Meditation & Mindfulness 6/15/24
2024-06-15 - 2024-07-14
photo of Will Hornyak (and surroundings) by Michael Wetter

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

June 15, 2024

Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon.

—Ikkyū (1394-1481), translated by John Stevens
*

“Sometimes a conversation can be the greatest adventure of your life.”

—Lyn Slater (sent by Jill Littlewood)
*

How

small birds flit
from bough
to bough to bough

to bough to bough to bough

—Gary Snyder, from danger on peaks
*
The Owyhee River

Ushers us
Through canyons
A thousand feet deep
Two million years old
Past sheer, towering
Basalt walls, chalk hills
Alive with the songs of
Canyon wrens, chukar partridge, quail.

Eons of weathering
Ice, floods and wind
Yield cracks and crevices
Ledges and knolls
Perfect perches
For eagles, hawks
Ravens and falcons.
Niches hold soil and seed
Birth flowering shrubs.
White phlox, yellow arrowroot
Erupt from unlikely fissures
In drab stone walls.

Just below Montgomery Rapids
The river slows, deepens
We are engulfed
In clouds of industrious cliff swallows
Darting wildly around us
Daubing mud, sculpting nests
The ancient stone face
Cradling new dwellings and
Delicate feathered life.

The days are long and generous
Hot springs, cold plunges
Coyote songs at dusk
Just one rattlesnake!
We navigate rapids named
“Read-it-and-Weep”
“Upset,” “Nuisance” and “Squeeze”
And dozens more
Scouting those
Where disaster is a possibility
Terror and joy flowing together.

The stars seems so close here
The night silence complete
Save for the swirl of current
The occasional slap of a beaver tail.
A touch of whiskey
Loosens the tongue
For conversation, laughter
The medicine of friendship
Like the rising moon
Renews, restores, heals.

We drink morning coffee
And welcome first light
To sage-covered hills
Sandstone cliffs and water.
Soon we’ll begin the ritual
Of gathering, packing up
Strapping down the gear
Casting off and feeling
The first tug of current
The river drawing us
To itself once again
An old friend
Shouldering our load
Showing us the way.

—Will Hornyak, June 2024
*

I was thinking about meditation the other day, and wrote this letter to Rocky:

June 5, 2024

Dear Rocky

This morning I want to write to you about meditation and mindfulness. I know you are very busy these days. I hope you are able to find some time each day—even if it’s just five minutes—to just sit.
Words like “meditation” and “mindfulness” can be misleading. Maybe just think of it as “quiet time.” A time when you don’t have to do anything, or be anyone. Awake and alert. That’s all. No past, no future.
No thought.
No thought?
If a thought arises, look at it as if it is a cloud passing through the sky of your mind. All thoughts are just thoughts. They come and go.
With thought and language we label everything. We name every thing. We take something which is very big—life!—and confine it in words.
We confine ourselves. We imagine that we are a “man,” that we are “in prison,” that we are happy or sad. That we are separate from other people and from “the world.” These are all just ideas.
In silence, all these little ideas just fall away. Something is still happening, but it has no name.
After five minutes or an hour of silence, we have to rejoin other people in the activities of life. We have to pretend to be “Rocky” or “Johnny,” and do the things that Rocky and Johnny have agreed to do—the things that other people rely on us to do.
Writing in a journal during “quiet time” can be helpful—reflecting on our life, reminding ourselves of the things that are most important. Remembering to be grateful. Remembering that every thing is miraculous. Nurturing feelings of peace, love & happiness.
Certain texts are good for “quiet time,” to bring us to “the peace which passeth understanding.” Your True Home is good. So is “Song of Myself.” Also, Tao Te Ching and Hsin Hsin Ming. The poems of Han Shan and Hafiz. The Only Revolution by Krishnamurti. Poems and meditations of Thomas Traherne. My theater pieces “Silence” and “The Golden World.” (The latter is in my book The Nonstop Love-In, which I hope has some things in it that people find inspirational.)
Silence puts us in touch with the reality that is larger than our descriptions and explanations of reality—which are small and partial. This feeling of boundless being is truer than our ideas about the world and truer than our ideas about who we are.

peace & love
Johnny
*

One Trick Pony

I’ll be the first to say it: Oh yes, I can be
predictable—rise, write a little song, then
putter the day away. And my verses, they
lament, or praise, in small compass. Nothing
too fancy, nothing too long or elaborate.
As for ambitious reach, let it pass me by.
Doesn’t every tree have all summer,
every singing bird the whole sky to fill?
Meanwhile, the sun, born in the big bang,
remains content to roil and smolder, now
and then to flare, before settling back
to seethe. So I seethe and suffer, need
and wonder, try scratching syllables
of joy, or sorrow, hope, or warning.
What more can I do than this—
a slow burn, singing and singing.

—Kim Stafford
*

#19 Flowers and Garbage
“Flowers and garbage are both organic in nature.So looking deeply into the nature of a flower, you can see the presence of the compost and the garbage. The flower is also going to turn into garbage, but don’t be afraid! You are a gardener and you have in your hands the power to transform garbage into flowers, into fruit, into vegetables. You don’t throw anything away, because you are not afraid of garbage. Your hands are capable or transforming it into flowers, or lettuce or cucumbers.
The same thing is true of your happiness and your sorrow. Sorrow, fear, and depression are all a kind of garbage. These bits of garbage are part of real life, and we must look deeply into their nature. You can practice in order to turn these bits of garbage into flowers. It is not only your love that is organic; your hate is, too So you should not throw anything out. All you have to do is learn how to transform your garbage into flowers.”
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

Ugh. Garbage. I don’t even want to write about this, because it just dredges up ugly, old memories—memories of my first marriage and all of its ugliness, fear, chaos… But on reading Thich Nhat Hanh, I realized that it was living through that ‘garbage’ is precisely what led me to my determination and devotion to loving and working on behalf of others who are considered ‘garbage’ by much of the world. Prison inmates, rough teenagers, Hispanic adults (documented or undocumented), the homeless, the poor. I am called to be with these people and to instill in them the belief, the understanding, that they, one and all, have value and true worthiness and beauty in this world.

My first husband let me know countless times (always in an alcoholic stupor) that I was a ‘piece of garbage.’ It is said, and it is true, that when you say something enough times, the listener will come to believe it. And I did. Who was I to believe otherwise when the person closest to me told me over and over that I was useless, stupid, and…garbage. Nowadays it’s called gaslighting, I think. Of course I was too ashamed to mention any of this to my dear, concerned family or friends, so it all just settled itself in my being and festered.

I escaped that marriage—and I flourished. (Latin—flor=flower). From the ‘garbage’ came the flower. I blossomed. I grew stronger and eventually I branched out and realized that that piece of garbage could be valuable to others. Now I cultivate relationships with the ‘lost ones,’ those denigrated and scorned and dismissed as worthless. I instill in them a sense of their value through love and attention and presence. I want to transform them all from garbage into flowers.

—Jude Russell
*
Michel Deforge asked me to let everyone know that he has transferred to Oregon State Correctional Institution (OSCI) in Salem. He likes it much better there. Here are some excerpts from his journal:

May 6, 2024

….Some things are not good for me, and at the same time I don’t benefit from obsessive focus (aversion). I simply don’t need to give any more energy than is polite to acknowledge existence. For example: my cellie of late opines loudly—whines even. If (when) I give this energy by having my own opinion, and then sharing it, I see something odious develop in the opinion each holds, and aversion arises. If, instead, I let him rave but do not form my own opinion, or at least don’t share my thoughts, aversion is less powerful in me. I may still find his ideas odious, they vanish quickly enough; unfed they wither.

May 7, 2024

Abraham rushed to Sarah’s tent and said, “Hurry! Three measures of the finest flour! Knead it and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the cattle and chose a tender, choice calf. He gave it to a young man who rushed to prepare it. [While recovering from circumcision!] —Genesis 18:6-7

Indolence is easy. The only requirement is do little-to-nothing, and think less of it. To follow Abraham’s example, hosting unexpected travelers, during the most painful day of convalescence from a minor surgery, is to fight the siren song of self and indolence. He didn’t just follow pro forma for these guests, he ran out to meet them—away from the comfort of shade and recuperation—and then back again to prepare not just a light snack, but a full banquet in honor of his guests. In his great discomfort, Abraham sets himself the task of providing for others’ comfort instead of his own. Many, if not all of us, would not do half as much. We’ll tell ourselves we would. But we know, in the end, pain and our own discomfort will win out, driving us back to our cozy convalescence. I don’t blame us! What Abraham did was extra-ordinary. That’s what ENTHUSIASM does to one, shifting focus and priorities toward where one is aiming his intent. Someday, maybe I could be ENTHUSIASTIC as was Abraham. “If not now, when?”

—Michel Deforge
*

Katie Radditz sent this poem by Rilke:

Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built,
perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour
before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name from all things.
Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
As no one has thought to love them,
Until they’re worthy of you and real.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 – 1926
*

Elizabeth Domike sent this poem by Stanley Moss:

Bright Day

I sing this morning: Hello, hello.
I proclaim the bright day of the soul.
The sun is a good fellow,
the devil is a good guy, no deaths today I know.
I live because I live. I do not die because I cannot die.
In Tuscan sunlight Masaccio
painted his belief that St. Peter’s shadow
cured a cripple, gave him back his sight.
I’ve come through eighty-five summers. I walk in sunlight.
In my garden, death questions every root, flowers reply.
I know the dark night of the soul
does not need God’s eye,
as a beggar does not need a hand or a bowl.

—Stanley Moss
*

Our Lady of the Mangoes

Señora Mango
Doña Mango
holds court behind the counter
of her shop,
a five minute walk
from our casita.

Morning till past dark
she waits, taciturn,
does not look up.

Her buyers approach her
for pronouncements of cost:
two tomatoes
or one potato, a handful
of eggs secured
in a produce bag.

Most days I find her
sipping Cup of Noodles,
glued to the soaps
on a tiny TV
beside the withering lettuce.
Her husband watches
from a produce crate
out of view.

I am there for mangoes
zucchini, avocados, tomatoes
onions, bananas
garlic, limes
papaya and pineapple
a profusion of necessities
some too extravagant to buy
at home.

She frowns at my use of
her plastic bags.
I learn to bring my own.

There’s no space on her counter
for all I want to buy. Over time
recognizing me, she
motions me to hand her my
shopping bags. She jots down
my total and picks
the right coins from my hand.

I greet her always and thank her
when I leave. One day
as I turn to go I hear her call
after me “Qué la vaya bien.”
I call out to her in return.

Did I catch just a hint of a smile
in her eyes? We have made progress.
I walk my mangoes home.

—Gail Lester, Guanajuato, March, 2024

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Archive
2024-06-16 - 2024-09-01
Avalokiteśvara from the Ajanta Caves

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Community

In September of 2020, Open Road board members–Bill Faricy, Deborah Buchanan and Katie Radditz–along with Howard Thoresen and I, inaugurated the Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Community, for people who live in prison and for those who don’t. If you are interested in meditation and mindfulness, you are welcome to join us. The idea of the Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue is to provide support and encouragement for your spiritual practice–that is, whatever gives your life meaning.

We are not promoting any religious tradition. We will just be sharing our thoughts, experiences, questions and friendship in order to support and encourage each other in living more peacefully and mindfully. To begin, we will be using Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh as a jumping off point for dialogue. As we go along, we will use other inspirational texts and poems, along with everyone’s personal ruminations.

I will coordinate the writings of prison residents through the Open Road post office box, and use email for everyone else. To begin, everyone is invited to find one of the 365 meditations in Thich Nhat Hanh’s book that inspires you and write something in response to it. You can use other sources of inspiration as well.

On the 15th of every month I will send out what I’ve collected from everyone to all the participants. You are free to respond to what other people write, or just ponder it.

Here is the first Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on September 15, 2020.
Here’s the second Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on October 15, 2020.
Here’s the third Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on November 15, 2020.
Here’s the fourth Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on December 15, 2020.
Here’s the fifth Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on January 15, 2021.
Here’s the sixth Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on February 15, 2021.
Here’s the seventh Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue, published on March 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for April 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for May 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for June 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for July 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for August 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for September 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for October 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for November 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for December 15, 2021.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for January 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for February 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for March 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for April 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for May 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for June 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for July 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for August 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for September 15, 2022.
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for October 15, 2022
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for November 15, 2022
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for December 15, 2022
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for January 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for February 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for March 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for April 15, 2023
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Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for June 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for July 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for August 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for September 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for October 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for November 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for December 15, 2023
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for January 15, 2024
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for February 15, 2024
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for March 15, 2024
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for April 15, 2024
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for May 15, 2024
Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue for June 15, 2024

Here are two meditation texts:
a talk on Beginner’s Mind by Shunryū Suzuki (1904-1971)
the earliest Zen text, Hsin Hsin Ming, by Seng Ts’an, the Third Zen Patriarch (529-606 A.D.)
If you’d like to join our merry band, email me and let me know.

Jake was in segregation (solitary confinement) at Two Rivers prison when he wrote this:

49 – What is a leaf?

Is one of my favorites! In segregation we have paintings that are of different scenes. At first it was cool, then I and others got over it. But since putting this wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh in perspective you see more than a painting. For it opens my eyes to the time, the painter, the painter’s years of art skills, everything down to what makes paint…paint. There are so many miracles that came together to make these paintings! It’s amazing. Now I try to be mindful of what miracles come into place to make people I meet, foods I eat. Being conscious of what had to come together to create your best friend or your favorite food gives you much more appreciation for how they come to be in your life .

Thank you for giving me a chance, Johnny. I’m really working on myself. My goal is day by day. (Today be less ego-oriented.) Trying to not care who judges me for being me. Because that’s not my problem, I am happy and peaceful. It’s been a sacrifice, but as I’m learning sacrifice is the way to a peaceful life!

Peace Love Happiness

–Jake

May all people be happy.
May we live in love.

–Johnny Stallings
Executive Director, The Open Road

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/4/24
2024-07-04 - 2024-07-31
photo by Abe Green

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 4, 2024

I asked some friends to answer this question: “What stories do you tell yourself to feel okay, cheer yourself up, bless the day?”

I like to remind myself that everything is miraculous. I tell myself that life is short, this day is precious and so I want to live it in the Golden World. The Golden World is a name I give to a feeling that everything is perfect, that this is Paradise. I’m most likely to feel this way in the quiet time at the beginning of the day—especially when thought and language fall away. So, in addition to telling myself stories to cheer myself up, I love to enjoy “the storyless state”—free of narratives, free of cares.

