I sing everyday. It’s my name. Carmen means “song or poem.” Even on days of challenging ways, I sing. I’ve always been thankful to live under and with and through a name that means “song or poem.” It’s like my very name reminds me, “Did you sing today?”
Kindness. We could be kind more.
Every true religion has kindness as its core. Same for every true philosophy and wisdom tradition. One way I listen to the Mystery at the heart of the Heart is I sing. While my brain swirls and loops and careens, like winds in March, my song holds my heart against love and I deepen into tenderness, as I sing.
A friend shared with me the Medicine Buddha Chant. Some 1400 years young, it’s as old as Beowulf. And totally otherwise has nothing in common with Grendel’s poem. It’s a prayer for healing from the fakery of duality. It’s a prayer for the dissolving of negative thoughts. It’s a prayer for the healing of past traumas. It’s a prayer for bringing calm energy.
A friend shared it with me. He’s a Buddhist teacher. I sing it often. Through the marsh. Down sidewalks. Folding clothes. Sitting at the computer. And in bed at night, quietly.
I think of the billions of souls and bodies and selves who’ve sung it before me and who sing it now with me and I with them, together. You see it spelled many different ways when transliterated. Here is what I am singing:
“Teyata om bekanze bekanze maha bekanze radza samudgate soha.”
Here is my meditative translation of that, with my friend’s approval:
“It’s like this. Om, sacred tone of the universe, holy body, holy speech, holy mind. Medicine Buddha, King, Supreme Healer. Eliminate and remove the pain of illness of mind and body, eliminate and remove the pain and illness of spiritual suffering, and greatly eliminate and remove any slightest imprints left on my consciousness by disturbing thoughts, Ocean of goodness and wisdom, may my prayer go to the highest, widest, deepest, in sincere intention, blessing, I offer this prayer and let it go out.”
I also made a short translation and a melody for the original and the English version, and I sing both:
“Teyata om bekanze bekanze maha bekanze radza samudgate soha.”
“Sacred Song of the Universe, heal me, heal us | Deeply heal us where our mind-heart wanders from Love.”
I’m posting these, sung, on my YouTube Channel, if you want to listen, sing with silently, or sing along aloud: https://www.youtube.com/@CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence
Remember, you’re singing for yourself, not as a performance.
The way life really is, for yourself, not performance.
“When you go outside, do you worry about your hair getting messed up in the wind? Why? Life’s short, why worry for small things?” That was a motivational speaker in my high school gym for assembly.
Painfully shy, I felt a sting of realization: Yes I do.
My hair being in place and my face being pimpleless were my primary obsessions.
There were bigger, existential worries at home, but once at school, my wavy hair not staying in place and the growing spot on my forehead wearied me with pondering.
It became a touchstone of personal growth then to be someone who went outside and felt more hair-free. It took time to outgrow this painful, critical self-consciousness. Not that How do I look is ever absent, but I’ve grown kinder in it toward me. It was fortunate that at 29 my hair turned curly overnight and more and more I just let it go and do its thing.
My appreciation for run-of-the-mill, each-one-is-different, not-too-strong winds has also grown with each passing day. I often walk after supper down the sidewalk a block or two just to listen from a spot near a friend’s house where three tall trees (no one seems to know what kind) make beautiful music high in their boughs. I love that sound of vibrant gentle winds in tree leaves. And how they dance while they play.
How each tree has a different-sized, differently shaped leaf and all together as a symphony, each tree makes a different sound when the wind blows through, and different winds blow through in various ways, so the music is always unique. Just like when you arrive in an airport in a city, and whatever language or dialect is spoken there, the collective sound of it is different from that in an airport in another city with a different language or dialect.
And I stand under trees in my neighborhood and think, How alive to be here with wind in my hair. How alive.
Lately I also think, when I walk in the marsh with the wind. How I experience the wind is how I live with my thoughts.
Sometimes on the gravel path between silent snowy white egrets and squawking geese, I gently hold my hair back, often takes several tries, the wind is so brisk and wild. So I can see better. Brisk wild wind prickles the face the eyes. Sometimes I just let it blow my hair to the moon and back and flip my head back to enable me to see ahead. When the wind is really up in the marsh, it looks like I have my hand on a Van de Graaff generator.
And sometimes it’s that amazing calm with not much wind at all. Just the occasional zephyr. Reminding me inspiration has in it spirare “breathe.” The earth breathing through the wind.
It’s not far from wind—Old English “blow”—to breath to breathing to inspiration to our thoughts blowing, the winds of the mind-self-soul-body that I breathe with and through.
