The Open Road: a learning community

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 7/30/23
2023-07-30 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Beloved Bibliophiles!

Our theme for Bibliophiles Unanimous! on Sunday, July 30th is: What’s Going On? What are some books that have given you insight into what’s happening culturally, politically, ecologically, historically, sociologically, spiritually, psychologically?
The Zoom gathering commences at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 7/15/23
2023-08-02 08:00 - 17:00
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

July 15, 2023

Johnny is traveling and sends his joy and news below.

And so dear friends, thank you for carrying on with your reflections and poems and stories for this edition of the Meditation and Mindfulness newsletter.

Thanks to Andy for his gorgeous contribution from his newly finished collected visions of the Hundred Verses of Self Instruction. Here is his commentary on cover image:

Verse 9

The Atmopadesha Satakam (Hundred Verses of Self Instruction) of Narayana Guru

Growing on both sides, in a blossoming state,

is the one vine which has come, spread out and risen to the top of a tree;

remember that hell does not come

to the man dwelling in contemplation beneath it.

The image of a contemplative seated beneath a flowering tree is practically universal in world religious art. Narayana Guru’s use of the image contains several details that tie it to the Indian tradition of Advaita Vedanta, and that would have been familiar to his original Indian audience. The tree is covered by a creeper that is two-sided, with roots that are concealed from view. The invisible origin of the creeper, with its attractive flowers hiding the supporting tree, is actually a metaphor for the structure of human consciousness, as outlined in greater detail in Vedantic writings such as the Mandukya Upanishad. There, wakeful experience is explained as a complex interaction of perceived form and conceptual name, with both name and form springing from a common hidden source of seeded memory. This structural picture is a fundamental understanding that underlies much of the Atmopadesha Satakam.

Narayana Guru was not interested in philosophy for its own sake; he was instead concerned with helping his fellow beings find their own way to lasting happiness. His use of the ideogram of the tree and the meditating being provides profound clues about how the moment-to-moment flow of our experience assembles itself, how we can be caught by that flow, and about how a dimension of our innermost Being remains free from bondage.

We seldom question the validity of the ongoing flow of our experiences, with their sensory richness, or their linear organization in time. The birth of a child, or the death of a loved one can suddenly expose the unconscious nature of our routine forms of understanding. Our experiences can be afflicted in countless ways, through the thwarting of our exaggerated sense of personal control, through our habits of desire or aversion or the rigidities of habitual thinking. In the terms of the verse, the experiential world of names and forms, and the afflicted states that accompany them, are nurtured from sources that are invisible to us. Name, form and memory function collectively to conceal a deeper reality.

The emphasis of this verse is on noticing. The man dwelling in contemplation beneath the tree has discovered something priceless. He has learned that his own pure awareness permeates the entire field of the germination, growth and dissolution of phenomenal experience, and yet stands apart from it.

-Andy Larkin

***

Ah, Summer . . . . . The soft polka dot flowers of Spring have passed. Summer blossoms are exploding. Red dahlias with fiery petals, huge blue hydrangeas that droop with such languor. They make me as sleepy as Dorothy in the field of poppies. I pick them, arrange them in bouquets, give them as gifts. I like to drive with jars of flowers in the coffee cup holders. Their fading nature reminds me that beauty is constantly changing and reemerging in new forms. Life is short. “But here we are again,” say these same but different flowers that come in summertime.

In the summer, I like to get out the book The Immense Journey (from 1957!), by Loren Eiseley, and reread his essay, “How Flowers Changed the World.” Eiseley describes what he calls “a soundless, violent explosion” of seed-born plant life millions of years ago, just as the Dinosaurs started to pass out and mammals arrived. At the heart of the explosion was a new kind of flora with magic seeds.

“Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know would never have existed. Today we know that the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of human life. Borne on the wind or attached to animal hides, the new plant life spread all over the world.

The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability. . . . If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before.

If it wasn’t for the high energy content of seeds produced by flowers humanity wouldn’t have flourished.

“If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.”

– from Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

–Katie Radditz

***

Greetings from Lebanon!

Johnny writes: I’m on the Open Road–visiting with my good friend Zeina Daccache in Lebanon. Some of you will remember when she came to see our production of “Twelve Angry Men” at Two Rivers prison in 2012. She had directed a production of the play at Roumieh prison in Lebanon and made a wonderful documentary about it: “Twelve Angry Lebanese.” We will be showing Bushra Azzouz’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison” here on Saturday, July 15.

I’ve been reading John Moriarty’s amazing book Dreamtime and studying clown philosophy from Slava Polunin. Here’s an excerpt from his book, The Sixth Door:

Feelings and Emotions

There is one door that ought to be kept shut. Or so we’re told. Even Pushkin taught us, “You shall be lord and master of your heart.” Behind this door live our FEELINGS and EMOTIONS, which must never be given free reign, if we are to believe the poet. There is a life of suppressed emotions, a rational, regular life, led by persons of good breeding, one that offers the most direct path to one’s goals. But it turns out that what we give up on this path is our own vitality: we become mere cogs in some sort of a giant mechanism. Only emotions can give us life in all its fullness. Just as in a child’s mind, any little thing can assume tremendous importance and take you on a wild ride at the slightest pretext. Passion, emotion, excitement, obsession with the least trifle—these are the things that make for a full life, because they demand utmost commitment and openness to the whole world around you. Such emotional perception of reality is fundamental to a human being, and theatre has the ability to inspire it.

To be honest, though, not every kind of emotion appeals to me in equal measure. I suspect this is true of most people.

I happen to like positive emotions. The more positive, the better.

Because a positive attitude actually makes the world a better place.

There is nothing mystical about this. Simply put, kindness and joy radiate a kind of energy that goes out into the world and has the ability to change it.

–from Alchemy of Snowness by Slava Polunin,

pp. 76-77

-Johnny Stallings

***

The Garden

All this time I have been standing here

I’ve never seen these trees before.

All this time I have been living here

I’ve always thought to go out.

Out to find love, beauty, out to find

passion, the wisdom of the ages.

Out to feel, out to see, the wide sweep,

the hand of God.

Out to the woods, to the city,

messy, vibrant, all the hues, full of life.

Now I find standing here

looking at this garden,

it has everything.

Everything I have been longing for,

unfinished,

perfect.

-Elizabeth Domike

***

The Hammock

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap

I think how day hides the stars,

the way I lay hidden once, waiting

inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember

how she carried me on her back

between home and the kindergarten,

once each morning and once each afternoon.

I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.

When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:

Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries

from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember

there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:

They have so far to arrive. Amen,

I think, and I feel almost comforted.

I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.

Between two unknowns, I live my life.

Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am

by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am

by outliving me. And what’s it like?

Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?

A window, and eternity on either side?

Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.

-Li-Young Lee

“The Hammock” from Book of My Nights

***
Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day’s performance of the meanest [most menial] duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

– Margaret Fuller

***

Following Navajo Songs

Beauty all around me

Beauty in front

Beauty behind

Beauty above, wind rustling the leaves

Beauty below, hard ground

Beauty in the air, soft, soft

Beauty in my eyes, tears

Beauty in my hands

fingers trailing pollen

Beauty in my footsteps

blossoms spring from the earth

Beauty in my heart

dark as thunder

Beauty in my heart

quiet as the last birds

in evening trees,

Beauty

Beauty

Beauty

-Deborah Buchanan

***

Yogi tea tag says today: “Uncage your heart, free your heart, let it be wild.”

East Side Footsteps (Sierra Nevada)

On those wild wide sandbars at Walker River,

we put toes into warm sand so fine

our feet sank to ankles

at each step. Summer’s end, September,

celebrating birthdays,

convening halfway between

my life in the Bay Area

and yours in Lone Pine.

Your great curly dog loped ahead.

Our toes caught split straws of earlier grasses

until they rounded over river rocks

so hot under foot,

we scurried and stumbled across them

to keep our feet from burning.

Then reached the cool mud at water’s edge,

where tiny frogs leapt from sedges,

alarmed by our thudding presence.

Rocks in that river were slippery with algae.

It took determination to find a level spot,

an eddy, where stones could not lurch us

to our knees, nor current upend us.

The air wafted sagebrush and river. Untamed.

Invigorating and peaceful, all at once.

Two friends’ brief pause

before ascending Sonora Pass.

-Gail Lester, (after William Stafford’s poem “Tamarisk”)

Desert Poem

Desert paintbrush shows no mercy

ravishing, red smoldering your eyes.

Come to your knees to receive it. See

how stems peg color to earth, where

prairie flowers wild in their differences

are loyal in their fit: lupine crazy blue,

yarrow dusky, shy pink on scattered

farewell-to-spring. Each flower whispers

fragrance to court small wings, tiny tongues.

From every twig, leaves offer gestures

of forgiveness to this wounded world.

Plants gather strands for our basket,

and prairie hills weave them all together.

In this place, each pilgrim’s goal

is to be lost in wonder, and

with all flowers softly howl.

– Kim Stafford

Extract from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Understanding Our Mind

Mind Consciousness gives rise to actions that lead to ripening.  The mind consciousness plays the role of  gardener, the one who sows, waters, and takes care of the earth.  The store consciousness is often described as the earth—the garden where the seeds that give rise to flowers and fruits are sown. Because mind consciousness can initiate an action that leads to the ripening of seeds in our store consciousness, it is important that we learn about, train, and transform our mind consciousness. We act and speak on the basis of our thinking, our cognition. Any action of body, speech, and mind that we take based on mind consciousness, waters either positive or negative seeds within us. If we water negative seeds, the result will be suffering. If we know how to water positive seeds, there will be more understanding, love, and happiness. If mind consciousness learns to see in terms of impermanence, nonself, and interbeing, it will help the seed of enlightenment to grow and bloom like a flower.

One Hundred Percent Your True Home   -Thich Nhat Hanh

“Be there truly. Be there with 100% of yourself. In every moment of your daily life. That is the essence of true Buddhist meditation. Each of us knows that we can do that, so let us train to live each moment of our daily life deeply. That is why I like to define mindfulness as the energy that helps us to be there 100 percent. It is the energy of your true presence.”

Well. “…live each moment of our daily life deeply.” “…the energy of our true presence.”

It is about that time of year again. Every year, right around the middle of July, my senses are heightened to an acute level of awareness. Everything tingles. The morning sunlight is slightly different, its angle more oblique, its color more amber-toned. The word ‘mellow’ comes to mind. The early mornings cooler and darker. The evening stars winking around 9:07pm, then 9:04pm…then 8:56pm. Right around Bastille Day, July 14th, I send a text to sisters, daughter and close friends who understand what’s coming, every year…”Hey! Have you noticed how the sun is slanting differently? The mornings are a little cooler, and darker? Do you think it feels a little…like…Fall???” Oh, the roar of negation that follows: “Nooooo!!! No way! Stop it! Be quiet!!!”

I love Fall. l adore Fall. I am thinking and feeling and savoring Fall right now —on July 14th. I am in the moment but not in the moment.

Deep in the moment anticipation, deep in the moment change. In the mountains, August brings on the Fireweed and Gentians, saying goodbye to Lupine and Avalanche lilies. Huckleberry leaves stain the slopes burgundy red. I tingle and savor with love the utter feel of change in all the senses—smell, sight, feel/touch, hearing…taste? Sure! Who hasn’t bit into a warm peach, apple, or pear from an orchard and felt Fall in their bones?!

So right now I’m in the future, but more deeply in the present than at any other time of the year. Does that count as mindfulness? I hope you’ll say yes!

-Jude Russel

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/3/23
2023-08-03 - 2023-09-06
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

August 3, 2023

VISIONS OF UTOPIA & PARADISE

To create around ourselves the kind of world that we wish to live in–isn’t that the most important project of our lives?

–from Alchemy of Snowness by the Russian clown, Slava Polunin

GONZALO
Had I plantation of this isle, my lord—
ANTONIO
He’d sow ’t with nettle seed.
SEBASTIAN Or docks, or mallows.
GONZALO
And were the king on ’t, what would I do?
SEBASTIAN Scape being drunk, for want of wine.
GONZALO
I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all,
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty—
SEBASTIAN Yet he would be king on ’t.
ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets
the beginning.
GONZALO
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth
Of its own kind all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
SEBASTIAN No marrying ’mong his subjects?
ANTONIO None, man, all idle: whores and knaves.
GONZALO
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
T’ excel the Golden Age.
SEBASTIAN ’Save his Majesty!
ANTONIO
Long live Gonzalo!

—from The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Act 2, scene 1

Here’s an excerpt from Magdalena Cieślak’s interview with Stratis Panourios about a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which he directed at Korydallos prison in Athens:

MC: One of the central characters in your production is Gonzalo. Can you explain why this particular character is of such importance for your reading of the play? In what way are his ideas of a utopian state crucial for the social role of the project?

SP: Gonzalo, as Shakespeare mentions him in the list of characters, is an honest old advisor from Naples, and I see him the same way. Although he was appointed to dispose of Prospero and Miranda at sea, he actually helped them survive, giving them water, food, clothes and books that Prospero considered important….He is a positive thinker, who believes in the will of Heaven….

The participants are baptized again through the performance. For the duration of the rehearsals and their presence on stage, they are reborn. This is particularly visible in the participant who plays Gonzalo, as he becomes a different person, even if just for a few months. The inmates call him Gonzalo inside the prison. And during his famous monologue, when he says “And were the king of it, what would I do?”, he becomes a king, president or prime minister of the country. After this monologue he cannot be himself. He acquires respect and prestige, even if this is related to a theatrical monologue.

He is also given the opportunity to speak on behalf of all the prisoners—to say that he imagines their own world, outside the prison. A world that is “upside down” or “opposite” to today’s world. In the monologue, Gonzalo says: “I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things.” In our rehearsals we pondered on whether this world should be the norm and not the other way around….This verse opened a whole world to us.

