So Full of Your Answer

 

“And if you have ready-made answers in your head,
you will not be able even to listen to the question. 

You will be so full of your answer, you will be incapable of listening.”

(Osho) 

 

I love the phrase, the thought, “so full of your answer.” 

Like an old house full to the rafters with pale, outdated things, things that have served and have therefore been put away to serve again, worn and imperfectly fit to whatever the new circumstances, too many there for any scrap of wisdom to be found, for any chance of picking up the trail of curiosity and wonder like a neat track in the snow, a glittering small track with only one tipsy or errant line of boots or four-toed paws, or no track, just the untracked sand or snow. 

 

Listen along the way away from the burdensome clutter, that head and heart already full of answer, and hear Rilke’s “perhaps a bird.” Perhaps the calling of a distant bell in its medieval tower on a Tuscan hill, perhaps a lapping, or a slush, a match scratching, a whoosh, a whooo, the rasp of a gutteral “r,” a whispered uncompleted word, a halting syllable that makes all consummately clear. 

 

 

 

image: dog footprint, Филип Романски 

(Wikimedia Commons)

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  photographer unknown

Writing Spaces (A Journal Page)

 

Writing Spaces

 

"Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate . . . "

(Go, thought, on golden wings)

—Temistocle Solera, for Verdi's Nabucco

image:  Franklin Booth, Giving Wings to Words

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ashmolean Museum

Keeper of Winds

 

Like Odysseus, after encountering the god,

I’m carrying my bag of winds—

 

the eight winds I learned in Catalán

from dictionaries,

mestral, xalac, migjorn, and then

the wind across the mountains

coming from the north.

 

The winds found on that other island

years ago, while looking for temples, fish traps,

the old sugar cane shipping port.

 

The pastures upswept by the wind,

the long grasses and wild sugar cane shoots,

only the gray horse and green chair fixed 

within the constant motion of the rest.

 

I learned it's called 'apa'apa'a, that wind, 

blowing always in the same direction.  

And I was charmed, learning 

to call the wind by name.

 

A hand-lettered sign along the road

at the crossing between ancient districts

welcomed the winds to Kohala. 

 

The wind was even in the house at night,

and an Italian aria returning from far

places and old times, carried precariously there

along with the low voices of the sacred bells.

 

And here?  Kitesurfers

carried by wind and waves,

by curls of eyebright silk.

That sure, that light!

 

Will these be loosed and lost like those others,

or might they blow me always safely back to shore,

to some untroubled harbor which I’ll recognize

     as mine?

image:  Jan Jansson, 1650, compass rose surrounded by wind heads, Volume 5 of his "Novus Atlas" of the Ancient World.

Create

 

“In a time of destruction, create something.”

—Maxine Hong Kingston

 

 

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell

Writing Spaces

 

Prayers in the fabric of it all,

of absolutely everything we write—

whether the fabric is

salt-drenched sailcloth

or gold-shot silk, 

grandmother’s softest calico

or a rustic spice-drenced kilim.

However we wear it,

hold it against our skin.

 

 

 

images:  Christie B. Cochrell

Compassion

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Kwaidan, Masaki Kobayashi

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell

Appeal

 

Appeal

 

I summon the comet back,

tail oh so long, splendid and glad 

as a cathedral train

sweeping along behind the bride

at the wedding of light to light,

attended by Venus

and a cohort of lucent stars 

there in the western sky

above the skeleton of the gray whale;

 

summon those owls of summer

haunting the interstices

of Shakespeare’s soliloquies,

frisky or fateful murmurs

in the hallowed grove, there on

the unceded ancestral homeland

of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe.

 

I persuade the traces 

of the driftwood labyrinth 

drawn in remembrance 

on our little sandy beach 

to tarry one more day 

here on this shore,

on the uneasy limen of winter

and the onerous year beyond.

 

A line or two of it’s rewritten every night 

by the kleptic November waves, 

exacting this and that, 

but I bid what stray sticks and branches 

of the whole circle are still in place 

and can be paid homage by my bare feet

to stay a little longer within reach 

in their steadying dignity,

in their contemplative orbit. 

 

Inspiration.  Heartsease.

Sometimes, I think, all that

can possibly save us.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell

Writing Spaces

 

How I go to the woods

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore 
unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds 
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of 
praying, as you no doubt have yours. 

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, 
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.

 

—Mary Oliver

image:  John Stoehrer, Girl Writing Outdoors

Writing Spaces

 

image:  source unknown

Writing Spaces

 

A possibility of getting away . . . 

whether to or from.  Words 

as escape and restoration, both,

the means (or place) of finding 

a still center, still, a plumb line 

fashioned from that line of text,  

or alternately a good sturdy paragraph 

laid down into a temporary bridge 

from shore to open water, ripples, drift,

impatient embarkation point for some 

exultant odyssey, no land in sight, 

or maybe a fine panoply of turrets 

off on the horizon, shimmering 

with silken banners, clarinets and horns.

Passages read, waterbound passages 

to becoming demesnes—

contiguous and oh so far,

foreign and achingly familiar,

ours.

image:  Getty Images, Noel Hendrickson