Speaker 1: Many of you know my story, but what you might
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Speaker 1: These spiritual habits are the things I turned to when
Speaker 1: I feel overwhelmed or when I want to make decisions
Speaker 1: from the deeper, wiser part of myself rather than the
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Speaker 1: combine the science of behavior change with the wisdom of
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Speaker 1: in the Spiritual Habits program. Normally, this work is done
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Speaker 1: I've decided to again offer a group version of this program,
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Speaker 1: now through July nine. To learn more. In sign up,
Speaker 1: go to group dot spiritual habits dot net. It comes
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Speaker 1: join me for this special edition of the Spiritual Habits
Speaker 1: group program. Again. That's group dot spiritual habits dot net
Speaker 1: or click on the link in the show notes. Poetry
Speaker 1: is out loud, I mean we put it on a
Speaker 1: page so that it can move around more easily. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have
Speaker 1: recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like
Speaker 1: garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit but it's not just about thinking
Speaker 1: our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guests on this episode is Ellen Bass, a poet,
Speaker 1: nonfiction author, and teacher. She's the author of many collections
Speaker 1: and books, including Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and
Speaker 1: Mules of Love. Ellen's poems also appear frequently in The
Speaker 1: New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She's
Speaker 1: been awarded three push Card Prizes, the Lambda Literary Award,
Speaker 1: the Pablo Naruta Prize, and the New Letters Prize, and
Speaker 1: also teaches in the m f A Writing Program at
Speaker 1: Pacific University. Her newest collection is entitled Indigo. Hi Ellen,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for inviting me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure
Speaker 1: to have you back on a second time. I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed our first conversation and I'm happy to do it again.
Speaker 1: We're gonna jump into your new wonderful book of poetry
Speaker 1: called Indigo here in a moment. But before we do that.
Speaker 1: We'll start, like we always do, with a parable. There's
Speaker 1: a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second. He looks up what
Speaker 1: his grandmother says, grandmother, which one wins, and the grandmother says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 1: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life and in the work that you do. I
Speaker 1: really think that's a wonderful parable, and that things that
Speaker 1: I'm relating to, especially right now, is the fear one,
Speaker 1: because although we certainly have enough greed and hatred in
Speaker 1: the world as well, that we are looking at the
Speaker 1: terrible brutality and murder and injustice, and you know, all
Speaker 1: of us, I think who care at all, are really
Speaker 1: trying to take stock of our own lives and see
Speaker 1: how we can work for the values that are for
Speaker 1: kindness and compassion and justice and love. So it seems
Speaker 1: like a perfect time for that parable and personally, what
Speaker 1: I really relate to is the polarity of fear and
Speaker 1: love and fear and gratitude. It's been a few months
Speaker 1: now that we've all been in this state, never before
Speaker 1: encountered by any of us in our lifetime, including those
Speaker 1: of us who have lived a pretty long time, and
Speaker 1: I'm noticing that gratitude is one of the things that
Speaker 1: most allows me to manage fear, and love is maybe
Speaker 1: a close second with they're holding hands. So I'm really
Speaker 1: noticing that that it doesn't help so much to save myself,
Speaker 1: will you know, you don't need to be so afraid.
Speaker 1: But when I can refocus and get my food trough,
Speaker 1: you know, over towards the gratitude realm and the love realm,
Speaker 1: it's been helping me a lot pretty much. I think
Speaker 1: every evening I feel low level but noticeable anxiety, and
Speaker 1: I feel really fortunate because during the day I don't
Speaker 1: really feel it. You know, I wake up and we're lucky.
Speaker 1: We live in Santa Cruz and if we get up
Speaker 1: early enough, we can take a walk down by the ocean,
Speaker 1: and uh, my gratitude for that, now, that's a real
Speaker 1: my cup runneth over, and I'm, you know, very busy
Speaker 1: during the day. The opportunities to share poetry and teach
Speaker 1: and uh here poetry, read poetry are so great now,
Speaker 1: and so I'm very busy. But there's that evening time
Speaker 1: where that fear starts to vibrate a little, and that
Speaker 1: thing that helps me the most is feeding that other wolf. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great place to start talking about
Speaker 1: gratitude and all the wonderful things that so many of
Speaker 1: us have in our lives. I want to start here
Speaker 1: with the first poem in the book. It's called sous Chef,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna have you read some full poems later,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna pick a couple of lines out of
Speaker 1: some early poems. And I love this poem because you're
Speaker 1: describing basically cutting up vegetables and you're giving them a
Speaker 1: lot of attention, which we know paying full attention to
Speaker 1: what we're doing is another antidote for the emotion and
Speaker 1: thoughts that tend to run away with it's being really present,
Speaker 1: and I love that. The idea of the SIUs chef
Speaker 1: is that someone else is telling you sort of what
Speaker 1: to do and You've got a couple of lines in
Speaker 1: here that really resonated with me as I thought about
Speaker 1: spiritual practice. And I'll just read a couple of the
Speaker 1: lines that jumped out to me, tell me what to do.
