Saw a teacher today sewing clothes and cushions for the kids. I was moved to see this, I really was.
Chicago Public School teachers are heroes, especially the ones who work in the “alternative” schools, i.e. prisons. I like going to the Cook County Jail actually. Often fights will break out on the tiers, and all the classes will be canceled for the day, so I’ll just sit at a desk in the prison teacher’s lounge and watch YouTube videos.
Recently I’ve been watching Sister Wendy’s “American Collection” art history videos that she made for PBS. She was a cloistered nun from South Africa who obtained permission to leave her trailer (she was an anchoress) and give lectures on art. Her videos are so fascinating and so deep. She mentioned that while she was cloistered, she would write letters to people who she knew were art lovers and she would ask them to send her postcards and photographs from all the museums they visited. As a nun, she could not travel. But she would spend many of her silent hours just meditating on the postcards of paintings from all over the world. I don’t know how many years she lived as a solitary nun- I think it was between twenty and thirty years. One day she received an inner call to share her love of art, enriched by decades of silent reflection on these reproductions of masterpieces, with the wider public. I love her tour of the Chicago Art Institute. I think it’s one of her best presentations. She looks so out of place in her flowing black robes, walking down the crowded streets of the Magnificent Mile and sweeping down the halls of the Institute. And yet, she still somehow fits right in. Chicago is a place for pilgrims of all kinds. This has been my experience.
I recommend “YouTubing” ‘Sister Wendy’ and ‘Art Institute of Chicago’ to find this particular video. It’s worth your time, absolutely.
I listened to Haydn’s symphony number 58 today. So inspiring! It is beautiful, subtle, mystical, rich, deep. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, and all of them have reserves of imagination and poetry that dazzle me. The string quartet and the symphony both existed before Haydn, but Haydn gets great credit into evolving them into the proving grounds for compositional genius.
About six months ago, I met a journalist by a bus stop in the Edgewater neighborhood. We spoke for about ten minutes. I recited some of Guru’s poetry, and also some of my own poetry. Last week he contacted me. His supervisor asked him to write a piece on local Chicago poets. So we sat down for a three hour interview, and he asked me questions about every aspect of my writing process. I also told him all about Sri Chinmoy’s poetry, and how essential my Guru’s poetry has been to my own creativity. I recited about twenty or thirty of Guru’s poems and I also gave him copies of my own work. I also had my typed manuscript of “From the Source, To the Source”, which is Guru’s book that I am currently memorizing. He was astounded by Guru’s poetry. I recited some of those poems also from memory while he followed along on the sheet. He took out his phone and he photographed every page so he could study them himself!
He asked me how I found Sri Chinmoy and I told him everything. I was talking and talking about being a seeker and looking for a Master, and my first impressions of Guru, and the dreams I had of Guru, and how Guru took away my breathing problem, and the visions Guru gave me, and the man just listened with utmost soulful attention. He became like the Buddhist void, and I felt I was really talking to the vast omniscient vacancy within myself.
We also went over the poems I had printed out and brought, and he went over my poems with me line by line- repeating some of the phrases many times like mantras. I could tell he was deeply impressed! He asked me what my writing process was like and I told him that it takes me months and months of drafting to get a poem, but the final form, the final utterance will often come to me in a flash and I’ll write furiously. Then I’ll take that final burst of inspiration and refine it until I’m satisfied with each word. But to enter into that place of revelation takes me a few months of work. He asked me if I ever get stuck, look through my countless pages of notes, and discover a jewel just waiting for me in the middle of a notebook, and I told him that YES, this has happened to me several times- I’ll be drafting and writing, but the poem was already written a hundred pages back and I didn’t know!
I told him that my poems ultimately are a function of Grace, God’s Grace or my Master’s Grace. I often pray over a poem if I get stuck and can’t finish it. After ten minutes of soulful prayer, the lines will begin to flow again, if not that very day, then very soon after. When it comes to my best poems, I don’t feel like I’ve written any of them. I was just a channel.
At the end of our conversation he told me that he had been having a pretty bad day, but that our marathon conversation had raised his spirits immeasurably. I told him I was grateful to him as well for giving me the opportunity to rise into a much better consciousness.
We shook hands and so concluded my first literary interview!
I’ll post a link to the article once it comes out…
