As a youth, I was fortunate to have some special friends more than twice my age. When I was 30, my friend Helen Cornelius, in her late 60s, lamented to me, “I’ve spent my whole life learning what to do next time.” I don’t think she meant to be droll, let alone suspected how those simple words would leave their mark.
Life is constant learning. We must try to catch up to what prior generations have already learned, and meanwhile the sum of new knowledge keeps growing exponentially. Eventually we realize that we’ll never comprehend more than a fraction of what there is to know, and that’s just knowledge of the exterior world. Inwardly we stumble along a rocky, uncertain path just like my friend Helen.
We must each find our own way. Every life is a uniquely personal experience that cannot be objectively defined nor taught. Thankfully, we share the gifts of art, music, and poetry to help guide and inspire us.
Poetry has enriched my life immeasurably. In fact, poems literally introduced me to the love of my life. So here I wish to share a collage I created from favorite poems that have served me as wise teachers. I’ve cut and pasted snippets of the poems to form an interior conversation between two facets of the self, the learner and the compassionate teacher. If you would like to read the original source poems, the internet link at the end of this column will direct you to them.
A poetry collage
When I was young and easy, time let me play and be golden in the mercy of his means. In the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways, and nothing I cared that time allows so few and such morning songs before the children green and golden follow him out of grace.
There is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break. The world can take; the soul restores. A million wrong voices proclaim. From nothing you become sad, from nothing you become happy.
What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.
What terrifies you must be beautiful. If you embrace these assaults, if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!” then you’ll be free.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in. Let the young rain of tears come. Let the calm hands of grief come. It’s not all as evil as you think.
Oh, but sometimes I forget what companionship is. Unconscious and insane I spill sad energy everywhere!
For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. I forgive you for feeling awkward and nervous without reason, worried that you have, perhaps, no moral center at all. I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you for growing a capacity for love that is great but matched only, perhaps, by your loneliness.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that person in our body.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises.
Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.
Dead my old fine hopes and dry my dreaming, but still … iris, blue each spring!
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