Transcript

Krista Tippett, host:If you have listened to On Being for any period of time, you have probably heard me invoke Rainer Maria Rilke. His works of prose and poetry are enduringly beloved — the Sonnets to Orpheus; the Duino Elegies; the Book of Hours. But none of his words have carried more persistently across time than his Letters to a Young Poet. It’s a small volume of ten letters Rilke wrote between 1903 and 1908 to a young military cadet and would-be poet, named Franz Kappus. Kappus reached out to Rilke, full of anguish about life, about love, about adulthood. But Rilke’s way of addressing these questions from an ordinary life touched on the enduring dramas of creating our lives — prophetic musings about solitude and relationship, humanity and the natural world, even gender and human wholeness.

And now, for us, there is a new translation. What a joy it is to delve into Rilke’s voice freshly rendered, with the translators, themselves prophetic humans: the wise psychologist and poet Anita Barrows and the incomparable Buddhist philosopher of ecology, Joanna Macy.

Joanna Macy:In his letter that he wrote — he wrote an amazing letter, Rilke did, from Sweden. And he starts out saying, “I’ve been thinking.” He’s not responding so much to the cadet, but he’s speaking about: there’s something going to happen. It is enormous. It is huge. “We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us: the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

The conversation that follows is infused with friendship as much as ideas. Joanna and Anita have translated Rilke together across decades, alongside many other professional and life adventures. I’ve come into friendship with both of them as guests on this show — Anita on “The Soul in Depression,” Joanna on her spiritual and activist “Wild Love for the World” — and all three of us have communed with Rainer Maria Rilke across time and space. The Bohemian Austro-Hungarian world into which he was born in 1875 was utterly remade by the tumult of the young 20th century. Amidst the tumult of our young century, I spoke to Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy via Zoom.

Well, I wish I were sitting in a room with the two of you. [laughs] But here we are.

Joanna Macy:Can I see you?

Tippett:No, you can’t see me. You’re just going to hear me. I’m like the voice of God coming straight into your thoughts …

[laughter]

… and you into mine.

Anita Barrows:I’m not even going to look at my screen. I’m going to look at the redwood tree in front of my house.

Macy:That’s a good idea.

Tippett:This is a little hard to get used to, but I mean, I sometimes close my eyes, so I can completely listen. And it’s such a joy to be with the two of you. And I can’t really tell you how excited I was when I heard that you were translating Letters to a Young Poet, which — I feel like this book has — it’s been part of my life for such a long time, since — I think, Joanna, one thing you and I have in common is those — the early years we spent in Berlin, or in Germany. And we were both there in chapters of its 20th-century tumult, which was kind of a fault line of the world’s 20th-century tumult.

And I have my book with me. I think the two of you have your books with you. And I really just want us to kind of talk about this book and read to each other. And you know, I was just amazed, recently — I’m not sure I knew this or had ever taken it in — to read — well, it’s in your book, too, but I had read it recently somewhere else, that Rilke himself was only 27 when he replied to these letters. [laughs]

Barrows:That’s right. And I did not take that in at all, when I read it. I assumed he was an elderly man. [laughs]

Tippett:Yes, yes.

Macy:Well, he never got to be elderly.

Barrows:Right. Right.

Tippett:No. No.

There seems to me something that I have identified with in the last period that wasn’t there for me when Rilke entered my life, which was in the last couple of decades of the last century, is that he was a turn-of-century person, just as we have become turn-of-century people. It feels like there’s something in the heft of what he said and how he said it that he, also, in 1903 when he was writing those letters, was on the cusp of this unimaginable tumult and carnage and transformation of that last century.

Macy:Yes. You know, in the Book of Hours, which we’re not talking about, but he then, just a couple of years younger than when he is writing to the military cadet in his letters to this young poet, he said, “The leaf is turning like a century is entering,” just at that moment, at the becoming of the 20th century. And you could feel his — what would you say? — his awe and a troubled sense: what is in store? And the fates that are turning this page to the 20th century look at each other and say nothing. And he senses — he could’ve known nothing about the two world wars, the death camps, the nuclear bombs, the — [laughs] none of that. And yet, he sensed that to his core.

Barrows:Yes, very much, and he was very aware of the dangers of industrialization, which were already beginning to have their effect, certainly on Europe. And I think that was a piece of it — that there was an ominous sense of what was happening to the natural world which he loved.

Tippett:And all of that, everything that you two have just mentioned, is with us still and again, right?

Barrows:Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Tippett:That’s what I kind of — I feel, emanating from these pages, from these words.

It does seem to me — I have to say, in the last week, just in the last week, I have had his language of living — his language of living the questions has become absolutely central to my work and to my life. And just in the last week, for example, I’ve had it quoted at me by a neuroscientist and by a television actor. [laughs] And it does feel to me like if there is — and so let’s just maybe start with living the questions. Let me just read that passage, very particularly that experience of standing before great personal and civilizational questions, which right now have no answers. [laughs]

So he said — and which letter was this? This was Letter 4.

