aperch

“Talk of mysteries!
Think of our life in nature,
daily to be shown matter,
to come in contact with it;
rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!
the solid earth!
the actual world!
the common sense!
Contact! Contact!
Who are we? Where are we?”

~ Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods


Subtle encounters with nature do much to point out our whims. We must always be able to see that our environments extend far beyond the clamshells of our laptops. In vastness is captivating intricacy found. But it takes some cultivated perspective- and the ability to perch oneself at conducive vantage points. My tastes draw me to edges and confluences: shorelines, precipices, and mountains; as edges these have much in common with streetcorners, front stoops, and windowsills. The mind must keep an awareness that horizons are surely farther away than an armspan. It seems the meetings of depths and surfaces provide places for reflective repose. Writing requires a good perch.

Promontories with interesting views are as compelling as they are distracting. But that goes with the territory. One perch is selected in favor of another due to sheer intrigue. A pleasant diversion can serve as needed writing spice, broadening tastes and views. One afternoon at the Boston Athenaeum, a beloved perch of mine, I glanced up from my journal and books surprised by a sizeable red-tailed hawk on the terrace railing.

Such birds of prey find plenty to do between their nests atop office buildings and open spaces such as the Boston Commons, or the Granary Yard which is behind the Athenaeum. Of course I put down my writing to have a good look at the hawk. From its railing intermission, the sleek raptor surveyed the landscape. We looked at each other from our respective perches, and in a few short minutes the hawk flew off to glide above the canyons of Downtown Crossing.

I’ve long referred to the act of writing as the taking-up of a perch. Similarly to perching birds, a writer’s pause to recollect, record, and look ahead to the next flight of fancy is momentary. A suitable perch merely needs the furnishing of a sturdy surface. It can be a chair, a flat section of rock, a dock, a low brick wall, or a well-inclined hill for some back support. Just about the same list may be employed, if a table-surface is needed. Being birds of our own feathers, we each find the landing places for our thoughts. Around the places in which we temporally situate ourselves are the elements of air, light, and either sound or the cessation of sounds. Essentially a preferable perch is a place of reflection. And from that figurative branch with beak between books, victuals, and curiosities, words sing forth.

For this occasion, these words are assembled at the coffeehouse nicknamed in more than fifteen years of my journals as The Familiar Perch. The shopfront is now under its 3rd manifestation as a café, prior to the mid-1990s it was a perfume shop, and these transformations surely follow numerous uses since the rows of brick buildings on Exchange Street were built in the late 1860s. At the base of the narrow street, at the heart of the Old Port, this is an ideal location for its contemporary purpose.

At first, I’d come here to do my homework, preferring the convivial continuum for writing after spending extended silent reading hours in my apartment. Then as semesters progressed into graduate work, constant weekday road travels made any sort of nonacademic writing a rare luxury. The Familiar Perch became a base for my ritual of Saturday morning coffee and journaling- regardless of the previous weekdays’ chaos of coursework and the years of employment-juggling that followed. But it is indeed always a perch. Sitting here to write, I’m a bird on an extended branch scratching recollections on leaves. Some are bound, others are loose folios. Sometimes the words are pecked by typewriter. Over the years, I’ve accumulated additional favorite perches in various cities, states, and countries. These are cherished island oases amidst an expanding ocean, making it necessary to have places to perch though arduous journeys.

Still, the Familiar Perch is distinct with personal history and ambiance. Most of my New Year’s Eve “year in review” journal entries have been written here. During the previous name-change of the café, the new owners set the glass tops over the table linens that remain there now. Writing surfaces have intrinsically mirrorlike properties, and I’m always pleasantly startled when birds in flight high above the mansards across the street are visible in the glass tabletops. Just now a cormorant has darted, it seems, from under the saucer and across to the next table. Sometimes the coffee itself becomes a reflecting pool. The sensation is one of noticing the sky while looking down to write.

Birds intersperse their flights with perches, as there must be pauses to strengthen and observe. Hence the perching writer becomes as a branchseated bird, noticing the world of sights and wind currents, retrieving and sending forth song from within. After reckoning with the moment, a launching toward the next way-station. Perhaps you are aperch right now, or you may be on your way to an inviting ledge of your choosing.

heartsong

“Whistling in the dark,
I see the lights all over town,
And I keep walking up and down,
While I am whistling in the dark.”