Through extensive discussions during rehearsals we achieved a connection between the world of Gonzalo and Platonic ideals. Since the staging of our play not only involved rehearsals but also a lot of research, one of the participants took the initiative to guide us with a lecture, making an introduction to Plato’s work Politeia [The Republic]. As a modern Socrates, a prisoner, he spoke to us about the importance of justice and how much happier a righteous person is from an unjust one. He spoke to us about the definition of justice, the structure of society, property and privacy, and philosopher-kings; he spoke about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the importance of the truth for different regimes; and about art, utopias and dystopias. Our room was transformed into the “Gallipoli” of the book and all of us into philosopher-kings. We could talk for hours and hours about the issues in Plato’s Politeia, so we decided for the time being that maybe one of our future performances would have the theme of Politeia, where we could all study it thoroughly.

As reference books and texts on the ideal state, we studied Thomas Moore’s Utopia, written in 1516, presenting a story taking place on a strange island somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South America. We could not help but associate Shakespeare with the reading of this book, making sure that the decision to link the prison to Prospero’s Island was the right one. This reading was followed by references to the Biblical Garden in Eden, Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia (1580), a summary of Michel de Montaigne’s Of Cannibals (1580). We ended our study with texts written by the participants on the subject of their own vision of an ideal state. The adaptation of Gonzalo’s monologue in our show was based on the texts by the participants.

The participant who plays Gonzalo now had the opportunity to talk about his ideal state, a world without crime and prisons. Until then, his voice was heard only in his apology in court, while now his monologue was addressed to the spectators. And the spectators are by no means jurors. On the edge of the stage, he was free not only to apologize but to share something very important: his own discovery and the thoughts of an ideal utopia. His words are dominated by a big “if.” “If” the world was different, maybe he would not have to be in prison, he would have the opportunity to live like other people. He would live a normal life and his childhood would be full of wonder and hope. Because in the conversations we had, we likened this time to childhood, which for most prisoners may have existed as an idealized state. In the rehearsals, of course, we experienced this through the joy of creation.

—from Multicultural Shakespeare, vol. 26 (41) 2022
*

Alas!, there was no “peace, love, happiness & understanding” in July because I was on the open road—traveling to Athens and Beirut, where I showed Bushra’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison.” The conversations following the screenings were great! While in Athens, I saw a production of “The Persians” by Aeschylus at Korydallos prison, directed by my friend Stratis Panourios. One thing especially reminded me of our plays done in Oregon prisons. After the performances, love and happiness were in the air—in prison! A miracle!

At the end of the June issue of “peace, love, happiness & understanding,” I invited everyone to share their visions of utopia and paradise. The subject turns out to be so big that all I can manage are a few random thoughts. Here they are:

The word “utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas More for his novel Utopia. It is often said that it is a translation from Greek, and that it means “no-place,” but Thomas More was probably punning on two Greek words outopia, meaning “no-place,” and eutopia, meaning “happy place.” Most creators of literary utopias were imagining societies where life would be better than the societies in which they lived—happy places!

Plato’s Republic is a grand vision of an ideal society. I wouldn’t want to live there. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is more my speed. But of course not everyone wants to live in the hippie version of paradise.

In Christianity, the word “Paradise” refers to the Garden of Eden and to Heaven. In the Garden of Eden a naked man and woman live in innocence, without sin or death. There is just one rule: they can’t eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Tempted by a talking snake, they do just that. They get kicked out of the Garden before they are able to eat of the Tree of Life—and gain immortality thereby. They are punished for the sin of disobedience to the God who created them. A number of other punishments ensue, but the most dramatic one is that they will die.

Probably the oldest story invented by humans is that when you die you don’t really die. You go somewhere else. In Christianity, the basic idea is that when you die you go to Heaven if you have been good—and if you believe in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to save you from sin and death. If you have been bad—or are an unbeliever—you are damned and must go to Hell, which is a place of eternal punishment. The idea that the good are rewarded after death and the bad are punished is an idea that is found in many cultures, and in the writings of Plato. There’s a Tibetan board game called “Rebirth,” which features a number of hells, including “The Black Rope and Crushing Hells.” (Incidentally, most of the squares on the board—on your journey to Nirvana—are states of consciousness above the heavenly realms of the gods.)

There are lots and lots of visions of utopias, dystopias, paradises, and hell realms of one kind and another. A fundamental obstacle to achieving utopian societies is that one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia. Recently the Lincoln Project posted a video on YouTube in which Marjorie Taylor Greene describes the nightmarish Socialist Big Government dystopia that Democrats like Joe Biden represent—addressing education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, food stamps, welfare, economic opportunity, labor unions, and environmental programs. This all sounds pretty good to some folks.

There are many dystopian visions these days, in books and films. Two of the most well-known dystopias of the Twentieth Century are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s utopian novel, Island, is less well-known. Dave Eggers has recently given us two novels set in a not-very-distant future, in which efforts to create a technological utopia give the reader a distinctly dystopian feeling—The Circle and The Every. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy imagines a future that is so ecologically devastated that human survival is in peril.

Cinematic dystopias abound. The series of Mad Max films is one example among many. Utopian visions are harder to come by. In Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, one of the angel protagonists exchanges his immortality for an earthly existence, where he can enjoy the aroma of coffee and live with a beautiful trapeze artist. It’s like in the fairy tales where at least some of the people live happily ever after. This is also known as the “Hollywood Ending.” We leave the theater feeling good.

There were many utopian experiments in Nineteenth Century America—from the Oneida Community, which lasted for 33 years, to the Mormon Church, which is still going strong. More recently, lots of people started hippie communes. These days the term for people who get together to live more in accordance with their ideals is “intentional communities.”

There’s a dark side to utopian visions, especially when violence and coercion are used to “improve” the world. The Third Reich is a spectacular example. There are others.

Last weekend Nancy and I went to the Canterbury Renaissance Faire, where some of our friends were performing Hamlet. The whole festival was someone’s utopian vision. Thousands of people came who enjoy imagining themselves as fairies, medieval knights, and other natural and supernatural characters of one kind and another. A play is a magical world, whether it is performed at Korydallos prison or the Canterbury Faire. For a little while we are transported to another world.

If you think of it in this way, utopias are everywhere. Sometimes they are very brief. A perfect moment is paradise.

The Big World is an endlessly complex system of ever-changing forces. While some people work for peace, justice and ecology, there are many countervailing forces in play. We have, I think, an obligation to make efforts to make the world a better place for all people—and for elephants and butterflies.

In addition to this extremely challenging undertaking, we have a duty, day-by-day, to become better people—wiser, kinder, more happy, more loving, more free. Surrounded by dystopias and hells of one kind and another, we can bless the day, be thankful for our human life on earth, be helpful to our fellow mortals, create for ourselves and others moments when we find ourselves in Paradise.

—Johnny Stallings
*

My new friend Spiros in Athens sent this poem:

And people mix and separate and they take nothing from each other.
Because love is the most difficult way to get to know one another.
Because people, my friend, live in the moment they find a solace in the lives of others.
And then you understand why the desperate become the greatest rebels.
And we are suddenly defenseless,
like a victor in the face of death or a defeated one facing Eternity…

— Tasos Leivaditis, translated from the Greek by Spiros Chrisovitsianos
*

Kim wrote this poem this morning (8/3/23):

Borrowed Aura

In my dream, our shop dealt in dazzlings—
each soul’s essence distilled to mist
we could bottle and bestow to restore
balance, a hint of your verve to enliven
my calm, a whiff of my patience to guide
your eagerness, gifts sifted for exchange
until we each became whole.

Waking, I walked into the forest of dawn
where the scent of pitch brightened my mind,
ghostly lichen on a limb re-set my life clock,
a raven’s raspy shriek startled my pulse,
green light dazzled my numb soul,
as each turn in my pilgrim path
nudged me toward wisdom.

—Kim Stafford
*

Words for Cup and Water

Stepping through the dream-wall President Lincoln
cradles a cat named Bob. Droplets of rain shine
on the hemlock tree which reached
the bedroom window just this year.

All beveled mirrors still shimmer no matter
what they reflect, drugstore, library, bookshop
all carry magazines, hopes, and dreams,
one long loop running down

streamlets in the mist. I make a nest with my hands,
try to capture the mood of the mountain.
the President says, “Don’t bother, we have work to do.”
Instead, Bob washes, framed by evening light.

We pause for a moment.
Watch a female Harrier glide golden,
over marshy fields opening before our eyes.
Sleeves rolled up; possibilities begin to appear nearby.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

What an Angel Said
after Austin T. Holland

You better believe it,
kid: the arkless sea
is also a kind of ark.

My grief has endless credit
but I blew it all on craps
and now my eyes lack coins.

I never understood whether heaven-sent
meant from or to
that bright & high-rent place.

Divinate me. At the bottom
of every teacup (in the dregs)
you’ll find a death’s-head.

Tomorrow, you’ll risk laughter
when I ascend the compost pile
in a huff of regeneration.

Next century, I am
crowned with a wreath
of black dove & white raven

feathers.

—Alex Tretbar, first published in Anti-Heroin Chic
*

Perfect Day

it’s another perfect day on Planet Earth
I carried a heavy stone from the truck to the back yard
the bright flowers shouted at me
woke me up
reminded me
what is true

far away, in Washington D. C., they are making plans to kill more people
in order to get more money

and maybe oblivious to the blue sky
people in this city are charging off to work
preoccupied with all their problems

there are millions of ways to ignore
and even to try to destroy
the beauty that calls to us everywhere
from everyone
from every thing
on this perfect day

—Johnny Stallings
*

We shall study every philosophy, search through all the scriptures, consult every teacher and practice all spiritual exercises until our minds are swollen with the whole wisdom of the world. But in the end we shall return to the surprising fact that we walk, eat, sleep, feel and breathe, that whether we are deep in thought or idly passing the time of day, we are alive. And when we can know just that to be the supreme experience of religion we shall know the final secret and join in the laughter of the gods.

—Alan Watts, quoted in Wandering in Eden by Michael Adam

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 8/13/23
2023-08-13 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

Our theme for Sunday, August 13th is:

What Are Your Top Ten (or Fifteen) Favorite Novels of All Time?

The Zoom gathering starts at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there.

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 8/15/23
2023-08-15 - 2023-09-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

August 15, 2023

Live righteously and love everyone.
—tag on a Yogi Tea bag

#32 Constant Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complete transformation.

—Jude Russell
*

Jude, you’re a saint!
—(from the Editor)
*

Artificial Light

By bulbs and wires, porch lights insult dusk,
streetlights thieve stars from children, headlights
stab haste deep into wounded night.

By day, I squint by the pallor of false explanation,
the sickly glow of lies claiming illumination
while casting artificial darkness everywhere.

This light blinds my mind. I seek real dark,
no human spark’s denial. I need thin shoes
finding my path by feel, night stars, grope touch,

earth sleep, nocturnal dreams, then dawn.

—Kim Stafford 8-11-2023
*

Not Yet

A connoisseur of hands
(because hers are crippled)
said when looking at his
that they are the most beautiful
she had yet seen.

The fact that they will leave
this world soon may have had
something to do with this impression.

A glint of silver flashes as fish
leap headlong
out of the river into the sky.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Midsummer night dreaming

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

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

The Peace of Wild Things

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

—Wendell Berry

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

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

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

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

—Katie Radditz
*

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings
*

Understanding Makes Compassion Possible (pt. 1)

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

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

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

—Michel Deforge

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/7/23
2023-09-07 - 2023-10-04
One Happy Man (Rocky Hutchinson) with Eight Puppies (two are black)

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 7, 2023

If you help one person, you help humanity.
—Ai Weiwei

Ken Margolis sent this poem by Ai Qing, who is the father of the artist Ai Weiwei:

YARKHOTO
It’s almost as if a caravan is wending its way through town
A clamor of voices mingling with the tinkle of camel bells
The markets bustling as before
An incessant flow of carts and horses
But no—the splendid palace
Has lapsed into ruin
Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows
Not a trace can be found
You who are living, live the best life you can
Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory

—Ai Qing (1980)
*

A letter from Abe Green:

It’s early morning
I’m sitting in my backyard acquainting myself with the
richness of this new day
The sun bright and warm
The air intoxicatingly fresh [small feather taped to the page]
I gulp it with delight
A hundred thoughts clamor for my attention but I deny all in
anticipation of the song birds arrival at my feeder
I am patient
Suddenly a single wren swoops in alighting on the small
table next to my chair
Next to my arm
We both seem surprised and take cautious appraisal of
one another
She inspecting this mysterious land-bound creature
I observing her intricate feathering
Her tiny yet powerful legs and feet
And most of all her dark probing eyes

Gazing into those ebon portals I was confronted with the
full creative power of life
Did she see the same in mine?
Did she see the earth song in my heart?

How beautiful those few heartbeats were for me and
How beautiful was her perfection

Then with three resonant chirps as if clarifying an essential
truth with this benign human
She took wing to be about further business

How astonishing is creation in its continual
bursting forth with life

And how wonderful is the human experience to be

Astonished!

—Abe Green
*

Dear Johnny

Hey there, my friend. It’s been quite some time now since I’ve written you a letter. But you know that I’ve just been really busy. My skills that I’ve been obtaining the last few years have been shining through the last few weeks in my work. It’s an amazing thing to see all you can accomplish when you really apply your heart, mind & soul into life. The truth is, is that for me the difficulties are worth the accomplishments.

My lesson with the dog today went surprisingly well. The things I’m doing now are so hard to do, but my trainer is very good at this & is helping me to be better too. As I performed all the “get help” cues with the dog, I got to do them by the flowers I planted this Spring. As I gave direction to the dog with cues, my eyes took in the beauty of the gladioluses, brown eyed daisies, foxgloves & a rose bush. It was an enchanted few seconds, sacred in the pause of the mind. My hope is that my life will be this way once I’m out of here. I’m happy & wish to stay so.

We got to take pictures with the puppies & you’ll be getting some soon. As luck would have it, my favorite one, “Unique,” a 9 lb female black lab has moved into my cell “for a short stay.” She is a lot of work!! She is 41 days old & knows her name, comes, sits & potties on the pad. She will be doing rides & hills by 60 days old. They are an amazing litter….

