Tara Brach - Saying Yes (Part 2): A Conversation with Tara Brach & Jane Hirshfield

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Saying Yes (Part 2): A Conversation with Tara Brach & Jane Hirshfield - In this rich and full two-part interview, Tara speaks with renowned poet Jane Hirshfield about the interface between poetry and meditation, the centrality of acceptance, and the pathways of remembrance that reveal our belonging to this world and open us to caring. Here's a link to Jane's most recent book: The Asking: New and Selected Poems. The interview includes readings from this beautiful collection.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, my friends. So I'm glad you're joining us for part two of an interview with the beloved poet, teacher, Zen practitioner, Jane Hirschild. I found our time together in this interview so deeply moving. listening to her read several poems and exploring ways that they really come alive in our lives. So I hope that you'll enjoy and feel touched and inspired as I have by Jane, the poetry, and our conversation. Okay, blessings.

Your poems, Jane, you know, there's a lot of conceptual stuff in Buddhism, you know, about no self and, you know, interdependence, your poems have a transmission that actually you experience what has often been conceptual. And I'm thinking, you know, that you've got so many poems. But I almost wanted to invite you to move into another poem right now, read another poem. I'm thinking of my proteins right now, because it just, like, reading it just went beyond my mind into the realness of interdependence. Well, that is exactly the reading of the poem that I would hope it would lead to. So I'm going to give people a tiny bit of background, which is this poem, like many poems in American poetry these days, or a certain number of them, came from an article I read in the Tuesday Science Times section.

about discovering quite recently, I think it was 2013, how protein works in the body. And so I read this and I just immediately went, oh, I have to explore that and began writing. But it changed over time and moved on to the then new discovery of the microbiome, which is the, you know, 10 billion beings having enjoyed. their own lives inside of our bodies that are in fact creating our own lives to a great extent, our moods, our intelligence, our well-being, our exhaustion. And so, yeah, this poem is one of exploring, you know, where does the self begin and where does the self?

And the one thing which is useful to know for getting one line in it is the word protein comes from the Greek god Proteus, who is the God who changed shapes. And so proteins, when they are doing their work in our bodies, they do that by folding and unfolding. So kind of helps to know that. My proteins. They have discovered, they say, the protein of itch, natuoretic polypeptide B, and that it travels its own distinct pathway inside my spine. As do pain, pleasure, and heat. a body it seems is a highway a cloverleaf crossing well built well traversed some of me going north some going south ninety per cent of my cells they have discovered are not my own person they are other beings inside me as ninety six per cent of my life is not my life yet i they say am they my bacteria and ye my father and mother, grandparents, lovers, my drivers talking on cell phones, my subways and bridges,

my thieves, my police who chase myself night and day. My proteins, apparently also me, fold the shirts. I find in this crowded metropolis a quiet corner, where I build of not-me Lego blocks, a bench, pigeons, a sandwich of rye bread, mustard, and cheese. It is me and is not the hunger that makes the sandwich good. It is not me, then is the sandwich. A mystery, neither of us can fold, unfold, or consume. Part of what I'm so appreciating is how the weave of science actually deepens the experience of what is. You know, it's a powerful metaphor for reality, just like every other metaphor, but you draw on it an exquisite way. And I'm really curious about your involvement and how it came about because I'm, you know, in my life, I found so many times when I

learn the science of something, it just deepens the direct, the direct sense. sense. And just I'll give one example, which is reading Carlo Rovelli. So he's a quantum physicist, for those who don't know, his way of describing physics is that you can't talk about the world and reality without talking about relationship, everything to everything. But in his personal life, this is just a story that really got me was when he gets anxious before speaking in front of a group, he will go outside and put his hand on a tree. And he'll just leave it there for a moment. And I'm imagining in the background, there's some sense of communion because that's it. It drops away and then he goes ahead and talks.

And there's something so powerful about feeling our relatedness. I don't know if you can see, I have a Ming Aurelia back there. You know, before I, even before us getting together, Jane, I went and I kind of touched the leave and I say, you know, we are friends and feel, you know, we've been exchanging gases and in the field together for a long time. You know, sometimes I'll spray a little just for good measure. Well, I have. I've never done this before. and it's a fairly recent practice, I have this little frog, little frog figure,

and the frog reminds me that I am part of the frog pond chorus. And you know that we live in a field of singing frogs and fireflies. And I don't need to worry so much because the whole chorus is taking care of things. things. So this was quite recent and it really changed my relationship to being nervous. So I'm much less nervous than I used to be once I remembered the frog. Beautiful story because this is what we need. We were talking about pathways of remembrance.

We need the particulars, the particulars that kind of catapulted. back into knowing that, you know, we're both a wave in the ocean and we're the ocean. And, you know, if you trust you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. And so I'm curious, any other practices that you have that are remembrance practices that help you to remember your belonging and feel that communion? So again, you know, one that arrived fairly recently, which I really love, I went, I think it might have been 2018 that I was invited to read in Australia for the first time. So I went to Sydney and Melbourne and then a marvelous festival in the middle of the country, a little town Mildura. and for some reason I was completely captured by an Australian expression,

which even though it's in a grammatical form that seems to point it at something, is actually just a general exclamation of happiness, which is, you beauty, you beauty. And I can't do it with an Australian accent. Sorry, I'm not much of an actor. But when I came home, I suddenly. took up the practice of every morning when I first come to awakening and I open my eyes, exclaiming to, you know, the world, the mountain if it's visible and not fogged in, the fog, if that's what I see,

to just have my first gesture of greeting the day be to say, you beauty, the world. That's a gem. I mean, these are gems. More than sometimes. the most fancy concepts, just you beauty, you know, or beauty. I like bowing. I just find that when I bow my head, it, something drops away and something opens up. And when I say thank you to whatever, oh yes. Oh, yes. On the one that most impacted me in recent times, Robin Wall Kimmer, who I know you know of botanist, indigenous woman describes in the field, seeing the moose, I mean, seeing the tracks of the moose.

And the comment is, oh, somebody has been here. Yes. Or the bird or the squirrel or whatever the being is, oh, somebody. And so now I just, whatever I'm seeing a plant or, you know, seeing my dog or my dog is not alive anymore, but picture of my dog, you know, that sense of the sentience. really, really registering the sentience of everything, including the rocks and the, really, there's no way to be alone. Yeah. There's not to feel, it drops self-centeredness and it opens to the, just the richness of it all.

So I'm going to tell you, again, it's something I don't think I've mentioned this anywhere in decades. When I was 18, I was taking the psychology of dreams in college and doing an experiment in the dream lab with my closest friends and keeping a dream notebook. And one, you know, some dreams come sort of with gold frames around them. You know they matter. And in a dream I had someone who was important to me. asked me the question, why do you write? And what arose in my mind was an image of the rather sterile housing project that I grew up in, you know, red brick apartment buildings, chain leak fences, little tiny scraps of green, but, you know, not much life on them, lots of concrete,

you know, New York City. And with this image in my mind, the words that came to join it were because everything is alive. And it actually took me some years before I realized how incongruous that marriage, you know, the way I described it, it's already integrated. But I heard the because everything is alive. And it took me years to recognize even that, you know, even these, you know, metropolitan life insurance company, you know, post-war veteran housing buildings, that too. And yes, every brick of it, every human-made erasure of the natural world that once thrived on that ground, alive, alive. You know, when we talk about this, it's so clear non-separation. Like, it's all alive,

then there's just no separation. And we know the deep suffering is that we've forgotten our belonging And you have a poem that just, you know, as they all have, that really have caught me, it's called the cataclysm. And I'm wondering if you might read that. So this is one of the poems from the book Ledger that came out in 2020. And that book, I had been writing about the crisis of climate and biosphere for a long time. Because, you know, you and I, 1970 was the first Earth day. everything we needed to know was known by 1970. You know, Rachel Carson wrote about the melting of the ice caps, I think in the late 1940s.

It was all there to be known, and yet everybody ignored it for so many decades. And the book, Ledger, which I started writing in 2014, the earliest poem in it, is the book when these issues of biosphere and climate and extinction and toxins became really foreground. Rather than being, you know, one or two poems in a book, it became many of the poems in the book. So this is one of them. Cataclysm. It begins subtly.

