A Quote From Meher Baba

"The task for the aspirant is to pierce through his own layer of self-imposed self sufficiency and expose a layer of vital awareness to the world around him, which would teach him if it could." 

Outer Wilds -- Timber Hearth

 Human beings have gathered around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years, looking up into the mystery of the night sky, playing songs, telling tales.  May the perception of beauty lead you beyond your own confusion.  Harmony -- in whatever form -- is a remembrance from deep within your soul about who you really are, and where you really come from.  You are the mystery of the cosmos, incarnate.

Simplicity of heart is the secret key to life.  Drop your burdens.  Leave the lies, hidden hatreds, roiling rages, dark desires -- who are you, really, behind all that?  Merely a witness watching it all roll by.  Who you really are is quietly watching from within, untouched by the mud and mire, the spit and spite of life. Be still; remember the simple silence of your own being, before all this began.

This music reminds me of that fleeting experience.  Outer Wilds, one of my favorite finds of the past year.

The Ice Ages

All fall I've been reading a book by Brian Fagan entitled, "Cro-Magnon -- How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans."  There's more than a bit of Eurocentrism in that title, as by 45,000 years ago modern humans had spread throughout Asia and possibly into the Americas.   But I don't intend to pick that battle today.

As I'm of Northern European descent according to my DNA, excepting about 3% that's Middle Eastern / Ashkanazi Jewish, I've long felt a sense of psychological roots when confronted with the cave art from prehistorical Europe.  It rings a bell for me somewhere inside.  I've also long wondered where exactly the West went wrong, because it was painfully obvious to me even in my childhood that Western culture was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt, its Christian facade notwithstanding.

So I decided to read about the time period in question, which would be from perhaps 45,000 BCE to about 12-13,000 years ago, the time when the Ice Age finally ended, or at least this interstadial began with a global warming that produced the Holocene, and transitioned European humanity from the paleolithic, through the mesolithic, and finally delivered us to the beginnings of a settled lifestyle in the neolithic.  We can trace our intermittent development through contemporary archeology back to about 8,000 to 10,000 years, but not really much further.  It's only natural to wonder, what came before?

We know that the Neanderthals preceded modern humans in Europe by perhaps 200,000 years.  The first half of the book really dealt with this species, about which I don't hold the same level of interest, partly because they really aren't the forbears of homo sapiens.  Although geneticists tell us that some Neanderthal DNA continues to exist in our populace, I still don't feel the pull to study their history and, in fact, there's very little to study.  Archeology is largely a field of supposition; its claims to knowledge of the past are mostly imagined because, really speaking, who knows what happened or how people lived?  We can only infer based upon our best guesses or  refer to polar cultures that subsist today.

What I gather with respect to the Neanderthals is that their culture changed very little over their 200,000 year occupation of Europe.  By that I mean that the tools they made changed very little, if at all.  They apparently passed on their knowledge but didn't progress measurably.  They must have been adaptable in order to have survived as long as they did, but it doesn't seem evident from their technological stasis.  

People wonder what led to the Neanderthals' demise and this book makes no particular claim on the subject.  However, the entrance of another, more inventive hominid species into their environment no doubt had an effect. There was also a major volcanic eruption in what is present-day Italy about 39,000 years ago that interrupted the development of the Cro-Magnons who had already entered the continent and perhaps hastened the Neanderthal's demise.  They seemed to relocate to sites along the Mediterranean and coastal Spain, and then gradually their population dwindled.  I'm guessing homo sapiens entered their territory and either out-competed them for resources and food, or were aggressive towards them (although there isn't really factual, archeological evidence of such conflict, given the history of people of European descent, it wouldn't surprise me).  It also occurs to me that the evidence of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon "coupling" was probably not always, if ever, consensual.  

Archeologists divide the Ice Age cultures amongst the modern humans who moved into Europe into three or four major groupings, based primarily upon the differences in how they made and shaped their tools.

The first culture is called Aurignacian and they dispersed over the entire continent, at least that portion that was livable.  This culture flourished for about 10,000 years, from about 39,000 to 29,000 years ago.  They were following game migrations or using specific locales which lent themselves to hunting and/or other resources.  Until the spectacular discovery of the splendid art in Chauvet cave in the south of France in December of 1994, it was believed that this culture had little to offer in the way of cave art.  If you've seen the incredible bestiary portrayed in the Chauvet cave, you know that presumption to be false.

A deepening of the Ice Age circa 30,000 bce had two results: the apparent disappearance of the Neanderthals from the fossil record, and the emergence of a new culture of modern humans in Europe.  This culture has been called the Gravettian.  Again, they lasted for about 10,000 years.  There was a brief culture, again identified by their own specific forms of weaponry, called the Soultrean, specifically in northern Spain and southwestern France.  And finally, the last major culture, from about 18,000 years ago until the end of the Ice Age, called the Magdelenians.  The famous cave paintings found at Lascaux are attributed to this culture.

I highlighted much of the text of this book and intend to go back and make notes on those sections.  But my primary take-away from the entire study is simply this:  we -- that is, the culture of northern Europeans -- were once indigenous.

Think of what that means: it means the culture of Europe was not unlike, and perhaps very similar to, the culture that developed in North America until these self-same Europeans came to disrupt it.  If you've looked into the Sami culture in northern Finland, or listened to their musical chants, you'd easily mistake them for a tribe from North America.

Why that interests me is for this reason: we in the West once had the same orientation to the earth, to nature, and to life that indigenous peoples in the Americas had.  Where, why, and when did we lose that?  Because one of the most prominent, and negative, features of our culture is our complete separation from the natural world and our lack of concern for it at all, beyond seeing it simply as a resource to be plundered.

When did we come to see the world from such a distance?  When did we lose our relatedness to other forms of life and to the natural world itself?  My guess is when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to a settled people who had begun domesticating animals and plant-forms for our own purposes.  Somewhere in that process, a few screws came loose -- we lost our spiritual center and became unmoored.  And we've been spiritually and emotionally adrift ever since.  That's what all this means to me.

I want to trace where we went wrong, so that I can trace the way back to that existential center.

And that's what my study has been about this fall.  I'm now looking into the transition from the paleolithic to the mesolithic, in terms of our spiritual beliefs, because something happened there.  We went awry in that transition.  Looking at the Venus figurines of, say, 30,000 years ago, which were ubiquitous across the European continent, it seems apparent that a goddess/Mother Earth form of worship towards life and the cosmos may have prevailed.

When and how did we transition from the divine Feminine mediating spiritual guidance for us, to male warrior sky gods imposing their judgements upon us?  

That's the basic spiritual question I have for the time of our cultural origins.

I have to admit that the subzero weather of this week has put me into a mindset of thinking about all these things.  I've wandered out into the cold just to experience it firsthand, and to remember the world from whence we came.

That's all for now.

Seventy

I turned seventy this week.  In keeping with my life of the past several months, I was alone.  My erstwhile friends and sometime hosts left last Friday to drive to Texas.  It was probably a much less stressful way to travel than those people who have left their journey for the past few freezing days.  I don't know about you but the last place I want to be over the holidays is in an airport crawling with thousands of others, all wondering if our flights have been cancelled -- yet.

