(In My) Solitude

 Just gearing up for New Year's Eve with this old Duke Ellington/Billie Holiday tune, performed here with understated beauty by Katie Martucci and Josh Dunn.

And the Devil Knows What

 A snippet of a new polka (or "polska" as they say) by the Danish folk trio, "Dreamers' Circus," whom I love.  The entire song is posted below this preview.  Meanwhile, enjoy both this clip of the guys at work on the song, and the full and completed version below it.

Rainbow Connection

 I don't know how I stumbled upon this one.  A Kermit the Frog song originally written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, played here by real people -- Katie Martucci and Josh Dunn -- at what looks like somebody's unassuming dining room table.  There you go -- real music by real people.  Lyrics below the video.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions
And rainbows have nothing to hide
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that and someone believed it
Look what it's done so far
What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing?
And what do we think we might see?

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

All of us under its spell
We know that it's probably magic

Have you been half asleep?
And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one in the same
I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm supposed to be

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me
La-da-da, dee-da-da, doo
Ba-da-da-da, da-dee-da, doo

What Changes When Nothing Changes

A moody, ambient piece by Kazuma Okabayashi.

 

Arabesque

Roxane Elfasci again, from her 2021 album, "Hommage a Debussy."

"God's A Different Sword"

 A song by the Folk Bitch Trio, performed for the Stephen Colbert show.  I love how vague this is.  Sometimes the more elusive truths of life are better expressed by skirting around them in just this fashion.  Lyrics below the video:

God’s A Different Sword Lyrics by Folk Bitch Trio

Am I lucky?
Or am I just sane?
Have I been walking round in circles
Always fumbling your name

Heard it quiet
At the bottom of my drawer
A heavy conversation
That I started to ignore

Here I go
Just one more

If I left it
Just a little while
Would these questions turn to answers
In a neat little pile

Could I be good
On my own accord?
Heaven knows I know need it
But God’s a different sword

Here I go
Just one more

I feel better
No, I feel awake
Well, I’ve been lying in a hook net
Just waiting for my break

Can’t deny it
My body keeps the score
But if you tell me that you need it
I can get up off my floor

Here I go
Just one more

Woke up early
Just a rule I’ve laid
Now my future’s written out
On my Sunday dinner plate

Could I be good
On my own accord?
Heaven knows I know need it
But God’s a different sword

Here I go
Just one more

Trust

 I'm not very inclined to trust and perhaps I am not alone in that characteristic.  Be it by our own original nature or through the betrayals of other human beings, fallible as they are, or merely through the incessant pounding and apparent opposition of life itself, we perhaps all experience some measure of loss of the ability to trust as time goes by.

I do have an instinctive trust in fate, as it were; that it will all work out in the end.  However, I don't mean that I believe my life will go as I wish, or even that my life will be in any way happy.  I mean I have a sure sense of faith in the inevitable culmination of my destiny, in a future that may be so far and distant as to be beyond my ability to conceive.  You may call that naive; I call it an instinctive faith in either divinity or simply life itself.  

I work with children.  In doing so, I attempt to provide them with a sense of safety, fun, assurance, and the nearly always unwelcome guidance in their interpersonal interactions with their peers.  I try to create an atmosphere where they feel secure and are willing to take chances and explore.  

I feel life, or God, or divinity, or destiny, fate, or what have you -- does that for me as well, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.  Despite the losses and heartaches of life, I persevere.  I'm stubborn that way.

Here's a little statement by a seeker named Don Stevens who voluntarily affiliated his life with the spiritual figure Meher Baba.  Don's talking in more depth about what I'm trying to convey and he's more articulate than I am, so I'll let his message speak for itself.

But I must say, what Don is really talking about, between the lines, is love.

SENSE OF
SELF-DETERMINATION ANNIHILATED

Don Stevens

 
Sooner or later, each human being must be willing to annihilate for a time his own sense of self-determination in a sense of absolute trust of another*. Only in this manner can there be the opportunity to comb out the snarls of countless accumulated actions in one's nature.