Barrows:It’s the fourth, yeah.

Tippett:“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.”

Macy:What a wonderful way to relate to uncertainty.

Barrows:Yes, yes. And I think, you know, so much, especially in our very consumer-oriented society, where we’re looking for answers all the time, we’re looking for solutions — rapid solutions and neat solutions — [laughs] here we are, being told to live into the questions, to be able then to say, “I don’t know. I have to sit with this. I have to be with it.” It’s a practice that we’re not taught by anything in our society.

Macy:But it’s the only way to be in the present moment, because when we want to know, “Oh, where’s this heading? Are we heading to war? Are we heading to — can I have it now? Shall I be — can’t I have hope?” All of those things, even the question of hope takes you out of the present moment. And the present moment is the only place you’re really present, the only place where you can actually choose.

Tippett:You know, I have actually really taken this teaching as a life practice of holding the questions, loving the questions, and of — I’ve taken it as a life practice, with a question — to actually very actively do that: put the question before me, hold it, treasure it, nurture it, walk with it. And I have found that if you are faithful to a question like this, it will be faithful back, right? It will do this thing that he says, which is that you live your way into whatever the form an answer takes.

Macy:Yes! Then it comes toward you. Then it has more to say to you. Then you can hear it. And it — then you have a capacity. You are with the question in a way that invites you to become something that you haven’t been, yet. It extends a hand. So this is what I have been feeling even more in this last year or so, with all the work with Rilke’s feeling in him — this sense of opening to the reciprocity of life. It’s a living world. We can listen to it. We can open to it. It’s not a machine that we poke and press and push a button. It’s a mystery. And we meet the mystery, and then it talks.

[music: “Orchard Lime” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being — today, delving into Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They’ve just released a fresh new translation of that work.

[music: “Orchard Lime” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Joanna, I say, so living the questions is perhaps the part of the book that I feel — I’ve watched people culturally discover, so many people discover or have it be part of their life. I have also always felt, and never more than recently, that the things that Rilke said about gender 100 years ago, in this book — that our world has met him there now.

Macy:Or almost.

[laughter]

I think that we still have a lot to learn. I think he’s a little bit beyond us, at the moment.

Tippett:Well, let me just — like there’s one part, also in that fourth letter, where he says, “Perhaps the genders are more closely related than people think. The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this: that male and female, freed from all false feelings and disinclinations, do not seek each other as objects, but rather as siblings and neighbors, to become human together, simply, seriously, and patiently helping each other bear the burden that sexuality has placed on them.”

[laughter]

Barrows:Isn’t that wonderful?

Tippett:Well, it — to me, it’s a description of — of where we are — as you say, fitfully, imperfectly, but I think heading as a culture. But then, of course, there’s the extraordinary part in the letter from Rome, Letter 7, where he talks about “the girl and the woman.” I don’t know — does one of you want to read some of that?

Barrows:Yes, sure.

Tippett:Page 59 — 59, 60 is where I’m looking.

Barrows:Oh yes, oh, that’s wonderful. Yes.

Tippett:Or maybe “One day the girl and the woman who don’t define themselves …” Whatever you’d like to read, as much as you’d like to read, there.

Barrows:Let’s see. I’m looking for exactly — oh, here we go. “One day, the girl and the woman who don’t define themselves in masculine terms but as something in themselves, female humans, will require no other completion. This enormous shift will transform the character of love, which is hampered today by the resistance of men, and generate a relationship from human to human, not from man to woman. And this more human love, endlessly considerate and light and good and clear, consummated by holding close and letting go, will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare — the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.”

Macy:Ah.

Barrows:Yeah, I love that passage. [laughs]

Macy:Yeah. Yeah.

Barrows:Yeah — “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” Yes, so it’s not the merging, not the convention-bound ways of acting.

And I love that Rilke speaks — I mean, I could see where it could be critiqued, but I love that he speaks, at the beginning of that paragraph, about the ways in which women need to be careful of not just stepping into the patriarchal system, the patriarchal values, which, you know, has happened to a large degree. We’ve had the feminist movement, but in many ways we have not yet brought the feminine sufficiently into our culture. And the feminine — I think Rilke — you know, [laughs] Rilke was talking about this so early on, at the beginning of the last century.

Macy:He was also concerned that in the freeing of coming to experience and being free to experience one’s sexuality, it was male sexuality. So much of what — how sexual freedom in our country, and even sexual fulfillment, has come to be identified with what he calls here the “lust and thrust and restlessness.”

[laughter]

Tippett:I don’t think that was in the Herter Norton translation.

Barrows:No. [laughs] Right. Right. We had a good time translating that.

Tippett:[laughs] And what we’re talking about is the feminine aspect to humanity, right?
Barrows:Yes, exactly.

Tippett:This is not just about women. It’s about a fullness of human nature and human capacities.

