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For a society founded on a “declaration of independence,” most of us enjoy very little true freedom these days. Brown people live in fear of ICE thuggery. Black people face open racism disguised as DEI. White people claim their equal rights are being eroded. How do we achieve real independence? It starts by understanding what freedom is – and is not. Spiritual writer Richard Rohr says it this way: “Most of us try to find personal and individual freedom even as we remain inside structural boxes and a system of consumption that we are then unable or unwilling to critique. Our mortgages, luxuries, and privileged lifestyles control our whole future. Whoever is paying our bills and giving us security and status determines what we can and cannot say or even think.” In other words, it’s the entrenched institutions, systems, and processes of our culture that keep us willing captives. I say “willing” because as a society we seem to be clutching some romantic dream of what our all-American life should be. As a result, we’re terrified by any disruption to what we feel is normal and accepted. When we surrender to this fear and perceive danger all around, we grasp at whatever we think will protect us. I’ll give you an example. When I lived in Puerto Rico, I learned from the local divers that to catch a Caribbean lobster, all you have to do is push a length of broomstick into the hole where it’s hiding. The lobster will grab it and not let go, even as you pull the stick from the hole and deposit the tasty crustacean in your bag. So what’s the path to true freedom? Declare independence by refusing to be co-opted by illusions of security, possessions, and power. In his classic novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Robert Pirsig describes “the old South Indian Monkey Trap.” The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside, which can be grabbed through a small hole. The monkey’s hand fits through the hole okay, but his clenched fist can’t fit back out. The monkey is trapped, not by anything physical, but by an idea it probably learned from its mother: “When you find rice, hold on tight!” Psychologists call this einstellung , a settled way of thinking – our instinct to solve a problem in a tried-and-true manner even though there might be better solutions. Much like the monkey clutching a fistful of rice or the lobster clenching the broomstick, we hold on to things that don’t necessarily serve us. The things we’re most attached to can keep us shackled, too often with toxic effect. Valuing ourselves only according to our successes and satisfactions is to miss the point of every faith tradition – that contentment comes by valuing ourselves as God does, simply for who we are.
After so many decades of striving and seeking, it’s time to apply a lesson I learned from snorkeling: just hover and let the wonders of the world come to me. I like to read the journal of Thomas Merton each day, because his mind was a heated cauldron of ideas, insight, and inspiration. Last Monday, waking up saddened by so many stressful happenings outside my control, I came across this passage from Merton’s journal of June 24, 1947: “I am tired of being my own Providence.” He was describing his impatience with himself for being caught up and distracted by the minutiae of life. I connected this monk’s discomforts with advice I received years ago from my swimming guru, Melon Dash , who has been a major influence in my life. Melon is the originator of an innovative self-discovery course in swimming and has taught it to more than 6,000 adult students, and counting. She taught me to forsake the kind of snorkeling that has you dashing about from reef to reef and rock to rock in pursuit of the next aquatic allurement, underwater camera in hand. She talked about “hovering.” It’s a matter of finding a suitable spot where the mystical creatures of the sea are likely to congregate – and just floating there, as motionless as you can manage. Melon says: "What makes snorkeling most magical – hovering – is the same thing that makes other mindful activities magical: being fully there. In snorkeling, if I stop not just my body but myself, and let moments unfold, out come the creatures, and out pops what's already there that I had missed." Add to Melon’s counsel the example of my late friend and sailing mentor, Bill McKay, who once described a November day in his tranquil life: “A beautiful day that will have me oystering, putting up storm windows, bringing in a quarter-cord of firewood, sailing, and then off to dinner at a friend’s house.” The dead giveaway, I think, is when my kids started teasing me about my compulsion for creating spreadsheets for everything – from my daily task list to my weight, blood pressure, and diet monitoring. For Father’s Day this month, one of my daughters gave me a mug emblazoned with the words, “I have a spreadsheet for that!” So, I’m going to try. I’m going to try to slow down. To move through my day with the same mindfulness I did as a snorkeler – concentrating on the rhythmic coursing of my breath. To cease charging from place to place in search of the perfect something. To stop measuring the time that might be left for me to finish all the projects I’ve listed on the master spreadsheet of my life. And I’ll try to finally face the fact, as Merton did, that: “The more I go on, the more I realize I don’t know where I am going.” I, too, am tired of being my own Providence.
