See to Your Sacraments Wherever You Find ‘Em

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[Image: “Plumbing the Divine,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Another Poem of the Gifts

I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the labyrinth,
For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,
For love, which lets us see others
As God sees them,
For the solid diamond and the flowing water,
For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,
For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,
For Schopenhauer,
Who perhaps deciphered the universe,
For the blazing of fire,
That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,
For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,
For bread and salt,
For the mystery of the rose
That spends all its color and can not see it,
For certain eves and days of 1955,
For the hard riders who, on the plains,
Drive on the cattle and the dawn,
For mornings in Montevideo,
For the art of friendship,
For Socrates’ last day,
For the words spoken one twilight
From one cross to another,
For that dream of Islam that embraced
A thousand nights and a night,
For that other dream of Hell,
Of the tower of cleansing fire
And of the celestial spheres,
For Swedenborg,
Who talked with the angels in London streets,
For the secret and immemorial rivers
That converge in me,
For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,
For the sword and harp of the Saxons,
For the sea, which is a shining desert
And a secret code for things we do not know
And an epitaph for the Norsemen,
For the word music of England,
For the word music of Germany,
For gold, that shines in verses,
For epic winter,
For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,
For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,
For crystal prisms and bronze weights,
For the tiger’s stripes,
For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,
For mornings in Texas,
For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle
And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,
For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,
Who, before there was Spanish, had written
All Spanish literature,
For gallant, noble, geometric chess,
For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,
For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,
For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,
For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,
For habits,
Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,
For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,
For night, its darkness and its astronomy,
For the bravery and happiness of others,
For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers
Or in an old sword,
For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers,
For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon
For dying so slowly,
For the minutes that precede sleep,
For sleep and death,
Those two hidden treasures,
For the intimate gifts I do not mention,
For music, that mysterious form of time.

(Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alan Dugan [source])

From elsewhere:

As a child I memorized a short and elegant definition of a sacrament: “an outward sign signifying an inward grace.” That is, a sacrament is an ordinary thing or activity that, to a properly educated imagination, signifies or points to a deeper spiritual meaning and power. The priest sprinkles holy water on your head and calls it baptism. Thoreau takes a bath and says that for him it’s a spiritual action. As priests and theologians of our own religion, we can take almost any aspect of ordinary life and see its sacramentality, for everything can have an inward grace.

Which is what the Greeks were getting at by seeing gods, goddesses, and spirits of all kinds in every aspect of life. The philosopher Thales said, “The world is full of gods.” These figures, far from being absurd or fanciful, help us see the holiness in anything. You can find Demeter, goddess of grain, in a supermarket, and Hermes, god of crossroads, on Wall Street…

Intention and style convert the commonplace into the spiritual.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Prayer of Light

Plants only have two choices
to grow or to decay
as long as they grow more leaves
than what decays
they are still here
growing to the light
reaching up to the sun
without any deterrent
they thrive.

We are here like plants
and with every breath
We are meant to grow and thrive.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

Birds have a song
they sing and huddle in windows, branches,
any doorway or echoing archway
between stars and dawn
seeking just a breeze to take flight
to their future
and as they fly, we breathe.

I breathe,
Therefore I am.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

Bread rises with a little warmth
some of us even have a mother starter dough
to yield endless loaves
Some of us prefer rice
a little steam fattens dry seeds into many meals
if we have bread, if we have rice
we are meant to survive
with bellies that can be full
know the sun feeds us

We grow more than enough to
feed all the children.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

Love is ever present when we share food
Love is ever present when we see people pet a stranger’s dog
Love is ever present when we sit together and listen to each other’s stories
Love is ever present when we simply care.

Little moments promise that love will not vanish.
When love is ever present
we do not need to be afraid
because love, like light, welcomes us.

Love lets us speak and be seen.
We do not need to be silent.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

( Jen Cheng [source])

Postscript for regular visitors: No, your eyes do not deceive you — this edition of the RAMH “Whiskey River Fridays” series is indeed coming to you on a Thursday. Because, well, reasons: I won’t be able to post it tomorrow. And probably not Saturday, come to that. Apologies for the disruption to routine… maybe I’ll stop by in a few days and change the posting date, heh.

