The Ways To The Path

Between the years of 1970 and 1973 I, like many others of my generation, was on an unconscious search for something authentic, real, and lasting.  I say "unconscious" because I was unable to articulate what I was looking for or even why.  Several enormous waves had washed over America and I had been caught by one of them and was along for the ride.  All I knew was that I couldn't blithely and blindly walk into the future as completely ignorant as I instinctively knew myself to be.

The search was intuitive.  It was a felt-sense of reaching for something true.  All antennae were out.  Out of step with my peers, I quit a dalliance with smoking dope and began to meditate.  

I wonder if there's ever been a time in human history when truth has been less in commerce than in this contemporary culture.  No one seems to really know what it is yet everyone is avowing their own perspective to be true.  At the top of their lungs.  And you can agree or die.  I think beneath this shrill stridency is the deep fear, the nervous uncertainty, the desperate insecurity of not really knowing what in the hell is going on.  Everybody is lost and no one wants to admit to it.

Fifty years ago, I found an avenue.  Lest you think it an easy answer, all I can say is that fifty years later, I'm still struggling to get my life aligned in some meaningful way with what I perceived.  It's one thing to sight an opening; it's quite another to attempt to get your entire being turned around.  Because many parts of your nature, as ancient as they are, don't want to turn around.  And you can't bend your entire being by an act of will or fiat.

What do you do, then?  You inch your way towards the truth.  It may be a snail's pace but perhaps in a billion years or so, we may have made some headway.  

I've been gradually re-reading the first book of Meher Baba's that I encountered, way back in the spring of 1973.  Back then, 99% of it flew far over my head.  But every so often, a sentence would float up off the page at me and I would have the feeling, much like recapturing a childhood memory that had been hidden for many years, and I felt, "I used to know this -- long, long ago."  That happened several times throughout the latter half of the book, which was a sequential series of essays.  By the end of the book, I had the feeling, "Okay, this feels true.  Who, then, is the guy who wrote this?  Who is Meher Baba?"  

Much of my life was spent in attempting to answer this question for myself.  I travelled the world, met elders who had spent time -- moments, years, or their entire lives -- with Meher Baba.  That took me to San Francisco, South Carolina, Europe, India, Australia.  But at the end of the day -- and, as I'm now 71, at the end of one's life -- the question is really an internal one.  You can go looking for external clues but in the end, they all turn you back on yourself.  There you sit, a null and numbing void, an inexplicable expanse, an unanswered question.  And somewhere within, a journey to begin.

Here's an excerpt from a chapter of that book, entitled "Listen, Humanity."  The chapter title is "The Ways to the Path."  I'm quoting a section from page 155 to 158.  And I don't quote this as someone who has "found."  I quote it as someone who is still seeking, as a mere beginner.  Fifty years is nothing, my friends.

"The path of divine knowledge has both beginning and end....the understanding of God which the average person attains through belief or reasoning is so far removed from true understanding that it cannot be called inner knowledge.

"Such true knowledge (gnosis) does not consist in the construction or perception of an ideology.  It is the product of ripening experience that attains increasing degrees of clarity.  It consists in man's consciousness becoming more real and participating increasingly in the truth, until there is nothing more to become, and nothing more to assimilate.

"The devotional rituals followed in religions do not lead the seeker to the true inner journey, for in greater part they are mechanical observances barren of the redeeming experience of divine love.

"Nevertheless, regardless of how rudimentary these types of belief and devotional observances may be, they do contain in latent form the future inner knowledge.

"As the aspirant struggles through the obscuring fog of mental and emotional tension his consciousness becomes more one-pointed, forming a spearhead that eventually pierces through the curtain to the inner path of divine knowledge.  Even the early glimpses of this knowledge which the pilgrim gets are a great advance over understanding that rests solely upon faith or reason.

"As the aspirant advances towards the path he undergoes a significant change of direction that might be compared to a somersault.  He is now more concerned with the inner realities of life than with their outward expression.  As the emphasis shifts from the external to the internal aspects of life, the deepening of consciousness is greatly accelerated.  Now consciousness is no longer committed primarily to external incidents or routines, but is directed towards the deeper and truer aspects of being that demand greater integrity of thought and feeling.

"Caught up within this deeper awareness of the self is a concurrent deepening of perception into the workings of the world.  A refocusing of consciousness occurs which is far-reaching.  All the avenues through which the individual conducts his search are radically transformed by the sincerity and concentrated purpose of his effort.  The increasing depths of his internal understanding suffuse every aspect of life, giving it new form and meaning and causing him to hasten his exploration with the greatest exhilaration.

"Poise of mind born of the pilgrim's new understanding automatically and unwittingly brings about a readjustment of material surroundings, and he finds himself at peace with the world.  Conservatism, intolerance, pride and selfishness are shed, and everything takes on new meaning and purpose.

"Sinner and saint appear to be waves on the surface of the same ocean, differing only in magnitude, each the natural outcome of forces in the universe rooted in time and causation.  The saint is seen to have no pride of position and the sinner no stigma of eternal degradation.  Nobody is utterly lost and nobody need despair.

"The 'internalizing' which is the real basis of entering upon the path should not be confused with the purely intellectual discovery that there can be an inner life.  Nor should the gradual and natural shift from participation in external events to a focusing on inner development be confused with the limited intellectual detachment some persons achieve.  Since such detachment is only intellectual, it brings freedom only in the realm of limited intellect and is usually characterized by a sort of dryness of being.

"The intellectually detached often try to shape the present in the light of knowledge of history, as well as through their insight into the possibilities of the unborn future.  At best, such a purely intellectual perspective inevitably remains partial, sketchy, incomplete and in a sense even erroneous.  Further, the intellectually detached are almost never in vital communication with the elements which so largely shape the course of the present.  Therefore their beliefs, even if transformed into effort, rarely produce marked results.  The limited intellect is not competent to grasp qualities which are beginningless and endless.