On Wednesday evening I guided a cross-country Zoom workshop in writing poetry to achieve peace. More than forty people registered, a demonstration of how eager we are to rid ourselves of the increasing emotional trauma of life in the new America. Academic research into immune system function has found that writing about stressful experiences is a kind of medicine. There’s not only science behind poetry as a way to well-being, but a dose of magic, too. The event was held under the sponsorship of a religious congregation, the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Peace. The sisters have developed a speakers’ program exploring how to cultivate peace within ourselves and then bring it to the world. The series is offered at no cost. The Sisters fund their outreach programs through donations. Each workshop, presentation, and retreat in the series features speakers from different backgrounds who bring insights into what it means to “be peace” in a way that transforms not only our own hearts but also our communities. The premise of my two-hour program was to show how what I call “healing poetry” can move us toward the kind of peace portrayed in Psalm 131 of the Hebrew Scriptures: Truly calm and quiet do you make my spirit, quiet as a fed child in its mother’s arms. We tend to read poems to console ourselves in times of adversity, I told the group. But it’s not often we write a poem to console ourselves. Julia Darling, a prolific British novelist, playwright, and poet who was taken by cancer at forty-eight, wrote in her anthology, The Poetry Cure : “Poetry is essential, not a frill or a nicety. It comes to all of us when we most need it. As soon as we are in any kind of crisis, or anguish, that is when we reach out for poetry, or find ourselves writing a poem for the first time.” Healing poetry, especially, lets us emerge from what one poet calls the “cave of self.” Writing this kind of poetry gives us somewhere to turn to express openly the emotional wounds we prefer to keep hidden. When we write, we find strength in our own words, which enables us to gain a sense of control over stress and anxiety – a first step on the path to peace. There is no greater exemplar of this, perhaps, than Wendell Berry, now well into his nineties, and his famous poem, “The Peace Of Wild Things.” When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. As a kid growing up in a gritty New Jersey industrial city, I never could have imagined where life would take me, leading me to suspect that maybe God does, in fact, have a plan for me. I’m grateful to have found this fourth career – first a journalist, then a corporate executive, then owner of my own communications agency – and now guiding people toward writing poems that help them feel happier and healthier. It’s my “old man project,” and my most rewarding pursuit. As famed author Thornton Wilder said, seniors need to stave off death through work – even if it’s work that no longer drives a career. Mostly, I’m just grateful not to be living in The Villages and playing pickleball.
Every time we get our hands on something we’ve been after for some time, the afterglow doesn’t last long. Why? We don’t want just beautiful things, we want beauty itself; we don’t want this or that good thing, we want goodness itself. Our feelings of satiety and satisfaction evaporate quickly and unfailingly as something else comes along to entice us. Some say this constant craving of ours for something more is a proof of the existence of God. Why else would we be hard-wired to want something that does not exist? In short, we crave God. God is our deepest desire. In light of this, I have to ask myself about my Christian faith. If I really believed to my core that there is in fact a God, that he cares for me and that I will mesh with the divine after my death, then my days would be flooded with joy, wouldn’t they? Well, simply put, my days are more often run-of-the-mill. As the old joke goes: “Life is just one damn thing after another . . . then we die.” By way of illustration, here are lines from “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde: And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid When we follow the conventional milestones, meting out our lives with birthdays and graduations and anniversaries and funerals, we are left with voids along the way—vast stretches of empty space lost to memory. We take photos only of the high points, not the quotidian. As I wrote about everyday life in one of my poems: And I? I’ve sought the space, the place, the lane, like a student out to master his instrument, and stumbled upon the novel in the humdrum of the day. I’m not convinced that I have faith at all. And so my constant craving for more of the world’s comforts. My fear is that most of us share this lack of conviction. How else explain all of humanity’s striving and seeking and sinning? Jesus said this on the eve of his crucifixion: “I am not alone, because the Father is with me. I have said this to you so that you may have peace in this world.” If he is wrong, if there is no divinity, no afterlife, we are the most wretched species on the planet, cursed with the awareness of our mortality for no purpose.
