THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

July 2, 2020

 

This is a simple story I tell myself about our human life on Earth. We start out as perfect innocent beings. Then something happens to us. We become “adulterated.” We learn to think and talk. We learn and co-create stories about who we are and about the world in which we live and our relation to it. We become grownups. Which is great. But. We are now stuck with our stories, which we repeat over and over. We have lost much of the spontaneous joy and wonder we had when we were very small. And the maps we have made of the world, though useful and even necessary, are an extreme over-simplification—(like this one)—of our life.

 

But that is not the end of the story. Once we have achieved something like “well-adjusted normal,” we want more. We want a life rich in meaning. We want happiness! Love! We want to live in such a way that we bless each day, that our life gets better and better as it goes along, until we are amazed at what a miracle it all is.

 

Here are two of William Blake’s poems of innocence:

 

Infant Joy

 

“I have no name:

I am but two days old.”

What shall I call thee?

“I happy am,

Joy is my name.”

Sweet joy befall thee!

 

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy but two days old,

Sweet joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while,

Sweet joy befall thee

*

 

Laughing Song

 

When the green hills laugh with the voice of joy,

And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;

When the air does laugh with our merry wit,

And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

 

When the meadows laugh with lively green,

And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,

When Mary and Susan and Emily

With their sweet round mouths sing “Ha, Ha, He!”

 

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,

Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread,

Come live & be merry, and join with me,

To sing the sweet chorus of “Ha, Ha, He!”

*

 

But then something happens to these innocent children:

 

The School Boy

 

I love to rise in a summer morn

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the sky-lark sings with me.

O! what sweet company.

 

But to go to school in a summer morn,

O! it drives all joy away;

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

 

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour,

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learning’s bower,

Worn thro’ with the dreary shower.

 

How can the bird that is born for joy

Sit in a cage and sing?

How can a child, when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring?

 

O! father & mother, if buds are nip’d

And blossoms blown away,

And if the tender plants are strip’d

Of their joy in the springing day,

By sorrow and care’s dismay,

 

How shall the summer arise in joy,

Or the summer fruits appear?

Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,

Or bless the mellowing year,

When the blasts of winter appear?

*

 

The GARDEN of LOVE

 

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

 

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore;

 

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys & desires.

*

 

Here’s William Wordsworth’s account:

 

Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight

                 To me did seem

            Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

             Turn wheresoe’er I may,

              By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

            The rainbow comes and goes,

            And lovely is the rose;

            The moon doth with delight

     Look round her when the heavens are bare;

            Waters on a starry night

            Are beautiful and fair;

     The sunshine is a glorious birth;

     But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

     And while the young lambs bound

            As to the tabor’s sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

            And I again am strong.

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,—

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng.

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

            And all the earth is gay;

                Land and sea

     Give themselves up to jollity,

            And with the heart of May

     Doth every beast keep holiday;—

                Thou child of joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

        Shepherd-boy!

                 Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call 

     Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

     My heart is at your festival,

       My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.

         O evil day! if I were sullen

         While Earth herself is adorning

              This sweet May-morning;

         And the children are culling

              On every side

         In a thousand valleys far and wide

         Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,

And the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:—

         I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

         —But there’s a tree, of many, one,

A single field which I have look’d upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone:

              The pansy at my feet

              Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

          Hath had elsewhere its setting

               And cometh from afar;

          Not in entire forgetfulness,

          And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

               From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

               Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

               He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

     Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

          And by the vision splendid

          Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day…

*

 

This is about the first third of Wordsworth’s poem. For the complete poem, click this link:

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood 

 

He is sad that he has lost something that he vividly remembers having as a child: “There hath past away a glory from the earth.” William Blake and Thomas Traherne were able to find it, or something like it, in the later part of their lives. Here is Thomas Traherne’s poem “Innocence,” along with a link:

 

Innocence

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45414/innocence.) 

 

Here’s what Hamlet had to say. I’ve used it in a previous newsletter (4/23/20), but, hey!, some things are worth reading more than once. Hamlet knows intellectually that the world is beautiful and people are glorious, but he just can’t feel it:

 

Hamlet. 

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why it appears nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.  What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?  Man delights not me.  No, nor woman, neither.

*

 

I have the nutty idea that every child is an incarnation of the Divine. Recently, I had the good fortune to meet Zak and Rina’s daughter Nina, who was born on May 6th. She proved once again—(like every baby I’ve ever met)—that Augustine was wrong. We are born in innocence, not in sin. Our job is to welcome each new arrival on this planet and to co-create a culture that nurtures their well-being.

 

—Johnny