Laughing Beneath the Meteors

What was it about the written reminiscence that made it so appealing?  Why could I so easily identify with the firsthand experience that was being described, and with the inner feeling the writer remembered?  It was a recollection by a poet in his twenties, thinking back to an occasion of nighttime camaraderie with peers:

"Some day I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes....  and how we laughed till the meteors showered round us,

 and we fell calm under the winter stars.

 And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time.

 And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us,

 we praised God with louder whistling...."

As I read this recollection, I almost wished I were there myself.  The cool night air.  The feeling of relaxation among friends.  The happiness and contentment.  The star-filled sky above.  The wonder of a sudden meteor shower.

Even as relaxing and restorative as those things were, there was also a deeper layer that gently emerged.  It seemed to have to do with that experience young people can have when they feel their youthful idealism beginning to be channeled into the paths of their individual identities:

"[S]ome of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time."

I felt as if I knew those subjective emotions because I had experienced them myself at that stage of adolescence:  The paradox of joyful freedom despite not knowing what the future will hold. The only thing I had not experienced as such was the meteor shower.  But I still felt as if I could understand the meaning of what the author described.  Today, in our U.S. popular culture, such things as meteors get mentioned mostly in the form of the fear that a massive asteroid might hit the Earth, bringing devastation.  Modern science also tells us that our sun will eventually burn out, bringing death to the Earth.  Terrifying scenarios caused by uncontrollable events in outer space abound (guaranteeing work for screenwriters of disaster movies).  In contrast, the young poet remembers laughing with his companions as the meteors rained down.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The reminiscence has a power of its own.  But it is given added poignancy by knowing that it was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died at the age of 25, fighting in World War I.  Owen's war poems have a sensitivity of feeling not unlike that which is revealed in this reminiscence, shared by letter with a friend the year before Owen was killed in battle.

To me, the reminiscence, even as brief as it is, conveys an experience of belonging.  The combination of the companionship of friends and the surrounding realm of Nature convey a sense of ultimate belonging.  Wilfred Owen is now gone.  But nighttime is still cooler than the day. Overhead, there are still stars.  And there is still, I am sure, at least one more shooting star ready to be seen as it pierces the air we breath.

~~~

Have you ever experienced a moment of deep contentment while you were in Nature?

(Owen's reminiscence is quoted in "Memoir (1931)" by Edmund Blunden,

in the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.  p. 172.)

(The photograph of Owen is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Getting Beyond the Bitterness

I turned to the poem in the anthology partly because of an experience involving a friend when I was in college.  That fellow student's family owned a produce company that brought together vegetables from a number of farmers, cleaned and packed them, and distributed them to grocery stores.  One evening, my friend took me to see the company's processing center after the day's operations had been completed.  There I saw more radishes than I had ever seen in my life or will probably ever see again.  The radishes were neatly packaged in small bags piled five-feet high on a pallet five-feet square.  An estimated 125 cubic feet of the familiar reddish radish, each no more than an inch in diameter!

As I said, it was partly that memory that prompted me to turn to a particular poem -- one with "radish" in its title -- in an anthology of sacred poetry.  The poem was a simple three-liner by the 18th-century Japanese poet Issa:

"The man pulling radishes

pointed the way

with a radish."

So short, the poem forced my mind to pause, taking it a few moments to picture the gardener on his knees, one arm outstretched to give directions, using the humble radish in a new-found way, as a pointer.

Growing up, I was introduced to radishes when our family had Sunday dinner at a restaurant.  On each of our restaurant salads was a single brightly colored radish, mostly as garnish.  It would require returning to that restaurant a few times before my sister and I could begin to nibble like rabbits on the humble, red vegetable as we became accustomed to its bitter edge.

In the collection of spiritual poetry, I turned to the biography of this man Issa, and found there more bitterness than I was prepared for.  The biography described how "Issa (1763-1827)... lost his mother at the age of three and was continually beaten by his stepmother....  His later life was marked by poverty... and the death of his first wife and four young children.  But somehow he triumphed over all these obstacles and kept his simple, affectionate nature.  His is particularly admired for his love of animals and his championing of the underdog."

My heart warmed to this somewhat overlooked man, and so I turned back the pages of my book to read another haiku poem by him:

"In the cherry blossom's shade

there's no such thing

as a stranger."

This second three-liner was a very upbeat poem, the kind our U.S. society today prefers to have populating its collections of religious poems.  However, having read of Issa's life -- both the bitter and the beautiful -- I decided to treasure both of the poems, printed back-to-back on a single leaf of paper in my book.

~~~

Has there been in your life any bitterness you have had to get beyond to find your way?

(The poems and biography of Issa are from The Enlightened Heart,

 ed. Stephen Mitchell, © 1989.  pp. 99, 158 & 100.)