I was in Manhattan last Sunday to attend the Metropolitan Opera production of La Boheme . I walked almost six miles through midtown streets that lovely Spring day, just reveling in the pulse of the city. All the while, I felt invisible. I’m technically retired. I don’t have “a job.” My material value is no longer recognized by way of formal financial compensation. So I have to validate myself nowadays through more spiritual endeavors, like writing and teaching programs in healing poetry. Where I was once the youngest in the room, I’m now the oldest. I suspect these are the early steps in my demise. All the people who mentored me are gone – teachers who guided me toward the pursuit of excellence, and the bosses who evaluated my performance. Friends and colleagues who navigated the currents of life and career with me are no more who were yo. Just last month another friend died, who was younger than I am. What it’s like to feel invisible? Women who in bygone days made eye contact with me when we passed on the sidewalk no longer glance in my direction. Of course not – they could pass for my granddaughter. The only ones who acknowledge me are waitresses, who call me “Sweetie.” When I was forty-one I ran more than twenty-six miles through the five boroughs of New York City. Now I automatically gravitate to the sides of subway stairs so I can grasp the handrails. Grown men defer to me in doorways and call me “Sir.” I assess the flashing “Don’t Walk” countdown to gauge whether I can make it to the other side of the street before the traffic light changes. I keep one eye on the sidewalk in front of me constantly, less my Joe Biden shoes catch a crack. Yet, all the while, my mind views the world as if I were a twenty-something, eagerly imagining how I’d look in the cool jacket that shop-window mannequin is sporting, or assessing if I can afford a Porshe like the one purring by, or assuming I can walk almost six miles without feeling it the next morning.. If you’re familiar with La Boheme , you might notice the plot has an uncanny resemblance to the cast of Seinfeld – a tight band of young men and a pretty girl. The men – a poet, a painter, a philosopher, and a musician – are just beginning their careers and trying to make it in their chosen pursuits. Why, at the sunset of my life, was I identifying with these guys last week and not with their elderly landlord? So that was my Sunday Funday in the city. Fully aware that nobody noticed I was there. Nor did they care one way or another. I felt already forgotten, as surely as if I were sealed away in my cemetery crypt. This is the latest version of me. An invisible man who wonders if my declining body even casts a shadow on the sunny side of the street.
For the past three years, I’ve been guiding patients and caregivers in writing poetry to ease the emotional trauma of cancer diagnosis and treatment. Growing out of this work, I’ve launched fee-free Zoom workshops for anyone interested in making use of healing poetry. This is not so much an “academic” program as a contemplative one. A safe place to share without critique in an encouraging group environment. Not how to write better, but writing to feel better. And, of course, I do this on a volunteer basis. Last week I held the first of these “healing verses” programs. How was the initial session? Well, a woman who identified herself as a grandmother wrote what she said was her very first poem. She wasn’t even sure if it could be called a poem. It was so sweetly compelling and laden with love that I suggested she give it to her children and grandson so they can come back to it again and again to rekindle her memory after she’s gone. “Yes,” I said, “I would most certainly say it is a poem!” In my classes at the American Cancer Society’s New York City facility, Hope Lodge, we’ve found that poetry can be easy, beautiful, and uplifting. I've conducted these sessions at Hope Lodge for the past three years for patients from outside the area who are in Manhattan for treatments at the city’s oncology centers, like Memorial Sloan-Kettering. I’ve also led day-long programs at retreat centers to guide participants in writing poems to ease emotional trauma of every kind: grief, rupture of a relationship, illness, and more. My approach to healing poetry is based on the proven Expressive Writing protocol developed by Dr. James Pennebaker. At the University of Houston, he demonstrated that self-reflective writing about pent-up emotions can lift their burden, enabling the writers to find strength in their own words and thereby gain a new sense of control. His methods have been replicated more than two thousand times and have become an academic pursuit in their own right. The Wednesday Workshops have a one-hour format: • Reading and discussing a healing poem • Time for participants to draft their own poem • An “open mic” period to read their work if they want to I’ll hold these workshops starting at 7 P.M. every other Wednesday. Participants may invite any family or friends who might benefit from exploring how poetry can smoothen the rough edges of life. In the first program last week, we looked at how Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran and Langston Hughes, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, faced up to fear by writing poems. To join our next session on June 11, all you have to do is click this link , and you’ll find my smiling face. I promise, my workshops won’t be like this: After English Class By Jean Little I used to like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I liked the coming darkness, The jingle of harness bells, Breaking—and adding to—the stillness, The gentle drift of the snow . . . But today, the teacher told us what everything stood for. The woods, the horse, the miles to go, the sleep— They all have “hidden meanings.” It’s grown so complicated now that, Next time I drive by, I don’t think I’ll bother to stop.