Barrows:Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Tippett:I’m just curious, and Joanna, you’ve lived such a long time, you’re so amazing — I wonder how you see, again — well, so we should clarify that Franz Kappus was writing to Rilke, as this lovesick young person, right? So he was bringing sexuality into these letters. But Rilke did always reply to that in — well, he replied in a very tender, personal way, but also in the whole context of relationships — of gender, really, that certainly 100 years ago was so much of a box and a container and compartment. Joanna, I’m especially curious about how you’ve watched this evolution.

Macy:Well, I’m remembering — yeah. I’m thinking of the love between Rilke and Lou — Lou Andreas-Salomé, when he was 21 and she was 35, and they met. And it was just a totally powerful experience that outgrew the sexual part, at  least from her point of view, but they stayed best friends. And she took him walking barefoot through the fields at dawn, [laughs] in the foothills of the alpine meadows along the Isar, near where we used to live, and that he adapted so quickly to this natural singing of the Earth itself, in his bones. And he combined it also with the simplicity of the — sort of the Russian peasant that he acquired when he went with her to Russia. And singing the Earth became — he could feel that.

What a shift from in his late teens and 20, 21, becoming such a dandy, and to let himself open to the natural world so widely, so fully, and let that shift what love of man and woman or love for anything felt like — was. The freedom in that, and then even what that could mean for politics. And that gave him a trust in life that I sense in him, in his words, in his poetry. Life comes toward him to meet and be met. It rings in his lines. And it reaches me, and standing here, a hundred-and-what …

Barrows:Almost 120, yeah.

Macy:… when we cannot be sure or even have the trust that complex life forms will endure beyond the next few decades. We’re seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And yet, having been with Rilke, his trust in life is still with me. And so I trust being with life, even though life — the web of life might crumble, but then I’m still with it. I’ll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling. The song is so deep in him.

[music: “Ballet” by Thrupence]

Tippett:After a short break, more with Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

[music: “Ballet” by Thrupence]

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, as a new rendering of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before, we are delving into that work with the translators. Joanna Macy is a philosopher of ecology and Buddhist teacher. Anita Barrows is a psychologist and poet. They are the closest of friends, and former guests on this show. They’ve previously created splendid translations of three other books of Rilke’s writing. Rilke sent his ten prophetic letters about life and love to a young, lovesick military cadet and would-be poet, between 1903 and 1908.

So let’s talk about solitude for Rilke, which was also so defining, so permeated his poetry, his life, his writing. It’s so interesting to be speaking about solitude right now, in the post-2020 world, where, civilizationally, we went through — almost the global “we,” although with huge variation in terms of the experience — but of social isolation, right? And I wonder, I’m curious about this world that we move into beyond that — at least the parts of the world that are emerging from the worst of the pandemic. Do people start to reckon or work with or play with solitude in a new way? And what would Rilke have to say to that?

Macy:Well, I’m so struck by how members even in my own family, my own children, my own grandchildren, how the pandemic and the lockdowns and the care of has resulted, for so many of them, of more time out-of-doors in the natural world, in direct contact, even if it’s when it’s their backyard or walking in the park, and giving them a habit of this that they do not want to give up, and that the solitude becomes — as it was for Rilke — not being by yourself, but by being in, with, surrounded by, and of the living natural world; that you’re surrounded by the rustle and touch and reach and murmur of the natural world.

Barrows:Yeah. And I think that was really something Joanna and I discussed throughout the process of doing this translation, because there are moments in the letters where Rilke seems to idealize solitude at the cost of community, at the cost of some belonging to the collective. And we were at moments irritated by that, because —

Tippett:Yes — he also seems to emphasize it at the cost of probably being a good partner [laughs] to the woman he’s with.

Barrows:Exactly. Oh my God, yes. [laughs] Right. Right. Right.

Tippett:Sorry, go on.

Barrows:Yeah, no, we kind of got fed up with it, at moments. [laughs]

[laughter]

Macy:Yeah, we worried about if the young cadet were to take him seriously. You know, you have to be — if you’re forbidden to write poetry, if you’re forbidden to write, then you’re not a — you must be ready to die for your …

Barrows:[laughs] Right. Right.

Tippett:You know, here — I’m going to read a little bit from — this is page 56. This is from Letter 7. You know, I have to say, this is a passage that was so important to me in my 20s, and really life-giving. I mean, this is to me a robust definition of solitude that is about —about making and defending that home within oneself.

So he says, “Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price, to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.”

And then he says, “To love is good, too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.” So he’s always — even as he is defending solitude so fiercely and, as you say, sometimes extremely, it always moves back and forth with the notion of loving.

Barrows:Yes, yes, exactly. And he really emphasizes the need to love from that place of solitude — that love is not about merging, but it’s about being oneself fully, and from that place of fullness …

Macy:Yes, I love that.

Barrows:… being able to meet the other. Yes. Yes.

Macy:Right here he says, “For love is not about merging. It’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.” I love that.

Tippett:It’s so interesting, you know, I remember being so moved by that and it being so helpful to me in those young years, when I was tempted — I mean, you know, because he’s really saying to Franz Kappus, to his young correspondent, “Become yourself, before you join with another human being.”

