One Time, One Meeting

Many years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the village of Inniskeen in Co. Monaghan, Ireland. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) grew up on a small farm in Inniskeen and is buried in the village cemetery. After visiting his grave, which is marked by a simple wooden cross, I spoke with a local farmer, who remembered his illustrious neighbor.“I knew Paddy,” he told me. “His mother couldn’t read or write. His father was a shoemaker. Paddy was not a good farmer—not good at all. He paid no heed to his fields.”

Paddy Kavanagh paid no heed because his mind was elsewhere. He yearned to be in Dublin, where he could enjoy the bohemian life and pursue a literary career. At the age of thirty-five he finally left his farm for the big city, and within a decade he had become an internationally known poet. In “The Great Hunger” (1942), the poem that made him famous, he examined the spiritual and sexual deprivation of the Irish farmer. And in “Stony Grey Soil” he looked back in anger at his native ground, which had “clogged the feet of [his] boyhood,” “fed [him] on swinish food,” and “burgled [his] bank of youth.”

Yet Kavanagh also loved the “black hills” he had abandoned, and in “Innocence” he revisits the scenes of his childhood:

They laughed at one I loved—

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love’s doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved

I flung her from me and called her a ditch

Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms

The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies

On bleached potato-stalks—

What age am I?*

Remembering his youth, he also recalls his innocence, which enabled him to take delight in the violets in the ditch and the dew on potato stalks. And in his closing lines, he embraces the environs he had scorned. “I cannot die,” he declares, “Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.”

The quality of innocence so important to Kavanagh is also important in Zen practice, where it is known as “beginner’s mind.” A translation of the Japanese term shoshin, “beginner’s mind” describes an openness to experience, unimpeded by preconceptions. In the book that introduced the term to the West, Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki explains:

The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind. . . . This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.**

Beginner’s mind, in other words, is the mind before it is conditioned by knowledge, experience, and expectations.

Patrick Kavanagh sought to reclaim his innocence through the art of poetry. Zen practitioners cultivate beginner’s mind through the discipline of meditation. But we needn’t be poets or Zen monks to see the world afresh. We have only to quiet our minds and open our eyes.

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*Patrick Kavanagh, “Innocence,”  The Complete Poems (Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1972), 241.

**Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill, 1970), 21.