"Since feeling is first . . . "

In my personal favorite of his poems, e e cummings tells us

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

landscape by e e cummings

All of my life I have paid too much attention to the syntax of things. I have wanted to figure my life out--as if it were a puzzle to be put together.

I have analyzed too much. Analysis is some comfort, but it is cold comfort. I wanted Life to have some order, to make some sense, to have a pattern to it.

To synthesize, if you will--to have a logical, coherent rhyme or reason to why things had happened in their certain ways.

To evaluate, classify, and assign things, and even people, to their categorical shelf.

I wanted to reach some new and higher level of Truth. To put together the pieces of myself into a unified whole.

I wanted my life--all Life--to have symmetry, beauty, balance, and harmony.

I did not want Life to play me for a fool.

Analyzing the games we all played, I worshipped at the altar of Intellect and Wisdom.

If the best gesture of my Brain could just work better. If I were only smart enough, then I could know. Know what?

The 1950s and my childhood had taught me that things were white and black, that there was a wrong and a right way (a certain way) to do something, to do anything.

Logic taught me that one thing led to another. Cause and effect.

Most times, I have let my Mind squeeze my Heart out. I didn’t allow my Heart to speak very loudly. I didn’t trust her; she had betrayed me too many times in my chidlhood.

Was I an illusionist? Was it Life’s illusions that mystified me?

I fell hard for the rationalist delusion. After all, I had a mathematical, scientific mind.

I leaned toward Classicism; I desired to be a Classicist. Didn’t they have all of the answers, rules, and reasons for everything?  The voice of my human rule-based education led me down that path, down the logical path.

Did you notice the repetition of the word down in the last sentence? Did you pay attention to its syntax? That’s just it, isn’t it? I went down a path, rather than up a path.

Ironically, one of the first classicist Horace coined the phrase “carpe diem.” Isn't it more reasonable, logical to work and plan for tomorrow? To be ready for any and every eventuality? An impossibility.

 Both Emilys have taught me to live mindfully and to "dwell in possibilities."

Of all that I tried to teach my students, by the end of my career, it was the concept of “mindfulness” that stood out the most for me, (and I hope that some of them got that message as well!) It was there and emphasized in the literature of Thoreau and Emerson, Wordsworth and Shelley, and Whitman and Dickinson, and Wilder’s famous play Our Town.

I have become an intuitionist--I now trust my Heart more and more, thus my Mind less and less. But it’s a long, long journey from the head to the heart.

Life is not black and white, but made up of a multitude of hues and textures and intensities and feelings.

All I know for sure is that I didn’t get to laugh enough in this lifetime. So unpracticed in laughing am I that now my laughter sounds hollow, even to me.

And I have no one’s arms to lean back in and laugh. But it is not too late to laugh nor to lean back. Will you catch and hold me? Will you be tender with me?

At long last, I have found no answers.

All I know to be True is that Life is definitely not a paragraph--it cannot to organized; it is not coherent. It has no topic sentence nor supporting detail sentences.

Perhaps it is not even a distinct division from Death.

And you Mister Death--the great mystery--are no parenthesis--you are not unnecessary. You are the only necessary thing in this life.

(As parentheses often indicate, Death is not just something that is explanatory, qualifying, amplifying, or digressing.)

Death is an interruption of continuity, though perhaps only an interval. And it is the one thing that gives meaning and sustenance and laughter to Life.

seascape by cummings