October 16: "Tecumseh," Anger Boundless, Good at Heart

Mary Oliver on righteous anger . . . 

Tecumseh

by:  Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago

to the Mad River, under the willows

I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it

what madness you will, there's a sickness

worse than the risk of death and that's

forgetting what we should never forget.

Tecumseh lived here.

The wounds of the past

are ignored, but hang on

like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,

newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?

Do you know?  Or would you have to 

write to Washington, and even then,

whatever they said,

would you believe it?  Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into

the glittering snow to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.

From Mad River country north to the border

he gathered the tribes

and armed them one more time.  He vowed

to keep Ohio and it took him

over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,

it was over, except

his body could not be found.

It was never found,

and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night

and hauled him to a secret grave, or that

he turned into a little boy again, and leaped

into a birch canoe and went

rowing home down the rivers.  Anyway,

this much I'm sure of:  if we ever meet him, we'll know it,

he will still be

so angry.

There is a righteous anger in this poem.  The wounds of the past don't disappear.  As Oliver says, they hang on, persist like plastic bottles or bags, making the world unkind and ugly.  Tecumseh becomes myth--disappearing and transforming--yet he is still defined/identifiable by one thing:  his all-consuming anger.

Holding onto anger is not healthy.  I've learned this through my hundreds of hours in therapy and counseling.  Being angry at an individual doesn't really accomplish anything.  The person who made you angry is probably ignorant of your feelings while you are losing sleep and developing an ulcer.  Anger makes you sick.  

That doesn't mean all anger is bad.  People should get pissed about injustices and inequalities.  We in the United States all benefit from old white men stealing land from Indigenous peoples.  The economy of this country was driven by the slave trade.  U. S. citizens suffer and die because they can't afford decent healthcare or proper medication.  There are Holocaust deniers and white nationalists.  Rich male politicians and Supreme Court Justices who want to control women's health and bodies.  Homophobes who think love is something that can be legislated and controlled.  Islamophobes who blame the world's evils on Muslims.  Xenophobes who blame the world's evils on everyone but themselves.

The list is endless, the anger boundless.

However, I learned a long time ago that you can disagree without being disagreeable.  Another way of saying this:  you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.  Bombs don't settle disagreements--they simply lead to blood and death.  Screaming and shouting don't settle disagreements, either--they just make your opposition scream and shout louder.  Starting a war is easy.  Building lasting peace, on the other hand, is complicated, if not impossible.  

I always return to a quote from Anne Frank when I fall into anger or darkness:  “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

If a little Jewish girl hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam can still hope for peace and tranquility, I think we all can, as well.  Anger can be a catalyst for the worst kinds of human behavior.  It can also be a catalyst for goodness, kindness, understanding, and love.

In spite of everything happening in the world today, Saint Marty still believes that people are really good at heart.  Unless they're Trumpers.  

June 13: "On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate," Rain, Good at Heart

Mary Oliver meditates on Psalm 145 . . . 

On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate

by:  Mary Oliver

(Psalm 145)

1.

All day up and down the shore the

     fine points of the waves keep on

tapping whatever is there:  scatter of broken

     clams, empty jingles, old

oyster shells thick and castellated that held

     once the pale jewel of their bodies and sweet

tongue and juice.  And who do you

     think you are sauntering along

five feet up in the air, the ocean a blue fire

     around your ankles, the sun

on your face, on your shoulders its golden mouth whispering

     (so it seems) you! you! you!

2.

Now the afternoon wind

     all frill and no apparent purpose

takes her cloud-shaped

     hand and touches every one of the 

waves so that rapidly

     they stir the wings of the eiders they blur

the boats on their moorings; not even the rocks

     black and blunt interrupt the waves on their

way to the shore and one last swimmer (is it you?) rides

     their salty infoldings and outfoldings until,

peaked, their blue sides heaving, they pause; and God

     whistles them back; and you glide safely to shore.

3.

One morning

     a hundred pink and cylindrical

squid lay beached their lacy faces,

     their gnarls of dimples and ropy tentacles

limp and powerless; as I watched

     the big gulls went down upon

this sweetest trash rolling

     like the arms of babies through the

swash--in a feathered dash,

     a calligraphy of delight the beaks fell

grabbing and snapping; then was left only the

     empty beach, the birds floating back over the waves.

4.

How many mysteries have you seen in your

     lifetime?  How many nets pulled

full over the boat's side, each silver body

     ready or not falling into

submission?  How many roses in early summer

     uncurling above the pale sands then

falling back in unfathomable 

     willingness?  And what can you say?  Glory

to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the

     silver fish.  Glory in time and the wild fields,

and to joy.  And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.

