Two poems from a day at the Grunewald Guild

On July 25, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

My family and I have lived in the Pacific Northwest for many years now. I maintain that it is readily the most beautiful part of the country, perhaps the world – well, the parts I’ve seen. The Grunewald Guild is a tiny oasis of assorted buildings, forest pathways, an old church converted to a library, and a whole lot of contemplative, liturgical artists. My peeps. After living in the Yakima Valley now for almost nine years, receiving their regular emails for that entire time, I finally decided that it was time for a visit. Of other poems to come, these are the first two.

Plain

The chuckachuck of sprinklers

slaking thirsty brown grass

drone me into an almost zombie-like peace –

a single note, unyielding, in its own

tonic harmony.

A thousand shades of green –

jade and emerald and pine –

line themselves up in the random scattershot

only found in perfection. Much too random

for the soldierish replants

of our brutish industry.

Even the highway wants a place

in this scene – wearing the yellow line

like a scarf around the neck

of its own movement and momentary digressions –

Like this.

The Smell of Grey

The smell of grey, old and musty

books holding ten thousand curious fingerprints.

The dog-eared tales of dog-eared folk,

standing together like square-jawed

colonels of mystery, harboring

citadel secrets.

For so silent a place, how loudly

they shout for my attention.

These Lutherans have it right.

There is no distance or

false pings of conscience that

“The Exorcist” shares a shelf with

“The History of Israel” and something else on liturgy.

Here, my dangerously haphazard

story fits. Suddenly, my impractical

arbitrariness feels intentional –

almost holy.

Thoughts in a driveway

On July 17, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

It was about that time when

he knew it was about

the time.

Waves of heat wrapped

themselves around the throat

of a late morning.

He stretches out his arm to

catch some summer, letting the

hot breezes twist through his fingers.

Sometimes hearts rattle like

the car door that, offered

enough reprieve from the summer

heat, shuts itself outright in annoyance.

Distance, like an angry hornet,

intent on its aggressive intrusion

pushes against an unyielding window.

But, given the panic level, he relents

and opens up again to the outside

where it too was vulnerable,

like prey.

And once more

a day’s penumbral gifts,

restless like the dandelion fields

become like they were before –

and he starts the car.

A morning in Malibu

On July 9, 2015August 1, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

Day creeps in slowly

like a child, uncertain, demure.

The disheveled hillsides yawn

themselves back to thirst again

in the dry, January sun.

A nighthawk, warblers, and sparrows

choir themselves out of the quiet night –

a morning dissonance at war

with nothing but hunger.

Down the slow road into town

a woman pegs up laundry, old school,

to dry in the hot ocean winds.

Eucalyptus, snapdragons, and primrose compete

for what little water is left

after years of drought.

Shakes of uncommitted clouds

stoop to the margins of

warm sky. That’s where the colors are,

a shock of tapioca time in love

with the lilacs, blooming only

for themselves to be the judges.

The town at the bottom of the hill

smells of competing sea-salt

and cheap tourist breakfast.

Those ladies looked out of place

in their broqued jeans and high heels,

that push them up above the

flip-flop culture encroaching –

like the sea.

Runners, running, so many runners,

running apace and aloof as the uneven

shoreline. They are chased by

over-confident gulls and the sad

feeling they can’t outrun something.

But still the water dances with sun

and dreams and there is time.

Hiraeth – making peace with longing, part 5

On July 5, 2015July 6, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn celtic spirituality, Christian spirituality, faith, sacramental living, spiritual formation3 Comments

“The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature” – John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

At the beginning of chapter one of The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, Catholic theologian, Ronald Rolheiser‘s pivotal work, he implants the following poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“The Holy Longing”

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,

Because the massman will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,

where you were begotten, where you have begotten,

a strange feeling comes over you

when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught

in the obsession with darkness,

and a desire for higher love-making

sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,

now, arriving in magic, flying,

and finally, insane for the light,

you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced

this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest

on the dark earth.

Goethe voices something Rolheiser explores very well in his book. It is what we’ve been examining these past weeks: longing. Rolheiser maintains that longing, or desire as he calls it, is our primary dis-ease. He submits that “there is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace” (p. 3). In fact, he believes desire to be stronger than the satisfaction for which it yearns. And everyone desires – longs – and our spirituality is what we do with that unrest.

