Fiery-throated Hummingbird

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

January 2, 2025

 

Swiftly the years, beyond recall,

Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.

I will clothe myself in spring-clothing,

And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.

By the mountain-stream a mist hovers,

Hovers a moment, then scatters.

There comes a wind blowing from the south

That brushes the fields of new corn.

 

—T’ao Ch’ien (365-427 A.D.), translated by Arthur Waley, from Zen In English Literature and Oriental Classics by R. H. Blyth

*

 

I Believe Nothing…

 

I believe nothing—what need

Surrounded as I am with marvels of what is,

This familiar room, books, shabby carpet on the floor,

Autumn yellow jasmine, crysanthemums, my mother, my mother’s flower,

Earth-scent of memories, daily miracles,

Yet media-people ask, ‘Is there a God?’

What does the word mean

To the fish in his ocean, birds

In his skies, and stars?

 

I only know that when I turn in sleep

Into the invisible, it seems

I am upheld by love, and what seems is

Inexplicable here and now of joy and sorrow,

This inexhaustible, untidy world—

I would not have it otherwise.

 

—Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)

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Joyas Voladoras

 

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

 

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

 

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

 

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

 

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

 

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

 

—Brian Doyle (1956-2017), published in The American Scholar, June 12, 2012, and in One Long River of Song. a collection of his essays 

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Here’s a New Year’s essay by Michael Meade:

 

Finding Ways to Begin Anew

 

Although there can be no quick fix for all that troubles the world at this time, the aim of traditional New Year rites was to end the reign of the old year in order to begin everything anew. The idea was to follow the course of nature in which the world descends into darkness before the light and the energy of life begin to return.

 

The old idea was not simply the turning over of a calendar, but the understanding that a capacity for transformation and regeneration resides at the heart of nature, at the center of the cosmos and in the heart of humanity as well. The point was not to be naive and deny problems that must be faced, but to return to the origins of creation and symbolically participate in the capacity of life to renew itself.

 

For, small and insignificant as we may increasingly feel, we carry within our souls a spark that is connected to the galaxies and to the origins of creation. On one hand we are time bound, on the other we are secretly tied to eternal things that transcend the limits of time and space. By symbolically participating in the dissolution of time, ancient people were temporarily delivered from their faults and failings and had their original life potential restored.

 

Although this primordial sense of rejuvenation and renewal does not remove suffering or injustice from the world, it becomes more important if we are to avoid overwhelm and navigate the chaotic and exhausting times in which we live.

 

We live amidst a shattering of paradigms that radically alter familiar patterns in both nature and culture. As the future of the Earth itself becomes increasingly uncertain the search for genuine knowledge begins with accepting the sense that we truly do not know what the New Year might bring. To find the kinds of insight and wisdom we most need, we must accept the condition of “not knowing” that parallels the uncertainty and darkness that appear before creation occurs.

 

Inside all stuck situations there is a deep vulnerability that can lead to a release of unexpected imagination and inspired ideas. In Zen Buddhist traditions the practice of shoshin translates as “beginner’s mind.” Shoshin begins where received ideas and accepted patterns are left behind as an innate capacity to awaken from within begins with “not knowing.” The open and humble attitude of a beginner makes us less likely to simply repeat old patterns of behavior.

 

While those who claim to be able to solve the complex problems we face may claim dogmatic certainty, the openness of the beginner is more likely to find the true nature of a situation. A principle idea of shoshin is that in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. Thus, beginner’s mind offers a particular kind of wisdom based upon a willingness to be at the edge where life remains open to many possibilities and unrealized potentials.

 

In keeping with the sense of many possibilities, the ancient term for beginner’s mind has more than one meaning. Shoshin can also mean something or someone that conveys “genuine truth.” Thus, it can refer to a work of art or a person that is genuine and not a fake or an imitation. When we draw from the root of our deeper self, we become more authentic and able to act in alignment with the inner spirit and the genuine aim of our souls.

