What is not flighty but soars? You, Poetry Slow Down Listeners! 

 “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” Kahil Gibran

“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles overcome whilst trying to succeed.” Booker T. Washington

“However great the hardship pursue with firmness the happy ending” The Tirukkural

“If you’re going through hell, keep going!” Winston Churchill

“You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him learn it within himself” Galileo

“Making miracles is hard work, most people give up before they happen” Sheryl Crow

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted” Aesop

 “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the human eye” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy

“Now I become myself, it’s taken many years and places, I have been dissolved and shaken, worn other people’s faces” May Sarton

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” William James

“A man is but a product of his thoughts; what he thinks, that he becomes.” Mohandas K. Gandhi

“I dwell in Possibility,” Emily Dickinson,

 And this is Professor Barbara Mossberg, Hail, Evolving citizenry! You have alighted at the Poetry Slow Down, in our grove of poetry, the news-we-need-in-our-civic ethos.You are an amazing community of our airwaves, O Flight of Listeners, making time in your hurtling day to slow down with poetry, and so gracious, writing me. This is dedicated to Krishna, on her birthday today. So in response to your mail, our show today continues my and your thinking onYour Inner Butterfly, including excerpts from my Chautauqua Address for the City of Pacific Grove, California, aka Butterfly Town USA and our show September 25 2011.

 The epigraphs to our show today, a hodge-podge of global cultural icons whose words have changed the world—imagine this dinner party, around the table Winston Churchill, Kahil Gibran, Booker T. Washington, Sheryl Crow, Galileo, Antoine Saint-Exupury, Gandhi, May Sarton, Aesop, Tolstoy, William James. Each bon mot expresses what I think of as butterfly knowledge. Artist, statesman, philosopher, poet, scientist, saint: the distinctions blur, overlap, fuse, as we see a common interdisciplinary set of observations on the work of becoming. 

Each by itself is an observation in worlds seemingly unrelated, not in the same conversation. But taken together, shaken and stirred, a blended recognition of our lives as journey, of struggle not only in our lives, I think, but defining our lives—known as pain, obstacles, change, being dissolved and shaken, altered lives and minds, becoming, invisibility, as some of our greatest and most enduring thinkers on earth express their own headline news: This is the poetry sound track of being human.

 Aristotle once said: In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. We should venture on the study of every kind of animal . . . for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.” We’ve been talking about butterflies these days, in honor of their incredible desire and ability to migrate thousands of miles—straight here to us on California’s Central Coast. If we consider the butterfly as a marvelous example we can learn from, we see the most improbable story of apparent incoherence and powerlessness—and then miraculous change that occurs from within.

I cannot think of an example of a creature on earth that works so hard at transformation . . . except maybe us, in ways poetry brings to light. Poetry, the language of slowing down, of expressing understanding in terms of other things, the relation of things that don’t seem related—metaphor—analogy—trying to turn thinking inside out, hang upside down, slow down to a stop, seem obscure, give language to thought in its most raw and wild state of knowing and unknowing, as we learn by unlearning, dismantling what we know to construct a new form of knowing. It makes sense, then, to me, that when scientists who were working on emergence theory, called chaos or complexity theory, from multiple ways of knowing, agreed that in such an interdependent earth system, dynamical, any initial force or energy remarkably perturbs and disturbs and changes the system, no matter how seemingly small. When scientists sought a way to explain this phenomenon to the public us, of a little going a long way, of the slightest initial action causing momentous changes over time and space, they called it The Butterfly Effect.

  

The anthem in the emergent science community, to explain the findings of physics goes: The butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causes a cataclysmic storm system in Texas. It makes sense that such a powerful outcome would be named for the creature who works so hard to create and reform itself into a being of power, of beauty, of inspiration. Surely the butterfly flapping its wings is not the strongest in the animal kingdom; it does not have a roar; but its flap is heard round the world. It is a symbol of transformation, from blob to ravenous-take-no-prisoners worm to imprisonment; from prison, immobility, to freedom; from writhing struggle to soaring; from dark to light; from solitude to mating and community; from encasement to far travels; and it does this all itself; all its work is inner.

