And yet I have faith still in the value of love’s
enchantment; the rich colors the world takes on in lovers’ eyes. I believe in
the tears of love, the joys of love, in the warmth in the chest that comes when
we feel we have known this person all of our lives and beyond. The recognition:
it is what we long for.

You may say this is nothing more than delusion; that an
enchantment necessarily deceives and leaves us disappointed and possibly
lonely. Yet for all the challenges it may bring in distinguishing reality from
imagination, surely the romance of love is one of the deepest and most integral
experiences of being human. It is a gift from beyond; from beyond the
strategies of the self-seeking mind. It doesn’t come on demand; rather it
chooses us if it is so inclined, even if it may be inconvenient to our best
laid plans. It can upset our world, and yes, it can leave – as suddenly as it
came, or little by little over a lifetime.

But isn’t it worth it, all the same? A broken heart allows
us to feel more deeply the heart of others and their sufferings, and to take
our place more humanly in this world in which everything, but everything, falls
away at last, and not least ourselves. Success in love is determined not by the
length of time two people stay together, but by the generosity, the caring, and
the tenderness they have shared, in parting as well as in staying.

When my own marriage ended, I read my wife ‘The God
Abandons Anthony,’ the astonishing poem by the Greek poet, Cavafy. Anthony and
Cleopatra are about to lose the city of Alexandria to the Roman army. Anthony
is also losing the protection of Dionysius, god of music and wine. He stands on
a balcony as a procession of musicians walks by. The poet urges him not to turn
away from the beauty of the music, but to turn toward it; to take in the full
impact of the loss he is going to sustain; to be willing to listen

to the
exquisite music of that strange procession,

and
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria you

are
leaving.

Can we stand to gaze into the heart of our loss, the
preciousness of what we are losing, and not look away? This is the challenge
Cavafy offered me. His poem gave me the words with which to say goodbye to my
marriage, and, even as it was dissolving, the courage to feel the value it had
served in my life for a period of time.

The poet e.e. cummings takes this courage several steps
further. In his poem it may not always be
so, and i say, he displays a heart-rending generosity.

it may
not always be so; and i say

that
if your lips, which i have loved, should touch

another’s,
and your dear strong fingers clutch

his
heart, as mine in time not far away…..

 if
this should be, i say if this should be-

you of
my heart, send me a little word;

that i
may go unto him, and take his hands,

saying,
Accept all happiness from me.

It is not common to bow so gracefully to the very person
our beloved is turning toward, even as our beloved turns away from us. I feel
humbled by these lines; by what they say of the human being’s capacity to truly
love; her ability to accept the way life moves and has its own intelligence; to
bow deeply to the reality that, in fact, we are never in control of the way
things go. I think of the end of Mary Oliver’s poem In Blackwater Woods, where she says that you have to be able to do
three things in order to live in this world:

to
love what is mortal;

to
hold it

against
your bones knowing

your
own life depends on it;

and,
when the time comes to let it go,

to let
it go.

In loving what is mortal, we know that the object of our
love will pass away. Even so, we love utterly, without reserve. And to let go
when it is time to let go, as Cummings does in his poem, is perhaps the final,
most absolute mark of that love. The poem ends with a heartrending cry of loss:

Then
shall i turn my face, and hear one bird

sing
terribly afar in the lost lands.

For letting go of his beloved in the way he does, freeing
her to follow her life’s deepest affections, does not mean to deny the feelings
he has toward her, but on the contrary, to raise them to their subtlest and
finest station.

The greatest gift of love is the gesture of open arms – let
come what comes – not because you don’t care, or because  you hope to steel yourself against pain, but
because you care so much that you are helpless to do anything else. You bow to
what wants to happen, whatever it is. And as in these last two lines, you
accept the cost, the inevitable blow to the heart. Better in this life, after
all, for the heart to be broken – to take on the rich, the tender vulnerability
of being human – than not.

Yet there is also an echo of something in all religions that goes deeper for me than art appreciation. I have always had the intuition, felt in the marrow and not just in the mind, (a feature of my temperament, shared by many) that we live on the edge of a fullness of life that, while constantly available, seems all too often to be just out of reach. A lack, or sense of incompleteness, that gives rise to a longing for something beyond the known, and that cannot be spoken. No wonder the Jews leave out the vowels in YHVH.

Sometimes, whether through meditation, a walk in the woods, or being in love, or any number of catalysts, the incompleteness, the separateness, falls away and we feel less ourselves than part of everything; joined to a life both larger and more knowing than ourselves alone. More knowing, because in those moments we are a speck in the endless web of life, and yet joined even to the intelligence of the wheeling stars; a web that has no need of a computer terminal. Indra’s net, the Hindus call it.