When I’m in the marsh, I don’t judge the wind. I accept it as the miracle it is.
When I meditate, I don’t judge my thoughts. I accept them as the here-they-are miracle they are. They come and go.
The winds come, the thoughts come, and I let them come, and feel them without judging without stories.
What beautiful shadows on the sidewalk winds make of leaves dancing in the sun. The first movie.
The winds come, the thoughts come, and sometimes I hold my hair back gently or let the thoughts go gently, so I can rest so I can see better.
The marsh wind reminds me thoughts are weather, the earth sacred.
Increasingly volatile storms with dangerous winds, also remind me those grow with our own lack of attention to caring for earth’s sacredness.
I translated Brother Lawrence. I entered some dusty and beautiful books from the 1600s, and they brought me the gold in my shadow and new friends. Something similar happened with Cloud.
Many of these new friends I kind of knew already. If you count having read all of Mirabai Starr’s books friendship. Isn’t it though, in a way? Do you do that, too? You find one book by someone that really resonates, so you find all they’ve written and devour it?
So here are a few kind friends whom I’m grateful for and whom I met through translation. Here they are in no particular order, each in a few lines, that like the tip of an iceberg just suggest rather than represent the richness they bring into my life and into the world’s. Some hyperlinked URLs are here for those who want to delve deeper into the richness these wise friends contribute to the global community. Today, we can be grateful for their helpful videos, too, that we can find on the internet.
Mirabai Starr, whose way of living teaches me more about beyond-binary life than even any of her amazing books, acclaimed translations, creative non-fiction works, Wild Mercy, and one on-the-way.
Mark Dannenfelser of Contemplative Outreach International, a wise storyteller who also introduced me to David A. Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing.
Rev. SeiFu Anil Singh-Molares of Spiritual Directors International, who brings new life to conversations surrounding translation, spiritual companionship, and trying to live a life of tranquility and kindness.
Jon M. Sweeney, who cultivates meaningful conversations in “Off the Page” at Spirituality & Practice, and in his many books–I’m joyful anticipating his and Mark Burrows’s next Meister Eckhart translation!
Lama Yeshe Rose, who shared with me about her adventures translating Tibetan scriptures, and I’ll never gladly be the same, for what I learned in two hours of our talking.
Aurelia Dávila Pratt, whose A Brown Girl’s Epiphany: Reclaim Your Intuition and Step into Your Power is a wise, powerful book, asking all of us to honor the sacred voice within us and be kind to others.
Renée Roden, a freelance reporter and writer, also member of St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago, whose deep listening and writing skills inspire me, and I hope for future books from her.
Josh Patterson and Greg Farrand who interviewed me for the podcast (Re)Thinking Faith and who gave me such grace of listening and who share their own journeys in ways that give me great hope and joy.
Annmarie Sanders, IHM, who interviewed me for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and shared such wisdom with me about what women religious are thinking and experiencing today.
Clifford Brooks III, who publishes The Blue Mountain Review, hosts the NPR podcast Dante’s Old South, and cultivates community through The Southern Collective Experience in the best, most lasting ways.
Cassidy Hall, Kevin Johnson, and Carl McColman, who through the Encountering Silence podcast, and in countless other ways teach us all what it looks like to really, really, really pay attention and listen.
Cynthia Bourgeault, a kind friend since Cloud days, is much cherished for how she creates newness from ancient wisdom and listens into the mysteries and brings us all back joy and new ways of seeing.
Shima Bagheri Ahranjani, is also my friend because of the Cloud. She emailed me a few years ago to say she loved the Cloud. Shima is a dear friend, she has a Ph.D. in Persian literature, and she has given me one of the greatest gifts I always yearned for–friendship with someone who knows Rumi in Farsi, inside and out.
And so many many more. Making me so grateful. Little wonder. From the last section of my Introduction to Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, we encounter the amazing friend Brother Lawrence, who has a way of cultivating friendships wherever he goes:
The best description I know of him is, unsurprisingly, by his good friend and mentee Joseph of Beaufort. It’s from the Profile:
The virtue of Brother Lawrence never made him harsh. His goodness made him gentle. He was a warm, welcoming person. He gave others confidence. When you met him, you felt you could tell him anything. You knew you’d found a friend. As for him, once he knew the person he was dealing with, he spoke freely and showed great kindness. He said simple things, but these were always to the point, and full of common sense and meaning. Once you got past his rough exterior, you discovered a unique wisdom, an openness of mind and a spaciousness beyond the reach of an ordinary lay brother. His depth of insight exceeded all expectation. . . . And you could consult him on anything.
