Bavabhuti

 A day off after two days on the tractor mowing meadows and pastureland, the dog curled up on the floor, her nose pressed up against the glass, eyeing the grass for pheasants.  I'm spending a quiet autumn morning at home before I go in quest of a cup of coffee.  

Hunting season has opened.  My buddy Steve was up at 4 a.m., had already scouted out the ground he meant to hunt.  By the time I got upstairs, he had already returned with a buck on the back of the flatbed truck.  He'll have to skin and gut it now, hang it in the cooler to startle me each time I open the door for a cold drink.  Not my cup of tea.  I don't eat a lot of meat.  But as an old Chinese monk advised long ago, "Don't tell a hunter what the Buddha says about not killing."  We each follow our own nature and that's as it should be.

I've been spending my early morning reading the ancient poetry of India.  Here's a short poem by a playwright named Bhavabhuti, who hailed from the southern town of Padmapura and was writing in the early years of the 8th century, still within the shadow of the Muhammadan manifestation.  When a prophetic figure comes, they issue in an age of several hundred years, a cycle when the tenor of the time changes, and these cycles can last up to 1,400 years.  We come to the close of an old cycle in 2032 and we're at the inception of a new one now.  The arts change, the sciences advance, political structures are reinvented.  In fact, at such times entire cultures are born, die, or arise anew.  Bhavabhuti was writing at such a time.  We live in one ourselves.  Who knows yet where it might lead?

So, my favorite poem of the morning -- translated by Andrew Schelling:

Critics scoff

at my work

and declare their contempt --

no doubt they've got

their own little wisdom.

I write nothing for them.

But because time is

endless and our planet

vast, I write these

poems for a person

who will one day be born

with my sort of heart.

James Baldwin

James Baldwin, in Paris, interviewed by Terence Dickson of the UK.  He's kinder to the interviewer than I would be if I were in his shoes.  But that's because he has the truth of his own perceptions on his side, and he knows it.  You can't shake him because of that.

 

Happiness and Misery

Simple, but difficult.  Now I'm going for a walk to make myself happy.

 

Chinese Buddhism: Journey to the West

I'm not a Buddhist but I am quite fond of the hermetic poetry tradition of China, which was a blend of many different spiritual approaches -- Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist.

Although Buddhism had been extant in China from about the beginning of the Common Era, there were only a limited amount of Buddhist texts available to Chinese practitioners.  In 628, (curiously, while the Prophet Muhammad was still on the earth) a young monk named Xuanzang decided to (illegally) leave the country and travel West -- that is, to the homeland of Buddhism -- India.

Braving highwaymen, the robbers and bandits of the day, some of whom were so impressed by his fearlessness and character that they joined him, Xuanzang made it to India, where he lived for 17 years.  He settled at the great Buddhist university known as Nalanda, which was located in what is now Bihar, east of Varanasi (nee: Benares) in northeastern India.  There he studied for many years before returning home with over 600 Buddhist texts, which greatly influenced the further development of Buddhism in China.

Why should that matter to me if I'm not a Buddhist practitioner?  Well, I am interested in the various spiritual developments that have taken place in different places on earth, in different ages.  I've never seen them as competing with one another; instead, I view them as the (im)perfect, particular, and peculiar blends that were just right for the time and place in which they arose.  

Buddhism has a deep knowledge of different states of consciousness and their relative merits because of the emphasis upon meditation within the faith.  It's really an inquiry into the nature of consciousness itself, as opposed to the more dogmatic faiths in the West, which evinced a more pronounced dichotomy between the exterior, exoteric aspect of the faith and the more interior, esoteric dimensions of those particular expressions.  

It's a little like climbing up a mountain via different and various routes.  It's the same mountain.  Rather than argue about the best method or route, just start climbing right where you are.  You will create your own path as you go.  

Anyway, this young fellow is a fairly astute student and it's a fun and informative video.  Give it a watch, you might learn something.

Autumn, Thoreau, and Walking

We each have a kind of mythos about our own lives, a story we tell ourselves or others which may depict important moments or themes in our lives.  In August of 1970, when I was a callow, 17 year old football-playing lad, a few unexpected things happened.  One I'll save for another day as it's the genesis of a life-long inquiry.  The other was my encounter with Henry Thoreau.

I remember the previous spring when my English class was focused upon American literature, reading a one-page condensed version of Emerson's essay, "Self Reliance."  It was my first encounter with the Transcendentalists of New England in 19th century America.  For some unknown reason, I really tried to grasp what Emerson had to say, and it was a little like kicking over an engine that had never been turned on before.  Fits and starts, gears moving rustily back and forth for the first time.  I'd never engaged my brain on anything philosophical prior to that.  I remember feeling like there was something there for me.

