An Argument Against Moderation in All Things
March 1, 2013
A dream of trees
A Dream of Trees
by Mary Oliver
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.
There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.
I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?
It takes a poet to find the glimmer of meaning in suffering and pain — that is life after all. I yearn to go on retreat and dream of its promise of peace, but perhaps to stay engaged will yield the more worthy rewards.
Victory in Defeat
by Edwin Markham
Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out.
When the great oak is straining in the wind,
The boughs drink in new beauty, and the trunk
Sends down a deeper root on the windward side.
Only the soul that knows the mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come
To stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.
“Poets must have a way of life as businessmen, teachers, scientists, publishers — something of a nature that keeps them in mortal danger of their lives and their self-respect. Something which demands sacrifice from them of time, energy, thought, creativity, from which they go with a feeling of relief and accomplishment when they succeed and which permits them to write poetry then. This poetry will be rooted in their lives and be authentic, even if despairing and hard and bitter because of the demands of their lives and the subsequent disillusions.
There is nothing any man should fear more than to escape for too long a time from his life. He will then have no way of returning to it and will be as lost as though he had lost his life, for in living and meeting the problems, unbalances and unfairness in life we find a meaning.”
— from The Notebooks of David Ignatow, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
March 1, 2013 at 6:10 am
Who ever made music of a mild day? reminds me of Wendell Berry’s wonderful poem:
The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
March 1, 2013 at 6:50 am
Too much moderation is immoderate. I wonder at the idea that creating a nesting space, like in the first poem, is also seen as the numbing and the dumbing down of settling for less, for pretending it is enough, using the word content, for a death. I am not one to follow the idea of pain and angst as the markers of the creator. I notice that perhaps there aren’t as many expressions that can contain the idea of grounded that can come from a grounded place. The ideas of it are rather consistent and insistent, and I can get frustrated when within it at not finding a way to explain it, one that means exactly what it is. I don’t find that suffering though, nor pain, just a continuing communication jam. See, even the word jam, connotes a negative or a bad state, rather than the beauty of a thought not having a direct way forth.
I can notice, as I wish to ask for you to share how your selections today apply to your own choices and thinking, that once one meets needs and gets to self actualization there are less rules and perhaps less urgent drive of feeling, a slipping into a calm complacent state. (sudden stop in thought warning!)
March 1, 2013 at 5:37 pm
It’s so interesting how words trigger different associations. Right now I’m thinking of the difference between refuge and retreat. A nesting space could be both.
The older I get, the more I see that things are not always black and white, but that the positives contain a bit of the dark, and the negatives may have their own valuable aspects, too.
March 1, 2013 at 1:09 pm
I really was transformed by your post today. I have become fascinated to your daily thoughts. They provoke me to think about something outside my self-consciousness ramblings. I am an existentialist–I revel in whatever is happening at this moment. There is no moderation–there is only be here now. The heart knows no moderation. Annie Dillon says this about living life and seeing it with both eyes.
“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
― Annie Dillard
“Now here is my secret, very simply: you can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince