Friday Morning Meditations at MIAU on Zoom
Our meditations are for everyone: please feel free to join us in the fall and spring semesters Fridays at 9am EST.
We sit for a half hour with some guided support, and I give a little talk around the poem intermittently. Please keep your microphone off to respect the silence for others.
Dear friends,
Thank you to everyone who joined our final sit for the semester last Friday.
Last week I announced I will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome throughout the fall. Once I get settled in my studio, our new sessions will begin from there in the first week of September. The 9 am EST time and the Zoom link will remain the same. Nothing will change; you just might glimpse some cypress trees in my backdrop instead of a magnolia.
Last week’s poem was “The Dove,” from my 1999 book of poetry, The Rose Inside. If you didn’t attend the sit, you can find a recording of it here:
The Dove
Days the crowds emerge at three pm
In September performers come out with their stands—
The doves unfold like paper
In a street magician’s hands—
And the new money is good for bread
And the old money for salt, yeast, sugar
The old money in one pocket, the new in the other
On the table is our dictionary: a long time for Nika to say
You are tender and me back: You are tender
The bath, the white tub, Turkish coffee on a white chair
For a long while
I’ve been too fast to talk, I should take my time
With words, the words are precious
An hour for the coffee on the fire
A dove
As I mulled over the ways I might conclude this semester’s talks and meditations around the flavor of a loving heart, I got to thinking about my place among these poets, whether they be stoic “don’t-know” or “stone” poets like Charles Simic, or genius “tiger” poets like Adrienne Rich or William Blake, or “dove” poets like Seamus Heaney, who stand on two sides of a border, who are the interpreters and peacemakers. Remembering then a poem from my first book, written thirty years ago this fall, I knew where I belonged. The poem, fittingly, is “The Dove.”
On the one hand, “The Dove” feels like someone else’s poem. It was written many years ago by a young man I no longer know, who hardly had begun to know himself. On the other hand, I recognize myself immediately. The slight self-deprecation. The note of mindfulness (“I should take my time/With words, the words are precious”). The attraction to broken landscapes through which the light shines. I also see here the themes that would follow me through decades to come. There is a theme of conversion in this poem, which happens to be the subject of my new book. “You are tender” in one language is met with “you are tender” in another. Also, the bread and its ingredients are interchangeable though they appear different. The old money buys the ingredients, the new money the product. The old money and the new money—an image inspired by the then recent, bizarre reduction of zeros from the Polish zlaty where 10,000 old zlaty converted to one new zlaty—look very different but equal the same sum.
Meanwhile, the speaker—let’s just say me, because it is me—is also undergoing a conversion moment that involves the passage of time. Time has cornered me. Everything took longer in those years. To start the fire and boil the coffee at Veronika’s family cottage required an hour. Our conversations covered very little linguistic ground but they required whole evenings, passing the dictionary between us. Yet the constriction of language and time which cornered me in this new life were also the vehicle of its transformation. With four walls around me—I was stuck there, I was helpless, I was made to wait for things, I was forced to think out every word—the only place to go was upwards, to fly upwards whether I liked it or not. What came of all that was the infinite patience that reaps instantaneous rewards. What came of all that was learning tenderness for myself and others.
In the work I’m doing now, I’m still thinking about conversion. In the conversion story, the figure in question willingly embraces a new life, though they know it will be a more difficult one. Whether I’m writing about the figure who would become the Buddha or St. Paul or Jesus at his “take this cup from me” moment, or Mary in accepting the terms of her narrative, or Moses resisting the call, or Keats writing “To Autumn” (“thou hast thy music too,” he says to death), each comes to say yes to the more difficult life. We somehow know this in our bones. The more difficult road, the road with more experiences to be had, is going to be the higher road. It is the road of life. I think of that line from Rilke which says it all. “We know little but that we must do the difficult thing…That something is difficult must be all the more reason to do it.”
