Currie Silver on The Art of Being

Currie Silver is an artist living in Mesa, Arizona. Her colorful, collage-like paintings and assemblages offer uplifting affirmation of life’s bright side. Living with stage 4 lung cancer, she maintains a gratitude blog, I Love You, Currie.

“These are two things about me that really matter to me,” says Silver. “I am an artist with the soul of a teacher, and, learning is my heart. It completes me. Even now, as my life is winding itself to a close, I am learning and teaching and loving life. Every. Single. Day.”

Silver's life and art embody be-ing.

“The Art of Being is about being myself, being human, right now," she says. "Since I’m only ever in right now, this keeps those pesky expectations in their right place. The Art of Being is also about sometimes being some way other than my usual self’s way of being. It is about the place where joy and grief meet and take a walk. But while I might define it this way today, it's likely to change over time. All art is that way, so there is always movement and change, even when standing still or sound asleep."

Currie Silver offers her three favorite books on the art of being:

The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norton Juster

I discovered this book around 1969 and read it aloud to my campers. It was sheer joy for me. Learning to read it the way I liked best was in chapters, over time, and out loud. I loved being able to nearly recite it because I had read it so much. It’s a nice way to bring it inside so it can shine out into the world. It’s why the book is such a favorite. And why I’ve always returned to it when I’ve lost my way. Favorite books work that way for me. And The Phantom Tollbooth is a multi-layered favorite. An excerpt:

"It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat, "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault."

"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons."

"But there's so much to learn," he said, with a thoughtful frown.

 "That's just what I mean," explained Milo, as Tock and the exhausted bug drifted quietly off to sleep. "Many of the things I'm supposed to know seem so useless that I can't see the purpose in learning them at all."

"You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everythinging and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer."

"And remember, also," added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme, "that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."

This passage has informed my life for many years. It has comforted me when things were going too fast. It has taught me to love mistakes, my own and others. To celebrate the wrong doings and the power of doing. I did a lot of heart art about making mistakes and being wrong awhile back. I loved that it spoke to people and brought them into a place where they began appreciating just being without all the doing.

So much richness in this book. Every pass is like the first time, only better.

Goodnight Moon
by Margaret Wise Brown

I chose this because it is a treasure. It is a simple little story about being present in our own world and appreciating it, as it is and as it is not. It’s everything simplified. Saying goodnight to the socks and the cow jumping over the moon is a lot like how I end my days.

It’s somewhat silly, I’m sure, but the reading practice of Goodnight Moon  36+ years ago showed me how to let go of my day when sleep was at hand. I learned this by doing. And by being willing.

Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.  

In addition to stars and air and noises everywhere, I say goodnight to my day’s shortfalling. I say goodnight to doing the best I could even when it turned out to be a huge and ugly mess. I say goodnight to my unasked and unanswered questions. I say goodnight to everything I have, everything I’ve lost, and everything that remains.

Margaret Wise Brown said, “In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been — it may even be greater — for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.” 

And she said this a lot of years ago as she lived from 1910 to 1952.

I love the way this story changed me when I became a parent. How it let me feel I was enough. How the repetition built the bond in my relationship with my son, even now.

Finding Your Strength In Difficult Times
by David Viscott

It came like a feather on the wind into my world when it seemed like Difficult Time was my default setting. Over the last 22 years I have read it so many times that it always seems to be just what I need.

Thinking about what I want to write, sometimes I will randomly open this book. I’ll do that now:

Now

Surrender to this moment.
This moment is the stuff of Life.
Memories are past, both the good and the bad.
Fears define events that have not yet happened, and worry drives away simply Being.
Live in this moment, at this time, when Life takes place.
It will not take place. It has not taken place. It is taking place.

. . . Now is never and forever, both fleeting and eternal.
Now is the gift of Life spreading its wings in glad bestowal.
Now is Now, If you live in this moment, you live in every other part of Time.

. . . Now is everything, but it is also nothing. It is none of the past and yet it is all of the past, the tip of the spear of time needing everything that led up to this moment itself.
Ride the moment bravely and in passion. It is where you are most alive. It is where children play and where silence fills the forest. There is as much room in this moment as you are empty of your past.

