The Open Road: a learning community

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 4/15/23
2023-04-15 - 2023-05-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

April 15, 2023

Dear Mindful Meditators

Our Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue began on September 15, 2020. Recipients include people inside and outside prison walls. It is currently mailed to 10 men in prison and emailed to about 60 people who aren’t—including 9 men who were in prison in September of 2020 who are now out of prison! Hallelujah!

We are going to have our first get-together on Saturday, May 13th, from 2 to 4 p.m., at Taborspace in Portland: 5441 SE Belmont.

This will be an opportunity for people to get to know each other, and to have a dialogue about our life journey—what it means, what we love, what we do to nurture peace, happiness, goodness and understanding in our own life and in the lives of others.

I hope you can come! Bring a friend, if you like.

My friend Rocky Hutchinson, who is a member of our meditation & mindfulness community, called me the other day, and was excited to tell me about an author he had just discovered—Kahlil Gibran! Back in the day, The Prophet was an essential book in every hippie’s library. Rocky’s enthusiasm inspired me to re-read it (after 50 years). This quote from The Prophet relates to our upcoming gathering:

Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving….
And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughing, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

—Kahlil Gibran

peace & love, y’all
Johnny
*

Dreaming in Detail

The casting director for my dreaming
I can understand—bringing in my parents
from gone, grown children as infants again,
and a parade of strangers, each with a bit part
fraught with obscure purpose. The location scout
found familiar places, made them mythic, then
added an abundance of tunnels, caves, cities
in ruin, and a foggy coast. My costume director
surrenders to seasonal change—blues in spring
yielding to summer gray, and autumn black. But
why is the director of photography so obsessed
with effects of light both atmospheric and exact?
In one scene we see fine hairs on my father’s arm
glitter in low sun, then a heap of medieval coins,
then that lost button shining on a stone.

—Kim Stafford
*

A Fish Describes Water

There are prayers best said
only at night, in depths, water steps
rubies in the mouth.

Wind ripples across moon grass
longing to be released by washed
stones. The rowboat

is empty. What remains
is a song, a solitary gold-winged
warbler, the pattern of rain.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

What do you do to nurture peace, love and happiness in your life?

Recently I had a chance to sit in on a phone call with Johnny and Rocky Hutchinson. Rocky is one of our inmates in the dialogue group, and he is one of the dearest human beings I’ve ever known. He has been in prison for a long time, and has had quite a—well—rocky experience.

I asked him how he was doing, and what he was doing, and he told me he had just finished the Master Gardener program, and he was also training dogs for use with people with disabilities. He loves it, both the gardening and the dogs.

I said, “Rocky, you couldn’t have picked two more valuable activities for the soul than gardens and dogs!” And I realized that that is just how I feel: Gardens and dogs fill my heart and soul like nothing else.

You all might have heard that digging in dirt, the smell of dirt, of the soil, stimulates endorphins in the brain, the happiness endorphins. True! Of course, I don’t head to the garden thinking, uh oh, I think I need some of them endorphins about now! No, it’s just an instinct, a drive, that takes me there. And planting carrots, chard, beans; digging watery moats around the tomato plants (the smell of those tomato leaves!); cutting bouquets of coral colored peonies and lavender irises (the smell of irises!); picking green beans with glints of sunlight beaming through the vines—all of this settles in me and brings focus, joy, and quiet peace to my soul. Gardens, yes!!!

And dogs! Lolo! My love! Some friends took care of Lolo while we were gone and when I asked how she’d been, they said, “She had us with one look into her soulful eyes.” So true. She looks into your heart and understands when you’re sad, she rejoices when you’re happy, and every emotion is acknowledged with a loving and energetic lick on the face. Ick! you might say. Not at all—it’s the lick of love. Don’t you remember that Dusty Springfield song, “The Lick of Love..(is in your eyes…?”) Oh wait—maybe it was “The Look of Love.” Whatever.

Anyway, she’s a soft and fuzzy and uncharacteristically sweet-smelling dog! What more can you ask for?

SO: gardens and dogs. Rocky, you’re so right. But I must add that it’s you, Rocky, you and all the other men in our dialogue and theater group who bring peace, love and sheer happiness into my life, and I am forever grateful.

Addendum: But how could I have forgotten hiking??? Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams, my two sentinels. How could I have omitted family, and dear friends? Music!!! Riding my bike! Art! Books and reading!!!

What a topic!

—Jude Russell
*

To nurture peace, love and happiness I simply do nothing.

Each morning I take my coffee out on the porch and watch the daybreak. I say my little peace prayer. Then I do Nothing. I don’t analyze or plan or meditate or cogitate. I find myself surrounded by the sky. Maybe the moon is out, or the sun comes up. It’s a moment of peace and harmony, and I did nothing to get here. I merely stopped distracting myself.

I can’t spend the whole day sitting here. There’s still clutter in my life or my mind or my house that needs some tending to. But when the morning starts out this peacefully the rest of the day usually follows suit. Our natural state is peace and love, unless we sully it up. How can this not nurture some happiness?

Thanks, and love,

—Bill Faricy
*

In the chalice of the heart,
Lies love’s sweet essence:
Born of the seed of truth;
Watered by the tears of devotion;
Warmed by the sun of faith,
Through the fruit of days,
On the vine of humankind–
One and another,
All One Together…

—sam muller 14 April ’23
*

Michel is currenlty using a book by Pema Chödrön as the inspiration for his meditation journal. (I’m not sure which one, but it appears to be inspired by Chögyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind.)

March 9, 2023 #14 Seeing Confusion as the Four Kayas is Unsurpassable Shunyata Protection

Through meditation practice you begin to realize:

Thoughts just pop up out of nowhere—dharmakaya
Thoughts are never ceasing—sambhogakaya
They appear but are not solid—sambhogakaya
All together: no birth, no cessation, no dwelling—svabhavikakaya

This understanding gives unsurpassable protection of
realizing called shunyata—“complete openness.”
Nothing solid to react to.
You’ve made much ado about nothing!