And — but I say, also, that language, after my marriage ended, after my divorce, I read it again and realized how wise it was, right? I mean, it’s incredible wisdom.

Barrows:Yes, I know — I felt the same, after my divorce. And I thought, all right, the love I have for my children, the love I have for my friends, that love also needs to come from that place of wholeness.

Tippett:Joanna, I’m curious about that phrase for you and that notion for you.

Macy:Well, just when I was sitting here, I was remembering — because our first conversation was shortly after my husband died, after a marriage of 56 years. And I remember, about a year before we married, I’d been talking away, talking away as he was driving, and then he just looked at me and he said, “What a world you’ve got inside you.” And then I knew that it was my own world, and he could tell. He didn’t want to own it, he didn’t want it to be explained, but he was so glad it was there.

All of that was in his voice. And that stayed with me throughout all those five-and-a-half decades — a world in myself. And being a stranger to each other, to some extent, we always affirmed that. And Rilke helps us there.

Tippett:And in your memoir, Joanna, you wrote about your long marriage. And it was an adventure, right? And it had — it had hard parts in it, it had parts in which that — the fact of being strangers was defining. And yet you kept finding your way back to each other.

Macy:That’s right. That’s right. It was always interesting.

[laughter]

Always interesting. [laughs] Yeah, never finished. Never finished.

[music: “Donnlee” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today delving into Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They’ve just released a fresh new translation of that work.

[music: “Donnalee” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Macy:Well, speaking of growing and seeing with expectations and not knowing, did you catch the part in these when he talks about “You haven’t lost God” — because, you know, the cadet, Franz Pappus, was a complainer. You could tell that.

[laughter]

And so he complained that he’d lost God. And so [laughs] because — and he’d believed in God as a child, and now he didn’t anymore. And then he even complained about that. And so — remember? And he has this great idea. He says, “Just think” — where do I have that …

Barrows:Page 51.

Macy:I just — it tickles me. [laughs]

Tippett:Would you like to read that?

Macy:Yeah, he says, “Do you think that anyone who really has Him” — God — “could lose Him, like a little stone? Don’t you think that one who holds Him” — God — “could only be lost by Him? Why not think, rather, that He is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all Eternity, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What stops you from projecting God’s birth into times to come and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the story of an immense pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is ever again a new beginning? And couldn’t it be His beginning? For to begin, in itself, is already so beautiful. If God is the fulfillment, must not what is lesser come before him so that he can emerge from fullness and overflow? Must he not come last, in order to include everything in Himself? And what meaning could we find, if God for whom we yearn belongs to the past?”

Tippett:And then that next sentence — “As bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God.”

Barrows:Yes. [laughs] Yes, it’s wonderful.

Tippett:So Joanna, talk to me about — tell me what’s in that, for you.

Macy:Oh, so much. So much. I’m — it’s inside me. I’m 92 now. I am in this tenth decade of my life, when I follow with rapt attention what is happening with the climate catastrophe, with the mass extinctions of our siblings in the creation of this world. I feel that there is within me a sense that, read through Rilke, the translations, and also very much through the work that I have been blessed enough to do, called The Work That Reconnects, and that starts the spiral journey that it is, with gratitude — so much gratitude — that what’s in it is that we are never abandoned. But there is something for us to behold and be part of and that — and to be there. The great moment is there for us, to be present to this incredible moment. We’ve got to realize — we will realize that we belong to each other. That’s coming forward now. How could we not harvest that understanding in this moment? 

Tippett:And you know, Joanna, if somebody had, let’s say, just tuned in in the last ten minutes and listened to you speak about God, they would not guess that you are an eminent Buddhist teacher. What does that language of God — what does that mean for you? How do we talk about what that is and how that itself has been evolving?

Macy:Because God has become a word for everything, so we reach for something that includes everything. I’m looking in his letter that he wrote — he wrote an amazing letter, Rilke did, from Sweden. And he starts out saying, “I’ve been thinking.” He’s not responding so much to the cadet, but he’s speaking about: if you could take in, there’s something going to happen. It is enormous. It is huge. “We must accept our reality in all its immensity.”

So you need God language for that if you’re in the West, and then, of course, I was born into a theistic, a Christian tradition, so it’s in — and I come from [laughs] a long line of preachers, so it’s in my bones. “We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us: the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”

Tippett:You know, I’m curious about — you’ve talked about this as a time in which we are faced with the “great unraveling” or the “great turning,” or perhaps both of those at the same time. Just with this conversation holding us, with Rilke by our side, what do you see right now?

Macy:Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so we who are alive now and who are called to — who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world — to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how — if it must disappear, if there’s dying — how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what — and so there’s a need, some of us feel — I know I do — to what looks like it must disappear, to say, “Thanks, you were beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.”

And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be — has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness, you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face, see how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.

