Serenity is the Hallway Hero

I kept a list of student names and spellings from the classes I used to substitute teach when I first moved to Missoula.  Brock, Brodee, Cody, Elmira, Camas and Willow were some of my favorites.  Characters from a Larry McMurtry novel, small towns found in the wilds of Wyoming or abstract concepts revived by the now grandparents of the 60's.  Only West of the Mississippi would you consistently have a roll call with a boy named Earl.  And a girl named Serenity can be a hallway hero.

My niece is named Wren and I adore her and her name.  It seems to be rather onomatopoetic when you say it for it easily flies out of your mouth and you find yourself smiling when you say her name.  Despite our distance and lack of time spent hanging out on a daily basis, Wren and I are rather fond of each other.  Perhaps it might be because we have a similar sense of spirit.  Perhaps it might be because she has a friend named Emily she likes who lives near by.  

What I do know is that last Valentine's day Wren and her mom were in the post office sending off Valentines' to friends and family when Wren said, 
"I want to send Emily a card."  
"Emily who?" asked her mom.
"Emily Montana." (which sounds pretty darn cool, like some struggling country western singer who spends too much time not singing.)  And so, Wren put together a card for me, which this picture does not do justice, but is framed and hung in my bathroom.  It felt too artful and alive to just be left on my fridge to fold or fade into the year placed under some magnet.  I wanted to hold that spirit all year long.  I wanted to feel in the random St. Patrick stickers, smily faces, reindeer and pieces of cake a sense of love and joy.  Placed just so with so much well, spirit and such a sense of unabashed delight. 

Last Valentine's day for me was not a memorable day in the state of romantic love.  Perhaps what was memorable was it was so full of almost every other type of love: familial, hopeful, renewal, longing and of course, loss of love.  I'm confident if you wikipediaed love, you would find plenty of more types, but what resonated with me with this card was a specific type of love.  A love that comes from a personal place in our hearts, regardless of how old we are,  let's just call it a love of light.  Call it lightness of being, call it joy, call it whatever you want, but hopefully you call it.  I believe we all possess this love or are capable of being surprised by where we might find it.  For me, it is a card thickly coated with every holiday of the year stickers, placed in a manner of a four year old's artful mind.

I only recently framed this card out of the desire to remind myself of being able to bring light, or delight into my daily life.  November can hang heavy.  Can make you forget about the sun.  And it is during these dark hallways of days that you need a torch, need some sort of light regardless of how faint to follow.  It is during these days I have needed this card the most.  I am sure all of us have some totem of joy we follow. And most of the time for me it is art or poetry.  It is the poetry of Jack Gilbert that I turn to for cerebral joy when I feel heavy in my heart.

Last night, thanks to the post by fellow poets on Facebook, I found out Jack Gilbert died.  (Again, I just think we should all it Face It.)  If you don't know Jack Gilbert, please google him.  No, google his poetry.  Even better yet, google videos where you can hear his voice break almost in every poem he reads, as if his words were so heavy with emotion but so giving with light.  

He had won the prized Yale Younger Poets award in 1962, thought to be this next handsome man of yes, literary fame if there is such a thing, but Jack chose to live in Europe.  Chose to write a book of poems every ten years, chose to live more than he taught.  Wrote more about the terrible beauties of this world not under the guise of shame or darkness, but rather delight.  Or as the article in the New York Times said of his work yesterday, "..and their (his poems) embrace of life as a big, messy possibility, his poems were for many readers both serious and accessible, connecting to their own feelings of having to endure in a often cruel, unfair world."

But there is more there in his work.  In the poetry of Jack Gilbert, suffering was not something to endure, but to accept with a smile.  He loved this world so much, maybe too much for our rational minds to understand. Here are a few lines from his poem, "A Brief for the Defense" found in his book, Refusing Heaven,  

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of  their deprivation.

We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure,

but not delight.  Not enjoyment.  We must have 

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world.   To make injustice the only 

measure  of our attention  is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had  magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

And I believe to risk knowing there is sorrow, but to risk holding delight despite it all allows us to live with our hearts as much as our minds.  To risk our ability to have delight and joy is to risk love.  And the greatest risk is truly believing we are worth it.  To hear our names as the hallway heros of love.  To be happy with our sorrow and give thanks that our hearts can still bring joy.  Despite everything.  Despite losing Jack we have gained his words. 

Here's a poem from the same book, Refusing Heaven. 

Enjoy.

The Reinvention of Happiness

I remember how I'd lie on my roof

listening to the fat violinist

below in the sleeping village

play Schubert so badly, so well.