I wanted to let you and Nancy know about a movie I caught a few days ago. It’s called “Maudie”! It’s about a Canadian folk artist that had arthritis badly. Very good movie…very humble life. When I see such things…it gives me a sense of calmness, knowing that the best lives are full of difficulties & that makes the joy we find in them all the sweeter for us, and maybe for those we touch.

Well, you can use this whole letter in the Open Road newsletter if you’d like. It’s all good & beautiful. I love you & miss you & hope to hear from you soon.

Beautiful things on the Golden path are like finding the best rocks in the river on a Summer’s day. The best things we all have in life are the joys we give & get & the love we let shine from our hearts that grow all the good things. It feels like I’ve got raven wings to fly on, shiny, strong and true, for carrying all the love I have to all the ones I love so true.

—Rocky Hutchinson (8/13/2023)
*

Prairie Radio

Way out on open hills we get
no reception—no news or message
gets through, so we listen to birds
explain existence, and by scent of dust
and flowers apprehend our chance.

Back home in cities, signals bombard
our tender minds with wars and other
troubles, air around us thick with
warnings and sorrows, light around us
thick with poisons for heart and mind.

But anywhere, if you turn your head,
wind delivers light across prairie hills
from far to inform your ancient soul.

—from Beauty So Intense You Shield Your Eyes by Kim Stafford
*

Scott Teitsworth recently read this inspiring passage from Brian Doyle’s essay “The Final Frontier” to some of his friends:

….I began, slowly and dimly, to realize that humble was the only finally truly honest way to be in this life. Anything else is ultimately cocky, which is either foolish or a deliberate disguise you refuse to remove, for complicated reasons perhaps not known even to you.

Of course you do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.

But you cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane.

All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s a more calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow. That trying to be an hones and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, and in fact the vast majority of things you do right will go utterly unremarked. Humility, the final frontier, as my brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is ultimately more valuable or rich or famous or beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true about humility.

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love. That could be. I wouldn’t know; I’m a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

—One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle, pp. 58-59

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 9/10/23
2023-09-10 15:00 - 17:00
Old Mother Hubbard’s dog playing the flute (19th Century illustration)

Beloved Bibliophiles!

Our theme for Sunday, September 10th is:

Mother Goose & Friends

What are your favorite nursery rhymes, poems for children, children’s folklore, nonsense & children’s literature? The Zoom gathering starts at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there.

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 9/15/23
2023-09-15 - 2023-10-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

September 15, 2023

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
—William Blake, from THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL
*

#103 A Garden of Poems

One day in New York City, I met a Buddhist scholar and I told her about my practice of mindfulness in the vegetable garden. I enjoy growing lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and I like to spend time gardening every day.
She said, “You shouldn’t spend your time growing vegetables. You should spend more time writing poems. Your poems are so beautiful. Everyone can grow lettuce, but not everyone can write poems like you do.”
I told her, “If I don’t grow lettuce, I can’t write poems.”

—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

This one really made me laugh. For me, it’s playing music, or drawing, or writing. If I don’t do these things it is difficult for me to think correctly in my day-to-day life. Everything is out of tune & I don’t feel right. One of the counselors here asked me about my drawings. I told her that I did not have time to draw anymore. She said, “NO! You must find the time to draw & express yourself, so you feel right!”

So I found the time & she was right. I can in fact think better now. My tasks run smoother and I just feel better. So I do get what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying here. We must do the things that we are passionate about & we must do the things that feed our being so we’re capable of doing all of the things we need & want to do.

Love you all so much.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

#10 “Lotus in the Mud”

“The goodness of suffering is something real. Without suffering, there cannot be happiness. Without mud there cannot be any lotus flowers. So if you know how to suffer, suffering is okay. And the moment you have that attitude, you don’t suffer much anymore. And out of suffering, a lotus flower of happiness can open.”
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

Before I ever read this, I believed this. Going back to my first marriage of thirteen years in an abusive, alcoholic relationship, I suffered in such a way that my mind and body simply shut down. I stopped talking, I stopped eating, I stopped feeling. It was the only way I could keep living—by not living. I suffered internally and externally, not understanding either condition.

It was only when I escaped the marriage that I was released from suffering and moved—no, vaulted, catapulted, jetted!—into joy, into happiness. Into gratitude. I had plenty of scars, physical and emotional, but I came to understand and rejoice in what I had lived through. I rejoiced in the suffering, because I was now living life. Getting unstuck from the mud of suffering is how I came to be grateful for the suffering. So to happiness, I would add gratitude as an ingredient that blossoms from the mud.

—Jude Russell
*

Holy Land

Where the angel gave black stone to the prophet,
where the old man woke under a tree, where
a king killed a worthy friend, first there is silence,
then singing, chanting, sweet smoke, and visions.

Where the bones of a frail saint lie, where a newborn
slept in straw, where a father did not slay his son—
pilgrims have passed by places without stories
by the thousands to be here weeping and praying.

It’s all in how you see it, how you tell it.
On this rocky hill, a peasant met a virgin girl.
On that one, he did not. Here a cathedral,
there only the wind twitching dry grass.

Under the sky in a burning world, how can
we choose what is holy and what is not?

—Kim Stafford
*

I have already seen red leaves on a tree! Autumn is lulling in even during this hot summer day. I think of this poem, as the beauty and sorrows in the world unfold together. And it helps me feel the expansive wonder of it all.

Three Times my Life has Opened

Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and
starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.
But outside my window all day a maple has stepped
from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping
the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of
light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,
or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

—Jane Hirshfield, from The Lives of the Heart: Poems

—Love and Peace, Katie Radditz
*

Ode to things (Oda a las cosas)

I have a crazy,
crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
I love
cups,
rings,
and bowls—
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love
all things,
not just
the grandest,
also
the
infinite-
ly
small—
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
and flower vases.

Oh yes,
the planet
is sublime!
It’s full of
pipes
weaving
hand-held
through tobacco smoke,
and keys
and salt shakers—
everything,
I mean,
that is made
by the hand of man, every little thing:
shapely shoes,
and fabric
and each new
bloodless birth
of gold,
eyeglasses,
carpenter’s nails,
brushes,
clocks, compasses,
coins, and the so-soft
softness of chairs.

Mankind has
built
oh so many
perfect
things!
Built them of wool
and of wood,
of glass and
of rope:
remarkable
tables,
ships, and stairways.

I love
all
things,
not because they are
passionate
or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don’t know,
because
this ocean is yours,
and mine:
these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten
treasures,
fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms,
glasses, knives and
scissors—
all bear
the trace
of someone’s fingers
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depths of forgetfulness.

I pause in houses,
streets and
elevators,
touching things,
identifying objects
that I secretly covet:
this one because it rings,
that one because
it’s as soft
as the softness of a woman’s hip,
that one there for its deep-sea color,
and that one for its velvet feel.

O irrevocable
river
of things:
no one can say
that I loved
only
fish,
or the plants of the jungle and field,
that I loved
only
those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.
It’s not true:
many things conspired
to tell me the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
or my hand touched them:
they were
so close
that they were a part
of my being,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.

—Pablo Neruda, from Odes to Common Things, edited & illustrated by Ferris Cook, translated by Ken Krabbenhoft

love to all,
—Johnny Stallings

GOLDFINCHES!: a theatrical monologue by Johnny Stallings 9/17/23
2023-09-17 19:00 - 21:00
Goldfinches!

a theatrical monologue
by
Johnny Stallings

at PAUSE
PAUSE is a meditation studio—133 SW 2nd Ave., Suite 300
Sunday, September 17th, 7 p.m.

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 9/24/23
2023-09-24 15:00 - 17:00
Black Elk

The leaves on the trees, the grasses on the hills and in the valleys, the waters in the creeks and in the rivers and the lakes, the four-legged and the two-legged and the wings of the air—all danced together to the music of the stallion’s song.
–Black Elk

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, September 24th, Johnny Stallings reads from:

Black Elk’s Great Vision

Followed by a dialogue, of course.

The Zoom gathering starts at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there.

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 10/5/23
2023-10-05 - 2023-11-01
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

October 5, 2023

My friend, I am going to tell the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it….
It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit….
Now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now it is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.
But if the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit…

—Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk, transcribed and edited by John G. Neihardt, pp. 1-2
*

Black Elk (Heháka Sápa) was born on December 1, 1863 near the Little Powder River in the Montana Territory. He was a holy man of the Oglala Lakota people. He was second cousin of Crazy Horse, fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn, participated in the Ghost Dance movement, survived the Wounded Knee Massacre and toured Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He is best known for the account of his life he gave to John G. Neihardt, which was first published in 1932, and remains in print to this day.
At the age of nine, Black Elk got a fever, and remained lying as if dead for twelve days. While absent from this world, he had a great vision. Here’s a brief excerpt:

All the universe was silent, listening; and then the great black stallion raised his voice and sang. The song he sang was this:

“My horses, prancing they are coming.
My horses, neighing they are coming;
Prancing, they are coming.
All over the universe they come.
They will dance; may you behold them.
(4 times)
A horse nation, may you behold them.
May you behold them.”
(4 times)

His voice was not loud, but it went all over the universe and filled it. There was nothing that did not hear, and it was more beautiful than anything can be. It was so beautiful that nothing anywhere could keep from dancing. The maidens danced, and all the circled horses. The leaves on the trees, the grasses on the hills and in the valleys, the waters in the creeks and in the rivers and the lakes, the four-legged and the two-legged and the wings of the air—all danced together to the music of the stallion’s song.
And when I looked down upon my people yonder, the cloud passed over, blessing them with friendly rain, and stood in the east with a flaming rainbow over it.
Then all the horses went singing back to their places beyond the summit of the fourth ascent, and all things sang along with them as they walked.
And a Voice said: “All over the universe they have finished a day of happiness.” And looking down I saw that the whole wide circle of the day was beautiful and green, with all fruits growing and all things kind and happy.
And a Voice said: “Behold this day, for it is yours to make. Now you shall stand upon the center of the earth to see, for there they are taking you.”
I was still on my bay horse, and once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world.* And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

*Black Elk said the mountain he stood upon in his vision was Harney Peak in the Black Hills.” But anywhere is the center of the world,” he added.

—Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk, transcribed and edited by John G. Neihardt, pp. 41-43
*
In his vision six grandfathers who were “old like hills, like stars” blessed him and told him that he must save his people. He said: “I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World.”
As a nine-year-old boy, he was unable to tell his people about his vision. By the time he was 17, his tribe re-enacted much of his vision. This was a very important event in Black Elk’s life. As an old man, he was heart-broken by what he had lived through and what had happened to his people. He was sad that he had been unable to make real the vision of peace and harmony that had been granted to him. At the end of his life he was a practicing Catholic. He also continued to perform the sacred rites of the Lakota people.
In 1947, Joseph Epes Brown met Black Elk. Concerned that his sacred tradition not be lost, Black Elk gave him an account of the seven sacred rites of the Oglala Sioux. In 1953, Brown published The Sacred Pipe. It is a treasure trove for indigenous peoples and for the rest of us, whose ancestors were surely indigenous at some point. John Trudell used to say: “We all come from tribes.”
Black Elk died in 1950. His vision and his wisdom live on.
*

Kim Stafford was Oregon’s Poet Laureate from 2018-2020.

All My Relations

I want to thank all my relations
for this chance to be on Earth
in her time of flourishing; to thank
the First People of this place, the
the Multnomah people, the Clackamas,
Molalla, Tualatin, and Chinook, to honor
their sovereignty in long and continuing
relation, still teaching us how we might
be here together; to thank my mother and father,
moon and sun, for setting me forth before
their own passing on; to thank my grandmother
who listened to me so eloquently I learned
to listen to my own heart and mind, to find
stories and songs there; to thank my family
and friends, and all citizens and travelers
who study and work for deeper kinship
in this place, with one another, and with
all creatures, one Earth, visible, palpable,
fragile, intricate, resonant, in need of our
better stories. I want to thank you
who have gathered to receive what I have
carried here—in hope that something
I have may meet something you need,
so all our relations may be strengthened
for the life we live together.

—from Singer Come from Afar by Kim Stafford
*

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022. She said about her work:

“I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings.”

My House is the Red Earth

My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy strips of fat. Just ask him. He doesn’t have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter—he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs.

—from Secrets from the Center of the World by Joy Harjo
*

John Trudell (1946-2015) was a member of the Santee Dakota tribe.

Grandfathers Whispering

Grandfathers whispering
In the wind
Rejoice at the life
You are a part of
Natural energy
Bound to natural laws
You will survive this
Temporary madness imposed upon you
Natural life is longer
Than oppressors illusionary insanity
Spirits experience human deeds
But need not end
This is just one place of changes

Spirit life is forever if you want
The universe is your home
You can survive here
Do not let them kill you
Keep your spirit strong
For distant stars and distant drums
Are the memories of spirit infancy
Children of earth let the spirit live
So you can grow in your place
In the universe

—from Lines from a Mined Mind by John Trudell
*

Gary Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975.

MOTHER EARTH: HER WHALES

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoes, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck
big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”
can speak for them?

The whales turn and glisten, plunge
and sound and rise again,
Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
Flowing like breathing planets
in the sparkling whorls of
living light—

And Japan quibbles for words on
what kind of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
dribbles methyl mercury
like gonorrhea
in the sea.

Père David’s Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice—
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD—

Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
what we call “China”
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
the monkeys,
like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two legged, people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world Communist paper-shuffling male
non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead…do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
near a dying Doe.

“In yonder field a slain knight lies—
We’ll fly to him and eat his eyes
with a down
derry derry derry down down.”