"Intellectual perspective is workable and even indispensable for planned action.  Yet in the absence of the illuminating wisdom of heart and the clear intuition of spirit, intellectual perspective gives only relative truth bearing the ineradicable stamp of uncertainty.

"So-called intellectually planned action is really the product of weighty subconcious forces which have not yet risen to the threshold of consciousness of the planner.  Thus, planning often leads to many results entirely unanticipated in the so-called planning....

"Although the unfurling realization of divine knowledge is often figuratively described as 'traversing the path', this analogy should not be taken too literally.  There is no ready-made road in the spiritual realm.  Spiritual progress is not a matter of moving along a line already laid down and unalterably defined.  Rather, it is a creative process of spiritual involution of consciousness, and this process is better described as a 'spiritual journey' than as the traversing of a path.

"The journey is comparable in fact to a flight through the air, and not to a journey upon the earth, because it is truly a pathless journey.  It is a dynamic movement within the consciousness of the aspirant that creates its own path and leaves no trace behind it.

"The metaphor of 'the path' is helpful to the aspirant in the early stages of his development because it gives him the sense of new phases of consciousness to be experienced.  This anticipation is stimulated further by accounts of others who have completed the spiritual journey.  This makes the pilgrim's ascent easier than if it depended solely upon his own unguided efforts to visualize the probably path."

I think I will stop there with the acknowledgement that although this is a real pursuit of a real experience, it is also immaterial in a certain sense.  Although acted out upon the playing field of our lives, it is directed internally.  Such is the basic reorientation of focus.  And I should add the disclaimer that although I have wended this way for fifty years, it has been a perhaps unnecessarily convoluted and twisting journey.  It is not so much external life that leads us astray as the constituent parts of our own nature pulling us in different directions.  Hard to get your whole self turned in the same direction.

So there you have a snippet of what I'm thinking about as the New Year turns.  May we "turn" with it.

How To Love God

A message from Meher Baba regarding the many practical ways to love God.  It may be hard to do but it's really the only thing worth striving for.                                                            

                                                             How to Love God

To love God in the most practical way is to love our fellow beings.

If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones,

we love God.

 

If, instead of seeing faults in others, we look within ourselves,

we are loving God.

 

If, instead of robbing others to help ourselves, we rob ourselves to help others,

we are loving God.

 

If we suffer in the sufferings of others and feel happy in the happiness of others,

we are loving God.

 

If, instead of worrying over our own misfortunes,

we think ourselves more fortunate than many many others,

we are loving God.

 

If we endure our lot with patience and contentment, accepting it as His Will,

we are loving God.

 

If we understand and feel that the greatest act of devotion

and worship to God is not to hurt or harm any of His beings,

we are loving God.

 

To love God as He ought to be loved, we must live for God and die for God,

knowing that the goal of life is to Love God,

and find Him as our own Self.

— Avatar Meher Baba

O Parvardigar

Originally a prayer dictated by the silent Master, Meher Baba, partially re-written and put to music by Pete Townshend, of all people.  But I thought it was fitting to post this on Christmas morning, a day ostensibly commemorating the advent of Christ on earth.

He's never what we expect when He comes.  It's easy to miss Him.  It requires an open mind, a spirit that questions all the pat answers, and a heart that may not know that it's ready to love, in order to recognize the face of the Lovely Stranger.

 

Solstice Poem

Exactly thirty years ago, December of '93 that would be, I wrote this poem for the winter solstice.  I don't really believe in these sentiments anymore but here's the poem nonetheless.

Solstice summoning the grey year,

grey hair gathering in my beard,

forty-0ne at the muzzle.  First signs

of the coming cold, January's shadow.

Winter's winds are cutting through

layers of protection.  Spring's ex-

tremities, shrewn of leaves, my

noggin just as bare.  I'd share

my covers with a friend.  Though

I've fought shy these forty years

in the semblance of my freedom,

we choose only our dependencies.

Wise the one who chooses one 

who's wise enough to know: 

we need each other.

 

White Sands Footprints

 Along Interstate 70 in southern New Mexico, between the towns of Las Cruces and Alamagordo, about a hundred miles north of the Mexican border town of Juarez, there's a national park called White Sands, which is literally just that -- white sand dunes surrounding an ancient lake bed.

What's fascinating about this location is the discovery of human footprints, footprints that have been dated between 20,000 to 23,000 years old.  The footprints appear to be tracking megafauna -- giant sloths, camels, and mammoths -- around the shores of that ancient lake.  There are children's footprints too, playing amongst the various megafauna prints.

There is, of course, a long-standing question about how the Americas were populated by modern humans.  The supposition has long been that a group of humans migrated from northeastern Siberia over the Bering Strait land bridge that existed during the last Ice Age's maximum.  Presumably there was once a corridor between ice sheets that covered all of what is now Alaska and Canada, and humans traversed that.  Some think people may also have migrated via boats, following the coastline.

What's interesting, though, is that no Native tribes that I'm aware of have any oral history of making such a migration.  If it happened "only" 13,000 years ago, one would think some version of the story would have survived as a founding myth of the peoples involved.  As far as I know -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- there isn't an such an extant mythology amongst any North American native peoples.  They claim that they have always been here.

So, the mystery remains.  Where did the earliest residents of North America come from, and when?  Who were they?  This short clip doesn't pretend to answer those questions, but to pose the implicit question about timing -- if people were in White Sands, New Mexico, 23,000 years ago, they must have arrived some thousands of years earlier.  When, exactly, and from where?

We're not able to definitively answer those questions yet, but I trust the earth will continue to slowly reveal her secrets, by and by.

Selene Munoz Redux

A short clip of Selene Munoz dancing flamenco on a Danish tv show, rhythmically weaving her usual magic.

 

Love and Lust

 A quote from Meher Baba about love and lust.

