"The breakers steady crash..."
The
end of a year seems a good time to reflect on time: what shortens it, what
stretches it. The beginning of this year I eagerly read most of Alan Burdick’s Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific
Investigation (2017). Though I recommend it, I found the text sometimes
contradicted the title as I trudged through scientific studies and jargon.
A
similar fate awaited me as I read a book about spirituality toward the end of
this year. I felt as if I needed to come up for air, and found my eyes pausing
over the text and searching the ravine behind our house from the vantage point
of our deck for something more, something inspiring, maybe even God.
Then
I remembered J. Barrie Shepherd had sent me a copy of his latest book of poetry,
entitled Bench on the Bluff, and I
set aside my dutiful reading of the somewhat dry tome on the spirit and sought
the poetic wisdom of a writer who had been my spiritual director as a young
man, unbeknownst to him, one whose books of daily reflections helped me
establish my morning prayer routine and inspired my own desire to provide such
reflections for others in my books and now this blog.
The
image of a “bench on the bluff,” taken from his Maine retirement village’s
cliff overlooking the Atlantic, reminded me of a tranquil spot on the palisades
of Santa Monica overlooking the Pacific, where, according to an inscription on
a circular stone bench (as I remember it) “in the sunset of his life, John P.
Jones used to come here every evening to watch the sun set over the ocean.”
At
81 years of age, that is similar to what Barrie Shepherd is doing in what he
calls a “chapbook”: “a small collection of poetry…that often centers on a
specific theme.” It is dedicated to his and Mhairi’s Yorkshire Terrier, Iona,
and “all her canine neighbors.”
In
college I had a double major: English Literature and Religious Studies. So I’ve
loved poetry from the start, and used to write poetry regularly, like many a
youth. But I had to read so much of it, so quickly for courses, and think too
much about what made poetry work that my first love became a source of anxiety
and even competition. One of my texts, Understanding
Poetry (a good book despite a presumptuous title), made me sympathize with
Robin Williams’ character in The Dead
Poets’ Society who advised his prep school students to rip out the first
chapter of a similar text.
Poetry,
like art and scripture and pornography, is something you know when you see it.
And poetry, when unhurried and absorbing, stretches time for me.
And
so it is with Barrie’s poems, and it was all I could do to restrain my impulse
to read them all in a few sittings. I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog that I
can’t read anything meaningful without a pen, underlining or marking texts to
return to. The problem I’ve faced reading Barrie’s book is that I’ve wanted to
underline and mark everything. Writing about it as I’m doing now made me want
to quote so much of it that I would be infringing on his copyright!
I
will never look the same way at the slender month of February or the shimmering
surface of a lap pool. I will find haikus in every aspect of my community. I
will look to nature and the seasons to welcome my own life cycle. His encounter
with the Perseid meteor shower took me back to my own encounter in the night skies
above Santa Barbara’s Mount Calvary Retreat House. I will counter the pains of
aging with laughter in the wisdom of an “even-older-than-I-am-now lady”
advising “When you wake up in the morning and nothing new hurts…you know you’re
dead.”
And
did I just call him “Barrie”? A person I’ve encountered less than a dozen
times, but whose words befriended me in his books and now, continue to “friend”
me in email exchanges about my blog. Yes, I feel like we are chums, and I am
sitting with him on that bench missing the latest news “in an age of the
absence of angels,” but watching:
The breakers steady crashand crumple as they rolled ashorereporting on the deepest state of things,reminding me that they will still be singing herewhen all my news has fled like so much sea sprayon these stark, primeval rocks.
Copies
of Bench on the Bluff are available @
$10 plus $5 shipping from:
The
Rev. Dr. J. Barrie Shepherd
Piper
Shores Retirement Community
15
Piper Road, Apt. K325
Scarborough,
ME 04074
Proceeds
are donated to charity.
For
my other posts that mention J. Barrie Shepherd, go to:
Here’s hoping we all have happy and new years!
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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser.
Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.
Other rights reserved. Photo from visit to Hawai'i, October, 1985.