Tippett:You know, when I think about Rilke and the ways he brings together solitude and love, I feel like you also have always have brought together what I would think of as synonyms or companions to those, like interior life and aliveness. I’ve heard you talk about the voice within and that if people can hear the voice within, they hear that the voice within wants to live. And when people can share that voice within, they fall in love with the world, they fall in love with each other, they fall in love all over again with life.

Anita, you have spoken about your calling as a psychologist and a teacher, and also as a translator and writer, as standing at the intersection of the sacred, the daily, and a holding of the pain of the world. So I just want to ask you the question I asked Joanna a minute ago — what do you see, looking out right now, and again, with Rilke as our friend standing alongside us at that intersection?

Barrows:I think about the passage that I referred to before, from the Ninth Duino Elegy, where Rilke really speaks about what he sees as our mission as human beings. “Perhaps we are here to say …” — and then he names things about the world. So for me — I actually just had a book of poems published, called Testimony, which is 20 long poems and a coda. And each of the poems speaks about some of the suffering of the world — I speak about a prisoner, I speak about a child in Syria, I speak about a checkpoint in the West Bank, occupied Palestine — speaks about the suffering of the world, and then I move in other sections of the poems to the beauty of the world. And for me, that intersection of suffering and beauty, gratitude, as Joanna says, feels like my mission in poetry.

And to state that, to name that, to be here to name those things feels essential to me, and I see Rilke as my friend in that. This conversation is so wonderful, because it’s really bringing me back to the origins of my reading Rilke, who really was the first serious poet whose work I read when I was first feeling my own vocation as a poet — that he was so engaged with this as our mission, perhaps we are here to say. And if you have the passage, Joanna?

Macy:Yes, I have it, and I remember when we translated that together. This is the ending of the Ninth Duino Elegy. An elegy is an incantation or a poem at the end of a funeral.

“Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I seek no other law
than yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

“See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.”

Tippett:Ohhh.

Macy:Thank you, Rilke.

Barrows:Yes, thank you, Rilke. Thank you for accompanying us.

Macy:Thank you for being with us.

[music: “Klockan” by Andreas Söderström & Rickard Jäverling]

Tippett:Joanna Macy is the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects. Our previous episode with her is “A Wild Love for the World.” That’s also the title of a lovely book of homage to her, published in 2020. Anita Barrows was part of the On Being episode on “The Soul in Depression.” And both of those shows include readings from Rilke’s poetry that they’ve translated together so brilliantly: Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; also, In Praise of Mortality and A Year with Rilke. Anita Barrows’ most recent poetry collection is Testimony. She is Institute Professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and also maintains a private practice. And Anita and Joanna’s Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary was published in June, 2021.

[music: “Vittoro” by Blue Dot Sessions]

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Laurén Drommerhausen, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Jhaleh Akhavan, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Ben Katt, Gautam Srikishan, and Lillie Benowitz.

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being is an independent, nonprofit production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

Our funding partners include:

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org.

Kalliopeia Foundation, dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality, supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org.

The Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.

The Charles Koch Institute’s Courageous Collaborations initiative, discovering and elevating tools to cure intolerance and bridge differences.

The Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community development, and education.

And the Ford Foundation, working to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement worldwide.

 

This interview originally appeared:

https://onbeing.org/

 

Crete, Greece’s largest and southernmost island, sits in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It is halfway between Europe and Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and the Middle East. It has been occupied since Neolithic Times and, due to its unique and sensitive geographical position, has been invaded and occupied by different conquerors for thousands of years. Its people have retained a fierce spirit of resistance, rebellion and devotion to Greece. They live up to their motto, Leftherios H Thanatos, Freedom or Death. 

Crete is speckled with ruin sites dating back 25,000 years. There are mythological sites where some of the ancient stories unfolded – such as the Idean and Diktean Caves where Zeus was born and as an infant hidden from his devouring father while being nursed by a goat. There are archaic sites such as the great Minoan palace of Knossos and several other palaces as well as scattered towns whose streets, foundations and house and walls remain from the last of the Great Goddess civilizations that flourished until the Santorini earthquake around 1450 BCE. There are Greek, Roman and Byzantine ruins from all epochs. There are monuments to the dead and small burned out and deserted towns from the Nazi invasion and occupation during World War II. And there is the fortress of Frangokastello, built by the Venetians in the 1370s to secure their rule of the region. Later, in 1828 it was occupied by the Greeks during their War of Independence from the Turks. The site, known as the Greek Alamo, is a now-silent ruin site on the lonely southern coast staring out across the Libyan Sea. There, on May 17, 600 rebels fought against 8,000 troops of the Turkish occupation in a last stand to the death. To this day residents and tourists to the area testify that every year on the anniversary of this battle the ghosts of dead Greek freedom fighters appear. The Turkish army saw them in 1890 and fled. A German patrol saw them during World War II and fired on them, thinking they were real insurgents. Here is yet another place in Greece where the veil between the visible and invisible is so thin that we see into the hidden dimensions and cannot tell what is corporeal and what is mist and spirit.

