“I said to my soul be still and let the darkness come upon me and know it is the Darkness of God.”

-T. S. Eliot

   

There are many poets who are or were also meditators.  Ginsberg.  Stanley Kunitz.  Anne Waldman.  I feel very connected to this lineage, of pens and cushions, silence and speech.

I attended my first 10 day silent meditation retreat a few years ago, after a friend of mine attended one person and came back another.  A better one, I thought, and I, too, found myself on a Greyhound headed  to an unknown patch of land in Massachusetts.  At the registration desk, I checked in my cell phone, my magazines, and my (!) notebook.  But I kept my pen, an ever-extension of my arm, stashed quietly in my bag.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to write, just as I wasn’t supposed to talk or listen to the radio or call home.  I was nervous about many of these things, but mostly about not writing.  Here I was in a whole new experience, without my normal routine of pen scratching on paper to contemplate, to “figure things out?”

On the first night I found myself in the bathroom scrawling on thick brown papertowel.  “Day 1.”  I wrote the details of my day and my feelings about them, a junkie hiding her habit.  The guilt was palpable at the base of my tongue, my heart raced with it.  But I had to write!  I had to interpret, catagorize, fantisize, harmonize my day with myself.

Crawling back to bed, my mind rocking with words stirred up with a Bic, I made a decision.  No more writing for the rest of the retreat.  I felt  this would get in the way of my experiencing the retreat, that while writing brought me closer to some experiences, it did so by first distancing me, and this was something  had to dive into without immediately deconstructing….letting thoughts come and go, not stick to paperfiber.

As the days went on, I emersed myself in experience, not the contemplation of experience.  This was different for me.  I felt the language beneath, or behind?, words, the web that carries it through.

On the bus ride home, I marvelled at the trees I’d ignored on my way there, my nose in a book.  I reached into my reclaimed bag to find my notebook.  I pulled out my pen to finally write.

And for the first time, I felt that words weren’t enough.  After sitting in silence for 10 days, I just couldn’t find the words to express what I’d experienced there.  This both fascinated me, and scared me.  I could find shadow-words, words that would point the way.  But the words no longer felt like stable anchors to hold onto.  I understood more fully the difference between the word “tree” and the tree itself.  I realized I’d always been writing shadow-words, that there was so much I couldn’t “figure out.”

In re-entering NY, I became more fully involved with my poetry, and in a few weeks found myself sharing a bench at a Korean restaurant with Anne Waldman and a crew from the Bowery Poetry Club.

“I just returned from a retreat,” I told her.  Her eyes lit up, and we talked of the words and non-words.  I felt thankful for the practices of meditation and poetry, which, to me, is the form of writing that comes closest to pointing to the gaps between words and the truths we sometimes feel but are too human to express.

 ~~~~~~~ 

this day

what is the start

of this heart?

this engine running

slowly dying?

the body is a thing that needs

sweet cell

sweet weight

kissing singing

flower stem

roots

soil

if all beings were bodiless we would escape for a minute

air everywhere

silent bubbles

pouch of sudden creatures

trembling parades flying

reverberating like jelly fish

the halo over my head is a portrait

that dances and twists

like a tree moving in and out of focus

a wild party full of lost moods

a diamond on your wrist

this juice

year after year

orange inexhaustable

this year a number

i cannot hide