5.

So it is not hard to understand

     where God's body is, it is

everywhere and everything; shore and the vast

     fields of water, the accidental and the intended

over here, over there.  And I bow down

     participate and attentive

it is so dense and apparent.  And all the same I am still

     unsatisfied.  Standing

here, now, I am thinking

     not of His thick wrists and His blue

shoulders but, still, of Him.  Where, do you suppose, is His

     pale and wonderful mind?

6.

I would be good--oh, I would be upright and good.

     To what purpose?  To be shining not

sinful, not wringing out of the hours

     petulance, heaviness, ashes.  To what purpose?

Hope of heaven?  Not that.  But to enter

     the other kingdom:  grace, and imagination,

and the multiple sympathies:  to be as a leaf, a rose,

     a dolphin, a wave rising

slowly then briskly out of the darkness to touch

     the limpid air, to be God's mind's

servant, loving with the body's sweet mouth--its kisses, its

words--

     everything.

7.

I know a man of such

     mildness and kindness it is trying to 

change my life.  He does not

     preach, teach, but simply is.  It is

astonishing, for he is Christ's ambassador

     truly, by rule and act.  But, more,

he is kind with the sort of kindness that shines

     out, but is resolute, not fooled.  He has

eaten the dark hours and could also, I think,

     soldier for God, riding out

under the storm clouds, against the world's pride and unkindness

     with both unassailable sweetness, and consoling word.

8.

Every morning I want to kneel down on the golden

     cloth of the sand and say

some kind of musical thanks for

     the world that is happening again--another day--

from the shawl of wind coming out of the

     west to the firm green

flesh of the melon lately sliced open and

     eaten, its chill and ample body

flavored with mercy.  I want

     to be worthy of--what?  Glory?  Yes, unimaginable glory.

O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am

     not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.

Psalm 145 is a praise psalm.  Pretty much, King David is calling on everything in the heavens and on Earth to "praise his holy name for ever and ever."  I think Oliver made her poetic career following the advice of this psalm.  Even in her darkest poems on loss and grief, she finds holiness.  Everything was sacred to Oliver, from the flesh of a freshly cut melon to the grief over a lost loved one.  Joy can't exist without sorrow.  So, just as much as great happiness is a gift, so is great sadness.

Today, it rained for the first time in a long while in the Upper Peninsula.  I woke to the sound of rain on the roof, and it continued all morning and afternoon.  I'm not complaining.  We needed a good soaking.  For the last few weeks, Canada has been burning, causing orange sunrises and orange moonrises.  Until today, one little spark of lightning or cinder of campfire, and the entire U. P. would have joined our flaming neighbors to the north.

Forest fires are normal occurrences.  Sometimes, they're caused by careless humans.  A lot of the time, however, the cause is natural:  lightning and volcanoes and meteors.  When a forest burns, nature takes over.  The ashes and soot feed the soil, and those nutrients start the process of regrowth.  

Out of ashes, hope.

When the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, 170 trees survived the blast.  Those trees are still thriving almost 80 years later.  A group called Green Legacy Hiroshima sends seedlings from those trees all over the world to promote peace.  

Out of war and death. hope.

Yes, human beings have messed up this world.  (Climate change deniers may want to skip the rest of this paragraph.)  Polluted oceans and lakes.  Disappearing polar icecaps.  Extinctions of animals and birds and fish.  Rather than glorifying the gifts of creation, we use them, mine them, consume them, and then abandon them.  To paraphrase Ursula from The Little Mermaid, it's what we do, what we live for.

Of course, not all humankind is corrupt or destructive.  Even in the darkest of times, a person can find beauty.  During the horrors of the Holocaust, one little Jewish girl wrote in her diary, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."  

I believe that, as well.  I have to.  Because the alternative is just too depressing.

So, this evening when I got home from work, I took a walk around my soggy backyard.  Because of the recent rain, the mosquitoes were out in full force.  Praise the rain.  Praise the mosquitoes.  Because it was near dusk, other creatures were appearing.  Praise the earthworms.  Praise the frogs.  The grass and trees and bushes seemed to be breathing the moist air.  Praise the color green.  And inside my house, my wife and son were waiting.  Praise love.  Praise love.

Saint Marty believes, in spite of everything, that the world is full of goodness.

December 13: How to Be Very Happy, Looking for Happiness, Grilled Cheese Sandwich

 Merton graduates from Columbia and sets out to find happiness . . .

