“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper” - W.B. Yeats.
What are some glorious, magical yet mysterious things that us humans often don’t notice? Things, not necessarily beautiful but which leave one filled with mystery, awe; breathless and aching as part of this life we call home?
Today, finally that first burst of spring warmth on the skin as I biked along the river. One’s senses seem to come alive and the world brims with energy and procreant urge. Even bugs, swarms. Ate a few as I sped along. How fast life begins to revive!
It brought back memories of my running days. Running the sideroads where we lived in N.Ontario, running for the first time of the year in shorts and t-shirt, loving it, embraced by nature’s warmth finally appearing to greet me after a long, frozen cold Canadian winter.
I stopped on the bike path to take off my windbreaker and saw this magical thing crossing, to god knows where. A slug. I hung over my handlebars and watched closely.
We are in a way, victims of our senses. Our phenomenological limitations. We can’t see eternity in a grain of sand. We can’t see the life therein, in a slow moving, sentient slug. But we should try.
We live as Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell alluded;
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern,"
We live in a house with doors of perception that only allow certain thoughts, certain truths, certain experiences to visit. The rest we deem in our better moments “magical” but out of reach, understanding.
We only “see” a very limited part of the visual spectrum. We are missing out on so much. And too, our olfactory senses are indeed an old factory. Unlike a grizzly, we can’t note a patch of blueberry bushes 2 miles yonder. Our hearing is horrendous - we only catch a sound bite of the noise, the communication existing in the world. I could go on and on and on …
That is what “life” is - a sliver of experience. All lifeforms live within set limits. Maybe next go around, we’ll get to be a butterfly and not just be a man dreaming of a butterfly?
Us humans, we are in a sense (literally) caged. I spend a lot of time walking Viernes, our Guatemalan “chucho”, now here in Korea. She is a “smell the roses” kind of dog. I' want her to run and move fast with me but she’s always more interested in sniffing about.
Sometimes, she’ll spend 5 minutes smelling a few blades of grass. Intent, focused. I often wonder what is going through her head, what she’s experiencing. I haven’t a clue but I’m sure it is enlivening, I’m sure she’s getting news I’ll never find on my screen.
And that’s just it. We only get to experience a slice of life. However, as a poet, I find it my job to make sure that slice of life is as large as possible. It’s part of my training, to keep alive, to see what is hidden, to view and experience and digest the magical - then poop a poem.
Poetry after all is “ringing a bell” - an awakening and attempt at seeing things in a different ways. It is an awakening of our senses and awareness. Poetry is spring. It is communion with all forms of sentience, feeling and allows us to pierce the aloneness we all feel deep within.
And this world of violence, of narcissism, of self-interest damn well needs more poetry. It needs less hubris and to understand we know shit, we are victims of our impoverished microscopes and primitive binoculars. Moths hurtling towards dim lights. Poetry I believe can’t make us fully experience “the other” but it can let us go through the door and glimpse, and understand more the other ways of life.
I write a lot about materialism as a belief system and the rot, the ruin in sets into one’s soul. You’ll find posts smattered here and there in this blog. Materialism is a philosophy and embedded paradigm that we are all enculturated with - teaching us that there is no soul, only matter. That there is no purpose, only “stuff” that operates according to set laws (who set them? The question is never asked.). We are all just robots, genetically pre-programmed until our expiration date summons. We are deus ex machina. Full of ourselves but essentially fiction.
I reject this belief system for a lot of reasons. One is, I feel there is a lot we don’t know. It was only 100 years ago that medical science was driving nails into people’s foreheads (the lobotomy) and claiming, awarding a Nobel Prize, that it fixed mental illness.
There IS a lot of magic out there. Especially when it comes to how we experience the world and how too, the universe experiences us. I’m too, convinced there are other fields, forces as work that we know little about, are terribly blind to. Just take for example, the fact that butterflies remember their time as caterpillars.
It’s cherry blossom season here and everyone is taking in the annual beauty of trees showing off. It’s a cultural ritual to walk among these trees and feel their magic. But there is a lot more magic out there … we just need to train ourselves to notice it. Work at it. Don’t let yourself fall asleep to life, to the magic which Yeats mentions.
I wrote this poem when I was 17 years old. Reading Leaves of Grass. Lost in the wonder of his words. I dedicated it to old man Walt.
Grass, O little blade of grass
How is it that you sit so still
Through summer’s heat,
Through winter’s fury?
To I, it is quite a feat
That you are never in a hurry.Often I have wondered
How you came to be – right there.
Often I have wondered
Why it is you are anywhere,
So silent do you pass through life.I don’t need to know
The categorical imperative
Nor understand completely
The holy trinity.
I need not know the reason why
It all began
Nor how come with firy splash
It will end.I only long to know
Of your sweet solitude,
You little blade of grass.
Then,
Contented I will be
To sleep with questions
In this house of broken glass.
