‘Untitled’ Working Poem was given Dr. James Orbinski, in absentia. This poem was given to him in hopes that he would read it to his new PhD students in the collaborative public health program he has co-created at the University of Toronto.
Untitled
Science Asserts:
Proposition #1:
“We cannot solve a problem by using the same consciousness that created it.”
Cross reference with Pulitzer Prize winner, Douglas Hofstadter’s proposition, while regarding Escher’s hands drawing hands: the contradiction of which hand is drawing which hand cannot be solved at the visible level.
Proposition #2:
“The medium is the message.”
Proposition #3:
“I cannot see in the dark, so I have to use my ears and touch to navigate and that brings me into new ways of knowing.
It is this kind of connected knowing, resting on the metaphor of voice and touch, that puts the knower back into knowledge construction.
The cosmological crisis of today is maintained by our unwillingness to question the efficacy of our dominant epistemology
and the metaphor of sight on which it rests.”
“In the wisdom tradition…
objective seeing means seeing with the eye of the heart.”
To enter the dark
is to cross a threshold
to a land
where no light beckons
where no light welcomes
This darkened threshold
opens to a void
black
grey
maybe grey
sometimes grey
I have visited this place
many times now
never yet by choice
but by life’s beckoning
by life’s invitation
although the invitation
did not come on gilded paper
Life came riding high
banging down my fortress door
a roar of Cossacks'
sabers brandished high
sun scorched torches
burning blades
a stampede
beating me down
down
down
through
in
into the land of Dark
If I cannot yet call
it home
I can at least say
I am no longer a visitor
I dwell here
like Demeter
and Inanna
at least part of every year
In this land called Dark
I can see no edges
discern no shapes
gauge no horizons
My eyes retired
released from bondage
a Sabbath
In this land called Dark
I must walk slowly
and feel my way
My breath
slow intakes
and slow releases
brings my steps to
the rhythm of the dark
slow, treacle, molasses
My breath deepens
moving in
moving deeper
My body surrenders
until my heart cracks
Tears fall
as breath touches
the door of my barricaded heart
opening, just a crack
it only needs to be a crack
I can feel all of it here
My body aches
for all I rush past
in the land of Light
Breath that comes
in staccato wheezes
elongates to
breathe deep and slow
just to meet the holy mystery
of this dark place
It is here that I listen
deep into the silence
My hand reaches out
a longing for connection, communion
In this slow full bodied breath
I return to trust
in utero trust
twenty one weeks
in utero living
pattern embodied
like little Samuel's hand
that reached out knowing
the hand of love was just
within his tiny reach
One little arm suspended between two lands
his warm wet world of Dark and the land of Light
That tiny hand reached out
and grasped his healer's finger
and the moment was saved
and called the Hand of Hope
It is here
like little Samuel
at the edge
at the tiny tear
in the skin
between the two worlds
I feel my wounds
and reach out
in faith
© Deborah Prokipchuk Ackley 2008
