Errant Thought

 I was re-thinking my statements about the moral universe being polar and dual.  Certainly the physical universe appears to operate via that set of principles -- at least, the macro-cosmos does -- the micro-cosmos, or subatomic world, is an entirely different matter.  Or it isn't matter at all!  T'ain't there unless you look for it....but that's another topic, for a later post.

In human terms, I was thinking about hierarchies.  I'm not someone who has flourished under patriarchal hierarchies.  Experienced alot of them, in families, in schools, in sports, in jobs, and just in society in general.  But I also have not flourished in  matriarchal hierarchies.  And again, I've experienced those within family, within schools, in jobs, as well as in my spiritual path.  

What I've realized is that I've never known a healthy hierarchy, ever in my life -- period.  Is the phrase "healthy hierarchy" a contradiction in terms?  Maybe the problem isn't the gendered inflection; maybe the problem is hierarchy itself.

Food for thought.  I'm going to go chew on that one for awhile.

"Well, This is the Forest of Arden"

That's Rosalind's comment to Touchstone in Act 2, Scene 4, in Shakespeare's "As You Like It."  The Forest of Arden was the setting for this comedy.  I haven't read Shakespeare since I was a sophomore in college, but Jack Kerouac penned this quote on the front of one his writing journals for 1947-48.  Why, one might ask?  

According to biographer Gerald Nicosia, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, longtime buddies and co-progenitors of the Beat Generation's most pertinent literature ("On the Road" and "Howl" successively ) seriously discussed the metaphorical meaning of this apparently meaningless line and often used it jokingly in conversation as their own kind of touchstone, as in "Well, this is the Forest of Manhattan," while they knocked around Gotham City in the Forties and Fifties.

It turns out there's quite a bit of critical commentary about the setting of the Forest of Arden and its imagined significance as an alternative environment to society and the supposed effect that change might work on human behavior.  In Shakespeare's day, "society" meant the Court, which, one presumes, was the site of myriad mendacious power plays, constant conniving, false fronts, back stabs, and the impassive wall of a trenchant and rigid hierarchy of nobility. 

The idea was that, removed from society and cast into a pastoral setting, one could or would return to one's own original nature.  Quite a Taoist notion, that.  But even within the play, Shakespeare had characters disputing this view and presenting nature as wild and utterly without concern for human beings, much like Thoreau's stark realization on the rocky summit of Maine's Mt. Katahdin.

The play also has the delightful conundrum of Rosalind, a part that would have been played by a boy or man in Elizabethan England, pretending to be a man while in the Forest of Arden.  So you had a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man, and thus able to speak her truths for once and be heard.  And we thought the blurring of sexual identity and the politics of gender to be utterly modern!  But then Shakespeare, with perhaps the possible exception of Montaigne, was the first fully modern man.

But why am I bringing all this up?  Well, for two reasons.  One is that I said I'd write about Kerouac again, and secondly, in my prior post about him I made a brazen statement.  I said that all cultures lie.  I knew that comment would need further vetting.  And for some reason, this comical aside that Kerouac and Ginsberg used, and which Kerouac often resorts to in his journals, seemed like a way into this topic.

It feels to me like Kerouac and Ginsberg's reference to this quote had a sly context.  I get the sense that the Forest of Arden, in their parlance, suggests a kind of illusion in which people haplessly bumble about trying both to find their way through life, and hopefully find themselves in the process.  That's my point of entry for this discussion.

As I've written earlier, I had decided in my childhood that the adult world and all its values were false and insane.  Okay, fine.  But then, what are real values?  And how does one discover them?

I had another moment of awakening in August of 1970, when I was 17.  Although I was reading Thoreau's Walden at the time, and that had begun to crack my head open, I also had a brief encounter with an image, a face on a poster of someone whom I didn't know, but whose face was instantly recognizable to me.  It was in a film.  The moment passed, the face gone, but a revolution had begun in my mind. 

 In the few weeks following, it felt as though my mind was being turned inside out.  At the end of that two week period I was no longer the boy I had always been.  I was who I am now.  That is, the broad outline of who I would become had been sketched.  I've merely been filling in the empty spaces of that template for the past fifty years.

This new person -- me -- was no longer only interested in the world I had inhabited up until then -- sports and athletics.  Now, I was interested in philosophy, poetry, and the spiritual heritage of other cultures and other times.  My real life had truly begun.  I had begun my search for alternative values.

The Sixties were a rebellion, but rebellion is simply a reaction to existing values.  Its point of reference is still those same values.  It still measures itself in relation to them.  As long as you are in reaction or rebellion to a certain set of values, you are as chained to them as when you were crushed by their weight.  You have to get entirely outside of yourself -- and outside of your own cultural conditioning -- in order to discover something fresh and new.

I identified, from about the age of twenty, with what I thought of as spiritual values.  In short, unselfishness.  That is of course an uphill battle.  And if one doesn't keep one's wits about one, you quickly become everyone's doormat.  But luckily, there is still within us all an instinctual voice which says, "Get the hell off of me!"  That's actually a healthy voice.  Usually it is buried under social conditioning and has to be re-unearthed.  So, how to be skillfully unselfish in a selfish world?  In other words, how to not just be "out for yourself," without losing yourself in the process?

Human nature proceeds most often down the path of least resistance.  In effect, everyone tries with all their might toward "the good life," i.e., pleasure, and tries with all their might to avoid the attendant suffering.  As many a sage will tell you, you can't have one without the other.  It's a dual universe.  Up, down; positive, negative.  It's polar.  Pleasure, suffering.  All these contrarieties go hand in hand.  Thus sayeth I, after having looked into the matter for all these years.  Here's my individual take:  it's okay to want what you want; just don't expect it to be free.

In the big picture, cultures are merely collective incarnations of their constituent members.  Right?  There is usually a cultural imperative or paradigm which guides the people en masse.  For many thousands of years, religion has played the dominant role.  Sometimes it's a political structure like Rome.  As any sociologist will tell you, and as the past four years in America have proven, it's easier to marshall people around negative values than positive ones.  Mob psychology.  People will do things in a mob that they might not do otherwise.  Their selfish nature is emboldened and magnified.  Our country is currently a perfect example of this dynamic.

As a child, I dismissed the Semitic cultures and religions out of hand. Ergo, I dismissed my own culture.  Why?  Well, because they had all only led up to this -- the madness of the world as I knew it -- or so I reasoned.  Why then would I believe that any of them had the answer?  I always loved Gandhi's response to a western journalist's question, "What do you think of western civilization?"  Said Gandhi, "I think it would be a good idea."

What I discovered by my readings from other times and other cultures is that all civilizations have a life span.  They're born, they grow, they mature, and they die.  They have guiding principles or values, but those values are always partial, incomplete, somewhat servile to the powers that be.  In other words, they're all the Forest of Arden -- illusory. But one wonders whether we happen to be at the end of the life span of all the cultures on earth, all at once.  

What comes next?  Don't look to the historical past.  You won't find values that will light the way and fire the heart there.  Don't dream up another model society, because Utopia doesn't exist.  A pastoral sojourn through the Forest of Arden won't suffice.  The indigenous cultures that have survived have a genuine way forward but that door might be shut to those of us not born into such a culture.  What we need is an entirely new vision, an entirely new culture.  Nothing else will work.

I haven't found that vision, myself.  I'm still working out my own individual path.  I don't know from where the new vision will come.  It's easy to be nihilistic nowadays.  But I find I still have faith.  I don't know in who or in what -- maybe just in Life itself.  I have faith that we won't entirely destroy ourselves or the world we inhabit, all evidence to the contrary.

In my reading of other times and cultures, I came to a few simple conclusions.  

