Moving On

A sea change is looming. I've decided to shut things down in California, close out what passes for life here, and move home to Washington state.  I'm finishing the school year where I teach and then hitting the road in mid-June.  

This will also be my last post on this blog.  I've been writing on it for two years and it has served its purpose for me, which was to get me thinking about what I'm interested in, and it's given me some good practice in a relatively informal way to just knock a few ideas about. 

But the internet is a strange phenomenon.  I was about to say it's a strange place, but then, it isn't a "place" at all, is it?  It gives you the illusion of contact with others.  I suppose if you're on a dating site, you might surmise that you're in some form of real contact with others, but you're really just window-shopping for human beings.  It's a meat market.  I shop for things online, just not people.  I don't date, so there you go.  I used to believe in the old-fashioned way of meeting people in the natural course of events but life seems to move too fast and too superficially nowadays for that to happen.

I once joined a dating site for seniors.  Big mistake!  In about three days, I had 27 offers for coffee.  'Twas then I realized that I don't really want to be the object of that kind of attention.  I quickly got off that site and have never wanted to repeat the experience.  Besides, I'm not looking for merely social or sexual contacts.  That's the problem with aging -- you see through all the bullshit, and you can't unsee what you've seen.  There are a whole host of desperate and lonely people out there, for whom I'm unable to fill the void.

I moved to California twelve and a half years ago, arriving on Halloween evening, 2009.  I should have seen that as an omen, because the origin of that holiday was a "hallowing," to cast out the demons of one's own lower nature in order to make one "whole."  That's a pretty good description of my sojourn here.

I came down for two reasons.  Firstly, I was in love with a woman from Mexico who wanted to move here.  The plan was, I'd come first and set up a base.  About two weeks after I got here the woman in question came up, we fought, we broke up (presumably we were engaged), and she left.  

So, there I was -- in a location where I knew no one, with no job and with no immediate prospects.  Although I'd come also to investigate a spiritual order, it was apparent no real help was going to come from there.  I had two choices -- I could either turn tail and slink home, or I could toughen up and try to make a go of it here, on my own.  I chose the latter option.

The other half of the equation was my looking into the spiritual order.  You can't really know something if you don't experience it for yourself.  For about seven years, I worked seven days a week, if you count my day job, which was also part of a service project for this group.  It was a lot; in fact, a little too much for me.  I quit participating about three and a half years ago.

I'm not going to write about them.  I'm only touching on the aspect of subjective loneliness.  Spiritual students aspire to an impersonal form of love, most usually expressed in acts of service to others.  My own experience was largely mundane.

After a few years, I was talking with a mother at the school where I work.  She was, I believe, from Kuwait but her family had emigrated to the US when she was 18.  We were talking about how difficult it was to make a real friend in California. I asked her how long it had taken her to make her first real friend here.  "Ten years," she said.  I swallowed hard.

I've been here twelve and a half years, and I never made a single real friend, nor did I form any kind of lasting or meaningful bond with another human being.

To be fair, I was in a pretty damaged state myself.  Cumulative losses add up. By the time I got here, I'd been through about twenty years of deep and affecting losses.  It undermines one.  Especially with respect to women, I felt inside as though I was literally, structurally damaged.  I could feel it.  It took me a long, long time to heal and try to overcome that.  But my attempts to reach out again were fraught with internal pressures and conflicts.  I had one brief, three month debacle which was a mistake, plain and simple.  Lesson learned.

In one other case, I allowed myself to begin to open towards someone.  For a brief moment, everything felt right -- but as soon as I saw that vision, it vanished into thin air.  The other person chose not to open the door, for whatever reason.  People are not always who they present themselves to be and not all doors open onto something positive.  In the end, you have to accept the choices other people make with their lives.  

When I was living in Seattle, over about a twenty year period I dealt with mother issues in my dating life. I got smothered.  Then, when it seemed I had finally worked through those issues, strangely enough, I started to work through father issues in my dating life.  In other words, the women emotionally resembled my father -- cold, distant, incapable of expressing emotions, and the type of person who never said, "I'm sorry," or "I was wrong," neither of which phrases my father ever uttered.  Strange how the psyche works.  I have unwittingly and unerringly drawn women who evince exactly those same characteristics. 

Which is all to say, my exile in California has been as much about my own issues as it has been a matter of the superficiality of this locale.  But it's time to move past all that now.

For the past couple of years I have found myself thinking about how I live roughly a thousand miles away from my remaining family members and all the old friends that I truly care about.  My time is limited.  Age does that to you; you start to see the end and realize your own mortality, which poses the question "What to do with the time that is left to me?"  My own answer is this:  to move home, and to write.

