With that moon language

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language,

What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

 

Illustration is my own, and is available at Society6 and Redbubble. Link in menu . Please do not use without permission.

 

 

 

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‘let life take it’s course.’

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”

 

I have sons and stepsons- five young adults – and I am vexed about the same concerns for all of them.  How can I help them to live well in the world?  And every time I ask myself this question I come to the conclusion that I can’t. I am still struggling with the question myself as we all do.  I know in the rational part of my mind that each individual must ask their own questions, find their own path to some sort of equilibrium.  That said, there is the other part of me, the spark of optimistic longing that wants to share that wealth of experience from authors and artists that have resonated with me, moved me, performed some magical alchemy that has allowed me to feel some sort of transcendent moment which makes life worthwhile, meaningful, exciting. It’s also why I write a blog, a catharsis of sharing what I have found valuable to my living. A howl into the wilderness to connect with other lives, belong to a tribe where I am accepted, nourished, nurtured.

Thus I come to the nub of today’s post – the illuminating writing from Rainer Maria Rilke in ‘Letters to a young poet’.  The words of that hopeful young man  preface the Penguin Little Black Classics version, as an older version of himself  speak for themselves.

‘And where a great and unique person speaks, the rest of us should be silent’

-Franz Xaver Kappus , Berlin , 1929.

I will choose some of the text of the letters and share it here, but recommend the book to be read in its entirety,

On being asked to give criticism to the poets verses, Rilke writes to him ;

‘You ask whether your verses are good.  You ask me that. You have asked others, before, You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry…let me ask you to give up all that.  You are looking to  the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now.  Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.’

‘…read as little as possible in the way of aesthetics and criticism (of works of art) – it will either be partisan views, fossilized..or neat wordplay, where one opinion will triumph one day and the opposite the next. Works of art are infinitely solitary…. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. – With regard to any such disquisition, review or introduction, trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights.  Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must  be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered. ‘

Rilke doesn’t just advise the young man about art – it is fuller than that – but expresses his views on sexuality too – ideas about how to take deep pleasure in mature love, acknowledging that man often gets it wrong when  ‘he loves only as  a man, not as a human being’. If I could just take that line and impress it on my progeny, that would be enough.

More to follow!!

 

 

 

That freedom

 

With That Moon Language

 

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

 

 

-Hafiz

Barely there

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

Images  Anne Corr

Message from the heart

If our species could just try to hold this thought in the forefront of the mind, wouldn’t we be looking on at a different world?  We have such a marvellous potential from the start.

Be kind to one another.  Even when its tough. Love is the remarkable ineffable force that enables us to continue to hope .  When we love well,  the world changes.

Practice – its all it takes. Iris Murdoch once encapsulated the imperative of what love is-

‘Love is the difficult realization that something other than ourselves is real’

Which by extension involves examining our own reactions and behaviours and reflecting on whether we are loving enough. It’s that giant leap when you are in the middle of feeling justified in your own feelings, and suddenly you stop to think ‘How would I feel if someone said/did that to me? ‘

How to bear solitude – how and when to love.

 

 

How often has Rilke been quoted?  Letters to a young poet was written over a century ago when the poet was responding to a young soldier who had read his poetry and was having doubts about his chosen military career. The first letter was written in 1903 as a response to the young soldiers request to critique his own poems. Rilke refused that request but continued a correspondence which fortunately the young would-be poet had the presence of mind to keep.  The letters will continue to challenge, inspire and bring solace to anyone who chooses to dive in. Dive deep, float and re emerge refreshed and reinvigorated.  

I want to recommend these lines to my two young men sons, as they begin their individual journeys into adult life.  Somehow a recommendation from their mother doesn’t always get the reaction I most want, so sometimes I wait, I hold, there may be occasion when I need to draw upon this well of sagacity.

 

 

….And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”

 

One more thing I would say to my lovely boys, which appears in the story Rilke proposed the young soldier read, ‘Mogens’ by Jens Peter Jacobsen, 

“you know in the darkness things often seem larger than they are.”

A trio of treasures from Lao Tzu to you.

 

 

 

 

I have three treasures. Guard and keep them
The first is deep love,
The second is frugality,
And the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world.
Because of deep love, one is courageous.
Because of frugality, one is generous.
Because of not daring to be ahead of the world, one becomes the leader of the world.

Lao Tzu

I have no ambition whatsoever to be leader of anything, but apart from that remove, Lao Tzu speaks for me.  Deep love.  Whenever I feel disconnected  from the love I feel for my family for whatever reason, I sink into despair.  The pit is dark and deep, and I have fallen in many times in the past, and know I will be visiting it again before my brief sojourn on this earth is at its end.  I hold on to very little, possibly because I have had breakdowns in the past which lead to new perspectives that can benefit .  It is good to travel light but sometimes I feel so weightless that I defy gravity. Well almost. It is hard to come back to the world inhabited before a breakdown and  feel at home.  Everywhere is strange and everywhere you feel a stranger. I imagine myself as The Little Prince and suddenly the day is more inhabitable.

I feel certain that we all share the human experience of feeling inadequate sometimes,  and the times for me that are the most challenging are when I don’t feel the love I know I have.  I have to remind myself about the reality of that love, that I can return to it and it is not removed forever. In the past I have confused this with not feeling loved by others, but as I get older I know my deepest challenge is when I am not loving enough to the people in my life who deserve it.  No one said it would be easy now , did they? If they did, they were deluded, or simply lying.

Frugality comes much easier to me.  I find it relatively comfortable to live modestly.  I have never liked conspicuous consumption, finding it more akin to bragging than anything else.  Good job as needs must, and we are relatively stretched as a single income family, having both had divorces to deal with and five children between us.  Perhaps I would feel differently were we to win the lottery.  Except I don’t waste my money on lotteries.  I don’t waste money. I want to be more self sufficient than we are, living the Good Life that Felicity Kendal advertised in the 1970’s.  The good life. Somehow it feels closer the less one owns. That’s one of the paradoxes I can live with.

And the final words, not desiring to be ahead of the world  – now that I can identify with.  I don’t need to feel the admiration of the modern world, I barely recognise most of what the modern world views as reasonable.  I stay content in a little corner of it, mainly out of plain sight.

 

Good cheer,

 

 

 

 

It’s all there is

It’s all there is.

‘My love is my weight:wherever I go my love is what brings me there’ St Augustine.
Wise words on Love, what are you giving your effort , attention and love to today?

Lost

 

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,—and would that night were here!
But ah!—to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again!—with twilight near!

Love has gone and left me and I don’t know what to do;
This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin I leave before I’m through,—
There’s little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me,—and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There’s this little street and this little house.

-Edna St Millay