About six years ago, when I was going through the darkest time of my life, my loving older sister graced me with a healing book, "Ten Poems to Set You Free" by Roger Housden. It was the following poem that touched me most deeply.

____________________

The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
_____________________________________

Housden follows this poem in his book by writing:

Stanley Kunitz was in his seventies when he wrote this poem. Today, at ninety-eight, he is still writing, the oldest active poet alive. Still now, at his venerable age, he does not consider himself "done with my changes." One of the great American poets of the twentieth century, and twice poet laureate, he is a man dedicated to the aesthetic life, to the persistent aspiration toward truth and beauty. His daily existence is dedicated to the life of the soul; and the soul of a man like Kunitz never stops flowering.

I can choose to live on the 'litter' the garbage in my life that is non life giving, bringing out my base nature, settling for mediocrity and worse. Or, I can 'live in the layers', the very rich, deep, textured layers of ALL my life. All things are recycled--are gifts, which cannot only be learned from but worn as a transcriptional garment to assist in living more fully present.

Housden goes on to speak of this understanding when he writes of Kunitz' life:

He has passed through many lives, not just those of others, but many that he himself took on and then later let fall away. Or perhaps some of them were torn from him by the winds of fate, by circumstance, or by others. I know that his first wife, whom he loved greatly, suddenly disappeared from his life one day, and that he never heard from her again. Then, within a short span of time, and not long before writing "The Layers," he suffered the loss of his mother and two sisters, as well as several of his dearest friends, including the poet Theodore Roethke and the artist Philip Guston. With great dignity, he speaks in this poem of the losses he has known and what it is that survives when all else is gone.



Yes, this thing called 'life' that can only be understood backwards but we must live it forwards. And though I too 'lack the art to decipher it" as Kunitz concludes his poem, "No doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes."