It is an attempt to say the unsayable. Writing a poem is shining a laser beam on a particular moment in time. Poetry points you back to the fundamental unknowable. We usually have writer’s block when we have too much to say, not when we have too little.

Toi Dericotte, Lucille Clifton, Linda Gregg & Mark Doty speak on “Going Public with Private Feelings”

Linda Gregg: First I contain the poem, then I write the poem. My life is run by the rules of poetry. I feel safe in the world of poetry. I don’t argue with the poem.

Mark Doty: The “wound” becomes the gateway to the real work. Allow the poem to have its own life.

I’ll check in again in the next day or two on the latest goings on. I did connect with poets from Squaw Valley–Alex from NYC with his high school students and Diane & Jill from Canada who are staying in the same hotel as we are. Becca, who was in my workshop group with Jane Hirshfield at Napa last year is here from Chicago. Being here is so inspiring and fills me up with such joy and determination to keep writing, keep those poems coming, keep working to say better what I want to say. What I took away today was about how vitally important it is to write about the most terrible and painful places in our lives, to “say the unsayable” because so much of our communications are on the surface and so, so much of what really matters is in the underground caverns that we carry around in our psyches. This is what brings on depression, neuroses, alienation and a host of other isolations from others and, most importantly, our own souls. As Lucille Clifton said, “Surely, I am not the only one.”

Next week is the Dodge Poetry Festival—a bi-annual poetry extravaganza staged in the village of Waterloo, New Jersey. This will be my second pilgrimage. I went two years ago for the first time. It was a year of record rainfall on the east coast as a result of hurricanes blowing through Florida and then angling north into New England. The mud was thick, cars got stuck, shoes were gummy and the organizers had to lay tons of hay all over the fields so we wouldn’t all be sucked down into the squishy muck. For the first time in the history of the event it was held at an alternate site, the Duke family park/estate. Despite the best efforts of all involved, the grounds took a beating and it’s clear that it was thought better to return to the old haunts, even though they are smaller and the event has grown substantially over the years.

Being there, where poetry is spoken fluently and there are so many venues with so many different poets speaking, reading their work or dialoguing is–as these things often go—alternately exhilarating and exhausting. Some of the highlights I remember were the early mornings at the main stage under a gigantic tent with a hot cup of tea listening to Coleman Barks read Rumi, accompanied by the music of the Paul Winter Consort; crowding into under an overflowing canopy on a sunny afternoon to hear Mark Doty talk about how poetry is made and keeping us all enthralled and entertained; Seeing Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds and Gerald Stern, who I had the privilege to work with at Squaw Valley. And, really the best was being there in a community of people dedicated to something that has very little to do with money or power—an art form that, throughout all history, has spoken for the lost, the repressed, the dreamers, to be with those who do not see the primary source of fulfillment as a human being as one of acquisition and manipulation but one where the interior world of the heart and the commonality of our grief and desire is given a voice.

Throughout the week I’ll be logging on with commentary, photos and poems to share the experience with those of you who would like to be there but can’t be and those of you who are just curious to see what it’s all about. I’m flying out on Monday, the 25th to Boston where I’ll stay a couple of days with my friend Liza and drive to New Jersey on Wednesday. The poetry fest starts on Thursday and we’ll be there when the gates open, rain or shine.

Waterloo Village

I know I said I wouldn’t write anymore about SV, but I found some more pics that had gotten lost in all the downloading and wanted to get them up and well, frankly, I’m just not quite sure I’m through with the experience. I haven’t spent much time with the poems I wrote there since I got back. I definitely need some distance from them to let them cool out in the root cellar until they’re ripe and ready to be picked, peeled and carved into the real deal. I also have an assignment, a kind of quest if you will, so kindly suggested to me by Sharon Olds in my workshop with her on that last Friday. I need to dig deeper into a subject from a poem I brought on that day and it is a really tough one. I think I need a hypnotist to get to the root of it and even then, not sure it will completely reveal itself. Poetry can be like that…take you out on an emotional limb and then leave you there to think about how cold and lonely and scary the world can be. It’s gratifying to know you can climb out there on that skinny little twig but the truth is that jumping from there into the void is really what you’re being asked to do and that is downright TERRIFYING!! Well, the gauntlet has been thrown down and I have taken it up and will keep at it until the little devil surfaces and, if I’m very lucky, I can capture it, put it down on the page and make something out of it besides a lotta misery.