Now you may be thinking, AHA, I recall Professor Mossberg’s title is Your Inner Butterfly. If we go back to Aristotle, he noted, “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

In fact, Aristotle saw the butterfly poetically as a metaphor of spirit. Aristotle named the butterflypsyche, the Greek word for soul.

So our human mind sees in butterfly a transformative power of flesh and spirit. Know thyself, was inscribed on the Delphic temple, Socrates said it, but how, sir? I am thinking of ancient wisdom, more ancient than Socrates or Aristotle, more ancient than the Bible, more ancient than clay tablets scratched with sticks in cuneiform. The Sphinx. The Sphinx standing for  . . . existence. . . a composite creature in stone, four-legged lion, two-legged woman, and winged eagle. This Sphinx can do it all; it is all. When Sophocles is writing his plays in 5^th century BC, Oedipus the King, to explain our human situation, he describes the Greek City of Thebes guarded by the Sphinx. You can’t get into the City without passing the Sphinx’s admission test. Now this test isn’t like the MCATs or LSAT or GED or SAT or Driver’s License. It has one question. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the afternoon? Well, that’s impossible, right? Some creature better make up its mind! Who are you, anyway? Well, it turns out, no one could figure it out. And the Sphinx, well, the Sphinx was a hard grader. Strict, really. You couldn’t just take a test and go back, and it didn’t say, well, you tried, come back later, or, good try. No, it throttled you (the Sphinx means “throttler”) and hurled you down the cliff. One day a guy shows up, who was told he would kill his father and marry his mother, and so he leaves home, but on the way, kills a man with his entourage, which he thought was okay, because it wasn’t his dad safe at home, or so he thought; and he answers the Sphinx, MAN, who in the morning of our lives—early on in our day, so to speak, crawls as an infant on four legs, who strides erect as an adult (with Advil) in the prime of life, our noon, and in our afternoon, in the waning golden light, we walk with support of a cane. All of these three stages are being human.  We are changing, and transforming, but we could not recognize ourselves in action, our whole life-long selves. To not see in what ways we are like the butterfly, in fact, is a fatal ignorance. We are not only not fit to live WITH, since we can’t get into Thebes Town, we are not fit to live at ALL. So ancient wisdom held that it was good for our health and our communities to understand and appreciate the butterfly-ness of ourselves—our capacity to transform into something that can powerfully influence and change our world, we, who change our own being over and over.

But Professor Mossberg, how can one person be like this butterfly effect and change the world?

And so I imagine us, each person a cocoon, creativity wriggling inside, working for emergence, and your eyes, your ears, with a destiny of liberation, a message we can take inside our minds, where it will soar. . . And I think of the words in you, that you can say and sing and write that matter so much . . . Because what we do know from human history—FACT– is that words can change how we think, can perturb and disrupt and destabilize what we thought we knew, and erupt in learning, and growth, and change . . . .So we’ll graze on chaos theory and cultural history of butterfly outcomes of global transformation, as we continue to explore your inner butterfly, and we’ll find examples of chrysalis crisis at the heart of T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Tennyson’s Ulysses. We’ll hear butterfly philosophy of Wendell Berry, and reprise a little of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. We’ll conclude with James Wright, with a new reading of his hammock poem, where he swings in chrysalis preparing for a new soaring life, not wasted at all. It turns out everyone we know has butterfly on their minds, and we are no exception this Sunday. We give the last words to Emily Dickinson, in memory of Steve Jobs, her funeral service to summer, as a farewell and salute to change, “in the name of the bee, and the butterfly, and the breeze.” I hope this lens of the butterfly will illuminate how you see your life in terms of transformation and creativity: it is when things look most not happening, most locked up, when one is invisible and one’s meaning is obscure, that we know we have to hang on, and as Churchill said (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953), if we’re going through hell we have to keep going! We hear a message of hope and cheer from your Dr. B, and you are sent off with hopes for your innie and outie butterfly to soar. Thank you for joining me, until next week.