I received word last week that my poem “Examen” will appear in the Spring issue of Time of Singing, A Journal of Christian Poetry. I can’t decide if my ditty is simply a morose self-portrait of a grumpy old man readying to meet his maker – or a surprisingly hopeful entreaty for one more, perhaps final, love. One thing is sure. My poem was written by a guy who has too much time on his hands, pondering the ravages of age that are manifesting themselves before his eyes. The Daily Examen is a core practice of the Jesuit religious order. It calls for prayerful reflection on the events of the day in order to detect God’s presence and discern his direction. It’s a technique formulated by St. Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Jesuits, in the sixteenth century. Here's the poem. It's not the Examen Ignatius had in mind, I know. Examen I watch my body deteriorate daily, my personal slack tide far behind, that static moment when the body ebbs and yields to inevitable decline. My face is yeasty as risen dough, and flesh slides down to turn my smile to frown. Knees that jammed my Trek up mountains are worn and weary. Equilibrium goes rogue, and I clutch handrails both up and down. Eyesight disappoints, memory humiliates me at every turn. And my feet. My feet. Spawn of an alien strain whose mildewed digits disgust even veteran mycologists. A fleshy, fragile creature now, I’m wary of falling, that unwelcome herald of death spiral. Where’s the wind that powered me when I gobbled up 26.2 miles and left the pack to chase behind? Where’s the muscled mass of me that moistened the fair sex by mere presence? Turned to sponge. Only my soul remains fixed and fresh. And I’m awake to it. Awake, also, to the expectation of seeing you soon face to face. Which calms the night and floods my day with light. I’m at that awful stage of life when family members and friends are shuffling off one by one into eternity. Like lightning bugs on a June evening, their radiance seems to last just a fleeting moment, then they recede into the dark. Before the advent of helicopter parenting, we kids were allowed to play outside until it was too dark to see a thrown Spaldeen. We were creative, and made up all sorts of ad hoc games and activities. At least in New Jersey that’s what we did. When the lightning bugs appeared, we’d catch them in our hands and – using needle and thread supplied by our unknowing mothers – we’d try to string the tortured little wretches into glowing necklaces. We wanted to keep them gleaming forever like living, luminous pearls. It never worked. (Image from original oil painting by James Coates.)
The program was titled Living With Spiritual Integrity in an Age of Fragmentation. We attendees voiced a common goal: to have a day of respite from witnessing the criminal dismantling of everything we hold dear. Our guide was Mark Kutolowski, the founder and co-director of Metanoia of Vermont. His work there focuses on recovering the Christian contemplative tradition, exploring the role of nature as a path toward deeper union with God, and fostering the connection between prayer and the body. His counsel to our group at a conference center near Hartford, Connecticut, was simple – pay attention to how Christ modeled a peaceful heart in the midst of chaos. This was counter-intuitive and difficult for my Type-A personality, which is prone to seizing a problem by the throat and shaking it until it cries “Uncle!” Remember, Mark noted, there was a reason Christ chose to be born into Roman-dominated Palestine, with all the de-humanizing treatment of the Jewish citizenry by a rapacious occupying force. To answer the pop-religion question of What Would Jesus Do (WWJD?), Mark traced how Christ did the exact opposite of what I – and you, perhaps – would do. Christ taught radical love, as in love every person who comes before you. And by the way, pray for the welfare of your enemies. Because that’s what “Love your enemies” means. Christ preached downward mobility, as in radical detachment. He urged his followers to accept suffering, as in turn the other cheek. He demonstrated utter dependence on God, as in trusting that five loaves and two fish would feed five thousand. Then He took a second look at the thou shall not list that Moses brought down from Mount Horeb. And presented His own list – thou should: · Embrace being an unimportant person · Engender gentleness · Be reconciled to, not resentful of, pain and sorrow that come your way · Live in alignment with God · Show active compassion · Free yourself from earthly comforts · Nurture a peaceful heart · Recognize that there will always be a cross to bear
I’ve gotten lots of reactions to my blog last week about death. People asking if my health is okay. Daughter sending me teardrop emojis. A friend writing: “At least your brain appears to still be functioning pretty well.” It’s understandable. Our entire being is oriented toward preserving our life, and every living creature, from flea to falcon, will fight like crazy to stay alive in the face of death. But we don’t think or talk about our dying very much. We shun that. We take out a life insurance policy and prepare a will, maybe, and consider ourselves prepared. All of which is foolish. We all seem to assume we’ll live to 70, 80, 90 or beyond. Most people do not. Yet we are convinced our own death is far, far away in an unknowable future shrouded in mists. Thomas Merton, the renowned Trappist monk, author, and mystic, wrote this in his journal in March 1966: “Thinking about life and death – and how impossible it is to grasp the idea that one must die. And what to do to get ready for it! When it comes to setting my house in order, I seem to have no ideas at all.” Less than three years later Merton would be dead, accidentally electrocuted by a toppled floor fan as he stepped from the shower. I am already past the average life expectancy for American men. Every day that I continue in this dimension is a cherry on the sundae of my life. But my attitude remains convinced that my passing is far in the future. My head swirls with projects I want to finish: a novel that’s under way, a memoir in the form of a book-length poem, a volume of my collected haiku. I want to expand my teaching of poetry as a tool for emotional healing. For almost three years I’ve worked with patients and their caregivers in Manhattan to guide them in writing poetry to address the stresses of cancer treatment. Last autumn I launched a day-long program at a Connecticut retreat and conference center along the same lines – how to write poetry to alleviate emotional trauma. I will conduct a second program next week. A group in Washington has booked me to do a program via Zoom this summer about writing poetry to move toward a more peaceful mindset in the face of chaotic current events. As a result I’ve caught myself negotiating with God. How about “maybe ten more years to finish all this?” Then what, Peter? You’ll be ready to lie down and breath your last? On June 1, 1897, the New York Herald reported Mark Twain to be “grievously ill and possibly dying. Worse still, we are told that his brilliant intellect is shattered and that he is sorely in need of money.” Twain was in London at the time, covering Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee for the New York Journal. The following day, the Journal skewered the Herald‘s account as false and offered Twain’s denial: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” I can relate. (Image: “Death and Life” by Gustav Klimt, 1910.)
