Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • Of All We Make

      The potter
      innocent of all
      he makes
      how could he know
      his bowl would hold the moon?
      — Peter Levitt, The Potter

      Inevitably, for every high when everything seems to click, we find ourselves in a low when everything seems to be off kilter. Working through the down days brings us to the other side. The trick is knowing you aren’t quite through yet and to take yet another step forward. We aren’t simply in it for ourselves here, planting breadcrumbs and such—we’re here to grow, that we might offer more to those who need more from us.

      We don’t always know what will come of our work, only that we may do it. Making it better than yesterday ensures we’re climbing. We ought to know that the climb is bringing us to the right mountaintop, but every false summit is a lesson too. Making sense of all we make is impossible while we are in the act of making it. What we need is a moment to look around from the vantage point reached. We know when our work resonates. We know when it doesn’t. To charge ahead without a glance at our compass will have us running around in circles.

      Joseph Campbell referenced the Krishna’s dictum and observed that “the best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.” Perfection will always be elusive and just out of reach for us mortals, but we’re all works in progress, aren’t we? Every day is one more humble attempt to do something positive in this world through our advancement. To stall now would be a disservice to ourselves, surely, but also to those who quietly root for us from the corners of our lives. Keep going.

    • About Time

      ‘In headaches and in worry
      Vaguely life leaks away,
      And Time will have his fancy
      To-morrow or to-day.
      — W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

      I tend to track time differently than I once did. Now I measure time by the length of my hair or fingernails (weeks versus days since my last trim). I don’t generally look at the clock before calling it a night, for what does time have to do with how tired we feel? Nor do I set an alarm to awaken, I simply wake up. In many ways, I woke up years ago to the folly of time, even if I still follow the rules and show up early (as any civilized adult ought to aspire to). In this way, you might say my relationship with time is complicated.

      When we see time for what it is, something inside us shifts. We become collectors of experiences and embracers of moments rather than maximizers of minutes on the schedule. For all my focus on productivity, at the end of the day I only care that I’ve done the essential few things that move the chains forward for me in the direction I wish to go. The rest float away like all the other past initiatives.

      Writing every day forced me to become an efficient writer. There’s no time to waste on things like writer’s block when you must ship the work and get on to other things. Similarly, other things I do every day become automatic for me, that I may check the box and move on to other things. If that sounds transactional, well, so be it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not the most important thing for me in those moments doing it. When we give something our complete attention for the time necessary to complete it, we may surprise ourselves at just how quickly we can do the work.

      One of the people who works for me was stuck on a presentation he had to deliver to the team, simply overwhelmed by how to structure a slide deck and what to talk about. After being his sounding board for all the built-up stress and despair over the unfairness of having to do this in the first place, I made the deck for him in 30 minutes and quietly sent it to him to personalize in his own way, that he might focus on more important things than a peer presentation. When we get wrapped around the pole on the details of things that aren’t all that important in the end, we waste our time. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to quickly create solutions to problems that I may go back to spending time on more important things. Spending time on my employee wasn’t a waste of my own time, it was an investment in his. I’ll take that trade-off.

      The thing is, I recognize the place that he’s in now in his life. Ten years younger than me, with family obligations that can overwhelm you when you’re just trying to get through the day—I’ve been there, done that. My doing his homework for him wasn’t meant to take him off the hook so much as to show him a clearer future. My priority is to develop an employee who can assess the nature of a commitment and allocate the appropriate amount of focus on it, that he may move on to more essential things. Looking back, I’m sure someone did the same for me once upon a time.

      Life always comes back to our operating system. When we ground ourselves in stoicism, we know that time flies (tempus fugit) and we must therefore seize the day (carpe diem). There’s no time to waste on how we feel about the matter. In the end, the quality of our life is measured in how effective we are at navigating the small things that we may accomplish the big things. What’s bigger for us than using our brief time on this earth on things that matter most?

    • Tell About It

      Instructions for living a life:
      Pay attention.
      Be astonished.
      Tell about it.
      — Mary Oliver, Sometimes

      “If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.” — Paul Arden

      Writing is simply a practice for tracking and amplifying progress in this bold act of becoming what’s next. There are no advertisements or subscription fees or hints to go buy whatever it is I’m selling that day. There’s simply a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of a daily blog for those inclined to follow along to see what this fool is up to now.

