GETTING HELP FROM THE UNIVERSE

This weekend, I put together a large garden cart for my wife, and it was an inspiring experience, because I saw, a short time after I started, that I was receiving substantial help from something so large and wise it’s like a limitless mind – the universe itself. After all, I am an inseparable part of this universe – a small speck, yes, but still absolutely fused with the vast universe that started me off some 71 years ago. The stars and winds are as much in me as I am in then. The atoms that sweep in and out of me make the sun shine as effortlessly as they make my bones and blood brand new each moment. The fragments that form my body were born at the Big Bang as surely as the galaxies were. As I was stumbling through the instructions for assembling the cart, for some reason I thought of the stars and how stalwart they are, and somehow I felt their spreading strength inside me. If they can shine so effortlessly for eons, perhaps I could construct this cart with stylish smoothness as well. If the winds can efficiently work their unsettled sorcery across thousands of miles, then maybe I could make this garden gift for my wife come together with easiness and satisfaction. 
Surprisingly, several hours later, thanks to the universe that always supports me, we were both looking at a smartly finished garden cart that can carry compost and leaves for years to come.        

WAKING UP FOREVER

"Vintage Gold Pocket Watch", oil,
by Hall Groat II 

Someone asked me recently what time I usually wake up, and I wish I had answered, “Every moment,” because, in fact, I do awaken each moment, and so does everything and everyone else. This universe, you might say, continuously starts over. Each second is the start of something fresh and up-to-the-minute, the very latest style -- new-fangled, ultramodern, cutting edge. The universe can’t help but prepare pristine, unused moments, sort of like an entire cosmos constantly coming wide-awake – and I am part of all this. Everything’s always arousing and stirring, including me. Each moment my blood is newborn, my lungs are cleansed, my countless cells restructured. Each moment a clean, unsullied idea suggests itself to me, like the light of a new star. Awakening is my continuous honor and privilege as a member of this always starting-up universe. Whatever the clock happens to say, that’s when I wake up.     

SHADOWS AND LIGHT

"Shadows on the Water", oil, by Nigel Fletcher

It sometimes seems like I've spent most of my life in daydreams -- spellbound, you might say, by shadows instead of delighting in the light. I've been so fascinated by forms, things, objects, and thingamajigs that I've been blind to the beauty that sits behind those passing fancies. I've been sitting in the shade, so to speak, instead of living out where the sun shines. Plato wrote about this centuries ago, and it's strange to see that, thousands of years later, I'm living, at least in some ways, the life he belittled. I don't mean to make it seem like I'm locked up in some mental prison that makes life a losing proposition, because, in fact, I'm as happy now as a person can probably be. I just somehow sense that more light -- more shimmering wisdom than I have ever conceived of -- waits for me to discover it, and all I have to do is open my eyes. After all these years, I still have't yet seen many of the stunning aspects of reality, the sunshine that spreads behind and beyond the insignificant things with which I so often busy myself.  I've been dazzled by shadows, I guess, but now, at 71, it's time to turn toward the light. 

FRESH RUNNING UNIVERSE

"The Bathroom Sink", oil, by Elizabeth Fraser

   I still find it fairly stunning to simply turn a tap and see fresh water instantly start running, but of course, it's the way the entire 

universe works, so I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. The universe flows for me in limitless and instant ways. Doesn't fresh oxygen flood into my bloodstream with every breath, and don't thoughts flow forever through my mind, and doesn't the light of the sun stream across the world each day, and aren't all the measureless stars always racing along? The universe can't be turned off. Some kind of wind, soft or strong, is always sweeping around our houses, and feelings of all sorts are steadily surging through us. There are times when the water taps in my house are shut off, but the taps of the universe are always fully open.  Sunlight is always somewhere, shining with its fullness, and ideas are always cascading, with affluence and freshness, through these rushing lives of ours.

SIMULTANEITY

"Landscape Blue II", oil, by Gabriel Phipps

    Because a good friend of mine, Gabe Phipps (also my son-in-law), is featured in a group art exhibition entitled "Simultaneity", I've been considering the countless ways simultaneity shows up in my life. As I sit beside the small window in my study and see the last stars in the morning sky, numberless events are simultaneously making themselves felt in this harmonious universe. I'm typing, blood is flowing through my fingers, my small lamp is letting its light out into the room, the furnace in the cellar is singing a warm song, the day is starting to show its first light. Despite the appearance of occasional chaos , this world is a well-balanced place. Friendliness flows through all things as they occur with their surprising graciousness -- millions of people preparing a fresh start to their day, countless cars streaming down the interstate to do something special, the trustworthy sunlight starting to color the sky, my fingers finding the keys to make a few fresh sentences.  

