Dialoguing with a Poem
Dear Readers, I am an apprentice to David Whyte’s Invitas: A Path to Conversational Leadership. I have followed his work for nearly 25 years now. I have learned to be in dialogue with any and everything , so too, with poems. In fact listening to David recite and riff on a poem puts one in a dialogue with their own sweet soul as well as their heart and mind.This morning I decided to do the dialogue on the page (blog) in honor of Valentine’s day and the celebration of love. Hearing this poem almost 25 years ago with Leslie Lanes, ushered in my first experience of an ecstatic moment. A moment where everything belonged, including me. Just as it was. Just as I was. If that is not Love I am not sure what Love is. To be able "to gather all our flaws in celebration” is to truly unconditionally love all of ourselves, to love how we were made. To love how the world is made. In honor of Valentine's Day, I offer you this:The link for the poem without commentary can be found here. I suggest you read it first and then come back to the blog and read my dialogue with it. As you read it, note your own inner conversation. There is no single way to dialogue with a poem. There are as many ways as there are people.https://www.davidwhyte.com/where-many-rivers-meet/
The Faces at Braga by David Whyte
Commentary by Nancy C. WondersIn monastery darkness by the light of one flashlightthe old shrine room waits in silence. While above the doorwe see the terrible figure,fierce eyes demanding. “Will you step through?” Will I step through the glories of youth and a well-functioning body and quick intelligence into this new territory? The territory that holds decline, disease and disappearance? Will I? Good God this is hard. My mind knows I cannot choose anything else. I do not want my face to be the face of an old woman chasing a time that is decades gone. If that is what is behind door #1, it is not for me. It is humiliating. It is shame. I had so much of that in my youth at the mouths of my mother and the nuns. No, I cannot go that way. I cannot return to those youthful days when I barely appreciated the beauty of my form, the brilliance of my quick mind nor the grace of a body I did not have to pay attention to because it ran just fine! That is gone. But door #2? What waits there? And the old monk leads us,bent back nudging blackness,prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lampsand bow, eyes blinking in thepungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation,a hundred faces carved above,eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light. That’s true! So many more wrinkled faces than mine. So many more who went before me could I see them as … Such love in solid wood!Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the pastthey have been neglected, but throughsmoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growingthrough the dust of eroded slopes,their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain. So I too must turn my face toward the mountain of age, even with my youthful spirit, my body is asking other things of me now. It demands me love it, touch it, stretch it, move it.Carved in devotiontheir eyes have softened through age …oh please let me soften…please do not let me harden…and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand. Delight? There could be delight in this paring back? This essentialism. BUT my life mantra has been DO NOT MAKE ME CHOOSE and it would seem this aging stuff is all about choosing. AND I have a lousy picker (chooser). It does not want to choose. It wants everything and mostly all at once. Sheesh…how can I possibly walk this road? I truly know virtually nothing about this way of being. If only our own faceswould allow the invisible carver’s handto bring the deep grain of love to the surface. Shoot, I knew it, what is going to have to go is my ability to skim along, to flit from flower to flower. instead I am going to have to pay deep attention to what I want above all else moment by moment. To choose and abide within my current limits.I do not have time to read the NY Times or the Atlantic Magazine from cover to cover. I can no longer follow all my lovely random curiosities. Well actually I can, but I must accept that this means something else will need to be sacrificed. It takes me more time to do what I did on almost everything. "If only my own face would allow the carver’s hand (aging) to bring the deep grain of love to the surface."If only we knewas the carver knew, how the flawsin the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, my flaw: my mind that does not live within limits…how?we would smile tooand not need faces immobilizedby fear and the weight of things undone. It is true, I worry about this more and more, “what am I forgetting?” The constant backlog of work or home responsibilities not tended to yet? When we fight with our failing. This was the first of David’s poems that I fell hard for. I had a transcendent moment and it began on this line. I (and others I might add) have fought with how I am made as long as I can remember. And…we ignore the entrance to the shrine itselfand wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fightour eyes our hooded with griefand our mouths are dry with pain. So much unnecessary suffering from this all my life…even still. But