      More than that, it serves as a vehicle for sharing my attention and awareness and growth when it would be easier perhaps to just consume my share and leave the words for others. Who really has time to follow yet another blogger in this crazy world anyway? Viewed as a daily ritual leading to self-improvement and a greater awareness of my place in this world gets me closer to why. But it’s more than that, for wouldn’t a journal serve the same purpose? No, there’s something in the act of sharing everything that opens up the mind to receive more.

      To live and then to tell about what we’ve encountered along the way is to expand our lives beyond ourselves—beyond our time and place and circle of trust, and connect with some soul who may never know you but for these words. Like the tide ebbing and then flowing again, we are refreshed, alive and connected with the rest of the universe as soon as we click publish. We owe it to ourselves to have something to say in that moment. That each post may just be our last implores us to do our best with it. Living with urgency brings vibrancy to the otherwise mundane possibility of another today (sort of like yesterday). Fully aware and ready to share what we see with others forces our senses open. To find something new to be astonished about today seems a lovely way to move through a life, don’t you think?

    • On Home and Garden

      Ah, yet, ere I descend to the grave
      May I a small house and large garden have;
      And a few friends, and many books, both true,
      Both wise, and both delightful too!
      And since love ne’er will from me flee,
      A Mistress moderately fair,
      And good as guardian angels are,
      Only beloved and loving me.
      ― Abraham Cowley, The Wish

      I keen observer recently challenged me on how much I telegraph desired change in my writing. The perils of writing to an audience that includes people I interact with regularly… We write what we write and things fall out as they may. So forgive the repetition, it’s not dissatisfaction with the current state, it’s a strong focus on becoming better. Sometimes that means habit change, sometimes it means habitat change, but there’s no rush to move to a place faraway. I do kind of like it here.

      Here, of course, is far more interesting when the garden grows and stick season gives way to budding trees soon to leaf out. The garden changes everything. We might pay lip service to the hardscape of winter, but it’s the dance of annuals with perennials in that hardscape that makes the life of a gardener joyful.

      Cowley poetically sums up the simple joys of a good life. I seem to revisit this poem every couple of years just as the season changes. A few good friends, a few great books, a roof over one’s head, a garden to roam about in and someone to cherish it all with. Change will happen, some chosen and some a much a surprise to me as it will be to you. That’s the game we’re all in. But isn’t it more lovely with a bit of sun and color?

    • To Follow the Call

      “When one thinks of some reason for not going or has fear and remains in society because it’s safe, the results are radically different from what happens when one follows the call. If you refuse to go, then you are someone else’s servant. When this refusal of the call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost. Everything in you knows that a required adventure has been refused. Anxieties build up. What you have refused to experience in a positive way, you will experience in a negative way…
      Your adventure has to be coming right out of your own interior. If you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.” ― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

      We have people in our lives who would read that passage from Joseph Campbell and shudder at the very idea of answering the call. They’ll throw all kinds of logic at you about why this is not a good idea at all, not nearly as good an idea as staying the course and following through on the path chosen for us. It’s an attractive rut to stay in place, doing what is expected of us, with a promise of retirement and a few healthy years before we die. It’s a Siren’s song that has lured many a soul to the rocks.

      Thoreau said something unnervingly similar, didn’t he, when he observed that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”? We may either look inward and refute the observation or find it rings true, but we may never be fully the same having seen the truth within us. Still, every day is a new opportunity to step into who we really are. Every day we may follow the call or go on killing the dream. We must choose wisely which voice we follow, remembering that the rocks are closer than we might believe.

      Alone on a midnight passage
      I can count the falling stars
      While the Southern Cross and the satellites
      They remind me of where we are
      Spinning around in circles
      Living it day to day
      And still 24 hours may be 60 good years
      It’s really not that long a stay
      Jimmy Buffett, Cowboy in the Jungle

      Joseph Campbell is very much in the “follow your bliss” camp. He’s largely the originator of the term. There are many who mock this following your bliss strategy as impractical at best and self-deceptive folly at worst. The question is, if we may have our 60 good years doing something we absolutely love—that calls to us—or if we will forever shelve that for what the world wants of us. What will it be, for you and me?

      Perhaps the answer is to follow our call, instead of bliss. Sure, it’s the same thing, but the optics are better for the person who knows what they want and seizes the moment attempting to achieve it. What is the difference between a start-up entrepreneur in the garage and a poet writing in a cabin in the woods? The former have better marketing budgets. We glamorize the chase for a personal fortune but mock the chase for personal enlightenment.

      Whatever our path is, whatever our call, we ought to feel the urgency to follow it immediately. For the rocks are getting closer and there’s no time to waste. Decide what to be and go be it.