SILENT HOUSE

"Country Cottage", watercolor, by Don Gray

Since I do most of my writing in the very first hours of the morning, when our small house beside the Mystic River is as silent as the stars that are still shining, I sometimes feel the fullness of silence in my mind, as well. At that time of the morning, the furnace might be making soft sounds down in the cellar, but the rest of the house is hushed, just as my mind is, just as it needs to be in order to start to show me some new thoughts. As I sit at my desk in front of the laptop, I listen to the hum of the furnace, and also to the  purr and murmur of my mind as it silently makes thoughts materialize in their mysterious ways. The river flows from secluded beginnings in bogs and concealed swamps, and who knows in what wilderness my thoughts have their inscrutable start? In the boundless country of my mind, there are borderless areas beyond counting where thoughts can come together to share and start up new thoughts and families of thoughts. I sit in the peaceful house and patiently wait, and soon the thoughts start showing up, straggling or fancy-dancy, like visitors from far away. 

THINGS AND THOUGHTS

"Mystic River (CT, I-95 and River Road)". oil,
by Roxanne Steed

     Like most of us, I have surrounded myself with "things" as the years have passed --  shirts, socks, sweaters, flashy laptops, iPads, poems, paragraphs, cars, houses, friends -- but I now know for sure, in my 71st year, that the thoughts that have visited me are vastly more valuable than the things. All the things that have come and gone, usually with suddenness, were almost as short-lived as transient winds, but the thoughts, especially the magnificent ones, have stayed by my side with trusty steadiness. The good thoughts that have been bestowed on me like unforeseen gifts give me powers that no thing -- no computer, no car, no holiday in Hawaii -- could ever give. The simple thought of friendliness, for instance, makes me more powerful than the forces of the Mystic River, for friendliness flows wherever it wishes and won't be defeated by any "thing".  Even the supposedly most significant thing, my body, cannot create a lack of friendliness in me, no matter how sick and sore it might become.  Even if I die a drawn-out death, I will still have the strength of friendliness streaming out from me with its full effectiveness.  And what about the thought of gentleness? What thing, no matter how sinister it might seem, can generate even a suggestion of opposition to the everlasting strength of gentleness? Can a hurricane make gentleness be less gentle, less able to bring consolation and comfort to the fearful? Cannot the thought of irrepressible gentleness gently gain mastery over even the most menacing circumstances, even the most terrifying "thing"? 

SOUNDS IN THE POETRY OF HOPKINS

In my continuing study of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, I came across these insightful sentences about the mysterious power of his strange uses of sound:

"In Hopkins, as we have seen, we have a mind that loves the uniqueness of things, yet passionately asserts their unity in God. When the poet turns to language, his available resource for expression of this doubly-viewed world, what does he see? He sees words, and certainly he felt about words as he felt about the objects of nature and experience: they are infinitely various and infinitely valuable. All his manipulations of vocabulary suggest this passion for words: his coinages, his often irritating archaisms, his specialized diction. The world of words was treated by Hopkins much as he treated the world of sense as a vast variety shop in which each individual inscape has its own uniqueness and preciousness and is to be admired for its own sake. "

"For [Hopkins] was able, by his control of certain sound likenesses, to go right on communicating what was his Great Fact: that all things, even words, are interconnected and have meaning in God." 

     

--  Walker Gibson (New York University), "Sound and Sense in G.M. Hopkins", Modern Language Notes, 1958

This expresses almost exactly the way I feel about words -- their wildness, their infiniteness, and their inescapable connection with God.

SUBDUED BUT PROSPERING

"Question: What is Spring?"

Growth in everything."

--- from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The May Magnificat"

"Back Road, Early Spring"
gouache, by Chris Ousley

I must admit to not noticing much growth in these first few frosty days of spring, but Hopkins has me hopeful. I'm happy to search with all seriousness for any signs of growth -- any suggestions that the universe is still a place of persistent increase and expansion. I don't see it yet -- not in the snowy grass or the sky like steel or the chill I steadily feel in my feet and fingers -- but perhaps there are thousands of signs I just don't see. Perhaps there are small sprouts in seeds all around me, sort of shouting at me in a silent way, and perhaps the powers in the big trees along our streets are starting to move their inside muscles to make a new season's leaves. Maybe snakes and toads and tiny insects and springtime birds are starting to set up their new family situations. Maybe millions of miracles of growth are getting started as I sit on the couch, as I stand at our wide windows, as I walk across the grass that seems so sterile but may be bursting with new births. What do I know about growth in spring -- me, a guy who gives more attention to his laptop than to the springing up of healthy-looking life in March, a guy who gets more pleasure out of a poem on a lifeless page than the look of a lawn of greening-up grass? Perhaps I need to take myself outside sometimes and make myself stand still for several minutes - just stand still and be astonished by the signs of spirited life in these subdued but prospering first days of spring.

