We Live Inside A Poem

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Prairie Moon, 24x24, 2006

THE POETRY THAT MAKES US

We live inside a poem. 

It makes us like we make bread

And eats us like we eat bread.

We sleep inside this poem

And we walk about inside it.

This poetry that makes us

Offers us the moon if we would take it.

We glean words from smooth stones

And from heron’s lift above river

But our words remain only trinkets not poems.

The wind says everything all at once

And yet it remains nearly silent to us.

Our words cannot even match the variable living gestures of wind:

The graceful script of wind in wild grass

Or a mountain summit’s flag of snow.

Our very best words are small.

Perhaps for all of our intelligence we are neotenic.

We are still far too young to know who we are

Far too young to even begin to express this way that you and I are an ocean.

THE CALMNESS and quietness of selected body mind practices have the capacity to open a wondrous gate—to allow us to discover that we live inside a poem.  The Earth and everything in it—including each one of us—and the stars and their galaxies, as well as the ninety percent (at least) of the substance of the cosmos that we cannot sense--is a poem.  This poetry makes us, and with a complexity and subtly to which—for all of our elaborate measures--we can barely awaken. 

The quietness, for examples, of tai chi and qigong and restorative yoga and meditation may open gateways that allow us to cross a threshold from the fast pace and routine of the everyday into this living poetry that is still in creation.  Crossing over, we may sense that, for all of our commonness and self-depreciation, we are miracles inside a miraculous terrain.  When we feel that we are either insignificant or the veritable center of the universe, we might slow enough to find that we are lost deep inside a universe that is so inifinite as to be beyond our capacity to imagine or that we are so full of light—radiating (at least) enough infrared energy as to be one of hottest events in the universe.  Calmness and quietness can open—open a window on the world that we see, and that is what makes doing “easy” restorative yoga a high art and not a beginner’s practice.  The limit is ours.  In any moment, what we feel inside and that which we sense around us is not as much difference as it is the size of the window of awareness that we hold up to this inseparable landscape.

To live awake inside this poem is the great gift of calmness and quietness.  There are poems of bird’s eggs in spring or newborn sapiens or the tenacity of a “weed” that is a wondrous design to fit into disturbed soil. 

The ultimate outcome of calm body-mind practices may begin both as pursuits of a physical health of mobility or optimized lymphatic flow as well as a psychological health of lessened anxiety or depression and increased joy.  These are real, yet facile—too easy.  They are the beautiful, deeply poetic, physiological graces that we can receive from calm and quiet practice.

To live awake inside this poem is that leap where body-mind becomes body-mind-spirit.  Here instead of aspiring to receive, we begin to offer.  There is an overwhelming experience of gratitude for the grace of such a world.

By returns to calm practices, we amble softly up a mountain path.  And perhaps at some turn, a gate that we had never imagined to exist opens.  There, a heretofore, unimaginable sense of being in the world becomes possible.  A new sense of what the body is may open as well.  This place on the pathway up the mountain can attain turns in the path where the world is, suddenly, astonishingly different, where self and landscape are interchangeable, where personality can be dropped or held at bay or sensed to be small, like an ocean wave, and the poetics of pose and movement, like the ocean itelf, may flower for a time.