Ru Freeman

Last year, my middle-child, the thinking feeling one, wrote a question to me in a book that we pass back and forth to each other: Is Santa Claus real? She had already experienced a near-miss with the tooth fairy who hadn’t yet come by 4.30am, a fact which she had taken, tearful, to her older sister, saying, “I am afraid the Tooth Fairy is Amma. She went out last night and there is nothing under my pillow.” Mercifully, the usually self-absorbed teenager tucked her sister into bed, watched until she fell asleep and then went looking for a box of art-cards to leave under the pillow with a note that read, I am sorry I am late. Your box was heavy and it took me a while to get here. Understanding, in other words, was just around the corner. And yet, how could I be the one to dispel the mystery? Instead I, like hundreds of mothers and fathers before me, took refuge behind a full-color print out of the letter written by Francis P. Church and appearing in The New York Sun in 1897, ‘Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.’ Sometimes, I wrote by way of introduction, a writer looks to another writer to say what they want to say. The book stayed with her a long time and I was afraid I had crushed her faith in my honesty.

This past summer, while cycling around the Schyulkill river in the City of Brotherly Love where I live, she brought up the topic again. “Are you the tooth fairy?” she asked. What could I say but, yes. I launched, then, into an explanation as to why these stories exist. The job of a parent, I told her, is to keep the fairy tale alive until the child is old enough to take it on. I related the story of her older sister standing in for me, of how once she was no longer waiting for the famed fluttered one, she was glad to turn her attention to making sure that the fairies kept arriving for her sisters. It’s your turn, I said, to do the same for your younger sister.

Although she had taken to winking and smiling in a knowing way as the youngest of my daughters talked enthusiastically about Santa, just a few days ago I realized that the knowledge of his ‘non-existence’ sat heavy in her heart. “Why,” she asked me - as we went looking for ‘the furry slippers’ that the youngest was hoping against hope Santa would bring for her - “why is it that if we have to end up knowing Santa is not real, why do parents tell their children that he is real? Wouldn’t it be better if we never thought he was real?” Navigating traffic, I, at first, gave a smart-alecky response: “Would you have liked to be the only curmudgeon walking around at the age of two saying ‘Santa is not real!’?”

Then, I gave her the answer that I felt in my heart. We let children believe in things that don’t exist for adults in the hope that they will continue to believe in the things that adults forget do exist: that the world is essentially good, that people are kinder than we know, that peace is possible. If we only believed in the things we see before us, or know for a fact are real, why would we ever dream of magic, transformation, the immense potential for a different outcome?

Growing up in Sri Lanka within a Buddhist family in a predominantly Buddhist country, Christmas was something I celebrated with my Catholic friends, going to midnight mass, eating Bruedher and sipping cheap wine. On our tropical island, there were no Christmas trees or snow. But the Christmases of pines decorated with ornaments and lights, of snow on the ground and carolers and, most of all, the arrival of Santa Claus, all things I had read about in books and imagined, was always on my mind. Each Christmas Eve I would put myself to bed in a fever of excitement. Santa was going to come. This was the year. Santa didn’t come to Sri Lanka, I thought, because not enough people believed he would. Every year my older brothers, particularly the one closest to me in age, would say goodnight from the door to my room, lifting up the curtain to say “You waiting for Santa? You think he’s going to come this year?” with laughter in their voices. Looking back I wonder if they envied me my complete and heartfelt faith in the arrival of Santa, the ability to forgive the fact that he never showed up, nor ever would.

Now, in my American home I embrace Christmas with the fervor of the zealot. The tree! The presents! The cookies and carrots! Even, when my husband indulged me one year, “footprints” made of flour leading from chimney to tree for my oldest daughter’s first Christmas and mine.