I am in this moment being me.

Each little meditation is like this. Over time I’ve gone again and again to this source for comfort, inspiration, insight, and perspective.

Let Others Be Free

Let other people be free.
Free to accept you, free to turn you away.
Let other people be free to love you and to love you not.
If these words strike your heart with the agony of anticipated rejection, consider for a moment that only people who are free not to love you can love you completely.

I could go on for days. Some of these I don’t read for years and years and suddenly there is something in this little book I could swear had never been there before. I guess this is why this book has remained as one of my few real books.

The Art of Being comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is something to see, or to touch, and sometimes it’s something quiet and too tender for words. The Art of Being is sweet word-dancing. It causes my inside to smile and grin. Which then pours itself into my world. The Art of Being is the willingness to shine and the courage to be wrong.



Postscript: Currie Silver died on April 25, 2015.

Her brother, Ward Silver, writes: "To all who have found their way to the magical mystery who was my little sister, I thought you should know that she passed on to an even more wondrous place. Her art gave her great joy, and helped sustain her to the last; as did those of you who were touched by her gentle, vibrant spirit."

Paulann Petersen on Nature Inside & Out

photo by Sabina SamieeServing as Oregon Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2014, Paulann Petersen logged nearly 28,000 miles as she crisscrossed the land giving readings and workshops in every nook and cranny of the state.

She is a retired high school teacher and has published six full-length books of poetry, most recently Understory. She serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual Stafford Birthday events.

It’s been said that Paulann Petersen’s work “grows close to the earth.”

“The effect of landscape, homescape, on me is both deep and oblique,” she says. “Oregon is mountains, ocean, high desert, rain forest. It’s the hotsprings in Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge, the Church of Elvis in downtown Portland, pelicans on Klamath Lake, herons in Oaks Bottom in the Willamette. Oregon is abundance, variety vast and gorgeous. It teaches me inclusiveness and gratitude. Oregon encourages a wide embrace.”

Paulann Petersen offers three good books on the theme of nature inside & out:

The Klamath Knot, Explorations of Myth and Evolution
by David Rains Wallace

“A classic of natural history which will take its place alongside Walden and A Sand County Almanac,” said G. Ledyard Stebbins, renowned author and botanist. Klamath Knot offers a startling and transformative vision of the relationship between wilderness and human consciousness. Wallace’s fusion of science and imagination leaves me breathless.

 

The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
by Ellen Meloy

A Pulitzer finalist, this book about the history of color is a wonder. Ellen Meloy’s embrace encompasses nothing less than human imagination and the natural world. She’s a marvelously talented, beautifully insane, poetic natural history writer. A voice both ecstatic and exact.

Orpheus: The Song of Life
by Ann Wroe

This book goes onto my “best list” before I’ve even finished reading it — I’m only halfway through the book as I write this recommendation. Ann Wroe, superb mythographer, tells the story of Orpheus in poetic, precise prose. She tells how Orpheus — the first poet, the first musician, the “magician-singer of the ancient world” — is inextricably bound with the natural world. His lyre represents “all poets, all trees and the world itself when the divine wind plays.” The 13 consonants in his alphabet derive from 13 trees. A whiff of the “incense of spring” announces his presence. Right now, I want to buy dozens of copies of this book and give one to each lyric poet I know.

Special Delivery!

Do you enjoy 3 Good Books?

Well then, don't miss a minute. Sign up now for a free subscription!

Just type your email address into that handy spot (on the right) and we'll deliver every delightful, insightful post directly to your email box.

Hot off the keyboard and onto your screen.

Don't dally. Don't tarry. What's the delay? 

Sign up now.

Scott T. Starbuck on Activist Poetry

A commercial salmon troller and charter boat captain turned creative writing professor, Scott T. Starbuck is a fierce protector of the environment.

After the Exxon Valdez oil spill coated over a thousand otters in 1989, and 21 years before Deepwater Horizon oil ran for months, Starbuck wrote Memorial Against Offshore Oil Drilling for the City of Depoe Bay to the Oregon Governor's Ocean Resources Management Task Force. He’s published two activists chapbooks, The Warrior Poems, and The Other History or unreported and underreported issues, scenes, and events of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. He’s author of River Walker, a fishing poetry book, and Industrial Oz, a collection of activist poetry, will be published in 2016.