A life more knowing, and yet ever a mystery to our ordinary mind; a mystery with horizons that stretch away the more we gaze into it. An anonymous English writer in the 14th century called it The Cloud of Unknowing. Rumi and Hafiz, the two great Persian poets of Sufism, couched the experience in the language of lover and beloved. So too did Christian writers like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Hindus like Ramakrishna and Tagore, and countless others.

This flow of longing into an awareness of belonging and back into longing again is, I suggest, the original and naked religious impulse. It is common to human beings everywhere throughout time; and it is this that has been concretized and systematized into different belief systems around the world. It itself, however, is prior to belief of any kind.

The poet Rilke urged us to live the question rather than settle for easy answers. To live the question in this regard surely means being willing to feel and explore that eternal itch — to experience its poignancy, its pleasure and pain — and then the awe, the wonder, the beauty, the deep peace and fullness that may come as the wave hits the shore — without either dismissing or explaining away any part of the cycle.

The fullness I refer to has nothing to do with thinking or believing. It is a spontaneous emergence of clarity, peace, aliveness, connectedness — truth and beauty if you will — and all for no reason. We might justly call it an authentic expression of the human spirit; and as such it is the source of spirituality, unbound by any religion of any kind.

The intuition of a larger life which embraces everything that lives and breathes is a felt sense rather than a thought or a concept. Reason, after all, is just one kind of knowing; felt sense, another. The one, more objective, gives rise to secular humanism, while the other, more subjective, can give rise to a personal and secular form of spirituality. Both can arise independently of external beliefs, and both are the fruit of a questioning mind.

Both are concerned with compassionate action in this world and not with rewards in some hypothetical afterlife. The abolition of slavery, the right to vote for all colors and both sexes; human rights, animal rights, environmental protections – all these extraordinary accomplishments of the human spirit surely add up to more lasting good done in the service of humanity than all the religions of the world together.

You may say that these extensions of the circle of life to include the previously disenfranchised are simply a reflection, not only of an age of enlightenment but also of the mirror neurons that we now know make us empathic creatures who can identify with a We as well as an I. But do mirror neurons account for the ecstatic love poetry of Rumi?

I wonder whether this We also reflects something of a larger reality still, beyond the neurons firing in our brain; whether it is a felt awareness of a dimension beyond the separate sense of self, one in which we are one body, one mind, with everything that lives and breathes. Not only that, but that there is an inscrutable wisdom in the way it all works. Not the wisdom of some Creator looking on bemusedly at his creation, but a wisdom and intelligence inherent in all creation itself.

Do I know this to be true? I can only say I recognize it to be true — I remember it to be true — in a region not accessible by my reasoning mind. In his book The Ego Tunnel, the German philosopher and radical materialist, Thomas Metzinger, argues persuasively that absolutely everything we experience, however cosmic it may seem, happens only within the confines of our own brain. He may be right; though we have no way of knowing. In the meantime, I will take that tremor of recognition until my experience tells me otherwise.

A secular spirituality, far from being an oxymoron, brings heaven down to earth, and encourages everyone to be their own priest. It bows in recognition of the extraordinary mystery that we are living in this very moment, without packaging it up in a neat bow of explanation. Bowing in a gesture of wonder and awe, not to any god or deity, but, as W.S. Merwin says in his poem, For The Anniversary of My Death,
bowing not knowing to what.

The realization that it may
not always be so reminds me of an early conversation with a woman I lived
with for thirteen years in England. We could sense that we were going to live
together almost as soon as we met, and yet we also knew it would only be for a
certain period of time. How long, we didn’t know, but we shared the same
intuition, and it was strangely awkward to acknowledge it so early on. It was
why, in spite of a rich and primarily nourishing life together, we never
married.

Unlike the couple in Cummings’ poem, our eventual parting
was due, not to some other love coming between us, but to the gradual
differences of life purpose and direction. It was like sand slipping, almost
imperceptibly, between our fingers over time. In Cummings’ poem, the slipping
away of the lovers’ bond might have been gradual too. Or it may have happened
in an afternoon. Either way, what struck me on reading it was the tenderness
and selflessness of the poet’s love for his beloved. Cummings gives us a
heartfelt example of how to love even as love is leaving.

He is aware that he may be losing her; that someone else
may now be enjoying the intimacy he himself once knew in time not far away. Yet his response is extraordinary:

if this should be, i say if this should be-

you of my heart, send me a little word;

that I may go unto him, and take his hands,

saying, Accept all happiness from me.

I wonder how many of us have been able to bow so gracefully
to the very person our beloved is turning toward, even as our beloved turns
away from us. Cummings shines a light on the human capacity to truly love. He
accepts the way life moves and has its own intelligence. He accepts the reality
that we are never entirely in control of the way things go.

