This Everything Dance

"I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of the mountain air. A sharp reminder hits me: this world still is alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I'm part of it. Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day and night, winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere. This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it. This motionless turmoil, this everything dance."

~ William Stafford

 

[@WhiskeyRiver]

Being Lost

Cutting Loose
by William Stafford

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go
where you want to.

Arbitrary, sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound will tell where it is, and you can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path—but that’s when you get going best, glad to be lost, learning how real it is
here on the earth, again and again.

*     *     *     *     *

See also:

Lost & Found (1/25/11) -- “In this episode, Radiolab steers its way through a series of stories about getting lost, and asks how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.”

 

Like a Flame

The Dream of Now
by William Stafford

When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream,
you carry day out of the dark
like a flame.

When spring comes north, and flowers
unfold from earth and its even sleep,
you lift summer on with your breath
lest it be lost ever so deep.

Your life you live by the light you find
and follow it on as well as you can,
carrying through darkness wherever you go
your one little fire that will start again.

Like Right Now

Yes
by William Stafford, from The Way It Is

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That's why we wake
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

Why Stop?

William Stafford quotes from On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things:

“Poems don’t just happen. They are luckily or stealthily related to a readiness within ourselves. When we read or hear them, we react. We aren’t just supposed to react—any poem that asks for a dutiful response is masquerading as a poem, not being one. A good rule is—don’t respond unless you have to. But when you find you do have a response—trust it. It has a meaning.”

[When asked during an interview, “When did you first realize that you wanted to become a poet?”]

“My question is, ‘When did other people give up the idea of being a poet?’ You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did other people stop?”

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him  a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions.”

 

Poetry Everywhere

Adrift

Let me dream while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
that is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

By William Stafford, from The Answers Are Inside the Mountain: Meditations on the Writing Life

Everyone’s Dream

Being a Person
by William Stafford

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

To Create the News of Our Common Life

From Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War, edited and with an introduction by Kim Stafford:

All his life William Stafford was witness for a comprehensive view. He believed in the fragile but essential community of the world, and he wrote on behalf of what he called “the unknown good in our enemies.” In his view, such a life of witness was both compassionate and profoundly practical—in the long term, wars simply don’t work as well as reconciliation. So every day of his life, from those years in World War II until his death in 1993, William Stafford would rise before first light to remember, to ponder, and to write—often writing about peace and reconciliation.

It would be difficult to overestimate the unusual importance of William Stafford’s daily writing practice. Most of us read or hear the daily news, beginning each day with a dose of another person’s truth. My father had a different way: to create the news of our common life by writing your own. This act is true freedom and constructive citizenship. It is available to all of us.

21 February 1951
To hold the voice down and the eyes up when facing someone who antagonizes you is a slight weight—once. But in a lifetime it adds up to tons.

19 May 1963
One must learn to waver.

4 April 1966
One should talk to people, not to “nations,” or “classes,” or “professions,” etc.

22 September 1967
Those who champion democracy, but also make a fetish of never accepting anything they don’t agree with—what advantage do they see in democracy?

25 September 1969
Tyrants depend on helpers.

12 September 1981
The wind you walk against but do not feel is ignorance. Your foolish face has happiness on one side, but the world pressed on the other.

16 September 1981
Winners can lose what winning was for.

14 October 1982
I don’t like to hear from victims. At one remove they remind me of oppressors. And I don’t like oppressors. Oppressors have become the way they are through damaging conditions. Like victims. I want to turn and start over again. As for myself, I don’t want to be an oppressor, nor be like a victim. There are probably ways to live so as to shut out chances to be victimized. Those ways are probably worse than being a victim.

The Darkness Around Us is Deep

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home we may
miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of
childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each
elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the
park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the
dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to
sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

* * * * *

“Stafford is a poet of ordinary life. His collected poems are the journal of a man recording daily concerns. That is why his daily method of writing is relevant to his life's work. You could say that his poetry is truly quotidian: he writes it every day; it comes out of every day. And the poet of the quotidian did not find it necessary to become maudit, to follow Hart Crane to the waterfront or Baudelaire to the whorehouse or even Lowell to McLean's. He got up at six in the morning in a suburb of Portland and drained the sump.”

~ Donald Hall

Wherever You Go

You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

[Thanks JC!]