Speaker 1: I'm free of will. Let me escape my own insistence,
Speaker 1: and I still have opinions, but I don't believe in them.
Speaker 1: And I just love those three lines, particularly, let me
Speaker 1: escape my own insistence. You know, how much better does
Speaker 1: life go for us when we stop insisting that things
Speaker 1: be a certain way. Indeed, you know, I'm a pretty
Speaker 1: strong willed person, so I'm speaking from personal experience there.
Speaker 1: I love that phrase free of will, which comes actually
Speaker 1: from a bonny Rate song, and the part of I
Speaker 1: still have opinions, but I don't believe in them. This is,
Speaker 1: I think, pretty funny. Our second George Bush President, actually
Speaker 1: said that line, and I had it on my refrigerator
Speaker 1: for years. It was, you know, clipped out of the
Speaker 1: newspaper because of course the newspaper was showing him as
Speaker 1: a kind of you know, idiot for saying something like that.
Speaker 1: But I just always kept saying, you know, this is
Speaker 1: one place where Bush and I exactly exactly agree, and
Speaker 1: I don't think he meant it the way I mean it.
Speaker 1: But but you didn't who knows. But yes, I can't
Speaker 1: start myself from generating opinions. I read and listened to
Speaker 1: Pema children a fair amount, and uh, she's always talking
Speaker 1: about things like when you walk down the street, you
Speaker 1: just constantly you know, you pass a person on the street,
Speaker 1: you know nothing about them, but you immediately have a
Speaker 1: feeling of being drawn towards them or being repelled from them,
Speaker 1: or neutrality, and you know that they were just forming
Speaker 1: opinions all the time. And so and I am a
Speaker 1: very opinionated person. I come from opinionated family, but I
Speaker 1: have learned not to invest too heavily in those opinions
Speaker 1: and to notice them but not always feel that I
Speaker 1: need to root for them and try and make them
Speaker 1: as vocifer. This as possible makes me think of something
Speaker 1: my zen teacher said to me recently. I just turned
Speaker 1: fifty in the last couple of weeks, and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, when I turned forty, I stopped caring what
Speaker 1: other people thought of me, and then when I turned fifty,
Speaker 1: I stopped caring what I thought of myself. And I
Speaker 1: just thought that was I thought that was a really
Speaker 1: it just brings up that idea. But yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: line about insistence, I feel like makes me feel like
Speaker 1: I heard audio Shanti the spiritual teacher wants say something
Speaker 1: about that like that, you know, we've got to let
Speaker 1: go of our insisting all the time. That really stood
Speaker 1: out to me in that poem, and I loved that idea.
Speaker 1: Moving on to another poem that brings up a theme
Speaker 1: that's pretty common and spiritual traditions is it's a poem
Speaker 1: called Reincarnation, And I'll touch the first line, which I
Speaker 1: think makes me laugh every time I read it, and
Speaker 1: then I'll jump into the part that talks to me.
Speaker 1: He said, who would believe in reincarnation if she thought
Speaker 1: she would return as an oyster? Eagles and wolves are popular.
Speaker 1: I love that. But then you go on to say, humbly,
Speaker 1: the oyster persists in filtering seawater and fashion in the
Speaker 1: daily irritations into luster. And I love that idea of
Speaker 1: the grist for the mill. It's the how do we
Speaker 1: take these things that seem like they're a problem to
Speaker 1: us and turn them into luster, into the pearl. And
Speaker 1: I'm kind of curious how you look at doing that
Speaker 1: in your own life. I think that's my practice as
Speaker 1: a poet, to take suffering and to make art. Making
Speaker 1: a poem gives me a way to grapple with my experiences,
Speaker 1: to come to terms with them, to explore them, and
Speaker 1: to try to go deeper into them rather than to
Speaker 1: resist them. Uh. You know, all of which are the
Speaker 1: things that the spiritual teachers talk to us about. And
Speaker 1: I find that in a poem, all of those things
Speaker 1: are what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to understand
Speaker 1: something that i didn't understand before. I'm trying to be
Speaker 1: more present, trying to be more deeply rooted into my life,
Speaker 1: whatever that is. And sometimes it's being more deeply rooted
Speaker 1: in something celebratory and wonderful. There there's some odes in here.