During all those years when Santa failed to show, I never imagined that Christmas would become the anchoring holiday of my adult life. I still have a youngest who marvels at how well Santa knows our family. That chore chart, she says, is perfect for the three of us. I have coaxed my husband the atheist to say, just this morning, “there are elves who wait for those last minute requests and then they shoot out little rockets so Santa, who is already on his way, gets them.” This, in the face of a small voice announcing at breakfast that she really hoped for a guitar pick, something she had not let ‘Santa’ know in time. Most of all, I have three daughters who are willing to let what they know to be true unwind just a little; enough to let the magic in. I fully expect that, as adults, they will look at all the problems in their world with clear eyes, as I do, and still be able to soften that gaze long enough to know that it doesn’t have to remain that way. I credit Santa for that. Long may children small and large, believe that he will come.

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I say what I think. Perhaps that’s a bit of an understatement. I say what I think about a multitude of things and often when I’m saying what I think I am in direct conflict with what a majority of people may be thinking about the same thing, or I am at odds with a more comfortable point of view. For people who don’t know me personally it may seem as though I am constantly in the thick of one sort of battle or another, usually against forces far greater than any I could muster, often against those who are going to cream me in the long run. I learned from the best: my father is now in retirement and lives as he does because he stuck to his guns through decades of service to multiple governments, my late mother was - and, in memory, remains - beloved precisely for her willingess to tell it like it is. My brothers and I carry the torch. (Only one of us, the oldest, is able to let some things go unsaid and I attribute that to his deeper involvement in scripture and his renunciation of much of the noise produced by politics).

What sustains me is what sustained and sustains them: a belief that, if I do not shy away from doing my small part, in the end, good will prevail for us all. To paraphrase the Pink Floyd song, I guess the “walk on part in the war” has always seemed more preferable to the people in my family than the “lead role in a cage.” And though my mother, in particular, often worried about our fate, and sometimes tried to tell us how hard the fall is from the edge of that limb up high in the sky, or how bare our necks looked exposed as they were, what could we do but do as she did, do as our father did: keep climbing, keep sticking our necks out.

People who do know me know that - whatever it looks like from the outside - I try to live a peaceable, compassionate life, attending just as much to moments of grace as I do to the social/injustices that plague us. And, as a rule (okay, with the exception of the fool who turns on the left turn signal after we are already at the stop-light), I tend to take people at their word, to accept that they are who them say they are, to believe that they are well-intentioned until proven otherwise. When I do find something that gets under my skin, more often than not, what I can bring to a cause is my voice. If I have been given the gift of words, then it stands to reason that I should use it to honor the gift-giver by using it to the best of my abilities. But passion and words are both double-edged swords.

This weekend, I fell into conversation with a neighbor. We had both been concerned about the misuse of authority on the part of an individual employed by this school district and we had talked about bringing our concerns to the relevant people. Although he had decided, in consultation with his wife, that it would be better not to become involved, I have no doubt that, after our conversation, they will decide to do so. But it was what he said that gave me pause. Touching my shoulder in genuine reassurance, he said, we know the fight is in good hands. i.e, mine.

Like I said, I learned from the best. I learned to speak up. But I also learned that nobody gets anything done by themselves. Audre Lorde said the following words: “there are no single issue struggles because we do not live single issue lives.” The Occupy Wall Street movement is a perfect example of what Lorde was talking about, despite the fact that so many seem not to understand the reason for its seeming “chaos.” But we also do not fight our battles alone. The boy with his finger in the dyke may have prevented the town from being inundated and countless human beings from drowning, but he suffered greatly while doing it. I do not imagine that I am that important, or that anything I do is comparable to that story, but I do know that standing alone is, well, lonely, often futile and usually fatal to ones wellbeing.

Long ago - it seems - in the months after I had returned to the US after a long period back home, when I was still looking for work and spent my time watching the Senate hearings on TV, hour by endless hour, I went to Newark, NJ to stand on a street-corner to protest the attacks against Bill Clinton in the throes of the Lewinsky scandal. It was an event organized by a relatively small group called Censure and Move On, a group which has since become MoveOn.org a behemoth power in politics. As we drove up we saw that, on a grey and rainy afternoon, there were two people standing on the corner with umbrellas. My companion - whose constant charge has been to save me from myself - surveying the embarassing scene from a fair distance said: “Ru, don’t be nuts. Let’s not make fools of ourselves standing in the rain with two people.” The words that sprang to my lips came not from me but from generations of people who had felt the same way I did right then: “That’s when it is important to stand out there,” I said. “What is the use of joining something when there are a thousand people there? This, when it is difficult and uncomfortable, this is when it counts.” With that I stormed off and, as he often does, my husband soon followed even though this type of shenanigan is not his thing, it has never been; it will always be difficult for him but, to his everlasting credit - much more than I deserve because, hard though it may be, I grew up learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable - he has always done it when it counts.