If you were placed anywhere on earth, at any time in history, whether in a massive cultural construct, or within a small clan or tribe -- be it now or 40,000 years ago -- what human values would be universal?  What would you find within any grouping of human beings, at any place, at any time?  This is what I believe you would find:

Some form of love.  Some form of honor.  Some form of humor.  An appreciation of some form(s) of beauty.  Some form of awe or reverence, if only for life and Creation itself.  And care and concern for one's children.

These are the basics.  These are the core values that make human life bearable.  I believe you would find some variation upon those values no matter where you found yourself, no matter at what point in human history.  Those are our universally human, and humane, values.  And they're not too bad, are they?  All cultures are merely variations upon those themes, albeit with their own peculiar, untimely, and unseemly aberrations thrown in. That durned Forest of Arden.

I  hope we can get back down to the basics again.

Winona LaDuke on Redemption

The Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke.

Navaho Healing Song by Navaho and Sioux

 

More Images by Helen Hardin

 I wanted to put up a few more images by Helen, for your perusal. She was such a prolific artist, it's hard to do her justice but these few images may suggest more of her style.

Helen Hardin

 I thought I would write another post about Jack Kerouac, and I will before too long, but as I was thinking about art and the creation of art, I found myself thinking about Helen Hardin.

About 20 years ago, I one day visited the local county library in Bremerton, Washington, where I then lived.  I spent an entire afternoon looking at every single book in the art section.  Why?  Maybe because I write -- words tend to be my medium in this life, and not images.  Back when there were still bookstores (Amazon doesn't count), I would spend time thumbing through art magazines, searching for images that moved me or called to me in some way.  A visual image does something to me that I can't quite articulate, stirs something visceral, internal, but something which I can't easily put into words.  And I find that valuable.  It puts me in touch with a feeling-center in myself that isn't verbal or intellectual.  The verbal side of life was too easy for me, for a long time.  It's less so now, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.  I have less access to the subconscious mind, less easy access anyway, but there's no doubt that with age, if you're lucky, you also deepen and you have a kind of emotional gravitas that wasn't there or was out of your reach when you were younger.  It is time's gift to you as the lyricism of youth wanes.

I found a book about Helen Hardin called "Changing Woman," which opened up an entire world to me.  Helen was a Tewa, or at least partly.  Her mother, Pablita Velarde, was a full-blooded Tewa of the Santa Clara pueblo, situated between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Pablita was a strong woman.  Born in 1918, she became a painter, which was discouraged by the more traditional members of her pueblo.  She also crossed paths with her pueblo by choosing to paint some of their sacred images. And lastly, she married a white man.  Pablita chose a difficult path in life and suffered thereby, but she was true to her path and carried on nonetheless.

Pablita and her husband had Helen.  Helen's fate was to not be accepted by either world; neither her pueblo, which would not allow her to participate in their sacred ceremonies, nor by the white world, which excluded her with its own bigotry and prejudice.  But Helen inherited her mother's determination and indomitable spirit, as well as her mother's artistic talent.  What I find particularly interesting about Helen's own artistic path is that she took many of the images that were important to her mother and carried them further.  Helen painted small, stylized and geometric kachinas, as well as other images that held a very concentrated and symbolic spiritual power.  It wouldn't be inaccurate to state that Helen's paintings were vivid and concrete expressions of her own spiritual struggles to internalize a world which she'd not been allowed to experience fully in a more human manner.  

Back in the fall of 2016, I accompanied a friend on a trip to Albuquerque.  My friend's father had passed away and she needed to go back and close out bank accounts, clear out a storage locker, and tie up loose ends.  She simply didn't want to make the drive alone and asked me to join her as co-driver on the trip.

I love road trips and hadn't been in the Southwest for several years, though I was married there and lived in northern Arizona for a time. My friend and I had some time on our hands while there so we took one day and went an hour north to Santa Fe.

I had discovered that there was an art gallery in Santa Fe dedicated to Pablita Velarde and Helen Hardin, called "The Golden Dawn."  It had been started by Helen's daughter, Margarete Bagshaw.  I had an intense desire to visit this gallery, and happily, was able to do so.

As I walked into the gallery itself, I realized that Margarete was also an artist, and she had taken some of the imagery that her grandmother Pablita and her own mother Helen had developed in the course of their own careers, and Margarete had taken it even farther.  Whereas Pablita's work was visually simpler and on canvases of a conventional size, and Helen's were concentrated, sometimes geometric, and often on very small canvases, Margarete's work was abstracted, modern, and on very large canvases, often several feet wide and high.  But she had taken the same images that her grandmother and mother had worked with, those same sacred Tewa themes, and had extended them into the world of modern art, awash with vibrant colors.  I loved it all. 

In fact, I stood in the middle of that gallery, extended my arms, slowly turned 360 degrees around and said out loud, "I can't believe I'm finally here!"  I felt I was in a sacred space.  The caretaker of the gallery came up and took my hand and led me to a table where she started handing me all sorts of materials for free -- posters of exhibitions, tee shirts with images, biographical videos, even books.  I honestly felt a kind of awe at the work these three women, all from one family, had accomplished over the course of their respective lives and careers. My hat's off to all three of them.

Helen died of cancer in 1984.  Pablita passed in 2006, and Margarete had died the year before my visit, I think.  I was so grateful for the chance to visit that gallery.  I had been living with Helen's artwork and images for many years.  I'd attended a symposium on her life and work at Sonoma State University.  To finally see the work itself, and to discover her mother's and daughter's work at the same time, was just such an incredible experience.  I'm really speechless to describe it.

So I did the next best thing I could do.  The following summer I returned the favor of this trip by taking an artist friend of mine who lived on Camano Island in Washington state, and driving her to Santa Fe so she could stand in this gallery as well.  The curator of the gallery had begun to change the emphasis of the art therein to reflect other artists' work, which is understandable -- otherwise the gallery would become merely a mausoleum.  But most of the work I had seen was still on the wall, and we had a chance to look at canvases that weren't currently being displayed.

I would encourage anyone to explore the work of these three women and their amazing legacy as a family, as artists, and arguably, as representatives of their pueblo and their people.

There is an aspect of Helen that is important to me as a writer.  She is in a sense a muse, an anima figure.  Her imagery and style evoke that nascent whorl of creative energy for me.  The process of creativity often has a kind of gestation period, of which I have to be mindful and to which I need to be sensitive.  It has to be the right moment to write, and that's both a felt-sense and a kind of close observation of one's internal life, images, thoughts, and those fleeting feelings that pass through one almost unnoticed. There is a kind of feminine sense of containment until the moment to write arrives. Somehow these anima figures help both to inspire the genesis of this creativity, and to form a subtle shell in which that energy nests until it is ready for expression.

I find the visual work of these three committed women to be a fruitful source of, and access point into, the fecundity one discovers within oneself.  This is one of the ways we touch and influence one another in life.

Giving Something For Nothing

This blog notwithstanding, it's finally dawning on me, don't give something for nothing.  Meaning, pay attention to what you're giving and to whom.  Some people take and give nothing in return.  It's rare when someone reciprocates.  

This is not a matter of what people say, because talk is quite cheap and usually untrue.  People talk a good game.  When someone actually gives something back, for real, it comes straight from their heart, and spontaneously too.  Spontaneity can be a good thing. No talking, no judging, no measuring what's due or whether someone has earned your response.  It's natural; your heart responds.  That's the real deal.  

For years, it seems, I gave solely for the sake of giving and I believed in that.  Somewhere along the way, I realized how little I was getting back from anyone.  This is the foolishness of unconsciously expecting others to treat you the way you've been treating them.  Naivete, once again.  My front burner lesson.

So as for me, it's now a matter of choosing what I have to give and to whom.  Because I do have something to give.  Do you?

Be wise.  Give what you have to give to those who value it and can reciprocate.  Otherwise, it's a waste of spirit for an expense of same.