The maple withdraws an inch from the birch tree. The porcupine wants nothing to do with the skink. fish unschool sheep unflock to separately graze clouds meanwhile declare to the sky they have nothing to do with the sky which is not visible as they are nor knows the trick of turning into infant tumbling pterodactyls The turtles and moonlight, their long arrangement is over. As for the humans, let us not speak of the humans. Let us speak of their language. The first person singular condemns the second person plural for betrayals, neither has words left to name.

The Fed consider the hungry and stay silent. That is just a poem of undoing grief for me. It isn't a portrait of repair. It is a portrait of one of the ways in this world where everything is perfect as it is and you can wake in the morning and whatever you open your eyes to, you can say you beauty. This also, you know, as you said in one of the earlier things you chose to read, I always try to look at both sides. Whatever it is I'm aware of, I want to ask what else,

what am I not seeing? What am I not naming? This poem is looking at all those things that when you say you beauty, you're not quite including. And it is very important to me to include my awareness of what we have done, what we are doing, what we are failing to do, and that, you know, yes, anywhere on Earth, any moment on Earth, people have been hungry. There have been cataclysms. There is no inch of this planet which is not soaked with grief and suffering.

And yet, we have the capacity to do better than we are. it's the poem that breaks our hearts open that allows us to avail ourselves of that capacity we have to care yeah i think one of my deep inquiries is what what wakes up our caring you know and i think it's when we're facing into the places of grief and i was very struck by the line as for the humans let us not speak of the humans, let us speak of their language. And the way you bring out how much of the very structure of our language and our brain is to perceive a self and hear and an other out there, and then to have the other become unreal, which is a word that is meaningful to me, that becomes an object, not feeling that subjective sentience, and that's what allows us.

to have somebody else be hungry and not. Exactly. It's real. And you write so beautifully, and I've been reading a lot now, about the antidote of medicine as kinship, you know, is really waking up to the kinship and that shift from I to we. Yeah. Yeah.

So pronouns have, you know, as a writer, I've always been very interested. in pronouns and following them through. And in the beginning was a young, you know, in my teenage years and early 20s, almost every poem that I wrote began with the word you. And you can mean many things. You know, there are about nine meanings of it. One of them is me.

You're talking to yourself. One of them is a particular person you're talking to. One of them is anyone. but my pronouns expanded. I began to sometimes say I. I began to say we. And one really early poem, I don't remember anything else from it, but I've always remembered this line. It said something to the effect of to define the meaning of we is to find a life. And I've thought a great deal over the years, what do people mean when they say we? And I hope that my we is extending limitlessly and boundlessly. I'm kind of willing to let it stop at the top of the atmosphere. You know,

I'm willing to say, okay, this planet, I'm okay with this planet being my we. It doesn't have to include, you know, distant nebulae. But short of that, you know, we are living in a time when tribalism has again stepped forward and the we and the you or the we and the they have become so contentious and so clung to and so fanned by people who feel they can increase their power by saying, they and advocating something against those they. But, you know, every one of us shares the matrilineal mitochondria of one early woman. Everyone in the world, all human beings, we are relatives, and we all share the oxy, you know, share the oxy, and we all share, you know, that marvelous plant behind your shoulder.

You know, every leaf of it is giving us our lives. And it doesn't happen except through individual leaves on individual plants with their individual histories. It's collaborative. It's, you know, Lin Margulis' Gaya hypothesis, seeing just as we ourselves are made up of this microbiome community, so is the earth made up of us. And the whole existence of it depends on each of us, you know, fulfilling our task. And part of that task is to live and breathe and cultivate and do whatever it is we do during those lives.

And part of that task is to die and pass the baton to give ourselves back to the fungi. to give our space over to the next generation. So, yeah, that understanding of we. But, you know, I do not want to pretend that I am not a person who if someone came charging at me with a knife or a gun, I would be terrified. You know, I've not been tested in that particular way yet in this life. But I do feel like we are training,

as you said, every moment we are training in the saying of yes, but I suspect if someone came running at me with a knife, I might be inclined to try to run away or to say something. I'm out of here, you know. Yeah. Look, I have been tested and I have seen how this human ego and nervous system has the flinch quick response to defend and protect and aggress. So that, no question. And as, you've been saying all along, Gene, our task includes a remembrance of something more, just over and over again, no matter what the moment, just to pause, there's something more. There's something larger, some awareness and love that we belong to that's always and already here. And what helps us remember.

