What does modern spirituality look like? In this, the third entry of his second season, Mr. B moves beyond modern society's censorship of open and public discussion of spiritual questions to consider what it might actually look like, today, to walk a truly spiritual path. This question is important -- within it lies the potential to unlock our own capacities as individuals and, also, the capacities of society as a whole for genuine progress -- a question that Mr. B does his best to struggle through in this segment of "Mr. B's Diaries..."
Craig Arnold: "Meditation on a Grapefruit"...
"To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
` To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully without breaking
a single pearly cell
To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
so sweet
a discipline
precisely pointless a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause a little emptiness
each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without"
... and, now, two more poems that also capture "metaphysical materialism," the modern path toward reunion with our inmost natures as spiritual beings ...
Mary Oliver: "White Owl Flies Into And Out Of The Field"...
"Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings -- five feet apart --
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow --
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows --
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us --
as soft as feathers --
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light -- scalding, aortal light --
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones."
Christian Wiman: "My Stop is Grand"...
"I have no illusion
some fusion
of force and form
will save me,
bewilderment
of bonelight
engrave me
as when the El
shooting through a hell
of ratty alleys
where nothing thrives
but soot
and the ratlike lives
that have learned to eat it
screechingly peacocked
a grace of sparks
so far out and above
the fast curve that jostled
and fastened us
into a single shock of --
I will not call it love
but at least some brief
and no doubt illusionary belief
that in one surge of brain
we were all seeing
one thing:
a lone unearthed loveliness
struck from an iron pain.
Already it was gone.
Already it was bone,
the gray sky
and the encroaching skyline
pecked so clean
by raptor night
I shuddered at the cold gleam
we hurtled toward
like some insentient herd
plunging underground at Clark
and Division.
And yet all that day
I had a kind of vision
that's never gone completely away
of immense clear-paned towers
and endlessly expendable hours
through which I walked
teeming human streets,
filled with a shine
that was most intimately me
and not mine."
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