Speaker 1: There are some um, some praise poems, uh, and also
Speaker 1: some elegies and poems that grapple with loss and suffering
Speaker 1: and pain and fear and worry and all those other emotions.
Speaker 1: So when I'm making a poem, even if the poem
Speaker 1: is about something painful, when I'm working on the poem,
Speaker 1: actually Jane Hirshfield talks about this. She calls it the
Speaker 1: secret joy of writing poems that there's a joy that
Speaker 1: we don't talk that much about that we feel when
Speaker 1: we're making a poem, when we're making art, no matter
Speaker 1: what the subject is, there's a zen idea right that
Speaker 1: says in the first idea, best idea, right. You know,
Speaker 1: there's musicians that are like, get it in the first take, right,
Speaker 1: And then you get somebody like Leonard Cohen who's like, well,
Speaker 1: I wrote a hundred and fifty verses to get to
Speaker 1: the four you've got here? Do you lean to one
Speaker 1: of those sides more than other? Into the Leonard coh inside. Um.
Speaker 1: There's one poem in here called Failure. Ironically that took
Speaker 1: me twelve years of versions to write, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: working on it constantly over those twelve years, God forbid.
Speaker 1: But I did make my first try at it talking
Speaker 1: about this experience I had when I was a young
Speaker 1: girl and I couldn't get the poem to work. And
Speaker 1: a few years later I tried it again. A few
Speaker 1: years later again. But when I say try, I mean
Speaker 1: like really, you know, I worked on it for a
Speaker 1: few months each time, and then I just say, no,
Speaker 1: it's not there. And sometimes when I'm teaching, I like
Speaker 1: to go back and show my students some of the
Speaker 1: process so that they can have a more realistic idea
Speaker 1: about why it's so hard for them. And I tell
Speaker 1: them it's hard because it's hard. Uh, you know, it's
Speaker 1: not hard for you. It's hard. It's it's hard for
Speaker 1: not every single writer or poet, but the vast majority
Speaker 1: are on the letter coin side way more. And then
Speaker 1: after that many years, I was able to find a
Speaker 1: way into the poem and out of the poem which
Speaker 1: I hadn't been able to find before, and to discover
Speaker 1: what the poem was really about. I had a hint
Speaker 1: that it was in the failure category, but sometimes I
Speaker 1: sort of think to myself, well, I just had to
Speaker 1: have more failures before I could manage this poem. Yeah, boy,
Speaker 1: you brought up a few different things in my mind there.
Speaker 1: The first that I think is so important is what
Speaker 1: you said. They're about that it's hard. We've got a
Speaker 1: coaching client that I'm working with and we were talking
Speaker 1: about impostor syndrome and she said something that was really interested,
Speaker 1: and she said that they did an impostor syndrome workshop
Speaker 1: at her university and then they played bingo like every
Speaker 1: time you heard a phrase that you thought in your head,
Speaker 1: you wrote it down. The person who won was the
Speaker 1: person that everybody looks up to. They all think like,
Speaker 1: this guy is, you know, he's it, and he won
Speaker 1: impostor syndrome bingo because he had all those things. And
Speaker 1: it made me think about, like, I've talked to enough
Speaker 1: wonderful artists and poets and writers like yourself who all say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've done it before, but I still sit down in
Speaker 1: front of a blank piece of paper and it's hard.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's so important for people who
Speaker 1: are working on anything in life that's valuable, whether it's
Speaker 1: art or anything else, it's hard. If it's worth doing,
Speaker 1: it's hard. A lot of us interpret the fact that
Speaker 1: it's hard to mean we're not good at it, we're
Speaker 1: not meant to do it, we can't do it, versus
Speaker 1: realizing like, that's the way it is for most everybody.
Speaker 1: And it's the people who managed to grapple with the
Speaker 1: hard consistently enough that leads to something. It's very true.
Speaker 1: And because poetry is the art form that I know best,
Speaker 1: I can speak you know most knowledgeably about that. But
Speaker 1: I'm sure that it's true across the board. But in
Speaker 1: poetry you have to really have a high tolerance for failure.
