Poetry Can Help Us Live with Death

"Poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that. Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another. Poems are easy to share, easy to pass on, and when you read a poem, you can imagine someone's speaking to you or for you, maybe even someone far away or someone made up or someone deceased. That's why we can go to poems when we want to remember something or someone, to celebrate or to look beyond death or to say goodbye, and that's one reason poems can seem important, even to people who aren't me, who don't so much live in a world of words."

~ Stephen Burt, from "Why People Need Poetry," TED Talk, June 2013 

See also:

• "LIKE: A speculative essay about poetry, simile, artificial intelligence, mourning, sex, rock and roll, grammar, romantic love," by Stephen Burt, The American Poetry Review, January/February 2014 
• "Poetry’s Cross-Dressing Kingmaker," by Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, September 14, 2012

The Story Begins to Live and Breathe

Excerpt from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic by Adyashanti: 

Topiary Park, April 20, 2014Transmutation is what transfiguration and relinquishment make possible. In it, your orientation to life is entirely selfless. It's not that you want to be selfless or you're practicing being selfless: rather you're selfless in the sense of no self. 

For this transition to happen, one has to go through the death of the ego. Certain aspects of the transmutation may occur earlier in our own journey, but the crucifixion or relinquishment must be complete for it to happen in full. At that point, really, the only thing left to do is to be a selfless, benevolent presence in the world—there's really nothing else to do, nothing else that makes sense. Whatever that may look like—and it looks different for different people—that's where the whole process ends up. 

In the Jesus story, this stage is termed the resurrection. Out of death is resurrected a new life, which really means a new orientation. That movement, that long turning from self-orientation to selfless orientation now comes to fruition. This is where the journey culminates for Jesus, and this is where it ultimately culminates for anyone who's taken the journey of awakening.  

The story of Jesus mirrors back the journey of spiritual awakening for anyone who has the eyes to see it or the experience to notice it. I believe this is among the most powerful lenses through which to view the story, because from this perspective the story begins to live and breathe as a metaphor. 

Jesus doesn't live anything out in a small fashion; everything in his story is writ large. This makes it easier for us to see that he's depicting a journey of awakening. We shouldn't expect to live out our own journey in the same fashion and, fortunately, we don't have to, though our journey will certainly have its own challenges and intensity. 

The mystery of the story of Jesus is the same as the mystery of you and me and everyone: we are all God appearing as man and as woman, divine being manifesting as human being. They're actually two sides of the same coin. They're one and the same thing; it's only our minds that separate divinity and humanity. We separate them in our mind and in our experience, but the whole spiritual journey is finally to see that they aren't separate, that they never were separate...

And when you reorient your life toward this realization, then you understand: you so loved the world, you had so much compassion, you had so much love that you poured yourself forth into life, and that pouring forth was your birth. You are here to redeem whatever you encounter in this life, to wake up within everything the deep reality of its divine existence. 

The kingdom of heaven is spread upon earth and men do not see it. When you see this, you shift from being a victim of your life and assigning blame for the tragedy you encounter. The truth, I would suggest, is that you poured yourself willingly into form of infinite love in order to redeem the entirety of this life. When seen from that perspective, all of a sudden life looks different. You stop holding back from life, your inner life or the life around you, because the kingdom of heaven is within and all around you. That's the message of the Jesus story.  

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See also: 

• Books and talks by Adyashanti from Sounds True
• "Oprah & Adyashanti on Falling into Grace," April 20, 2014

Pain and Response to Pain Teaches Understanding

Sherwin Nuland from "The Biology of the Spirit," On Being, September 29, 2005:

Sherwin Nuland (Dec. 8, 1930 – Mar. 3, 2014)Do you know what I learned from writing [How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.

When you recognize that pain and response to pain is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people's behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word? Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

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See also: 

• "Brain, Mind, and Spirit: The Wisdom of the Human Body," Sherwin Nuland's lecture given at the Chautauqua Institution (Aug. 22, 2005)
• "Fresh Air Remembers Surgeon And 'How We Die' Author Sherwin Nuland" (March 7, 2014)
• "How Electroshock Changed Me," TED Talk (Feb. 2001)
• "The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary People," TED Talk (Feb. 2003)
• Nuland, S. B. (1994). How we die: Reflections on life's final chapter. New York: A.A. Knopf. [library] 
• Nuland, S. B. (1997). How we live. New York: Vintage Books. [library]

It is Enough

Green River, Utah (August 2013) by Paul Kolesnickoff

It is Enough
by Anne Alexander Bingham

To know that the atoms
of my body
will remain

to think of them rising
through the roots of a great oak
to live in
leaves, branches, twigs

perhaps to feed the
crimson peony
the blue iris
the broccoli

or rest on water
freeze and thaw
with the seasons

some atoms might become a
bit of fluff on the wing
of a chickadee
to feel the breeze
know the support of air

and some might drift
up and up into space
star dust returning from

whence it came
it is enough to know that
as long as there is a universe
I am a part of it.

Let Me Die Living

A Prayer for the Living
by Jeff Foster

Life, 

Break in me whatever needs to be broken.

Fix my hope of ever being fixed. 

Use me. Draw every ounce of creativity out of me. Help me live a radically unique life, forever forging a never-before-trodden path in the forest. 

Show me how to love more deeply than I ever thought possible. 

Whatever I am still turning away from, keep shoving in my face.

Whatever I am still at war with, help me soften towards, relax into, fully embrace. 

Where my heart is still closed, show me a way to open it without violence.

Where I am still holding on, help me let go. 

Give me challenges and struggles and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, if that will bring an even deeper humility and trust in the intelligence of life.

Help me laugh at my own seriousness.

Allow me to find the humour in the dark places.

Show me a profound sense of rest in the midst of the storm.

Don't spare me from the truth. Ever. 

Let gratitude be my guide. 

Let forgiveness be my mantra.

Let this moment be a constant companion. 

Let me see your face in every face. 

Let me feel your warm presence in my own presence. 

Hold me when I stumble. 

Breathe me when I cannot breathe. 

Let me die living, not live dying.

Amen.

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See also:

• Life Without a Centre
• Foster, J. (2012). The deepest acceptance: Radical awakening in ordinary life. Boulder, Colo: Sounds True. [library, Amazon.com, Sounds True]
• Foster, J. (2013) Falling in love with where you are: A year of prose and poetry on radically opening up to the pain and joy of life by Jeff Foster [Amazon.com]