Kerouac's Prophecy

 Jack Kerouac aspired to be an "earthly prophet." He says so in his own journals. I actually prefer reading Kerouac's journals to his published work. I'm less interested in his performance on the printed page as a literary icon than in what he thought and felt in the privacy of his own inner world. Jack Kerouac talking to himself is far more interesting than Jack Kerouac talking to anyone else.

What brought this about is a passage I found some years ago in a volume entitled "Windblown World," which is a selection of Kerouac's journals from about mid-1947 to about mid-1954.  In 1947 Kerouac was writing his first novel, "The Town and the City," a conventional novel in terms of structure and style. Kerouac wrote it slowly, laboriously, by pencil.  He ended up with over 1,000 typewritten pages when the manuscript was done. It's interesting to note that when he was at the tail-end of this process, sometime in the year 1948, he had already conceived of the basic premise of "On the Road," had that as a working title, was already plotting the novel out as well as deciding to write it in a more personal style, in a form that more truly reflected the workings of his own mind.  Some years down the line, this became a commitment to "spontaneous prose" with the credo of "first thought, best thought."

A little later this next year, after perhaps re-reading Kerouac's first two novels, I may have something to say about them and about his arc as a writer. For now, though, I'm more interested in this passage that actually reflects his role as an "earthly prophet."

While Kerouac wrote his books, he also kept what he called "mood-logs" where he would talk out loud to himself, so to speak, about whatever was on his mind, what was going on in his life, his thoughts or frustrations about what he'd just written, the weather, women and what-not.  

And so it was that on a Sunday in December of 1947 -- December 7th, to be exact -- Kerouac was writing along about how he'd briefly gotten derailed and sidetracked by his new novel idea while not yet finished with his current novel-in-progress. In a long extended paragraph, without any transition at all, he willy-nilly broke from that discussion with this passage:

"However, it is suddenly occurring to me that a great new change is about to take place in mankind and in the world. Don't ask me how I know this. And it's going to be very simple and true, and men will have taken another great step forward. It will be a kind of clear realization of love, and war will eventually seem unreal and even obsolete, and a lot of other things will happen. But madness will rule in high places for a long time yet. All this is going to come up from the people themselves, a great new revolution of the soul.  Politics has nothing to do with this. It will be a kind of looking around and noticing of the world, and a simultaneous abandonment of systems of pride and jealousy, in many, many people, and it will spread around swiftly.  Enough for now."

And that was it. He moved on in his journal and never referred to this passage again. But to me, as soon as I read it, it rang true as an actual prophecy.  Why?  Well, we've got to trawl through the past once again in order to flesh that out. 

I've written previously about my coming of age in the Sixties and being affected by the spiritual undercurrents of the time.  It's hard to recapture the energy of those years for someone who didn't experience it directly.  It might be impossible to do.  But underlying all the startling, shocking, and radical changes of that decade was an undercurrent that said, "Something's afoot....a change is in the air...."

Two months shy of my 10th birthday, we had the Cuban missile crisis.  It's one thing to read about something in the history books.  It's another to have lived through it.  I remember leaving school that last Friday of the crisis and saying to a friend, "See you Monday."  He replied, "Yeah, if we're still alive."  I woke up that Sunday morning on pins and needles, wondering if all-out nuclear war would be waged that day.  "Cold war" is just a meaningless phrase unless you practiced laying down on a playground during a nuclear war drill, knowing full well that if there was an actual bomb you'd end up as nothing more than a shadow imprinted on the asphalt.

A year later, while sitting in class at school, we received the horrific information that our President, John F. Kennedy, had been shot and was already dead.  I just couldn't believe it.  I couldn't believe that something like that could happen in America.  As for today, well -- I no longer recognize America.  It's not the country I grew up in.  It's a dark and twisted mutation of itself, wherein half the populace would willingly accept an authoritarian poseur rather than the legally elected representative.

By about the age of 11, then, I had decided that the adult world was completely insane and I knew I didn't want to emulate adults in any way, shape, or form.  All bets were off.  Something new needed to be born, and damned if it didn't feel imminent.  I felt part of a generational change.  It felt as though we, the youth of the Sixties, had all sprung fully formed from the brow of Zeus; history meant nothing to us nor could it contain us. 

As always, generations split as people age and enter more fully into their individual lives. The presumed unity fractures or dissolves as people's lives become more clearly defined, and more clearly differ, by virtue of their varied choices. Besides, all cultures lie. It's just that every new generation tells the lie in a way peculiar to themselves.  That's the cynicism of my having lived through the decades that ensued after the promise of the Sixties fell flat.

But enormous change takes time.  Perhaps hundreds of years.  A thousand years ago, lords from the south of France would visit Moslem Spain, sometimes as guests at the courts of Muslim lords, sometimes as captives of those courts, but what happened was that they came back to the south of France with a new set of values -- the beginnings of chivalry, the fragile and nascent sense of romantic love, which developed into the troubadours and trouveres and the tantra of courtly love, a little later the Arthurian cycle of Chretien de Troyes -- this all began roughly 900 years ago, and it was the beginning of an entirely new cultural cycle which eventually swept all of Europe.  The culture we live in today is in the death rattle of that enormously important 900 year cycle of values.  Those values have been an enduring part of European thought and feeling ever since their inception.

We're on the brink of another such sea-change.  Despite Kerouac's implication, it would surprise me if such a monumental change happened in a matter of a few years.  I thought as a child that this was what the Sixties represented; I thought we were living through that change.  And in a way, we were part of the sowing of the first seeds of that change, on the heels of Kerouac and the Beats.

Some time later I will write of my own prophetic dream, which rose up out of my subconscious the summer I was twenty.  It was part of my catching this wave of change, or its catching me.

The disruptions we see all around us in our world, the enmity, polarized opposition, lies, hatred, violence, bigotry, lust for power and control -- all of which are in full sway at the moment -- are harbingers of this larger change.  I think an entirely new culture will have to be born, because the one we're in can't carry this change forward.  This civilization is eating itself alive and will continue to break down, methinks.  But eventually, over decades, or perhaps over several hundred years, a new impetus of energy will push through an entirely new culture, built upon values which we are only now dimly beginning to perceive, or maybe values which we're as yet completely incapable of imagining.  

Before the new values can be born, though, the old ones are rearing their ugly heads once more and fighting against this change. The atavistic impulses of selfishness, competition, domination, pride, ego, intolerance, racial, religious, and sectarian violence and hatred -- business as usual, in other words --  are cultural archetypes which have outlived their usefulness and utility and are fighting for their very lives.  This fight, this struggle, is embodied in our public figures and in the national consciousness prevalent in America right now. We're living through the resistance to the very shift that Kerouac was talking about.

If we happen to live long enough, it would be something to see the world, and humanity at large, come out the other side. 

I'll write more on this later but since it's early December, and as I read this windblown version of Kerouac's journals constantly, I thought I'd make a reference to Jack's prediction. Let's hope it comes true and that I'm wrong about it needing several hundred years to play out. 

It can't happen soon enough.

Closing the Door(s) on the Past

 For several weeks -- well, at least for the month of November -- I had looked forward to my school's Thanksgiving break.  We don't take the entire week off, but we do take the day before and the day after Thanksgiving proper, hence we have five days off.  I was looking forward to the opportunity to lay low, pull in, be quiet, and recharge.

It didn't turn out quite that way.  Not that I was busy, but instead of a sense of self-nurturing, it turned into a bleak subterranean journey through a long dark tunnel.  It is only today, Sunday, the last day of this period, that I feel I'm emerging and am somewhat myself again.

So what happened?  I asked myself that question.  And the answer for me was that I have been dragging around an enormous bag of unfulfilled hopes, longings, wishes, desires and disappointments for far too long.  Been carrying some of them around for 7 or 8 months.  But then I realized that some I had been carrying around for years, and still others, decades.