I may have the words to write persuasively about my case, and those words probably give the impression that the “fight” whatever it is, can be successfully won by me. I may speak with passion for my candidate, my cause, my peeve, and that passion probably makes people believe that I’m “passionate enough for the both of us.” Neither is true. Nothing, absolutely nothing, except for love for another and enlightenment of the soul, can be accomplished alone. No matter how strong the words, no matter how great the passion. Everything takes a village. And then many villages. And entire regions. And a country. And many countries. But mostly, it takes more than one. The fight is not in good hands if it remains in the hands of a single person because that is usually a fight that is going to be lost. So if you ever wonder if it is really necessary to raise your hand and be counted when somebody else seems to have it covered, or if it seems a little out of your comfort zone - even though you are invested in the outcome - or if you are worried about what this one or that one might think of you - even though you really hope the fight will be won - rest assured, it is. It is always necessary. Unless you are equally invested, equally hopeful that the fight is going to be lost. If that is the case, by all means, remain silent.

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About a month ago I spoke about blogging at the Montgomery County Community College Writers Conference. Given that the people who were in attendance were, for the most part, writers who were thinking about blogging but had not set up a blog of their own, I offered them my space so they could see what it looks like, a literary version of “try it before you buy it.” Of the people who signed up, I’ve received - thus far - only one post, and that, from a fourteen year old girl, the youngest in that room. Rhiannon Richardson and is a freshman in high school who describes herself thus: passions include “Writing and conversing about debatable and common topics is my passion. I love to take what I hear and see in everyday life and put it into my novels. My hobbies are softball, writing, reading, listening to a wide range of music, and raising a nursery of Dalmatian molly fish.”

I remember being that young. I remember seizing every opportunity I was given with gratitude and enthusiasm, an immense love for life. It is great to see the tradition alive and thriving among this generation of writers. So long as there are girls with an imagination like hers, how can the world go wrong? Here’s Rhiannon’s post on the last day of her life.

The Last Saturday

Saturday. It isn’t Monday, the workday. It isn’t Sunday, the day you go to church. It isn’t Friday, the day you spend partying all night because “hey tomorrow’s Saturday!” Saturday is the day where you can do anything you choose. The one day out of the week that you can go anywhere and do anything, it’s the life changing day of your life! So how would you spend it? The world is going to end on Saturday and you will lose everything. What are you going to do?

The last Saturday of my life I will wake up and pray. I’ll thank God for the life he’s given me, and the last day he is going to give to me. Then my day will begin. I’ll go to the Hollister store, and buy an entire outfit, because if I’m trying to scrimp with my money I can’t normally afford it. Then I’ll take all the rest of my money and take a trip to Bali because right down there, there’s a little rocky hillside with a beautiful view of the ocean, and I’ve only been to the beach three times in my fourteen years of living. I’ll find Alex Pettyfer and kiss him, because I’ve never kissed anyone in my life, and he is my favorite celebrity. A private plane will take me to Africa because I’m African American and I’ve never seen the place of my heritage, and I think it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Après ce (after that) I’d go to France because I’ve spent two years learning the language and I want to go where I have no choice but to speak it. Plus, France is one of the most fashionable places in the world, and it’s a wise place to spend the last bit of money I have on my party dress… To end my most magical day, I’ll grab all of my friends and go to the world’s last party, because “Tonight is the Night” that we dance for the last time. I’d dance till my heart gives out and I’ll dance again once I’m in heaven.

