“Woman is a ray of God: She is not the earthly beloved.

She is creative: You might say she is not created.”

—Rumi, 13^th Century poet

 

A young woman sits under a deep tamarind shade in the summer of 1971, thinking deeply about a form of being that is creative and responsive to creativity. She listens to life coming fresh from spaces around her, highlighted by ideas and ideals, dreams and imaginings, reminiscent of something strange and true.

 

 

I am that young woman. My experiential search for solitude at that time was not unbegetting. It just caught me, stayed with me for long, and waited to see my “shifting configurations” (Aoki, 1980). Something was happening to this being, some-thing that had not happened before. I was not my usual self. I was myself and yet some other. I felt the tremor of that living moment, and was aroused to meet its sensuality, direct, spontaneous, and immediate. Such excitement, such sensitivity in that silent moment invoked that was palpable, feelingly perceptive, and permeable in me. I perceive I saw through flashing eyes, that visionary gleam and my beautiful dream (Coleridge, Kublai Khan) in just one moment. Such stimulation provoked my imaginative perception and flew me on my own wings to write my soul.

 

 

The black stormy spectrum of our eyes

are risques

trapezing at will

between cosmoses

helplessly dilated by time.

 

 

I was ecs+a+ic, and dwelling in that moment’s ecstasy, I opened up to touch the fringes and fluoresce time. Time was around me, all watchfulness, setting me apart for a creative discourse in such experiential moments, and what was being felt became what the creative piece is. This was my being in the light of Love, and what danced within me became words in poetry.

 

This poem, like its soul mates, manifests the event in time. And for me it is my natural opiate for more exultant being.

 

 

Almost enamoured of death

I woke up

On a palette of million colors.

My green self

Spread all round its myriad leaves

Singing me, flesh and my dancing spirit

From sky to sky,

Soon abandoning me to a delight of my own.

 

 

This experience was inaugural to another form of creativity—self and language interaction, and a newly discovered universe poetically adequate to creativity. My travel in poetic expanses had begun.

 

My intention here is to give you, dear Reader, an opportunity to experience one woman’s poetic becoming as an ontology, and in agreement with Pinar (1995), with tremendous integrative, synergestic, and emancipatory potential. Understanding that the personal narrative is an exciting adventure with interpretive value for self-understanding, I invite you to re-position yourself with me as hermeneutic presence, for reading my personal story of coming to poetry/language/writing, and find some provocative narration for your own curricular narrative.

 

This writing is my first intimate meeting with myself, and your intimate presence is the best elation you offer me. I quiver with reminiscence of past memories, and retrospective emotion at the existential and experiential process of self-creation and self-performance in creativity as a woman. Performing the poetic function (Jacobson, 1981) takes us to a new level of creative coexistence. How do we, as educators, respond to this process of mutual creativity?

 

The investigation of experience, fiqr-o-amal (thought and action) as praxis, takhiyuul and takhleeq (imaginative vision and creation) as the pulse of life experience, seen through autobiographical lens, is an aesthetic educational enterprise. An inner landscape etches out for an intense interpersonal gaze, and I soon find myself in self-reflexivity, and see myself set for exploration in the openness of language (Heidegger, 1968).

 

 

(Re)Tracing the poetic course

 

The riguor of an intent gaze

and my fragility, I am amazed.

 

 

I was young in my seventeen years of life, reading literature, an engagement that had intoxicated me in my school years at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Lahore, and now in the open corridors of Lahore College for Women, I was taken over by the new, different and freedom-loving paths of the liberal arts and humanities. The literary world and the world I imagined were exceedingly beautiful. Living in such a world for so long for the enjoyment and existential attunement it brought, inspired me to create words in the real. The real world was beautiful, too, but wanted more than mere existence and mere living. So I indulged my passion for deep living, for deepest connections, and feeling extremely safe in the liberal paths of liberating literature, began to flow in words.

 

 

Thistles of joy

electrify me.

Existence that cannot curb thought

continues to be.