I have friends in books who have written about those moments of perfect beauty and joy: Walt Whitman, Hafiz, Thomas Traherne, Kim Stafford, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others. I love the little book by Peter Schumann of the Bread & Puppet Theater, St Francis Preaches to the Birds. I love Giotto’s painting of Saint Francis preaching to the birds. Nancy and I enjoy watching “Jeeves and Wooster” with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. We love watching Wes Anderson movies. The “Chaiyya Chaiyya” video (with English subtitles) from the movie “Dil Se” on YouTube always makes me happy.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Re: the discussion, after Jill’s reading of Mary Oliver, of what to do with our one wild and precious life, I offer this link to a video seasons greetings card I made when we lived in the Sierras, long ago, made with my little camcorder and scratchy sound, circling the wildness we once tried to rein in, and later yearned to touch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFTtCsj0js

—J Kahn
*

Here’s the Mary Oliver poem that Jill Littlewood shared, that J was referring to:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
The grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver
*

A Translation Project for Peace

by Kim Stafford

A friend at the Oregon Society for Translators & Interpreters, whose members work primarily in hospitals and the courts to help patients and clients outside the English language to navigate the system, asked if she could invite my poem “A Proclamation for Peace” to travel around the world.

I said yes, of course, and last fall we held a zoom session with translators online in Japan, Nepal, India, and elsewhere, at work translating the poem. Since then, we’ve decided to invite more languages into the project and make a book. We’re up to fifty languages and counting. As I describe the project on the back cover:

This book sends a poem for peace around the world so it may become a new poem in Arabic and Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, Tibetan and Mandarin, Tamil, Vietnamese, Polish, Yoruba, Yucatec, and a host of other languages. Together with notes about the peace-making translators and their languages, and recordings of voices speaking gentle words, this book is for the children of the world.

—from A Proclamation for Peace: Translated into World Languages

Here’s the poem in English, and in Persian, as translated by my friend in Tehran, Alirezza Tagdareh:

A Proclamation for Peace

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

And here is the poem read in Yoruba, by my friend Abayo Animashaun from Nigeria:

The book will be available at Bookshop.org and other outlets by mid-September.

—Kim Stafford
*

Elizabeth Domike sent this:

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient
for human beings; we need to transcend,
transport, escape; we need meaning,
understanding, and explanation;
we need to see over-all patterns
in our lives.
We need hope, the sense of a future.

And we need freedom (or, at least,
the illusion of freedom) to get beyond
ourselves, whether with telescopes
and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning
technology, or in states of mind
that allow us to travel to other worlds,
to rise above our immediate
surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions
that makes it easier to bond with each other,
or transports that make our consciousness
of time and mortality easier to bear.

We seek a holiday from our inner
and outer restrictions, a more intense
sense of the here and now, the beauty
and value of the world we live in.

—from Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
*

Alex Tretbar wrote:

Hadn’t seen this one of Bill Stafford’s before. How gorgeous.

Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere

A gather of apricots fruit pickers left
gleam like reasons for light going higher, higher;
I look half as hard as I can to tease
the fruit out of its green.
(It is time to run lest pity overtake us,
and calamity pit invents to accompany itself:
to sigh is a stern act—we are judged by this air.)

Down the steady eye of the charging bear
a gun barrel swerves—intention, then flame;
and willows do tricks to find an exact place in the wind:
resolution steady, bent to be true.
(While there’s time
I call to you by all these dubious guides:
“Forsake all ways except the way we came.”)

—William Stafford, from The Paris Review, issue no. 22 (Autumn-Winter 1959-1960)
*

This is a summer poem if ever there was one. It makes me think of your and Nancy’s back yard. I can relate except for the part about having no aches after working in the garden. sigh . . . I know it will get better after all the beds are prepared and the seeds get growing. Then the salads make it all worth while.

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was nothing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

—Czesław Miłosz

Wishing you all such a summer moment.
xoxo Katie Radditz

¡Bardaphilia! 7/19-8/9
2024-07-19 - 2024-08-09
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”

Bardaphilia!

If you don’t already love Shakespeare, this class will remedy that. And if you do…you know there’s nothing more fun than reading the plays and poems together with friends. Actor and director Johnny Stallings is the genial host. Bring copies of some of the plays—(optional). We will make up the “curriculum” as we go along. This is an Open Road event. You’re invited!

Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
Friday evenings, July 19th & 26th, August 2nd & 9th: 7-9 pm
suggested donation $5 per class

If you have questions, you can email me at: stallingsjohnny.com

peace, love & poetry

Johnny

Your Enjoyment of the World is Never Right Till Every Morning You Awake in Heaven: Poems & Meditations of Thomas Traherne 7/20/24
2024-07-20 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Your Enjoyment of the World is Never Right
Till Every Morning You Awake in Heaven

Johnny Stallings reads poems and meditations of the Christian mystic Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), followed by dialogue. This is an Open Road event.

Muir Hall in Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland
Saturday, July 20th, at 7 pm

peace, love, happiness & understanding Archive
2024-08-01 - 2024-08-15
painting by Charles Erickson

Dear Friends of the Open Road

Click on titles in Bold to go to any issue of our peace, love, happiness & understanding journal. The list of issues is followed by an Index, which is a guide to each issue’s content.

On this web page there is also a search box into which you can type a word or phrase, and find what you are looking for in that way.

Issue #1 Spring Equinox (picture of pansy) 3/19/20
Issue #2 Humor (images: cartoons by Gary Larson) 3/26/20
Issue #3 Some Poems (image: Japanese picture of cherry tree) 4/2/20
Issue #4 Walt Whitman (image: painting of WW by Rick Bartow) 4/9/20
Issue #5 Rumi (edited by Prabu Muruganantham) (picture of flower) 4/16/20
Issue #6 Shakespeare (picture of young Johnny with Shakespeare sweatshirt) 4/23/20
Issue #7 Happiness (picture by Jan Steen: The Merry Family) 4/30/20
Issue #8 Ingersoll: Crimes Against Criminals (picture of Robert G. Ingersoll) 5/7/20
Issue #9 Compassion (picture of Einstein) 5/14/20
Issue #10 Love (picture of Hafiz) 5/21/20
Issue #11 Peaceable Kingdom (painting by Charles Erickson) 5/28/20
Issue #12 Meditation, Dialogue & Study (Goya’s Sleep of Reason) 6/4/20
Issue #13 Black Lives Matter (image of George Floyd) 6/11/20
Issue #14 Mostly Poems (Blake image: When the morning stars sang together) 6/18/20
With Issue #15, peace, love & happiness became peace, love, happiness & understanding.
Issue #15 Ripple Effect (image of ripples in water) 6/25/20
Issue #16 Blake: Innocence and Experience (Laughing Song image) 7/2/20
Issue #17 Remembering Nick (picture of Nick Consoletti) 7/9/20
Issue #18 Kim Stafford Featured Poet (picture of Kim, Hugo & Johnny) 7/16/20
Issue #19 Metaphors: Battle or Picnic? (picture of Emerson) 7/23/20
Issue #20 Humor Issue (Gary Larson cartoon: Nerds in hell) 7/30/20
Issue #21 Culture that Nurtures (picture of Wisłowa Szymborska) 8/6/20
Issue #22 My mind started to blossom… (picture of Aaron Gilbert as Toby Belch) 8/13/20
Issue #23 Poems, Stories, Letters, Thoughts (picture of four actors from Midsummer Night’s Dream) 8/20/20
Issue #24 Meditation and Mindfulness (image of Avalokiteśvara from Ajanta) 8/27/20
Issue #25 Interview with Ashley Lucas (photos of Ashley and Jeff Sanders & Joe Opyd with his mom, Sharon Lemm, and Aunt Andrea) 9/3/20
Issue #26 Paradise of Books (image of Don Quixote in his library by Gustave Doré) 9/10/20
Issue #27 Smoky (image of the Platters) 9/17/20
Issue #28 How Hippies May Still Save the World (image of Flora by Botticelli) 9/24/20
Issue #29 Gary Snyder and FOUR CHANGES (image of Gary Snyder) 10/1/20
Issue #30 The Golden World (image of glass of water) 10/8/20
Issue #31 Pollyanna (image of Mary Pickford) 10/15/20
Issue #32 Loving the Earth (image of sunrise from atop Big Mountain) 10/22/20
Issue #33 Gettysburg Addresses (image of Lord Buckley) 10/29/20
Issue #34 Gandhi (image of Mahatman Gandhi) 11/5/20
Issue #35 Writings of Lonnie Glinski (picture of Lonnie as Ophelia) 11/12/20
Issue #36 Freedom’s Firm Foundation (picture of Nitya, Nancy & Peter O.) 11/19/20
Issue #37 Writing Poems (picture of Pablo Neruda & Matilde Urrutia) 11/26/20
Starting on November 26, 2020, peace, love, happiness & understanding went from being weekly to bi-weekly.
Issue #38 Pictures (not words) 12/10/20
Issue #39 Poetry Corner (image of Mr. Natural watering the Tree of Possibilities) 12/24/20
Issue #40 Allegory of the Cave (image of Plato’s cave) 1/7/21
Issue #41 Loving Your Enemies (photo of Martin Luther King) 1/21/21
Issue #42 The Hill We Climb (screen shot of Amanda Gorman) 2/4/21
Issue #43 Valentine’s Day Special: Love Poems (image of Paolo and Francesca) 2/18/21
Issue #44 Harold and the Purple Crayon (image from Harold and the Purple Crayon) 3/4/21
Issue #45 Spring Equinox (peace, love, happiness & understanding is one year old!) (picture of Daphne odora) 3/18/21
Issue #46 Story Poems (picture of Aged Aged Man by John Tenniel) 4/1/21
Issue #47 Singer Come from Afar (picture of the cover of Kim Stafford’s book) 4/15/21
Issue #48 Bibliomania (picture of cover of Autobiography of a Yogi) 4/29/21
No issues of peace, love, happiness & understanding in May (Mexico vacation)
Issue #49 Wisława Szymborska Nobel Lecture (picture of Wisława Szymborska) 6/10/21
Issue #50 Johnny’s Imaginary TED Talk About Love (picture of sidewalk message: EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY) 6/24/21
Issue #51 Dreams of Better Worlds (pictures: 3 by Crumb of futures, big orange splot, Wague mural) 7/8/21
Issue #52 The Art of Happiness (picture of Slava Polunin) 7/22/21
Issue #53 The Three Questions (picture of Leo Tolstoy) 8/5/21
Issue #54 War: What is It Good For? (picture: First and Last Day of Spring by Jonathan Winters) 8/19/21
Issue #55 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (picture of United Nations flag) 9/2/21
Issue #56 Another Humor Issue (picture of Mother Hubbard & her dog) 9/16/21
Issue #57 HEART! (picture of loteria card El Corazon) 9/30/21
Issue #58 Johnny’s Brief Guide to Ancient Greece (pictures of “The Death of Socrates” by David, and a bust of Aeschylus) 10/14/21
Issue #59 Poems from the Last Five Days by Kim Stafford (photos taken at the beach by Kim) 10/28/21
Issue #60 Recipe for Living a Life Rich in Meaning (pictures of four bodhisattvas: Brenda Erickson, Dick Willis, Jude Russell & Jack Baird) 11/11/21
Issue #61 Goldfinches! (picture of Goldfinch) 11/25/21
Issue #62 A Christmas Carol (picture of Scrooge beholding the Spirit of Christmas Present) 12/9/21
Issue #63 Dream of a Ridiculous Man (picture of Goya’s sleeper dreaming Peaceable Kingdom) 12/23/21
Issue #64 Brother West (photo of Cornel West) 1/6/22
Issue #65 Big Sky Country (picture of Glacier National Park) 1/20/22
No issues of peace, love, happiness & understanding for most of February (Mexico vacation)
Issue #66 Big Sky Country Part Two (picture of bee on lilac blossom) 2/24/22
Issue #67 What Are Some of Your Favorite Books? (picture of the cover of Borgel) 3/10/22
Issue #68 War & Peace & Spring! (photos of plum tree and Ukrainian refugees) 3/24/22
Issue #69 Carl Sandburg (picture of Potato Face Blind Man) 4/7/22
Issue #70 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison (picture of Bottom & Titania) 4/21/22
Issue #71 Some Poems (picture of sidewalk covered with cherry blossoms) 5/5/22
Issue #72 Poems By Women first page has Emily Dickinson; pictures of the other poets accompany their poems) 5/19/22
Starting in June of 2022, peace, love, happiness & understanding went from bi-weekly to monthly, coming out on the first Thursday of the month.
Issue #73 Walt on my mind…and in my heart (painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow) 6/2/22
Issue #74 Interview With Bryan Joyner (picture of Bryan Joyner) 7/7/22
Issue #75 Adventure Tales! (picture of Edith Mirante in Burma 8/4/22
Issue #76 William Blake (Blake’s painting “River of Life”) 9/1/22
Issue #77 Kate Brown on Clemency (picture of Governor Kate Brown) 10/6/22
Issue #78 R. H. Blyth (picture of R. H. Blyth) 12/1/22
Issue #79 Tender Buttons edited by Alex Tretbar (picture of Gertrude Stein) 1/5/23
Issue #80 Something That Changed the Way You See the World (poster of “Song of Myself” by Rick Bartow) 2/2/23
Issue #81 Favorite Poems (picture of a stone wall with a gate) 3/2/23
Issue #82 Favorite Films (picture of “The Rink”) 4/6/23
Issue #83 Books That Changed the Way You See the World (picture of For Your Own Good) 5/4/23
Issue #84 Peace (picture of young man putting a flower in the barrel of a gun) 6/1/23
Issue #85 Visions of Utopia & Paradise (picture of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) 8/3/23
Issue #86 peace, love, happiness & understanding (picture of Rocky Hutchinson with eight puppies) 9/7/23
Issue #87 Black Elk’s Vision (picture of Black Elk) 10/5/23
Issue #88 The War Prayer (picture of Peanuts cartoon) 11/2/23
Issue #89 A Letter from Rocky and Lots of Poems (picture of Lake Grinnell in Glacier National Park) 12/7/23
Issue #90 Celebration! (picture of Alan & Christine, with Santa and dogs & cat) 1/4/24
Issue #91 What has enlarged your world? (picture of Nancy in Guanajuato) 2/1/24
Issue #92 Abundance! (picture of Mexican ceramic Tree of World Literature) 3/7/24
Issue #93 Creativity! (picture of Martha Graham) 4/4/24
Issue #94 Mostly Poems (picture of cow weathervane, with bird perched on it) 5/2/24
Issue #95 Blogs and Other Stuff (picture of “The Young Hare” by Dürer) 6/6/24
Issue #96 What Stories Do You Tell Yourself to Cheer Yourself Up? 7/4/24
Issue #97 Poems, Letters & Other Writings (picture by Saul Steinberg) 8/1/24