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Recognizing the Universe’s Hand When It’s Offered

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From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.

(Jon Kabat Zinn [source])

…and:

Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees.
    like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light
    of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

There is a hole in the universe.

It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.

(K. C. Cole [source])

…and:

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

If you knew what I knew about generosity, you wouldn’t let one meal go by without sharing it.

(Buddha [source (in slightly different words)])

From elsewhere:

To foster your spiritual life, you need an effective method especially suited to you. Buddhists call it upaya, “skillful means.” When I first heard about upaya many years ago, I felt excited because it helped me make sense of the many odd things we do in the name of religion. It’s important to have good ideas, but you also need to be skillful in your method. The practice of religion requires precise and thoughtful action…

Some schools of Buddhism teach that upaya goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands? In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Mysticism for Beginners

The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
like nuns in fields of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.

(Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

Beach

The end, I think, will be a little like looking down as far as I can see to where the wind has kicked up the tide and turned it all the same—sea, spume, the air. There might even be someone walking toward me, the way in the edge-of-the-ocean blue light they’ll be obscure until the last moment. I think it’ll be late afternoon, the sky that luminous oyster white into which things disappear. I’ll stop to look at the sky, and the moment I do I realize I’m alone, I misunderstood the figure coming toward me, which, considering the time of day, is as it should be, especially now that the wind has kicked up a little and the white sun has almost dropped under the soft gray almost stillness of the water, it seems just the right hour to be, again, alive.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

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What Do You Want to See? Why Can’t You See It Already?

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[Image: “Seeing In,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

NOTE: An evening at the theatre. It occurred to me that there is something weird about someone wanting to be someone else. And even more so about someone sitting down for a couple of hours to look at someone they don’t know, pretending to be someone else, talking to someone who is also pretending to be someone else. A dialogue, furthermore, invented by somebody who imagined they were pretending to be each of these in turn.

(Alan Fletcher [source])

…and:

Enlightenment is a Gamble

Time to cash in your chips
put your ideas and beliefs on the table.
See who has the bigger hand
you or the Mystery that pervades you.

Time to scrape the mind’s shit
off your shoes
undo the laces
that hold your prison together
and dangle your toes into emptiness.

Once you’ve put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you’ve got left to gamble with
is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.

(Adyashanti [source, in different format])

…and:

Surely you remember

After they all leave,
I remain alone with the poems,
some poems of mine, some of others.
I prefer poems that others have written.
I remain quiet, and slowly
the knot in my throat dissolves.
I remain.

Sometimes I wish everyone would go away.
Maybe it’s nice, after all, to write poems.
You sit in your room and the walls grow taller.
Colors deepen.
A blue kerchief becomes a deep well.

You wish everyone would go away.
You don’t know what’s the matter with you.
Perhaps you’ll think of something.
Then it all passes, and you are pure crystal.

After that, love.
Narcissus was so much in love with himself.
Only a fool doesn’t understand
he loved the river, too.

You sit alone.
Your heart aches, but
won’t break.
The faded images wash away one by one.
Then the defects.
A sun sets at midnight. You remember
the dark flowers too.

You wish you were dead or alive or
somebody else.
Isn’t there a country you love? A word?
Surely you remember.

Only a fool lets the sun set when it likes.
It always drifts off too early
westward to the islands.

Sun and moon, winter and summer
will come to you,
infinite treasures.

(Dahlia Ravikovitch, translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch [source])

From elsewhere:

In the past people criticized me for being too intellectual, but study and reading and the exchange of ideas has not only made my life interesting, they have also been the source of my values and actions. I am what I am because of my ideas, and I don’t apologize for enjoying the life of the mind and imagination. Intellectual people have also criticized me for being too much in the heart, being too involved in people’s lives and not maintaining a distance proper to a writer and thinker. They also accuse me of being lightweight in the realm of ideas, but I think they may be reacting to the interests of my heart and my attempts to make rich ideas attractive to all kinds of people. Some want me to be more of an activist, some want me less easygoing, and some want me to be part of a movement or an organization. Meanwhile, in the din, I play my piano and write. It isn’t always easy to practice the virtues of wisdom, compassion, skillful means, wonder, and serenity. Especially serenity. The world might like you to do something else.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

The Convert

When in nineteen-thirty-seven, Etta Moten, sweetheart
of our Art Study group, kept her promise, as if clocked,
to honor my house at our first annual tea, my pride

tipped sky, but when she, Parisian-poised and as smart
as a chrome-toned page from Harper’s Bazaar, gave my shocked
guests this hideous African nude, I could have cried.