"Love is different from lust.  In lust there is dependence upon the physical object, and thus spiritual subordination of the soul to it.  Love puts the soul into direct, coordinate relation with the reality which lies behind the form.

"Therefore lust is experienced as being heavy, but love is experienced as being light.  In lust there is a narrowing down of life, while in love there is an expansion of being.  To have loved one soul is like adding its life to your own.  Your life is multiplied and you live vicariously in two centers.  If you love the whole world, you live vicariously in the whole world.  But in lust there is an ebbing of life and generation of a sense of hopeless dependence upon a form which is regarded as another.

"Thus in lust there is accentuation of separateness and suffering, but in love there is a feeling of unity and joy.  Lust is dissipation, love is recreation.  Lust is a craving of the senses, love is the expression of spirit.  Lust seeks fulfillment, but love experiences fulfillment.  In lust there is excitement, in love there is tranquillity.

"The best of all forces, which can overcome all difficulties on the way, is the love that knows how to give without need to bargain for a return."

Shakespeare's Sonnet #29

 A little clip from the Graham Norton show, with Dame Judy Dench reciting Shakespeare's 29th sonnet and Arnold Schwarzenegger adding his own bit.  The text below for all you Shakespeareans.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Thomas Berry and the Re-Indigenation of America

 Nearly two years ago I wrote a post gleaned from Thomas Berry's seminal book, "The Dream of the Earth," notably published by the Sierra Club in 1988.  

That book was a comprehensive exploration, through sixteen separate essays, of where the West went wrong and how we might right ourselves through a re-acquaintance with the Earth. Berry has become one of my touchstones in my attempt to understand the world at large and how -- and why -- we went awry. 

Berry provides no clear, concise answer.   He does, however, pose what at first appears to be a nonsensical formula:  we are to look to our own "genetic coding" and to the Earth itself.

What does this mean?  The assumption still seems to be that technology going to save us.  Although there is a silent groundswell of people who are continuing to live close to the Earth and focus on regional solutions, the huge mechanism of our modern economy is still running roughshod over the world.  It appears to be beyond the reach of any of us to turn the tide against a raging technocracy.  How do we, then, look to our genetic coding.  What does that mean?  What would it look like?

For Berry, it was trusting in Nature as expressed by the 14 billion year epic of cosmological transformations that have led to life on this earth.  Somehow, "we" have resulted from all of this: "we" as in contemporary humanity.  It's fashionable among a certain set of intelligentsia to say that "we" are the Universe made conscious; that is, the Universe evolved a self-reflective consciousness that can pose the questions of life and attempt to find the answers.  Presumably, we have the eyes with which to appreciate, query, and grasp all that we see.

We, as in homo sapiens, have apparently out-competed all other homo species and after a mere 300,000 years, stand alone on the earth as the sole homo species survivor.  Until relatively recently we lived under conditions over which we had little to no control.  Climactic challenges and changes, enormous predators that could eat us for lunch, food sources that were seasonal or mobile.  

As fate or luck would have it, we are in a 12,000 year interstadial that has led to -- well, all of recorded history as we know it.  The farther we have strayed from our natural state, as nomadic, tribal hunter-gatherers, the more bizarre our social organization has become.  We are about to overlap the limit on bizarre, aided and abetted by our penchant for technological wizardry.  In the process we seem to have abstracted ourselves right out of our own natural state.

Berry's premise is that we return to our natural state, but in a new way, by heeding our genetic coding, which, he posits, has guided us thus far.

Okay, how?

By listening to the Earth, our original teacher.  

Again, how?  We're clueless, having so separated ourselves from our natural state of being that we have to learn once again what we have long forgotten: the lessons of the indigenous.  Berry states in Chapter 14 of his book, "...the interior sources of renewal that are available to the Indian....are our hope for the future."

As a culture, we tend always to look for the easy way out, the short-cuts.  New Age shamans, drumming circles, sweats -- our superficial appropriation of practices that native peoples have evolved over tens of thousands of years.  We can't copy what they've learned.  We have to go to the source from which they learned, listen, and see if we can't learn for ourselves, anew.

We can bend the knee to our indigenous forebears and approach the question with some humility.  After 500 years of colonial conquest, oppressive attempts at assimilation, broken treaties and such, why would they trust us?  

But for us, it's a question of attitude.  We have to acknowledge our wrongs, as Winona LaDuke has said, attempt to make amends.  And listen to their wisdom, in humility.  Our own arrogance is our Achilles heel.  We obviously don't have the answers.  Not among the Religious Right, not in our technological wunderkinds.  Our politics are a debacle, our religion a sham.  No one in the West has the answer.  No one.  

As Berry says, "We have so developed our rational processes...that we have lost much of the earlier communion we had with the archetypal world of our own unconscious."  

So there's the clue: what we seek is not in our conscious minds.  Our conscious minds have created this madness.  Where is the way into the archetypal realm of the unconscious mind?  How can we listen again to the winds of the spirit, which blow whither they will?  How attune ourselves, how makes ourselves vulnerable?

What Berry is saying is that we must seek visionary experience.  This is partly why he is pointing us toward the indigenous orientation and their history of wisely using symbolism, vision and dreams, their unique and integral bond with the spirit of place.  These are forms of knowing we've long ignored and with which we somehow must become familiar once more.

Berry states, "The Indian now offers the Euroamerican a mystical sense of the place of the human and other living beings.  This is a difficult teaching for us since we long ago lost our capacity for being present to the earth and its living forms in a mutually enhancing manner.  This art of communion with the Earth we can relearn from the Indian."  

He says this while acknowledging the tension and opposition that exists between ourselves and Native peoples, hoping that tension can be used creatively to bring something better out of our nature, something besides the need to dominate the perceived "other," which has been our modus operandi for 500 years.  

Berry's realism -- "The wilderness is largely gone and will never again be what it once was.  Yet the psychic structure of the Indian, however shattered in recent centuries, retains an amazing integrity with itself....the destinies of the Indian are inseparable from the destinies of the American Earth.....the fate of the continent, the fate of the Indian, and our own fate are finally identical."