Speaker 1: You really have to have a certain kind of crazy
Speaker 1: personality where I think it's worth it to, you know,
Speaker 1: hammer away at a one page poem on and off
Speaker 1: for twelve years because you care about investigating that experience
Speaker 1: and you want to find a help what it's all about,
Speaker 1: and you want to make art out of it. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, there's so many other things that people can
Speaker 1: do with their lives that are more obviously rewarding. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure to be a master gardener or a great surfer,
Speaker 1: you also have to work really hard, but I think
Speaker 1: that you see beauty and delight quicker in the process.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be working at it for decades
Speaker 1: in order to plan a garden and have the joy
Speaker 1: of that garden growing. But boy, a mediocre poem just
Speaker 1: is mediocre, whereas you know, a garden that's just not
Speaker 1: really perfect, it's still a wonderful garden. So it's not
Speaker 1: for everybody to have that much failure. You know, it
Speaker 1: takes me, you know, to write forty or fifty poems
Speaker 1: takes me six seven, eight years. And if you think
Speaker 1: about how many words. That is, when you think of
Speaker 1: all the white space and that I write all the
Speaker 1: time proportionately, it's hard. Yeah. Well, my girlfriend and I
Speaker 1: were talking about this before we started the episode, and
Speaker 1: she loves poetry, and she was saying that poetry is
Speaker 1: so amazing because it can conjure up this huge world
Speaker 1: and these really big emotions out of very few words.
Speaker 1: And I think that's speaking to what you're saying. Why
Speaker 1: it's so hard as you've got, it's very constrained, it's
Speaker 1: not a lot of words that yet still has to
Speaker 1: cause this big thing to happen, has a very very
Speaker 1: high bar, because the bar is really that when you
Speaker 1: write a poem, you want to be changed. You want
Speaker 1: to be a different person at the end of writing
Speaker 1: that poem than you were before, and you hope that
Speaker 1: that will be true for the reader as well. So,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, we don't like at a personality transplant,
Speaker 1: but we want, in some perhaps small but very real
Speaker 1: way and sometimes a big way, we want to be
Speaker 1: different after we write that poem, and we want to
Speaker 1: have discovered something that we didn't know before, and we
Speaker 1: want to be changed, We want to be enriched and enlarged.
Speaker 1: So those few words, they have to do some heavy lifting.
Speaker 1: So let's have a poem. This one is called taking
Speaker 1: my old Dog out to pee before bed. And I
Speaker 1: love this poem for a whole lot of reasons, but
Speaker 1: one is I'm a deep lover of dogs, so I've
Speaker 1: had the privilege of going through several dogs through their
Speaker 1: entire lifespan, and there's something beautiful about that taking my
Speaker 1: old dog out to pay before bed. Zeke's hips are
Speaker 1: too ground down to lift a leg, so he just
Speaker 1: stands there. We both just stand looking into the darkness.
Speaker 1: The moon silver's his thinning fur. Orion strives across the heavens,
Speaker 1: his own dog trotting at his heel, and a great
Speaker 1: live oak reaches over from the neighbor's yard, dense black
Speaker 1: limbs silhouetted against a paler sky, single voluptuous remnant of forests?
Speaker 1: Can a tree be lonely? Zeke tips up his muzzle,
Speaker 1: sent streaming through two hundred million olfactory cells as he
Speaker 1: reads the illuminated manuscript of night raccoons prowling down the street.
Speaker 1: Who's in heat? We're just out for a stroll. Handsome still,
Speaker 1: he reminds me of an aging movie. Star with his
Speaker 1: striking white eyebrows and square jaw. He always had an
Speaker 1: urbane elegance, a gentleman who could carry off satin lip
Speaker 1: hills and a silver tipped cane. Tonight, an ambulance whales.
Speaker 1: Someone not so far away is frightened in pain, trying
Speaker 1: to live. We're trying to die. And then it's quiet again.
Speaker 1: No birds, no wind. We don't speak. We just wait
Speaker 1: alive together until one of us turns back to the
Speaker 1: door and the other follows. It's so beautiful, so wonderful,
Speaker 1: and unlike in the poem, we do have a bird.
Speaker 1: You are crows. Yeh, yeah, we've got some excited crows
Speaker 1: here in the yard. I'm been in loud and clear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: crows are remarkable creatures. My girlfriend I just started reading
Speaker 1: the book called The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman.
Speaker 1: It's all about you know, basically, you know, for a
Speaker 1: long time we basically thought birds were dumb, you know,
Speaker 1: like bird brain, um. But boy, that they are not.
Speaker 1: It's stunning some of the things birds can do, crows
Speaker 1: in particular. We just started. But it's it's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun so far already. Oh, that's a good recommendation
Speaker 1: I couldn't read it. Yeah, lots of people really love
Speaker 1: that book, So we shall see. I'm going to read
Speaker 1: just the first part of another poem of yours and um,
Speaker 1: and then we can kind of just discuss it a
Speaker 1: little bit. It's a poem called enough, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's a fairly long poem, so I'm just reading the
Speaker 1: first paragraph or two. But there's a part of it
Speaker 1: that I just had to get into this conversation. So enough, No,
Speaker 1: it will never be enough. Never enough wind clamoring in
Speaker 1: the trees, sun and shadow handling each leaf, never enough,
Speaker 1: clang of my neighbor hammering the iron nails, relenting wood,
Speaker 1: sound waves lapping over roofs, never enough bees purposeful at
Speaker 1: the throats of lilies. How could we be replete with
Speaker 1: the flesh of ripe tomatoes, the crushed scent of their leaves.