On the pages that follow, you will meet this genuine soul who lives in these words. His authenticity flowed from his friendship with the Presence. His gentleness and warmth, great kindness and common sense, wisdom and openness of mind, which made him a wonderful friend, are the spiritual muscles that his practice of the presence prayer developed, over time.
Brother Lawrence is the reason this wise book has stayed alive through centuries of plague, famine, inequity, inhumanity, religious strife, wars, floods, and our ever-present human fragility. He extends friendship and wisdom to you.
Enjoy becoming friends, and spending time with him, returning now and again for conversation.
Alexandria “Lexi,” Alithia, Amerie, Annabell, Eliahna “Ellie,” Eliahna, Jackie, Jailah, Jayce, Jose, Layla, Maite, Makenna, Maranda, Nevaeh, Rogelio, Tess, Uziyah, and Xavier, plus educators Eva and Irma. Grieving the deaths of nineteen children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and more than a dozen people wounded.
I remember an international student from England who asked me once in disbelief during an office hour conference: “Why do you allow guns here like you do? My father was in the secret service, and when he retired, he had to turn his firearms back in. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have gun violence.”
I had no answer. I have no answer.
I turned to other questions I can begin to answer on an incredibly still gorgeous blue-sky Sunday morning. Contemplating how growing up in the South influenced me as a writer and translator. And, because I’m always up for learning more about how women navigated systemic obstructions, reading a dissertation by Dr. Han VanderHart on seventeenth-century women poets, thanks to Twitter.
Which tells me that writing and rewriting, reading and taking notes are sometimes more comforting to me than even walking in sunshine. Putting good ideas/feelings, and healthy challenges into my brain is a kind of nourishment when my self is existentially frustrated. Being a focused student is soothing, healing.
My good friend Darrell Z. Grizzle invited me to do a future online interview for his blog, Story & Spirit in the Shadow-Haunted South. His kind idea, to help get the word out about my translation of the spiritual classic Practice of the Presence by Brother Lawrence, releasing on August 23, 2022. Two of his questions, “What is your connection to the American South?” and “How has that connection to the South informed your work as a writer?” got red dirt on my knees again.
I grew up in the rolling ancient hills of northwest Georgia. If you haven’t felt and seen and walked through the lacy soft mist embracing those hills when they’re green and it’s early morning and it wraps you up in its beautiful mystery, you haven’t yet lived. The purple of those morning glories will teach you the meaning of glory like nothing else can or will. And its long-weathered, rust-shaded dirt is hard, packed by history. The ack-swat-whack at unassailable horse flies down deserted, asphalted back roads where I walked regularly taught me the meaning of persistence and made the pesky gnats of my mother’s south Georgia seem nowhere near vexing.
My much-loved neighbors influenced me a lot. I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they taught me Southern Mountain English and culture, how neighbors help each other, or as they said, holp each other. Beautiful language—How over there is over yunder way and a photo is a pitcher and there’s a joke my classmates told me in 5th grade about did I know that the wise men in the Christmas story were actually firemen because they came “from afar.”
Partial to bib overalls, my neighbors worked at deafening looms making denim for the cotton mill owners, and grew and canned their own vegetables. And raised sardined yellow chicks in long stinking chicken houses. While rocks and trees deep in the woods where I played had Cherokee carvings on them. And several of my high school friends who are Black whispered to me they had been shot at driving through a town nearby. And church was a screed or screech or scree of brimstone from a booming pulpit while women quietly tended nursery. And my childhood held other trauma for me. While I also found school almost impossible during decades of undiagnosed dyslexia and deep anxiety.
But the homemade ice tea was so sweet, so cold, and so delicious I can still feel my teeth set on delicious edge just by thinking of its amber light in a clear pitcher. Peaches were worth eating with the fuzz on, so juicy they drip down the chin. A neighbor called me into her garden one summer afternoon, pulled and offered stunned me a huge ripe red tomato, said, “Bite hit,” and only then tasting that deep sweetness did I learn why tomatoes are indeed fruit. I watched a neighbor’s house burn slap to the ground and then other neighbors took off work and built them a new one, while I helped clean the trailer they lived in until it was done. And, yes, the guns that were everywhere made me as nervous as Fiver. I have stories about guns I’ve written down for myself but don’t tell.
How do all of these stories and more shape a writer/author and a translator of spiritual texts?
