poetry | Michael Valliant

Show Me How to Live

Our senses are gateways to the world. What we see, hear, smell, touch, taste give us our world, in part. And our senses have memories.

Walking the dog the other morning, I was overwhelmed by the smell of honeysuckle. It transported me back to being a kid, building forts in the marsh, sections of which were absolutely and wonderfully overgrown with it. The smell of steamed crabs has the same effect.

The feel of cut grass under bare feet, or hot sand, or gravel under toughened summer feet. The first time my daughters’ newborn hands wrapped around my finger.

Our senses cue up a lifetime of memories in our mind’s eye and in our souls.

And there is music. Our lives have a soundtrack. Mine is different from anyone else’s, though certainly we share songs and groups with others. Anyone who rode in my car during high school heard their share of the Beastie Boys “Paul’s Boutique,” The Specials, Public Enemy, The Clash, and Metallica.

Getting to North Carolina for college, it was meeting Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog.

I don’t generally sing, but to this day when Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” comes on the radio, much to my daughters’ cringing, I am belting it out.

Cornell and Vedder are still on about every running playlist I have. But Cornell is integral.

We all get to those rough places in our emotional lives. When I was driving four to five hours a day back and forth to DC, in what came to feel like a soul-less grind, and my marriage was crumbling around me, it was Cornell, Tom Morello and Audioslave. Played so loud the windows and dashboard shook. It was the angst, the wail Morello’s guitar, the reach and pitch and emotion and questions in Cornell’s voice.

You gave me life
Now show me how to live.

Audioslave was and is catharsis, solace, energy. When I moved down Bailey’s Neck and got my feet back under me, and would run the wood-lined back roads, it was Audioslave time and time again.

Show me how to live.

In finding a job in Oxford at the community center and re-embracing a community that helped raise me, in moving back to town here, and running through town and up Oxford Rd.

Show me how to live.

The night Ava had her big seizure in Pennsylvania and was flown by helicopter to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh; as I buried the gas pedal driving through the night it was Cornell and company playing in the car to keep me awake and focused.

Show me how to live.

As we all returned home, and I was filled with gratitude for the outpouring of support and prayers from friends and family and strangers, and I found church and faith, and would shuffle a playlist on my runs, I could hear:

You gave me life
Now show me how to live.

In hearing and finding a calling and Christ Church and being in small groups and building a family and community of faith through our Alpha program, I hear the same words.

I’ve never met Chris Cornell. His death isn’t like losing a family member or close friend. There isn’t a hole in my life in that way. When David Bowie, Prince, or Lemmy died it was sad to lose great artists. But they weren’t a part of first team soundtrack of my life.

We come to know artists through their art. When we find those artists whose work resonates and enlarges our souls, we know it. We connect with them in ways that makes our own struggles and questions seem relevant for someone else; we feel less alone. Like together we tap into something bigger–in the best art we can feel connected; at times maybe we can hear God’s message for us.

In the end, I’m best leaving the words to Morello, who knew Cornell well. The poem Morello wrote to Cornell after his death is beautiful, moving, and open-hearted and minded. Go read the whole thing. But we’ll leave his last words here:

You’re the clear bell ringing, the mountains echo your song

Maybe no one has ever known you

You are twilight and star burn and shade

Tangents and Timing

I waited until I was 45 to meet William Stafford. Sure, I’d heard of him. Maybe run into him at a couple parties (figuratively). But there is no reckoning, or quickening if you are a “Highlander” fan, until it is time.

Tangents seem to be the most direct route to my soul. Stafford is a writer who I have known I wanted to, and needed to read for probably 20 years. I have read bits and pieces and read articles about him, but haven’t made a point to dig in. And then he appears in a birthday compilation of thoughts, memories, and musings, writing about Great Blue Herons.

So I take the hint and find a greatest hits book that has that same poem in it. And reading Stafford it is instantly clear that he has his own unique place in my tribe of soul writers.

Timing is everything. I’ve seen it and felt it countless times: I read something or hear a song that seems cool, but doesn’t resonate. Until I have had the experience that makes the lid blow off it, and it drives directly to the heart and makes a home there. Until it is time, it doesn’t make sense.

Stafford is like that. I needed a birthday reminder to get in touch with him. Scripture is like that. For more than 40-some years, I have read spiritual tomes and everything I could get my hands on. But it wasn’t until last year that I knew it was time to immerse myself in the Bible. And now, finding the connections between the Old Testament, Gospels, epistles, and seeing how God’s Word becomes living words in our lives; I know I wasn’t ready for that search, that journey, those connections, until I was.

At Christ Church Easton, we’ve finished up our Lent Bible studies, which came on the heels of an Ephesians group. We’ve still got an Old Testament study underway, and Alpha groups, but I look forward to what’s next, what direction groups will take this fall.

But first it’s Holy Week and Easter. And spring and summer. And spring break for the girls. It’s finding the soul tangents and being led to follow them. Those tangents can be adventures, people, paddling, reading, traveling, sunrises, birds. They are the threads God puts in our lives, puts in front of us for us to follow.

Stop, Look, Listen, Believe

“Perhaps it is time to look and listen without seeing and hearing.” This has been a common theme in Father Bill Ortt’s last two sermons. It’s a message I connect with; one that resonates. The idea is to look with fresh eyes and listen with new ears, to shut off what we expect to see or hear, and really take things in. Flaubert gets it:

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony. – Gustave Flaubert, November

But this isn’t a specialization, it’s not exclusive. Looking and listening are things any of us can do. But it is so easy not to. We are in a hurry to get to work. To get our Christmas shopping done. To get to the next meeting. To check off our to do lists. And we know people, we know what they are going to say. We have heard stories or we know their soapboxes. What can we learn?