Even when a person is unhappiest, he still has a persistent sense of unconscious hope that his own deliberated actions will one day lead him to success and happiness. Usually it is only the person who has almost entirely ceased to hope who is willing to take the conscious step of annihilating his own ego in the person of another. For in annihilating his ego, he denies the very core of the "right" of free-will, of self-determination, and in that destruction there is bound to go his most stubborn, ego-centered hope for the future.

Once it is gone, he is really at sea. There is no landmark, no point of reliance or help, only that cause or person to whom he has perhaps by now given his allegiance. This is a frightening position and it is no wonder that most people would prefer to trust their own fallible but "visible" sense of self-determination, rather than surrender it to another's possible whims.

There are few people who have reached either such desperation in the successive traps of life, or enlightenment in the inner processes of the heart, to be willing to trust their fate implicitly to another being.

---

*Trust in or identification with another human being is not peculiar to the follower of the guru. It has its modern counterpart in the relation of patient to psychoanalyst, of friend to trusted advisor, of one who loves to the beloved. Such a relation apparently involves a very fundamental principle of nature in which the complexities of self can be attacked at their root only through the loss or lessening of "self" in the being of another.

 

LISTEN, HUMANITY, pp. 232-233, Meher Baba
Narrated and edited by D.E. Stevens
2004 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust

The 100th Anniversary of Meher Baba's Silence

Avatar Meher Baba kept silence from July 10, 1925, until he passed away on January 31, 1969.  Baba gave many messages regarding his silence and its import.  But perhaps the simplest explanation was when he said that he knew one day he would have to break his silence, so he began keeping it.

What does that mean, to “break his silence?"  What significance could that possibly have for any of us?

There are several cosmologies that depict the beginning of Creation as a spoken “Word” or, you might say, a vibration.  It is my understanding that this is what Meher Baba intended to convey when he referred to “breaking his silence."  He was referring to the impetus that begat Creation and stating that it would be renewed or  "re-uttered."  What would that look like?  I haven't the slightest idea.

Even so, I offer this deeply esoteric message from Meher Baba on the meaning and import of “The Word.”

 

God in the Beyond-Beyond state

          is likened to a soundless, shoreless Ocean.

The “whim” of God for knowledge of Himself (“Who Am I?”)

          manifested as sound.

 

This Oceanic Sound

          is of God and is God

          and contains, and is

          His experience of power, knowledge, bliss.

 

The emergence of this sound

          through what is called the “Om-Point,”

          or its creative utterance,

          produced the worlds of Mind, Energy, and Matter.

This Primal Oceanic Sound

          is the root of all forms

          and creatures

          and men,

          and they are continuously connected with it

          and derive their life from it.

 

When one closes one’s lips and expresses sound,

          an “m-m-m” is produced.

 

This “m-m-m”

          is the foundation or ground of all spoken words

          and contains all feelings

          as when it expresses pain and anguish

          or joy and happiness,

          or all thought when expressed during thought,

          and is capable of containing

          the whole of a question and its answer.

 

This “m-m-m”

          is a drop of faint sound of the Oceanic Sound:

          the “M-m-m” or “Word” of God,

          separated from the Ocean by seven shadows of separation.

 

If the whole physical universe was a huge bell,

          the sound of it in comparison

          with the sound of the Oceanic Sound

          would be as the furthermost point of audibility

          of an ordinary bell.

 

This sound-drop is not different

          from the Oceanic Sound;

          it is that Ocean and can never be anything but Ocean –

          but it experiences itself as a drop

          because of separation.

 

This separation is not a separation by division,

          but a separation through impression.

          (As words are expressions of this drop-“m-m-m”

          separated from the Oceanic “M-m-m” –

          so are sense-actions, expressions, and experiences

          removes from Oceanic Experience:

                   seeing and seen from Oceanic Sight,

                   hearing and heard from Oceanic Hearing,

                   smelling and smell, taste and flavor, touching and touch

                   from corresponding Oceanic Faculties.)