I had covid the two weeks prior to my birthday.  I had been working but that ended with my illness.  Although they say you're not infectious after five days, the fact of the matter was, I was still very ill.  As my friends were leaving shortly, I quarantined in the basement for two weeks, and never came upstairs unless it was the middle of the night and my friends were in bed. And I wore gloves and a mask.  It worked.  They left healthy, fat and sassy.

I've since tested negative.  But I still don't feel quite up to snuff.  Regardless, I almost went back to my day job -- a crappy mandatory 12 hour day, six days a week with one day off.  As if I had nothing better to do.  And I live 45 miles away.  Not only that, on my birthday it snowed several inches, and then the arctic cold front came down from the north.  It's below zero and that's not counting the constant wind and therefore the windchill factor.  T'would freeze a witch's warts right off her nose.

I had a winter like this when I was sixteen.  It was 40 below zero for two weeks.  We got high-centered on a snow drift in the family car, all heading for school or work at six am one morning.  I had to walk a mile to a farmer's house for help, in that forty below zero weather, with ice-cold wind ripping through my ribs right to my bones, and me a stupid teenager in a windbreaker and tennis shoes.  It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and so remains.

Thus, I arose at 2:45 am on my birthday, hit the road at 3:30 am, a mile drive on a snow-packed gravel road to a two-lane highway, then a fifteen mile drive through rocks and rangeland with no houses or farms until one reaches the interstate and its perpetual herd of semis.  It was snowing and there was already 4-5 inches blanketing the road.  I got maybe half a mile down the flat on the state highway, thought about how the next two hours would be spent bent over the wheel driving 25 mph on compact snow and ice, with the chance that at any moment I might slide off the road -- which is raised by several feet above the surrounding fields -- and be stuck walking back several godforsaken miles in the freezing cold at 4 am.

"Fuck it," I said, as I turned around, drove home, and climbed back into my toasty warm bed.

I've been home ever since, what with the temperature well below zero in the brittle daylight, and who knows how cold under the night's chill and heartless stars.  Although I have the heat on in the house around the clock,  woke up this morning to a house that was 56 degrees inside.  I'm thankful that at least the electricity is still on because it almost blinked off last Sunday night.  Running the heater all day, I got the house up to balmy 62.  I have a space heater down in the dungeon room and it's the warmest place in the house right now.

I called my employer and said I wouldn't be in until the roads improved.  But truth be told, I've decided not to go back to that job.  Working mandatory 72 hour weeks is not my idea of how to live life at the sainted age of seventy.

You see, I've sighted mortality on my horizon.  Limited time means some hard choices.  I don't have time to waste on shit jobs, nor on people who have nothing to offer, but only want to take. Let them fritter their own time and life away -- not mine. 

I'm unburdened by the usual ubiquitous desires people have in life.  I was never acquisitive, beyond books.  I never wanted to be saddled with a house or to pay taxes on property.  I didn't want to tie myself down to the good earth in that way.  I never chased the sweet slime of success or the supposed debaucheries of the "good life."  I wasn't trying to keep up with the Joneses.  I decided long ago, when I was ten or so, that the adult world was completely fucking insane and nobody had the slightest idea why they were living the way they were.  I had no intention of emulating their stupidity in any way, shape, or form.  I'll create my own forms of fruitless endeavor, thank you very much.

Besides, I've been on a quest all my life.  A quest with several facets, to be sure, but one of the main purposes of my life has been to try to get a bird's eye view of the "big picture."   I've done that sufficiently, I think, despite the fact that if you keep learning -- if you continue to stay open to life as you age instead of shutting down -- then your "big picture" will forever be expanding beyond your current horizons.  

That seems to be the case with my horizons, which is quite alright with me.  I find it exciting.  The constant learning and the attempt to understand life more deeply, dearly or to hold a longer view or broader vision of life, is both engaging and enlivening,  Brisker than bat's teeth on a gnat's ass.  It gives life, however mundane,  an overall sense of meaning and purpose.

The question then becomes, well, where do I fit into this "big picture?"  

I've answered that question for myself and to my own satisfaction. "My" place is not center stage but somewhere on the far edge of the periphery where, I might add, I've never set eyes on the likes of you.  You might be even less relevant than me.  Hence, I don't feel the need to present that answer here nor to justify my existence to you or anyone else.  I'm content with my place in life.  I came with nothing; I'll leave with nothing, and I haven't wasted a wastrel's day of my solo sojourn in competing for who has the bigger, better, or  most expensive toys.  If you wasted your life in such pursuits, I pity your poor choices.  Better luck next lifetime, compadres.

I would like to write a book before I go.  Some biographical vignettes of my foil and folly, perhaps, and then my sense of that "big picture."  Where we in the West came from, where we went wrong, and where I see us going once we've exhausted all the myriad errors that life keeps offering us.  Human beings seem to be especially perverse in that way.  They never, ever try doing anything the right way unless they have attempted every possible short cut, wrong turn, or dead end first.  It's very strange.  Anyway, I'm going to paint that picture.  The picture that I see.  The canvas of our confusion.  It may help another sorry soul cut down on their futile pursuits and karmic toil and trouble.

And if not, if it's all simply a vain pretense on my part, well, may it be so.  It's still how I choose to spend the time left to me.  And when my time's up, I'll be happy to go, no second thoughts and no second guesses.  Until then, then......

The Travelers' Return

I've been house-and-farm sitting for some old friends since the end of June.  Last Thursday night marked their final return after two months of kicking around mostly northern Europe and the British Isles, and another month lazing on the beach in Mazatlan.  They had a brief stopover here for a couple of days between the two excursions.

I've spent 90 days alone throughout all this.  I didn't exactly go stir crazy.  The down time was much needed, having just left 13 years spent on the east side of SF Bay, thirteen years which became increasingly difficult and disillusioning as time went by.  It wasn't all doom and gloom; there were good times too.  Just fewer good times than I'd hoped for. 

What that time really did for me was solidify me.  That wasn't my intent when I went down there, quite the contrary.  This won't make sense to anyone, but my hope was that my stay would dissolve certain aspects of my character.  But that didn't happen.  Instead, my character gradually became more distinct and more clearly defined.

That definition appears to happen through the process of working with others.  Sometimes the friction of working with others will knock off your rough edges, and I suppose that happened to me to some extent.  The alternative is working through opposition with others.  This opposition may be external or it may be internal and never expressed openly.  For me, sometimes it was the former; more often than not, it was the latter.  

Either way, what happens with opposition -- if you meet it head-on -- is that it solidifies who you are inside.  Standing up for yourself solidifies your character.  

After many years of experiencing this both in my professional life and through extensive volunteer work, it was apparent that my growth wasn't happening in any spiritual, immaterial realm, but in my ego, in my personality. That wasn't what I wanted or intended but that's what happened.  You take energy in and that nutrition allows you to grow in whatever way is most natural to you.  I also gave a lot and this point is crucial: it's all an exchange, a circular flow of energy, or no growth happens at all.  You have to give as well as receive. 

