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SUMMARY:peace\, love\, happiness & understanding  1/5/23
DESCRIPTION:Gertrude Stein (by Picasso) \n  \nTHE OPEN ROAD \npeace\, love\, happiness & understanding \n  \nJanuary 5\, 2023 \n  \nSo now to come to the real question of punctuation\, periods\, commas\, colons\, semi-colons and capitals and small letters. I have had a long and complicated life with all these. \n—Gertrude Stein\, Lectures in America\, 1935 \n  \nA Carafe in Bb Major \nby Alex Tretbar (Guest Editor) \n  \n“The difference is spreading.” \n  \nLast night I sat down to read the final pages of Gertrude Stein’s small\, strange book Tender Buttons. I don’t use bookmarks\, as I’m usually able to quickly identify where I left off. I remembered reading the section titled “Cups” on page 49 of my edition\, but I saw nothing familiar in the following subsection\, “Rhubarb\,” which consists of a single sentence: “Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.” So I read “Rhubarb” and moved on. \n  \nThe book is divided into three parts: “Objects\,” “Food\,” and “Rooms.” On page 60 I read “A Center in a Table\,” the final section of “Food\,” then turned the page and began “Rooms\,” which begins as follows: \n  \nAct so that there is no use in a center. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation. \n  \nThat initial imperative —“Act so that there is no use in a center”—rang through me in such a way that I knew I wasn’t reading or hearing it for the first time\, and the heavy declarative statement that concludes the paragraph—“There was an occupation”—struck me with the ghostly certainty of déjà vu (“already seen”)\, or\, more accurately\, déjà lu (“already read”). \n  \nI read eleven pages of Tender Buttons on the evening of December 21st\, then read the same eleven pages again on the evening of December 22nd\, remembering none of them until reaching “Rooms.” How could I read so many pages before stumbling across a certain phrasing or arrangement of words that would seem to indicate I had read them before\, and recently? The answer is not that Tender Buttons is forgettable. The answer is that Tender Buttons is slippery. As Juliana Spahr writes\, it is “a book always in the process of being read over and over.” It acts as if there is no use in a center. \n  \n“Lying in a conundrum…” \n  \nI served 64 months in the Oregon prison system\, and was released on July 22nd\, 2022. I spent the final ten days of my sentence in quarantine\, in the hole\, and I had made grand literary plans for those ten days. In my luggage of plastic trash bags\, alongside a half jar of coffee and other essentials\, I had stowed a stack of poetry collections\, anthologies\, and magazines\, and I was looking forward to the 240 hours of unfettered reading. I didn’t bring any fiction\, save for the handful of short stories sprinkled throughout the magazines\, and I came to regret that decision. \n  \nNow\, it wasn’t ten days of traditional segregation: I had all of my canteen luxuries\, I was granted time each day for phone calls and microwaving\, and the general vibe was not punitive. Plus\, after all\, my prison sentence was about to end. But the pressure cooker of the cell came to seem like the anteroom between hell and heaven\, despite my knowing that prison isn’t (necessarily) hell\, and liberty isn’t (necessarily) heaven. I continued waking up at 5\, drinking cold tap water coffee\, and reading and writing\, but the onslaught of poetry’s nonstop ellipsis\, misdirection and elusion/allusion began to erode my ability to pass the hours calmly. I thought of Ezra Pound slowly losing it\, writing his lonely Cantos in the oblivion of St. Elizabeths. I craved narrative: A then B\, so C. I wanted fiction. Characters doing things\, and things happening to characters. Undreamlike causation. \n  \nOne of the books I brought with me was an issue of Fonograf Editions\, and on its cover was a pink and purple abstraction “indebted to [the Russian painter Kasimir] Malevich’s Suprematist artistic vision\, one that believed that ‘the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.’” But in that ten-day moment before release\, I was sick of the avant-garde\, sick of abstraction\, and sick of poetry. I wanted objects—like a milk carton passed through a hole in a metal door—to appear familiar. Tender Buttons may have been a torturous book to possess at that time. \n  \nImages brand our spirits\, and the twin sigils of the final cell I lived in were: \n  \n \n  \n \nYes\, a ridiculous pairing\, but I believe that there is no highbrow\, no lowbrow. There is only brow\, and beneath it the