An important book that informs the convening and concept of Contemplative Poets is “An Ocean of Light” by Martin Laird.
Laird quotes Archbishop Rowan Williams who declares that contemplation “is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
Laird goes on to write that “contemplation liberates us from the seeds of violence in our own heart, especially from our individual and social compulsions to find someone to blame for the ills that befall us – such compulsions do nothing but keep us bent over ourselves, blind to what constitutes a human.”
From Thaddeus of Vitnovnica, Laird shares: “If our thoughts are kind, peaceful, and quiet, turned only toward good, then we also influence ourselves and radiate peace all around us – in our family, the whole country, everywhere. This is true not only here on earth, but in the cosmos as well.”
Contemplation, and the lifestyle leading to it and flowing from it, asks but a single question, ‘What does kindness look like at any given moment’” Laird writes.
The problem is, according to Laird, our minds are deeply cluttered. He uses the metaphor of the cluttering and decluttering of our minds as a way of considering how the practice of contemplation works.
“The metaphor allows us to look at the contemplative process of liberation from a point of view other than that of acquiring something we think we do not have and therefore must up with a strategy to acquire, possess and control. Think of a bright and spacious room whose polished wooded floor is covered with mounds of clutter of whatever sort. The practice of contemplation gradually declutters our minds, gradually revealing the brightly polished floor – the radiant core of all – that we did not realize was already there…”
“Our guiding metaphor of clutter and the process of decluttering (release, letting be, letting go, non-clinging) bring to the fore certain topics crucial to the practice of contemplation.
The same process of decluttering is the foundation of the beauty of poetry. We seek to recognize and celebrate only the essence of what really is. A revolutionary act, indeed!