What he's banking on, I believe, is the underlying, deep love that anyone on this continent has for the land upon which they stand.  How is it possible to not love this land?  We have only to let this love lead us wisely and not self-righteously.  Let the energy move up the front of the torso and out the heart rather than up the back of a spine rigid with messianic fury, exploding out the crown of our overworked heads like millennial fireworks on the 4th of July.  

Time to let that love of the land lead.  The spirit is gentle, quiet, tenuous, and one must quiet oneself and sit still -- preferably in a natural setting -- in order to be vulnerable to its voice.

There are unanswered questions here, I realize that.  Berry was naive, I think, to state that the shamanic personality was re-emerging in our culture and to place his faith in something so nebulous.  We are a culture that always looks for the quick fix, even in terms of visionary experience, hence the renewed interest in psychedelic drugs.  As if the answer was in a pill.  How Western is that?  That we could be saved by a substance; materialistic to the core.  The answer's there, but it's blowin' in the wind, so to speak, and who can hear?

Remember Einstein's famous quote, that you can't solve a problem with the same thinking that got you into trouble in the first place?  Such is our dilemma.

Berry, bless his heart, hoped his vision would shift the culture.  I believe he was mistaken.  For a man who lived his life essentially as a scholar, he grew a large thought and then looked beyond himself and his religion for the answer.  He did have a crucial piece of the puzzle; the indigenous does have part of the answer to our current technological entrancement and the havoc it wreaks upon the Earth.

For an entire culture to shift, though, something more is required.  It takes an entirely new vision, one larger than Berry's, to shift something so monumental as an entire civilization.  I'm under no illusions that this will happen voluntarily or quickly.  If it happens at all, it will still take several hundred years for a civilizational or cultural shift of the necessary magnitude and effect to take place.  

A small portion of people may be able to make the shift now and, in time, others may follow.  When I look down the barrel at the remaining three-quarters of this century, I don't see voluntary and informed change happening.  Atavistic attitudes abound.  I see an entire system collapsing under it's own weight and the accumulated national, religious, ethnic and sectarian hatreds simply serving to distract us from the larger picture.  Much of humanity, I'm afraid, will simply go the way of the megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene.  Unable to adapt, refusing to learn the lessons at hand, railing into their graves.

We'll talk in the future about visionary experience and the size and range of what would be needed to shift this world on its axis before it hits "tilt."

Harvest Moon

Once, about thirty years ago, I was walking home on an autumn night and there, off on the horizon, hung the most orange moon I'd ever seen -- the Harvest Moon.  I quickly went home and wrote this poem.

Orange moon, negative sun

     of the smoky night

            you rise, you fall

      you borrow light

caught your tail

    in love with sol

         whom you glimpse

               over the curve

                        of earth's hip

When will you embrace them again?

Luminous stone

      in a splash 

            of diamonds

          sprinkled through

        the dark mane of

    this sultry sky

Katie Spencer

I'd never heard of Katie Spencer before I saw her in this clip performing a beautiful rendition of Nathan Salsburg's composition, "Impossible Air."  She's obviously a first-class musician and guitarist, but I see she's known primarily as a folk singer from Yorkshire in the UK, having grown up outside of the city of Hull.  I will definitely be exploring her own catalogue and will share some of that material.  Until then, enjoy her wonderful musicianship on this song.

 

First Field

Nathan Salsburg looks like he just walked in out of a cold forbidding field and picked up his guitar to play this piece.  What better way to while away the time than to just sit down and play your guitar. 

 

A Musical Meditation

 There are four songs that comprise this video clip.  I only ever listen to the first piece -- in fact, I've been listening to it over and over.  I can't seem to get enough of it and that's because it takes me to a place that is nonlinear, not nostalgic or emotional. but not rational either.  It's almost a place of memory, but it's not.  It's strangely mesmerizing.  There is a middle interlude in the piece that doesn't affect me that way; it's a little too conventional.  And then we're briefly back into the main thematic movement again.  It reminds me of something -- some internal place that I've lost touch with.  It's like a hint -- "Remember?  Do you remember?"  And then I return to the beginning of the piece and start over again, trying to grasp the hypnotic place this takes me to.  Still working on it.

Molly Tuttle

Just a little music here to wake up to.  Got my cup of coffee, listening to Molly.  Watching her play -- shit, I can't even think that fast!  Got her bib overalls on.  Good girl.  I'm about to put mine on, fill up the side-by-side with five gallon buckets of grain, the dog'll ride shotgun and we'll head out to the pasture, cross the creek, and feed the calves.  

Love Molly's playing.  Good way to start the day.

 

Lakes

As I've said many a time, I live in a landscape that most people would call barren, that cattlemen would call rangeland, and that farmers gave up on because of sparse soil and too damned many rocks.  Basalt.

9 to 17 million years ago the North American continental plate was so far east compared to where it is now that the Pacific Coast was somewhere along the Idaho Panhandle and the region in which I live, the Palouse, was sitting directly over the "hot spot" that currently sits under Yellowstone.  Yes, we formerly sat atop a supervolcano for several million years.

Well, guess what happens when a supervolcano erupts?  Thousands of square miles of lava, 30 to 50 meters deep, spreads out over the land, destroying habitat and creating what must have looked like another planet -- miles of nothing but barren, black, smoldering lava that would slowly over time harden into basalt.  Then centuries, thousands, millions of years of dust blowing in on the wind, creating a topsoil that originally was several hundred feet deep.  Still is, in places.  Such soil makes this area one of the most fertile wheat-producing regions in the entire world.

So much lava erupted from this "hot spot" super volcano over a period of several million years that the entire Columbia basin is covered by thick layers of basalt, which are so heavy they bent the earth's crust, and this whole side of the state from the middle over to Idaho, and the southern 50% of the east side, slopes all the way down to the Columbia River.  Think of a giant bowl.  That's what the southeastern part of Washington state is, emptying into the Snake River, which empties into the Columbia River, which empties into the Pacific Ocean.