CORDIAL AIR

“That cordial air made those kind people a hood/

All over…” 

-- from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “In the Valley of the Elwy”

Winter sunlight in the valley of the River Elwy, Wales

     It’s always been my hope to have a cordial classroom, a place for people to come together in good-natured camaraderie. The very air in my room, I hope, has a happy feel about it, as though it’s found it’s special place among my students and me. The word “cordial” comes from the Latin word for “heart”, and indeed, there hopefully is a heartwarming quality in the air – a sense of pervasive and persistent kindness – as the students come in. Learning to use the wisdom the universe gives us to listen to the words of writers is what English class is all about, and being in a place of kindheartedness and consideration surely helps that process. In Hopkins’ words, it’s like having “a hood all over” us, a protective covering under which we can feel the influence of books and our own best thoughts. 

FOOLISH OLD FEAR

It was just foolish old Fear.

It had followed me for years,

and yet I had never seen it

as it really is,

but yesterday it screamed in pain

as it prepared to die.

It didn’t actually die,

but simply disappeared,

like subsiding haze,

or a wordless summer evening.

It was dressed in scraps,

its bones twisted,

its face like dusk as it disperses

among the limitless stars.

Hopkins on the shock of Wordworth's Immortality Ode

I'm going back to Wordsworth's famous Ode again (and maybe Blake) since reading this:

"There have been in all history a few, a very few, men whom common repute, even where it did not trust them, has treated as having had something happen to them that does not happen to other men — as having seen something, whatever that really was. Plato is the most famous of these. Or, to put it as it seems to meI must somewhere have written to you or to somebody, human nature in these men saw something, got a shock—wavers in opinion, looking back, whether there was anything in it or no—but is in a tremble ever since. Now what Wordsworthians mean is that in Wordsworth, when he wrote that Ode, human nature got another of those shocks, and the tremble from it is spreading. This opinion I do strongly share; I am, ever since I knew the Ode, in that tremble. You know what happened to crazy Blake, himself a most poetically electrical subject, both active and passive, at his first hearing: when the reader came to ‘the pansy at my feet’, he fell into a hysterical excitement. Now commonsense forbid we should take on like these unstrung hysterical creatures! Still, it was a proof of the power of the shock."

     --- from a letter by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)  to R.W.Dixon

LOOSE AND UNFASTENED

"Tidal Pool", oil, by Brenda Ferguson

I used to believe it was admirable to sometimes be adamant – to be steadfast and unshakable in certain situations – but over the course of the years, I have come to see a slight, or perhaps enormous, mistake in my thinking. Actually, nothingin this universe can ever be adamant, because everything is in a state of non-stop transformation. No thing or person can possibly be stubborn, because shifting and switching and sliding is a constant fact of existence. When I’m believing I’m unchangeable and adamant, I’m simply unaware of the steady stream of adjustments constantly taking place in my life. When I’m stubbornly standing for some position in a discussion, the cells in my body are being refreshed and replaced at speeds beyond measure. While I’m feeling firm and resolute about some decision, about 400 billion different chemical reactions are occurring in my body. I change faster than the fastest-flowing stream, faster than flames shift and flicker in the fireplace. How can I possibly be as adamant as a stone, when even stones are steadily transforming and falling away into dust and sand? My life is as loose and unfastened as this universe, always confidently modifying, always effortlessly refining.

READING GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

I came across a wonderful review of Hopkins' first published book of poems. The review appeared in the young Poetry Magazine in 1918, and I give the author, Edward Sapir, a ton of credit for recognizing the genius in a poet who, at the time, was being strongly ridiculed for his wild originality. Here is a quote from the review:

"His voice is easily one of the half dozen most individual voices in the whole course of English nineteenth-century poetry. One may be repelled by his mannerisms, but he cannot be denied that overwhelming authenticity, that almost terrible immediacy of utterance, that distinguishes the genius from the man of talent. I would compare him to D. H. Lawrence but for his far greater sensitiveness to the music of words, to the rhythms and ever-changing speeds of syllables." 

ADAPTABILITY

"Squirrel Away", oil, by Linda Apple

     When I heard someone say recently that they were hoping to become more adaptable, I silently wished them well, because I’ve been working on that particular project for the better part of my life, with seemingly scanty results. Later, though, as I began to turn over the word in my mind, I started to see adaptability everywhere, and it slowly became clear that the entire universe, counting me, is constantly and effortlessly adapting. I recall watching from a window later that day as birds were winging their way across some backyards, and it was obvious that they were adjusting and restyling their flight to fit in to the flow of the winds. I glanced down to see several squirrels scampering here and there on the lawns, looking, it seemed, for food, and clearly modifying their movements moment by moment to make fresh discoveries. They seemed to be continuously redesigning their actions, almost like starting a completely new kind of search each second. It brought to mind so many of the other adaptations I’ve noticed in nature – the way clouds constantly reshape themselves as breezes blow among them, the way tree branches bend and lift to let the always-shifting winds pass through, and of course the way my old but still quick-witted body makes slight and clever changes as circumstances change. I didn’t choose to be adaptable; it’s just a gift I was given by this ever-versatile universe I’m lucky to belong to. 

