Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

III. Poetry

C H A P T E R I I I Poetry .OETRY is an expression of the Centering Consciousness. Byspeaking figuratively, by calling things by names other than their own, it helps to enliven in us the awareness that all beings partake of each other. It is no respector of persons or of terms. It lives frankly in a world of shape-changers.For example, I go to my door in the early morning, open it and smell the air sweet off the grass and the garden, and smell at the same time the coffee steeping in the pitcher, and see lolloping down the road a young girl on her way to school, her hair flying, and at the same time feel the pang of young-girlness in my own heart and with that a feeling of love for the woman she will become and a love for what the woman loves in this day that is about to happen too. And all of this simultaneously, until breakfast and dawn and puberty and earth and the future and more all fuse, all center in one big breath of feelings and perceptions, and the will responds in an utterance: 0 the bonny cheer of an ancient day bacon-bright and coffee-thoughtful, 1love its dawn and the dawn in me of my neighbor's child, when she comes lolloping down to her school-life and waiting soul, when I marry her! Today has its nose in her tattering hair; I'm pulled by the hand, we hug and we eat, and somehow the last love of our lives breaks fast here. And so on. 57 P I do not know what I will say until I begin to say it. I do not know what I have said until I begin to hear it. Is this poetry I have composed? It is a process of Centering which I undertook consciously at this moment of writing, committing myself to letting what was there happen. Is this what poetry is, letting what is there be there, radiantly, all of it? When we become involved with "all of it," we are likely to get tuned in on hidden matters. We are likely to begin to hear things. We find that Sound is somehow deeply connected with Energy, with Form. Voice and Person; Form and the Ear. Recall the potter sitting with his head on one side, listening, as he threw the cylinder, filling it with air. "Music hath charms . . ." That's physiology! Its vibration enters our blood and influences the will in our movements. Even sounds we don't consciously hear affect us. There is an ancient teaching that hearing existed before man was created. The ear is the archetype. "The ear is our mother; out of the ear we come." This strange saying is suggestive to one's sense of origin. The other principle in poetry is image, or picture. This is carried by, or reflected by, light. Out of hearing and seeing, sound and light, grows our organ of poetic speech. According to another ancient teaching, man has three ears: the outer organ, which bears the name "ear" but which does not hear anything; the inner ear, with all its intricate resonating devices, which connects with the brain and the rest of the body and tells us what sound the ether is carrying; and the whole man, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet and from his heart to his intellect, who "hears" the meaning of what the sound is saying. It takes a golden ear tobe empty enough of itself tohear clearly. Listening requires a centering discipline if we are tounderstand each other. For what we say will be related to our past and future, to our health and mood and ambitions and self-image, our needs and our ideals, and what we say will be related also to forces which work in all men unconsciously; it will also be related to the weather, the season, to moonlight and the stars; it will be related to the history of man, to the history of the individual, to nature and evolution at every level; it will also be affected by the relationship between us. This is my view. Perception if it is true is direct: inclusive: poetic. The poetic process of centering multiple responses in an organic unity may characterize widely the activities of life when they are filled with their total natural energy and 58 [18...