I know this all sounds very cryptic but that’s the way it will have to be because I’m hanging out here on that limb and to reveal too much is to stir the winds and get the whole tree swaying like crazy. I’m guessing you have some idea about what I mean. We’ve all had those times when you either walk into the fire or go home with your tail between your legs. I’ve done too much of the latter in my lifetime and have been determined the last few years to always accept the challenge and find out where it takes me. Unfailingly, it’s to a place of elevation and awareness.
Enjoy the photos….

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David Lukas with telescope, binoculars, water, sunscreen, and assorted other necessities of the naturalist.

The Pines

The Aspens

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Poem by Stewart Mintzer
Wandering poet and dear friend

Nature Walk

The wing’s composed of many wings.
Each feather’s a wing. Flap hard and you’ll rise,
but to go forward you need some torque,

the invitation of the easy bend
to fly exquisitely contained.
Don’t look down, trust the body to know the way,
the groove of hush before the storm.

Give up being right.
Earth a web of fused connectors.
When one part’s sick, the others know it,
moist attention shifts to love the wound.
Roots of all stories underground, breathe up the middle

numinous granite, lava, ant prayers, untouched shade.
The whole ecosystem stops what it’s doing
to whisper you home. Create a flamboyant display
and pollinators come like reservoired servants of spread.
Jeffrey Pine blue green needles basal sheaths
cone scales stiff flat curved trunk bark firm vanilla
odored when one’s nose is pressed into deep furrow.
A woman kisses bark, my lips are right behind.

If you’re gonna live a long time you better get
a long term strategy. Birds sing because they love it.
Clarks Nutcrackers only eat one third of the seeds
they gather. They’re the dominant forest planter
in the Northern Hemisphere. They sing
I want a forest      here
and              here

and                          here

and

here
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Sarah & Lori in the Great Room at the Olympic Lodge. In the background is the Squaw Valley Wall of Fame.

Brett Hall Jones–She and Lisa and Kaitlin run the show–and run it with a lot of love & fun!

Loading the plates at the picnic.

Blissing out on poetry.

Enjoying hearing poems together.

On the last night it’s a tradition for the SV poets to gather at the home of Oakley and Barbara Hall, the founders of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. There are about 80 of US all together and I’m amazed at how they manage to come up with all the tables and chairs that fill their living room, dining room and two large decks. There is a huge vat of curry on the stove (in a very tiny kitchen) and quesadillas being made on the spot, fruit and veggie salad, asparagus, sodas and wine and bread. The food is wonderful and the conversation lively.

The kitchen is buzzing. The quesadillas were hot off the grill and delicisioso! (yeah, I know that’s not an official word-but poetic license is in order when it comes to describing food).

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Christine (wacky, wonderful roommate), David (fellow blogger) & Dean Young (love those pearly button shirts)

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Sarah (dear poet mentor), Billie (need a hex or a blessing she’s your gal) & Alex (high school teacher in NY that any kid would love to have as their teacher)

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Larry (love the shirt) and Jo (awesome first basewoman)

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Chauncy (wrote his first love poem at SV) and Bryan (zen poet of Chico)

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The best part of the evening is after dinner one of the tables is folded away, we all gather ’round the fireplace and it’s time for anyone who wants to go for it to stand and recite a poem by heart. Frost, Yeats, Eliot, and of course, Dickins0n, were all honored, alongwith many others. Even I got up and spoke three short lines from a poem by Muriel Rukeyser that someone had sent me a couple of weeks before in an email: “Say it! Say it! / The universe is made of stories / not atoms.” I needed something really simple because memorizing does not come easy to me. I so envied some of the poets there who had several poems they could pull out of their pockets. I find the recitation of poems moving. I think of families or clans, people throughout time gathering around a fire or in the parlor or a small theater to tell stories, to chant and speak from the heart, to remember the elders, and to touch the essence of who we are as spirits, not bodies or minds, but visitors, bringing what we can to humankind.