there is slowly emerging a small voice that talks back a bit to that fierce figure…there is not yet an Archbishop Desmond TuTu (Made for Goodness) residing within me that is FOR me on a consistent basis, but there is something that says: "Don't talk to my friend Nancy that way, it doesn't help her." And that is everything. If only we could give ourselvesto the blows of the carvers hands, I wonder, what is it I refuse to give myself over too? What if it is a kind of faith/trust in these very things I am struggling with?the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the seawhere voices meet, praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away my face of productivity, of “earning,” of “the need to be deserving,” of competence…maybe if I could finally trust that as I am made, I am enough for my life…I could indeed grow youngeruntil we, growing younger toward deathevery day, would gather all our flaws in celebration to merge with them perfectly,impossibly, wedded to our essence,full of silence from the carver’s hands. May it be so." src="blob://www.nancywonders.com/1b966a48-e3cd-4ff8-8fd1-890eda11c993" alt="image001.png" class="Apple-web-attachment Singleton" style="opacity: 1;">
Thankful for Wonder and Wonders
As you know I am a Wonders. Daughter of Robert John Wonders, Mary Skotze Wonders, niece of Helen Wonders Chandler, Marion Wonders Wollum, Louise Wonders McKinnon, Lucy Wonders Doney, Virginia Wonders Rahoi, Joseph Wonders, and Harry Wonders. And Granddaughter of Claire Lemieux Wonders to whom I owe my middle name and my beloved Harry Wonders. He was only in my life for my first six years but I simply adored him and I am not sure I will ever know why. Why does a six year old love one human to the moon and back and not others? I do not know but I do know it isn't because her smart brain took a tally, or came to value assessment or built a spread sheet to point her in the right direction.She simply loved who she loved for reasons unknown to her. And that is what I want to write about today:The reasons unknown. Why do we love this one and not that one? Why do we get triggered by this one and not that one? But this isn't just about humans. Look through out your day. You have clear preferences for all kinds of things, from your favorite kind of pasta, to your preferred coffee house, (today mine is Champion on Nassau Ave in Greenpoint (Brooklyn), a block from my daughter's apartment), your route to the grocery store, etc. What is your favorite time of day? Mine: sunrise or sunset. My favorite day of the week is Saturday, and I am not even Jewish. My favorite season Autumn edges out spring, summer and winter by which also delights. But when fall arrives, I am done. I am at home. Leaves turning, the transition between the uber fullness of summer and the quiet barren landscape of winter, the transformation of green leaves into the bare branches of the season is the one I savor most. And luckily, living in Dallas TX, our autumn cycle is a slow circuitous path to the shortest of days.Do you ever wonder why you prefer one thing and not another, one man over all others, one woman? A season? A book? A movie? Anything? What is the preference making vehicle we all come factory loaded with?I wonder this a lot. And not just for myself, but for all of us. I think our preferences, desires, longing, affiliations and affections are glimpses of our individual souls, if you believe in such. If you don't then they are a peek into our essential self. It is the nest of our distinctness, like a cuckoo clock popping out on the hour, we too reveal ourselves to ourselves and to each other through our affections.Isn't that the loveliest of thoughts? Don't know who you are? Wonder who you came here to be? Just look to your affections and in due time all will be revealed.Yes, our preferences could also arise from longstanding, unconscious habits but even so, they were born out of either random chance or our particular resonance (the cuckoo popping out) to that particular thing. And if our habits began out of a random choice, a preference, an affinity for that choice set in early and thus it became a habit.Why is that? I think because our soul wants to be revealed, first and foremost to us, so we can follow it's code. But also it wants to be let out to dance in the world. I believe we each come with an "inner chooser" with dislikes and likes. Affections and repulsions. Longings and aversions.And why does this matter? Because the inner chooser, (I will name her, Joy) is also our inner compass who can help us find our way home. And by home I mean, to becoming our essential self, the person we came here to be, or who God made us to be.And why does that matter? Because that my dear friends, is the miracle of life. It is the wonder of life.So as we enter the season of wonder and awe that is initiated in Thanksgiving and ends in the positive resolve of a fresh new year, my favorite essayist comes to mind: Anne Lamott. I wish for us all a moment where "We start to get a hint of the power and sweetness and absurdity of life and to see it not as all fragile and harsh but as real, the really real. We get buoyancy and, God knows, sometimes even effervescence. Perspective doesn't reduce the gravitas, it increases reverence."Let's all raise our glasses and toast to wonder, reverence and effervescence.