ABANDONMENT

"Morning Star", oil, by V...Vaughn

         It’s interesting that the word “abandon” originally meant simply giving up trying to control a situation or a person, a definition that doesn’t necessarily give the gloomy feeling the word usually brings these days. For instance, I could easily take pleasure in abandoning myself now and then, just giving myself up to the whims that waft through my life moment by moment. I’m so accustomed to keeping control of my life that it would be wonderful, now and again, to get free of self-imposed restraints and just loosen up and let go. I wish my friends could occasionally say, “Ham’s so fortunate to be able to abandon himself and be free now and then!” Surely the small, spindly, defenseless, and always anxious “self” I have been painstakingly protecting all these 71 years deserves to be abandoned, just as I would abandon a ship with no sails and lots of leaks. This strange sense that I am a separate, struggling entity in a world of separate, struggling entities needs to be renounced, disavowed, and discarded – abandoned as fast as I would walk out on a project that promised nothing but disappointment. I need to live with a little (perhaps a lot ) more abandon, just trusting this single, startling universe to take me where it will. Stars shine in limitless and always surprising ways, and I should allow myself to do the same.  

DEAREST FRESHNESS

"Grand Canyon",  oil,  by Karen Winters

“There lives the dearest freshness deepdown things.”      
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

     Sometimes my small world seems even smaller than usual, with almost none of the freshness Hopkins speaks of, and yet his words were an opening, this morning, to the fact that far down inside all things is freshness so plentiful it’s always overflowing. I find it so easy to be bored by my life – to let commonplace things pass by me like so much tiresome, insignificant stuff – and yet I know beyond a doubt that even the dust on the dashboard of my car is something special – that it has atoms inside it that were made billions of years ago, makes designs on the dashboard that have never been made just that way before, and lets sunlight shine across it in entirely fresh ways. I rarely even notice the dust that’s always all around us, which -- because dust, in its own way, is as stunning as any canyon -- is like living beside the Grand Canyon but never noticing it. Freshness like dust’s overflows around me, moment by moment – in smiles I see in the supermarket, in singular patterns of shadows spreading for the first time across roads, in streetlights whose shine seems ever so slightly different today from any earlier day. Even the keyboard I’m typing on has taken on fresh dust and dirt since yesterday, new specks here and there that create, in a way, a new, unused keyboard for my morning fun.

A quiet, cold late winter day. Breakfast side by side with Delycia -- spinach omelet and raisin toast for me, healthy cold cereal for her. A good part of the day -- at least the afternoon -- was spent in front of the fire -- reading, talking, finding places for some pieces in our newest jigsaw puzzle. Lucky us.

GOOD GIFTS

"Morning Sky", oil. by Laurel Daniel

Every good gift and every perfect (free, large, full) gift is from above; it comes down from the Father of all [that gives] light, in [the shining of] Whom there can be no variation [rising or setting] or shadow cast by His turning [as in an eclipse].

-- James 1: 17, Amplified Bible

My life has been loaded with good gifts, all springing upon me by surprise and all from secret beginnings, so I can easily relate to what James says in this sentence. My life, moment after moment, is as free and full as the sea my wife and I sometimes stroll beside. My thoughts are thoroughly full of possibilities, and each one seems as large as the light-filled sky I see outside my window this morning. As James suggests, there’s a shining quality in the moments of my life – all of them – as though something like suns or stars are inside every one. I don’t mean to suggest that I believe these glowing moments, these steady and splendid gifts, come from the God I grew up believing in, and that James perhaps believed in -- the human-like super-being who could be as cruel as he was kind. No, I’ve come to see these gifts as being the spontaneous and easy-going cascade that pours down on all of us simply because we’re alive.  Most of us, for countless different reasons, don’t always notice these gifts, but I’ve come to see that they’re always with us, like the sunlight is with us even on the cloudiest days, or like breathing is bringing us new life even when our world seems to have broken into pieces. Just now, a thought of one of my brave and gentle sons came to me from somewhere, and, in an unrestricted and effortless way, I can soar on that thought and feel its light lifting me. Amazingly, any thought has that power, any of the tens of thousands of these good gifts that flood over me each day.