all-seeing eye through which we witness our lives. \n  \n“Nickel\, what is nickel…” \n  \nStein renders the familiar unfamiliar. Her prose poems (if you can call them that\, if you can call them anything at all) approach “A Table” or “A Shawl” from unexpected angles\, with grammatically impenetrable constructions\, and for this reason her work is often cited as bearing the Cubist torch into literature. Here is the first and most famous piece from Tender Buttons\, titled “A Carafe\, that is a Blind Glass”: \n  \nA kind in glass and a cousin\, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary\, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. \n  \nWhat are we to make of this? Tender Buttons has engendered much academic handwringing and dissection over the past century\, and you are not alone if\, in reading the above excerpt\, you find yourself shaking your head or scoffing. Perhaps the most agreed-upon facet of Tender Buttons is that we can agree upon nothing when regarding it. It is an object “simultaneously considered to be a masterpiece of verbal Cubism\, a modernist triumph\, a spectacular failure\, a collection of confusing gibberish\, and an intentional hoax.” Like Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time\, the book “is perhaps more often written about than actually read” (Poets.org). \n  \nAnd yet I recommend that everyone read it. Unlike the behemoth works of Joyce or Proust\, it can be read in a single evening or two\, and there is no constellation of characters and motives and histories to keep straight. There are few\, if any\, people in Tender Buttons (personal pronouns are haunting in their rare surfacing)\, and nothing really happens. But there is music\, and undeniable passion—even be it bridled or obscured by syntax. Just look at those first seven words of the book: “A kind in glass and a cousin.” Never mind what it “meant” to Stein\, or what it “means” to me. It is just a beautiful arrangement of\, as Coleridge defined poetry\, “the best words in the best order.” The poet Charles Bernstein has provided some of the best advice for readers of Tender Buttons\, and it is worth quoting him at length: \n  \nThe sections of the work are not “about” subjects that are discussed but are their own discrete word objects (verbal constellations). Meaning in these works is not something to be extracted or deciphered but rather to be responded to\, so that the reader’s associations create a cascading perceptual experience\, guided by the uncanny arrangement of the words. The more readers can associate with the multiple vectors of each word or phrase meanings\, the more fully they can feast on the unfolding semantic banquet of the work. The key is not to puzzle it out but to let the figurative plenitude of each work play out; for\, indeed\, this work is not invested in a predetermining structure or in precluding or abstracting meaning. Tender Buttons does not resist figuration but entices it. And the work is rife with linguistic and philosophical investigation as well as an uncannily acute self-awareness of its own processes. \n  \n“A letter was nicely sent.” \n  \nI was exhibiting an uncannily acute self-awareness of my own processes. (Have you ever felt clairvoyant in the knowledge that you know what you are about to do? Is it not strange that\, before we go to pick up the plastic mug of cold predawn coffee\, we know that we are about to pick up the plastic mug of cold predawn coffee? And even if we decide\, in auto-rebellion\, not to pick up the mug\, we construct a new future the knowledge of which is instantaneously and irrevocably ours—until we change our minds again. I used to take drugs\, I think\, for a simple reason: I didn’t want to know what happened next. I wanted to be surprised.) \n  \nAlas\, in a single afternoon of quarantine I devoured the handful of short stories available to me\, and once again I was left with poetry\, the desolation of my processes\, my circuits and orbits and feedback loops. For five years I had been invested in a predetermined structure\, and that structure was beginning to dissolve. Reading poems—whether they were straightforwardly narrative or relentlessly experimental—repulsed me\, and so did writing them. \n  \nThe last letter I sent from prison contained the last poem I wrote in prison. Ironically or perhaps not\, it was a letter to someone living in the same building as me\, another prisoner. Distance is often nonphysical. Here’s the poem:  \n  \nSpecial Features \n  \nthere isn’t a thing to say \nso close to the relinquished \nlight of a star \n                         what really comprises the common