Rolheiser goes on to say however that, although we all suffer deep longing, not everyone addresses it in the same way. He compares Janis Joplin’s longing, lived out in the erratic and scattered desires that ultimately led to her untimely death with the more focused and singular desire of Mother Teresa that allowed her a healthy integration and more restful existence. This of course recalls Kierkegaard’s definition of sainthood – someone who can will the one thing.

Stated another way, our spirituality is “about how we channel our eros…what we do with the spirit that is within us” (p. 11). This is for me the greatest challenge since I have so many competing and overpowering inner voices, all clamoring for supremacy. Indeed, willing the one thing first requires the monkeys to quit swinging in the mental tree (thank you Henri Nouwen!). It is also why desire and longing have, for me, been so intimately tied to identity: my is-ness.

I believe this concept is utilized best when determining the growth pattern of our inner lives, specifically our emotions. It does not deny the tiger claw tears in the fabric of our hearts that rich memories can bring. It invites us however to live there in a liminality of time and space, with one eye on the object of our longing, who in fact dwells comfortably where our elevator originates; Christ at our foundation.

And that is where our discussion will ultimately lead us. For now I want to explore longing as it pertains to the soul’s need for self-knowledge. And, at the root of self-knowledge is self-love that can find itself anywhere because it belongs everywhere. As an adoptee and one who has seldom truly felt “at home” anywhere, this can be a daunting, even depressing idea since it points to a (be)longing that, again, is never really be satisfied.

Numerous spiritual directors, almost all my friends, my therapist, and of course my wife, tell me I am my own worst enemy. I can talk myself out of anything. I will consistently deny the gifts apparent to others that elude me. I will be a willing martyr in order to delay or defuse conflict and, in my tireless efforts at ensuring my belonging in any crowd, will osmose into their particular zeitgeist like a chameleon in a tree. “Yup, I can fit here. Hmm, I can make this group work. Wow, this feels good. Now, who the hell am I?”

The result is that I have lived many lives, none of them my own. It makes me a blast at parties, a generally affable guy; the one you want to have sit at your table. It also means I am someone always willing to help change your tire, hear your story, or sing you a song of encouragement when you most need it.

But it can also have more sinister tones.

The loneliness and stress of living in the constant search for the “real me” often drives a relative blindness to boundaries as I push my way into everyone’s acceptance. It means the elaborate construct that has become my life lacks foundation and could all too easily topple into disarray, and often does. I wonder sometimes if it’s the adult version of the kid constantly tugging at the sleeve, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom…” Eeewww.

So, you see my dilemma. The hard path ahead is finding acceptance without expecting it, exercising self-love without bounding over other people’s personal space, and learning to live, contented, in tension when none of it works all the time as I think it should. For me as for others, the longing I experience is most likely the soul’s vocal cries to express the deepest, truest self; the self that is free even in prison, safe even in danger, content even in deep darkness.

We find the satisfaction to our longing once we know we belong. We belong in God’s ongoing cosmological project. We belong to the broader family of beings with whom we co-inhabit this spinning little ball of wonder. We belong wherever we presently are. It means everywhere can be home. It means we never truly have to live as exiles in our own domains.

We are most home when we come home to ourselves.

modern poetry

On July 1, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always words4 Comments

Every new generation of poets seeks to build on that which was before and push boundaries of language, metaphor and meaning. As a lover of more “classic” poets to whom we all look for guidance and inspiration, but who struggles to say things in new and fresh ways, I’ve had a love-hate affair with the beautiful pretentions of contemporary verse. Perhaps there is just too much genius for me to capture. Perhaps I am destined to speak in an older voice with newer words? Perhaps I need greater patience to see what is ever before me? I ask here some questions in verse.

a medicine cabinet

stuffed with placebo

a closet full of clever

a basket of plastic apples

half-eaten, half-observed

spit back out where they too

become poetry

Hermes has a message

but his feet are raw

from too much slogging

in circles through the plumage

of the self-engrossed