I think of Rilke’s reminder to Franz Xaver Kappus—”Herr Kappus”—in Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet). I “try to have love for the questions themselves,” and I hear Rilke say again, “Live the questions now.” But how do we live the very hard questions now facing us all?
So often quoted, Rilke’s wisdom has become a bit of a blunt saw, so I refresh its teeth by looking at the original German, both beautiful and useful: “zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben” (“try to have love for the questions themselves“) and “Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen” (“Live the questions now”). “Perhaps then,” Rilke adds, and I translate, “one day far from now you can gradually, without realizing it, be able to live into the answer.” This is dependent, he says, on the possibility that his young letter-writer does exercise his inherent power for “conceiving and shaping a sacred, healthy way of life.” If you like, you can read Rilke’s July 16, 1903 letter yourself at poetryintranslation or in German at Google books.
And what does Rilke have to do with my reading Dr. Han VanderHart’s dissertation this morning? Living the question for me means staying open to all I don’t know. Especially to that which doesn’t seem to be of any immediate practical use to me, but that pulls me to it for some unknown reason. Through all of life’s ups and downs, my journey has been profoundly enriched by listening to what and/or who I don’t know. Just being curious and genuinely interested in what others are doing is worthwhile, which today included this: “Gender and Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Philip and Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Philips and Mary, Lady Chudleigh.” Listen to that title. I’m a fan of dissertation titles. Just reading it reminds me how solitary and brave and vertigo-inducing writing a dissertation is. (Yes, it’s also quite a community effort, but paradoxically, at its core, writing a dissertation is one long terrifying leap off a cliff, just you.)
Through Twitter logic, I stumbled happily onto VanderHart’s Twitter page: @hmvanderhart. I checked out linktr.ee/hanvanderhart, then ordered their What Pecan Light book of poetry, because I have spent countless hours in hushed, dense pecan groves, picking pecans for hours on end for my elderly neighbor for quarters that I stacked up very high, when I was ten or so in Perry, Georgia, and I fell in love with the way the light comes through pecan tree leaves, and anyway picking pecans is very meditative if you’re the meditative type. Then I went in search of VanderHart’s work on these four women writers: Mary, Aemilia, Katherine, Mary. Let’s admit it: One of the unsung, quiet joys of the truly chaotic, clamoring internet is you can access and read as-yet-unpublished dissertations and masters theses.
What is so great about VanderHart’s dissertation is it brings Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Aemilia Lanyer; Katherine Philips; and Lady Mary Chudleigh to light, to breathe today’s air. I’d never heard of these writers. Or if I did hear of Mary Sidney Herbert, it was in passing, because of course I read Herbert’s brother Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Astrophel and Stella, but his younger sister would’ve been sadly soon forgotten on the high-altitude hike to a PhD Phi Beta Kappa.
VanderHart’s work elevates the poetry of these women, which they describe as “explicitly and warmly interested in the other.” We need more empathy and more interest in “the other”—in each other, I thought. To my delight, the dissertation’s through line demonstrates that the poetry of Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh “does not merely resist, challenge or subvert male patriarchy networks, but that their poetries enact an engagement with them that creates literary and social spaces for women readers and writers.”
These poets made healthy community through writing. That’s it in seven words. I was happy to learn about their “collaborative writing,” and loved following VanderHart’s analysis of how the work of these women “acknowledges social bonds and community and, in fact, sees these practices as essential to the writing of poetry itself.” My teaching and writing keep me grounded in community, and seeing this example from several centuries ago inspires me, I mused.
My favorite chapter was on Mary Sidney Herbert. What a good Sunday morning read. Mary collaborated with her brother Philip Sidney in making psalm verse paraphrases. When he died in battle at thirty-one during the Eighty Years’ War, over 100 psalms were left for her to finish. She was grief-stricken, but carried on. In this chapter VanderHart directs keen attention to the act of revision—to “re-seeing” itself, a process I love for being so intimate with who I am (becoming) as a writer and a person.
VanderHart shows us Mary Sidney Herbert’s loving, brilliant work up close. Previously, Herbert was branded by scholars as a so-called “inveterate tinkerer who found it difficult to make up her mind” (quoting William Ringler, but also an epithet, VanderHart notes, used by Gary Waller, Harold Love, J.C.A. Rathmell, et al.). This chapter’s discussion of “the joy of revision,” particularly of Herbert’s “joy” in her “care[ful,] attenti[ve]” revisions of Philip’s psalms, and of revision itself as an activity “closer to that of a musician playing variations on a favourite theme” (quoting Harold Love) reminds me of the unfinished nature of all writing that is truly alive, even the most polished.