An owl winks in the shadow
A lizard lifts on tiptoe
breathing hard
The whales turn and glisten
plunge and
Sound, and rise again
Flowing like breathing planets

In the sparkling whorls

Of living light.
Stockholm, Summer Solstice 40072

——from Turtle Island by Gary Snyder
*

In his old age, Black Elk saw no contradiction between his traditional beliefs and those of Christianity:

We have been told by the white men, or at least by those who are Christian, that God sent to men His son, who would restore order and peace upon the earth; and we have been told that Jesus the Christ was crucified, but that he shall come again at the Last Judgment, the end of this world or cycle. This I understand and know that it is true, but the white men should know that for the red people too, it was the will of Wakan-Tanka, the Great Spirit, that an animal turn itself into a two-legged person in order to bring the most holy pipe to His people; and we too were taught that this White Buffalo Cow Woman who brought our sacred pipe will appear again at the end of this “world,” a coming which we Indians know is now not very far off.
Many people call it a “peace pipe,” yet now there is no peace on earth or even between neighbors, and I have been told that it has been a long time since there has been peace in the world. There is much talk of peace among the Christians, yet this is just talk. Perhaps it may be, and this is my prayer that, through our sacred pipe, and through this book in which I shall explain what our pipe really is, peace may come to those peoples who can understand, an understanding which must be of the heart and not of the head alone. Then they will realize that we Indians know the One true God, and that we pray to him continually.
I have wished to make this book through no other desire than to help my people in understanding the greatness and truth of our own tradition, and also to help in bringing peace upon the earth, not only among men, but within men and between the whole of creation.
We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as He intends.

—from Black Elk’s Foreword to The Sacred Pipe, recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown

Bibliophiles Unanimous! Mythic Ireland with Will Hornyak 10/8/23
2023-10-08 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, October 8th, at 3 p..m. (PDT), legendary storyteller WILL HORNYAK will be our SPECIAL GUEST!
Here’s the link:

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

Mythic Ireland

Tales, Legends, Songs and Lore From the Emerald Isle

Ireland is deeply layered with the myths and tales of many peoples. The landscape is a living manuscript of the doings of countless gods and goddesses, hags, heroines, sorceresses and saints. According to the mythologist Michael Dames, “Each successive Irish culture seems to become mesmerized by the myths of the previous one. Nothing is rejected. Everything is synthesized.” So, over time the stories and plots have mixed and mingled infusing Ireland with a kind of psychic charge and a rich and soulful oral and written storytelling tradition. We’ll take a stroll through a few tales and ideas.

–Will Hornyak

SILENCE written and performed by Johnny Stallings
2023-10-14 19:30 - 21:00
painting of Johnny by Nancy Scharbach

SILENCE
a theatre piece about meditation
written & performed by
Johnny Stallings
Saturday, October 14th, at 7:30 pm
at PAUSE * 133 SW 2nd, #300

Meditation & Mindfulness 10/15/23
2023-10-15 - 2023-11-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

October 15, 2023

Walk beautifully, talk beautifully, live beautifully.
Let your heart speak to other hearts.

—wisdom from Yogi Tea bags
*

Be joyful, though you have considered the facts.

—Wendell Berry
*

Some excerpts from a recent letter (8/31/23) from Rocky:

Today was a good day for me here. Almost everything ran smoothly. My dog Nelly is programming well & so am I. I’m on my way to being one of the primary trainers. That means I will also be training another A.I.C. [Adult In Custody]! Real work! All of this is going well.

My mind has been wondering & thinking about what we have been talking about in the whole relationship department. I’m not sure how all of that will happen. “Organically” I hope. But you do not have to worry about me trying to save anyone! I might be the one that needs to be saved. LOL. I’m getting out to a whole new world, one that I do not know too much about.

Honestly, I want someone I can admire and appreciate and muse over. A simple, kind love that is fun & sweet. That would be really…nice. Hummm…we will see how it goes! It should be hard to find her I think. LOL. I would like to know & love someone completely & be known & loved by them. Kind & gently & with happiness. I don’t feel I am damaged any longer. I can only feel the scars, which is really good. It took a long time for them to heal.

When I was 22 or 23 years old, I was working as a “cedar maggot.” We did not cut down living trees, but cut up and cleaned up what the old time pioneers left on the forest floor. You see, bugs don’t like cedar wood too much & cedar does not really rot too fast. The old timers would cut only the “clear” wood, from the stump to where the branches started, and leave the rest to rot. That’s where we came in. We cut all that left over stuff and we turned it into cedar bolts for shakes & shingles.

One morning I climbed up on a tall cedar stump to sharpen my saw. There, stuck in the stump, was a rusted old wedge & the head of an axe with a splintered handle! There were also five pieces of yellow glass and an aluminum ring laying in a pile of rust—the remains of an old time lantern! All that stuff had been there for a long time.

All of these moments we all have in our lives are what we are made of—strands of our hearts, links in our minds, reflections in our souls. I, in my mind, have returned to that stump, the smell of the woods, many times over the many years I’ve been in prison. My place of peace & solace when the weight of correction becomes much too much.

The place in the woods, the stump, wedge, axe & lantern glass are all lost, as they should be. Magic does not just linger in one place. Maybe I took it in my soul & that is a good thought & it’s true? I go there often & I could have captured it that day so long ago all for myself & that is a good thought. It makes me smile to think it’s all mine, & now yours too.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

#363 Why Wait to be Happy?
“Many people in our society are not happy, even though the conditions for their happiness already exist. Their habit energy is always pushing them ahead, preventing them from being happy in the here and now. But with a little bit of training, we can all learn to recognize this energy every time it comes up. Why wait to be happy?”
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

What makes me happy? What brings me joy? I’ll tell you, for me, it’s opening to love. Letting love in.

I have to admit, sometimes I have episodes of resentment, judgment, selfishness, defensiveness…more often than not, though, these episodes are brief and they just—melt away. The other day we were discussing Thanksgiving. I’d already offered to have Thanksgiving at our house, for ‘my side’ of the family, and then in passing, I offered and invited David’s sister and others on ‘his side.’ When Mary called to confirm, she breezily, albeit apologetically, announced that ‘everyone’ wanted to come, like fourteen people! ‘My side’ includes only five people. I had the distinct physical sensation of my heart balling up like a tight fist. ‘Fourteen,’ I kind of gasped. Did I gasp, or bellow? I’m not sure. I struggled for a bit with all those big negative feelings: resentment (pretty nervy to descend with fourteen people!), selfishness (‘my side’ will be engulfed!), judgment (they are not ‘my kind’ of people). But then the miracle happened: just as precipitously as my heart clenched into that hard fist, it spilled open and…love…poured out. I just relaxed into love and happiness. “Well, I think that will just be fine,” I said. And I meant it. To have all those people, young and old, want to come up to our home on the mountain all of a sudden was a wonderful thing. I felt such love and happiness and joy at the thought of twenty family—‘my side’ or ‘his side’—spending the day of Thanksgiving together in our warm, cozy home, fire in the fireplace, maybe even with a dazzling mountain view, or maybe with a few snowflakes drifting down…

This happens often; one moment I’m feeling a little ‘grrrr,’ the next moment I’ve dissolved into love, and happiness. Don’t ask me the formula, the key to unlocking—I don’t understand it myself. I sure recognize it every time it comes up, but don’t understand the radical nature of it. All I know is that I am in wonder of it myself and never fail to feel blessed.

—Jude Russell
*

past parentage or gender
beyond sung vocables
the slipped-between
the so infinitesimal
fault line
a limitless
interiority

beyond the woven
unicorn the maiden
(man-carved worm-eaten)
God at her hip
incipient
the untransfigured
cottontail
bluebell and primrose
growing wild a strawberry
chagrin night terrors
past the earthlit
unearthly masquerade

(we shall be changed)

a silence opens

—excerpt from “Silence” by Amy Clampitt

May we be at peace
May all be healed
May we be a source of healing for all beings.

love,
—Katie Radditz
*

Last Thursday, when friends had gathered for coffee and conversation, Will Hornyak asked: “What do you do to feed your soul in difficult times?” I passed that question along to some friends, and here is what they sent me:

Three poems from Kim for Gaza and Israel:

War for the Holy Land

You could say it’s Biblical, this fury
between the children of Yahweh and Allah,
this frenzy of rockets and bombs opening
the gates of hell for fire to take and take
where hungry Death stalks the streets.

Weak leaders need war, or else we would
require them to be wise and kind. Instead,
this fury allows them to say, “We wage war
because it’s the anniversary of war,” and
“We wage war because they wage war,”

and everyone else goes along with it,
an eye for an eye, a child for a child.

Peacenik, War-nik

When there are two sides,
and one side starts shooting,
what are the rest of us to do?
Peace-mongers may run and hide,

while war gives warriors a certain
clarity: be the implement between
command and death. Hawks seek
prey, while doves sort seed.

Flower child, thistle child—when
we hear an angry leader speak
of vengeance, of human animals,
then it’s up to all of us.

Armor

What armor can our hearts put on
when facts and photos find us, far war
hunting us from hiding? Now news
becomes an implement to pry us open
so we, too, carry children through smoke
and rubble. We bury victims of atrocity,
flee with only what we can carry. We find
our kinfolk heaped. We are the massacre.
We try to keep the beating drum from
giving in, giving up. We guard our capacity
for hurt, each wound proving we feel, proving
divisions are a lie, proving our complicity.
Old heart, let suffering prove we are kin.

—Kim Stafford
*

Navigation

In early morning dark, I could meditate.
I have done. 40 mornings. Sa Ta Na Ma.
The fingers of both hands in rhythm.
Awkward, fumbly. Good for the brain

They say. Integration of the hemispheres.
Instead, I feed the cat. Fend off the worst
of the arthritis with small movements
until I can sit upright at a keyboard.

No, not music. That would be lovely,
a little Chopin. A laptop. Precious tool,
dictation. I close my eyes. And talk.
If I look, I want to edit, dangerous walk

This revision thing. More conversational
this way. The petty indignities, frets from
days before, get out all the surface stuff,
the annoyances, so the sweet stuff

Has room to grow into the day.
An unexpected bloom of affection
or engagement with something
absurd and wonderful.

Did you know that if you smell
The inside of your elbow
It clears the nasal palate for all
The aromas the next encounter will bring?

Elizabeth Domike
*

In answer to Will’s question…

The times are always difficult. There is still the urgent question: How do you feed your soul? I try to nurture peace, love, happiness and understanding within myself. Without them, I don’t have much to offer my fellow mortals that might be helpful. And I enjoy them for their own sake. I try to live a life that is rich in meaning. Life is short. Each day, each moment, is precious. I try to pay attention. And not forget to say thank you thank you thank you.

—Johnny Stallings
*

I write. That takes many forms. Novel, screenplay, song, essay, memoir. Just whatever I’m currently doing, that has a world I can dive into, and let everything else fall away. If I’m too brain-tired to do any of that, I’ll do a crossword puzzle, and if that’s too much, I’ll go for Wordle. I lose myself in words, and if I’m doing a song, the music is extra bonus points.

—J Kahn
*

How to cope with a calamity, of which there seem to be a surfeit? I started to add “right now” but that is not true…there is always a surfeit of despair. One necessary action is to be involved in preventing or ameliorating the disaster. Often you can help others. It sustains all of us to mutually better situations and solve problems.

How else do we come to terms with difficulties? For me both music and poetry are deep sources of consolation. I started to list poems and then realized the list is endless. Follow your own loves and you will find many poems that speak to the heart. A good starting one is Wendell Berry’s:

The Peace of Wild Things

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

And, yes, being in the wild, whether a city park or untrammeled mountains, is a deep source of nurture. Not consolation. Nature can be wild and destructive but not cruel. It is a vital reminder of the nurture and persistence of the world.

Oliver Sacks said that music is the one art that is both abstract and emotional, it can elevate and reassure us, deeply touch the place where we have no words. That is certainly true, and my music may be very different than yours but both are the endless world of sound and silence that envelop us.

But above all: find what you love, give yourself to it, work through reward and pain and frustration. Give yourself to it. Your immersion will carry you through so many griefs. Don’t do it all alone. We need one another, we need community and its irreplaceable links. As the poet June Jordan often reminded us, we are a community in fact and in aspiration.

—Deborah Buchanan
*

Jill sent this poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

—William Carlos Williams

—Jill Littlewood

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 10/22/23
2023-10-22 15:00 - 17:00
Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, October 22nd, our theme is Peace & War.
What have you read–books, essays, poems–that illuminates this subject?
The conversation will not be limited to what we’ve read, but will also include what we’ve experienced and Will’s question: “How do you feed your soul in difficult times?”

The Zoom gathering starts at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there.

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 11/2/23
2023-10-30 - 2023-12-06
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

November 2, 2023

People who love are happy.

—Yogi Tea bag wisdom
*

My friends and I have been talking about the ongoing violence in the Middle East. Kim wrote:

I lie awake at night thinking about Gaza. I have a friend there. She has fled her home and is camped in a house near Rafah with six families.
Bombing happens there, too.
Hence, today’s (10/26) poem…

Other Laws of War

Where anger flares, wisdom withers.
Where death thrives, truth dies.
Both sides are the bad guys.
As with weather, no one is in charge.
Even precision kills children.
War funds the hate school.
Dead soldier, mourning mother.
Strategic advantage limits thought.
Your vengeance vow is a trap.
Local victory, regional defeat.
Killing gives killers secret wounds.
A war wounds a generation.
Easy to start, hard to end.
Munitions makers always win.

—Kim Stafford
*

Mark Danley reminded me about Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” written in 1905. When asked if he intended to publish it, Twain said: “No. I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after my death.” Mark Twain died in 1910. “The War Prayer” was first published in 1923.

The War Prayer

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism. On every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun. Nightly, the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while. In the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles—beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

Sunday morning came. Next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams—visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said.

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work.

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. He ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting.

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside—which the startled minister did—and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light. Then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne—bearing a message from Almighty God!”

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two—one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this—keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer—the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it—that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts—fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid, with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

—Mark Twain
*

On YouTube you can find a film version, adapted by Marco Sanchez and directed by Michael Goorjian.
*

from CNN’s website on October 27th:

Sari Beth Rosenberg was teaching a high school history class in New York City recently when a student interrupted her with a question: “Are you Team Israel or Team Palestinian?”….

