Daily Profundity
In this video, you will see me read a little poetry, just a few phrases, and to suggest that each of our five senses is a door leading to the profound if we will let ourselves fully experience, right now, that smell, touch, sound, sight, or taste. I’m not the first, by any means, to testify to the benefits of spending as much time in “the present moment” as we can. I'm just the one here who can affirm the difference it has made, and makes daily, in my life.
I have a relationship with poetry and it’s a love/hate or more often, a love/indifferent encounter with those parsimonious drips of meaning. My favorite magazine is The New Yorker , hands down. It's the best long form writing you can find, covering a wide range of topics I often don’t even know are all that important until I read about them in a New Yorker article. Each issue is a little treasure chest to open, with fascinating stories, chatty observations about people or events, and witty, intellectual takes on this or that. The New Yorker exemplifies creative non-fiction at it best.
But for the most part, the poetry I find in the mag is way too esoteric for me. I think one has to have been an English lit or history or philosophy major to understand those poems. Most of the poetry I read in the New Yorker is “too hard!” as my MBA statistics professor, Bud Kelly, used to say. He was one of the best teachers I ever had because he made the complex into something simple (but not simplistic) we could understand and use, using humor and stories and examples.
The poetry in The New Yorker (not all but a good chunk of it) is “too hard” for me to interpret. I am sure it’s prize winning poetry and all that. Maybe it’s my age, but I want insights into simple truths, beautifully and perhaps unusually expressed. Starting the morning by reading a poem by Mary Oliver, or a short essay by Gunilla Norris, or a passage by John O’Donohue sets the entire tone of my day.
Each of those authors express through their words, through beautiful language, ways we can observe in life every day, and in every moment.
