The Open Road: a learning community

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: Memorize a Poem!
2023-03-12 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Beloved Bibliophiles!

For Sunday, March 12th, at 3 p.m. (PST): MEMORIZE A POEM! Do you know any poems by heart? Did you used to know some poems that have gotten rusty? Is there a poem that you would like to learn and be able to recite? This is your chance!
Bring a poem or poems that you would like to share. (Extra points if you know the poem by heart.)
Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace & love
Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 3/2/23
2023-03-02 - 2023-04-05
photograph by Kim Stafford

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

March 2, 2023

I invited some friends to…
…please send me one of your favorite poems and say a little bit about why you like it. Here’s what people sent:

Vernal Sentiment

Though the crocuses poke up their heads in the usual places,
The frog scum appear on the pond with the same froth of green,
And boys moon at girls with last year’s fatuous faces,
I never am bored, however familiar the scene.

When from under the barn the cat brings a similar litter,—
Two yellow and black, and one that looks in between,—
Though it all happened before, I cannot grow bitter:
I rejoice in the spring, as though no spring ever had been.

—Theodore Roethke

I think why I am so fond of this poem and tend to read it every spring, often many times, is that it captures perfectly my delight and joy as the subtle and sometimes not so subtle signs of spring emerge. And yes, “I (truly) rejoice in the spring, as though no spring ever had been.” This short poem seems almost perfect to me and brings me joy just as witnessing the first signs of the pussy willows, the first call of the returning robins, the glorious scent of daphne wafting over the damp air, enlivens me and gets my pulse slightly elevated. Roethke masterfully captures the delight that is so available in the ordinary!!. I believe that we all need to pay more attention to these ordinary miracles that reveal themselves if we pay attention.

Cheers my friend!

—Jeffrey Sher
*

After an Illness, Walking the Dog

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
The he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—

imagines to the end that he is free.

—Jane Kenyon

I like the designated optimist and think of him or her often.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

My favorite poems….of the moment!
And I’m cheating a bit as I am sending in two short ones, from two extremely different writers and I list the books they are from as the books are quite spectacular.

First:
Untitled. From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Really the entire book is an intact work but here is a current favorite small poem. Harjo is Creek/Muskogee, writes intimately from within a native community, is a former US Poet Laureate and a jazz saxophonist.

I thought of all the doors that had opened and closed.
I thought of how so many I loved were no longer on
This earth. I thought of all my mother’s songs looking
For a place to live. I thought of all the Saturdays in the
World. I started with G and rounded the bend at B-flat.
I followed my soul.

—Joy Harjo

Second:
“A Meadow” from Facing the River by Czeslaw Milosz. Again the book is really a unit, written after returning to his native village after being in exile for fifty years. He grew up in then-Lithuania, now Poland, survived the Nazi invasion, the Soviet invasion and then Occupation. He first served with the Communist government but soon left. He won the Nobel prize for Literature.

It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest,
On an immaculate day in the sun of June.
I searched for it, found it, recognized it.
Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.
With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.

—Czeslaw Milosz

—Deborah Buchanan
*

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

—Theodore Roethke

Hands down my favorite poem. Every morning when I wake up, I try to not be in a rush, or have a plan, but let life take me slowly into the day, and learn from where it takes me.

—Dave Duncan
*

Here’s my submission to your beautiful request, and I will say it might not be my “favorite” poem but it is an artifact in my younger life when I somehow imparted the power of poetry to my two now grown daughters.

Easter, 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

—William Butler Yeats

—Mark Danley
*

My favorite poem has often been one by T’ao Ch’ien (365-427 A.D. ), translated by David Hinton. Here is this one:

Together, We all go out Under the Cypress Trees in the Chou Family Burial-Grounds

Today’s skies are perfect for a clear
flute and singing koto. And touched
this deeply by those laid under these
cypress trees, how could we neglect joy?
Clear songs drift away anew. Emerald wine
starts pious faces smiling. No knowing
what tomorrow brings, it’s exquisite
exhausting whatever i feel here and now.

