Into Wild Poetry

The weight of inspiration

lies heavy upon me

on this Monday morning.

Commuters on the train, we sit,

iPhones, Androids, Kindles in hand,

along with a lone newspaper reader, a single guidebook peruser,

three who journey apparently disengaged,

(or more engaged)

-  and your poetry strikes me,

sweeps me away.

I have not had my coffee.

It is too much,

it is too beautiful; 

my soul

is not prepared

for the sparks that fly

for the hope that springs;

my mind, 

lulled heavy by late nights and early mornings

wants to sit quiet

in its shell

- nothing expected,

expecting nothing.

I pause to reflect.

A tiny, burnt orange spider,

two millimetres in diameter,

weaves swift, tortured, repeated circles

across my clean white page;

endlessly, persistently seeking a way out.

I watch him till he finds 

the end of infinity,

slips over onto, into, a forest of a hundred paper edges

holding poems between them;

journeys into the unknown.

We are both learning this dance,

weaving our steps

from familiar circles

into wild poetry

today.

The Stories We Tell

"It is not what happens to us that has shaped us, it is the stories we tell about what happens to us that have shaped us."

So said poet Joel McKerrow this morning, to around 20 of us gathered in the old community house in West End, the house that has heard so many of our stories, so many of others' stories, over the years.

How right he was.  The same truth has been stated many times in different ways by many different people:  what we believe about our lives creates our reality.   For the past does not in fact exist, only our memories of it - individual and collective.  I have a friend who is naturally an optimist, her sister a pessimist.  She says she had a wonderful childhood; her sister claims to have had a terrible childhood, yet they grew up in the same family, in more or less the same situation.  The stories they tell themselves are all they have of their childhood, and both are, in a sense, right - the only childhood they have had is the childhood that exists in their memories, whether wonderful or terrible.  Memory, said a friend this morning, is a creative event. We recreate the past, and every time we do so, we get further from what actually happened.  This is hard-wired into us - the telling of stories, the recreation of the past - it is what we live by.

I have a chance to reflect on this every time people ask me about a significant broken relationship in my past,  which they still do, now and again.  But what happened?  they enquire - curiously, caringly, and every shade in between.   What did happen?  I ask myself.  Which version of the story shall I tell today?   Was it emotional immaturity?  Was it independence?  Was it lack of commitment?  Was it inability to understand?  Was it that we were not right for each other?  Was it that we did not love well enough?  Was it that it was not meant to be?  Was it the best thing?   Was it was it was it?  It was all of these, it was none of these, it was a thousand other things, it was none of them.

Can I choose the story that I tell?  Do the more positive stories (It wasn't the right thing, at the right time) comfort me, or leave me unable to change?  Do the negative stories (It would have worked, if only...) challenge me to change, or leave me depressed and regretful?

I come back to the words of Brother Roger of Taize.   Why dwell on what hurts, both in ourselves and others?  Yes, why indeed?  If memory is always a creative event, why not choose, why not create, the best version of a story to live by?

I'm still working out how to do this.

Dreams and Reality

I wake before 4:00am from a vivid dream, in which I walk with a friend, invite her back to lunch, introduce her to my warm and delightful mother, realise I’ve forgotten to pick up some bread, begin to drive to do so, and find I am back in the suburb where I spent my late primary and then high school years.  We cannot find a bread shop any closer than the city, but end up in some industrial complex.  I am frustrated but as we are walking toward what we think is a bakery we see an older woman fall over; her son kneels down to help her, we rush to provide support.  The dream turns; instead of the woman being checked in for observations it is me who is in some kind of mental health centre; I must lie there for two weeks, I am fed apple pie.  When it comes time to be picked up it is my father who comes to collect me, and I wake with a sense of being protected, a sense that all is right with the world because my dad is looking out for me; I am safe.

I want to slide back into the dream but I pick up laptop and write about it; who knows if it will still be there when I wake again.

There are books that interpret your dreams for you; with pearls of wisdom such as:  You dreamt of coffee?  That means your best friend is jealous of you.  Along with Carl Jung, I believe there are some archetypal symbols in dreams, but I do not think that there is one interpretation that can be provided by a dream book.  The best interpreter of the dream is the dreamer.   What does coffee mean for you?  What associations do you have with it now, as it appeared to you in the dream?  Some years ago I was fortunate enough to do a dreams course with a wonderful Brisbane-based Catholic spiritual director, Patrick Oliver.  Over four Saturdays we were taught, and discussed, the role of dreams in the Bible, the way God would speak to people through them, and how to understand our own dreams.  We shared dreams with each other, we listened to their meaning for each other.  The stance was one of openness, of willingness to hear what God might be saying to us through them.  People say you dream of random things that happen in your life - but why, asked Patrick, does the dream choose that particular event from the thousands of thoughts and actions that you take every day?   The details in the dream are often slightly different from reality.  Why?  How is that difference significant for you?  In small groups we were taught how to ask each other questions to help each other listen.   

I believe that we can manage well enough without reflecting on dreams.  But if we stop and listen, we may just discover a window into our lives that we didn't know was there; we may find we can say with Jacob, when he awoke from his sleep and from his dream:  "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it." (Genesis 28:16)