Four bodhisattvas!: Brenda Erickson, Dick Willis, Jude Russell & Jack Baird

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

November 11, 2021

Beginning My Studies

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,

The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,

The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,

The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,

I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,

But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

—Walt Whitman

My Recipe for Living a Life Rich in Meaning

What I would like to do in this essay is to provide some clues as to how to find your way to the Golden World, and live there. This is my recipe. You have to create your own. That’s part of the fun. Make the most of the fact that there has never been and will never be another you. 

To live a life rich in meaning, the first thing is to have that as an aspiration. A much more common goal in our society is simply to get rich. Rich in money and rich in meaning are not the same thing. My basic idea is: Since life is short and each day is precious, I want to BLESS THIS DAY. 

There is not some other day to be happy. Today is the day.

Some of the ingredients that make my life rich in meaning include: love, silence, books, friends, creativity, gratitude and being helpful to others.

We all need to love and be loved. One of my constant aspirations is to become a more loving person. We learn to love by loving and being loved. I have the extreme good fortune to be living with Nancy, who loves me and who I love. We’ve been living together for 15 years. We’re nuts about each other. Every day together is a good day. 

Nancy and I got together when I was 55 years old. Since I was single at the time, it means that all of my previous efforts to be in a loving relationship had not worked out, and yet I learned a lot about loving from each of them.

There is also Big Love—unconditional love for everyone and everything. Being in a loving relationship is one aspect of living in love. It nurtures and strengthens the bigger project of loving everyone, of loving life. I don’t know exactly how or why it worked out this way, but having a three-hour meaning-of-life dialogue every week for many years with a dozen or more friends in prison did a lot to open my heart. It made me softer. I cry more than most men do. In those prison circles, we opened ourselves to each other. This gave everyone in the circle many blessings. We humans need each other more than we know. Our potential for loving has no limit.

Peace is something that is not given much attention in our society. By “peace” I mean here “inner peace”—what the Bible calls “the peace which passeth understanding.” My introduction to peace as a value to aspire to came from Indian yogis. First from books by J. Krishnamurti and Paramanhansa Yogananda, then from spending time with two teachers I had when I was in my twenties, Nataraja Guru and Nitya Chaitanya Yati.

Meditation and mindfulness are essential ingredients in my recipe for living a life rich in meaning—the most essential. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without them. More miserable, for sure. They provide the foundation for whatever peace and love and happiness and freedom I have. It feels to me like I have a lot of those things. Every day of my life is filled with blessings. As I look around, everything appears miraculous to me. I am thankful for my human life on earth.

My Paradise is a library. I live surrounded by books. Each one is a world. Some of the authors and even some of the fictional characters are among my closest friends. I love Walt Whitman and Alice, who has adventures in Wonderland and through the Looking-Glass. I hated school. As soon as I dropped out of college, I began to read whatever I wanted to. I read widely, going from subject to subject and author to author as the mood strikes me. I get endless pleasure from this. As for living a life rich in meaning, there is no building more packed with meaning, from floor to ceiling, than a library. My own library contains a lot of books by people who are especially good on the subject of living a meaningful life. Some of my favorites, to whom, I return again and again, include: Thich Nhat Hanh, Susan Griffin, Joseph Campbell, Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman, J. Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Hafiz, William Shakespeare, Ramana Maharshi, Shunryu Suzuki, Lao Tzu, Thomas Traherne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Han Shan. It’s a much longer list, but these are some of the people whose writings most reliably enrich my life.

Friends enrich my life. If I look at my life, it appears that my vocation is gathering people together. For many years, I would make waffles at my house (or apartment) every Sunday and have somewhere around 2o people come over. For thirteen years I had a weekly dialogue group at a prison with around 16 people sitting in a circle and talking about—guess what!—how to live a life rich in meaning. The original title of the dialogue group was: The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Our Thinking Shapes Our Lives. I love this kind of deep dialogue. I like to get together with friends for coffee or tea—often one-on-one—and talk about everything under the sun, but especially about what is most important, or essential, or meaningful to us in that moment. During the current pandemic, when it has been harder to get together with others, I’ve done a lot of videoconferencing on Zoom.