A wise man once said, “Work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching,” (Randall G Leighton). So, how would you spend the last “free” day of your life?

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Two years ago I was in Sri Lanka, getting ready to return home to ordinary life. Life that had to go on, life that would, with all its accompanying routines. As I sat in the home I had grown up, surrounded by all the things that my mother had left behind, quite as though she had just run out for a moment, I felt a deep sense of dread about leaving. I saw no point in life. I did not know how or when I would ever stop grieving. My brothers were both worried about me for they understood that while they would continue to live in the place where she had lived, continue to be comforted by the many rituals of our Buddhist faith, I was going to a place where I would be alone with my grief. One of them offered to have his wife apply to study for her doctorate at one of the universities near my home. “We could live there,” he said, though I knew that living here was not something either of them would want to do for any length of time, their lives were in Sri Lanka. The other brother, an anti-Apple brother, but a musician to whom I had once boasted about my acquisition of an iPod, said “I will put some sermons on a CD for you. You can download them onto your iPod. They will help you.” They did. There was nothing else that I could listen to but those sermons. I don’t know that I understood each one, but there was something calming in the warm and, often, merry voice of the priest whose name I did not know.

Today, my father sent me this sermon and it turns out that it was delivered by the same priest whose words had helped me through the worst year of my life, publication of my first novel notwithstanding. Then, as now, I am often in the position of having to set aside what I am feeling in order to be light, rock, beacon or hope to the people I love. And as I do those things I have often wondered when I might find that illusive state of being called peace of mind. Below, the sermon:


‘RIP now while you can still enjoy it’
WORDS OF WISDOM from Ven. Ajahn Brahmavanso on his 60th Birthday

Achieving peace of mind is a lovely way of describing the meaning of life. It is something that everyone aspires to. However, peace of mind is often like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - it tends to be elusive for most people. I would like you to reflect on the times when you were the happiest. You would probably find that your happiest times were when you experienced a deep sense of contentment or peace of mind. But when you reflect on these experiences, you realize they didn’t occur because everything around you was perfect. On the contrary, you realized that peace of mind occurred, in spite of your surroundings not being perfect, in spite of difficulties problems and imperfections of life.

That is my first important point. Don’t think peace of mind only comes once you have fixed up all your problems and finished all your business. All your worrying, all your striving and struggling.., has it ever got you where you really wanted to be? You can’t control the world and change it the way you would like it. Therefore, you can only find peace of mind and achieve the meaning of life by embracing the imperfections of life. How do you do that?; by knowing that imperfection is the nature of the world. So make peace with imperfection. Another thing you can’t change is the past and yet lingering on the past, people worry about and feel guilty and angry about it, but since you can’t change it, the only wise thing to do is to make peace with it. But how do you do that when there is so much unfinished business? You make it finished.

One of my favourite stories is about the abbot who was building the main hall for his monastery. It takes a lot of time and effort to make such a big building, and the building work was still in progress when the time came for annual rains retreat. The abbot told the builders to go home and come back in 3 months. A few days later, a visitor came to the temple and asked when the hall was going to be finished the abbot replied ” It is finished ” the visitor was quite stunned and said ” What do you mean it is finished? There is no roof are you going to leave it like that? There is no glass in the windows, there are pieces of wood and cement bags all over the floor”. To which the abbot unforgettably replied: “What is done is finished.”