I can relate to this one. The fancy names mean little, but the effort of meditation practice for complete openness is valuable—learning to not react to mental formations. Thoughts of mind are like mists or fog; the warm light of reality will dissipate all obstacles to reveal reality as it is. I’ve driven in misty, snowy, fog late at night and my vision played tricks on me, so I had to drive extra cautiously. During a clear day, the same road was easy to see and navigate. Mind plays the same tricks on me with reality; I need to slow down and pay careful attention—nothing changed except perception. Or did it? Surprises appear faster through foggy delusions. I can’t see them coming. Definitely: foggy, misty, delusions require proceeding cautiously until clearer.

March 13, 2023 #17 Practice the Four Strengths, the Condensed Heart Instrucions

Strong determination to train in opening heart and mind
Familiarization with practices helping you do this
Positive seed within, experienced as yearning to practice and wake up
Reproach, tricky for Western students, realizing ego-clinging causes suffering, delight in self-reflection, honesty, seeing where you get stuck
Aspiration to help alleviate suffering in this world, expressing that intention to yourself

I value each of these principles and judge they can be of benefit to any religious practice. I find, and imagine it is similar for many, that working with ego issues can be the most challenging of all, since our culture is all about cultivating a powerful ego. My experience reveals Western egoism is the central source of all our sufferings. It’s from here that we develop attractions (grasping) and aversions (pushing away), and this ego makes us blind to our faults and challenges which, once corrected, would release—at least diminish—suffering. Yet, we focus on and build up ego, wondering at our suffering. The “escape” is to practice breathing.

—Michel Deforge

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: Shakespeare Birthday Extravaganza!!! 4/23/23
2023-04-23 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:

Beloved Bibliophiles!

This year is the 400th Anniversary of the “First Folio” of Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES. Shakespeare’s Birthday, April 23rd, falls on the day we do our next Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom gathering–at 3 p.m. (PDT). To celebrate, an all-star lineup of actors is going to read scenes and speeches from Shakespeare’s plays.

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

DON’T MISS THIS!!!

peace, love & poetry

Johnny

Bottom. There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself, which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that?

Snout. By’r lakin, a parlous fear.

Starveling. I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done.

Bottom. Not a whit. I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed. And for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear.

peace, love, happiness & understanding 5/4/23
2023-05-04 - 2023-05-31
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WAY YOU SEE THE WORLD

May 4, 2023

When I first read Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, I realized that literature could be even more powerful than I had known. Powerful enough in this novel to make me feel acute embarrassment, shame, and humiliation–unsavory, and unforgettable emotions. It was, in that sense, one of the most unpleasant books that I have ever read–but I suffered those ugly emotions because I was in empathic thrall to the characters, which was thrilling. Christina Stead had such power over me that she could compel me to keep reading even against my own will. Sixty years later, the book stays with me.

—Ken Margolis
*

The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison

As the first book in the Inspector Shan series this book gave me a glimpse into the history and current status of the relationship between Tibet and China. It also gave a different perspective on Tibetan Buddhism, a more human practical one, and it opened me to a world of beliefs deeply different from those I had learned about in the West.

There are ten books in this series.

When I first met Andrew, he had an “Endlessly Connected” bumper stick on his car that was flanked by two Meander Knots. A simple design, the endless knot iconography symbolizes samsara—the endless cycle of suffering of birth, death, and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism. The intertwining of wisdom and compassion. Also, the Interplay and interaction of the opposing forces in the dualistic world of manifestation, leading to their union, and ultimately to harmony in the universe.

The books have a starkness to them. As mysteries they are dark and sometimes brutal, but the characters, particularly the lamas have stuck around in my head since encountering them. Andrew and I read them at approximately the same time, sharing tidbits and references and when it came time to name our poetry press, little magazine and open mic, Meander Knot was the obvious choice.

We even got identical tattoos as both a branding exercise but also an expression of perhaps a deeper connection between us and the possible connection over more than one lifetime.

And then, when I started teaching yoga, I called the business “Meander Yoga”. The endless knot is not featured specifically in the books, (although I suspect it is mentioned. I am planning on re-reading them this year and will find out) it symbolizes to me the deep cultural richness in the books and how that richness has enhanced both my spiritual, but also my artistic life.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Hi Johnny!

There are so many books that have changed me and/or inspired me but the one that comes to the top of my mind is Hope for the Flowers. I’ve read this book so many times and have shared it with so many people. It’s such a sweet and simple illustration of transformation but also of embracing who you are right now.

On a totally different note, I remember reading Johnny Got His Gun for the first time and being in awe. It was the first time I really sat and pondered what it means to be human and what makes life worth living.

Oh, and of course, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth!

I’ll stop before I start listing 100 books.

—Nicole Rush
*

The Mahabharata retold by William Buck

I first thought Peter Brooke read this.
I found it falling apart in a free box or a yard sale.
I found I couldn’t read it.
It sat on the bookshelf for a couple of years. I kept an eye on it.

One morning in Parkrose neighborhood, on a north deck, watching the planes glide in over the trees and rooftops, following the river west to PDX, I saw the sun was shining after endless rain.
A cup of coffee was there, and the time had come to open the book of wonder.

—Charles Erickson
*

beautiful morning, Johnny. good question!

I immediately thought about how I felt after reading Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. I had never had an English teacher in High School assign anything like it to read. I think I was the only one in the class who liked it or even read it. So for one thing it forged a bond with my fascinating lovely teacher.

Mainly it opened up a world of wonder about the wild, where savage had the meaning of wild/wyld people in a forest wilderness unmitigated by modern civilization. It is about true freedom compared to that of the birds.

Hudson writes with a clear style that matches his view of beauty and wonder being the essence of life. It is a love story as well as a tragedy of what would come of nature.

Now I’ve pulled it out to read once again. I had forgotten the main character’s name is Abel—my first son’s name! I think this story has stayed with me in my deep consciousness.

In the forward, John Galsworthy wrote in 1918 that Hudson was the most valuable author of his Age. He says of Hudson, who was a naturalist as well as an author: “his nomadic records of communing with men (women), birds, beasts, and Nature, has a supreme gift of disclosing not only the thing he sees but the spirit of his vision. Without apparent effort he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarged, by going there.”

—Katie Radditz
*

About ten years ago a good friend of mine urged me to read Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert Massie. I was reluctant, because, as I told her, “I don’t do history.” She said, “Well, do!” I said that because up until then the only history I’d read had been high school and college textbooks. I’d read, study, take a test and then forget everything (hopefully in that order). I read hundreds and hundreds of novels from junior high school on—Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, etc.—so it wasn’t for a lack of love of reading, just no desire or aptitude for history.