Open Road peace, love, happiness & understanding Newsletter Index

Issue #1 Spring Equinox (picture of pansy) 3/19/20
Alan Watts quote: “there is nothing wrong with you at all”
Serenity Prayer
Metta Prayer
Night Rain at Kuang-k’ou Yang Wan-li (Deb)
Eagle Poem Joy Harjo (Katie Radditz)
Foolish Young Flowering Tree Kim Stafford
Trees in the Wind Kim Stafford

Issue #2 Humor (images: cartoons by Gary Larson) 3/26/20
jokes from Johnny, Kim, Ken, Bill & Will

Issue #3 Some Poems (image: Japanese picture of cherry tree) 4/2/20
Out breath Ryokan
Celestial Laws Walt Whitman
sweet spring e.e. cummings
a lover and his lass Shakespeare
From the Train Kim Stafford
Dennis Takes Us to the Old Trees Kim Stafford
I Ask for Silence Pablo Neruda

Issue #4 Walt Whitman (image: painting of WW by Rick Bartow) 4/9/20
Miracles by Walt Whitman
link to Marfa Interview with Johnny about “Song of Myself”
Teach Me to See, Walt! by Johnny
Song of Myself brief quotes: “seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles…this head more than churches, bibles and all the creeds,” “Whoever degrades another…,” “Dazzling and tremendous…,” “In all people I see myself…,” “This minute that comes to me…,” “Each moment and whatever happens…,” “Why should I wish to see God…in the faces of men and women I see God…”
link to whitmanalabama.com from Perrin Kerns
Kim Stafford’s story about his dad and Walt Whitman

Issue #5 Rumi (edited by Prabu Muruganantham) (picture of flower) 4/16/20
A Just Finishing Candle
The Sunrise Ruby
Prabu’s poem: “You too are flowering”
Where Everything is Music
Rumi story from Kim
Guest House from Johnny
Nancy Yeilding’s essay “Two Ways of Talking”
Bill Hughes’ thoughts and poem “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing…”

Issue #6 Shakespeare (picture of young Johnny with Shakespeare sweatshirt) 4/23/20
some thoughts
All the world’s a stage
eat no onions
lost all my mirth…what a piece of work is a man
sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Alexander died…might they not stop a beer barrel?
Our revels now are ended
The quality of mercy
My bounty is boundless as the sea,/ My love as deep…
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats…
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments

Issue #7 Happiness (picture by Jan Steen: The Merry Family) 4/30/20
yogi tea tags
The baby beats the nurse… Shax
commentary on The Merry Family: link to Rijksmuseum
Happiness Carl Sandburg
a few words about Twelfth Night: “Care’s an enemy to life”
Gary Larson cartoon about the absent Bluebird of Happiness
link to Louis Armstrong’s “A Lot of Living to Do”
aphorism: Happiness is the art of not making yourself miserable.
aphorism: The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled. Blake
“The Salutation” Thomas Traherne
Beginning My Studies Walt Whitman
Shirt of a Happy Man story
from Writing for Happiness by Kim Stafford—to be with happ is to be happ-y
“Gift” Miłosz
“Happiness” Jane Kenyon

Issue #8 Ingersoll: Crimes Against Criminals (picture of Robert G. Ingersoll) 5/7/20
Crimes Against Criminals
“in this world hate never yet dispelled hate…”

Issue #9 Compassion (Picture of Einstein) 5/14/20
Einstein quote
Gregory Boyle on Compassion and Kinship
links to Homeboy Industries and to TED talk
Please Call Me By My True Names

Issue #10 Love (picture of Hafiz) 5/21/20
The Subject Tonight is Love Hafiz
The Noble Ninefold Path Johnny
Response to Ninefold Path Essay Shad Alexander

Issue #11 Peaceable Kingdom (painting by Charles Erickson) 5/28/20
Penn’s letter to the Indians
Thomas Traherne: “Your enjoyment of the world is never right…”
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Whitman: “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy…others will punctually come forever and ever”

Issue #12 Meditation, Dialogue & Study (Goya’s Sleep of Reason) 6/4/20
some thoughts on depression: letter to E. about meditation, dialogue & study

Issue #13 Black Lives Matter (image of George Floyd) 6/11/20
quote from Martin Luther King: …black revolution more than a struggle for rights of Negroes
some thoughts by me and quotes from:
King: “love is creative understanding goodwill for all men”
Buddha: “In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate…”
1 John 4:8
Blake: Love to faults is always blind
more Blake quotes:
Every thing that lives is Holy
Children of a future age…
Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations
more thoughts from me
recommendation for Between the World and Me, The New Jim Crow & film “13th”
excerpt from King’s sermon “Loving Your Enemies”

Issue #14 Mostly Poems (Blake image: When the morning stars sang together) 6/18/20
Blake quote: “The tree that moves some to tears of joy…”
Buckminster Fuller photo & quote: “I always say to myself: What’s the most
Inmate Calls Home by Kim Stafford
poems sent by Howard:
Life-and-Death by Uchiyama Roshi
It Is I Who Must Begin by Václav Havel
from Song of Myself: “I peruse manifold objects” & “Dazzling and tremendous”
“A woman went to see her therapist…” by Johnny

Issue #15 Ripple Effect (image of ripples in water) 6/25/20
“If I can stop one heart from breaking…” by Emily Dickinson
letter exchange on “the ripple effect” between Josh Underhill and me

Issue #16 Blake: Innocence and Experience (Laughing Song image) 7/2/20
some thoughts on going from innocence to experience
four poems by William Blake:
Infant Joy
Laughing Song
The School Boy
The GARDEN of LOVE
Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” (first third)
quote from Hamlet: “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth…”

Issue #17 Remembering Nick Picture of Nick Consoletti 7/9/20
Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow, too…?
Lonnie’s letter
some thoughts about Nick by me

Issue #18 Kim Stafford Featured Poet (Picture of Kim and Johnny) 7/16/20
To Be a Better Person essay by Kim Stafford
Dew & Honey poem by Kim Stafford
Two Rivers poem by Kim Stafford
“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves…” Sylvia Plath
“This is what you shall do…” Walt Whitman
link to talk by Cornel West on “What It Means to Be Human”
Kim’s aphorisms on poetry

Issue #19 Metaphors: Battle or Picnic? (picture of Emerson) 7/23/20
Emerson quote about metaphors
Battle or Picnic? essay by Johnny
Sifter by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Panther by Rilke
There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale
link to Sacred Economics video featuring Charles Eisenstein

Issue #20 Humor Issue (Gary Larson cartoon: Nerds in hell) 7/30/20
two Gary Larson cartoons
one cartoon by Lars Kenseth
lots of jokes
link to video of people in India singing and dancing on top of a train

Issue #21 Culture that Nurtures (picture of Wisłowa Szymborska) 8/6/20
Consolation by Wisłowa Szymborska
The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost
The Fact of Forgiveness by Kim Stafford

Issue #22 My mind started to blossom… (picture of Aaron Gilbert as Toby Belch) 8/13/20
Letter about Love in prison by Aaron Gilbert
Poetry Class at the Women’s Prison by Kim Stafford
A Blessing by James Wright

Issue #23 Poems, Stories, Letters, Thoughts (picture of four actors from Midsummer Night’s Dream) 8/20/20
Practical Illusions by Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford, Ace Reporter poem by Johnny Stallings
Katie Radditz’s story about sitting next to Aaron Gilbert’s mom at play
my letter to Howard about how men honoring me in the dialogue circle
Whitman quote: “This minute that comes to me over the past decillions…
my thoughts about Kim’s poem
Thomas Traherne quote: “There was never a tutor that did professly teach Felicity”

Issue #24 Meditation and Mindfulness (image of Avalokiteśvara from Ajanta) 8/27/20
Kingdom of God is within you Bible quote (Luke 17: 20-21)
intro to Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Project by me
Thomas Traherne: “Our blessedness, like His, is infinite…”
Pico Iyer about seeing the world more clearly and loving it more deeply
Walt: “There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me…
johnnypoem: “when you see how simple it is to be happy…”
notice of Deborah’s publication of three chapbooks
Deborah’s poem Early Morning Hours
Wendell Berry: Ask the world to reveal its quietude…
Huxley quote: “Unrestrained and indiscriminate talk…”
Thich Nhat Hanh: “Mindfulness is when you are truly there…”
Finding Deep Calm story about Gheed in Palestine by Kim
Invitation to join Meditation & Mindfulness Project by me
Hafiz on perfection: “the movement of your breath…the beating of our hearts”

Issue #25 Interview with Ashley Lucas (photos of Ashley and Jeff Sanders & Joe Opyd with his mom, Sharon Lemm, and Aunt Andrea) 9/3/20
Interview with Ashley
links for ordering her books, link to Open Hearts Open Minds, link to Open Road

Issue #26 Paradise of Books (image of Don Quixote in his library by Gustave Doré) 9/10/20
thoughts on books and bibliophilia
catalog of animals by Borges
thoughts on books that changed my inner landscape
Sonnet #1 by Joshua Barnes
Sheltering in Place #12 by Doug Marx
YARD SALE by Nick Eldredge

Issue #27 Smoky (image of the Platters) 9/17/20
It’s smoky: links to “Meeting in Smoky Places,” “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and Smokey Robinson
Inmate Fights Fire by Kim Stafford
Second Chance by Randall Brown
Smokey the Bear Sutra by Gary Snyder
link to Smokey the Bear song with Eddy Arnold

Issue #28 How Hippies May Still Save the World (image of Flora by Botticelli) 9/24/20
How Hippies May Still Save the World essay by Johnny
lyrics to “Love’s In Need of Love Today” by Stevie Wonder & link to song
some lyrics from “What the World Needs Now” and link to song
lyrics to “All You Need Is Love” and link to song
lyrics to “Get Together” and link to song
lyrics to “San Francisco” and link to song

Issue #29 Gary Snyder and FOUR CHANGES (image of Gary Snyder) 10/1/20
Holy Smokes by Kim Stafford
FOUR CHANGES by Gary Snyder & link to Gary Snyder reading it

Issue #30 The Golden World (image of glass of water) 10/8/20
The Golden World essay by Johnny

Issue #31 Pollyanna (image of Mary Pickford) 10/15/20
The Glad Game from Pollyanna
link to Reasons to Be Cheerful website
link to talk by David Korten
link to talk by Charles Eisenstein
link to talk by Thich Nhat Hanh
Our Next Big Thing by Kim Stafford
Gary Larson Hell cartoon: “We’re just not reaching that guy”

Issue #32 Loving the Earth (image of sunrise from atop Big Mountain) 10/22/20
For Papatūānuku – Mother Earth by Nadine Anne Hura
A note of gratitude from Nadine
link to an essay by Nadine Anne Hura: “I’m Reclaiming the Name I Lost”
“I peruse manifold objects…” brief passage from “Song of Myself”
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Earth Dweller by William Stafford & link to him reading the poem
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Weary of those who come with words…” by Tomas Tranströmer
“My Work is Loving the World” by Mary Oliver

Issue #33 Gettysburg Addresses (image of Lord Buckley) 10/29/20
Revising Genesis by Kim Stafford
For All by Gary Snyder
The Color of Eyes by Deborah Buchanan
Everything is Going to Be All Right by Derek Mahon
Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Abe & I by Kim Stafford
The Gettysburg Address by Lord Buckley and link to him performing it
The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

Issue #34 Gandhi (picture of Mahatman Gandhi) 11/5/20
Nitya’s encounter with Gandhi from Love and Blessings
some thoughts about having to be right by Johnny
brief Gandhi bio
Gandhi quotes

Issue #35 Writings of Lonnie Glinski (picture of Lonnie as Ophelia) 11/12/20
excerpt from letter from Lonnie
lyrics to Somebody Famous by Lonnie
excerpt from letter from Lonnie
lyrics to Bloom Where You Landed by Lonnie
lyrics to And They Just Smile by Lonnie
lyrics to It Ain’t Me by Lonnie

Issue #36 Freedom’s Firm Foundation (picture of Nitya, Nancy & Peter O.) 11/19/20
Finding Freedom’s Firm Foundation essay by Nancy Yeilding

Issue #37 Writing Poems (picture of Pablo Neruda & Matilde Urrutia) 11/26/20
i thank You God by e. e. cummings
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
Writing as Ritual essay by Kim Stafford
My Sheltering Sky by Kim Stafford
Poetry Doctor by Kim Stafford

Issue #38 Pictures (not words) 12/10/20
drawings by: Saul Steinberg, Franciszka Themerson, Hakuin, Leonard Cohen, B. Kliban, Ralph Steadman, José Guadalupe Posada, Hokusai, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, John Lennon, Amadeo Modigliani, Rick Bartow, James Thurber, John Tenniel, Charles Erickson, Maurice Sendak, Mark Alan Stamaty, Andrew Larkin, Hugo Anaya, Jake Scharbach, Peter Schumann, William Blake, Dr. Seuss, Rube Goldberg, Winsor McKay, Gary Larson
link to OK Go:” This Too Shall Pass” Rube Goldberg Machine video

Issue #39 Poetry Corner (image of Mr. Natural watering the Tree of Possibilities) 12/23/20
“I believe the soggy clods…” quote from Walt
“Since water still flows…” by Li Po
Found Kin by Jeff Kuehner
Elemental Thoughts by Joshua Barnes
THE MEANING OF THIS by Alex Tretbar
Hindsight (2020) by Joshua Barnes
Think Twice by Kim Stafford
Your Sovereignty by Kim Stafford
Winter Feet by Esther Elizabeth
Daily Bread by Esther Elizabeth
What Issa Heard by David Budbill

Issue #40 Allegory of the Cave (image of Plato’s cave) 1/7/21
Wonder by Thomas Traherne
DUST by Alex Tretbar
Allegory of the Cave by Plato

Issue #41 Loving Your Enemies (photo of Martin Luther King) 1/21/21
Loving Your Enemies sermon by Martin Luther King, November 17, 1957

Issue #42 The Hill We Climb (screen shot of Amanda Gorman) 2/4/21
The Hill We Climb poem by Amanda Gorman
link to Amanda Gorman reciting The Hill We Climb
Prabu’s thoughts on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection

Issue #43 Valentine’s Day Special: Love Poems (image of Paolo and Francesca) 2/18/21
kissing rocks and throwing them story
Love to faults is always blind by William Blake
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet by Shakespeare
i carry your heart by e. e. cummings
I Loved You Before I Was Born by Li-Young Lee
The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats
This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
What We’re Doing Here by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
link to Offenbach song Barcarolle sung by Elīna Garanča & Anna Netrebko
Sonnet VII by Pablo Neruda
Re-Statement of Romance by Wallace Stevens (not in prison version)
We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d
Romeo & Juliet: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand…” sonnet
Juliet: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea”

Issue #44 Harold and the Purple Crayon (image from Harold and the Purple Crayon) 3/4/21
some thoughts on Harold and the Purple Crayon
Tenniel’s illustration to A Mad Tea Party
“A Mad Tea Party” from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Issue #45 Spring Equinox (peace, love, happiness & understanding is one year old!) (picture of Daphne odora) 3/18/21
A Color of the Sky by Tony Hoagland
Oregon Dawn in Spite of the News by Kim Stafford
In Just-/spring by e. e. cummings
O sweet spontaneous by e. e. cummings
Spring, the sweete spring, is the yeres pleasant King by Thomas Nashe
Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins
A Thin Sliver at the Door (prose) by Deborah Buchanan
Come Spring by Dorianne Laux
A Light exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson
Spring comes on the World – by Emily Dickinson
Issa:
Look at this world even its
Grasshoppers in the chilly breeze
Spring rain:
Basho:
I don’t know
Spring!
Chiyo-ni:
the pheasant sings-
I forget
squatting
to be in a world
Thank you’s to contributors to “peace, love, happiness & understanding”

Issue #46 Story Poems (picture of Aged Aged Man by John Tenniel) 4/1/21
And the people stayed home by Kitty O’Meara
Nirvana by Charles Bukowski
Abou Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt
The Thee Hermits by William Butler Yeats
Three Angels by Bob Dylan
A Story That Could Be True by William Stafford
The Aged Aged Man by Lewis Carroll

Issue #47 Singer Come from Afar (picture of the cover of Kim Stafford’s book) 4/15/21
Poetry in Prison by Kim Stafford
Blue Brick from the Midwest by Kim Stafford
Ask Me by William Stafford
God made a little Gentian – by Emily Dickinson
The Divine Image by William Blake
Waxwings by Robert Francis
Meditations 47 & 48 from the Second Century of Meditations by Thomas Traherne

Issue #48 Bibliomania (picture of cover of Autobiography of a Yogi) 4/29/21
Bibliomania essay by Johnny
Prospero’s speech: “Our revels now are ended…”

No issues of peace, love, happiness & understanding in May (Mexico vacation)

Issue #49 Wisława Szymborska Nobel Lecture (picture of Wisława Szymborska) 6/10/21
Wisława Szymborska Nobel Lecture

Issue #50 Johnny’s Imaginary TED Talk About Love (picture of sidewalk message: EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY) 6/24/21
Johnny’s imaginary TED talk about love
For the Bird Singing Before Dawn by Kim Stafford
Letter to the Mothers and Fathers of Palestine and Israel by Charles Busch
link to Fields of Peace website

Issue #51 Dreams of Better Worlds (pictures: 3 by Crumb of futures, big orange splot, Wague mural) 7/8/21
Paradise essay by Johnny

Issue #52 The Art of Happiness (picture of Slava Polunin) 7/22/21
Slava Polunin’s TED talk

Issue #53 The Three Questions (picture of Leo Tolstoy) 8/5/21
The Three Questions (story)

Issue #54 War: What is It Good For? (picture: First and Last Day of Spring by Jonathan Winters) 8/19/21
quotes from Ten Commandments, Dhammapada, Hermann Göring, and the song “War” by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong
Michel Deforge’s response to Kim Stafford’s poem “Old Glory’s New Red, Black, and Blue”
some thoughts by Johnny on Pacifism
Kim Stafford’s poem “Old Glory’s New Red, Black, and Blue”

Issue #55 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (picture of United Nations flag) 9/2/21
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Issue #56 Another Humor Issue (picture of Mother Hubbard & her dog) 9/16/21
Old Mother Hubbard Nursery Rhyme
lots of jokes

Issue #57 HEART! (picture of loteria card El Corazon) 9/30/21
Pascal quote: The heart has its reasons…
Rocky’s essay: HEART!
wake up, heart! by Johnny Stallings
Love Therapy in My Second Home by Alokananda Roy

Issue #58 Johnny’s Brief Guide to Ancient Greece (pictures of “The Death of Socrates” by David, and a bust of Aeschylus) 10/14/21
Essay by Johnny about “Suppliants” project and Greek Philosophy & Drama

Issue #59 Poems from the Last Five Days by Kim Stafford (photos taken at the beach by Kim) 10/28/21
five poems with commentaries by Kim Stafford

Issue #60 Recipe for Living a Life Rich in Meaning (pictures of four bodhisattvas: Brenda Erickson, Dick Willis, Jude Russell & Jack Baird) 11/11/21
“Beginning My Studies” by Walt Whitman
“My Recipe for Living a Life Rich in Meaning” by Johnny

Issue #61 Goldfinches! (picture of Goldfinch) 11/25/21
Johnny’s theater piece: “Goldfinches!”

Issue #62 A Christmas Carol (picture of Scrooge beholding the Spirit of Christmas Present) 12/9/21
Abridged version of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens (for reading aloud)

Issue #63 Dream of a Ridiculous Man (picture of Goya’s sleeper dreaming Peaceable Kingdom) 12/23/21
Johnny’s version of Dostoevsky’s short story “Dream of a Ridiculous Man”

Issue #64 Brother West (photo of Cornel West) 1/6/22
Cornell West on “What It Means to Be Human”

Issue #65 Big Sky Country (picture of Glacier National Park) 1/20/22
Photos and Texts by Abe Green, including:
Dew & Honey by Kim Stafford
Rain by Neall Ryon
quote from Love and Blessings
quote from Dhammapada: “All that we are arises with our thoughts…”
(Mexico vacation)

Issue #66 Big Sky Country Part Two (picture of bee on lilac blossom) 2/24/22
Photos and Texts by Abe Green, including:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
Birth is not the beginning/ Death is not the end quote from Chuang Tzu
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death quote from Walt Whitman
So here I sit by my campfire… by Abe Green
It’s the job of wise people… by Johnny Stallings
thoughts on Earth’s inhabitants by Abe Green
Lessons from a Tree by Kim Stafford
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
thoughts on broken objects by Abe Green

Issue #67 What Are Some of Your Favorite Books? (picture of the cover of Borgel) 3/10/22
Some favorite books from Kim Stafford, Patrick Walsh, Ken Margolis, Deborah Buchanan, Jude Russell, Bill Faricy, Will Hornyak, Jeffrey Sher and Johnny Stallings.

Issue #68 War & Peace & Spring! (photos of plum tree and Ukrainian refugees) 3/24/22
link to Spring Equinox issue of peace, love, happiness & understanding (3/18/21)
Plum Trees in War by Kim Stafford
Thomas Bray’s favorite books
Vernal Sentiment by Theodore Roethke
Katie’s favorite books
On Pilgrimage by Czeslaw Milosz
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border by William Stafford
a favorite book of Michel Deforge
favorite books of Brandon Gillespie and his thoughts on Spring and War
let’s pretend by Johnny Stallings
My Foolproof Plan for World Peace by Johnny Stallings
link to Ukraine meditation group

Issue #69 Carl Sandburg (picture of Potato Face Blind Man) 4/7/22
Definitions of Poetry by Carl Sandburg
The Potato Face Blind Man Who Lost the Diamond Rabbit on His Gold Accordion by Carl Sandburg
How the Potato Face Blind Man Enjoyed Himself on a Fine Spring Morning by Carl Sandburg
The Right to Grief by Carl Sandburg
Happiness by Carl Sandburg
link to Those Darn Accordions playing Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire by Jimi Hendrix
link to Flaco Jimenez, Mingo Saldivar, Pete Ybarra, David Farias & David Lee Garza
link to Clifton Chenier playing Tighten Up

Issue #70 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison (picture of Bottom & Titania) 4/21/22
link to National Poetry Month on poets.org website
link to Shakespeare issue of “peace, love, happiness & understanding” 4/23/20
plug for upcoming Bibliophiles!, and link to Keith on the Mysteries of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
announcement of Portland premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison
the history of prison dialogues and plays: how A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison came to be

Issue #71 Some Poems (picture of sidewalk covered with cherry blossoms) 5/5/22
A Question by Joshua Barnes
Flickering by Joshua Barnes
thoughts on akrasia by Alex Tretbar
a blue little flower is nodding by Alex Tretbar
the rumor by Nick Eldredge
How to Be an Old Man of Some Scant Worth by Kim Stafford
earth the door Orpheus goes through by Deborah Buchanan
Ghost River by Deborah Buchanan
Ukraine by Mark Alter
my sangha by Johnny Stallings
amateur dilettante by Johnny Stallings

Issue #72 Poems By Women (first page has Emily Dickinson; pictures of the other poets accompany their poems) 5/19/22
The Infinite a sudden Guest by Emily Dickinson
A Light exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson
O Taste and See by Denise Levertov
from My Wisdom by Naomi Shihab Nye
Happiness by Jane Kenyon
from Reconciliation: A Prayer by Joy Harjo
At Blackwater Pond by Mary Oliver
Miracle Fair by Wisława Szymborska
The Award by Alice Walker
Despite the Hunger by Alice Walker

Issue #73 Walt on my mind…and in my heart (painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow) 6/2/22
Celebration of Walt Whitman’s 203rd birthday
link to April 9, 2020 issue of peace, love & happiness, celebrating Walt Whitman
link to new Friends of Walt Archive on the Open Road website
Emerson’s letter to Whitman
excerpt from Emerson’s essay “The Poet”
link to May 7, 2020 issue of peace, love & happiness, which featured Ingersoll’s essay “Crimes Against Criminals”
Address at the Funeral of Walt Whitman by Robert G. Ingersoll (March 30, 1892)

Issue #74 Interview With Bryan Joyner (picture of Bryan Joyner) 7/7/22
Excerpts from CRCI Studio Interview with Bryan Joyner and link to YouTube video of interview

Issue #75 Adventure Tales! (picture of Edith Mirante in Burma 8/4/22
Tales of Adventure from:
Edith Mirante
Kim Stafford
Nick Eldredge
Johnny Stallings
Abe Green

Issue #76 William Blake (Blake’s painting “River of Life”) 9/1/22
Love to faults is always blind…
Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations
Children of the future Age…
The Garden of Love
To see a World in a Grain of Sand…
aphorisms from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
from the Preface to Blake’s poem “Milton”
The Little Vagabond
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Enion’s lament from The Four Zoas
from Visions of the Last Judgment

Issue #77 Kate Brown on Clemency (picture of Governor Kate Brown) 10/6/22
Amanda Waldroupe’s Guardian article about Oregon Governor Kate Brown’s historic use of clemency

Issue #78 R. H. Blyth (picture of R. H. Blyth) (12/1/22)
Essay by Howard Thoresen on R. H. Blyth

Issue #79 Tender Buttons edited by Alex Tretbar (picture of Gertrude Stein) (1/5/23)
Essay “A Carafe in Bb Major” by Alex Tretbar
“Special Features” poem by Alex Tretbar
“no comas” by Irene Cooper
“the buttons are as tender as we make them” by Laura Winberry
Excerpt from the song “Tender Buttons” by Trish Keenan of the band Broadcast
“Stein’s Enigmas” essay by Kim Stafford
“Lone Pine in Scotland” poem by Kim Stafford

Issue #80 Something That Changed the Way You See the World (poster of “Song of Myself” by Rick Bartow) (2/2/23)
“In Memory of My Literary Godmother” by Will Hornyak
“Coincidence” by Kim Stafford
Story about visiting Sam Alley in hospice by Charles Erickson
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” by Johnny Stallings
The family I choose by Rocky Hutchinson
“Five Tanka Written Upon Spending the Night in a New Apartment” by Alex Tretbar
“Leftover Rainwater” by Elizabeth Domike

Issue #81 Favorite Poems (picture of a stone wall with a gate) (3/2/23)
“Vernal Sentiment” by Theodore Roethke (Jeffrey Sher)
“After an Illness, Walking the Dog” by Jane Kenyon (Elizabeth Domike)
“I thought of all the doors that had opened and closed… by Jo Harjo (Deborah Buchanan)
“A Meadow” by Czeslaw Milosz (Deborah Buchanan)
“The Waking” by Theodore Roethke (Dave Duncan)
“Easter, 1916” by William Butler Yeats (Mark Danley)
“Together, We all go out Under the Cypress Trees in the Chou Family Burial-Grounds” by T’ao Ch’ien (Katie Radditz)
“Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of their Titles” by Billy Collins (Katie Radditz)
“May I never by complete…” by Chuck Palahniuk (Jeff Kuehner)
“Afternoon” by Max Ritvo (Alex Tretbar)
“Valentine” by Ken Hunt (Kim Stafford)
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost (Scott Teitsworth)
“The Salutation” by Thomas Traherne (Johnny Stallings)
from “I Corinthians, Chapter 13” by Paul the Apostle (Ken Margolis)

Issue #82 Favorite Films (picture of “The Rink”) (4/6/23)
“In the Beginning” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Kim Stafford)
“Ted Lasso,” “Wings of Desire,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Hail, Caesar!,” “Bliss,” “Brazil,” “The Kingdom of the Fairies” & “The Rink” (Johnny Stallings)
“The Count of Monte Cristo” (Brandon Gillespie)
Book: This is Happiness by Niall Williams; Film: “The Mission” (Will Hornyak)
Will sent a poem he wrote: “Why Baseball Matters”
“The Rules of the Game” & “The Rider” (Ken Margolis)
“Wings of Desire” (Elizabeth Domike)
“Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” & “Heimat” (Katie Radditz)
“The Crying Game” & “The Lives of Others” (Jude Russell)
“Withnail & I” (Alex Tretbar)
“Andrei Rublev” & “Tree of Life” (Prabu Muruganantham)

Issue #83 Books That Changed the Way You See the World (picture of For Your Own Good) (5/4/23)
The Man Who Loved Children (Ken Margolis)
The Skull Mantra (Elizabeth Domike)
Hope for the Flowers, Johnny Got His Gun & The Power of Myth (Nicole Rush)
The Mahabharata (Charles Erickson)
Green Mansions (Katie Radditz)
Nicholas and Alexandra, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, American Prometheus & The Orientalist (Jude Russell)
For Your Own Good, Woman and Nature, “Factory” & “Song of Myself” (Johnny Stallings)
For Your Own Good (Todd Oleson)
Man’s Search for Meaning, Writing My Wrongs, The Master Plan, My Grandmother’s Hands, Homecoming & The Body Keeps the Score (Michel Deforge)

