FREESTYLE CHAT 2020 EPISODE 1: “RICH BEING”

The Be-Loving Imaginer

Today’s freestyle chat has 4 parts, all stemming from Roger Brooks’ book The Power of Being Rich: 10 Essential Principles to Manifest What You Already Have. As dialogic interpreter, my bold beginning is to suggest that Roger’s admirable volume might equally well be titled The Power of Rich Being. Roger wants to show people how to conceive and advance a practical enterprise by starting with a feeling of abundant Being, fullness of Being, plenitude of Being. It starts with confidence, which is nothing more than faith – faith in yourself. Gratitude for your gifts is both starting point and end result.

Next, I show that the exchange of approaches between Roger and me amplifies the meaning of the book we’re discussing, and this deepening or broadening of significance is the essence of friendship. Friendship is mutual mentorship, reciprocal shared learning. I invented the new literary genre of the verse interview to develop dialogue-friendships of this kind with writers I admire. In Shakespair I answer all the Bard’s 154 love sonnets with Shakespearean-style sonnets on facing pages. What an extraordinary human experience! But it’s also, for me, very ordinary in that my poetic “career” began when I discovered it was more fun to write e-mails in sonnets rather than in the usual conversational prose.

In part 3 I show how Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, relates the theme of rich being to that of friendship. In his poem “Breathing,” he tells us that the tension of inhaling and the relaxation of exhaling are two types of “grace” or vital taking-and-giving, the healthiness of rich Being. Next, he writes a myth of Lucifer or Satan as uneasy in the continual society of God or Elohim. Satan leaves them to be on his own, but gets lonely. Using Jesus as a role model, Satan decides to return to harmony with the Elohim. But, being the kind of person he is, Satan eventually gets restless and has to leave again. What results is a pendular movement between Solitude and Friendship. The “devil” loves it, and so will we. This alternation I correlate to the contrasts in the “Breathing” poem between inhaling and exhaling. Moral and psychological “breathing” means alternating between taking and giving, between self-affirming (inhaling) and self-transcendence (exhaling), between “Selving” and “Unselving,” two wonderful word coinages of Goethe. This alternation is deeply, powerfully lifegiving. It enriches our Being.

Finally, in part 4, I show how the gift of a gingko-patterned coffee cup from a potter friend (artist mentor), added to reverie-thoughts on the November window landscape (reminding me of the paintings of painter Andrew Wyeth, another artist mentor), produced a dialogue-response in the form of a newly composed sonnet.