So that's what I'm going to do.  

I said earlier this week that I was going to withdraw this blog.  I'm still going to do that.  I'll pull it down at some point within a few days.  My guess is no one will read this anyway, but if anyone happens to, I intend to put the blog back up in about a year.  There are important anniversaries and milestones that begin next spring, and I want to write about them.  But in the meantime, I'm going to pull in, go home, and instead of writing a blog, write a book.  Wish me well.  

A New Story

As I came to the realization the past few weeks that I had absorbed all that I possibly could from Jack Kerouac over a twenty-year period, the question became, what now?  Or possibly, who now?  Since I look for signposts in the world at large, through the agency of other humans, other times, other cultures, one would think I might cast far afield for another guiding star, since our own culture, so deeply divided and obstinately bent upon aggressive expression of its own stupidity, arrogance, racial bigotry, prejudice, and the utter denial of obvious truths -- in other words, the death of "common sense" -- why on earth would I look within our own culture for anything positive?

There are only a few touchstones from the last century that might be of any aid.  If we look to the 19th century, the guiding stars I see are Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and a little later, John Muir.  In the 20th century you had the urban common sense (though he had a farm in Maine to which he often retired) of E.B. White as an essayist, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, but they all built toward a fuller, further expression in the work of Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and Thomas Berry.

Gary Snyder used both Buddhism and indigenous wisdom to fashion a new/old approach to nature and human life itself.  There is great value in Snyder's work, which I would like to address further, but not at present.

Wendell Berry is perhaps the last wise voice from the Christian and farming tradition of America.  I'm not a Christian and have never identified as such. You might say I'm "culturally Christian" by virtue of having been raised in this society, much as people who were not Orthodox in the expression of their own Jewish heritage would say they were "culturally Jewish."  I can honor Wendell Berry as our last wise elder from the homogenous past, but as I said, I'm neither Christian nor -- though I spent a swath of my childhood on a farm, I did not originate there, nor did my family actively farm -- am I a representative of our agrarian, pastoral history.

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009) was a Catholic priest of the Passionist Order.  However, Thomas was really a cultural historian, scholar, and educator.  He first delved deeply into the Western tradition, but he also expanded his vision into other faiths and saw truly -- as far as I can tell -- and quite accurately into Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism.  I've read the books he's written on these faiths and they are beyond erudite; they penetrate into the inner vison and reality of each faith.  Thomas taught graduate classes in these faiths at the collegiate level for many years.

One might think, then, that Thomas would continue delving more deeply into the realm of the human spirit and become something of a mystic, much as Thomas Merton did.  But instead, due to a growing ecological awareness, Thomas moved into the biological and geological sciences and in turn studied the entire history of the development of the Earth, and then with the guidance of his friend, Brian Swimme, extended that study into the history of the Cosmos itself, back to its origins.  In fact, he coined a new term for himself.  He said he wasn't a theologian, but a "geologian."

Although Thomas never left his religious order, it's apparent to me that he educated himself right out of his own faith.  He became less a believer in a personal god or redeemer and instead, placed his faith in the intrinsic and instinctive processes of the Universe itself.  Instinct, after all, is just compressed and condensed intelligence.  In effect, he transferred his faith from believing in a Creator into believing in Creation.  

I quite understand that.  I went through a similar phase, in my own smaller fashion, about 15 to 20 years ago.  I articulated it to myself in this way: I couldn't say that I loved a Creator, but there is no question that I love Creation.  I guess in a way, it's an indirect method of loving God.  If you can't love a deity, you can at least love what has been created, whether by that deity or not.  As it turns out, in my own faith and path, Creation is said to have begun in a kind of automatic, unconscious way.  But what Thomas and I both agree upon is that Creation seems to operate from a vast, complete, and quite spontaneous intelligence.  You may call it instinct, but anyone who looks at nature with an unjaundiced eye sees a comprehensive and creative intelligence in everything about it.  The whole process of evolution and nature is instinctual genius.  No matter what the obstacle or cosmic disaster, Nature just keeps right on rolling along, including making a crucial part of human blood out of ancient exploded stars.  Fantastic.

Nature does this through sequential transformations.  Evolution is quite creative and continually adapts.  However, we are at a moment in human history when our own impact upon nature has been extended far beyond the capacity of Nature to keep pace.  In the long run, Nature wins, of that I'm sure. But in the short term, we may screw up both the healthy stasis of Earth's natural endowment, and short-circuit our own evolutionary path forward as well.