And for many subsequent suns, we, who had placed apart
this hour to proclaim our plunge into modern art, mocked
her “Isn’t he lovely?” whenever we eyed this thing,

for by every rule we’d learned, we’d been led to discern
this rankling figure as ugly. It hunched in a squat
as if someone with maliciously disfiguring intent

had flattened it with a press, bashing its head,
bloating its features, making huge bulging blots
of its lips and nose, and as my eyes in dread anticipation

pulled downward, there was its navel, without a thread
of covering, ruptured, exposed, protruding from a pot
stomach as huge as a mother-to-be’s, on short, bent legs,

extending as far on each side as swollen back limbs
of a turtle. I could look no farther and nearly dispensed
with being polite while pretending to welcome her gift.

But afterwards, to the turn of calendar pages, my eyes would skim
the figure appraising this fantastic sight,
until, finally, I saw on its stern

ebony face, not a furniture polished, shellacked shine,
but a radiance, gleaming as though a small light
had flashed internally; and I could discern

through the sheen that the bulging eyes
were identical twins to the bulging nose.
The same symmetrical form was dispersed again

and again through all the bulges, the thighs
and the hands and the lips, in reverse, even the toes
of this fast turning beautiful form were a selfsame chain,

matching the navel. This little figure stretched high
in grace, in its with-the-grain form and from-within-glow,
in its curves in concord. I became a hurricane

of elation, a convert undaunted, who wanted to flaunt
her discovery, parade her fair-contoured find.

Art clubs, like leaves in autumn fall,
scrabble against concrete and scatter.
And Etta Moten, I read, is at tea with the Queen.

But I find myself still framing word structures
of how much these blazing forms ascending the centuries
in their muted sheens, matter to me.

(Margaret Danner [source])

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Remembering the Silences of the Future

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[Can we hear silence? Well, I dunno; the gods know I’m no authority on hearing things. But here’s a Spotify playlist of pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s recordings of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Feel free to pick and choose — the complete cycle as presented here is well over an hour long — or to just let the thing play in the background as you make your way through the day. But try to hear not only the notes themselves, but what’s going on in the split-seconds scattered among the notes; anticipate and catch yourself in the act of “hearing” them.]

From whiskey river:

The Moment

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment

when,   nothing

happens

no what-have-I-to-do-today-list
 

maybe   half a moment

the rush of traffic stops.

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Stephen Hawking… found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now… To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say: ‘Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are.

(Ted Chiang, quoting Kurt Vonnegut [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Every cop who’s been undercover knows there’s nothing in the world quite like the day before you go into a job. I figure astronauts on countdown know the feeling, and parachute regiments lining up for the jump. The light turns dazzling and unbreakable as diamonds, every face you see is beautiful enough to take your breath away; your mind is crystal clear, every second spreads itself out in front of you in one great smooth landscape, things that have baffled you for months suddenly make perfect sense. You could drink all day and be stone-cold sober; cryptic crosswords are easy as kids’ jigsaws. That day lasts a hundred years.

(Tana French [source])

…and:

X

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.