Whimsical moods never stay,

and I remain phantasmagoric

to know who you are

or

who I am?

 

 

 

The flow of language alternates my freedom as immersion in the river of words begins. It is 1971, and I see myself opening to the free, open spaces of language, learning to live in the Open of naming and saying. The words take their own course along with the passion and thoughts too incessant to flow despite my father’s cautioning me about unreal imaginative connections, about public displeasure at a Muslim woman speaking what is presumed to be private. This was transgression from the path of truth, he said. I was asked to be careful, conform to reality, a long tradition of respectability, reservations and purdah, and reminded that to stay within private confines and resuming personal responsibility there, was also freedom.

 

Moments were immaculate for surrendering, and time being compassionate to my green youthfulness, and I, surrendering to my own inwardness, chose to be free in my own self-way. In a moment of quivering passion, the emigrant in me was fully prepared to go out into the real world and see what happens when Woman loves. Moreover, intermittent repertoires with my father, and promises of not transgressing modesty and discretion pacified his fears, and were reinforcement on my (be)wildering sojourn with words.

 

The high cold winds

that blow through me

Come!

Impinge on

my sodden perches

so that

I may play ‘liberation!’

 

Personal disclosure came in a flow, empowering me as it came in numbers that I overcame the resistance and a little reticence that I may have felt due to my father’s insistence that I give up writing poetry. The power that came with words was paramount to my being human and enjoying living in the space I had created for myself, and retrieved from people and society not given to such disclosures at that particular time in its history. My poetry, reflecting the inner workings of mind and heart, was music to my ears. Its thrill animated me—part psychology, part fuel. My mind, then on wild bird’s wings, flew curvilinearly that dodged my reserves. I cast off the curtain carefully, closed my eyes and like Vishnu, began to sing for diaspora.

 

Through fichus of unlapped time,

I freewheel back and forth

for condescension I can dream of.

 

A wide assortment of real-life experiences began to emerge in poems. The voice that speaks is unambiguously mine. But, the ache of other voices is also perceptible here.

 

The plaints are unambiguous …

    from Kosovo to Kashmir, from Kandahar to world winds,

black draughts

               pass windward cries from the last heartache.

 

                       The moon ramping through wet blankets

raises streams in plenitude.

 

The earth is now light

after the burden of a long dream.

 

On lavender wings it turns

to give the world

another heart and other pulses,

when? wherefore? why?

 

 

Each poetic piece pulsates in silence and like silence, it speaks its own language; more incoherent, more willful, refusing to be unheard, resonating the silent spaces which sets the creative tone for the poet in me. I readily conform to their singular self-emerging textures and then, the rhapsody between us necessitates its hearing. To hear is to respond. And when the poem is read, it doesn’t change but changes us, I the poet, you the reader, with dreams of transformation, the world over.

 

Once in a millennium,

the world’s upside down.

 

Riders reckon time over steep water-mounts.

Hot bidders for the biggest haul

surf through walls and breaks;

the edge off

and the mountains on top,

only one liases

and marches

beyond a line of ants

to be Your radiance

and that smile, the winner.

 

 

These poetic pieces express the urgency for creating spaces of freedom, spaces we create when writing for beauty and for being-in-truth. Then, there is no ruling but passion for expression that becomes a responsibility for the empowerment it brings uncompromisingly. This empowerment does not come alone. It invites the challenge to capture and explore imaginatively, horizons within and without, with a wise passiveness to step down into self and hold communion with soul mates in a fine camaraderie of events. The palette within has “colours and sounds, intensities and becomings” (Pinar, 1995), all set for a chiaroscuro like nature’s yet not nature’s. Here time flows as steps are taken and entrances made.

 

Centuries press down

as I pass

through lanes

of sluggish gold,

moonbeams spinning dreams

                          end around end.

 

On an old carpet

        I went

           to sit down

        and rake the deposits;

        the black cone

suddenly setting up and sprawling beside me,

and the consortium

           of uncharred memories

besetting things around and me;

and I, moonshiny

in this ambience,

turn now

to play chameleon

with such defiance

for me to utter

                   ‘Oh, how nice!’