    • Still to Be Ours

      Last night
      the rain
      spoke to me
      slowly, saying,
      what joy
      to come falling
      out of the brisk cloud,
      to be happy again
      in a new way
      on the earth!
      That’s what it said
      as it dropped,
      smelling of iron,
      and vanished
      like a dream of the ocean
      into the branches
      and the grass below.
      Then it was over.
      The sky cleared.
      I was standing
      under a tree.
      The tree was a tree
      with happy leaves,
      and I was myself,
      and there were stars in the sky
      that were also themselves
      at the moment
      at which moment
      my right hand
      was holding my left hand
      which was holding the tree
      which was filled with stars
      and the soft rain –
      imagine! imagine!
      the long and wondrous journeys
      still to be ours.
      — Mary Oliver, Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

      It seems to rain all the time now. Is that a function of climate change or spring in New England? If winter was a forever mud season, what are we to make of the regularly-scheduled mud season? Control what we can, let go of what we cannot, and celebrate the moments rain or shine; that’s what. The silver lining was that the rain that greeted me this morning inspired me to seek out an old friend.

      It’s been a while since Mary Oliver graced the blog, and honestly, I felt the void. If our quest is greater awareness of the moment we’re in, the whisper of a poet in our ear is as good a place to start as any. But then you read a poem like this one, with a look ahead to what’s still to be ours, and it’s easier to see the way. A great poet looks at who we are becoming as much as who we are. Poetry is life, after all.

      I’m not much for resolutions, but I love a great routine. Each day should include a bit of self-maintenance, a bit of movement, some honest effort applied to work that matters to us, a conversation with someone as deeply invested in us as we are in them, the pursuit of deeper knowledge and experience, and yes, a wee bit of poetry and song to complete the soundtrack. That to me is a successful day, and if we may string together enough of them in a row, one heck of a life.

      If I dwell too often in what’s to come, it’s merely a sense of hope and purpose betraying my intentions. Our present is built from the momentum of the past carrying us to this place, where we linger for a beat to feel the rain on our face before we turn again to what’s next. Our lives are forever lived with an eye on the path ahead, lest we stumble. To imagine what’s possible for ourselves and have the boldness to step towards it. This is the momentum for our tomorrow, greeting us today.

    • Stepping Out of the Box

      Let me ask you this.
      Do you also think that beauty exists for some
      fabulous reason?
      And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
      your life—
      what would do for you?
      — Mary Oliver, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

      Plotting our next adventure in a faraway place, we went out for breakfast to dance with the hopefulness of scheduled enchantment. We ran into a woman we know, who once was married and then she wasn’t, but she never accepted that she wasn’t and retreated into herself and the rituals of the church and suddenly twenty years later she’s still the same shell of a person she was then but older and more insulated from the world. She might have gone with us on our adventure, or perhaps one of her own, had she only gotten out of her own way.

      She made me wonder—what rituals of routine are getting in my own way? If the opposite of boredom is engagement and being captivated by the world around us, why do we settle for something less? What lingers just outside the box of our identity? Why is that so frightening? To live in fear of the world is to never be alive.

      As this is published it’s the first Monday in March. March was once the first month of the original Roman calendar. If you think about it, the calendar is arbitrary and nothing but a shared belief that keeps this whole game going. We can’t very well change the calendar and function in a society that works off of it, but we can use it as a reminder to ourselves that we can change things when we find our routine isn’t working for us any more. It’s like adding two months to a year our ancestors thought they had figured out. It turns out the extra two months made it better. Imagine what we can make better if we changed too?

      A few days ago we had a leap day on that 12-month calendar, tacked on to the end of a month that once didn’t exist in the minds of mankind. It was a bonus day and a chance to do something truly different. Most of us went about our lives as we did the day before or the days since. It was sort of like New Year’s Day in this way, where we might think up all sorts of ways we may break out of the box but end up right back in our ritual of routine. Imagining our possibility is easier than actually living it. We forget that we don’t have to leap, we could simply step out of the box and close the door behind us.

    • Shepherds and Poets

      “For the shepherd the poet is too facile, too easily satiated. The poet would say ‘there was… they were…’ But the shepherd says ‘he lives, he is, he does…’ The poet is always a thousand years too late—and blind to boot. The shepherd is eternal, an earth-bound spirit, a renunciator. On these hillsides forever and ever there will be the shepherd with his flock: he will survive everything including the tradition of all that ever was.” — Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

      “Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

      We know great poetry, because it feels as eternal as that earth-bound shepherd. We know bad poetry because it clings to us like tree sap, cursed in it’s stickiness. A bad line of poetry haunts us for a lifetime. Great poetry feels revelatory as we discover some truth about ourselves that seems so obvious after stumbling over it. In the entirety of this blog, I’ve written one poem about a kitten who once thought she was a dog (she’s since become decidedly cat-like). I aspire to write like a poet but I save poetry for those who dare more greatly. You know who you are, and thank you for your audacity.

