Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

August 15, 2023

Live righteously and love everyone.

—tag on a Yogi Tea bag

#32 Constant Transformation 

“Impermanence and selflessness are not negative aspects of life, but the very foundation on   which life is built. Impermanence is the constant transformation of things. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Selflessness is the interdependent nature of all things. Without interdependence, nothing could exist.”—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

A couple of things have happened in the last year or so that make this #32 of Constant Transformation jump out at me:

#1: I have a neighbor who uses people. It’s one thing to ask for favors and then offer some form of thanks or reciprocation—-no problem with that. This neighbor offers nothing, and often just asks for more. I have been very ticked off about this. Years ago she asked me to ‘just swing by and water my geraniums. You’ll be walking Lolo anyway, right?’ Okay, sure. But this meant  watering 40 geraniums, several times a week—for five months! While she was in Arizona! So I did. In return, she gave me five lemons from her tree in Scottsdale. I did this for two years, with no small amount of growing resentment and internal grumbling, and then I politely but firmly refused, feeling really taken advantage of. This last year she asked again, and for some reason I said yes. This time I started admiring the bright red blooms in the pale, midwinter light. I rubbed the leaves with my fingers and smelled their pungent flavor. It took me back to my dad’s geraniums and gave me sweet memories of him and my mom. It became a welcome task to take care of the geraniums, and when she returned, with five more lemons, I thanked her gratefully for brightening up my wintertime. Because she did!

Second transformation: I love to hike. I love burbling streams, mossy banks, nodding trilliums, dark green branches of massive tree trunks.  Oh no! Another bag of dog poop left at the foot of that tree! What is wrong with you people?!?!?! If you’re going to bring your dog, pick up your damned poop bags on the way out! Honestly, I know you know it’s there. You just decided it’s no big deal to leave it. Snarl, snarl, grumble, fume. The beauty fades and all I can think is…being pissed off! Well, what’s the point of that?

So one day I picked up the bag of poop and carried it out. I attached it to the rear windshield wiper of my car and took it home where I tossed it in the garbage can. Maybe they just didn’t see it when they were hiking out. You never know. Next time I picked up another bag. Somebody saw me carrying it and thanked me for carrying my dog’s poop bag out of the woods. Oh, it’s not my dog’s, it was just left on the trail, I said. You’re a saint, they said. Oh no, I murmured, modestly. 

But aside from sort of feeling like a saint, I felt good about helping keep my beautiful woods clean. I kept thinking that you don’t know, maybe people do just forget or can’t find their dog’s poop bag. So I can help out and kind of keep things beautiful for me and for other hikers. 

That was a couple of years ago, and now I do it all the time. I’m a little bit miffed that nobody’s called me a saint again, but I still get a good feeling when I see the clean and beautiful woods. 

Complete transformation.

—Jude Russell

*

Jude, you’re a saint! 

—(from the Editor)

*

                   Artificial Light

By bulbs and wires, porch lights insult dusk,

streetlights thieve stars from children, headlights

stab haste deep into wounded night.

By day, I squint by the pallor of false explanation,

the sickly glow of lies claiming illumination

while casting artificial darkness everywhere.

This light blinds my mind. I seek real dark,

no human spark’s denial. I need thin shoes

finding my path by feel, night stars, grope touch,

earth sleep, nocturnal dreams, then dawn.

—Kim Stafford   8-11-2023

*

Not Yet

A connoisseur of hands

(because hers are crippled)

said when looking at his

that they are the most beautiful

she had yet seen.

The fact that they will leave

this world soon may have had

something to do with this impression.

A glint of silver flashes as fish

leap headlong

out of the river into the sky.

—Elizabeth Domike

*

Midsummer night dreaming

It’s heating up—the Sun is beaming up there during the day. But the night sky is also fully alive with shooting stars. I’m sleeping outside to watch the Perseid meteor shower at its peak. It’s a new moon so a black sky, no clouds or rain to block the view. I know it can sometimes make us feel insignificant looking at the cold stars, but tonight I feel expansive, to be alive and witness the amazing cosmos. The cooling breeze makes me feel in tune with the cedar trees and the birch that surround our home. Even though there is only a narrow strip of sky, I can see the big dipper’s handle and there was one long streak of shooting star that seemed to welcome me to the party. I’m cooling down, slowing down. 

I relate to this poem of Wendell Berry’s and am lucky to live where I can go out and lay down in the wild.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

—Wendell Berry

Dreaming about and longing for summer’s past, hiking in the snow-capped mountains, along fresh creeks we could drink from, having a young adult body with knees that could easily let me jump from boulder to boulder up McCord Creek in the Gorge.

Impermanence and desires – Thinking of Hermia and her many changing desires that are befuddling and too rapid. Finally they are debilitating, all these loves won then lost, until her legs fail her. This seems like a good Buddhist story. How important it is to not cling and be swept away, to slow down and enjoy what there is here now. To stop running after things till our legs give out.

I like the quiet implied in Wendell Berry’s poem. There aren’t sounds after the first one that wakes him. And so I lie down outside when the traffic has stopped and I can hear the soothing wind in the trees and the silent stars that I know are always there.

I hope you all stay cool somehow and enjoy Midsummer Night dreaming.

—Katie Radditz

*

In this excerpt from Centuries of Meditations, Thomas Traherne gives an account of how he experienced the world when he was a child:

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish properties, nor bounds, nor divisions: but all properties and divisions were mine: all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

—Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, Third Century, Meditation #3

—Johnny Stallings

*

Understanding Makes Compassion Possible (pt. 1)

Understanding is the substance out of which we fabricate compassion. What kind of understanding…? It’s the understanding that the other person suffers too. When we suffer, we tend to believe we’re the victims of others, that we are the only ones who suffer. This is not true—the other person also suffers. If we could only see the pain within him, we would begin to understand him. Once understanding is present, compassion becomes possible….The other person may be an inmate like us, or a guard. If we look, we can see there is a lot of suffering within him. Maybe he doesn’t know how to handle his suffering. Maybe he allows his suffering to grow…and this makes him and other people around him suffer. So with this kind of awareness or mindfulness, you begin to understand, and understanding will give rise to your compassion. With compassion in you, you will suffer much less, and you will be motivated by a desire to do something—or not do something—so the other person suffers less. Your way of looking or smiling at him may help him suffer less….

—Thich Nhat Hanh 

(This might be from the book Be Free Where You Are, which is the record of a talk he gave at the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown—Ed.)

Sometimes I struggle to want to allow compassion for some to develop. Is it unreasonable to want those who (seem to deliberately) cultivate the means of suffering for others to have even more suffering—because their actions show their mis-managed suffering? I guess the answer is in the question: If they have more, then they will pass on more—hurt people hurt people. How sad this is, that our world, with all the advancements, can’t evolve (communally) past the concerns of toddler-hood. Such as, basic safety and hurting others to express our own pain. This was revealed for me in For Your Own Good and some other books Johnny shared with me. Compassion seems to be the path out, and mindful awareness is the key unlocking the gate thereto.

—Michel Deforge