One of my resources for a rich experience of life is the community at Second Presbyterian Church. You can check us out Here. There’s a lot going on there in the way of outreach, creativity, spiritual exploration and encouragement, and, truth be told, good eating. Occasionally, Jesus was into giving people something to eat, right? In fact, that was part of the text of a message brought to us recently by Rev. Charlene Han Powell, a senior pastor at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. You can see a video of her sermon at the link above. As I thought about her message, related to an experience of hers with a magic performance in New York, I remembered a poem I wrote a long time ago. It was published in 1988 in a small collection of poems put together with my friend and fellow poet Gail White called Sibyl and Sphinx.
STRIKING THE BALANCE
Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.—Tom Robbins
By day and by night
I have weighed my wants, my needs, my God
on the scale of meaning and magic
imperfectly balanced. A bird
or the song of a bird, a leaf
or the shadow of a leaf could
sway it. Certainty’s an arc
with unknown limits. What horizon finally
will settle and satisfy it? What touch
steady the swing of the light?
It appears that I’ve been pondering the idea of “magic” as a yearning of the human spirit for a quite awhile. This isn’t the first time I’ve been astonished, really, by what I “knew” before I knew I knew it. If poetry could be considered (and I do so consider it) prophetic, it is because its message comes from a deep place that speaks through as well as to the writer. It is a form of truth, and yes, magic.
As I’ve read one after another the recent books of Professor Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century) I continue to ponder the direction of human evolution on this planet, especially the mystery of the human Mind. We know what the brain is and what it does. We have yet to discover what Mind is, when and how consciousness in humanity came about, and where it is taking us. As always, whatever I think, the stories I tell and the stories I discover in poetry, lead me to yearn for connection and relationship among the living species of the earth, especially the human.
Well said! And thanks for bringing up S&S once again.
You make me think I should write a poem about Simon Magus. Or you should.
Aha!
The brain like tricks we know.
The Mind like Magic we awe.
Thanks, Barbara.
While I think I like straight horizons the arc of unknown limits will always be a bend I can’t resist. Thanks Barbara. And I’ll need to borrow a Harari book or two.
Oddly enough, your phrase “yearn for connection and relationship among the living species of the earth, especially the human” is part of the point of my blog post scheduled to show up on Thursday at my site. Perhaps that means we are connected.