The view from here

Hello, my people. How are you all doing? I am a million things but on a gradient, I’m right in the middle of radiant and terrified. This song has been holding me the last few weeks—

And also, this. Every so often, I stumble upon a poem without realizing I’ve been waiting years for it. I read this one by Jessica L. Walsh this week and wanted to share—

By my fucking teeth! AND Talking Heads references, oh the brilliance! I could send out this newsletter with just this poem and it would be enough, but also wanted to send you the talk I gave to students this week. I wrote it one morning in darkness, as if speaking from below the past weeks. I don’t know how yours have been, but mine have been bumpy and filled with potent and difficult-beautiful work of aliveness.

On Awe, Praise, & Fear

I believe that praise, and awe, and the capacity to feel both, are some of the most important things a writer, or poet, or person could have in their toolbox— the ability to say, I do not understand everything, but here is the harvest moon, glowing brighter than I’ve ever seen it, illuminating a path on the water. Here is my small cousin, throwing back her head in laughter. Here is the maple tree, red light pouring from the leaves, a color softer than fire but just as bright.

For me, awe and praise are both words interchangeable with God, because they are another way of saying thank you through our noticing. What I mean is, I ask myself daily: how can I find awe when I go to the hardware store? How can I find wonder when I get the phone call of bad news? When I’m in pain? When I’m scared?

Inside of these questions is where poetry comes in. Poetry reminds me of my aliveness because it asks me to put into words what it means to walk on this earth, to really be here— not here thinking of somewhere else, but absolutely present. And when I’m absolutely present, it’s really hard to walk around without a ridiculous grin on my face. There is so much to look at, and beyond look at, really see. To listen to oppose to just hear. Like one of my friends Eva, who when I hear a bird song, hears blue warbler, gold-finch, chick-a-dee. To me, this is poetry— the ability to witness with precision.

I love poetry because, days after I ask the question, how can I find awe when I’m at the hardware store, I stumble upon a poem titled, “A Hardware Store as Proof of the Existence of God,” where the poet Nancy Willard begins, “I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east / like the steel woodpeckers of the future,/ and dozens of hinges opening brass wings, / and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes / and bins of hooks glittering into bees.”

Yes, poetry can deconstruct, make difficult, analyze, bore us to death, or offer riddles until our heads spin. But my favorite kinds of poems are prayers, not because they speak directly to a god you may or may not believe in but because they remind us to find the miraculous in the absolutely ordinary— which was actually never ordinary at all.

There is a poem by poet Hanif Abduraqib titled, “Ode to Drake, Ending With Blood in a Field,” where he writes, “don’t want to be threatening / just feared / enough to never have to / make a fist”

Or “Ode to Ugly Things,” by Leila Chatti, where she begins, “God Bless Ugliness,” “I mean soar of the eyetooth, slam of the door. I mean blood, however it comes, always bright and shining. The ambulance still screaming its wail life life life!”

Or a poem called “The City Limits” by A.R. Ammons. “When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold / itself but pours its abundance without selection into every / nook and cranny not overhung or hidden.”

These poems are prayers because they are show me what I have not yet learned to praise.

Praise Drake.

Praise the ambulance.

Praise the radiance.

Praise poetry, as a set of instructions.

We cannot feel praise or awe without the reality that there is ending. Praise and awe are both death-informed. If we know death cannot be avoided, we might be prompted to ask, what can I love more fully today?  As poet Mary Oliver writes and is so often quoted saying, “When it's over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.  / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

It seems to be no mistake that I would give this meditation today, Oct 12, just as those autumn leaves finish being their brightest and begin to fall. On the Jewish Calendar, we just ended the High Holy days, otherwise known as the days of Awe or Fear, because this period, “from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, is seen as the time when our lives hang in the balance— will we be inscribed in the Book of life for the year ahead, or will we not? Will we be here to celebrate another Rosh Hashanah next year, or will we not? It’s a time to know, and feel fully, great uncertainty” (Rabbi Diane Elliot). It’s a time of accounting for life, and for death.

So it’s interesting that I cannot talk to you about awe without talking to you about fear, and the unknown. The etymology of the word awe is from an Old Norse root meaning “terror,” or a Greek root meaning “pain or grief.”

It makes sense to me that we when we feel awe, we feel a little bit afraid, because of course the most beautiful things, or the most meaningful experiences, go beyond the limits of our understanding. And it’s easy to fear what we do not understand. I’ve tried to turn this logic around, to say, when I am most afraid, when I am on a turbulent flight or reading the news, or getting blood drawn or hearing a bear rustle right next to me in a berry bush— perhaps I am just feeling awe. And most of the time I say ummm no actually I’m just terrified. But sometimes, a little light gets in, and I realize that I’m afraid on an airplane because even though my pilot friend has explained it to me a million times, it’s absolutely miraculous to me that we soar through the air drinking ginger-ale and eating peanuts, right above thunderstorms where I watch lightning flash.

I love how this etymology makes me redefine my fear as a potential gateway to awe and wonder. It helps me to see fear as a companion, showing me what I love so much I do not want to lose, whether that be a job, a friend, a lover. Grief, too, a form of praise.

I felt awe, just this summer, crouched on the top of a mountain in a storm, tasting metal in my mouth. I felt awe, seeing not just two but THREE shimmering red hummingbirds outside my window the day I was to move to Exeter. Awe when the car did not crash. When all the work was finished. When the Shakira song I needed came on the radio at the perfect moment.

I think awe is a practice. We have to look for it, whether we are primarily poets or athletes or musicians or students or teachers. It does not come naturally, at least not for most of us. We have to say, it is worth more to me to be in love with my life than to be untouched by it, protected by a cool hard exterior made of leather jacket and cigarettes. In high school, I was convinced I wasn’t cool because I wasn’t mysterious, because it was easy to make me laugh or smile or speak of pain. I spent a three month period practicing a resting bitch face, but I never succeeded. I wish I could go back in time and say, please don’t wish away your ability, your desire, to be with the world fully.

I’m thinking now of a boxer I trained with, who spent the entire time in the gym laughing. We would be in the middle of the most difficult workout, the rest of us dripping with sweat and sometimes doubling over in pain, and he would be in hysterics. At first, I thought it was a little bit scary. I was like, why is this guy smiling after 200 burpees, there must be something wrong with him. Until I asked him, and he said that he could either laugh or cry and that laughing was the way God came to him. What I like most about this is that he felt he had a choice, whereas for the rest of us, those mornings were miserable until the workout was over, and only then were we exhilarated by what we had finished. But this man, he was my hero those long hours before dawn, running through New York’s parks covered with snow, because he was really there for all of it, not wishing it was over.

That man knew what awe was. and when thinking about this meditation, I took a poll of the people I trust most. What does awe mean to you? My father sent me a Van Halen song. My partner Derick spoke of awe as ‘being in the presence of something,’ which is the most succinct and best definition I’ve heard, for it includes the mystery and aliveness all at once. Awe at just being, at presence, at something.

One of my best friends, Ben, told me awe is the intersection of joy and mystery, which I love, but at first I thought he said misery, which also makes sense— that awe is the intersection of joy and misery, a still place in the center of the scale when it hangs in balance.

And nobody knows awe like the five year olds I’ve hung out with, who’ve made me see whatever is in front of me as new and shining with possibility. An egg can be a person, if you only draw a face. A pile of sand can be not just a castle but a city with people made of shells.

I’m not sure what awe means to you, or where you feel it, but I’d love to know one day. An exercise I gave my students last year was to write about an activity you love like you were explaining it to an alien. It let them see their familiar tasks and routines completely new. And sometimes I like to walk through the world like an alien, too— like I’m seeing it for the first time.

Some people actually have. The astronaut Loren Atton, about seeing earth from far away, wrote, “Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty—but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That's where life is; that's where all the good stuff is."

I guess the practice is to keep remembering, to keep praising our aliveness. One of my favorite words is hallelujah— a combination of two Hebrew words, "hallel" meaning praise and "jah" meaning God. And it doesn’t matter if you replace the word God with love, or the universe, or life itself. In the song Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen sings, “Now I've heard there was a secret chord /That David played, and it pleased the Lord.” These lines refers to the biblical story of King David who, according to Talmudic legend, plays his lyre at night for angels and sages. He does some messed up stuff, and his God forgives him, and David sings, Hallelujah. And perhaps the secret chord was actually the hallelujah in the first place, the desire to say thank you.

And perhaps there is room for the hallelujahs and the holiness in the smallest moments, and our gratitude is what makes them big. One of my favorite biblical commentaries is about the moment Moses receives the ten commandments from God in front of the burning bush. In Exodus 19:19, it is said “Moses spoke and God answered with a voice, in a voice he could hear.” One 19th century Rabbi said that it is possible Moses heard nothing other than the hebrew letter alef, which is pronounced, ah, like a small sigh. I love this story because it is possible it was in Moses’s own breath that he found God, and that feels more relatable to me than any thunderous voice speaking from the heavens. God is a deep breath on a hard day. Hallelujah.

I find God, or the sacred, in the smallest, most quiet places. At lake Michigan. At the grocery store. In my fear. In my awe. In the poetry that, as laureate Joy Harjo writes, “keeps the door open to awe and ensures that we will find our way through the broken heart-field of wars, losses and betrayals…”

By apprenticing to awe and praise, we fall further in love with our lives, as messy and difficult and uncertain as they may be. We do not discard the difficulties, rather we enter into them more fully, as gateways or extremely turbulent portals instead of just detritus. As writer Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

I don’t know about you, but I want to spend my hours in praise. I want to spend them stunned by this world, amazed at how lucky it is to be alive, then forgetting when I take out the trash. But mostly, I want to remember. I want to spend my hours saying thank you, even when the sickness and the death and the wars humble me, when I shake my head and say I do not understand. But I also do not understand the sunrise ocean, the flaming red tree.

So, let me end by saying thank you. For listening. For accompanying me while I write. I think each one of you is worthy of awe, and praise, not for doing anything in particular, not for winning any prizes or getting A’s or being “the best”— but just by being, by breathing.

Thank you.

xoxox

Raisa