Spirit Sunday: Culling beauty from hateful words

Meditation takes a lot of forms, and for me, it often takes place with pen in hand.

When I’m writing, I tend to go deep and make discoveries about who I am at the core. And I renew my connection with what I regard as the source of all knowing, while also gaining reassurance and stillness. It’s what I try to achieve with seated meditation, but writing gets me there more reliably and meaningfully.

To get to where I want to go, I just lay down some words—sometimes I’ve thought of them a bit before starting, and sometimes, when I’m feeling a little dry, I just move my pen or fingers. A kind of energy seems to flow, as if the words on the page are sparking, pulling toward one another. That’s where the discoveries happen.

Yesterday, the first full day of a new president’s administration, I started a brand new writing meditation, and I’m interested to see where it goes.

What I plan to do is look for words from the new president each day. I don’t doubt that his words will be belligerent or spiteful or self-serving; he’s not a person who is prone to generous speech acts or writing.

I honestly can’t stand the bellicose, hateful posturing of this person, and his words are repugnant to me, and yet I like to stay on top of the news—it’s the duty of every citizen to do so, after all. That leaves me in a pickle; how will I take in vitriol from this terrible person, every single day?

I plan to take the worst words from this person who claims to know all the best words, and I’m going to sit with them in front of me. I plan to see how they move—what a loving perspective can do with these raw materials. And I’m going to shift them from hate toward love. I’m going to move and manipulate his words so that they represent everything our president does not—love, compassion, intelligence, and humor.

When you think about it, it’s the ultimate pussygrab. “I can do anything,” the president said in the famous bus video. And I can do anything, too. But my plan is to find the love that is there (surely there must be love?), and I will manufacture the love that is needed.

Words are seeds. And I won’t let the president’s hateful words take root in my garden. That doesn’t mean I can’t let them blossom into something beautiful—and that’s just what I plan to do.

Yesterday’s poem, sort of a nonce American sentence (seventeen syllables, usually presented as just one sentence), was based on the president’s lies about his inauguration crowd, and his accusation that the media was dishonest in reporting about numbers. The president said, in part, “We caught them. And we caught them in a beauty.” All of the words in this poem are from this brief utterance.

Looked out: a million people! Caught them in beauty—

now, that’s not a lie.

My plan is to post a new poem each day in a series I call “Love in His Throat.” I’ll guess I’ll go until I can’t stand it anymore—until the meditation no longer serves me well.

Spirit Sunday: Inauguratio—when we look to the birds for signs

Black Vulture or Carrion Crow, by John James Audubon

This is our week of inauguration in Washington. At home, though, we’ve had an ice storm; the trees wear sequins, and there is a steady drumbeat of melt.

It seems right that I’m looking at my suet feeder as I consider what’s to come. The small songbirds make fearful, surreptitious visits—a flutter, some quick nibbles, but they seem to prefer the regular birdseed I don’t have to offer today. They get their sustenance in a fast flutter, and then they escape as quickly as they can.

It’s not this way with the starlings. They’re larger than the other birds that visit, and they bully the songbirds away. They even bully each other away. They want more—more fat, more seed, more room at the wire mesh suet holder. They act like it’s their due.

I don’t actually begrudge the starlings their sustenance. I just wish they could change their nature—share the resources. Take turns. Understand that here, there is plenty for all. In fact, I have another block of suet ready to go when this one is consumed.

But it is in the nature of the starling to show its dominance—to use its advantages to crowd out the other birds.The starlings make sure they get theirs.

The word “inauguration” relates to the birds, as it turns out. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains that the word comes from the Latin inaugurationem/inauguratio, meaning “consecration,” or originally “installment under good omens.” Specifically, the entry says that it is a “noun of action from the past participle stem of inaugurare ‘take omens from the flight of birds; consecrate or install when omens are favorable.’”

Because words and their origins are endlessly fascinating, the entry goes on to explain (citing William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities of 1842) inauguratio, a ceremony to obtain “the sanction of the gods to something which had been decreed by man.” Specifically, this is the ceremony by which things or people were consecrated to the gods in ancient times.

During the inauguratio, the priests would observe the actions of the birds, and if these actions appeared to be favorable, the decree would be thought to have godly sanction.

Further investigation (because I can lose whole days to this kind of thing) reveals that one important sign was the direction from which birds called or flew. According to “On Auguries” by M. Horatius Piscinus, at Societas Via Romana, if the action of the birds came from the right, that was a good augury in Greece—but bad in Rome. 

To read the signs, priests would divide the sky into sections that had specific relevance, according to Piscinus; they would observe the section where the birds were most numerous or from which actions or sounds emanated. A flute would be used throughout the augury ceremony, possibly to attract birds. Incidentally, only the actions of certain birds were thought to be relevant—eagles, vultures, storks, osprey, owls, ravens, crows, and chickens among them.