And part of the remembrance, as you just pointed out, is to look bravely, at the reality of the forgetting, to look bravely at the reality of the enormity of the suffering. And I think often about this growing science that on a heating planet, on a climate crazy planet, the heat makes people more angry and more afraid and more, and it brings up more of a dividedness. It stresses us. So we're working with reactive stressed nervous systems that are running away from presence. And the task is, can we deepen the dedication to remembrance? And there's a poem.

I know we're getting towards the end, and I wanted to make sure we had time for. And it's been viral. It's so out there. And every time I listen to it, it's. goes right to me. So would you be okay reading? Let Them Not Say. Yes. So Let Them Not Say is that poem that I wrote in 2014. It was written as a poem thinking about the crisis of the biosphere. When it was first published, it was published in a context where it did go immediately viral as a political. As a political poem. And so it speaks to all of these crises. And it looks at our lives from the point

of view of the future looking back on us. And it contemplates, you know, it's a poem that hopes to make itself irrelevant, that, you know, that in 300 years, if someone were to stumble across it, I hope they will say, what was she so worried about? Turned out okay. But I think the only way it turns out okay is if we're properly worried. So let them not say. Let them not say we did not see it. We saw. Let them not say we did not hear it.

We heard. Let them not say they did not taste it. We ate. We trembled. Let them not say it was not supposed. not written. We spoke. We witnessed with voices and hands. Let them not say they did nothing. We did not enough. Let them say, as they must say something, a kerosene beauty. It burned. Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, read by its light, praised, and it burned.

Thank you, my friend. You know, you've spoken again and again about the fullness, about the different dimensions. And this has, again, got that the riveting sorrow and also the beauty. And so it also, there's some hope or some trust in something good that is unfolding in the midst of, even this kind of painful dis-ease and dying on the earth. And I thought maybe I'd end by just asking you, what is it, what is it that you, that reminds you, that helps you to really sense into that goodness? The gratitude of being alive, the sense of perhaps, you know, in the best possible meaning

of this, my great debt to this extraordinary existence that I am able to be part of for this brief lifetime. The increasing sense of how lucky it is to breathe in this air, to see this mountain, to get to speak with you, that helps. and also the feeling of, I think, the great antidote to despair, maybe I'll say two great antidotes to despair. One is humility. We never know what can happen.

You know, it is an absolute arrogance to think we know the future because anything can happen at any moment. And so a little humility before our own fears and angers and rages and self-stamping of feet, a little humility goes a long way. And then the other antidote to despair for me is any sense of agency at all. That in the moments when you think there's nothing I can do, there's nothing I can do, there is always something you can do. There's a little poem somewhere in this book

called Changing Everything, a modest little title. And it describes one day I was walking in the woods and I picked up a stick from one side of the road and moved it to the other side of the road. And that was probably shortly after I had learned the scientific concept of the butterfly effect. You know, change anything.

And you change the entire fabric and history of existence. And for me, you know, when I can do nothing, I can put two words next to each other in a way that will alter my own heart and mind from despair, towards hope, from forgetting, towards remembrance. And so really, it can be anything. I know times when I've been in the deepest, you know, personal darkness over something and I've realized I couldn't help myself at all. I began to realize, well, then help somebody else. You know, do something for someone else if you can't do anything. And it works.

So any remembrance that there is always something you can do, including the great invisible actions that do change the fabric of the world, of prayer, of contemplation, of appreciation, of gratitude. We can put our gratitude and our intentions into the air as much as the plants can put their oxygen into the air, and we can put our carbon dioxide in turn to give back to the air. them. That's a beautiful note to end on, the humility, the agency that allows us to continue to be part of this precious world. And I want to thank you, Jane. It's been just an utter delight to just have time

with you. And I want to remind all those listening, be asking. I am so, so glad to have this book on my shelves by my bed right here. I hope you'll get it. And my friend, blessings. Thank you enough for everything you have offered all of us for so many years and for the chance to get to know you a little bit in person to begin our friendship now. Thank you, Tara. Thank you, Tara.