—T’ao Ch’ien

I feel T’ao Ch’ien as present as my Great Aunt Emma, who knew much deprivation but was so joyful that we would arrive for a visit to the Farm. We would sit out in the grass looking for four leaf clovers for hours, and she would bake us blackberry pies.

I like to write back to T’ao Ch’ien—over many years now. He has inspired me to stop, be in the wild, appreciate the moment as beauty at the same time, feeling all that’s been lost and is gone. And he led me to the Buddhist sutras!!

I also love to find another poet respond to him, like Billy Collins does, below. Though it may not be for T’ao Ch’ien himself, it’s across time and distance, enchanted still in the twentieth century by what they wrote in the the fifth.

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And “Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner,
cross my legs like his, and listen.

—Billy Collins

—Katie Radditz
*

May I never be complete
May I never be content
May I never be perfect

From Fight Club! I remember reading that over 10 years ago and being inspired by the hidden beauty of a concept like willing ones self to never want completeness… I’m going to always be learning growing struggling to figure out what the hell I am on this Giant beautiful rock… It’s not easy to accept flaws… growing… Being content as in settled in, not striving to learn… it’s a beautiful sentiment… That’s my fav poem… That I’ll prolly get tattooed someday.

—Jeff Kuehner
*

Max Ritvo is one of my favorite poets, and “Afternoon” is my favorite poem by him. He died young, of cancer, and he produced a great deal of work during his final years, while he was very sick. I find much to admire in this poem, but perhaps what stays with me the most, and will always stay with me, is the fountain. I won’t spoil it. Just read the poem and see for yourself.

Afternoon

When I was about to die
my body lit up
like when I leave my house
without my wallet.

What am I missing? I ask
patting my chest
pocket.
and I am missing everything living
that won’t come with me
into this sunny afternoon

—my body lights up for life
like all the wishes being granted in a fountain
at the same instant—
all the coins burning the fountain dry—

and I give my breath
to a small bird-shaped pipe.

In the distance, behind several voices
haggling, I hear a sound like heads
clicking together. Like a game of pool,

played with people by machines.

—Max Ritvo

—Alex Tretbar
*

Valentine

On the eve of the apocalypse,
the wild turkeys are tuning up for their dance, flared
stately stepping upon the new fallen snow
I continue to ponder

Ruby Crowned Kinglet.
He is fixed in my mind because
unknown to him,
set upon a background of olive green feathers
embering with gold and
floating above his brain there glows
a fire ruby jewel.

Like the mandalas radiating from ancient bodhisattvas,
the feathered crown of hunter gatherer peoples, branched trees on
the halos of saints, the heads of shamans
that they say all together,
look how I see you.
See how you look through my open heart.

—Ken Hunt

Ken Hunt is an artist, saddle-maker, horse-trainer living in a remote canyon in NE Oregon, and he has a vibrant sense of his place and the creatures there. He lives close to all kinds of wild beings, and in this poem brings them close to us, so close they can see through our eyes and hearts.

—Kim Stafford
*

Deb thought another poem would not go amiss, so she invited me to join your party this once.

Among lots of favorite poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” has grown in depth to me for my whole life. Frost’s simple example demonstrates how we sabotage unity by drawing thick lines between groups and positions, and then fighting over them. The poem details how we carefully resurrect these divisions, where they aren’t needed. The conflict is merely hinted at.

