Awakening to Beauty… Writings

Returning the Soul to Poetry
and Poetry to the Soul…

By Jennifer Ferraro

In a techno-consumer culture enraptured with externals and superficiality, the tendency toward poetry can represent a struggle to value, protect and embody those qualities that are most hidden in oneself, the qualities of the soul. This hidden-ness within us recognizes and loves beauty and is nurtured in being, as well as in doing.

No doubt most of the poetry one reads is meant either as pastime or for amusement, but real poetry comes from the dancing of the soul.
~ Hazrat Inayat KhanIn other words, simply, the soul can be said to refer to all that is secret and without form, all that lives within one formlessly. To affirm that that which cannot be seen exists, that that which is wordless and elusive to language has presence and power and reality, is no small feat. In a time when our world grows increasingly wed to surfaces, we need to actively protect and foster such inwardness, that which is hidden from the eye of superficial vision. We need poetry more than ever now. We need it in order to remember, in order to revalue what we have left behind as the “childish” dreams of youth and innocence. We needs its imaginative waters to remind us of unseen and invisible worlds that exist. Ironically, to me the task of poetry is not to simply describe or convey what is seen but to be a reminder of how, when what is seen penetrates the depths of our silences, vision opens and can transfigure reality. The real act of poetry happens in the heart, not on the page.

The following essays are excerpts of a forthcoming book
that Jennifer is writing about Beauty…

People need poetry in order to remember that soul exists. Sometimes our lives take us away from who we deeply are and into a façade which we live in for years. All the while, we live amidst a numbness and aching hunger for meaning and beauty. The hidden secret longing for more, for a home in one’s own being, persists. We long for a time when we will feel fully at home in ourselves, our lives, and wildly alive in ways which we have only glimpsed. We want life to be rich with love, full of gifts given and shared, a continual praising. The note we were given to sing pursues us, waiting for us to remember, to return to its urging. More and more I have come to feel that the only thing we really have to do is here is to try to stay true to that note each one of us was entrusted with, that is the unique signature of the soul. We must sing it clearly, with every ounce of our attention and faithfulness and strength.

In the wasteland of exile from your soul’s note, how you wander and throw yourself into various occupations, trying to forget. How you long for one who might hear you and see you, and coax you into the becoming you know is possible. You are vast as the universe, and inwardly you sense that nothing you do here will ever equal what you are actually a capable of. Redemption seems to spring from the very barrenness that you have let claim your life’s voice. From the interior loneliness of finding yourself isolated from other beings, and from love, something new is often born. Ultimately you must stand up for innocence and soul sweetness, for beauty that is constantly assaulted by hollow, shallow and cynical images that repeat the mantra “There is no meaning here.”

Each of us, male and female, has a harsh, critical and often assassinating inner voice that functions as henchman to what is mysterious and soulful in us. When you feel sadness it tells you that you are a sissy, or irrational or pathetic. When you feel something in your gut, it tells you to be logical and to filter everything through rational thinking. It says discipline is what you need, and it rules through control. It tells you that you must achieve and conquer, that you are nothing except what you produce, that otherwise your life has no meaning or value. Success is tangible and worldly, and power is what you should possess and desire. This voice within tells you to get over yourself and your heartbrokenness, to forget what happened to your love as a child, with those people you called family.

And there is a time when that voice can be necessary and useful to move you through the ruts of self-pity or self-defeated lethargy. But more often that voice becomes a willful dictator, robbing your life of its vitality, its quiet joys and potential for true contentment. The voice of what you should be, do, or fix in your life distances you from your soul's innocent curiosity about life. There is a part of you, however small and buried, that has utter faith in life, that is willing to go wherever you are taken, that looks out upon this precious existence with wonder and praising, for the simple blades of grass, for the smell of the earth, for the warm flesh of your loved one and the laughter of strangers. This part of you sometimes breaks through the mask of your control and affirms the childlike innocence of your heart. There is a moment when the rational discursive thinking breaks through to the symbolic, feeling language of rhythm and image, hidden in your blood. This happened just now as I was writing this…

In the land of image only
of sound without word only
I’ll search for you
I gather the golden leaves
each one inscribed with a destiny
a calligraphy no one has yet understood
the meaning of which must be whispered

As I was writing about language and the inner voice my own inner voice rose up to speak. Notice how my third person objective prose turned into intimate address, into “You” all of a sudden. Where the limitations of rational language appear, soul must find a way through to greater truth. The soul is excellent at flowing into any cracks and crevices that appear in the monolithic structures of your conscious mind. Heart’s logic is not mind’s logic. Which feels more real to you? Which kind of language glimpses a fuller, richer more mysterious experience? Which is more vulnerable and exposed? Poetry is both a veil and the rending of the veil covering Reality. It is a cover for the poet, yet it is designed to reveal much more than other kinds of language can reveal about the complex multidimensionality of experience. Is it straightforward? Is it the language of therapeutic self-disclosure? No it is not.

