This blog pairs well with my YouTube channel meditation / video where you can spend 6 calm minutes listening to it, watching birds fly over blue water in a blue sky, seeing a rivulet flow, and enjoying a container ship slowly entering the horizon. To view, go here.
The practice of Lectio Divina is ancient and simple, and it exists in diverse forms across faith traditions and wisdom traditions. It means sacred reading. It’s a kind of steeping that creates a web of mental associations, sometimes broken up into four non steps.
I think of these as a web.
We read or bite some wise words, and then we chew on them like a cow chewing her cud. And for those of us from the country who’ve seen cows chewing their cud, that’s some very, very excellent chewing. Very serious nourishing chewing and re chewing.
And then the next non step or spot on the web is savoring.
So read or bite, reflect or meditate or chew, and then comes the respond or oratio or prayer. What is it saying to me? And then the final non step is contemplatio, or contemplation, resting, simply letting go of thoughts or finding that thoughts let go of you, of us, and resting.
Sometimes the fourth non step is sort of separated away and packaged as centering prayer. And that can be, as I’ve experienced it and many others, very nourishing.
Also the cloud of unknowing’s author Anonymous says in chapter 35 and elsewhere that Lectio Divina is where we start as contemplatives.
And in my experience, this kind of food or eating is needed throughout the journey of life. And the wise Jesus said, we don’t live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of love or God or mystery, the ultimate source, however a person thinks. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. What from this seems to be highlighted in your consciousness?
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
What would you feel is speaking to you in this in these wise words from Jesus? What might it make you feel and what might it make you realize you would like to have more of in your life? Or what kind of a relationship is it calling you to with yourself, with God, or love and with others in whatever non aggressive way you wish?
Let this passage of wise words that have meant so much to so many over millennia speak to us, and then we rest.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
“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.
“One’s whole life is in the work, in the writing and in the play.”
That’s Donna Haraway, a scientist-cultural activist-professor. In the documentary Story Telling for Earthly Survival by Fabrizio Terranova (58:02), Haraway presents my favorite beyond-colonial, beyond-patriarchal approach to being in the now, on earth, in community. It’s all about being present, embodied, here, now.
Her words also resonate with my translating. My whole life is in it.
It’s like the story of the shucked corn cobs Earcell would bring my family. She’d call about 5:30 of an evening: “Git your pot on, water a-boiling. I’m heading to the field. Be over tirectly.” That corn, with the freshest sugar, grown by our thoughtful generous neighbor, walked over and shared with us, then cooked by my mother, well, no other corn on the cob has ever, and I mean ever, tasted as delicious.
Translating sometimes reminds me of that freshest taste of the gift of just-picked corn.
The snow leopard, called “the ghost of the mountains,” is elusive and beautiful. Evolved to thrive in some of the harshest environments on our planet. Elusive also because its grey, yellow, brown-spotted pelage blends in with its rocky, snowy environment.
A good translator is a little like a snow leopard. If doing the job well, the translator may disappear into the text.
A beautiful series of unending acts. Sometimes a translator sits down at a desk and respectfully makes the alchemy happen that slowly turns this text into another one. Other times translating is walking in the marsh or washing dishes or listening to students who’ve faced guns pointed at them merely because their skin is Black. Sometimes translating is resting.
In a world that worships this-or-that, one thing over another, translation is neither and both and something else entirely, all at once. Its essential nature is on the move. “Across and beyond,” trans places, trans times, trans people, it magically carries meaning and beauty and joy between multiple complex points, existing everywhere and nowhere.
Always in complex motion, and outside simplistic categorizing. Translators may be patted on the head and called “clever,” or praised for their “areas of expertise,” but only 44% of books carry their translator’s name on the front cover. That’s from Pamela Paul’s “Stop Pretending All Books Are Written in English” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Thankfully, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many others are pointing out this “unique form of neglect.”
Author, critic, and translator working from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, Croft asserts, “[I]t’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author.” Croft’s own Man Booker International Prize-winning translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights doesn’t have Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft on the front cover, and Croft resolved, “I’m not translating any more books without my name on the cover” (Oct. 15, 2021, PW).
You’d also not know that the novelist and translator Jhumpa Lahiri translated Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust, because you don’t see Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri on the front cover. Lahiri argues in Translating Myself and Others: “Translators are often described as being invisible, discreet, self-sacrificing presences. Their names are frequently absent on book covers; their roles are meant to be supportive. . . . Indeed, feminist scholars have argued that the practice of translation corresponds to traditional feminine archetypes in which a woman’s position and identity were subservient to a man’s” (May 12, 2022, TCC).