A girl in my class had an older brother in college who had loaned her a copy of Walden by Thoreau.  She loaned it to me.  And it was as if the scales fell from my eyes.  Maybe it's the fact that Thoreau began that book as an in-your-face smart-aleck.  I've met many a person my age who fell in love with Thoreau in their teens.  He was just contrary enough to appeal to us.  He wasn't merely a critic of society, he was a woodsman of some note, a naturalist, and a philosopher to boot, all the while being a handy fellow who could build a cabin or improve the process at his family's pencil making factory.  He was a lecturer of note in the day.  Was one of the first to recognize Walt Whitman's genius; they met and came to admire one another's shared perspicacity.  He was a life-long friend of Emerson's, being the protege who outgrew that role.

Some of my favorite 20th century writers admired and were influenced by Thoreau.  E.B. White, for one.  Aldo Leopold.  Wendell Berry.  To a lesser extent, Gary Snyder.  Even Jack Kerouac read him.

When autumn comes around each year, with that first crisp, chill bite to the air, my mind turns to Thoreau and I usually break out something of his and spend all of September and most of October reading Henry once again.

So yesterday I cracked out a famous essay of Thoreau's, Walking.  It's considered by most scholars to be one of his finest pieces of writing, a little along the lines of Emerson's essay, Nature, but much more down to earth, which was the essential difference between Emerson and Thoreau anyway.

As I opened up my copy of Thoreau's essay, I saw that I had already highlighted much of it, so I was kind of scanning it to see what had caught my eye earlier.  About midway through the essay, though, I noticed something that had escaped me before.  Much to my surprise, I saw that even Thoreau had fallen prey to the ideology of human progress by moving west.

This was a long-standing historical conception of the day.  Philosophers and historians of the West all saw the evolution of human culture as a steady march towards more progress, the moderns -- themselves -- standing on the backs of all previous -- and presumedly lesser, more primitive cultures.

Thoreau began by stating that when he stepped out of his house to go for a walk, it sometimes took him 15 minutes to decide -- by feel -- which direction he was to walk that day.  I quite understand this.  The entire time I was a runner, I experienced just this: I would step outside, and then stop to feel which direction I wanted to go on my run.  Same process with walks; in fact, to this day, I do this.  If I'm going for a walk, I step outside and at some moment, stop to consider which direction to go.  And it's always a decision that is made by a distinct but completely irrational mode:  by feel.

Thoreau happened to state that he almost always chose the direction southwest or west.  His family home was on the west side of Concord so of course the woods and the wilds tended in that direction.  But Thoreau noticed a resistance in himself to walk east and he realized that underlying this tendency of his was the feeling that heading east was walking back towards the past while heading west felt like moving into the wide open future.

That observation stopped me in my tracks.  Thoreau followed this observation of his own inclination by stating, "I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen.  I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.  And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west."

He continues: "We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure."  He says the sun itself moves from east to west and tempts us to follow him.

Thereafter follow several pages of Thoreau quoting different European traveler's impressions of America, and dare I say it, the Manifest Destiny of these peoples who had left Europe for the New World and whatever it was that drove them across the entire continent, impassively unconscious of the fact that it was actually a peopled place.  They didn't see it as such; they saw it as their divine right to occupy this land.   

Thoreau himself says, in this essay:

"To Americans I hardly need to say -- Westward the star of empire takes its way.  As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman of this county.  Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England: we sympathize with the West.  There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance."

Trust me, I could scarcely believe what I was reading.  Whitman constantly extolled America, its people, and its future.  Here Thoreau was doing the same.

What are we to make of this?  Thoreau was a sharp, constant, and astute critic of the culture of his day, and indeed, for all his life.  How to account for this lapse into a set of patriotic blinders?  He was a natural historian who greatly admired the Indian, especially for his perfect adaptation and relation to nature, and often contrasted it with the orientation of his contemporaries, the stuck in the mud farmers of New England.

It's true, there was a gradual move from east to west across the European continent, extending over a period of at least 40,000 years, and continually recurring with people of various and different ethnicities.  Always moving, always looking for something better, ever and always restless, apparently.

There are a few ways to approach this temporary lapse of Thoreau's.  One of which is to say, there are ideas which seize people, entire large groups of people, nations in fact, and which seem self-evident to the people who are so affected, the Manifest Destiny of 19th century white Americans being a case in point.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, made the tongue in cheek observation that in Europe and America, the most conservative people stayed in the east, the most stable settled in the center of the continent, and the most unstable just kept going until there was no more land and ended perched upon the sea.  In Europe, he said, it was the Irish.  In America, the Californians.

But the truth is, we have circumambulated the globe and there is nowhere else to go, no "new world" to discover, plunder, and inhabit.  There is no more escape from ourselves.  So now new age and esoteric believers speak of a "new earth" that you'll just transition into, once you've transformed yourself out of your gross humanity.  A modern variation upon a continuous human theme?

Who am I to say?  Or perhaps a contemporary version of "Manifest Destiny."  

That someone as seemingly independent and archly critical as Thoreau would fall under its spell, if only for the few pages of an essay late in his life, means that we had all better keep our wits about us in a day and age like the one in which we live, where mass indentification with this or that mindset/ideology appears to sway millions of people.  