Rosenberg, who is Jewish, feared that getting into a conversation on the complexities of the conflict could alienate some of her students with ties to the Middle East. So she tried to turn the question into a learning experience.

“I told them I’m ‘Team Humanity,’” she says. She told her students that she thought both the deadly Hamas terror attacks in Israel and Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza are horrific.
*

When I was a young man it was against the law to not join the military. I refused to obey that law for the simple reason that I didn’t want to kill anyone. Instead of going to Vietnam, I went to India and studied with yogis.

I am against all present and future wars. Our problems can be solved with words, instead of violence. Wars represent a failure of dialogue, of intelligence, of empathy, of good will, of love, of imagination. All children are our children.

On the Fields of Peace website (fieldsofpeace.org) we learn that in World War I, one civilian was killed for every 9 soldiers. In World War II, the ratio was one to one. In modern warfare, one soldier is killed for every 9 (unarmed) civilians—most of whom are children. From the perspective of people my age, soldiers are children. Here’s my latest version of the Metta Prayer:

May all people be happy.
May we live in peace & love.
Even if some people are making other choices.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who advocated for peace and refused to take a side in the war. He taught meditation & mindfulness to people throughout the world. He published many books, including Being Peace, Creating True Peace and Peace is Every Step. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. Here is his poem “Please Call Me by My True Names,” followed by an account of how he came to write it:

Please Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when Spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

Meditation & Mindfulness 11/15/23
2023-11-15 - 2023-12-14
etching by Alan Larkin

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

November 15, 2023

Where…do universal human rights begin?
in small places,
close to home—
so close and so small
that they cannot be seen
on any map of the world.

—Eleanor Roosevelt (shared by Jill Littlewood
*

October 23, 2023
9:40 a.m.
Dear Johnny

The weather is getting ready to change & the leaves are all changing too. Within the frame of my window all of the spiders are spinning their winter webs. I watch them & soon the birds will find them & two feet from my eyes I will see the winter feast of the birds. I find these things in life to be what polishes my mind, the simple functions of all the life of all things around me. The moss growing on the rocks, the autumn leaves falling off the tree, the longing of love reciprocated with every beat of my heart.

I long to share all of this with the ones I love in life. To see the world in each other’s mind & eyes without the walls between any of us. We will all discover new wonders that will really be old ones, but new to us.

Do you remember when your eyes first opened to see a redirection of your life? Was there a scene of contrast in the cloth you thought you were cut from & did you find you were truly made from something altogether different? For me it was a casting away of tools and hooks, and a soul-cleansing rain that washed away a lifetime of blood, bruises & filth. Once I simply “let go” my eyes opened, and something like a waterfall poured into my mind, flooded me inside. After that, well…breathing & balance was needed. It’s a strange thing that the only way I can explain my transformation is with elemental references—which is unintentional.

Love You, Love Me!

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

I was on the University of Michigan campus last Thursday (11/9/23). I visited one of Ashley Lucas’s classes there. All the students in the class go into prison every week and teach workshops in theater, creative writing, or visual art. They had watched Bushra’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison.” We talked about Love.

When I think of “meditation & mindfulness,” the first thing that comes to mind is quietly enjoying the the beauty and miraculousness of my human life on Earth. Out the window, where I’m sitting right now, in South Bend, Indiana, an old maple tree is dropping some of its bright yellow leaves. The Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue tries to be uplifting and is mostly intended to be inspirational, to nurture peace, love, happiness, beauty and goodness in our minds and hearts. This does not mean we ignore the violence, the injustice, and suffering that are always present in the world. When we read or listen to the news, we are reminded of terrible ongoing tragedies in the Middle East, in Ukraine, Sudan, and many other places. The suffering is real. The beauty is also real. The sorrows of the world do not negate the Love and Joy that are our birthrights.

As Ashley and I were crossing the campus, more than a hundred people lay on the ground. Many of them had small signs with someone’s picture on it. A woman in a hijab read the names of people in Gaza who have been killed. The list of names was very long.

It felt to me like a real peace demonstration. No one was shouting. Jewish participants held signs that said: JEWS SAY CEASE FIRE NOW. Another sign said: NOT IN OUR NAME. To see some of the faces of those killed, and to hear the names read, was deeply moving to me, and to Ashley, and to many others I’m sure.

My own position on the violence in the Middle East is simple. I’m against the killing of children. Always. Everywhere. At my age, soldiers are children too. (The subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five is: “The Children’s Crusade.” It’s about World War II.)

Recommended listening: “Road to Peace,” from Tom Waits’ 2006 “Orphans” album.

May all people be happy.
May we live in peace & love.
(Even if some people are making other choices.)

—Johnny Stallings
*

Big Eddy

It’s where we camped as kids—
the Clackamas River fresh from
fast water waves breaking boulders
in long runs of rapids met a cliff
that turned its brawny rush to swirl
back on itself under a lid of glass
so you could see green stones deep
inside their secret room where all
that rain slowed in thought to
reconsider, before going on. There
our river learned to retrace its steps,
to ponder, to reconcile, restore itself,
become young again. Oh, my country.

—Kim Stafford
*

Oh, dear ambulance
high above the hospital:
a sheer, blue-white dust.

—Alex Tretbar
*

Still

There are possibilities
maybe less of them
But still

As long as there is water
some nourishment
heat

A cool breeze
perhaps
You know; the basics

There can be a moment
that shines
bright skin on a piece of fruit

A flash of light
as a bird wings away above

The sound of a song
sung in unison
the hum of it bearing
the weight of our well used bones

—Elizabeth Domike
*

As we approach the holiday season with Thanksgiving almost upon us, this lovely poem by Gary Snyder is always a touchstone for me. In my hierarchy of values, Gratitude and Kindness stand out as primary. Certainly aspirational even when I fail to meet the mark. Here is the poem:

Prayer for the Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing, light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowering spiral grain
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave and aware
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep—he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars—and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.
so be it.

—Gary Snyder

—Jeffrey Sher
*

From One to the Other

Lips touch first,
not a kiss, not desire
or response,
but a gateway,
open breath and movement,
energy
from being to being,
from another wanderer
sharing his deepest home,
dust on the pathways,
cold nights under stars,
youth that wakes each morning,
age’s knowing acceptance,
the ceaseless renewal of
atoms and smaller storms,
each one saying:
This moment,
this exact place,
endlessly.

—Deborah Buchanan
*

#79 Releasing Our Cows

One day the Buddha was sitting in the forest with a number of monks when a peasant came by. He had just lost his cows; they had run away. He asked the monks whether they had seen his cows passing by. The Buddha said, “No, we haven’t seen your cows passing through here; you may want to look for them in another direction.”
When the farmer had gone, the Buddha turned to his monks, smiled, and said, “Dear friends, you should be very happy. You don’t have any cows to lose.”
One practice we can do is to take a piece of paper and write down the names of our cows. Then we can look deeply to see whether we’re capable of releasing some of them. We may have thought these things were crucial to our well-being, but if we look deeply, we may realize that they are the obstacles to our true joy and happiness.
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

I come from a long line of conservers. We all were reduce, reuse, and recyclers long before that catchy phrase appeared on the scene. Duct tape, needle and thread, Elmer’s glue, needle-nose pliers were good friends and always close at hand.

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was one of my dad’s specially tended and cultivated compost piles. He named all three of them that year, and I received the W A Mozart Compost Pile. Black gold, they call it in the nurseries, and that it is.

I save and reuse aluminum foil, and plastic produce bags, and sandwich bags, and storage bags—for years! Why not?! They’re all perfectly good when washed and hung to dry. My daughter gave me a wooden mobile with a dozen or so small clothespins attached to strings for hanging washed plastic bags. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.) One of her early boyfriends gave me one dozen washed, dried and smoothed out sheets of aluminum foil he’d saved from deli sandwiches. Now that’s a thoughtful gift!

I darn and mend socks multiple times. Again—why not?!?! Ninety five percent of the sock is perfectly good. I have a friend who works at REI and she gives me all of her hole-y Smartwool socks. I mend them like new and give them back to her. She is ecstatic.

Goodwill is my go-to luxury shopping spot; the Bend Goodwill has any and all of the best sports clothing, barely worn and just my style. But. I’m really not even a shopper, so any ‘come hither’ shopping sales are lost on me.

Speaking of camping, I am never happier than when I am going to sleep in my cozy tent. I’ve turned it into a small home for a few days, and often I genuinely believe that I could live in nothing bigger than a tent with a campfire and meadow nearby.

One of my husband’s first observations about me was: “You are the lowest maintenance woman I’ve ever known!” I like to believe it was said in admiration, but I think the tone was more one of exasperation.

So it’s not about cows and peasants and monks, I know that, but the thought is there: I can be happy with few “cows.”

—Jude Russell
*

There’s a lot of suffering in the world, some feeling it closer to our hearts than usual. There is also the abundance of life changing before our eyes, as the sky fills with a rush of yellow leaves in the wind. Impermanence, filled with joy of birch, and ginkgo, and fig passing into their next stage. Is a fig tree still a tree without its leaves?

I’ve been reading The Book of Joy, a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, about lasting happiness in a changing world. They are discussing eight pillars of joy, beginning with Perspective. Here’s an excerpt:

If we are suffering, the Dalai Lama suggests that we get a wider perspective, to see the bigger picture. Scientists call this practice “self-distancing,” and it allows us to think more clearly about our problems, as well as to reduce our stress response. The ability to go beyond our own self-interest is essential for any good leader, whether of a nation, an organization, or a family. The Dalai Lama suggests that by shifting our perspective to a broader, more compassionate one, we can avoid the worry and suffering of further pain.

“Then, another thing,” the Dalai Lama continued. “There are different aspects to any event. For example, we lost our own country and became refugees, but that same experience gave us new opportunities to see more things. For me personally, I had more opportunities to meet with different people, different spiritual practitioners, like you, and also scientists. This new opportunity arrived because I became a refugee. If I had remained in the Potala in Lhasa, I would have stayed in what has often been described as a golden cage.

So personally, I prefer the last five decades of refugee life. It’s more useful, more opportunity to learn, to experience life. Therefore, if you look from one angle, you see, ‘Oh, how bad, how sad.’ But if you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same event, you see that it gives me new opportunities. So, it’s wonderful. That’s the main reason that I’m not sad and morose. There’s a Tibetan saying: ‘Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.’ “

I have found this reading helpful, along with the colorful leaves and the star-filled night skies of Autumn, and conversing with my dear friends, to keep centered and compassionate and joyful.

I hope this season finds you well and thankful for life!

—Katie Radditz

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 12/3/23
2023-12-03 15:00 - 17:00
“The School of Athens,” by Raphael

Beloved Bibliophiles!

Our theme for today’s Bibliophiles Unanimous! is Wisdom.
What is it? How do you get it? Where would you look?

The Zoom gathering starts at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there.

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 12/7/23
2023-12-07 - 2024-01-03
Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

December 7, 2023

From Rocky:
October 18, 2023, 5:40 a.m.
Dear Johnny

Hello and good day to you. I hope that this letter finds you in a moment of peace & joy. I am just starting my day here & it is a beautiful day & the autumn sunrise is starting to fill the sky. I love this time of year. Between October & April is the time of year I love the most. The holidays & friends & food! The feeling you get from being close to the ones you love. Well, I have to start the day now. I’ll be back soon.

October 19, 2023, 6:11 a.m.

Do you know the dreams you dream at night that let you know everything is alright? I had one of them last night. A friend & I just sat & talked about the last 25 years of our lives. It would seem we did it in the blink of an eye, or, 40 winks. We just sat and talked & it was so nice to see her, even if it was only in a dream.

October 30, 2023, 5:10 a.m.
Dear Johnny & Nancy,

It’s a very cold morning here & it is also beautiful Autumn out, my favorite time of the year. Family, friends, food & good times. I had an amazing October this year.

The harvesting of the last of the Summer’s growth & the tilling of the earth for the crop. The falling of the leaves, each one of them landing on the bed of my heart. Autumn has always been dear to me, even when I was a child.

The smell of pies & of chopping wood, the smoke from the chimneys as the smell fills the neighborhood. Children in costumes, bags full of candy and running noises—running towards Thanksgiving with their families. With Christmas on the way.

It was so nice to talk to you two while you were picking out a tree for your yard. I closed my eyes & could see you shopping together. I know you came to the right one and it will look great in your yard for many years to come. I wish I could have been there to plant it for you, while you enjoyed some coffee while I dug the hole. I know the digging around there is not so easy. I’m more than happy to do these things for you two. I want to enjoy life with my friends & family.

The last few days have been so cold here! It is going to be one of those years, I think. Long Cold Winter!

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

Katie 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

I think this is perfect for our times. The importance of language and listening and compassion can lead to deep understanding and inter-connectedness.

—Katie Radditz
*

Todd Oleson shared this:

Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archaeological dig. I was talking to one of the archaeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’n not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.
*

Driving to the Headlands
on the 23rd of December

What a light this morning!
Glowing peach balloons for clouds,
towering bouquets of them,
suspended by an invisible clown
across the heavens.

At last the greening of our hills comes to pass,
like iridescent birds beside a charcoal sky.
A jungle phoenix whose feathers color
with inhalation and sunlight.

And there’s an egret
doing tightrope tricks
above the marsh on my way to work.
All white and long necked,
she bows and scrapes
from her telephone wire
acrobat in nature’s circus,
waiting for applause.

—Gail Lester, from Transformed by Other Places
*

Water Song

I flow lower, slower, sliding wet in rivulet
or defile, creep deep, seep under, sift through,
turn blue, mist up from wave or pool, fool
to be gone, abscond beyond accountability,
myriad molecule sipped by Caesar, fog
furrowing battlefields, shining shields,
surrender’s yield sealed sacred, feeling
my way out from thicket or conflict,
healing drought, ooze from wounds,
sound of splash, blood from lash, river’s
dash from peak to sea, pleased to meet
you, travel through you, be lost, ghost
in your shape, rain cape descending,
sending my battalions over islands,
storm stallions stamping feet of lace,
dawn song, small saint, clear paint,
face dressed, soul blessed, best taste,
not much, a healing touch, and gone.