The continental plate continued to drift but it must have been at an angle rather than directly west, because where I live now sits about 500 miles west of Yellowstone's hot spot, whereas the Idaho border -- formerly the West Coast of America -- is maybe 400 miles from the ocean.

All that hundreds of feet of topsoil sitting above that basalt got washed away, again covering an area from Spokane over to the middle of the state and all the way down to the Columbia, in a cataclysm very similar to the super volcano's eruptions.  A massive flood that emptied an Ice Age lake up around Missoula that was a couple of thousand feet deep and said to be as large as lakes Erie and Huron combined, all came rushing down from the Clark Fork River in Idaho, where a massive glacier ice dam had backed up the lake.  Either the pressure of all that water was too much or it floated the ice dam until it broke.  A torrent of water that held 10 times all the water in all the rivers on Earth today -- think of that! -- came flooding down and covered about third of Washington state, moving so fast and in such volume that it literally scoured the earth bare and blasted basalt rock away, creating eddy patterns in the earth and the rock itself.

My buddy Steve and I were trying this week to imagine what this landscape looked like prior to the floods.  Because I can tell you what it looks like now.  Mesas dot the landscape, and you'll notice that all the mesas stand the same height, which means that they used to be ground level.  Everything below, all those sculpted canyons of scab rock, as we called it as kids, long river channels, waterfalls larger than Niagra, vast backed-up lakes, and the Columbia gorge deepened further as this incredible volume of water moved unrelentingly towards the sea.

I think this was a flat, vast prairie much like the Midwest.  It seems to extend from about mid eastern Washington, through eastern Oregon, all the way down into the great central valley of northern California.

Steve, his wife Ann, and I all went fishing a couple of days ago on a lake that was probably created by those Ice Age floods.  It's about fifteen miles long, at least four hundred feet deep in places as the channel was fashioned by the flood, and bordered on both sides by massive basalt cliffs.  The basalt came in several different layers -- or several different eruptions -- and you can see them stacked one atop another.  Each layer, as I said, is maybe 30 to 50 meters high.  At least four different layers, sometimes five, all about of the same depth and stacked on top on each other, building to the last, or top, layer creating a bluff several hundred feet high.  

So there's rarely a shoreline along this lake, but instead these sheer cliffs.  If you bring your boat close to the cliff wall you can see how the water scoured the rock and literally tore it apart as it ripped and roared through the channel it was carving.

Because there is really no shoreline to this lake, there's nowhere to build, which has been a fortunate occurrence because there are no resorts on the lake and no cranky landowners forbidding anyone to dare trespass on their little stretch of beach.  Just miles of bluffs.  Occasionally you can spot a portion of a wheatfield way up on top.  Wouldn't want to lose my brakes when navigating that field way up there.

Anyway, down at the southern end of the lake there is of course an exiting creek and a couple of makeshift boat launches.  There are always about a half dozen vehicles parked there.  It's popular with fishermen, kayakers, and water-skiers.  I've rarely ever seen people water skiing on the lake.  It's usually the more bucolic boaters trolling the middle of the lake for trout or nearing the rock walls for bass.

We were in the middle.  Steve and Ann fished off either side of the back of the boat and I steered while we trolled.  All the modern gizmos showed us the depth of the fish (about twenty feet) and the shallower regions of the lake that I steered clear of.  It was hot but late afternoon.  Tank top and shorts type weather.  Sandals or clogs on bare feet.  The dog perched atop the bow, alert to every bird on the lake.  Steve and Ann batted .666 -- they caught six fish, but lost three just as they were trying to net them.  It was a friendly interfamily competition which Steve won, 4-2.  All together, about ten pounds of fish.  The dog pawed them in the creel and drank her fill of the water.

Just a few days before, there had been a 1,200 acre fire along the west side of the exiting creek so there was lots of ash and debris in the water.  There's just something about being in a boat on the water that's calming, given good weather.  The conditions were mostly windless with an occasional, thankful breeze.  Almost glassy.  We spent about four hours on the lake, which is only seventeen miles from the house, so is easy to get to.  I grew up about 5-6 miles southeast of this lake and went to junior high in an old brick school house a mile or two south of the lake.  Where my mother had gone and graduated with the class of '37,  My 8th grade class was the last graduating class of the school before it closed and consolidated.  The class of '67.  The school's torn down now, more's the pity.  It was an interesting, three-storey building with a full, sloped theater on the top floor, where we staged the plays I wrote and lip synced to the latest Beatles hits.

Steve was having trouble with the motor so had been working on that for a few days.  We took the boat out for a trial run last night, this time on a lake that's about 13 miles north.  It's a very different lake, incredibly shallow (about twenty feet throughout), maybe five miles long, with a couple of run-down resorts and one small campground.  The state maintains a really nice boat launch so we put in there and did a 30-40 minute tour of the lake, engine wide open.  Still not working quite right.  A lot of wildlife.  Several group of pelicans.  Deer standing in the water along the shores, drinking their fill after another hot day.  Two cormorants booked by us like we were standing still.  We were doing 26 mph and they quickly sped by so they must have been flying at least 35 mph.

Steve and Ann were going to take the boat and go camping down along the Snake River this Tuesday but alas, something's still amiss with the engine so that trip's off.  I would have stayed home with the dog and fed the cattle.  Will still do that one day this week while my friends do an overnight fishing trip with another couple who live about forty miles north.  That's close in this neck of the -- well, basalt. 

And such is my life at the moment.  In between the boating trips I did two solo days where I broke down, off-loaded, stored and stacked eight pallets of freight entirely by myself.  I don't mind working alone but that is quite a workout for me.  My back is stronger but boy, does it ache.  Alleve is my friend.