 

 

This Original Oceanic “M-m-m”

          is called Brahm-Nad (Sound or Word of God)

          or Unhud-Nad (Limitless Sound or Word).

It is continuous

          and is the eternal Root and continuous Cause

          of all causes and effects.

It experiences

         All-power, All-knowledge, and All-bliss.

But the drop “m-m-m,”

          although of the same substance

          and not in any way different

          from the Oceanic “M-m-m,”

          and although continuously connected with it,

feels – because of its separation through seven shadows of separation –

          most weak,

          most ignorant,

          and most unhappy,

          even though at times it asserts

          strength, knowledge, and happiness.

 

In this present age

          when words,

          through accumulation and accretion,

          have become meaningless,

          and all my previous words in the form of precepts

          are neglected and distorted,

 

I maintain Silence.

 

When I break my silence and speak,

          it will be this primal Oceanic “M-m-m”

          which I will utter through my human mouth.

 

And because all forms and words

          are from this primal sound or Original Word

          and are continuously connected with it

          and have their life from it,

          when it is uttered by me,

          it will reverberate in all peoples and creatures,

And all will know

          that I have broken my silence

          and have uttered that sound or Word.

 

The effective force of this Word in individuals

          and their reaction to it

          will be in accordance

          with the magnitude and receptivity

          of each individual mind.

And the reaction will be

          as instantaneous and as various

          as the reaction of people in a room

          through which a cobra suddenly and swiftly passes,

 

          when some would nervously laugh,

          some lose control of their bowels,

          and some feel great courage

          or reasonless hope and joy.

         

             

This Age is a Mirror-Civilization

 A quote from Meher Baba:

For better or for worse, the world of motion pictures has grown up extensively within the larger world of so-called realities. But the film world is not foreign to the "real" world — the two are affiliated so intimately that they can be seen, essentially, to be made of the same fabric. For everyone is, in a sense, an actor and the world has often been compared to a stage by poets and philosophers.

In point of fact, much of what passes for "action" in modern life can be called little but "acting"; and so the larger world has little ground to regard only the film world as being imitative. In the film world, the actor has to think, feel and act according to the pattern held before him; to mirror, though temporarily, the personality of the character being portrayed by him.

This can be said to be equally true, to a considerable extent, of those outside the world of motion-pictures; who struggle to follow the conventional pattern of living as they imagine it is expected of them, even if it cramps their inner individual expression. This is so not only figuratively but literally.

While looking in the mirror, people often see themselves more through the eyes of others than through their own. The reflected image evokes in their minds the impression they will make on others and the expectations which others have of them — and the best that most can do is to try to look the part they play.

Thus the mirror, literally and figuratively, has become such a seemingly indispensable part of modern life that we might almost name this age a mirror-civilization.

 

THE PATH OF LOVE, p. 124
1986 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust

Two Poem-fragments

...from Phillip Whalen, who eventually became the abbot of the San Francisco Zen center and his old buddy, Gary Snyder, who was about to go to Japan to study Zen in formal fashion.  Both poems from late 1955, shortly after the infamous 6 Gallery reading in SF which kick-started the emergence of the Beats, hence the hippies, and all that....

First Whalen, from a poem entitled "Unfinished":

    A single waking moment

    destroys us

    and we cannot live without

    ourselves

    You come to me for an answer?  I

    invented it all, I

    am your tormentor, there is no

    escape, no redress

    You are powerless against me: you

    must suffer agonies until you know

    you are suffering;

    work on that.

And from Snyder, the same winter, 1955/56, about to embark on a momentous life change, crossing the Pacific:

    All America south and east,

    twenty-five years in it brought

    to a trip-stop

    mind-point, where I turn

    caught more on this land -- rock tree and man,

    awake, than ever before, yet ready to leave.

                damned memories,

    whole wasted theories, failures and worse success,

    schools, girls, deals, try to get in

    to make this poem a froth, a pity,

    a dead fiddle for lost good jobs.