But I read Nicholas and Alexandra and loved it! It’s the story of the last czarist Romanov dynasty and its fall. I’d never known much about Rasputin, but he figures in powerfully, with the strange spell he held over Alexandra and her hemophiliac son, Alexi. It was probably more biography than accounting of events. It led me to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, both of which were also biographical, with dominion, control, conquest, acquisition and rule over dozens of countries in that region threaded into their stories.

So perhaps it’s biography rather than history that has opened up a new world of reading for me.

In that vein, I also read American Prometheus, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb.” Strange reading material, eh? But he was such a brilliant polymath and was forever conflicted about how his genius was put to use.

Right now, it’s The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss, the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best selling author in Nazi Germany. It looks at the early 20th century and the origins of our ideas of race and religious self-definition, and the beginning of modern fanaticism and terrorism.

So now it’s geography in addition to biography and history, and I’m sitting with the big World Atlas and a magnifying glass, scrutinizing Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, Georgia, Turkey…

To wrap this up, explorations in readings of geography, biography, and history have expanded my vision, experience, and understanding of the world in these last ten years, thanks to my friend, Nikki! (But I still love novels.)

—Jude Russell
*

Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence changed the way I look at individual acts of violence and collective acts of violence—war. The basic thesis is simple: abusing children—physically, psychologically, emotionally, sexually—wounds them. She says that when we grow up, we unconsciously and compulsively re-enact the violence that was done to us. Randy Newman’s song “I want you to hurt like I do” sums it up. The violence can also be directed against ourselves. There’s more to the story than the idea that we are, by our nature, violent apes. We certainly have the potential for violence, and we also have the potential to be loving and kind. It depends which seeds we water.

It follows from this that to the extent that we can be loving and kind to our children—instead of mean and cruel—the world will be transformed in positive ways. Conscious awareness of what we suffered and how it has affected us can help us to not act out the same things that were done to us. Her book helped me to better understand how “hurt people hurt people.” Instead of judging people for the suffering they’ve caused, I want to know about the pain they’ve suffered.

Susan Griffin’s book Woman and Nature brought home to me the relentless way in which men have defined, dominated and oppressed women over the centuries. Her book is also a visionary call for women’s (and men’s) emancipation from this tyranny.

Antler’s poem “Factory” changed the way I see the world around me. Having read the poem many years ago, it still manages to regularly remind me that the paint on the walls, the windows in the walls, the lightbulbs, the refrigerator, the glasses on my nose, the computer that I’m typing on—almost everything that surrounds me—was made by men and women working in (ugly, noisy) factories (which pollute the air, the water and the soil).

Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” inspires me to see beauty everywhere, to love everyone, to be astonished by the miraculousness of everything I touch, taste, see, or imagine.

—Johnny Stallings
*

FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
Thanks for the reminder, Johnny,
You introduced me to that book ages ago, and I carried it around with me for a long time.
It says lots about childhood and being treated as a child by adults who are very busy in their own sphere.
It has left a lasting impression on me.
I’ll see if I can come up with another that has been useful as a life reference.

—Todd Oleson
*

In the recent Open Road letter you asked about life-changing books—or at least life-influencing ones. Many of the titles you sent me fall in this group. However, due to space limits, I’ve sent the most helpful ones home and forgotten the titles. Some others include: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison by Shaka Senghor, The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose by Chris Wilson. I’m working through My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem—a bit “woke,” but still has relevance. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw. Mmm…I’ll have to come back to this.

There’s a small-ish list of books I hope to read this next year—after ordering, of course. Some may trigger comments and feedback for others I’ll need/want to read, or even avoid: 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes, something by W.E.B. Du Bois [his two most well-known books are The Souls of Black Folk and Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois—ed.], Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development by Ann S. Masten, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer, and Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Oh, The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk, on trauma—this was helpful. So many helpful books, and all the best are at home. This is great for when I get out (15+ years), not great for now. Oh, and I have crossed the halfway on April 9th: 50% done, 15¾ years left.

—Michel Deforge
*

Dear Reader

Next month (June 1st), our theme is Peace.
Send me something.

peace & love
Johnny

War in Ukraine Dialogue 5/4/23
2023-05-04 10:00 - 12:00
PLEASE JOIN A DISCUSSION ABOUT U.S. INVOLVEMENT
IN THE WAR IN UKRAINE
The Open Road invites you to take part in a dialogue about the War in Ukraine, and our country’s role in it.
Thursday, May 4th, at 10 a.m.
The Gallery at Lolo Pass, 1616 East Burnside, in Portland
For questions or information call Ken: (503) 351-5891
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous use of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
—President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961
FREE ADMISSION

Jon Bennett performs Fire in the Meth Lab at ADX
2023-05-06 20:00 - 21:30
The Open Road invites you to come and be astonished by Jon Bennett’s brilliant show: Fire In the Meth Lab, Saturday, May 6th, 8 p.m., at Art Design Xchange (ADX), 417 SE 11th. Doors at 7:30pm. Click here for tickets:

Jon Bennett has crafted a powerful story of addiction and family. When I saw this show, I laughed and cried as he took me on an unforgettable journey. Not to be missed!! –Jeffrey Sher

This is a benefit for Outside In. Since 1968, Outside In has transformed thousands of lives by helping to break the cycles of chronic homelessness, poverty, and poor health. Our health clinic and young adult programs strive to provide safe, caring, affirming spaces for our community to receive judgment-free care and support. MISSION: We help homeless youth and other marginalized people move towards improved health and self-sufficiency.

Thank you to Ronni Lacroute for sponsoring this event.

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 5/7/23
2023-05-07 15:00 - 17:00
from Liber Novus (The Red Book) by Carl Jung

Beloved Bibliophiles!

The theme for our next Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom dialogue is Psychology. Read any books on this subject? Got any insights? Please join us at 3 p.m. (PDT), Sunday, May 7th.

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

peace, love & psychology

Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue Gathering 5/13/23
2023-05-13 14:00 - 16:00
Dear Friends

You are invited to join us for our meditation & mindfulness community’s first live get-together, this Saturday, May 13, from 2 to 4 pm, in the Artspace Room at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont Street, in Portland.

In September of 2020 we began our Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue–sending it to friends inside and outside of prison walls. Many of the “insiders” have gotten out of prison since then. Currently, the Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue is mailed to ten men in prison, and is emailed to about 60 people who aren’t in prison. If you are getting this email, you are one of the 60 lucky “outsiders.”

This will be a lovely opportunity for everyone to have a dialogue and get to know each other better.

We hope you can join us!

peace, love & happiness from

Johnny Stallings & Katie Radditz

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 5/15/23
2023-05-15 - 2023-06-14
May 15, 2023

Let your heart speak to others’ hearts.
—tag on Yogi Tea bag

Gandhi Returns

As if he had said enough in life, he uttered
not a word where we stood in the station
in my dream, only a stillness in the bustle
all around us. Instead, he listened, turning
his bright young face in welcome to every
traveler as they made speeches of their own.
A mother told of her son, and in Gandhi’s eyes
the boy was hero. I told him how Ali in Tehran
had written me that poetry is oxygen, and in
Mahatma’s eyes, this was a truth no gun
could injure. One by one he summoned
witness from each pilgrim. Then, smiling,
in his folds of pale cotton he helped us
struggle with our luggage onto the steaming
train. And when I turned, I saw he had none.

—Kim Stafford
*

Alex Tretbar sent two translations of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke—showing what a big difference a translator’s choices make. He prefers the Robert Bly version:

PALM

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.

—translated by Stephen Mitchell

PALM OF THE HAND

Palm of the hand. Sole that walks now
only on feeling. It turns over,
becomes a mirror,
shows sky roads, which
themselves are walking.
It has learned to walk on water,
when it dips down,
moves on springs,
causes all roads to fork.
Comes forward into other palms,
those like itself
turn into a countryside,
through them it travels and arrives,
fills them with having arrived.

—translated by Robert Bly
*

I saw lots of Jet trails in the blue sky gaily criss-crossing
and wondered how many of us might be able to see them.
Then this poem, that our beloved friend and Zen teacher
Bob Schaibly liked, popped into my mind.

Love Note

Let us hire a hundred planes
Stuff them with hot cotton smoke
And write white poetry on the paper of the sky.
Let the ant people on the hot summer beaches look up squinting
Read feathery descriptions of your lips,
Traced by the sky writers.

We’ll pick a calm noontime,
Sun pressing wrinkles out of the steamy sea
Sky flat, receptive.
“Love,” I’ll write, and “mouth,” and silver words.
“Cling,” I’ll write, and “Stars,” and oh, don’t worry.
The words will all come easily enough.
It’s the idea that matters.

Then I’ll fly up in the highest plane’
And jump and parachute right through
The O in the word “Love”
And land in your backyard,
And kiss you – home again.

—Joseph Siebel

—Katie Radditz
*

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels…
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

The Miraculousness of Everything

Because life is short and each day is precious, I like to begin each day by entering what I call “the Golden World”—a state of quiet joy. To do this, I often reflect upon the miraculousness of everything. Puffy white clouds floating by in the sky—how do they do that? Where did these coffee beans come from? The trees I see out my window have brand new bright green leaves. How did that happen? Our neighborhood is full of tulips. The irises and the rhododendrons are just starting to bloom. The daphne and the daffodils have had their glorious days. The laptop computer that I’m typing this on was undreamt of when I was a boy.

Maybe the most impossible and amazing thing of all is that I am alive and aware. My eyes, brain and nervous system somehow create the illusion of a three-dimensional world in full color. Scientists might say, “It’s just photons of light hitting the surface of the eye, sending an electrical current to your brain, where the synapses in your visual cortex something something something…” Huh? Photons? Synapses? Brain? What the heck are those? Where did they come from? One of my little poems goes like this:

there has never been
is not now
and will never be
anything more perfect
than this glass of water

Oops! Here I am again…in the Golden World.

—Johnny Stallings
*

#186 The First Noble Truth
“The Buddha told us to recognize the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, and to look deeply in order to discover the Second Noble Truth, the cause of suffering.That is the only way the Fourth Noble Truth, the path to transform suffering into happiness, can reveal itself. So we have to emphasize the role of suffering. If we are so afraid of suffering, we have no chance.”
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

When I was in the midst of deep suffering, of course I couldn’t comprehend that this was a good thing, leading to happiness. Sure didn’t feel like that to me.

The suffering was thirteen years of marriage to a raging alcoholic—yes, “raging” is not an exaggeration. Trying to cover a black eye with makeup, wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover bruised arms, making humiliating excuses for his passing out on the floor in the presence of company, sharp, cutting words more lasting than any physical pain…on and on. I thought if I left, I would be seen as a failure in my parents’ eyes, so I stayed and endured and excused for, yes, thirteen years. Believe me, I was not thinking of these years as those leading to happiness. Upon divorce (thank you, Al Anon), I eventually became a new person—or I became who I had been before marriage, Jump-up Jude! I felt like a helium balloon released into the sky. Happiness and euphoria beyond belief. However, I lived periods of time (and still do!), infused with what I would now call PTSD: Once I clambered over audience-filled seats in a theater in Ashland to escape sitting through a play by Sam Sheppard about an alcoholic husband who goes to bars and trades his car for bags of green peppers, which he drunkenly spills on the kitchen table as he lurches home to his wife. I can’t watch the movie Elephant Man, or The Days of Wine and Roses. Much as I wanted to, I could not even sit and watch the delicious hunk, Bradley Cooper, starring in A Star is Born, as he devolves into violent and abusive alcoholism. And I just can’t be around drunk people. I feel like I’m suffocating.

So where does the happiness component come from that??? The happiness and benefit come from my ability to connect and empathize with others who have been traumatized by life experiences. The kids I mentored, the Indian woman whose family I helped for 18 years, and most especially, the men in prison I have spent time with for seven years; I have not lived their lives, nor have they lived mine, but we all have had deep trauma and all can relate to one another’s deep trauma in a blessedly bonding experience.

It truly is sheer happiness when one understands, and is understood by another, in experiences of trauma and suffering. I wouldn’t trade it for the world!

–Jude Russell
*

Out Here

We come out here to watch the stars
fade as Orion heads home towards
the horizon. Low lying mist obscures his
turning as waves curl and crash, foamy flow
up on newly deposited rocks, old wood,
yellow toes of bald eagles foraging
among crows, pink footed gulls.

