tending the subtle

this timeless moment {how to be a poet}

Aug 20, 2024

I saw it in the clouds the other evening. At the flourishing heights of the great arc of summer, I glimpsed the other side— the inevitable descent, off in the distance but there it was. Just when I had begun to think that the flowering might unfold forever, a group of clouds passed overhead with messages of a great change coming.

The wild world has always reminded us not to get too attached to these physical forms. Last week I was reading about NASA’s imaging of white dwarf stars, which are dying suns that at one time are thought to have supported whole solar systems. After a star goes through its dying process, it continues to glow softly— for billions of years— despite being technically dead. For a long time astronomers speculated that planets could not survive the death of their parent star (yes, the sun is our “parent star” in space terms). But in newer images, dying stars have been found with a lone planet left still orbiting them, even as their sun slowly fades into darkness. The poetry of this image shattered my heart forever. Isn’t our whole universe made of these tender farewells, and the love that abides beyond form?

Every year when the first frost nears and the last hummingbird voice rings out in farewell, my heart winces with the thought, I hope I loved them well enough. And I mean all of them, the whole collective of summer people. Gone in a glimmer. As Jack Kornfield once said during a talk, Because in the end, what matters? Did I love well? What beauty do we leave behind? The beauty he was referring to is not a physical offering, but the lingering perfume of our presence. The same way a star continues to glow even after it has died.

Herein lies the great work of my life, of all life. To love this world well, now. To try not to miss the precious moments of tenderness and awe that flicker in between the busy stream of thoughts we call our lives. I am stalking, with fang-toothed focus, that subtle space between each thought, where the intelligence of the heart can speak.

[the luminous pause]

In receiving that news from the August clouds, I felt a flash of energy that felt equal parts terror and thrilling enchantment. The warm, bright flowering reality I had just begun to settle into was on its way to dissolving back into the dark firmament of soil. Our lives are made of these whirlpools of unraveling, in great losses like death as well as smaller, daily griefs. When we experience a loss of any kind, we enter uncharted territory of change. These transitory periods are a concept described in Vajrayana Buddhism as the bardos, a word that means “gap”. It denotes a transitional time, the open space that exists between known realities.

In its traditional definition, the bardos are a series of intermediate states that the consciousness passes through after death, but a teacher of mine recently used the word to describe any disorienting transition or upheaval in our lives. An experience of change that feels groundless, or losing grip on any prior definition of your identity, could be defined as a bardo. Our days are full of small transitory pauses, as we move from one thing to the next. Most importantly, these expansive gaps live in the space between each passing thought. It is just that we are often so caught up in our flow of thoughts that we don’t pay attention to that utterly subtle, vast open space between.

the vast mystery of the heart beyond physical form

The most fascinating thing about these gaps is how wildly generative they are, despite how uncomfortable and empty the vastness can feel. If you’ve experienced the death of a loved one, then you know how groundless this space is. And yet all creative potentiality and heart intelligence is hiding in that space. That’s what I felt when I looked up at the peculiar slants of evening light against those prophetic clouds the other night— I felt the impending death of summer, and also a sudden rush of everything that becomes possible when we let go of what we thought we knew. Like opening a door and letting in a fresh, strangely familiar breeze of possibility.

[subtle teachings in the emerald leaves]

We spend so much time trying to become things, rather than admitting that our real gift is given when we finally come apart. Late summer gives us a special opportunity to practice being present with the undoing. To enter the stream of subtle sensations approaching us, that which is utterly true. And to do it now, while the world is still fragrant and flowering with ten thousand hidden messages being handed to you.

This is how we prepare our hearts for the elusive, formless dreamscapes of the unknown, by practicing being present with the subtleties now while they appear in bright form. The feelings of love and care you exchange with the world, this is what stays with you when all forms have dissolved. This is what we can study now.

tea with the setting moon, from a high mountain ledge, 5:57 am yesterday

A teacher of mine recently spoke of secret, ancient teachings being hidden in the fluttering leaves and the voices of the mountain streams. That our ancestors, the elemental spirits, Gaia herself, and even our own soul, have hidden messages in the land for us to discover. Like a treasure hunt. Oh, how delighted I was by this idea. Can we become still enough to receive these messages, engaged enough to go seek them out? This is what it means to tend to the subtle body of Self and Earth: to let the land help slow the stream of your mind, so that you can feel the creative luminosity that lives in the space between your own thoughts. Within that pregnant silence lives an endless stream of poetry and song.

the real work is to recognize yourself as a cosmopoetic ripple of tenderness

Cultivating heartful presence is perhaps the greatest act of ecological restoration humans can participate in. To sit, breathe, and allow who we are and what we have to be enough. To watch the world approach us with gifts beyond form, to feel the creative intelligence of the wild world speak through us. The more we experience this, the more we will be able to gently dismantle the modern human definition of the word intelligence, which centers completely around human intellect and the success of our individual identities, and has led to the destruction of our ecosystems and each other. There is an older kind of intelligence here that generates all the beauty we see, the cycles of dissolving and the undying love. It is an utterly free and poetic intelligence, born from a small seed of creative possibility. Our heart is that seed.

To tend the subtle body is to become an apprentice to your own mysterious heart. Are we willing to become students of not-knowing, so that everything becomes possible? The space between is all about understanding our own love. Studying this space transforms everything into poetry.