    Granite sierras, shelves of books,

    all my friends, scatter

    aimlessly tumbling through

    years and centuries

    Aristotle's herd of formal stars

    stampedes:

    the diamond point mercy

    of this timeless rain.

    

 

One Step

 If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.  Looks like that's what's happened with Ronnie here.

Farewell to Craigie Dhu

 A beautiful song originally composed by fiddler and songwriter Dougie Mclean, arranged here for guitar and performed by Robin Bullock.

Goddess of Mountains and Rivers

 Thirty years ago Gary Snyder published a book entitled, "A Place in Space."  It was a compendium of previous writing done either as independent essays, book reviews, sometimes talks he had given.  In that book I found just such a review of a volume by Edward Schafer entitled, "The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature."

After I read Gary's little essay on the text in question, I checked the book out of the library.  Not content with one volume, I also checked out two others: "Hiding the Universe; poems by Wang Wei," and Andrew Schelling's "The India Book: Essays and Translations from Indian Asia."

Of the three, Schelling's is the one that dares poke its head beyond the pall of literary criticism.  Schelling taught for some time at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which is about as far left as you can get in American academia without falling into the Pacific Ocean.  Schelling is a fine translator of ancient Indian poetry.  He sticks mostly to somewhat amorous content, but strays at times into Buddhist poetry.  I think his finest work in this volume is his translation of six bhajans (devotional songs) by the destitute and wandering poetress-saint, Mirabai.  Mira's songs were all devoted to Krishna, whom she often addressed as "the Dark One."  Hers was a passionate devotion.  Here's my favorite of the six:

Yogin, don't go --

at your feet a slave girl has fallen.

She lost herself

on the devious path 

of romance and worship, 

no one to guide her.

Now she's built

an incense and sandalwood pyre

and begs you to light it.

Dark One, don't go --

when only cinder remains

rub my ash over your body.

Mira asks, Dark One,

                can flame twist upon flame?

The book of Wang Wei poems is a puzzle.  I quite like Wang Wei as a poet; I've yet to read a volume of his poetry that didn't enchant me.  Yet something about these translations feels flat and two-dimensional.  That seems to have been the translator's intent, as he makes the point that Wang Wei is often absent from his own poems. That in itself is characteristic of the older Taoist and Buddhist poetry from China and is indicative of the blending of the human spirit with nature in a kind of meditative unity.  But the poems in this book seem bereft of that inner luminosity; they feel flat and vacant, which came as a surprise to me.

Lastly, the book Snyder reviews.  Sadly, it's the most academic of the bunch.  By that I mean that the subject matter, the varied background and historical information, which I often find illuminating, here seem, well -- academic and intellectual.  It suffers from that fatal Western flaw: the pretense of objective detachment.  Observing something from the outside and thinking that you can say anything of real value about it is a vacuous core belief of the intellect.

Oddly enough, Snyder himself brings the subject matter alive in a mere six pages.  The lead sentence is perfect, although he fails to entirely flesh it out:

"In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire....a dragon-like writhing."

Gary goes on to mention Robert Graves' book, The White Goddess, as a form of our own magical-muse tradition. (Maybe Yeats would agree) And then he duly notes the gradual diminution and devaluing of the feminine within Chinese culture and verse over the passage of time.  Once, perhaps several thousand years ago, there were female shamans in China, called shamankas, who were designated by the term Wu.  But over time the divine feminine was reduced to being what we in the West might call "nature spirits," said to inhabit mountains and streams.  

There is more than a suggestion here.  I believe, and if you inquire into the American Indian experience on this continent, that those spirits still exist; it's just that we lack the sensitivity or sensibility required to encounter them.  They inabit a reality very close to our own.  In more primitive times, the membrane between those two worlds was more permeable and transparent than it is today.

Gary Snyder had studied Chinese under the author, Edward Schafer, at the University of California at Berkeley, way back in 1951, before Gary began his own thirteen year sojourn as a zen monk in Japan.  Hence his desire to survey his former teacher's text.  But I feel I got more out of Gary's six page review than the actual tome in question.