Frangokastello stands on the remote, stone and sand-swept southern Cretan coast about 7 miles east of another village. Sfakia is a small town of about 2,000 residents built of several roughly parallel streets running along the craggy coast. It has been known throughout history as the home of revolutionaries and is famous for never having been conquered. During World War II the last British troops evacuating from the German onslaught boarded their fleeing vessels in Safkia’s deep, broad aquamarine bay. Safkia’s people are strong, proud and independent, generous and hospitable unless crossed, then fierce and self-protective. They give their few visitors a taste of the original Cretan personality.

I am leading a group of pilgrims on a journey to Crete’s remote regions. We immerse ourselves in its landscape, history, mythology. We wander ruin sites and wonder and imagine at the life lived among these hot stones and near this sparkling sea, sometimes rough, sometimes placid. We visit Frangokastello. The men in our group gather at the old gate, take out pens, pocket knives or the hand-made machiari, the carved and honed knives for which this region is known that we have purchased from local artisans. In front of these gates made sacred by self-sacrifice, we bless our blades and pray that they are used for life-affirmation rather than destruction.

Sfakia is small and authentic. Local elderly residents still recall the Nazi occupation here where many took to the mountains to hide and resist but were limited in their ability to fight because of the brutal retaliations against their families and villages. At nights in the tavernas lining the water, locals still laugh and talk, dance and drink late into the night and blast the sky with old firearms in celebration. The village is built into the rugged southern coast and its only access road stretches through the southern mountains to land on this rough coastline. It turns east toward Frangokastello or west into what looks like endless stretches of nowhere. There are no residences, no streetlights, just a narrow and black winding road sandwiched between rough mountains on its northern side and a boulder-strewn plunging coastline along its south.

I am leading five or six of my pilgrims on a late-night hike westerly down this remote coastal road. It is dark, dark, darker than most of us have ever seen. The mountains along our northern border tower over us like rugged black giants against a star-studded blacker curtain of sky. We hear the waves crashing against the rugged coast below us that we cannot see. We walk closely together, making sure our footfalls land squarely on the blacktop beneath us. 

A half hour into our hike, unexpectedly, we are bumped by furry, aggressive four-leggeds coming down off the mountain, mingling in and scattering our human group, then continuing down the road or over its steep side. We are in a flock of kri-kri,the wild Cretan mountain goats that have become a totem of the island. It is believed they were brought to Crete about 7,000 years ago during Minoan civilization, have long since gone wild, and are now the only population of such goats in the world and give us a living glimpse into the earliest domestication of wild animals known.  

The kri-kri, with their long swept-back horns, furry faces and long beards, bump and jostle us, showing no fear but letting us know that this is their home and we are the visitors. Some of my group giggle and stroke them, others are more cautious and step gingerly through their traffic jam.

We pass through the goats as if through guardians of a sacred boundary. Now we have walked an hour and are in deep darkness with no lights but the blazing stars above. We come to a cleft in the rock and precipitous curve in the road. One of my travelers says she thinks we have gone far enough; she feels like we are deep in the distant cosmos and she would like to pause, rest and return. We stand together in the deep stillness.

Another of my travelers addresses me in the darkness, “Ed,” she says, “you told us that this would be a spiritual journey. You said we might experience strange events and witness mysteries. You insisted that Greece is both sacred and beautiful. Well, I see beauty everywhere. But I have not experienced anything spiritual. What did you mean? Where is it?”

I answer her and all my travelers through the pitch-black Cretan night. “Be careful of what you say,” I reply. “The gods may be listening.”

At that very second, as the last word drips from my tongue, a huge meteor bursts out of the southern horizon. It screams over our heads low and very large, a molten fireball burning red and gold with a long yellow-red tail trailing behind it back towards the sea. 

 We all fall into silent awe. The meteor shoots right over our heads, lower and larger than any celestial object any of us has ever seen. It disappears over the mountain crest by our side.

“Oh!” mutters one traveler. “They heard,” whispers another. “The gods are listening,” echoes a third. We walk slowly back toward Sfakia in stricken silence.  

We cannot know exactly what occurs behind a synchronistic event. It is a coincidence not in the sense of being random but simply meaning that events coincide. Such an occurrence happens at an unusual, unexpected time in a way that draws our attention to some hidden meaning unfolding before us and with us. It seems like a miracle in its original meaning – an occurrence that seems to defy ordinary natural laws. It makes us attend, listen, question, realize that we do not know but that everything is somehow connected and powers beyond us may be communicating with us. We become part of the web again.

What was this meteor? It was an event that reduced our entire group, including the “non-spiritual” member, to awe and wonder. It projected us into a domain for which we have no adequate explanations. In ancient times we might have said that Zeus threw a lightning bolt or Poseidon a fireball, Athena a flaming spear or Hephaistos an ember from his forge to awaken us, challenge us, show us that there is a transpersonal dimension that hears and responds, and we are interwoven in its logos in ways we cannot see but that can be blessedly revealed.