I have no problem with giving; in fact, I actually had to learn how to give less.  Some people or institutions will gladly bleed you dry.  You get taken for granted.  If you have a strong sense of self-worth, you won't allow that to happen. When the balance of the equation is askew, it's time for a corrective.  My "corrective" was to move a thousand miles away.  There were no heartfelt goodbyes.

Now I'm in a new phase.  I have a book to write.  I'm just getting the building blocks in place in order to do that: a place to live, a job to support it.  Next is putting in the time and research, to make notes to flesh out my ideas.  I won't be posting about the subject matter online.  Why?  Because I've learned not to trust anybody.  You too, dear reader, whomever you might be.  Don't steal my ideas.  Have a little faith in your own originality.

To some extent, I leave a piece of my heart behind in California.  But I've done all this before -- I've had to walk away from people and places I care about -- I will survive.  And flourish.  Why?  Because I choose to.

4 Pieces by Ludovico Einaudi

I'm sitting by the bay window at sunset watching the clouds slowly change hue and listening to this piano.  It's the perfect combination.

These four pieces are being played by Jacob Ladegaard.  It's interesting to watch the focus upon the hands -- his subtle sense of touch gives one some impression of how this kind of tone and texture of sound is given shape.

Parents Passing

As I said on Thursday, on Friday I visited the cemetery where my mother and father are buried.  I did not take the dog -- it didn't seem to be appropriate etiquette -- and I'm glad I didn't.

My home town is a small country burg, under a thousand people, situated in a long farming valley.  The valley probably extends for fifteen miles.  It must have been a river channel once, perhaps 15,000 years ago when the water from the great Missoula Flood backed up for miles in all these lowland valleys.

The town is healthy, whereas many of these small towns have died.  First, the stores in town begin to shut down.  Then you lose either the bank or the post office, or both, and finally the school closes.  That's the real death knell of the community. All that remains open then are the grain elevators and warehouses.

Back when my mother grew up, from the early Twenties until, say, the late Forties, the population of this county was actually much higher than now. That's because at that time you could support yourself and a family on maybe 250 to 500 acres.  If you had more than 500 acres then you might have another house on your property, or at least a bunkhouse, for the hired man and possibly his family. I would guess the population of this county was nearly twice what it is now, seventy five years ago.

As time went by, this all changed, of course.  By the time I was a kid here, you really couldn't support yourself on less than 1,000 acres.  Now it's probably 2,000.  Sons still take over the family farm, but there aren't as many of them.  Most kids leave now.  Farms have consolidated.  Land has changed hands.  Some land is now farmed by companies that are not local.  When you're not tied to the land by blood, the heart goes out of farming.  You care less about conserving the health of the land.  You're just looking at the bottom line.  You use utilitarian practices which may gain you more $$$ post-harvest but which really aren't good for the soil.

Still, my hometown has a sense of pride about it.  The demographic is different now, though.  It's no longer strictly farming families or people employed in the industries that support farming directly.  Now it's a bedroom community for retirees or for people who commute to the nearest larger city, which is about 50 miles to the north.  Hence, there are fewer kids.  The high school's about a third of the size it was when I attended.  Educational co-ops with neighboring towns have become a financial necessity, keeping the schools from shutting down entirely.  It's also necessary to combine with nearby towns in order to field sports teams, due to declining enrollments.

All that said, the town looks exactly like it did 44 years ago when I left.  The same grocery store is open, owned by the same family.  The woman running it was my coach on the swim team in the summer; her son, who stayed and helps run the business, was four years younger and we lived together one spring in college. He has a nice, long Ho Chi Minh goatee, struck through with white hair.  I said to him when I saw him, "Mike!  We got old and grey!  How did that happen?  We were supposed to stay young forever...."  

The bank is still there, the post office too.  One pharmacy closed and another one opened.  There are two small hardware stores, a gift shop that makes espressos (!!!), a second-hand store, and the grange supply turned into a "country store."  All in all, everything looks the same.  The houses and yards are well taken care of.  The little town park is green and still has a swingset and a merry-go-round.  Last night was Homecoming for the high school football team, but I didn't go.

You can drive through town in under 60 seconds on the main street.  There are no traffic lights, not even a stop sign to slow you down.

A mile or two east of town, further on up the valley, on the sloping hill on the north side of the road, is the town cemetery.  All these little towns have their own cemeteries.  For some of these little burgs, there are now more people buried in the cemetery than there are living in the town itself.  It's a way of life that I'm not sure will survive intact through the end of this century.  Hope I'm wrong about that.

Anyway, our cemetery is really quite a peaceful spot.  Lots of pines and other trees interspersed throughout.  My mother and father are buried between two pine trees above and below on the hill, maybe 50 feet or so apart.  As fate would have it, my grandmother got buried between my dad and mom.  Just like in actual life, Grandmother always tried to come between my mother and father.  They really didn't allow that.  My mother always took the high road with her mother-in-law and probably earned some stripes in heaven thereby.

Dad died 35 years ago.  I was 34 when he passed.  We had been at war for thirty years by that time.  He was a smothering presence in my life, one which I just couldn't seem to shake or get out from under.  His own father had bailed on the family when my dad was one year old, so he grew up without a father.  He thus overcompensated and overdid it with me.  He had his own issues as a human being.  He oh-so-gradually mellowed as he got older.  We had some healing experiences together right at the end of his life.  But that's a story I'll leave for another day.

Mom passed on my dad's birthday in 2015.  I was preparing to move back home that summer to be closer to her, but she left before I could get there.  I sat alone on that hillside by her grave and felt like an orphaned child.  I don't cry often or easily, but in that instance, I let myself cry.  I allowed myself to feel the loss.

For about a year prior, I kept dreaming that I was visiting my mother at home, but the house was always empty.  And for about a year after she passed, I dreamt regularly that I was trying to find my way home, but could never locate the house.  Eventually, I came to terms with the loss, as we all do over time, but still I feel guilty that I wasn't there for my mother in her last years.  I was busy trying to make a life for myself in California, which never really happened.  Now I'm back home and will make a new life for myself here, on the old ground.

I will probably choose to be buried in this cemetery someday. Let myself rot into good wheat-producing soil.  It's a peaceful place.  My two remaining sisters feel the same way.  

Honestly, I don't feel like my parents are there.  I go and visit their graves as a sign of respect, and I made a fall floral bouquet which I placed on Mom's grave yesterday (sorry, Dad!), but I don't really feel like they're present there.  They've moved on.  Wherever life and existence -- since I don't believe that anyone or anything ever really dies, but simply continues on -- have taken them, I trust they're doing well.  

You see, despite the horrors human beings can go through on this earth, I have an overarching sense of faith that it all subserves a kind of long-term higher learning in the end.  That may seem like a stretch for some of you, but it's a deeply rooted feeling in me.  I understand it intellectually, too.  Someday I will write about this at length in a book.  But for now I'll just say that I trust that both Mom and Dad have moved on, have had a chance to review and digest their earthly experiences, and are probably both excited about the chance to continue to live, learn, and grow 

Because, after all is said and done, that is what this life is really all about.  I'll meet them both in some other guise down the road and we'll have a different relation to one another.  It will be interesting to see where things go from there.

