April 2025: Poetry and the wisdom behind the words.
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” - Henry David Thoreau
Hi Galaxy friends. I’m playing catch up after traveling in Greece for ten magical days with my family, then coming home and immediately prepping to launch our next round of teacher training (which was a pretty darn magical first weekend). Thus, the Dispatch is a full week late, but as you will see in these words I’ve crafted… there’s no rush.
This April, like last April and the April before, sort of, is poetry month here. I think I shall make every April at the Galaxy poetry month, henceforth. You can do what you will with that information: come to every class and soak up the poems, or avoid us because you hate poems. But I’m guessing, if you’ve come this far with the studio, with me and these Dispatches, and with many of the teachers who grace our roster, you may like poetry at least a little bit like I do.
So, back to the reason why this dispatch is late, I was traveling in Greece for 10 days with my fam. We are not a fancy, travel abroad for spring break family, but I was committed to this trip, because I wanted my one-quarter Greek kids to understand where some of their great-grandparents were born, and to connect with second cousins and relatives that were still there (and so eager and loving and lovely to meet, I might add). Their Greekness goes beyond that long last name that translates to son of a silversmith, and lies in the DNA.
Maybe it manifests in my daughter's love for capers and olives (cretan salad pictured above, as an example), or for my son’s ability to sit down with a random stranger’s bouzouki and just jump right into playing Misirlou on it. But we made time to intentionally say, in Messenia: this is the land you came from, these mountains and olive groves. In Kyparissi: this is the house your great grandmother had to leave at 18, and never returned to again for her entire life. In Kalamata: this is where the Greek people united to overthrow hundreds of years of Ottoman rule. In Crete: this is where a civilization flourished 2000 years before the Acropolis. We could have gone there, ate good food, swam in the ocean, walked through the Acropolis museum and called it a day. But we did our best to dig a little deeper so that my kids would understand the why behind the journey.
And one day, in the little eastern Peloponnesian town of Kyparissi (that means cypress), I was talking to our host, Ismini, whose home we were renting - a stone home built by her grandfather, I might add. Ismini is a theatre teacher, but in her spare time, she has created a small gallery space in Kyparissi that features the oral history of some of the elders of the town. These towns in the Peloponnese mountains are so isolated, the same families go back many generations, and the dialects of each town differ quite a bit. Ismini said that sometimes they would be interviewing someone, and they couldn’t translate the Greek of the interviewee, because the dialect was so dissimilar to their Greek. I lamented that I wished I could speak Greek, because it’s such an interesting and beautiful language. It’s been in continual use for a really long time - longer than many/most other languages. It has evolved from earlier forms, but Ancient Greek is much closer to modern Greek than Old English is to current English, just as a comparison. Then Ismini said something back to me that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind: “It’s good to study Greek, because you’ll uncover the wisdom behind the words, and the hidden meanings. And you have to study it, to know it - most people who speak Greek have no idea that there is this hidden wisdom.”
I still get the shivers when I think about that. If you really sit and learn what the words mean, they’re going to reveal hidden wisdom to you. If you take your kids to Greece, and really show them how they’re connected to this land, they’ll understand themselves more.
In that small town of Kyparissi, I sat on the pier and looked at the Myrtoan waters, so deep blue; a different deep blue from the water of my beloved Superior. I quietly watched, and thought about Homer’s words for these waters: οἶνοψ πόντος, oinops pontos. Sometimes that phrase is translated as “wine dark,” but its literal translation is “wine-faced.” Maybe Homer meant that it was dark. Or maybe he meant that it was wild, like someone who had drank too much wine. I can’t know exactly what Homer meant, but I do know that, after a little spent watching the water, and letting those words roll through my head slowly I thought: I can see it.
If you sit and read a poem and let those carefully curated and crafted words speak to you, you’ll uncover meanings and magic that help you understand the writer, yourself, the world… so many things.
It’s all the process of mindfulness.
So when I read a poem in yoga class with you, it’s partially because I believe it has something to tell us that parallels the dharma talk and intention for the day.
But it’s also a way of inviting you to dig a little deeper, pay attention a little more closely, listen a little harder, and really understand why you’re doing what you’re doing when you practice. You can practice without this sort of intentional mindfulness, but you might not uncover the wisdom that lies behind those poses and that breathing. Just like the Greek people who speak a magical language of hidden wisdom, but never study it to know the wisdom behind their words. Or the people who travel place, but don’t think hard about why they’re there and what hidden meaning is waiting to be uncovered about that place.
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
So, I’d love if you share a favorite poem with me at some point this month - and more than just sharing the poem, I’d love to know what you “see” when you read it.
You know how to get in in touch with me.
Anna
What I’m Reading
About a month ago, likely on a Wednesday night, I was driving to the studio, and I happened to catch Padraig O’Tuama being interviewed on All Things Considered. I love O Tuama’s podcast, “Poetry Unbound,” and I already have one anthology of poems that he collected into a volume, with an intro and following essay attached to each poem he selected. That book is called “Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World” and I highly recommend it.
O Tuama read a poem by Jim Moore, called “Fear and Love,” which is included in his new collection of poems, entitled “44 Poems on Being with each other,” and I was so moved by it, I had to stop the car, pull over, and write a note to myself to find that poem and read it later. So I’ll attach it here as a last little bonus offering for the month. But let me also heartily recommend both of O Tuama’s poetry collections.
Fear and Love
by Jim Moore
I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough. But whatever comes next must include
tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek from the cancer removed yesterday.
I said last night, in the few seconds before I fell asleep,
You do realize, don’t you, everything
is falling apart? You said, OK,
I’ll try to keep that in mind. And now it is
starting to be late again, just like every other night
for the last seventy-five years. Fear and love,
a friend said in an impromptu speech
at his surprise birthday party,
we all live caught between fear and love.
He tried to smile as he spoke, then sat down.
Yesterday you saw the moon
from the operating table
where they were about to cut you.
Look! you demanded, and the surgeon bent and turned
to see it from your angle, knife in hand.
from Prognosis (Graywolf, 2021)
