To thine own self be true

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
–John Keats, “When I Have Fears”
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The search is a lifelong one, of course, amidst the transitoriness of change and time passing. Happy is the poet or person who can say he or she has found what the poet sought unsuccessfully in vain, succumbing to T.B at 26.

Certainly there is much–money, fame, celebrity, etc.–that pales viewed against the prospect of “the faery power of unreflecting love”. One learns much about the sensibility of both poet and blogger in this one.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms Seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific–and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
–John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

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The spring of 1967, English 300–grade 12, Silver Heights Collegiate, Winnipeg. Mr. George Brown’s class. The context–he invited each of us to pick a poem from our poetry anthology and to read it and talk about it, possibly analyzing it.

I had cased the entire book and picked this one. Simply put, it spoke to me in volumes–to my close connection with nature, my exponentially increasing interest in and love of words from grade 12 on, my essential core interest in possibilities and beautiful discoveries, and my only-child-based solitude. It was a very freeing, liberating poem, consciousness-wise. Very much an objective correlative of where I was at then and where I wanted to go, what I wanted to be, what I would eventually become. A romantic, a lover, a writer, a poet, a teacher, a performer, a possibilitarian, a seeker and discoverer.

I memorized those words for the oral recitation; they emblazoned my mind, heart, and soul. I spoke with passion about the meaning and purpose of the poem. It was a true defining moment of being, performance, and turning point in my life. I had been marked for a life of literature–both reading and writing thereof. I would go on to teach 3-5 thousand senior high kids about literature in a 30 year career. I would go on to talk to thousands of English teachers across Canada, again, in a 30 year span from 1980-2010. As a singer-guitarist-songwriter, I would perform for several thousand more people (kids and adults) from 1969-2003. I would go on to write over 60 widely-authorized texts and guides for Canadian senior high students and teachers, books that would eventually sell over a million copies. I would go on to write hundreds of poems as well as songs, stories, and plays and read them in many venues and have well over 100 published, winning contests along the way. I would return to my teacher in the 1980s and tell him personally what this opportunity had meant to me. I would finally remember this moment and tell about it here today.

facsimile of Thoreau’s cabin near pond

Quotes from Walden, “Walking”, and Reflections at Walden

-I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

-Our life is frittered away by detail….Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

-The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation….But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

-In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.

-Books are the treasured wealth of the world and fit inheritance of generations and nations….How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?

-I love a broad margin to my life.

-The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

-Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

-Cultivate reverence.

-Follow your genius closely enough, and it will never fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

-To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

-If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

-In literature it is only the wild that attracts us….In short all good things are wild and free.

-I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay to life itself, than this incessant business.

-There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living…You must get your living by loving.

-If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and friends, and never see them again–if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man–then you are ready for a walk….I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

-So we saunter to the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

-Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

-The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another tenderly.

-A wise man will know what game to play and how to play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the seasons rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature`s. Nothing must be postponed.

-Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this….Take any other course and life will be a succession of regrets….There is no world for the penitent and regretful.

-All change is a miracle to contemplate.

-He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul`s estate.

-Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.

-The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird.

-A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

-Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

-I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

-It takes two to speak the truth–one to speak, and another to hear.

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A definite highlight of my two `90s  fall wonder trips to New England was walking all around Walden pond and visiting the Thoreau Lyceum. He has long been an inspiration as a connection to nature. solitude, and individualism. (I even wrote a one man play about him!) I always start to recall those trips and his work when summer is winding down and autumn begins…

“I am large….I contain multitudes.”–“Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass

Many people view freedom as being external-based or external-caused. “If I go on a cruise, I will be free.” “If I had some extra money, I could buy a house.” On the surface, it may look to many as if freedom is just an external matter.

In contrast, Viktor Frankl, the eminent psychotherapist, in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning, viewed freedom as largely an inner or internal matter, as in mind, heart, and spirit. He noted that the WWII extermination camps were designed to break down prisoners, and that those who survived had inner resources or strengths to draw on, such as will to live and imagination to transcend the horribly limiting context. He’s right. The experience of freedom is largely an inner matter anyway since it’s the individual responses of individuals which signify and get a person through difficult times and circumstances. It is those inner responses which are always potentially freeing from whatever limits.

Even the first two sample quotes above are about how freedom is a personal matter–as in “If I…” and that whatever benefits these two speakers would receive would most likely be felt or experienced innerly if they could achieve their wishes.