 

Each entrance is symptomatic of stirring activity in the pond Time sponsors to each being. As the pond fills and refills and breathers offered by creative beings, the entrant assumes power to become what s/he was not before. This breeds desire for self-expression in writing, which, like all processes, is never a smooth passage. It is interlaced with resistance, opposition and like all creative resistances, infuses resolution for more; more driven and enthused the entrants, the greater the find. A whole new world is in the making, inviting us to hold upon our world in order to know the superficies of our language and also dare to delve deep for true knowing and living liberated lives, afresh.

 

The mind, warm and moist, delirious from indigenous passion, aligns intelligence and vows for an open-ended spiritual liberation that is infinitely leavening for self-surrender.

 

Slipping out of life’s indigenous clangour,

I mount ambrosial clouds,

And see things more than delphic-

Fair tresses of landscape

Uplifted with thousand magnificences.

New vapors that voluntarily concede favors,

                              More sweet and wooing,

All who walk with humble feet

The airy grounds

Made crystal with meteors

That wane not with Man

Into little dreams and nothing.

 

 

Meandering to an oasis

 

Now sitting in the calm ambience of beautiful Vancouver (June 2006), I make precious of these moments when delving into my own private self, I see with unborrowed lens, the course of my becoming a poet. It is like traversing new ground and setting up for self-exploration against much inquired regions of biographies and autobiographies. I cannot escape the awareness that an understanding of being is reality and cannot be avoided. This relates to my being in the world in another way, engaged in realizing a certain way of living. That is what we are “first and mostly” (Heidegger, 1968). In fact, my being relates me to all beings. And that is for me what we are “first and mostly.” Our “second and partly existence” (Taylor, 1995) that is becoming something more than what we are “first and mostly” has historical perspectival reality, and also relates to our being what we are “first and mostly.” Both situations relate to Being, and to understand Being is to exist. My poetic pieces are an attempt to embody that commitment. These are efforts made to understand existence as human; each affective state distinct in its own way yet finding its own distinctive way of compounding my life as lived experience into one piece.

 

These reflections offer a glimpse of life through eastern eyes. They bring into the contemporary reader’s consciousness, experiential forces that invite presence and participation, and express desire for inclusion and inexclusion. The need is so pressing that there can be no retreat.

 

Each stepping is traversing familiar ground as both live, enjoying moment by moment, the circumstances instanced there, exploring a unified mode of existence against stretches of time that are so diverse, absorbing and yet distinct. Here, in this cognitive and emotive mode of experience and expression that the openness of language affords (Heidegger, 1968), the search for meaning begins.

 

Beloved,

Inspire us

           the right understanding

of matter: to each

give Will for knowledge

and wisdom, Love

that makes us

                       sing “glorious You”

                                  with hills and the birds,

flying low

in oeuvres

that singe for monsoons,

                       as a field

                              that is awake with corn,

                       as ashes

                              that speak passion

                                      and sweep away the human cobwebs,

returning us to You

Who blesses

               and is beloved so.

 

That I would meander into the world of imaginative art was not predetermined although it had been my father’s much loved engagement, besides philosophy. It was easily acceptable for him to read into literature and enjoy conversations with Shakespearean characters, for example, and also share engage me in these conversations. But for me to write about myself in language was something that I had to be apprehensive about. However, time’s beneficence could not go unregistered. I took the offer and began to spend time in expressive acts of poetry and poetic being thereof, which were exhilarating, joyful, and ecstatic. Taking the elements of life, both pain and pleasure had to be so intense as to excite me and in-form me. I had to be intensely alive in order to be living what to Keats was “living on the pulses.” I loved soulful living and embraced all souls alike. This was a mode of experiential existence that spoke to me, with multiple voices beyond time and within time, being heard and listened to with deep reverence. A vociferous multicultural and multidimensional speaking session was in progress. Here I could hear, see, smell and touch my own usualness and feel being touched by the unusual and symbolic modes of existence that define all humanity.