—Kim Stafford, from As the Sky Begins to Chang
(forthcoming as a print book from Red Hen Press, April 2024, and also as an audiobook)

(QR code for “Water Song” poem by Kim Stafford)
*

J Kahn sent a link to “Nature’s Mystery: Watch the Hypnotic Dance of a Starling Murmuration”:

He says: “I personally believe it is an example of meta-consciousness.”
Check it out!
*
Honesty

Mirroring one another
the herb pale and round
as the moon is pale
and round shows in the house
of light that all favors
have been showered upon us.

The object, barred by the dragon,
cinnabar, sulphur, and mercury
joined to find salt, we’re keeping
the wax warm for the inscription.

The rhythm of hymns
protects us from the snake.
The tree, branches
through each state,
vapor rises as the eagle rises
the serpent held aloft eats his tail.

Nature is one substance
in different forms,
the very last thing left behind.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

There is a ribbon
so deep in shadowed rubble
it is colorless.

—Alex Tretbar
*

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(quoted by Jack Kornfield in The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, p. 32)

There is no statistical evidence that harsh punishment, including the death penalty, acts as a deterrent to crime—(109 countries have abolished the death penalty). On the international level, the idea that the world can be improved by war has long been a popular one. The results so far are not encouraging. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Buddha said:

In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.

—Dhammapada, translated by Thomas Byrom

And as Tiny Tim says:
God Bless Us, Every One!

—Johnny Stallings

Meditation & Mindfulness 12/15/23
2023-12-15 - 2024-01-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

December 15, 2023
Let us be kind and compassionate to remove the sadness of the world.
—tag on a Yogi Tea bag
*

Someone at a lecture asked Suzuki Roshi about psychoanalysis.

In answer he said, “You think the mind is like a pond that you throw things in, and they sink to the bottom, like old shoes, and later they rise to the surface. But actually, there’s no such thing as the mind!”

—from To Shine One Corner of the World: moments with Suzuki Roshi
*

What Christmas Means to Me

It took me a long time to discover the error in presuming to write something with a title like “What Christmas Means.” But I’m an authority on “What Christmas Means to Me.” Who else?

It seems to me that every spoken or written sentence should begin with the phrase “it seems to me.” But that would be tedious. I am not and you are not in a position to make pronouncements about the way things are.

Only Donald Trump is in that position. Just kidding.

And so, dear reader, don’t take offense. This does not pretend to be the right way to look at Christmas. Just my way.

The birth of Jesus is a symbolic event, not a historical one. What it symbolizes is that every baby born on Planet Earth is an incarnation of the Divine.

End of essay. That’s about all I’ve got to say on the subject, but I enjoy saying it.

—Johnny Stallings, from the forthcoming book The Nonstop Love-In
*

Earth Eve

Yes, we know that telling, about the apple
and the exile, how one son slew the other,
so we descended from their legacy of loss
and violence, and blamed our troubles
on a woman’s taste for sweet. But

in another telling she remained resident
in green, her daughters Wind and Willow
danced together, could bless without fire
or sacrifice, could follow moth by night,
butterfly by day, moon and sun, enough.

Which story shall we tell the children:
how we failed, or how they might live.

—Kim Stafford
*

Brandon sent these quotes:

When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.

—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

—Brandon Gillespie
*

“It is very important to have at least one meal together every day. This meal should be an occasion to practice mindfulness, and to be aware of how fortunate we are to be together. After we sit down we look at each person, and breathing in and out, smile to him or her for a few seconds. This practice can produce a miracle. It can make you real, and it can make the others at the table real also.”—#359 “A Family Meal” from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

Welll—-ha ha ha! “A Family Meal,” “an occasion to practice mindfulness,” “breathing in and out, smile to him or her for a few seconds…” I don’t know how many of the twenty three people at our Thanksgiving meal had a chance to enact these practices, but I know that everyone laughed and hugged and ate and jabbered for hours and hours…and hours. One woman said, “You don’t know me, but Mary said she thought you wouldn’t mind…” Another said, “Oh I’m Sean’s son’s girlfriend and Sean thought it would be okay if…”

Of course it was okay. It was a gorgeous, sunny, chilly day, and the snowy mountain gleamed as white as the mounds of whipped cream on the pumpkin pies. Six kids under five years old caromed from wall to wall, inside and outside. They poked at Lolo the dog’s nose and ears, then shrieked and ran when she growled her old dog growl. We had to cook on the outside barbecue to get all the food ready; doors flung open and shut a hundred times. Cold air in, warm air out. “Hey, close that door!” “Can’t! Gotta’ heat up this ham because she has turkey in the oven!” Everyone, it seems, brought pies—pumpkin(s), apple, peach, blueberry/blackberry, pecan… One of the pumpkin pies had a huge slice carved out of it. Sister, Holly, waving her wine glass around, announced, “Pie before dinner is my motto!”

In spite of all the chaos, the meal went off without a hitch. Sisters and brother-in-law spent the night, along with a few others who decided they were so comfortable they would, too.

So: Mindfulness? Not so much. Except for our singing of a round that my family has sung before each Thanksgiving meal since I was little. I passed out copies to groups of 4 or more; I sang for them to introduce the simple tune, then instructed groups to chime in after a few bars. Everybody settled down, and we sang. It sounded like a chorus of bells being rung. Ethereal. Holy.

“Around the table now we praise the Lord of earth and heaven.
In grateful songs to thee we sing for all thy mercies giv’n.”

We sang several rounds until the last group echoed away, “….for all thy mercies giv’n.” And there was silence for a hushed moment. I guess that was our “mindfulness moment,” and we did all smile to each other, and we were real.

—Jude Russell
*

Open the Door

Open the door
Receive the breath like a wave
Weave a sense of calm
Whisper soft and shallow
Resonate – an underground stream
Smooth continuous deepening calm
Nourishing release
Feet heavy, lower legs settle
Stillness in the knees
Thighs heavy
Hips belly chest back
Sinking
Hands lower arms elbows upper arms
Shoulders – head heavy
Effortless heaviness
Silent silent
Peace peace peace on the in breath
Peace peace peace on the out breath
Body infused with peace
Mind saturated with peace
Become peace
Awareness
Peace inside the body
Peace outside the body
Peace above the body
Peace below the body
Surrounding the body
On the breath – in the mind
Absorbed
Unchanging
Undisturbed
The source

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Clairvoyance

When you work in newspapers, you’re always a few days in the future. On Tuesday you’re talking with your editor about Thursday, and on Wednesday you’re talking about Friday. On Saturday I talk about nothing. I sit on the patio at 5 a.m. facing the eastern dark, remembering how I tossed and turned in utero. I’m really not so intelligent as people think. I forget books as soon as I’ve read them, articles as soon as I’ve written them. I got through all of Proust in five months but could tell you little about it, other than how I superimposed my great loves over those of the narrator. When you work in newspapers, “today” is always in the rear-view, familiar but strange, like your lover’s face when you see it in the mirror, a speck of toothpaste in the corner of their backward smile.

—Alex Tretbar, originally published in SAND
*

5 “It was beginning winter”

It was beginning winter
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

—from the poem “The Lost Son” by Theodore Roethke

“unto us a child is born”
Unto all of us. Delana Nalin Kloster has been born unto us, into our family and our loving, wise tribe.
We are blessed and so happy to have you friends around us. Even in this time that, like all times, is troubled and people feel hopeless—more war, less water.
But a child comes into the world and all around this shining space, there
is anticipation and hope!
A not so subtle shift; she comes like a force of nature, hungry for life.

Delana – named by her parents Kornvipa “Ying” and William Forest Kloster, is an ancient name with many meanings in many cultures. It symbolizes the embodiment of beauty and love, sunlight, and resilience.
Nalin – in Sanskrit means Beautiful Lotus Flower. Named by her Thai Grandfather, following the tradition of waiting in meditation for the right meaning,

Delana Nalin arrives at Christmas time when millions of people are celebrating the birth of a child.
May she be a princess of Peace, Love, and Happiness

—Katie Radditz
*

This year is coming to an end. I just looked through the Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogues for 2023. It’s quite a treasure trove of beauty and inspiration! If, from time to time you find yourself in need of either, please visit the Meditation & Mindfulness Archive on the Open Road website: https://openroadpdx.com/event/open-road-meditation-mindfulness-archive/

Much love to everyone reading this!—now and in the year ahead.

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 12/17/23
2023-12-17 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, December 17th, at 3 pm (PST), legendary actor KEITH SCALES will read A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas to us!!! Here’s the link to the Zoom gathering:

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

Don’t miss this SPECIAL EVENT!!!

peace, love & happiness!!!

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 12/31/23
2023-12-31 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

What are the best books you read in 2023 & what books are you looking forward to reading in 2024?

We will gather once again on Zoom on Sunday, December 31st, at 3 pm (PST). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness!!!

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 1/4/24
2024-01-04 - 2024-01-31
Happy Family

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

January 4, 2024

Live righteously and love everyone,
you will build up around you an aura of light and love

—tag on a Yogi Tea bag
*

Because you are alive, everything is possible.
Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment,
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

—from “Buddha True Meaning of Life by Thich Nhat Hanh,” on YouTube
*

Well, it’s a new year. I wish you all an abundance of peace and love and joy. I’m enjoying a quiet morning—quiet outside and quiet within. Looking out the window at the clear blue sky. Drinking coffee. Doing nothing. It’s perfect.

For this coming year, I’m thinking of every day as a Day of Celebration. Today (1/1/24), of course, I’ll celebrate New Year’s Day. On Thursday (1/4/24), I’ll celebrate friendship with my weekly dialogue group. On the sixth is Epiphany—when the Wise Men arrived with gifts for the divine child. (Every baby is an incarnation of the Divine!) It’s also Twelfth Night. Shakespeare’s company performed his play Twelfth Night for Queen Elizabeth in 1602. That’s something to celebrate! This coming Saturday, the sixth, we will be showing Bushra’s film A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison at the First Unitarian Church. After a Q & A with some of the actors, we will celebrate together all the people who contributed to the success of the film, and of our prison theater programs. Nancy and I will be celebrating Valentine’s Day in Guanajuato. (In Mexico, they have a fiesta almost every day of the year!) May 3rd is Buster Cornelius Day. (Listen to “Buster Cornelius” by The Colorblind James Experience on YouTube.) On May 31st, I’ll celebrate Walt Whitman’s 205th birthday by performing “Song of Myself”—as I often do. These are just a few of the many celebrations ahead.

When I’m in need of wisdom and inspiration, I often turn to the great Russian clown-philosopher, Slava Polunin. He says:

“I think that theatre was created to open doors and passages in the blind walls of everyday reality—doors that lead into other worlds….

The First Door

Celebration

Look at the crowds of people at a celebration—their faces are beaming with almost giddy smiles of happiness. I love a festive theatre, a theatre of spectacle. I love it when even the most serious matters are discussed—perfectly naturally and inadvertently, as it were—under the cover of some common festive prank. I don’t want to live in the workaday world, and especially not when I’m on stage, because it is a depressing world, painted in grey with a smell of stuffy rooms. I love rich and vivid colors, the kind that children use to paint. I love the profusion of aromas, like you find in Hawaii. I love the lushness of sound, even if it’s only the sound of cicadas trilling in the night…

This is the teeming, brimming world of celebration. A world that delights and astonishes, crawls under your skin and haunts you for a long time afterwards—until such time when you finally accept the fact that a life of celebration is far more attractive than the day-to-day routine, and that it only takes a tiny effort to learn to transform one’s daily life into a holiday. The world of celebration is filled with creativity. In this world each and every one of us can endlessly recreate and reinvent himself.

I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t bring joy to me, to my friends and my audiences. This is how I’ve arranged my life, and this is how I assemble my team. Any time I see someone who is full of joy, whose life is a celebration, I drag him into my show. I’d rather pass over a brilliant expert, if he happens to be of a different spirit.

In general, I collect festive people—they radiate a wondrous light! Such people are few and far between, but they do exist, and they are spectacular. No matter what happens to them, they never lose their spirit of celebration. And I try to learn from them. This is why I do everything I can to have such people near me.

Festive people are a bit like ambulance paramedics, because whenever they show up, you feel like you’ve been given a shot of mysterious optimism. Maybe we ought to set up a kind of emergency mental health service staffed with these people. In any event, whenever I have to put together a touring company, I always make sure we have some holiday people on board. It is very important for the whole team to be in high spirits. It is essential to have the walls of whatever theatre we happen to be in shaking with our raucous laughter!

Celebration of life is an enormous and very important subject….For now I will only say that I love celebrations. And I can spend a great deal of my time and energy making sure we put on a fabulous celebration.

AS A MATTER OF FACT, ALL I’VE EVER DONE IN LIFE IS PUT ON CELEBRATIONS—WHETHER IT BE PERFORMANCES, PROJECTS, FESTIVALS, OR JUST PARTIES FOR MY FRIENDS. I REALIZED THAT MY GREATEST PROJECT IS CALLED ‘CELEBRATION OF LIFE’, AND THAT ITS PURPOSE IS TO TRANSFORM THE GREY WORLD OF OUR EVERYDAY HUMAN LIVES INTO A RICH, COLORFUL, ARTISTIC CELEBRATION.”

—from The Alchemy of Snowness by Slava Polunin

In the year ahead, I want to gather together often with friends—live or online—to celebrate our friendship, and anything else we can think of. When alone, I want to celebrate the miracle of having a precious human life on Planet Earth.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Kim sent this:

Thought of you when I ran across this little blessing I sent to some youth “offenders” in a California prison a friend was working with…after they thanked me for some poems I had sent them:

I am with you.
What my breath made is for
your breath. And the silence
between words–that too,
is for you. For in silence
I exchange my sleepless nights
for your day of release.
For that moment I chant
every morning on this page.