Well, I won't condemn Henry, and I'll continue to read him.  But with a more critical eye, methinks.

Ryokan's Meditations

The Japanese poet-monk Ryokan (1758 - 1831) is my Buddhist patron saint of  childlike simplicity.  He much preferred playing ball with the local children to discussing sutras with other monks.  Me too.  Give me a four year old with an unbridled sense of play any day of the week over a heavy-handed, overly serious academically inclined educator with their pet child development philosophies to impose upon the innocent.  

Let's just play. Here's an example of a Ryokan poem to that effect:

How long has it been since the teaching 

of pure essence was swept away?

Students are caught up with the written word

and Buddhist priests are stubbornly obsessed

with doctrine.  It's a shame that for a thousand years

no one has spoken seriously of this essence.

Better to follow the children 

and bounce a ball on these spring days.

Along with such simplicity and innocence comes an innate, or hard-won (who can say?) humility....

I'm truly simple

living among trees and grasses.

Don't ask me about illusion or enlightenment.

I ford streams with these thin legs,

and carry my bag in fine weather.

Such is my life,

but the world owes me nothing.

He joined a Buddhist monastery at the age of 17, forgoing the inheritance of his father, that of taking over the role of headman of his village.  Judging by his intrinsic sense of fairness, he probably would have been good at it but it seems he didn't want the trouble.  External trouble, that is.  Instead, he turned to the internal wrangling of zen.  

He studied for ten years with the master Kokusen, receiving Inka (recognition of his enlightenment).  When his master died in 1791, Ryokan left the monastery and became an Unsui (cloud and water) monk, wandering from place to place, rather than establishing his own dharma lineage or becoming an abbot at a monastery.  He chose simplicity.

But don't be fooled.  He understood the vagaries of the mind.  He couldn't have written this poem had he not --

Gazing at it, the boundaries are invisible

But as soon as even a slight thought arises,

ten thousand images crowd it.

Attach to them and they become real;

be carried by them and it will be difficult to return.

How painful to see a person trapped in the ten-fold delusions.

Of his own time, he says --

It is fine to see young people

stay home and enthusiastically compose poems,

imitating the classic styles of the Han and Wei

and mastering the contemporary styles of the Tang.

Although their style is excellent, even novel,

unless the poem says something from the inner heart

what shall we do with so many empty words?

I'm sure there are still monks in Japan.  In China, there are still hermits up in the mountains, trying to become "immortal" in the Daoist conception of the word.  Somehow, somewhere, someday, the world will give birth to new forms of spirituality, new waves of the spirit will resound through different cultures upon the earth, and depending upon the time, place, and circumstances of each locale, new forms of spiritual practice or focus will evolve.  I believe we will be there and will partake of these new forms, live and breathe the new energy that they convey, and our consciousness will grow, transform, and express itself in new ways.

I can't wait, but I can.  We have no other choice but to go with the flow of time as we experience it.  You can't push the river.

These poems and the gist of the text are from the volume "Between the Floating Mist," translated by Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro, published by White Pine Press, 1992, 2009.

Summer Soldiers On

Yesterday in 106 degree heat I helped deliver a load of hay to a young family who just moved onto a farm in the area.  Tomorrow I'll unload eight pallets of freight in a cooler, so there you go.  Hot and cold, that's my life.

For the past two years I've done nothing but physical labor.  I needed that.  I was so stressed out from thirteen years in California that I needed to just put my head down, put it out of my mind, and work it out of my system.  When I saw my ex brother-in-law this spring the first thing he said was, "Wow!  You look healthy again -- all the stress is gone out of your face."

Two weeks ago, I was visiting old friends in Seattle, where I lived during the Eighties and Nineties.  My mid-twenties to mid-forties.  It was a good time to be young in Seattle.  It was growing but it wasn't over-crowded yet (it is now).  My first stop two weeks ago was at Green Lake, which was always the heart of Seattle for me.  I always oriented myself to it, no matter what part of town I was living in.  I must have run around that lake (2.8 miles) at least ten thousand times over twenty years, and loved each of those runs.  To my astonishment, Green Lake is even more beautiful now than it was then.  The trees and shrubbery have grown more lush and taller.  They protected the bike path around the lake and left the internal asphalt path to runners and walkers.  The wading pool is still full of little kids, there are still guys playing hoop on the courts outside the gymnasium, soccer games going on the field next to it.  The boathouse is expanded and of much higher quality.  Talk about a trip down memory lane.  Walking around that lake is like going back in time for me.

