Fishers of Men/The Strength of Fields

Some days, the right words come along and stun me into silence.  I'm headed out to read at church this morning, Psalm 62:5-12 and Mark 1:14-20.  The latter has always been one of my favorite passages--that we can become fishers of men.  I am not one for proselytizing or preaching on street corners; a person's road to God is his or her own personal business.  But I've always loved the notion that behind the fishers of men line, that if we are passionate and honest enough, we can unite people to our cause, give them a sense of their own power, infuse them with the light that shines in us.  I don't think that infusion has to be relegated to faith, though it's clear that was Mark's intention.  I think we can light ourselves as we light others, filling and refilling our own depleted souls through the sharing and telling of stories that brings people always always together.

And that sharing can give us purpose.  Today, James L. Dickey says it better than I ever could.

The Strength of Fields

BY JAMES L. DICKEY

... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ... 

Van Gennep: Rites de Passage 

Moth-force a small town always has,   

          Given the night.

                                           What field-forms can be,

         Outlying the small civic light-decisions over

               A man walking near home?

                                                         Men are not where he is   

      Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength

Of fields.    The solar system floats on

    Above him in town-moths.

                                             Tell me, train-sound,

    With all your long-lost grief,

                                             what I can give.   

    Dear Lord of all the fields

                                             what am I going to do?

                                        Street-lights, blue-force and frail

As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how

    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source   

      Of the power you always had

                                             light as a moth, and rising

       With the level and moonlit expansion

    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved

       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk

The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity   

   Is close to the source that sleeping men

       Search for in their home-deep beds.

       We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered   

   By moths, in blue home-town air.

          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under

The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,

                            When there is no one else

   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea

         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,

          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar

               Like the profound, unstoppable craving

            Of nations for their wish.

                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:

         The moon lying on the brain

                                                    as on the excited sea    as on

          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                   My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

Light

"The poem...is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.  And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see--it is, rather, a light by which we may see--and what we see is life."--Robert Penn Warren

Tonight is our last performance of The Laramie Project at LHS.  Directing this show has been an incredibly emotional experience for me not only because of the subject matter but because, during this process, I have come to appreciate a part of myself that I do not always see as positive.

I am a very emotional person.  Very.  Commercials, movies, stories people tell, stories I read, the look on a sad dog's face, just about anything can make me tear up.  I have a heightened sense of empathy--I learned there's a word for this, it's called being an empath or being an empathic person--which means I soak up the energy of those around me and reflect it back, sort of like an emotional mirror.  This is great when I am surrounded by joyful, creative, positive energy--as I have been much of the past few weeks--but it can be exhausting, too, when the energy surrounding me is negative or anxious or fearful.

Any time I direct a show, I try to settle the students on the nights of performances with a positive message that, sometimes, takes the form of a guided meditation.  I ask them to close their eyes, hold hands, breathe deep, and focus on the light within them, the positive message they're sending, the joyful act of creation of which they are a part.  As I say these things to them, I am, of course, speaking to myself, my voice rippling over them in waves, carrying them to what I hope is a more centered, peaceful place from which to bring the show we're working on to life.

And now, after weeks of nervous anxiety, elated successes, tearful worries, and joyous celebration, it is almost over.  I find I am terribly tired and--while happy to have been the director of the process as well as the overseer of the product--I am grateful the end is near.  This does not mean I haven't enjoyed the work--I have, immensely--it's actually been one of the best processes I've been part of in that I gave up so much control and just let it all breathe itself into existence that I never totally lost myself, which is a first.  But, like the Robert Penn Warren quotation at the beginning of this entry, I am ready to allow room for something else to make my life meaningful.  And that something is me.  I want to find meaning not just in the work I do, but in myself.  My shining, emotive, overly sensitive, often anxious little self.

I am ready to accept the myth of myself as poem, as poetry, as motion, as music, and see what kind of light will shine once all the other noise and light quiets and dims.  So, tonight, when the final bow is taken, the last set piece struck, the lights turned out for the final time on this run, I believe a new light will begin to sparkle in the distance.  May it be just bright enough to shine me home.