I’M gazing at the world while getting tipsy going drunk last night while looking at my beautiful children sleeping in their own beds dreaming of their own world. Even when I am at the state between reality and heading to my own little world, I always thought It is a battle of concept that is far removed from actuality. After all, there is only the life I am living, not two separate and opposing lives which our narrow metaphors might have me to believe. Perhaps all work is creative work. Perhaps I am to be an artist in all areas of my life. Perhaps there is poetry in all of it.
Several days ago, while riding public transportation with my children, we heard a five-year-old child shout enthusiastically, "Salamat lord, Wednesday karon!" What was I supposed to do on Wednesday? I found myself wondering. Were we to ignore it and accept it as insignificant? Are we supposed to celebrate and revere our days of rest at the expense of all other days? How has it become accepted that we should "keep our heads down" or "go through the motions" to concentrate on the menial tasks at hand in order to pursue "what we love to do" until we are released from the constraints of "what we must do"?
This is more of a digression into how reading poetry has influenced the fundamental rhythms of my life than a rambling about poetry itself, for which I am woefully underqualified. How it motivates me to make room for concepts that our metaphors are unable to adequately convey.similar to the wall clock that shows the hours, minutes, and seconds of my day. I am curious how this affects how I relate to those aspects of my reality and myself if my understanding of time makes no room for concepts and realities that transcend time.
When I was younger, I used to wonder in private if people who said they understood poetry were just making things up to look more cultured. But as I grew older and started to reflect more on myself—a common trait of brooding teenagers—I discovered that authors like Edgar Allen Poe and Henry David Thoreau drew me in. What had previously appeared to me as a strange, coded language took on a new form. It appeared that many great thinkers, perhaps feeling that traditional scholarly prose had failed them, frequently turned to poetry or adopted a more poetic sensibility in their writing. Most importantly, I believe, was that their writing had a deeper, more personal quality than, say, my history textbook. Something about this style—the rhythms, the simplicity—seemed better suited to convey ideas about things that were timeless or unspeakable.
While I wholeheartedly endorse reading more poetry, I am not exactly saying that one should. There are probably a lot of ways to start living a more poetic life, but it is not for everyone. I think that ultimately, living a poetic life gives us the ability to rediscover our love for things, that innocent perception that, by the time we become adults, the experience of growing up in this world seems to have completely subdued. Poetic life connects us to the mundane, as demonstrated by Van Gogh's connection with sunflowers and Mary Oliver's connection with a grasshopper in The Summer Day. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Denial of Death, Ernest Becker suggests that we should seek inspiration from artists to create a masterpiece in our lives. Why not take inspiration from poets, painters, musicians, and writers to develop a more meaningful relationship with the world around us? Consider pursuing an artistic career. What if she approached every day with the same deliberate and methodical movements as a painter would toward her canvas—a sacred space she would traverse? The process is what gives life to the painting; what matters is the act of painting. The painter's attraction to her canvas is the act of painting itself.
A part of me longs for more poetry in my life because of the almost puritanical attitude that has developed around what I find profound or meaningful. As if something extraordinary, pure, or otherworldly is required to be allowed into the club. Such exclusivity has the drawback of requiring me to assign the rest of my life to the "other" category, where the crossing guard at my son's school might expect me to file them because those amazing experiences do not happen every day. Being so disengaged for the majority of the day can be oppressive, unfulfilling, and draining of energy. The fatigue that many of us experience at the end of the workday is "not a natural tiredness, but a product of a day filled with wasted thought," as Philip Kapleau states in the introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen Keys. If all that occurs in a day is "dull" and "uninteresting," I wonder if we have truly lived.
It’s clear we thirst for more. Grand peak experiences, such as a picturesque viewpoint during a mountain drive, a cabin in the woods for vacation, or a stunning woman who would one day become your spouse, evoke strong emotions in us. We yearn for the sublime, for beauty, for our lives to have significance. Humans are naturally thirsty. However, I question whether we are passing up chances to find that significance, which could turn those moments into, in the words of poet Edward Hirsch, "an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder" when we read poetry. Maybe the thirst is the message that is being sent back, as Rumi might put it.
Composing music was an exercise for renowned avant-garde musician John Cage to become "fluent with the life we are living." Because he felt so strongly that we should live with "the fluency of the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams," he started creating music by copying "nature in her manner of operation" through the use of a technique called chance operations. For Cage, all sound, whether produced by people or the natural environment, was music.
There are things all around me that I have to either ignore or put up with. Leaf blowers. Toy laser guns are extremely loud. Bills. Emails. Ignoring things requires energy and is exhausting. I am tired of feeling tired. I want to experience what Thoreau did during his two-and-a-half-year experiment living in the woods, "when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore." At the end of each day, I want to feel exhausted from a sense of gratitude rather than from "non-creative" work. I want to live in a world where metaphors are simply metaphors.
As one quote says,
“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Welcome to the poetry of reality…
