My granddaughter, Oona keeps drawing mountains. In the spirit of repetition, I say yes. yes! YES! and want to write poems and introduce her to Shibori.

Shibori: is the Japanese word for  ways of embellishing textiles by shaping cloth and securing it before dyeing, using a variety of techniques in different shapes to make different patterns. I was watching a small video and thinking how I would show it to Oona,  to inspire an art project we could do. Patterns.    http://skl.sh/video-shibori

video: at source click bottom (free entry) then go to line 11 “3 simple Shibori Styles”

“The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free… The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit!”  Igor Stravinsky.

“Meter, in the most basic physical way, releases illogical energy and brings it in coaction with the rational part of the mind, creating a synergy that might seem badly needed today—a balance between the unconscious power that perhaps composes what we sense as sanity.”  and “Repetition pulls the reader down… into the preliterate, the childlike… appeals to the right-brained qualities of space, being, and unindividuated consciousness…”   Annie Finch

Let It Be Forgotten   ~   poem by Sara Teasdale

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,

Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,

Let it be forgotten for ever and ever…

As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall

In a long forgotten snow.

<>  <>

Oona has been drawing mountains for awhile. As I write this she is up in the Sierras. The repetition brings her  closer to what she is drawn to. Mountains, mountains, mountains……………………………………..

The Patterns in art and words made visible.

A repetition poem from Marilyn Hacker works both ends of the line with a repeated word at the beginning (anaphora) and rhymes for the final word. It gives a kind of hypnotic progression which goes on for six more stanzas than are shown here:

Casting Out Rhymes
Yes, dictionaries opening again
Yes, scorched across her forehead like a stain
Yes, less to say than cognate words contain
Yes, caffeine and butalbital for pain
Yes, ruptured synapses hobble the brain.

No, watched grey water circle down the drain
No, looking out the window of the train
No, not the melody, just the refrain
No, not temerity, no, not distain
No, stroked across the scar against the grain….

                                                                                                                              
from William Blake ~The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…
…What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp…

Closing with a humorous moment, having found the mountain with the Starbucks on the top. Oona’s dad, Ammon, VP of Product Design at the new company Takt, on brief vacation in the Sierras, is due for a coffee stop near the top. Yes!

The next post will announce the arrival of my new book: Fatima’s Touch, Poems and Stories of the Prophet’s Daughter, Ruhaniat Press, September, 2016.

 

Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, Riverhead Books, N.Y., 2016, by Lesley Hazleton

When Lesley started working on this book I wasn’t sure what I thought or felt about the word AGNOSTIC. Now it is published and selling briskly. I read this book with great pleasure—the questions it raises and the wild ride in ideas and words. I’ve marked and turned down the corner on countless pages. I’m happy to share my interest and enjoyment.

Lesley and I had met years ago over our various writings on Muhammad and what needed to be said about him and the women around him. She read the Qur’an cover to cover in several English translations! Who can say they’ve done that? She gave TED talks. I am in awe of her accomplishments. Pilot. Journalist. Funny friend. My all time favorite book she wrote is Mary, A Flesh and Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother. Lesley Hazleton is my SHE-ro, that’s hero with a she, the most skillful driver of the vehicle of the written phrase. Her sentences move you right along.

I wondered how agnostic thoughts might fit into my world of Sufis, my research on Muhammad and Fatima. There is a very wide scope to this book.

Begin with the title. …A Spirited not Spiritual Manifesto. Yes! I like that. I live in a world where sentimentality lurks very close by, since Sufism is about LOVE. Like GOD it is almost impossible to discuss. Lesley writes:

God is such a little word for such a huge concept. A mere three letters in English, it’s so short, so concise, so …familiar. Far more user friendly than the amorphous idea of the divine or the transcendent or the infinite, its really kind of a nickname, a shorthand claim to intimacy…. 1

See what I mean? As with LOVE, everyone assumes the meaning is shared. Like LOVE, GOD gets held hostage by personal beliefs and experiences. Then the AHA! we share is lost. Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto brings up and stirs around what we assume we know, yet don’t question.

The agnostic stance defies artificial straight lines such as that drawn between belief and unbelief, and shakes off the insistence that it come down on one side or the other. It is free-spirited, thoughtful, and independent-minded—not at all the wishy-washy I-don’t–know-ness that atheists accuse it of being. 2

I want to explore unanswerable questions with an open mind instead of approaching them with dismissive derision or with solemn piety… to get beyond old, worn-out categories and establish an agnostic stance of intellectual and emotional integrity, fully engaged with this strange yet absorbing business of existence in the world. 3

The following lines make me want to be Banksy, Graffiti Master of UK, painting phrases and paradoxes on buildings at night— everywhere.

