Dear friends ~ September, the month that rounds out summer's dreamy days, the ones in which Mary Oliver strolls though the fields, idle and blessed, falls down into the grass and gazes at the grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand. The days that carry enormous questions on their sun-kissed shoulders. "...what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
I wanted to write about all that: imagination and cosmos, consciousness and love, gift and gratitude and joy, all that one contemplates as summer fades on the horizon and the sun sets magenta behind the purple clouds.
But what kept coming up was not the bittersweet glory of sunset but the fierce territory of forgiveness. Perhaps this is because the human community I'm part of is facing something of an existential crisis, a rough initiation, stumbling together toward the inevitable consequence of living shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart. We are confronted not with the glowing questions of Oliver's one wild and precious life, but with the frightening invitations in these lines from David Whyte's poem, "Sometimes":
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing like the ones
in the old stories...
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests...
...Requests to stop what
you are doing right now
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life....
~ David Whyte, lines from "Sometimes" in EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
There is a longing for forgiveness, a crying out for it, that can arise among open-hearted people who find themselves cast into the pain of being human with other humans. But forgiveness is not a moral obligation, nor is it a virtue, Christian or otherwise. It is not something you can simply choose to do or be. Forgiveness is an unfolding, a grace, that arrives out of the immense storm, the harsh kneading of transformation. It is the healing that becomes possible after you have wrestled to the blood and bone with the questions of Whyte's poem...and been defeated by them. The lyric poet Rilke has a vision of this:
...The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age...
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.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us...
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows:
by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly from "The Man Watching" in SELECTED POEMS OF RAINER MARIA RILKE
Perhaps I am offering you the cosmic and the enormous after all. Here in Rilke's poem is the immense storm, the Angel, the extraordinary and the eternal, by whom we are defeated, unmade, and made again.
After the storm, the unmaking, there is a hush in which something breaks open. Khaled Hosseini's difficult and luminous novel The Kite Runner is an excruciating tale of friendship, betrayal, and long-struggled-for redemption amid the violent and troubling time of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It is the story of the immense storm and the long fight with the Angel. In the end Hosseini writes:
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
Forgiveness. After the harsh hand, the kneading, the changing of the very shape of things. A fierce grace, and a healing.
So, friends, settle down before the magenta sunset of summer's fading and listen to the soul criers sing for you of forgiveness, of cosmos and imagination, consciousness and love...and gift, grace and joy. ~ Lindsay
Entering into silence is like stepping into cool clear water. The dust and debris are quietly washed away, and we are purified of our triviality. This cleansing takes place whether we are conscious of it or not: the very choice of silence, of desiring to be still, washes away the day's grime.