(Gwendolyn Brooks [source])

…and:

I came across the remarkable story of Simone Dinnerstein, who, after having some daimon in her wakened upon hearing Glenn Gould’s version of the Goldbergs, shifted her piano studies in a different direction and found her own vision for the piece. I thought that Gould would be perfection for me, but Simone’s playing had a vitality and lightness that forced me to rethink what I had enshrined. I read an interview with her in which she said that people listening to her performances were having mystical experiences…

“I grew up without any religion,” Simone told me at the beginning of our conversation. Yet she and her audiences are aware that there is something about her playing that takes you to a spiritual place. For having been brought up without formal religion, Simone Dinnerstein is able to give people a mystical experience. In my estimation, she is a theologian in the world of music and a teacher of a certain spiritual discipline in which her method requires a piano.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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Digging Deep for Compassion When Cynicism Comes to Call

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[Image: On my first visit to downtown Durham, NC, in the fall of 2022, I was struck — moved — both by the obvious demographic diversity and by the displays of public art, especially murals. This mural (I haven’t been able to learn the artist’s name) commemorates (among other things) a particularly fraught moment in the history of that diversity: the establishment in the early 1970s of a “charrette” to help resolve ongoing racial tensions, especially surrounding school integration. The two people seated at the table at top left were appointed by a Federal judge to lead the charrette; from left to right, they are C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater. At the start of the project, Ellis was the angry “Exalted Cyclops” of Durham’s Ku Klux Klan; Atwater, an angry community activist and organizer. You can read more about the charrette — and the “best of enemies” relationship between Ellis and Atwater — here, here, here, and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Prayer for the Abuser
(excerpt)

To those who see only division and separateness,
I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.
For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother’s embrace,
I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.
To those who still feel somehow incomplete,
I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.

(Kuan Yin [source: widely quoted, including here, but nothing canonical I can find])

Not from whiskey river:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Some schools of Buddhism teach that [skillful means (upaya)] goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands?

In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity. I’ve borrowed them all, but now, in this new configuration, they become mine…

It isn’t always easy to practice the virtues of wisdom, compassion, skillful means, wonder, and serenity. Especially serenity. The world might like you to do something else.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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Pruning the Topiary in the Gardens Between Our Ears

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[Image: “The spirit of this world … Will heal … And rise,” by Guy Mayer. Found it on Flickr, and using it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) The caption under the photo there — actually something of an epigraph, from William Butler Yeats — reads, “Yet …. / Vast are the shadows / That straddle and strafe / And struggle in the darkness / That troubles my eyes.”]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving… The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

(David Foster Wallace [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

(Yuval Noah Harari [source])

…and:

As a child I memorized a short and elegant definition of a sacrament: “an outward sign signifying an inward grace.” That is, a sacrament is an ordinary thing or activity that, to a properly educated imagination, signifies or points to a deeper spiritual meaning and power. The priest sprinkles holy water on your head and calls it baptism. Thoreau takes a bath and says that for him it’s a spiritual action. As priests and theologians of our own religion, we can take almost any aspect of ordinary life and see its sacramentality, for everything can have an inward grace.

Which is what the Greeks were getting at by seeing gods, goddesses, and spirits of all kinds in every aspect of life. The philosopher Thales said, “The world is full of gods.” These figures, far from being absurd or fanciful, help us see the holiness in anything. You can find Demeter, goddess of grain, in a supermarket, and Hermes, god of crossroads, on Wall Street.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Field of Skulls

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,
and if you’re predisposed to dark—let’s say
the window you’ve picked is a black
postage stamp you spend hours at,
sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love
Lucy reruns have gone off—stare

like your eyes have force, and behind
any night’s taut scrim will come the forms
you expect pressing from the other side.
For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws
and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.
They’re plain once you think to look.

You know such fields exist, for criminals
roam your very block, and even history lists
monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe
who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters
unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps
that disgruntled mail clerk from your job

has already scratched your name on a bullet—that’s him
rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought,
for it proves there’s no better spot for you
than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing
the bad news piped steady from your head. The night
is black. You stare and furious stare,

confident there are no gods out there. In this way,
you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine
and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all
your remembered loves. If the skulls are there—
let’s say they do press toward you
against night’s scrim—could they not stare
with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh
that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,
at the force your hands hold?

(Mary Karr [source])

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Squinting at What You Might or Might Not See

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[Image: “5x5x2 (10 June, 2023, 06:15 AM; Northeast and Southeast),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (abbreviated there):

Body and Soul II
for Coleman Hawkins

The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
                                                             seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,
Is faith, it appears—faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind.
                                            April, and anything’s possible.

Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back—on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645,
Mountains and deserts,
In search of the Truth
                                               the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
                                                                                                      And he found it.

