The Hammock Papers: Happy Birthday Frost

26 March 2010

Happy Birthday Frost

It's 3:55 a.m., I just woke up, wide awake.

Reaching to my right to flick on the lamp, I noticed the stereo is still on, thankfully playing Bach's B minor Mass.

As I focused on the bookcase across the room, a book of Frost's poetry caught my eye.

Today is his birthday (1874).

One of my favorite pieces is one that he recited from memory for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

It begins ...

"Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender..."

A dear friend recently made the bold move to share her art with the world in the form a blog she created (see it here). Her intent is to share her love of writing with her friends and family and in doing so create dialog. She is a brave poet.

Kelly taught me about living in the moment, surrendering to the pleasant surprise of each day, looking, listening, ... being.

Her most recent post dealt with the very subject of noticing and appreciating the struggles of the day.

Noticing.

Surrendering to life, not running away from it. Longing, but living in the meantime.

This is the quality that draws me to Frost. The quality of understanding that only comes after the act of surrender. "Withholding from the land of living" ... the ugly, soulless, illusion of control. No ...

Surrender.

Kelly's view ...
So for me to pause for a moment and to notice that I feel the rain is, to me, a form of appreciation for what's real. And is it always beautiful? Maybe not. Or maybe mostly so. Actually, maybe largely so. Because it's so honest. I can appreciate the rain more when I'm not trying to run from it. When I take a breath, notice it, spend even a second being curious about it, about the world, about how I'm feeling in relation to it all. Even a moment being appreciative of what's happening and what's beautiful about that. What's beautiful is that I love my children. That I learn to see and not to mask. That I take a cup of hot tea with me in my car. Because I still have to drive somewhere. But I can take my curious nature with me. Even the rain glistens, as Alice Walker says, 'from the light of being seen and loved for simply being there."

Happy Birthday, Frost.

Thanks, Kelly.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL