“Occult Power of the Alphabet”
In last month’s post, remake your world with words, we talked about the change-making potential of words and story. In this New Year’s post we will continue with this idea, sparked by another line from Gregory Orr’s poetry: the occult power of the alphabet. How can words, letters and stories become allies for hope and vision in this new year? Here is the first stanza of a much longer poem by Gregory Orr:
Occult power of the alphabet —
How it combines
And recombines into words
That resurrect the beloved
Every time.
The image of making words and recombining them, the feeling of resurrecting the beloved, stops me and fills me with desire to combine and recombine words. To feel the presence of the beloved. The last line of this stanza is only two words: every time. It resonates because this line is not folded into one compound word, but is two separate words with a pause in the middle. This vanquishes any doubt about the beloved returning. Now I am convinced that what the poem says is true; the alphabet, writing, has the power to resurrect the beloved every time — I only have to be willing to stay with it, to wait, to make myself an instrument, to be devoted to the time it takes.
The great wave is in waiting for any boat…
The worst is not to be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle.
— Sister Wendy Beckett
Travel & Workshop Notes I: Italy 2025
Start with ancient walls, frescoes, paintings, the discovery of a studio in a side alley with an artist at work, immense handcrafted doors, cathedral bells, museums and add cappuccino, chocolate, wine, cashmere, fabulous hand stitched jackets and shoes. When I open to any of these I am drunk with pleasure. There are potted plants down every narrow alley in the most obscure places — bright cyclamen flowers against ancient cracked walls, olive trees planted in pots, and trumpet vines filled with colossal amber blossoms falling over the old stone wall. The narrow cobblestone street opens to a courtyard with a farmer’s market and more flowers, bright red peppers the size of winter squash and baskets of arugula, pears, pomegrantes and purple striped garlic.
If you want to see luscious images of art, markets, food, Umbria, and creativity blossoming, click below:
Copses Speak
The outcome isn’t up to us. Even so, I persist in believing that moving into the moment, and away from managing it, changes everything that is going to happen: I see a left turn that wasn’t there before, a hummingbird arrives out of clear air hovering close to my cheek, a single yellow leaf floats in slow motion down to the ground. It helps to befriend boredom. Patience joins time to eternity, says our Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry.
I try to remember this when I am struggling with a painting, impatient with what I see. Who do I think I am to assume for the canvas what is next? There is even some relief in knowing the outcome is not up to me. The solace is in part due to remembering that there are prompts in the air, always there. As now, when I just stop and listen, my hand is prompted with words that unearth what is holy in every unfinished mess — all the falling piles of paper burdened with words that have lost their way. And I know, or at least my hands know, that when I find the lost words they lead me right back to you.
Pleached Hornbeam
This morning I woke up with a word, well two words I had come across in my reading: pleached hornbeam. Hornbeam struck me because I have a Hornbeam tree growing outside the kitchen window, and it sounds like a tree out of Lord of the Rings. Pleached because I didn’t know what it meant. Some of you gardeners may know that the verb pleach means to braid, to interweave — mostly with vines or branches. It can mean to make or renew by interweaving. Make an arbor, a new way through. After an unusually long time away from home I have returned to the chaos of undone things and the dust and tumble of remaking a 60’s bathroom. I find pleach to be the perfect word…How do I interweave where I have just come from — New Mexico, Chicago, Rhode Island, New York and Colorado — with home here in Kentucky? Pleach can also refer to making a fence. Oh yes, I need to braid the experience of a month long odyssey into a fence, and weave a border around my wandering mind.
As for hornbeam, the reference to horn goes back to the idea of a wind instrument. Now my imagination opens to the obvious — that this tree is an instrument of the wind. It reaches down into the earth and up into the sky, making leaf-branch music, reaching so far into the heavens that another reference to horn is one tip of the crescent moon. This tree music, now touching the moon, calls in the second word beam, as in ray of light. Horn-beam.
“Do you have hope for the future? Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied”.
There is much more that can be said about Robert Frost’s hope for the future, and, in retrospect, the past. But for now consider that one way of re-kindling hope and perspective is to take a time apart from news and entertainment and open the wide door to imagination, the muse and uninterrupted time. Sometimes you have to go away from the world to enter more fully. Re-fueling and opening to what prompts us was our aim at the recent retreat in Taos, New Mexico. Time moves by another dial and is expanded by all the cross-pollination of ideas in the room. The work that comes has the aliveness of something discovered along the way.
“Impatience is an argument with reality.”