The visit put me in a pensive mode for the rest of the day.  I wanted to write about it this morning, and then move on with my day.  Life goes on.  As it will when I pass as well.

Dogs, Redux

I gave yesterday's ending dream a trial run today.  Put some old blankets over the back seat of my truck, collared the dog and loaded her in, then took off up the road.  I'm south of the Interstate.  Due north is a little podunk farm town that probably would have dried up by now if it wasn't for the occasional weary traveler who pulls off for gas, a cheap bite, or even a night at the fleabag hotel.  Well, I haven't stayed at the hotel so that might be an unfair characterization.

Anyways, I cracked the back passenger window down a bit and hit the road. It's about 3 miles of farmland and then 5-7 miles of rangeland to this town. By rangeland what I mean is a washed-out basin several hundred miles long and wide of exposed basalt, scoured by a flood that scientists say held 10 times all the water in all the rivers on earth today.  That's a lot of water.  Trying to visualize this is well nigh impossible.  But drive through this country, mile after washed out mile, and you'll begin to get an inkling of its staggering immensity.

The gas station fortunately has lattes, so it's my version of Starbucks. There are two Starbucks within driving range, but they're both another 22 miles away, in opposite directions.  With the price of gas being what it is, I'll pay extra for my little Chevron latte.  They also carry the daily newspaper, which is my other daily vice. Only it isn't printed daily. The regional paper doesn't print on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Saturdays.  I really didn't foresee my dotage existing without being able to minutely scrutinize the stats in the sports page each morning.  That's a huge cultural shift for me.

The dog did okay but at both that stop and a short one at the downtown grocery, when I came out, she was sitting in the driver's seat.  I didn't even wait until I got in.  I just hollered from the sidewalk, "Get out of my seat!" and re-iterated that statement in forceful dog lingo when back in the truck cab.  (sometimes I just growl at her -- it's a quicker, easier form of communication)

All in all, it went pretty well. Tomorrow we'll head into my old hometown, 17 miles due east. I should visit my mom and dad's graves on the other side of town, but I don't trust the dog.  I could put a collar on her and a leash but, you know, pooping on somebody's grave is probably not good karma, even for an innocent like a dog, so she'll stay in the truck there as well.

We'll keep extending these excursions.  I tried to take her for a walk out in the stubble fields yesterday but she took off running like a demented deer.  Long sprints and jumps.  Let's just say she didn't stay close.  I had to take her back to the house and do the walk alone.  Steve hasn't trained her to stay close yet.  Not sure if he will.  

I took her down to the creek once and she immediately jumped in and happily lay down in the mud.  In that instance, I took her home, put on my swimsuit, and carried her into the walk-in shower in the utility room.  She tried hard to scramble away but I got her on her back and spun her around a few times, after which she nobly surrendered to her ignoble fate. After she was dry, I had to take my own shower!  Now tell me again, why do I want a dog?

I'm practicing, I guess, for eventual dog ownership. We'll see if I pass the tests.  

Dogs (and cats)

When I was growing up, we always had a passel of cats and dogs.  My sisters (two older, one younger) were all cat people; hence, each had their own cat.  My oldest sister had Blackie, a smoky dark long-haired cat who had a mysterious air, and liked to roam outdoors -- we lived in the woods then -- but he'd show up on my oldest sister's bedroom window ledge when night-time came and she'd open the window and let him in.  Blackie we lost pretty early on, the first of my oldest sister's many heartbreaks in life.

My second sister had a gentle, genial striped tabby who would allow herself to be dressed in full doll-clothes regalia and pushed around in a stroller.  Her name was Baby Face.  Baby Face was "easy" -- she was perpetually in heat and thus perpetually pregnant.  Whenever we moved to a new locale, which was every six months to two years, Baby Face would immediately become pregnant.  Ergo, that sister was always finding a new litter of kittens in her bedsheets, clothes closet, under the bed, in a carboard box in storage -- wherever.  I think Baby Face single-handedly -- well, with all the male company she kept -- populated the entire western United States with kittens.  Certainly the West Coast because we lived in all three states -- Washington, Oregon, and California -- and she had litters in all of them.

For a while we had a beautiful Irish Setter but he kept knocking me down, me being about two or so.  He wanted to rub up against me but only ever succeeded in knocking me over.  So when he approached, I would start swinging away in order to preserve my upright status.  Sometimes I won, sometimes he did.  Old Red.  He used to hide under the family Studebaker, a low-sitting car, on the 4th of July when the fireworks all went off, and always got himself stuck.  My dad would have to crawl under the car and carefully drag him out.

And for my fifth birthday, I got a dog.  A small one, part dachshund but heavier, longer fur, and little bigger.  I named her Heidi. She pooped prolifically and everywhere, and if a door opened, man, she was gone -- she was pretty fast on those little legs.  Would ignore your calls.  It was rare we caught her; she'd amble back home when it damn well suited her.

What used to irritate me was how my sisters would say, "She's not your dog!"  That is, until it was time to feed her or scoop up the piles of dog poop in the yard.  Then it was, "She's your dog!"  This obvious hypocrisy riled me, but apparently didn't bother my sisters any.

Those animals, sans Blackie, made it to the farm with us in August of 1965.  Heidi was in 7th heaven (ever wonder where that phrase comes from?  someday I'll tell you), running through the wheatfields, at least until the stalks grew taller than she was.  Then it was hard to find her way home.  You'd see her jumping mid-field, ears flapping in the air, trying to get her bearings.  She lived to about fifteen.  She went blind but had made a trail around the house and would run laps all day for exercise.  You could look out any window at any time of day and in a couple of minutes, Heidi would come trotting by.  She was a long-distance trotter until the very end.

Frosty, from my Uncle's litter over the hills, soon joined Heidi.  They were about the same size.  I don't know how, but Baby Face got pregnant again and before too long -- within a few years -- we had about a dozen cats, and maybe half were feral.  My dad could sometimes tame them.  He was far more patient with animals than with his kids.

We got more dogs over the years.  My favorite was Puddin.  This must have been the winter of '66-'67 because my oldest sister had come back up from California.  It was snowy and on the bus ride home my other older sister thought she spotted a puppy on the hill in a snow drift.  So she walked back to the hilltop and, sure enough, a sweet little black and white shepherd of some sort was now in the family.

He was a great dog.  He and I would play rough in the yard.  He loved to be rolled and tossed; he'd then run back and start gnawing away at an arm, a hand, my foot.  He never broke the skin; he instinctively knew exactly how much pressure to put on and never went past that.  If I threw him too hard and he yelped, he'd come running back in for a quick hug and then we'd begin anew.

One mother cat was a little off her rocker.  She took a couple of litters of kittens out into the wheatfields and didn't come back with them.  The second time this happened my dad realized what was going on and had her spayed.  Anyway, this had happened again.