Once, after I had written about the poem in my weekly blog, a friend told me that the PM of Israel, don’t recall which, had recently cited the poem to justify their apartheid: “good fences make good neighbors.” Of course, this is the antithesis of the poem, but how many tumultuous patriots would have known this? On behalf of Frost’s dignity and immense compassion, I humbly offer perhaps his greatest poem, though it does have competitors in his oeuvre.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

—Robert Frost

—Scott Teitsworth
*

That Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is my all-time favorite poem is a well-known fact (among my friends), but I have many favorite poems. In the not-too-distant past (five years ago, maybe?) I had the great good fortune to come upon the writings of Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). His poems and meditations were first published in 1903, ten years after they were rediscovered in manuscript—229 years after his death. I often start the day by reading a poem and/or a meditation by him. His wild delight is contagious. He helps me to get the day off to a glorious start. The first four poems in The Collected Works of Thomas Traherne are all sublime: “The Salutation,” “Wonder,” “Eden,” and “Innocence.” Here’s the first:

The Salutation

These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,
Where have ye been? behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?

When silent I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.

I that so long
Was nothing from eternity,
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Beneath the skies on such a ground to meet.

New burnished joys,
Which yellow gold and pearls excel!
Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys,
In which a soul doth dwell;
Their organised joints and azure veins
More wealth include than all the world contains.

From dust I rise,
And out of nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,
A gift from God I take.
The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,
The sun and stars are mine, if those I prize.

Long time before
I in my mother’s womb was born,
A God preparing did this glorious store
The world for me adorn.
Into this Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.

A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
Strange all and new to me;
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

—Thomas Traherne

—Johnny Stallings
*

I Corinthians, Chapter 13, which ends:

Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tonguers, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part: but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

—Ken Margolis

Bibliophiles Unanimous! Snowed In!
2023-02-26 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, January 26th, at 3 p.m. (PST) our theme will be: SNOWED IN! What are you reading? What’s a good book to read when you’ve got a lot of time on your hands? When you’re snowed in? What are your favorite (fat?) books of all time?
Here’s the Zoom link:

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

peace & love
Johnny

A Midsummer Night's Dream in Prison Goes to Santa Fe!
2023-02-19 16:00 - 18:00
GREAT NEWS!!!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison will be shown at the Santa Fe Film Festival on February 19th, at 4 p.m. The festival runs from February 17-26, 2023. You can get tickets from the festival website: http://santafefilmfestival.com/index/festivals/2023-santa-fe-film-festival/
Actors William Foote and Allen Mills will be in attendance, along with the play’s director, Johnny Stallings.

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 2/15/23
2023-02-15 - 2023-03-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

February 15, 2023

Jason Beito sent this poem:

Cloud

Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and
murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadow of a cloud
crossing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a
man who cried into a plaid handkerchief. You were a sky
without a hat. Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets
drying on a line.

And when you were a tree, you listened to trees and the tree
things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a
red bicycle. You were the spidery Maria tattooed on the
hairless arm of a boy in downtown Houston. You were the
rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock
of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a
Victor Hugo novel. A crescent of soap. A spider the color
of a finger nail. The black nets beneath the sea of olive
trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer wrapped in
newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueberries in
heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass.

And when you opened your wings to wind, across the
punched-tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to
death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and
sweet a white cloud glides.

—Sandra Cisneros
*

Jinx

Trees spread their arms, birds open
their wings, rain falls on everyone,
and the wind brings breath to all.

When I’m lucky, do I mother my luck,
knowing how fragile fortune can be?
Am I generous and kind, letting luck
brim and flow, spill and splash to wash
everything I touch, everyone lucky enough
to stumble into this circle of light?

Or might I forget how happiness shuns
a place of no love, where luck leaks
from a fist clenched to keep it?

—Kim Stafford
*

Now I close my eyes,
and somewhere a butterfly
contemplates cocoon.

—Alex Tretbar
*

It’s Valentine’s Day. Love Day. I don’t know what love is, or where it comes from. It’s a Mystery! Wouldn’t it be lovely if everyone lived in love—if we all loved each other, and loved all the animals and plants and rivers and clouds and stones? Let’s try it and see what happens!

