returning thanks for ambiguity and doubt...

Two poems that have recently found me offer a subtle sense that my year of wandering and beholding without a specific plan is on target. The first comes from the work of Israel's greatest modern poet, Yehuda Amichai. His translator Robert Alter calls him "the most widely read Hebrew poet since King David." 

Born in Germany in 1924, Amichai left that country at age twelve with his family and journeyed to Palestine. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war he fought with the Israeli defense forces. The rigors and horrors of his service in this conflict, and in World War II, inform his poetry, although he is never ideological. (for more info: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yehuda-amicha)i

His words celebrate ambiguity - even doubt - resonating with what is turning into an invigorating season of desert spirituality for me.

From the place where we are right

flowers will never grow
in the Spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

The second is from the contemporary American poet, Sheryl Luna, of El Paso, TX. "Rubbernecking" suggests that looking backwards is rarely edifying: remembering, yes, but never obsessively gazing in the rear view mirror for hints of what is still to come.

The art of the century is to hear
sun through mulberry,
small ball of white light centered
in torn leaves. We are not
biblical? Here in grounded
in verse as children while
the poor present alms to the poor,
we are freedom finding itself.

We have no answers.
Some of us missed the broadcast
to success. The neighborhood
fills with unseen deep-throated
robins. Remember
what it means to be alone
we say, disliking or loving
mad streets, where the broken
fearlessly ride buses.
We cannot fix the contest
outside, even if we
rubberneck our way
through accident and luck.

These poems arrived in my world at about the same time two essays captured my attention. The first, by Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer, speaks of how we "move towards our growing edge" in this era of fear, fatalism and fascism. Borrowing freely from the African America mystic, Howard Thurman, Palmer and Newcomer write that moving toward our growing edge has something to do with finding deeper meaning, solidarity, creativity, compassion and even hope. This growing edge always takes time:

Often (it emerges) as slow as the growth of a plant, so the process requires patient tending. We seem to go through three stages before we can begin to see and have confidence in the flowering. The first is a barely-perceptible nudge toward “who-knows-what.” This often takes the form of feeling that we’re somehow out of alignment with our souls, our relationships, our work, the world’s needs. It’s a quiet, intuitive sense that we’ve lost our way: We made a wrong turn somewhere, or were forced to take a detour, or were barreling down a speedway without paying attention. That’s when we have to pull over, get out of the car, breathe, acknowledge that we’re lost — and resist the anxiety that compels us to look for the well-marked road and miss the clues that point us toward the heart’s imperatives.(for more go to: https://onbeing.org/blog/parker-palmer-carrie-newcomer-look-well-to-the-growing-edge/mc_cid=8b78105c68&mc_eid=aaa79b290f&utm_campaign= 8b78105c68-EMAIL_

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Newsletter&utm_term=0_1c66543c2f-8b78105c68-69812713 )

The other essay, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, is a reflection on Albert Camus. It is Camus' conclusion that in the face of life's absurdity and abundant disappointment, we always posses the power to live as women and men of integrity and love. His existentialism "sympathizes with anguish but cajoles the fellow sufferer to embrace life, all the more so because it makes no sense. We should, Camus advises, accept that our desires do not match up with the world as we know it, and yet love the unanswerable strangeness of it all." And then this: the zenith of creation's absurdity is our choice to not only endure life's agony, but to fill it full of love, beauty and compassion.

Life in the face of its pain, he writes, is the ultimate revolt. Suicide “is acceptance in the extreme.” Our challenge is to be aware of death and at the same time reject it. The tension between being keenly aware of death yet not being resigned to it is what creates the absurd, and keeping the absurd alive keeps the person alive.... The person who understands the absurdity of the human condition is strengthened by it. He or she still has to work unceasingly to bear up under the weight of being, but it is worth it. There is no higher destiny, Camus declares. The absurd man is the master of his days. When he gazes backward over his life, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, and like Sisyphus and his rock, the whole seemingly unreasonable effort turns out to have meaning, just because it constituted his life. (for more information: https://onbeing.org/blog/the-absurd-courage-of-choosing-to-live/)

For many people of faith, hope and love in the United States these days, the

ugly absurdity of this regime has evoked a stultifying sorrow. Some of us know a constant, low grade fatigue. Others have become filled with such fear or anger that we seem immobilized. And still more sense that creation as we know it is collapsing. I would never argue with those feelings. I often share them. But I consciously choose to believe that Camus is right: choosing to live fully into the absurdity is how blessings are born. It is even a sacred and sacramental act though Camus would never use these words. The bard of Vermont, Frederick Buechner, once put it like this:

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

For the past three years, my life - my heart, soul, mind and strength - was telling me that the time had come to move closer to my growing edge. What that was, however, wasn't exactly clear. It had something to do with music. And compassion. And solidarity and spirituality. What it was was not yet fully discernible. I needed more wandering in the wilderness. More trust even when it felt absurd. More emptiness and openness. More time in the garden so that my growing edge could take root and maybe even flower. Less looking backwards. Less rubbernecking. Less trying to be right. Less doing, more being. Less big changes and more celebrations of a small holiness. The fullness of this desert time is only now taking shape... so we'll play a small house concert for dear friends on Friday. As the toast proclaims with joy and resistance: to life!
 

credits
+ By Yair Medina (יאיר מדינה), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56629706
+ https://philosophynow.org/issues/110/Albert_Camus_1913-1960
+ http://www.sargamgriffin.com/paradox-and-hair-on-fire/
+ http://www.risingher.com/the-self-awareness-paradox/