While giving a talk at an All Day Retreat on Saturday I came across a familiar concern. When encouraging participants to be “at home” in the moment and widen this to being at ease in their lives as they actually are, one person wondered whether this meant we will never improve. It is true that some people may use acceptance as an excuse for passivity or to mask an already existent depression. However, for most people the practice is to go against the deeply-conditioned habit of judging oneself and trying to “fix” one’s life – normally in response to the internalized early demands of parents or from the exigencies of today’s continually comparing society – and see if they can relax in their history and their personality as it is. Practically, this means noticing the way the mind likes to compare our life as it is with better lives and how it finds it hard to believe that where it is at this moment is enough. In this poem, May Sexton seems to try this. She decides, finally, to become herself and stop wearing the faces which others demand of her. She has the courage to stand still and be in her life as it is.
Now I become myself. It’s taken Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning? Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant. As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent, Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give, Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
