Maui Mindfulness

MAUI MINDFULNESS

This is a story of mindfulness, or the way of things. My introduction came painfully, after a poetry reading I did with a friend and poet Will Staple, at the now defunct Garbo's in Guernewood Park.

It was the last day of the Fall semester, December 18, 1981. I'd passed my exams, including the dreaded senior seminar—necessary for me to enter the Master's program in creative writing. In those days I had no concept of pacing—everything was done full-bore. I needed to slow down, and nothing seemed capable of stopping me. I had a whole vacation stretching out in front of me, vast as the horizon of the sea.

Still steeped in the melancholy liquor of a bitter break-up, I was uneasy about bringing Will home, and I remember a small moment that changed my life: I was scrambling around looking for the seatbelt, but it was underneath the cab seat of his truck, which meant getting out of the truck, lifting the seat, and retrieving the belts.

It was late and rainy along the river. I opted for au natural, no constraints. Tension, thick as clotted milk filled the cab as we wound our way along the river. A late-model '60s car in a hurry to the next watering hole, overtook us with impunity along the midway stretch, only to signal left into Dino's bar.

We wanted out of his way, and passed on the right, only to have them plow into us—they'd changed their minds—but not their blinkers. Bracing myself, I flew up against the window, and thought nothing of it.

By the telephone, where Will was about to make the call to the police, the driver motions him aside. Will, trying to be a nice guy, is agreeing with the driver—it would look bad on both insurance policies. Besides, he was a prominent realtor in the community, with an Irish name—his strange redheaded son lived two cabins down from me.

The next morning, when it was obvious something was seriously wrong, Will contacted the police, but the driver, Bruce Collins was sober as a judge, so to speak. Of course, I had no idea of what was to follow, the months of lying flat out on my back, unable to even hold up a book, let alone read.

I remember the victory of when I could carry in a small bag of groceries, or sweep the floor without experiencing nauseating pain.

It was just as well I didn't know I would never be able to do calligraphy or graphic arts again because, ten years later, I still can't tilt my chin down for any length of time. (I use my computer on the bed, with pillows propped behind my head.) Every time my neck bothers me, or the blinding headaches come, I am reminded of the lesson of mindfulness.

Will went off to Maui to join a zendo. His lesson on mindfulness continued in the dailiness of running the zendo as head resident. "No more Mr. Nice Guy," he wrote. "I've learned about appropriate behavior." Two years later, I got a small settlement from the accident, and, in order to go on to the next level of healing, I knew I had to go and see Will.

The daily chores, the cooking, the gardening, cleaning the dojo, stacking wood—were all part of the lesson of mindfulness. I suffered after stacking the wood, but it was a small victory over the body.

That night, on the slopes of Haleakala, in a hamlet appropriately called Haiku, we fired up the wine barrel hot tub, and had a poetry reading under the stars of the Southern Cross, drinking rum and eating May apple pie.

It was there, under the bodhi tree I met Robert Aitken Roshi. I admired his translations of the 16th century Japanese haiku poet Basho. We were preparing for a deep ecology conference, and poet Gary Snyder needed to be picked up at the Maui airport—such as it was.

I don't know who made me more nervous—Snyder or Aitken. My banana-persimmon bread, a smash success the week before, came out of the oven looking more like a brick than food—they were polite and ate it anyway.

The lanai was redolent with gardenia scent; the gekkos chupped, the famous Maui cockroaches spun on their backs like draedls when we entered the kitchen. Will taught me the Maui cockroach shuffle—namely, don't pick up your feet, because it's not a good idea to kill other living things.

They instructed me in the manner of mindful thinking by not instructing me at all.

Poems for Peace

More than Words CPITS NEWSLETTER
CALIFORNIA POETS IN THE SCHOOLS
An Affiliate of the Poetry Center

Poems for Peace
by Maureen Hurley

"Teach the children about the cycles, the life cycles - ail the other cycles. That's what it's all about..."
—Gary Snyder

I walked into a fifth grade class to teach a poetry workshop and while we were reading poems and discussing poetics, I glanced down at my hand resting on the morning newspaper headlines which shouted in three inch superbold type: "U.S. INVADES LEBANON". Stunned, I stopped what I was saying mid-sentence and asked the students what they thought.

