The Poetry of Affirmation
UU Santa Monica
August 3, 2014

Good morning. This morning's topic is "Poetry of Affirmation."  We'll be presenting poems that talk about making conscious and positive choices, about turning difficulty into opportunity, and about celebrating the joy of life.

I want to start by telling you a story. You may have noticed that I have a new hummingbird tattoo on my shoulder. Ten years ago, when Norb and I got engaged, we'd been living together for 13 years. Although I was committed to our relationship I didn't feel the need to get married. We had close friends, a married couple, who liked to tease me about this and we were hiking with them one weekend in the Tomales Bay area near Point Reyes. We started talking about tattoos, and my friend T asked if I had ever considered getting one. I said I had thought about it and had some ideas but nothing definite. Then she asked if Norb would consider the idea. I said no, that he wouldn't do such a thing and that he wouldn't even get his ear pierced. T's husband David immediately said, "What if he got his ear pierced, then would you get married?"

Half joking, I said yes. Actually, I think my exact response was, "Sure."

Now, at this point, my memory of the story varies from what the others say happened. They insist I promised to get a tattoo; I think I may have said I would think about it. At any rate, Norb did get his ear pierced, the day before we got married in a ceremony on Heart's Desire beach, where we'd been hiking that day. Our friends David and T were there, and a lot of our other friends, most of whom were members of the small UU church we attended in Petaluma. Also present were Norb's sister Kathy, her husband Mike and their daughter, Robin, who have become my second family.

Often when I have important decisions to make, I consult the I Ching, or Book of Changes. It's an ancient Chinese text which has been used for centuries as a guide for spiritual practice and divination. Questions are asked by tossing coins or sticks to form a pattern of six solid or broken lines, called hexagrams.  Each of these patterns has a specific meaning, the interpretation of which creates, in the words of translator Richard Wilhelm, an “intimate interplay between image and concept.” This description also reminds me of the way poetry works. The lines that form the hexagrams can be changing or static. If there are changing lines, then the answer is in two parts; the first representing the present influences and the second showing what is to come. If there are no changing lines, there is only one answer. When I asked about getting married the response was an unequivocal yes, the hexagram called "Nourishing".

This year, for a variety of reasons, it finally seemed like the time to get the tattoo, in honor of our tenth anniversary. (I don't like to rush into things!) When I was trying to decide on a design for the tattoo I again consulted the I Ching. I knew I wanted a bird, and, like the hexagrams, the different birds I was considering have different meanings to me. The answer I got spoke of joy and simplicity, of living in the present, and so I chose the hummingbird. I liked the idea of having a daily reminder to let go of worry and embrace life's joy and spontaneity. 

We can all tend to make things more difficult and complex than they need to be. We set up obstacles for ourselves. The first poem I've chosen talks about this; it's by Alison Luterman, and the title is "Because Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle"

Try to love everything that gets in your way;

The Chinese women in flowered bathing caps

murmuring together in Mandarin and doing leg exercises in your lane

while you execute thirty-six furious laps, one for every item on your to-do list.


The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water

like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side and

whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.


Teachers all. Learn to be small

and swim past obstacles like a minnow,

without grudges or memory. Dart

toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking, Obstacle,

is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl

lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:

Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,

in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.


Be glad she’ll have that to look at the rest of her life, and

keep going. Swim by an uncle

in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew

how to hold his breath underwater,

even though kids aren’t supposed

to be in the pool at this hour. Someday,

years from now, this boy

who is kicking and flailing in the exact place

you want to touch and turn
may be a young man at a wedding on a boat,

raising his champagne glass in a toast

when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.


He’ll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,

but he’ll come up like a cork,

alive. So your moment

of impatience must bow in service to the larger story,

because if something is in your way, it is

going your way, the way

of all beings: toward darkness, toward light.

We make choices constantly, trying to do the right thing, trying to know what the answer is. Time moves forward and our lives seem to be the sum of the choices we've made. We are defined both by what we want and by what we don't want, what we've chosen and what we've rejected.

Sometimes, it can be helpful to set aside our ideas of the way things are supposed to be, and try to participate in life the way it is at that moment, with all its confusion, beauty, contradiction and difficulty.

I first learned about the I Ching when I was studying music, because the composer John Cage made use of it in writing his "chance" pieces, where sounds are determined by random procedures. The idea is to remove the element of choice to create a piece that represents the unique combination of forces at work at that particular point in time. Cage wanted to eliminate his personal preference for certain sounds, and so he began deliberately using timbres he had previously avoided. I was thinking about this because later this morning you'll hear a poem with a reference to Beethoven, who was one of the composers Cage disliked. Instead of seeing this as an obstacle, Cage re-examined his own attitude, with the result that he came to find the sonorities of Beethoven's music surprising and interesting.

Cultivating an attitude of affirmation can make a profound difference in everyday life. I'd like to read you an excerpt from a beautiful article my best friend sent me. It's from a magazine called "Brevity", and it's titled "An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work".  The author is A. Papatya Bucak , who teaches writing at Florida Atlantic University. 

