Carolyn Martin - Poet

“All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful.” – Sting

Carolyn Martin

Oprah Winfrey and Thích Nhất Hạnh: A Conversation

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It happens this way …

While the Internet can be maddeningly time-consuming, it can also be surprisingly miraculous. Last Sunday evening as hummingbirds zipped around the yard and the hum of the neighbor’s air conditioner provided white noise, I was guided to an interview Oprah Winfrey conducted five years ago with Thích Nhất Hạnh. I can’t remember how I found it. I’d like to think it found me.

Among other topics, they spoke about the monk’s relationship to Martin Luther King, Jr., his practice of meditating every moment of every day, and the gift of compassionate listening. About three minutes before the end of their engaging conversation, Hạnh offered the best relationship advice I ever heard. He explained four mantras that can heal and deepen our connection to our loved ones immediately.

Here is a brief synopsis of what he suggested. Perhaps you’ll be motivated to go to the video to hear his enlightened words in his own sweet voice.

 

1. Darling, I’m here for you.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer him or her is your presence. How can you love if you are not present? And this means your true presence, unencumbered with thoughts of the past or the future.

2. Darling, I know you are there and I am so happy because you are truly there.

You recognize the presence of your beloved one as something very precious. To be loved is to be recognized as existing.

These two mantras by themselves can bring happiness right away. You can even practice them over the phone!

3. Darling, I know you suffer. That is why I’m here for you.

Before you can do anything, your very presence can bring relief. This requires compassionate listening, not trying to fix the beloved.

The fourth mantra is the hardest because it’s about your suffering and your belief it has been caused by your beloved. You would prefer to go to your room, close the door, and suffer alone, and you want to punish him or her for having made you suffer. This mantra helps to overcome that.

4. Darling, I suffer. Please help me.

You go to him or her and, if you can bring yourself to say this mantra, you will suffer less right away.

What simple words. What healing possibilities!

 

 

Notes from the Garden, Part I

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Confessions of a Perennial Gardener

 

Six nurseries ago, I said, I’m through.

Colors cozied up in my backyard, five dozen pots

brimmed full, and Nature praised, More is less.

Anyway, I had little planting time or space

and proclaimed a mid-summer freeze.

 

That is, until Perennial Sale this week!

How their names enticed:

Elegance Snow cooling Artic Fire,

Peptalk Pink stirring with Red Rum,

Funfare Yellow hovering over Pixie Blues.

Each multi-life a guarantee to fill

the gap annuals leave behind

and fight against the fret of frost.

 

The choice? Ignore their tags’ advice

and squeeze them into tightnesses

between petunias and marigolds,

behind lines of pansies and mums,

under the semi-shade of maple trees.

 

More is more: my new rule.

When every bloom has dropped, I’ll wrap

my roots around those tucked in last.

We’ll breathe in winter’s depths,

dream of lives to come,

and celebrate death’s impermanence.

 

 

Point and Click

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It happens this way …

In their author’s questionnaire, Unsolicited Press, the publisher of my next poetry collection, asked a number of engaging questions. For example:

What’s your favorite punctuation mark? (Question mark).

What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? (I was a good Catholic girl in a Catholic high school and read everything assigned!).

What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgments?

It took me a few seconds to answer to that one. Then, the obvious: my Sony digital camera. Since I only have a “dumb” clamshell phone, I rely on the Sony to be my companion as I walk the garden each morning and evening or go on trips near or far. In fact, I panic if I arrive somewhere special and don’t have the camera with me.

Some people think taking photos detracts from the experience of a moment. On the contrary, it helps me focus. The sun filtering through a red maple and splashing pink begonias in a hanging basket, the feral cat sitting in a pot of jasmine, the varied blues of crashing waves off the California coast: I photograph, therefore I am.

I used my experience with a camera in a poem about one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska. She was a Polish writer who lived through the brutal Nazi occupation of her native country during World War II and then four decades of Stalinist Communism. The reward for such brave perseverance? The Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1996.

Her poems are witty, subtly subversive, and intellectually delightful. She once remarked, … the word ‘why’ is the most important word in any language on earth, and probably also in the languages of other galaxies … . She, too, likes question marks!

