Dear Reader,
Happy New Year, and welcome to A Contemplative’s Field Guide, a new reading series created to celebrate my latest poetry collection of the same name.
This series is an extension of the book, an invitation to slow down, to listen carefully, and to practice attention in a distracted age. In each installment, I read one poem by a writer who has deeply shaped the way I see the world, followed by one poem from my own collection.
The opening episode turns to Jim Harrison, a poet whose work insists that attention is a kind of ethics. His poem raises questions about hearing when ego, violence, and interpretation so often get in the way.
I place his poem alongside one of my own, written in conversation with the figure of Black Elk, to explore how often our urge to label and define prevents us from truly listening.
This poem approaches Black Elk's story with a degree of hesitation. It is less concerned with defining his spirituality than it is with examining the cultural and theological frameworks that have attempted to do so on his behalf. By refusing labels, the poem seeks to draw attention to the limits of interpretation and to the risks we run when we reduce complex human lives into neat and manageable categories.
What is offered here is not an explanation, but an inquiry shaped by an awareness of the ethical responsibilities involved in interpreting the stories of others. In some way thats the poem's point. Any act of speech is a failure to speak, at least truly. But since we can't avoid speaking altogether we must speak as those who deeply listen rather than as those who rush to label.
Both the podcast and the book are rooted in the same intention. These poems aren’t answers or conclusions, but are instead moments of observation, written in the hope that paying closer attention might itself be a form of transcendence.
If this episode resonates with you, then maybe you'll enjoy my book. Supporting the book is the most direct way to support this series and the work that follows.
Hope you enjoy, and Happy New Year!
— Ryan Diaz
From a Contemplative's Field Guide
They say Black Elk took to Jesus
the way a fish takes to water
or to put it in Catholic terms:
the way Jesus took to the cross.
On the other side of sainthood,
Black Elk rests somewhere between
the pearly gates and northern lights—
heaven, whatever we call death,
an abstraction of an abstraction,
like calling Black Elk Catholic
or Lakota like him converts.
Better to let the nameless stay nameless.
Titles and labels like state lines,
useful for maps, when the world is
2-D and flat.
Last night, I saw Black Elk dancing
with the Virgin—Mother Sky or
Brother Earth: I can hardly tell the difference.
