Kaleidoscopes & Other Shifts in Consciousness

I. Good Vibrations

Yesterday bink & I FaceTimed --we've never bothered before, since we live in the same town.

Our toys wanted to sent out healing to the humans.
(Toy Reiki?)
 With my phone, I took this photo of my laptop screen-- SweePo and bink's bug sending you good energy:



II. A Moment of Consciousness

A very nice person on Instagram responded to me posting "embarrassing photo of yourself as a child" (an invitation going around on social media). (I shared the photo of me miserable at fifteen, wearing tube socks). The person said:

"These types of pictures bring you back to a time that no matter what was going on in the world, as a kid you were blissfully unaware."

I don't much relate to the concept of a time when I was conscious but blissfully unaware of what was going on. I didn't, or course, know political details (not until I was five or so, and the Vietnam War was at the dinner table and on TV), but I had a sense of the scariness of the world from early memory.

(I think perhaps we too easily forget what childhood is like...)

A guiding memory is a scary dream from before I was five (when we moved house): 
I was among? or actually was? a tiny grain of dirt looking up through blades of grass at the sky.
It was terrifying.

That dream always fascinated me--what was it I experienced? 
Was it my consciousness clicking into an awareness of being separate and finite? 
I think it was something like that.
Very scary at the time, . . . but useful.

It's like a favorite film of mine, the 9-minute doc "The Powers of Ten (and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe)", where very quickly as you zoom in or out by leaps of adding a zero, you reach vast empty spaces.
You can watch it here:
www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/powers-of-ten

This morning I read this quote from Czeslaw Milosz, and it weirdly reminded me of the perspective of my childhood dream.

Milosz is writing about "a moment from Nazi-occupied Warsaw":

"A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them.
Such moments in the consciousness . . . judge all poets and philosophers."

"Milosz wanted to write poems that could survive such a judgment."

––From the New Yorker article, "Czeslaw Milosz’s Battle for Truth:

Having experienced both Nazi and Communist rule, Poland’s great exile poet arrived at a unique blend of skepticism and sincerity." *
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III. Wild Geese (again)

I keep pondering, why do I personally dislike Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese"?

It's not about its worth as a poem. I like some pop poems, such as Sheenagh Pugh's "Sometimes" ("Sometimes things don't go, after all/ From bad to worse.") **

I think it's that "Wild Geese" simply doesn't line up with my moments of clear consciousness. 

My moments are more likely to make me want to "to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting"--something Oliver's poem says "you do not have to" do.

No, you don't have to.

But to me, that––walking across deserts, or things like it (pilgrimage)––seems a complicated but reasonable reaction to the reality of a world where gunfire makes cobblestones stand on end like porcupine quills.

So, that's where I'm coming from.
.

Do I sound like a crank, going on about disliking "Wild Geese"?

Really, I'm not against the poem! I do see it lines up beautifully with the consciousnesses of many other people, and that's great. 
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IV. A Little Leavening

Oh, my.
Have I seemed awfully heavy lately?
Maybe so.

I'm thinking a lot about these crazy times, as things crack open up...  and through them sometimes green shoots appear, and sometimes monsters.

But I'm actually in a good mood!
Setting concerns aside, being under orders to stay home for two weeks is a treat for someone like me. (For, in fact, me.)

Plus, many people are acting in ways that make me very happy.

A couple examples:

A Star Trek band I love, Five Year Mission, live-streamed a performance on Facebook last night. (I'd seen 5YM live at Trek Fest in 2012.)

 Each band member was in his own home, and you could comment alongside the screen that showed them all. (Erg. Not sure the terms to describe this---it's not new... except to me!)

The online event was free, but you could donate through them to WHO and a local food shelf. Eight-five viewers donated a total of $1,200.

Then, a friend who lives nearby has placed a weekly delivery order with a local bakery to deliver a dozen loaves of their bread to her porch. She invites friends and neighbors to come pick up a loaf, as a gift.

Here I am with mine, last week:

These people leaven the heaviness.

And now I'm going to go for a walk . . . with no electronics.

As they say on Camino, Ultreia! "To Beyond!"

Or, from Silver Linings Playbook, "Excelsior!" 

____________________

* A couple more quotes I like from Czeslaw Milosz:

"When gold paint flakes from the arms of sculptures,
When the letter falls out of the book of laws,
Then consciousness is naked as an eye."

❧ “The things that surround us in childhood need no justification, they are self-evident,” Milosz wrote in his memoir, Native Realm.
“If, however, they whirl about like particles in a kaleidoscope, ceaselessly changing position, it takes no small amount of energy simply to plant one’s feet on solid ground without falling.”

❧❧❧

** Sheenagh Pugh herself says "Sometimes" is badly written, because people think it's blithely optimistic. I think her poem gets across that "sometimes" is rare. Still, I see what she means:

"When read carefully, it says sometimes things go right, but not that often, and usually only when people make some kind of effort in that direction. So it isn't blithely and unreasonably optimistic.
But a lot of people read it that way, which means I didn't write it well enough - the writer can always make the readers see what he wants them to if he does the job right."