photos by Sepia, montage by Jenn Cavanaugh
Lenten Calendar: Given and Taken Away
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photos by Sepia, montage by Jenn Cavanaugh
Category Archives: Poetry
Lenten Calendar: Transformation
My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease —
I’m feeling for the Air —
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear —
A power of Butterfly must be —
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty implies
And easy Sweeps of Sky —
So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine —
–Emily Dickinson
photo by Jenn Cavanaugh
We romanticize the caterpillar’s transformation, and it’s easy to do because it’s hidden. And because we relish the concept of shedding a homely, crawling, bristly self for a soaring and beautiful one, but no one wants to undergo what the caterpillar does. It’s a real death and resurrection. Essentially, it digests itself. Breaks down into goo and reforms on a cellular level before a sticky and difficult rebirth.
I’m sure I’ve learned this fact half a dozen different times, because my imagination regularly rejects it and returns to my childhood image of the insect contortionist twisting and bending, unfolding to reveal what it always was inside.
It turns out that there’s some truth to that image as well, in that there are structures within the caterpillar that it has always carried within itself that emerge intact to become the exterior qualities of the butterfly. It doesn’t break down completely, just the parts that were inherent to the larval stage break down and reform around the structures of the mature and fully realized version of itself, which entomologists call the imago. The structures are called imaginal discs. They carry a “pre-pattern” of the butterfly’s final incarnation. Entomologists, whom I’ve never properly credited as the poetic souls they obviously are, can chart a “fate map” for an imago by studying these discs.
I wonder, can we do the same for ourselves? I suspect that outside perspective helps here, but what parts of your self that have always been hidden inside you do you suspect are ready to emerge like wings? What divine clues have you been given to your ultimate design?
If transformation were really all about contortion and twisting into an unfamiliar shape, it seems like the caterpillar would seek out a wide, open space in which to do it. Instead, it creates a small, confined and private space in which to let the hard carapace that protected it dissolve, to let its wings and antennae move to the surface. In our Lenten confinement, so may it be.
Lenten Calendar: Behind Glass
Behind Glass, a petit récapitul portatif
Woman at a Window by Caspar David Friedrich
April 3, 2018, Paris
for the woman at the window
A tenure of retiring footsteps
and java of iffy origins
tooled your destiny in muted tones.
(retiring, iffy, muted)
You kept your hand on the ball, your eye
peeled for the signal to pitch your lot –
an open wire swaying yet uncrossed.
(kept, peeled, yet)
Maybe this spring’s release of vine will
burst the gutted and buried glass shrine
you beetled down under, unlatching
(maybe, buried, under)
relics of the unpronounceable.
– Jenn Cavanaugh
As the poet, I’m hoping to let the poem speak for itself. A note, however, about the fun Oulipo form: I find that these poems often write themselves in ways that surprise me. The links provide images and vocabulary that demand the creation of fresh poetic connections. It’s a useful form for breaking out of mental ruts or through blocks; because it does double duty by encouraging both free association and verbal problem-solving, it feels like activating multiple regions of the brain. You can find the rules for it here.
Lenten Calendar: Creative Withdrawal
On a day when more of us are systematically removing ourselves from public spaces, Christian Wiman reminds us that “all love demands withdrawal.” Giving others their space is not a novel way of demonstrating care. What’s new for most of us is negotiating the majority of our relationships at such a remove. Already, though, I have seen some intentional, beautiful, and creative examples of closeness growing without physical proximity, and I hope you are seeing some, too. Wiman also says that “all love demands imagination.” Let’s redeem the time imagining new ways of being with and for one another.
Wiman continues…
846A Window Right by Friedensreich Hundertwasser
We must create the life creating us, and must allow that life to be —
and to be beyond, perhaps, whatever we might imagine.
I, too, am more (and less)
than anything I imagine myself to be.
“To know this,” says Simone Weil, “is forgiveness.”
It is an air you enter, not an act you make.
It is the will’s frustration, and is the will’s fruition.
It is to wade a blaze one night that I once crossed
— a young man, and lost —
to find a woman made of weather
sweeping the street in front of her shack.
It is another country.
It is a language I don’t know.
La por allá, la por allá, I repeat in my sleep.
The over there.
Lenten Calendar: Telling
This week’s lectionary readings play with the conceit of the rock that Moses struck to provide the newly liberated Israelites with fresh “living” water. “Strike the rock,” God says, “and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Exodus 17:6b-7)
“Is the LORD among us or not?” seems like a perfectly reasonable and non-rhetorical question. Some questions are mysteries to sit with and ponder, invitations to meditation, but this is the kind of question that demands an answer. It’s one that God answers when asked, even when the answer isn’t what the people expected. It’s one that Jesus answers even when he’s not asked. God wants us to know joy in “the rock of our salvation” (Psalm 95:1), and hope “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:5), and then to pass on this knowledge. Jesus tells the woman at the well that if she “knew the gift of God” she would have approached him asking for a drink, instead of the other way around (John 4:10). He tells her that this living water will become in those that drink it “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Then he tells her everything she’s ever done and who he is, and she tells everyone else.