The meaning of life is that it stops. 4

…to be lost is to be fully present. 5

(The agnostic )…takes a spirited delight in not knowing. 6

Names pin things down…create the illusion of understanding. Which is why naming God might be the trickiest business of all. 7

As with your keys or your wallet, you “find” God or “lose” your faith. 8

This is the agnostic’s faith: not in answers, but in possibilities. 9

She speaks a truth that is rarely spoken:

By refusing to accept death—by seeing it as failure—both physicians and their patients (assume)…death is the enemy… “you can do this, you can beat it,” as though we declare war on death, As though, absurdly, we could kill it… 10

Perfectibility seems so hollow to me. The definiteness, the absolutism, the dead-endness of it— all these leave no room for life. The perfect tomato in the store turns out to be tasteless, genetically engineered for shelf appeal, not for the palette…. Complete agreement with whatever I might say leaves me gasping for intellectual air, longing for something more than a mirror of my own thoughts. 11

I can’t follow her into the mathematics of the universe, big numbers and infinity, so these pages with words like ouroboros and googolplex have me scanning and page-turning.

The book ends with a discussion of “soul.” She does that thing like the child’s game of repeating a word until it’s like Dr. Seuss, or like cracking an egg—

…soulful, a good soul, soul music, soul food, soul mates Soul… we seem to end up in a haze of well-meaning sentiment…

 Then she brings in a deeper layer:

…soul not as a thing, but as a dimension of being that defies the narrow lens of dogma…12

Hazrat Inayat Khan, the great Sufi who came to the West in 1910 calls the soul “…consciousness, which is all-pervading. That same consciousness is caught in a limitation … All the holy beings of the world have become so by freeing the soul, its freedom being the only object there is in life.”13

I like this, since I am in the lineage that reaches back through Inayat Khan for over 1000 years of direct guidance and experiential understanding. It is not a religion. I like to call Sufism, “the fragrance over the flower of religion,” I am open to what these Sufis have shared, but also look for and cherish a healthy “spirited” view including humor and paradox that insists on real experience, not just accepting what I’ve been told. Out of the deep sincerity of that attitude, devotion to the path I walk can be born in my heart.

This book …to quote Lesley’s final page about the soul, “makes my heart swell… makes me glad to be alive.” 14

Reference Notes

1     Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto p. 25.
2     p. 4, 5.
3     p. 6
4     p. 135
5     p. 117
6     p. 6.
7     p. 51.
8     p. 47
9     p. 79
10   p. 145,146
11   p. 190
12   p. 193.
13   Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message of HIK “Spiritual Liberty.” vol. 5, Chapter 1.
14   Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto p. 204

See the article below: This plan for White Cloud Press to publish my Fatima book did not happen. Fatima’s Touch is published by Ruhaniat Press. For more information see http://www.ruhaniat.org/index.php/work/ruhaniat-press

I just finished a phone conversation with Steve Scholl of White Cloud Press in Ashland, and my book will be published there in 2017. Yes. I can celebrate, and will be— over the next year. FATIMA’S TOUCH, POEMS AND STORIES OF THE PROPHET’S DAUGHTER.

I have felt the urgency to make this happen, as world events usher in terrible stories linked to Islam, driving away any association with kindness and compassion, with no thought to the family visited by Angel Gabriel at the beginning of the seventh century, or the man Muhammad, who believed he was in the line of Abraham of the Old Testament. FATIMA’S TOUCH looks at her life based on historical writings in fifty-three poems. I should stop here, because much can change in a year, but for the moment, this is it.

[There are three poems from the book and an interview  with me in the April issue of AJI Magazine: http://www.ajimagazine.com ]

I remember living on a small sailboat, a thirty foot trimaran,  in 1970. We were sailing down the coast of Baha, with no radio or cellphone, just point-to-point navigation, calculating latitude and longitude. We’d had our dingy stolen near San Diego so we needed a dock to land. There was no road down Western Baha in those days. All that was left in the cupboard was rice. We had fresh water. It was my watch, the 9-12 slot, day and night. That morning, and I was at the helm with a line out the back, trolling for fish. Suddenly a strike! Reeling it in carefully, there on the deck lay a good size tuna. I remember my stunned surprise and delight, not unlike being told I have a publisher, not just a line out. A fresh meal-of-words lifted out into the sun.