“Impatience is an argument with reality. There are no shortcuts.” The shortcut is just a trick of the mind. It was Mark Twain who apologized for writing a long letter saying he didn’t have time to write a short one. It takes a long while to find the just the right words to make writing concise. We have ample reasons for argument with reality, and endless opportunities for impatience. How do I gain the clarity to decide what deserves my attention?
One complaint against “reality” is the absence of leisure. Where is the time free from demands, entertainment, news and distraction? Is something always on? The computer, the phone, the TV, those blue lights on the stove? We have a romantic notion of the past, when there was time for lying in the grass, swinging in a hammock, watching the clouds. The experience of the awesome immensity of a night sky filled with stars, or the surprise of a shooting star stirs the soul and settles the mind. Doubt, agitation, and anxiety cannot co-exist with gazing and immensity. The leisure of gazing — whether it is the night sky or the whole-hearted attention given to someone or something you draw — is in itself enough, and carries the joy of losing oneself in noticing, in beholding.
“We are meant to know we have lived a life and not just done this and that.”
This time between Christmas and the New Year has always been a liminal time for me, a time to set down my ambition, my brushes and normal routine. I am reminded once again that awareness needs refreshing, that there is available all around us a source of wisdom and inspiration, if only we can limit the interference. How do I make myself more accessible to — what is your word — the muse, pure being, divine presence, the mystery, god? The something that is both inside us and otherness. Being a maker is my longing for this presence. I think it is what Rilke means when he says: Only in our doing can we grasp you. It is not so much about what we make as it is being an instrument that is ready for song. The instrument needs tuning. The vessel needs emptying. This is the hour of clearing and noticing signs. Yes there are the family and friend celebrations so integral and precious to this season, but the balance of time in silence is what prepares me for the new year. The openness to what wants to come leads me to a new focus for this threshold: listening, reading, walking and arranging.
Maker is both a noun and a verb
“This morning my assignment is pleasure.” I wrote this in my sketchbook today as a remedy for the many hours I have spent agonizing over a painting, or a piece of writing, or one letter. The struggle is, in part, “the nature of the beast” — the uncertainty and self-doubt involved in the decision to be a maker, the conflict of leaping ahead instead of listening to what the work wants. The shift to plowing through any conceptual road blocks and doing something is a key. But the real guide for me is to work with some tool or surface or color that gives pleasure — even if what you are looking at, as I am now, is an immense pile of imperfect paintings or a tall stack of (mostly) unpublished writing.
Over and again I'm reminded of what I know, of what you know. I mean the most important kind of knowing, the kind that gets lost when I'm busy or distracted — for example, today, remembering when I take my small sketchbook with me, when I mark something down, even one small thing in a day — how this keeps me as a plant watered, rather than wilted. How this one mark can baptize everything that happens in a day.
Notes to Myself
Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss. — Joseph Campbell
What part of myself, I wonder, am I trying to find, to save? The need to retreat from media, to regain something I once knew, has the urgency of survival. On the second day of my retreat here at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, stillness begins to win over the part that wants to keep up with people and news. That wants the action of entertainment. It is so easy for me to forget that stillness is a way of knowing, of apprehending presence, of inhabiting the room of belonging. Time spreads out for paper, pens, paint, books and walking. The refreshment of beech trees rattling their leaves in the winter woods. Reading and writing. Sorting my tools.
There is something so restorative about the physicality of a place and the reckoning that comes with being fully embodied and uninterrupted. I remember how the saving mystery breaks through at odd and unforeseeable moments. There are many thoughts on the subject of places having memory, of places remembering what people forget. But the first thing I noticed on my arrival was something I have never seen here before: about 100 black vultures and a few dozen crows circling the sky above where I am staying. The black vultures have only recently entered this area in such great numbers, and are more aggressive than the native turkey vultures. They have an ominous reputation that calls to mind the birds of Mordor. The second thing I noticed was the green sprouts of crocus already up in the woods. The dark and the light, the evil and the good, both ever present.
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“Our summer made her light escape into the beautiful.” —
On this side of the world, outward-looking summer has ended just as spring is beginning in Australia. Wherever we are, we feel the shift of seasons and time passing. Here, the equinox, the balance of days and nights, is a reminder that even the happiest life requires balancing success and failure, glad and sad, right and wrong, pain and love. The movement into longer hours of darkness turns us inward. There is often a sense of loss when the long days of light recede. What is lost has the possibility of being returned to us in a new shape; a recognition of something deeper — seeds hidden in darkness.
Isn’t this what creation, the occupation of makers, is all about? Finding a new shape? Or recognition of a shape that is both new and has always been? In this short pause of equal days and nights, what is it that we wish to bring with us from summer into autumn? Or, on the other side of the world, what sleeping promise is ready for a new beginning?