Unlearning the constellations so we can see the stars

[Lisa Walford]

Happy New Moon magic everyone! If you have considered joining the Wednesday morning pranayama class, please arrive! Now! a New Moon is always a good time to begin, even if the beginning is putting it in your calendar for next Sign up here: week!

I end each class with a poem. This week.... poignant, easy reading, and yet the build up is rich. There is such a gap between words, feelings, emotions, longing, wonder, and all the adjectives I might find to embellish what cannot really be said. The closing lines of this poem: unlearning ........ the constellations so he can see the stars. It is in our nature to abstract an experience and agree on how we "see" something so that we can communicate it and share our thoughts. YET! to see the stars as a complete experience, to "find" someone on the other side of finality, death. We can really only imply an intention and then, open to however our words might land on another's ears, leave their experience fresh and know that they will see their own stars, and eventually even create their own constellations.  

Not the Almost Right Word

 David Kirby – b.1944

 A friend tells me he was holding

 his mother’s hand as she lay dying.

 At the end, her final words were,

“ I’ll find Dad and tell him you said hello.”

 “Find,” she said. Not “I’ll see him”

 or “we’ll be together again”

 but “I’ll find Dad.” How astonishing

 that language almost means

 then frightens us when it doesn’t—

 love, we say, God, we write,

 and the words fall short. We dream

 of  lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,

 a word is worth a thousand pictures.

 What you say doesn’t have to be true.

 It only has to be imaginable.

 Where is my friend’s father?

 In the kitchen of that big house making coffee, say,

 or sorting nails in the workshop.

 Or in the yard, unlearning

 the constellations so he can see the stars.