Front row seats on the stone fireplace.

I don’t remember what Dean recited but this must have been a moment of high anxiety.

Liza read something long and, obviously, thought provoking.

C.D.: I think she did a cowboy song. She is a southerner.

Stephen with his Eliot recitation, complete with gestures and credible imitation!

Arlene expressing poetry through her beautiful dance.

Had to end with Sharon, who sang us a song–sweet, sad and full of all that’s Sharon.

On that note I’ll end this post with a favorite poem of Sharon’s and a huge THANK YOU again to all the folks at Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Until we meet again…

by Sharon Olds
from The Unswept Room

Kindergarten Abecedarian

I thought what I had to do was to read
the very long word, over the chalkboard,
ab-kedev-gi-hij-klem-nop-qurs-
tuv-wix-yiz, but what I had to do
was to look at a crescent moon-shape and to go
k k k k with my mind. It was strange,
like other things–that a very large Boy owned everything,
even a fire, where he could put me for the thoughts
in my head. Each day, I tried to read
the world, to find his name in it,
the trees bending in cursive, the bees
looping their sky script. Crescent moon
was k-k-k. Cereal bowl
uh-uh-uh. Cap-gun puh-
puh-puh. K-k, uh-uh, puh-puh,
kk-uhh-puhh, kk-uhh-puhh–
cup. Would God be mad? I had made
a false cup, in my mind, and although
he had made my mind, and owned it, maybe this was
not his cup, maybe he could not
put this cup in hell, and make it
scream the cup-scream. Maybe the paper
world was ours, as the actual one was his–
I was becoming a reader. For a moment I almost remember it,
when I stood back, on the other side
of the alphabet, a-b-c-d-
e-f-g, and took that first
step in, h-i-j-k
l-m-n-o-p, and stood astride
the line of the border of literacy,
q-r-s, t-u-v,
I would work for a life of this, I would ask
sanctuary: w-x-y-z.

One of the highlights of a week at SV Poetry are the early morning nature walks on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday with David Lukas, a naturalist, writer and cosmic earth guy. David has spent months in the Arizona desert living on what he could find there, hiking and camping in Borneo for a year and countless days, months and years roaming the Sierra Nevada. The “walks” are more like strolls with multiple stops along the way to pull out the telescope, zoom in on a squirrel perched on a rock sounding out an alarm or to turn over a leaf where ants are busy herding and milking aphids or to discuss the lava and granite rock formations or the “batholith,” the mass of rock underneath the Sierra Nevada range of mountains.
David taught us how to walk, one foot in front of the other, so that we could be balanced, so that our eyes would be free to look up, not down at our feet. He spoke of the three levels of being in nature: Concentration: where you are taking in information, cataloguing, cognitive thinking. Attention:tuning in to the surroundings, accuity of the senses, letting yourself be affected by nature, a sensory experience. Thirdly is Awareness where you lose yourself, there is no barrier between what is outside or inside the self, a spiritual experience. Awareness in nature is not easily achieved and may take years of meditative practice OR it’s possible that it is an innate ability of some to be so attuned. I imagine this was natural and necessary for the Native Americans as they lived with the land in order to survive and live as comfortably as they could in the ever changing environments.

There were always a lot of questions and the walks ended too quickly for most of us. We had only gotten the tip of the iceberg of all the knowledge that David had to offer. One day someone saw a Clarks Nutcracker (named after Clark from Lewis & Clark) in the top of a tree happily pulling pine nuts out of pine cones. This bird, David told us, is one of the smartest animals known and is responsible for the forestation of most of the Sierra Nevada as it caches untold thousands of pine nuts every year, a good many of which are never eaten and consequently germinate into seedlings. Over a ten-thousand year span of time the Clarks Nutcracker alone was responsible for foresting the entire state of Nevada with pinon trees. This was just one of the many “nuggets” David shared with us on our short forays into the woods. I think I can say that for the majority of us who walked with him, that it was not so much the information he shared, but more his wisdom and understanding of the great web of life we see in nature. There are connections that are obvious such as sunlight-water-photosynthesis-plant growth, etc. and then there are those connections, such as the mycorrhiza web of fungus under the earth that feeds the billions of hairlike roots and stretches around the globe, that we are oblivious too unless we chance upon the information. It was the magic and the mystery, and ultimately, the deep respect that David imbued in us for nature, as well as how we could be advocates for preserving it, that affected us all and made these walks a kind of prayer, a walking meditation.