dust \n                         of living rooms & cells \n                                                                 panting \n                                                                 panting \n                                    the television is panting \n                                 is \n               underwater \n                 with grief \nI look what I think is west \nis west it’s hard to tell \n      amid so many competing surfaces \n      amid \n      amid \namid absent flowers & oxidized materials \nyou can oversanitize to the point where everything becomes \n                                                                         is permanently \n                                                                         clean \n                         & the action movie soundtrack \n                         convinces me of climax \n                         a nonexistent curtain falls \n           the show is \n              the story is over   /   I am asleep \n                in the deleted scenes of my life \n  \nTo me—the writer of this poem who had forgotten its contents until now\, digging through my notebooks\, reading it now with the privilege of distance—the poem reeks of wordsickness. But it’s okay to be sick of words. Even the sun can make us sneeze. \n  \n“Book was there\, it was there.” \n  \nA pink is not of vitamin\, is it. Smaller \nand smalling. What recedes fortifies \nand running now\, a mauve. Crossing \na street requiring friends in need of. \nWe are not a wobble. We nosy. Let us \nconsider longing now the ultimate form. \n  \nOr\, as my friend Irene Cooper puts it: \n  \nno commas \n~for GS & ABT \n  \npop buttons pop projections of rimming. collect the close & closings tendered against the winded heart. red petals the threaded plain & some cleavage is rising. plastics are crashing are the rain sugaring the cavity are a red tempest in a chest. in closure some button slips its absence & is too much is intolerable is undone & so open. open.  \n  \nOr\, as my friend Laura Winberry puts it: \n  \nthe buttons are as tender as we make them \n  \n[essayistic interpretations of cubism in non-prosaic form\, in conversation with Miss Stein] \n  \na trach tube is or isn’t a direct pathway to living \n(well or at all). so is a catheter\, a pic line\, a drip \nlike a bright sweep through the body every eight \nhours or so. \n  \nit doesn’t all have to be so tragic. we see \nthings and beings through to some kind of end \nthen start again. so many moments are synonymous \nwith continue. \n  \nwhen mom asides about the new nurse I think \nhe’s born-again Christian as if he were \nalso diseased he’s too neat—I laugh. \n  \nafter a night in his tender she admits to being wrong— \nhe’s lovely and my buddy let me tell you his life story. \n  \nthe subject seen from a multitude of viewpoints \ncrescendos into a tenderness of context. what was once \nangular\, disjointed\, rearranged \nbecomes whole. \n  \nI think what I mean to say is multi \n-dimensional\, -faceted\, -plying as in \nnothing is ever what it seems. \n  \nI don’t yet know how to call this tender\, \nbut something in my body \ntells me I will. \n  \nOr\, as the late Trish Keenan of the band Broadcast puts it\, in the song “Tender Buttons”: \n  \nThe cortex \nThe comb \nThe codeine \nThe comma \nThe context \n  \nSuch is Stein’s influence. And the funny thing is that when I first came across that unlikely pair of words—“tender” and “buttons”—it wasn’t in the form of Stein’s book. It was the Broadcast song\, a complicatedly hopeful acoustic-electric drone in the key of B-flat major. \n  \nThe website Last.fm allows users to log the songs they listen to on their computers and mobile devices\, and this evening I performed a search of my account\, which I created in 2006. I searched for “Tender Buttons\,” and found that I listened to the song for the first time at 12:38 p.m. on October 22\, 2009\, 14 days after my 20th birthday. According to Wunderground.com\, it was 54 degrees Fahrenheit in Lawrence\, Kansas\, at that very moment\, the sky was cloudy\, and the wind was blowing around 15 miles per hour from the north-northwest. I was probably stoned on that 295th day of the Gregorian calendar\, a Thursday\, skipping class and lazing on the green couch of a flophouse attic. \n  \nIf I remember correctly\, I was heartbroken at that time\, and I would spend many hours by the attic window\, watching the leaves of a great tree tremble in the wind. It was years before I knew who Gertrude Stein was\, a time when my addiction was still like a kitten: small and manageable\, asleep and purring\, contained