Accompaniment to the March 12, 2023 live session from the Three Sundays series, Clear Mind Wild Heart.
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination. - John Keats, from his letter to Benjamin Bailey
We tend to think of wildness as being something beyond the frontier of a normal human life, out there ‘in nature’ – in the African bush, in the mountains of Alaska, or across the broad oceans, but all of us who have had times of great joy or untrammeled grief have felt a kind of wildness of the heart in those moments. A sense that the edges of our sense of self are fraying and falling away into something to begin with unrecognizable, with its own rules and compelling nature far beyond our everyday comprehension. Absolute joy and absolute grief are states that almost always result from powerful states of compelling attention: a birth, a long-anticipated reunion, or the bereft, desolate state of losing a loved one. But a more sustained sense of the wilder edge of things in the everyday, outside of these subversive and compelling moments thrust upon us against our will, comes from the willingness and the practiced ability to give deep attention to people and things other than ourselves. We don’t realize how wild almost every form of reality is, including standing at a bus stop, or sitting in a quiet kitchen, until we pay real sustained attention and enter the deeper states of silence that result from that attention.
To have a clear mind that is paying attention in a spacious, appreciative silence and out of that, a wild heart that is moved by the world, and by being moved, is moving to the music of life – might be one of the great triumphs of human existence. It is a form of edge existence where a person is intuited to be living at some frontier, artistic or psychological – that brings the bounty of joy, generosity and even a form of good fortune or constantly arriving ‘luck’.
We often wish for these edge qualities in our lives when we recognize a certain form of quiet, joyous wildness in the life of another. Those who seem to have an ability for a deep form of happiness, presence and joy, are most often those able to listen to the music of life while paying deep attention to what is. When we get far from what is, we start to immobilize ourselves, our lives and our actions and we lose the ability not only to hear the music but the motivation to dance. We move not to edges beyond ourselves but draw the edges in to a safe psychological proximity where we stop ‘going out’. We draw in the edges of the spectrum of experience because we do not want to feel pain, but in refusing our pain we retract the other end of the spectrum of joy in a kind of symmetry and end up in a bland middle which feels nothing of either true grief, or true joy. For the full experience, we have to open up the surface area – ‘The full length of the vulnerable body exposed to the golden wind’.
All of us are halfway to saying goodbye and halfway to saying hello to everything all at the same time. Only one half of existence is ever on the up and up and growing while the other half has already gone through the full incarnation of effulgence and fullness and is now fading away. Coming to ground in reality is to realize we are just as alive when we're saying goodbye or in complete darkness as we are when we're in the lighted hours of the day, on the upswing, or accomplishing things in our lives.
There are times in life where we're radiant and beautiful, our leaves are green, there are blossoms on our branches and everyone is admiring us and our contribution to life and there are times in life where we feel like a ghost and people just cannot see us or recognize our talents – our leaves have gone. There are three days and nights in every cycle of the lunar month where there is no moon at all. This disappearance is not only a doorway to the next dispensation of our lives – where our leaves will grow again in the new spring, but disappearance – where we cannot recognize or name ourselves, is life itself, in and of itself. If we refuse to be there in the dissolutions, giving aways and disappearances of our lives, we are only present half the time. The deeper invitation behind Yunmen’s koan is ‘Will you be present to the whole cycle of existence?’
Almost always, when we're in the throes of real transformation, there is a simultaneous sense of close intimacy and distance – the intimacy is with our own vulnerability, the distance is felt both from the world but also from this new body that we are now starting to incarnate. Part of the wildness of the experience is that we always meet the new ‘us’ in the form of a stranger and almost always turn away from that stranger to begin with. The intuition is that we somehow need to die to ourselves, to get out of our own way – that we have to become much simpler than we are. Moments of extreme revelation are almost always preceded by a sense, not of pulling together and focus, but of undoing – of the frontiers of our bodily experience opening and vaster territories both inside and outside of us suddenly gaping before us. The sense of precipice that we get in our lives whenever we truly arrive at a heartfelt sense of things – when we are coming to ground at a foundational center in ourselves, occurs because that foundational center makes anything that's not essential in our peripheral lives fall away. In apprenticing to this destabilizing experience of ‘wildness’, it becomes easier to say no to everything that is not a real, courageous and heartfelt yes.