William Blake says:

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

—Johnny Stallings
*
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Loving Kindness Meditation goes hand in hand with Mindfulness says Thich Nhat Hanh.
Here is a link to Thay giving a rare Metta meditation for LovingKindness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5luvQp–B8U
Is there a difference between being nice and being kind? After practicing LovingKindness meditation I’ve been feeling a pull to agree, to say yes, to be more present,.. Kindness itself is a practice that can make us become and feel more engaged – with others, in causes, and in our own true self as well. This feels like what it means to have meaning in our life.
“Just being nice will not be enough to save civility in today’s world. It will take the patience and focus of true and loving-kindness.” writes Donna Cameron. She has a book about her year of consciously Living Kindly. She continues:
“Kindness is how you see the world, and you be kind because it needs to be done. On the other hand, . . . You can remain distant and still be nice, but that’s not the case with kindness.
Kindness doesn’t mean becoming saintly!
No, we all are humans, and all of us tend to falter now and then. Just because you get angry and upset doesn’t mean you cannot or should not practice being kind.
Health benefits of kindness
Kindness has a major effect on our emotional, mental, and physical health. Studies have shown that kindness raises serotonin and oxytocin levels in our bodies, and these chemicals make us happier. This surge isn’t permanent, hence you have to keep practicing kind acts to keep the level up. These chemicals also help in reducing blood pressure and inflammation.
Not only that, kindness eases our relationships therefore drastically reducing our stress levels. Interestingly, witnessing a kind act also has the same impact on our body as performing a kind act does. Each act of kindness establishes neural pathways, therefore it becomes easier and more natural over time.”
Invitation: Think of a time you received a kindness, something small that may have changed you, or that you often think of even though you may have been young.
Or join a Monday night LovingKindness meditation with me and others. Here’s a link if you would like to sign in. It is free, every Monday 8-8:30 p.m. Drop in.
https://www.firstunitarianportland.org/events/lovingkindnessmeditation/
A metta practice for you: Thich Nhat Hanh says there is value in practicing Metta even 5 minutes a day.

May I be at peace.
May my heart remain open.
May I awaken to the light of my own true nature.
May I be healed.
May I be a source of healing for all beings.

Continue with loved ones – You, We, then one you may have a conflict with, then with the whole world.
May we know Peace. May we know love.

“Only your compassion and your loving kindness are invincible, and without limit.” “Smile, breathe and go slowly.” – Thay

— Katie Radditz

Katie also sent this poem by Juan Felipe Herrera:

Song Out Here

if i could sing
i’d say everything you know
from here on the street can you turn around
just for once i am here
right behind you
what is that flag what is it made of
maybe it’s too late i have
too many questions where did it all come from
what colors is it all made of everything
everything here in the subways
there are so many things and voices
we are going somewhere but i just don’t know
somewhere
but i just don’t know
somewhere
do you know where that is i want to sing
so you can hear me and maybe you can tell me
where to go so you can hear me and just maybe
you can tell me where to go
all those hands and legs and faces going places
if i could sing
you would hear me and i would tell you
it’s gonna be alright
it’s gonna be alright
it’s gonna be alright it would be something like that
can you turn around so i can look into your eyes
just for once your eyes
maybe like hers can you see her
and his can you see them i want you to see them
all of us we could be together
if i could sing we would go there
we would run there together
we would live there for a while in that tilted
tiny house by the ocean rising up inside of us
i am on the curb next to a curled up cat
smoking i know its bad for you but
you know how it is just for once can you turn around
a straight line falling behind you it’s me i want to sing
invincible bleeding out with love

just for you

— Juan Felipe Herrera
*

I keep what is sacred to me
safe in the heart of the sun.
The path is a maze of stairs
made for the ones I love.
All are welcome & if you’re
able all can come.
Just being yourself as
you were always meant to be.
Everyone is welcomed and
all are accepted by me.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

The Pause

When I read a poem in the mornings
to the people in boxes on the screen,
dear people, beloved all,
they settle, they listen
and when I am done
they don’t look at each other,
or at me.

They look up.

Many times, depending of course
on the poem, there will be a half smile.