May this book’s story continue to unfold and bring understanding and increased clarity. May it be read far and wide.  <><  <><   <><

Wendy’s here from Eureka Springs Arkansas. She came to give a poetry reading at Willow Glen Library in San Jose. Wendy Taylor Carlisle. My heavenly poetry muse. She has been editing my 52 poems. My back has been out for weeks. Working at the computer, I’m sometimes kneeling or standing with boxes under the screen, the mouse.

6 lines to this poem, # 40 in my Fatima book. She looks with concern at line 2. Metaphorical beings….

Can’t say that.

After dancing with the Thesaurus for awhile I change it to Inconceivable hands

I wave it in the air at her as she stands at the stair landing.

Then I recite it as I walk down the stairs.

That’s arrogant, honey. You put yourself above those beliefs mentioned

You need something else.

And I’ve got the metrics. Needs to be a /u/uu/

Look up “Mystical.” In the Thesaurus.

Enigmatical?

            no

Preternatural

That’s good, but “outside nature” is that what you want to say?

Clear, ambrosial?

Ambrosial refers to food.

But I like it!

Can’t do that. How about encompassing.

YES. I like that but it needs another syllable!

            Strong encompassing hands.

Wait.

 

           Firm.

 

That’s it!! Firm encompassing hands.

Great. Listen…

 

Letters of Love

Houris call to her spirit, signal nightfall.

Firm, encompassing hands untie her life; she

exhales Arabic.  Dazzling repetition

lifts: Muhammadan-Rasul’illah re-echos

“God’s perfection through human limitation*.”

On these letters of love she can fly to heaven.

[*quote: Hazrat Inayat Khan defining Rasul – Messenger of  God. Also, a text says that Fatima died saying the words Muhammadan-Rasul’illah: Muhammad is God’s Messenger. The form is hendecasyllabic, 11 syllables /u/uu/u/u/u.]

We did it.

I’m going to take a bath.

<>  <><  <><       ><>

Here’s my blog. I just wrote it while you were in the bath. I’ll call it

“Editing.”

Call it: On Process.

Done.

 

Friday evening, November 27^th my beloved friend Ann Riley passed away, surrounded by family in hospice care at her Moonshine Ranch home in Camptonville, CA. In 1974 Shabda took me to Terry and Ann’s newly-purchased ranch for an overnight. As I remember we were warmly welcomed, and slept under the stars on the hill behind the house. Shabda and Terry rose early to sing together, and Ann and I began a soon familiar kitchen tea-talk. She was an excellent listener, with a wide variety of interests, known to break into a smile or laugh easily. Soon we were pregnant together with Gyan and Solomon, so the conversation went down that path. There was the porch with the grapes, and the garden, the pond, and the barn, where the music happened, until the remodel, considerably later.

Both our husbands had another “wife.” The same one. Shabda called Pandit Pran Nath or “Guruji” his first wife, and I was the second wife. Terry and Shabda spent a great deal of time in service to this wonderful Indian singer, who honored each of us. We were a family. Our private family occasions were times when the guru stayed with us and music was everywhere. The public ones were concerts, in the San Francisco area, at Mills College, in The Garlings’ house, or in New York City at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, in New Delhi and places I no longer remember. After Guruji died, Terry and Shabda went to India for the next four years, then as time passed we saw less of each other, but in the last decade, Gyan, a brilliant guitarist, performed with Terry, and we’d go to see them whenever they played in the Bay Area. Birthdays. The decades stretched out.

New Years Eve was a time when Ann and Terry and I sang standards way into the night years ago. Grab your coat and get your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep. Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street…

My 50^th birthday I spent as an overnight with several close women friends. Ann was among them. Shabda’s 60^th we were together by Donner Lake. Weddings, funerals,  family gatherings. For my last birthday party they appeared with a sweet gift. It was a colored gourd with an OM, a Buddha crowned with flower patterns hand-painted in gold, white, green and brown. Inside was a card with birds wearing party hats and the message in Ann’s tidy script “We love you, Tamam.”

This morning, in meditation there was Ann all covered in light and I knew, before the phone call that the line that held her here had stretched thin. She was already gone beyond the body. I searched my poetry books for the right words to honor her. She liked Naomi Nye, wrote me in 2011 she had bought her poems.

from Fold:

I am partial to poems about

little rumination, explosions of minor joy,

light falling on the heads of gentle elders.