~ Bert Ambrose, Whistling in the Dark

hands

“Hands that make each day begin again
and bring to light
our distant dreams.”

~ The Monks of Weston Priory, Hands


For the written word to reach the legible surface, an idea must be held buoyant from its depths. Then we form our phrases as they are written down. From eternities and immediate reflexes alike, our hands perform the recording in our own language of thought. The individual is unique and potentially a point of original perspective. Stopping to think about it, I recall the whirlwind of sights, sounds, interactions, and imaginings. A certain slant of light returns parallel seasons past. A radio song on a winter night conjures the hot summer day of its first listening. A turn of phrase from a passerby today brings to life bygone words of a departed soul, and today I’ve handwritten the notes to preserve them.

Through mysterious combinations of intuition and urgency, both conscious and subconscious decisions follow the determining of which ideas will be gleaned for exploration. The process continues, even during moments of setting words to paper. It seems that any in-process apprehensions that ensue are due to notions that the initial jottings cannot be changed and recomposed. Of course they can, and that very thought should encourage further writing. Documentation provides a basis for expanding thoughts and aspirations. The written page becomes something of a reflection pool. Human hands miraculously serve as the intermediary instruments between soul and writing implements.

Hands are the finest, most intricate, and amenable of tools. Instruments capable of making instruments. Our hands were created for us; we haven’t made them. I’ve long thought of my own hands as inheritances from my artistic forbears. There isn’t far to look for me to notice the painters, photographers, furniture makers, tailors, and musicians that have preceded me from both sides of my family. At times, my hands remind me of the family members I most closely resemble- and of those I’ve been told I resemble. Those glimpses usually happen when I notice how I draw, or prepare food, or repair books, or handwrite. A few years ago, it occurred to me how my penmanship merges the styles of both my parents equally. My mother had taught me to write, and that made me impervious to absorbing the official writing style taught at school. Gratitude, in this regard, isn’t so much for a peculiar orthography of calligraphic vertical loops and dotted capital I’s, but more about how the letters and their application form an individual’s development.

By cultivating the human touch to concept and action alike, the soul can creatively venture out. Beyond what is crafted by hand, instruments and visual media can become extensions of operating hands, demonstrating an individual’s comprehension. But beginnings are drawn from the transcendent sensed from within. We animate the materials of our creativity and we can reshape them as well. Keeping that in mind, I’ve noticed how creative methods and tools carry their own respective and intrinsic syntax. Remembering how changing cameras affects and alters my interpretations of subject matter, I’ve found the same phenomenon with writing tools. One writer’s hands shaped to craft with different instruments will write a consistent vision from respectively different vantage points. The individual’s touch begins with formulating thoughts, but is made manifest through commanding the various materials of documentation. Not only have I found subtleties between how and what I write in pencil as compared to pen- one being more ephemeral and pressure sensitive than the other- but I’ve even noticed syntactical differences among the various typewriters I use. An awareness of what I consider “orthographic syntax” helps to free my thoughts from writing standstills.

In these pages, I’ve often clarified how instruments are means for creativity and not ends in themselves. Perhaps a similar argument can be made for human hands, if not for all material. Of late, my thoughts often turn to differences between what may be considered “sufficient” versus heights that compel conscience to engage. Fine tools and trained hands are given their justice in their dedication and use. There may even be results. Winter reminds us of life’s course, with short days of longshadowed bright sun. A life of ideas and journeys has barely enough hours for appropriate words.

Let us bring out those enshrined writing implements and set forth the manna of our best ideas. Eat on the holiday-only fine china with the good silverware on a Tuesday morning. This world of “virtual reality” can use some more counteractive and authentic expression of encouragement. Let us not permit the inheritances of our souls and hands to be lost in waves of autocomplete. Retrieve and recultivate your handwriting. Spell and sculpt your own narratives. Type on a manual machine from your shoulder muscles. Imagine visiting a town of prefab drab squared structures filled with hoarded beautiful housebuilding lumber, saws, planes, fixtures, furnishings, and chandeliers. Indeed, it is the Spirit that gives life. How about a show of hands?

strangers and pilgrims

“And the tougher it gets
And the more that I sweat
And the harder it fights
And the deeper it bites
I’m one step closer to home;
And you can tie my hands
Or whip my back
I can’t give in
’til the sky turns black
I may get lost
I’m one step closer to home.”

