The Art of Conversation

          Isadore "Izy" Gruye interviewed me for Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads this week.  The result, In this Version of My Life--An Interview with Susan Chast, carries the marvelous tone of an engaged conversation, an unusual event in this time of my life.  It was fun to chat with Izy on-line, hear her voice on the phone, and then watch her shape the posted interview through her generous emails.  I laughed and learned while interacting, and regretted the end of the conversation.  Here's part of the raw conversation from Facebook chat: 

• 

  10:43pm

  Isadora Gruye
  

  
  

  I think you are saying wonderful things thus far, I wouldn't want to reign in a wild horse....but let me circle back

• 

  10:43pm

  Susan Chast
  

  
  

  I just noticed how close p o e t i c a l and p o l i t i c a l are in spelling

  A wild horse!

• 

  10:44pm

  Isadora Gruye
  

  
  

  you deserve to run free

• 

  10:45pm

  Susan Chast

  poli-poet-ical
  O, we all deserve that. But could we get jobs? Could we survive in the wild?
  Easier and safer to let the wild survive in us.

  
  

              Ha ha!  I remember being in settings such as college housing, bars, coffee houses, and beaches where rising dialogue was plentiful.  Nothing else was quite as effective at making me forget to go to bed, meals, classes, work, and even dates.  In these conversations I had the sense of rising up in an elevator through tall mountains of thought; I felt movement from peepholes to picture windows at the same time.  Heat was generated, but not the heat of battle--more the heat of building a high-rise in the light of day or walking in sunshine without a protective hat.   That was talking to think, just as now I write to think.  Rene Magritte's image of conversation nicely captures what I mean:

L'Art de la conversation by Rene Magritte

          This week I was blessed with two of these conversations, after missing them for what seems like years.  The second one occurred at the yearly 2-day conference of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts.  There we each shared our art(s) at an open mic of poetry, music, song, theater, and slide presentations.  Visual arts--paintings, fabric and paper art, pottery, and sculpture--formed a gallery, and I actually entered my raw notebook of first drafts here (besides reading 4 poems in the show).   We expanded our perception of the world through trying out new ideas in workshops and at meals.  Here is a picture of me with Pat Reed in the "Clay: Naturally!" workshop she led with Marilyn Morrison of the Lancaster County Art Association:

Pictures are by Blair Seitz

In his "Revision" workshop, Blair Seitz read from his new book and led us through an exercise of writing for 20 minutes and then work-shopping our work in the intimate group.  I wrote about my broken heart, one still evident despite retirement from teaching English in Philadelphia's secondary schools.  The conversation climbed because it did not hinge on  particulars but on the theories and experiences of learning we each brought into the room.  I was finally moved to tears from an overflow of gratitude, tears from being part of a true meeting for learning in the Parker Palmer sense:

Meeting For Learning: Education In A Quaker Context
by PARKER PALMER
"Much of what I want to say about education in a Quaker context can be organized around one of Quakerism's most central, concrete, yet spacious images: the image of "meeting." Among Friends, of course, there is first the meeting for worship, but then there is the meeting for business, the meeting for marriage, the meeting on the occasion of a graduation , the meeting in memorial of one who has died.... Friends made a simple and compelling point: The common element in both worship and business should be the search for truth - and the expectation that, if we give it space and time, truth will come to us."

            - Palmer, from the pamphlet   "Friends Council on Education" 2007 13 PP. Paper

        
          When I speak of the "Art of Conversation,"  I am not speaking about the discipline of Rhetoric taught in academies, but the meetings for learning that can occur inside or outside of them when the spirit comes out to play as well as emotions and mind.  In this art, we find our vulnerabilities, our meanings, our friends.  In these meetings we grow.

Mary Oliver, Rumi and Me.

Mary Oliver.  Photograph by Rob Howard.

This morning on NPR, poet Mary Oliver, in a promo for her new book A Thousand Mornings, spoke of prayer becoming more integrated into her mornings and quoted Rumi: "Hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Because this quote resonates with my own experience living and also with writing poetry, I googled the quote and found that it came from a longer Rumi poem available on line from The Wandering Minstrels:

Rumi

                              (Poem #472)






Spring Giddiness

 Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
 and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
 and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
 Let the beauty we love be what we do.
 There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

 The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
 Don't go back to sleep.
 You must ask for what you really want.
 Don't go back to sleep.
 People are going back and forth across the doorsill
 where the two worlds touch.
 The door is round and open.
 Don't go back to sleep.

 I would love to kiss you.
 The price of kissing is your life.
 Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
 What a bargain, let's buy it.

 Daylight, full of small dancing particles
 and the one great turning, our souls
 are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
 Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

 All day and night, music,
 a quiet, bright
 reedsong. If it
 fades, we fade.

-- Jalaluddin Rumi    

Today--actually yesterday and all night--I have been meditating on my fears because of a challenge at the on-line poetry workshop group dVerse Poets Pub to write about fears and phobias.   Rumi's poem speaks directly to that.  I am a horn, a brassy instrument, I fear the air ceasing to enliven me.  Here I am, let me play.  I am song, therefore I am.

Me