Everyone enters periods of quietude. Horoscopes suggest these periods. The moon’s new phase abandons the sky to its own darkness. Over the past months since my last post here I have taken care to not push any doors open beyond their readiness to swing wide.
This day I am choosing to explore a phrase that has captured my attention, imagination and inspiration. From a poem by Marie Howe, she writes,
“...willing to be the sky again.” *
I am often shocked by poetry. Whole poems, or fragments, phrases containing whole ideas. Whole worlds there. With this phrase, one might wonder, are we thus willing?
Who might be willing? The creatures of the sky? Those who have passed beyond?
And what of this willingness. Is it transformational? Will our changed selves return from being the sky, taking on some mantle of obligation?
Will there be renewal?
A community revitalized?
Bird Of The Universe 16, 24” diameter, oil paint, mica, Venetian plaster with 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel.
The fact that a few words can open wide wonder in someone has always filled me with astonishment. I walk around wondering about (my) willingness to be the sky again. I sit with this conundrum, allowing the nebulous, uncertainty of its implications to distract me. Entirely.
When words enter us this way, with this unaccountable power, everything changes. Phrases we allow to burrow deeply into our layered consciousness open the corridor to belief. Can it be possible to undertake belief? A confidence, an idea, theory, understanding. It may be more important to ask the reverse, can it be possible to not believe?
Can it be possible to live without certainty, assurance, intuition, our imaginations. These questions may have an abstract, rhetorical feel. It seems we are living through a time when so many possibilities besiege us. Daily. Making quietude within the external roil can feel like, well, like a hermit determined to seal themselves into an inaccessible cave.
Here is Howe’s poem.
What the Silence Said
By Marie Howe
Do you still believe in borders now?
Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.
You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires
travelled on wind you couldn’t see
wafting over the valley
and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.
Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?
Or hear the silence of the animals no longer singing?
Now you know what it is to be afraid.
You think this is a dream? It is not
a dream. You think this is a theoretical question?
What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?
The water grows clearer. The swans settle and float there.
Are you willing to take your place in the forest again? to become loam and bark
to be a leaf falling. from a great height. to be the worm who eats the leaf
and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky: are you
willing to be the sky again?
You think this lesson is
too hard for you You want the time-out to end. You want
to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.
It can end now, but not in the way you imagine You know
the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that
can explain everything? Don’t listen.
You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know.
Remember the burning boat that brought you there? Climb in.
Copyright © 2021 by Marie Howe.