Issue #84 Peace (picture of young man putting a flower in the barrel of a gun) (6/1/23)
Poems by Deborah Buchanan: “Early Morning Hours,” “The Only Now,” “Unexpected,” “The Tree in the Universe”
Thoughts on peace, including poem “My Foolproof Plan for World Peace” by Johnny Stallings
“Bolinas” by Tom Clark, submitted by Alex Tretbar
Thoughts on peace by Rocky Hutchinson
“Siddhartha’s prayer” by Bill Faricy
“Surrounded” by Elizabeth Domike
“Peace Tree” by Kim Stafford
“Peace Within, Peace Without”: thoughts on peace by Jude Russell
Thoughts on peace by Ken Margolis

Issue #85 Visions of Utopia & Paradise (picture of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) (8/3/23)
Quote from Slava Polunin
Gonzalo’s utopia from The Tempest
Excerpt from interview with Stratis Panourios about utopia and The Tempest in prison
Johnny’s thoughts on utopia & paradise
Poem by Tasos Leivaditis, translated from the Greek by Spiros Chrisovitsianos
“Borrowed Aura” poem by Kim Stafford
“Words for Cup and Water” poem by Elizabeth Domike
“What an Angel Said” poem by Alex Tretbar
“Perfect Day” poem by Johnny Stallings
Quote from Alan Watts

Issue #86 peace, love, happiness & understanding (picture of Rocky Hutchinson with eight puppies) (9/7/23)
quote from Ai Weiwei
“YARKHOTO” poem by Ai Qing
letter from Abe Green
letter from Rocky Hutchinson
“Prairie Radio” poem by Kim Stafford
excerpt from “The Final Frontier” essay by Brian Doyle

Issue #87 Black Elk’s Vision (picture of Black Elk) (10/5/23)
passages from Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk & John G. Neihardt
“All My Relations” by Kim Stafford
“My House is the Red Earth” by Joy Harjo
“Grandfathers Whispering” by John Trudell
“MOTHER EARTH: HER WHALES” by Gary Snyder
passage from The Sacred Pipe by Black Elk & Joseph Epes Brown

Issue #88 The War Prayer (picture of Peanuts cartoon) (11/2/23)
“Other Laws of War” by Kim Stafford
“The War Prayer” by Mark Twain
story about New York City teacher Sari Beth Rosenberg from CNN
some thoughts by Johnny Stallings
“Please Call Me by My True Names” by Thich Nhat Hanh

Issue #89 Letters from Rocky and Lots of Poems (picture of Lake Grinnell in Glacier National Park) (12/7/23)
Letters from Rocky
“Gate A-4,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye
Kurt Vonnegut quote about doing things because you enjoy them
“Driving to the Headlands on the 23rd of December,” poem by Gail Lester
“Water Song,” poem by Kim Stafford
video of starling murmuration
“Honesty,” poem by Elizabeth Domike
poem by Alex Tretbar
some thoughts by Johnny Stallings, with Dhammapada quote

Issue #90 Celebration! (picture of Alan & Christine, with Santa and dogs & cat) (1/4/24)
some thoughts on celebration by Johnny
“I am with you” poem by Kim Stafford
“The Three Wise Men” poem by Will Hornyak

Issue #91 What has enlarged your world? (picture of Nancy in Guanajuato) (2/1/24)
The Key to Sweden by Kim Stafford
Alex Tretbar recommends In Search of Lost Time
Johnny Stallings’ thoughts on the question “What has enlarged your world?”
Elizabeth Domike’s thoughts on the question “What has enlarged your world?”
Katie Radditz’s thoughts on the question “What has enlarged your world?”

Issue #92 Abundance! (picture of Mexican ceramic Tree of World Literature) (3/7/24)
Thoughts on Abundance by Johnny, including passages from King Lear, Ulysses & “Song of Myself”
“Some Tides” poem by Will Hornyak
Preface to The Lagniappe by Kim Stafford
passage from “Last Prayer” essay by Brian Doyle

Issue #93 Creativity! (picture of Martha Graham) (4/4/24)
letter by Martha Graham about creativity
“Wild Visioning” poem by Kim Stafford
“How to Make a Poem” poem by Kim Stafford
“Creativity” essay by Kim Stafford about Naomi Shihab Nye’s essay “Maintenance”
quotes from William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway sent by Keith Scales
“The Choice” poem by W. B. Yeats sent by Keith Scales
“My Process of Creativity” essay by Deborah Buchanan, including three of her poems:
“Her Gaze Never Drops”
“white orchid”
“Retroactive Prayers”
two ancient Mexican poems sent by Andy Larkin:
“Here through art I shall live forever…”
“The Artist”
“Sisters” essay by Elizabeth Domike
four short poems by Johnny Stallings:
“The trick of a poem is:”
“i want to go to the place where poems come from”
“the unwritten poem”
“if i could put into words what i see out this window”

Issue #94 Mostly Poems (picture of cow weathervane, with bird perched on it) (5/2/24)
“Remember” poem by Joy Harjo
“Birthing Your Secret Self” poem by Kim Stafford
“Not So Much” poem by Elizabeth Domike
“MAD” poem by Brandon Lee Roy
some thoughts from Rocky Hutchinson
“We Are Seven” poem by William Wordsworth

Issue #95 Blogs and Other Stuff (picture of “The Young Hare” by Dürer) (6/6/24)
“The Province of Clocks” poem by Alex Tretbar
quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer about the wisdom that older people have
“About Those Web Logs (Blogs)” essay by Elizabeth Domike
some thoughts by Johnny about “peace, love, happiness & understanding” and Walt Whitman

Issue #96 What Stories Do You Tell Yourself to Cheer Yourself Up? 7/4/24)
Johnny’s thoughts on the stories he tells to cheer himself up
link to a “Seasons Greetings” video by J Kahn
“The Summer Day” poem by Mary Oliver
“A Translation Project for Peace” and the poem “A Proclamation for Peace” by Kim Stafford
quote from Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
“Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere” poem by William Stafford
“Gift” poem by Czesław Miłosz

Issue #97 Poems, Letters & Other Writings (picture by Saul Steinberg) 8/1/24
“I put on my glasses” poem by John Brehm
“Walking Through a Wall” prose poem by Louis Jenkins
J Kahn writes about “Marcel the Shell With Shoes”
Johnny responds to what J wrote
lyrics to “That Feel” by Tom Waits
“Nirvana” poem by Charles Bukowski
letter from Rocky Hutchinson
letter from Michel Deforge
Jude writes about finding peace, love, happiness & understanding
Katie shared Gary Snyder’s poem: “I Went Into the Maverick Bar”

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/1/24
2024-08-01 - 2024-09-04
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

August 1, 2024

I put on my glasses
to see the fog
more clearly

—John Brehm
*

Walking Through a Wall

Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said, ‘Say, I want to try that.’ Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren’t so good. They won’t hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren’t pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it’s the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don’t know, but I’ve torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.

—Louis Jenkins
*

What did the zen master say to the hot dog vender?
Make me one with everything.

I was reminded of that joke because of the ending of a stop-action animated film we just watched, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, about a one inch snail who has lost his family. It was sweet, funny, odd, and unexpectedly touching.

But I thought you’d especially like this excerpt from the end of the script, in which Marcel is sitting on a window sill, the window is open a crack, and a breeze is blowing past him:

The wind blows through Marcel’s shell, creating a LOW PLAINTIVE HUM.
MARCEL: Can you hear it? That’s it. That’s going through my shell.
WIDE ON THE ROOM
It’s a normal laundry room. But in this moment, in this afternoon light, in this breeze, we feel something transcendent.
MARCEL (V.O.): It connected me, I felt, to everything. Because if I wasn’t there the sound would never exist. I felt like everything was in pieces but when I stood there, suddenly we were one large instrument. I like to go there a lot. Because it reminds me that I’m not just one separate piece rattling around in this place, but that I’m part of a whole. And I truly enjoy the sound of myself connected to everything.
Marcel sits on an eraser, looking out the window. His shell HUMS with the wind.
CUT TO BLACK

—J Kahn
*

I replied to J in an email:

Thanks, J.

Sounds like my kind of movie.

With the ending they are trying to say something very simple, which is difficult to put into words–and is the most important thing in the world.

In Act 3 of Our Town, Emily feels that feeling and is brokenhearted that other people aren’t feeling it.

I don’t know if it is what Tom Waits is talking about in this song, but the song is very evocative of something, in any case:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-c5L_45_gA

That Feel

Well there’s one thing you can’t lose
It’s that feel
Your pants, your shirt, your shoes
But not that feel
You can throw it out in the rain
You can whip it like a dog
You can chop it down like an old dead tree
You can always see it
When you’re coming into town
Once you hang it on the wall
You can never take it down

But there’s one thing you can’t lose
And it’s that feel
You can pawn your watch and chain
But not that feel
It always comes and finds you
It will always hear you cry
I cross my wooden leg
And I swear on my glass eye
It will never leave you high and dry
Never leave you loose
It’s harder to get rid of than tattoos

But there’s one thing you can’t do
Is lose that feel
You can throw it off a bridge
You can lose it in the fire
You can leave it at the altar
But it will make you out a liar
You can fall down in the street
You can leave it in the lurch
Well you say that it’s gospel
But I know that it’s only church

And there’s one thing you can’t lose
And it’s that feel
It’s that feel

–Tom Waits

And then there’s this poem, which was in the April 1, 2021 issue of peace, love, happiness & understanding. It’s good enough to share again:

Nirvana

not much chance,
completely cut loose from
purpose,
he was a young man
riding a bus
through North Carolina
on the way to somewhere
and it began to snow
and the bus stopped
at a little cafe
in the hills
and the passengers
entered.
he sat at the counter
with the others,
he ordered and the
food arrived.
the meal was
particularly
good
and the
coffee.
the waitress was
unlike the women
he had
known.
she was unaffected,
there was a natural
humor which came
from her.
the fry cook said
crazy things.
the dishwasher.
in back,
laughed, a good
clean
pleasant
laugh.
the young man watched
the snow through the
windows.
he wanted to stay
in that cafe
forever.
the curious feeling
swam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.
then the bus driver
told the passengers
that it was time
to board.
the young man
thought, I’ll just sit
here, I’ll just stay
here.
but then
he rose and followed
the others into the
bus.
he found his seat
and looked at the cafe
through the bus
window.
then the bus moved
off, down a curve,
downward, out of
the hills.
the young man
looked straight
forward.
he heard the other
passengers
speaking
of other things,
or they were
reading
or
attempting to
sleep.
they had not
noticed
the
magic.
the young man
put his head to
one side,
closed his
eyes,
pretended to
sleep.
there was nothing
else to do-
just to listen to the
sound of the
engine,
the sound of the
tires
in the
snow.

–Charles Bukowski

peace, love & that feeling

Johnny
*

6-29-24

Dear Johnny,

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon & my work is finished for the day. My mind is always full of thoughts of life outside the walls of prison these days, all of them good. It sometimes occurs to me that my past life feels like it was just a dream & that I’ve never been out of prison. I’m sure that one day my whole life will seem like one long dream. Who’s to say that it’s not just that?

I had a bunch of flowers left over from the plots & I asked if I could place them along the window sills here on my new unit. I was given permission to do so. Now the whole front of H Unit is covered in bright-colored flowers & I’ve gotten a lot of positive comments! It feels good to make things beautiful here. What I’ve done with plants & flowers, Johnny, you’ve done with people in and out of prison. Once I’m out, my plan is to do what you’ve done, plant seeds in people and help them to reclaim their lives. Well…we will see what happens once I’m out. Maybe a few friends & a good job & happiness in a simple life would be more my speed right now.

7-1-24

Here is something nice that I’ve been thinking about for the letters we all share. Being in a cell lets me have personal time to think and write.

Good things are what I need to rent space in my head. My waking life is full of dreams that come to pass. Never again will I take for granted the world that is waiting beyond the walls, razor wire & glass. I try to bring the beauty of the world outside in here.

7-9-24

The way we all think and express how we feel about the kindness we see and share with each other in the group letters we compile for me is sweet as honey dripping into my soul. We are on the path to the core of the golden world, all of us are the shining ones helping others to find this world as well.

I love the Mary Oliver poem that Ms. Jill Littlewood shared with us called “The Summer Day”! And to you, Ms. Littlewood, I must say…

I do not know who made the swan or black bear, or the grasshopper, or you, or me. What I do know is that if all of my days were like the one summer day in this poem, it in itself would be bliss. Most of my days are spent in a greenhouse and I do have grasshoppers. I even have a rock chuck who eats my kale! My prayers are to life & love & joy and friends. I speak them to the morning sun and to my coffee. With my one wild and precious life I simply plan to be content.

Harvesting saffron in the summer morning sun was a gift today. Most of the time these days it does not even feel like prison to me anymore.

My mind is always on what it will be like to have a different scale of freedom in this world…. My perception of freedom is I’m sure quite different than most.

Well, I love you Johnny & will talk to you soon.

Good things Always
Rocky
*

June 23, 2024

Johnny,

Thank you for the copy of Every Day, Holy Day. I really appreciate your doing this for me. Life at OSCI goes well. I’ve been here over 30 days now; still settling into my routine, but much here is differently-same. (More of a reasonable and calm state, yet still a carceral environment with a few “toughs” to keep things interesting.) I find I’m exposed to far fewer people here. It’s not just a smaller population, but each unit is more isolated than it seemed at TRCI, including overlapping at meals and pill-line. Each keeps to one’s own “people” or unit. All-in-all, it’s much nicer here!

Topic: Joy. Moments come when the heart dances in the light. So much more than the experience of fun, or even happiness, joy erupts when the inner sphere scintillates in its completeness. An experience touches us to the depths of our souls, and in that moment we are graced with a vision—if only fleetingly—of the flawless wholeness and perfection of all. Then the heart fills and flows over, even amid the brokenness of the world.

Week’s mantra: Mouth filled with laughter, ears with shouts of joy.

