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Like an old house full to the rafters with pale, outdated things, things that have served and have therefore been put away to serve again, worn and imperfectly fit to whatever the new circumstances, too many there for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