That’s all very different from the ceremony that will happen on Friday here in the United States. Birds have no place in the official proceedings. Instead, the point of the activities is the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next—a regular event that is the hallmark of our democracy.

I generally watch this important event on TV, but I’m afraid I’m busy on Friday. I have a date with the birds. While the inauguration is going on, I’ll be conducting my own as I walk through a certain meadow that rests alongside a river.

In Missouri in January, I can expect to see any number of birds. The last time I was at this spot, I was lucky enough to see huge kettles of vultures circling, exactly like slow black cyclones. Some might see vultures as a bad augury, but I don’t. When my older son was born, huge group of vultures had settled in the trees—a committee, volt, or venue of them. Vultures are ungainly and unbeautiful on the ground or in branches, but when they take flight, they are majestic; there is no bird more graceful in flight.

Some songbirds I might spot in a Missouri winter field: the downy woodpecker, the Eastern bluebird, the American goldfinch. An upside-down white-breasted nuthatch, hunting for seeds. A black-capped fellow insistent on his name: chickadee-dee-dee. Relevant to the day for me? Pairs of mourning doves—lovers, cooing to one another in their sad syncopation.

I’m of a mind to focus closer to home for a bit. We don’t need birds to tell us that we are entering troubled times as a nation. So I’ll be reading signs here. Who will visit my feeder? What will balance at the very tip of a depleted seedhead in my favorite meadow? And will I be visited by vultures, the useful scavengers that take away sources of stench and decay and then rise up, sublime?

I hope so. Truth be told, I prefer them even to eagles.

Sources consulted:

“Backyard Birds.” Missouri Department of Conservation,

https://mdc.mo.gov/conmag/2013/11/backyard-birds

“inauguration (n.).” Online Etymology Dictionary,

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=inauguration

Piscinus, M. Horatius. “On Auguries.” Societas Via Romana,

http://www.societasviaromana.net/Collegium_Religionis/augury.php

A time to dance

Yesterday was magical—one of those perfect late-summer days in the Ozarks, the sun not too hot, a bit of a breeze to boot. My family went apple picking; we had fun at the playground and on walking trails. And at the end of the day, I went to a class at the local holistic life center.

The class was described as a chakra dance class—in fact, it was “Chakradance,” a trademarked name for a holistic practice—but I have to admit, I thought the dance part was a metaphor. I guess it was the poet in me, but I pictured myself meditating, focusing on my chakras, thinking about dancing in a very figurative way.

The way the class works, though, or at least this installment of it, is that participants spread out in a dark room and they close their eyes. In just that way—all attention directed inward, no sense of what others are doing—we moved our bodies while focusing on each chakra in turn, root to crown.

I’m not disciplined enough to follow the rules precisely. I had to peek out between my lashes a few times, just to make sure the others were still there, that they were moving in similar ways, that they weren’t just lined up against a wall and silently laughing at my gyrations. You can’t be too careful, right?

But they weren’t. My lashy perspective revealed that they, too, were swinging their arms and swiveling their hips and moving their shoulders from side to side. And their eyes were shut, so they had me beat in that regard—not that it’s a competition.

I’ve been engaging with my spiritual self in a more focused way recently. I see it as a writerly practice—going inward to find both my inspiration and my discipline. Both are necessary to be a serious writer. Inspiration is no good if it never sits down; discipline does little without an occasional shove from the spirit.

Today I’ll go to church, and it will provide another chance for me to drill down into my core. No matter what my minister says—and she always says valuable things—the point is my taking the time to sit still and think about my spirit. Often I adopt an affirmation for the week—words that will take me instantly inward without a lot of preamble.

I don’t think it’s necessary to be religious to be a good writer. No one I know really thinks of me as religious, and my church—a Christian denomination, but one that encourages a personal approach and has no central shared theology—is looked at askance by many in my Bible belt city. Instead of church, I’m advocating a habit of mind—of deep exploration that doesn’t ignore the spirit, and that consults the center.

Writing is partly about good habits, i.e., going to the writing place (desk, chair, bed, floor) and, you know, writing—setting down some words. It is partly about the intellect, too—about thinking things up (and through) and being clever. I think the best writing transports the reader, though; a reader can feel connection sometimes not because the writer is a genius, but because you’re both tapping into something universal—the collective unconscious, the monomyth, the Godmind, or what have you. You don’t get to that place accidentally; you have to cultivate an awareness somehow. You can probably get there by reading Walt Whitman or by listening to jazz flute. Whatever works, right?

And that’s why I tried the chakra class, and it’s what had me spinning and waving my hula arms and doing a few seconds of the Twist—in the blissful and experiment-friendly dark, glimpsed, if glimpsed at all, through a forgiving veil of lashes.

Try new things in life and maybe you’ll try new things on the page. It’s not a bad plan—not a bad way to move through the world.