This training course is starting at a time when I feel within the roots of myself and The Institute for Poetic Medicine a deep willingness and power to enter a new landscape. This is not something taking root for the first time, yet something wholly new is coming to fruition.
We all have points of great change in our lives. When I was about 26, about 7 years after the amputation of my right leg, I made a decision (long before the advent of titanium prosthetics!) to learn how to run again and then to actually run very long distances.
And during that same exact time (1981), I was introduced to the work of modern Greek poet, Odysseus Elytis. I had gone to visit an old friend in San Francisco, Anjani O'Connell. I met Anjani years before when she was the "secretary" to the spiritual teacher, Ram Dass.
This is part of that story:
During my freshman year at Boston University in early January of 1974, I wrote to Ram Dass. His book, Be Here Now, had given me inspiration and had struck a deep chord of meaning in high school. At B.U. someone shared with me an album of six records titled Love Serve Remember. These were made by Ram Dass and friends during a week of evening radio programs broadcast on WBAI in New York City.
Listening to those records in my dormitory room - a reading from the Gospel of St. John, guided meditations, questions from people also searching for God - I absorbed these into my marrow and quite likely this saved me from despair.
My letter was a wintertime cry for help sent five months prior to the amputation of my leg in the approaching spring. Ram Dass wrote back, reminding me (at 18!) in a brief note that this time of severe breakdown was also a time for something within me to breakthrough. His response was fierce and loving. There was no way around it, this life, this living.
I felt, during this period in my life, stripped down far beyond comfort, bobbing naked upon a swift river of aspiration, while at the very same time caught up in an immense lightening storm of loss and great change. Knowing what all of that "meant" was perhaps knowable while sitting protected on the riverbank - but that's not where I actually was!
The truth of it was a feeling of being thrown, frightened but determined to survive, into that swift river. I could only try to stay afloat as much as possible, and on many days, flail about.
Upon my return to B.U. in September of that year (my sophomore year), Ram Dass wrote in a very brief note sent to my dorm at Myles Standish Hall, "You are a being of much Spirit - and will open much to your reality." I sure didn't feel like it at all or know at all what that could mean. I am not sure I do now - but the encouragement, it made a difference.
A few months later I was invited to visit and spend some days with Ram Dass and Anjani. Even through a maelstrom of grief and fear, I recognized a spirit of deep service to God, and especially I felt a presence coming through them. Ram Dass and Anjani expressed a spiritual quality that was integral to their daily lives and that impacted and drew me deeply. This was new in my experience of how people could be.
(To learn about the current work of Ram Dass, CLICK HERE and I recommend a fine book about elders, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying: CLICK HERE).
So it was, in 1981, during another season of change, when I had at last come into some balance, where I had really begun to look up -- and was ready for another opening - that I visited Anjani. She, not knowing about my new commitment to run towards something new and more whole, gave me the volume of Elytis' Selected Poems.
Like nothing else I had ever read, the following poem spoke to what I felt about my loss and life itself:
. . .My friend, when night wakens your electric grief
I see the tree of the heart spreading
Your arms open beneath a pure idea
To which you call
But which will not descend
For years and years:
It up there and you down here.
I knew that "electric grief." What a way to describe a visceral feeling of loss and, in particular, to name phantom pain, which can, for some, be the intense and ongoing residue of amputation.
But now, as a kind of lovely miracle, the poem spoke to my great desire, the longing of my flesh, blood and bones, to breakthrough into something more, something I could only imagine - and to do this by training to (over not months, but years) run a marathon!
And yet longing's vision awakens flesh one day
And there where only bare solitude one shone,
A city now laughs lovely as you would have it
You almost see it, it is waiting for you
Give me your hand so that we may go there before the Dawn
Floods it with cries of triumph...
Placing one intense step after another, longing's vision awakened my flesh. A few years later I ran that marathon -- and in the act of that, raised thousands of dollars to build a meditation center.
Yet it wasn't running the marathon or the money raised that affected me the most. Although the whole experience was a worthy vehicle for my growth and transformation, what I discovered was stepping into a more uplifted place in my life where I felt connected to the help and joyful wholeness of something beyond myself.
Something that was so much like that welcoming dawn in Elytis'
poem.
The images which came as a way to show this shift towards action in me was of lifting a banner to the wind, making my way through ice and looking out from a mountain top.
Lift up the banner of your heart boldly
and commit your very next step
to what you love most dearly.
Such a banner is for the greatness
of wildflowers kissing their way delicately
through glaciers, for the beauty
of the mountaintop from which your soul
undoubtedly has gazed.
The next step you take shall bring you home
if you but release your cares
and think instead that help has come,
as sure as the wind will fly the banner
that you have raised--
~ from "Lift Up the Banner of Your Heart" (by John Fox from When
Jewels Sing, Open Heart Press, 1989. CLICK HERE to read the full
poem on the IPM website).
I wrote "Lift Up the Banner of Your Heart" at 28, the year I ran that marathon and just as I was moving to the Bay Area. The poem wanted to call out from inside myself and declare into the world an invocation and affirmation that help is present with me even when so much was unknown.
It was immediately after writing this poem and that marathon experience that Dr. Ken Zubrick, an orthopedic surgeon at El Camino Hospital, introduced me to Joy Shieman, the great woman who became my mentor in poetry therapy.
Joy is one of the earliest and greatest pioneers in the field. She already had worked at El Camino for 22 years bringing her deep and creative healing spirit to that hospital. I was blessed to work under her guidance for 2.5 years.
Joy is the author of a very unique book about using haiku as a healing art, Eating Sour Rhubarb Beneath a Cold Moon (CLICK HERE) and co-author of a volume of poems, When Silence Speaks (CLICK HERE).
Since that time of apprenticeship, the pure idea to which I have been called for 27 years is not that personal overcoming running gave to me -- but a willingness to renew again and again my life-calling.
In 1987 I wrote to Nobel-Prize winning Odysseus Elytis to thank him for that life-changing poem. I wrote about running the marathon and explained the work of poetry as healer. Writing from Athens, he responded: "A window has been opened for you towards the world of the unknown but also true and it will help you." I knew what he meant and no one had ever said it so well!
Somehow that help, for which I am so grateful (although I forget so often to be thankful) was available in the dark valley and at the sunlit peak. Elytis' words distill so much of what living this life and following this calling of poetry is about for me. Perhaps, much like Ram Dass writing to me many years before, about opening to the reality of Spirit in my life, that "longing vision" had gazed through the window to the unknown, and had awakened more opening.
I believe that over time, it has become this work.
I have found joy bringing poetry as healer, poetry therapy, what I call "poetic medicine" to people in a way that lasts. I've had thousands of graduate students. If you strung together all of my years of teaching in those four graduate programs it would total 51 years! Six years into the establishment of The Institute for Poetic Medicine, it feels like it's time to begin a training program so that others may be empowered to bring poetry as healer into the world.
With the advent of this IPM training program, something very real is intended in my commitment to do this work "in a way that lasts." This is another time to awaken each day and feel the dawn, and as Elytis says at the end of the poem:
Give me your hand--before birds gather
On the shoulders of men to announce in song
That Original Hope is seen coming at last
Out of the distant sea.
We will go together, and let them stone us
And let them say we walk with our heads in the clouds--
Those who have never felt, my friend,
With what iron, what stones, what blood, what fire,
We build, dream and sing
Please consider joining in this adventure.
John
Poem by Odysseus from Selected Poems "With what blood, what stones, what fire" translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard, Penguin Books, 1981.
". . .our island nannies chased demons from our cradles by pronouncing meaningless words with utter seriousness, holding the leaf of a humble herb that assumed, by the very innocence of its nature, who knows what unknown powers. This little basil leaf surrounded by these unknown powers of innocence, the strange words, is Poetry, precisely."
~ Odysseus Elytis
from Open Papers
translated by Olgma Broumas and T. Begley
To View Selected Poems on Amazon: CLICK HERE
To Read About Odysseus Elytis: CLICK HERE
February 21, 2012