In loving what is mortal, we know that sooner or later, the
object of our love will pass away, as everything does. Even so, Cummings loves
utterly, without reserve. And to let go when it is time to let go – which is
often not the time we would have chosen – is perhaps the final, most absolute
mark of that love.

And yes, there is a cost.
The poem ends with these lines:

Then
shall i turn my face, and hear one bird

sing
terribly afar in the lost lands.

A heartrending cry of loss such as this would be moving in
any context. It is even more moving when it follows immediately upon such a
generous expression of love as the one Cummings makes earlier in his poem.
Letting go of his beloved in the way he does, freeing her to follow her heart’s
deepest affections, does not mean to deny the feelings he has toward her, but
on the contrary, to raise them to their subtlest and finest station.

The greatest gift of love is the gesture of open arms – let
come what comes – not because you don’t care, or because you hope to steel
yourself against pain, but because you care so much that you are helpless to do
anything else. And you accept the cost, the inevitable blow to the heart.
Better in this life, after all, for the heart to be broken – to take on the
rich, the tender vulnerability of being human – than not. Then we can say with
another poet, Philip Larkin, and with some degree of truth, that

What will survive of us is love.

My book, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye, comes out
on February 21^st with Crown Books. You can pre-order it here on
Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Poems-Goodbye-Roger-Housden/dp/0307885992/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320526817&sr=1-1

What if you knew you’d
be the last

to touch someone?

Diego is from the Yucatan, but now he makes cappuccino in my
local café in Sausalito. We shake hands every day as I order my cappuccino. He
invariably slides it across the counter to me with some exclamation about how
beautiful the day is; whatever the weather. Even if I have just walked through
a blustery wind and a smattering of rain, it seems churlish to contradict him,
and I can only agree; especially when I know how far he has cycled in the small
hours of the morning to get here. Yes, it is a beautiful day. Always.

Today, I take in his tiny, Mayan frame, his businesslike
vigor, his kind, open gaze, and feel what this café would be like without him.
It would be empty. All the locals are here because of him. Because of his
warmth, his welcome, his verve. I wonder about the sad stories that hide behind
his smile; the journey from his homeland, the family he has left behind, the
relatives, perhaps, who never made it across the desert in Arizona. I think of
him on his bicycle at 4.00am in the morning, pedaling into the wind all through
San Francisco and over the Golden Gate Bridge while the rest of us are quiet in
the sleeping city.

Today, his gesture of sliding the cup over the wooden
counter is lit for me with an uncommon light; the light that glows around
someone as you sense that this gesture, that sentence, that smile, that look in
the eyes, is already disappearing out of this moment into the timeless. Gone;
gone forever. And yet a trace remains; not in the memory only, but in the feeling
heart. And in the body, too; because when we see and feel like this we are
moved. For what is illuminated is the reality that, even as it disappears, the
most ordinary gesture can convey the truth and beauty of a human life. I feel
grateful for Diego’s courage, aware of his humanity as I am now streaming
across the counter to me along with my coffee.

Aware as I am, too, of my own vulnerability, and that of
everyone else in this café this morning, washed and tumbling along as we all
are in the river of time, on our way to the endless ocean. Because all of us
are here only for the time being; vulnerable, intrinsically vulnerable to old
age sickness and death. Nothing will save us from this, our common fate.
However puffed out our chest may be, however booming that voice of ours,
however many tall buildings or stocks we own, we too are exquisitely,
excruciatingly exposed to the fact that, sooner or later, our place will be
cleared and we will be gone.

When we remember this, something softens in us. Our judgments
soften. Our hurry slows down a little, our worries return to proportion. We
breathe a little easier. After all, every one of us is in the same leaky old
boat. Everyone we meet, everyone around us – the wise, the foolish, the
saintly, the murderous – all of us alive today are heading together, in one
great fellowship, toward the final waterfall – even as we argue, lash out at
each other, care for each other, love each other – regardless of what it is we
do or don’t do.

This is why ours is an exquisite
vulnerability. It is exquisite because it is so touching, so life-affirming
when we see through the shell of a person to the tender reality beneath. One of
the women I pass in the café most mornings was in the local supermarket the
other day. We had sometimes smiled in recognition, but never spoken. She always
seemed busy and brisk to my eye; in charge of her day and what she was doing.
When we bumped into each other in the supermarket I greeted her by saying how
colorful she looked in her bright blue shirt. She said her husband had died
recently, and it was the first day since then that she had felt a little alive.
I am so sorry, I said. She burst into tears and clung to my shoulder, sobbing.
The wave of her grief washed through and over me. I had had no idea. I would
never have known. She was not in charge at all. She was just trying to do what
she could to get through.