Speaker 1: It would take many births to be done with the
Speaker 1: that nous of that? And I just I love that
Speaker 1: last line in particular, take many births to be done
Speaker 1: with the that noess of That reminds me of a
Speaker 1: phrase I hear in Zen often. Thus, nous, do you
Speaker 1: like hearing other people read your poems or you like,
Speaker 1: oh my goodness, you've got the you've got the emphasis
Speaker 1: wrong on that. No, I think it's wonderful because poetry
Speaker 1: is more popular than it's ever been in my lifetime,
Speaker 1: and it's still not like movie or you know, TV
Speaker 1: or you know football. So hearing someone else read my poem,
Speaker 1: the first thing that I'm thinking about is, you know,
Speaker 1: they care enough about this poem that they even want
Speaker 1: to read it. So that's like you're way ahead of
Speaker 1: the game, just starting right there. And then it's interesting
Speaker 1: to me, you know, how does someone else receive it.
Speaker 1: I've been reading a book recently by a man named
Speaker 1: Virlin Klinkenborg, and it's called Several Short Sentences about Writing,
Speaker 1: and he says that it's important to know what you
Speaker 1: mean to say, but it's crucial to know what you
Speaker 1: have said. And so when I hear somebody read my poem,
Speaker 1: I'm more aware of what I've actually said, not what
Speaker 1: I mean to say, but what I've said. So that's
Speaker 1: special to That's like a little peek into what is
Speaker 1: the poem doing out in the world, because sometimes the
Speaker 1: poem does things that we're what I'm is thinking about.
Speaker 1: That's the poem doing it, not me and what I
Speaker 1: was thinking or what I meant or why I cared
Speaker 1: about it, but what is it doing when it's out
Speaker 1: on its own. So that's very interesting to me because
Speaker 1: it's something I made, So that makes me think of
Speaker 1: I've often heard from people that when you read a poem,
Speaker 1: that it's really helpful to read it out loud, that
Speaker 1: there's something about hearing it. Oh yeah, it's all about
Speaker 1: hearing the words and the sound of them. When your
Speaker 1: mouth makes the sound, the sound is different out in
Speaker 1: the world than it is inside your head. Do you
Speaker 1: read poetry that way? Of course? Absolutely? Yeah. Poetry is
Speaker 1: out loud. I mean, we put it on a page
Speaker 1: so that it can move around more easily, but it
Speaker 1: really wants to be out loud. As the writer, you
Speaker 1: can't tell what you have. This is true for prose
Speaker 1: writers too. You can't tell what you've got there until
Speaker 1: you read it out loud. Grace Paley used to call
Speaker 1: it the speedy eye and the slow ear. We read
Speaker 1: just with our eyes. There's a way in which we
Speaker 1: can just grasp, you know, in kind of grouping. We
Speaker 1: don't really hear it word by word and syllable by syllable,
Speaker 1: and when you read it out loud, you hear what
Speaker 1: you didn't hear before. And so when I'm writing a poem,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm always reading it out loud through all the drafts.
Speaker 1: And when I read poetry, I'm often reading it out loud.
Speaker 1: And if I've read the poem silently to myself a
Speaker 1: number of times and then read it out loud, It's
Speaker 1: always shocking to me how I hear things that I
Speaker 1: hadn't heard before, even though I might think I'm sounding
Speaker 1: it in my head. The wonderful poet Frank Gaspar calls
Speaker 1: that part of the word in your mouth. He calls
Speaker 1: it the mouth feel. What would you like to read
Speaker 1: another one for us? I'd love to. How about we
Speaker 1: do the long recovery? It the long recovery. When she
Speaker 1: would come home from the strawberry fields, I'd empty the
Speaker 1: dirt from the cuffs of her jeans, scrub the mud
Speaker 1: ground into the knees. It made me want to tongue
Speaker 1: the sweat of her throat, taste salt in the dusty crevices. No, no,
Speaker 1: I say now to my dumb sex that, like a
Speaker 1: dog can't understand. I know I'm less than a speck
Speaker 1: on the planet, the planet, less than a spec and
Speaker 1: so on. Is it sacred or insane that I matter
Speaker 1: so much to myself that she matters so much to me?
Speaker 1: What use is my turning her again and again towards
Speaker 1: the sun. I'm old enough to know there's nothing we
Speaker 1: love without incurring the dead of grief. The maple leaves
Speaker 1: just edged with crimson, the bright yellow breast of the warbler.