Little Big Birds

There are few places on this earth where the names of towns carry the weight of abandonless hope.  Here in Montana, Wisdom, Opportunity, Sunburst and even Big Timber conjure up the sense of our internal West.  The idea that life is elsewhere and that elsewhere is where you have arrived.  There's even the main street of Helena, that illustrates this perfectly: Last Chance Gulch.  History claims four men from Georgia had travelled all over Western Montana in search of gold, finding nothing, they decided to take one last chance on a small stream which runs down the main street of this state's capitol.  And sure enough, they found gold.

On a late October day, I found myself in need of some hope too.  So I took myself on a one day road trip.  A solo road trip.  When the mountains aren't snow-ski ready and trails drench with cold mud, the warmth of a car seems almost like a vacation.  Rolodexing through my mind for things I enjoy, I decided to head to Helena to see the Holter Art Museum, but maybe also because Boulder Hot Springs is just a mere 30 more miles away.  The day was grey, washed out by intermittent rain squalls, but with sudden bursts of golden sun.  The larch gleamed.  My car played and re-played Cat Power's latest CD, Sun.  And when I arrived in Helena, all I wanted to do was take photos of sky, afternoon light on brick and get lost in the fact I could stand in front of a de Kooning brought out on a train from New York by a family who wanted to ranch.  It was titled Woman and full of the same muddled mustard of the late October larch I had passed for over a hundred miles.

I had not been on a solo road trip in over five years, the last being when I drove into Missoula with my car full, two bikes and a cat, late one Tuesday night just a week before Halloween.  Ironically, it had been almost five years to the date, so my solo road trip to see art and soak, was a bit of an anniversary.  But what was I celebrating, really?  Independence, which really wasn't what I wanted at 38.  Freedom, which is thrilling and all my married friends with toddlers tell me how lucky I am, but after a divorce, I've learned it pays a heavy price.  As I let my body float and watch the last of the light fade into the Continental Divide, I settled on a word to celebrate: hope.  

But hope is tricky.  Sure, we recall hope was also in Pandora's box, which according to myth contained all the evils of the world.  Despair, grief and anger to name a few seemed to have scrunched themselves tightly in the corner wrapped with hope until they were all released.  And here's the thing: When you go in search of hope, the odd part is, you have to have enough of it already to believe there is more.  As if hope is gold for the soul.  But furthermore, you cannot believe hope is only one-sided, either just evil or just good.  Again, tricky.  So why would I want to celebrate hope, if it isn't something to have or hold?

While I was floating in the pool, I watched the late autumn clouds move quickly across the sky.  A couple maybe in their 60's perhaps not married, but close, sat in the pool holding their bodies up in the water with neon colored noodles.  They spoke of the election.  They had different opinions.  But they listened to each other, carefully.  The spoke of music. Music they liked to play passionately.  They didn't interrupt each other and enough laughter surfaced between them to keep their conversation light, but intimate.  

I went and dressed and poured myself a cup of coffee from my thermos.  Still hot.  I sat in my car and kept waiting for some shade of loneliness to set in, a full day not talking to anyone, I thought some sense of dusk would rise to elude me.  But it didn't.  And I didn't want it.  I wanted to see the day in more than one shade.  Simply, I had hope that I could keep the darkness on the outside of the car while I headed west for Missoula.  And for the most part I did, until I merged along the same stretch of road I recalled coming back on late one June after eloping, so full of hope and future.  I let the memory pass.  Not with tears, nor with anger, or remorse, not even a whiff of judgement or a shadow of pure loss.  Nope.  I just let it pass.  Because hope, thankfully, isn't something to hold, but to understand as impermanent.  

As Emily Dickinson claimed, "Hope" is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ and never stops--at all--.  As if hope can come and go, can fly to leave or arrive, but regardless of direction, the bird continually sings.  It is not the bird we need, but the knowing of the song.  And maybe, our hearts are the little big birds full of noise we can choose to hear as song.  Enjoy.  Another revised poem/ song

Hymn of the Pigeon

She finds a pigeon, dead

on her way home.  She's drunk,

swears the stars can lead her

to her front door.

Feet curled, taut with it's eyes gone, 

laying outside a drug store.

She picks up the still body

covered in gravel and warm.

Cupping the chest, she feels

an echo of a pulse, a pebble skipped

into a shallow pool.  Finds a box,

and nestles the blind bird with rosemary,

not knowing what to do with anything

born-again.  She feeds it oatmeal,

drops of water and waits

for it to do something.  Fly,

coo or shit, but it just rocks

back and forth like this boy

with dark glasses she watched

on a bus, who sang in perfect pitch.

Now she hears the song

of a meadowlark, far from her home

in fields of burnt grass, without

asking the world its name.