Walking Poetry into Our Bodies

“When great Nature sighs, we hear the winds

Which, noiseless in themselves,

Awaken voices from other beings,

Blowing on them.”

Each day, enroute to class, we stop at the Gate of Silence to recite a poem. There’s no actual gate, just a passage through dirt and sage. It’s a place, hardly different from another, windswept and innocuous like everywhere on the mesa.

But these places are intimately wound into our lives. They have names and purposes, memories from years of use. Slight inclines, crumbled canyons. It was near the Gate of Silence, for example, that we found the arroyo so many years back, which always runs dry, swelled to an unrecognizably massive river of snowmelt.

Time. Change. The regularity of footsteps. It’s given us a pace with which to measure the shifts in our bodies, minds, and hearts. It’s been years.

From autumn to spring, we speak the same poem. All year. I’ve never done this on my own – memorized or recited words. For me, it was math equations. They have their own poetry. The sound of language often got my attention, but I never put effort beyond the basic prayers of my youth, or a Shakespeare sonnet in high school. Sorta whatever. Shrug.

Now it’s an everyday experience, going on six years. It’s given us the chance to chew on our words, to ignore them, to listen, to be angry and listen. To be silent and listen. To be sad and listen. And whole.

There are so many seasons of the heart.

“From every opening

Loud voices sound. Have you not heard

This rush of tones?”

The first year I had only two students. We were so young we dawdled the whole way – looking at animal prints, finding stink bugs, getting lost in this or that. The mesa is deceptively empty. It’s empty if you perceive it to be. Full if you give it the gift of your awareness.

That year, we spoke the words of Thich Nhat Hanh.

“Take my hand,

We will walk.

We will only walk.

We will enjoy our walk

Without thinking of arriving anywhere.”

It was a bit over our heads for first grade. I admit it. But it mattered little as our feet and lips wrapped themselves around the words. Speaking and walking like this day after day, we made memories. We walked ourselves into space. A space of words. A space of meaning. A space of twigs and bugs and dust. The Gate of Silence. Stop and listen, not for the words, but the care for one another on our breath.

Our little class grew quickly, and in subsequent years we spoke the words of Rilke, Frost, Carroll, and Whitman. Now Chuang Tzu. Always over our heads. Under ‘em too. Step, step, gravel, crunch.

The rhythm of walking and voice – these are ancient medicines. The 4/4 time signature, the universal rhythm of all but the most exotic songs, is found in our footsteps. It’s a regularity that affords a glimpse at what is irregular.

That’s second grade material, isn’t it? I like to laugh at this.

“In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.”

Is it true? The kids used to ask me that when they were younger and the protective wrapping of imagination was so vivid that fiction and truth were merely threads of the same thing. There was care in our footsteps. Shall we stop and take a moment to call them true? It’s real.

The challenge is that words, like numbers, unravel like old blankets if we look at them too closely. The forces that keep these things together are never what they seem. Atoms are divisible. And yet they’re as solid a thing as can be found in this universe. They’re predictable. They’re intangible. They know how to avoid our microscopes, even when we stare right at them.

“My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far beyond the road I have begun,

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has an inner light, even from a distance…”

Poetry tells a story, a subject I’ve had the fortune of learning and speaking about at great length. It’s a funny turn of fate, because inside I’m a mathematician. I see things in that language, frequently at least. Storytelling and math, most people don’t put these things together. For me it’s sort of a creole, a language formed at the converging edges of others.

The essential message of this creole, and I’m getting a little poetic here, is that stories aren’t so much about the stories. They’re about the people. The people who tell them, the people who listen. They’re about the care that lives between them and holds them together, even in fiction. Stories are ways to fill that space and time that lies between us with, “I see you. I notice.” Used skillfully, stories build relationships of trust and goodwill.

And yet, any good storyteller will tell you that a story has a life to itself. This too, if not true, is at least real. In fact, stories are not merely beautiful or benign. In our enthusiasm for story, we often forget that they can be hideous and manipulative too. It’s possible to fill ears and hearts with all kinds of, “I see you’s.”

What is your purpose? Like the frangible blanket of youth, stories, like words, like numbers, unravel when we look too close.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood,

/

Snicker-snack went the vorpal blade,

/

And changes us, even if we do not reach it,

Into something else.

/

I exist as I am,

That is enough.

/

Our walk is a peace walk.

Our walk is a happiness walk.

Then we learn

that there is no peace walk;

that peace is the walk;

that there is no happiness walk;

that happiness is the walk.

Look across the mesa. A stiff and cold wind strikes us in the face. Two ravens swerve in the distance. Feel the weight of backpacks, of lunch, of bodies. Of time. Feel the titter of humor in the morning air.

“Some power stands behind all this

And makes the sounds die down.

What is this power?”