“The strenuous life tastes better,” William James said. The flavor of the heart is sharpened. The lovingness is offered the chance to activate, the way salt brings out the flavor of a hidden ingredient. What corners us then becomes our guru, the agent of our rising.
The last thing I would say about “The Dove” is that it is a poem celebrating the triumph of words. The magician stands pulling doves from his sleeves as though there were an exhausting supply of them. I remember standing among friends in the years I returned from Czech, just marveling at the outpouring of sounds which each of us were translating at an astonishing speed into humor and information and wisdom.
The words are little miracles. How “dove” sounds like what it is. With its blunt front and the feathered tail of that long, luxurious “v.” The words are real magic. We are magicians all.
Tools for Meditation: Being Empty
The great agent of rising in my life has been the teaching profession. It did not come easy. There were nearly ten hard years at the beginning. Teaching, as I have described so many times, sands the edges from your heart. Constantly it demands you take yourself less seriously. If you are paying attention to what the teaching profession is teaching you, you cannot walk away with your hubris intact.
In those early days in the Czech Republic where this was set, when I was a teacher in Frydek-Mistek at gymnazium Petra Bezruc, I got the worst of it. Once, the students drew a little Soviet flag on a desk and had written in English, “We hate David.” That I stayed in the profession still amazes me. I remember a moment when I sussed it all out for myself, a little piece of dharma that must have been offered me like a gift. I had four options, the voice said.
The first option was to play “tennis” with them. I could counter their harassment with jabs and jibes, according to the fight response. Well, that wasn’t going to work. We didn’t have a language in common, and I had no power, and I gave them no grades. I was simply there to converse with them. I also felt certain that charging against them would only escalate the problem.
The second option was no good either. I could just be a wall. I could go on with my lectures hard as stone, as if a recording. If they were going to hit tennis balls at me, I wasn’t going to participate. That’s a bit like the freeze response. I’m a shield. But even then I was repelling something. I’m still acting against something. I tried that for a little while, and it simply exhausted me.
The third option was to quit. That would have gotten me out of the trouble, but the trouble would have followed me. The old money would have become new money in one form or another.
So I was cornered into taking the fourth option, which was to be empty. Not to ignore but to be fully present and let the tennis balls pass through me. To be impersonally interested—Ram Dass says look at anything and just say, “far out!”—as though I were watching leaves falling in a gentle wind. To have a good time with it. To experience each insult cheerfully, as though it were happening to Charlie Chaplin, a part I was playing, and not to the actor, not to me. To not take it all so personally. That’s what I learned to do. I learned to be a dove.
A few of those students really came around. I’m not saying it was To Sir, with Love, but it came close. I started laughing with the strangeness of it all.
When I see the Dali Lama laughing, I am watching him touch down into that emptiness. As teacher Michael Singer instructs, to live without hard preferences is to allow this experience, whatever it may be, to move through me. I can be empty. I can choose to let this irritation be writ on water. I can let the inevitable disturbances of life pass through my life like the tennis balls aimed beyond me, somewhere else. I can even play tennis with them as they pass, if I like, so long as I see myself as a player engaged in a game made out of emptiness, whose other players are all empty, too.
What has cornered you? An A-B-C-D Meditation
As it is: Consider something that has cornered you. A financial situation or a troubled relationship or a chronic illness. This exists. Just name it for a moment. Be empty with it, not fighting it, or averting your eyes, or ignoring.
Be here with this: Just for today, just as an experiment, can you live with the fact that it is part of your story right now? Can you expand the walls of your mental interior in order to make space for this? Be empty of what should have been or could yet be. Be here.
Change happens: Even change will change. Even death will die. What other changes, too, have you noted in your practice of attention since this disturbance began? In what ways are you being asked to rise?
Don’t Judge: Don’t reproach yourself for distraction or disappointing outcomes with this practice. You showed up for it. Don’t judge yourself for the causes or the worsening of the disturbance you are working with. Be empty with it.
With love,
David