 

As a practice, beginner’s mind can also involve the sense of forgiveness. For only when we forgive ourselves for mistakes and misdeeds can we let go of the ties that bind us and be released from the need to repeat the mistakes of the past. In that sense, not knowing, being open to change and forgiving ourselves and others turn out to be key ingredients in seeking to rejuvenate, start anew and be able to imagine and contribute to a better world.

 

Something ancient and knowing is trying to catch up to us and being fully present when a moment in time breaks open to unseen possibilities depends upon practices like beginner’s mind that help us to be authentic and original and able to start anew. In being more open and forgiving we become more able to unlock untapped capacities for creativity, flexibility, and resilience.

 

In the open moments of life we become connected to the heart of nature again and can sense what the ancients meant in saying that all of life is sacred; and all that can be a grace in the world and at the edge of every moment.

 

We at Mosaic wish for you and for all of us, that we might allow ourselves to be touched by the eternal, be blessed by the sacred and become more able to help with the healing healing of the Earth and each other.

 

—Michael Meade (https://www.mosaicvoices.org/)

*

 

News from Rocky Hutchinson: 

11/24/24

 

Dear Johnny & Nancy

I’m getting ready for work right now & it is a nice, quiet morning. The sun has not yet cracked the sky, but it’s looking like a beautiful Autumn day, my favorite time of year. Nature is at its most alluring time for me, all the colors fading and changing, pushing out all of the fragrances. Birds nesting in the windows, spiders spinning their webs, beauty in everything I see.

The best time for me, the very best things are friends & family & food….

 

12/10/24

 

Okay, several more days down, I’m sorry I got caught up in all the Alcohol & Drug packets. They are much easier to do, due to the fact that I want to live clean and sober. I’m not fighting it in any way. So to me it’s all positive trinkets I’m picking up while walking along the golden path.

It is very early here & besides myself there are only two others awake, such a peaceful time of morning. Between the hours of 4:30 & 5:30 A.M….Ahhh, so nice! It is so could out (27°) and the fog is so thick that it is billowing on the windows like some scene out of a vampire movie, it is really quite cool. Our world is such a mysterious place & so beautiful. I’m in a condemned mental hospital that is now a maximum prison, engulfed in vampire fog! LOL

Today I will work on the big turtle I’m drawing. From here on out I will be keeping all of my works for my place to hang on my walls….

I received “peace, love,  happiness & understanding” from the Open Road yesterday. They warm the heart always. I also got four Christmas cards. That’s the most I’ve received in quite a long time! The kindness I can feel in my soul is such a gift & in only a few months I will be able to reciprocate “all” of it with everyone in a normal social way!

When I do my emotional & personal & mental evaluations I’ve started to realize that my capacity to obtain, accept & reciprocate goodness can be done in volume & on a calm level, with a depth of sincerity that I can only describe as…peaceful harmony…like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It’s supposed to be good! I have this ability now because I have no more anger or resentments using up space in me any longer.

One of the many things I’m looking forward to is to engage in positive social settings. I’m a little worried that people might be scared of me. I hope that’s not the case & I’m sure it won’t be, but once people get to know me they will find out that I’m really a nice guy, smart & funny! I’m dying to be in a greater social setting!

 

12/12/24

4:35 a.m.

 

….Another thing I’m really excited about doing is going to an arts & crafts store to get supplies for drawing!!! All that COOL stuff! Man, that’s going to be fun!

Time to get this into the mail box!

 

Love & Light

Rocky

*

 

A Reverie

 

A cozy fire in the library.

Up in the ballroom

just a bed and the faint winter

light through leaded glass.

 

Out in the gulch the vines

twine around bare branches

of scrub trees, furry seed pods,

cotton against the rain.

 

In preparation, rusted parts of things long

forgotten grace willow arrangements

in chic salons with terracotta floors.

Men walk by. Smile half smiles.

 

Everyone dreams of the sun,

long bare legs, smell of land.

But now, there is tea and ceremony.

Musicians assemble in the drawing room.

 

Soon the Bach will ache and set us down

in the white dewed ground

as if we inhabited the heartbreak

reflected in the garden pool at midnight.

 

 

—Elizabeth Domike