The last week of that school year at Columbia had been rather chaotic. Lax and Freedgood had been making futile efforts to get their belongings together and go home. Bramachari was living in their room, perched on top of a pile of books. Lax was trying to finish a novel for Professor Nobbe’s course in novel-writing, and all his friends had volunteered to take a section of the book and write it, simultaneously: but in the end the book turned out to be more or less a three-cornered affair—by Lax and me and Dona Eaton. When Nobbe got the thing in his hands he could not figure it out at all, but he gave us a B-minus, with which we were more than satisfied. 

Then Lax’s mother had come to town to live near him in the last furious weeks before graduation and catch him if he collapsed. He had to take most of his meals in the apartment she had rented in Butler Hall. I sometimes went along and helped him nibble the various health-foods. 

At the same time, we were planning to get a ride on an oil barge up the Hudson and the Erie Canal to Buffalo—because Lax’s brother-in-law was in the oil business. After that we would go to the town where Lax lived, which was Olean, up in that corner of New York state. 

On “Class Day” we leaned out the window of Lax’s room and drank a bottle of champagne, looking at the sun on South Field, and watching the people beginning to gather under the trees in front of Hamilton, where we would all presently hear some speeches and shake hands with Nicholas Murray Butler. 

It was not my business to graduate that June at all. My graduation was all over when I picked up my degree in the registrar’s office last February. However, I borrowed the cap and gown with which Dona Eaton had graduated from Barnard a year before, and went and sat with all the rest, mocking the speeches, with the edge of my sobriety slightly dulled by the celebration that had just taken place with the champagne in Furnald. 

Finally we all got up and filed slowly up the rickety wooden steps to the temporary platform to shake hands with all the officials. President Butler was a much smaller man than I had expected. He looked intensely miserable, and murmured something or other to each student, as he shook hands. It was inaudible. I was given to understand that for the past six or seven years people had been in the habit of insulting him, on these occasions, as a kind of a farewell. 

I didn’t say anything. I just shook his hand, and passed on. The next one I came to was Dean Hawkes who looked up with surprise, from under his bushy white eyebrows, and growled:

“What are you doing here, anyway?” 

I smiled and passed on. 

We did not get the ride on the oil barge, after all, but went to Olean on a train, and for the first time I saw a part of the world in which I was one day going to learn how to be very happy—and that day was not now very far away.

Merton's life is about to change.  In that last paragraph, he pretty much spells it out.  He's traveling to place where he will learn to be happy (my emphasis).  It's not the place that's going to make him happy.  It's the place where he will somehow undergo a education in which he attains happiness.  There's a big difference.

I think we're all looking for happiness.  There'd be something wrong with you if you set out every day to make yourself as miserable as possible.  Sought out grief and tragedy.  That's the job of journalists, to show up at every school shooting or plane crash or Donald Trump press conference.  Places and events that engender sorrow and outrage.

It has been a little over 24 hours since I found out that my son was COVID-positive.  I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening watching Christmas movies.  Normally, after doing my four hours for the library on Saturday morning, I would have spent four or five hours getting ready to play the pipe organ for the 4 p.m. Mass.  Getting music prepared and practicing, and then, eventually, sitting down on the organ bench, switching on the organ, and playing.  Instead, I watched A Beautiful Day and Elf and Miracle on 34th Street and The Polar Express and The Nativity Story and The End of the Tour.  

It was a comforting activity.  Something that, under normal circumstances, I would never have allowed myself to do.  Because I'm too busy.  It was like those afternoons from my childhood when my mother would make me a grilled cheese sandwich and Campbell's chicken noodle soup.  I would sit by her huge hi-fi wooden stereo, eat, and listen to her records.  Doris Day.  Bing Crosby.  The soundtrack of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!  Brenda Lee.  Petula Clark.  I felt so . . . content in those moments.

It's Sunday.  I was supposed to play a service for a Lutheran church this morning.  I didn't do that.  Instead, I slept in, another thing I never allow myself to do.  Then I got up, checked my email, and took my puppy for a spin around the backyard.  I was just sinking onto the couch to do some computer work when my phone rang again.  

It was the local Health Department, doing a call for contact tracing.  I spent about ten minutes on the phone talking to the nurse, giving her details about each person in the house and their health conditions.  She reconfirmed our quarantine and isolation times, suggesting that we all get tested, as it might shorten the time we are house-bound.  

Now, I am back on the couch, watching movies again.  And working.  I am leading a poetry workshop this evening, so I have some prep work to do for that.  Then, writing and writing and, after that, a little more writing.  I haven't figured out what I'm making for dinner yet.  I'm not feeling very ambitious, so I may be throwing together a ham-and-cheese quiche.  