~ The Alarm, One Step Closer to Home

An exploration of negation skates upon thin ice. The lowest strata, weighted to darkest depths, are opposed by lofty and liberating heights. Yet it remains for an earnest soul to comprehend spectra of the spirit. Navigating into the open seas of this new year brings me through straits that grapple with the old shoals of alienation. Knowing to steer such shores is essential. Terrain and tossing tides change constantly, emphasizing the critical value of compass accuracy. And thus there must be ways to manoeuver through the anguish of exclusion, en route to the vast embrace of oceans and horizons.

Belonging and acceptance, with their conditional properties, have haunted me since my earliest memories. Of late, it has pronouncedly surfaced how my self-perception has been tainted for too long by the black-sheep and bullied experiences of childhood, along with familial and social rejections of young adulthood. Coming to solid terms with a life’s course of a tacking outsider that never quite belongs does not mean resigning to the shadows. Not at all. It must mean exulting in disjointedness. But thriving along uncharted realms demands an urgency to deflate that lower, darker, defeatist nature that propels despair and bitterness. Throw it overboard.

For the voyage to really progress, the high road of positive growth cannot be delayed an additional moment. Take stock in the kindred, understanding souls you know, and count them among retrievable family members. As protracted and relentless as the journey may appear, our times are temporal. We hang our hats upon provisional hooks, and our season’s duration is unknown. Forever is something that defies cartographic description. One might justifiably say that dreaming and hoping are steeply priced, but I contend that stuffing-away and discarding hopes would be far more costly. While trying to discipline myself not to dwell upon dead-ends, I pondered the skills of how thoughts are squelched by those who busy themselves lest old hopes return to the fore. Perhaps this is what so many do with deposited longings left among inner recesses to decompose and blend into the mind’s depths- too far from the surface to be fished out. Then I wondered whether there is an appropriate age for the cessation of aspirations; it seems I’ve either missed that memorandum or blithely excluded it from my much more consequential messages.


Psalm 137 : Babylonic rivers

Consider the words of the exiled Psalmist who wrote:

“... they that wasted us
required of us mirth...
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a strange land?”

More than an indentured captive’s lament, these ancient words reveal a soul forced to produce. The rivers of Babylon, and their circumstances in the opening stanza, represent the inhospitable and unfamiliar. Quartered along the waterfront, the laborers found themselves without music in their midst, and sat on the ground, after hanging their harps on willow branches. But they were commanded to stand again, take their instruments from their hanging hooks, and deliver cheer to their captors. The heart of this somber psalm does not include any description of the work they had to do, but instead the pain of forcing joy out of sorrow. Surveying a hostile proximity has a numbing effect, but the emergence of memory brings the deluge. The psalmist and his companions wept when they remembered their lost homes. They had to sing joyous and sacred songs as strangers in an alien land. Although, as Matthew Henry once commented, “it argues a base and sordid spirit” on the part of the captors, it remained for the captives to sing beyond their anger and their expressed hunger for vindication.


Waters of Siloë

The Waters of Siloë, Thomas Merton’s history of the Trappist monastic order, contains instances of wavering between historiography and subtle autobiography. Contemporary readers are able to apply the benefit of retrospective knowledge about Merton’s life. His superior recognized the potential for Merton’s literary skills to draw popular attention to the monastery, and he set the young monk to publishing histories and translations, along with philosophical works. The results were phenomenal, with new postulants and fanmail flocking to Gethsemani Abbey. As for the dutiful Merton, the life of silent contemplation eluded him; the vocation which brought him to the monastery remained unfulfilled until his last years. While unable in good faith to disobey his order, Merton industriously delivered the goods- even adding the beautifully insightful works that continue to inspire. He found ways to sing the Lord’s song through his anguish, and occasionally his distress appears between the lines.