Also the way pampas grasses look toward

the end of summer, shining, shaggy…

 

<><    <><     ><>

I like the melancholy tone of this one—

From One of the Butterflies by W.S. Merwin

…I cherish

only now a joy I was not aware of

when it was here although it remains

out of reach and will not be caught or named

or called back and if I could make it stay

as I want to it would turn to pain

<><    <><     <><

Ann, dear friend, what a beautiful life you have shared! Married to Terry for 60 years, friend to many, teacher to many, mother and grandmother, you will be missed. You will bring love and great benefit wherever you go.

“The world isn’t fair, Calvin.””I know Dad, but why isn’t it ever unfair in my favor?”― Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbs

“Maybe yes, maybe no, fairness isn’t always so…” These words I stuck on my fridge from my friend Hayat Rubardt started this.

Unfair: not based on or behaving according to the principles of equality and justice: unjust · inequitable · prejudiced · biased · discriminatory · one-sided · unequal · uneven · unbalanced · partisan · partial · skewed · undeserved · unmerited · uncalled for · unreasonable · unjustified  (Dictionary.com)

Frequently parents hear the voices of their children age four and up saying, “That’s NOT FAIR!” My granddaughter, Oona, cries big tears when she says the word, UNFAIR, followed by a sound that explodes like an explanation mark that hurts her mouth. There can be a kick or something thrown. Fairy tales in children’s books, often begin with unfairness and triumph at the end, like Cinderella restoring fairness as her foot slides into the glass slipper. A poem should show, not tell, as in this beautiful section by Naomi Shihab Nye from So There:

Because I would not let one four-year-old-son

Eat frosted mini-wheat cereal

Fifteen minutes before dinner

He wrote a giant note

And held it up

While I talked on the phone

LOVE HAS FAILED

Then he wrote the word LOVE

On a paper

Stapled it twenty times

And said

I STAPLE YOU OUT…

∇  ∇  ∇  ∇  ∇    ∇  ∇  ∇

My father was a lawyer and his father was too. I remember he gave a good deal of attention to the word “fairness,” attentive to how it felt to my sister and to me. So did my son Solomon. When I told him it was too stormy for him to drive the car (he was 15 and had a permit) He countered with how it was more than unfair, unreasonable even, followed by words for the defense, “Don’t you want me to be able to drive in all weather conditions?” My logic rarely stood up to his, so I said, “It doesn’t FEEL right to me.”

“You could say to the universe: this is not fair. And the universe would say: Oh, isn’t it? Sorry.” ― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Time

The Dictionary “Fair” moves from “free from bias” to “likely” to “bright and sunny” to (#22) “Archaic: A beautiful or beloved woman.” Fair meaning “beautiful” is an old German word of origin: fagar.  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,/ who is fairest of them all?” The answer was enough to drive one woman to poison another. FAIR can mean light in color, especially blond: fair hair. It means light complexion: fair skin. Not so good in an era of equality for women. Unfair, in fact. Although Audrey Hepburn was a brunette…..

I spent hours recently going through scores of poetry books, looking for poems using FAIR or UNFAIR. Here’s one. Gerald Stern in his poem The Dove’s Neck has “Fair or not fair” on the top line of the second page in an uncorrected proof of his book, LAST BLUE. I was lucky to find them, although to take a piece of a Gerald Stern poem is like extracting a tooth. It works so well with the other words and ideas it seems wrong to mess with the over-all structure.

…I lay in a field of daisies and clover… practically

sleeping, a short drive east of Ohio, near the abandoned

coal mines, half a century

after the grass had hidden

the disgusting earth including,

fair or not fair, the anger

for all I knew, underneath that

field which seemed to tilt

in such a way that stretching

my arms and legs the flowers were

always there and the wind

was always blowing, one of

my bitter personal heavens.

 ∇   ∇   ∇   ∇ ∇ ∇   ∇ ∇ ∇

Although I know it’s unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.      Steven Dunn.

I’ll end with a poem from a favorite moment in my life. I was at San Miguel Poetry Week years ago, in small Q & A with W.S. Merwin. I had never met him before, or heard him read, although I read his poems for years. I raised my hand and asked how we can tell what needs to be told. He looked right at me and recited this sonnet by William Shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.