Our Creative Sangha Please enjoy two selections this month from writer Charlie Kyle.

Hy'shqe Koma Kulshan

~by Charlie Kyle

For this being-time uji (有時)

For this life to snowshoe White Salmon Road

For this snow the last few days

For this Tuesday in early March

For this brilliant sunshine and bluebird sky

For this wildness of the hoot hoot hoot hoot

For this small green fir bough lying on top of the snow 

For this quiet noise of snow falling off the branches

For this noise of a faraway jet reminding me of home 

For this view of Mt. Shuksan at the turn around

For this thermos of lentil soup

And most of all for you my partner Jeanne

Meditation and Rilke

~a short essay, also by Charlie Kyle

“Be more mindful,” by wife Jeanne said to me after I caused a ‘minor’ $1800 car accident recently. Wise words I ignored until I sat down at a mid-day meditation on Zoom a few days later and started to follow my breath. I started to realize how many days had gone by since I last meditated. 20 days? 30 days? Maybe more. I couldn’t remember the last time I meditated. But it was longer than any period over the past five years since I started meditating at the beginning of the pandemic.

Tim, the leader of the meditation, read this passage from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Tim continued through the first part of the meditation by talking about focusing on the questions without trying for the answers. Let the answers come to you, he said. During the next part of the meditation, we stood and did a slow walking meditation responding to Tim’s suggestion to appreciate your body.

I felt the aches and pains and the old injuries as I walked distributing my weight on three points at the bottom of each foot like I practiced during my physical therapy appointments. I was walking slowly back and forth in front of my desk and computer about six steps in each direction mindful of a relaxed but upright posture. I closed my eyes and remembered a feeling from 50 years ago — walking blind-folded guided by an acquaintance, learning to experience the world more by touch than sight. The result back then was not only noticing usually unnoticed details but also experiencing a renewed appreciation for the beauty of the visible world once the blindfold was off.

The second reading from this midday meditation was also by Rilke. I didn’t make a note of the source, but I remember it was about angels. With a little research, I found the Duino Elegies in the Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland. The Duino Elegies consist of ten intensely spiritual poems.

Here’s the first stanza from The First Elegy, which is my best guess at the poem Tim read that day. The asterisks indicate the words have explanatory notes.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders

of Angels?* and even if one should suddenly

hold me to his heart I would fade back, touching

his intenser existence. For beauty* is nothing

but the beginning edge of the dread* we may barely endure,

object of our awe because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every Angel is dread.

*Angels: A famous letter from Rilke to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, contains as clear a statement of what he understood by the figure of the Angel as he ever made: “The ‘Angel’ of the Elegies has nothing to do with the angels in the Christian heaven (indeed has more in common with the angelic figures of Islam). [. . . It] is the creature in which the transformation of the visible into the invisible that we are undertaking already appears completed. For the Angel of the Elegies all the towers and palaces of the past are still existent because they have long since ceased to be visible, and the towers and palaces that still exist today in our world are for him already invisible, even though they still endure physically (for us). The Angel of the Elegies is that being which guarantees the recognition of a higher degree of reality in the realm of the invisible.—It is therefore “terrible” to us because we, who love and transform it, still cling to the visible. (13 November 1925)

*beauty . . . *dread: beauty may be seen as the visible world that has been (trans)formed and shaped (by the poet or by other artists), whilst dread is the invisible that has yet to be transformed. Cf. ‘Early Apollo’, II. 4-5 (p. 57)

From the explanatory notes it appears that Rilke believed metaphorically that angels could see what no longer exists, which is terrible for us because we cling to the visible. We can see beauty in the visible world especially when it has been formed by artists. But we dread the invisible task we all have of coming to terms with questions of our own individual existence either with or without a god and a heavenly host of angels.

I’ve always sort of believed in angels in the same way I believe in ghosts, spirits and an afterlife. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m not counting on it. As a kid I believed I had a guardian angel even as I doubted the existence of God. When I climbed up a tree farther than I knew I should, I believed my guardian angel protected me. And when I went to bed at night my guardian angel protected me from the monsters in my closet and the other strange goings of my mind in the dark. One time when I had a fever I thought the little plastic figures I saved from Cracker Jack boxes were alive, dancing around on my window ledge to the feverish sound in my head.

I was scared but not to point of hiding my head under the covers and not watching the show.

~

~Charlie Kyle writes and lives in the traditional territory of the Lummi and Nooksack Peoples near Bellingham Bay. He shares in the responsibilities for their homeland where we all live today.