Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before the summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music in spite of everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
“A Brief for the Defense”
by Jack Gilbert
I took a long walk yesterday morning on the first day of the new year. Feeling the chill of melancholy down to the marrow, I needed to move, needed to make sense of all of the epic crises and personal struggles going on around the world. As I walked down the leaf covered path into the forest I saw 3 deer crossing ahead of me, an enchanting experience I’ve often encountered while living in the middle of nowhere. But the spell was soon broken when I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching, a scout from the chasse, hunt, no doubt. As I tucked myself into a thicket of trees and watched him pass, I came to the humbling realization that someday no circumstances will exist at all, good or bad. I turned around and came home. The mist over the valley below my house began to drift holding the sound of bells from a nearby village church, reminding me of the hundred and eight bell Buddhist chant that releases all of the sins of the world.
Life unfolds in mysterious ways sometimes. When I turned on my computer I received a weekly poem delivered into my inbox by Roger Houdsen, author of the Ten Poems series, which I always look forward to. I read the poem above and was startled by its synchronicity. Then I read Houdsen’s thoughts. About the poem he said, “The world contains the full spectrum of human experience. Staggering beauty and ravening pain live side by side in Nature. We must risk delight . That is the most dignified response we can give in the face of the world’s sorrows. It doesn’t deny those sorrows, it balances the world as it is.” I reread the poem. In this world of endless distractions it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters.
How do we know what really matters? When I was a child I would daydream all the time. I believed that anything was possible. I made books and collages, kept pictures of places I wanted to see. Seeing my dreams every day eventually brought them to life. I didn’t know I was creating a vision journal at the time, but I was, and to this day I still keep one. A visual journey draws forth our inarticulate yearnings of not only what our dreams look like, but how they make us feel.
One of the places I dreamed about visiting was France. I pulled a few of my vision journals off the bookshelf to look back at what I’d accomplished over the past years since I decided to follow my dream of living in France. They are big books full of words, photographs, paint colors, magazine clippings, pressed flowers, stories, poems, sketches, architectural renderings, anything that reminded me of what I’d wanted. They not only visually reflected what I wanted to achieve, they reflected how I felt about what I wanted to achieve. It was practical magic and it worked. This is what the law of attraction is really about.
I don’t like New Year’s resolutions. The promise to better yourself in some way never works, no matter how well intentioned. I know from my own personal experience, that it’s the small, focused steps that work along the circuitous path. The thoughts and images that are pressed in between the pages of my vision journal, like this blog, have helped fuel my imagination and illuminate what really matters.