What a beautiful response that was. It is the only way to find peace in life. If you want all your building work to be finished before you stop to find peace, all your jobs out of the way, all your letters and emails replied to, you will never find peace of mind, because there is always more to be done. As I have often said, the only place in our modern societies where you find people resting in peace, is in the cemeteries, but then it’s too late to enjoy it. So I say RIP now, while you can still enjoy it. I’m making the observation that you only find peace, when you realize that what’s done, is finished. The past is gone; let it go. One of the signs of true spirituality - of whatever tradition - is forgiveness and letting go. I was once asked how many times you should forgive, and I replied, ”Always one more time,” that is, forever.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful acts that humans are capable of. In South Africa, Just after apartheid had been dismantled and Nelson Mandela had been made president, instead of seeking revenge, instead of punishing all those people who punished him, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anybody who had done a crime was able to go to this commission and confess, what they’d done. As long as they were truthful, no matter how horrendous their crimes, they would be given amnesty and forgiveness. It was a brilliant way of dealing with the past. One of the moving events of that commission was a policeman recounting, in the presence of the man’s widow, how he had tortured and killed her husband, a black African activist from the ANC. Can you imagine this scene? There was a woman whose husband had disappeared…, probably in the middle of the night, and she suspected what had happened, but didn’t know the true story. Now she was facing a man who was confessing in detail, how he had tortured and killed her husband, the father of her children, the man she loved. Apparently this white police officer was shaking and trembling as he recounted the details of what had happened. At the end of her testimony the widow rose from her seat and went towards him. The guards were supposed to stop her but they froze. She went up to him put her big black arms around him and said “I forgive you.”

Not just the two of them wept, but apparently the whole room.

This sort of beautiful act is one of true spirituality. Both the victim and the perpetrator would move on and become better people. They would learn real compassion, gain real wisdom, and find a real way of moving forward. Now if that woman could forgive the murderer of the man she loved, then each one of us - if we really put our minds to it - is capable of forgiving anything.

I was once counselling a woman who was dying of cancer. I asked her what was the worst thing she’d ever done, an act she might carry to her grave and feel terrible about. She told me she had kissed a man who was not her husband. I said ” If that’s the worst thing you’ve done, you’ve lived a pretty good life.” When she saw my reaction, she realized for the first time, that it wasn’t all that bad. To me it seemed like a small thing, but she had been eaten up inside. It was such a release for her to tell someone.

When you keep things to yourself, even the smallest things can become huge. When you acknowledge them, especially if you tell a good friend, you can see that they’re no big deal and you can let them go. The way to forgiveness is to realize that you’re worth forgiving and so is the other person. That realization is step number one. That black woman in South Africa saw something in that policeman who had killed her husband, something she could respect, something worth saving, so she forgave. Remember, there’s no such thing as a murderer; no such thing as a thief; only a person who has stolen; no such thing as a cheat, only a person who has cheated. If you understand that, you understand why forgiveness is possible: there’s something more to any person than the bad acts. And that’s true of each of one of you. No matter what you’ve done, there’s always something inside of you, that is worthy of forgiveness.

Worrying about the future

Another thing which stops inner peace is worrying about the future. People often think they need to worry about global warming, the credit crunch, the wars, the natural disasters, AIDS, and the cancers. But it’s only worthwhile thinking about things you can do something about. If you can’t do anything, why worry? In addition, you can’t predict the future; It’s totally uncertain.

On one occasion when I was just a school kid, my mother told me I was going to the dentist the following morning. I told my mum ” Mummy don’t send me to the dentist; you don’t love me; you’re sending me to the torturer.” But try as I might, I couldn’t get off it. When I went to bed that night, I was worried and didn’t sleep well. The following morning my mother had to drag me to the dentist, and I was screaming and crying. But I eventually got to the surgery, my appointment had been cancelled. All that worry, all that crying for no reason. That was a very important experience for me. I learnt, there’s no point worrying about the future, when you don’t know what’s going to happen. Life is completely unpredictable. When you understand that, you can have peace of mind in the present moment.

You can have peace of mind, even when you’re dying. Why not? No more worries about taxes, global warming or anything else, because you’re soon, about to depart, The problems of the world become irrelevant. When there are no problems, you become peaceful. And because you never know how much time you’ve got left, you might as well be peaceful now. This was Ajahn Chah’s great teaching to me, when I was sick in hospital. He came to visit me and gave me the sort of teaching you remember for the rest of your life. He told me ” Brahmavamso you’re either going to get better or you’re going to die.” That really didn’t hurt at first, because it wasn’t what I had expected. It wasn’t the usual bedside manner of your best friend. But when I started to think about it, I realized that it meant the sickness wasn’t going to last. That was such a relief. Sometimes, you meet people who have understood this; They are dying and supposedly in agony, but they still tell jokes. They’re happy and peaceful.

