poetry – Surprised By Joy

“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

On my first mountain climbing attempt, a guided climb of Mt. Rainier in the summer of 1998, the lead guide introduced us to the poetry of Robert Service. Whether you or not you like his poetry, he delivers a cadence that I found helpful in keeping a climbing rhythm:

“There’s a race of man who won’t give in
A race that can’t stand still.
So they break the heart of kith and kin
And roam the world at will.”
The Men Who Don’t Fit In by Robert Service

Climbing depends on a steady pace. If you go too fast when roped to your teammates, you create too much slack ahead, and end up pulling the climber behind. If you go too slow, you create drag on someone else. When climbs would get tough, I’d recite the poems in my head and it would regulate my head, heart, and feet.

Thought I don’t climb any more, I still find evidence of pacing in all of the rest of my life. At work, knowing the cadence of team meetings helps to know when we can address issues. At home, rhythm is such a large part of how my little family stays stable. The waking up, eating breakfast, packing lunches, off to school rhythm is the cornerstone of our weekdays. When we get out of sync, it’s like a band that’s lost the beat.

Miss O recently learned to play Ode to Joy on the piano. When feeling like she wants to show off her mastery, she plays it somewhere between double and triple time. Played like that, it quickly becomes Ode to Indigestion.

I’m thinking of all these examples of rhythm and cadence because of an incredible podcast conversation that Vicki and I had with Edgerton award winning playwright, Jack Canfora. As a playwright and trained Shakespearean actor, he thinks a lot about cadence in writing. But for him, it extends beyond the theater. It applies to humor writing and essays as well.

Jack describes himself as a rhythmic writer. I’m thinking of You Make a Mean Salad as an example of his writing and humor. Or perhaps it’s best heard in a play. Step 9 is available as a theatrical podcast.

Thinking of my own writing as someone who tends to extended sentences, I have a lot to learn about calibrating sentences from Jack. Here’s a clip from our podcast where he talks about how Shakespeare balances sentences.

If you’re in the mood for a podcast, listen to this one. It’s got a great rhythm: Episode 56: Master Class In Creativity with Jack Canfora – Part II or search for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon Music, Spotify or Pocketcasts.

Links for this Podcast episode:

Jack’s website: Jack Canfora | Playwright | Podcaster | Writing Coach

Jack’s Online Theater Company: New Normal Rep

Jericho by Jack Canfora on Amazon

Jack Canfora on Instagram and Twitter: @jackcanfora

Other podcast episodes featuring Jack:

Episode 4: Why Theater Matters

Episode 55: Master Class in Creativity with Jack Canfora – Part I

From the hosts:

Vicki’s personal blog: Victoria Ponders

Wynne’s personal blog: Surprised by Joy

Vicki’s recently released book: Surviving Sue

Wynne’s book about her beloved father: Finding My Father’s Faith

(featured photo from Pexels)

“Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm” – Rumi

We traveled this weekend to visit a friend in Eastern Washington. On Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed early for my sacred meditation time. After I meditated, I built a fire in the wood stove to take off the chill of the early morning in the woods.

The sequence made me realize the similarities between meditation and fire building.

We accumulate the debris from our lived days – the celebrations, the joys, the annoyances, the worries. It sits like stacked wood until we are ready to coax out the heat and the warmth. Somethings are easier to ignite than others while others need some tending to burn.

It requires a spark to convert it to something other than dead wood that we carry around. The spark can come from something like writing, introspection, or meditation. It can come from people around us or circumstances can set us off. But one way or another something is likely to light us up in good ways or in bad.

Some sort of ventilation is necessary in order for the process to work. We can talk it out, sweat it out, write it out, pray it out, cry it out, or some combo of it all.

Thinking about these parallels as I sat watching the fire in the stove, I found myself mesmerized by the beauty and warmth. But there are few things that scare me as much as when fire escapes its boundaries and roars out of control.

I came home from the weekend with a new motto: Be a campfire, not a conflagration.

Tag: poetry

Finding the Rhythm

Be a Campfire, Not a Conflagration