We all have to say goodbye to everything eventually, and
life is punctuated with a thousand goodbyes, some greater, some smaller, all along
the way. And yet all too often, we can’t find the words to say goodbye. We may
leave a relationship or see a loved one die without ever being able to find the
words or the courage to express feelings that have moved like weather in us for
years. We can be at a loss for what to say when a relationship ends, when our
friend or lover dies, when we wake up one morning and realize that a whole
period of our life – our youth, our career, our healthy body, perhaps, is no
longer what it was.

This is precisely where poetry shines. Good poetry is not
merely a few thoughtful words to fill in an awkward moment. It is not simply
good advice or a gentle consolation. No, great poetry reaches down into the
depths of our humanity and captures the very essence of our experience. Then it
delivers it up in exactly the right words. This is why we shudder with
recognition when we hear the right poem at the right time. This is why I have
written a book called Ten Poems To SayGoodbye, which will be published by Harmony next February 21^st.
It starts with Ellen Bass’s poem, the last lines of which say it all:

What would people look
like

if we could see them
as they are,

soaked in honey, stung
and swollen,

reckless, pinned
against time?

is, I believe, a true hello and goodbye all in one: a
wholehearted embrace of the way life is showing up for us now, even as we
acknowledge and yes, even wave at its leaving. And because I do not always live
like this, caught as I sometimes am in the holding on or the pushing away, I
turn to poetry to help me in the moments of my need. Poetry reminds me of what
I know and often forget. Poetry speaks for me what my own tongue sometimes
cannot say. Poetry can coax from the shadows of my heart those feelings whose
existence I may even have been afraid to admit to. This is why we shudder with
recognition when we hear the right poem at the right time.

I have felt that shudder myself more than once in these last few years. I have attended my
mother’s funeral, lost a dear friend, ended a marriage, left a city, New York,
that I had grown to love, and a couple of years ago, said goodbye to an
intimate relationship with someone on another continent.

All too often, we can’t find the words to say goodbye. So when my marriage ended, I
turned to The God Abandons Anthony, the
astonishing poem by the Greek poet, Cavafy, and read it to my wife. Anthony and
Cleopatra are about to lose the city of Alexandria to the Roman army. Anthony
is also losing the protection of Dionysius, god of music and wine. He stands on
a balcony as a procession of musicians walks by. The poet urges him not to turn
away from the beauty of the music, but to turn toward it; to take in the full
impact of the loss he is going to sustain; to be willing to listen

To the exquisite music of that
strange procession,

And say goodbye to her, to the
Alexandria you are leaving.

Can we stand to gaze into the heart of our loss, the preciousness of what we are losing, and
not look away? This is the challenge that Cavafy offered me. His poem gave me
the words with which to say goodbye to my marriage, and, even as it was
dissolving, the courage to feel the value it had served in my life for a period
of time. In capturing our innermost wishes and feelings,  a poem can be the gift that we give to
another and also to ourselves in a moment of parting.

I have learned that a goodbye is an opportunity for kindness, for forgiveness, for intimacy,
and ultimately for love and a deepening acceptance of life as it is instead of
what it was or what we may have wanted it to be. Goodbyes can be poignant,
sorrowful, sometimes a relief, and now and then, an occasion for joy. They are
always transition moments which, when embraced, can be the door to a new life
both for ourselves and for others.

To say goodbye with all our heart is to turn a parting into a blessing. God be with
you, goodbye means. A blessing is the offering of one heart to another; to
another person, to a situation, to life itself. Isn’t that what we are here
for? To bless the savor of this precious moment even as it slips through our
fingers? To allow its sorrow, its joy, its silence or laughter to enter our
life stream and add a measure to who we are? This is the spirit and the hope of
my book, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye, which will be published by Harmony in
February. You can pre-order it here http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Poems-Goodbye-Roger-Housden/dp/0307885992/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320262095&sr=8-1

The village is truly a picture postcard example of the way much of the English countryside
has managed to retain its character and way of life despite being online and
not so far from a roaring motorway. It nestles in a soft and dreamy pastoral
scene, little changed in centuries, with rolling fields surrounding the village
church and thatched cottages and the single pub lining the one narrow street.

There are other villages in England as quaint and timeless as East Coker, but since 1943
and the publication of Four Quartets, it is East Coker that has become an
emblem of Englishness, of ancient communion between the earth and those who
live on it, a village that transcends time and place. Each of the Four Quartets
addresses one of the elements, and East Coker is earth: “the earth of South
Somerset, the sandy lanes worn down by generations of carts” as the Independent
journalist puts it; the deep lane/Shuttered with branches, dark in the
afternoon…the stones that cannot be deciphered.”

The village had been the home of Eliot’s forebears, and it was from here that his ancestor,
the Reverend Andrew Elyot, set out for a new life in America in 1669. Eliot traveled
the other way. An American by birth, he moved to England in 1925 and became a
British subject in 1939, the year he wrote East Coker. He had first set foot in
the village two years earlier, and over the next few years it became a mythic
place in his imagination.