You must also make peace with whatever you have to do in life, with your duties and responsibilities. Peace of mind is not achieved by always trying to do what you like. On the contrary, you find peace of mind, by making peace with whatever you are called to do. Whatever your role, whatever your duties, you can always have fun, enjoy it, put happiness into it and make peace with it. You can make peace and have fun with anything, anywhere. Peace of mind is not found by searching for a deep cave, in a perfect monastery; in a wonderful place high in the Himalayan Mountains. If you’re looking for peace that way, you are looking for what Ajahn Chah called, a tortoise with a moustache. People look for the impossible and of course, they can’t find it. There is no such thing as a tortoise with a moustache.

You find real peace of mind, by accepting your life as you have it now, even in the midst of great tragedy. What a wonderful thing that is. How do you find this peace? Let go of all the past and guilt, by forgiving, don’t worry about the future, and learn to appreciate the moment. Do your duty and put fun into whatever you have to do.
Peace of mind is as free as the air: Drink it, enjoy it, and take it with you. It’s always there, if only you look in the right place.

Ven. Ajahn Brahmavanso

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Two days ago the vast state of Pennsylvania woke up to news of a fresh scandal involving allegations that a coach at Penn State University sexually assaulted and abused at least eight student-athletes in his care. You can read more about the case here. Below, a few snippets form the case:

Sandusky, 67, faces 40 abuse charges, including 21 felonies. Sandusky, released on $100,000 bail, is charged with abusing eight boys between 1994 and 2009, with some incidents said to have taken place in a Penn State athletics building. He retired from Paterno’s staff in 1999.

Athletics director Tim Curley is going on administrative leave at his request, according to a statement from the school board of trustees late Sunday. Senior vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz will step down and go back into retirement. The two face charges they perjured themselves before a grand jury and failed to notify law enforcement authorities of child sexual abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky.

A student athlete is defined as “a participant in an organized competitive sport sponsored by the educational institution in which he or she is enrolled. The term student-athlete is used to describe the direct balance of a full-time student and a full-time athlete.” The NCAA has clear guidelines (sometimes observed in the breach), regarding the management of the student (who is also an athlete), and the degree to which a coach can and cannot be involved in the conduct of the student’s life outside the time allocated to coaching that student in a sport and the playing of that sport.

I had reason to look into those guidelines with regard to the management of high school athletic programs here in the Lower Merion School District and I was shocked to discover that many of the laws governing that relationship between coach and student at the NCAA level were being violated by one of the coaches at the high school. Agreed, the NCAA guidelines do not cover high school athletes, however, it stands to reason that whatever limitations are places upon college coaches who are dealing for the most part with adults, ought to be far less severe than guidelines in place at high schools for coaches dealing with minors, particularly those coaches who are working with children of the opposite sex, even more so if the child’s health is at risk.

How is it possible, for instance, that there are clear guidelines for teachers who see students perhaps once a day for an hour - and never send them emails using a personal email address not associated with the district whether school is in session or not, or invite them to dinner in their homes or make mixed CDs for them, or abuse their parents, or demand that they do not participate in other school sanctioned activities, or bully them one at a time into agreeing to continue participating in a class of the teacher’s choice - but none for coaches who spend several hours with students within and outside the school environment? In all fairness, this particular school district (Lower Merion), is taking this discrepency very seriously. After all, we live in an area where you can’t sneeze without a gesundheit from a trigger-happy lawyer.

11/10/11 - Addendum:The documents released by the grand jury in the case against Sandusky describes the testimony of Steven Turchetta, the assistant principal and the head football coach at the high school that Victim 1 attended:

Turchetta characterized Sandusky as very needy within the mentoring relationship he established with Second Mile students. Sandusky would often want a greater time commitment than the teenagers were willing to give and Sandusky would have “shouting matches” with various youth in which Turchetta would sometimes be the mediator. Turchetta would also end up being Sandusky’s point of contact for a youth he had been unable to reach by phone the previous evening. Turchetta testified that Sandusky would be “clingy” and even “needy” when a young man broke off the relationship he had established with him and called the behavior “suspicious.”