Providing a historic chronicle of Cistercian monasticism, beginning with the late 11th century, Merton describes the major leaders and communities from medieval Europe to foundations throughout the world. Amidst the general narrative of The Waters of Siloë is a thorough and sensitive portrait of an ordinary French monk named Maxime Carlier. Merton elaborates about how Carlier, called to a life of silent contemplation and monastic solitude, had been sent by his abbot to fight in World War I. Though chronologically impossible, one would think Merton knew Carlier personally by the book’s vivid comments about the latter’s spiritual life and intentions. Merton’s summaries of Carlier’s inner renewal reads remarkably like his own experience. Perhaps it was Merton joining Carlier, sensing that “somehow, I don’t know how it was, my soul entered upon a state in which all its desires seemed to be fulfilled. It enjoyed the delight of resting in a feeling of secret happiness.”

It seems Merton is speaking through his telling of Carlier’s life, expressing the inner torment of having to go to war and leave behind his heart’s vocation. Carlier’s troop even had to march past his own monastery, but he was not allowed to stop and see his brethren. At the close of the Carlier vignette, Merton describes a reckoning which may have been his own: what puzzles us as divine unkindness is actually the sacrifice asked of us en route to perfection. When we are kept away from our hopes and goals, we must continue to bear the cross and walk worthily of our calling. Carlier rescued many of his fellow soldiers, was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, and finally killed in action. Concluding, speaking his voice through his history writing, Merton adds: “then the veils of faith were suddenly shattered, and the noise of the world ended forever, as the Cistercian soldier entered into the sounding silence of a contemplation without obscurity and without end.”


The Cloud of Unknowing : being nowhere

The anonymous 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing set out to counsel novices in his community for whom spiritual life seemed arcane and frustrating. Among basic points of advice and encouragement, still applicable to this day, is the unusual exhortation to be nowhere. Strangers and pilgrims do well to set their hearts upon things above, and in so doing find their affections “transformed by the inner experience of nothing and nowhere.”

“But to this you say: ‘Where then shall I be? By your reckoning I am to be nowhere!’ Exactly. In fact, you have expressed it rather well, for I would indeed have you be nowhere. Why? Because nowhere, physically, is everywhere spiritually.”

Reconciling aspirations, accomplishments, and disappointments as one who is “nothing and nowhere” reminds the humbled sojourner of the liberating aspects of being both something and everywhere. “When your mind focuses on anything,” the author advises, “you are there in that place spiritually, as certainly as your body is located in a definite place right now.” He continues, “go on with this nothing, moved only by your love for God.” Tolerating- even thriving- amidst life’s setbacks seems a burdensome purgation, yet somehow a necessary darkness we must navigate through. The nothingness borne within an individual is a cloud of unknowing between humanity and divinity. From material nothingness comes spiritual plenitude: “For in this darkness we experience an intuitive understanding of everything material and spiritual without giving special attention to anything in particular.” The reward for patiently persevering through dark times is confidence about our own destiny.

one step closer

Though we are “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,” the Epistle to the Hebrews equally offers reminders that the most prominent among our ancient forbears “confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” While trying to make sense of my abundant failings and occasional instances of acceptance, the best thing is to revel in the very alienation that oppressed so forcefully in the past. Similarly to the authors referenced in this essay, we move about in worlds as yet unrealized. Rejections far outnumber acceptances, but the wilderness of refusal must be traversed for the cause of gaining the pearl of affirmative. Strangers and pilgrims have the noblest of patron saints, as well as the strongest spines.

Let us be, at least, contentedly disjointed- bringing out the open-endedness and positive aspects of being perennially out-of-place. Instead of lucrative contracts, financial founts, or real estate, my chief assets begin with faith, wits, and oddness. The flip side of exclusion is the “nothing and nowhere” of the Cloud of Unknowing. Though not fully belonging anywhere, somehow part of many places. Moored by mere threads means mobilization toward improvement. Riches and recognition recede in importance, compared to the freedom to choose away from what is unproductive in favor of pursuing what is constructive and good. The voyage requires unrelenting vigilance, no matter how unsure prospects and opportunities appear. Comprehending how the blessed nothingness exceeds the world’s everything may require more than human faculties, therefore trust will have to suffice as a navigational instrument. “For myself,” wrote the anonymous author of Cloud of Unknowing, “I prefer to be lost in this nowhere, wrestling with this blind nothingness, than to be like some great lord going about everywhere and enjoying the world as if he owned it.” We may wonder what is really owned, and by whom.

january territory

“Behind all seen things
lies something vaster;
everything is but a path,
a portal, or a window opening
on something other than itself.”