My life has slowed down these last 24 hours.  Time seems to be stretching out, like a cat in a shaft of afternoon light.  I am learning about happiness and gratitude.  I loved watching all those movies yesterday.  Grilled cheese sandwich movies.  I loved the peace of not rushing from one obligation to another yesterday.  Doris Day peace.

And I have felt so loved.  So, so loved.  People offering to drop off food and go shopping for us.  More texts and IMs than I can count.  I already knew that my family and friends are amazing people, but, in the middle of this pandemic and contentious election, it's easy to lose sight of the goodness that exists in the world.  To feel jaded and angry.  Yet, I can tell you, as Anne Frank wrote so long ago in her diary, ". . . in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I am learning new happiness today.  A quiet happiness.  Filled with kindness and compassion.

Here are a few snapshots from the last 48 hours:

• My beautiful daughter is feeling worse today.  Body aches and fever.  No respiratory problems.
• My beautiful friend, Rose, dropped off a Christmas turkey on our front porch this afternoon.
• My other beautiful friend, Esther, is bringing frozen pizzas and treats for my puppy tomorrow. 
• My wife's beautiful cousin, Amy (we are the obnoxious drunks at family gatherings), has offered to replenish my liquor cupboard once my supply has dwindled.
• My beautiful puppy snuggled with me for almost an hour last night.  She's enjoying the quarantine.  A lot.
• Some of my beautiful poet friends will be joining me this evening for a poetry workshop on miracles.

Yes, this slower existence is stitched with concern.  But I am surrounded by light.  I truly feel it.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of friends and family, unexpected kindnesses, and the comfort of Christmas movies.

August 12: A Beautiful City, Terrible Events, Good at Heart

The Englishman said that he, when captured, had made and kept the following vows to himself:  To brush his teeth twice a day, to shave once a day, to wash his face and hands before every meal and after going to the latrine, to polish his shoes once a day, to exercise for at least half an hour each morning, and then move his bowels, and to look into a mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance with respect to posture.

Billy Pilgrim heard all this while lying in his nest.  He looked not at the Englishman's face but his ankles.

"I envy you lads," said the Englishman.

Somebody laughed.  Billy wondered what the joke was.

"You lads are leaving this afternoon for Dresden--a beautiful city, I'm told.  You won't  be cooped up like us.  You'll be out where the life is, and the food is certain to be more plentiful than here.  If I may inject a personal note:  It has been five years since I have seen a tree or flower or woman or child--or a dog or a cat or a place of entertainment, or a human being doing useful work of any kind.

"You needn't worry about bombs, by the way.  Dresden is an open city.  It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance."

The Englishman is correct.  Dresden was a center of culture in Germany.  It wasn't a military target at all.  The firebombing of the city has been compared to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.  The entire city was leveled.  The Allies did this at the end of the war, to break the morale of the German people.  It's still a controversial moment in the history of World War II.

I'm not here to argue whether this attack was right or wrong.  You can decide that for yourself.  Certainly, the war in Europe ended shortly after Dresden was destroyed.  It was horrific for the people who were there at the time and survived, like Kurt Vonnegut.  The cost of war on innocent lives is always huge.  There is no way to avoid it, unless it's simply to not engage in warfare at all.

I'm not completely sure that all the current world leaders can put military decisions in any kind of historical context.  (One leader, in particular, has never even read a history book, I'm certain.)  And without that historical context, I don't know how any head of state can make a military decision that puts innocent civilians in harm's way. 

What I'm saying is not a profound insight.  This post is just me grappling with things that are going on in my country and the world right now.  I'm not going to change anything with a blog post about an attack that occurred over 70 years ago.  I just want to express a hope that somebody in power somewhere will step back and say, "What the fuck are we doing here?"

Of course, history is full of terrible events--tragedies committed against humans by other humans.  The enslavement of the Jewish people by the Egyptians.  The Crusades.  The Spanish Inquisition.  The enslavement of African Americans in the United States.  The use of mustard gas in World War I.  The Holocaust.  The Armenian and Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.  The firebombing of Dresden. I could go on.  And these kinds of tragedies keep happening.  Just ask the people of Syria.

Like Anne Frank, I want to believe that, in spite of everything, people are still good at heart.  And I want to believe that those good-hearted people will prevail in the end.

Saint Marty is thankful today for soup kitchens and Habitat for Humanity.  For Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders.  Animal shelters and cancer research.  For goodness and kindness.