Light comes up slowly burning mist
away. As we are away at the edge of the
known world. Beacons of cable laying ships,
barges full of earth slowly appear
as tide comes in. Now there is color
as sky settles into her blue cloak, hovers
protectively around the huge remnant

Rock of sister cape worn down, left
standing alone in calling distance of
shore. Before us feasting on starlight
the sword edge crescent moon glints
over barrier pine hills,
sweeps the way clear, for us to make
what we can of this fresh new day.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Michel is using a book by Pema Chödrön, based on the slogans in her teacher Chögyam Trungpa’s book Training the Mind: And Cultivating Loving-Kindness, as inspiration for his April meditation and mindfulness journal. Here are some excerpts:

April 4, 2023 #35 Don’t try to be the fastest. Don’t compete with others.
I might offer a step further along: Don’t compare self to others—don’t get judgy, of anything. I’m finding this is one of the lasting legacies of Jake Merriman and OHOM in my life: the letting go of judgement words. To do this one has to follow Johnny Stallings’ trait—compassion for everyone. I find that letting go of obsessive need to categorize and judge, or sort out good/bad, like/dislike, etc. I will vie less and less against others, or even self, for prizes that do not exist. From this less judging space it becomes easier to understand and have compassion for an other, and eventually even for self.

April 20, 2023 #48 Train without bias in all areas. It is crucial to do this pervasively and wholeheartedly.
IT’S IMPORTANT TO INCLUDE EVERYONE AND
EVERYTHING YOU MEET AS PART OF YOUR PRACTICE.
THEY BECOME THE MEANS BY WHICH YOU
CULTIVATE COMPASSION AND WISDOM.
Who doesn’t want to cultivate compassion and/or wisdom? I certainly have been striving to do this. There are certain beings (things are also included in this teaching—sigh) with whom I have a very challenged relationship. I don’t like them, they don’t like me, and neither is open to changing this. Yet, I’m certain (from all my readings) these others are here for some greater purpose in my life; shouldn’t waste an opportunity to grow, I may not get another one—then what? Go about with a malformed (uncorrected) ego, as I do now? No thanks! I guess I better get busy with my work/training.

April 21, 2023 #49 Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment.
DO TONGLEN PRACTICE WHENEVER YOU FEEL RESENTMENT.
DO IT WITH SMALL THINGS ALL THE TIME. THEN YOU’LL BE
PREPARED TO WORK WITH THE BIG ONES WHEN THEY ARISE.
It seems wise to work with resolving one’s resentments, before they grow into “hates” for people, beings, or things. I believe all mindfulness practice is like this; sit now, in silent reverie, so amidst a fierce stormy barrage calm may prevail. Everything would simply build from there. Just breathe…

April 23, 2023 #49 Don’t be swayed by external circumstances.
WHATEVER YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES, PRACTICE TONGLEN.
WHATEVER IS WANTED, SEND THAT OUT; WHATEVER IS
UNWANTED, BREATHE IT IN AND EXPERIENCE IT FOR
YOURSELF AND ALL OTHERS IN THE SAME BOAT.
This speaks to equanimity—not allowing the outside storms of life to sway my little stuff. Currently, I am bracing for the eventual passing of my father, whom I’ve come to love very much. Alzheimer’s is taking a toll on his mind and personality. I don’t see it yet, but my mom has to deal with many of the challenges that are arising. There’s nothing I can do for either of them; letting those concerns frazzle me doesn’t help any. All I can do is keep doing as best as I can. I’m not ready to let him go, and at the same time he is already gone. My father I knew as a child is long gone—the one with whom I had so many conflicts and struggles—and the one I’ve come to know, love, and appreciate from prison, he, too, is now gone. What’s left is the husk of of a man I once knew for his strength and resolve. He’s not dead, nor has his mind gone completely yet. However, the inevitable reality of time’s ravaging of mind and body are no longer easily ignored. It is time to embrace each moment, as it may be the last one I get with him. Whether by phone, or if I get to see him once more face-to-face, truth is present that we all proceed apace to the same destiny—each on our own path and in our own time.

—Michel Deforge
*

Dear Mindful Meditators

Our Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue began on September 15, 2020. It is mailed to 10 people who are in prison and emailed to about 60 people who aren’t—including 9 men who were in prison in September of 2020 who are now out of prison! Hallelujah!

We had our first get-together on Saturday, May 13th, at Taborspace in Portland. In attendance were: Charles Erickson, Nicole Rush, Sam Muller, Nancy Scharbach, Katie Radditz & Johnny Stallings. We talked about how our “life journey” and our “spiritual journey” are the same thing. Everyone shared stories from their life. Abe Green visited us from Montana—via FaceTime. We all had a lovely time together.

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

—Johnny

Deck Boys Friday Night!
2023-05-19 19:00 - 21:00
Music Lovers!

This Friday, May 19th, from 7 to 9 pm, Deck Boys (https://www.deckboys.com)–featuring the inimitable Jeffrey Sher!–are gonna rock the Ross Island Grocery & Cafe, 3502 S. Corbett, Ave, in Portland.

Wanna have a good time?

This is the place to be.

peace, love & music

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 5/21/23
2023-05-21 15:00 - 17:00
Nobel Prize-winning author, Doris Lessing

Beloved Bibliophiles!

The theme for our next Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom dialogue is Favorite Women Authors! Please join us at 3 p.m. (PDT), Sunday, May 21st.

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

peace & love

Johnny

Johnny Stallings performs Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" 5/27/23
2023-05-27 19:30 - 21:00
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

For Walt’s 204th Birthday, Johnny Stallings will be performing

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

at PAUSE

PAUSE is a meditation studio — 133 SW 2nd Ave., Suite 300, (door code 54445)

Saturday, May 27th, 7:30 p.m.

a benefit for the Open Road Film Fund
(for distributing Bushra Azzouz’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison”)

for info, call Johnny: 503-347-6869

peace, love, happiness & understanding 6/1/23
2023-06-01 - 2023-08-02
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

June 1, 2023

Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations.
—William Blake

PEACE

Early Morning Hours

From the house silence flows
to the ebony lawn
glittering like a river.
A small candle flickers,
mirroring the moon
sliding down night’s curve.
Fir branches stand against the sky,
the hours’ tall sentinels,
and the hum inside silence
fills each shadowed crevice,
the world inundated.

