The Natural Patriot

[The solstice has turned and we are once again, as the poet would say, moving toward the light. A new year and a new decade, with all the hope and apprehension — the yin and the yang — inherent therein. For thousands of years people have seen the year come and go, the light dwindle and return, and faced the new year with the same mixture of hope and apprehension that we do. So this first morning of 2010 it seems fitting to turn to the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, in the 39th chapter of Stephen Mitchell’s masterful (if somewhat free-form) translation.]

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

The master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn’t glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as a stone.

[For good measure, here is another, perhaps more literal, translation of the same chapter by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English:]

These things from ancient times arise from one:
The sky is whole and clear.
The earth is whole and firm.
The spirit is whole and strong.
The valley is whole and full.
The ten thousand things are whole and alive.
Kings and lords are whole and the country is upright.
All these are in virtue of wholeness.

The clarity of the sky prevents it falling.
The firmness of the earth prevents it splitting.
The strength of the spirit prevents it being used up.
The fullness of the valley prevents it running dry.
The growth of the ten thousand things prevents them dying out.
The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall
of the country.

Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.
The low is the foundation of the high.
Princes and lords consider themselves
“orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.”
Do they not depend on being humble?

Too much success is not an advantage.
Do not tinkle like jade
Or clatter like stone chimes.

[The earth is beginning to wake up and stretch again.  So let’s savor the last breaths of the unique waning season before we move on. Number ten in a series.]

To days of winter
W.S. Merwyn

Not enough has been said
ever in your praise
hushed mornings
before the year turns new
and for a while afterward
passing behind the sounds

Oh light worn thin
until the eyes can
almost see through you
still words continuing
to bloom out of yourselves
in the way of the older stars
your ancestors

season from before knowledge
reappearing
days when the sun is loved most

[In celebration of the recently passed Solstice and the dawning season of rebirth, number nine in a series, this the second from Mary Oliver. Food for thought in the holiday season, and always]

The Sun
Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from the world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

[Editor’s note: Shortly before we left California in 1994 and headed east to settle on Timberneck Creek in Tidewater, Virginia, where we remain to this day, I happened across the writer Richard Brautigan. He was from California, evidently, at least that’s where his works take place. He is most famous as the author of the unique work “Trout Fishing in America“, which is difficult to describe or to categorize among the genres of fiction, poetry, memoir, and stream-of-consciousness journals of hallucinations. The cover of the book has a photo of him and his girlfriend hanging in Washington Square in San Francisco and — no, I am not making this up — the first chapter of the book is entitled “The cover for trout fishing in America”. It describes, you guessed it, the cover of the book. How could such a thing attain the status of a cult classic? How, indeed, can we be sure that it is a cult classic? For me, the key evidence came when I was listening to NPR one morning, around that same time when we were living in the Bay area, and I heard a story about a kid who, as soon as he turned 18, changed his name to “Trout fishing in America.” Legally and officially. There was something about him asking his Dad for the money for the legal fees as a gift when he graduated from high school. It is beyond my powers of imagination to picture what went through either his head or his father’s in this transaction, but it really happened. I heard it on NPR. Anyway, my point in bringing all this up is that Brautigan also wrote several books of poetry. The following is from the book “The Pill versus the Spring Hill Mine Disaster.” On the surface it would have to be considered pretty corny, but I have to admit that I’ve always found it quite touching. I’ve even been known to recite it to my wife (don’t tell anyone). It’s my favorite by Brautigan. Number eight in a series.]

Your Catfish Friend
Richard Brautigan

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful
here by this pond. I wish somebody loved me,”
I’d love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”

[Editor’s note: A millennium before Charles Frazier, before Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, there was the original “Cold Mountain”, a modest group of poems thought to have been authored by the mysterious hermit Han-shan, who scribbled them on rocks and trees around his humble abode and left them. The story goes that they were collected by an official who wished to be enlightened. And that, fittingly, is how the most influential Zen poetry in history has come down to us. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. The poems cover a lot of ground, but the following one hits home at the moment (although I would switch groundhogs for mountain monkeys). This poem, seventh in a series, is from Burton Watson’s translation.]