It is my recurring experience that there is central faculty inside each of us that can understand its place amid the constellation of forces around us at any time – and in fact, not only understands them, but is equal to them, even if the elemental constellation of those forces includes grief, loss and difficulty. This is the ‘conversational nature of reality’ – the experience of a far horizon inside us that is holding a conversation with a far horizon outside of us. Like the sight of geese migrating – there is a sense when a human being is looking at those outer, flying, symmetrical representations of what lies inside us, that there's a part of the world inside us that knows exactly when to go – that is clued into all of the indications, invitations and particularities of the thresholds of time, or seasons in which it's dwelling. Part of the great discipline of existence is clearing space between this far and rested foundational horizon inside us and all the gorgeous horizons of the world outside.
We tend to think that we need a clear mind in order to employ the heart – the faculty of belonging we feel at the center of us. We think that we need to have a clear understanding of it all, but we actually get to that clear mind by a deep, foundational, heartfelt way of being that allows us to be found by the world. Being found, rather than willfully trying to find and name everything around us allows us a deep sense of rest. This foundational sense of rest ushers us into a kind of silence in which we experience a clear mind. ‘All’ we have to do is rest deeply into the body that we've been given and then pay tremendous attention from that place – a task that is deeply entrained in the Zen tradition. It is interesting just to take a moment to drop down and try to locate and feel wherever that deepest sense of feeling is in us. It has always been imaginatively and traditionally the heart, but it's also felt internally as a horizon, often a troubled one deep below the level of the chest. Will you take the time to practice dropping down to that heartfelt horizon and then looking out from that place with a clear mind?
No matter how we try to create a space that's entirely our own, it seems we are also always in the process of being distracted, interrupted or visited, but once we create that space, we also get another, proper kind of visitation. As soon as we create a real ‘Temenos’, or sacred space of silence inside us, it becomes an invitation for a real visitation from the world – for the world to find us and give us its blessing. For someone who loves gardening, when they have their hands in the soil, everything in the world makes sense. There is a sense of spaciousness and rightness about who they are and what they are about. When we clear space for silence, all of a sudden, there's something and somebody else knocking at our door. When we make space for silence, that sense of tending and nurturing, of turning over the soil inside us and coming to ground brings us to life. From that place we realize how we are an invitation to everything and everybody. There is a sense of rightness inside us, a strange kind of wildness that comes from a deep dwelling in the body that's paying attention to things other than itself. It is listening to the music of life. What a different experience we have when we stop doing other things, turn the lights off, lie on the couch and just listen completely to a piece of music. We begin to understand what's happening to our body when we are in that listening and perhaps, in one way or another, begin to dance.
Are you willing to pay attention and come to ground, to simplify yourself and live fully with things just as they are? Are you willing to stop trying to create this other reality where you are never going to die, where you will never have to suffer, where you will never be disappointed or have your heart broken?
My next Three Sundays Series, Poetry: Our Intimate Horizon: The Everyday Art of Reading, Writing and Speaking Poetry begins May 14th. To find out more, visit Three Sundays Series.
IT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO LIVE ALONE It happens to those who live alone that they feel sure of visitors when no one else is there, until the one day and one particular hour working in the quiet garden, when they realize at once, that all along they have been an invitation to everything and every kind of trouble and that life happens by to those who inhabit silence like the bees visiting the tall mallow on their legs of gold, or the wasps going from door to door in the tall forests of the daisies. I have my freedom today because nothing really happened and nobody came to see me. Only the slow growing of the garden in the summer heat and the silence of that unborn life making itself known at my desk, my hands still dark with the crumbling soil as I write and watch the first lines of a new poem like flowers of scarlet fire, coming to fullness in a clear light. from River Flow: New & Selected Poems