c Barbara Mossberg 2011

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Live from Butterfly Town, USA. We’re talking about butterflies today, in honor of their incredible desire and ability to migrate thousands of miles—straight here. The haven Monarch butterflies come home to is Pacific Grove, where I’m Poet in Residence, and in this role I was asked this week to recite a poem and blessing at the annual event for the Monarch Sanctuary as the butterflies once again begin to return. Local citizens have roused to care for their habitat; with about fifty enthusiastic welcomers including Essalen Nation Tribal Chairwoman Louise Ramirez, and Cedar Street Times Editor and community arts leader Marge Ann Jameson greeting about three abashed (but glorious) butterflies, I confess to you that I titled my address, Glorious R Us.  Or: This is What Comes of Taking Care of the Trees, Please  Before I wrote my own words, I thought about what has been written about butterflies. I found myself involved in epigraphs. From “Sanctuary” by Jaci Velasquez, to Paul Erlich, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, John Muir (see Thecla Muirii), to every poet you ever heard of, we see the butterfly. I don’t know who loves butterflies more—scientists or poets. All the poets wanted to be part of the words for monarch’s return—they all made their case to be epigraphically chosen for this occasion—Emily Dickinson made the case that she has explicit and implicit poems on butterflies, and Walt Whitman interrupted– I’m sorry Walt, I don’t recall your writing about butterflies. But who wants Walt to be wrong, I don’t, and it turns out, his favorite photograph of himself is with a butterfly, of himself regarding, and being touched by, a butterfly, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling painting by Michelangelo of Adam and God, and he put this photo on the cover of his edition of Leaves of Grass. . . a story which we reveal hence. More about that anon. Some favorites writing on butterflies: Pablo Neruda, D.H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.S. Merwin, Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, and virtually a who’s who of world poetry. But I chose the man who wrote The Unsettling of America, of our efforts to preserve and respect and have reverence and awe for our local land and each other—Wendell Berry, and we’ll hear his philosophy of place and form that illuminates butterfly dynamics, and his poems “What We Need Is Here” and “The Peace of Wild Things.” We consider the concept of learning earth as home from poets and butterflies, and the relationship therein, of miracle and mystery of transformation, and I share my poem written for the occasion of the (hopefully) returning Monarchs to Pacific Grove, whose citizens certainly deserve this sacred trust. I wrote an epigraph of my own whose theme is Glorious has “us” in it.

To Pacific Grove,

Sanctuary of butterfly:

Who takes miracle seriously;

Whose law it is to honor our role as earth steward,

Whose policy it is to get ourselves back to the garden,

Whose civic culture is to make of earth Paradise.

Whose Welcome sign to town—welcome to Butterfly Town, USA—and whose welcome sign to the sanctuary—may have something to do with the butterfly’s sense of home . . . where they take their stand. I make the case for us cocooned hearts, why the butterflies might want to hang out with us. Imagine being a place trusted by butterfly! The poem ends,

Right around the corner of time, right inside of us,

Is another stage for us, on this homecoming,

In the world we tend of loam and breeze and fog and foam,

When we improbably become glorious.

And the butterflies know it, and come home.

You’re telling me not to give up.

Ever; who knows what we will become?

Yes, Who’s on First, teaching us,

What butterflies mean to the soul,

When they return to join us on our visitation:

Miracle, evidence pure and simple—as for the rest:

We make of life a sanctuary, and here, we are whole.

Living here, to bless, and be blessed.