Kalidasa

A poem by the 5th century, CE, playwright and poet Kalidasa, known as India's Shakespeare, translated by Andrew Schelling.

Eyeing objects

crafted for pleasure,

hearing a strain of

sweet song,

even the satisfied

person grows restless,

taken by an inexplicable anguish --

perhaps

below the threshold of thought

traces of someone

loved then forgotten

           lifetimes ago -- 

A Quote From Voltaire

 "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

Promenaden

So there's still a little beauty in the world despite the madness.  Dreamers' Circus, continuing to weave their magic.

 

The River Song

 When American expat Ernest Fenollosa passed away in London in September of 1908, he left behind notebooks containing word-for-word translations of 150 Chinese poems, done in concert with two Japanese scholars who specialized in Chinese poetry, as the Japanese long had done.  Five years later, Fenollosa's widow gave those notebooks to the American poet Ezra Pound, who also had expatriated to Europe.  Pound put an end to Victorian verse with his versions of those translations, like lobbing a verbal hand grenade into an effete nineteenth century parlor rife with intellectual affectation.

In Port Townsend, on the NE tip of the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, in America's Pacific Northwest, is an intrepid translator of our own, Bill Porter, or as he's also known, Red Pine.  He has faithfully been doing translations of Chinese verse for nearly fifty years.  Some time past, he put out a small volume of his own translations of a selection of the poems Pound did over one hundred years ago.  This is one of them.

As I sit here in the rolling, snow-covered hills of the Palouse, this is my attempt to escape both the solitude and silence of my immediate environment, and the noise and madness of my national environment.  Come on along.  We'll sail down the river with some song and wine.

Originally by Li Po, circa 750 CE, or so.  

In our magnolia-oared, apple-wood boat

gold flutes and jade pipes fore and aft

a thousand liters of fine wine on board

we drift with courtesans beside us

A Taoist is waiting to ride off on a crane

a fisherman ignores the gulls walking behind him

the songs of Ch'u Yuan are heard here night and day

the King of Ch'u's garden palace is a desolate hill

Inspired by wine, I write this and sacred mountains shake

the islands of immortality resound when I'm done

if fame and fortune could somehow last

the waters of the Han would flow upstream

Sunset

Pastels again

   sunset's 

 brushed

   striped 

     light 

Behind the barn

  the old owl

    echoes 

      his

  weatherbeaten

      question

The Brutal Reality of Evolution

....which is, housecats rule....

I'm at the top of the ladder of human evolution -- I can drive a stick shift and....I can write cursive!  I can even tell time from a wall clock....and can tell directions based on where the sun rises and sets.  Neanderthals got nuthin' on me.  Housecats, though...there, I may have met my match.  

Winter Charm of Lasting Life

A folk song from Scotland, the homeland I've never seen.

 

When You Walk On

 Eliza Gilkyson, from twenty years ago.  Lyrics below.

There's a long and winding river
From the darkness to the dawn
It will carry and deliver you
When you walk on

No one here can say for certain
What lies in the great beyond
You'll pass through that parted curtain
When you walk on

You may grasp at the illusion
The confusion of your mind
But soon you will remember
To surrender one more time

You may fade out the doorway
Fly away above the throne
Those who stay carry your story
A little glory lingers on

Though the world you leave behind you
Will become a distant song
Every soul you loved will find you
When you walk on

Desire

  "Desire is the root of pain. Want nothing, have everything. Want everything, have nothing."

Interesting quote, isn't it? It seems to me to encapsulate the basic insight of Buddhism, as well as addressing one of the inner core truths you might find in Hinduism (Vedanta), esoteric or monastic Christianity, and perhaps some of the Sufi mystics of Islam. Desire appears to be at the core of all life. Why then is it so problematic?

Perhaps the basic nature of desire is that it is unquenchable. No matter how many times you may satisfy a particular desire, even to the point of satiation, usually after a lapse of time, the desire thus satisfied raises its head again with renewed vigor.

