“Start Close In”. (1) Start with what <you think> you know. “Start where you are; use what you have; do what you can.” (2) Begin with immediate experience. “In order to write about life, you first have to live it.” (3) “ Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” (4) The kickoff for inquiry, creativity, mastery, and spiritual growth is often what is right in front of us. So let’s begin there.
On the way home from a produce stand, in the car, mask and gloves removed, hands as yet unwashed, I became increasingly aware of tickles and itches: tip of my nose, below a nostril, corner of my eye, cheekbone, chin. Perhaps heightened by the knowledge that I should not touch my face, these little annoyances invited a suite of coping mechanisms. Resistance by summoning the will, ”mind over matter”. Surrender by diving into the irritating sensation as if to diffuse or transform it with attention (rather than scratching). Avoidance by distraction, becoming absorbed elsewhere. Release via a temperate scream or expletive.
What intrigues me is how much more aware I was of the nuances of these little sensations in the context of keeping my hands away from my face than I would be otherwise. Such concentrated focus! Isn’t that the way of it with we humans? As toddlers. As adults. When an action is prohibited, the stimulus, object, or objective of that action takes on additional power. A toddler in tantrum over a “no”. Great literature filled with the obsessed man or woman driven by the smallest details of a forbidden love. A young Frederick Douglass compelled to experience the witnessed freedoms denied him… literacy, life as a free man… risking everything.
This power of prohibition to augment our experience can be constructive or destructive. It could be channeled into a poem or song, a Zoom gathering , social activism, a letter, or a walk or garden to commune with the flourishing non-human world. Or it could crush the spirit with loneliness, depression, and the constricting feeling of scarcity.
We are living this current reality over which we have little control. We need to pay attention to what consumes our awareness and make conscious choices about what we do with that. Perhaps we can tap into the wonder of this enhanced experience and find new ways to respond.
“In my darkest night,/when the moon was covered/ and I roamed through wreckage,/ a nimbus clouded voice/ directed me:/’ Live in the layers,/ not on the litter’.”(5)
“Remember all is motion, is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance language is, that life is. Remember.” (6)
(1) David Whyte (“Start Close In”)
(2) Arthur Ashe (tennis champion)
(3) Ernest Hemingway (novelist)
(4) Lucille Clifton (poet)
(5) Stanley Kunitz (“The Layers”)
(6) U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (“Remember”)