within my palm. \n  \nThe codeine\, the comma\, the context. \n  \nStein’s Enigmas \nby Kim Stafford \n  \nTender Buttons has been called the stuff of genius\, and of intentional obfuscation. Nothing but an utterly original mind could produce such a range of response. Gertrude Stein once said of Paris\, it’s not so much what it gives you—it’s what it doesn’t take away. Paris clearly didn’t take away Stein’s almost childish instinct for feral experimentation\, and readers have been struggling and reveling ever since in what her pen splashed forth. \n  \n     For a reader\, Tender Buttons offers a challenge\, a series of jokes\, secrets\, a scatter of debris\, a net of clues\, hints\, hunches\, all with a rich dose of affection for true freedom of speech. \n  \n     For a writer\, the lessons are many\, and a bit different. First off\, the lines in her book seem to say\, apart from what they are saying\, or not saying: Go your own weird way. The lines are presenting evidence that language belongs to each of us\, and all of us\, and none of us. Language\, by Stein’s witness\, is a freakish\, frisky\, irreverent rush of possibility\, not to be imprisoned by any grammarian’s so-called rules. Yes\, such freedom by a writer may lose some readers\, but may also gain the fierce loyalty of some others.  \n  \n     A printer friend was meeting with a poet to talk about designing a broadside for a poem. Said the printer\, “Wouldn’t it be easier to read if you arranged the lines this way\, instead of what you have?” \n    “I’m a poet\,” was the reply. “Is my goal to make things easy?” \n    “Ah\,” said the printer. “You taught me something there.” \n  \n    And Stein’s book\, over a century old\, is still teaching us something\, perhaps a different set of lessons for each reader who makes it through the book. What the book seems to want to teach me is to question my practice\, when I’m in danger of making too much sense and too little music. To question my goal when I’m trying to persuade instead of sing. To question my purpose on earth when I’m relying on the rational instead of birdsong. \n  \n     I can’t do what Stein has done—or can I? Is it just that I haven’t tried? What’s to stop me from breaking the rules I’ve followed so obediently for so many years\, to stop me from achieving escape velocity from the firmament of the clear\, the cogent\, and the utterly tamed? \n  \n   Some years ago at a conference for artists\, the Indigenous old-time folk singer Buffy St. Marie was to give a talk\, and I thought\, foolishly\, that she would coast along on her former fame\, maybe play a few classics\, and be done. Instead\, she sang ideas at us with fierceness that stunned me. Among many calls to trust our own way as artists\, she used a word I had only associated with the fight for Indigenous rights. She told us an artist must maintain complete sovereignty over what we do and how we do it\, saying\, this is my poem\, song\, painting…this is my language\, my tune\, my colors…and the way I do what I do belongs to me. \n  \n   Last summer\, I met a pine tree in Scotland\, alone on a hill\, its trunk crooked\, its branches quirky\, lopsided\, eccentric in the extreme. It was more ruin in wood than civilized for the lumber trade. Perhaps it had been left alone when they cut the others\, simply because it managed to be strange.  \n  \n     In the tree’s presence\, I found myself jamming words together with maybe 5% of the freedom of a Gertrude Stein\, but still more in keeping with the tree before me than what I might have written without my encounter with Tender Buttons. For what if polite forms of language are lying\, really\, about the true\, knotted complexity of the world\, and what Stein does in Tender Buttons hews more closely to the rugged real? \n  \n        Lone Pine in Scotland  \n  \nOne flung green gown on one hung \nshade skirt growing outward\, glowing  \ninward\, light-hungry\, root-thirsty\, long  \nwind-limber\, limb-laddered\, ever loyal \nto the nation of its kind\, but hermit here\,  \nmonkish nun hospitable to wasp and crow\,  \nrain-wet silhouette of old trunk with young  \ntwigs\, buds\, needles\, cones glistening for  \ndawn above by dusk below\, earth-offered\,  \nring-hearted\, bark-guarded\, pitch-scented\,  \npollen-dusted citizen\, sentinel\, sovereign.  \n  \n 
URL:https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-1-5-23/
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SUMMARY:Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue  1/15/23