Time for winter housecleaning.  I can't afford to wait until spring.

As of today, then, I am jettisoning the past.  Whatever came before is dead, gone, and long since lost to the Neptunian halls of memory's delusions.  Do I think it will be that easy?  Not really.  The imps in my own psyche will troll through the garbage can and drag some old memories back in, but I'm sure their rank odor will give them away.  Maybe this is why some people do a ritual burning of items associated with the past when they want to move on.

However, my items are largely of my heart and my mind, so the housecleaning is internal.  I can see that several cycles of life are ending all at once.  One cycle was about 2 and a half years, with the past several months squeezing all the issues into one huge morass.  Time to stop dragging it around.  I'm throwing it out and I'm shutting the door.  

Another cycle is years long, beginning with my move to California eleven years ago this month.  That involved a very heavy commitment which I shouldered for about 7 years.  For the past 3-4 years, I have been moving away from that previous commitment.  It officially ended this month.  Another one bites the dust.

And strangely enough, I can see a fifty year cycle -- yes, that is 5-0 years -- that began almost exactly fifty years ago and perhaps was in full sway, although I didn't know it at the time, by my 18th birthday.  That cycle denoted the official end of my childhood and the beginning of an adulthood marked chiefly by internal conflicts, the skewed sense of a quest, and decades of shadow-boxing with love, life, and the usual rites of passage that tend to mark adulthood.

What I'm really having a tough time trying to chew and swallow, though, is the belated realization that my entire life has been characterized by a childlike naivete wherein I ascribed to other people a sense of goodwill and support that perhaps never existed in the first place.

I long ago observed that life brooks no naivete.  Wherever you might be naive in your character and thus your life, you can be sure you will be pounded on just that sore point until the time comes when you are no longer naive.  You can delay or try to deny the lesson, but good luck; it will keep returning until you deign to learn it.

Such is the case with me.  Some illusions die really hard.  They linger on in the shadows and dark corners of the heart, but I've spied them out for better or for worse, and I'm afraid that now I can't unsee them.  I've finally learned that people are not necessarily what they present themselves to be, and they have motives that serve their own needs, desires, and egos, and not mine.  At worst, we are merely pawns in each other's games.  I used to believe that if you just put all your cards face up on the table, everyone else would play fairly too.  Didn't win too many card games, if you hadn't figured that out already.  

I'm teetering on the brink of cynicism here.  I've always felt that cynics are merely failed idealists.  Now to be wise to the possibilities yet open to them at the same time.

So be it.  Time to get on with life.  Perhaps for the first time, I am free to live whatever life I can imagine, unencumbered by misconceptions about what that life "should" be.  It will be what I choose.  The question then is, what kind of life do I now wish to live?

I will ponder that one good and long for the next while.  Until next time -- 

Another Round of Chinese Poetry

 I've been reading a book by Red Pine, or Bill Porter, who's my go-to guy, along with David Hinton, for delving and dipping into different eras of Chinese poetry.  The book in question is entitled, "In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu."

Many of China's greatest poets happened to live through the An Lu-Shan rebellion in 755/6 CE, which seemed to split the T'ang era (618 - 906) in half, and which brought to a close a cultural golden age, turning a large portion of the society into refugees, and which kept simmering in various provincial uprisings for decades thereafter.

Wei, born in 737, had been called to the court at age 15, serving in the palace guard, which sounds like it was the high life for a young man.  But when Wei was only 18 or 19, that life was disrupted by the rebellion.  Although Wei later established himself in government service, with periodic retirements here and there, during the rebellion itself Wei often found sanctuary in Buddhist monasteries, a practice that continued for some time and later involved his entire family, i.e., wife and children.

Wei never did permanently retire from service in the government, pursuing posts in regions far from the day's capital, Ch'ang-an, eventually passing away in Suchou in 791 at the age of 54.

What I find especially interesting about this book is the format that Red Pine chose.  He arranged Wei's poems in chronological order, and sectioned them off according to the location in which they were written.  He also has the helpful habit of including explanatory notes at the bottom of the page containing the original script, with the English translation on the facing page.  Hence, it's quite easy to follow the course of Wei's life, travels, and relative tribulations as you read his unique way of responding to his life's events.  It's an autobiography, in poetry.

Chinese poets of the time usually, it seems, addressed their poems to specific individuals, and Red Pine fills in those details as best he can.  Another strength of these notes is Red Pine's fine grasp of Chinese geography, right down to the ancient layout of certain cities, with the locations of the sites and buildings mentioned by Wei in his poems.

In order to give you the flavor of one of Wei's poems, I opened the book at random to this particular poem from the year 781.  Wei was 44 and his wife had passed away some years before, leaving him with young children to raise.

At this time, however, Wei was living at Shanfu temple near the Feng River, a period of a couple of years of retreat and peace in Wei's life.  The poem is entitled, "Waking late in my garden: to Magistrate Han and Secretary Lu in Chaoying."

"Farmers have already started to plow/thick smoke is rising from their yards/birds are singing sweetly from garden trees/ being retired I was still asleep/unaware the day was so late/ I got up and gazed at the azure sky/ I stretched my limbs/ and felt quite happy indeed/then I went back below thatched eaves/ poured some wine and considered  fine men/ adjusting their belts  on their way to the office/ with nothing but documents to fill their days/wishing they were here in the woods/ enjoying the sight of mountains and streams/  unless you're living in enlightened times/why not work on yourselves instead"

So there you have it.  Conversational, common, not grand in tone, not set in remote mountains on hermit peaks, just a hut in the woods somewhere along a river.  Sounds like a calm, settled life.  The Taoist ideal of "do nothing/no effort."

But alas, the world and its work kept calling Wei back into government service.  Although he maintained friendships with hermits, poets, and Buddhist monks wherever he happened to be posted, most of us would recognize his life by the daily worries and concerns that he had.  And that's what marked Wei out -- he wrote about those concerns, worries, problems and troubles, and the attendant feelings, even as one part of him kept to the detached view of the "witness" or the monk's elevated perspective.

All in all, a different kind of read for me in the realm of Chinese poetry.

A Rambling Reprise

For the past fifty years, I have more or less followed a spiritual path which has usually been invisible and not at all apparent to me.  That stands to reason, I suppose.  The spirit is immaterial, or so we consider it in the West.  In many people's minds, it's a fiction, if they think of it at all.

I happened to come of age during a time when several spiritual tsunamis were  sweeping through the world.  I probably first picked up on it sometime in late 1965, early 1966, both through the music of the time and the primacy of drugs in the burgeoning counterculture.

Except that I very early on sensed something suspicious, sinister even, in the use of drugs as a mystical tool.  It didn't ring quite true to me that a chemical could be a signpost.  I was too young to test my hypothesis directly but I did have an older sister who started putting it to the test sometime in late 1966, early 1967.  She was five years older and would describe to me her drug experiences.  At first, there was a certain glamour and the thrill of "insider information" to these disclosures.  But slowly that sense of something more sinister at work came to the fore as I watched my sister's personality disintegrate before my eyes.

She dropped out of my life and I hardly saw her for the next 4-5 years.  But I remember reading a letter to the editor of Life magazine sometime in the fall of 1966 wherein the writer espoused the opinion that the hippies, then a new phenomenon, were right in their declaration of love as the answer to the dilemmas of the times, but were wrong in their choice of mediums, that is, drugs.  This seemed to me to hit the nail on the head.

I did do about a year of light experimentation when I was 19 but two things intervened.  One was an insistent inner voice that kept telling me to stop. I'm talking about conscience here, or what we might more accurately call intuition.  Incredibly, I actually listened to this voice despite the fact that drugs were socially ubiquitous at that time.  I was surrounded by them.