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle, ch.19

treasures of a year

“Then said Hopeful, ‘My brother, these troubles and distresses
that you go through in these waters,
are no sign that God hath forsaken you;
but are sent to try you, whether you will call to mind
that which heretofore you have received of his goodness,
and live upon him in your distresses.’”

~ John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Treasure found ~
Above: 1/2" thick pencils from Austria for rapid note-taking at the Boston Athenaeum.

Below: Smith-Corona "Skyriter," found in its pristine case at a salvage barn in Midcoast Maine, came from a shop in Bangor- and had never been used before.

1- cf: "Like a River to the Sea," 20 May 2011.
2- cf: "Brave," 14 November 2011.

In this essay, I described having a backpack custom-made by Alder Stream. Jane Barron, who handmakes these, created a narrow version of her "Allagash" model with inner pockets especially for books and pencil boxes. We nicknamed this the "Maine Narrow Gauge," after the famous little railway on the Portland waterfront. Beautifully made and rugged, the backpack is a real treasure that has already seen travels. I added a strand of red fabric, which is a custom for pilgrims of the Taizé monastery in France to be a reminder that the Holy Spirit accompanies the traveller.

The Maine Narrow Gauge Railway - Portland, Maine.

joyeux noël

"All hail to the days that merit more praise
Than all the rest of the year,
And welcome the nights that double delights
As well for the poor and the peer!

Good fortune attend each merry man's friend
That doth but the best that he may,
Forgetting old wrongs with carols and songs
To drive the cold winter away."

~ In Praise of Christmas, (18th century England)

en attente

“True silence
is the rest of the mind;
it is to the spirit
what sleep is to the body,
nourishment and refreshment.”

~William Penn, Quaker leader and author


Pulling away from Portland on a southbound track, the Boston-bound train picked up speed. My window view of trees and salt marshes began to blur and blend with the sky. Blurring and stirring in a swirl of sunrise light, form and color marbled into its own ephemeral texture. The journal writing I’d begun, before the train began rolling, was distracted along with my afterthoughts about previous weeks’ anxieties. Departing from the Sewall Street Station was the start of a retreat I’d anticipated for months. Such diverting landscape tableaux were gratefully received. The journey settled into a soothing overcast. In the buildup of worldly cares, economic trepidations, and general dead-ends visibility tangled into disproportion. With so many hopes sinking into swamps of thwart, I continue to try taking stock in the good that exists, while aching for the better of my wishes. When do my prospects improve, and will they ever? What do I await? My thoughts turned to the notion of continuing to hope for outcomes for which no evidence is detectable. A retreat is a chance to let the treadmills turn without me. The pursuit instead is for respite and hope. But patience is required to be able to unwind and rest. It takes time, though it is a worthwhile investment. Beginning to recover requires a slowing of paces. The gift of an entire week just starting, the train’s rhythm returned me to the present and toward the good fortune of a sojourn.

In between compound tasks and commitments, I managed to fit in my travel preparations. As the train-trip-eve drew closer, more ingredients were gathered at the floor near my desk. Snippets of late nights and early mornings permitted additions of writing, clothing, and photography provisions. Being able to see the accumulations, over several days, also permitted me to eliminate the extraneous from the essentials. There would be plenty of reading at my destinations, so I resisted loading-down with more than two small books. And the recurrent question of what I expected to do, prevented me from overpacking. Those who write and travel can attest to the discipline of balancing tools, trappings, and tastes when gathering gear. For such things, the priority goes to simplicity.

Beacon Hill Friends House sanctuary.