DESCRIPTION:  \nOpen Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue \n  \nJanuary 15\, 2022 \n  \nRoshi \n  \nI never really understood \nwhat he said \nbut every now and then \nI find myself \nbarking with the dog \nor bending with the irises \nor helping out \nin other little ways \n  \n—Leonard Cohen \n* \n  \nThis song\, written by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson\, feels like a meditation song to me: \nLove Itself \n  \nThe light came through the window\, \nStraight from the sun above\, \nAnd so inside my little room \nThere plunged the rays of Love. \n  \nIn streams of light I clearly saw \nThe dust you seldom see\, \nOut of which the Nameless makes \nA Name for one like me. \n  \nI’ll try to say a little more: \nLove went on and on \nUntil it reached an open door— \nThen Love Itself \nLove Itself was gone. \n  \nAll busy in the sunlight \nThe flecks did float and dance\, \nAnd I was tumbled up with them \nIn formless circumstance. \n  \nI’ll try to say a little more: \nLove went on and on \nUntil it reached an open door— \nThen Love Itself \nLove Itself was gone. \n  \nThen I came back from where I’d been. \nMy room\, it looked the same— \nBut there was nothing left between \nThe Nameless and the Name. \n  \nAll busy in the sunlight \nThe flecks did float and dance\, \nAnd I was tumbled up with them \nIn formless circumstance. \n  \nI’ll try to say a little more: \nLove went on and on \nUntil it reached an open door— \nThen Love Itself \nLove Itself was gone. \nLove Itself was gone. \n  \n—Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson \n* \nAlex Tretbar sent this poem by Jim Gauer: \n  \nWill This Thought Do? \n  \nSo I don’t think I’ll work today. Today it seems best \nTo let this bench hold my end up. Today \nOf what my part was\, brooding \nOver the sum of things\, there remains \nOnly the sum of things\, and that part \nSeems best. Yes this morning\, whatever is \nWill do nicely in my absence: this sunlight \nLooks fine\, it seems to be holding \nIts own without me; the crowded sidewalk \nIs fully employed\, it appears its task \nHas come to be child’s play; even the trees \nAre doing well\, they seem to be working \nAs well as trees can\, as trees \nThese truly work\, and the things they do \nAre all nicely done. What a relief \nTo be wide awake\, knowing my wakefulness \nDoesn’t need me\, sure that my bench exists. \nNever doubting its existence beneath me\, knowing \nFor sure that it is truly beneath me \nTo sit on a bench that I doubt exists. \nHow sweet to be fully alive\, for just this morning \nTo have nothing to live for\, to think well of my thought\, \nThe way a child thinks of his childhood\, the way that a tree \nMakes do with its boughs\, the way this moment lives \nOn what it’s seized in its hands\, because this morning \nWhat the moment has seized in its hands \nIs sweet and alive\, and this thought will do. \nWill this thought do? It seems it’s already done so. \nWill this thought do? Today there could be no doubt. \nWill this thought do? Today beyond the shadow \nOf a doubt my thought is done with \nAll the light I doubted\, and now \nIts shadow believes it too. \nAt last I know I’m the genius that no one needs to listen to. \nOntologist of a morning that turned out better than he thought. \nThe thinker there on a park bench\, resting his chin \nIn a hand I gave him\, a hand I traded \nFor a day of rest\, for a moment’s peace \nI could have had no hand in\, for an instant \nUnder just this sky that out of the clear blue \nHas come to me\, as silent as I am\, \nFull of birds I did not think up. \nNo I don’t think I’ll work today. Today it sounds best \nTo let the silence work its ends out. Today \nOf what my words were\, sounds \nForming the heart of things\, there remains \nOnly the heart of things\, and this heart \nRings true. \n  \n—Jim Gauer \n* \n  \nFrom an early age I was Mr. Know-It-All. I was a big expert on every topic\, especially the ones of which I was completely ignorant. The older I get\, the less I know. I don’t know who I am or what’s going on here. The world is bigger than my descriptions\, opinions and explanations of the world. I’ve met a few of the 8 billion people on the planet\, but the inner lives of even my closest friends are hidden from me. Every night my dreams teach me that my inner world is full of mysterious people and places and events that I can’t remember when I wake up. I don’t know why we humans create so many problems for ourselves and for each other. Why can’t we be kind to ourselves and nice to each other? I don’t have solutions for our problems. I don’t have answers for anyone’s questions. Sitting quietly with a cup of coffee in the morning\, everything I see is