We had moved my dad's mother -- we called her "grandmother" with all the emotional distance that phrase implies -- into a mobile home on the property and dad had built her a deck to sit on.  To sit and watch the wheat grow, I guess.  Anyway, one of her sisters came to visit and they were both sitting out on the deck.  On top of the long hill in front of our house, where they were facing, they could see Puddin -- way up on top of the hill.  He was moving very deliberately in a kind of zig-zag pattern down the hill, taking his time.  This was late May, early June, and the wheat was about knee high, so they could see Puddin's back but nothing else.  They commented on this and wondered what he was doing.  It took him about 30-40 minutes to get all the way down to the gravel road, usually a three minute jaunt.

And when he got there, he nosed out this skinny, scrawny little kitten that the mother cat had abandoned on the top of that hill.  Puddin had patiently herded this little cat all the way home.  If you think animals cannot feel gratitude, let me tell you, that cat never left that dog's side.  She would constantly rub up under his chin and he'd be sitting on his haunches, looking at you like, "What did I ever do to deserve this?"  But he stoically put up with this cat's undying affection until the she finally passed away -- after a happy cat life around the place.

Puddin and I would go jogging together.  We'd be toodling down the road at a comfortable pace when, all of a sudden, I would sprint and get a ten yard lead.  Puddin would speed up, catch me, then lope along for a few strides looking over at me as if to say, "You think this is fast?!"  Then he'd hit the afterburners and scream down the road at high speed, leaving me far behind in the dust.  That was our game.

The last dog we had when I was growing up was Pepper.  Small, black and white mutt.  Her thing was birds; when she was a puppy she would chase after birds flying, looking up into the sky the whole time -- and fall in a ditch or crash into a bush, or worse, a tree.  She eventually figured out how to navigate the obstacles on the ground while chasing the birds in the sky.

Pepper would greet me every morning in a special way.  

My "bedroom" was the coal cellar which you entered through a trap door in the floor of the pantry.  One corner of the cellar was paved and had walls made of a kind of strong cardboard.  The rest of the basement was dirt.  Yes, I was interred in the earth for the duration of my adolescence.  It really felt that way.   One could probably theorize accurately about the psychological symbology of that experience.

In the morning, when I would lift the trap door with my shoulders, Pepper would race over, flip onto her back, and I would blow a big fat raspberry on her tummy. "PHAATTT!!!"  It was our little ritual.

I've not had a pet as an adult.  I would probably get a dog, but I've lived my adult life in cities and it never seemed appropriate to me, having been raised partly on a farm and seeing how absolutely happy a cat or a dog is on a farm, to raise one within the confines of a city.

My roomie in California had a dog.  It was her condo.  At first she had two little dogs, elderly, who passed within months of one another.  Then she got a German shorthair retriever, a very high-strung, hyper-active dog who couldn't be alone and who never really figured out that I lived at the other end of the hall.  I would walk out of my room and be attacked at high speed by a dog barking madly as he dashed down the hall.  I was tempted to whack him on the nose out of fear and frustration, though I don't believe in hitting animals.  It felt like self-defense. I was never sure if he was going to bite or not.  Otherwise, he was a total goofball.  Loved to chase balls. Wyatt.

Where I'm staying now, there's a springer spaniel, a little female, who's totally codependent.  She can only be where a human is.  If she's in, she wants to go out, but only if you'll go with her.  If you let her out and don't accompany her, she'll sit on the front step facing the door, staring sadly, wondering why she's been abandoned and tossed so thoughtlessly out of her home.  She's sweet enough in temperment, and has a wide assortment of stuffed animals that I throw or play tug of war with, but sometimes I wish she'd just go run around outside.  Be a dog, you know?

We do have one ritual together.  I'll say, "Cows!" and Toni will immediately jump up and start running around in circles.  This increases in rapidity as I put on the bib overalls I wear down to the barn.  Then as we approach the barn, she starts running in circles on the NW corner of the building, where the door is.  She runs these tight circles until I approach, then runs one big, next-to-last circle around me, one more tight one ending right where the door cracks open.  She's sure there's something in the barn to chase!  A rat or a cat.  (I once managed to quietly save a mouse from her without her noticing.)  

Once we hit the barnyard to fill the feed troughs, she scours the ground because who would want to miss out on that delicious doggy delicacy, dried cow pies?  What could taste better?  I try to get her to stop but she is a dog after all, I guess.  She scared up five pheasants this morning, all hens, and was halfway to the creek after them before I could get her to come back.  Hunting season hasn't opened yet, dog.

Years ago, I dreamed of having a pick-up truck.  I mean this quite literally.  I dreamt one night that I owned an old, beat-to-hell late Fifties white Ford pickup, body all banged up, and I woke from that dream the happiest I've ever been in my life.

Well, now I've got the pick-up truck. Seems like the next thing I should get is the dog.

Octavio Paz in India and Japan

I've been reading a literary biography of Octavio Paz, the best I've read thus far.  It's by the Mexican author, fellow poet and compatriot, Alberto Ruy Sanchez (translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas -- translators don't get enough credit for bringing within our grasp the thought and poesis that would otherwise remain out of our reach -- that of another language, another culture).  Sanchez is only a year older than I am, so I feel he represents my generation and I find that helpful in my own approach to Paz.  Sanchez must have met Paz sometime after his return to Mexico from India in the late Sixties or the Seventies.

Paz left Mexico, where he felt high and dry in a literary sense, for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the United States in 1943.  He spent time in Los Angeles, Berkeley, and New York.  While in NYC he joined the Mexican diplomatic service and was transferred to Paris in 1945, where he remained through the end of 1951.  

1952, then, was split.  First Paz spent six months in India, New Delhi specifically, and his reaction to India was much like my first reaction to India: an instinctive, shuddering rejection of the overpowering sensory onslaught of the environment itself.  I went to India six weeks after turning thirty.  It was my first trip abroad.  Within 45 minutes of walking out into the swirling streets of Mumbai, I had a splitting headache -- the almost psychedelic cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, colors in nonstop motion.  Or the thousands upon thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night.  Riding in the back of an auto rickshaw in the pitch black, it took me some minutes to identify what I was seeing.  The sheer rawness of life.  I recall saying vehemently to my girlfriend as I stepped off the plane upon my return stateside, "I'm never going back there as long as I live!"  

I was in India again a year and a half later.

For Paz, this was a case of putting his toe in the water of the Orient.  Ten years later he would return a more mature man, as Mexico's ambassador to India, and he was able to fully absorb India's influences, culturally and philosophically.  He also met there the love of his life, a young French woman with the curious name of Marie Jose Tramini, then married to a French diplomat.  She and Paz met again by chance a year later in Europe and never spent another day apart until Paz passed in April of 1998.

But after six months in Delhi, Paz was transferred to Japan.  Two countries that had been riven by conflict: India by the partition, and Japan by WWII.  And in Japan, Paz spent his final bit of time with his first wife, Elena Garro (a writer in her own right).  It was Paz's last attempt at the recovery of this marriage, before he was forever alienated from his first wife and their daughter Helena.

The experience of India and Japan was alienating in itself to Paz.  France had been familiar, as his grandfather's library had been full of French literature into which Paz delved deeply as a child.  India and Japan were foreign cultures altogether at this point.  In his long exile and estrangement from his own country and culture, Paz was also experiencing a kind of alienation from himself.  A line from a poem written at that time states: 

"This instant has swallowed everything of childhood, and the future is nothing but furniture nailed into place."

