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peace, love, happiness & understanding 3/24/22
March 24, 2022 - April 6, 2022
photo by Kim Stafford
photo by Alex Onciu for El País
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding
WAR & PEACE & SPRING!
Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations.
—William Blake
March 24, 2022
peace, love, happiness & understanding is two years old!
HURRAH!!!
Our first issue celebrated Spring Equinox. Last year at this time we again enjoyed a bunch of Spring poems.
(https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-3-18-21/).
So, we want to celebrate Spring…and there are other things on our minds as well. In our last issue people wrote about some of their favorite books. In it, we invited friends inside prison to write about some of their favorite books. Meanwhile, we are also thinking about war and peace and refugees.
It’s Spring!!!
And every day the front page reminds us that bombs are falling on people in Ukraine.
Kim had this to say:
These days I seem to be obsessed with news from the war…and with the little plum tree outside the door of my writing shed. It was only a matter of time before the two started talking to each other in a poem.
Plum Trees in War
How do they do it?—no resistance,
no complicity, simply opening
a new species of light bud by bud
in spite of all that is burned and broken.
Splayed against a shattered wall,
from a stump amid the rubble,
or even from a sheared branch
dusted with ash, petals unfurl.
As enemies prepare to advance
across hills and fields, spring
got there first, took possession
and raised its million flags of green.
From the sky, breath by breath,
the command comes down, so every
soldier says, “I can’t kill today—
I am busy blossoming.”
—Kim Stafford
*
Thomas Bray wrote to us about his favorite books:
I thoroughly enjoyed your latest newsletter with all the book recommendations in it. I read it with great interest. My two favorite books are:
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. This is about a Jewish psychiatrist imprisoned in Auschwitz and how he manages to find meaning in the most dire of situations. I read it at least once a year. I always think the same thing when I read it: that if he can survive that, then surely I can survive this.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. This is another true story of an Australian prisoner who escapes, and flees to India. He lives amongst the “untouchables” for years. It’s a truly riveting tale of survival.
Regards,
Thomas Bray
*
Each spring I read this favorite gem of a poem by Roethke. The last line captures my feeling about the return of spring perfectly. As the blossoms of my daphne waft the delicious fragrance in my backyard portending the return to life of all of the brown stalks and underground plants waiting to burst forth with fullness, I am always filled with a sense of wonder and excitement. Here is the poem that I always read:
Vernal Sentiment
Though the crocuses poke up their heads in the usual places,
The frog scum appear on the pond with the same froth of green,
And boys moon at girls with last year’s fatuous faces,
I never am bored, however familiar the scene.
When from under the barn the cat brings a similar litter,—
Two yellow and black, and one that looks in between,—
Though it all happened before, I cannot grow bitter:
I rejoice in the spring, as though no spring ever had been.
—Theodore Roethke
—Jeffrey Sher
*
Katie talks about some of her favorite books, and then, on the subject of War & Peace & Spring, she includes a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:
that was impossible! and my favorite author lately is Olga Tokarchuk.
“My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”
—John Updike
Favorite books is a BiG topic for a houseful of too many loved books. I do have a shelf of some of my favorite books that I like to have more than one copy so that I can give one away to whoever is here at the time that fits.
On that shelf are these magical books–
The Lives of Rocks short stories by Rick Bass, living out in the Montana wilds.
Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom
The Green Child by Herbert Read
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard WW II time: is the great fire war or love?
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The Plague by Albert Camus, the book I have reread the most often. I highly recommend it in the Covid era.
On the shelf too is Bill’s favorite book. For years he has given most, a book called History: A Novel by Elsa Morante.
Making this list I am aware of how I like to read what is most foreign to me.
Lately I’m wild about the stories and writing of Roy Jacobsen, his trilogy about a family who are the only ones living on their island off the coast of Norway. The Unseen is the first in the series.
I read the heartbreaking Arizona/Mexico Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain. “The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies.” (Then, this line I have posted on my writing desk): “Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.” From Cities of the Plain.
Penelope Fitzgerald – I first read The Bookshop, very English, but then read all her books and liked most The Gate of Angels, about the chaos theory.
When I love a book then I want to read everything else the author has written.
When I first read a book by a black American author I was also in a foreign land and wanted to read all Black Women Writers in America
I first read Sula, by Toni Morrison, then read her others, through Beloved. This led me to Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, then Zora Neal Hurston, then plays of August Wilson and Lynn Nottage.
In poetry too, I love the foreign but also the most current in America. The poems of T’ao Ch’ien, written in the 4th century China, witten in a natural, personal voice of his immediate experience and feelings makes it seem so contemporary. This led me somehow to Buddhist teachings and practice. And the first thing I read by Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart, which led me the next week to my first Mindfulness retreat.
Now I’m reading the Polish poets Szymborska and Milosz to stay open hearted and in solidarity with those suffering in the war zone and on the move as refugees and those opening their homes in a safe place. Here is a War and Peace and Springtime poem from the 70’s by Milosz to ease the sorrow as we continue to pay attention and practice peace.
On Pilgrimage
May the smell of thyme and lavender accompany us on our journey
To a province that does not know how lucky it is
For it was, among all the hidden corners of the earth,
The only one chosen and visited.
We tended toward the Place but no signs led there.
Till it revealed itself in a pastoral valley
Between mountains that look older than memory,
By a narrow river humming at the grotto.
May the taste of wine and roast meat stay with us
As it did when we used to feast in the clearings,
Searching, not finding, gathering rumors,
Always comforted by the brightness of the day.
May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks
Remind us of everything we have lost,
For we have seen on our way and fallen in love
With the world that will pass in a twinkling.
—Czeslaw Milosz
English version by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass
Original Language Polish
—Katie Radditz
*
Milosz’s poem reminded me of this poem by William Stafford:
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
—William Stafford
*
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
—Michael Deforge
*
My favorite series of books are the Harry Potter novels. They are so rich and full of flavor, each one has its own beginning and end, and kept me enchanted the entire read. A true masterpiece they are.
Spring happens to be my favorite season. It is to me and many the beginning of something. It has the feel of new endeavors and adventures to take on. A new start, rather. So, in a negative sense, the beginning of war—since that is the topic. We humans always find a way to not get along. One day I believe we will have to, or it will be the end of us.
—Brandon Gillespie
*
Here’s are a couple of my recent contributions to the Poetry of Peace:
let’s pretend
instead of pretending that we are afraid
that we must improve
that we have enemies
that the future will arrive someday
let’s pretend everything is sacred
pretend this is Paradise
pretend every moment is precious
pretend we love everyone
pretend our joy knows no bounds
pretend we are the whole wide world
My Foolproof Plan for World Peace
I hereby declare today to be International Love Day.
And a General Armistice.
All hostilities must cease on International Love Day.
Henceforward, every day is International Love Day.
—Johnny Stallings
*
Perrin Kerns sent me a Zoom link to a daily meditation, at 8 a.m. (PDT), with people in Ukraine. In addition to sitting together, there is an opportunity to hear from people in Ukraine and give them love and support. Here’s the link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83817903514
Today’s Yogi Tea bag message:
Live righteously and love everyone, you will build up around you an aura of light and love.