And that's it.  Life on the farm.  Today's an off day, so will mostly read, rest, write, and maybe go in search of a cup of joe and a Sunday paper.  Ta.

The Wind Cries "Mary"

This may be the one Jimi Hendrix song that I like.  He did a fantastic version of Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" but that's for another day.  As I wrote a few years ago, the hippie movement displayed an evanescent and haunted sense of spiritual despair -- because that was underlying the culture of the day.  What could anyone say about today?

Chas Chandler, Jimi's manager, says this song was thrown together late at night when he told Jimi they had about twenty more minutes of recording tape left and Chas wondered if Jimi had any other song fragments to work on.  Jimi quickly laid down several guitar parts for this song.  I don't know if the lyrics came first or later but they're quite poetic and fairly surrealistic.  To me, it's obvious that when the wind cries "Mary," it's equivalent to asking for mercy.  The spiritual desperation of which I spoke.  I quote the lyrics below even though they're not sung on this rendition by Jamie Harrison.

I chose this cover because I like this guy's sense of touch.  He's not simply playing the notes that Jimi played; he's capturing the feel of Jimi's playing.  For instance, near the end of the song, he spontaneously riffs in a way that is reminiscent of Hendrix but isn't a copy of the record -- it's Harrison inspired by Hendrix and paying homage to the song in his own way.  I like that.  Takes balls to pull it off.    

The original rendition of Jimi's follows this.  Here goes:

After all the jacks are in their boxes

And the clowns have all gone to bed

You can hear happiness staggering on down the street

Footprints dressed in red

And the wind whispers, "Mary"

A broom is drearily sweeping

Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life

Somewhere a queen is weeping

Somewhere a king has no wife

And the wind cries, "Mary"

The traffic lights, they turn blue tomorrow

And shine their emptiness down on my bed

The tiny island sags downstream

Cause the life it lived is dead 

And the wind screams, "Mary"

Will the wind ever remember

The names it has blown in the past

With its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom

It whispers, "No, this will be the last"

And the wind cries "Mary"

My Sister Julie

It's a beautiful morning in the Palouse, with the sun shining not too hotly -- yet -- and the breeze blowing through the leaves, birds swooping, and nary a cloud in the sky.  I'm sitting on the front steps of the house, under the eave, with the front porch door wide open, sipping my hot cuppa joe and munching on my toasted english muffin -- breakfast of champions.  I'm a champion of the mundane, I guess, and celebrate the wonderful ordinariness of life just as it is.

My most recent employer somehow failed to schedule me for the next four days.  So, whilst everyone else will be going nuts getting ready for the 4th of July, I have four days of quiet and solitude with which to reflect on life a little, do some reading, some writing, and some stretching of these poor, sore muscles of mine. 

It actually has been a week of subliminal reflection because it was sometime this week four years ago that we learned -- by letter -- that my oldest sister Julie had passed away.  My dad, my mother, and my oldest sister all died in the month of June so although I've always loved this month, its sunny nature has now an undercurrent of sadness running throughout.  Dad died on June 3rd, 1987, Mom passed on Dad's birthday (June 25th) in 2015, and four years ago my oldest sister joined them, sometime in the last week of June.

Julie had distanced herself from the family.  My two other sisters hadn't seen her in five years.  I had seen her the previous two summers simply because I just showed up at her door and braved being eaten by her two English mastiffs.  Julie had ceased responding to emails, voice messages, or phone calls some years prior.  No one could reach her.  So I just showed up on her doorstep.

I remember the last morning I spent with her, after a visit the previous afternoon.  First, I took her out for coffee.  Then, at her request, I took her out for breakfast.  Finally, a few hours later, I took her out to lunch.  It seemed she didn't want to let me go.  I think she knew this was the last time she would ever see me.  

Julie was the wild child in the family.  Usually, in terms of family dynamics, the first child is supposed to be the do-gooder, the achiever, but my second sister outdid my first at being the good child, so Julie reacted to that by becoming the rebel.  She burnt all the bridges.  In late 1966, early 1967 Julie dropped out and joined the burgeoning hippie movement.  She did all the drugs and told me about her experiences.  She asked my mother, an RN, for birth control pills.  She lived communally.  I didn't see her for four or five years at one point.  She moved to Seattle and lived her entire adult life there.

It was a life of hard knocks.  Her high school boyfriend, a strapping, 6'4" blonde surfer named Dan, was drafted into the army, became a helicopter pilot, and was shot down and killed in Vietnam in 1966.  Julie went and saw Dan's parents and they unwisely told her how Dan had died -- he'd survived his helicopter crash with a broken collarbone and then was shot in the back when running away from the wreckage and killed.  Who needs to live with that image for the rest of their lives?

I think that drove Julie's plunge into drugs.  No one knew how to help.  My Dad just shouted at her and drove her out of our house.  She was orphaned.

It got worse.  Julie married and her first husband was abusive.  She became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy with a massive heart defect who died on his fourth day.  Not long after, her husband was hitch-hiking, was picked up by a driver and they both died in a head-on collision.  Julie was in her mid-twenties by the time all this had happened.

As you might suspect, she recoiled from life, put on weight, and became largely agoraphobic for many years.  But even throughout all this pain and heartache, she pressed on, married again and worked steadily all her life.  

I got to know Julie better when I moved to Seattle in the late Seventies.  I lived there for the next 21 years.  It was here that I became familiar with Julie's wicked sense of humor -- it's hard to characterize the flavor of her humor -- it was wicked and sardonic but it was never really at another person's expense.  It was really aimed at the ridiculousness of life.  We had many a night watching either sci-fi or horror movies and laughing our way through the entire evening.  Her husband was always writing a book so he was off in the den or had his head in his research, Julie and I on the couch eating peanut M&Ms.  After I explained the simple rules of football to her, she became a rabid Seahawks fan and could shout at the screen with the best of crazed sports fans.

