I have a friend who is a poet. Poets pour their thoughts, ideas, passions and experiences into their work. For these writers, it is a form of expression that sustains them emotionally. They use their creative gift as a way to reveal universal as well as internal truths, showing the rest of us how to see people and the world around us more honestly, creatively and completely.
Just as I have been a doctor of medicine, I see my friend as a doctor of soul care as he invites others to read his poems. He was not always a poet, having lived for most of his years focusing on other facets of his life. But now he builds bridges between the interior lives of people and the world around us, offering insight, challenge or comfort where needed. Through his poems he builds these bridges by combining different senses together in a way that is unexpected, using metaphors or images to challenge the reader to see or think in a different way – a way that is deeper, wider, more compassionate.
It is this friend who has encouraged me to consider writing poetry. In fact, from time to time – separated by decades, not months – I have occasionally done this. Typically, it has been driven by a sense of despair, and the need to express feelings in a way that is shareable and yet private. But it is clear to me that I am not a poet. I could, however, be someone who simply writes poetry – more like that suggested by the title of Hugh Prather’s first book of poetry, Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person.
Three weeks before graduating from medical school and almost seven years after first moving to Baltimore to begin college, I wrote a poem to express my frustration and uncertainty about the direction my life was taking. Reminiscent of J.S. Bach’s short and simple compositions for his students, I called it my Two-Part Invention:
Contrapuntal life lines –
a theme of work
and a theme of pleasure –
carry me toward a future
which I create for myself.
Each theme has developed independently
lacking harmony with the other.
I have produced dissonance
by failing to find pleasure in my work
and meaning amidst my pleasure.
One voice sings the joy of achievement,
the satisfaction of effort
and the virtue of discipline.
I have made this theme dominant,
though it sounds harsh by itself.
The second voice sings of pleasure –
a shedding of responsibility
and escape from constraint.
This theme is beautiful and strong
but heard only in my imagination.
The two-part invention must be rewritten:
I will strengthen each line
with the other.
I will create for myself a life
in which work and pleasure are consonant.
The original copy of this poem has remained buried among my papers for almost fifty years, but I have never had the desire to share it, because it reflects a fairly naïve and self-centered world view. It is a candid marker, however, of where I stood as I wrapped up the first quarter century of my life and embarked upon the second.
Over the years since, I have come to better appreciate poetry. I have come to believe that a great poem often reflects both a depth and a mystery that transcend what even a gifted writer can express with prose. One such poet is Jalaluddin Rumi. He was a Persian poet and mystic born at the beginning of the 13th Century. He grew up in the city of Balkh, an ancient and once prosperous trading center along the Silk Road, located in the northernmost part of what is now Afghanistan. Rumi lived amidst a rich mixture of faiths – primarily Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam. As a result of the Mongol invasion led by Genghis Khan, who slaughtered thousands of people in the cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad, Rumi moved west to Anatolia in what is now central Turkey.
His poems are surprisingly accessible (when translated into English) and deeply meaningful for those now living eight centuries later. He considers universal truths of heart, mind and soul in his era of uncertainty, animosity and foreboding – which also describes our times eight centuries later. He foreshadowed the thoughts of early 20th Century mystics such as the French Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, or the Greek-Armenian philosopher, George Gurdjieff – both of whom are variably credited with saying: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”[1]
One of my favorite poems by Rumi is entitled A Great Wagon. Here are three of the eight stanzas of the poem:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
Rumi gently shares these invitations to joy and to relationship – with nature and with others. This is very different than my poem that speaks only to my internal concern about the balance between work and pleasure; there is no invitation. Rumi is a poet; I am not. As Rumi so deftly explains, and as I began to understand the universe around me, much of what once worried me simply does not truly matter.
The irony in my story is that – three months after I wrote Two-Part Invention – I met Gram. For me, she quickly became the other – the one for whom I was grateful, no matter the circumstances; the one with whom even the concept of each other made no sense; the one who was more important to me than any of the pleasures or problems in life.
The poetry of Rumi shows us the centrality of belonging – to others and to the world that has been gifted to us. He speaks of oneness with others and our world; he speaks of living with joy and with discernment, but without judgment. His words were helpful to people seeking to transcend the values of the Persian Empire. His poems – like the works of great poets past and present – give voice to thoughts that can open our minds and allow us to look within and discover what has been lying dormant.
No matter the era in which poets live, their experiences, beliefs and unexpected insights suggest a different and perhaps better path for us to consider. We, in turn, may be challenged to be more attentive and more discerning on our journey.
Opa
[1] See: https://www.goodreads.com/questions/161835-hello-i-have-been-reading-some-of-pierre?t and https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/06/20/spiritual/?t