beautiful\, miraculous\, impossible\, including the “cup” of “coffee” and whoever it is who is typing this. \n  \n—Johnny Stallings \n\n\n\n  \nHere is Michel’s meditation on a contemplation from For Someone Else by Chana Friedmol Uhlman: \n  \nDecember 3\, 2022 \n  \nPraying As One \n  \nIn communal prayer we come together to stand before God. \nFacing our lives\, facing our existence \nin communal prayer\, I am not alone\, \nI don’t need to hold everything by myself. \nI have partners. A sacred community. \nWe are like a philharmonic orchestra:… \nEach person playing their own part… \nThere are many roles… \nWe are like a single body… \nNot everything rests on my shoulders. \nHere and now\, I am not alone. \nMy existence began before me \nand my friends are here surrounding me \nplaying together \nfocusing together \npraying together \nto the Master of the World. \n  \nCommunity is where everyone thrives\, even hermits. (I think they’re in denial.) When I allow myself to connect with others—and allow others to connect to me—we develop a unity\, a symbiosis\, an interconnected reality where the whole is more\,…everything\, than the sum of its parts. As cliché as this may be\, it’s no less true. Think about your communities; is there health and vibrant vitality\, growth and expansion? Or\, is there dis-ease\, sickness of mind and contention? Or\, like my living community: flu\, cold\, Covid\, RSV\, or other respiratory affliction in ⅓ or more; in addition to all of the above. I particularly like the idea of a healthy community\, as in today’s contemplation. I like this because I don’t need to carry the community on my own; we can all play together as one. Any differences\, and I hope they are myriad and plethoric\, are what make a symphonic event out of a chaotic cacophony—be it life\, love\, music\, prayer\, or meditation. Together we\, all of us\, are more. I am dissatisfied with situations pushing us to be less. Let us come together and be symphonic. \n  \n—Michel Deforge \n* \n  \n                               The Box \n  \nWhen I was a young poet\, I went into schoolrooms  \nto ask children\, “What if you had a treasure box  \nto fill now\, and open when you’re old? \nWhat would you put in it?” \n  \nOh\, they listed their first shoes\, a tree\, a best friend\,  \na crown\, a dog\, “all my stuff I love so much.” \n  \nI made books of their wishes. But now that I’m  \nold myself—what’s in my box? Waking in the night\, \nevery night\, I watch the parade of all I have lost\,  \nbut not lost\, stumble from the dream house \n  \nand become a blessing before the morning’s light. \n  \n—Kim Stafford \n* \n  \nThis Altar of Earth and Sky \n  \nBefore he died \nThe old farmer \nTold his lazy son: \n“I buried \na chest of gold \nIn the field. \nPlow deep \nAnd far \nAnd wide \nAnd you’re \nSure to find it.” \nThe son plowed \nFor a day \nA week \nA month \nA year \nAnd found \nNo gold \nBut the fields \nWell-plowed \nYielded \nA Bountiful \nHarvest \nAnd on his \nAmbits \nHe noticed \nFences \nThat wanted \nMending \nA coop\, a stall \nIn need of repair \nHerds and flocks \nTo water and feed. \nIn time \nA treasure \nAccrued \nFrom his \nDevotion \nTo land \nAnd labor. \n  \nWith my penchant \nFor idleness \nI call to mind \nThat lazy son \nAnd \nPutter \nEndlessly \nIn my \nFront yard \nAnd back \nAmbling from \nGarden \nTo garage \nWorkbench \nTo toolshed \nA path \nWell worn \nOver 18 years \nThrough rituals \nOf planting \nPruning \nConstruction \nAnd repair. \n  \nIn time \nAny practice \nCan become \nA spiritual practice \nAny object \nSacred: \nThis wheelbarrow \nHauling compost \nThat hammer \nSetting a nail. \nIn time \nThe druid \nDoffs his robes \nAnd \nDons overalls \nThe monk \nSets down \nHis holy book \nAnd lifts up \nThe common spade \nEven \nThe high priest \nRetires \nFrom the temple \nAnd returns \nTo this altar \nOf earth and sky. \n  \n—Will Hornyak   December 2022 \n* \n  \n#65 Don’t Underestimate Yourself  \n  \n“Don’t underestimate yourself. You have the ability to wake up. You have the ability to be compassionate. You just need a little bit of practice to be able to touch the best that is in you. Enlightenment\, mindfulness\, understanding\, and compassion are in you. Very simple practices—such as meditative walking\, mindful breathing\, or washing dishes mindfully—make it possible for you to leave hell and touch the positive seeds that are within you.” \n–from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh \n  \n“Don’t underestimate yourself. You have the ability to wake up.” Believe me\, if this happened to me it can happen to you. I “woke up” back in March of 1994\, and it came as a bolt out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting it\, or hoping or praying for it. Indeed\, I was not the praying sort at all—more agnostic\, or…simply indifferent to any kind of religion. My father proudly pronounced that he was agnostic on even days and atheist on odd days.  