A Lark

   

A life ended, in a moment, his car spun out of control and rolled and he was gone, in a moment.  All expectations for his future, his art, his life with his new young bride, all ended yesterday afternoon in light traffic, on a dry freeway in my hometown.
    Grief has weight, mass, it sits heavily on my chest and pulls my cheeks to jowls and I cannot cry.  Nor ask why...

                                                        KYLE TORRETTO 1977 - 2009
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    I was raised in a cult.  Yes, as an Irish Catholic I was taught to have a ferocious devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the BVM, as we smug 12-year olds smirked behind our rosary entwined hands.  That's Mary the Mother of God, for those poor souls who don't know her saving grace and are destined for hell, according to limited and dull Sister Francis James at St. Luke the Evangelist parochial school, circa 1964.

    But as an erstwhile adult, I have to say that the repetition of  the prayers counted on the beads of the rosary  do provide a comfort that can lead to a meditative state or a form of the quiet mind. 
    And rituals that are engraved on your bones can be of benefit in times of crisis.  As my father lay dead on his bedroom floor and  a police officer stood sentry in the small hall, my mother and I said the rosary together, aloud, tears streaming to be sure, but not a prayer was missed.

    I have a sense that everything we possess within our own physicality has a purpose but that the knowledge of the purpose of something as simple as our breath rising and  falling has been forgotten.  But there are threads of ancient knowledge that have survived and can be used to find a way to the whole cloth of an esoteric teaching.

    I recently read again a slim volume by Sir Paul Dukes, On a Single Breath, A Lost Interpretation of the Lord's Prayer.  On prayer, Sir Dukes transcribes for us what his teacher said to him:  "...The three pillars on which prayer is built are all runaway horses.  Each has to be trained and disciplined by restraint -- there is no other way because they are all runaway horses..."

    I am in need of a ritual.  I am in the midst of an annual melancholy.
Happens every year round the Autumnal Equinox.  I am in mourning, but I can't say for what, or can I?
    Gail Sher writes in her book, One Continuous Mistake, that she experienced a disconcerting sense of being "peripheral" to her own life.  She explains that the activity she felt sure that belonged to her was writing; but, she couldn't find a way "in" to writing.
    Sher continues on to say that she developed an intense nostalgia as if a precious possession (so familiar) was being mysteriously withheld from her.
    Cue the Morris Dancers. This is  my state.  Running to my dictionary, I read that nostalgia comes from two Greek words.  The first, nostos means to return home, and the second, algia,translates as ache!
    This yearning for my own life is absurd, yes?  Reminds me of the Zen story of the tongue wishing to  taste  itself...but if I am not present to my own life, then Sher is right, life is lived and the remnant observor is peripheral, is a ghost.  And what remains is a persistent ache and a dull sense of loss.
    Fifteen years ago, I submitted poetry on a regular basis to magazines and university presses around the world.  One kind editor from the Missouri Review returned a poem with a note expressing thanks for the submission and noted that it was a "lovely, elegaic" tribute.  The definition of elegaic?  What else?  Expressing sorrow for something now past.
    Which brings me to the present and the ritual I propose.  One new photo and one haiku inspired by that photo, posted here each and every morning for the next week.
    Join me.  I invite you to sit in quiet meditation, then write your own inspired haiku, the first line to be three syllables, the  second five and the last line three syllables. Post it as a comment on this blog if you'd like.

    Note to the ambitious:  Write an Elegaic Stanza, that is a quatrain in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of abab.