Starbuck was a 2014 Friends of William Stafford Scholar at Speak Truth to Power Fellowship of Reconciliation Seabeck Conference, a 2013 Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island, and writer-in-residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. He writes about fishing and the environment on his blog.

"The truth is these disasters to Earth’s climate and inhabitants were done in exchange for adding zeros and ones in banking computer databases,” writes Starbuck in Manifesto from Poet on a Dying Planet. “The same type of men who invented clay symbols for record-keeping in ancient Sumer are exactly the ones killing life today by getting the rest of us to place more value on abstractions than on our children, our ecological communities, or each other. Poets know viscerally this has to stop."

Scott T. Starbuck recommends three activist poetry books:

The Moon Reflected Fire
by Doug Anderson

Most poets, before we die, want to write at least one poem that matters, that resonates across place and time, and hopefully more than one.  A way to do this is to go to the most dangerous and most difficult places one has experienced and/or imagined, and not look away from suffering, as fine poet Thich Nhat Hanh and writer Toni Morrison have said. Anderson’s book is essential because it shows many examples of war horror with precise details that are authentically literal and richly symbolic. Given our recent war history after Sept. 11, 2001, it is also timely. This book changed my standards for my poems. I was a different, and better, poet after reading it.

The Light Around the Body
by Robert Bly

I read this book when I was about 25, and loved how Bly attacked institutions and individuals responsible for immense unjust suffering while also making his poems fun to read through historical and place references. I also found in them a home for right-brainers, or people who reject materialism and the official order of things because they hear and perceive the world through inner images that often confuse and frustrate left-brained disciples of commerce, industry, and politics.

I imagine most people are quickly suffocated by activist alarms as if being squashed by a giant stack of king-sized mattresses. This book is different. Bly’s truth-telling and psychological insights devastate the money changers and their political puppets, and truth-seeking readers delight in this devastation. One memorable example is his poem Driving through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings: “We were the ones we intended to bomb!” noting a seldom spoken root of violence in self-hatred.

Another is his poem Come With Me, showing how capacity to care equals capacity to hurt, or, put another way, why some of the most dedicated activists are psychologically, emotionally, and/or physically destroyed by systems of control they challenged. Maybe they didn’t have, or refused, support from loved ones, or had no healthy balancing influences such as meditation or time alone in wilderness. The gulag and cubicles of Industrial Oz don’t usually offer those luxuries. It reminds me of a wrestling coach on my charter boat The Starfisher who offered, “A man’s strength is also his weakness” — meaning too much generosity of spirit can lead one to poverty if a person can’t find a healthy way to recharge.

What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread
by Alden Nowlan

Most poets probably wouldn’t think of this as “activist poetry” in the way Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us is with its “human ears on the table” in her poem, The Colonel. I chose Nowlan because of his precise details regarding human decency in an age which, in the words of William Stafford, has “blasted it away.” Nowlan is a wise elder delivering narratives peeled like onions to cores of truth and beauty, especially in unlikely places. I used this book many years in my poetry seminars, and students felt it gave them a meaningful place to enjoy contemporary poetry, as well as a point of departure for their drafts. A 29-minute documentary from National Film Board of Canada, Alden Nowlan: An Introduction, complemented the poems by giving an inside view to his life of poverty and close observation.

Nowlan’s poem There is a Horrible Wing to the Hotel shows how beauty appears even in squalor:

The toilets are plugged.
There is excrement on the floors
and urine in the bathtubs.

In one room I saw a dog
eating a kitten.

[ . . . .]

But one night on the roof we released balloons
in the shape of little animals;
there was a bear, for instance, and a giraffe
which was bright red, and a blue rhinoceros.

They flew very high, those balloons,
and I am afraid of heights, yet I watched them
like everybody else, until they vanished
into that enormous, spinning funnel of blackness.

They flew very high and fast,
and I have never seen anything that looked so free.