There was – and is – plenty of material in the village to inspire a fertile mind. There is
the land of course, with its leisurely rhythm and the cottages that seem to
grow up out of the earth; the old alehouse, the Helyar Arms which, I
discovered, and contrary to popular stories about English cooking, can give you
a wonderful lunch. And the old church, where Eliot’s ashes are buried, where
crusaders have lain undisturbed for seven hundred years, and where William
Dampier was finally laid to rest.

Dampier, born in the village in 1651, was a legendary adventurer who circumnavigated the
world three times and was the first Englishman to explore Australia and New
Guinea. His memoirs inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. For Eliot,
Dampier was a powerful metaphor for ceaseless exploration which ends finally in
returning home. Tiny East Coker, home to just 1,750 souls, easily grows large
in the mind.

I was there to research a journey for book lovers I am planning to lead next Spring, taking
a small group to the landscapes that inspired Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, TS
Eliot, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. The idea is to see the land of England
through their works and to use their words as inspiration for our own life
journey.  It was unusually warm in England just a few weeks ago; warmer than Athens was at the time. The stones of
the houses glowed like honey, the grassy lane to the church was firm, the
narrow main street was empty and quiet.

But there by the door of the Helyar Arms was a notice that shouted in large capital letters:
“NO NO NO to the urban extension.” I went into the pub and there was a copy of
the Independent, though I didn’t need to read much as the lady behind the bar
told me the story as she served up my pint.

“The local council wants to zone 600 acres of prime farming land around the village to
build an eco-town of 3,700 new homes,” she scowled. “It will be the end of life
as we know it. Except it’s not going to happen. Not if we can help it!”

She and the other villagers know they live in a village that is like no other. Because of
Eliot’s poem, widely considered to be the greatest poem in the English language

written in the 20^th. Century, they are aware that the village has
the status of a global brand. They have established a Preservation Trust which
has applied to Unesco for special status for East Coker as a World Heritage
Site, though the bid will only succeed if the government in London supports it,
which it has so far shown no signs of doing.

The poetry world has also taken up arms. Andrew Motion, England’s former poet laureate,
has gathered a number of famous writers and scholars to sign the Unesco
application. Academics from Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and Chicago have written
to South Somerset Council begging them to reconsider, pleading that the area
has been immortalized by Eliot as a landscape of deep historical, psychological
and cultural value.

For the council, however, strapped for cash as most councils are now, the economic
pressure for change is hard to resist, since there are cash payments made to
the council for every house that is sold, under a government plan known as the
New Homes Bonus.  There is no guarantee that the villagers and their supporters will succeed in stopping the plans, but
they are doing everything in their power to try. If you want to see East Coker
as it is now, you might be wise to join me next May.

See the full itinerary on the Journeys page on www.rogerhousden.com

What if you knew you’d
be the last

to touch someone?

Diego is from the Yucatan, but now he makes cappuccino in my
local café in Sausalito. We shake hands every day as I order my cappuccino. He
invariably slides it across the counter to me with some exclamation about how
beautiful the day is; whatever the weather. Even if I have just walked through
a blustery wind and a smattering of rain, it seems churlish to contradict him,
and I can only agree; especially when I know how far he has cycled in the small
hours of the morning to get here. Yes, it is a beautiful day. Always.

Today, I take in his tiny, Mayan frame, his businesslike
vigor, his kind, open gaze, and feel what this café would be like without him.
It would be empty. All the locals are here because of him. Because of his
warmth, his welcome, his verve. I wonder about the sad stories that hide behind
his smile; the journey from his homeland, the family he has left behind, the
relatives, perhaps, who never made it across the desert in Arizona. I think of
him on his bicycle at 4.00am in the morning, pedaling into the wind all through
San Francisco and over the Golden Gate Bridge while the rest of us are quiet in
the sleeping city.

Today, his gesture of sliding the cup over the wooden
counter is lit for me with an uncommon light; the light that glows around
someone as you sense that this gesture, that sentence, that smile, that look in
the eyes, is already disappearing out of this moment into the timeless. Gone;
gone forever. And yet a trace remains; not in the memory only, but in the feeling
heart. And in the body, too; because when we see and feel like this we are
moved. For what is illuminated is the reality that, even as it disappears, the
most ordinary gesture can convey the truth and beauty of a human life. I feel
grateful for Diego’s courage, aware of his humanity as I am now streaming
across the counter to me along with my coffee.

