Hi Mom

I’m thinking this morning of my mother and my wife and my daughter and mothers everywhere—giving birth to other human beings and thereby open themselves to the great joys and sorrows of never-ending vulnerability and wondrous attachment.

Deep bows of appreciation and awe.

Here’s a poem for my mother and for all mothers from all sons and daughters:

Hi Mom

Inconceivably long ago, through you
came my two small legs and arms—
my eyes, ears, and all the rest—
surprised and bawling at first,
I imagine, then later on, larger
and laughing too— walking and
talking—full of wonder about this
beautiful world of flowers
that must also include the wild
sadness woven through each family
as we wander together and apart
in the great astonishment of being human.

059

Begin Again

My new stonewall isn’t going so well. I had begun a series of smallish terraces behind our new addition to follow the step-like rising of the siding and hide the cement foundation below. I began with the granite cobblestones I had lying around from other deconstructed projects. At first, it went well enough. Though the stones themselves are of various thickness and length, their overall rectangular dimension made it reasonably easy to stack them together.

I was about a quarter way through the project when I realized two things: 1) I wasn’t going to have enough stones to finish the project and 2) I wasn’t sure that the lovely looking walls I was constructing would be strong enough to hold the soil through its natural cycles expansion and contraction with water, ice and root systems. When I consulted my local rock-yard expert, John at Sansoucy Stone just up the hill from me, he informed me that: 1) my intuition of the containment issue was probably correct and 2) the granite cobblestones came from India and were relatively expensive.

So I wandered through the stone yard with John looking at various options. At the most ambitious end was the pile of stone that was random rocks to construct a true New England style wall, calling for the attendant balancing and fitting of wildly different shapes and sizes. At the other end was a pallet of thin and relatively flat shale from northern Pennsylvania which I had used several years ago to create a sculpture at the Temple. In between were many options, including a variably buff-colored schist from northeastern Connecticut that was relatively flat and came in relatively thin pieces. I was enchanted by the mottled rich color and, from the outside of the cylindrical stack on the pallet, it looked relatively easy to work with.

I had two pallets delivered to the end of my driveway and promptly got lost in other projects. Yesterday, I finally deconstructed the lovely quarter-wall of cobblestones and promptly repurposed them again to define the boundary of a new arcing garden on the other side of the addition. I also began laying the first courses of my second attempt at the terraced walls using my new schist. It is indeed a lovely stone. Each piece sparkles with evidence of its ancient provenance of clay, heat and pressure over inconceivable stretches of time.

This morning I learned a little more about these stones:
Schist is a foliated metamorphic rock made up of plate-shaped mineral grains that are large enough to see with an unaided eye. It usually forms on a continental side of a convergent plate boundary where sedimentary, such as shales and mudstones, have been subjected to compressive forces, heat, and chemical activity.

So the Pennsylvania shale that encountered the pressure and heat from the colliding tectonic plate of the Atlantic became schist in eastern CT—the schist I am now attempting to stack with elegance and solidity into series of small and rising walls behind my cottage here in Massachusetts. And, grabbing individual stones from the pallet, I find the variation in thickness and shape to be more robust than it appeared in the neatly stacked cylinder. They do not easily stack one on top of the other as they had in my imagination.

Such is the natural course of most worthwhile projects. Initial enthusiasm and dreams encounter the wondrous complexity and ambiguity of the real world. It is here that the real creativity begins and a certain amount of stubborn determination is required. The very real stones I now have demand more time and attention than the ones of my dreams.

So I take a deep breath and hold the vision of terraced walls stepping gracefully up the incline at the back of the cottage while I appreciate the variability and solidity of each stone—persisting in the process of attention as I learn what these rocks and this project have to teach me.

Between Apathy and Apoplexy

I have been avoiding thinking about politics recently, happy that we have a President who shares my views on general reality as well as on the necessity of government action to protect us from the worst aspects of our capitalistic system of individualism, accumulation and objectification. I am pleased that the former guy is not dominating the headlines and is not speaking and acting as the head of my country. I am spending less time reading the headlines and being outraged and more time considering whether the Patriots’ new draft calss will be relevant again in next fall’s football season.

The other day, I was with some friends who had CNN playing on their TV. It was surprisingly unpleasant to listen as the anchors do their best to gin up our outrage over the way some other people were behaving. The behavior they were reporting was indeed in poor taste, but CNN was clearly doing their best to rouse a particular emotionally reaction in us, the watchers. I could feel my latent outrage at ‘those’ people begin to rise again and asked my hosts if we could turn the TV off. They were getting pulled in too, and were happy, once I suggest it, to turn their attention elsewhere.

I don’t miss being outraged, but have not yet found the middle way between apathy and apoplexy. What is the third way that is not merely a watered down version of the two or simply swinging between the extremes? How do I stay engaged in the ongoing generational fight for equal rights for people of color? For the protection of our environment from the predations of industry? For the protection of the poorest from exploitation by the richest?

