crone
wraps the shawl around her
in a way of sayingi’m enough –
sits in front of our block
her old bones chilled –warming now, us seeing her
knowing we want her,
the wise crone in our lives
Posts tagged as:
Poetry
bird
i read that the body is a depression
and wanted you more.and walking to the car
weary from the waitingthinking of the day to come
a single bird
voiced what i’d yearned to graspwanted to have
translated into form.
Scything Device (detail)
the scything
there were high meadows
and a wooded passthere was a clearing
where people gathered
[continue reading]
it’s like this at the fish market -
standing around
when all I want is
pink glistening salmon flesh -there’s a problem with knives
and by the time I get one
you’ve offered me
your breast to cut -I go for the cheek
incising thin red
around the jaw lineand throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflictedhiding the act
from the rest of my life
It feels time to publish this little book of poems, The Rains That Fall Around Here on Issuu. All 24 poems, written over the period 2003 to 2009, have a devotional theme.
My poetry output is fairly low, and these poems are for me a distillation of an ongoing understanding and occasional encountering of the devotional, the noumenal.
One of the poems, something in a drawer, appeared in Australia’s Blue Dog; the rest are unpublished elsewhere.
white clouds scroll
across the sixth-floor windowdo not open window
to prevent a dewdrop
or harmful insect enteringthe book of buddha’s
at the bedside tablebe always thinking
of the transiency of your lifeleaving, turns back to the
white sheet crumpledto the cast of a body
spent the night in transit
bound for rome
Here’s the first of four short posts on the field, a topic dear to my heart.
This post’s a personal reflection on Robert Duncan’s exquisite poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, which appeared in his 1960 book The Opening of the Field:
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall thereinthat is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going downwhose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
The phrase “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” has me thinking of David Bohm’s implicate order, unfolding in time to form the explicate order of which we are usually only aware. And “eternal pasture” is a lovely poetic form for what I usually refer to as the noumenal field, “so near to the heart”.
“Wherefrom fall all architectures I am” has the sense of that place from which the constructions of selfhood occur, the developments of self-representations, those patternings with which we then subsequently live, mistakenly taking them to be our real selves. As A.H. Almaas says:
The experience of the self is actually determined by the self-representation. The phenomenology of the self’s experience presents itself through this representation, and hence, what the self perceives and experiences as itself, in its present experience, is greatly determined by it. The self-representation actually sculpts the forms that arise as the phenomenological particulars of the self’s experience of itself. (A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, p59)
“as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos” speaks to me of that noumenal place – we can see it in Unica Zürn’s work and I mentioned it in my previous post – that place which for many of us is a creative centre – which holds the psyche against dissolution. Duncan puts it so beautifully, “a place of first permission.” And this is a “made place”, a place we make for ourselves by giving it (finally!) the importance it deserves.
This is merely a series of notes – the poem stays alive and available to me as a source of inspiration, always more rich than any attempt I might make to analyse.
(There’s a more literary reading of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.)
Here’s an article, A Tailor In The Cyclops’ Cave?, by Steve Silverton, that I’ve just enjoyed reading. It’s a good reminder of what really works in psychotherapy, and a reality-check on notions that mechanical approaches can in some way address the poetic, relational worlds that we create, as they contemporaneously creates us.
… we humans tend to make ourselves up as we go along, not only our present but our past and our future as well. We are always re-writing ourselves and whatever the current story or pre-occupation is tends to change our sense of our past, present and future selves. The figure creates the ground and the ground creates the figure.
Steve Silverton’s writing comes with the clear mark of personal experience. His reflection on the question “How do you work?” (posed to the therapist by a potential client) moves not only into the nature of the relational venture of client and therapist, but raises the subject of how we potentially are limited by the words at our disposal (the words in that question), by collective sub-texts behind our endeavours and inquiries; how these endeavours can be limited by that sub-text.
In this recent Counselor Magazine article – Spirituality Around the World, Culturally Diverse Approaches to 12-Step, are thoughtful cross-denominational views of approaches to 12-Step recovery for addictions – the approaches being Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Here are gems from the Buddhist Rev. Koyo S. Kubose:
There is no sin in Buddhism, only ignorance. The greatest ignorance is ignorance of oneself; namely, thinking that one exists as an independent entity in the world and that everything revolves around oneself.
Liberation comes from loosening the grip of one’s self-centered and self-created existence.
Which evoke for me a poem I wrote in 2004:
wicca
perhaps one night they will take you
from your home
to a place out of doors
and in the darkness
on bare ground
before a pitch painted shed
begin to tell you who you are –and realise something
for which even they were not ready –that its only
that in the black shed
(its closed door hiding a mystery
terrifying even to them)
of which you are worthy
Un- has been around since 2003 as a poem, posted at my old art site. Recently I wanted to explore again the potential crossover between text and the (spatial) field that I’m so interested in, and I’ve made a few (sometimes failed!) attempts at this in the past. I find it a hard thing to do, to enable a synthesis of text and the spatial, the visual. Anyway, here’s the latest attempt to put the Un-poem back into its spatial field. The poem itself is about the underlying field, the noumenal, the enabler from which all springs. This is Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund:
The mysterious teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund, about the abyss, without foundation, dark and irrational, prior to being, is an attempt to provide an answer to the basic question of all questions, the question concerning the origin of the world and of the arising of evil. The whole teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund is so interwoven with the teaching concerning freedom, that it is impossible to separate them, for this is all part and parcel of the same teaching. And I am inclined to interpret the Ungrund, as a primordial meonic freedom, indeterminate even by God.
Ron Dowd
Un-, 2008
linocut, 30 x 30 cm
(As an aside, if you go to the 2003 page, the liquid “Ungrund” you see is a photo I took of a natural mud pool in my home town of Rotorua, New Zealand. Growing up in that city I was often aware that we rested on a volcanic abyss.)
So how do we get to new business cards, seemingly a dimensional shift, from the sublime to the mercantile? Well my wife and fellow psychotherapist Amanda Gruhn (Karima) made the leap, saw the work as a potential carrier of what we do in our separate practices, and what we do when we work together with couples – there’s a kind of un-ing that occurs here before pre-existing seeds can sprout.
We next took the concept to Danielle Kojic (who as well as being a graphic designer is a subtle Gestalt psychotherapist) and she moved the work further, until we ended up with the cards below. And giving the cards to people is a lovely continuation of the energy of their gestation.
(Along with the cards goes a new web site, Therapy Duo.)