Lahiri adds that writing and translating are “two aspects of the same activity, two faces of the same coin, or maybe two strokes, that allow me to swim greater distances, and at greater depths” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Isn’t that superlative, I think to myself, another third way to look at the creative process that is writing and translating.
In the lyrical This Little Art translator and author Kate Briggs explores that third way in writing. Her book is fun to read, even if you don’t care about translation one bit, if you just love words and history and joy and walking around in Europe. My favorite books are genre-bursting, like Briggs’ essay, scholarship, novel, poetry, and philosophy all rolled into beautiful words, words you like, words I take in like I eat barbeque potato chips. Happily, simply.
I am blushingly, deeply in love with words. I admit it. When I translate, the sound of the words and their rhythms matter to me as much as their meanings.
As a kind friend and colleague, also a professional editor, pointed out to me recently, I am not likely meant to say, as on the About webpage I remade recently: “Carmen is the author of x-number-of books,” if some are translations. Aren’t translations books?
When my translation of Practice of thePresence is published by Broadleaf Books, I will have worked on, written, revised, translated, been translated by, and put my body, mind, heart, and soul into ten books, not even counting time invested in reissues, new editions, Audible releases, and the like, and even so, I can’t say I’m the author of ten books? Ah, words. Ah, world.
When I think of translating a work from one language and one time period into English and now, I think of how my “whole life” is in that translating, in the writing and in the high-serious play and joy of the countless little acts. I’m looking up innumerable etymologies of words, lovingly finding old dictionaries that offer words in their timely habitats of sentences from that period so I can see how they were used then. I’m also studying history and who knew Paris experienced a Little Ice Age and then floods in the late seventeenth-century.
And I’m letting the words and their meanings “happen” to me by entering into the entire wisdom of the work that translates me, so where past translations of Nicolas Herman see a word like bonté in French and just hear “goodness,” as a binary-system antithesis of “evil,” the Spirit shows me the “kindness” that exists outside a binary view and that is omnipresent in Brother Lawrence’s teaching. Which helps us create all sorts of relationships that Haraway sees as kinships she calls oddkins. These relationships include animals, trees, and yes, relationships human-to-human, with each other.
Noble laureate Olga Tokarczuk in the essay “Ognosia” translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, calls this “multiorganismicity” (June 6, 2022), at Words Without Borders: “Complexity, multiplicity, diversity, mutual influence, metasymbiosis—these are the new perspectives from which we observe the world.” This essay is a must-read.
Alice Walker dedicates The Color Purple:
“To the Spirit: / Without whose assistance / Neither this book / Nor I / Would have been / Written.”
That dedication speaks to me and my experience of translating. How I best listen to the palpable silence. With my body, mind, heart, and soul alert to the Spirit, who seems a friend, and the Spirit is also my body, mind, heart, and soul, a third way, a fourth way, a fifth way opening. Way opens, meaning kindness.
Translation is how I find my way to more kindness.
Translating is bodyful. A term I take from Christine Caldwell’s Bodyfulness (Shambhala). New days need new terms. New ways of being-awake need new words.
Bodyfulness is her neologism. Caldwell says, “The body isn’t a thing we have but an experience we are” (xxv). She calls bodyfulness “attention during action,” “a purposeful and athletic ability to alter our attentional focus” so that “the amount and type of sensations we work with can be nourishing and deeply informative.”
Body as experience is a complex process of my capillaries, my acetylcholinesterase, my toes, my thinking, the water I drink, my breathing, grief, tears, saying sorry, meaning it and changing, my listening, my joy that we have the right to vote and have our votes counted, my worries for America, my love for others, my love for my self, the tang of coffee, the getting up, the sitting down, the walking, the snowy egrets, and always the dancing.
Caldwell is wise like Haraway. She says, “Humans invent words because we need language to articulate and share our experience with others, yet our words also actively shape how we perceive and move in the world.”
When a friend asked me to write down my translation philosophy recently, I thought, Translation philosophy? because until that moment I translated almost unselfconsciously, but when I sat down to do the task my friend suggested, out came the words embodied mysticism, which after reading Caldwell became bodyful mysticism. I translate because I love words and wisdom and kindness and self-compassion and changing and making community. Because I actually love making space in me for listening to an other, and then sharing their beauty, and it’s a puzzle I respect and it makes me sway and shimmy and spin . . . with myself and others.