Speaker 1: It's sweet, sweet, sweetie, cry her hand as she lifts
Speaker 1: a cup riddled with veins, rushed, the loose skin, almost transparent,
Speaker 1: almost familiar as my own. How can I hurl myself
Speaker 1: deeper into this life? Why do I think there's something
Speaker 1: better I could be doing? I missed her. I miss her.
Speaker 1: I believe in her animal scent. I believe stars burn
Speaker 1: in the blank day sky. I believe the Earth rushes
Speaker 1: through space so I can't feel the slightest breeze that's
Speaker 1: so lovely. The line in there is its sacred or insane?
Speaker 1: That I matter so much to myself that she matters
Speaker 1: so much to me? Is such? I just love that
Speaker 1: because it's both right, I mean, I think it really
Speaker 1: is both add a pretty deep spiritual experience not too
Speaker 1: long ago. And the main thing that I came back
Speaker 1: from that with the only thing I could really say
Speaker 1: was that it's like it felt in the midst of
Speaker 1: it that everything was so utterly insignificant and so utterly
Speaker 1: sacred at the same time those things were both true
Speaker 1: in the same moment. And and I it's you know,
Speaker 1: I just felt that so deeply, And when I read
Speaker 1: that in this poem, it just really brought me back
Speaker 1: to that moment. Yeah, it's it's both and and then
Speaker 1: the other line, which I think is basically, if I
Speaker 1: could sum up everything I'm trying to do in spiritual practices,
Speaker 1: how can I hurl myself deeper into this life? You know?
Speaker 1: That makes me think of Dogan's phrase, enlightenment is intimacy
Speaker 1: with all things. M That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's really the job description, isn't it. That we're
Speaker 1: trying not to resist the life that we have and
Speaker 1: instead for all ourselves more deeply in to it. And
Speaker 1: when it's rough, that is a big challenge for me,
Speaker 1: and I think for most of us, but just for me,
Speaker 1: just say, it's really hard, but it helps to know
Speaker 1: that it's what we're trying to do. And I even
Speaker 1: almost sometimes find that really difficult moments are are hard,
Speaker 1: you know, to to hurl ourselves deeper into. But I
Speaker 1: almost feel that, like for me when it's really difficult,
Speaker 1: I can kind of lean in. It's almost just the
Speaker 1: more prosaic, just sort of black moments that I find
Speaker 1: it so much harder to hurl myself into, you know.
Speaker 1: And and I found quarantine to be interesting because it's like, well,
Speaker 1: there's nothing happening. I'm not going anywhere. I've been grateful
Speaker 1: to be a Zen student during this, you know, I
Speaker 1: start to go, well, there's just nothing happening, and then
Speaker 1: I go, wait, hang on a second, that what would
Speaker 1: my if I if I said that to my zend teacher,
Speaker 1: what would I get? Right? I would get everything is
Speaker 1: happening right now, pay attention, you know. And and I
Speaker 1: love that, you know. The next line you say is
Speaker 1: why do I think there's something better I could be doing?
Speaker 1: You know, boy, is that the curse of a lot
Speaker 1: of life. There's something better I could be doing. I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is, but something I think that's
Speaker 1: really insightful. What you're saying about the blah moments, or
Speaker 1: even the neutral moments, or even the sort of mildly
Speaker 1: nice moments. You know, sometimes I'll be well, taking a
Speaker 1: walk along the ocean. I mean, that's glorious, and will
Speaker 1: I be there? Am I in my body? Do I
Speaker 1: feel my feet walking? Am I looking at the ocean?
Speaker 1: A lot of the times, I'm embarrassed to say, how
Speaker 1: many of the times? UM thinking about something else? Oh?
Speaker 1: I remember to put that on my calendar, you know,
Speaker 1: Oh I have to do this. Oh, you know, I
Speaker 1: should kind of think about what I'm going to say
Speaker 1: to so and so. You know, I mean all kinds
Speaker 1: of things. When you know, I could be looking at
Speaker 1: the whole Pacific Ocean out there later out just for me,
Speaker 1: so to speak, and I'm not even really appreciating it.
Speaker 1: The beautiful thing about a poem like the one we
Speaker 1: just heard is it reminds us in a way, and
Speaker 1: it stirs in us, at least in me, in a
Speaker 1: way that saying like these moments are really special, you
Speaker 1: should pay more attention. Like I can say that, and
Speaker 1: I can understand that intellectually, but when a piece of
Speaker 1: art comes along like this, it gives it a different lens.