As the administration in general and principals and athletic directors in particular within the schools that belong to this district deal with these matters, they would be wise to reflect on the events unfolding in our own backyard at PSU. In the end, the adults in charge are to blame. In the end, the particular adult who broke the rules of engagement isn’t the only one to take the fall, and with good reason. The people who supervise the coaches and the people who supervise the people supervising the coaches are all culpable. Schultz and Curley are history and there are calls that the board of trustees fire Graham Spanier, the president. head coach, Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier have both been fired. Underlining all of this is a gigantic financial price tag that the university will have to fold into a budget that is supposed to deliver services to students. That’s usually the way things shake down. It would be a pity if this school district (which is beleaguered by people who rush to lawsuits before trying to get school staff and district administration to do the right thing), refuses to take the complaints of multiple parents seriously and ends up precipitating exactly the kind of negative publicity, financial burden and demoralizing school environment that are part and parcel of lawsuits.

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I have a brother who writes (another who does not and many more “brothers” who are engaged in doing good things in the world). People who know me know how much I admire this writer-brother of mine. Over the years I have tried to organize his poetry (he has a collection out), collect his hundreds of articles, and in other ways attempted to corral his words into one place so that everybody can access them. He has resisted all of it. I keep trying. He’s a Libra, I’m a half-Virgo. End of story. The following is a feature piece that appeared recently in The Daily News in Sri Lanka, one of the papers for which he writes alongside all the other newspapers that also carry his work. It spoke to me for all the reasons his writing speaks to me, but particularly, in this case, because life has been difficult lately for me and I have often found myself posing the question, “when will it end?” to myself. Not as I should - it will end, all life does - but more in the sense of “when will this particular hardship end?” Which is, as he points out, a fairly meaningless question in the scheme of things.

There Will Always Be A Bell To Save You.
by Malinda Seneviratne

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Just a few days ago, the husband of my college room-mate, a guy I’ve only met once (at their wedding), who serves in the American military whose wars I cannot condone, posted this line as his facebook status update: “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”

In a rush of excitement at discovering something in common between us, I mistook that poem for one I had learned as a child, ‘Wander-thirst’ by Gerald Gould, whose poem opens with these lines:

Beyond the east the sunrise; Beyond the west the sea
And East and West the Wander-Thirst that will not let me be;
It works in me like madness to bid me say goodbye,
For the seas call, and the stars call, and oh! The call of the sky!

I heard that poem recited best by my oldest brother, Arjuna, to whom poetic declamation and stage-presence came readily along with the accolades of teacher and examiner alike. The lines quoted by my Facebook friend, of course, came form John Masefield’s poem, ‘Sea Fever,’ another “yearning to breathe free” poem that I had heard recited by my brother.

It got me thinking about poetry and the first poems that I read. I studied what is called ‘Elocution’ in Sri Lanka, a mannered acquisition not only of the English language but of its literature, including history and literary theory as well as the latin terminology for the various parts of our mouths that combine or separate to form sounds - the epiglottis, lingua, etc. I learned these things at a young age, as an only girl in an all-boys classroom where I am told that during one morning in an early year of my life - I must have been six or seven at the time - I, much to my teacher’s and mother’s horror, stood up and tucked my pretty dress into my underwear in order to look like them! Small efforts to integrate like that notwithstanding, In comparison to my oldest brother who executed precise and heartfelt recitations, I struggled with the poems and prose passages I was given to memorize for my examinations. I could decorate the pages of my notebook with sketches of my characters, even manage a passable Becky Sharp (from Thakeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’) or Katherine (from Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’), but in general I was not bound for success upon the stage.