[how to be a poet / attention + affection]

I don’t actually know how to be a poet, in the literary sense. “How to Be a Poet” is the name of one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems. It was the original inspiration for this newsletter, and I have shared it down below in closing. The wonderful thing is that there are as many different kinds of poets and poetry styles as there are species on this planet. And new ones continue to emerge.

Every day I wake up before dawn to drink tea by candlelight. I sit quietly and scribble things into my journal before pulling a random poetry book off the shelf. Adrienne Rich, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, Hafiz, Diane di Prima, Louise Glück, William Stafford, Mirabai, I could list their names for pages and I love them like grandparents… I am so thankful to these dedicated students of the heart. That’s what a poet really is. All of them remind us, over and over, about the necessity of cultivating our attention. A poem is a pause, a whirling timeless moment, that just barely captures a glimpse of an uncapturable truth. Poets listen deeply enough to hear the subtle waves and whispers that the rest of the world is too busy to hear.

I have written at least a poem a day for over a decade, and 99% of those poems came from either sitting in silence or walking in quiet listening. I can’t say that I wrote any of the poems myself, because it always feels as though someone invisible handed them to me. There is a clear knowing that they do not come from my own mind. And even though I cherish the little poems that arrive, it really isn’t about the poems at all. It’s about their spacious origin, and the careful, honest attention that connects me to that heartspace.

This is not about how to write a poem, but how to be a poet. This is not about producing something, rather about embodying the Self who sees the entire world through the open lens of the heart. This means that anyone can do it. You don’t have to call yourself an artist, a writer, or anything at all — to simply be a human in relationship with the world is to be a creative force. It is purely about your way of being here. If you happen to end up with a poem or a piece of art, consider it a heavenly by-product of your heartfelt presence. If we get caught up in the product, we miss the next message flying toward us in the changing clouds. The point is to keep paying attention to the more subtle stream of happenings of right now.

Attention is the practice of seeing the suchness of things, to train yourself to witness the true nature of things from the perspective of your own heart. For any creative process, we must being by cultivating our attention and our comfort with quiet listening. When we witness the truth of things as they are, it is a natural progression for feelings of tenderness to arise. This tenderness has a name: it is affection. And affection tends to speak in poetry.

Both attention and affection are equally important states to practice, and they naturally give way to each other. In a world so saturated in separateness, mental distraction, dullness and apathy, I think cultivating these states is a special sort of kindling for the human heart. We have so much unexpressed love to give this planet, and we easily forget that our affectionate gaze is a profoundly healing balm for this world.

I thought I was on the right track when I
was admiring an odd-shaped squash cooking
in a pot and I called it “angel”

At least, that meant something to me.
It seemed like progress—

spontaneously talking in a sweet and
sincere manner to something
that I had not ever spoken to
so romantically
before.

[Hafiz, tr. Ladinsky]

If you need a real life teacher of attention and affection, look to the wild lands and the animals. I recently saw a scientific study that aimed to prove whether or not dogs actually love their humans (as if this was ever remotely in question…). Ultimately the study found that, in terms of neurotransmitters, dogs regularly hug their humans with their eyes. When they look at us, it feels as good for them as a hug, and they are constantly sending us love just by looking at us. Isn’t this the essence of poetry, of art, of cultivating the creative landscape of the heart? To hug the world with your eyes.

If you have ever watched a dog sit quietly in a forest, you have seen what true attention looks like. They innately attune themselves to the most subtle nuances of scent and sound. This depth of listening and engagement with the world gives way to a natural expanse of loving. Let’s never forget that dogs are the creative gift that came out of the wolf’s love for humans. This is the ultimate example of how alchemical our own affection can be, creating a world of even tighter bonds of harmony and connection. Generating new dreams for the Earth.

watching the sunset with my beloved feral dog Santo. A tender of the most intricate energetic happenings of this world.

To be affected means to be moved or touched by something, to let the world touch your heart, to be so inspired by it that you are moved to tell about it, or to create something. Isn’t this how we create the beauty of this world? By loving it? Affection for our world is the ultimate creative act — it turns everything into poetry.

And as it is with all sincere loving, there will be grief. Bringing our full attention to this world inevitably unearths all its most tender, blazing truths. Grief is one of the primary messengers of the creative heart, showing us exactly what we care about, and just how much. If you begin to practice presence and affection and are met with grief, know that you have opened the door to your own personal, wildly precious poetic expression.

This notion of affection found me several years ago, in this Wendell Berry poem “How to Be a Poet.” Under the title of the poem, Berry wrote in parentheses: to remind myself. I find this little note so reassuring, coming from such a great poet. We are all in this together, all equally practicing the art of being here. The question is how much are we willing to devote ourselves to tending these subtle states, to experiment with this kind of stillness and intimacy.

So here is the Wendell Berry poem for you. I have read it out loud with some guest appearances by hummingbird voices in the background, as well as typed it below. I hope you find it as nurturing as I do.

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-1:32

How to Be a Poet, by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon affection,
reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

You might experiment making a similar list to Berry’s, with your own personal directives for living heartfully. What small reminders might help you return to your heart’s conversation with everything? Maybe borrow Berry’s note at the top of the page, to remind myself.

Let’s keep tending the subtle heart, and resurrect co-creative joy with other species — let us dream of poetic ecosystems that include humans. I will continue to believe in our ability to reawaken an ecology of miracles, by way of our willingness to simply be present. Our attention gives way to flourishing.