Mysticism is not an elite word. Though it’s become rarefied. Treated like champagne when it’s really clean water and oxygen. It merely means my translation listens for mystery and makes room for mystery and respects mystery and honors mystery and opens for the kind Other in others, which cannot be worded, just as the mystic Marguerite Porete’s Loing Près is a Far Nearness happily decentering-Me while embracing me, and I others. This is the Something More healer Ann Bedford Ulanov often mentions, the Source of the Source.
Mysticism is ordinary. It’s a cup of tea, its steam rising. It’s not exclusive. Not housed in institutions. It’s certainly no gatekeeper. It’s a cup of coffee, its steam rising. It’s my breath on a cold day. Your breath. It’s working to make sure everyone can breathe.
Translation is also making oddkins. A portmanteau from Old Norse oddi, “third or additional number,” and Old English cynn, “family,” plus a soupçon of Octavia Butler’s parables, this neologism articulates Haraway’s vision of surprising ways of kin-making. She sees kin as “a wild category” that people “do their best to domesticate” but can’t. Oddkins expresses our need for “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” for “becom[ing]-with each other or not at all.” Making oddkins is “cultivating multispecies justice” among humans, dolphins, ants, corals of the seas and lichens of the land, orchids, bees, you name it.
Living on “Terra” during “disturbing” and “mixed-up” times, Haraway describes our “task” as learning to respond well by inventive kin-making, finding connections with each other, even though as humans we’re all a little “bumptious,” which is a sweet way of saying obnoxious, or as Merriam-Webster‘s puts it: “presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive.” Aren’t we all.
She sees oddkinning as a “practice,” a “response-ability” to make a “thick, ongoing present.” Echoing the wise Georgia Congressman John Lewis, she says, “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” She teaches that “staying with the trouble” requires not focusing on an “awful or edenic” past nor an “apocalyptic or salvific” future, but instead on “learning to be truly present.”
“Learning to be truly present” is what Practice of the Presence is about. I spent the quarantine summer of 2020 and beyond in seventeenth-century Paris with Brother Lawrence, translating solidly. This dedication of my time deepened my lifelong walk with this simple practice that heals complexly. When out of the blue on June 9th, someone who read my translation of the Cloud of Unknowing, also a Companion of Julian of Norwich emailed me a gut-wrenching breath prayer: Slowly inhale, I can’t breathe and slowly out, Come, Spirit.
George Floyd’s presence is in Practice of the Presence too. So is Ahmaud Arbery’s and Breonna Taylor’s. As I translated, I began seeing Brother Lawrence, disabled veteran and an unremarkable Carmelite friar then, slipping into his self-repaired sandals, picking up a homemade #LesViesNoiresComptent sign, and marching down the ruede Vaugirard, with a profound limp.
Making oddkins happens where, when, how? Here, now, being present. Haraway translates her vision into a new word. To learn to be present and stay with what Lewis names “trouble,” Haraway renames our present age, seeing the traditional term for our “current geological age,” Anthropocene, as limited, limiting. For our “transformative . . . timeplace” Haraway makes the “simple word” Chthulucene, pronounced, / ˈTHOO luh scene / (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene).
Chthulucene envisions our present moment, with its “vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy,” as the time “to make trouble” by “staying with the trouble . . . [through] learning to be truly present.” Chthulucene is the present moment where we take the third way of sym-poiesis, or making-with all other creatures. Haraway believes, “We become-with each other or not at all.” That’s why she coined Chthulucene by marrying the Greek khthôn/χθών or “earth,” with kainos/καινός or “now . . . thick, ongoing presence.” (Which is very much what the friar’s practicing the presence is: “being present now on earth.”)
Brits keep the initial “k” for χ, but mostly it’s dropped from khthôn/χθών, and the word starts with θ or “th.” A fun word to say, it’s also beautiful. It lands on the tongue like life and love: / ˈTHOO luh scene /. Its sound doesn’t match its looks, which is just the kind of vertigo love makes. Like the word kin, Chthulucene is a “wild category” open to untold healthy possibilities. It’s more inclusive and generates more joy and more opportunities to connect in “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” rather than Anthropocene, which centers man in anthro and excludes other creatures.
We’re all kin and wildly, wonderfully odd. We’re here now, on earth, made of dust, together.
And as my very bones know, translation is a process some may also call, yes, love.