One old friend lives one block north of the lake, bought his house for about 35 thousand back in 1976.  I suppose it's worth a million now.  We talked for several hours.  He's a part of a spiritual group that I left, down in the Bay area.  He's happy as a clam.  The over-riding feeling that I had in discussing my experience was that of not being recognized for who I am.  Seems to be a theme of life.  For the most part, I've always accepted that as a matter of course, and in fact tried hard to keep who I really am hidden under the pretense of your usual social persona, but only because almost no one shares my obsessions in life.  I've spent fifty years trying to delve as deeply as I can into the meaning and purpose of life, as I've found it.  To some extent, I succeeded.  But of course, to find that answers exist is one thing; it's entirely another to try and integrate those answers into your character or your life.  In that respect, I feel I've mostly failed.  But that's okay -- it's a beginning.

Spent a day and a night in the beleagured town (again, a subjective perception) of Bremerton, a couple of days on Camano Island, and two days in the woods up above Sedro Wooley, at the west end of the North Cascade Highway.  I tried to drive that, got as far as Jack Kerouac's old stomping grounds at Marblemount, but a fire further on closed the road and I had to double back.

Since my return from that week-long excursion, I've decided to go back into education.  Teaching is really the only meaningful occupation I've had in this life.  I'm applying at the elementary school in my old hometown.  I may or may not get the job. Wish me luck. 

Mind Moon Poem

Cleaning house, I was going through old cards which I've kept, including some from my deceased mother and oldest sister.  In a picture of one of them I found an old business card with a Chinese poem printed on it.  It was given to me by a friend who passed nearly thirty years ago.

In all these losses, something remains and lingers on....

Tower in the clouds, moonlight palace, land of crystal

abiding nowhere, dependent on nothing, a single Mind

Don't say there is meeting and parting

another year when we meet again

it will just be right now

-- Mind Moon of Stone River

 

Dharma Bums

A short clip of Gary Snyder, Peter Coyote, Allen Ginsberg, and Michael McClure talking about Jack Kerouac's great book, the Dharma Bums, and a little about the shake-out and after-effects of it.  By the way, they're Dharma Bums all....

 

The Fairy Lament

 The Fairy Lament (*) is a haunting and mystical traditional Irish air. It is believed to have originated from the Blasket Islands, off the southwest coast of Ireland.

One of the legends behind "Port na bPúcaí" relates to the idea that it is an interpretation of the fairy music heard on the wind by the islanders, particularly on stormy nights or just before a storm.

Performed on a MK Pro Low whistle by Pedro DC.

Gary Snyder's Wisdom

A short clip of the poet Robert Bly mentioning a comment by Gary Snyder.  If everyone on earth put down roots where they are now, and had to deal with what and where they are intelligently -- which means "conscientiously" --  everything about life on this planet would improve.  That's a hard truth for me to hear because I've lived a life of wandering, but I do hear the truth in the statement.

Gary Ruminating on Jack

These guys are like my mythological heroes.  Gary Snyder met Jack Kerouac in San Francisco on the autumn equinox (Sept 23rd, 1955).  Phil Whalen and Allen Ginsberg were along too.  They all went out for a beer and then to a reading at Kenneth Rexroth's house.  Gary had just spent the summer on a trail crew in the high Sierras; Jack had been living on a rooftop hut in the Roma district of Mexico City, writing "Mexico City Blues" while high on morphine.

Both were seeking, both were Buddhists (Gary remained one and Jack eventually flipped back into Catholicism), and both were writers.  Gary, the more grounded personality, was able to integrate Buddhist truths into his life and make that faith the cornerstone of his world-view.  Jack sought joy and inebriation and "ecstasy of mind" as he would say.

But this is a really sweet reminiscence by Gary and a touching portrayal of Jack's character, as Gary knew him.  And Gary is not a naive guy.

 

A Poet

 A poet is a mountain doing a drunken headstand 

upside-down

on a sidewalk in Times Square

peak poised on a single rock

icemelt runoff in a sharp, steep ravine

a dust devil twirling til it hits basalt 

a massive flood, a drought of thought, that 

lone wisp

of cloud disappearing in a

bright 

blue 

sky

What To Do Around A Look-out

From one of my heroes, Gary Snyder.....

 

His Hands

A few weeks ago I posted a song by Pete Townshend that sounded, well, apocalyptic.  His public work, especially with The Who, tended to be loud and aggressive, but always lyrically interesting.  On his own, however, Townshend could portray myriad musical styles.

This is a quiet, personal song Townshend dedicated to the spiritual master Meher Baba, who was silent for the last 44 years of his life and communicated through his own unique language of hand gestures.  If you've never seen film or video of this, his hands were beautiful and there was a captivating grace to their movement through the air.  Silence punctuated by graceful gestures.  Perhaps it is because people simply wouldn't listen to the mere speech of the tongue.

As one reviewer noted about Townshend's compositions, they always contain a certain tension in their musical construction and I find that interesting as well.  

 

The Heart Is Undaunted

A quote from Meher Baba:  

"Do not listen to the voice of the mind. 

 Listen to the voice of the heart. 

 The mind wavers, the heart does not. 

 The mind fears, the heart is undaunted. 

 The mind is the home of doubts, reasonings and theories. 