As Buddha so aptly deconstructed desire, it can cause suffering in three different ways. First, it is a state of apparent lack -- there is something or some state that you crave. You experience the lack thereof. You're restless to have or experience it. This state of fundamental need masks an undeniable truth: we feel incomplete in and of ourselves. We feel a sense of lack and incompleteness and we know not what we lack; perhaps a state of equanimity and wholeness. It is a profound hole in our soul, or our inner psyche, if you will. We pour anything and everything into that hole in the hopes that it will fulfill that need. As experience eventually teaches us: nothing does. Nothing fills that hole.

The second state of desire, then, is impermanence. We live in a condition of being limited by time and duration. Nothing lasts. Our moment of satisfaction doesn't last either. However you may satisfy your particular desire or need, it will be impermanent. Think of the simple experience of taste, how limited it is. That special flavor that lingers but a moment on your tongue. What a perfect metaphor for all of life. You can build an empire and surround yourself with all that you desire. Someday, you will die and have to leave every last prop behind. As we all know but no one seems to know well: you can't take it with you when you go. All desire is like this. It's temporary, impermanent.

So you have the initial state of craving and lack. Provided you're actually able to fulfill your finite form of desire, you will still lose that moment of satisfaction. It may have a short or long duration of fulfillment but sooner or later, you will lose it. You can't keep it, no matter what it is.

And lastly, nothing you use for your temporary state of satisfaction ultimately works. Nothing fills that hole in your soul. Because nothing is meant to. Things or conditions are all passing. If all you ever wanted was at your beck and call 24 hours a days, you would still feel unfulfilled. You may successfully distract yourself for the time being. But time is passing, my friend. Your days are numbered and so is the time duration of your temporary, conditional existence, no matter how thoughtfully you've arranged it.

That sense of impermanence leads to the intrinsic need to hold onto what we desire and to grasp at it so very desperately, because we intuitively know it's going to be taken away. It's just a matter of time.

Thus, desire is the root of our suffering. This brings us to the middle of the quote: "Want nothing, have everything." If you understood the ephemeral nature of desire, whatever its constituent component of fulfillment, what would happen if you stopped trying so desperately to grasp at it? Would it be a state of perpetual want, suffering, and lack?

Not if you understand that everything by nature is temporary, and you're able to enjoy it in the moment and equally able to live without it if its not there; then it no longer has any hold on you. If it's there, fine; if it's not, you're still good. This all depends upon an appreciation of the fleeting nature of all conditional life, all objects of sense or any form of temporary desire. But it only works if you're coming from a place of interior contentment, not a place of lack.

Lack is a form of torture. The contentment of which I speak is not the result of fulfilled desire. That's simply temporary satiation. Contentment, it seems to me, would be a state of resilience and equanimity founded upon a non-grasping, non-desperate state of inner freedom. Freedom from the driving need and blind compulsion of desire.

I think it must take practice to get there. Probably many lives of practice. But we have that time; we have forever, really speaking. Our individual conditional lives fool us into believing this is our one and only chance to grab everything we want. The illusion of individuality, in the sense that we will only be who we are now, once, ever -- that's the set-up of incarnational life. It fools us into thinking we have to take what we can get now, and everyone else be damned. It encourages us in our selfishness and our callous disregard for all other life.

Western culture in particular, and the world at large in general, all seem based upon the unexamined premise that "happiness" is the result of fulfilled desire. This premise is false and inaccurate. It drives the insanity, compulsivity, selfishness, and gnawing desperation that characterizes modern life. If your initial premise is wrong, then every conclusion you draw thereafter will also be wrong. Time for us to re-examine that initial premise, then.

The stance described in the quote above is one of non-grasping. It doesn't say to not enjoy life or the temporary conditions of life. It simply says don't grasp onto them and don't depend upon them. Be free. Be able to live with, or without, any particular state of affairs. It will all pass eventually, as we will ourselves. But even that is an illusion. Physics knows that all things in the universe continue to exist; they just change form. It would go a long way in correcting our mental imbalance to realize that the same is true of ourselves. We should work on that.