The Unbreakable Circle

A Meditation and Reflection from September, 2024

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

The Unbreakable Circle

There’s a passage in Irish Nobel Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney’s groundbreaking introduction to his translation of the 1300-year-old Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, when he shares how he hit a wall. Here he was, an Irish poet, having grown up Catholic in British-ruled Northern Ireland, suddenly questioning, what’s my role in this project? Am I a mere mouthpiece for the colonizers? Because of these English who took Ireland, he explains, I have lost a heritage I may never fully imagine or begin to know. He describes this sensation of language loss and cultural dispossession as a wound that tempted him to engage in a binary relationship between English—the descendent of the Anglo-Saxon language he was translating—and his lost Irish tongue.

But then he had an experience with the Old English word “thole,” which means to suffer, a word he encountered in Beowulf and which he remembered being spoken around the house of his childhood in County Derry. He suddenly felt “the farflungness of the word,” he called it, and fell deeper into the roots of Irish and English, until by sheer linguistic gravity he tumbled down into the primordial soup of their source, the Proto-Indo-European mother tongue that had borne Sanskrit and later both the Germanic Old English and the Gaelic/Celtic of Central and Western Europe. He found himself translating then with a willing tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm. He had unearthed his birthright, the helm of his responsibility to this work. No mere interpreter between two divergent branches, no traitor to one or the other, he was working from the root system both worlds shared. It was then that he felt he belonged to the English he was writing in and the Old English he translated from; he was free of his binary thinking, having come to a place of unity and connectedness.

This process Heaney describes is identical to our work in seeking the connection all things have to everything else. Thich Nhat Hanh called this phenomenon interbeing, by comprehension of which we realize there is no death or birth within the continuum of interrelationship:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper…The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. …Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. (TNH)

As it often happens for poets and monks, it is the act of peeling away separate identities—paper, cloud, rain, trees, earth, sky—that reveals there is no part of them untouched by a world much larger, much older than themselves. There is no separate atom in here that has not come from a previous source out there. At the moment it hits us, in fact, “out there” and “in here” lose all meaning.

It wasn’t until I understood interbeing that I could fully comprehend Mary Oliver’s “From the Book of Time,” a poem I read for years in awe of its music but confused by its stakes. For we are not only talking about a cut flower here, but the cut-off self: lost and isolated in its glass of water, this body-mind replete with ruminating thoughts and beliefs. Like the flower, the self must follow its memory back to a place of unity. Like Heaney, it wants to overcome its separate and dualistic thinking about “them” and “us” until it reaches the “unbreakable circle.”

From: "From the Book of Time"

The Leaf and the Cloud

by Mary Oliver

Even now
I remember something

the way a flower
in a jar of water

remembers its life
in the perfect garden

the way a flower
in a jar of water

remembers its life
as a closed seed

the way a flower
in a jar of water

steadies itself
remembering itself

long ago
the plunging roots

the gravel the rain
the glossy stem

the wings of the leaves
the swords of the leaves

rising and clashing
for the rose of the sun

the salt of the stars
the crown of the wind

the beds of the clouds
the blue dream

the unbreakable circle.

Oliver’s poem begins with the curious words, “even now.” This phrase can be read in many ways. Even now on a bad morning, or, even now, in a human incarnation. I read “even now” as a state of confusion, caught as we are in the tight coils of identifications, those aggregates I have been speaking of that include the body, the thoughts, the feelings, concepts and conditioning, and the huge store of stories in our individual consciousness. Even now, wrapped up in all of these bandages like an invisible man, I can remember invisibility. Even now, I am remembering what it’s like to be everything. Even now, like the cut flower in a glass, I can remember beyond the glass; to the stem; the roots; the earth; the rain; the clouds. Even now, I can remember that I am both here and not here, but with all the world. As the poet falls more deeply into this ecstatic memory, the world is joined by metaphor: “the rose of the sun,” “the gravel the rain,” the “salt of the stars.” The poem sinks and sinks into its interconnections. Whatever she looks at devotedly becomes a mirror for something else.

The Pali word for Mindfulness is sati, which means “remembering.” Our most serious work in mindful practices has to confront this depth of remembering. “Remember where you came from,” my father used to say to me. Remember the people whose works and lives made your works and life possible. If you can, if you do, he told me over and over, you will stay humble and close to the earth. My spiritual father, Thich Nhat Hanh, brought basically the identical wisdom: “'To be is to inter-be," he wrote. “You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.”

Oars for the Boat

Mary Oliver’s “unbreakable circle” seems to refer to a discovery that comes of years and years of deep looking. It is within the separate figure that we discover our non-separate ultimate reality. Thich Nhat Hanh concludes, “the paper is made up entirely of non-paper elements. The self is made up entirely of non-self elements. It was never born and will never die.” He calls it, “the song of no coming and no going.” It is a song many poets have sung.

Using Mary Oliver’s poem as a guide, remember your way down through your own root system until you meet everyone else. Remember the bodies who had to be in order for your body to be—until your body as a separate entity independent of the world begins to unravel like the bandages of the invisible man. Remember the thoughts of family, friends, and teachers who helped you find your moral center, your concepts and beliefs— knowing that without them you might view the world very differently—until beliefs and concepts spill away. Remember the conditioning, the world you were born into, the country and its values, the religion with its parables and creeds—until those bandages, too, unravel. Unravel, lovingly, fearlessly, all of it, and what is there? It is the invisible man. The holy spirit. Buddha nature. It is pure remembering. It is the one life that shines through everything.

Brothers and sisters,
the beautiful Earth is us.
I embrace her and hold her tenderly against my chest.
Breathing together in the same rhythm
we restore our calm our peace.
Let us accept ourselves
so we may accept one another.
Let us share the vision and make it possible
for Great Love to arise.

--Thich Nhat Hanh, from “Morning of Peace”