These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbor’s back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
                                                       when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.

Every true poem is a spark,
                                     and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.
Shooting stars.
April’s identical,
                                  celestial, wordless, burning down.
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination’s our own, its hope is the hope we live with.

Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
                                                                                                                  and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
                                                              in failure, he thought, and suffering.

Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small
Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
                                                                                        I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.


(Charles Wright [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Dreams

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.

(Wislawa Szymborska. translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak [source])

…and:

Confuse the sacred and the secular in your environment. Create a liminal, neither here nor there, milieu. It is always in the liminal places that significant things happen, so work at creating liminality. Shock yourself and others by refusing to separate the holy and the profane.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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Learning to Fall, Prepared to Fall, But Watching Out for — and Following — the One Right Path

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[Image: “Ever Onward,” by John E. Simpson. Note that this depicts not a single path, but three: there’s the one, the “subject” to the extent that the photo has one, running diagonally northwest-to-southeast; there’s one straighter horizontal path sorta sitting up on the hillside to the right, with no obvious way of getting to it; and then there’s also one — a fatter, “easier” route, to the left (I took the photo while standing at a fork).]

Astute observers of the rhythms of my RAMH postings (there are a few of you!) have probably noticed a breakdown of same during the last couple weeks. To wit: the weird, scrambled, exceedingly brief post of a couple Fridays ago, and then… nothing.

No mystery, really, and no cause for alarm. I spent ten days in New Jersey with my family, helping our elderly parents downsize from the home they’ve shared for decades to a senior facility nearby. (My own “help” consisted I think mostly of the psychological sort; my three sibs, who all live within an hour of Mom and Stepdad, have done by far the bulk of the manual and spiritual heavy lifting over the last few months, especially.)

Anyhow, last week I’d actually begun a regular “whiskey river Friday” post, but then ran out of time to wrap it up. Here then is my selection from whiskey river last week:

Afterwards

Mostly you look back and say, “Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it’s not too bad, but look — things happen like that, and you did what you could.”

You go back and pick up the pieces. There’s tomorrow. There’s that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.

Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn.

(William Stafford [source (not canonical)])

Balance that against this one from more recent days, also from whiskey river (second two paragraphs):

I do think that society doesn’t encourage us to be self-aware enough to understand what motivates us to do what we do. Many people actually believe that loving themselves means being in denial of their weaknesses and seeming failures and instead talking themselves up with affirmations. But that’s missing the point.

Self-love is not just about constantly giving yourself praise and telling yourself how awesome you are. It’s about loving the real you, the human you—the person who has feet of clay, who comes undone under criticism, who sometimes fails and disappoints others. It’s about making a commitment to yourself that you will stick by yourself—even if no one else does.

That’s what I mean when I say you must love yourself as though your life depends on it, because quite simply, I know without a doubt that it does!

(Anita Moorjani [source])

Those selections, separated in time, seem to me related — related to frailty and disappointment, and to the resilience, the equanimity (which must be learned and practiced) which together help us to move on beyond those low points.

But, y’know, we don’t have to wait until things go wrong to respond to them. We can anticipate the coming wrongness; we can train ourselves to pay attention in advance — not predicting all the possible futures and playing the odds thereon but just resolving, knowing, that when the time comes, we’ll be ready: ready not to panic, not to stampede for the easiest double-doored exit, but to turn calmly… and to go that way. It needn’t be in some other wildly different direction; it might even just lead us — one precise step at a time — along a “path among paths” headed the same way as the mob. But it will be our path, one we recognize and have prepped ourselves for all along, maybe without even realizing it…

A lot of these thoughts have been roiling around in my mind as a result of the New Jersey visit. Mom and Stepdad have been living a reality of reduced circumstances for a good while now — a reality of paths being successively closed off to them. Failing hearing and eyesight, diminished mobility, a world driven ever more by new technologies, global pandemic… it all adds up. It didn’t make them downsize; they could have stayed, even now. But every day of not-choosing added to the risk, not just to each of them, to them as a couple, but to the other person.

And so they sort of inhaled, deeply, and started to pack up everything they can take with them, and prepared to leave behind everything they cannot.