Speaker 1: It brings it more to life. I think the thing
Speaker 1: about poetry that I love is that good poets, great poets,
Speaker 1: and I think you're one, observe the world so closely,
Speaker 1: and they teach me how to do it. It teaches
Speaker 1: me how to look more deeply. There's something in the
Speaker 1: way that a poet sees the world, the way the
Speaker 1: poet basically zooms in on something very ordinary and causes
Speaker 1: it to become sacred and beautiful, that teaches me a
Speaker 1: little bit about how to do it. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the most important things to me that poetry can do. That. Again,
Speaker 1: a spiritual teaching can tell me to do, but poetry
Speaker 1: sometimes teaches me how in a way that I can't articulate.
Speaker 1: I was talking recently about an article that I read
Speaker 1: a while back, and it talks about metaphor and metaphorical language,
Speaker 1: which you know, even when a poem it doesn't have
Speaker 1: an actual metaphor in it, it's still metaphorical language. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they did some brain imaging and when you read
Speaker 1: something that is a metaphor, the part of your brain
Speaker 1: that responds to the texture of touch lights up. And
Speaker 1: when you read something that gives you the idea of that,
Speaker 1: But isn't a metaphor or in metaphorical language, that part
Speaker 1: of your brain does not that way in which it
Speaker 1: reaches us, It reaches us through I know how to
Speaker 1: say this word. The riotal operculum is the part of
Speaker 1: drain that I love that sound. I hope I can
Speaker 1: put that in the poem. So it is literally affecting
Speaker 1: us the way physical touch affects us, whereas the idea
Speaker 1: of it just goes into our thinker, whatever the thinking is.
Speaker 1: YEA fascinating totally, And of course in a poem too,
Speaker 1: we're trying to say something without making it reductionistic, without
Speaker 1: reducing it to some kind of slogan or you know,
Speaker 1: cliche or sound bite or something like that. You know,
Speaker 1: we're trying to actually say something that is not really sayable,
Speaker 1: but we're trying to get it into words without losing
Speaker 1: its complexity. You said that you will spend I know
Speaker 1: this was an extreme, but twelve years on a on
Speaker 1: a poem. I'm you know, I'm I know. They don't
Speaker 1: all take that long. How do you know or do
Speaker 1: you even know? When you've got it right? I'll just
Speaker 1: say this and then actually you talk. I was reading
Speaker 1: a book, a far side book the cartoons, and he
Speaker 1: was showing in that book some early sketches he had
Speaker 1: and how they turned into cartoons, and he in a
Speaker 1: couple of times was like, and here's where I polished
Speaker 1: this one too much. I can see now that like
Speaker 1: I should have left it alone, you know, so so
Speaker 1: I guess you know. My question is how do you
Speaker 1: have a sense of like, Okay, I'm there, this is ready,
Speaker 1: this is done well as a poet, unlike um, a
Speaker 1: visual artist or you know it maybe at the extremes
Speaker 1: somebody sculpting in marble. We if we overdo it, we
Speaker 1: can go backward. Uh. And that is really very wonderful.
Speaker 1: So you don't ever have to worry about going too
Speaker 1: far and uh and over polishing. As long as you
Speaker 1: save all your drafts, you can go back to the
Speaker 1: last time when it's still had a and um, you know,
Speaker 1: then see if that actually was the right place and
Speaker 1: you went too far. Sometimes I just know, I mean,
Speaker 1: sometimes there's just something you can almost feel the click
Speaker 1: where it clicks into place, and you just know that's it.
Speaker 1: You've got it. And sometimes I know I haven't got it.
Speaker 1: My wife is a very insightful reader, and her criticism
Speaker 1: is really valuable to me. And I would never show
Speaker 1: her early drafts because she's not a teacher. She doesn't
Speaker 1: look and see what the potential in that poem is.
Speaker 1: She looks It's like what Klinkenborg was saying. She sees
Speaker 1: what is actually there, not what I might hope to
Speaker 1: have be there. So but that further along. And I
Speaker 1: showed her a poem one time and she kind of hesitated.
Speaker 1: She looked up at me and she said, I don't
Speaker 1: feel changed, and uh, we just both burst out laughing,
Speaker 1: because you know, I didn't feel changed either, but I
Speaker 1: was kind of hope that maybe there was more there
Speaker 1: than I thought. So sometimes sometimes I know that the
Speaker 1: poem is not working. I think more often I'm in
Speaker 1: a kind of middle range, and I'm thinking, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: it's coming along. But I'm fortunate to have a couple
Speaker 1: of friends who I quote friends, and a couple of
Speaker 1: poet friends, and one friend who isn't a poet but
Speaker 1: who is a very devoted reader of poetry, and she
Speaker 1: will give me some feedback, and then a couple other
Speaker 1: quote friends will give me some feedback. And that's very
Speaker 1: helpful to me, not that I always will do exactly
Speaker 1: what they say, but hearing what they say is a
Speaker 1: kind of a sounding board, and sometimes they're just exactly
Speaker 1: right on, and I can just do what they say
Speaker 1: and there it is. But that helps me a lot,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it takes me quite a while to see.
