A Life of Beauty Inside Language:

“A life inside of language, that is what we want.” In the dream, I say these words to an audience in New Orleans as if I composing a poem in the moment. The words awaken me at 4:04 am December 26, 2014.

I say this from within language. From within the transparent luminous egg that language is. Composing the poem and living in language are the same. Language is an environment, a landscape within which we walk, the earth and sky from which creation emerges.

(Language is not a flak suit, an armored vehicle, a bank account, an oil well, a website or a commercial, though these days it is hard not to confuse them.)

When I awaken the sentence revises itself. It reveals its hidden intention: We want to live a Life of Beauty inside Language.

This is what it means to write a poem. Sentences, essays, novels, conversations, dreams are all poems in this way. Awe and wonder accompany this understanding. To write a poem: the slow, deliberate searching out of the exact word that is a counterpart to the vision, to what is seen, what is seen there in the world, and here within oneself, and from within or into the numinous. The tremulous word is the border between, or it is a particle of each of the different worlds that it evokes. And both.

To write a poem is to be crossing between the worlds like bees humming. It is difficult to explain. Do you remember the time you sought the right word because you needed to give shape to the invisible? It was longing to be born and you had to push. Inevitably, it tore you open.

Don’t be deluded: Beauty is not a pretty thing. Don’t mistake it for a bauble or it will take you down. Beauty has teeth, will draw blood. Beauty does not look away. Beauty bears witness to poison, plastic and dismemberment – whatever you have been fooling with or has been fooling you. Beauty does not appease. Beauty does not condone. Beauty will shame you, you with all your bombs and distractions.

The poem, alive and transparent, is the means to see through to the hidden shimmering, if bloodied, reality right here. The poem can say Yes and the poem can say No. From within the living world of language to see and to call forth and to manifest all at once. Language as homage to what has been created and what is possible. As the intermediary between you and me and what is.

We want to live a life inside language. We want to live a life inside the Holy. We want to live a life inside the sacred beauty of the natural world. We want to live inside the natural world, which is Holy land. We all want it to be our home.

This is what Indigenous people know. When they speak, the Holy is in their breath. Or the Holy is breath. This is what your ancestors knew. This is what was stolen from you. Do you dare to bring it back?

The focused and devoted activity of recognizing Beauty and revealing it through language.

Choosing Beauty in each moment over the expedient,

An act of choosing the Holy over the mundane. Life is not mundane. Culture has made it so. Resist! Each word is an ethical choice.

Language within which we can live arises from the re-emergence of each word in Holy relationship to every other word in each sentence that acknowledges and revives creation. We are being asked to inhabit that language. To walk within it as we speak it. To live it.

The Diné (Navajo) say, “Walk in Beauty.”

In the dream the words were: “A Life of Beauty inside Language, that is how we want to live.”

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