My appreciation of literature came from listening to my mother teach her students, then one of my older brothers (who gave up physics and maths to study literature and politics), and finally, me. And of all the poems my mother taught, the one I remember with the greatest clarity as it stayed on the Advanced Level syllabus year after year, was John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

A teenaged school girl at the time, Donne’s message was entirely crystallized in an unabashedly secular reading of those final lines, their visceral yearning finding an answering beat in my own tormented heart, a heart whose longings were anything but prayerful. And yet I often wondered what faith my mother harkened toward as she recited those lines, sounding the beat of his words with consistent passion. Who, in other words, was her God? Was he - I had no doubt that this God was male - human? Was he crowned with thorns like the Jesus Christ who reigned in stained glass glory over the chapel at the convent I attended? Was he poetry itself? Somewhere along the way I realized that I did not know to whom or of whom she spoke, and I learned that I, too, may never know of whom I spoke then or speak now. The poem existed and the very fact of its existence, its permeable words, its impermeable intent, its offering of itself, these things were enough.

I always knew that this poem and all the other poems that she would teach me - poems by Wordsworth, Longfellow, Soyinka, Dryden, Browning, Coleridge, Rossetti and dozens of others including Dylan and Lennon - moved my mother into a realm that held a greater peace than was permissible in the conduct of her life. I followed her there as a child, longing to inhabit the same space that moved her so greatly. I never made it. She was always a little further on, somewhere else, the reading that she gave to me only a fragment of the gift she received through her own involvement with the poem. I realize now, that was her gift: to teach me to hold a poem on my tongue, to follow it with my whole heart, to let it take me where it will, to return blessed.

A while back I put out a call to ask my friends to tell me their favorite poets. A reading list for me. Here is that thread. I am sure my friends will forgive me the cut/paste that reveals their identities (and do click their links to read their work):

In honor of this month dedicated to poetry, can you tell me your favorite poets? Mine: Mahmoud Darwish, Jane Hirshfield, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, Anne Carson, Eevan Boland, Rabindranath Tagore, Sholeh Wolpe, Jack Gilbert, Stanley Kunitz, Nathalie Handal…

Larry Bradley: Czeslaw Milosz, John Berryman, Carolyn Forche, WS Merwin, Linda Gregerson, Rilke, Charles Wright, Eliot, and maybe an ounce of Pound

C. Dale Young: John Donne, George Herbert, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Brigit Begeen Kelly, Carl Phillips, and others…

Ru Freeman: Love yours too, C. Dale. My first poems were Donne’s - with my mother teaching them as part of the syllabus for high school literature.

Amanda Auchter: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Marie Howe, Nick Flynn, Claudia Rankine, Lucie Brock-Broido, Nicole Cooley, Matthea Harvey, Sylvia Plath, Brian Turner, Jason Shinder, Gary Copeland Lilley, TS Eliot, Sophie Cabot Black, Carolyn Forche, Brenda Hillman, Kevin Young.

Jess Row: Meng Jiao, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Su Shi, Wang Wei, Rilke, Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Anne Sexton, W.S. Merwin, James Tate, James Galvin, Mary Ruefle…

Tomas Q. Morin: Zbigniew Herbert, Gerald Stern, Homer, Philip Levine, Szymborska, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Milosz, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, and whomever wrote the books of Ezekiel and Amos.

Hamutal Yellin: William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, Wislawa Szymborska, Rachel Bluwstein, Leah Goldberg, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Tal Nitzan

Julie Prough: Erica Jong, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, Dylan Thomas, Sandra Cisneros

Pat Ford Loeb: Tony Hoagland, Kay Ryan, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke

Marsha Levell: paul Lawrece dunbar

Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes: Lucille Clifton, Marjorie Agosin, Tato Laviera, Quincy Troupe, Janye Cortez . . .

Porochista Khakpour: ‎#1 Favorites: Henri Cole and Forugh Farrokhzad. Then James Wright, Mark Strand, CK Williams, Sylvia Plath, GC Waldrep, Philip Larkin. And yes re Darwish.

Porochista Khakpour: Oh and Gerard Manley Hopkins of course!! (love this post, Ru. It’s a great reading list for me!)

Sara Stowell: ernesto cardenal, roque dalton

Porochista Khakpour:(how did i forget frank o’ hara! oops)