With all this in my head, then, just a couple days ago I stumbled across this from another writer. Here, he cites favorite quotes from two of his favorite sources (and of course, none of this come from whiskey river):

I’ve known people to refuse an opportunity to leave a rutted, well-worn path because it can be so disorienting at times and also lengthy. In the Gospels Jesus uses this very imagery when he says, “Go through the narrow gate, because the wide gate and the broad road lead to disaster. Many go that way, of course, and yet a narrow gate and a little lane lead to life. Unfortunately, few choose them” (Matthew 7). Thoreau adds to that advice: “I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.”

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and then this:

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

(Muhammad Ali [source])

Mom and Stepdad are well beyond 50. But that reality has taught them, among other thing, not to waste the opportunity to choose from and follow the paths — however narrow — still open to them.

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Pick a Point, Any Point, and Call It the Point

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[Image at right: the so-called “Big Tree” in Redwood National and State Park, California. My camera has a Panorama mode, which normally requires you to swing the camera from left to right, keeping the shutter open, to give you about a 180° field of view; I thought I’d experiment with doing a “vertical panorama,” swinging the camera — turned on its side — from treetop to base. (My phone’s camera has a Panorama mode, too, but it’s much harder to get it right with the phone.) Of course, with a subject this tall, what we call the “top” is a pretty arbitrary point in space… The tree, by the way, around 286 feet in height, is only the sixteenth tallest in the park. The tallest, at around 380 feet, is a tree named Hyperion — at a secret location somewhere within the huge park. Hyperion is actually in fact the tallest tree in the world.]

We’re in Reno, Nevada, today, the California leg of Road Trip 2021-22 behind us, and a couple thousand miles of eastward continent ahead. With luck, we’ll be able to unload the car — for at least a few months, anyhow — by September, somewhere in one of the East Coast states. The prospect makes me happy, which is slightly absurd: we’ve seen so many extraordinary things — shouldn’t I be sad to be imminently leaving all that behind?

Well, I don’t know… My Instagram account, such as it is, celebrates something I’ve been calling “the extraordinary commonplace.” (I don’t know where I picked up that phrase but I’m certain it can’t be original.) And I think that phrase may point to the source of my elation: if every day delivers to me remarkable, unfamiliar experiences, maybe it’s simply that I miss the unremarkable — the experience of opening my eyes and seeing the same things, at the same times, that I’ve been seeing them for years.

This all plays into the same general theme of my Friday posts here in recent week: how to be happy in a world which, well, seems to discourage happiness (to put it mildly). I found echoes of it in whiskey river entries of the past week, unsurprisingly. Echoes like this:

There Are Mornings

Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and this:

Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we’ve utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities—warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful–happier.

(Dalai Lama XIV [source])

I encountered an echo, too, in a non-whiskey river source. This comes from a book which I’ve been reading, intermittently and a bit at a time, for probably the last four or five years — as I’ve puzzled over what it means (to me, to anybody) to be living now:

My dog, fully in possession of the Buddha nature, has some lessons for me about the sacred in the secular. He wants to go out twice a day, and I live in New Hampshire, where the winters are usually snowy and bitterly cold. I walk out on a clear, dark night. My dog shoves his snout deep into the snow, apparently catching the scent of a deer or a neighboring dog. I look up and see Orion brilliant against the dark blue-black of the sky. Coming out on a cold night I’m well aware of my earthly existence and yet I’m pulled out of myself into wonder, once again, at the brilliant stars. Who am I in this tremendous context, and what is my fate and what do I mean in the huge expanse of galaxies and multiple universes? My mind can’t hold the vast openness and complexity, and I can’t twist my imagination to fit myself into such a place. And yet, here I am with my dog, waiting for him to do his business in the snow that mirrors the Milky Way, one of the great mysteries of my existence. Orion’s two dogs, Major and Minor, are up there, too, probably taking similar advantage of the milky-white galaxy.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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Potpourri: June 18 (2021 Edition)

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Age: 6(ish)

[The latest installment in my sorta-kinda imperfectly-annual series of whatever-the-hell-I-want posts on this month and day.]

