Daily Nourishment for July 21, 2024: Poetry and Spirituality with Guidance from Words by Li-Young Lee
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 55 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
“The whole enterprise of writing absolutely seems to me like a spiritual practice. It’s a yoga. It’s definitely part of my prayer life, my meditation life, my contemplative life.” - Li-Young Lee, Image
Pause.
Take six deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale then read this poem by Li-Young Lee. (This is such a lovely summer poem.)
Prompt.
Read more from this Image interview with Li-Young Lee:
Image: What does that mean, “It’s a yoga”?
LYL: Well, you know the word religio. It comes from Latin, and it means yokedness, bondedness. The same word in Sanskrit is yoga. We get the word yoke from yoga. So yoga is any practice that reminds us of our original condition, our embeddedness in God, whether it’s breathing meditation or East Indian yogas or any art form. The ancients in India and China said that the practice of art was a royal yoga, the yoga of yogas. When you practice an art form, you realize that the poem is a descendent of your psyche, but your psyche, if you pay attention, is a descendent of something else, let’s say the cosmos. Then the cosmos is a descendent of something else, let’s say the mind of God. So ultimately you go from the mind of God to the cosmos to the psyche to the poem. Those are concentric circles of embeddedness. And the knowledge of our condition of deep embeddedness in a cosmic context, it seems to me, inculcates fearlessness, trust, love, openness, generosity—a more comprehensive, fuller human being. So it seems to me that’s a sacred practice.
Image: What is poetry, that it does this more than other forms of language?
LYL: I think the paradigm for a poem is DNA—that is, as much information as possible written into as little space as possible. It’s like writing code. There’s so much code in a tiny strand of DNA. And there should be tons of information in a poem. I don’t mean information from the phenomenal world alone. I mean spiritual information, emotional information, concrete information. I think that the more you practice that kind of work, the more you try to change your own thinking so that it is saturated with meaning and being, the more you see how thoroughly the world is encoded, that information is written into every single quantum quadrant of the universe. That God is everywhere, literally. Everything is saturated with God. So the sacred condition of meaning in a poem seems to me a perfect paradigm of mind and world. The saturation of meaning and being in a poem exactly mirrors the saturation of meaning and being in the cosmos. And I can only explain that kind of saturation of being and presence and meaning in everything, from my body to everything else, as a condition of embeddedness in God.
Practice.
Set a timer for 10 minutes and do a few slow readings of Li-Young Lee’s poem and the interview excerpt above.
Then take notes, journal, or begin writing a new poem, essay, story, or letter to a friend.
Want More?
Read more of Li-Young Lee’s poems and other things here and here.
Read the entire interview here.
If you’d like to subscribe to Image, here’s a discount link for $30 for a full year’s subscription.
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Safe travels to everyone attending the Glen Workshop this week, may you find more of your people there. People who help you feel less alone in your faith. People who nourish your creative soul. If you aren’t attending the Glen Workshop this year, may you find more of your people wherever you may be.
During the month of July, Spiritual Direction for Writers® Daily Nourishment will feature Glen Workshop facilitators and other Glen-ish people, places, and things. Enjoy!
Upcoming Workshops & Gatherings
—The July Co-Writing Schedule is live
—July 21-27: Charlotte Donlon will provide a few spiritual direction offerings at the Glen Workshop in Seattle
—July 27: Online Revision Stations Designed by Lauren F. Winner
—Save the Date: Spiritual Direction for Writers® + Enneagram for Creativity Gathering will take place on Saturday, September 28th. Recordings will be available if you can’t join us live. Speakers will be announced soon!
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
*Please help us protect our intellectual property, our creative process, and the integrity of our work. Spiritual Direction for Writers® Daily Nourishment is covered under the Spiritual Direction for Writers® trademark. You are welcome to share this link with others, but any other use (written or spoken) is prohibited without written permission from Charlotte Donlon.