CURRENT POEM & PRACTICE
April 2010
Skunk Cabbage
And now as the iron rinds over
the ponds start dissolving,
you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding,
upon the brash
turnip-hearted skunk cabbage
slinging its bunched leaves up
through the chilly mud.
You kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows out in the most
unabashed way, attracting
into itself a continual spattering
of protein. Appalling its rough
green caves, and the thought
of the thick root nested below, stubborn
and powerful as instinct!
But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again -- a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
Mary Oliver
This is one of my favorite poems of spring - mostly because it reminds me about how to begin, or more specifically, it reminds me that beginnings are "not necessarily pretty." The poem also unapologetically and unrelentingly makes clear that those things that I/we tend to crave as measures of success and mastery - the fruits and "flowers, the last subtle refinements" - tend not to burst forth until there are roots firmly in the ground, strength and stability in the heart, and an unimpeded connection to sustenance.
I have been struggling with the fact of this for the last two years. Since I left my home, my teaching career, my family, and my yoga community in Cincinnati to move to California, I have wrestled with attempting to begin again. After almost 8 years of teaching in Cincinnati, I had reached a level both of mastery and comfort in my teaching that I somehow thought I could re-locate along with my bookcases, my cooking implements, and myself. Not so. Not only is California a different place, but I am a different person in this place, and my life has changed dramatically in the wake of a marriage & divorce, a new love, travel & adventure, and a move across the country.
Ironically when I first discovered yoga one of the things I loved about it was that I knew I would never master it. I truly enjoyed thinking of myself as a perpetual beginner. I relished being able to simply relax into "Beginner's Mind," that state of mind that is simply open to learning, to investigating, to asking the questions without being uptight about having to find the right answers. However, over the years I was teaching, I found myself slipping into a place where having the "right" answers seemed important, and along with the urgency to know came tension, anxiety, investigation as problem-solving rather than curiosity exploring mystery. I didn't realize this was happening at the time, and it is only since I have been so utterly displaced from my role as "teacher" that I have slowly come to realize that I lost touch with that place that "blazes the trail," that humble, but unabashed place of unknowing that makes learning possible.
This spring, in an attempt to reacquaint myself with the visceral experience of Beginner's Mind, I am journeying to Costa Rica for 3 weeks of Spanish language immersion. I have never done an immersion program before, nor have I lived with a host family. I studied French in high school and college so the only Spanish I know is what I have learned from studying the Rosetta Stone software for the last 3 months; in other words, nada. I suspect that this may not be pretty. However I agree with Mary Oliver that "Not tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn pull down the frozen waterfall." I have been feeling fairly frozen in place and I am seeking an experience that will dislodge the ice floes and put me in touch with the flow again. It is my hope that in placing myself in a situation in which I truly know nothing, I will rediscover in myself the mind of the beginner that relaxes into that knowing, and learns there.