I was like that\, only even less vocal about it.  \n  \nWhat happened? One afternoon I was talking on the phone to an aspiring artist\, helping her with contacts in architecture firms\, encouraging her to call and show her work. I’d been helping her and a dozen other ‘emerging artists\,’ as we called them\, for 6 months or so. Believe me\, it had not been in my nature to be so helpful—I’d sort of been roped into it. I’d been on tv in a segment on artists’ careers\, and the anchorman had done a great job—I was expecting lots of commissions for more work! Instead\, I was deluged with requests for help. Shoot! Not what I had in mind\, but I offered a workshop\, and another\, with a couple dozen artists. I gave handouts\, articles I’d used\, helpful tips on how to present your work\, etc. No sense in making others go through all the junk I had gone through. And I followed up with all of them every few weeks\, just to see how they were doing\, if maybe they were discouraged and thinking of giving up.  \n  \nAnd then this afternoon of March 20\, 1994\, when talking to this one woman\, she asked\, “I don’t get it. Why are you doing this? You have a successful career\, you’re very busy with your own work. What’s in it for you? What do you want from us???” And I said\, “All I ask from you is that you do the same for somebody else some day. Isn’t that what it’s all about?” I don’t think that it was I who said those words. They just came out. And then I started crying\, and crying. Something—everything—just opened up. I simply…understood…everything. The world\, the universe\, God—no\, beyond God\, not limited to God. I understood\, and everything was complete\, whole\, filled with joy\, with light\, overwhelmed with love. These words can’t even express it adequately. I’m crying into the phone. This poor woman asks\, “Are you alright?” I said\, “Oh\, you have no idea how alright I am!! Thank you!” \n  \nAnd that was it. My life changed from that instant. I knew I had to help others\, to keep this alive\, to continue to be imbued with joy. And I had to scramble to understand others\, those not like me\, since I’d had this moment of total understanding. I had to read\, read\, read to find out what this was all about. And I had to be quiet\, and listen\, to feel that beauty\, that light\, that joy. \n  \nThe word that comes to mind is propelled. I was propelled to live my life differently than ever before. It is difficult\, it can be frightening (but I am not afraid). It can be hard work (but I can’t live otherwise). If I’d had this moment of pure understanding\, then I had to follow up with concrete understanding\, of making connections with all those who I didn’t know\, with all those who were not like me.  \n  \nI must understand others. I have dragged my husband to five different states to work with Habitat for Humanity: Meridian\, Mississippi; John’s Island\, South Carolina; Bartlesville\, Oklahoma; Charleston\, West Virginia\, etc.… I have mentored at-risk teenagers (still\, and now in their forties); worked in homeless shelters; supported a Native American woman and her family for 18 years; tutored dyslexic teenagers and adults; tutored Hispanic adults; given art workshops to homeless teens…and\, of course\, the most wonderful and joyful (and stressful) of all\, being a friend and supporter to inmates at Two Rivers Correctional Institution for the last six years.  \n  \nWorking my way to understanding (and loving!) others. After all of this litany\, my point is that this just happened to me; I didn’t work to make it happen. And if I experienced this\, so can we all. We can awaken. It is a life of joy. It is also sadness and grief and work\, but that is all part of the beauty and the joy. \n  \n—Jude Russell \n* \n  \n\n It’s still the beginning of a new year and there is a practice from the Buddhas’s time called “Beginning Anew.” It is a practice for keeping the community healthy with kindness and openness. \n\n  \nThay writes\, “Beginning Anew is not to ask for forgiveness. Beginning Anew is to change your mind and heart\, to transform the ignorance that brought about wrong actions of body\, speech\, and mind\, and to help you cultivate your mind of love. Your shame and guilt will disappear\, and you will begin to experience the joy of being alive. All wrongdoings