Author Archives: Garnet David

Learning to Let

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Learning is doing and letting. When we face fear, we learn. To learn we must let. We learn that to let we must trust. To trust we must believe. And so it goes, until we get to experience. When we experience, we find change; it begins to carry more weight. We can see things and admit they are absolutely new.

Sure, there are patterns, familiar repetitions, like spirals and swirls and hatcheted hounds-tooth patterns hovering over the surface of our experience. What I mean here is the raw, visceral newness of the moment, like opening a new box of Cheerios, or like watching a candle burn. Our contribution is our trust in letting it be perpetually new. It’s not necessarily pretty, but it’s magnetic in its truth.

Accepting and opening to everything can be daunting, terrifying even. But it can happen. It must happen to really live. And it needs to be acknowledged and practiced consciously.

Art and Life: Living Fully

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Many personal growth sites on the Internet offer lots of advice on how to live better, be richer, be more successful. But few suggest habits and attitudes which enhance the personal, subjective quality of living, the sweetness of moment to moment existence.

For that I suggest taking time from a life of achieving great things to enjoying great things. Listen to arias from the best operas to learn how beautiful tragedy, love and death can sound.

I remember Tom Hanks’ character from the movie Philadelphia playing a recording of Maria Callas singing “La Mama Morta” from Andrea Chenier’s “Giordano”.

This is how the aria is described in the movie. “This is my favorite aria. This is Maria Callas. This is “Andrea Chenier”, Umberto Giordano. This is Madeleine. She’s saying how during the French Revolution, a mob set fire to her house, and her mother died… saving her. “Look, the place that cradled me is burning.” Can you hear the heartache in her voice? Can you feel it, Joe? In come the strings, and it changes everything. The music fills with a hope, and that’ll change again. Listen… listen…”I bring sorrow to those who love me.” Oh, that single cello! “It was during this sorrow that love came to me.” A voice filled with harmony. It says, “Live still, I am life. Heaven is in your eyes. Is everything around you just the blood and mud? I am divine. I am oblivion. I am the god… that comes down from the heavens, and makes of the Earth a heaven. I am love!… I am love.”

I cried along with everyone else in the theater when I saw this scene. I had not heard of the aria before. That scene made the movie, which was otherwise just a good movie about the politics of AIDS.

I like crying at movies, operas, plays. I feel cleansed. No self-help advice can do that for me.

Art is not entertainment, as many people mistakenly think. It’s meant to challenge our comfort zone, push us where we don’t normally go. Life is not just a problem to be solved. It is a lesson to be experienced, never completely learned.

Take time to learn from art, music and poetry. Art goes beyond just living well. It shows us how to live richly and fully.

Leaving in Parts

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I feel like I’m leaving in parts; As I age, holes appear; wrinkles carve their canyons in my skin; eyes strain to sense details; mind clouds; cells struggle to replace themselves. Can I learn to see beyond the holes to something gained rather than lost? Does spirit automatically fill the emptiness?

There is a strange comfort in these holes, the loss of limbs, cells, parts. The stars still shine through them. And after all, “stardust” is what we are.

At the same time, there is an urgency to the fact that we will never know, cannot ever know what we really are. Spirituality is our attempt to create meaning out of that mystery.

If we see our lives as gardens, why then, do we clean and plant the garden when we know it will grow thick with weeds soon after? Or to use another metaphor, why do we clean our rooms when we know they will soon become messy with the entropy of living?

Can the true meaning of, or metaphor of, the garden be that it is something beyond, or further inside us, part of us still, either way?

Can gardening speak of a cure for the insanities of the world, murder, torture, war, famine, and the political and social webs which create and imprison beauty and freedom?

In the reflection of the puddle I see my tortured face, my stony frailty, monstrous melting glacier, shuddering scrawniness, dialed-in stupidity, creaturely, Gollemy.

Can the garden cure all that?

Yes. Out of the dirt I create myself, muddy, filthy, and beautiful. There will be no other like me or this moment.

No matter how down or weak you feel, cherish that uniqueness, all parts of it.

Meet me just beyond the garden gate, nowhere else.

Buoys

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Bobbing freely
above the drowning,
briny sea,
they move with
the breeze yet
remain tethered
to solid ground beneath
darkly mysterious
still waters.
I look into those eyes,
such deeply rooted guides
which flow with every mood
yet never become lost
by my winding path.

Seasonal Poems to Warm the Soul

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Happy Winter Solstice! I may not be religious in the traditional sense, but I understand and cherish the importance of the “spirit of the season”.

As many of you know, Jesus wasn’t born in December, but his birthday was placed near the pagan Roman holiday of Saturnalia by Constantine to encourage pagans to join the church. The celebration of light and rebirth appeals to all.

Over the years I’ve written various poems for the season. Some are just ruminations on the mood, some are about the solstice, but all, I think convey universal sentiments. I’ve linked to some and printed others in a list here. Enjoy.

Poem, with photo of yellows roses in snow
—
Rhythms of the Seasons
—
Noël
—
Sacrificial Tree (two poems)
—
Jingle Ironies
—
A Simple Gift
—

Inspire Beauty

Beauty calls and yearns for your attention,
it gives rise and dimension to your soul,
a reflection of your truest goals.

Lest we forget, our hearts are fueled
by a love enduring beyond our lives.
And beauty is its chaperon,
a spark through the dark nights
on the long walk
to the light of the mountain top.

All we have is each other.

May the comfort of love be with you.