Who hasn't felt that stuck at times within the strictures of their own life?

It took Paz many years to slowly absorb the experiences of 1952.  He did it in the way most natural to him: through literature.  He explored the Japanese poetic form of haiku, and translated into Spanish, with the aid of his friend Eikichi Hayashiya, the book "Paths of Oku" by the great Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho.

Paz later wrote of Japan:  "In the Japanese tradition I found, first, the idea of concentration; secondly, the idea of the unfinished, of imperfection -- to leave something aside, to not finish everything."  He's referring here to two main influences in Japanese literature -- the concentration borne of meditative awareness, i.e., Zen -- and Wabi Sabi, the appreciation of rustic authenticity.

As Paz says later in the same text, "...in India there's a lot of exaggeration; they write two million lines whereas a Japanese writer would condense meaning into a question mark..."  Later Paz would find in India the idea of the "blank paper scriptures" and would include that tonality in his own long poem written while residing in India, "Blanco."

What I find interesting about this is the time it takes to absorb the influence of another culture.  It is not instantaneous.  It has to percolate down into the deeper layers of one's being, often over years or decades.  I found myself asserting when I returned from India the first time, "I am a Westerner!"  I wasn't going to eat rice and wear rough cotton Indian shirts.  In other words, I wasn't going to take India on as an affectation.  But it did gradually influence me as I returned occasionally over the years.  Even today, I find myself still slowly absorbing experiences I had in India almost forty years ago.

It's funny how time and experience shape us, and alter the texture of our character and lives, over time.  The goal is not to go through life and time unaltered. If you trust in the process of life itself -- however querulously -- you must finally accede to the lessons which life is trying so desperately to teach you.

Heroes

 It's strange to me how songs or melodies with which I'm already familiar, in this case the late David Bowie's song, "Heroes," sound so fresh and new when played upon a twelve string. The mysterious beauty of this is difficult, if not impossible, to articulate. You can only feel it. Its arching poignancy.

What a way to start my morning, with a piping hot cup of coffee and the hauntingly exquisite sound of Angela Lancieri's guitar ringing through the air. This sounds like it arrived upon wings from a different time, era, or world.

Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne showed up on the scene about 50 years ago with his debut album of exquisitely crafted songs.  Jackson's songs are always distinctly his own composition, simple, melodic, lyrically masterful and insightful.  He can be rowdy and raunchy in a light-hearted way as well.

I drove three hours south of the farm on which I reside, through the rolling wheatfields and rangeland of the Columbia Plateau.  This region was shaped in part by massive lava flows 17 to 9 million years ago.  The flows were so vast and extensive that they actually bent the mantle of the earth into a kind of bowl shape and the entire region from the upper Columbia River slopes gently downwards towards the confluence of the Snake River with the lower Columbia and the hundred mile gorge that leads to the sea.

Down near the bottom of this slope, nestled up against the Blue Mountains, you have the town of Walla Walla.  I always remember that refrain from Bugs Bunny cartoons as a kid -- I think it was the character of Elmer Fudd who would repeat in his inimitable accent, "Walla Walla Washington!"  Well, it's really there, after all.

My cousin Dave lives down there.  We grew up together on our mutual family farms, lived together in college.  Dave really is my oldest friend, two years younger, happily chosen by the fates.  We grew up listening to the music of the Sixties on AM radio.  It was our constant companion on the farm.  Wherever we were working, we would lug along a battery powered radio so we could groove on the airwaves while we worked, so to speak.  It was a happy way to be.

Anyway, Dave had scored a couple of tickets to see an artist we both have long admired, the aforesaid Jackson Browne.  I'd seen him solo in Seattle maybe 30-35 years ago and remember that he played all his songs note for note from the album cuts.

This was a different Jackson, with his remarkable band, loose, spontaneous, enjoying his repartee with the audience.  The venue was the kind you only find in America: a driving range with no golf course nearby.  Jackson said it was the best-sounding driving range he'd ever played on.  We took our lawn chairs and set up maybe 150 feet directly from center stage.  It was a low-key event.  On the perimeter of the range were stalls for food and drink.  People were relaxed and laid-back, and all older.  Not many young people in the audience.  We dreaded boomers, reliving our youth before heading for the grave, en masse.

Jackson was quite funny.  He sang what he said were the saddest and second saddest songs he ever wrote.  He said they were the same song: well, the same circumstances if not the same song.  His songs delineate the painful twists or ridiculous turns relationships take, non-allied political observations, songs of life, love, ideals lost or dearly held onto.  He broke away from his set list on three or four occasions and played songs suggested by the audience.  You have to be on your toes if you play in Jackson's band, it seems.

There was an intimate feeling to the whole occasion, partly because of the ambience of the setting, and a warmth to the whole evening despite the chill in the autumn air.

I looked for but didn't find videos posted from this concert.  There were a few others from concerts on this same tour, preceding ours by a few days.  But the sound was muddy and dim and it didn't do the dynamism of their performance justice.

So I've culled a small home performance of Jackson's recorded last year with the guitarist who is currently touring with him.  It's quite a typical Jackson Browne song, almost quintessentially so, in structure, sound, and lyric, and it has the intimate quality of the performance I attended, so I'm including it as an accurate sample of my experience.  Jackson played it during his concert encore/coda medley.  Enjoy.

 

The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington

I grew up on the eastern border of these coulees and canyons of scabrock.  For me, only an indigenous perspective has come close to describing the innate power of this place.  It is a primal landscape.

I found it especially interesting that they referenced a 1926 flood outside of Walla Walla that exposed several layers of silt, each layer deposited by a single, discreet flood.  At the bottom of the canyon was a layer of ash which was analyzed and found to have come from Mt. St. Helens.  It was carbon dated at 15,000 years.  But there were 39 separate layers of silt on top of it.  It is surmised that Lake Missoula formed again and again, flooding every 60 years.  If we multiply the 39 layers of silt by 60 year intervals, that means after St. Helen's eruption 15,000 years ago, the floods continued for approximately another 2,340 years.  That would put the last flood at about 12,660 years ago -- into the age of human habitation.

I'd be interested to know what legends the tribes native to the Columbia Plateau have about the Great Floods-- did they tell the story for all the many thousands of years since, for all their succeeding generations?  This is narrated, believe it or not, by Captain Picard.  Really.

 

The Woman at the Well

I haven't watched the series, "The Chosen," although a friend suggested it to me several months ago.  I watched a short clip on Mary Magdalene recently and found it true in spirit.  And I would say the same about this clip -- that it is true to life.  I've always been frustrated with the "chapter and verse" people who think they know everything there is to know about God.  You will never be able to figure God out with your mind.  Only with your heart.  

And so it was back in the day.  The figure who's playing Christ has to get past this woman's emotional and intellectual defenses.  She's been hurt and she blames his people.  He doesn't run from the argument but he is not aggressive either.  In the end, it's that he knows her from the inside out that reaches her.  How do you defend against someone who knows your deepest secrets and yet does not reject you, but loves you?  I love that fact that she was the first to whom he disclosed his truth.  He knew her heart of hearts, and as you can see from her reaction, in her heart of hearts she was ready to hear his truth.

