photo by Abe Green

 

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

July 4, 2024

 

I asked some friends to answer this question: “What stories do you tell yourself to feel okay, cheer yourself up, bless the day?”

 

I like to remind myself that everything is miraculous. I tell myself that life is short, this day is precious and so I want to live it in the Golden World. The Golden World is a name I give to a feeling that everything is perfect, that this is Paradise. I’m most likely to feel this way in the quiet time at the beginning of the day—especially when thought and language fall away. So, in addition to telling myself stories to cheer myself up, I love to enjoy “the storyless state”—free of narratives, free of cares. 

 

I have friends in books who have written about those moments of perfect beauty and joy: Walt Whitman, Hafiz, Thomas Traherne, Kim Stafford, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others. I love the little book by Peter Schumann of the Bread & Puppet Theater, St Francis Preaches to the Birds. I love Giotto’s painting of Saint Francis preaching to the birds. Nancy and I enjoy watching “Jeeves and Wooster” with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. We love watching Wes Anderson movies. The “Chaiyya Chaiyya” video (with English subtitles) from the movie “Dil Se” on YouTube always makes me happy.

 

—Johnny Stallings

*

 

Re: the discussion, after Jill’s reading of Mary Oliver, of what to do with our one wild and precious life, I offer this link to a video seasons greetings card I made when we lived in the Sierras, long ago, made with my little camcorder and scratchy sound, circling the wildness we once tried to rein in, and later yearned to touch:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFTtCsj0js

 

—J Kahn

*

 

Here’s the Mary Oliver poem that Jill Littlewood shared, that J was referring to:

 

The Summer Day

 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

The grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

 

—Mary Oliver

*

 

A Translation Project for Peace

 

by Kim Stafford

 

A friend at the Oregon Society for Translators & Interpreters, whose members work primarily in hospitals and the courts to help patients and clients outside the English language to navigate the system, asked if she could invite my poem “A Proclamation for Peace” to travel around the world.

 

I said yes, of course, and last fall we held a zoom session with translators online in Japan, Nepal, India, and elsewhere, at work translating the poem. Since then, we’ve decided to invite more languages into the project and make a book. We’re up to fifty languages and counting. As I describe the project on the back cover:

 

This book sends a poem for peace around the world so it may become a new poem in Arabic and Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, Tibetan and Mandarin, Tamil, Vietnamese, Polish, Yoruba, Yucatec, and a host of  other languages. Together with notes about the peace-making translators and their languages, and recordings of voices speaking gentle words, this book is for the children of the world.

 

—from A Proclamation for Peace: Translated into World Languages

 

Here’s the poem in English, and in Persian, as translated by my friend in Tehran, Alirezza Tagdareh:

 

     A Proclamation for Peace 

 

Whereas the world is a house on fire; 

Whereas the nations are filled with shouting; 

Whereas hope seems small, sometimes 

     a single bird on a wire 

     left by migration behind. 

 

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news 

     and peace an abstraction
     while war is real; 

 

Whereas words are all I have; 

Whereas my life is short; 

Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all 

     fire and anger and fear; 

 

Be it therefore resolved a song 

shall be my calling—a song 

not yet made shall be vocation 

and peaceful words the work 

of my remaining days. 

 

 

 

And here is the poem read in Yoruba, by my friend Abayo Animashaun from Nigeria:

 

 

The book will be available at Bookshop.org and other outlets by mid-September.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

Elizabeth Domike sent this:

 

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient 

for human beings; we need to transcend, 

transport, escape; we need meaning, 

understanding, and explanation; 

we need to see over-all patterns 

in our lives. 

We need hope, the sense of a future. 

 

And we need freedom (or, at least, 

the illusion of freedom) to get beyond 

ourselves, whether with telescopes 

and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning 

technology, or in states of mind 

that allow us to travel to other worlds, 

to rise above our immediate 

surroundings.

 

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions 

that makes it easier to bond with each other, 

or transports that make our consciousness 

of time and mortality easier to bear. 

 

We seek a holiday from our inner 

and outer restrictions, a more intense 

sense of the here and now, the beauty 

and value of the world we live in.

 

—from Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

*

 

Alex Tretbar wrote:

 

Hadn’t seen this one of Bill Stafford’s before. How gorgeous.

 

Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere

 

A gather of apricots fruit pickers left

gleam like reasons for light going higher, higher;

I look half as hard as I can to tease

the fruit out of its green.

        (It is time to run lest pity overtake us,

        and calamity pit invents to accompany itself:

        to sigh is a stern act—we are judged by this air.)

 

Down the steady eye of the charging bear

a gun barrel swerves—intention, then flame;

and willows do tricks to find an exact place in the wind:

resolution steady, bent to be true.

        (While there’s time

        I call to you by all these dubious guides:

        “Forsake all ways except the way we came.”)

 

—William Stafford, from The Paris Review, issue no. 22 (Autumn-Winter 1959-1960)

*

 

This is a summer poem if ever there was one.   It makes me think of your and Nancy’s back yard. I can relate except for the part about having no aches after working in the garden. sigh . . .  I know it will get better after all the beds are prepared and the seeds get growing. Then the salads make it all worth while.  

 

Gift

 

A day so happy. 

Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. 

There was nothing on earth I wanted to possess.

I knew no one worth my envying him. 

Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. 

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me. 

In my body I felt no pain.  

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails. 

 

—Czesław Miłosz

 

Wishing you all such a summer moment.   

xoxo  Katie Radditz