Aware as I am, too, of my own vulnerability, and that of
everyone else in this café this morning, washed and tumbling along as we all
are in the river of time, on our way to the endless ocean. Because all of us
are here only for the time being; vulnerable, intrinsically vulnerable to old
age sickness and death. Nothing will save us from this, our common fate.
However puffed out our chest may be, however booming that voice of ours,
however many tall buildings or stocks we own, we too are exquisitely,
excruciatingly exposed to the fact that, sooner or later, our place will be
cleared and we will be gone.

When we remember this, something softens in us. Our judgments
soften. Our hurry slows down a little, our worries return to proportion. We
breathe a little easier. After all, every one of us is in the same leaky old
boat. Everyone we meet, everyone around us – the wise, the foolish, the
saintly, the murderous – all of us alive today are heading together, in one
great fellowship, toward the final waterfall – even as we argue, lash out at
each other, care for each other, love each other – regardless of what it is we
do or don’t do.

This is why ours is an exquisite
vulnerability. It is exquisite because it is so touching, so life-affirming
when we see through the shell of a person to the tender reality beneath. One of
the women I pass in the café most mornings was in the local supermarket the
other day. We had sometimes smiled in recognition, but never spoken. She always
seemed busy and brisk to my eye; in charge of her day and what she was doing.
When we bumped into each other in the supermarket I greeted her by saying how
colorful she looked in her bright blue shirt. She said her husband had died
recently, and it was the first day since then that she had felt a little alive.
I am so sorry, I said. She burst into tears and clung to my shoulder, sobbing.
The wave of her grief washed through and over me. I had had no idea. I would
never have known. She was not in charge at all. She was just trying to do what
she could to get through.

We all have to say goodbye to everything eventually, and
life is punctuated with a thousand goodbyes, some greater, some smaller, all along
the way. And yet all too often, we can’t find the words to say goodbye. We may
leave a relationship or see a loved one die without ever being able to find the
words or the courage to express feelings that have moved like weather in us for
years. We can be at a loss for what to say when a relationship ends, when our
friend or lover dies, when we wake up one morning and realize that a whole
period of our life – our youth, our career, our healthy body, perhaps, is no
longer what it was.

This is precisely where poetry shines. Good poetry is not
merely a few thoughtful words to fill in an awkward moment. It is not simply
good advice or a gentle consolation. No, great poetry reaches down into the
depths of our humanity and captures the very essence of our experience. Then it
delivers it up in exactly the right words. This is why we shudder with
recognition when we hear the right poem at the right time. This is why I have
written a book called Ten Poems To SayGoodbye, which will be published by Harmony next February 21^st.
It starts with Ellen Bass’s poem, the last lines of which say it all:

What would people look
like

if we could see them
as they are,

soaked in honey, stung
and swollen,

reckless, pinned
against time?

So we meditate, we go into therapy, we take classes to improve our sex lives, we read books on how to follow our bliss. We may succeed in ironing out one wrinkle, but then another pops up in its place. The sense that life is not as good as it could be — that we are not as good as we could be — seems built into our genetic code.

It’s true, we’re not perfect. But then, neither is anyone else, however glowing their life may seem to our eyes. We are, all of us, no more and no less than wonderfully ordinary, imperfect mortals. So why not give ourselves a break? Why not celebrate our blemishes, our imperfections and dissatisfactions, as the very qualities that make us human? No one else has quite our mix of idiosyncrasies. We all have a fault line, and usually one with many branches. It will always be that way, as it always has. Even mighty Achilles had his heel. And doesn’t Venus de Milo look better without her arms?

When I allow myself simply to feel my longing for something that I don’t have — say, the summer in Paris — I realize that the energy in my dissatisfaction is nothing other than my own life energy rising in temperature; and as I let the intensity grow, I begin to feel more alive instead of breaking out in a rash of envy toward those who are already strolling along the Seine. What I’m wanting from Paris, or wherever it is, is not Paris — that’s only the image my desire comes dressed in. What I’m wanting is the very thing I already have, I realize: this warmth in my chest that my fantasy of Paris has spawned. If I let it, Paris can take me back to myself, and that is a genuine pleasure. This is what the old Sufi poet, Rumi, meant when he said, “This longing, You express is the return message.”

Our longings can serve to take us home, rather than keep us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction. And as for our various imperfections, as long as they do no harm to ourselves or to others, there is no reason to consider them anything less than our own unique contribution to global diversity. Instead of apologizing, we can choose to enjoy ourselves just as we are — no upgrades necessary.

Not being perfect allows us to feel empathy and compassion, not just for ourselves, but also, and especially, for others. We see our own frailties and shortcomings in our friends and lovers, or we see that they stumble in their own way just as we do in ours. Not being perfect together joins us in our humanity. That’s a good feeling; that we’re all in this impossible, crazy life together, and that in large measure it will take us where it wants to go. That may cause anxiety to our control needs, but it beats being lonely in a posture of having it all together when everyone around us seems to be less than capable.