Flaubert’s quote above is about making the time. It’s about being quiet. Looking and listening without expectation. Being alive to what is really there in front of us.

In many ways, those are the only times we are open to God–when we turn off our small minds and wants and open ourselves up to what is real and what is now.

The other morning I walked the dog along the shoreline. I could feel the cold in my bones. I dropped into a catcher’s crouch to pray at the edge of the river and took a few deep breaths. I can still feel that moment, those breaths, and the creak of my knees.

When we got back home, I picked up Mary Oliver’s “American Primitive” and read “Morning at Great Pond” for the first time.

It starts like this:
forks of light
slicking up
out of the east,
flying over you,
and what’s left of night–
its black waterfalls,
its craven doubt–
dissolves like gravel
as the sun appears
trailing clouds
of pink and green wool,
igniting the fields
turning the ponds
to plates of fire.

I know those mornings. I’ve felt them when running; I’ve seen the sun paint away the night. Great Blue Herons, ducks, geese, songbirds in motion. Looking and listening in the morning, but it opens up to more:

and you’re healed then
from the night, your heart
wants more, you’re ready
to rise and look!
to hurry anywhere!
to believe in everything.

Mary Oliver is clearly a morning person. So am I. That’s when my energy runs deepest. But looking and listening isn’t limited to the sunrise hours. God’s paintbrush reaches the west as well. In the evening, it’s just as easy to look, listen, and believe.

Hurricanes and Riverbeds

I dig storms. I always have. The build up, the uncertainty, the excitement, the aftermath. Thunderstorms, hurricanes, snowstorms, blizzards. I have biked and run in conditions ill-suited for humans; walked in waist-deep streets after hurricanes and driven around surveying storm and snow damage.

I am not alone. We don’t have a Weather Channel obsession because of days of abundant sunshine.

September is a time of year on the east coast where storms find their way into our psyche–the possibility, the coming of them, the anticipation.

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of a handful of writers I come back to over and again, for inspiration, for glimpses behind the curtain, for a kindred historical soul. Rilke wrote his “Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets to Orpheus” in what can only be described as storms of creativity; visions channeling divine inspiration. He described it as a “hurricane of the spirit.”

mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn
of all Beginning,–pollen of the flowering godhead,
joints of pure light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
space formed from essence, shields made of ecstasy, storms
of emotion whirled into rapture (from The Second Elegy)

Rilke wrote in a whirlwind. Reading about the intensity of effort and emotion and thought he went through in writing, I’m not sure many of us would want, or survive, his hurricane of the spirit intact.

Being in a constant state of storm, or constantly on guard for a storm doesn’t seem like a way to live life. Richard Rohr‘s daily e-mail yesterday morning offered a different approach to being swept up in the storm.

The contemplative’s inner stance is not one of being swept downriver along with everything else. The contemplative’s repose is not a passive state, but an engaged, silent receptivity… like a riverbed, which is constantly receiving and letting go in the very same moment. Vigilant receptivity and nonclinging release are one and the same for this riverbed awareness as it constantly receives all coming from upstream while at the very same moment releasing all downstream. – Martin Laird

Be the riverbed. That’s easy enough, right? Take all that life throws at you, let it wash over you, and don’t cling too tightly to any of it.

It’s a repose. It’s a metaphor. Easier said than done, but helpful. It’s a letting go of the storm, of worries, while being receptive and mindful. Not a bad stance for a Monday.

Saturday Prayer

I have not sat still well today. Solitude’s double-edged sword had me pacing, caged.

I walked Harper across town to the Oxford-Bellevue Ferry and back in the morning. I cut grass, which brings on thinking for me. I read and wrote for a book review article coming due. Changed lightbulbs. Sitting in the yard, I had to move.

I hop on my bike and cruise through town, riding down to the shoreline at the park. I pull Gary Snyder’s “Turtle Island” from my pocket, in all its underlined, written in, and dog-eared grace.

I close my eyes with my face in the sun. An evening breeze brushes my ears and hair.

The waves are sharing an embrace and a conversation with the shoreline; sitting in silence, it is all I can hear–a soundtrack no less extraordinary for being commonplace.

I bend my head in prayer to listen. Language doesn’t need words to speak. No, that’s not it. God doesn’t need words to speak to those who listen.

I leaf through Snyder, who offers a “Prayer for the Great Family:”

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep–he who wakes us–
in our minds so be it

I don’t properly write in my pocket notebook very often, opting for a bigger one where my mind stretches more. But the pocket notebook made the bike ride, and as I scrawl these thoughts together, I see words bleeding through from the next page.

They are Ava’s from the rehab hospital last year. She was working on getting her words back with a therapist–she couldn’t find the right words to say, to answer, but she could write them down. Today being a year since the seizure that landed her there, it doesn’t seem a coincidence to have her words find me here.

I close now wet eyes again to listen to the river. And God.

Riding my bike through town, life goes on. People are happy eating, walking, biking. There are kids playing in the sand and ankle deep in the water at the Strand.

Almost home, I turn up Jack’s Point Rd., and an Eastern Bluebird flies across the road in front of me, into a vacant lot. I have only seen a handful of bluebirds in town and I smile. If you read birds, happiness must be nearby.