      For most of my life I’ve fancied myself a shepherd; tending my flock, trying not to step in it and eternally minding the weather. Aspirations of poetry are saved for moments of brevity in writing. Poetry for me is the last holdover of a time when I told myself I wasn’t good enough to be a writer, choosing history instead, where looking backwards seemed safer than facing the truth in the present.

      The thing is, Miller and Rilke were both on to something. The worst shepherds have their heads up in the clouds, paying no attention to the needs of the flock. The worst poets likewise dance in flowery prose, searching for clever instead of truth. Great poetry is earth-bound, with a bit of dirt and manure smudges showing the truth of the matter. We must live in the immediacy of the flock and write as if the wolves were just over the rise.

    • Maps

      “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” — Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

      “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” – Gilbert Grosvenor

      I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. I’d asked him when was the last time someone had pulled up asking for directions? It just doesn’t happen now—there’s a phone app for that. That same app takes us to parties and work appointments and the Grand Canyon. Maps are relegated to the wall or the imagination. GPS rules the road now.

      Grosvenor, the founder of National Geographic, had it right when he compared a map to poetry. It stirs the imagination similarly. When you look at a great map of a place, how can you not be stirred to explore that place? Maps whisper to me like Sean O’Connell beckoned to Walter Mitty: Go!

      The name of this blog is Alexander’s map for a reason, it’s based on William Alexander’s pamphlet Encouragement to Colonies and my own wanderings around the northeast corner of North America. I saw a replica of the map Alexander commissioned in a conference room in Newfoundland and it sparked my imagination, which is exactly why he had it commissioned in the first place. I just came into the picture a bit later than he’d planned. That one map completely changed the person who viewed it that day.

      If maps are no longer needed for everyday use, they still have a place in our lives. Maps give us the big picture, while a GPS just tells you where to go. We must always reference the big picture when determining where we want to go in our lives, while remembering always that the map is not the territory. The world is more complicated than that.

      What sparks our imagination? Where do we want to go in our lives, and what tools are we using to get there? The answers to these questions are more important than we might believe.

    • Stars and Snowflakes and Would-Be Poets

      Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
      That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
      But on earth indifference is the least
      We have to dread from man or beast.

      How should we like it were stars to burn
      With a passion for us we could not return?
      If equal affection cannot be,
      Let the more loving one be me.

      Admirer as I think I am
      Of stars that do not give a damn,
      I cannot, now I see them, say
      I missed one terribly all day.

      Were all stars to disappear or die,
      I should learn to look at an empty sky
      And feel its total dark sublime,
      Though this might take me a little time.
      — W. H. Auden, The More Loving One

      The indifference of the universe to our lives offers lessons. It’s seen characters like us before and will again. Sure, like snowflakes there may never be another just like us in all of time, but how many snowflakes stand out? I cast them aside by the shovelful. Yet every now and then one shows up that delights. The first and last of a season, surely, but also that rare character who sticks to a cold windshield at just the right moment to make a lasting impression. Blogging isn’t so very much different than the life of that one snowflake, is it? So it goes.

      I don’t write all that much poetry, but I aspire to write like a poet. My writing isn’t so different from Thoreau’s, in that I ramble on for a spell before getting to the point. With Thoreau we can forgive the technique as he casts insights about like grass seed in his best work. My own technique is to keep my blog posts to a few paragraphs lest I lose you forever.

      The last two nights I’ve been up late, crossing the midnight hour with a walk outside to give the pup some relief before bedtime. The ritual is always the same: flip on the spotlight, look for skunks or other critters that would ruin a perfectly good bedtime ritual, then walk out into the starry dome to let the pup do her business. My own business at such a time is simply to wonder at the stars as Auden did in his day.

      What will come of all this? There’s no doubt that the would-be poet is the more loving one in their time, aware of so very much in an indifferent universe. To be more than a snowflake on the windshield of time is too bold an aspiration. Isn’t it simply enough to be aware and celebrate the miracle of reaching one more night? Words may live on or simply melt away, but they’ve been released to dance with the universe nonetheless.