In Japan there is an entire world view that appreciates the value of the imperfect, unfinished and faulty. It’s called Wabi Sabi, where the first term refers to something simple and unpretentious, and the second points to the beauty that comes with age. Wabi Sabi is the aesthetic view that underlies Japanese art forms like the tea ceremony, calligraphy and ceramics. It’s an aesthetic that sees beauty in the modest and humble, the irregular and earthy. It holds that beauty comes with the patina of age and in the changes that come with use. It lies in the cracks, the worn spots; in the green corrosion of bronze, the pattern of moss on a stone. The Japanese take pleasure in mistakes and imperfections.

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regimen we follow, no matter which self-help guru or meditation practice we follow, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last. Death is our supreme limitation, the final proof that perfection was never meant to be part of the human experience. A hundred years from now, there will be all new people. Sooner rather than later, we shall not be here: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no mind, no you or me — gone, and who knows where, if anywhere.

Yet knowing the extent of our limitations, feeling our soon-not-to-be-hereness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here at all. That is the brilliance of the human design plan — the built-in “defect” is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draught as it comes to us.

How did this happen? This incredible feeling, thinking, sensing, moving, joyous, painful, doubting, wondering life — what keeps it upright even now, right now in this unrepeatable moment that is already gone? No answer to that, merely the gasp of the breath as it moves in and out, and the pleasure of knowing that for now we are here and not elsewhere. Better to taste it now — this gritty, imperfect life that we have — than to defer it to some more perfect future that may never come.

In the last few years I have spent much of my time writing books on poetry. Sometimes, while sitting alone in front of my computer, I have wondered whether I was wasting my time. After all, the world is in trouble. It has always been in trouble. Surely there must be something more useful, more pressing, to give my time to than reflecting on poetry? Couldn’t I go and start a project in Africa, or at least do some small thing to prevent climate catastrophe; start reducing my own carbon footprint, for example, and begin a movement to encourage others to do the same? But no; I wrote more poetry books, wondering all the while whether they and I were doing little more than making ourselves progressively irrelevant.

On my good days, I knew better, which is why I kept writing. I knew that great poetry has the power to start a fire in a person’s life. It can alter the way we see ourselves. It can change the way we see the world. I knew this from my own experience. When I first read Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey, which begins with the lines

One day you finally knew

What you had to do, and began…

I had just landed in San Francisco from London. That one reading made my hair stand on end. It confirmed the rightness of all that had just happened in my life. A few months earlier, I had woken up one morning and knew I should leave my native country of England and go and live in America. Just like that. Rather than a decision, it was like recognizing something whose time had come. Everything needed to change, and the time was now. I sold my house, my library, my love of twelve years and I finally parted. I got on a plane to California, and have never looked back.

The Journey is a change of life poem, a wake up and walk your truth poem, and people in many different life circumstances can recognize themselves in it, because Mary Oliver has used the magic of her words to capture a universal condition. When I returned every so often to that poem and my own essay on it in Ten Poems to Change Your Life, it would remind me that poetry not only matters, but that poetry is profoundly necessary. Especially in times of darkness and difficulty, both personal and collective. To read or to write poetry is a powerful, even subversive act; and it is one small thing we can do that can actually make a very big difference.

You may never have read a poem in your life, and yet you can pick up a volume, open it to any page, and suddenly find yourself blown into a world full of awe, dread, wonder, marvel, deep sorrow, and joy. Poetry at its best calls forth our deep Being, bids us live by its promptings; it dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind; it calls to us, like the wild geese, as Mary Oliver would say, from an open sky. It is a magical art, and always has been – a making of language spells designed to open our eyes, open our doors and welcome us into a bigger world, one of possibilities we may never have dared to dream of. This is why poetry can be dangerous. Because we may never be the same again after reading a poem that happens to speak to our own life directly. I know that when I meet my own life in a great poem, I feel opened, clarified, confirmed somehow in what I sensed was true but had no words for. Anything that can do this is surely necessary for the fullness of a human life.

The word “poet” means a maker – someone who crafts language into a shape. The word maker has the same etymological root as the words matrix, and magic, and it’s true that the sound and the rhythm of good poetry is literally spellbinding. It lulls, it sways, it rises and falls, and our hearts and minds rise and fall along with it. Poetry literally entrains us into the energy, the mood, the vibration even, that the poet has conjured with her words and images. The more subtle and refined that energy is, the more it can raise us to the best that we are. That it can do this is another reason why poetry is so necessary, perhaps today more than ever. One of the greatest spell makers in the English language is WB Yeats.