One student wrote, "any step toward war/ is a wrong step." I was dumbstruck by her political and poetic awareness. Soon, the whole class was writing their own poems of protest. This germinal seed sprouted when I read the late poet and visionary, Kenneth Patchen's What Shall We Do Without Us, published by Yollo Bolly Press and reissued by Sierra Club in October of 1984.

Using Patchen's Poem-Paintings as a role model, several poetry recipes developed during my 1984-85 California Arts Council Artists-in-Schools residency at Mark West Union School District (K - Sixth Grade} in Santa Rosa. Students, using both visual and verbal forms of communication, wrote poems of protest, environmental and ecology poems, self portraits, world political portraits and love poems — all with the focus of describing something with multiple perspectives.

I told them about Hyde Park, London, where people stand on real soapboxes to tell the gathered crowd anything they want. I told the students that this was their chance to get up on their soapboxes and tell the world what they were thinking: both inner feelings and how they felt about their environment.

What resulted was a series of posters, Poems for Peace and cards which reached more than the traditional poetry reading audiences. Because they were visually accessable, more people read them and the general comment was of suprise that kids had such deep feelings about these things. Once I had to interview children after the movie "The Day After" was aired. Most kids assumed that they weren't ever going to reach adulthood. One hird grader said, "I'll never reach 21. Why should I think of what I'm going to be
when I grow up?" and walked slowly across the playground.

I remember it was a foggy day and suddenly I was sobbing, not for fear of impending nuclear disaster, but for the children — how they feel inside and no one's asking them to voice their opinion.

Katherine Harer, a former CPITS Executive Director, once quoted a poem that gripped me. Written by a fifth grader, it gowentes something like this: NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE./ Once I was afraid of the dark/ now I'm afraid of the light.

In What Shall We Do Without Us?, Patchen's work in a large 8 x 10" full color format, incorporates both visual and verbal elements, but most importantly, it inspires a direction for poetry in post-nuclear literature. The poet, Carolyn Forché, maintains that anything written after the dropping of the bomb is post-nuclear literature. 

Robert Hass said, "You can write a poem about flowers, and have no mention of nuclear war in it, but if you've taken the meaning of nuclear war into yourself, you can write about flowers and you don't have to mention nuclear war. Monet did those water lily paintings as a solution to World War I." The students took the issues into themselves and what blossomed were stunning poem paintings Patchen would have felt an immediate kinship to.

Patchen wrote, "Peace now to all men/ or amen to all things." He wasn't taking the threat lying down. His accusatory poems address the utter foolishness of harboring the idea of nuclear war as a viable means of achieving world peace. He stated, "You can't separate America from the world./ We are all one, and we are all guilty."

Sixth grader Rene King wrote on her self portrait: "Recognize life/ and the way we live it/ freely/ without the everyday fear/ of not being able/ to see the sun/ shining brilliantly.

For me as a visual artist who became a poet, taking poetry to its next logical step was to incorporate visual images, making the writing a part of the visual impact. Picture poems. Both the written word and the image carried the message. Doing this was, in a sense, to heal the modern world by going back to the source, back to picture-grams, the beginnings of language.

Take Matt Kondratieff, a fifth grader's poem:

HOW DID WE GET THIS FAR?

A bluebird at a faucet
waiting for a drop of water.
How did we get this far?
A grebe washed up on the shore.
Oil smothered on its once-beautiful feathers.
How did we get this far?
The super power nations
tearing the world apart.
How did we get this far?

—Matt Kondratieff

Matt offers us no easy solutions. But his poster with its brilliant red background of a mushroom cloud leaves little room for doubt that something went wrong somewhere in the process of becoming civilized.