 The heart when purified becomes the dwelling of the Beloved. 

 Rid your heart of low desires, malice, and selfishness 

 and God will manifest in you as your own self."

 

Dystopia, or, My Own Personal Eclipse

Three or four years ago when I began this blog, I used to write about what it was like to be growing up in the Sixties -- the energy, the hopefulness, the music, or the dark underbelly, the drugs and detritus.  I always felt that what underlay that entire phenomenon was a spiritual impulse pushing its way through our country and our culture.  If that was true, it was probably surging through the world at large but that's harder to discern.

In the fifty-five years since that decade came to an end, I've ever-so-slowly watched the world tip.  For a very long time, I felt that the spiritual undercurrent that I picked up on in my teens and early twenties was working silently behind the scenes.  Intellectually, I understood that destruction precedes construction.  You have to raze the lot and the old structure, wipe it clean, in order to build something completely new.  Several human revolutions have begun with that intent, or at least made that claim.

For the past fifty years, the steady toll that the monoculture enveloping the earth has taken upon it has slowly encroached upon the general awareness of the populace.  Whole movements have arisen comprised of people whose genuine belief is that we're destroying the planet and are in the full sway of what is called the "sixth mass extinction event."  All that is true as far as it goes.  Yet it seems to me we're all missing the point: it isn't the Earth that is dying, it's this civilization, in a sloping arc of inexorable, willfully blind, self-immolating, monomaniacal, inhuman self-sabotage.  Yeah, I know -- "doom and gloom."  But given what I've seen happen just in my lifetime, I don't see how the commercial values of modern society can continue as they are.  Not with an ever-increasing population base covering the globe.  So, we'll see -- we'll see whether I'm just another crackpot or I'm seeing things as they actually are.  (Is that even possible in today's world?)

I've spent much of the past two years trying to understand the gradual evolution of modern humans from, say, 40,000 years ago, especially in Europe, to the present day.  I consider that evolutionary through-line to be the lineage of the culture in which I live.  To a lesser extent I've looked at, or will look at, India as it moved out of the Ice Age.  I'm more concerned with what happened roughly 12,000 to 13,000 years ago as we segued from nomadic hunter-gatherers into early neolithic settlements.  It isn't so much that I'm hoping to discover the social evolution as I am the beliefs the people had, the gods and goddesses who populated their mythic minds, because that's the real description of a people's psychology.  What did we believe as we stepped out of the tundra and began to settle, to cultivate grains and domesticate animals?  How did our gods change?  I'm not sure I have the patience to trace the rise and fall of different gods over thousands of years, but I do want to get a general sense of how we became the rapacious imperialists of the past 500 years.  Why did we become such desperate materialists?  Not so much "how" as "why?"  When did we lose our instinctual, indigenous wisdom?  That was the real "fall" of the West.

Toward that end I've been doing a survey of shamanism over the past winter.  There's something a little repugnant in this for me and I have had to force myself to proceed in spite of some misgivings.  Along with attempting to discover this nearly universal belief system, since it shows up in recognizable variations over the entire world, but in the back of my mind I'm also looking at it as a study in cosmology.  I'm trying to ascertain the interior structure of our minds, and perhaps the interior structure of the universe itself.  There are commonalities to shamanic experience which seem to suggest that, spaced though they are in time and locale, somehow shamans everywhere seem to encounter a similar interior terrain.  Whether that may be of the human psyche, or the interior structure of the vertical universe, or both, it's useful to observe and draw the parallels in such experience.  It's helpful to have a map or chart of the universe one happens to find oneself in, be that inner or outer.  The West has been externally driven for long enough.  Rather than continuing to look outward, our current dilemmas would seem to suggest that now is a good time for the West to begin to consider where we have been, why we did what we did, in the manner in which we did it, and to reconsider our approach to life, our modus operandi.  Because it's obviously not working well.

The Sixties, at least in America, and to a lesser extent in England and continental Europe, was an almost spontaneous attempt to invent a new culture on the fly.  New values, more genuine, more honest, more humane.  It was riding on the back of the musical expression of the times.  It was also falsely fueled and derailed by the emphasis upon drugs as the avenue to a new consciousness and thus a new culture.

Many cultures have historically used substances as part of their ritual and/or shamanic attempt to make contact with and perhaps have guidance from the unseen spirit realm.  It may have worked in the context of a clan or tribal scheme -- a social construct that was perhaps widespread but whose immediate social context was small.  Certainly the monolithic religions of the past 5000 years all seem to have made such practices taboo and verboten, in an effort to control the constituency.  You can't control what's going to happen in an altered state of consciousness.  I think after sixty years of drugs seeping into our culture, we can probably say that they've had a more negative effect than we naively hoped, and they most assuredly haven't changed the culture in any positive way.  They haven't made us wiser, more mature, more unselfish, or more caring.  To the contrary, they've made us more selfish, self-concerned, and narrowed our scope.  They didn't change the culture for the better.  We are not more enlightened than we used to be.  It's rare for anyone to be sane or clear-sighted nowadays.