Things have been so nuts these last few months, especially in the last couple weeks, that I can’t remember what, if anything, I’ve said about The Next Phase of life — of retirement, generally. So apologies in advance if any of this is not new-new to you…

In short, we’re going homeless — by design — for a few months. Since we had to bag the Europe tour in 2020, and we couldn’t of course anticipate whether “things” would have opened up over there by this year, we decided we’d head out on a road trip across the US. Nominally, it’s a US National Parks road trip — The Missus has visited only a single National Park/Monument of which she has a record, and I’ve visited none.

But the parks etc. provide just the general shape of the itinerary. Really, neither of us has ever seen much of the country. So we’re hoping to correct that, between now and whenever we call it quits, sometime in the first half of 2022.

We’ll just have to wait and see what comes next.

Laurie Anderson is one of those musicians of whom I can genuinely say: I wish I liked her work as much as I admire it. It’s never struck me as music to “like” anyhow, I guess. We’re not meant to, y’know, dance to it, and “a Laurie Anderson” earworm seems, by design, a contradiction in terms. But since I first saw this performance a few weeks ago I’ve kept going back to rewatch it. Maybe that’s what I should’ve been doing all along… The occasion seems to have been a re-release, on its near-40th anniversary, of her Big Science album. For more, see this writeup at the Nonesuch Music site — and, of course, the video itself:

(A comment at the YouTube site says, “I randomly throw in the line ‘He may have been a hat check clerk at an ice rink’ in conversation, and while nobody ever knows what I am talking about, it makes me happy.” This anecdote, including the quotation from the opening of “Let x=x,” may represent the perfect starting point in trying to grok whatever Anderson is up to: when you’re in the music garage with her, understanding is the one tool you should leave hanging on the pegboard.)

The tradition of particularly celebrating so-called milestone birthdays in multiples of 10 may not be “silly,” exactly. I know why it’s done — we count naturally on our fingers, right? But on average, little about someone’s life at age 30 differs from their life at 31, or 29. (In fact, if you think about it, the distribution of actual milestones throughout a lifetime probably has something of a Schrödinger quality to it an event becomes a milestone, forever etched in your head, only after the fact — when observed in retrospect — such that Milestone A occurred [whenever]; B, nine years later; C, three years; D, six; E, four; and so on.)

All of which said, yes, my 2021 birthday would, traditionally, be regarded as a milestone birthday: the one sometimes described as “the allotted three-score and ten.” That word “allotted” unsettles a bit, yes? Not only does it imply the presence of some outside authority, parceling out lifespans by divine choice; it also implies that whatever one has done and experienced to that point, whatever comes next is just gravy — disposable, so we need to just accept it and move on, preferably soon.

In this context, I recently encountered and here offer to you this passage in Thomas Moore’s A Religion of One’s Own:

On my first trip to Italy I asked some friends to take me to the Villa Medici in Careggi, just outside Florence. The villa was then part of a medical center and had been preserved and maintained, especially the beautiful gardens that, though modified in the nineteenth century, showed off the spirit of the Renaissance. Walking through the exotic plants and trees, I came upon an extraordinary sculpture… It is an image of an old man with a child’s body and bird claws for feet, sitting on an owl…

The lesson I take from the mysterious image in the garden is to realize how important it is to deal with life’s mysteriousness, using your imagination and intuition, prepared for paradoxes and surprises, able to appreciate how intricate the path toward fulfillment can be. It isn’t enough to be reasonable, to follow the crowd, to do what is expected, and to be normal and adjusted. We have to be like that figure in the garden: old and young, feeble and birdlike, infantile and wise.

I haven’t been able to find a decent photo of the sculpture in question which I can use here… except for one, frustratingly taken from behind, at the site of the V&A museum. It’s apparently a statue of Aesop. For me, this makes Moore’s determination to draw a lesson from the statue a bit more on point, maybe a bit less like nagging.

Old, young; feeble, birdlike; infantile, wise… Like the passage of milestone birthdays, I think the adjective “wise” is one which can be applied usefully only in retrospect, and ideally never by oneself. But I’ll accept the other descriptors for now, with the hope of repeating the status report in a “Potpourri” post on June 18, 2022.

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