Poetry Corner: Open Mind, Like a Baby

POETRY CORNER

– 5/30/18

Hosted by Kathabela Wilson

My daughter told me, soon after she came home with her new baby, and for weeks after, ‘we take a walk around the grounds each night, he loves to watch the trees moving with the wind.’ This has stayed with me, and I am sure, with him! Then I thought of Peter Mugglebee, my Tai Chi teacher, and his private story to me about how he keeps an open mind, like a baby. So I asked him to write it for me this week. I am grateful that he did, and I wove it with the words of these poets in tune with his. I hope you find it as helpful, provocative and inspiring as I do.

~ Kathabela​​

Johannes S. H. Bjerg

while crows take refuge in my skull I become a horizon

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Peggy Castro

clouds patching
up the sky…and
you fading into blue

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Karla Decker

still pond
butterfly in the air
in the water

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Valerie Fern

just past sunset
the rustling of wind in trees
nothing seems more real

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Peter M. Mugglebee

Those who study Psycholinguistics, the study of how the human brain functions with respect to language, recognize that at birth, and for a number of months thereafter, the human infant interacts with its environment, surroundings, and care-givers with a high level of sophistication- in lay-person terminology, “understanding”. It’s visual and auditory sensory receptors are functioning as they will for the rest of its life.

It is indisputable that the baby sees, hears, smells and feels, and responds to these sensory inputs, but it is also evident that the infant has no words, no systematized, structured facility for communicating its experience of these sensations.

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Josie Hibbing

the clouds
in their nameless shapes…
silence
is sometimes more
than a thousand words

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Peter M. Mugglebee

Until the structure and pattern of its native language are impressed on the structures of the brain in combination with the sensory inputs, the child perceives and engages its environment without words. Once the words have been made coincident with the sensory experience, the cognitive apparatus is forever hobbled in its ability to exceed the limitations imposed by the inadequacy of words compared to the actual experience.

The challenge and objective is to try to regain the purity and fullness of experience, as it was for each of us before we had the limiting elements of words attached to the experience. We are born with a functioning sensory net and an innate facility for developing linguistic systems by which to communicate our experience. Prior to the development of the language capability, what do we have at our disposal to think with, to remember by? My contention was that we utilize “images”-pictures instead of words.

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Johannes S. H. Bjerg

for a moment all there is to it cherry blossoms

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Peter M. Mugglebee

Thus the task of trying to reclaim the clarity of infancy became- think in pictures to the exclusion of words. It became quite apparent very quickly that this was no easy thing to accomplish. It became clear the extent to which words have taken over the experience itself, limiting and devaluing the potential richness of what the experience could have been if not being substituted for by a word.

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Michael Czarnecki

water flows
where it needs to
without thinking about it

if obstruction occurs
water will find a way around
there are places it must be

With open mind, beginner’s mind, child’s mind, there are no distinctions. There is only flow, like stream water flowing toward the ocean, forever.

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Peter M. Muggleebee

As in all meditative endeavors, the venue for engaging this quest needs be comfortable, quiet and private. The more distractions, the more difficult. Sit or lie down in a darkened space, close your eyes, and defocus your mind- Let images come and go, all the while trying to see them without verbal content, context, or implication. Don’t be frustrated if at first the recognitions are all familiar to you by way of words- people by their name, places by their location, events by their headline. The first time you conjure an image and the experience attached to that image is devoid of words, will be a great satisfaction to you, as well as a guidepost to have it happen again the next time.

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Johannes S. H. Bjerg

dusk till it fills the fields

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Michael Czarnecki

when one is open
all possibilities arise
water flows effortlessly
clouds float effortlessly
with open heart
with open mind
we too can float
effortlessly
through this life

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Mariko Kitakubo

bamboo sounds
beside the Japanese pond
thanks for
bringing me back
to my childhood

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Johannes S. H. Bjerg ​lives in Denmark. He creates poetry in many forms, haiku, haibun, visual poetry, painting and asemic writing. “Asemic writing has been around for ages​,”​ he says, “​I​t simply means​ ​a writing without semantic content​.​ In that way it’s kinda like haiku: The reader decides for him/herself what it means. Guess that’s why some combine it with art and it becomes postasemic and post-literate … as the theory peeps say.​” He adds “​It is one thing I do while trying to figure out what it means to be alive.​” Learn more about his words and art on his website. Peggy Castro who attends Peter’s tai chi class and our ‘Poets on Site’ meetings in Pasadena wrote this in a garden: “letting my mind open to emptiness and loss”. Karla Decker lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with numerous beautiful little fish ponds. She says: “One very still day I saw this butterfly flying over a pond and was amazed at the perfect reflection”. Valerie Fern of Carmel Valley, California is a former elementary school teacher. She’s been following the path of Japanese poets for many years, with the intention of capturing a single moment in time and remaining still in that moment. Peter M. Mugglebee teaches Tai Chi at Caltech. You can be inspired by following his movements and insights here. Josie Hibbing lives in Iowa, USA. She says: “This tanka was produced one time I was traveling in my van all by myself. It was a sunny day. The sky was so blue and their were big clouds on the sky. My life was always full of noises– kids talking and jabbering but at that moment, I enjoyed the silence, watching the clouds and I could think clearly. That’s when I thought of that particular tanka.” Michael Czarnecki lives in Wheeler Hill, NY. He’s a traveling poet who makes his living giving poetry workshops, readings all over the USA, and publishing books with his Foothill Press. He writes daily spontaneous poems on Facebook. Tzetzka Ilieva (haiga) lives in the suburbs of Atlanta. She says: “Each evening, I take a walk around the neighborhood and it is usually during that walk when everything seems to fall into place.” Her haiga captures the essence of our quest. Mariko Kitakubo is a tanka poet who lives in Tokyo, Japan. She travels the world performing her tanka, in Japanese and English, accompanying herself on traditional and contemporary Japanese percussion instruments. Her most recent book ‘Indigo’ was published by Shabda Press in the US. Her tanka will be included in our forthcoming ‘Storrier Stearns Garden Poets on Site Book’. She has visited and performed here many times, and practiced tai chi with Peter Mugglebee on her visits.

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