I’ve been blessed to be able to travel, and work to keep myself open to learn from new people and places. At the same time, as the solstice approaches, I’m struck with the joys of a smaller world closer to home, of listening with more presence, of relaxing with more mindfulness, of looking at the familiar with fresh and astonished eyes.
From a short piece called ‘Sleep-and-poetry’ by Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (wow – the lyricism of Yeats meets the stutter-step rhythm of Dickinson)
Listening – in place of speaking. Even – more important than vision, than any vision (even – in imagination)….pauses are the places of reverence before: the Song
From ‘We Travel’ by Lebanese poet Issa Makhlouf -
We travel to go far away from our place of birth and see the other side of sunrise. We travel in search of our childhood. . . we travel so that unfinished alphabets complete. . .We travel so that we can tell those we have met that we shall return and meet again. . .we travel to learn the language of trees that never travel; to burnish the ringing of bells in holy valleys. . . we travel to tell those we love that we still love them; distance cannot overcome our amazement. . . we sit and look into the expanding space, watch the waves jump together like children….
Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague, wrote in German, but was really a wanderer in a pan-cultural space. The poem ‘Moving Forward’
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
Into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
With warmest best wishes to everyone and hopes for times filled with climbing birds, jumping waves, and songs written from those formerly unfinished, now complete alphabets.