 

So many times I have melted into stories, anecdotes shared unassumingly in infinitely small moments that stretched into minutes without a second as hearts opened and outpoured content. These living performances found poetic expression and speak my story as much as humanity’s and even more definitely about mortality, meaningful living, and Beingness. Every poem now rehearses the act of our interbeing as time’s guests, and sometimes host to Necessity that finds true and free and beautiful expression in poetry.

 

 

Each poem offers two experiential moments to the reader, to step out of one’s own biography into the poet’s autobiography, and to see for oneself as to what counts and who counts. A third moment is quintessential in the lives of both reader and author as both meet in the poem’s context and celebrate this coming together as human. Such a fusion, in which “intuitive insight and moral control” coalesce (Eliot, in Spender, 1975, 17), brings passions of the mind and soul, and values that are essentially aesthetic and esoteric too. As and when these fusions are frequented, the reader will feel buoyant and ready about re-journeying in life.

 

Each poem I write exists on its own, built as it is on its own energies—imagination, perception and passion, and thought spurred to activity by poem’s natural musical reserves. What comes forth is spontaneous expression of ‘a life’ lived in passionate response to conferment that builds, interacts and means life to me. Am I an architect or a participant presence in other’s architectural designs for themselves?

 

From the start of schoolgirl days, I walked through the warm ebullient corridors of English literature and bore the chalice of creative becoming. Unmindful of inopportune time, I would run on imaginative escapades, have wild childhood repertoires with falcons and phantom listeners, and look for airy spaces on the spacious playgrounds of the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Durand Road, Lahore, Pakistan. Here and in my small space at home on Nisbet Road, I would be with my intimate self and see the world with “inward mind” (Wordsworth). The traffic here was fantastic. I floated on moonbeams beyond the sky and each float transmuted my odd years on Earth “into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare).

 

As I grew up, I plodded deep into romanticism and lived up to the romantic dream. This was luxuriant, charismatic existence. I gave up all order and imbibed the aesthetic relish and reprieve many literati offered. I was living on their pulses, and soon began to feel my own impulse. At such moments, I felt empowered to enter “otherness” (Huebner, 1999), and do justice to human joy and sorrow. Spending some consequential time in writing made me see order in this disorder, and now I am making contours of various shapes and assortments. The moment is intense, and insistently works upon me. I am living on the pulses and in no mood to be another hesitating, deliberating Hamlet, but let passion and vision play upon me for ‘a life’ in the world and words, of poem, my autobiography, and in a special way, the reader’s autobiography, too.

 

 

To run riotous and play

more powerfully ‘Hamlet’

on the stage of your manliness,

and breathlessly slake the passion f your bared breast,

and for the unbarred,

in your temple rest,

and walk down the aisle,

all sweetness and light.

 

 

The world of these words is a living context, and that is for me, a meaning and meaningful life. It’s a strange relationship that helps me strive to be what I want to be and what I am not yet. A constant striving brings into knowing the wrangling human concerns that bereave life and deprive it of joyful being. But, again the question arises of how proprietorial a performer gets about such strange music in much amidness as it takes over its own performance in poetry.

 

In full amidness

I’m spared,

pure words, my refectory

and savour

their pounding on my heart

strong and long and spacious

 

Every word watches me

the space in me

and the words

I listen deeply listen to

their sonorous overtone

ringing in my ears

over and over

as it comes on me

in rapt silence

till the sound slows

to become silence

in me

at home.

 

 

This state of being is a way of carrying us beyond to our creative becoming and conscientious being. Here forms of words and worlds with many shades of meaning and metaphoric texture enrich human experience. I know this is another kind of existence seen by eastern eyes and expressed in the English language. And I also know that such creative interactions fill the soul and become inspiration for more soulful living in the real world and the world of words.

 

My poetic expression affirms my natural desire for interbeing and intercultural dwelling, and most joyfully in poetic spaces where words melt and only spirit speaks. Here I am my original self, I mean, the way I am and would be only that way. My self then gets presented in words that express that is deep, I mean our human connections, and once these are known and acknowledged, we start living on our pulses, with this beautiful knowing becoming knowledge, relations making relationships, communicating and communion bringing communication, and our human individuality enriching Humanity. Only then we begin to confirm our engagement with life as creative, and of ourselves as more alive joyfully than mere living.

 

And to make this journey, you have to step in, and saying ‘yes’ to this quest, take yourself on rounds of the same spot with the whisper ‘who’s here’? With ourselves living on transcendence, we move beyond our limited circle and enter the circle of Life and celebrate our togetherness. I know that this is the central facet of human existence and experience, and agree with Griffiths (1994) that this is “the goal of human striving, the truth which all art, science and philosophy seeks to fathom, the bliss in which all human love is fulfilled”. Our unified Being in this kind of existence thus asks us to move from self-transcendence toward world Creation that blesses us, and is a way of blessing our beautiful Earth, and celebrating what we are today, human, and that gets named and said most beautifully in language, words that is poetry.

 

 

Resources

 

Aoki, T. (1980). Understanding Curriculum as lived: Curriculum Canada VII. Vancouver Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction.

 

Beittel, K.R. (1973). Alternatives for Art Education Research. Dubuque, IA: Win C. Brown.

 

 

Eisner, E. W. & Vallance, E. (Eds.). (1974). Conflicting Concepts of Curriculuum. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

 

Gadamer, H.G. (1983). Reason in the age of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

 

Giri, A.K. (2002). Conversations and Transformations. Maryland: Lexington Books.

 

Gregory, D. (1998). Discussing imaginative Geographies: Derek Gregory on representation, modernity and space. In Explorations in Critical Human Geography. Hettner-Lectures, 1. Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg.

 

Griffiths, B. !1994). Universal Wisdom. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

 

Heidegger, M. (1969). What is called thinking? New York: Harper & Row.

 

Jardine, D. (1992). Reflections on Education, Hermeneutics, and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics as a Restoring of Life to Its Original Difficulty. In Reynolds, (Ed.) Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text. New York: NY Teachers College Press.

 

Kraemer, J.W. (2000). Healing and Cosmology. Published papers in Ethnopsychologische Mitteilungen, Band 9, # ½, pp. 109-148.

 

Noddings, Nel. (1992). The Challenge to Care in Schools. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Pinar W. (1995). Understanding Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang Publishers.

 

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics. In Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Science. (Ed. & trans. J. B. Thompson). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

 

Roemer, M. (1995). Telling Stories. England: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

 

Shairp, J. C. (1984). On Poeic Interpretation of Nature. Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin and Company.

 

Shalom, A. (1984). Subjectivity. Review of Metaphysics, Vol. Xxxviii, (2), Dec. 1984, pp. 229- 271. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

 

Spender, S. (1975). Eliot. Glasgow: Fontana Publishers.

 

Taylor, C. (1995). Overcoming Epistemology. Philosophical Arguments. Mass: Harvard University Press.

 

 

About the Author

 

Sohaila Javed is a PhD graduate (November 2004) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She also has a Masters in English and a Postgraduate Diploma in the Teaching of English as International Language.

 

Sohaila has an extensive background in English literature, and a wonderful experience of teaching English literature for 22 years in 4 federal colleges of Islamabad, Pakistan, and is now working as Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor to the M. Phil and PhD students in the Faculty of Advanced Integrated Studies & Research at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan.

 

Sohaila is a teacher, educationist, poet and spirituality enthusiast. She can be reached at jsohaila@hotmail.com.

 

About the Artist

 

Rahat Naveed Masud is an artist of international repute, and has participated in numerous exhibitions abroad and at home since 1982. Her most recent participation with her self-portrait in “Let Peace Prevail 2003” by Women Painters in Pakistan, expresses her grave concerns about the human world. She has many publications and art displays at important venues in Pakistan and abroad to her credit.