INTEGRITY
This morning, I must start with snippets from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation (from the Integrity chapter). As I finish my Poetry Studio course (really my first poetry in anything), I sense serendipity and synchronicity in reading Merton’s reflection on being a poet or a saint. I am neither though I would like to believe that I am in the making. . . We all are. . . In the fullness of time, it is not about being a poet or a saint, but about being yourself, how God made you, and what God intended.
Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
Humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God.
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?
And so it takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the man, or the artist, that God intended you to be.
These are lifetime-filled wisdom and words with “integrity.” The particularity of who we each are based on our unique life circumstances is what makes us, us. And that humility is about acceptance of who we each are. And can I add confidence and even celebration without arrogance? The world’s judging eyes mess up and muddle the process, big time, because the world says to compare and compete. The question of the fine imagery, “How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man’s city?” packs integrity and wisdom, and is worth pondering over a lifetime.
I am finding that writing poetry is more than writing, it includes the soulful preparation of emptying hurry and urgency from my system, both known and unknown. This entire process of preparing and “being in a zone” is worth the gold. And I am learning to live with what comes out without judgment and much filtering. Often, I am surprised by what gets articulated and voiced. I want to think that I am giving God in me a voice to say what God wants to say, through me as a vehicle. And I am also at the recipients’ end along with everyone else.
I wrote this poem below a few days ago with twelve minutes of restraint. I have not learned how to edit or if I should. As of now, I am content to let it sit, having captured it in its virginal form. Should there be a background, for some odd reason, I was reminded of my Yangpyeong days when I witnessed magnificent and intimate natural surroundings, feasting my eyes and my lungs. To my dismay, I also saw multiple eyesore carvings of the hillside to make room for building fancy homes. Though my poem does not capture it, I also was imagining the Treebeard and the Ents in the movie, The Lord of the Rings. The poem is not about making a social statement though it can be read that way. And I do not know what “stewarding nothing as useful and needy” means to me. The least I can do is to notice and appreciate. . .
When nothing is something
Oh, it’s an empty lot, barren field,
dormant hill, even an idle mountain
There is nothing, the saying goes
permission to plow
design to develop
to make something
useful and needy.
What happens when nothing is
something to begin with?
What happens when nothing really is
brimming with magnificence and wonder
which amounts to far more than our something?
Faced with somersaulting of perception and reality,
confronted with when something is nothing.
Perhaps the pinnacle of civilization arrives with the
realization of what nothing is:
To steward nothing
as useful and needy.
As an active person who is always thinking ahead type, I am contemplating organizing a group of “poets” in Asia to meet regularly to explore the depth of the particularities of our journeys, to make sure that we do not take the road to another man’s city. As the plot thickens, there definitely will be more stories from this journey.