There are well-worn roads of religious belief and practice that one might go down, but the only way I know through first-hand experience, is to create your own path by following your heart’s desire. I suspect that even if one chooses one of those well-travelled roads, each person must find their own unique way of knowing, believing and practicing that tradition.

In addition to religious belief and practice, some people live lives rich in meaning by devoting themselves to Art: theater, music, poetry, dance, painting—not to mention other arts, like gardening, cooking, woodworking, knitting, filmmaking, et cetera. My friend Abe goes hiking, skiing and camping in the Montana wilderness. He takes beautiful photos of some of the things he sees. He reports that his journeys give him great joy.

Creativity enriches our lives in mysterious ways. Theater is a realm in which I have had many adventures, as an actor and director. I haven’t given myself fully to an art form in the way that some of my art heroes have: Bill T. Jones, Ushio Amagatsu, Peter Schumann, Wes Anderson, Tom Waits, Susan Griffin, Rick Bartow—to name a few. One of my current role models is the fictional character Ted Lasso. I want to be more like him!

I’ve done some writing, and would like to do more. I’ve written some essays, poems, short stories and theater pieces. I’ve kept a journal for fifty years. The journal has helped me to better understand my life journey. I also use it as a tool to help me find my way to the Golden World every morning.

Helping others is another thing that enriches our life and gives meaning to it. Life is short. It often seems to me that the world’s problems are large, I am puny, and whatever I do won’t make much of a difference in the Big Picture. One of the things I tell myself when I’m having those thoughts, is that one kind act makes a whole life worthwhile. Everyone enjoys being helpful, when an opportunity arises. I know some people who don’t wait—they are always finding ways to help someone. I’m thinking of Brenda Erickson, Dick Willis, Jude Russell and Jack Baird. Bodhisattvas all!

Following your heart’s desire may sound selfish, but it’s important to distinguish between selfishness and self-care. I have often reminded my friends in prison that self-care is Job One. I remind them of this when they get out of prison, for there are many challenges outside prison walls as well. Because our life is short and each day is precious, we should be able to bless each day—to be thankful that we have a human life on earth. That’s another not-so-secret ingredient in my recipe for living a life rich in meaning: gratitude. At the most basic level, the difference between complaining and giving thanks is the difference between Hell and Heaven.

Which brings me to another important thing that I wanted to include in my recipe—coming to understand that every day, from moment to moment, we create the world in which we live. The stories we tell ourselves are our world. It’s important to distinguish between the world and my world, as Wittgenstein pointed out long ago. The world includes everything that has ever happened, and everything that is happening right now. It is beyond our ken, not only because it is so vast, but because it is changing from moment to moment. My world is the world as I experience it and understand it and know it and feel it, from moment to moment. At times, I may feel powerless to change the world, but I can be sovereign of my inner world and how I process my experience. A happy person lives in a friendly world. An angry person lives in a world full of assholes. A person who lives in love, lives in love.

This is not to deny or minimize, even for a moment, the vast amount of injustice and suffering that is always going on in the world. Right now, there are many places in our world where food is scarce and machine guns are plentiful. This is not acceptable, since all children are our children. Each of us must do what we can to make this world a better place for all our human, animal and plant friends, for all the rivers and forests and ecologies of every kind. 

Peace and love and joy and freedom and gratitude and beauty and wisdom are all intrinsically good for us. Where self-care comes in is by nurturing these qualities in ourselves, so that we can bring them to every encounter we have with each other, with all beings and with our Mother Earth.

Well, that’s about what I’ve got this morning as far as a recipe goes for living a life rich in meaning. I have a very limited repertoire. Apologies to pen pals, readers of this journal, and other friends who have heard me say all this before.

—Johnny Stallings