Could this have been a random or accidental event? That meteor would have had to have been created millennia ago by some incredibly distant cosmic explosion at just the right second for it to soar through the galaxies to arrive over our heads at just that instant that my words sounded. That scientific explanation, nearly inconceivable, would still render this event synchronistic because the universe would have collaborated in order for the meteor to appear at just that moment. So what explains the visitation? I still see that meteor flying over the heads of all of us doubting Thomases of the modern world.

Excerpted  from Ed’s forthcoming book, Soul Medicine

For years at the meditation center I rushed through my morning coffee. After all, if I did not drink it fast enough, I would be late for meditation. And that was important—to get to meditation on time. Otherwise I had to endure the social stigma of “being late,” as well as the boredom and frustration of having to WAIT to meditate—until latecomers were admitted to the hall.

When I moved out of the center, I had to learn how to live in the world. I had been an institutionalized person for nearly twenty years. I had been committed. Now I was out and about. What did it mean? There were no rules, so first off I stopped getting up at 3:30 or 4:15 AM. Once I was up, I found that a hot shower, which had not really fit with my previous routine, was quite invigorating. More sleep also helped.

Then I was ready for coffee: hot, freshly-brewed, exquisitely delicious coffee. Not coffee in a cold cup from an urn or coffee made with sort-of hot water out of a thermos, and not coffee with cold milk, 2% milk or non-fat milk, but coffee with heated Half-and-Half. Here was my opportunity to fulfill the frustrated longings of countless mornings. I would have not just any old coffee, but Peet’s Garuda Blend, a mixture of Indonesian coffees, brewed with recently boiled water and put in a pre-heated cup. So that the coffee would not be cooled down with the addition of butterfat, I would also heat the Half-and-Half before adding it, and cover the cup with a lid. With this heady, heavenly beverage in hand, what need was there to meditate? Sipping this aromatic beverage, I would fondly recall how we sometimes gathered in Issan’s room—you had to get up extra early!—and “luxuriate” with coffee and cigarettes before morning meditation.

Of course I had quit smoking cigarettes many years earlier; still, coffee by itself certainly hit the spot. Unfortunately, by the time I finished the coffee, I had been sitting around so long that it was time to get started on the day, and I hadn’t done any meditation. The solution was obvious. Bring the ceremoniously-prepared coffee in the pre-heated cup with the lid to the meditation cushion. This never would have been allowed at the center or in any formal meditation hall I have ever visited, but in my own home it was a no-brainer. Bring the coffee to the cushion –or was it bring the cushion to the coffee?

I light the candle and offer incense: “Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom,” I say, “the Lovely, the Holy. May all beings be happy, healthy, and free from suffering. May I live the life of today for the benefit of all beings.” I sit down on the cushion in front of my home altar and place the coffee just past my right knee. If I have brought the cushion and the coffee back to bed, experience has taught me that I have to be especially mindful where I locate the hot, full cup. I cross my legs, cover them with the blankets, and then put the cup right in the middle in front of my ankles. I sit without moving, so that I don’t accidentally spill the coffee.  

I straighten my posture, sip some coffee. I feel my weight settling onto the cushion, lengthen the back of my neck, sip some coffee. Taste, enjoy, soften, release. I bring my awareness to my breath moving in, flowing out. If I lose track of my breath, I am reminded to take a sip of coffee: robust, hearty, grounding. Come back to the coffee. Come back to the breath. A distraction? A thought? A judgment? Sip of coffee.

The coffee stays hot eighteen to twenty-two minutes, and I finish what’s left. Then, properly suffused with caffeine, I continue meditating another five to eight minutes.

Ready to get up and go.  

Once Katagiri Roshi told us, “Practicing Zen is not like training your dog: ‘Sit.’ ‘Heel.’ ‘Fetch.’ We are not training ourselves to be obedient and just follow the rules. We are training ourselves to wake up.” When a teacher says this, you know he’s seen a lot of people trying to get it right. And failing. And being miserable. What was the point again?

Katagiri Roshi would also say, “Let the flower of your life force bloom,” and, “the meaning of life is to live.” Not an easy task when so much by-the-book structure stands out from the background and appears to demand compliance. Still the wisteria grows freely using the trellis for support.

To be in the grip of rules is a fearsome place to abide. You know what you’ve done, so you are always on the run from the Zen police, trying to hide and cover up the lapses, seeing if you can face down the authorities. And how discouraging is it to find out that you are playing every role yourself—and there is no one to blame. You cannot escape the whole charade. You know what you’ve done, so you the authorities know what you’ve done and you the judge will judge you accordingly. And you, along with the others will conclude, “Darn, I’m no good at following the rules, even though I’m great at catching myself, and passing severe judgments. I’ll never be able to get it right.”

And you hear Roshi saying, “it’s the flower of your life force blooming, don’t you think?” And you don’t know what to think.

Our most common strategy is to try to measure up, to attain perfection and not have any lapses—zero tolerance, buddy. And you being the intrepid alert policeman catch the smallest infractions (“You did not stop at the stop sign. I don’t care if you’ve never been caught before in fifty years of driving. That wasn’t a stop.”) Bad dog!