In writing about butterflies, I am a dime a dozen. This is a garden variety poetic topic! We discuss transformation butterfly-style and human-style, the Sphinx’s riddle and Homer’s Odyssey, and then we discuss Emily Dickinson’s life and poetry through the lens of her understanding and value of the butterfly. This lens opens up her poems of interior chaos, silence, and secrecy. We hear Thoreau’s philosophy on happiness based on knowledge of butterflies, and Shakespeare’s concluding scene with King Lear and Cordelia. We touch on William Blake and Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. We hear from Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca on Walt Whitman’s butterflies in his beard, and unfortunately skip over about 200 examples ranging from T.S. Eliot to e.e. cummings to Marianne Moore to George Carlin to W.B. Yeats, Rumi Robert Graves . . . . We hear two great poems by W.S. Merwin (“One Or Two Things”), butterfly poems by Charles Wright and James Wright, and Emerson and Thoreau’s journals on the butterfly. When Thoreau discusses the butterfly transformation in terms of pregnancy and nature’s laws, I reflect on this day of giving birth thirty-one years ago to my son Nico, and the transformation that occurs when we are visited by butterflies in our life, always transforming, and in the process, transforming us. I share the song I wrote the night he was born, a metaphoric exploration of all his forms that he would take, a song that has come true. And if there were time we would conclude with Emily Dickinson’s poem for Fall, and her blessing of the butterfly. But we will come back to this. Meanwhile, I will be speaking in a public lecture, so come, to the Pacific Grove Public Library Friday September 30, 7 pm, on YOUR INNER BUTTERFLY: THE POWER OF WORDS TO CHANGE YOUR WORLD. As we are dazzled and dazed by the mystery and miracle of those who come to us, each of us a sacred grove and sanctuary of spirit, I wish you a garden of poetry, which attracts butterflies, and all seeking a home. As the people who come to us make us feel grove sanctuary to butterfly, blessed in visits–each person, are we not the sanctuary, the home to whoever comes to us, in this life? Are we not the butterfly in all its stages, so difficult and fraught and often dark and still, and confined . . .  is it not struggle, and then glorious flight, and journey? But think of the joy and hope—such visitation of all of us here on earth bring . . .  to each other.  Thank you for joining me, and please write me a bmossberg@csumb.edu.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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Greetings, fellow harvesters of earth’s bounty in mental and literal fields, psychic soil which nourishes and sustains us. I am thrilled to return to you, at this time of traditional harvest celebration, following our recent full moon, the time of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, celebrating the summer harvest and the myth of the moon and immortality (think: poetry!) goddess, with mooncakes. So we will have a version of mooncakes, and see what our garden has produced. Our line-up for harvest feast includes reprises from literary spring planting, adoration of weeds, salivating for fruits, dazzling array of vegetarian plenty, and thoughts concerning sustainability of harvest and field, the earth garden. Thank you for joining me, as we honor creation itself.