Eventually, Julie learned how to drive, bought a car, and finally she and her husband bought a house.  It was trashed by her animals -- always a herd of cats and usually a dog or two.  But it had a wonderful little creek abutting the backyard and was a stone's throw from Lake Washington.  A lovely location.

Julie's original litter of cats had a mythic dimension to them.  The mother was a small black-haired siamese with a ball and socket joint at the end of her spine which gave her a swiveled gait.  Her name was Sheba and she ran on primal instinct and little else.  When she ate her little plate of canned cat food, she would yowl loudly as though she'd just made a bloody kill.  The father was a huge thirty pound tomcat who looked like a manx.  If he deigned to sit in your lap you'd pet him just to keep from being eaten.  The dog paced and when the tomcat got annoyed with this, he'd hop down off the sofa, and swat the dog on the nose.  Duly abashed, the dog would go sit in the corner and Tom, the true alpha, would recline again on his throne, or your lap, whichever suited.

And then there were the others, so different from one another.  Isis, the sweet round one.  Ramses, white long-haired with eyes which were constantly dilated so that they reflected everything and looked endless.  Maggie, short, black, no tail, and spunky.  Squirt, grey and with over-sized ears who always had to be at the highest point in the room.  And of course, Corky, who was a male tabby and was so ugly he was cute.  Corky had the most endearing personality.  He always remembered people.  If you came over, he'd stand up and put his front paws on your thighs, and meow at you as if to say, "Make a lap for me already."  

Part of the charm of an evening at Julie's house was just sitting on the couch and watching this menagerie of cats interact with one another all night.  They were highly entertaining all by themselves.  I still miss them.

Julie's father-in-law died a millionaire and despite his wife's attempt to withhold her two sons' inheritance, or spend it all in international travel, Julie finally came into money late in her life.  She was profligate.  She must have bought 20 guitars and no end of jewelry, the more shiny and glitterier the better.  But she was also very generous.  Many a time she helped me out and I never asked -- she would just hand me a check out of the blue.

My mother had foot surgery in 2006 and we kids all four took a week off to take care of her.  Mom had been a nurse and what they say is true -- doctors and nurses are terrible patients.  Something happened in Julie's week with Mom that changed their relationship forever.  Julie stopped coming to visit her.  All our holidays were at Mom's; Julie adopted a cousin's family and spent her holidays elsewhere from then on.  She could really hold a grudge.  She felt intensely and no amount of reason could dislodge her from that emotional stance.  

Julie had refused to go see my father when he was dying.  I think she just couldn't handle it emotionally.  When Mom went into Assisted Living in Seattle, Julie became the point person and did that job for three years.  Mom had to move facilities twice and Julie took the point on that too.  It didn't help that another sister accused Julie of stealing from Mom.  When Mom was finally transferred to Long Term Care over on the Olympic Peninsula (at a facility where my younger sister worked as a geriatric physical therapist), Julie was done -- with Mom and the family.  She didn't attend Mom's memorial services when she passed and neither sister ever saw her again.

So, she was a complex character.  But truth be told, she was one of my most favorite people on the planet and I miss her dearly.  I often think about her.  Because of our age difference and the fact that my mother always worked when I was a small child, Julie was my perpetual baby sitter and kind of a second mother.  Later, she served the role of a confidant and advisor to all three of we younger siblings.  I think it weighed on her.  

Once at Mom's house, Julie and I were alone in the den.  She said to me quietly, "I feel like I'm eternal."  I said, "Yeah, I feel that way too."  Then she said, "But I don't know whether that means I stay myself forever or I get reborn as someone else."  I just said, "Yeah, I don't know either."  My guess is that this is the kind of thought that Julie wouldn't share with anyone else.  It was just a special moment between we two.

I am sure she is happier where she is now and that she's exploring life with renewed vigor.  I feel that she is watching over me.  Strange, I can sense Julie but not my mother.  I think of her often, I miss her dearly, and will love her forever.  I look forward to seeing her again.

I'm including a silly rendition of "White Rabbit," the old Jefferson Airplane song, which Julie loved -- it was the siren song of 1967 -- in a new, send-up version by the wonderful Molly Tuttle -- in costume no less.  Something tells me Julie would love this version.  I can hear her laughing and exclaiming all the way through, eyes gleaming, crooked smile of delight as we enjoyed it together.  

Here's to you, big sis' --

June 25th

Eight years ago today my mother passed away.  Curiously, it was my father's birthday.  (He had passed 28 years prior, also in June)  All of which gave me pause for thought.  

I was about to delve into their relationship but stopped myself.  Suffice to say, they each handled their own lives, and end of life processes, quite differently. Dad was fatalistic and passive.  Mom tried to live her best life to the very end.  

And yet, their bond was more significant than I had previously realized.  Call it coincidence, but my mother's passing on dad's birthday forced me to reassess the significance of their relationship.  I no longer see it in terms of my own experience of it but realized that, for them, it was truly a bond of the soul.

A few days ago I stumbled upon this old traditional sung by a trio of women who called themselves the Wailin' Jennys.  The song is called "Long Time Traveller."  It was apparently composed in 1856 by Edmund Dumas, using lyrics originally written in 1810.  It has that world-weary, vale of tears sensibility which I don't share, but there's something in the melody that appeals to me, so I'm posting it today in honor of both my mother's and father's passing.  

I Feel Fine

 Angela Lancieri and her twelve string adding something special to this timeless little pop classic by the Beatles.  Takes me waaayyyy back.

First Americans

Stefan Milo is a Youtuber who for years has been researching human origins and making interesting videos about that subject matter.  Here he's broaching the topic of early First Americans and the timing of their proposed entry into the Western United States.

There is evidence of human footprints in New Mexico and Southern California that vastly predate the time periods that Stefan is talking about, but nothing about the story of human incursion into the Americas is definite, firm, or yet proven.  Probably there have been multiple streams of human migrations onto this continent over the millennia, as weather and climatic conditions allowed. It wouldn't surprise me if the date of origin of human habitation on these land masses eventually ends up being much earlier than is presently hypothesized.