arise in the mind. It is through the mind that wrongdoings can disappear.” \n  \nAt Plum Village\, they practice the ceremony of Beginning Anew every week. Everyone sits in a circle with a vase of fresh flowers in the center. The ceremony has three parts: flower watering\, expressing regrets\, and expressing hurts and difficulties. This practice can prevent feelings of hurt from building up over the weeks and helps make the situation safe for everyone in the community. \n  \nThey begin with flower watering. They take the vase of flowers in their hands to reflect the freshness and beauty of the flower. During flower watering\, each person acknowledges the wholesome\, wonderful qualities of the others. It is not flattery; it is to speak the truth. Everyone has some strong points that can be seen with awareness.  \n  \nAt my Thursday night sangha\, one woman told us that she does this practice with and for herself at home. Although it is meant for a group or a family\, she sees how valuable it is for herself living alone. One way she found to do it is to write herself a love letter. Inspired by how Thich Nhat Hanh would write love letters to world leaders that he disagreed with.    \n  \nSo this is an INVITATION!:  \n  \n WRITE a love letter to yourself. You might acknowledge whatever you feel good about that you did this past year to nurture yourself or another\, or how you may have helped someone\, or how you learned something. How was your practice and your communication with others? How did you keep your heart open and yourself well? You may have regrets that you have dwelled on; acknowledge them but let them go with compassion for yourself. Maybe end with compassion for another that has done you a wrong. This is a practice like others – be a good listener to yourself\, speak/write from the heart\, and bear witness for deep understanding.   \n  \nThe second INVITATION!!  \n  \nWRITE a love letter to Thay.  Dear Thay! Thank him for what he has taught you this past year. Was there a special meditation you read and responded to from Your True Home?Is there a difference in the way you breathe or walk? Do you take more time to listen and notice what you are noticing?   \n  \nDebbie Buchanan passed on an Ode written by Joe Lamb—a veteran\, a writer\, a meditator\, an arborist—published in Nostos\, a magazine of Poerty and Art.  It is titled :   “A Letter to Thich Nhat Hanh.”  Here’s a little  excerpt: \n  \nDear Thich Nhat Hanh\,  \n  \nThank you for teaching me walking meditation. Walking exceptionally slowly through forests\, feeling the earth with each step\, slowing down to notice the shapes of leaves\, the smell of bark\, the sound of my own breath.  \n  \nThank you for the reminder that microaggressions build up in the unconscious where they can radiate out into the world. More importantly\, I want to thank you\, for the many reminders that micro kindnesses also build up and radiate out into the world\, that micro acts of compassion can heal and nourish people we may never even meet…. \n  \nIt’s misleading to say you taught me. We were never introduced. (He knows him from “a couple of lectures” and from a writing workshop with a two of  Thay’s other students\, Maxine and Therese.) \n  \nWas it you who taught our sangha to walk slowly\,  counting our breaths\, feeling our presence on the earth? Or was it Maxine and Therese? Where does the self stop and the other begin? Where does the teacher stop and the student begin? You complicated this confusion when you said that you are not only the man we see wearing a monk’s robe\, you are also a cloud\, a river\, a forest. \n  \nYou said this was not religion or philosophy\, but rather just an observation about biology\, about the earth itself.  Thank you for that marvelous confusion…. \n  \nYes\, of course\, we are water…. \n  \nYes of course I am forest…. \n  \nSo thank you for that great gift of reminding my anxious brain – always fussing with imaginary futures\, always trying to heal the wounded past – that right here\, right now\, I am in the world\, an astoundingly beautiful world\, and the world is in me. \n  \n—from Joe Lamb’s “Letter to Thich Nhat Hanh” \n  \nThe letter reminds me how lucky we have been to have a great wisdom teacher alive while we are here too. And how Thay and the monks and nuns would say to us\, “We are here because you are here.”   \n  \nThank you all for your reading\, responding\, and your practice. Feel free to share your letters.    \n  \nHappy New Year!   \n  \n–Katie Radditz
URL:https://openroadpdx.com/event/meditation-mindfulness-dialogue-1-15-23/
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