She and they and we become springs fed by the source: the rock that was struck.
In uncertain times, Gwendolyn Brooks names our desire to just be told what to do to so that everything will be okay. At first the answers given seem equally simplistic. Wear your boots [read: wash your hands!] and you won’t get sick! But then at some point — I’m not sure which point; I imagine it’s subjective by design — the simplistic answers seem to acquire a simple wisdom and move from the immediate to the important, from the actionable to the true and actual.
“One Wants a Teller in a Time Like This” by Gwendolyn Brooks – photo by Jenn Cavanaugh
[I couldn’t help but notice that not even the famous poets and poems are secure]
Lenten Calendar: Prayer for Direction
Sit with your uncertainties for a bit. Name them. Acknowledge them. Accept that most of them will still be with you tomorrow and that, in most cases, feeling certain or uncertain about a thing will not significantly affect what tomorrow actually has in store. Pick one concern that could benefit from attention and attend to it: research, seek advice, talk it through with a friend, journal your thoughts, listen, pray…
“Moon over Half Dome” – Ansel Adams
Lent: X
O, teach me to untangle hope
from hope that’s false,
and lead me farther down the winding path
and whatever elseyou think I need, because the angle
of the woven slope
of love and grief is steep. Unless the bind
is by design.— Maurice Manning
Lenten Calendar: Forsaken
Every hour of every day there are crucifixions,
Justice Scales by Emory Douglas
the Christ on trial in someone, somewhere,
judged in fear, condemned in ignorance,
mocked and beaten, imprisoned, killed,
while we watch at the foot of the cross
or from three cock crows away, and ask,
‘God, God, why have you forsaken them?’
The world is full of Good Fridays and Golgothas.
In the small arena of our lives,
there appears to be the same defeat of goodness
and it’s difficult to wear a bright smile
when the heart hangs heavy in a darkness
full of thorns and nails and swords.
Unable to see beyond dyings, we cry,
‘God, God, why have you forsaken us?’
from ‘Easterings’ by Joy Cowley
Justice requires attention and presence. Injustice demands we look or walk away. We sense this when we witness it — if God were only here, we think, this would never happen. Pray for somewhere that seems God-forsaken. Keep your eyes open for ways to shine God’s light in and on dark places.
Lenten Calendar: Confession
Why and how to reckon with the things on our conscience?
Candy Chang’s traveling project invited people to post anonymous confessions as an opportunity for “catharsis and consolation” http://candychang.com/work/confessions/
To whom and to what end do we confess?
What do we gain and what does it cost us to accept a confession?
What do any of us do with it once it is out there?
It is at once a comfort and a challenge to remember how much we all stand in the need of grace.
Late Results
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
—Milosz
And the few willing to listen demanded that we confess on television.So we kept our sins to ourselves, and they became less troubling.The halt and the lame arranged to have their hips replaced.Lepers coated their sores with a neutral foundation, avoided strong light.The hungry ate at grand buffets and grew huge, though they remained hungry.Prisoners became indistinguishable from the few who visited them.Widows remarried and became strangers to their kin.The orphans finally grew up and learned to fend for themselves.Even the prophets suspected they were mad, and kept their mouths shut.Only the poor—who are with us always—only they continued in the hope.— Scott Cairns
Lenten Calendar: Be Food
The Way In
Sometimes the way to milk
and honey is through the body.
The Spoonful of Milk – Marc Chagall
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in
the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.
— Linda Hogan
Lenten Calendar: Unfinished
“So, you’re a background singer in your own life?
Why’re you in the background?
…
You gotta let the lies go
and let your hope grow.”
Face (Claude) – Henri Matisse
I find a lot of hope in being unfinished — a work in progress. When things aren’t working out as planned, well, the story isn’t over yet. It helps me extend grace to others, but especially myself — there’s less pressure to be perfect or have it all figured out.
Sometimes I have to ask myself, though, why is that part of my life or myself so underdeveloped? Why is it just roughed in? A sketch I’m in no hurry to finish? What fears and lies are keeping me from committing the time and focus it would take to fill in the features? It’s safer to be all potential, even if that means squandering it, but God has hopes, dreams, plans, and work for our completed selves. What is one step toward that future self you’ve been avoiding for fear of mistakes? What if we accepted the possibility of imperfection along the way to being made perfect?
Homespun 