My work is to write this sentence and revise it into that sentence. To take this word and replace it with that word.
My work is a novel I wrote from five to seven a.m. for more than two years and that will never be published.
My work is to be the person you trust to tell the truth, even though I am a known liar.
My work is to see who you are and who I think you could become.
To notice the slate grey night lit by a full moon half behind a cloud.
To know what it is to want more from someone than they are willing to give.
To see the shadows cast by your secrets.

My work is to explain my heart even though I cannot explain my heart.
My work is to find the right word even though there is no right word.
My work is to stop everything when a student–right in front of me–writes the line,
“I think I would be a better dancer if only I had wings.”

My work is to believe in grace even though I don’t believe in God.
To realize that all of my greatest fears are things that are definitely going to come true. My father will die, my mother will die, my brother will, my niece, my nephew, me.
My work is to believe in everybody’s capacity for kindness.
My work is to believe in everybody’s capacity for cruelty.
My work is the bird of dawn, the tale of my grief, the thief of love, the city of beauties, the nest of snakes, the helping animal, the animated doll, the transformative power of love, the juice of a single grape.
My work is to imagine a world without art so that there is never a world without art.
My work is to tell you this:

Years ago I was on the subway in Manhattan, and we stopped between stations, and the staticky voice came on the speaker and said there would be a delay of twenty minutes, and cursing ripped through the car, as if a tribe of the homeless mad had just swept into our presence. But then a young woman across from me took out a small pile of paper, and she started folding red origami swans, and each time she finished one, she handed it to one of us.

My work is my origami swans.

Full text is at:
 http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/an-address-to-my-fellow-faculty/#comment-8394

I love this image, and it seemed appropriate to share it with you all this morning since I'm talking about affirmation, and birds. I enlisted some friends to help me fold some origami swans that we'll be handing out later in the service. You're welcome to take one home with you to keep, as a reminder of choosing to see things in a positive light.

The last poem I have for you is by David Whyte, called "The Journey". It's a description of a flock of birds flying across the sky, and it captures the moment as if we were looking at a painting. This reminds me again of the I Ching, where the process of casting the sticks or coins can be seen as freezing a moment in time, and examining all the influences that are acting at that unique moment. In the interpretation of the symbols, time is not viewed as a linear progression but as a more fluid entity.  In a very old part of the text the groups of three lines, or trigrams, that combine to create the hexagrams, are arranged in a sequence that reflects the four seasons and the four directions.  Describing the interweaving of these groups, the text says that “a double movement is observable: first, the usual clockwise movement, cumulative and expanding as time goes on, and determining the events that are passing; second, an opposite, backward movement, folding up and contracting as time goes on, through which the seeds of the future take form... In figurative terms, if we understand how a tree is contracted into a seed, we understand the future unfolding of the seed into a tree... As in the course of the year, so in human life we find ascending and backward moving lines of force from which the present and future can be deduced.” 

You'll see that this poem also addresses the cyclical nature of time.  

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky

Sometimes everything

has to be

inscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

small, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes

of your life.

You are not leaving

you are arriving.           

Poems presented by Judith Martin-Straw:

A Blessing
James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness  
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.  
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me  
And nuzzled my left hand.   

She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Sonnet 29
William Shakespeare                 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Poems presented by Edna Bonacich:

God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House
Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.

He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark 

that he barks every time they leave the house. 

They must switch him on on their way out. 



The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.

I close all the windows in the house 

and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast 

but I can still hear him muffled under the music, 

barking, barking, barking, 



and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra, 

his head raised confidently as if Beethoven 

had included a part for barking dog. 



When the record finally ends he is still barking, 

sitting there in the oboe section barking, 

his eyes fixed on the conductor who is 

entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful 

silence to the famous barking dog solo, 

that endless coda that first established 

Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Meditation

The text I offer for this morning's meditation is from the I Ching.  It is taken from the description of two of the hexagrams; "Obstacles" and "Meditation"

When flowing water meets with an obstacle in its path, it pauses.  It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it. These obstacles do not spring up suddenly in the way of the rushing water but are, in fact, inherent in the chosen path. Obstacles facing you now are part of the path you have taken and must be overcome before you can continue. Do not turn and run for there is nowhere worthwhile for you to go. Do not attempt to push ahead into danger. Instead, emulate the example of the water. Pause and build up your strength until the obstacle can be surmounted. To increase your strength you must rely upon others. Seek out friends, gain advice from reliable sources, and center yourself in your own divine nature. Many external obstacles are in fact internally generated.

Whether you create them in the process of dealing with internal conflict, or instinctively choose paths laden with difficulties, the struggle will take place within yourself.

In a state of meditation, your thoughts do not go beyond the present moment. Once your mind is calm, your inner stillness will bring enlightenment and help to center you. Hold your thoughts to the present and attempt an unbiased view of the situation. It is important to achieve an inner peace which will allow you to understand the great laws of the universe and act in harmony with them. The poet and philosopher Lao Tzu says: "Shut the door of desire. Blunt the sharpness. Untie the tangles. Soften the light. Become one with the dusty world."

Benediction

This is taken from an Apache blessing.
May the sun bring you new energy by day,
May the moon softly restore you by night.
May the rain wash away your worries,
May the breeze blow new strength into your being.
May you walk gently through the world
and know its beauty all the days of your life.