Speaker 1: In this book, there's a couple of poems that write
Speaker 1: at the eleventh hour. I lopped off about three orders
Speaker 1: of the poem, and it took me years to see
Speaker 1: that I and I always thought, oh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I kind of like something about this poem, but I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't think it's quite right. And then
Speaker 1: once it shed everything it didn't need, I actually felt
Speaker 1: very good about it. I know that there are poets
Speaker 1: who are more able to make those assessments without any
Speaker 1: outside reflection from others, and I think that would be
Speaker 1: wonderful to have that barometer exactly that way. But I
Speaker 1: do rely someone help. But knowing what to do this
Speaker 1: is what I tell my students when they're getting a
Speaker 1: lot of different kinds of feedback, And I tell them
Speaker 1: that knowing what to do with the feedback you get
Speaker 1: is an art in itself, because you just do what
Speaker 1: people say, unless they're my student, and then they should
Speaker 1: just do what I say. If the feedback is coming
Speaker 1: from your we can see each other and the room
Speaker 1: you're in is just filled with books, and there's books
Speaker 1: stacked on your desk. And it's always so distracting to
Speaker 1: me to be talking to anybody with a bunch of
Speaker 1: books in the background, because I'm like, what's that book?
Speaker 1: I wonder what those books are? But everything is right.
Speaker 1: Two walls are Florida ceiling books, and there's still not
Speaker 1: enough room. Right before the pandemic, I was about to
Speaker 1: go through and I'm sure you have too. I really
Speaker 1: like this term a lot death preparation, and um, I'm
Speaker 1: not really preparing for it um on a on a
Speaker 1: you know, deep level, but on just the clutter level.
Speaker 1: My mother would always go through things in her house
Speaker 1: and you know, get rid of paper, papers and stuff
Speaker 1: that you and she said, you know, I don't want
Speaker 1: to leave all this mess for my children. And so
Speaker 1: I feel like I have so much stuff in here
Speaker 1: that I have to start now because otherwise I'll we'll
Speaker 1: just leave too big a mess. Yeah. I saw a
Speaker 1: President Obama did a live stream yesterday. I wanted to
Speaker 1: see what he had to say about everything that was happening,
Speaker 1: and I was I mostly followed him, but there he
Speaker 1: was in front of a bookshelf, and I again I
Speaker 1: found it distracting, like what's back there? Like I gotta know?
Speaker 1: So I was curious too, Yeah, so why don't we
Speaker 1: wrap up by having you read one more poem for us?
Speaker 1: And I think that we should go with I think
Speaker 1: it's the poem that closes the book. Isn't it any
Speaker 1: common desolation? So we'll we'll use the it's the last
Speaker 1: poem in the book, and we'll use it as a
Speaker 1: way to wrap us up here. Any common desolation can
Speaker 1: be enough to make you look up at the yellow
Speaker 1: leaves the apple tree, the few that survived the rains
Speaker 1: and frost. Shot with late afternoon sun. They glow a
Speaker 1: deep orange gold against blue so sheer. A single bird
Speaker 1: would rive it like silk. You may have to break
Speaker 1: your heart, but it isn't nothing to know even one
Speaker 1: moment alive. The sound of an oar in an oar lock,
Speaker 1: or a ruminant animal tearing grass, the smell of graded ginger,
Speaker 1: the ruby neon of the liquor store sign warm socks.
Speaker 1: You remember your mother her precision a ceremony. As she
Speaker 1: gathered the white cotton, slipped it over your toes, drew
Speaker 1: up the heel, turned the cup. A breath can uncoil
Speaker 1: as you walk across your own muddy yard. The big
Speaker 1: Dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread,
Speaker 1: all you can't bear dissolves, and like a needle slipped
Speaker 1: into your vein that sudden rush of the world. That's
Speaker 1: so beautiful. It brings so many different things together. I
Speaker 1: of how it brings together the things that are difficult
Speaker 1: in the world, and just the overpowering beauty of it. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you so much Ellen for agreeing to
Speaker 1: come back on. It's been a pleasure to have you
Speaker 1: back on. The book is called Indigo by Ellen Bass.
Speaker 1: I'd highly recommended to everybody well. Have links in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure
Speaker 1: to talk with you. It's just wonderful to talk with you. Eric.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Bye bye bye. If what you just heard
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