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This is an incredible book. The photos are like nothing you’ve ever seen. You can buy it at Amazon.

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I didn’t take a lot of pictures on the walks. It seemed intrusive somehow and it was so easy to get lost in listening to David speak and scribbling what I could down in my little notebook. He has a wonderful website which you can access by clicking on his name in the first paragraph and two of his books I have are Wild Birds and one he co-wrote, Sierra Nevada Natural History, which is the “bible” of the Sierra Nevadas. Two books about birds that David highly recommends are: Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberger and The Singing Life of Birds by Donald Kroodsman. You can email David at david@whatbird.com. He does nature walks, guided tours in the Sierras, lectures, etc.

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Clarks Nutcracker can find its cached seeds under many feet of snow.

David & me–No, that’s not a partial eclipse. The shutter on my camera was stuck. We thought it was a nice artistic touch.

The mountain in Squaw Valley–granite and lava meet.

Stewart is ready for the nature hike–very suave poet!

The gathering in the parking lot before the walk. Scribbling down notes as fast as we can.

One of the wonderful traditions at SV Poetry is the Wednesday afternoon softball game and trip to Meeks Bay on Lake Tahoe for a swim, a walk and a good old-fashioned picnic. It’s a great way to break up the week and have some fun, even though there’s still a poem to be written for the next morning’s session. I love the softball game and brought two mitts that my husband so generously loaned me. In 2003 we were rained out for both the game and the picnic (the only day it rained all week), so this year I was grateful that the sun shone and the heat was not too overwhelming. Although we rallied in the final inning to bring the score to something like 7 to 5, the team I was on lost the game. Everyone who wanted to played, from Bob Hass (who pitched and got a hit) to Dash (a 4-year old). It was a great way to get completely out of your head for a few hours and into the physical—and lots of laughter!
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Jill in her quintessential baseball attire. The belle of the basepaths.

Lori, my roommate, an ardent Red Sox fan–didn’t even get dirt on those white pants.

The Peanut Gallery–starring Sarah Maclay!

I was thrilled to get a single and an RBI and the photo to show my husband that I really did get up to bat.

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At the picnic there were three kinds of salad: pasta, green and can’t remember the other…alongwith chips, salsa, drinks, and barbequed beef, chicken or veggie links. My roommates and I were a little late getting there due to a wrong turn that took us half way around the lake, in the wrong direction, but it was such a beautiful day that we didn’t mind. We ended the day back at our house on the hill with ice cream sundaes and a long night of writing.

Lake Tahoe with sailboat.

Our “grillers” Stephen & Melissa

Patty from Vermont

Christine, Ted & Jack. Dig the shirts!

Feels like I’ve been gone a month, or maybe an eternity. Time when you’re writing a poem a day and going to lectures, workshops and readings and picnics and socializing and writing some more…oh, and don’t forget an occasional meal or nap or walk or just chilling out, seems to flex in and out like a rubber band. At one moment you’re racing along and the next it’s so still you can’t find yourself. The whole week is a lot to digest and my metabolism is trying to catch up with all the fare offered. First, the Guiding Poets were wonderful–Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Harryette Mullen, Dean Young and C.D. Wright. I had worked with Sharon before at SV three years ago and at an Esalen workshop. She creates a safe space in her workshops that allows the poet to always risk just a little more. Harryette was at Idyllwild two years ago when I was there, but I didn’t work with her. She has a great spirit and does an awesome reading. Dean Young was new to me and I loved how he approached each poem, looking for its "center of gravity." C.D. Wright has a real knack for carving a rough poem into a gem. Robert Hass is the director of the program and is always busy–from leading his daily workshop to organizing the softball game to consoling distraught poets to giving a craft talk that got a standing ovation on the last day. It was obvious he gave 100% and everyone loved and appreciated his efforts to ensure that the week went well for each and every one of us.

