Death of a poem

Today was a mostly good day, but I ended it with a little weep, because my favourite poem died. Back in Cambridge, some time in my first or second year, I wrote the poem down on a piece of card I'd cut out from a tea-box. I wrote some lines bigger and bolder - the lines that really spoke to me. I called it my life poem, and tucked it away in my wallet.

You do not have to be good.

I'd first come across this poem on a day where I felt suffocated and stressed. It helped me breathe again, that first line cutting through all my striving and reminding me of the basic fact of grace. In Cambridge, grace was a shield against competition and imposter syndrome, a sanctuary and dwelling place when I asked myself simultaneously 'Am I doing enough?' and 'How can I do anything more?'

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

In Cambridge, when at times I felt so homesick I’d count the days till I’d fly home and then curl onto my bed and cry, I'd think of the last lines and feel seen by a God above. Even in my room, my loneliness wasn't unknown to him and the reminder that He is my Heavenly Father, the person who has put me in this world, into this big family of people and nature and words and art was something to hold on to. By the end of the year Cambridge felt less harsh, more exciting, and certainly more like family. As I wrote for the Unfiltered Network: 'Family happens where love is, and Cambridge is a place full of people who love intensely. [...] This intense atmosphere of unreserved love can be intimidating – or it can be an invitation [...] When you let yourself express your joy and passion to other people, you aren’t compared or patronised, but like a bud unfurling before the sun, you are invited to bloom – to develop that passion alongside people who find it equally important.'

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

When Grandma died and the sadness felt like an enveloping cloud, the poem reminded me it was alright to feel sad, but also that sadness was not the end. Sadness was not the future, even though it was a legitimate part of my present, and continues to be a legitimate part of my present now and then. (like, for example, writing this blog post and suddenly her soap smell and love of colour and fragile but persistent voice singing hymns beside me all come back) I didn't stay away from the world of people who love me and supported me, even though I felt like a big part of that world had gone. I talked to friends, cried on shoulders, and tried (and continue to try) to love the world she loved more fiercely.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

About month later, on a bus in Rome, I sat beside blonde-haired boy and showed him the poem. It felt dangerously vulnerable, as if the poem had become part of me, but I felt safe enough to show it to him. He didn't laugh at how the lines didn't fit within the width of the tea-box card. He didn't even laugh at the fact that it was written on a tea-box.

(Reader, I'm dating him.)

It took courage, but later in Dubai I felt safe enough to hold out more vulnerable words. And since then I've been learning to let myself love, to love, to be loved, to see God's love through the prism of this love on earth.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

I've shared this poem since, with close friends and in poetry groups. A dear friend told me recently that she now has it by heart, her Mum listens to it on spotify, and a friend of a friend of hers has it on her door. I imagine the poem as a pebble - it dropped into my life on that melancholy day and sent a ripple through my world. As I share it with others and they share it with others it moves over life worlds and through people eternally. So though I hold its sodden, pulpy fragments in my hands and mourn, it is not gone. It is all around me and within me. It is every time I feel joy with a friend from Cambridge, every time a remember Grandma, every time I kiss Jacob, every time I breathe in the grace of God.

And so now, the poem, in full:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

On Breath without Air and Buddhism

Earlier last term I finished the audiobook of Breath without Air, a combination of multiple cycle rides around the city with one ear phone plugged in culminating in a final fifteen minutes in my room, lying down listening to Lucy Kalanithi's epilogue (read by Cassandra Campbell) with tears streaming down my face.

Another thing I tried to do last term is wrap my head around the concept of nirvana. I'm still not entirely clear I grasp the Buddhist understanding of it, but I am quite sure I am closer to understanding than before.

These two things might seem oddly disjunct, but while I was reading about Nirvana my mind kept going back to something Paul Kalanithi believed in and repeated through the memoir: that life should not be about avoiding suffering, but about creating meaning.

A brief summary of what I've learn about Nirvana. Nirvana is not going to heaven or immortality, neither is it annihilation or apocalypse.  Nirvana is a cessation of desire/stress/clinging/craving/longing (Sanskrit: tṛ́ṣṇā - literally translated 'thirst') which traps us in the repeated cycle of birth, life and death (also called samsara) which is suffering. All the things we use to feel our way around the world and feel that we are in the world - all these cease:

'there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor staying; neither passing away nor arising: unestablished, unevolving, without support ...' (Udana 8.1)

What I see in the philosophy of Nirvana is the escape of suffering, in part through the understanding that the samsara is a construct of impermanent minds and bodies. (along with other practices encapsulated in the 8 fold path)

In Christianity I see something radically different, something far more along the lines of Kalanithi's conclusion. Suffering is so present in the bible - the 'whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth', Job loses his family, his property, his health, the Israelites are enslaved and wander through desert lands, are exiled, are occupied, Paul speaks about a 'thorn in [his] flesh' and even Jesus, faced with the pain of the cross and the separation from God his Father, says 'Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.' And yet that suffering is part of a God-authored narrative suffused with meaning: the defeat of sin and death and the restoration of humankind's relationship with God, for the glory of God which entails our satisfaction in Him.

Suffering in this life is therefore far, far outweighed by the weight of glory and satisfaction that Christ gives us both in the life to come, and in the here and now. This way of looking at life does not negate suffering, indeed, it gives it even more severity because it is so at odds with the joy that God pre-destined for us and given us through Jesus. It is understood as imperfect, unjust, and painful. Yet it is also made meaningful, because it can produce hope, and allow us to show radical love and care, and expose our need of God and how His kingdom is the fulfilment of desires we didn't even know we have.

At one point in Kalanithi's book, after his diagnosis, he and his wife Lucy consider having a child. She asks “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” and he answers “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I think that encapsulates the Christian understanding of suffering. We suffer because things are not perfect, but we are capable of suffering because we have an innate sense of the tragedy of loss and end and an innate sense of the rightness of eternity (given that eternity is free of what gives rise to tragedy). The Christian therefore does not shun pain, but embraces life with its contingent pricks and blows, knowing that those pricks and blows were first suffered by Jesus, in his death which actualised an eternity in which suffering does not exist, replaced as it is by endless joy. Perception, sense, nature, personhood - these remain, but made entirely good again. That, surely, is something to be desired.