The other was the interesting experience of an altered state of consciousness.  It was a novel discovery that there were alternative states to our ordinary, binary state of mind.  But instead of delving deeper into drugs, I paired that interest with the earlier experience of the inner voice and instead decided to start meditating.  It gave me a useful "out" with my peers, because one had to be drug-free in order to take the beginning meditation class that I was pursuing.  

That small, subtle decision set my life on a course I could never have anticipated.  I found indeed that I could easily enter into an "altered" state of consciousness directly through meditation, and that it revealed a fascinating interior terrain.

But rather than attempt to trace the meanderings of the past several decades, I'm just going to say that here I am, nearly fifty years later, re-thinking my life and that entire endeavor.  Everything is up in the air.  I'm alright with that.  Somehow this whole experience, which has taken me around the world and allowed me to meet many incredible personages, has only served to solidify my sense of self, not dissolve it.  For better or worse, I appear to have always been on the path of discernment rather than that of love.

What that means is that I have slowly, over the span of my life, learned how to think.  It's not something that came easily or naturally to me.  Until about the age of 35, I spoke almost entirely in the language of simile and metaphor, and nobody could understand me.  I'd say, "It's like...." and I'd pull something out of the ether, the thin air, which appeared unrelated to what I'd just been talking about, but which carried an inner resonance with it.  It drove people crazy.

Ever so slowly, I learned how to think like other people.  That is, somewhat rationally, all the while realizing that everybody just does whatever they want to do anyway, and they make up the high-falutin' reasons after the fact.  Just so it sounds good to other people.

But even that is not what I mean by the path of discernment.  In effect, it's situational ethics.  What I learned over the course of my life was simply a grounding in situational ethics, which I absorbed by living through many agonizing and conflicted situations.  There's a built-in truing mechanism to life.  Either you learn from it or you continue to suffer the consequences of your own choices, behaviors, and actions.

If you put me in a particular situation today, I can eventually think my way through it, work out the ethics and the broad spiritual implications.  I don't feel bound by that process, but I can do it if need be.  You see, I also realized somewhere along the line that desire is not the enemy, even though much spiritual literature portrays it as such.  To put it more personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing what you want, simply because you want to, all things being equal.  Course corrections are always allowed.  For most, this is not an issue at all, but for the few who become bedeviled by spiritual concerns, it's like a smart bomb that hones in on your very own psychological weaknesses and neuroses.  You'd be surprised how many people I have watched in my life as they painfully, torturously twisted themselves into convoluted and unnatural pretzels simply because they couldn't accept their own desires.

I see that I'm going to have to revisit this idea of desire here.  In a prior post, I said that ten years ago, I wrote thirty pages on the subject of desire.  Perhaps I exaggerated -- it was probably only twenty.  At the time, I was obsessed with the ontology of desire.  I was intent upon giving desire spiritual credence.  I wouldn't feel driven by the same need today, but back then, I was.

Sometime this month, I will unearth my previous material about desire, see if I can digest it, and try to bring forth something worth sharing.

Til then...

Blue Moon

I wrote this post last Saturday night, published it, then pulled it.  I've done that a couple of times with posts, either thinking something was too much fluff, or too personal.  This one felt a little too much of the latter.  It's all a matter of trying to figure out what I want to write about on this blog.  Is it me?  Or is it subject matter that I'm interested in, whether it pertains to me or not.

Hard to say.  I'm undecided.  But for now, I decided to put this back up.

Eleven years ago tonight, I arrived in Walnut Creek.  It was Halloween, a Saturday night.  I had recently found a place to live and was moving in the next day.  The person I was in love with, a woman from another country, was due in town shortly.  Moving here was her idea.  Marriage was the eventual hope or plan.

Three weeks later, we'd broken up, she'd gone back to her country, and I was roughly a thousand miles from home, friends and family, in a location where I knew no one, with no job and no immediate prospects.

Time to turn tail and go home, right?  I almost did.  But I felt as though I had nothing to go back to.  Life in the Pacific Northwest had run its course. I decided to stay in California and make the best of a tough situation.

After a couple of years of doing odd jobs to keep body and soul together, I got a little help and landed at a school.  That was the work angle.

The personal one has been tougher.  It has taken a long time for my heart to heal.  In part, it was the cumulative effect of having lost nearly everyone I loved over the previous twenty year period.  A marriage had come and gone.  With my latest attempt at love, I had tried with all my might to will it to work out, but it didn't.  I'd given it all I had, and when it ended, I had nothing left.  Just another person who'd loved and lost.

Because the other person kept coming up to visit the area (not to see me, it should be said), it took longer than usual to get over that break-up. It took a full five years.  Sometimes I thought the pain would never end.

It probably goes without saying that I wasn't open to love with anyone else.  You couldn't pry my heart open with a crowbar.  Only with children was I able to express any human warmth.  Their spontaneity was a saving grace.

In order to heal my relationship with the Feminine, I took a unique tack.  I started listening to female musicians from around the world.  My rule of thumb was that they couldn't be singing in English.  I didn't want my mind involved in any direct way; I wanted to viscerally respond to the music.  So either I listened to female folk artists from other cultures singing in their own language, or to female instrumentalists.  I also watched many kinds of folk dance, and delved into the visual art of women from other cultures.  I took a break from the women I'd known.  For ten years.  I needed a more positive impression of the Feminine to counteract the one I had.

And for the most part, it worked.  My heart eventually healed.  Maybe not entirely.  One year I asked four different women out; all four said "no."  My guess is that it had to do with my not being entirely healed.  People pick up on that whether they can articulate it or not.

I had one rough attempt at dating, which was about 50% ok, and 50% pure hell.  That confirmed a situation that I had long intuited as being suspect.

But I find that even at my age, I'm still working on family of origin issues.  After spending maybe 20 years working out mother stuff, strangely enough, I find in the past 20 years I've been working out father issues.  It's just that I seem to be working them out through relationships with women.  Who knew that was even possible?  I find the women I am attracted to are a lot like my father was, emotionally.

I have a friend in his seventies who has bemoaned the fact that he's still working on remnants of issues with his own father.  Some of this is really trenchant.

However, eventually my heart re-opened.  I met someone I was interested in and that motivated me to get to work on myself.  It has taken about two years of intense labor, including a misguided detour with a female therapist who was perhaps the most misogynistic woman I've ever met.  She had nothing good to say about women.  What's nice about being this age is that I trust my own judgement.  I didn't waste any time on that therapeutic relationship.  I moved on, on my own.

I now feel capable of, ready even, for love.  I'm just not sure if love is ready for me?

As I write this tonight, I feel myself at a crossroads in life.  In many ways, I am in my full maturity.  That doesn't mean that I know everything; quite the contrary.  I have a lot to learn.  And I look forward to learning it.  Some people just have that in their DNA.  They will learn until the day they drop.  Hopefully, I'm one of those.

I know I want to write.  I have a plan for that.  I know I want to love.  For that, I have no plan.  I think that's best, at least for me.  I'm simply open.  Open to what life brings my way.  

Love is nothing if not spontaneous.  It really does come out of the blue sometimes.

And so, as the days and weeks and months worked towards this day, when time would seem to emulate my plopping down unannounced in Walnut Creek so many years ago, it felt like it was time to do a little review.  A year ago, I may have written that I had found no real friendship or love here.  But secretly, I knew that was my own fault.  You can't find either with a closed heart.

I guess I have to cop to my own naivete.  And I am a little guarded.  I've learned this year that I'm none the wiser and can still be hurt.  But that just means my heart is open -- codependence aside, it simply means I care.  My heart has not shut down this time.  Still, Life does not brook naivete in any domain.  No doubt there is more to learn in the realm of human love.

I hope so. What brings the deepest pain, also gives us our greatest joy.