Once again we celebrate National Poetry Month during these mellowing days of April. Once again many don’t understand why. Here’s why. Last week I gathered with twenty people at a Connecticut conference center to guide a day of writing and sharing poetry to heal emotional trauma. Participants came from as far as New Zealand. They were highly engaged, participated eagerly in writing about and sharing their feelings and experiences, and several acknowledged breakthroughs over emotional issues they’d been struggling with. All done with a lot of laughter. It was not so much an academic program as a contemplative one. Not a lesson in writing better, but writing to make yourself feel better. It was the second such program I have led, in addition to the weekly session I offer at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in New York City. I also hold a Zoom meeting each Thursday evening for cancer patients who can’t travel. Why? Here’s some of the research into the health benefits of reading and writing poetry: The Journal of Consciousness Studies says poetry sparks emotional response similar to the way re react to music. Contemplating a poem’s word pictures and layers of meaning activates some of the same areas that help us interpret everyday reality. A study by the Max Planck Institute: Every participant claimed to feel chills at some point when reading poems, and about forty percent showed visible goose bumps. While listening to poems they found particularly evocative, participants subconsciously anticipated the coming emotional arousal in a way that was neurologically similar to the anticipation of unwrapping a chocolate bar. A study of hospitalized children finds that providing opportunities for them to read and write poetry reduces fear, sadness, anger, worry, and fatigue. Beyond the science, what about the art of poetry? Poetry itself dates back to the Gilgamesh verses of the late second millennium BCE. But the world’s first author is acknowledged to be a Mesopotamian priestess, named Enheduanna, who lived in the twenty-third century BCE. She composed works of literature that included forty-two hymns. The Torah, written about 1500 BCE, depicts Adam’s first words as poetry: Here at last the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman, for she was drawn forth from man. Poetry is in itself a way of thinking about the world and making sense of it. Poem comes from the Greek, meaning a “thing made.” A poet was defined as “a maker.” We “make” a thing out of words, out of language. We write a poem to make a story out of our experiences and feelings. It’s a way to use words instead of pictures to freeze that fleeting moment in time when the universe causes us to pause in awe. Poetry, in other words, is a way to stop time. The terse, three-line haiku form of Japanese poetry arrests incidents that seem to interrupt the flow of time. Like flashes of lightning, haiku dispel darkness for a moment. For example, the haiku I wrote when I left home to drive to Vermont to experience the eclipse last year. Capturing in poetry the first minutes of an ordinary road trip caused me to put a name on how short our lives on this planet are: off chasing the sun final eclipse of my life all is brevity Poetry has reverberated down through eons of recorded history because it forces us to notice the little things that help us make sense of the big things. A great poem, Robert Frost said, ends in a “momentary stay against confusion.” A momentary stay against confusion. Because a poem, even if it lasts a thousand years, is all about the present – all about time. Ursula K. Le Guin is known best as a sci-fi novelist. She also wrote eleven books of poetry, including her Hymn to Time: Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance. Time makes room for going and coming home and in time’s womb begins all ending. Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding. People have credited poetry not only with changing their lives, but also saving it. One is Kevin Powers, who wrote in The New York Times how poetry kept him from suicide. This is the place poetry occupies in our lives. This is what we celebrate this month. And why.