From: Cold Mountain
Han-shan
My house is at the foot of the green cliff,
My garden, a jumble of weeds I no longer bother to mow.
New vines dangle in twisted strands
Over old rocks rising steep and high.
Monkeys make off with mountain fruits,
The white heron crams his bill with fish from the pond,
While I, with a book or two of the immortals,
Read under the trees — mumble, mumble.

[Editor’s note: This week’s entry comes from Johhny Cash.  That’s right, the Man in Black. The song itself is, of course, an old traditional whose author has been lost to us.  The poetry in this piece comes in the prayer of Johnny’s spoken-word introduction. I don’t know if these are his own words, or those of the anonymous cowboy. But they send shivers down my spine every time I hear them. They are written in the plain Christian idiom of his tradition, but they also speak more broadly to the spirit of natural patriotism. Sixth in a series.]

Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie
Traditional, interpreted by Johhny Cash

Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow.
I loved creation better as it stood
that day you finished it so long ago
and looked upon your work and called it good.
I know that others find you in the light
that sifted down through tinted window panes.
And yet I seem to feel you near tonight
in this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.
I thank you, Lord, that I’m placed so well
that you’ve made my freedom so complete
that I’m no slave to whistle, clock or bell,
nor weak-eyed prisoner of Wall or Street.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
and give me work that’s open to the sky.
Make me a partner of the wind and sun
and I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.
Let me be easy on the man that’s down.
Let me be square and generous with all.
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town
but never let them say I’m mean or small.
Make me as big and open as the plains
and honest as the horse between my knees,
clean as a wind that blows behind the rains,
free as the hawk that circles down the breeze.
Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget –
You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall or fret.
Well, you knew me better than my mother did.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done or said
and right me sometimes when I turn aside.
And guide me on that long, dim trail ahead
that stretches upward toward the great divide.

[Editor’s note: Few have employed the Spanish language so masterfully as Pablo Neruda.  I’ve often felt that an important incentive to improve my own rudimentary Spanish would be the ability to read and appreciate Neruda’s poetry in his native tongue.  For now, alas, I have to be satisfied with the translation of by Alastair Reid, who has been called “Neruda’s most talented and imaginitive English translator”.  This is from Neruda’s poetic autobiography, written in his elder years as he reminisced down his long and eventful life from his remote home on the coast of Chile.  As winter winds down here in Virginia, and I can already see in the woods the subtle wash of red maple buds, I’m waiting for the earth too.]

Oh tierra, esperame
(Oh, Earth, Wait for Me)

Pablo Neruda
from “Isla Negra“

Return me, oh sun,
to my country destiny,
rain of the ancient woods.
Bring me back its aroma, and the swords
falling from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river margins,
the smell of the larch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded remoteness
of the towering araucaria.

Earth, give me back your pristine gifts,
towers of silence which rose from
the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I haven’t been,
to learn to return from such depths
that among all natural things
I may live or not live.  I don’t mind
being one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone that the river bears away.

[The photo below shows Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, Chile]

[Editor’s note: This past weekend, driving home from the mountains of West Virginia, I saw groves of sycamores lining the river bottoms and along the creeks running down the hollows.  This poem, by one of the great American poets and communicants with nature, is a worthy tribute to one of the most magnificent trees in our American sylva (also captured beautifully in prose by Donald Culross Peattie — see here), and a telling metaphor for the struggle and triumph of our beleaguered world, and — dare I say it — our souls.]

The Sycamore
Wendell Berry

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

[“Dry Creek Sycamore” painting by Michael Chesley Johnson.]

[Note: Few poets, or others for that matter, have captured the essence of our life in the world as Mary Oliver has.  How will we live in harmony with the earth? There are no easy answers.]

The fish
Mary Oliver

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are noursihed
by the mystery.

[Fish print by Lori Hatch]