To Be Happy in a Dark Time
Friday Morning Meditations at MIAU on Zoom
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, but feel free (if you like) to turn your cameras on to join the group.
The link for the meditation is always the same: https://american.zoom.us/j/97380213796
A note to our community:
You may notice that the design of this weekly letter has upgraded a bit. I’ve uploaded my mailing list to Substack, where readers now have the option to unsubscribe from the list or just keep their free subscription (in which case no action is required) or upgrade to a paid subscription, for which I will be adding some features for writers and practitioners—like a daily poetry prompt—at this Substack. (Some of you have asked me over the last two years how you might contribute dana (gifts) to the weekly meditations. At a few bucks a month, I'm comfortable doing it this way.) If you do nothing, you will continue to receive my letter, the video, and the link to Zoom each week, all always free, as usual.
I'm grateful for you all. Please enjoy this week’s selection!
Dear friends,
Thank you to everyone who joined our sit last Friday. Our next session will be this Friday, March 21, at 9 am EST.
Last week, our poem on the flavor of a loving heart was Robert Bly’s “Nudging a Poem.” If you didn’t attend the sit, you can find a recording of it here:
Nudging a Poem
By Robert Bly
All the earth rolls toward emptiness
And at nightfall the lonely streets
Fill with ice and cars. Loneliness fills the chest,
As if one walked by the North Sea.I am here, somewhere near the edge of life,
A warm room, lamps, some forms I love—
To nudge a poem along toward its beauty—
Is that selfishness? Is it something silly?Do others love poems as I do? Longing
To find you in a phrase, and be close
There, kissing the walls and the doorframe.
Happy in the change of a single word.
Once, in a Beskydy mountain town called Frenstat, a friend who had lived through the terrible years of Normalization in the Czech Republic shared with me his feelings about happiness. We were sitting in a hospoda with its unmistakable green tablecloths and white curtains, staring out over the town square covered in snow. “During communist times,” he told me, “it was dangerous to be happy. The only way to say our disapproval was to complain.”
The art of complaint, my friend explained to me, was a subtle form of activism in those times. The genuinely joyful and optimistic were suspected of colluding with or just approving of the powers that were, or they were too ignorant, or avoiding the reality of the daily barrage. It seemed there was for that generation, as I termed it in an essay nearly thirty years ago, a happiness taboo.
Some might agree we are living in similar times. The weather of the world has grown dark. “All the earth rolls toward emptiness,” Robert Bly writes in "Nudging a Poem," seeming to agree. His doubts circle around the point of it all, the worth of writing poetry in troubled times. “Is that selfishness?” He asks. “Is that something silly?”
Poet Robert Bly (1926-2021) was born and died in Minnesota. His first book, published in 1961, Silence in the Snowy Fields, established him as a leader of his generation. He won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body in 1968. A practitioner within the Deep Image school of poetry, he claimed once in an interview that writing poetry involved three steps: 1) an experience of the interior, 2) an act of cunning, and 3) “letting the animal live.”
The first step happens when a poet is very young. She might have an experience in solitude where the world outside is naturally, momentarily, an extension of her body. And everything she looks at is herself, looking back. As a child there is no reason to suspect that this mystical state isn’t normal and universal; she doesn’t question it but keeps it to herself, like other normal states of mind, letting it come when it comes. As an adult, her first poems arise out of that experience of wholeness, whether she knows it or not. But soon she understands that she must consciously recreate the interior experience over and over with “cunning.” She must re-enact the connection. So she develops practices. She comes back to the scene of the crime, she writes in a certain environment, with a certain method, at a certain time of day. The word “cunning” comes from James Joyce, who said the artist’s work is done in “silence, exile, and cunning.”
The third step Bly describes is a nod to the poet's craft. By “letting the animal live,” he meant that we should get out of the poem’s way, allowing for its messiness and wildness, all the while “nudging” it toward its intensity with the proper container, an organic form. Moving a word here or there. Making the softest footprint.
Reading this poem, which was first published in the 90s in the wonderful The Plum Review, I recognize those steps. It opens with a tantric experience of the interior, where the world outside, one of loneliness and ice and cars, seems to be happening in the poet’s own chest. The hugeness of a cold North Sea surges inside him.
Around the speaker are the symbolic elements that bring him to his cunning. “A warm room, lamps, some forms I love—” Don’t we all have a certain window, a table, a kind of music (for me it’s Bach’s Suites for the Cello or Coleman Hawkins or Satie’s Gymnopedies) that help elevate the senses or calm the heart, allowing for the necessary step back from distraction and worry? He "lets his animal live" by gently, gently nudging his poem into shape, like pruning a bonsai tree, or the way meditation quietly tugs the mind back from its meandering in the practice we all do together.
Tools for Meditation
Does writing poetry counteract the darkness? Maybe not. Does it remind us who we are, where we stand? Does it charge us to know, as best we can, what is real, what doesn’t change, what holds us here together? It does. Tara Brach’s wonderful line, “We are unhappy because we have forgotten we belong to each other,” reminds us that our happiness is connected to our sense of belonging. And doesn’t poetry sublimely point out that everything belongs to everything else? Isn’t a metaphor a way of saying that the properties of this are synonymous with the beingness of that?
In Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow, he refers to our suppressed side, our shadow self, the long bag we drag behind us. “We spend our life until we’re twenty,” he writes, “deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” Poetry, no matter its subject, no matter how dark, is our way of drawing those parts out of the bag again.
As I read him, I notice how his three-part practice for poets is identical to the practice I engage in in prayer and meditation. Spiritual life begins with an experience of the interior, a far-away memory of wholeness that may have begun before birth divided us, slowly, cut us away, farther and farther from our source. In the woods or in solitude or in the jostling of bodies while dancing or listening to music, or on a mountaintop, the outside is no longer separate from the universe within. With cunning we step back from the harried world into spaces that remind us of our eternal selves. And when it comes, in our places of worship or on the cushion, we just nudge our attention back to the center. We let the animal live but not rule us, creating a formal container with our practice.
Is it taboo to go around smiling, even now and then feeling overjoyed? We could argue that real happiness is only possible in our belonging. We know how it feels. We felt it as children. It was normal then. Whether through poetry or meditation or acts of compassion, we are practicing that old belonging. We are practicing how to belong. Our best hope for our world, in this moment, is to see deeply into it, into the connection we all already share.
With love,
David