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View from the balcony of the house I stayed in on Apache Road

Bob Hass welcoming us all to Squaw Valley

The roommates at lunch: Me, Christina, Melissa, Lori & Christine.

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The Whole Gang. In the first row from left to right: Sara, Billie, Judy, Michael, Me & Bryan. (Bryan was at the Napa Valley Writers workshop with me last year.)

Here is the piece I wrote for Poetry Evolution this week with a few photos of the Metolius River that is just a few miles from our place in Sisters, Oregon. It has always been a special place for me because when I was a child my best friend, Betsy, had a cabin at the head of the river (it springs right out of the ground at the foot of Black Butte) and we would spend summer and winter days there playing–riding ponies, canoeing, croquet and hours of reading and playing board games. It is a magical (and very, very cold) river that winds unfettered until it merges with the Deschutes.

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Like a River

Last month at the meditation course in New Mexico there was one class where we did a guided visualization along with a kriya to open up to guidance and clarity. It was a hot day, my back ached and I was hungry and ready for lunch and feeling the familiar resistance to the effort of concentration and stillness. As we got deeper and deeper into the meditation, though, I felt the strength of the process, felt myself giving way, opening to what might come through. Centering on the inhale and exhale, as well as holding the posture and the mudra, all brought more and more energy, a peaceful surge of strength and projective focus. In the last couple of minutes, as the mind chatter lessened and the body discomfort eased, three small words slipped through the veil, three words that landed with an impact that took my heart completely by surprise, brought tears, a welling of gratitude and recognition of the union of all in this vast universe.

Immediately following the meditation, my hunger having disappeared, I pulled out my notebook and pen, sat at a bench in the shade and began to write, write in response to the message:

The ripple, the roar, tidal pool flow, going, round a bend whirl, twirl, engulfing falling running, clouds reflecting, bowing branches turning down, the ground, the bounds of all solid, lost, found, counting stars on the surface, stones flung upon the floor. The bottom not solid, not sound, not caught, taught, swells with flotsam, buoyant with loss, whatever is tossed, floats, wants the journey, hears the call to merge to seek the expanse, beloved all, waters call never ending, the pounding, beckoning…come, come, leave the shore, leave all mammals, birds, meadows and falls, how sun finds day, the tears of the moon, the cottonwood snow, the pauses, move on, move on—chant of love, eternal mantra—always so, always so, always so.

Since that day I have been writing a little bit here and there to connect with this phrase, to find out what it has to divulge, what I need to learn from it. I have found a poem or two from it. I have begun to see life more and more as that eternal flow, as liquid, as fury, as calm, contained, overflowing, moving, still, all the many aspects of a river. Just a couple of days ago I was reading a short essay about Pablo Neruda by Edward Hirsch from his book, Poet’s Choice, where he quotes a portion of a poem of Neruda’s called “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” Two thirds of the way down I came to the lines, “like a river of riving yellow light / like a river where buried jaguars lie.” I would have thought it mere coincidence if there was only one line that began “like a river” but that there were two…I knew that this was a confirmation, a communication from this incredible poet to keep on, to keep going down that river, an assurance that there was much to be learned, many blessings to be garnered by such an endeavor.

I leave Oregon tomorrow, travel back to Los Angeles, but I will return in a month, to a land where rivers abound in the mountains and meadows. I will carry these waters with me as I continue to write and to meditate on the river, to dive into the depths, to risk the icy cold, the loss of breath, to experience crystal clear moments of transcendence, to one day reach my ocean.

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The Head of the Metolius

If you look really closely you can see a small bridge. To the right is the cabin of my childhood friend, Betsy.

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Winding through the Ponderosa Pines.

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