I first read The Lake of Inisfree on the wall of a hotel near Shannon in Ireland, some 25 years ago. It immediately took me out of my tourist mode, where all I could think of was how late they would serve breakfast in the morning; it took me down into the deep heart’s core, where the peace is to be found that comes dropping slow. Yeats literally conjured that peace in me, half way up the stairs to my room, let me feel it for myself. And he did it with his mellifluous rhyme and rhythm, with images and alliteration – I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.  With the gift of his imagination, he spins another world out of words we all know, a redemptive world which bestowed on me, the reader, the very quality of peace he is seeking for himself.

A hundred years ago, when Yeats was alive, the imagination was far more of a common currency than it is today. The imagination today is under siege. We are saturated with information; with concepts and opinions that stream ready formed, ready learned from our mouths and are fed to us by the chatter of media networks. Our world is becoming increasingly abstract. People engage less and less with the natural environment, less and less with each other in community, and rely more and more for their experience on the received knowledge that comes on a screen or down a tube.

No wonder the imagination is in danger of shriveling to the size of a pea. Imagination feeds on the smell of old tree roots, on conversation, on barking dogs, the cries of children. Poetry’s fuel is the imagination; it uses the things of this concrete world for its material, and then reaches down into the layers of meaning that any object or person contains. Pablo Neruda has written an ode to a lemon, to his socks, to laziness, to a tomato, to salt, and more. Poetry shows us that not just the gods, but the humblest forms in the world can reveal a truth and beauty to fill us with praise and awe.

Poetry reaches with its sounds and rhythms down below the realm of the conscious mind to awaken and nourish the imagination. In his poem, Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, WC Williams says

It is difficult

To get the news from poems

Yet men die miserably every day

For lack

Of what is found there.

This is how poetry says the unsayable; it allows for miracles, for the unexpected, the undreamt of.  Poetry is imagination’s language, and as such, it is prophetic speech.

Poems are necessary because they honor the unknown, both in us and in the world. They come from the unknown, they are shaped into form by the power of language, and set free to fly with wings of images and metaphor. Imagine a world in which everything is already known. It would be a dead world, no questions, no wonder, no other possibility. That’s what my own world can feel like sometimes when my imagination has gone into retreat. I, like you no doubt, have discovered that poetry is a phoenix I can fly on to return to that forgotten land.

And yet poetry uses language. It uses words that are known to all of us, but in a sequence and order that surprises us out of our normal speech rhythms and linear thought processes. Poetry is a unique combination of imaginative power and conscious intelligence, of inspiration and hard work, and its effect is to illuminate our lives and breathe new life, new seeing, new tasting into the world we thought we knew. Poetry bids us eat the apple whole.

To eat the apple of the world whole, we have to learn to pay attention; not only to the inner promptings of the imagination, but to the physical world around us. Poetry is a way of rescuing the world from oblivion by the practice of attention. It is our attention that honors and gives value to living things, that gives them their proper name and particularity, that retrieves them from the obscurity of the general. When I pay attention, something in me wakes up, and that something is much closer to who I am than the driven or drifting self I usually take myself to be. When I pay attention, I myself am straightened somehow, brought to a deeper life.

Poems like these shake me awake. They pass on their attentiveness, their prayerfulness, to me, the reader. We ourselves can wake up to the world and to ourselves in a new way by reading such poems as these. And especially when we read them aloud, and shape the sounds on our lips and the rhythms on our breath. This is why poetry can make us more fully human. Jane Hirshfield has said it this way:

Whether from reading the New England Transcendentalists or Eskimo poetry, I feel that everything I know about being human has been deepened by the poems I’ve read.

John Keats spoke of  this humanizing power too, when he said that Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a Remembrance.

That’s all very well, you might say, poems may be a humanizing influence; they may even carry us to the heights of spiritual insight and realization; but what have they done to shift the world’s obsession with power, greed, and violence? What has a poem done to dissolve injustice? This argument has been rising and falling for centuries, but it may be worth our notice that poetry and literature in general have been routinely banned around the world at different times because of their subversive influence. If poetry and literature are humanizing influences, they work directly against those regimes and ideologies that restrict rather than encourage liberty and justice. Because it connects different worlds, different ideas, and different people and things, poetry generates empathy – empathy with others and with all living things. When, through a poetic act of imagination, one feels kinship with others and with all life, it is that much more difficult to oppress others; and that, in a tyrannical regime, is subversion.

Stalin tried to strip Russia of its soul with his death camps. Mandelstam restored that soul by reciting poetry to his fellow convicts and by writing about it in his journal. “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances,” Saul Bellow wrote, is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place – the foreground.”

There’s a headstone in a Long Island graveyard – the one where Jackson Pollock is buried – that I think encapsulates the value and necessity of poetry in a world of sorrows. It says,

Artists and poets are the raw nerve ends of humanity. By themselves they can do little to save humanity. Without them there would be little worth saving.