An Odd Conversation

 I had a short conversation with my roommate.  Short, but odd.  We were walking her two dogs.  I'm an extra set of hands and legs in that instance.

Anyway, out of the blue, my roomie asked me, "If you could have any car you want, any make or model and price was not an issue, what kind of car would you choose?"

I never think about things like that so I was a little taken aback, but I gave it a moment's thought.

"My truck," I said.  

I have a fifteen year old Ford F-150 half-ton pickup.  Gold in color.  A little damage to the body (my fault), a little damage to the tailgate (the previous owner's fault), but all in all, I'm happy with it.  Despite having to say "no" to all the people who feel entitled to borrow it (the previous owner's fault) and who are now disappointed that I own it (my fault), I really like having a used pickup truck.

I had a dream once, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, that I bought an old, beat-up, banged-to-hell late 1950's white Ford pickup.  I can still see it in my mind's eye.  I woke from that dream maybe the happiest I've ever been.  Go figure.

"My truck. I like the truck I have."

Then my roomie asked, "If you could live anywhere on earth, in any country anywhere, where would you want to live?"

I briefly thought of New Zealand, where my great grandfather was born, emigrating to San Francisco 150 years ago to become a scout in the Old West (we had his powder horn and bowie knife on the wall when I was growing up), marrying a mixed breed woman in Kansas whom the family euphemistically referred to as "French Canadian," before he struck gold on a mountain in what is now British Columbia, but alas, was murdered for his claim -- at least the mountain is named after him.   

I spent a winter/summer in New Zealand once.  That's not what I said, though.  I surprised myself by saying, "I don't think it matters where one lives."  Meaning, I suppose, that "place" does not necessarily define happiness.  You can choose to be happy -- to have a good attitude -- no matter where you live.

"But what about a home?" my roomie asked.  "Don't you want a home?"

"Home is wherever I am," I replied.  

And I mean that. With the caveat that, yeah, it would be nice to have a home.  I can't even begin to count the number of places I've lived in my life.

And then came the final capping question: "If you could have any meal, from any culture, what would your favorite meal be?"

I like almost any kind of international dish.  I like Chinese, I like Indian.  I like Middle Eastern.  Vietnamese.  Mexican.  I like Thai but that's because I like peanut sauce.  The best meal I ever had was in the Latin quarter in Paris.  I bethought myself a moment and gave the most honest answer.  

"A hot piece of toast with butter on it."  

Now it was my roommate's turn to laugh and shake her head.  And I have to admit, my answers were offbeat.  They surprised me, too.  But they were my real unpremeditated answers to questions that I never ask myself.  I was struck by how simple my own choices were.

And as I write this, I am eating that piece of toast.  But I'm living large.  I slathered some peanut butter on it.

Half Moon Bay

What with Covid and 2020 just generally being the year from Hell, I decided to get out of the East Bay for the weekend.  Haven't been anywhere beyond about a five mile radius since the virus hit last spring and although I can be relatively happy as a homebody, I have felt at times like I was about to go crazy doing the same damned thing, day in and day out.  Sometimes you just need to move your body to a different locale and it will change your mind up as well.

It was a three and a half hour drive.  It didn't need to be.  I was winging it.  Driving west on 24, the on-ramp for SF was a parking lot, so I thought I'd head on down thru Oakland, hit the San Mateo bridge and cross over on 92.  Once the freeway stopped over on the peninsula, it was another parking lot.  Took a sharp left on a little country road, hit 280, missed the turnoff to 84, which would have been a nice drive, so I decided to just make a day of it.  I drove on down to Santa Cruz then up the coast.  

Once I turned north, Hwy 1 was a really pleasant and refreshing drive.  There's just something about being out on the open road.  It's such a quintessential American experience.  I've driven about half the country, done several drives of about 2,000 miles each, and I always love the sense of freedom in just being out on the open road.  The weather was overcast and turned to rain as I approached Half Moon Bay proper, but that's alright.  I'm from Seattle.

Holed up for the night, spent the morning strolling on Main St. in HMB, people watching with a nice cup of coffee.  Rather than drive anymore, I simply walked down to the beach and then headed north.  Despite the intermittent crowds, it was such a lovely and mostly private experience.  Just me and the sea.  The wind and the water.  That sea air blowing out all the stultified and toxic energy that had built up over the spring and summer, releasing it into the crashing surf, making room for something new to come in.  Barefootin' it.

Along the way, I saw a very determined little red spider, inexplicably heading down the slope towards the water, which duly engulfed him and swept him away. I googled little red sea spiders and by golly, there really is such a thing.  No wonder he seemed so determined!  It wasn't just inadvertent self-destruction, like with human beings.

A little farther along, I looked down and noticed two honey bees wrestling viscerally in the heel of somebody's footprint.  At first they seemed at war, but on closer inspection, it seemed that one bee was incapacitated and the second was trying its level best to help in some undefined way that involved alot of hustle and bustle and climbing all over the one that couldn't seem to right itself.

Lots of kids in the water, or going one-on-one with the ocean, running down to the edge of the surf, then back up the beach as the water raced in.  A few kites, including one massive black orca which occasionally dove straight down into the sand and could easily have swallowed me in one gulp.

I loved the diversity of the crowd on the beach.  Just about every ethnicity known to man was in evidence.  To me, that's what this country is really all about, is its secret strength.  More on that in a later post.

Heading north, I was walking into the wind.  After about an hour and a half, I decided to turn around and was shocked at what a different experience it was.  The way the sun was positioned in the sky, I had my back to it as I was heading north.  Once I turned south, the sun shone down upon me, glistening on the water and showing in clear relief every stone and shell on the sand.  The wind was at my back.  It was an Irish blessing enacted.

A short stop to eat a sandwich up by the bluff, clambering up and out of sight to take a pee, then resumed my southward journey.  Incredulously watched as a seal shuffled its body out of the surf and up onto the sand, where it plopped down for a rest and maybe a hoped-for snooze.  It was not to be, though, as people immediately approached within a few feet of it, and the seal (or sea lion) wisely returned, just as immediately, to the sea.

A good three and a half hour stretch of the legs, to even out the three and a half hours spent behind the wheel of my truck yesterday.  Tomorrow, another morning walk further south along the bluff above the beach, perhaps a return along the water, a quick cup of joe, and the drive home.  A little sun-burnt, a little wind-burnt, but ultimately, quite refreshed.

Pre-Addendum to Self-Care

 The title is referring to the fact that although this is a succeeding text to the prior post, it will precede it on this page.

A friend of mine complained that I didn't provide enough of a model for how one should hone one's own sense of self-worth.  She wants to think about things before they happen, maybe practice it in her own mind, but life doesn't often provide us with that opportunity.  Our lessons are usually thrust upon us unawares. Besides, I thought I'd done a pretty good job of using a real-life example: conflict with others.  Who isn't familiar with that?  And if you aren't, you soon will be.

To a certain extent, a sense of self-worth is earned slowly through the many tests of a lifetime.  It's kind of a side-effect of time and maturity.

What I didn't explain was how one affirms oneself, thinking that these are things one learns for oneself, in one's own way.

I think one learns to affirm oneself by taking one's stand upon what is within rather than looking outside of oneself, or to other people, to set one's course.  Our friends, and sometimes our frenemies, are often helpful in mirroring back to us our own false reads upon a situation or set of circumstances.  But eventually the time will arrive when one's internal sense of what is right in a certain instance -- what is right for us, in other words -- will be at odds with the opinions of those upon whom we might otherwise rely.  In the end, it is your own sense of judgement which has to steer your ship.  It isn't so much about being "right" in an objective sense -- if there truly is any such thing -- as it is a matter of personal self-knowledge and self-honesty.  The day comes when you can no longer make excuses for yourself.  You must live by your own light, go your own way, or lose yourself along another's.