Practice: Step away from your busyness and savor several moments every day; feel the joy that is available to you. —from Every Day, Holy Day by Alan Morinis

“Heart dances in the light…joy erupts when the inner sphere scintillates in its completeness.” Such an image! To touch the “flawless wholeness and perfection of it all.” (I struggle today with RA [Rheumatoid Arthritis] stiffness and pain, in addition to allergy congestion.) The step back; the step to smell the roses; it’s developing the awareness of life’s variegated moments as they pass. Some as “happy little clouds.” Others pendulous with precipitation, yet to be deposited on earth. No matter my opinion of the moment—good, bad, etc.—moments for experiencing joy abound. I have but to develop my awareness.

—Michel Deforge
*

Peace Love Happiness and Understanding…

…can be hard to come by in this blistering hot, suffocating weather.

I have been angry at the weather: Whoever heard of ‘heat domes’ until a couple of years ago? Whoever needed ‘cooling shelters’ until a few years ago? The heat wave would cool naturally in a few days—-well, not anymore. So I’m mad at Republicans, corporations, anybody who calls climate disasters ‘natural’, etc. etc.

But then it boils down (haha) to me, personally, of course. Instead of enjoying my coveted 5-7 a.m. reading and coffee time, I have to go out at 5 a.m. to water my gardens, put shade covers on the hydrangeas, do whatever garden work I need to do before the heat hits again. Or, most aggravating of all (poor me), I have to get a bike ride in at that time and finish before it hits 80 degrees at 9 a.m.! That ‘poor me’ should not be in parentheses; this is serious stuff.

So with that merry attitude, I hopped on the bike yesterday at 6 a.m. It was 58 degrees, and felt…deliciously cool! Well, that’s not gonna last, I growled. But it was, in fact, deliciously cool, and fresh. And with cool and fresh I breathed in the almost tangible fragrance…of green. The emerald green of grass-filled meadows. The nearby meadows of one hundred lovely sheep, all browsing heads down munching on the meadow. I love those sheep. ‘Hi sheep!,’ I called, as I always do. A few of them looked up, and I could swear they nodded at me. But how can they be enjoying themselves with those hot, wool coats on?, I grimaced. It felt good to have other creatures to commiserate with, even though the sheep didn’t appear to realize they were miserable.

And then…and then…the sun rose from behind Bald Butte and bathed the fields in gold. It backlit the patches of Timothy hay and the nodding heads of wheat in a shimmering light. Golden wheat, sky blue chicory, pearly pink sweet peas lined the road.

The birds exalted in the sunrise—-the soft staccato of the mourning doves, warbling meadow larks, the chirping and twirping of all, cheering the arrival of the sun. Before I could stop, I found myself chirping and twirping and cheering this heavenly morning along with all the other creatures.

—Jude Russell
*

This poem was published in Gary Snyder’s book Turtle Island, in 1969–a time when America was in a great divide of culture, politics, generations. A time of war, protests. The poem is like a timely marker, to engage in creating a more peaceful world.

I Went into the Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”

— GARY SNYDER

Not surprisingly, yet remarkably, Johnny and my husband Bill recognized immediately the last line. It is the title of an 1863 novel written by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. “Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.” (Wikipedia)

–Katie Radditz

¡BARDAPHILIA!: Horsing Around With Hamlet 8/2/24
2024-08-02 19:00 - 21:00
Bardaphilia!

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”

¡Beloved Bardaphiles!
This Friday evening the plan is to Have Fun With Hamlet. We’ll perform the one-minute version, talk to a skull, kill each other…et cetera. I’ll provide the scripts.
If you don’t already love Shakespeare, this class will remedy that. And if you do…you know there’s nothing more fun than reading the plays and poems together with friends. Actor and director Johnny Stallings is the genial host.
This is an Open Road Event. Join us!

Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
Friday evening, August 2nd, 7-9 pm
suggested donation $5 per class

¡Bardaphilia!: How to Put on a Play 8/9/24
2024-08-09 19:00 - 21:00
James Cagney as Pyramus and Joe E. Brown as Thisbe (1935)

Bardaphilia!

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”

¡Beloved Bardaphiles!

This Friday evening (8/9/24) we will learn from Peter Quince, Nick Bottom and their friends How to Put on a Play! We’ll see how they cast, rehearse and perform “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” We may even attempt a performance ourselves! If we do the result will be very tragical mirth!

If you don’t already love Shakespeare, this class will remedy that. And if you do…you know there’s nothing more fun than reading the plays and poems together with friends. Actor and director Johnny Stallings is the genial host.

This is an Open Road Event. Join us!

Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
Friday evening, August 9th, 7-9 pm
suggested donation $5 per class

Kalidasa! 8/24/24
2024-08-24 19:00 - 21:00
KALIDASA

Johnny Stallings reads from the works of Kalidasa (circa 5th Century CE), India’s greatest poet and playwright. Dialogue follows. This is an Open Road event (openroadpdx.org).

Muir Hall in Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland
Saturday, August 24th, at 7 pm

Charles Erickson, artist
2024-09-03 - 2024-09-10
This theatrical prop (above), including myself in the foreground, is an introduction to my present series of paintings about the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
It is about the mind and the five organs of sense–eye, ear, tongue, nose and skin–represented by the five painted portals.

“That call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”
–William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

One portal is on the left, and one is on the right. There are three portals in back. The portal on the left is the ear, the portal on the right is the eye. The ear and the eye are cognitive senses, rich in information, and accessible to language.
The central portal in the back is skin. The other two are tongue and nose.
Skin, unlike the other sense organs, is all over the body–so it was called sensus communis in the Middle Ages. There is a reason skin is in the middle. It’s a unifier, in the same way that the mind is a unifier. There is a central axis between the mind and the skin.
*
Here’s a passage about the transformation on Mount Tabor, from the gospel of Luke:

28 And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray.
29 And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering.
30 And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias:
31 Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.
32 But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him.
33 And it came to pass, as they departed from him, Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he said.
34 While he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud.
35 And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him.
36 And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen
Luke 9:28-36

Paintings by Jake Scharbach at Froelick Gallery
2024-09-03 - 2024-10-12
painting by Jake Scharbach

Jake Scharbach’s paintings will be exhibited at Froelick Gallery, September 3-October 12.

The First Thursday Reception is September 5, 5-8 pm.

He will give a talk at the gallery on Saturday, September 7th, at 11 a.m.

Froelick Gallery is at 714 NW Davis, in Portland.

Jake is Nancy’s nephew. We’re very excited about the show!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

¡Bibliophiles Unanimous! 9/15/24
2024-09-03 08:00 - 17:00, 2024-09-15 15:00 - 17:00
¡Bibliophiles Unanimous!

Friendly online conversation that starts out with books and…meanders.
Here’s the Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87614013058.

September 15th, 3 pm: Books That Changed the Way You See the World
October 13th, 3 pm: Favorite Poems & Poets
November 17th, 3 pm: Oddball Books
Free

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/5/24
2024-09-05 - 2024-10-02
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 5, 2024

Broken and broken
Again on the sea
The moon so easily mends.

Ueda Chōshū
_________________
We Are All Going into the Future Together

Johnny has framed this newsletter – Peace, Love, Happiness and Understanding – to give readers a sense of joy. He has asked me to write about being a futurist, an optimistic futurist, knowing that it is part of my practice to find good things in the world. Every day I try to find signals of hope from what is emerging – in the news, online, in conversation and from observation.

Two things about the future: there are no facts (as if we needed proof given our recent political stories) and, the future belongs to all of us. We are going into it together, learning as we go.

When I connect to people who think about the future we construct and play games as we set up scenarios that might come into being. Here is a recent one: millions of people will be migrating from too-hot-to-live-in places to places that aren’t as devastated yet. I’m in Oregon so people will be moving here for sure. How do I feel about that? What can/should I do? What problems and possibilities are there in this scenario?

My first thought is, “Wait. What? People coming here to my block? I don’t know them – they could be from anywhere.” I sit with this and then think how much I have and how much I’d like to share. I begin to think about how my neighborhood could embrace a new family. Could I put a small house in my yard? Could I find friends and neighbors who would pool money to buy a place they could gift this family until they could pay rent? Could I move in with one of my kids (or vice versa) and give a displaced family somewhere to get a new life started ? Could a group of friends build a house like Habitat for Humanity does? And then I start to get excited about exchanging ideas and culture with new people. As a teacher, artist and grandma I’d love to teach their kids art, or sit in their kitchen smelling their cooking, or share some of mine. My granddaughter could meet their daughter and who knows where that could go?

The futurists I hang out with are part of an online community started by Jane McGonigal. Years ago I read her book “Reality is Broken” because my boys were spending so much time on video games and playing Warhammer and I didn’t understand their fascination. Jane’s book opened my eyes to the foundation of games: to make a game you set a goal and then put obstacles in the way. Think golf: you could just walk over and put the ball in the cup. To make it a game you have all kinds of complicated rules involving special equipment, spaces, time, scoring. And though golf doesn’t interest me I began to realize that as an artist I set up rules to play by every day. Will I use watercolors or acrylics? Big brush or small – arm motion or wrist motion? Abstract or realistic? Political or decorative? And so on. What this has to do with futurists is the real game, the underlying game, is “What if?” What if I use only blues? (Picasso’s Blue Period.) What if I accentuate B&W contrasts and shadows? (Think film Noir.) What if I put lots of mirrors facing each other and walk between them? (Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms.)

Artists make up their own rules and play by them. Artists and futurists ask “What if?” to guide them to new places.

In our online group, urgentoptimists.org, we look ten years in the future and imagine:

“What if there was a huge climate event that knocked out food production across a wide band of the earth?”
“What kinds of new holidays and celebrations would you like to be part of?”
“What impact will AI have on medical care, education, business, art, politics?”
“How might we meet a new pandemic and what have we learned from Covid?”
“Tomorrow is the last day of trash pick-up for everyone, forever. What have you (and your town/city) done to get ready for this moment?”

Jane’s recent book is “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Be Ready for Anything.” As a game developer she knows how to make learning interesting and inventive. For Urgent Optimists she designs a scenario, like the ones above, and we are prompted each day for a week to write and post journal entries from the future (usually ten years, so 2034); or create an artifact (design a poster for the new holiday “Ancestor Appreciation Day”); or contribute to a poll that asks how we’d feel being in 110 degree weather for a week.

From all around the globe people answer Jane’s prompts as if they’re in 2034 and this is their reality. They share hopes, fears and cautions. They sleuth out signs that whatever-it-is is starting to happen now. Many places around the world have had 110 degree weather for a week and more, and that number is increasing. Where do we see signs of solutions?

This is foresight as a verb. Once your mind has gone to that place, no matter what question it is answering, you have a different way of imagining the future. You’ve imagined the people you are connected to in that future: your family, friends, neighbors, city, country, globe. Everyone and everything plays together: mycelium and birds and streams and avalanches and a girl eating a corn dog at the county fair in Nebraska or a boy eating yak-on-a-stick in Mongolia all come together – the yin and the yang of the great wheel of fortune. The murderer who types on a computer and the one with a sawed off shotgun. The baby blessed and the baby abandoned. The open road and the closed cell. We are all going into the future together. But since there are no facts, you and I are just as expert at drawing a picture of it. We are all immigrants in the future, dancing as we go.

—Jill Littlewood
*

Like all the other hippies, back in the day, I spent a lot of reading and re-reading The Whole Earth Catalog. It was a kind of Bible to us. It was a way of finding out about things before there was an Internet. A futurist and inventor named Buckminster Fuller was prominently featured in its pages. He invented the geodesic dome, and many of us dutifully did our best to build them on our hippie communes. As a young man “Bucky” had spent a lot of time imagining the future, what problems might arise, and how to solve them. He hoped that by getting a 50-year head start on the problems, by the time they arrived we’d be ready for them. Maybe we could even prevent some bad things from happening. A book of some of his speeches was titled Utopia or Oblivion. Those were our choices, he said. Since oblivion is not very interesting, he decided to devote his intelligence, imagination and energy to utopia.

Fuller invented something he called “The World Game.” The object of the World Game is to “make the world work.” Anyone can play. Maybe everyone is already playing it, but some strategies aren’t working out too well.

If you imagine you have enemies, you might prepare to fight. You might actually fight. If you imagine you have no enemies, the world is not such a scary place. Instead of imagining a world of warring nations, we might imagine that there is one human family. We might take it a step further and imagine that we love everyone—including plants, animals, clouds and stones. How would that feel?

I asked my friend Howard what he thought the future would be like. “Like the present,” he said.

When I asked Jill which of Robert Crumb’s visions of the future is most likely, she said, “All of them.”

At this moment on our big beautiful planet, everything imaginable is happening right now, and many things that we can’t imagine. The newspaper reminds us of the wars and other catastrophes. Meanwhile, birds and butterflies are migrating, children are playing, bees are spending their days pollinating flowers, mammals are falling in love, puffy white clouds are floating by. It has ever been so.

Not only do we not know what will happen next, we don’t know what is happening right now. Somehow, our eyes, brain and nervous system present the appearance of a three-dimensional colorful world to us. Somehow, my heart keeps beating. Somehow, I digest my food. I don’t know how any of these things work, but they do. The whole ecosphere, including us, is a complex example of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” In the future, I predict that everything will continue to inter-be.

Some of the ever-changing happenings are wonderful. Some are terrible. Personally, I want to be on the Fun Team. I’d rather be kind than mean. I’d rather be happy than sad. I’d rather be good than bad. I’d rather have friends than enemies. I’d rather be part of the healing than part of the wounding. I’d rather live in love.

In the future, as in the past and present, there will be injustice. And tragedy. There’s no way around it. We’re all gonna die! That’s the way this game is played. Life and death go together. While I’m alive, I want to live! I want to live a life rich in meaning—with lots of friendship and laughter. I often think of the words from a song by Laura Nyro:

And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone,
there’ll be one child born, and the world will carry on,
carry on.

—Johnny Stallings
*

It is Sunday,—-September 1st! Thank god! Finally! The sun, although hot, is slanting at its oblique, golden angle, and the heat is less intense. Goodbye to the hot, flattening blasts of July and August. The nights are cooler; the sun is rising later and later, and setting earlier. I love the darkness.

I am driving and listening to All Classical. They’re playing Autumn, of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; Autumn Divertimento by Constantini; September Song by Kurt Weill…well, someone else obviously is happy about this month, this season.

My chrysanthemums are blooming, russet red, sunshine gold; the tomatoes plump and ripe.

I am euphoric, incandescent with joy. Peace love happiness and understanding coalesce into one moment of palpable transcendence. Sometimes there are these moments. I feel enveloped by abundance and love and joy.

