Got kin?

Curled up with little black cat, idling through poems by Hafiz this morning:

I Got Kin

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.

Love
So God will think,

"Ahhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls."

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.

Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.

--Hafiz

Course, I am now contemplating how mightily tasty a freshly-baked cinnamon twirly roll would be right now...

Everyday Play

When I finally downloaded my photos, I had oodles of shots of this year's cherry blossoms (which I've typed twice now as 'cheery blossoms', perhaps with good cause). Trees that I pass on the walk to work, on the way to visit friends or family, on little meandering walks; blossoms blossoms everywhere.

Before the last one gives up its petals to this blustery weather, I thought I'd mark this fleeting, Pablo Neruda time of year:

"I want to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees."

Quite sublime. From Neruda's Every Day You Play.

Time to surrender

A busy start to the week: we're moving offices, which involves bursts of packing/unpacking, bursts of 'regular' work, and bursts of extreme flumpiness which only caffeine and sugar seem to mitigate.

Currently, our lovely new sunshiney office is at the phase where it looks worse before it looks better. Baby steps :-)

Anyhoo, I'm taking a moment out to be quietly inspired by the beauty of 14th-century Persian poet/mystic/seer Hafiz:

I wish I could speak like music.
I wish I could put the swaying splendor

of the fields into words,
So that you could hold Truth
against your body

and dance.
I am trying the best I can

with this crude brush,
the tongue,

to cover you with light.
I wish I could speak like divine music.
I want to give you the sublime rhythms

of this earth and the sky's limbs
as they joyously spin and surrender,
Surrender

Against God's luminous breath.
Hafiz wants you to hold me

Against your precious Body

And dance,
Dance.

♥

Light as a feather

My mom gave me a lovely collection of Emily Dickinson's poems years back. At the time, I hadn't read Emily's work for ages (since being scarred by the whole 'you can sing all her poetry to The Yellow Rose of Texas' revelation).

Anyhoo, that edition, which had a bright yellow flower on the cover, is one I think of from time to time. I thought of it - and its optimistic cover - this morning, when talking to someone who's coping with physical pain, facing an operation; someone with a clear sense that life's going to have more than its share of difficulties for a time.

  Hope is the Thing with Feathers

  Hope is the thing with feathers
  That perches in the soul,
  And sings the tune without the words,
  And never stops at all,

  And sweetest in the gale is heard;

  And sore must be the storm

  That could abash the little bird

  That kept so many warm.

  I've heard it in the chillest land,

  And on the strangest sea;

  Yet, never, in extremity,

  It asked a crumb of me.

    --Emily Dickinson

And Emily's hope led me on to Thich Nhat Hanh:

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

 

Meandering path

A friend posted Maya Angelou's Still I Rise this morning, and the journey began. I hadn't read the poem in a couple of years - and hearing Angelou recite it is a totally different experience:



Reading through some of her poetry, I ended up at TED, listening to iconic designer Philippe Starck talk in his self-effacing, comic way about 'our beautiful story' and being a good mutant. He covers human creativity, poetry, toilet seats, supermonkeys; how easily we fall from civilised to barbaric society, and our 'duty of vision', to look up, to see farther: "Arise the angle of vision" as he so endearingly phrases it. It's a nebulous free-ranging talk (which some find infuriating), but it's thought-provoking.
Philippe Starck thinks deep on design | Video on TED.com

Starck also does a killer impression of primordial soup. Bloop bloop bloop :-)

Anyhoo, then came Toni Morrison and Odetta, both speaking from different perspectives on overcoming, on being greater than any sorrow or disadvantage or anger you might feel or face. Which coincidentally fit nicely with the short film Words from NPR and Radiolab, referred today from openculture. In a short space, it offers a lovely wide perspective, giving a nice sense of things being greater than any one instance.



Treaty, to spend a couple of hours in the company of lyrical speakers and inspiring images.

Sticks and roses

I was browsing through the books of this house, looking for something by Jorge Luis Borges, a very short story about a rose... but instead I found The Marriage of Sticks by the very wonderful Jonathan Carroll.

Anyhoo, so I leafed through, trying to find the original description of 'the marriage of sticks', which is this:

"When anything truly important happens in your life, wherever you happen to be, find a stick in the immediate vicinity and write the occasion and date on it. Keep them together, protect them. There shouldn't be too many; sort through them every few years and separate the events that remain genuinely important from those that were but no longer are. You know the difference. Throw the rest out.

When you are very old, very sick, or sure there's not much time left to live, put them together and burn them. The marriage of sticks."

I thought about the spectrum of people, the endless variation of lives; how some of us might have a zillion thin spindly sticks, and maybe some might have four, or two, or a single stick, solid and strong.

I went and found the rose story, which is called The Rose of Paracelsus, and coincidentally also features burning as a signifier for your life beliefs. But Paracelsus does not gather up the past; he burns not as a retrospective, but a culmination: 'Every step is the goal you seek'. And in Borges's story, the rose does not stay burned.

Which brought me back to those sticks, wondering if they were so finite after all.