It's a balancing act between your head and your heart.  If you seek to live by your head alone, i.e., by logic, then good luck with your life.  Our hearts don't really lead us astray.  It's our identification with our desires and the belief that their fulfillment is "happiness" that is really the crux of the issue.  We presume that the satisfaction of desire, winning our desired end, will result in what we call "happiness."  It's the curse of Western culture.

Ten years ago I wrote thirty pages about desire on a blog, deconstructing it for myself.  Desire does tend to lead us into learning, but often it's painful learning.  Besides, desires are endless.  They never end.  They're never truly sated.  As the Buddha noted, either you suffer through their fulfillment, which is necessarily temporary, or the pangs of the longing of unfulfillment creates suffering, or one's focus and energy is depleted in an endless round of seeking, suffering, or satiation which never ends.  Then you're nothing more than a hamster in a wheel, chasing desire, running like hell and never getting anywhere.

I only mention this because people sometimes confuse their desires with the promptings of their heart. Don't.  The voice of the heart differs from that of desire.  Desire is insidious.  The voice of the heart is quieter, more subtle.  Unless you choose to ignore your heart's directional signal, in which case, sooner or later, the promptings of your own heart will be screaming at you.

You can numb your heart, if you try.  You can ignore it by an act of will (read: ego).  But then you're in a boat adrift without a paddle.  Because the apparent opposition between the head and the heart occurs when the function of one is encroaching upon the respective territory of the other.

Your heart tells you what is important in life.  What is most important to you, personally.  Your hopes, dreams, wishes, ideals.  Your head tells you how to get there.  That's the order, and you can't reverse it without throwing your entire life into an uproar.

Heart leads, head follows.  Heart sites the goal, head helps determine the way.  Heart is the "why" and the "what."  Head is the "how."  Lead with your heart, and let your head support that.

That's a basic premise for determining how to take your stand upon the truth within.  Your heart must recognize what that truth is for you.  Your head can't do that.  The head at best can be cleverly selfish when it encroaches upon the sphere of the heart.

So, when I said you must affirm yourself in the previous post, what I meant was that you must first ascertain, and then follow -- despite the clamor of the voices of others -- the truth within, the voice of your own heart,  and you must pursue that course if your life is to truly be your own.

Don't let go of that internal gyroscope -- which you must feel -- or else you really will be lost.

Choose Me or Lose Me

 I'm always amazed at the amount of pain and abuse people will put up with in the name of love.  The obvious, repeated, twisted folly of lies, cheating, damage that we witness others endure, sometimes for years, in their sad attempt to win what the other person will never, ever give them:  acceptance, value, validation, worth -- in other words, love.  All those things we mistakenly seek outside of ourselves.

Of course, it's much easier to see the patterns of others than our own.  Harder to discern the origin of, much less disentangle oneself from, the compulsive behaviors that are the earmark of our own unconscious, negative, and love-negating patterns.

I've sometimes had friends tell me, to my chagrin, "You know, love isn't supposed to hurt.  It isn't supposed to be that hard."  When I've heard that statement, I've wondered in the privacy of my own mind, "Am I just shadow-dancing yet again?  Is this not love....again?"

I'm not sure I've ever known real, reciprocal love.  Who among us has?  What is far more common is to see people unconsciously acting out patterns of behavior scripted in their own murky deeps, of which they seem completely unaware.  But you can't live an entire life -- I wouldn't think -- without figuring out that you have shadows which you are projecting onto living people, and that you're largely dealing with these phantasms from your own mind rather than the individuals outside yourself.  I would suspect that there are psychologists who posit that the entire realm of human relationship is merely an enactment of projections from our mutual psyches, through which we stumble, presumably to learn and grow.  

There is a close correlation between those internal phantasms and the individuals who can receive those projections.  You have to find the right player, otherwise the image won't light up in that luminous way.  If you've been raised by an abusive parent, and sworn that you will never pair with any such person in your life, and yet find yourself unerringly drawn to just such a dynamic, again and again, I think you have to wonder:  is there any hope at all?  Are we doomed to re-enact these patterns ad nauseum?  And one wonders whether this Shakespearean comedy of errors has any rhyme or reason, or whether we're all fated to wander forever lost in the shadowland we call "love."

I think there is a way out.  Although I've done many years of talk therapy in my life, it really didn't help much.  None of the therapists could figure me out.  I got tired of trying to explain my perspective to them.  Surely human beings have learned, throughout the ages, how to extract themselves from their own worst behaviors or dilemmas, without so-called expert help?

Once I had someone walk me back through my preconceptions about "love."  I was to say the first thing that sprang to mind regarding the word.  Each time, I was asked to go back behind the previous statement, and summarize the belief behind it.  I went back through 7 preconceptions about love.  Each of them was totally skewed.  I never reached a healthy perspective.  My own skewed conception of love was that layered and irreducible.  That was thirty years ago.  What have I learned since?

I've learned many things.  I've learned that I can love.  I've learned that I can love, lose the person I loved, and survive without caving in or contracting into the fetal position.  Life does go on.  To some extent, time is a healer.  But not without a little bit of help from us -- it doesn't happen in and of itself.  We need to participate, consciously, in our own healing.

Looking back on my own experience, and my seeming failure in the world of psychological self-reflection, I think our psychological health reduces to realizing, and viscerally experiencing, our own intrinsic self-worth.  This seems to be playing out across the world stage at the moment.  But it plays out in our individual lives as well.  You -- we all -- have intrinsic worth based simply upon our existence as human beings.  On the world stage, this plays out as hatred, bigotry, social struggle and strife.

In our individual lives, it often plays out in a similar fashion.  We find ourselves face to face with someone who wants to negate or discount our worth as a human being.  Someone who wants to steamroll us.  Someone who attacks.  At that moment, sooner or later, you have to stand up for yourself.  Because no one else will do it for you.  You have only yourself to depend upon.  Something inside you registers the outrage of the moment.  In some fashion, you must stand your ground, draw a line in the sand, and not back down.  It can feel ugly, that moment of conflict.  It's not often smooth.  But eventually, one gets better at doing it in a way that is less charged, maybe even less defensive, and sometimes, it is actually done with grace.  To learn to do that takes time.  

If you're inclined to negate your own worth based upon your sense of shame, failure, terrible crimes, or betrayal of others, think again.  These are all part of internal patterns of behavior rooted in your own woundedness.  Not even your wounds define you.  Underneath all that, you are a human being deserving of respect and, yes, love -- 

Nowadays we hear much about narcissists and sociopaths.  Yes, unfortunately there are people in life whom you cannot trust.  Perhaps they will never reverse those behaviors.  You don't need to fall victim to them.  There are ways to counter and protect oneself from such individuals.  There are many helpful videos online which teach one how to identify, and deal with, a narcissist.  Then there's that old adage, be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.  Which means be willing to give others the benefit of the doubt -- to an extent.  And then you have to recognize the situation for what it is, remove yourself if necessary, or protect yourself accordingly.

That's partly what I meant by the title of this post: establish your value, firstly in your own mind.  Then stand by that.  If someone else fails to recognize your value, move on.  Don't waste your time trying to convince them otherwise.  It's an unnecessary expenditure of your energy.  Your equal will recognize you instinctively.  Those who aren't, won't.  Walk away and move on.  Save yourself from the implicit suffering involved in looking for validation from those who are unable, or unwilling, to recognize who you are and what you have to give.  Save those pearls.

It seems to me that all these appropriate or healthy behaviors of ours are rooted in one vital experience -- our belief in, our felt-sense of, our own self-worth.  You must learn to affirm yourself.  Because others may never do that for you.

That root experience of self-respect is the foundation for ever having the ability to experience love.  And since love is a flow, a give and take, an expenditure and a return -- you have to be open on both poles -- you have to be able to both give and receive -- I think those two abilities demand trust, and first and foremost, trust in oneself.  Trust in oneself -- despite one's past or one's own baggage -- is grounded in the simple experience of recognizing your own self-worth.  As I said, it is intrinsic.  It is a fundamental quality of your being human.  It underlies your ego, your personality, and the supposed accumulated baggage of your lifetime.  It is an essential and existential human quality.

May you find a solid sense of your own worth, and on that foundation build the ability to love and trust; first yourself, and then another.  Something tells me this is the foundation stone of all real love.  May we all find that trust and love.

More Shan Shui

 I've been reading more in David Hinton's book, "Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China."  I'm perusing the introduction a little more thoroughly to see what I've missed.  

Tao Ch'ien's given name was T'ao Yuan-ming.  When he recused himself to the family farm in his ancestral village, near Thatch-Hut (Lu) Mountain, he also took upon himself his nom de plume.  "Ch'ien" meant "concealed," "hidden."  It was meant to signify his turn to the reclusive life, circa 400 CE.

This reclusion to a life of solitude was already an ancient tradition in China.  What made Tao Ch'ien unique was his use of his natural voice and his immediate experience as the medium and subject matter of his poetry.

I've gathered over the years that those who retired from the Confucian ideal of serving the nation differed rather dramatically in the life they adopted from those recluses who were spiritually seeking in solitude, be that seeking for Taoist immortality or Chan emptiness.  For one thing, those who retired from government service often -- but not always -- had a remote family property to which they returned.  Sometimes, one was simply banished to the provinces and made the best of the situation by making it a spiritual and artistic retreat.  

According to Hinton, the reclusive life of such retirees often included the following:

    mountains, rivers and wilderness

    a comfortable house

    a substantial library

    a working farm

    art, wine, family and friends

Who wouldn't want to live such a life?  Rather than ascetic solitude, like the hermits sought, this was "the good life" with all the trimmings.

I also liked this text from the Confucian classic, "The Great Learning:"

    To site understanding is to see deeply into things themselves.

    Once things themselves are seen deeply, understanding is sited.

    Once understanding is sited, thought is trued-up.

    Once thought is trued-up, mind is rectified.

    Once mind is rectified, self is cultivated.

    Once self is cultivated, family is in order.

    Once family is in order, the nation is composed.

    Once the nation is composed, all beneath heaven is tranquil.

If only it were that simple.  But perhaps it doesn't hurt to try.  And the first note struck is to try to see deeply into things themselves.  Let's start there and see where that takes us, shall we?

    

Shan-Shui

 Over the past several years I've read a fair amount of Chinese hermit poetry.  It helps keep me nominally sane.  When I lived in an A frame cottage amidst the pines on a western-facing ridge of Kitsap county in Washington state, I would go out the back door, sit on the porch and look out across Hood Canal, observing the shifting view of the eastern side of the Olympic mountains.  Weather would come blowing off the ocean and skirt the southern end of the mountains, then veer north.  The Olympics always elicited a visceral sense of being Asian to me -- the mists blowing through, obscuring then revealing different peaks.  Best thing that ever happened to the Olympic peninsula was for almost the entire thing to become a national park.  

I fancifully tried to piece together some fake geology to see if indeed the land that attached itself to continental America in the Pacific Northwest had actually drifted all the way across from Asia, and maybe some of it has, but the Olympics were formed by orogenic uplift, eruptions originating on the Pacific floor.  Lift and fold, then repeat.  So much for fanciful theories.

There's a guy who lives in Port Townsend, on the northeastern tip of the peninsula, named Bill Porter -- or the Chinese translator rubric "Red Pine" by which he also goes -- who lived in a monastery in Taiwan for a while then was a wide-ranging radio show guy based in Hong Kong, I believe.  Bill knows China like the back of his hand and has written many wonderful books about his treks there, for instance, hunting down the grave-sites of nearly all the famous poets in China's past, whereupon he would produce two cups from his pack and drink a toast to the poet, pouring the second libation on the ground in honor of his absent host.  

His book about the poets is called "Finding Them Gone."  Bill also went up into the mountains to find that there are still many Taoist hermits up there, seeking immortality, and he wrote a book about them called "Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits."  I've got two copies, maybe I'll send you one.  If you see a crane, perhaps one of them made "immortal."

There's a pal of Porter's who also lives in Port Townsend named Mike O'Connor.  There's a slew of them up there, guys who grew up on the peninsula, working in the woods, or failing at organic farming, or maybe relocated, people who pushed until they ran out of land and wound up there.  All of whom came under Red Pine's influence, and some of whom traveled to China with him.  Poets, drunkards, and recluses.  Kerouac's children.  Actually, they're probably all good family men by now.

Together, Red Pine and Mike O'Connor edited my favorite introductory volume to the Chinese  Buddhist hermit/poets called "The Clouds Should Know Me By Now."  Mike has some nice books of his own.  Red Pine has also translated many sutras and the Zen poets like Han Shan, or Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, and some others who are more obscure.

Then there's a guy who lives in the NE named David Hinton.  I like him less because he takes himself very seriously.  Whereas Red Pine will slip into gratuitous jokes, Hinton believes he understands all the great Chinese poets because he actually meditates too.  So of course he's happy to explain it all to you.  However, he is a useful introduction to many of the more obscure poets from China.  In particular, I'm reading a volume of his right now entitled "Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China."

The main take-away from this is that the whole genre, the shan-shui (mountains and rivers) genre of writing and landscape painting, all began at the same time, during the lifetime of the first poet who wrote about the mountains, a guy named T'ao Ch'ien, who lived from 365 to 427, CE.  He wrote in a personal voice about his experience in those landscapes, those locales, and he was an early practitioner of a combined Taoist renewal that blended with the early introduction of Buddhism into China that give birth to Ch'an, or "Zen," meditation and the resultant fixation with "emptiness" that developed thereafter in China and Japan.

The most important term I picked up from Hinton's intro was tzu-jan.  It literally means "self-ablaze."  This evolved into "self-so" or "the of-itself" and touches somewhat our sense of "spontaneous" or "natural," although it goes beyond both.  The final translation of tzu-jan became "occurence appearing of itself."  This seems to me -- and I'm not a Buddhist -- to differ from the Buddhist idea of dependent origination, whereby you can't separate anything individually from the Whole.  Buddhism is big on negating individuality, whereas it seems to me that Taoism recognizes a kind of mysterious sense of manifestation for every individual thing in existence.  Personally, I like the second explanation better, and I'm happy that it also evades rational and discursive dissection by the left brain.  So much the better.  Did humanity evolve by rationality?  Most unlikely.  We probably survived more readily by being attuned in a way which we can't quite articulate, but had the wits to trust.  So sayeth I.

Hinton's brief explication of the etymology of the phrase tzu-jan helped me to grasp more fully Gary Snyder's approach to nature, as well as helping me to appreciate the sensibility with which much poetry in China was steeped over the course of about a thousand years.

One sentence of Hinton's introduction states "The vision of tzu-jan recognizes earth to be a boundless generative organism..."  And here we've now made contact with the indigenous perspective of the first peoples of our own continent, and the slowly burgeoning perspective of eco-psychology, or eco-spirituality.  Perhaps someday we interlopers who are gradually becoming accustomed to this place, becoming grounded here, and being changed by the organic energies of the land itself, will have a spirituality which is indigenous to this continent, but which bridges all continents and cultures throughout the world.

The night before last, I couldn't really sleep and kept drifting in and out of consciousness.  But I was aware the entire time -- as I crossed from sleep/dream into some dim form of awareness --  that I was spending the entire night writing poetry -- in Chinese.  Quatrains in Chinese.  Which I neither speak nor read.

Oh, what does it all mean?