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...