Honey is a Promise

when a stir is needed.

Photo by Christina Branco on Unsplash

Somewhere in the middle of his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes our field of experience as a vale surrounded by low, cloudy hills, from which streams trickle by and hint at even further sources. This is Plato’s cave with an English twist. He also warns

Where the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others.

I think Coleridge is right. And wrong. In a strange way, it seems we comprehend each other more and more in our incomprehensibility: We buy into and willingly perpetuate the increasingly popular incomprehensibilities, the prevailing mindsets, the same rote language of the age. In other words, we’re tempted (or maybe tempered) always to settle for the vale without giving a second thought.

I recently sat in on a webinar on being change-adept in this technological era of ours. “Those who don’t adopt fall behind,” was the supposed golden nugget I was offered in more fluff. “Learners will always be prepared for what comes, while the learnéd will only ever be prepared for a reality that no longer exists.” A clever and catchy turn of phrase. But while I get the sentiment here (and there’s certainly some truth to it: we don’t want to stagnate) it ignores the fact that the field of our experience is only a sliver of reality. There’s a whole world out there—not to mention a history—of which we are only a part and player. If Coleridge’s vale is made to be everything, we lose sight in an instant of the tangible and the spiritual implications of our actions, and of the music ringing beyond the far hills. Adapting as fast as we can cannot be a good unto itself. The future (the one we’re fed, as opposed to the one we create) cannot be the only book to read.

Peter Berkman, in “Machine Apocolypse,” Plough Quarterly issue 40, reminds us “Narcissus didn’t fall in love with himself… He fell in love, fatally, with an image of his own creation.” My God, give me any other fate than this. Pausing for a flash to gather with family and friends this weekend, I want to slow and consider where my constructs, my created images, may be playing too large a part in my unspoken list of loves. Is it possible I’ve let them take me over?

Malcolm Guite, in his “Must I disrupt my life with discipline?” prays to no one in particular—or perhaps to someone very particular—

…let me stammer through these nights
Making a fertile garden of my squalor
Where we can scatter seeds in spring and raise
Above the rhythm of our appetites
The strange quietus I had thought was love.

The poem of mine that follows was written in the midst of being spread thin, eaten up by the rushings and the mad “progress” of the days, wanting something deeper and richer to characterize my life. Something less like the quick-sweet we numb our thought with; something better able to “raise / … / The strange quietus I had thought was love.” I’d rather live from there.

Honey is a Promise

Originally published in The Clayjar Review’s Toil issue

I could use a good
stir about now. The top
and surface of things is
watery sweet, and sweet enough,
and it would be so

easy to dip it up, over,
and into the cup. But press in—
look more, I say. Jam
your spoon down deep-like
to the raw heart of things
and spin it up. Take nothing
less. 
          There—this

is what you’ve wanted 
and been waiting for—the fully body and velvet
promise of how many stings and salves
and all that stuck
to deepen the tasting,
every sip of your steeping days.

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What does this poem stir you? I hope it's an encouragement as you consider the posture you want to live from.