We're like kids gone crazy in a science lab, and we may just blow ourselves and the whole lab to smithereens.

But this doesn't seem to stop anyone.  In fact, the cultural and economic monoculture that drives human life on earth seems like a headless beast that no one can command.  Even if we could, we lack the intelligence, foresight, wisdom, maturity, and consensus in order to act.  We don't realize that we're constituents of a biosystem that is larger than we are.  There have been many massive extinctions over the various phases of Earth's biological evolution.  Over millions and millions of years, one form's death and extinction seems to presage the later emergence of more advanced forms.  Contemporary humanity doesn't seem to be a logical terminus for the ongoing evolution of the homo species, but we might become extinct due entirely to our own continued intransigence.

In a clan or a tribe, if you acted selfishly, you were probably ostracized and died.  Unfortunately, when you have several billion people on the planet who are quite determined to continue being selfish, at first it is others who are less agreeably placed in the total structure who die.  But eventually, if our biological arrogance and self-absorption continues, we'll just move from genocide to biocide, which will inevitably lead to humanicide (sic).

But no matter.  The Earth will go on without us.  Of that, I have no doubt.

Anyway, I propose now to begin to delve into Thomas Berry's work.  I should warn you, though -- his work is so vast and so deep and so expansive, that I won't be able to do it justice in just a post or two.  I think it will take me at least a year, maybe longer, but in the long run, my hope is that these original posts grow and develop into a book.  I see that where Thomas's work ends, other information begins.  My hope is to be able to put the two major puzzle pieces together and to make a contribution to the scope and vision of our overall Big Picture.

That's the plan anyway.  Today I'm beginning what will be a long, long study, but one which I am quite looking forward to.

 

Goodbye, Jack

 Shortly after writing that post about "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity," I realized that after twenty years of reading about Kerouac -- probably read a dozen biographies or more -- reading his novels, journals, or other people's statements about him -- I'm finally done with Jack Kerouac.  

As I've written previously, I had absolutely no interest in the Beats growing up, nor in my early-to-mid adulthood.  It wasn't until when living on the Kitsap peninsula in Washington state about twenty years ago that I truly discovered Kerouac.  I briefly worked for the Kitsap County Library and one day happened across a new hardback copy of the volume, "Poets on the Peaks," which was John Sutter's masterful book on the years Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Phillip Whalen spent as fire lookouts in the remote North Cascade mountains, as well as simutaneously kick-starting the San Francisco poetry renaissance, which led to all that followed in the Sixties.  That book opened my eyes.

This was way back in the summer of 2002.  So I've been reading Jack Kerouac almost continuously in some form or another for twenty years now. And I've come to feel that I've gotten everything out of him that I possibly can.  He's provided me with a lot of sustenance, which I've largely digested.  I might still dip into his volume, "Some of the Dharma," which are his Buddhist studies, both for inspiration and also to notice where he ran up against himself and went awry, but for the most part, I'm done.  I just finished re-reading "The Dharma Bums" this week.

On the whole, I'm happy with what I've written about Jack.  I made my own observations about him, had my own personal insights into his behavior, motivation, and perhaps his destiny, and I've drawn my own conclusions. Not that it will matter to anyone else, but I feel I've absorbed what I have in a personal rather than a plagiaritive (sic; my own coinage, I think) manner. And that satisfies me.

A friend of mine in Michigan who is twenty five years younger has a bone to pick with Jack regarding his chauvinistic attitude towards women.  That's accurate.  But what I had to say to her regarding that behavior is this:  American culture itself -- what we might think of as modern America, post WWII -- was quite unconsciously chauvinistic from the Forties, through the Fifties, and right on into the Sixties.  

It wasn't until the late Sixties that I personally became aware that I was suddenly supposed to be "sensitive" with respect to women.  The dawning awareness borne of Feminism, long overdue, was finally having an effect.  That came on the heels of the wide availability of "the Pill" and women suddenly having control over their own bodies and their sexuality, which had never existed before then.  That little scientific breakthrough brought on the sexual revolution and with it, women's search for equality, which still goes on today.  I guess it goes without saying that a large swath of American males opted out of the change and are still complete dickheads.  It took empathy and intelligence to see things from a woman's point of view.

What contemporary women fail to realize is that early feminism was determined to refute being sexualized by males.  It was considered an insult to be seen as a sexual object, something simply to be used for another person's pleasure.  Strangely enough, that got turned on its head and instead, some women adopted the worst of male sexual tactics, considering that a form of personal power.  Such are the politics of gender and sexuality. But that whole realm is becoming subtly shaded by the dissolving of gender itself.  

That guy who wrote the 1970 intro to "Golden Eternity" likened Jack Kerouac's journey to those who choose to live in the subterranean "Underground."  All cultures have some version of that.  The dispossessed, the shunned members of society. I thought it was brilliant when he made the connection to the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.  Stepping outside of the monoculture, one sees things anew, but the method of escape may prove toxic and dangerous.  Drugs in the Sixties, for example.  I used spirituality as described and elucidated by Meher Baba to step out of the culture I was in, and used that as my measuring stick for authentic values. I think that worked, and still works for me. It's nicely captured in the phrase, found in both Sufi and early Christian writing, "To be in the world, but not of it."  That's the ideal, I think, because it will still be some time before the culture at large moves into a healthy arc.

Gary Snyder, who slummed through the underground well into the Seventies, used Buddhism to make his stance apart, and of course, internalized it in a way Kerouac could not.  Gary apprenticed himself to an actual Zen master in Japan for many years.  In that respect, he was a great example for Jack and that's why he became the subject matter for "The Dharma Bums."  Jack was somewhat prescient in realizing the import of Gary's insights and proto-lifestyle.

 Having just finished the Dharma Bums, my first thought is that it represents Jack's living -- or attempting to live --according to what in spiritual parlance would be called the "higher mind."  This is living according to one's own intuition, empathetically, and reading every event of one's life for its significance in terms of one's own spiritual journey.  I've been trying to do that for about fifty years.  In some ways, I'm much less sensitive than I used to be but perhaps that's just what life does to one.  Experience is a kind of overlay upon one's heart, mind, and internal nature.  The whole trick is not to lose who you really are while traversing the ups and downs of life in this world.  The world of hard knocks.  It's hard to stay open and not shut down.  By the same token, it's important to learn from life and not proceed as a naive, hopeless pollyanna.  Balance, as always, is the key.

It's a shame that somehow the world washed over Jack and took him out of the vision he had for a spiritual life.  But Jack secretly yearned for literary fame and that, I believe, was his achilles heel.  It kept him hooked into the world of crass commercialism and ended up subjecting him to the coarse expectations of the shallowest aspects of our culture.  He wanted literary stature; what he got was notoriety and the scorn of all the talking heads spouting the status quo of their quasi-intellectual world.  

Artists still find much in Kerouac's work and he'll probably continue as a literary icon for the underground for some time.  My only concern with him now is the hope that he continues in his own personal evolution, wherever he might be. His potential for growth in that lifetime was cut short by the detritus of fame.

So, goodbye, Jack.  You gave me much.  And now it's time to take what I've received and continue on my own way.  

Choir! Choir! Choir!

A version of Pete Townshend's song, "Let My Love Open The Door," by an open-door choral group in Toronto.  Ah, earnest fresh-faced Canadians.....but does anyone still believe in love?  If not, then maybe you should listen to this and take it to heart.

 

Sarada / Saraswati

This dance is a stylized form of Divine Femininity in action.  Sarada is the giver of wisdom.  As Saraswati, she is the ancient Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, wisdom, and learning.  She is one of the Tridevi, or three goddesses, along with Lakshmi and Parvati.  It's interesting to note that in the historical Harrapan civilization of the Indus valley, there were five rivers that were formed by the glacial melt at the end of the last Ice Age, and the most important of these rivers was the Saraswati.  The goddess Saraswati is often shown holding a veena on her lap, an instrument whose sound produces rapture, rhythm, and a melodious form of transcendence.  I can recognize that the dancer is taking sculptural poses that emulate sacred statuary, but I don't know what the poses themselves are meant to convey.

It's also interesting to note that in the Middle Ages in Europe, scholars and monks would always refer to, and make prayers or pleas to, the goddess of wisdom, who was known as Sophia.  In the great age of Mary, wisdom was also conceived of as granted by the feminine muse of Sophia.  Grace through Mary, Wisdom through Sophia.  Not a coincidence or mistake, I believe.  This dance happens to be a remnant of that ancient wisdom and those long-standing internal beliefs.

 

So Begins The Task / Hold On Tight

Two demo records cut by Stephen Stills, probably in the fall of 1969.  The first showed up on a record three years later, the latter song never saw the light of day, more's the pity.  These both dealt with his doomed love affair with the folk singer Judy Collins, who was forthright in her biography about her struggle with alcoholism in these years.  It's interesting that alcoholism was present in Stills' family of origin as well.  It feels almost like a curse, the way we are forced by circumstance and psychological predeliction to relive our childhood traumas unless and until we face and heal them.