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#4206 -
The Nonduality
Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
This is an excerpt of a
book review written by Gary Gach of Stephen
Levine's book, Breaking the Drought: Visions of
Grace.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/4283/can_poetry_heal_the_planet_/
“One Soul,
We All Share It”
In a prose introduction
to the final section, Levine shares with us a credo, inviting us
into the solitude in which his poetry occurs:
"A boundaryless aloneness, created perhaps when the One is
cleaved into the many (or the Big Bang scatters our parts) leaves
a strange and reminiscent aftertaste, the homesickness for our
original Oneness. It reaches from superficial thought down to the
substratum of the psyche. It knows us better than we know
ourselves."
This is quite a different
ars poetica than the “First thought, best thought,”
that Allen Ginsberg espoused (via his teacher Chogyam Trungpa).
It is, rather, the intuition, mentioned earlier, wherein we can
confront such vital questions as “Who am I?” and “How
can I deal with my pain?” It’s precisely here we can
awaken to our inner teacher. To that aim, Stephen Levine’s
exemplary poetry inspires us to trust our own vision, hold it,
make it whole.
To put a sharper point on
that, this trust in intuitive vision isn’t solitary, but has
been honed by a 40-year-long road engaged with the brokenhearted
and the dying. Speaking about this during one of his public
readings of Breaking the Drought, he says:
"There is no time in which we have a higher opportunity of
wisdom and freedom than in aging. We have perspective, a time to
see things we have loved fallen away. We can protect nothing from
death and impermanence. [It’s] a place of surrender in which
surrender is not defeat."
We don’t
even know we can do in the face of the Beloved. You don’t
talk in the face of the beloved, who hears you like a dog hears
you. The beloved space inside you is so big it doesn’t stop
at your edges, and it permeates everyone—one soul, we all
share it—the universal qualities beyond mine and thine,
opening to 10,000 other beings in same state. We find a place
where there’s peace. We find a place where we are already
out of the pain (even if we haven’t cured it). My pain and
your pain separate us. Your love and my love connect us.
Poetry, Under the
Radar
No “rugged
individualist,” Levine acknowledges his debt to forebears
(Rumi and Basho, Rexroth and Machado). Yet he’s a
trailblazer on the path where Contemplative Art (poetry, music,
dance) and the Art of Contemplation (mindfulness, yoga, prayer)
are as one. We owe the publisher great credit for the book’s
generous helping of 81 poems. (Today’s standard format for
poetry is 40 to 60 pages.)
Yet we must also
acknowledge that though his books of prose have found over a
million readers, this newest book, a return to poetry, flies
under the radar. It’s interesting, in passing, to note three
reasons why. One is the still-marginal place of poetry in
American culture. True, we’ve sparked a now-global revival
of spoken arts in the form of hip-hop and rap. But for book
publishers, the “poetry marketplace” (a kind of
oxymoron, since poetry operates largely outside the cash nexus),
is largely fueled by writing programs in academia. True, Coleman
Barks’ renditions of medieval Sufi poet Rumi captivated a
national audience, for a spell. But America’s own living,
devotional, mystic poets find a much smaller audience, and slip
through the cracks of critical discourse; examples that come to
mind include Jim Cohn, Patricia Donnegan, Rick Fields, Jonathan
Greene, Susan Griffin, Latif Harris, Dan Leighton, Russell Leong,
John Martone, giovanni singleton, Will Staple, Robert Sund, and
Dorothy Walters.
Secondly, there’s
the diverse lineage upon which Stephen Levine draws. While he was
a pioneer in bringing Theravada Buddhism to
Thirdly, while today’s
spiritual teachers are wont to tour in order to maintain their
following, his health has, alas, precluded that option. Thus it
is that you are reading the only review, to date, of this
incomparably marvelous book, a treasury of good soul medicine.
~ ~ ~
Read the whole
review at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/4283/can_poetry_heal_the_planet_/
Breaking the
Drought: Visions of Grace, by Stephen Levine, may be
ordered at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0943914485/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=nondualitysal-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0943914485
Thanks to Eric Chaffee
for sending this article.