The Only Now

The stripped body lies burrowed
in a flower well, utterly still,
and one wonders
if it has died into the nectar.
Sheltered by night,
in the morning the bee resumes
sipping, covered in pollen
bumbling from flower to flower,
his home where he stops,
satiated with sugared gold,
his life and eating and bliss,
sleep and journey all one.

Unexpected

Rampant weeds crowd bee balm and hyssop,
dirt clings to roots, leaves bend
and in the midst of this fecundity,
I am digging, pulling, only
the sun’s heat on my back.
Moving through the afternoon quiet
a feathered sound of wings
is near, slower and closer,
and a light weight comes to rest on my head.
Could it be? I reach a hand up,
the wings lift, rise, and are gone.

The Tree in the Universe

Light glints off cherries in the branches
swaying slightly in summer breezes.

I too am swinging, shimmering, high
in the tree, resting in a dark trunk

adrift and asleep, the sky
dappling the light in the tree,

above the ground air my companion, birds
my companions, jumping and wondering,

all of us in the branches, in the light,
time a mystery that moves in the tree,

off the ground, as my vision,
my mind unrolls in front of me

carrying my heart forward and backward,
inward, time and space a single pulse

and the cherries shine, the tree grows
quietly upward and outward, carrying me,

the birds, and all around, all around,
right here in the branches, in time and in sight,

I see that, yes, yes, each particle,
each moment turning in the sky,

in the tree, flowing between us,
in us, what I imagined, what I dreamed

and dreaded and is now here—all of it divine.

—Deborah Buchanan
*

A couple months ago my friend Ken Margolis was listening to the news. He heard a report on the war in Ukraine. Both sides were said to be running low on ammunition, because they were both using 1,ooo artillery shells per day. Two thousand artillery shells per day! More than one per minute. It was insane. He told his friends, including me. He wondered: Is there is anything we can do to bring this war to an end? That question prompted me to choose the theme “Peace” for this month’s peace, love, happiness & understanding. The word “peace” has two main connotations: the absence of war, and a calm, quiet state of mind. When I invited people to contribute to this issue, I said the topic is “peace,” but didn’t specify which kind of peace.

For me, the “two kinds of peace” are not unrelated. In the early Eighties I wrote a fairly long essay called “The Ecology of Violence, the Ecology of Peace: A Lived Revolution—Personally, Locally, Globally.” In it, I explored topics like Authority, Poverty, Education, Cruelty, the Media, Meditation, Economics, Ideology, Ecology, Family, Culture, Community, and many more. One of the primary insights of Ecology is that everything is inter-related to everything else. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of “interbeing.” It seems to me that our “job” is to help to co-create a culture that nurtures all people, and to learn or re-learn how humans can live on this planet without destroying it—like all the other animals do.

My outlook on life has been shaped by the fact that instead of going to Vietnam to kill people, I went to India and studied with wise yogis. When I think of war, instead of thinking about brave soldiers fighting to make the world a better place, I think of that photograph of Vietnamese children who have been bombed with jellied gasoline. Every day the war goes on in Ukraine, more children die. More mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers die. It’s insane.

Here’s a poem I wrote:

My Foolproof Plan for World Peace

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

—Johnny Stallings
*

Alex sent this poem by Tom Clark:

Bolinas

My wife’s recipe for a fairy:
Put buttercup pollen
And a canary feather
In a thimble. At midnight,
Immersed in my life’s current
However it may flow
In the giant life around it
That whispers like a tree
Rocked by evening light,
A tide of beams
Bears my dreambound boat.
The boughs drop peace,
A star wanders toward dawn
Over the dim wet leaves.

—Tom Clark

—Alex Tretbar
*

To me lately, peacefulness is just being a happy person and trying to make others understand happiness in just a few seconds of every moment. If one can achieve this their life will be happy. I found this secret on my journey to the golden path. A friend told me about the golden path years ago. I live there now and the town I live in on the golden path is called simple bliss.

I also find peace in the sweat of my brow from a job well done. I can’t wait to work hard for the ones I love. Peace is free and it lives inside of us and if you have it in you, my friends, give it to those that don’t.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

Siddhartha’s prayer

When they asked why he left
his people and his palace,
the response rose like fragrance from summer’s garden.
There is peace in every breath, he said,
and every heartbeat
and every footstep
that will no longer be forgotten
or forsaken.
I wish every thought to be a prayer
every word to be a poem
every touch an act of love,
and all to be
as it already is.
– amen

—Bill Faricy
*

Surrounded
Memorial Day 2023

Perhaps there is the sound of water,
the feel of a light breeze, comfortable
warmth, rustling leaves.

Maybe the colors make harmonies,
smell of sandalwood, taste
of cardamom on the tongue.

The temptation of a ladder rung
to a nest above ruins sharp
edged with smoke, mist.

Missed. We’re here. This list
of all that’s lost, endless. Still
fingers uncurl from a fist.

In the end everyone was right.
All we wanted was a sense of
belonging, a path, not a fight.

Instead, a respite, for now.
Forever? The crowd surrounds us,
whether we are aware, or not.

—Elizabeth Domike
*
Peace Tree

My calling is to rise. My purpose is to reach.
Where buildings fall, I stand silent in the shouting.
Even in billowing dust, I begin the next peace. If
you splinter me, I will heal. After the battle, I will
silhouette dawn. I have seen seasons pass, the rising
of anger, fury of the storm, return of calm. I’m still
yearning for the sun, still delving into dark. Rooted
patriot of Earth, I drink the sky to give you breath.
Neutral in war, I shade both sides. Send my seeds
across the border, I will be your diplomat of green.
If you plant me beside the graves of soldiers, I will
say to their mothers with my leaves what they
might have said in the wind that stirs.

—Kim Stafford
*

Peace Within, Peace Without

Who doesn’t want to have peace within him or herself? Who doesn’t want to have world peace? I would say there are very few people in either category—a few, maybe, but not many.

Here is an inside aside:
Can you have peace without love?
Can you have peace without joy, either within yourself or in the ‘world?’
Is peace synonymous with love? Is love synonymous with joy?
Are there other words that define or are requirements for peace? Compassion? Connection?