The initial impulse may have been towards personal freedom, but freedom without a sense of responsibility towards others is a doubtful boon.  Unless we can use such substances with wisdom and intent -- and there is some evidence current that we may learn to do just that -- we'd be wise to rely upon more natural, secondary methods.  Meditation, music -- specifically drumming -- and dance all offer a natural way in which to alter consciousness.  It sometimes happens in the natural course of following a spiritual path.  But the shamanic dimension of the human psyche seems to have emerged once more out of the chaotic collective experience of the past sixty years.  That can't be a mistake; we might best look at it as a clue, a possible signpost to the future.

I'm in my early seventies.  So I've watched the arc of this culture, indeed, this entire worldwide civilization for over sixty years now.  I thought it was crazy when I was eleven.  It's far worse now.  It's a train-wreck in the happening and doesn't look like it can be stopped.  I don't believe it's the end of humankind, but it seems to be the end of the world as we know it.  At the very least, it's the demise of human culture as we know it.  I don't know what's going to happen or what it's going to look like, but my gut feeling is that it won't be good, kind, or pretty.

The earth will survive, of that I have no doubt.  Not all species will, and that may include us in our current iteration, but life and the spontaneous process of evolution will devise something new given enough millions of years in which to do it.  I have to admit, I no longer believe that this civilization's course can be corrected.  It has resisted all attempts to date.  Perhaps I'm wrong.  But I'm just judging by the data of my own lifetime.  

Despite these dark ruminations, I'm actually an optimistic realist.  I believe the process of existence is ultimately benign, and works for the ultimate realization of all, all evidence notwithstanding.  That's a process that spans universes and is in fact, eternal.  Time may end for us, and will one day end for this earth, and even this universe but existence will continue in some form or another, working its will towards a final perfection in, of all things, the individual.  Who knew?

So know that though the stars may fall, you will endure in some form or another unto the very end, and I have it on good authority that THAT end will make all the suffering you endured along the way seem as though a moment's passing.  For some reason, I trust that Existence will redeem itself in the end.  That much I've learned in this lifetime.  So, despite all appearances to the contrary, I will continue to trust this apparently crazy process called life.  And ever onward we go, whether we want to or not.

 

The Boys In The Boat

                                                                            

That's a photo above of the old shellhouse in Seattle, the setting and scene for the movie, "The Boys in the Boat," an intriguing, and true, story about poverty, desperation, will, discipline, survival, and ultimately, triumph.  The book was engrossing; the movie's a little less so.

I moved back to Seattle in the fall of 1978.  Seattle in the late Seventies was a relatively sleepy place.  You could find trouble if you wanted to but by and large, it was fairly laid back.  A big recession had hit in 1971, Boeing closed a plant, the oil crisis hit and Seattle seemed like nothing more than San Francisco's poor little sister.  Up the road, Vancouver, BC, was a more cosmopolitan city, more a city of the world, than was Seattle.  But Seattle back then was a good place to end up if you were a bored country kid.

My mom and dad had met there in the late Forties while attending the UW on the GI Bill after WWII, so the campus loomed large in our family history.  And I eventually ended up working at the UW.  For me personally, the heart of Seattle was always Green Lake.  I oriented myself towards it no matter what part of town I lived in.  Green Lake drew my attention because it was such a great place to walk, people watch, or run.  Running had hit its stride in the late Seventies and the Eighties in Seattle.  The city somehow seemed perfectly laid out for runners.  Besides Green Lake there was the long Burke-Gilman trail running for miles from Gasworks Park on Lake Union all the way up the NW side of Lake Washington.  You could also drive over to Madison Park and run down to Seward Park and back on a trail along the SW side of Lake Washington, a good fifteen mile run, longer if you ran around the Seward Park isthmus.  

                                                                            

For a few years, I lived on the south side of Portage Bay, across the water from the UW campus.  I was in between two drawbridges.  A run across the west bridge would take me to the south end of the UW campus, where I'd run along the water by this old weatherbeaten shell house, which was still standing back then.  My folks filled me in on the history of crew in Seattle and at the UW.  I remember an article in the Seattle paper in 1986 with pictures of all the guys from the crew that had won the Olympic race in Germany in 1936.  These guys were local heroes.  They'd all settled down and led useful lives.  By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Olympic race -- that 1986 article --  they were all the age I am now, in their early seventies.  

So I'd run past the crew house on whatever grass I could find, back across the other bridge, then turn towards my apartment.  It was a short run, under four miles.  Longer runs were done elsewhere.  I think I did run from my apartment once or twice down to Seward Park and back, which was roughly 21 miles, when training for a marathon.  All of Seattle seemed to be running back then -- at least, all of us still-young boomers.