The polarization of our country between red and blue, is ongoing. Our former President continues peddling the big lie that the election was stolen and congressional Republicans are, for the most part, continuing to support this pernicious fiction. Liz Cheney, one of the visible exceptions, is encouraging the Republican party to separate from the cult of Trump, but she appears to be on the verge of being deposed by her fellow Republican members of the House. Republican controlled legislatures throughout the country have proposed a raft of legislative proposals that would limit access to voting in ways that would have disproportionate impact on low income voters and voters of color.

We are just four months out from the storming of the Capitol by the crowd egged on by our formerly sitting President after he had spent months doing everything possible to undercut the peaceful transition of power which has been a hallmark and bragging point of our democracy. Bidden’s focus on action to combat COVID-19 and to reduce the income gap, to protect the environment, and provide equal opportunity for all has been a welcome change from Trump’s glorification of greed and his constant stoking of fear and outrage at ‘those others’.

My hope is that Bidden will continue to take strong action to level the playing field and that the practical impact of his actions will touch the majority of Americans and thereby undermine the power of the lies of the far right. FDR too was opposed by wealthy industrialists and others who saw his proposals to create jobs and use the power of the government to reign in the excesses of capitalism as a certain recipe for national decline. In retrospect we can see that just the opposite happened.

But, I remind myself that we are not out of the woods*. We must stay engaged to lend our active support to the leaders both in politics and in our neighborhoods that are willing and able to help us move toward a culture that honors the worth and dignity of all.

* I also remind myself that I generally like being in the woods and we should all continue to spend time wandering among the trees alone and with friends whenever possible.

Right Here

Leaves flutter on the trees outside my window. Through the closed window, the low roar of rushing civilization in the far distance comes to my ears. This quiet early morning I remain steadfastly committed to doing less and less, even in the middle of the activity of my life.

At some place in the bible, it says ‘You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength’. At one point in my life I assumed that this was a literal command, so I broke up with my girlfriend—telling her that I could only have one true love at a time—to spend the summer growing a beard while looking for God (hitchhiking and camping) in Minnesota and Montana. Karma, destiny, or random chance propelled me through many diverse adventures to the doors of a small Vivekananda monastery near the shores of Lake Michigan. After a week of early morning and evening prayer and daily hard work with the mostly young brothers who were there, I was almost ready to sign up.

Vivekananda was a Hindu teacher, one of Ramakrishna’s main disciples. He attended the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago and was a great popularizer of Hinduism in the West and a great believer in the unity of all religions. From my brief time at the monastery, I remember three tenants: 1) our basic nature is divine, 2) the goal of this life is to realize that divinity, and 3) there are many paths (religions) toward that goal. It was the perfect path for an enthusiastic Presbyterian minister’s son who had been gently radicalized by the fringes of the ‘peace and love’ movement in the ’60s, touched by some depth of feeling through living in Japan for a year, influenced by a Marxist professor’s interpretation of Jesus’ anti-establishment message of liberation, and had had a personal experience of oneness on an LSD trip that the Christian ministers and priests he encountered did not seem to understand.

I felt at home with the rag-tag mix of mystics and drop-outs I encountered at the apple-farm monastery. I knew in my heart that this seeking of God, no matter what we call her, is the most important thing in this life. But I also knew that I was afraid to return to my ‘ordinary life’ and, being somewhat of a purist, decided that fear of the ‘real world’ was not a good reason to cloister myself. I returned to college for a wild senior year that involved a series of challenges (including multiple girlfriends) about how to integrate my glimpse of oneness into the complexity and ambiguity of daily life.

I found little support from spiritual teachers that year. My biggest teacher was someone I never met: anthropologist Joseph Campbell. His book, HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, was given to me by a sympathetic, agnostic Jewish professor of sociology. The main teaching I took from Campbell, aside from his agreement with Vivekananda’s position on multiple authentic paths, was his observation that the hero’s journey is not complete until he comes down from the top of the mountain, back into daily life. The hero’s job is to bring the gift of her vision of God/Dharma/Life back to everyone through integrating what she has experienced into her everyday life.

It’s hard to leave the mountaintop, but since it’s impossible to stay, we don’t really have much choice. I have drifted away from my initial affiliation with the Christian church, but remain deeply inspired and touched by authentic Judeo-Christian teachings. When Jesus encourages us to be ‘in the world but not of it’, I hear him speaking to me. Separating myself from the world has never been my path, something about the challenge of the complexity of it all has seemed to be the point.

So, once again this morning, I vow to remember that the one most important thing is life itself. Through all the activity of daily life, the unnamable source of life itself is present. Getting things done is just a wonderful game we humans have invented to order to pass the time. May each thing I do today be an expression of my love and gratitude for the impossible miracle of just being alive.

New Work

Abandoning the pointed lance
of their winter darkness,
the beech leaves leap
quietly into plain view—
still small and feathery
as they commence
their mighty seasonal
work of nourishment.