Poetry resists the overt statement; it suggests. Mind would create a bottom line platform or position out of our rich lived experience of each moment. Mind reduces and seeks to categorize and control, to discriminate and choose this over that. It desires or rejects in each moment, constantly affirming yes or no to every thing that crosses our path. This is how we make sense of reality and make the choices necessary to live complete lives. Rationality is a beautiful thing. Yet beyond our logic and rational mind there is the utter bafflement of the mind before the mystery of Being and non-being, birth, and death, pain, loss and love. We know nothing. We know everything there is to be known. These contradictions can be balanced within poetry, since poetry resists a bottom line, a black and white conclusion. Poetry is true to the grayness of the soul’s terrain. Since everything in the universe exists within the soul, how can it say this or that is wholly other? Since every life we encounter IS ourselves, how can we pretend we are separate? And yet we are separate and live most of our lives feeling bounded within our own skin and minds, completely alone and isolated from what is outside ourselves.

Poetry can contain and suggest this paradox, playing with it like a lover, coaxing it out and speaking to it from inside and outside. Poetry loves distance, and originates from closeness. But all of this is lost unless one has the courage to affirm the soul, the sacred inwardness of one’s own precious vision. This is especially challenging when inwardness has been given no value in the world, in culture, yet it is where everything is conceived, ripened and born from. Without silence, no word could form. There is an empty fertile darkness where all the forms are born.

Who will honor and protect the soul’s darkness? Will you protect and value your own inner life, even if there is never any applause or money or accomplishment you can hold up as its outer sign? Will you give your life to becoming a tender-hearted eye-- to learn how to truly see? Will you make a space for poetry, even if it has no value in the world but affirms the value of that which is mysterious, dark and silent in us, that which is, paradoxically, beyond language?

Poetry as Feminine Alchemy

By Jennifer Ferraro

P oems are the most highly condensed, highly charged usage of language. A poem must bear the brunt and wholeness of an experience in its slender and spare container, through compact lines shrouded by white space and born of silence to convey multiple dimensions of thinking-feeling. The poem is alchemical in that it turns the dross of unfathomed, unattended experience into a distillation of essence, of meaning.

Poetry is an act, ultimately, of transfiguration. It makes meaning out of chaos, wholeness out of what is otherwise fragmented, disparate and contradictory in our perceptions, feelings, and experiences of the world and our inner lives. While preserving the contradictoriness of our experience, the poem provides a container, a symbolic gathering place. In the end, it is the gathering in of all contradictions, tensions, dualities and states of being—to be fired, cooked, ripened, culled, polished and chiseled —into a jewel-like chalice full of elixir. This chalice is a living symbol of the interpenetration of consciousness in matter, the wedding of consciousness and matter that is more real than the original experience.

The poem is the bridge between silence and the word, between the personal and the transpersonal, the universal and the specific. The poet's voice is the signature note her soul strikes. The poet's five senses, body, heart and mind, are the only compass of truth—the universal truth gleaned from the specific and sensuous, coming within and through the specific and sensuous which now bear forth from the seas of wordless sensation and silent beingness the treasure of their own meaningfulness. It is in order to make the specific and sensuous sacred, to illuminate the essence of our lived lives and the tangible imminent world that the poem exists. The poem serves to sacralize the individual subjective experience and to create an elixir of that experience that can nourish, refresh, delight and awaken others from their slumber of inattention and forgetfulness of soul. Poetry unites the inner with the outer reality—or rather, depending on how one looks at it–testifies to and symbolizes the unity of inner and outer beingness.

The poem is always a matter of soul. Specifically, it is a matter of the soul's refinement and proneness to beauty coupled with a tendency toward language, the Word. Poetry is born not only from sensitivity but from exquisite sensitivity; and from an attentiveness to one's inner being as much as to the outer world. One’s eyes must be focused outward and inward at the same time. When experience penetrates the heart and mind of the human being a poem may be born. Not always though… since the mother of poetry is Mystery. The father of poetry is a mixture of Destiny and Craft. But craft and destiny in the end are a matter of necessity for the poet–and we are left again alone with Mystery.

