Nashville Buddhist Festival/”To Have Without Holding”

The Fourth Nashville Buddhist Festival last weekend went extremely well. I was surprised by the size of the crowd attending (close to 300) and I really enjoyed the many presentations by various Buddhist teachers and members of the Nashville Buddhist community. The Board did a great job this year of organizing an outstanding festival.

Lisa Ernst helped get the day off to a good start with an interesting and informative dharma talk on mudita, or sympathetic joy. She managed to make the talk interesting to those of us who have been practicing Buddhism for years and accessible to beginners. By including an example from her own experience, she also made the talk applicable to each of our lives. We are fortunate to have Lisa in a leadership role at One Dharma.

I appreciated the opportunity to sit on stage during Lisa’s talk and read and briefly discuss a poem related to the dharma. Once I got over the anxiety of being on stage in front of such a large crowd, I really enjoyed the experience. Here is a summary of what I said and the poem itself:

Good morning.

The poem I am going to read is To Have Without Holding by Marge Piercy. It is one of my favorite poems.

Marge Piercy is a novelist, poet, and editor of the Jewish magazine, Tikkun. She is Jewish and I don’t know if she knows anything about Buddhism, but this poem is very dharmic. The poem is essentially about the Second Noble Truth, which says that suffering (dukkha) is caused by grasping and clinging (samudaya). It is also relevant to our topic today of peace, because grasping and clinging causes much conflict. It disturbs both our inner peace and the peace of the world.

This poem is about loving without grasping and clinging. It is essentially about learning to love without grasping, about the practice of working with loving without clinging. This also fits in very well with Buddhism. One of the things that I love about Buddhism is that it is not just about understanding ideas like the Second Noble Truth on an intellectual level. We practice with them, we work with them until we understand them on a feeling level and they resonate in our hearts and in our bodies.

Marge Piercy writes very eloquently about the challenge, difficulty, and even pain that comes with this practice of learning to love without grasping; she also writes very well about the joy and beauty that can come from this practice. This poem has been very meaningful to me since I first read it about four years ago.

I would like to dedicate this poem to all of your practices.

To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.