A Festival for Meaning (part three)

Until Seattle University’s Search for Meaning Book Festival, I never dreamed I’d be in the presence of poets David Whyte and Mary Oliver. Their words washed over me like improvisational jazz, and hearing them “riff” live, in signature voices, I was thoroughly moved by two virtuosos, contemporary mystical poets whose soul-filled music is now a significant part of the soundtrack of my personal and professional life.

I’m grateful for the countless times in spiritual direction and chaplaincy that I looked to them for spiritual resonance—to find imaginative, gentle ways to capture or ritualize the places in the heart where the human and sacred converge. Their gifts for exquisite language, which not only elude the rest of us but also help us approach the numinous, are considerable. Both poets raised voices in praise of beauty, in the classic tradition of iconic writers like Rilke, Blake, Browning, and even Rumi. Both espouse the art of paying attention: allowing the heart to be opened, pierced, “aroused” or “astonished” by “a terrible” beauty which is the doorway to a corresponding inscape or spiritual geography. 

Whyte lightheartedly dismissed romanticism as he illuminated his hermitage experience of staying in “a bijou caravan” (i.e. trailer) on the craggy Welsh farmland of host, friend, and former Shakespearean actor, Michael Higgins. Just a wee bit up the side of Carnathy (i.e. mountains of longing), overlooking the Irish Sea, Whyte lived out “the metaphor of sheepherder.” Ultimately he partnered Higgins on the last leg of life’s journey: walking the thin places—questions rendered in an ancient Druidic, but decidedly Celtic tone. Together they engaged Blake’s “competency of doubt,” concluding like Blake, the only thing that really matters—has meaning in life—is who you love and who loves you. Whyte assured us that in his waning days, Higgins “walked with easy rest, cradled by the faith he loved.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning Mary Oliver also extolled the virtue of walking or indeed running through those preciously wild places in life. Of her teenaged years she said what saved her was that all her friends were “dead poets” and she “ran around in the woods behind the house.” This persisted as part of her creative process. She sometimes spent six to eight hours outdoors opening to the gracefulness of life, cautioning “if you don’t make time, the voice will go away.” As she read, I think we were witnesses to her re-membering what she’d written, which brought freshness to her delivery of half-forgotten, favorite lines. That she was totally at home and transparent in her own skin added to the feeling that we were not strangers, but maybe, as two young women next to me offered—across a table from her over tea.