There was also a boat rental place under the University Bridge.  I'd go down there and rent a kayak for half a day, pack a snack and either head out onto Lake Union -- which was a working lake with planes landing on the water and the occasional tugboat puttering by, so you had to keep your wits about you -- and I'd slowly paddle by all the houseboats or cut across to Gasworks Park.  

If you rowed the other way, east, you'd have to maneuver through the Montlake Cut under the Montlake Bridge.  It had concrete retaining walls on either side and was the passageway for boats moored in Portage Bay to venture out into Lake Washington.  If you were paddling through there in a kayak it was a rough ride, boats always motoring through, with wakes slapping back and forth and tipping you this way and that.  Once through you could turn south and explore all the ins and outs of the Arboretum, still considered part of the UW campus.  Lots of places to picnic there.  Or occasionally I would turn north and go up along Lake Washington's shore to the old Sandpoint Naval station.  

                                                                            

Even when I lived in Seattle in the Eighties and Nineties, regattas were still held and people would line up along both bridges to cheer the crews as they rowed through.  Green Lake had its own shellhouse and amateur rowing teams as well.  One of my co-workers at the UW was on one of the rowing teams out at Green Lake and competed regionally.  So it wasn't just the UW -- the city itself loved and supported rowing and crew.  I suppose that is still true to this day but then, I haven't lived in Seattle in 25 years.  I may return in a year or two, give it another whirl.  The landmarks will be the same even if the culture isn't.

Anyway, the movie "The Boys In the Boat," I found fairly unremarkable -- it didn't quite do justice to the book.  Both were most interesting as period pieces but the book is a more interesting character study.  My dad would have been 16 in 1936 and a high school student about two miles south of the UW campus -- there was an old high school on Capitol Hill, I forget the name.  The attempt to capture the tenor of the times, the Thirties and the Depression, succeeded somewhat -- I was struck by the shanties and the ever-present poverty displayed in the film.  Yet it didn't quite go deep enough.  The rowing scenes were largely shot in England rather than Seattle so failed to engage me entirely.  And the foliage was all wrong!  These things matter to a native.

I'm currently living on the other side of the state, amongst rolling wheatfields and rangeland and wondering whether the small towns here and this way of life will survive til the end of the century, or whether corporate and factory farms will swallow this aspect of America up for good.  It's impossible to predict the future and I'm not going to try, but honestly, I'm grateful that I won't be here to see what comes down the pike.  Capture your moment in time, that's what I say -- because nothing lasts as it is.  Even social media will be nothing more than an old polaroid photo someday.

Seattle still calls.  Despite its being overcrowded, a goodly portion of my adulthood took place there, the years of 25 to 45.  I may go back.  Back to where it all began.  Be nice to end where I began.  We shall see what fate has in store.

Thoreau, Jesuits, and Native American Mysticism

 I spent the fall reading four or five biographies of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the writer who sparked my initial interest in writing and philosophy.  I stumbled upon Walden in August of 1970 and spent that particular fall entirely wrapped up in that book, so revisiting Thoreau as summer turns to fall is a kind of nostalgic journey for me.  Except for the fact that I continually discover something new each time I read about him.  

For instance, Thoreau wrote a series of eleven journals devoted specifically to information about the Indian tribes of the American northeast yet he never wrote publicly about them.  Did he have a project in mind?  Or was he simply satisfying his own innate curiosity regarding them?  

In Robert Richardson's biography, "Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind," it's mentioned that while studying the early interactions between Europeans and Indians, Thoreau read widely in the annual journals of "Jesuit Relations," published between 1630 and 1690, a treasure trove of information as the Jesuits attempted at least to understand the people whom they wished to convert.

This reminded me of something I once read in a 1937 biography of Thoreau --was it Walter Harding's version? -- which was in the preface or introduction, not written by the author himself, and it was a long quote pulled out of these Jesuit journals.  I always found it stunning as a kind of mystical anecdote that doesn't fit any spiritual schemata I've encountered.  As I'm concurrently doing a deep study of the roots of shamanism, this is something that piques my attention, as perhaps it will yours.  The passage that follows is quoted verbatim from that long-ago introduction.

"What increases the aversion of the Indians to Christianity is the influence their powwows have upon them.  These are supposed to have a power of foretelling future events, of recovering the sick, and of charming persons to death.  And their Spirit, in its various operations, seems to be a Satanical imitation of the spirit of prophecy that the church in early ages was favored with.

"I have labored to gain some acquaintance with this affair, and have for that end consulted the man mentioned in my journal, of the 9th of May, who since his conversion to Christianity has endeavored to give me the best intelligence he could of this matter.  But it seems to be such a mystery of iniquity, that I cannot well understand it, and so far as I can learn, he himself has not any clear notions of the thing, now his spirit of divination is gone from him.  However, the manner in which he says he obtained this spirit, was, he was admitted into the presence of a Great Man who informed him that he loved, pitied, and desired to do him good.  It was not in this world that he saw the Great Man, but in a world above at a vast distance from this.  The Great Man, he says, was clothed with the day; yes, with the brightest day he ever saw, a day of many years, yes of everlasting continuance.  This whole world, he says, was drawn upon him, so that in him the earth and all things in it might be seen.  I asked him if rocks, mountains, and seas were drawn upon him, or appeared in him.  He replied that every thing that was beautiful and lovely in the earth was upon him, and might be seen by looking on him, as well as if one was on the earth to take a view of them there.  By the side of the Great Man, he said, stood his shadow or spirit.  This shadow, he says, was as lovely as the man was himself, and filled all places, and was most agreeable as well as wonderful to him.