To the dulcet tones of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” renditions of “Try to Remember (the Warmth of September),” “Shine On Harvest Moon,” Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” (“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”), and Donovan’s Mellow Yellow,” we hear MELLOW YELLOW LATE SUMMER/ FALL GARDENS, HARVEST MOON/HARVEST MOOD: POETRY IN EARLY AUTUMN. Gary Snyder’s “For All” sets the warm tone in a medley of mellow yellow September poems, including John Updike’s “September,” Jane Kenyon’s “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer,” and the Academy of American Poet’s Poem of the Day Amy Lowell’s “Autumn.” Reading poetry brings my consciousness closer to the land, in a kind of save-the-earth way we have seen with such writers as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Gary Snyder, David Brower, and Wendell Berry, a way of seeing that ultimately transforms save-the-earth to save-our-earth. A different way of thinking, from The earth to Our earth. It changes everything. Poetry takes us closer and closer to earth itself– do you remember our shows about getting on our knees, getting down with the soil? Eyeing grass and grasshoppers eye to eye? Can we read Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman without getting grass stains and mud on our minds, when we speak, people saying where have you been? But we look so happy, and then, somehow, there are all these poems about the garden itself. I feel the garden is the ultimate topic: literature and perhaps religion and science and philosophy and culture—from cultivation—all we know– began with our consciousness of the garden, the place we engage with and become co-creators of earth; and the people who are writing about the garden so passionately are poets who are slowing down themselves, so to speak, and I mean in a good way, slowing down to let the brain do its work, the eyes see, the ears hear, the tongue taste, the nose smell, all the senses reporting live from the Earth making it Our Earth. We hear Keats and Blake and Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, Barbara Crooker, Phillip Lopate, Gerard Stern, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Roethke, Charles Wright, Mark Doty, J.D. Salinger, and our show’s third section feature, 100 year old Stanley Kunitz. So our show today is homage to a mellow yellow harvest mood, and I’ve been thinking of some way to acknowledge what people have gone through recently with flood and fire, wind and rain, drought and loss, and it seems that poetry about gardening in a time of slowing down and withering, a time that looks like it’s winding down, invokes a way to think hopefully about what is deep and eternal and immortal in us, and our engagement with this earth. The more we slow down, the more apparent and shining is our earth to the eye, and we give more and more of ourselves to earth. In the conversion of psychic soil, toiling and tilling the earth until it becomes rich loam for creation as our earth, we think of ourselves in this process of season somehow, now, late summer/early autumn. I share with you my journal from a few weeks ago, writing to you in my perch on earth, office of sky and bench on the subject of gardens and meditating on what is edible (including you and me, and I’m thinking this is a good thing, imagining being delicious and good health to earth—and all that makes it “our” earth—the secret of earth’s beauty and vitality?).

The poem I mention in this meditation is “Coho”: I wrote it after a visit to the supermarket and saw wrapped in plastic lying on ice a Coho salmon, eyes fixed, who knows what seeing, saw, so shortly ago in some shining stream or some water with green gleam. And I knew I was going to eat this salmon—I wrote this in my car in the parking lot—

Coho, it isn’t just you.

It’s me, too.

Once you are strength moving through water, silver flow,

Gleaming in sunshine, shining scales, on your way,

And now, I’m eating you, you’re bagged, my afternoon treat,

And while I think of your life, how it ended this way,

I realize that someday

That’s me, too, not eaten perhaps in just this

Way but wouldn’t that be nice, if I were so nutritious,

Of such worth,

If eating me would make some creature lustrous and glow,

If I were good to its health?

Though perhaps in whatever form I become as part of earth

I will feed the waving trees and worm who is feast to some bird,

And when we think of what the river would need

It would be nice to think in such poem this prayer is heard.

We consider Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” definition of “edible,” and as we explore the view of “our” earth, and autumn, we think of the senses that open us to life’s meaning, with Diane Ackerman. We conclude with a short discussion of Stanley Kunitz’s The Wild Braid (which I always think of as “Wild Brain”) on poetry and gardening as inextricable practice and devotion, for life and immortality. And so for now, in these days of late summer, early Fall, be mellow, like earth, find solace in poems, with water and warmth in them, and good nurture, there’s shade and things grow, there’s a pumpkin growing somewhere, and if you take the flowers and sauté them, they make a great pasta sauce, and I’m thinking we’ll have a show on the poetry of autumn feasts including wine, old vine Zin, and the poetry of wine labels, and I’ll share with you some pumpkin recipes that I have dreamed, for edible poems. And meanwhile: if you are on the Central Coast of California, Pacific Grove, the evolved City aka Butterfly Town USA, where I am Poet in Residence, is planning Chautauqua Days, September 30, and I’m contributing a lecture called “Your Inner Butterly: The Power of Words to Change Our World,” at Pacific Grove Library, and I’ll tell you more about it, anon. Soon cafes will be serving pumpkin lattes and on that note, let’s end with a poem of the sweetness of late summer, coming to you wherever you are right now: it’s William Blake, notes of Keats, “To Autumn.” To be continued. Always. The message of Autumn, from our poets. Yours truly, Professor Barbara Mossberg. Please write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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