—Kim Stafford
*

The Three Wise Men

Maybe
Were not
Considered
Wise
Or even
In possession
Of all
Their senses
At first.

Men
Who suddenly
Depart from
Friends and family
Lucrative enterprises
Positions
Of power
And
Plush thrones
For
Long camel rides
Of indeterminate
Distance and duration
Over forbidding
Foreign terrain
In the
Dead of Winter
Drawn by a
Distant star
Are seldom
Considered
Wise.

Mad?
Foolish?
Yes.
But wise?
Not likely.

Yet
Wisdom is
Distilled
Drop by drop
Slowly
Over time
Not manufactured
Overnight
And now
Ages hence
We drink
That intoxicating
Liquor
Brewed from
A
Courageous
Plodding
Humble
Pilgrimage
Made
By men
Bearing gifts
In the
Darkness
To where
And
For whom
They
Knew not
Knew only
To leave
All they
Knew
For a long
Night Journey
Toward a
Beckoning star.

—Will Hornyak

A Midsummer Night's Dream in Prison at First Unitarian Church 1/6/24
2024-01-06 15:00 - 18:00
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison, a documentary by Bushra Azzouz, will be shown at First Unitarian Church in Portland–1226 SW Salmon Street–on January 6th, at 3 pm. Following the screening there will be a Q & A, featuring actors who were in our prison plays.

Then we will have a BIG CELEBRATION for all the people who helped make this film and all our prison plays possible!

Here’s a trailer for the film:

DON’T MISS THIS!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 1/14/24
2024-01-14 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

Our topic on Sunday, January 14th, is Histories!
We’ll talk about different approaches to history. There are traditional histories that emphasize the deeds of “great men” like Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great*–accounts of war and conquest, the rise and fall of countries, empires and civilizations. February is Black History Month. March is Women’s History Month. There are histories of Philosophy, of Art, of Theater, and of Literature. Biographies are histories of individual people, which often shed light on the time and place in which they lived. Now there are many ecological histories. There is a history of salt:

There is a history of the color red (featuring Cochineal Pirates):

What other kinds of history are out there? What are your favorite history books?
We will gather once again on Zoom on Sunday, January 14th, at 3 pm (PST). Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness!!!

Johnny

* Bonus Joke:

Q. What do Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear have in common?
A. Same middle name.

Martin Luther King Day! (1/15/24) & Black History Month in February
2024-01-15 - 2024-02-29
Today is Martin Luther King Day!

Black History Month is coming up in February!

Below is a link to a speech Dr. King gave a few days after Rosa Parks was arrested for not sitting at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. As far as I know, it is the earliest recorded speech of of his. The quality of the recording is not very good, but it’s a miracle that we have it. This YouTube video contains a transcription of the speech.

Something happens near the end. The people in the church realize that in this moment, in this place, the world is going to change. The roof comes off the church.

I’ve listened to this recording many times. I cry every time, without fail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmoFoG5P-U

peace, love & justice

Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness 1/15/24
2024-01-15 - 2024-02-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

January 15, 2023

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

—from “Paradise Lost” by John Milton
*

A couple poems from Kim. I’d like to read the imaginary book that he wrote this prologue for:

Prologue

This book should probably be banned
because the author not only believes in
freedom, but practices freedom by talking
about hard things that may distract you.
You should probably not read this book
if you are afraid to see things in a new way,
encounter ideas that require thought, or
come to know people you have discounted.
If anyone sees you reading this book, they
may judge you in ways you can’t control.
This book could cause young people to
develop open minds, then—who knows
what might happen? Maybe close this book
right now—unless you feel brave, and free.

Be Alive

Sometimes you see it on the street
among the many pedestrian pedestrians
dragged by errands, slouching toward work—
this one youth skipping with joy.

Or in the store where shoppers lean on carts
heaped with plunder, one bright-eyed,
gray-haired wisp of woman humming,
buoyant in the baking aisle.

Don’t die before you die. It’s possible, even
in dark days to wake in wonder, lift your gaze,
make them stare, amaze the sleeping multitudes
by how you swim through air.

—Kim Stafford
*

I bless the redbrick
obsolete city center
from the nineteenth floor.

—Alex Tretbar
*

#352 “Why Hurry to the Grave?”
“There is no need for us to struggle to arrive somewhere else. We know that our final destination will be the cemetery. Why are we in a hurry to get there? Why not step in the direction of life, which is in the present moment?”
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

Hahaha! Oh, that Thich Nhat Hanh has a funny bone in his body! Why hurry to the grave, indeed?! There’s way too much living to do: too many dahlias to plant; too many dogs to save; kids to teach, and kids to learn from; prisons to badger; trails to find, or trails to find me; bike routes to tackle; Asian dishes to cook—wait! African and Indian dishes to try; short stories to write….

Every day is a new day. Every moment is a new moment.

I want to take up cardiac surgery; there are a few hearts I’d like to transplant.

So I’d better get moving—this January 29th I will be 80 years old. Ack!!! Oh well, my dad was planting 10” Christmas tree seedlings when he was 90 years old.

—Jude Russell
*

Jill sent this quote:

Be kind to people; you never know what they’re going through. They might look perfectly normal, but if you could see into their heart of hearts, you might discover that they’re a poet, forced to wander the world noticing, noticing, noticing, until they’re hearts give out. I should know: my brother is one such unfortunate. So you never can tell.

—Sofia Warren

—Jill Littlewood
*

The Pelican

Finding oneself alone
locked out, just after dark
in snow, 15 degrees,
with only one’s clothes and one’s wits
sharpens awareness of vulnerability.

A bit like a knife finds one’s weak spots.

But this is about wittering,
or lack thereof.
The longing for much
maligned chit chat
that is the crack in a door left slightly open
for a glimpse of loss, grief, loneliness.

That’s where the brown pelican
comes in, prehistoric, living
dinosaur chasing an osprey,
terrifying huge bucket of a mouth open
to catch, hopefully, a dropped fish.

We sit with it.

The fear, the maw, the missing,
the nature of things.

And then we get up
go to the dining hall or grocery
and make a joke to the person
ahead of us in line.

About the weather.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Clear blue sky this morning. It’s cold out. Snow on the ground. Wondering what to write for the Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue—what to say about the unsayable. Emily’s poem pops into my mind, and says what I want to say better than I can:

The Infinite a sudden Guest
Has been assumed to be —
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?

—Emily Dickinson

—Johnny Stallings
*

We are experiencing snow with our original nature of AWE like we were children.

Furry Bear

If I were a bear,
And a big bear too,
I shouldn’t much care
If it froze or snew;
I shouldn’t much mind
If it snowed or friz—
I’d be all fur-lined
With a coat like his!

For I’d have fur boots and a brown fur wrap,
And brown fur knickers and a big fur cap.
I’d have a fur muffle-ruff to cover my jaws,
And brown fur mittens on my big brown paws.
With a big brown furry-down up to my head,
I’d sleep all the winter in a big fur bed.

—A.A. Milne

“When somebody has access
who did not previously have access,
that’s powerful . . .”

I read this sign on the front of the Metro Newsletter about where to hike in Portland. The lead article was about who has access to the rivers and the hiking paths. Metro is creating more accessible paths for people with difficulty walking. How essential is our ability to wander in the woods, to be in the wild, by running water?

I was reflecting on this quote on the way to the showing of Bushra’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison” at First Unitarian Church last Saturday. There was a wonder-full audience of receptive people who were astonished and moved by the beautiful experience of being able to see this story unfold. And I realized the profundity of access, not only to people imprisoned, but also to the friends, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons who have not been able to visit their loved ones in prison. How powerful it is to have access to theater, reading, Shakespeare, performing, music, visitors, freedom, transformation, spectacle , joy, laughter, hugging, love—to feel so alive and engaged in life!

I received a new year poem from Kim and Perrin – “Be Alive” so timely. We have access to so much that can make us happy to be alive. Even when the power goes out, branches are breaking, the internet is disabled, water only runs cold. When you wake in the dark under piles of quilts to stay warm, as Perrin and Kim write in their poem, “it’s possible, even in dark days to wake in wonder.”

This storm will pass.

With love and thanks to you all and our expanding community.

—Katie Radditz

peace, love, happiness & understanding 2/1/24
2024-02-01 - 2024-03-06
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

February 1, 2024

¡Saludos from sunny México!

Recently, I asked some friends: “Over the years, and right up to now, what experiences, people, books, movies have enlarged your world?” Kim sent this:

The Key to Sweden

In July of 1969 I was hitchhiking north into Sweden, after spending a few days at a commune called Dragon Houses just across the strait from Copenhagen. I had a small rucksack containing a sleeping bag, a camera, my journal, and a recorder, which I played inexpertly while waiting for a ride on the increasingly empty roads of Sweden stretching into the interior. I was nineteen.
A woman driving alone picked me up. She didn’t speak English, and seemed very preoccupied, as we drove north along what turned out to be a narrow peninsula stretching out into a great lake. At the end of the road, we got out, and I looked around. She made a rather halting speech in Swedish, then awkwardly got in the car and drove back south, leaving me there. All afternoon I waited. It was a dead-end road. Maybe no one else ever came there. Finally, in the evening, three French lads arrived in a little car, we all went for a swim, and then they drove me back to the main road, and left me at an improbable English-themed pub standing alone in a field, far from anything. Clearly, I was meant to enter.
Inside it was loud. Lots of young travelers, a scruffy lot like me. A din of languages. Lots of beer going down. Shouting and laughter. Long benches pulled up to long tables, and smoke from many cigarettes wafting up toward the rafters. I bought a beer at the bar, found an empty seat at one of the long tables, and settled in to nurse my silence. I was so solitary in those days, and sick with grief about it.
As I hunched over my half-empty glass, the traveler beside me — a boy about my age, from England, by his voice — turned to me out of the blue and shouted the wanderer’s existential question into my ear: Where are you going?
I leaned over and shouted into his ear: Göteborg, just then deciding.
He shouted to me: Do you have a place to stay?
I shook my head. But before I could turn back to my beer, a young woman on the bench behind me rose to her feet, and extended her hand toward me. In her hand was a key. She bent close to shout in my ear, I will not be using it. Then she took the pen from my pocket, and wrote an address on my palm, put the key there, closed my fingers around it, and stepped away. In a moment, she had disappeared into the crowd.
I hitched to Göteborg, found the address, opened the door to a snug refuge, lived there three days, baked bread, read a copy of The Grapes of Wrath I found on her shelf, cleaned the place as an act of gratitude, left the key on the kitchen table, and pulled the locked door shut behind me.
For decades now, I have carried that moment of generosity and trust as a talisman for the possibility of human kindness. When young people ask me, “What was it like in the 60s?” I tell about the key to Sweden, and the address written on my hand by a trusting stranger.

—from Little Book of Common Good by Kim Stafford, (Little Infinities, 2018)
*

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has enlarged my world more than any other book. It taught me the vastness of life.

—Alex Tretbar
*

For a number of years I facilitated dialogue groups at Two Rivers prison. The name I gave to the dialogue program was: “The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Our Thinking Shapes Our Lives.” I am obsessed with stories—especially what they do to us. We live inside of stories. We tell ourselves stories all day long—stories about who we are, about the world in which we live, and our relationship to it. Individually and collectively, we have worldviews, which are subject to change.

Stories can define and confine us. They can rob us of the joy that is our birthright. We can live in fear. And we can live in love.

The question I asked my friends—“what has enlarged your world?”—arose out of my own quest to see through the ideas, opinions, prejudices and dogmas that imprison me. I’m always wondering: what can make me wiser, kinder, happier, more generous, more loving, more free? I ask again and again: “What’s going on here?” I’m constantly on the lookout for the next book that will give me new insights and deepen my understanding, the next film that will make me laugh or break my heart, the next friend who will do…whatever it is that friends do. Love me? Enliven me? Correct me? Inspire me?

It’s a long way from Whitefish, Montana to Udhagamandalam, Tamil Nadu. Looking back on my life journey, I can see that Indian yogis made my life bigger and better. Also, American yogis, like Howard Thoresen, Alan Benditt & Walt Whitman.

Shortly after escaping from high school, I encountered people in books and in “real life” who changed the way I see the world. J. Krishnamurti spoke of “freedom from the known,” and from authority (including religious authority), and from fear. In Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda made India seem like a magical place. He wrote about meditation and spiritual ecstasy—samādhi. I wanted that! Instead of going to college or to Vietnam, in my twenties, I spent a lot of time with two Indian yogis, Nitya Chaitanya Yati and Nataraja Guru, in Udhagamandalam and elsewhere. There is an old idea in India, that one’s true self is not other than the All—which has no beginning or end. I spent a lot of time meditating on that.

During the years I was studying Indian Philosophy, I always had Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in my back pocket. In the poem “Song of Myself,” Walt says:

“I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.”

It doesn’t sound like something an Indian yogi would say. But the next lines of the poem sorta do…

“Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.”

I don’t know of anything that has enlarged my world more than Walt’s poem. Back in the day—before the Internet!—the Looking-Glass Book Store was full of books that blew my mind. The Whole Earth Catalog, the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, and the books of Jack Kerouac, Carlos Castaneda, Buckminster Fuller, Shunryu Suzuki, Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carl Jung and Nikos Kazantzakis come to mind.

More recently, paradoxically, going into the confined space of prisons made my world bigger. I made many friends there. Friends continually enrich my world—too many to name here. However, Nancy Scharbach, more-than-a-friend, deserves special mention.

As an actor and director, William Shakespeare has given me boundless gifts.

That’s enough for now.

—Johnny Stallings
*

This morning, I opened “my” blog that is kind of like a diary site online called Prosebox. I have been writing like this since 1998 and read notes and writings from my Icelandic friend who lives in Sweden and writes horror fiction and takes amazing photographs. There is a retired child minder grandmother who lives in a comfortable cottage town near Edinburgh who has a troubled adult son that is mentally ill.