Have a great weekend, all X

Stars by any other name

Among her many many volumes, Sara has the same edition of Louis MacNeice's Poems that I used to have - I took it out today and leafed through, gazing at words and couplets like old friends. I stopped to reread one that I used to have on my desk at work in Exeter. These days, there are probably different words that I would keep close to me in an office environment, but that's where I was, then: treasuring the stand-still quality of the last lines...

What is truth? says Pilate,
Waits for no answer;
Double your stakes, says the clock
To the ageing dancer;
Double the guard, says Authority,
Treble the bars;
Holes in the sky, says the child
Scanning the stars.

After some beautiful cooling rain this morning, the world has heated up once more. I must divine the secret to a good iced coffee...

The Cord

Whether you read it or listen to her read it, the whole world should know this poem by Leanne O'Sullivan. Gets me blinking tears every time...

That she wrote it as a teenager - that she possessed so early such maturity of thought and expression - blows my mind. She prefaces it by saying that she and her mother didn't have the easiest of relationships as she was growing up, and that this was written as a gift for her.

And what a gift. Enjoy :-)



The Cord
Leanne O’Sullivan

I used to lie on the floor for hours after
school with the phone cradled between
my shoulder and my ear, a plate of cold
rice to my left, my school books to my right.
Twirling the cord between my fingers
I spoke to friends who recognized the
language of our realm. Throats and lungs
swollen, we talked into the heart of the night,
toying with the idea of hair dye and suicide,
about the boys who didn’t love us,
who we loved too much, the pang
of the nights. Each sentence was
new territory, like a door someone was
rushing into, the glass shattering
with delirium, with knowledge and fear.
My Mother never complained about the phone bill,
what it cost for her daughter to disappear
behind a door, watching the cord
stretching its muscle away from her.
Perhaps she thought it was the only way
she could reach me, sending me away
to speak in the underworld.
As long as I was speaking
she could put my ear to the tenuous earth
and allow me to listen, to decipher.
And these were the elements of my Mother,
the earthed wire, the burning cable,
as if she flowed into the room with
me to somehow say, Stay where I can reach you,
the dim room, the dark earth. Speak of this
and when you feel removed from it
I will pull the cord and take you
back towards me.


From Waiting for My Clothes, 2004
Bloodaxe Books

Shining bright

Last night, Veronica Canning gave a talk entitled 'Thrive not Survive', and in it she talked about figuring out your big vision: doing something that you love and feel passionate about, something that's a little bit frightening in its audacity.

Anyhoo, she mentioned a poem by Marianne Williamson that's often misattributed to Mandela (he quoted it in his landmark inaugural speech). I had only just come across it a week or so ago, so here it is, for your thought-provoking pleasure:

Our Deepest Fear
By Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us;
It's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we're liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Have a lovely weekend, folks :-)

Faceted day

What a treaty day!

So, it started in Clon, with the Fabulous Baking Lady (and as I type, I am tucking into an entire cake of melt-in-your-mouth shortbread). It had been months since we caught up, so we chatted over a variety of coffees in two of Clon's coffee shops (it's only polite to spread our business around).

Then on to Cork, where among my wanderings, I explored the street where my mother grew up. The site where her family grocery store stood is now a shopping centre, but a good bit of the street survives. One building was in a half-demolished state, exposing three storeys of the house's walls, with their last tattered traces of once having been a home. The area was filled with resonances as I meandered, but they were elusive, like little glimpses of fireflies that vanish as you focus on them.

And then the afternoon whirled on: lovely meal with a friend who's down from Dublin, and off to the library on the Grand Parade to meet old friends, and make new ones, and to hear the writer Petina Gappah interviewed by Ann Luttrell (both pictured below). It was part of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival. The session was a great mix: funny and poignant and engaging, and it fed conversations among our little group in its aftermath.



One of the striking moments was when Petina was asked when she writes, as in, how she structures her writing around her life and work in Geneva. "I get up at 4.30am."

I'm sorry?

"Then I write for a couple of hours, until I get my son up..." and then make breakfast, school drop-off, work (she's a lawyer, and not like a Devil's Advocate lawyer, but one that works for the good, on a global scale), school pick-up, make dinner. Then she reads in the evening.

So, I sat with my friend - also a writer - and we waited for the Big Bone-Idle Lazy Hand of Shame to appear in mid-air, and quiver slightly as it scanned the room, locking irrevocably on to us.

All in all, a day to treasure :-)

Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award

Quick post, before I settle down for the remainder of the evening...

So, I nipped up to Dublin today for the announcement of the Davy Byrnes short story award, hosted ever so graciously in and by Davy Byrnes. Six fantastic writers were shortlisted , and earlier this evening, after three lovely speeches, Claire Keegan was awarded the prize for her story Foster.

Richard Ford, who judged the competition from the longlist of 30 stories (drawn from over 800 entries), gave the following citation on Claire's story:

A child’s rapt and eloquent vision of life-in-tumult between two families. In lifting a homely rural life to our moral notice, the story exhibits a patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality, and does so through a lavish, discriminating appetite for language and its profound capacity to return us to life renewed.

So, well done to all the shortlisted, and to Claire for her winning story. I've read one of the stories so far - Kathleen Murray's Storm Glass, which is closely-woven and haunting and just plain fab. So, super-special congratulations to Kathleen for both the story and the short-listing - superb job!! The plan is that Stinging Fly will bring out an anthology featuring the shortlisted and winning stories this summer; one to look forward to :-) And well done to Declan Meade (editor of Stinging Fly) for spearheading, managing, and delivering the whole competition from beginning to end. An epic task. I suspect he's deserving of a significant break right about now...

As you can imagine, there was toasting galore this evening, and catching up with friends old and new. And bizarrely, the village of Baltimore was the subject of much conversation (Bushe's Bar, Glenans, Chez Youen, yadda yadda...)

Tomorrow will be another travel-heavy day - just saying this up front, in case the next entry is a smidge bleary, or non-existent, or features misspellings...

endings and beginnings

I swear, time has sped up today... so before I suddenly find that dusk has fallen:

I was thinking about great endings to poems, like 'tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new' or 'so long lives this, and this gives life to thee' - poems that sweep the reader up, each line building up cumulatively, so that by the end you're aloft on this unstoppable crescendo. And for me, although lots of Kahlil Gibran works as small stand-alone quotes, his piece on death really delivers when read as a whole.

Then Almitra spoke, saying, "We would ask now of Death."
And he said: You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

He makes it sound like the greatest beginning.

Hope everyone's having a happy Wednesday :-)

Flights of Fancy

I've revisited Roberto Kusterle's strange and expressive images a few times of late; some are very beautiful, and some disturbing.

I kept coming back to this one - Wings of Dreams:

There was something about it - prosaic yet extraordinary - that reminded me of a poem, and I wandered through words about wings or dreams or flight or soaring. I finally figured it out: it's ‘Memorial de Isla Negra’; Pablo Neruda talking about beginning to write poetry:

...and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and I suddenly saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open...

I love that idea of coming to words, bare and unaffected, and also the notion of 'forgotten wings' - I was recently struck by someone making the point that if you ask a group of four year olds "Who here can draw?" every hand shoots up with confidence; but by aged twelve, they've come to believe something entirely different about themselves.

And that's such a loss.

Moments of wonder

Pondering over two quotes this morning. At first they seemed quite disparate to me, but I'm starting to wonder...

Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
-- Roald Dahl

If your cup is small, a little bit of salt will make the water salty. If your heart is small, then a little bit of pain can make you suffer. Your heart must be large.
--Thich Nhat Hanh

Email to smile to...

A friend just sent on a great quote:

"It's love," they say. You touch the right one
and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

—William Stafford

I scooched around online to read more by Stafford - loved this quote of his:

"Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music."

Ah, so true...

A mind led forward...

Ah, a morning of pretty words... idling around, listening to some fine readings of Neruda, and smiling at Jonathan Carroll quoting Tony Hoagland "There was a kiss that changed the history of my mouth" - great line!

Several moons ago I wrote a note to a friend. When next we spoke, she said she couldn't even throw away the envelope because it was so prettily written, and I said, 'Let it go. I'll write something for you to keep'. Over the months I looked for some perfect words for her - I was thinking of something about music or creativity or friends or family or overcoming loss. But nothing seemed to quite fit. We were talking last night, and planets came into alignment:

My Country Awake, by Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

And here's an inspirational Martin Sheen, reciting the poem beautifully. And now all I need to do is choose what kind of paper, and what colour ink. Decisions decisions...

And in other news:

So wrong it's right

Goodness me, we have the pub quiz grand finale this evening, and the day has just slipped away from me. I'm all behind like the cow's tail...

Sometimes, a typo is entirely successful: it just wins you over with its accidental charm. Like the sweet mice topping on the menu of my beloved pizza place in Garajau. Typos like that, you wouldn't change for all the world.

There's a big tv looming over a couple of check-outs in Field's, running local ads and making Christmassey announcements. They show a big colourful ad for a restaurant (coincidentally, a pizza place) in Ballydebob.

That's right. Ballydebob. Which if you pronounce in proper local fashion, would be Baal-d-bob.

I thought Baal-d-hob was the jauntiest place name ever, but this...

Genius.

Word legacies

I've been thinking about quotes we say to each other in times of sorrow or trauma; we offer another's words, because our own feel woefully inadequate.

Sometimes they're tried-and-true - words that have seen us through our own darkness - and we pass them on like a great family recipe. But family recipes are sometimes formed around an idiosyncratic oven, or a particular cast-iron pot, and don't always reproduce so well in another's kitchen.

For example, when we were kids we used to love "Keep passing the open windows", quirky advice offered in John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire. Actually, we had myriad quotes from HNH, about sorrow and bears and inventing our lives - it's a veritable treasure trove. But the wry suicide humour of open windows, that's not going to translate easily; few people would automatically feel the solace in that line.

On the other hand, there's a Hemingway quote from A Farewell to Arms that offers a certainty of pain, and of life beyond that pain. It somehow reaches easily:
"The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places".

It's not a favourite book of mine, but what a line...