Could this moment be aided and abetted also by the fact that I am re-reading (for the third time) the sublime Becoming Duchess Goldblatt? No doubt about it. For those of you who have not read about the Duchess, I would just like to quote some of the (anonymous) author’s words. Words that are nothing less than the beauty that comprises peace, love, happiness and understanding. I won’t go into the ‘plot;’ it’s too complicated. Here we go:

“My lifelong training as my father’s child has been instructive here. How do you love everybody? Surely you can’t love everybody. Surely some people don’t deserve it.

I used to ask my father about this all the time.

‘I’m not sure what you mean by ‘deserve,’ he’d say. “You love people because they’re people, because they’re human beings. Not necessarily because you enjoy their company, which is one kind of love, but because you recognize they’re inherently worthy. Every person is inherently worthy. I’d argue it’s your obligation, regardless of whether you think it’s your job to decide if they’ve earned it.’”

Lyle Lovett figures into the story (really!), and he offers thoughts about the Duchess:

“Duchess is such a unifying force of nature. That’s your book, as I’m sure you’ve already considered: how we can all be connected, how we all are connected by the most basic and most powerful of all, love, and the acceptance that comes with it.”

The Duchess/anonymous author as a young girl being chastised by a nun:

“I didn’t make eye contact with her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I kept my eyes down, but I heard every word she said, and I knew she was dead wrong. I knew in my bones, had always known, that my brother would eventually commit suicide, and I knew he was a child of God just as much as anybody else, and I knew that when he died he would be welcomed into heaven. If she’d ever seen despair up close, she would know what I knew, that God understands the nature of a broken heart. The saddest people will always be allowed to go home first.”

So with these heartbreakingly beautiful words, I leave it to you to enjoy, cherish, love, and celebrate this book and this season.

—Jude Russell

¡Bardaphilia! FALL 2024
2024-09-13 - 2024-11-15
Leonardo DiCaprio & Claire Danes in the Bay Lehman film “Romeo + Juliet”

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”

¡Bardaphilia!

If you don’t already love Shakespeare, this class will remedy that. And if you do…you know there’s nothing more fun than reading the plays and poems together with friends. Actor and director Johnny Stallings (stallingsjohnny@gmail.com) is the genial host.
Friday evenings, 7-9 pm, at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
September 13th, Muir Hall: Shakespeare the Storyteller (with special guest J Kahn) (This was changed to an online event because of Covid exposure.)
October 25th, Artspace Room: Measure for Measure
November 15th Artspace Room: Shakespeare on Film
This is a FREE Open Road Event

The Marvelous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca 9/21/24
2024-09-21 19:00 - 21:00
The Marvelous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca

Johnny Stallings reads Haniel Long’s version of this astonishing true tale, followed by dialogue.
This is an Open Road Event.

Artspace in Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
Saturday, September 21, 7 pm
Free

An Iliad 9/26/24
2024-09-26 19:30 - 21:30
Open Road Recommends:
An Iliad
Before taking this show on tour to prisons in Wisconsin, Vermont, Maine and Oregon, Paul Susi (actor) and Anna Fritz (cellist) perform this powerful play by Lisa Peterson & Denis O’Hare as part of the Risk/Reward Festival.
This is a great show! DON’T MISS THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE IT!!!

Ellen Bye Theatre at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave.
September 26, at 7:30 pm
Get TICKETS

peace, love, happiness & understanding 10/3/24
2024-10-03 - 2024-11-06
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

October 3, 2024

I’ve been having a conversation with myself in my journal for the past 54 years, or so. Here are excerpts from the entry for January 16th, followed by a brief essay, “perfect moments,” that I wrote on January 17th, followed by excerpts from what I wrote on January 23rd:

monday, september 16th

perfect day
perfect silence
perfect coffee
this home is a well-ordered place of refuge for two human beings
outside these walls, in some places, perfect chaos and confusion
perfect fear…
perfect sorrow…
perfect healing…
perfect love
the neon sign says: LOVE WINS
so it must be true…
the dance of shadows on the wall…
helping to co-create culture that nurtures—a local and a global culture of peace, love, happiness & understanding—begins with my own deep peace, love, happiness & understanding
a silence that is free of fear and hatred
love for everyone and everything
boundless joy
continuing to improve my understanding of what’s going on here by learning from wise thoughtful intelligent people
in order to be more helpful
to choose wisely
to not utter words that are hurtful
there’s a rough and tumble aspect to human life
don’t be too attached to non-attachement
or to ideas of no-self, ātman, et cetera
don’t forget to laugh and have fun
don’t take yourself or your opinions too seriously
feel the beauty of the blue sky and the puffy white clouds
the green of the leaves on the trees and bushes and grass
the bright flowers
the bright flowers!
i know why buddha held up a flower
the surprising thing is that everyone in the assembly didn’t get enlightenment at that moment
the bewildering thing is that we live in a world that has flowers in it and yet people hurt each other
how can this be?
i guess it’s because there are other things besides flowers in the world
there are, for example, guns…
i feel bad for the people who have lots of guns and no flowers…
in a world teeming with life, everything dies
and new things arrive
new people and plants and birds and bugs and elephants are always arriving
elephants!
wonderful beings!
monarch butterflies!
what a world!
it’s amazing that shakespeare wrote a midsummer night’s dream and king lear
it’s amazing that there are elephants and monarch butterflies
and hummingbirds and pansies
yellow pansies and little bright purple flowers
i’m in love with this world!

perfect moments

is this moment perfect?
yes!

i would like to sing the praise of perfect moments
and so i shall

everyone has experienced perfect moments
and yet many people are dissatisfied, unhappy, miserable
this is puzzling
this very moment might be felt to be perfect
and if it’s not, the next perfect moment might be right around the corner

the older i get, the more perfect moments i enjoy
i get a lot of blessings
i’m a happy man

to the extent that happiness is an art, and not just an accident, it might be the art of noticing and appreciating perfect moments

like this one

i like to start the day slowly, in silence
with a cup of coffee and two shortbread cookies
not by checking my inbox, or reading the new york times
i sit on the couch and look out the window
the backyard is filled with flowers
they are glorious, perfect!
perfect little birds come to the bird feeder
this morning: song sparrows, goldfinches, house finches, juncos
sometimes puffy white clouds float by in the blue sky
every one perfect

this morning the sky is overcast
have you ever noticed that some people say, “i love the rain!”?
on sunny summer days that are not too hot and not too cool, people seem to be in a good mood, more cheerful, more friendly
in portland, where i live, it rains a lot
it makes everything green
but people complain about the rain, and even get depressed
the person who says, “i love the rain!” is doing a kind of jiu jitsu
something that makes most people sad makes them happy
that’s a pretty neat trick

thich nhat hanh used to say, with a warm smile, “the present moment is a wonderful moment”
you might notice that most problems are elsewhere

if there is so much to take delight in, why isn’t everybody happy—at least most of the time?
there are countervailing forces in play
some are external and some are internal

to start with inner obstacles to happiness, we might look at “bad mental habits”
in this computer age, to say we have been “programmed” is a useful metaphor
our experiences, our society, our family of origin have instilled habits in each of us
some of those habits promote well-being
some do the opposite
some people are open, cheerful, friendly
some are anxious, some are angry, some are sad

of course a sad moment can be, and often is, a perfect moment
but to be sad all the time is to miss something that’s good for you—joy!

our external circumstances play a role in our feelings of well-being, or lack of them
a prison environment does not tend to promote happiness and well-being
and yet one of the happiest people i know is living in prison
he has mastered the art of appreciating perfect moments

people in ukraine and gaza and lebanon and sudan and israel are currently experiencing the terrible tragedy of war
and yet the experiences of people in those places are not uniformly bleak
there are perfect moments
there have to be, because an act of kindness is a perfect moment
and surely there must be many many acts of kindness under those terrible conditions
(ceasefire now!—everywhere, always and forever)

human life on earth includes tragedy, violence and injustice
they are exacerbated by fear, hatred, anger and greed
they are mitigated by love and kindness and joy and tranquility

to enjoy a perfect moment is to live—for a moment—in paradise
not the imaginary paradise that will arrive someday if we all just do everything differently than the way we’re doing things now
but a real paradise in this perfect moment

bankei calls this our unborn buddha mind
and asks why anyone would want to exchange their unborn buddha mind for the mind of a hungry ghost

perfect moments don’t necessarily have anything to do with religion or spirituality— although spiritual practices and religious symbols create perfect moments for many people
perfect moments are democratic
they’re available to anyone, anywhere, anytime
special environments, like japanese gardens, are sometimes created so that people who go there are more likely to experience perfect moments
a garden is a paradise
my local tea shop, the tao of tea, is a place where people go to enjoy perfect moments, alone or with friends

in quest of perfect moments, people go for walks in nature, listen to and play music, make art, read and write poems, make love
my own predilection is for simple pleasures
they’re readily available, cost nothing, and require no effort

it is my hope that while reading these meandering words you had a perfect moment
or remembered a perfect moment
or felt the importance of appreciating perfect moments
so that, over time, you enjoy so many perfect moments that you can’t believe how lucky you are to live in a world filled with miracle and beauty

monday, september 23rd

it’s hard to get used to the idea that we don’t know
because we like to pretend we do

from Endymion

BOOK 1

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms…

—John Keats (1795-1821)

i was talking with howard on the phone last night
i was trying to say something about pansies and moments

we have ideas that there are bad times and good times
“the dark ages,” “the enlightenment,” et cetera
we don’t know
the perfect moment in which i enjoy the pansies on our porch and the little purple flowers (lobelia!) beside them—that moment has no boundary
to say that the moment is “fleeting” is an idea about the moment
the moment itself has no idea, no duration
it is neither long nor short
it has nothing to do with “time”
time is another idea
for me, one yellow pansy is more important than the War of 1812
“more important” isn’t right
it has nothing to do with the relative importance of one thing or another thing
four and a half billion years is not longer than a moment
the bonneville dam is not more important or less important than a yellow pansy
the question of whether things are getting “better” or “worse” has nothing to do with the pansy

keats said it perfectly:
a thing of beauty is a joy for ever
he was right
that’s true
the pansy gives me boundless pleasure
infinite delight
enjoying a pansy for a moment makes my whole life “worthwhile”
i’m happy that i got to come to planet earth and enjoy the pansies and lobelia

what about the horrors of war?
the horrors of war are unspeakably horrible
people should be growing pansies instead of killing each other
why they’re not remains a mystery
we have theories about the causes of war
here’s my theory about what causes war:
unhappiness

the cure for war?
peace, love, happiness & understanding

by living in love and peace and joy we are setting a good example for our fellow mortals

walt says:
each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy
&
this minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
there is no better than it and now

krishnamurti speaks of “freedom from the known”…

blake says:
eternity is in love with the productions of time
&
to see a world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour…

there’s no such thing as death
either you’re alive, or you’re not
only people who are alive can read this
squirrels can’t read it
they don’t need to
they’re busy “living in the present moment”
*

In 1971, Charles Erickson and I met a Dutch sailor in India named Jules Dams. Jules posted something about John Wesley on Facebook that Charles forwarded to me:

John Wesley’s Manifesto

Reduce the gap between rich people and poor people
Help everyone to have a job
Help the poorest, including introducing a living wage
Offer the best possible education
Help everyone to feel that they can make a difference
Promote tolerance
Promote equal treatment for women
Create a society based on values and not on profits and consumerism
End all forms of slavery
Avoid getting into wars
Share the love of God with everyone
Care for the environment

John Wesley (1703-1791) was founder of the Methodist Church. This “manifesto” “based on his writings” is on display at the Wesley Museum in Bristol, England. As a kid, my family went to the Methodist Church. Maybe some seeds were planted.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Inspired by Martha and Elizabeth during Bibliophiles, I went back to read a mystery by an author I loved. In 1975 Wilhelm Van de Vettering wrote Outsider in Amsterdam, whose main character reflected his own—a zen student, jazz musician, cat-loving policeman living in Amsterdam. Very low key plot.

At one point this character meets a housebound sedentary old man on a house call. He feels that his life is thankfully so different from this man’s world, when he spies the man’s record collection. They share the same taste in music and they have all the same records!

Everything stops…they have this moment.

When asked, the old man says, yes, he has had these moments before…

“I never quite understood them. Something occurs, you notice something, and suddenly the moment is there. You can’t explain it, maybe you don’t want to explain it. I remember when it happened for the first time. I saw a hornbill in the zoo. Some people call them rhinoceros-birds. It looked so weird that suddenly my whole life changed. I saw my life differently. I knew it would change back again and become boring again, ordinary, everyday life. But that moment it was all different. The logic had been knocked out of it….Nobody can explain a hornbill to me. That’s the beauty of it maybe.”

That was very satisfying in itself; I thoroughly enjoyed reading the fifty year old book again. The next day I went with my grandkids to the zoo; I hadn’t been to the zoo for ever. We were going through the giraffe’s area and there was a most unusual bird staring up at us. A sign said, The Hornbill! I had read 11-year-old Sylvan the passage from Outsider in Amsterdam, and he asked me, with a smile, “Are you having a hornbill moment, Grandma?” I laughed and told him, “No, but I have had them before.”

To these moments that always stay with us, however absurd, and make no sense to anyone else’s reality, but are so meaningful to us!

This makes me think of a great William Stafford poem –

Why I Am Happy

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

—William Stafford

peace and joy,
—Katie Radditz

¡Bibliophiles Unanimous! 10/13/24
2024-10-13 15:00 - 17:00
¡Bibliophiles Unanimous!

Friendly online conversation that starts out with books and…meanders.
Here’s the Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87614013058.

October 13th, 3 pm: Favorite Poems & Poets (Bring a poem to read!)
November 17th, 3 pm: Oddball Books
Free

¡Bardaphilia!: Measure for Measure 10/25/24
2024-10-25 19:00 - 21:00
Mark Rylance as Duke Vincentio, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2005

¡Bardaphilia!

Measure for Measure

But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep, who with our spleens*
Would all themselves laugh mortal.**

–Isabella, Measure for Measure, Act 2, scene 2

* organ thought to control laughter
**(Proverbial: “to die laughing”)

For our Shakespeare class on Friday, October 25th, we will be exploring the darkly comic world of Measure for Measure! We will focus on Act 2.
Reading the play beforehand is recommended, but you don’t need to know the play to enjoy the class. (Folger edition has helpful notes on facing pages.)
It’s a great idea to watch a film version, if you can find one–but NOT the 2020 version with Hugo Weaving, which is not really Shakespeare’s play, but “inspired by it” in some way.

I hope to see you there!

Taught by Johnny Stallings
Friday evening, October 25th, 7-9 pm
Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland
This Open Road event is FREE!

