Merry Christmas from a Gingerbread Window Sill

 

I think all the time about thin spaces.

What is a thin space? Picture a familiar window and the child that might be playing on the other side. She sees you watching her, and like the kid on “The Christmas Story,” she comes close and presses her snotty nose and face against the glass to make you smile. 

I sometimes stand at my kitchen window and think about what angels might be out there-or picture the face of someone who is gone. I reach my hand out and almost feel that I have touched the face on the other side, but cannot deny the pane that is there, keeping me from that which is beyond. 

Of late I have sat with many who are perched on this windowsill. This week alone I have said goodbye to four elderly people I have loved and cared for. They are now, I believe, in a reality that is sharper and clearer, brighter and more colorful than the one I now know. They have entered a space where the grass would hurt our feet because of how much more real and solid it is than our own.* It is the place I tried to draw in this mural with my daughters, where our world is chalked in black, white and gray, but the other is full of joy, light, color…and gumdrops! 

This faith does not change the fact that I can no longer joke around with those four residents, or give them supper, or touch their wrinkled skin. But in this environment of loving and losing so many, I take comfort in the story of Christmas! I know that in Bethlehem of Judah the window was opened. The barriers around our small reality were invaded by God’s greater, all encompassing reality, and in a miracle our minds can barely fathom, the DNA of a righteous teenage girl joined with God himself in an immaculate scandal of cosmic love.

Where is your thin space? Whether it’s the church altar, the chair by the dying, or the woods at Abbots Pond, I’m committed to run toward what I can now know in part, and I want to invite everyone I know to join me as I press my face into the dark glass.

*C.S Lewis, the great divorce 

Learning to Linger-a response to a Japanese Woodblock Print

Tsuchiya Koitsu: Ryuhashi at Night, Yanagibashi

Learning to Linger 

by Queena Mast

Poets know how to linger in the world between

dreaming

and this consciousness we share.

By sharing it we feel safe to call this space

“Awake.”

Awake oh sleeper, and

Rise to the truth that artists and poets, 

priests and prophets try to learn– 

try to teach.

That Death is not real,

though your life might be, in fact, death.

Rise up from the dead.

    Learn 

the power of an interior life

    the wisdom of action born in love

    The eternity wrapped into this moment of goodness.

Who are you to say that Koitsu’s action of building homes on paper,

brush constructing brick,

mind moving toward some distant vanishing point

heart highlighting 

the yellow of warm homes

peopled by gray shadows

        under red Chinese Lanterns…

Who are you to say that, in time, his night won’t matter? 

Does meaning fade like memories,

into the fog beyond this reality,

beyond his death and mine

and yours?

I say 

your action of simply noticing

a world drawn by an artist

will wake up that which is sleeping in you.

   

    You are the man rowing through a river of time, carrying a single lantern of light…

Soon you will join Tsuchiya and myself in that small houseboat. You will hang up your 

light with ours and we will talk and paint, drink green tea and sake, and write poetry 

together for 3, 456 years of friendship. How glad you must be that you paused, in this now, 

between reading a Facebook post and your work emails, to meander into this poem.

Degas's Tangles: Why to write poetry, even if you aren't any good at it.

Degas https://g.co/arts/DDMyuU3B5CMESWdt5

 So, you want to write poetry? Know this first. Writing poetry is a full-contact sport. Blood is involved--and terror--mixed with a bit of bravery and not a small amount of stupidity. 

I admit, the bruises of football or boxing could be too strong a metaphor for what poets do. However. Know this. You can, at the very least, expect to feel the pang of tangles combed out of your hair when you attempt pull out the poetry which is hidden under the surface of your self. 

So why do you even want to go to these raw places and offer yourself up? You will become a living sacrifice, and who wants that? There is no holding back, no halfsies, no secrets. A poet looks for the bright shining pinnacle of beauty pared down to bare primal forms. Once you begin to write poetry you time-travel back to the nakedness of the Garden. However, in this garden of your creation, you don't need to be ashamed, but you could be very, very afraid. Your words might never bunch themselves together in an acceptable bouquet of meaning. You are likely to be left holding your dead darlings in a handful of rotting frippery or worse, plastic chintz. How will you face that special kind of embarrassment when your deepest thoughts and emotions wave at the world on stems of laughable, sterile, forget-me-nots? 

And yet you still want to write poetry?

Of course you do!

And you should...because dead flowers are more lovely than non-existent ones. Also, should you fail, at least chintz reminds us of our grandmothers. Go toward that raw and fearful place. Write your little poems, expose some skin, share your imperfections. Post them, write them out by hand on scraps of paper, tuck them like tracts into the stalls of a few gas-station bathrooms. Send them to a lover. Or a stranger. Or your grandmother. 

Or me. 

Degas https://g.co/arts/eiSyp4cykqcCqRqv6

The idea of "Full Contact" comes from p7 Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Poetry like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse. HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.

On May 19th, 1:00-2:30 I will be holding a class on poetry appreciation at the Greenwood Library. There might be some time given to share poetry you have written, should you join us. The library and I will be providing materials to create poetry/art notebooks, a practice I have enjoyed since I was about 20 years old. I don't feel qualified to teach a poetry writing experience, but I do know that reading and enjoying other writer's poems is the first step toward writing your own, and I can certainly share how much I like poetry. I would love to have you join me. Register here: https://fb.me/e/34F66gm0e

PS. I just need to temper the angst--Sometimes my favorite poems don't touch this raw and fearful places. For example the Sir John Suckling poem that I memorized this way (click here for more accurate quote ):

"Love is the fart of every heart

for when held in it pains the host,

but when released, pains others most"