Seared & Cauterized

Jack Kornfield
A Path With Heart

Sometimes when the demons are most difficult, we can use a variety of temporary practices that function to dispel them and act as antidotes. For desire, one traditional antidote is to reflect on the brevity of life, on the fleeting nature of outer satisfactions, and on death. For anger, an antidote is the cultivation of thoughts of loving-kindness and an initial degree of forgiveness. For sleepiness, an antidote is to arouse energy through steady posture, visualization, inspiration, breath. For restlessness, an antidote is to bring concentration through inner techniques of calming and relaxation. And for doubt, an antidote is faith and inspiration gained through reading or discussion with someone wise. However, the most important practice is our naming and acknowledging these demons, expanding our capacity to be free in their midst. Applying antidotes is like using Band-Aids, while awareness opens and heals the wound itself.

The brand name leads me to contemplate alternatives: dressing, bandage, plaster. And the French translations as pansement and its Middle French homophone pensement. The Thinking Wound. Like a pharmakon. A name. A brand.

And so for day 2340
10.05.2013

Restorative

Barry Lopez in Winter Count has a piece that is a portrait. "The Lover of Words" is described as understanding

the power of words to draw forth feeling and to mesmerize. He understood how words healed.

A slow reading that doesn't rush to the next sentence allows the image of a self-healing word to emerge. Words as beings that can be wounded. Such an image suits an attitude to language that respects not only power in words but also how power comes to words.

It is perhaps not surprising that there is a vegetative aspect to such use of words. The plant and the word are similar.

At an all-but-unfanthomable depth in his spirit, however, there lay an irreducible idea, medieval and adamantine, about the replicating quality of metaphor and the physical revelation of abstract ideas. As he tended to his bushes and plants, to the trimming of lawns and the hillsides of ivy, he drew himself along in a world of cultivated ideas, trimmed and watered as expeditiously, from which arose an atmosphere as salubrious.

How different the task of purging a language which some poets set themselves from the humble local project of healing words.

And so for day 72
24.02.2007