Well, I’m just throwing these out there, as you can see, but let’s go back to peace within/peace without.

How can you be at peace within yourself and not be concerned about the world? It is overwhelming to think about trying to ‘fix’ the world, for sure. We all know how that feels. Might as well give up on that and just work on being at peace within yourself, right? Well, that is impossible, my friends. A spirit at peace is one who gnaws away, tackles, wrestles with—inch by inch, foot by foot—-some part of the exterior world that is hurting, be it other humans, other creatures, the world of nature. We do the work often never knowing whether or not we are achieving change, lessening hurt, creating love, creating bond and connection and unity. This is not why we do it; we do the work because the work itself is what grows peace within us. And—-we have to do it.

Ha ha—but don’t get the idea that it is easy. It can be frightening, hurtful, frustrating, and really hard; but something in us is propelled to keep on. And whatever that ‘something’ is, brings (paradoxically) an inner peace.

So we have to be in the world, doing our bit, small as it is; but always, all of it, from all of us is growing peace in the world. And just think if each and every one were to do this! World Peace!!!

Working on the peace without is essential for the peace within…and vice versa.

—Jude Russell
*

The trouble with peace seems to be that it isn’t enough for us. Of course, war is the ultimate step in a power struggle to determine who gets the gold and the throne. So, in that sense, battle skills are the most useful of all skills.

But there is something more. At the same time we fear war, we lust after it. We sing of arms and the man. War becomes the context for heroism, nobility, and deep companionship. It also destroys the beautiful, kills the innocent, and generates hatred in future generations.

In spite of Elon Musk and other technological self-deceivers, most people feel intuitively that life and death form some sort of continuum. To manifest its cycle of renewal, life needs death. Does peace need war in some mysterious way?

When we think of Heaven, we think No More War, green meadows and grandchildren on our knee, not the whole thing blown to bits by an incoming drone. War has its lobby, its advocates and advertisers, its prophets and profiteers. It’s only fair that a few of us take the other, apparently less popular side, and advocate for peace.

—Ken Margolis
*

“Peace has been a theme in some of our earlier issues. Take a look at the peace,love, happiness & understanding Archive on the Open Road website. Here’s from June 24, 2021:

https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-6-24-21/

For July, send me something about your own vision of Utopia or Paradise.

peace,
Johnny

Roadside Attraction at Friday Night Market 6/2/23
2023-06-02 17:30 - 19:30
Roadside Attraction, featuring Morgan Faricy, is playing at Friday Night Market in Milwaukie, on June 2nd, from 5:30 to 7:30.
The address is:
Milwaukie Floral
SE Lake Road

This is a benefit of Open Hearts Open Minds.

Bring your friends!

peace, love & music
Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 6/4/23
2023-06-04 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles

We will have Poetry Reading! for Bibliophiles Unanimous! on Sunday, June 4th. The Featured Poets are Elizabeth Domike & Alex Tretbar.
The Zoom gathering commences at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

Bring along a poem or two of your own.
See you there!

peace, love & poetry
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 6/15/23
2023-06-15 - 2023-07-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

June 15, 2023

We were talking about the love we all could share
When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love
With our love, we could save the world….

And the time will come when you see we’re all one
And life flows on within you and without you

—George Harrison
*

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov there is a monk named Father Zossima. When I first read the novel, almost fifty years ago, I was impressed with the Father Zossima’s (Fyodor Dostoevsky’s) words. I still am:

Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love….

My friends, ask joy from God. Be joyful as children, as birds in the air….

When you are alone, pray. Love to throw yourself down on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things, seek this rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears. Do not be ashamed of this ecstasy, treasure it, for it is a gift from God, a great gift, and it is not given to many, but to those who are chosen.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, pp. 338-341)

—Johnny Stallings
*

On June 12, I sat down to write a note on mindfulness; my computer said it was National Loving Day, which celebrates the right to marry or not marry the person we love. It led me to be most mindful today and this week about the person I have been married to for almost 50 years. To begin anew, with fresh eyes for the things about him I most cherish. Not just as a father of my children.

Unaware It was a week early, we celebrated Father’s Day last Sunday with our children and grandchildren by going to a baseball game. My husband, Bill, was happy all day, enjoying a day off from work and gardening, being in an element of his youth that he could share with the younger generation. It was so good to see him totally engaged.

Bill is an introvert, 98% according to the test, and so he can be easily satisfied living in a solitary way with little social involvement, enjoying his tea and crossword and books and garden and a movie online. But getting out of that can also easily give him a burst of energy.

Mindful of my extroverted side that includes many friends and adventures, I am accompanying him this week on his trip to the post office, or to the deli, or to the hardware/feed store. Then taking a few minutes aside for a picnic or a walk before sunset, or even to sit together in the garden and watch the teenage chicks practice flying. I’m aware of how grateful I am to have the freedom to have a loving relationship, and that we can share such simple joys. It’s so easy to take this for granted. Being mindful adds an extra spot of honey to our tea. And it makes others glad to be around us. As Thich Nhat Hanh liked to say, “Happiness is not an individual matter!”

Below is a link to the life-changing story of the Loving’s decision to marry:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/12/loving-day-supreme-court-interracial-marriage-loving-virginia/70313073007/

—Katie Radditz
*

#333 Recognizing Negative Energy
from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

“Negative habit energy always tries to emerge, but if you’re mindful, you recognize it. Mindfulness helps us to recognize the habits transmitted by our ancestors and parents, or learned during our childhood. Often, just recognizing these habits will make them lose their hold on you.”

Last year I found a great children’s book called Fortunately, Unfortunately. It was a story about a little boy on his way to a birthday party. UNFORTUNATELY, a bear started chasing him and he dropped his present. FORTUNATELY, an eagle-eyed eagle swooped down and hooked the present’s bow in his beak and dropped it at the feet of the little boy. Gratefully, the boy scooped it up and continued on his way. UNFORTUNATELY, a gang of rascals…etc. etc. Finally, of course, FORTUNATELY, he ends up at the party and gives his present to the little girl.

So I read this story to my grandkids in Bozeman, and they loved it. Then I said, “Let’s make up our own story and draw a book and send it to your cousins in Arizona.” Which we did, and spent 3-4 hours writing, making art, and thinking up funny stuff.

