The Poetry of Stone

April 24

This morning, a light rain is falling. It will become heavier later. It's still dark; and the birds are singing in a melodious but deceivingly disorganized manner. After all, to each of them, their birdsong is purposeful; yet because of their multiple intentions and species, there’s a rhythymic and melodic disunity.

I say it’s deceivingly disorganized because within me, it becomes a whole thing nonetheless. Although the intelligence hears the disorder, the feelings have the capacity to blend it into a single and pleasing whole that lends a sense of beauty to the morning. Without the feelings, this wouldn't happen.

This morning, I climbed up the stairs after getting coffee, as I do every morning. The stairs, like the house, are nearly 100 years old. Their creaks have informed many an early morning aside from my own. Like the birdsong and the rain, they’re reminders that I inhabit a continuity. I don't own any of these things. I receive their impressions.

There's a piece of bluestone here on my desk which I cut down to a rectangle of the right size to prop up my iPad at a slightly sharper angle. That stone is made from ancient layers of sandstone; yet despite its venerable history, by itself it seems generally uninteresting. Just a piece of rock.

The shape, however, and the color, have qualities that only this piece of stone can have. This morning I was struck – as I still am, looking at it – by the way the feelings receive it. It has a sacred quality to it, a quality of existence that mere seeing with the eyes or thinking with the mind can't conceive of. Both of those acts of perception have a literalism to them that cannot comprehend the feeling, the poetry of this piece of stone.

I say poetry, because the word itself means the creative use of literature, especially to convey feeling. Poetry takes words and somehow makes more of them than what they are by opening a psycho-spiritual space into which feeling can enter. To take something literally means to take words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory; to be poetic means to add more: not with more words, but with an invitation to feeling.

We don't know quite what feeling is — of course, it’s a perception, but of a refined nature that defies exact description with words. Yet we know quite clearly when we have it; and it imparts a quality to life without which life would be flat and essentially meaningless. “Play it with feeling,” the piano teacher says to their music pupil. It gives the impulse to everything we do: "I don't feel like it" shuts things down.

Yet what do I feel like? There are times when the inner landscape of feeling seems flat and without features. I hit a point like that last night just before dinner, after working on a song for an hour and a half without getting very far. The landscape was suddenly blank.

Fortunately, I'm not unfamiliar with moments like this, and instead of allowing it to become self-inflected in a feedback loop that leads, all too often, to a subtle but growing depression, I ignored it. It gradually subsided and my feeling re-populated the inner landscape with an appropriate and more sensitive response to this ordinary nature of life.

No one would argue that feeling has levels of refinement; yet we all too often invest that level of refinement in its products, such as music, fine oil paintings, expressive dance, an exceptionally well made piece of fabric. In doing so, we don't adequately scrutinize the way the feelings are within us--not in the objects--as part of our intelligence and understanding.

I don't use the word intelligence as a reference to intellect, the part that classifies and organizes and discriminates. The example I gave of the disorganized yet still beautiful birdsong shows the limits of the intellect. Only the feeling can blend the birds into beauty. It opens a window on the sacred. The sacred is, in religious terms, what is holy; and that in turn means what is whole. Feeling helps bring a wholeness to life.

A feature of our psyche this important might, you think, deserve a bit more attention than we give it. Our usual interaction with feeling is to take it for granted, rather than taking a close look at the way it acts within us on small things. Yet most of the food we need in our daily life to support ourselves emotionally comes from our feeling-relationship with the small events that surround us. Anyone knows that having a bunch of annoying little things go wrong will put you in a bad mood; and it's equally true many pleasing little things that go right put us in a good one. It reminds me of a quote that a friend offered me the other night from the architect Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe: “God is in the details.”

“Yes,” I reminded him, “But the devil’s in there too.”

The idea that both God and the devil live together within the details is an interesting one to me. It puts the sacred and the profane together in one place. It’s the action of feeling that discriminates between them.

I'm curious about this because so much of the satisfying meaning in life seems to be about developing a healthy feeling-relationship with the least of things. In each day, if I attend mindfully to the little things, the big ones generally take care of themselves. Early on in my education in inner spiritual work, my teacher gave me sensitively intelligent indications about that; and I had no real idea of their value. It's only now, nearly 40 years later, that it makes sense. And it makes sense in such small ways, such intimate ways, that I wonder how it could be so easily overlooked.

It’s as though in our rush to get to life, we always race past it.

That brings me back to the collective theme of my diary for this month, which is to cultivate an inner stillness—from which I stop racing, and begin to feel my life, instead of thinking about it.

Maybe where I am is acceptable.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.