Day 2 Habits of Body, Mind and Spirit.

 Manly Development

I cried

reading a poem.

That is a good sign

for my development,

both the reading and

the tears.

From my upcoming book of Poems Simple Life

Our breakfasts in the community are always taken in silence. The silence is broken later with a devotional reading and prayer. I remember my first breakfast over oatmeal. Sitting with new people. Sitting with my wife and with wonderings about the coming two weeks. Thinking I should be calming and quiet. But that is not what my body had in its mind.

At the table with sun speckled leaves all around me I read Rilke’s Ninth Eulogy. He is describing how the angels are already experts on the miraculous and the wonderful. They long to connect with us in something that they cannot know: They want to know more about simple miracles of the ordinary life.

"...And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
Transient, they are trusting us
to save them--us, the most transient of all.
As if they wanted in our invisible hearts
to be transformed
into-- oh endlessly-- into us..."

Rilke's poem ends with

Abundance of being floods my heart.

Quote from marvelous book Rilke's In Praise of Mortality, 

Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

When I read the word Abundance I break into a sob. It is spontaneous and even jolting. I sat over my bowl of oatmeal and weep, not just cry, but weep. It's embarrassing to say this out in the world where people trample what they fear. Yet my pride about being strong was not so stony in the shelter of community. I wanted to feel safe. My spirit must have informed my body that it was safe here. So I cry. Head bent and then held up.

 

I was fully a man and I felt everything!

For moments a poem sang in my body.

I cried in a way that might have been mocked in my own family, out in the world or even here in cyber space. But here on this retreat, my wife looks on with compassion. And the other people don’t seem to even notice. Like it’s normal to feel like this and even to show it out loud. (It is normal!!)

I felt like my whole body let out the storage of the strongman. The armor of being in the matrix of the world.

I look out over the field and see our little trailer up on the crest of the hill. I recite the Rilke lines “Praise the world to the angel: leave the unsayable aside”

I write in my journal

"These trees, my parishioners.

This meadow, my church.

This stone, my pulpit.

These grasses, my holy parchment.

This wind, my song.

This trailer, my hermit’s cave.

This being still, the light of the sun

This pen, my traveling heart,

moving from god into God."

Then I named the spirits that I have known and who have loved me deeply over the years. I recited their names, like doorways to God. This practice of seeing, reflecting and naming would become the habit of my stay here in the church of sky and people.

For long drafts of time I felt unafraid of tears and worship. I thought: Perhaps this is the way we are built, under the armor of survival and comparison.

Peace

Rick 

Copyright Richard Sievers, December 2012