The experience and resonance of whatever freedom one cares to name occurs inside  us, giving us whatever pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Our inner selves are freed–physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually–when we experience freedom. Thus, it is the innerness, the inner release which makes freedom so wonderful, valuable, and completely necessary in our lives.

More on limits and limitations and what makes us who or what we are.

Context I’ve discussed already in a previous entry. We are always in a context at any given moment in our life. It is in those contexts that we may make our many choices and decisions in the large process which is and forms our lives. Context is basically situation and setting–the background and base which makes up our life. For instance, we wake up in a certain bed, in a certain house, either alone or with others each morning. We live in Edmonton or Timbuktu, in the jungle or on a desert. We have jobs we like or may be looking for work, or retired. On and on. Context is large when you start to examine it. It affects us every inch of the way through life. And it often limits our choices and what is possible for us by way of change.

I have not really spoken of environment, but psychologists point out that it is one of the main factors in influencing the course of an individual’s life. Usually the meaning of the term is restricted to where one grows up though it also refers to situations and circumstances that influence a very young person. A determining factor for sure. As with other things I’ve written about already, environment, too, has much to do with limits, limitations and the amount of freedom a person enjoys. I immediately think of how ‘restrictive’ and structured the 1950s and early ’60s were for many youth growing up and the large burst of freedom they began to experience in the mid and late ’60s,

The second main factor mentioned by psychologists and scientists, in general, is heredity and there is also no question that this largely makes us what we have looked like over the years and the kind of health problems we may have run into. Other people respond to how we look and our sensory responses to others and our surroundings. Again, the influence of genes. And if our parent had cancer, there is a susceptibility implication for us built in, so to speak.

Scientists say the individual personality, temperament, and character are fixed or set at an early age. Three years is one age that was once mentioned; other scientists say younger or older (5? 6?). No doubt this figure may be accurate or true given the amount of heredity and environment at work in about 1000 key days.

I have no problem concluding that what a person is, innerly and externally, has been created and limited by that age. And that that is the ‘core’ person who moves forward through the rest of experiences and processes occurring in mostly changing contexts after that. So, in a sense, the limits and limitations of a person are deep and many, and go back a long way. Whatever freedom we go on to experience is relative to that as well as to the amount of freedom we once may have experienced from the beginnings of our life, before formal education, and adulthood. Call this a kind of freedom context.

The question we are left with when we are ready to ask it some day is what freedoms do we need, want, and require? Which ones will enhance us and ‘de-limit’ us? How might they make our lives better? But always, the starting point is what freedoms do we not have which are within the realm of possibility, desire, and imagination?

Context, environment, and heredity we all have a ton of. It is freedom, inevitably, that we may be rather short of.

The yellow bird flitting from one perch to another in its cage, looking out on the enclosed street with its trees, gardens, and a pigeon walking on the ground. The cages of our lives and how we desire to be free, to live outside the cage.

Seen, likewise, in the sudden bolts for freedom by pet dogs–the proverbial mad dash. In the old days onto the road, perhaps chasing the spinning tires: the many deaths of farm dogs, all from following instinct and momentary urges.

Jane Goodall, in a documentary, was very upset with the small claustrophobic size of lab animal cages and campaigned for more space, more freedom. An advocate for freedom. Unbelievably, there are some dog owners who put large dogs in small cages, insensitively–some kind of failure of empathy in recognizing the sensate essences of animals and birds.

And then there are those who, by practice, let their pets roam free in houses, for example, pooping up master’s beds, or the cats that destroy expensive furniture and drapes all in the name of freedom. Two extremes, then, one lacking in moderation and common sense.

I thought, too, of all the humans living in various cages, be they handicaps, diseases, or the more common limited/limiting relationships–involving abused or controlling spouses. I thought of the millions caged by forced labor or the more familiar Western harnesses of 9 to 5, in order to support families or lifestyles, even the Martha Stewart ones. Dreams, of course, can also be or become cages.

The desire for freedom as seen everywhere in Nature and the many cages we create for ourselves and others. The limited/limiting perceptions and perspectives behind all of this.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove;
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

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There is no greater love than the marriage of true minds, hearts, and souls–basically, platonic love with all its purity and civilized fineness. Suffice to say that in 2013 A.D., such love between two people remains very special and more than possible.

Enough of science and of art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

–William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”, Lyrical Ballads