This week, the Library of Congress chose Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, as the twenty-third poet laureate of the U.S. A poet’s job, I once heard, is to pay attention, and hers seems to me exactly the kind of attentiveness we need right now, rooted as it is in Native American culture and awareness.
An excerpt from Harjo’s poem “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet” shows us the key to this practice:
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
I love this idea that we cannot get lost if we stay in our hearts. Even that short list of only a few of the world’s troubles can send our minds reeling off into fear and fixing, but our hearts, Harjo reminds us, know that we’re aiming toward something larger than all that, larger than ourselves.
In “This Morning I Pray for My Enemies,” she writes, “The door to the mind should only open from the heart.”
Both poems were published in the book Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. So much of what we experience every day indicates that we’ve forgotten we are holy beings living in a holy creation, a holy universe.
What is holy is worthy of reverence and love by its very nature. Our hearts know that the oak tree is holy, that the finches are holy, that you are, that I am.
In an interview with NPR, Harjo said that “humanizing and healing will be her aims as poet laureate — ‘a healing of people speaking to each other, with each other.’”
Listening with our heads, we white people could choose either our usual oppressive stance or one in which we look at ourselves and our past actions with irony and cynicism that speak only of our inability to change.
Listening with our hearts, we can choose instead to be humble and learn from a wisdom that has survived our best attempts to wipe it out, a wisdom that we must now allow to lead if we hope to participate in the healing of ourselves, this Earth, and all our fellow beings.
Being Finite 
Tears. So true. Thank you. I am buying her book. (If it’s not sold out everywhere already!)
How does one cultivate the capacity to listen with one’s heart? It seems that humility and surrender are necessary ingredients but also that these things only arise once the heart is already engaged.
For myself, the recognition that the hostility I feel toward various aspects of the world (e.g. institutions such as the church and the government, as well as the masses of people running and supporting them) has deep roots in my own psyche is a critical first step. Humiliations, traumas, disappointments, insecurities, all provide plenty of kindling for a reactive and hostile attitude. There’s a relevant aphorism from a buddhist tradition that I love: When a rock is thrown a dog will chase after it. Whereas a lion will turn toward its source. The dog is of course the reactive mind, that behaves impulsively, and is at the mercy of the forces that churn within it. The lion is a mind of self-restraint and insight, qualities that translate into poise, understanding, and thoughtful consideration.
I love this little aphorism, not least because in the lion scenario, the guy that threw the rock is in deep shit!