Albert Einstein who said, "My gift for creativity has meant more to me than my capacity for absorbing knowledge," also said, "To prepare simultaneously for war and peace is a non-sequitur." From the creative impulses also stem the seeds of destruction, that terrible beauty in the far reaching implications of a mathematical equation, E=MC2. How did we get this far?

EAT AT JOE'S

I was tired of living.
Now, I'm afraid to die.
We will be gone in a flash.

—Louis Mattei, fifth grade

Some of the connections also discussed in class were the interrelatedness of everything. Every time a species becomes extinct, we lose something immeasurable. The Quagga, a horse-like zebra and the carrier pigeon were hunted to extinction because they were plentiful. The sheer numbers of animal and plant life that have become extinct in the past 200 years is positively staggering.

Dammed rivers, no more wild fish—only hatchery-bred salmon—what are we doing to the gene pool? The California condor is down to less than ten birds. What one of my students said, "Connections/ of all the smallest things/ may be important/ someday," has yet to bear its awful harvest. Acid rain, lumber industries, pulp mills and the destruction of the forests and soil—the paper we write on, everything is connected to everything.

With Patchen's work, it is hard to separate the painting from the poem—which came first? His poetry is paradoxical, mixes religion and politics, focuses on the social as well as the poetic. Dubbed "Title Poems" by his editor, James Laughlin, his poems are like long titles, intuitive lines. Patchen didn't consider himself to be a painter. He thought of himself as "someone who used the medium of painting in an attempt to give an extra dimension to the medium of words.

Some people are visual learners, others learn verbally. Patchen's work appeals to both the visually and verbally oriented students. Kids love to read his work. That his haiku-like messages are paradoxical in nature gives it an added zing. I asked my students what they thought when he wrote, "Snow is the only one of us that leaves no tracks." This led to a discussion of man and the environment. For every action there is a reaction. Even the wind leaves tracks across the snow.

Everyman is me, I am his brother.
No man is my enemy.
I am everyman
and he is in and of me.
This is my faith, my strength, 

my deepest hope, 

and my only belief.

     —Kenneth Patchen

After the Dark Ages, the first plays written in English, the Everyman allegories, were used to teach the populace correct morals and behavior. Patchen uses the idea of Everyman to carry his message. Take "Concerns of the Heart./ Feeling, I must remind you, is the poet's sign…" I asked my students, what is the poet's sign, the poet's role? What does a poet do? Describe? Why?

Why do we need poets? As the good doctor, William Carlos Williams, said, "It is difficult getting the news from poetry but men die everyday from lack of what is found there." The children affirmed that poets were important because they were the eyes and the feelings of the world. Cycles. Life on this fragile planet. We talked about our feelings, the tracks men leave on this planet, the impact of civilization. I asked, "Is all civilization bad?" What leaves no tracks besides snow? Is it bad to leave tracks? Why? When Patchen said:

"Peace to all men/ or amen to all things," what do you think he meant? 

If you could change the world in some way, what would you change? "Remember this though," I tell my students, "without light there would be no darkness; without darkness there would be no light."

Robert Aitken, poet and Roshi, in his book of translations, Zen Wave—Basho's Haiku and Zen, expands this idea. "In Christianity, darkness denotes sin and error, but for the poet and the student of religion in Asia, darkness is an organic metaphor of the undifferentiated absolute, while light is the experience of the immediate phenomenal world... It is the light within the darkness, darkness within the light; it is just the dark-nist,"iust the light; it is darkness as the If there is a next time, the roles will be reversed; the Dark Ages will result from an excess of light. Aitken's translation of a haiku attributed to Basho takes on a new meaning:

For one who says,
"I am tired of children,"
There are no flowers.

These poems for peace written to us by the children are our flowers come full circle. Perhaps they'll seed in the garden.

SONG OF THE BLUEBIRD

The song of the bluebird
to the explosion of the bomb --
darkness is eternal, light is fleeting.
Should we change the treatment of animals?
Thank the cat by the fire
for keeping us warm at night.
Connections
of all the smallest things
may be important someday.

     —Andrea Baughan, fifth grade

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