So I thought, This is how I think, automatically! If something is wrong, or sad, or difficult, I say, “Yes, but just think of what ____ is going through everyday.” Or: “Yeah, it really is pouring rain today, but doesn’t everything smell so sweet now?” I have always done this; I’d never really thought about it until I read this story.

And then I thought—What a great topic for prison group dialogue! So I asked: “How do you react or respond in these cases?” Discussion discussion!!

And then the really fun part: We went around the circle and traded Fortunately/Unfortunately sentences, the crazier the better. There were giraffes involved, and badgers, and 100 foot deep wells, and 10,000 foot high mountains, and blonde wigs, and zits, and… Well, it was crazy and hilarious and so much fun, and it all told us a lot about all of us, almost all positive.

So that’s my take on recognizing negative energy.

—Jude Russell
*

Feeling Old

Leaves begin to curl. Limbs begin
to sag. The tree begins to lean. Know
the feeling? My buds—not so plump.
My heartwood—dry. My bark begins
to wither, my roots to lose their grip.

But hey—the sun shines bright as ever.
All that fell to earth has turned to treasure,
the sky’s still calling me to rise in praise,
and rain bestows that flavor fine as my
first sip when a sapling with no name.

—Kim Stafford
*

This amazing planet we live on is already Paradise. We can eat the grasses and the grains. Fruit fills the trees. There are fellow creatures to love and laugh with. This beautiful world is a gift.

We still live in the Garden of Eden. We just don’t take very good care of it.

All water is holy water. And every day is a holy day.

—Bill Faricy
*

Michel finished reading The Compassion Book by Pema Chödrön in early May, and for the rest of the month used Be Free Where You Are as the basis for the meditations in his journal. Be Free Where You Are is the record of a talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh at the Maryland Correctional Institute, which was published in May of 2002.

May 15, 2023 You are a Miracle (part 2)
“Dear Friends, you are nothing less than a miracle. There may be times when you feel that you are worthless. But you are nothing less than a miracle. The fact that you are here—alive and capable of breathing in and out—is simple proof that you are a miracle. One string bean contains the whole cosmos in it: sunshine, rain, the whole earth, time, space and consciousness. You also contain the whole cosmos.”

Do you “feel” like a miracle? Seriously! Do you feel the wonder and amazement of “be”ing alive, being able to breathe, move, exist? Each of us is valuable, even when we believe the lies that we are not. I know it is hard to drown out the noise of self-doubt and hate, wherever it arises from and for whatever cause; whatever the noise, it’s a LIE! You, me, all of us—we are a miraculous creation, here on Earth for some purpose. Fundamentally: to “be”—nothing more. Though many struggle to achieve even merely “be”ing, it’s what we are: “be”ings. We can add to that by breathing, walking eating…all our “do”ings too. Then, there’s passing on genes, knowledge, wisdom to the next generation. Yet, somehow, with all the noise of “do”ing, we forget “be”ing and how miraculous “be”ing is. I also believe we have one other purpose as we toddle along to our mouldering, and that is LOVE. Love as appreciation of the miracle that is life, appreciation for other “be”ings participating in the wonderful, miraculous, cacophony that is our life. (Certainly we’re averse to certain experiences, thus memories linger and trepidation arises about past and future. None of that is real any longer, nor will be.) Breathe, smile, “be” aware; there’s a special miracle in this world and it’s you. I know, sounds trite and contrived. And it is…if you and I refuse to see the miracle of the cosmos that each of us is; breathe (deliberately), smile (knowing this cosmological secret), and be aware (of what it takes for you or I to continue to exist…) “You are a miracle!” Me too!

—Michel Deforge

the dialogue continues...
2023-06-17 13:00 - 15:00
the dialogue continues…

This monthly gathering in the Artspace room at Taborspace in Portland, 5441 SE Belmont, is a continuation of the meaning of life dialogues we had in Oregon prisons–at Two Rivers, Columbia River & Coffee Creek. These Saturday dialogues are open to everyone.
The first one was on April 15th, 2023. The next two will be on Saturdays, at 1 p.m.: June 17th & July 15th. There will be snacks! You are invited!

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 6/18/23
2023-06-18 15:00 - 17:00
The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder

Beloved Bibliophiles

Our theme for Sunday, June 18th is Visions of Utopia & Paradise.
The Zoom gathering commences at 3 pm (PDT). Here’s the link:

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

See you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Illuminated: Myths, Poems & Music for the Summer Solstice 6/18/23
2023-06-18 19:00 - 21:00
Storyteller Will Hornyak Presents

Illuminated

Myths, Poems and Music for the Summer Solstice

From fiery feathers and the longing for light, to tales of summer days ‘gone fishin,’ join us for a celebration of the longest, brightest days of the year. Special guest musician Jeffrey Sher joins in for a tribute to Father’s Day.

Sunday June 18 7 p.m.
Ross Island Grocery and Cafe
3502 SW Corbett Portland
Great Food and Drinks Available
$15.00 Advance Tickets Recommended:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/illuminated-myths-poems-and-music-for-the-summer-solstice-tickets-646775501937

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 7/15/23
2023-07-15 - 2023-08-14
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 the cover image:

Verse 9

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.

–from Atmopadesha Śatakam (One Hundred Verses of Self Instruction) of Narayana Guru

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 Śatakam.

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 re-emerging 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 re-read 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!

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 Alchemy of Snowness:

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 Snownessby 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, 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
*

“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.”

from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Understanding Our Mind

*

“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.”
–from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

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 9:07 pm, then 9:04 pm…then 8:56 pm. 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. I 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 Russell

Hamlet at Canterbury Renaissance Faire 7/29 & 7/30
2023-07-29 - 2023-07-30
Puck’s Rude Mechanicals present Hamlet by William Shakespeare at the Canterbury Renaissance Faire on Saturday & Sunday, July 29 & 30.
Performances are at 11 a.m. & 1 p.m. both days.
The Canterbury Renaissance Faire is at 6569 Valley View Rd. NE, Silverton, OR 97381. For more info, and to buy tickets, go to the Canterbury Faire website at:

canterburyfaire.com

Robin Goodfellow (a.k.a. Allen Mills) directs this Rotten In Denmark Production. The stellar cast includes Jeff Kuehner and Josh Underhill.

Don’t miss this!!!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 7/30/23
2023-07-30 15:00 - 17:00
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
