Bookends: Hoh Rain Forest and Notes from the Field

Here are two poems, written ten years apart, that form a dialogue I've had with myself over the past decade.  The first, "Hoh Rain Forest," I wrote in an attempt to capture part of a 30-day camping trip my family and I took along the west coast and back down through the Cascades back in 2012 when our kids were still young.  As is so often the case with poetry, the poem grew beyond my intent and is really about my religious agnosticism at the time.

The second poem, "Notes from the Field," treads that dangerous ground between art and propaganda, in that I knew what I wanted to say before sitting down to write.  I just needed to find how to word it.  I'm well aware of the dangers of sitting down to write literature with an objective in mind.  Art is an act of discovering truth, not stating what you already believe.  That's what separates the crap of Christan rock from faith-driven groups like U2 or the Killers.  Christian rock groups pander to a particular audience, a particular creed, and as such, must always have an uplifting message.  Thus the music isn't earnest.  Any doubt, anger, irreverence must be sanitized by the end of each song.  U2, on the other hand, although faith-driven, can and does write about more than their faith.  Further more, Bono is the greatest critic of his own faith and himself.  So, when he does write songs like "Yahweh" we're moved.

It's too early for me to know whether "Notes from the Field" works or not.  To me, it doesn't really matter.  My blog is a journal with myself open to the world.  I have no idea why I have that need.  I just do.  Anyway, enjoy.

Hoh Rain Forest

Here in the sponge land
of moist temperate air
and giant moss-draped
big leafed maples,
these glacier carved
rock canyon walls
are like God,
seen only by those
willing to believe anything
and those willing
to get down in the mold
and decay of life,
dig through root
and rusted rot,
moving worm
and slug,
and clumps
of moss
carpeted
by tiny
white
jeweled
flowers

until stone sacred
stone
is reached.

Mother Theresa
knew God
in the bedrock
beneath crowded clumped
humanity.

Somewhere above me
shimmers
the great white peaks
of the Olympic Mountains

and I'm caught between
willing to believe anything
and willing to dig deep.


Notes from the Field

You say I'm a fool to believe.

I've paid my dues,
know these back streets
and dirty alleyways.

Seen a girl's soul break
as her sisters tried to sell her body to me.
One edge, thank God, I turned my back to.

Little lost boy
wandering the dirt calles
looking for God in the eyes of a dog
standing stately on a smoldering heap
of humanity--you can't tell me
unless you've been on your knees
begging God please take this whole damn
hole away--the empty glass towers,
the piercing white meteor showers,
the Milky Way split open, spewing
sterile light, standing the no-man's land
between void and mossy fecundity,
ready to climb the chain link and plunge
to the marble river below.

Unless you've dug
Mother Theresa deep
you can't tell me for sure
God doesn't whisper be still
through the rich eyes
of a child on a Juarez street corner.

What you call shallowness, cowardliness,
taking the easy way out,
stepping away from reality

I call gardening the soul
and I'm ready to get my hands dirty,
dig deep.

Afterwords:

There is no question that for some that religion is a Lazy-Boy chair for the mind.  I don't think there is anything wrong with that.  Life is hard--why not take refuge in something soft and comfortable, which might even be true?

But to assume fear or laziness motivates all belief and that only the simple-minded cling to God is not only arrogant, it's ignorant, every bit as ignorant as Bible thumpers claiming evolution doesn't exist after man has cloned a sheep and named her Dolly.

Further more, knowing the temporal world doesn't qualify you claim a spiritual existence does or does not exist.  Knowing a car engine more intimately than you know your spouse doesn't necessarily make you a poet.  It only qualifies you as a mechanic.  Only digging deep into words, feeling their sharp points, rough edges, marble smooth surfaces--only after handling their opaqueness and their translucency with your eyes after you rake through a poem again and again in the early hours of the morning qualifies you as a poet.  Likewise, science is no more religion (and vice-versa) than mechanics is poetry.  Though, of course, they are also not mutually exclusive--at least this is my belief so far. 

I'm not sure I'm qualified to know.  But this I do know:  I've dug deep enough spiritually to say with certainty, man is more than flesh and bones, that spirit, though invisible to the microscope is none the less as real as electrons or DNA.  Actually more tangible for me.  I've never seen an electron or manipulated a strand of DNA.  I have without doubt felt presence of God in my life, although I did have to dig deep for it.

However, just because I personally haven't viewed an electron or manipulated a gene doesn't prove they don't exist.  Obviously, if you can clone a sheep, you know a thing or two about genetics.  But do you know what animates the eyes or mind of your creation?

Many scientists and theologians suffer from the same arrogance:  they believe there is only one way to know life.  Existence is far too complex to be viewed through one lens.  For me, to even begin to understand life, I have to at least dabble in...

art
religion
music
cooking
mechanics
science
minimal wage jobs

while focusing on my way of know the world intimately--through the spirit--and remaining humble enough to recognize there are other minds, other eyes, other ways to know light flickering on aspen leaves on a cold October morning.

On the headstone of the Mormon theologian, James E. Talmage reads the following inscription rooted in the teachings of Joseph Smith:

Within the Gospel of Jesus Christ is room and place for every truth thus far learned by man or yet to be made known.

This is the size of the Mormonism I believe in, though admittedly it is not the Mormonism of all members.  There are Lazy-Boy Mormons--those who believe narrowly, without much effort.  But the same could be said of followers of any creed, including atheists.

Aspen at Dry Creek, October 9, 2012