When I read that Margaret P. Hannay describes the Psalms in the Tanakh as a “divinely inspired expression of human experience,” I thought how I feel just the same about Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence. It’s genuine wisdom. Always universal.
I loved discovering that Philip Sidney chose not “sinners” but “bad mates” in his poetic paraphrasing of Psalm 1, making the language “richer and more steeped in early modern life practices than the more abstract language of the English Bible translations,” as VanderHart observes. John Donne would later say that in The Sidney Psalter Philip and Mary “teach us how to sing.”
Next, VanderHart’s chapter on Aemilia Lanyer explores the life and writing of this Londoner, whose poetry was “expressly concerned” with cultivating a community of reading, writing women. Lanyer wrote from the margins. VanderHart discusses that she was “probably a Jew, married to a gentile instrumentalist associated with the production of royal music.” Lanyer reminds us that “to write from the margins, . . . is to write from a perspective of self-deprecation and unworthiness. Or at least a performance of humilitas.” As an olive-skinned woman coming of age in the South, margins are familiar terra firma.
Poet Katherine Philips intrigues VanderHart for how she “amends the concept of Stoic retreat by making sociability central to its conception as well as central to her writing process.” Philips’ poetry centers relationship and friendship rather than the expected Stoic retirement for self-discovery, self-healing. And poet Mary Chudleigh is fascinating for how she creates a “collaborative conversation” in the unlikeliest of places, with minister John Sprint, and her “Ladies Defence” is a wonderful argument for self-kindness.
VanderHart’s engaging dissertation ends with this paragraph about these remarkable poets they’ve brought blinking and bright-eyed into the klieg lights of the twenty-first century:
“With or without rooms of their own in which to write, early modern women in seventeenth-century England wrote with and for each other. To bring the modern language of collaboration to their poetry is to highlight an attention to audience and community integral to the production of their texts. The four women whose work this dissertation examines did not view themselves as writing alone but in a company of other women, readers and writers. These chapters argue that these four poets did not have the luxury or privilege—despite some of their aristocratic statuses—of considering themselves as working alone or autonomously. Whether the aim in addressing each other by name was praise, invitation or, as in the case of Lady Chudleigh’s poetry, a deployment of ‘reciprocal esteem’ taking the form of corrective dialogue, the recognition of specific others forms the occasion of the poem itself.”
Thankful for these poets, I reflect. I also do not consider myself writing alone but in the company of others, readers and writers, present and past, connecting these diverse strands: Grizzle, Rilke, VanderHart.
My friend Darrell Z. Grizzle and I write in different genres, but share similar interests, especially concerning books and kindness. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, he emailed me out of the blue to ask would I come to his book group discussing my Cloud of Unknowing translation. I hesitated because I was really busy teaching full-time and raising two young children, until Darrell said, “And I have to tell you I LOVE your footnotes.” Done. Our friendship and collaboration expand my world, helping me enter more deeply into “living the questions,” as Rilke says to his epistolary companion, while the seventeenth-century women poets also “lived the questions” against all odds, as Dr. Han VanderHart’s excellent work brings to life. How? Community. That’s what they all share. Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
The same is true for Brother Lawrence. He was living as a friar in a Paris monastery at the same time, and right across the channel from the amazing women writers Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh, who elevate community in their poetry. Community made and kept the friar’s spiritual classic Practice of the Presence alive. It has endured, been in print, read, and loved over 300 years, yet was only published in 1692, a year after his death, because of his friendship with Joseph of Beaufort, because of their conversations, and because Joseph and other friends wanted to read more of their friend’s writings.
Brother Lawrence also spent his days “living the questions” in community. He asked himself, and others asked him: “How can I heal? How can I find peace? How can I develop a friendship with the Divine? How can I become more like Love? How can I become Love?” His response was simple: “Practice the presence.”
Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
Thank goodness Love is closer to us than we may think. Brother Lawrence experienced that 24/7, and when he writes, “God,” I think “Love,” because as we read his work, we realize it’s all about true love (amour is one of his favorite words). The Divine is Love to him, and for anyone hankering for more of God, Love, Wisdom, or however a person might conceive of Meaning or Ultimate Reality, the friar’s Practice of the Presence is balm.
Clicking into news, Love is easy to forget these days. I remind myself, it’s worthwhile to remember that, as Brother Lawrence also says, “Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.”
I see him limping toward the kitchen to begin cracking eggs for omelettes when that line came to him.