That being said, let's let Stefan make his own points.  Two things in particular interested me regarding this video.  First, it originates at a site along the Salmon River in Idaho, specifically Cooper's Ferry.  That's not far SE from my neck of the woods, so somewhat immediate to me.

Secondly, the Western Stemmed spearpoint, which apparently predates Clovis points in America by two or three thousand years, were being made quite similarly about the same time (roughly 16,000 years ago) on the northern, indigenous island of Hokkaido, now a part of Japan.  Hoddaido was populated by the Ainu people until about 500 years ago, when the Japanese made inroads onto the southern tip of the island.  It's a rough, mountainous (and volcanic), forested landscape much akin to the Pacific NW.  

The fact that the Ainu were making arrowheads almost exactly similar to the Western Stemmed points at about the same time, 16,000 years ago, suggests a point of cultural connection between these Asiatic peoples and the early settlers of Northwestern North America.

There is also some interesting and tantalizing oral history of the Nez Perce tribe that pertains and which Stefan thankfully includes in this video.  After all, these are the very people we are presumably speaking of in studies like these -- best to listen to what they have to say on the matter.  

Cold Rain and Snow

This is an old American folk song or ballad, first transcribed around 1911, taught to the gentleman in North Carolina by a woman who said it referred to a murder that happened when she was a child.  She was fifty at the time she was teaching him the song, so that would put the original back in the 1860s.  So this song is at least 150 years old.  Apparently the Grateful Dead used to play a live version.  

I'm quick becoming a Molly Tuttle fan.  She can sing the shit out of a song and at the same time pick the guitar just like ringing a bell.  This is a performance from just weeks ago in Dallas.

 

Authenticity

 Authenticity -- you know, that thing or quality you gave up as a child in order to survive or be accepted.  A short, simple presentation.  The truth is often simple.  We're the ones who over-complicate everything.

Mexico City

14 years ago I fell in love/lust with a woman from Mexico City.  Over the next year, I visited Mexico City 5 times, staying anywhere from two to six weeks at a shot, trying to win this woman's love.  It didn't work, for whatever reason.  A lack of dineros, hidden competition, or maybe it was just a case of national pride, it occurs to me now.

Although I didn't win the woman's heart, Mexico City succeeded in stealing mine, along with my wallet (on the subway).  Hello, American Embassy!  Anyway, I look back at this video with a mixture of regret, nostalgia, and something akin to homesickness.  Not sure how all that works together, but there you go -- spend enough time in the Distrito Federal and it grows on you. 

I don't remember the cable cars and thus never rode one, but I do remember seeing houses just crawling up the sides of very steep hills, where none of the land has been leveled -- they just build on the steep pitch.  Another massive earthquake in Mexico City and alot of those structures are going to tumble down.

I love the scenes in the streets and the colorful bazaars full of people, full of life -- that's what I miss about Mexico City, the sense, the pulse of life all around you.  Here in America everything is very white-washed and toned down. Bland. Fake.  Nothing's real here.

I had to laugh when even the guide said, "We are lost now."  You could walk five blocks in Mexico City and go, "Now how in the hell do I get back?"  That said, I used to go running locally in Chapultepec park.  There would be gang members stationed every couple of hundred feet or so, just to stake out their territory.  I mean, other people were running too, but I was obviously the gringo.

I stayed in the Condesa where my friend had inherited the family home, which was originally purchased in 1964, with lots of excursions to the Reforma and Roma districts.  These guys are eating on the street in the Condesa, which I did often.  I miss that.  For some strange reason, it felt like home to me there.

They're having a really interesting conversation over lunch about the economic impact upon the locals of Americans and Europeans moving into neighborhoods like these.  My friend sold her family home and moved far out of the city, on a property nestled up against the volcanoes.

All in all, I miss that time of my life.  Though, as I said, the love affair didn't work out, still it was an exciting, lively, memorable, and often romantic time.  I guess my memories of Mexico City are still entertwined with those of lost love but, strangely enough, I find the memories to be mostly happy.  Go figure!

Quantum Mechanics

Physicists are still stumped by the dilemma of quantum mechanics wherein electrons seem to operate as a wave form, yet we perceive them as particles. The reason, I believe, is simple.  This is not physics, but speculative cosmologies.

Subatomics describes the permeable medium by which energy in the implicate ("subtle") universe or realm -- where everything is a form of energy and would probably only be perceptible in wave-form -- crosses over into our presumably material realm.  In the implicate (a term coined by the physicist David Bohm) universe, this "form" wouldn't be a form at all but at most an archetype seen as an energy wave.  If we were in that realm with corresponding faculties, our perception of it would be as a fluid form of wave-like energy which may incline towards a pattern, or archetype, in a macro-sense, but would be an immaterial wave in the micro-sense.  A whorl or little mini-cyclone of energy, perhaps.

We, observing from this realm, perceive the subatomic as a particle because of where we are standing -- in the material universe.  Wave-forms tend to take on the appearance of solid shape here because the vibrational energy of this realm operates at a much slower rate than in the implicate or subtle realm.  Here, we can see, touch, taste, and feel apparent form in order to learn from it.  It's a hierarchical design whereby energy and implicate patterns are slowed down, slowed down, and slowed down until our primitive physical senses can perceive and thus interact with them.

There are several layers to Existence or Creation.  It's a bit like an onion. Each layer has a kind of physics and its own laws which operate accordingly therein but don't necessarily apply outside of that specific realm.  They do operate hierarchically, trans-causally.  That is, the laws of the lower, or outer realms, are subsumed within the laws of the upper or inner realms.  We've yet to have that explained to us in terms of physics.  Perhaps sometime in the future.

And so to the video.  Spoiler alert: I have a theory about nonlocality, which is mentioned later in the video, as well but will write about that at a later date.