In her Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech, Szymborska proclaimed, “Whatever else you might think of this world, it is astonishing.” For a woman who lived through so many challenges under oppressive regimes and risked imprisonment for her writing, that is an astonishing statement. And it’s this world that my camera yearns to capture.

For lovers of poetry who would like to read how my camera focuses on Szymborska, check out “An Amateur Photographer Reads Szymborska’s ‘No Title Required’,” published in Open: Journal of Arts and Letters. The poem will also appear in A Penchant for Masquerades, my next collection.

If you’d like to read the Szymborska poem that inspired mine, click here.

Astonishing!

 

Morning Alert

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It happens this way …

That old saying about early birds and worms? Our yard must be rich in worm protein since a half-dozen robins visit every day. I enjoy watching them stand still and tilt their heads intently – like a doctor listening to a patient’s heartbeat – as they track down their meal. Something I learned this season: They repeat this process not only for breakfast but for lunch, dinner, and in-between snacks. Probably a lot of mouths to feed in their nests!

Robin

Which brings me to the haiku they inspired.

I’ve always rooted for the underdog. I’ve been known to cheer for calves at rodeo events and for sports teams that have no chance of winning. I’ve even focused intently on kids in high school musicals who sing and dance behind the leads and admirably stay in character. That takes discipline, like the kind I needed in third grade to keep my silver-tinseled halo from falling off as we angels balanced on a rickety riser behind Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

There’s no contest without calves or striving teams. No richness of production without a supporting cast.

So here’s to all the worms that, in the circle of life, support bird-life. A confession however: Whenever I catch sight of a crawly critter, I hide it beneath our Chinese wind flower leaves and dare robins to find it.

 

 

Karma at Work

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It happens this way …

Back in the early ‘70s when I was a Sister of Mercy teaching English at Mt. St. Mary’s Academy in Watchung, NJ, I met the most extraordinary teens who have grown up to be the most extraordinary women.

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve reconnected with a number of them and thrill to see their family photos and hear about their accomplishments. All of them have traveled far from those learning days on the hill, and it’s inspiring to see where they’ve landed.

One of the many talented young women I taught was a precocious “beyond-the-box” creative I reconnected with a few months ago. Rhonda Fabian is now the editor of Kosmos Quarterly, journal for global transformation, the online version of Kosmos Journal which celebrated 17 years as a print publication.

Kosmos header

This publication is amazing in many ways. Its mission:

To inform, inspire and engage individual and collective participation for global transformation in harmony with all Life. We do this by sharing transformational thinking and policy initiatives, aesthetic beauty and collective wisdom, local to global.

Each issue will have a central theme – this quarter it was “unlearning together – and an editorial circle of writers, artists, musicians, educators, technologists, videographers, healers, philosophers, visionaries, and activists from around the globe. As the themes and editorial circles change, so do the voices and visions of the journal.

An opportunity

A few months ago, Rhonda asked me to send some poems for the Quarterly because she wanted to add this genre to the publication. After she accepted them, she invited me to be her poetry editor. A no-brainer!

When the first issue comes out today, Kosmos Quarterly will have its first poetry section with work by local poets Andrea Hollander, Tricia Knoll, and me; New Mexico poet Anne Haven McDonnell, California poet Larry Robinson, and Brooklyn-based performance artists, Climbing PoeTree. You can hear Anne, ClimbingPoeTree, and me read our work.

Kosmos Quarterly is a subscription-based publication, but Rhonda has generously set up a sliding scale – from $0 to $60 ­– so everyone can afford it. If the journal’s not for you, try the newsletter and podcasts. I  know you will be as inspired by the beauty, passion, and intelligence of the contributors as I am.

The lesson: Be good to your students, employees, kids, neighbors. You never know how or when they’ll impact your life in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gift of being late

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It happens this way …

Two years ago I made my annual May pilgrimage to Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden a week too late. I missed the height of the rhody and azalea blossoms, but met a group of third graders on a field trip. My interactions with them were as much a gift as the garden itself. The result was the prose poem above published in Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine.

Lesson: Sometimes too late is right on time.