"Here, he says, he tarried some time, and was unspeakably entertained and delighted with a view of the Great Man, of his shadow or spirit, and of all things in him.  And what is most astonishing, he imagined all this to have passed before he was born.  He never had been, he says, in this world at that time.  And what confirms him in the belief of this is that the Great Man told him he must come down to earth, be born of such a woman, meet with such and such things, and in particular, that he should once in his life be guilty of murder.  At this he was displeased and told the Great Man he would never murder.  But the Great Man replied, 'I have said it, and it shall be so.'  Which has accordingly happened.  At this time, he says, the Great Man asked him what he would choose in life.  He replied, first to be a hunter, and afterwards to be a powwow or diviner.  Whereupon the Great Man told him he should have what he desired, and that his shadow should go along with him down to earth, and be with him forever.  There were, he says, all this time no words spoken between them.  This conference was not carried on by any human language, but they had a kind of mental intelligence of each other's thoughts.  After this, he says, he saw the Great Man no more; but supposes he came down to earth to be born, but the spirit or shadow of the Great Man still attended him, and ever after continued to appear to him in dreams, and other ways, until he felt the power of God's word upon his heart, since which it has entirely left him.

"There were some times when this spirit came upon him in a special manner, and he was full of what he saw in the Great Man; and then, he says, he was all light, and not only light himself, but it was light all around him, so that he could see through men, and know the thoughts of their hearts.  These depths of Satan I leave to others to fathom, and do not know what ideas to affix to such terms, nor can guess what conceptions of things these creatures have at the times when they call themselves all light."

And there you have it.  Isn't that an amazing account or occurrence?  It certainly doesn't fit the canons of classical shamanism; in fact, is more akin to Middle or Far Eastern forms of mysticism rather than, say, the result of occultism.  I find it fascinating, especially the instance of it happening prior to his incarnating on earth.  Of course, the Jesuit, bound by the confining conceptions of his own faith, could only ascribe it to Satan and not accept it simply on its own terms, as being outside the realm of his own experience.  But the history of Christianity is rife with its repression of anything out of the ordinary, be that of the light or dark.  Besides often persecuting its own mystics -- those carriers of the inner light of their professed faith -- it also represses, denies, and then projects its own shadow content onto others.  In other words, Christians are afraid of their own shadows, in the Jungian sense of the term.

Anyway, there you go -- a fascinating tidbit from the Jesuit Journals that Thoreau may have read, published in an arcane introduction to a 1937 biography of Henry.  You just never know what you're going to stumble across, do you?

Jesus and Coyote

Long ago, when I used to read a lot of poetry, I came across a compendium by a poet named Barry Gifford entitled, "Ghosts No Horse Can Carry."  In that book he had a section of poems devoted to the Native trickster character, Coyote.  One poem featured Jesus along with Coyote and I thought, "What a great idea!"  But I was disappointed by the poem.  So, in the ignorant, time-honored tradition of writers down thru the ages, I thought, "I can do better than that."  

One night when I was really tired and about to turn in, this poem showed up.  In fact, it came down the pipes so fast I could barely get one line written before the next line came rolling through.  I scribbled it down in probably 2-3 minutes flat.  Then I had to go back and re-read it because I had absolutely no idea what it said.  To my surprise, the poem read back v-e-r-y  s-l-0-w-l-y.

The first line of Barry Gifford's poem had inspired my version.  Try as I may, I couldn't seem to improve upon it so decided to keep it as it was.  Reading local poetry journals in Seattle (there was a long-standing journal called "Poetry Northwest"), I would occasionally see a poem with the title, "Poem with a first line by..." so I gathered that it was okay to be inspired by another poet's line as long as you made the attribution in the title.  Hence, this is a "Poem With A First Line by Barry Gifford."

Jesus found Coyote

clinging by his nails

to a precipice.

Fetched him up

in one strong motion.

Fed him milk

by the campfire.

Looked

the other way

when Coyote stole

the best rabbit

steak.

Judas complained,

"You always do that!

 Why'd you save

 that mangy dog?

 There's already no

 end of trouble

 in this world."

"Lucifer's lonely,"

Jesus replied.

Judas

dropped his jaw

lurched up

said, "I'm

outta here!"

Bolted into

the black.

Coyote

chewed rabbit fat

and thought,

"It's no fault

 of the sun

that it casts

so many

shadows"