INFIDEL: The Notorious Robert G. Ingersoll 10/26/24
2024-10-26 19:00 - 21:00
Infidel!
The Notorious Robert G. Ingersoll

Johnny Stallings reads from speeches and essays of 19th Century America’s most eloquent agnostic and humanist, followed by dialogue.

Artspace Room in Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
Saturday, October 26, 7 pm
this Open Road event is free

peace, love, happiness & understanding 11/7/24
2024-11-07 - 2024-12-04
“The School of Athens” by Raphael

THIS IS THE 100th ISSUE OF peace, love, happiness & understanding!!!

November 7, 2024

Coffee Shop Philosophy

The first question is: what’s the difference between “coffee shop philosophy” and “philosophy”?

Philosophy is an academic discipline, taught in universities. Philosophy professors teach students about the Famous Philosophers and their ideas. The list of Famous Philosophers is not an especially long one. It includes people like Plato and Descartes and Spinoza and Hegel. Those guys.

Coffee shop philosophy is an informal inquiry into the meaning of life, which can take place anywhere, but thrives especially in…coffee shops. And tea shops. There are no professors. No experts. All participants have equal status. The questions are immediate, not abstract. They are personal. In academic philosophy, thinking has primacy. Coffee shop philosophizing includes thinking, but also feeling. Academic Philosophy asks: “What did Kant think?” Coffee shop philosophy asks: “What do you think?”

Originally, the word “philosopher” meant “lover of wisdom.” Is wisdom confined to what the Famous Philosophers wrote? I don’t think so. Here are some of the people who are not taught in academic philosophy classes: Martin Luther King, Walt Whitman, Susan Griffin, William Shakespeare, Black Elk, Lao Tzu, J. Krishnamurti, William Blake, Fyodor Dostoevsky—all wise people! It’s a much, much longer list of people whose writings can enrich and illumine our lives, but who are not Famous Philosophers.

Coffee shop philosophy is friendly. There is laughter! There are no grades. You can’t fail. Friends get together to talk about what is most urgent to them. It can include psychology, ecology, poetry, love, happiness, death! Everything! We wonder about the meaning of our life. What are we doing here? We want to become wiser, kinder, more happy, more free. We talk about our life journeys, what we’ve learned so far, what continues to baffle us.

I took a couple Philosophy classes in college, long long ago. For more than 50 years now I’ve been avidly practicing coffee shop philosophy—alone and with others. If you keep a journal, you can have a long long philosophical conversation with yourself.

I’ve learned more about living, more about happiness, more about love, more about freedom—more actual wisdom—from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” than from any other writing. Because he’s labeled a “poet,” and not a “philosopher,” he’s not studied in Philosophy classes. I think of Walt as my friend—along with William Shakespeare and Thich Nhat Hanh and John Moriarty and Brian Doyle and many many other friends whose books fill my bookshelves and spill over onto the floor. I think of them as companions on my life journey, as fellow coffee shop philosophers.

The endless deep dialogues I’ve had with friends in coffee shops and tea shops and prisons have greatly enriched my life. For thirteen years I practiced coffee shop philosophy every week with men in Oregon prisons. There was no coffee. But there was something beautiful that I don’t know how to describe. I guess the closest word is “love.”

I love books! I’ve learned a lot from books, but we also gain wisdom from our life experience, and from sharing our experience and insights with each other. We need coffee shop philosophy! We need each other!

These days I still get together with friends for coffee and deep dialogue every week. We do it because we love to have big personal conversations about life and love and what’s going on within us and around us. Over time, we get to know each other better and love each other more deeply. That seems like a good thing for humans to do.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Can you feel surging joy and profound sadness at the same time? How can a heart handle both at once?

Once in the habit of morning walks with the dog, the habit continues without the dog, Lolo having died about one and a half months ago. She was sixteen years old, and we’d rescued her fifteen years earlier from Home At Last animal shelter in The Dalles. They had found her wandering the streets of Shaniko, a ghost town in Oregon. Scrawny and fearful, she cowered when anyone tried to touch her; but I knew that with time and love and stability and security she would be a perfect pooch. And she was. Hiking, backpacking, snowshoeing, beach walking—she went pretty much everywhere with us. Everyone loved her and she loved everyone. The great comfort dog. Any shred of anger, depression, fear or disappointment would melt away when I touched her silky ears. So you can surely understand the sadness I feel.

So what’s with the surging joy??? Is that possible? Well, I walk out the door and am kicking through huge, magical, golden maple leaves the size of dinner plates. They’re spinning, spiraling slowly beneath a vault of blue. Blue sky, white clouds, yellow gold leaves; how could I not feel a surge of joy?! It overtakes my heart.

More joy: It’s a good thing to spend time deciding whether you love October or November more. A contest for best month of the year. This is good: Is it the bustling oranges and reds and yellows of the buckets and buckets of leaves filling your vision in October? Or is it the beauty and starkness of the bare, black, muscular limbs once the leaves have shed in November? After all, it’s then that you can see through the bushy busy-ness of trees, to the hills beyond, to the mountains beyond. It’s then that you can settle into the spareness of November, settle into the cool rain patters, and the darkened mornings and evenings. I love it.

Can I feel both, then—-joy and sadness? I decree that yes I can, and do.

—Jude Russell
*

Kim Stafford’s latest book is A Proclamation for Peace: Translated into World Languages. In the book, his poem “A Proclamation for Peace” is translated into 50 different languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Ashaninka & Bislama; Gaeilge, Greek & Hebrew; Pashto, Persian & Punjabi; Quechua, Romani, Romanian & Russian; Tagalog, Tamil & Thai; Ukrainian & Vietnamese; Yoruba, Yucatec & Zapotec. The book can be ordered from bookshop.org. Here’s the English version of the poem:

A Proclamation for Peace

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be my vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

—Kim Stafford, originally published in Wild Honey, Tough Salt
*

I also wrote a proclamation for peace. Coincidence? Peace is always something we can use more of, so I’ll include it here:

My Foolproof Plan for World Peace

I hereby declare today to be International Love Day.
And a General Armistice.
All hostilities must cease on International Love Day.
Henceforward, every day is International Love Day.

—Johnny Stallings, from The Nonstop Love-In: poems, stories, essays & other writings

shāntih shāntih shāntih

¡Six Mystics! 11/9/24
2024-11-09 10:00 - 15:00
“The River of Life” by William Blake

¡Six Mystics!
Han Shan, Hafiz, Thomas Traherne, William Blake,
Walt Whitman & Black Elk

Explore the poetry and visions of six mystics from different times and cultures in a workshop with Johnny Stallings.
This event is live and online!
The live event is at Taborspace (see below). For those who are far away, here’s the Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86482174323

Rather than a brief presentation, I want to go into the material more deeply, so I’m doing a four-hour workshop, with a one-hour lunch break. There will be lots of opportunities for everyone to share their own ideas and experience. (We are all, in some sense, mystics.)
If you can’t stay for the whole time, either live or in-person, you are welcome to drop in for as long as you can.
If you have questions, or want to register in advance, contact Johnny at stallingsjohnny@gmail.com or 503-347-6869. (Letting me know in advance that you plan to attend, for all or part of the time, is helpful to me.)

This live workshop is in the Library at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland.
Saturday, November 9th, 10-3 (Lunch from 12-1; bring a sack lunch.)
This Open Road event is free.

¡Bardaphilia!: Shakespeare on Film 11/15/24
2024-11-15 19:00 - 21:00
Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede in Kurosawa’s “Ran”

¡Bardaphilia!

Shakespeare on Film

For our Shakespeare class on Friday, November 25th, we’ll talk about filmed versions of Shakespeare’s plays and watch film clips together.

Taught by Johnny Stallings
Friday evening, November 15th, 7-9 pm
Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland
This Open Road event is FREE!

¡Bibliophiles Unanimous! 11/17/24
2024-11-17 15:00 - 17:00
¡Bibliophiles Unanimous!

Friendly online conversation that starts out with books and…meanders.

On November 17th, at 3 pm, our topic is:

¡Oddball Books!

What, you might ask, is an oddball book?

Here are a few examples:

A book you have that you’re pretty sure none of the other bibliophiles have–and maybe haven’t even heard of.
A book that is unlike other books.
A book that has unusual ideas or things you haven’t heard elsewhere.
A book that is extremely imaginative.
Books written by or about oddballs or crazy people.

This is a free Open Road event!
Here’s the Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87614013058.

Earlier this Fall, we had…

Books That Changed the Way You See the World (September 15th)
Favorite Poems & Poets (October 13th)

Dream of a Ridiculous Man 11/23/24
2024-11-23 19:00 - 21:00
Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Johnny Stallings reads his performance version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s magical final short story, followed by dialogue.
This story–(see below)–is guaranteed to astonish!

Much better to experience it LIVE–bring a friend–but for those who are too far away, or don’t drive at night, you can watch on Zoom (at 7 pm, Pacific Time).

Here’s the Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81824888865

Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland
Saturday, November 23rd, 7 pm
Free

peace, love, happiness & understanding 12/5/24
2024-12-05 - 2025-01-01
photograph of flower & bee by Abe Green

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

December 5, 2024

Jill Littlewood sent this:

Gate A-4

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”
Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”
We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

—Naomi Shihab Nye
*

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

—Walt Whitman
*

On November 23rd, I gave a reading of my version of Dostoevsky’s short story, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” at Taborspace in Portland. You can find the text in Issue #63 of “peace, love, happiness & understanding,” (December 23, 2021), on the Open Road website (https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-12-23-21/). In the story, a guy dreams that he goes to a planet where there is no hatred, or violence or fear. When he wakes up, he wants to tell everyone that we can all live together in love.
When I first read that story, long ago, I realized that I too am a ridiculous man. To prove it, here’s a brief excerpt from my journal entry from yesterday:

isn’t there enough suffering in the world, without having wars?….
why do we have wars?
they’re not helping anything
war is the opposite of culture that nurtures
the culture of war produces suffering and death
how much money does the united states spend on the military and on weapons every year?
i don’t know
a lot
even a little would be too much
we should be helping each other
not hurting each other
isn’t this obvious?
we should be loving
not hating
loving everyone
all people and plants and animals and rivers and clouds and dirt
that’s what i want to promote:
love for every being and for every good thing
no thank you to hatred and violence and fear

—Johnny Stallings
*
Remember?

Remember that day
When the war ended
And you climbed from your trenches
And we oozed from our bunkers
Leaving guns and grenades
Bullets and bayonets behind?

Remember how we sang in the streets
Danced in the fountains
Crazy with Joy?
Remember how clouds lifted, hearts rose
Vengeance, bitterness, hatred and rage
Fell away like graveclothes?

Remember how we stood
Tall and happy
In the morning light
Eyeing the world
And one another
With new eyes?

Remember
How in that ecstasy
We forgot
If ours was a blue state or red
Liberal cause or conservative stand?

Remember
How easily we remembered
Who we were
From where we had come
Why we were here
Where we were going
And what we should do?

I will never forget that day
When the war ended
And trust sprouted and spread
Like a sea of green grass
Across every divide, covering every division
Uniting all into one state of grace
Indivisible, at peace
Under heaven.

—Will Hornyak, from This Altar of Earth and Sky
*

Canary in the Mind

If you descend to sorrow, take a little singer
to carry through the dark some color of he sun.
Tunneling through trouble, guard your little light,
shield your little singer for the good of everyone.
If your singer falters, if your mind grows dim,
If your breath grows shallow, if your days are grim,
feed your little singer seeds of hope again.
In the cave of grief, with every breath begin.

—“Canary in the Mind” is reprinted from As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024) by permission of Kim Stafford
*

Repeat the Sounding Joy

The camellias know
as do creatures
moving in piled
leaf litter, chaff.

Under yet unfallen snow
branches threatened by ice
plodders do their work,
distracted we laugh.

The hills remember
as do streams
fish swim on up
wriggling into our dreams.

Rumble underfoot
in the sky, repeat the story
throughout this land
sunrise brings glory

If we notice
as we stand.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

I’ve been listening each night to two owls who must have decided to stay in the neighborhood for the winter. Owls don’t migrate but they do move around some and often return or remain in a familiar woods. When they Who Hoot, I think of the squirrels and little rodents who are also trying to stay alive in the cold. But i do love their voices and am glad to have enough woodsy life to have them make a home here too. They make many of us beings pay attention. Here’s a poem by Mary Oliver:

Snowy Night

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

—Mary Oliver

—Katie Radditz
*

November 5, 2024. A day of reckoning. What was I ever going to do from this point on??? This is what I have been examining all month long, and this is what I have concluded: There are three realms in my life (and in others’).
First is my personal realm. That includes family, friends, nature, activities and situations I can manage, maintain, help, change. I made a list of those:

I can donate blood (done! donation #175 since I was 18)
I can complete my training as a hospice volunteer in the Gorge (done! Waiting for assignment.)
I can volunteer to walk dogs at the Hood River Adopt A Dog shelter. (Not done. We went a leap beyond and adopted a dog!) (She’s a work in progress. Progress, not perfection)
I can make a lunch/update date with my several ‘kids’ I’ve known for 30 years from our Youth-At-Risk program. (planning stage.)
I can DOUBLE my donations to favorite organizations (Planned Parenthood, Nature Conservancy, Doctors without Borders, OHOM, etc.)

Making this list and carrying through with it at least gives me peace of mind, happiness, and a sense of control.
Second is the national/country realm. That includes national politics, Trump, media, environment/climate change, et.al. ad nauseam. This is heartbreaking and infuriating, and, honestly, there is not a lot I can do to change or control this second realm. I will leave it at that.
Third and last is the universal/cosmic/infinite realm. Paradoxically, this is comforting; I am a speck, the height of insignificance, nada in the infinite time and space dimension, so nothing really matters in this universal realm. I am here, I will be gone, in no time it will be as if I never existed. Live my joy of life, do my best in my personal realm and…let the rest go.
The three realms. Amen.

—Jude Russell

A Proclamation for Peace Poetry Reading
2024-12-07 19:00 - 20:30
A Proclamation for Peace: Translated for the World (ORR) Kim Stafford & Friends read Kim’s poem “A Proclamation for Peace” in English and in other languages.
Saturday, December 7, 7 pm
Bold Coffee & Books, 1755 SW Jefferson
https://boldcoffeeandbooks.com/events/

Tenth of December: a live reading
2024-12-10 19:00 - 21:00
Tenth of December (ORE) Johnny Stallings reads George Saunders’ amazing short story.
LIVE: Tuesday, December 10, 7 pm
Library at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont
Free