A journey into days of sanctified reflection implies pausing the pace, breathing in the immediate, and paring away inconsequential thoughts. Transcendent of setting, the place must simply be conducive to repose. All that is necessary is an open-ended freedom to be silent. For contemplative time to be what one might call “constructive,” there must be a slicing away of excesses. Unfettered, a soul may center down to its core, to the beyond within. In so doing, the reflexive grasp on external definitions is released. Even gripped retained experiences can be loosened away. I have learned, however, that one release is rarely sufficient; often a habit, or perspective, or an accumulation must be jettisoned many times before such things leave my thoughts. Simplification involves a clearing-away that is both physical and mental. Some material may be good enough to give away, otherwise it is best thrown out. Casting off and letting go may extend from such things as physical items- to ideas, concepts, expectations, connections, and even dreams. Though en route to meditative places, there were surely tastes of peaceful release as the train advanced.

Above: Beacon Hill Friends House, Boston.
Below: Beacon Hill Friends House courtyard.

My aspirations toward simplicity were met by the ethos of my gracious host community for the week, at the Beacon Hill Friends House. Quakers have, for more than 350 years, founded their spiritual practice in emphases upon simplicity and patient perseverance. I’d spent a restful week at the House only six months ago. This time I experienced the courtyard in late-autumn, with shorter and colder days in the neighborhood. With time and increasing bonds of friendship, the welcomes are ever warmer and treasured- among communities at the House and at the Boston Athenaeum. Between the two places, I found rest, nourishment, great conversations, and time to write, read, and walk the ancient little peripheral streets.

Above: Boston Athenaeum Library.
Below: View toward Charles Street, from Revere Street.

The literature I studied in the Athenaeum’s rare books room included treatises on grace and the companionship of the Holy Spirit, written by members of the Religious Society of Friends in the 1600s and 1700s. I saw much to enlighten my thoughts about anticipatory listening and awaiting- and eloquent simplicity. These writers had been persecuted for their belief in the direct relationship between God and the human individual, without intermediary or ritual. In silent expectancy is God received in the heart’s recesses. It is almost indescribable, yet the authors found their own ways to encourage their readers with testimonials and discoveries. Having time to read through such poetical discourse- after acclimating to the old style language- it occurred to me how it is a great gift to have time to read an item to completion without interruption. Much as it is to dine slowly on savory victuals, I could read and take notes- then go out for ruminative walks. Weaving the lanes on Beacon Hill, I asked myself about what I expect in life. My unreasonable tendency is to expect better, regardless of apparent limitation. How much time constitutes too long a wait? Surely an aspiring kind of anticipation is quite unlike ways we wait in traffic, or in queues, or in waiting rooms. The wait for God is not in vain.

The season of Advent is one of glowing and expectant waiting. As the darkness of daylight’s diminution progresses, so conversely do hope’s embers intensify. Early-arriving evenings provide contrast for small, bright Advent lights displayed in windows. I began to notice them, along my afternoon walks. Guiding stars keeping vigil remind those in transit of the transient darkness. We wait not in vain. Having the opportunity to view a simpler expression of the upcoming holidays, Advent emerges as a season of hopeful expectation that anticipates fulfillment. As with the austere worship of the Quakers, the Holy Spirit is both evident and imminent, which is to say close at hand. Parakletos translates as consoler, comforter, the at-one’s-side, and the summoner to freedom as expressed in the gospels.

The Church of the Advent, Beacon Hill.

To silently await attentively upon the Creator Spiritus- as part of a large congregation- is as substantial as it is mystery. Somehow, in a perfectly congruent serendipity, first thing each morning I participated in morning vigil at The Church of the Advent- just a few minutes’ walk from the Friends House. Reciting the Psalms aloud from a lectern, toward the echoing heights of the large and elegant sanctuary, was an experience of spoken prayer in ancient footsteps yet with my own voice: No less extemporaneously, from row-house to cathedral, the Spirit moves. And just as seamlessly, the places and experiences of a week blended together as they settled within for the train trip home. Imagery of winding gaslit lanes, places of prayer, bright faces, ancient books, church cats at The Advent, and my chilled outdoor-writing hands filled my closed-eyed thoughts as the Downeaster rolled north. Rather than to look for any great resolve from this retreat, my hope is simply to do justice to these treasured experiences. For me, this means being faithful to the hopeful signs I have met and seen.

The lectern I read from daily at The Church of the Advent.
The motto translates as:
"Lord, let Your servant go forth in peace,
according to Your Word."