In Celtic tradition there are many moments considered to be a “thin time” which means that heaven and earth feel closer and we might experience moments of connection to those who have gone before us in ways that we don’t usually.

These moments are the daily portals of dawn and dusk as the world moves from dark to light and back to dark again. They also include the eight threshold moments of the year which are the solstices, the equinoxes, and the cross-quarter harvest festivals that fall between the solstices and equinoxes. Of these eight, Samhain which falls on November 1st is considered to be the thinnest time when the ancestors and spirits walk among us. The door then is even further open than at other times. We can feel the shifting energy in the weeks leading up to this time. Samhain is the start of the dark half of the year. It is the season of rest, incubation, and mystery. It is the season of dreamtime. The perfect time of year to open your heart to connection with those who journeyed before you. Listen for the messengers of the ancestors in these days especially – they will speak their wisdom through raven and stone, tree and rain, dreams and synchronicities. They will speak to you through your imagination. This is the language through which we receive these gifts and only need to open ourselves to them.

The Celtic feast of Samhain coincides with the Christian celebration of All Saint’s Day on November 1st and All Soul’s Day on November 2nd which begin a whole month in honor of those who have died. We tend to neglect our ancestral heritage in our culture, but in other cultures remembering the ancestors is an intuitive and essential way of beginning anything new. We don’t recognize the tremendous wisdom we can draw upon from those who have traveled the journey before us and whose DNA we carry in every fiber of our bodies.

Ancestral healing and connection work has been a significant part of my own spiritual journey since about 2005. That was the time I walked into the office of a Jungian analyst to process the unabating grief I felt over my mother’s death. He introduced me to family systems theory and to the ways Jung believed we carry on the unresolved traumas of our ancestors. All these years later I continue this work of connecting to my ancestors because it is a path that has brought me tremendous personal healing and a deeper connection to who I am called to be. It has brought me a sense of belonging and coming home to myself. I have added many layers to this work over time, including ancestral pilgrimage to the landscapes which shaped my foremothers and forefathers, and perhaps most especially allowing writing, poetry, and other creative arts to become a portal of connection. 

When I imagine ancestral work I see layers and layers of story, concentric rings or circles — my story is embedded in the story of my family, which is nestled in the story of my parents’ families, and so on back through generations. This genetic story is wrapped in cultural stories, the places and events that shaped the people who came before me — language, music, landscape, the trauma of war which epigenetic evidence shows carries down from generation to generation. Within me is a sacred thread that ties me to everyone in my ancestral past. I carry within me the wounds and unfulfilled longings, the hopes and dreams of everyone who came before me. Learning their stories means I come to know my own more intimately.

Our western culture doesn’t make much room for the honoring of ancestors or valuing what connection to the stories of our past might bring to us. When we uncover the layers of the stories we have lived for generations we begin to understand ourselves better. Some of these stories we may know the details of, and some we may have to access and experience in an embodied and intuitive way. These memories live inside of us, waiting for us to give them room in our lives.

I recently came upon an essay of Mary Oliver’s written near the end of her life. In it, she writes of her longing in the Spring to discover what she describes as “the desire to be lost again, as long ago” in childhood. “Now in the spring I kneel,” she writes, “I put my face into the packet of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.” And then she goes on with this startling admission: “Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.” Do you remember “losing yourself” in such childhood moments of delight? Have you dared to do it lately?

She goes on to describe what it means to live with alertness to the world around us. Well, spring is now behind us, but even in these balmy days of mid-summer we’re invited to savor other joys—like the sound of birdsong filling the morning air, or those balmy clouds tracing their way across the skies; like the sense of joy in feeling the warm winds on your face, or digging around in your garden in celebration of the annual riot of green. 

Each of these moments is one way we find ourselves connected to the world around us, discovering how we belong to its complex and mysterious beauty. What does this have to do with “eternity,” though, to return to Oliver’s startling admission? Everything, I’d say—joining in her wisdom; each moment in our lives connects with the vastness of space and the infinite flow of time. 

Here’s the clue: “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she admits at the close of her essay, and then it all falls together: how we attend to the moments in our days reminds—that is, re-minds—us that we belong to everything, and that we are responsible to it all. Which is to say, we are “response-able,” able to respond to the place where we are. And how? By attending to the moments; by opening ourselves to notice, even cherish, some small, particular glimpse of things, each of which—with us—belongs to everything else. That is part of the tapestry of space and time we call “life.” Trusting in it, delighting in it, is another way to speak of faith.

So, what are you paying attention to these days? How are you opening your life to this intimate sense of devotion? And what are you discovering as you do? There are opportunities enough to do this, right where you live—right at the familiar doorstep you’ve crossed a thousand times, which is—among all the others—a threshold opening to the rest of this world. As you open your life to this world, to our shared world, and connect with others as we seem to be coming out of that long stretch of Covid-burdened dis-connection, we can always discover something particular—and in that discovery, have the chance to “keep our attention” on eternity, in the here-and-now-ness of our lives.