There is something pretty much every day from my friend, a recent widow, who since the beginning of the pandemic and Zoom, also is now my yoga student. She lives in Peterborough Australia, (a flyspeck of a town she calls it) about as far north of Adelaide as Seattle is from Portland.

There is my friend who is a retired maths teacher living in Victoria Australia, a fifth-grade teacher in a Catholic School outside Calgary Alberta, a journalist writing for a prestigious medical journal on mental health and related topics in Washington D.C. who is obsessed with birds, all kinds.

There is a paper artist in San Diego, an inn keeper in rural South Africa who co-authored a book last year on native plants, a recent empty nester, fiddle player, master gardener and homeschooler (both kids now in college) in rural Maine.

The affiliation is loose and unstructured.

We don’t use our “real” names but over the years most of us have exchanged addresses and links to things in our lives. Interestingly, all our pets are described using their real-world names. My cat Carlo is internationally known.

Because of the way of these things, the original site we used closed down about seven years ago, but someone set up another less annoying one and many of us moved over there.

We talk about all sorts of things. Big things. Life changing things, small things, an annoying drawer, dogs barking in the night. Over the years we have learned what to share (so as not to annoy our loved ones) and what not to. I have had occasion to meet some of the people as they have passed through town. Mostly at Powell’s coffeeshop, because, why not?

One of the lovely things about all this, besides knowing what the weather is like all over the place each day, is that we know each other well. One of us has developed dementia in the meantime and she uses her old posts to help her remember friends and events and we act as a kind of collective memory for her.

It is a joy. And a bit weird. And not at all like Facebook. It has most determinedly enlarged my world.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

I’ve still been thinking about the Dalai Laman’s top suggestion for cultivating Joy in one’s life. If we are suffering, the Dalai Lama suggests that we get a wider perspective, to see the bigger picture.

After reading the newsletter a few months ago with Black Elk’s vision and telling of the midwest Native massacres, I discovered i knew nothing of the Trail of Tears in the Willamette Valley.

I read in National Geographic that a Mountain in the Cascade foothills near Cottage Grove was being renamed. From Mt. Swastika to Mt. Halo, it was renamed for Chief Halo who had refused to move his family from his homeland in 1856. From Tualatin to the Southern Oregon border, the indigenous People were forced to the coast where they were promised all the food they could eat. Most of the people died from disease or starvation along the route. The survivors ended up at two camps, one on the southern coast and the other that is now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

It is a paradox that to read this history and have more understanding feels expansive. It is easy to relate the stories to what is happening now in the Middle East, and what has gone on for centuries. I can’t say it brings me Joy, but it does make me have a broader view as well as deep compassion that will find a way to compassion in action.

Reparation takes a long time, but we do hear now recognition of those who lived on this land before European conquest. There is more awareness, and realization that there are descendants that are struggling to keep their culture. And there are stories of returning land to tribe members from those who have benefited for years from living on what was stolen.

There are books on this history, written by Americans, about the settlers and the US military and the tribes; about the Applegates, the Indian government authorities, and the Kalapuya. But now there is a book by scholar David Lewis, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley tells the rich history and systematic removal of The Kalapuyans who lived in the Valley for thousands of years. It opened my heart and mind to their/our ongoing story.

As we get older there is some letting go of despair over terrible news. Annie Lamott wrote about it this way recently, about aging and insight,

“In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now not so much. The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts.
The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do”

So this leaves me with feeling that kindness on an everyday basis, cultivating joy for the sake of those around me, enjoying nature and art especially books are the things that matter most.

May we be healed, may we be a source of healing for all beings.

—Katie Radditz

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 2/15/24
2024-02-15 - 2024-03-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

February 15, 2023

when the mind is still
all views disappear

trying to quiet the mind
is just more activity

—Seng Ts’an
*

“Abandoning concepts is of prime importance for a meditator.”

—from The Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh, p. 319
*

And a favorite quote for Valentine’s Day:

Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclin’d,
Lawless, wing’d & unconfin’d,
And breaks all chains from every mind.

—William Blake
*

¡Greetings from Guanajuato!

This morning (2/6/24) I was thinking about Thomas Traherne. He’s a Christian mystic from the Seventeenth Century. Naturally, he believes in God. For him, God created the heavens and the earth, and everything that lives here–including us.* He’s terrifically pleased with all this, grateful, and eloquent. I enjoy reading his poems and meditations. In my mind, I have to do some translating of what he says into ideas that are more congenial to me. So, this morning, instead of doing it in my head, I tried a couple things in my journal.

In Centuries of Meditations Thomas Traherne wrote…

58
The Cross is the abyss of wonders, the centre of desires, the school of virtues, the house of wisdom, the throne of love, the theatre of joys, and the place of sorrows; It is the root of happiness and the gate of Heaven.

…which I changed to…

58
Silence is the abyss of wonders, the center of desires, the school of virtues, the house of wisdom, the throne of love, the theater of joys, and the place of sorrows; it is the root of happiness and the gate of heaven.

A longer passage from Thomas Traherne…

71
But what life wouldst thou lead? And by what laws wouldst thou thyself be guided? For none are so miserable as the lawless and disobedient. Laws are the rules of blessed living. Thou must therefor be guided by some laws. What wouldst thou choose? Surely since thy nature and God’s are so excellent, the Laws of Blessedness, and the Laws of Nature are the most pleasing. God loved thee with an infinite love, and became by doing so thine infinite treasure. Thou art the end unto whom He liveth. For all the lines of His works and counsels end in thee, and in thy advancement. Wilt not thou become to Him an infinite treasure, by loving Him according to His desert? It is impossible but to love Him that loveth. Love is so amiable that it is irresistible. There is no defense against that arrow, nor any deliverance in that war, nor any safeguard from that charm. Wilt thou not live unto Him? Thou must of necessity live unto something. And what so glorious as His infinite Love? Since therefore, laws are requisite to lead thee, what laws can thy soul desire, than those that guide thee in the most amiable paths to the highest end? By Love alone is God enjoyed, by Love alone delighted in, by Love alone approached or admired. His Nature requires Love, thy nature requires Love. The law of Nature commands thee to Love Him: the Law of His nature, and the Law of thine.

…in my argot becomes…

71
It is impossible not to love someone who loves you. Love is so amiable that it is irresistible. There is no defense against that arrow, nor any safeguard from that charm. What life would you lead? By what would you be guided? We must have something to live for. What would you choose? Why not live in blessedness? Why not live in love? You must live for something. What more glorious than infinite love? Where there is infinite love there is infinite treasure. Choose the most amiable paths that lead to love and joy. By love alone is life enjoyed, by love alone delighted in. Love is the essence of life. It is our true nature.

*Darwin’s version seems more plausible to me than the account given in the book of Genesis–where Adam is a clay figurine and Eve is created from his rib.

paz, amor y felicidad

Juanito
*

Kim wrote in response—and sent a poem:

Thank you, Johnny, for these thoughts and texts. What you have done seems to me a version of what every reader does–adapt a text into one’s own frame of reference. I like that you took the time to spell it out in your own lingo.

I remember my father telling me about the early Spanish priest deep in the Amazon jungle preparing to preach the Christian gospel to the local tribe. For them, animals were gods. So the priest, to tell the story of Christ, began: “Once a jaguar was born in a nest of grass….”

This form of radical transformation of a text in translation, my father said, was called “an economy.” That is, an utterly thrifty and practical conversion of currency from one culture to another.

This you have now done, and all becomes a little more clear….
All praise to the Jaguar.

Kim

Deep State II

Any songbird is a likely spy watching your
every move, head turned to hear your thoughts,
owl on night watch channeling your dreams,
wheeling hawk agent in feathered surveillance
on the payroll of the CIA (Compassion in All)
to know your part in the great extinction. If
you are complicit, it’s not too late to change—
switch loyalty to Earth and earn exoneration.
Join the underground in radical solidarity with
insects serving the FBI (Friend Bond Intrinsic)
for the long-game operation eons old, code name
Conspiracy of Rivers trafficking in mist by secret
transport hidden in plain sight, sotto voce bats
chanting dispatch passed along by moth wing
semaphore for the sleeper cells of bees.

—Kim Stafford
*

Prayer for the Reader Who Photocopies This Prayer and Shares It with Friends and Sisters

Dear Coherence: Thank You for beer and friends and pencils and socks and the Red Cross and cellos and Paul Desmond’s saxophone and Wiffle balls and elm trees and woodpeckers and transistor radios in the pockets of old men who are fishing for bass and perch but also keeping one ear on the baseball game. Thank You for suspenders and Larry Bird. Thank You for typewriter keys and stamps and windowpanes and coffeepots. Thank You for Rosemary Clooney’s voice especially in her later years. Thank You for photocopy machines and friends and sisters and the refrigerators on which we pin up small lovely strange things people we love send us in the mail. Thank You for teeth and earphones. Thank You for sand crabs and safety belts. Thank You for the way men pat their pockets while checking for their keys and wallets and phones. Thank You for the way people defer to each other while boarding the bus. Thank You for all the little things that are not little. Absolutely beautiful work there. If You had a supervisor I would so be writing a letter of commendation for Your personal file, but…And so: amen.

—from A Book of Uncommon Prayer by Brian Doyle
*

Walt Whitman says:

…The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

7
Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as luck to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

—from “Song of Myself,” sections 6 & 7
*

#318 “True Generosity”

“True generosity is not a trade or a bargaining strategy. In true giving there is no thought of giver and recipient. This is called ‘the emptiness of giving,’ in which there is no perception of separation between the one who gives and the one who receives.
This is the practice of generosity given in the spirit of wisdom, with the understanding of interbeing. You offer help as naturally as you breathe. You don’t see yourself as the giver and the other person as the recipient of your generosity, who is now beholden to you and must be suitably grateful, respond to your demands, and so on. You don’t give so you can make the other person your ally. When you see that people need help, you offer and share what you have with no strings attached and no thought of reward.”—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

I am not a good board member; I am especially not effective as a fundraising committee member. I would like to be helpful in that area, but I am definitely a liability rather than an asset. In fact I have been quietly dropped from the two committees I’ve been on in the past. Let me explain.

Decades ago, I volunteered to go door-to-door soliciting donations for the American Cancer Society to put on the ‘resume’ for our Lake Grove Garden Club, to show others how charitable we were. I launched my campaign door-to-door, and after about a dozen or so households, I’d gathered a smattering of small checks and bills. Seemed like everyone had other needs for their money, very understandable. I’d collected about $75 when I came to the last house for the day. An elderly woman greeted me sweetly. I told her my reason for being there, and she whispered, “Oh my dear, I would love to help, but I have just finished my last round of chemotherapy myself, and I have not a penny left to my name, but I do wish you luck.” Well, I felt so terrible and could truly feel her pain, so I rummaged through my envelope of donations and gave her $60 of my $75 collection of the day. It was evident that she needed that $60, and much more; it was also evident that all the others I’d approached were in need themselves. Life is hard, I explained to the club members when I turned over my $15.00. Soon after, I was quietly taken off the fundraising committee and assigned to the cookie sales committee.

The fundraising committee of the Portland Artquake board evidently had not learned of this when they assigned me a spot in their group. They discussed with me how it was an essential component that we donate a portion of our artists’ sales profits to other organizations. This was followed by a heated discussion about what we would get in return for our donation: If we gave X amount, could we expect to get X in return? Could we give less than X amount and still get what we wanted/needed in return? Could we get a particular in-kind, non-fungible (I was 29 years old and just learning the definition of ‘fungible’) favor/gift? Would that qualify as an equal, or more than a win-win for us? I was naive, and puzzled.

During a moment of stony silence in the arguing, I piped up, “But isn’t this a gift? I thought you didn’t expect something in return for a gift. Isn’t it something you give with no expectation of some reward, or return? It’d sure be easier that way.” The silence turned frigid, and pitying. One man sneered at me in disbelief, “You don’t think we do this crap for nothing, do you? This is business, sweetheart, business!” The light dawned and I nodded slowly, knowingly.

Days later they told me everyone thought I’d be great on the arts display committee. They told me it was a promotion, an honor—but I’ve always wondered…

—Jude Russell
*

Mirror

Shipmates, we float on a sea of story.

Books become companions for a while,
saving us from chaos in our minds

We stay up to find
out what in the end
holds that particular narrative line.

Even though we can guess,
the thirst is there to know
no matter how twisty we go.

Just not too.

Not too easy, not too twisty,
not too overblown, or risky.

Not too sappy,
pedestrian, predictable
and please, not too happy.

A challenge or predicament
must engage
could be in the form of a wizened sage.

Perhaps there is a tiger
unexpectedly on a raft
or a talking spider
caught in an updraft.

A bear and his friends,
an unwholesome fish,
it could even be someone
trying to find the right sized dish.

There are colors and places
and narrow cramped spaces
full of smells
and remarkably… tolling bells.

Wherever we go
we are still here,
never having gone and yet…
things become, curiously, more clear.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

These days I am taking care of my granddaughter about 2 hours a day. Delana is nine weeks old. She is so tiny she looks like a baby buddha, with her mother, Ying’s, Thai genes. She looks more like a little old man than a girl when she is serious. My husband often refers to her as “he” even now. When my son Will, her papa, comes to pick her up, his face transforms. He starts beaming when he looks into her eyes. And he exclaims, “She is so darling! Even when she’s crying, I think she is darling!” I see Will’s face shining, as he remembers over and over that he’s totally, unabashedly, unconditionally in love. It lights up the room!

And I think of this poem. I carry this poem with me, I carry it in my heart!

(i carry your heart with me)

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

—e. e. cummings

—Katie Radditz

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 2/25/24
2024-02-25 15:00 - 17:00
Alokananda Roy

Beloved Bibliophiles!
On Sunday, February 25th, at 3 p.m. PST, our theme will be Who do you admire, and why? It could be an author, a fictional character, someone you’ve read about–or someone completely unrelated to books. I’ve got a long list–including Alokananda Roy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz1VlS-w9Co). I’m eager to hear who you admire. Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny
