Ecstasy

Had I not seen the Sun
I could have borne the shade
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made -
#1249 Emily Dickinson

I tend to wake up on Mondays feeling like I have to climb up and over the mountain of despair. I know I've been reading entirely too much Dickinson. My Emily Dickinson/Walt Whitman poetry class ended this last Saturday to a mixture of sadness (for the incredible gifts of insights from the mature participants and the scholarly and skilled teaching of the devoted poetry professor) and relief. Both poets eulogized aging and death. These are subjects I'm deeply interested in, but also subjects I now want to spend less of my precious time digesting. Dickinson had reasons for despair: being a 19th century woman, under the thumb of her patriarchal father and the century's predominantly male Christian philosophy, she decided to seek seclusion from this outer domination by pouring her soul into her poems. Emily was an amazingly sensitive, brave woman who faced her demons by attempting to carve out an opposing feminine, dare I say pagan, paradigm through the writing of her nearly 1800 poetic statements.

But I want to move beyond my Monday morning blues. Beginnings need to be celebrated, and not cursed. If I erase the labels and see only this day, I have deep gratitude for my blessings and feel wealthy beyond measure. The sun is shining away my dark mood by lighting up the last of autumn's brilliance. Earlier I stepped out on our garden deck and reeled at the beauty of the surrounding, colorful trees. According to my poetry professor, Autumn's October was Dickinson's favorite season, and I can understand why. It is the perfect antidote to winter's impending cold gloom. Take one dose of autumn color every day for at least thirty days. As Dickinson pointed out to her visiting niece as she entered Dickinson's window-surrounded, cozy, upstairs bedroom and study, “Here lies all the wealth in the world.” Even though creative solitude can conjure up desperate emotions, Emily knew it could also conjure up the highest bliss.

It is this bliss I am after when I write and more often than not it is this bliss I find. Even winter's dreary weather can be eased by intertwining spring remembrances with the verbalization of my fears and anxieties; by using words to describe those moments of existential anguish, a hidden, healing beauty surfaces. Being a slow learner in my sixties, I am only beginning to comprehend the complexity of human emotions and the human spirit. To truly understand joy and ecstasy, I find I have to also experience the sadness and the dark. Writing these words makes it all sound so simple. Write about the negative and the opposite will appear. Unfortunately, it's all caught in a tangle. This is what Dickinson and every other daring to be creative soul knows and this is what Dickinson labeled wealth: Going below the surface of our given times, our given human vulnerabilities, our human mortality.

Sometimes, as I look out on this miraculous, golden-red-leaf morning, I consider what I'm trying to say as total bullshit. Can words, art, or dance give us more joy than rushing outside and feeling the crunch of broken twigs under our feet, smelling the last faint whiff of rose perfume, feasting on the vision of dew glistening colors before the grays and naked trees are born? I'm always struggling between sitting here at my kitchen table with my overflowing, introspective brain and my itchy, trembling feet that want to explore the world beyond. Try as I might, for I have sporadically given up on my writing, I am unhappy unless I have both my inner and outer worlds. They feed each other and the two feed me and keep me alive.
What nourishes me even more is being able to discover, through my introspection, through my writing, a universal connection to other humans. During the last poetry class, I realized that Dickinson spoke beyond inner despair and found both hope and ecstasy in her outer, natural surroundings. My heart started beating faster as Dickinson's experiences with ecstasy led me to Virginia Woolf's “Moments of Being” - a time she described when the thick wool veil of life's dour reality is briefly removed to reveal an underlying, uplifting, universal, artistic beauty. Somehow, according to Woolf, no matter who or where we are, whether an unknown, down to earth farmer or a known, elegant composer, we each have the seeds of all other humans' potentials inside us.

Walking home from campus that afternoon, the vision of two of my own unforgotten, unveiled moments of being appeared: I am a serious and overly sensitive-to-my-surroundings college student living in Santa Barbara, California. One evening I am taking a solitary walk along a creaky harbor structure overlooking the ocean. The waves are breaking up against the wooden pilings and the fog is thickening. There is a glow to the hidden, evening sky and I am a twenty-something young woman trying to figure out her place in this soupy mystery. Just as I step down off the elevated, man-made path and my feet hit the smooth, white sands, a huge flock of seagulls rise from their standing positions and fill the sky above me. Standing in the midst of this wing fluttering whirlwind, I feel captivated by an ever-expanding magical experience. It is my answer to the mystery: right here, right now, I am being told I am simply another part of this miraculous cosmos. I am the sole person seeing the gulls soar and I am the sole person the seagulls see below.

At the same college, my residential dorm is located within a short distance of an enchanting lagoon. On another evening stroll, climbing over crumbling crags, hearing the roar of the ocean's waves behind my back, sensing a pre-storm stillness, I see a vivid, rainbow coming out of the night sky. An elderly gentleman, who is also walking the lagoon, whispers barely loud enough for me to hear: “We two are the only people here, witnessing this unusual natural phenomenon. What a gift we have been given.”

My Monday morning, which began with the blues, laced with thoughts of despair, took an ecstatic flight with remembrances of nature's wonders. How complex, blessed and rich a day of living can be! And for being there as observer and participant, for however long, I will be ever grateful.

© 2011