"All you undisturbed cities, have you not longed for the enemy?" Rilke
This line of (from a Rilke poem from his Book of Hours) arrests me. I heard it read by the poet David Whyte at the opening of our second Invitas learning experience near his home on Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington State, almost a month ago. It was evening, there had been wonderful food, wine and conversation. This was not his first or only poem to share. But when he delivered it, I felt as though it reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders and said…”YOU, Nancy, undisturbed Nancy, haven’t you longed for the enemy?” It was personal and it implicated me. It still does. Why? And what does that line mean? Who longs for the enemy? Hmmmm…what if I do? I mean literally the enemy is disturbance. Because the city of Nancy Clarie Wonders is undisturbed. And that is true. Other than my clients bringing me their disturbances, my city is pretty quiet, tucked in. How did this happen? Why did this happen? First question: how it happened was I arranged this life as it is. I made all the choices so I created a life with little disturbance. Why? Well, honestly because I had had so much disturbance for almost a decade, I think I just wanted to rest, to live in my little walled city (which is actually what the poet was seeing when he wrote the poem.). And I am so glad I did, not just because I was exhausted from constant change and seriously needed the rest but also because I had never lived my life in this contented and calm place. It was and is lovely. Helps me understand why we wall ourselves off. YET, I can feel something stirring deep within me, like the bulbs under the ground putting down roots and sending up shoots. I am ready for the enemy. I am ready for an intimate relationship again or some kind of challenge or learning that disturbs my self sufficiency and clarity.As the song Being Alive by Steven Sondheim states so beautifully…. Make me alive, make me confusedMock me with praise, let me be usedVary my days…One can be alone within a marriage or a family. Those folks in the walled in city had others with them but…still the poet asks them…do they long for the enemy?Yes, when disturbed...I fuss. But do I truly want to be disturbed? If I am honest, I am a house divided here. I do and I don’t. And yet, I know I only grow through these disturbances and I know that we humans are built for change and growth, even while we/I resist. Likes a ship, I am safe in harbor but that’s not what ships were built for. Nor was I! Oh goodness, here goes!
"What will you do, God...?"
From the great poet Ranier Maria Rilke...“What will you do, God, when I die?I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)I am your drink (when I go bitter?)I, your garment; I, your craft.Without me what reason have you?..."
It is true, for each of us. We are a little piece of God. A particular expression of the Infinite and if we pull back on that expression, when we judge that expression, we judge Divine, we doubt. We think we know best, but the part of us that is doing that thinking is the protective system called the ego or strategic mind. This part of us is on the defense. But if, instead of listening to it, we turn the other direction, we do and be what we love, we wholeheartedly move toward what we love, then we give God full reign. AND we “feel” like God…big "G" not small. Feeling like a small "g" god, is grandiosity and hubris. It may feel good in the moment but it is what Jungians might call being caught in an "inflation".BUT if instead we know, we actually experience ourselves as a particular expression of the divine, then we want to kneel and kiss the ground. We do not feel certain or powerful. We feel awe. We feel wonder. We feel humility. We feel like,“really, really? I get to be and do this? Oh goodness," or "'Beam me up Scottie'. When what you love, loves you back!”What if that is the secret? The really big well kept secret? What if that is God? What you love? Don’t settle for god, it’s like trying to live on only cake, or only adrenalin. It ends up leaving you empty, literally and figuratively. The ultimate high that drops you to the ultimate low. BUT there is another path, literally that puts allows you to move to another level.Einstein said, “you can’t solve the problem at the level of thinking that created it” so instead of HIGH and then LOW and then HIGH…etc. how about something that is not in between, or in the middle of those two, but rather of an entirely different order? That order is akin to the wonder and joy we felt as children, or on Christmas morning, or when watching a doodle bug curl into itself, or the first time we realize we are riding our bike without training wheels. That feeling the Infinite's way of giving us a green light to keep going in that direction. The direction of what we love. What if it is really that simply? And those doubting and critical thoughts? Well, they never enlarge us. They never call us to become someone we can truly admire. Instead they call us to play it safe. To stay separate and to protect and cling to what we have. They call us to distrust not only others but ourselves and ultimately our destinies.If like Rilke, above I truly trust the little piece of stardust that is me...well, then paradoxically I quit judging myself and focusing on myself and whether or not I am good enough. What I do instead, is simply go out and express my little piece of heaven. Just like the old song said..."this little light of mine...I'm gonna let it shine..."[audio m4a="http://www.nancywonders.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/03-This-Little-Light-of-Mine.m4a"][/audio]
Strength AND vulnerability...
I feel like the oak tree on the north side of the caddy shack at the city golf course I walk each morning.Fragile...beautiful...broken and bare branched in places, yet graceful and lovely on the whole.My mind like the leaves rustled by any breeze, yet my core, my trunk and roots are sturdy and strong.Strength and vulnerability, my existance.Strength and vulnerability our world.Strength and vulnerability, my home.At last.