In some ways, poetry is like the female sex in that it is always somewhat enclosed and hidden. It is veiled even at its most apparent and naked. Poetry has secrets that she doesn't give away. One must unlock them in oneself. Poetry does not yield easily to the shallow-minded or coarse-hearted. In order to open its secrets a poem requires a heart and mind capable of receiving and able to flow. In some sense, one must already know or have the capacity to know whatever the poem is pointing to. Poems are subtle and come from the crevices, the liminal places, where dark and light meet. Many poems must be felt, not thought about, in order to be understood. And some poems one must stand by dumbfounded and in awe–and be patient in a place beyond logic’s machinations—quaffing the fragrance of what has been conjured, beyond the safe and rational maps of discursive language.

The poem resists the dominating and limiting boundaries of rational logical thinking, even as it must use and refer endlessly to these established roadmaps of meaning. Feeling will not be excised; the heart will not be cut out of truth-making and truth-sensing. The moon will not be sacrificed for the sun, nor the ocean for the solid ground upon which humans rule. Silence will not be pushed under the word, the soul will not be pushed out of the earth and cast into the prison of a heaven where we are not. In this sense poetry carries out what Christopher Bamford calls a “Sophianic“ mission–The wisdom of poetry is the wisdom of the Divine Feminine, of the earth en-souled and heaven embodied.

Art as Intimacy

By Jennifer Ferraro

F or me art, whether poetry, painting or dancing, has always been driven, above all, by the desire to be seen and known—to not be an anonymous heart and being in the universe; rather to know that one is ever in the warm embrace of intimacy. Longing is the mother of intimacy, in that it is actually the sign that we are loved. Longing is the sign of our remembrance of being loved. This is not just a romantic urge or psychological impetus toward the mother and the womb… This longing is the proof that the heart is still innocent enough to sense that Reality is more than the shallow external images we are constantly pressured to believe in; That the purpose of our lives amounts to more than the myriad goals we set for ourselves, or that we should be content with building a secure, insulated, predictable outer existence.

Beauty is where the infinite becomes intimate.
~ John O'DonohuePoetry responds to my longing for a more authentic, real connection to life and enacts a greater intimacy with it. It comes from the paradox of intimacy and distance that we inherit as human beings. Intimacy is about truly seeing and being seen. To be seen is to be held in the embrace of vastness, to bring the cold vast stars and moon down into one’s face. Lovers can help us if they see and reflect us to ourselves—but what if they do not see us, or only see a partial view (which is most often the case)? What if they only reflect back the rejected or shadowy aspects of ourselves? Those we love and who love us must do this for us—but so often they will fail to provide what is truly sought for. The intimacy we seek encompasses the intimacy we find with those we love, but it cannot be contained in our human relations. Each friend or lover can only hold a given amount of who we are, can only reflect back so much. If we take their reflection as truth, we get a limited picture of who we really are. Even taking our own ideas and thoughts to be who we are is limited. We so seldom can see ourselves, our full potential as human beings.

The infinitude we hold in our finite lives is stunning—a wake up call we are called to answer. The Beloved we want to meet in loving embrace, with our realest, truest being, is the Universe itself. But we cannot love what we cannot see and relate with. Therefore we most often succeed in loving what is humanly imaged and imagined—and in another’s eyes which soften looking at us, in that communion which may or may not have words, we harvest the fruit of being human. We learn what a gift and a mystery it is to be a human heart, so tender and deep, so responsive and vast.

The gift of the artist is that the artist visits that place of communion in her own being–follows the path of longing inward toward a place of intimate conversing—where separation and union are constantly playing around each other, dancing whispering, advancing and retreating. Longing says, “Come here” and Union answers, “No—sing to me from over there—the sound of your voice thrills me.” The poet, for instance, might become a mystic in that moment of creative surrender where the poem is born. BUT for most poets, their destiny and calling is to linger at the ledge where silence births the word. To follow the path of silence to the Source of silence is not the path of the poet—that is the path of the mystic. The poet is created by the universe to be the mouthpiece, to dip into the real, the sublime, the beautiful, the tender, and in a fruitful over-spilling to speak – to share in language what silence worked within her soul. The impression of experience thus becomes transmission through the art of the poet, and our mysterious human existence is seen to be communal and luminous, mysterious, terrible and beautiful – in other words, utterly sacred and transparently divine.

Returning the Soul to Poetryand Poetry to the Soul…

Poetry as Feminine Alchemy

Art as Intimacy

Returning the Soul to Poetry
and Poetry to the Soul…