I've always hated portrayals of Christ on film.  He's always shown as solemn, morose, and humorless and that has always rung false to me.  Here, he's human, warm, and open even when attacked.  This feels true.  True to life, and more true to my sense of his real character than anything I've seen heretofore.

 

Mary of Magdala

Everybody on earth needs this -- how will he do it?

 

Labor Day

My friends at long last got back from two months of travel in Europe. This included a stop in Iceland first, an extended tour of Norway, a stopover in Copenhagen (one of my favorite cities in the world), extensive travel in the British Isles, that being Cornwall, Wales, and on up to Edinburgh, my home of heritage, then a trip up to the Isles of Skye and Lewis, a week in London, several days in Paris, and a tour through the south of France.

Hmmm....maybe next time I can do the traveling and they can stay home.

They got back on Tuesday.  I spent sixty three days and nights alone with the  animals and property.  Exactly the same amount of time Jack Kerouac spent on top of Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in the summer of 1956.  My time was nothing like the isolation Kerouac endured but at least now I have a sense of how truly long he was up there.  At times it seemed interminable but when I picked up my friends at the airport, it felt like no time at all had gone by.

Now I'm halfway to my next destination in eastern Oregon, along the southern Cascades, south of Bend.  I didn't want to do the whole drive in a day, fighting the Labor Day traffic, so I just crossed the Columbia River to the Oregon side and am spending the night at a glorified truck stop.  It's loud but I don't care.  I never travel without ear plugs.

My friends needed some time alone at home after mostly traveling with other couples the entire time they were abroad.  And I just need to get away from their place for a while.  Turns out they're traveling to Mexico for three weeks later this month, so after a week in Oregon, I will jet up to Seattle and visit some old friends.  I lived in Seattle for over twenty years, from 1978 to 1999.  It's changed a lot.  Too dense, too many people, too many problems.  But then, I will only be there two days.

I'll then make a short jaunt north of Seattle to Camano Island to visit another old friend and then head back over the Cascades for my next house-sitting gig.  After that, who knows?  I have to plant myself somewhere and find a new job.  And write a book.  That'll take about 4-5 years.  But I'm planning it out in my mind, can see the overall structure of it, so I'll start making notes on it this winter.

Since I've been on a poetry kick of late, I'm going to do another.  This is not one I wrote myself -- it's a poem written by someone else.

Thirty years ago I had a friend, a woman I worked with, who was very much a mixed bag.  She had grown up in a small wheat-farming community in eastern Montana, as I had in Washington, so we both had that in our backgrounds.  She was a polyglot and spoke several languages -- Spanish, Russian, Crow, probably French or Italian, had lived in Baja California and had traveled solo as an import buyer in Guatemala when it was quite dangerous.

During her stay in Antigua in Guatemala, she wrote a poem -- in Spanish -- about her experience there.  I happen to love Hispanic poetry so I was intrigued by what she'd done.  However, she refused to translate the poem into English.  With her permission, I took the original in Spanish and worked with a few friends who were fluent in the language to get a rough, literal translation, which I then cast into a poetic version in English.

I don't recall her response to my translation except to note that I once read it in public, a reading which she attended, and I noted her presence in my intro to the poem.  It really is quite a beautiful poem.   So with that understanding, here is an English version of the poem -- I'm sorry to say, I no longer have a copy of the original in Spanish.  I think I will not use this person's name, as we ended as much less than friends.  Just know that I am not the author of this poem, but I still respect its wonder and beauty.

Antigua

I step from my dreams into the night,

         yet

it seems peculiar to be out-of-doors,

   beyond the reach

         of my room.

Such fresh air, an evening sky

  intensely punctuated 

     by tiny stars

and the memory of a volcano

that hovers over me by day

          like a guardian.

I push through the dark, a somnambulist:

      my feet

    find directions

    I don't intend.

On this cobblestone street

         there are no lamps.

Alone, I search for the senora

   who sells sweet atole'

     in the square.

I need the warmth of her potion

   the pulpy thickness

      of the corn

    to fortify me

          in this distant land.

Tenets of Loss

Down below I mentioned that poems used to happen to me in all sorts of ways.  Sometimes I would awake from a dead sleep with either a line or a title in my head.  On this occasion it was a couplet.  Since I recognized this for what it was -- the muse gifting me with the beginning of a poem -- I turned on the light and quickly composed it.  As you will be able to tell, it was about 25 years ago.  1998, I believe.  Here 'tis:

Tenets of Loss

(the only sure thing) 

You have nearly escaped the twentieth century with your life.

You are rushing headlong into God knows what.

Turn back. Return

to what you always,

never

were.

Submit; submission, the lesson:

assert truth

without your tongue

or fist.

Decline. Forego. Lose face.

Challenge the challenge, the race.

Who wins? Who loses?

Who cares?

Lose yourself

and win.

Relinquish your grip

and hold on

with open hands.

Forget all except That

which you can't

quite

remember.

Begin

and end.

Recall.

It is tomorrow,

today.

Sadhguru and Danica Patrick

You read that right.  This is a fascinating conversation between a very grounded mystic, Sadhguru, and the race car driver, Danica Patrick.  Now, I know nothing about Danica Patrick other than what I've read in either the sports page or on the internet.  I was surprised and delighted not just by her obvious intelligence, but with her authenticity as a person and the genuine nature of her questions.  She's not someone who already thinks she has the answers.  A rare quality, that.

Humility is a necessary prerequisite for knowledge.  Unless your cup is empty, no one can pour anything in.  If your cup is full of yourself -- your pride, your vanity, your ego -- then you won't have the space inside for new learning.  I was surprised but happy to see that Danica has the humility to actually learn.  If you have the requisite qualities, then perhaps you'll learn something from this video as well.

A sneak preview: as I used to tell a hyperactive three year old in my classroom last year:  "Being still is the first super power. If you can do that, then all the others will follow."

Erstwhile Poet

I used to be a poet.  That is, poems would happen, often in the strangest ways.  For instance, I would notice a line repeating in the back of my mind. Usually about the time I finally noticed it, it would dawn on me that the line had been thrumming along subconsciously for some time, waiting for me to take note.

There's an Italian tradition regarding the muse and poetry called "the one line given."  Presumably, the muse gives you one line to begin with and then it's up to you to fashion the poem.  And strangely enough, that's how it would happen.  I might be at work, plugging away at some mundane task, then would suddenly realize I had a line going through my head.  So, I would duly stop work and quickly write the poem.  If you dare ignore the muse, she'll stop talking to you.

That's the other thing: such poems would come very quickly, so quickly that I often didn't know what the poem said until I'd finished transcribing it and then had a chance to re-read what I'd just written.  To my amazement, many a time there was a complex rhyme scheme that I'd been totally unaware of while writing.  The poems would come so quickly I almost couldn't keep up with them.  One line would come at a time, but I'd have to get it down quickly because as soon as that line arrived, the next one was on its way.  In other words, I wasn't composing with my conscious mind.  It was a little like taking dictation except one was listening with an inner ear.

