Poet's Petard # 12 – February, 2022

Our Deep Sense of Winter

The one place where everything breaks should not have been in winter.

– Annie Lighthart (Iron String)

Once again we have spent most of our preciously hoarded cache of winter endurance, and it's only the end of January. Once again we have arrived at the place where slogging through no longer works. No end in sight, so toss that metaphor. Time to go deep, but stay awake.

Let us now visit a few of the unspangled silences of this season.

Pay attention to the silent presence of everything in the room.

– Eckhart Tolle

Never mind the unlikelihood of getting to the bottom of anything:
it's the incidental illuminations along the way
that provoke our admiration.

– Patricia Craig, review of Irish Haiku by Chris Arthur

We start with the most basic practice – entering into the field of silence.

In silence, we perceive individual things surrounded by fringes of a great quiet. Objects are as if filigreed. Silence wraps around them like lace.

We also hear, smell, and taste the silence. . . .Such sensory experience is not imaginary. We are    not experiencing something that is not there, but rather are taken into a different level of what is there. The sense-perceptible world is raised to the level of the imaginal for us the moment we cross the threshold of the noisy world into silence. . . . When we are able to dwell for a time in silence, we perceive something of the soul of the world.

--Robert Sardello (Facing the World with Soul)

With the palms of my hands I explore the base of my soul. Cold and flat as a headstone in the darkest wing of the church, it bears an inscription in relief. I pass my fingers over it again and again, until I can read it. And so, thanks to the sense of touch, I discover who I am.

– Gemma Gorga, (Book of Minutes, #52)

Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about.
You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos
where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours.
Tell him about things. He'll stand amazed, just as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;
how even grief's lament purely determines its own shape,
serves as a thing, or dies in a thing – and escapes
in ecstasy beyond the violin.

– Rilke, Duino Elegies: The Ninth Elegy