In Nowlan’s poem “Rites of Manhood,” a young sailor looking for sex comes to understand being a man is more about accepting responsibility:

and at first it was great fun to play at being

an old salt at liberty in a port full of women with
hinges on their heels, but by now he wants only to

find a solution to the infinitely complex

problem of what to do about her before

he falls into
the hands of the police or the shore patrol

—and what keeps this from being

squalid is

what's happening to him inside:

if
there were other sailors here

it would be possible for him
to abandon her where she is and joke about it
later,

but he's alone

and the guilt can't be
 divided into small forgettable pieces;
he's finding out

what it means
 to be a man and how different it is
from the way that only hours ago he imagined it.

Robert Bly, discussing Nowlan’s poetry, said, “First of all, he breaks through denial. You know denial is now used as a guide for foreign policy in the United States. . . But especially in poetry there is a lot of denial. . . You can say that you can practice denial by saying that radiation won’t hurt you. That is the NSB (National Science Board) way. . . Then you can say that our bombs resemble high-level surgeons. That’s Bush’s way. Or you can practice denial simply by not mentioning death, cancer, or poverty at all. So we could call Nowlan a teacher of grief. . . This moment of suffering and confusion is the real place where we touch our reason for being born.”

Shirley McPhillips on Poetry in the Everyday

Shirley McPhllips is author of Poem Central: Word Journeys with Readers and Writers, a comprehensive guide to reading, making and enjoying poetry; and is co-author, with Nick Flynn, of A Note Slipped Under the Door: Teaching from Poems We Love.

A classroom teacher for many years, McPhillips is poet laureate for Choice Literacy and works as a writing consultant and speaker.

"One of poetry's gifts, for me, is the nourishment of an inner life — the outside brought in, rearranged, and sent back out again," she writes in Poem Central. "It is a meeting place for the objects and activity of the outside world and the inner world of consciousness and imagination. Recognizing, attuning, reaching out, connecting, responding. This is the place for poetry; this is the attitude of poetry. This is how it shows us a way we might face life."

Shirley McPhillips recommends three good books on finding poetry in the everyday:

Winter Morning Walks:
one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison
by Ted Kooser

In the preface to this book, former poet laureate Ted Kooser explains that he is recovering from surgery and radiation for cancer. After a sad hiatus from writing poems, he began to walk two miles each morning — “with my life creaking under my feet” — down isolated country roads where he lived. When he returned home, he began to write again. The sights, sounds, meditation and insights he had along the way inspired poems that were sent as daily, dated postcards to his friend Jim Harrison. As a writer of poems, I find a mentor here. Kooser has the uncanny ability to find the right imagistic metaphor, to set words together with the precision of a jeweler. He shows us how, in paying attention to the particulars of his daily life, he lets things matter, feels them add up. As readers and fellow travelers, we too hunger for connection, for some kind of clarity, as we make our way in the world.

Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet
by Jo Carson

Jo Carson, in this remarkable collection of found stories, brings us home. Using rhythms and nuances of places she knows well — the landscape of the Appalachian region of East Tennessee and the landscape of the heart — she reconstructed what she overheard people saying as they went about their daily lives. “I heard the heart of each of them somewhere,” she writes. “A grocery store line. A beauty shop. The emergency room. A neighbor across her clothesline to another neighbor. I am an eavesdropper and I practiced being invisible to get them.” The resulting 54 monologues and dialogues, written in poem form, take us on a journey to regions of the heart we will no doubt recognize and surely remember. As writers, we learn to pay attention, to listen, to remember.

A Life In Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal
by Hannah Hinchman

Late in life E. B. White wrote, “Even now, this late in the day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, and prettier than a red wagon.”

Hinchman, an artist, writer, and teacher, fills whole journals of blank pages with intensity and mindful observation. A Life in Hand brings readers into Hinchman’s world of journal keeping. In moments of “true wakefulness,” she writes a note, letters a quote or a phrase, makes a quick sketch or a more detailed drawing, all sizes, shapes, designs. She gives us stories and anecdotes, strategies and tools. She reminds us that once we begin to record in this way, when we turn around to look again, “the world will be a degree richer and more distinct, and you will belong to it more completely.” As a writer of poems, this book helped me realize more fully my kinship with all those makers who believe there is clarity and truth to be found from sorting and refining what Virginia Woolf called the “loose drifting material of life.”