These poems all came unbidden from the unconscious. It's like one part of my mind was communicating to the other in the only way it knew how -- through poetry.  That's partly why I never sought to publish any of these poems -- it all seemed like a matter of internal dialogue.  Internal memos, so to speak.  "Wanna know what the state of your soul is?  Read this!"  The messages were addressed to me.

Once I awoke in the middle of the night with a line, and the entire poem quickly followed.  Another time, I awoke with the title to a poem.  Just the title.  Then over the next six weeks, I noticed a kind of liquid feeling, first down in my legs.  As the weeks went by the liquid feeling moved up my torso. One afternoon, the liquid feeling reached my chest and out came a poem about God being the glass-blower and we -- you and I -- being the liquid glass taking various shapes. 

Another time, I felt a poem gestating inside me over several weeks. An errant thought or a feeling would arise out of the blue and I'd go, "Ah...that's part of the poem."  I never wrote any of this down, just noted it when it happened.  I felt like a pregnant woman -- I could literally feel the poem growing inside.  Then one day I gave birth -- there it was, the poem I'd been feeling all along.

They weren't all written so organically.  Sometimes I gave myself an assignment to write in a specific form, such as a Persian ghazal, or a sonnet.  But even then, I was surprised by what emerged.  It wasn't necessarily what I was intending when I sat down to write.  For instance, in the sonnet, I was intending to write a paean to harvest.  What came out was much darker.

I don't really remember the genesis of the following poem, except it was about a woman many years younger than me, who I felt was stripping me bare -- it was almost like being eaten alive.  It was merely a friendship, but it was a case of the other person taking their nutrition from you without giving anything back.  I didn't articulate it to myself in quite that way; it was more a visceral felt-sense.  

What I do recall is that it was one of those poems that comes out so quickly, you're not entirely sure of what you're saying.  I was stunned in re-reading it to see rhymes at the beginning and end of each stanza.  I did not choose to do that consciously; the poem dictated itself in that way.  Creation can be such a mysterious process.  So, here's the poem:

There is a woman I would know

if she would, running roughshod

through my garden, devouring

what has taken me so long to grow.

She doesn't recognize the fences.

Samples the fruit wherever she

finds it, lust of tongue and life,

lives in the taste of present tenses.

Mind supple, stricture of reins

pulling at the bit, still unsure of

her direction, purpose, form, yet

pulse insistent in the veins.

And time, that enemy, river we

swim in, stream unrelenting,

at two ends of the twisting pole,

looking back, or ahead, she

Can't see what I can. Lance:

this moment of sun, sweat, rain

and chill, gone. Life in the fist

for her; mine, in the distance.

 

Cinder

A selection by contemporary poet, Susan Stewart -- also born in 1952, but alas, lost to academia -- from her volume, "The Forest."  This is entitled "Cinder," and in a very short space, seems to say a lot about life, love, loss.  There's no escape -- we all get burned in the end.

We needed the fire to make

the tongs and tongs to hold

us from the flame; we needed

ash to clean the cloth

and cloth to clean the ash's

stain; we needed stars

to find our way, to make

the light that blurred the stars:

we needed death to mark

an end, an end that time

in time would mend.

Born in love, the consequence -- 

born of love, the need.

Tell me, ravaged singer,

how the cinder bears the seed.

India's 75th

Today is the 75th anniversary of India's independence from British rule, which officially took place on August 15, 1947, but more than that, from hundreds of years of being a country occupied by foreign powers.  The track is by Sandeep Chowta -- it's a groove, but true to its land.  Quoted in the track is the independence speech by India's first prime minister and Mahatma Gandhi's cohort in the long struggle for freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru. A hearty "jai" to Mother India!   

The Avatar and the Evolution of Consciousness

I first encountered the image of this soul in August of 1970, when I was but 17 years old.  There was an instantaneous sense of recognition but it took another two to three years of unconsciously bumping into this figure, over and over again, before the conscious awareness of who this might be, as I framed it to myself then, began to take root.

The logic of evolution when couched within the framework of the gradual development of a full and self-reflective consciousness -- ours -- as the grand scheme of Creation, with the goal being the perfection of consciousness for one and all, be that a human being or a nascent hydrogen atom, is by far the most egalitarian spiritual cosmology I have ever encountered.  The following video sketches these basic ideas. 

Pleasure vs Joy

Another short video explaining the difference between pleasure and joy.  It seems to me pleasure is dependent upon the senses; I suppose there are more discreet forms of pleasure, such as the pleasure of reading an interesting book.  But as this fellow says, pleasure requires someone or something external to you.  It may evoke pleasure but it's source is still external and therefore can be lost, will be lost, as nothing external is forever with you.  Pleasure is enslaving in the sense that you are always dependent upon a person, object, substance, or a certain type of experience that is external to you, and does not naturally arise from within.

Joy can also be physical, as when you have a natural sense of exuberance, an excess of energy that manifests as vitality.  As he said, it's life itself.  But also, it differs from pleasure in the sense that although it may manifest through the physical form, it's not always externally focused.  It can be; for instance, beauty can evoke joy, be that beauty in the natural world, in a song, a work of art, and even a person.  I think I'd say joy is rooted in the spirit and can arise without reason whereas pleasure is rooted in the body, and sometimes the mind.

 

Our Own Worst Enemy

So who do you think is going to win that battle between you and yourself?  Here is a nice, thought-provoking little video for those who are victimized by their own natures -- which is all of us, at one time or another.

 

Our Lady of the Well

A song Jackson Browne wrote long ago about Mexico. I'm tempted to hear it as a soliloquy and lament for a lost America, and if I were still living in a city, I think that's how it would feel.  But I'm back on the farmland where I was partly raised, where people still have their feet on the ground and are not so damned entitled.  It's good to be home and rooted in the living soil again.

 

Wang Wei

In 1987 Octavio Paz, the late Mexican poet (1914-1998) and Pulitzer Prize winner, published with his intrepid and accomplished English language translator, Eliot Weinberger, a slender volume entitled "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei."

In actual fact, this is one poem by the famous Chinese poet, Wang Wei (700-761).  There are nineteen "chapters," beginning with the poem in Chinese script, untranslated.  Then follow several translations of the poem into English, French and Spanish, beginning in the year 1919 and ending with Gary Snyder's fine translation of 1978.

Snyder had first popularized the Chinese hermit poet, Han Shan, in a volume entitled, "Riprap/Cold Mountain," in 1960, I believe, having studied Chinese at Cal Berkeley.  The "mountain and rivers" school of poetry had begun in China about 300 years prior to Wang Wei's poem, but would continue to exert a major influence on Chinese poetry for another thousand years.

Out of all the versions or renditions in this book, I like Snyder's best.  However, I don't like his rather arbitrarily ending the poem with the word "above," so I've struck that in this post.  Here then is Gary's version of Wang Wei's poem, slightly abridged.

Empty mountains:

no one to be seen.

Yet -- hear --

human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

enters the dark woods;

Again shining

on the green moss.