Mindfulness: How’s Your Ship?

AziMuth

During my travels earlier this week I made it a point to spend part of an afternoon in Gloucester, MA.  I first discovered the town in the poetry of Charles Olson who resided there while writing his epic The Maximus Poems.  

Olson’s work and practice has been the single greatest influence in my life.  Over a decade ago I spent a considerable amount of time in his archives reading into his head and his methods.  His output was vast, his interests as diverse as deep.  Through his lens I found an entry into subjects I didn’t know existed. 

During the current political season it is perhaps difficult to make this point, but in his methodology he revealed to me the workings of a liberal mind.  The point I’m reaching for here is how you work and develop mind.  Mindfulness.  Mind-full-ness.  The practice of it.

Gloucester provided Olson an amazing foundation to dream, think, explore and write off of.  It remains to this day a working fishing port, and the strong odor of the fish packing plants continues provide downtown with a unique signature.  It has an interesting pre-colonial history.  The beauty of rock and sea sourced his springs of mythopoetic imagination.  Each time I visit, in the impressions of the harbor, the commerce, the polis that is Gloucester, it seems I’ve entered again into the living poem that Olson revealed.  I see the place through his eyes.  It can’t be helped.  

Along with his stance toward life, his amazing engagement in text is an important lesson he left us.  His active dialogue with all that he read can be seen in the scribbles decorating the margins of the well worn volumes in his library.  You can track these scribbles as they get developed in notebooks, then into multiple drafts of essay and into the poems.  He worked his craft with the ethic of a fisherman.

To set off in a box upon the sea…