The threads the words weave
are a nest for us to rest in together
to ponder, wonder, absorb.

There is a pause.

We chat then briefly,
sometimes seriously,
sometimes frivolously,
about an image,
a confusion,
or something else entirely.

We learn about each other.

Then we disperse out into the day,
separate, yet connected by the resonant
imprint of a shared moment of apprehending
something we hadn’t thought of ourselves.

—Elizabeth Domike

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 2/12/23
2023-02-12 15:00 - 17:00
Abelard and Heloise Surprised by the Abbot Fulbert by Jean Vignaud (1819)

Beloved Bibliophiles!
On Sunday, January 12th, at 3 p.m. (PST) for our Valentine’s Day Special the theme will be: “What have you learned about love from books and plays and poems?”
Bring favorite love poems to read.
Here’s the Zoom link:

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

peace, love & poetry
Johnny

Link to the 2021 Valentines issue of “peace, love, happiness & understanding”:

peace, love, happiness & understanding 2/18/21

Link to poems from the 2021 Bibliophiles Unanimous Valentine’s Day Special:

Bibliophiles Unanimous! Valentine’s Day Special: LOVE POEMS

Screening of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Prison on February 6th!
2023-02-06 18:00 - 20:00
There will be a screening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center on Monday, February 6th, at 6 p.m. The address is: 6651 SW Capitol Highway, Portland, OR 97219. For people in the Portland area who haven’t seen the film yet (or who would like to see it again), this is a great opportunity!
Actors from the play will be there for a conversation afterwards–Josh Underhill, Allen Mills, William Foote & Aaron O’Hara.

peace, love, happiness & understanding 2/2/23
2023-02-02 - 2023-03-01
poster by Rick Bartow

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

February 2, 2023

I invited some friends to…
…send me a short work in prose or poetry about an experience, a person, a conversation, a book, or an inspiration that changed the way you see, experience or understand yourself and/or the world. Here’s what people sent:

In Memory of
My Literary Godmother

Her name was
Miriam Soomil
Of Russian-Jewish descent
And the editor of
The Belmont Courier-Bulletin
A small-town
Weekly newspaper
Where I interned
One summer.

She smoked
Pall Malls
Drank black coffee
Devoured the
San Francisco Chronicle
Loved politics
Had opinions
Quoted Keats
Knew history
Adored anything
Well-written.

I’d never
Met anyone
Like her.
She was
Gritty, smart
Funny, flawed
Big-hearted
And tough
Like a
Thick slice
Of dark rye
In my
White bread
Ozzie and Harriet
World.

We shared
An office
Pounded out
News stories
On massive
Underwood typewriters
Edited copy
With pencils
Cut and pasted
With scissors
And glue pots
Beat deadlines
Logged
Late nights
At the printer.

She didn’t
So much
Teach me
As infect me
With language
The names
Of poets
Writers, books
Ideas
And
A care
Uncompromising
For words.

We became friends
And remained so
For years after.
I visited her
In the cabin
Where she lived
In a grove
Of Oak trees
Behind Stanford University
(Erased by bulldozers
Decades ago.)
Her walls
Lined with books
Her home patrolled
By an enormous
Siamese cat
Her garden
Thick with basil
Tomatoes, rosemary.
When I became
A working reporter
I sent her clippings.

Sometimes
I drink
Red jug wine
Like I used to
With Miriam
And raise
A toast
To her
A Mensch
Of this world
Generous
Beyond measure
Indelibly imprinted
Upon
My own
Soul’s page.

In whatever
Language you
Now speak
Dear friend
May you know
The eloquence
And intelligence
You bestowed
Upon us all.

—Will Hornyak January 2023
*

Coincidence

For years I tried right place, wrong time,
then right time, but I was somewhere else
plodding a dark street wondering where
my luck had gone. What are the odds
for happiness? Could I help chance,
assist coincidence, gamble with verve?

The first bird of dawn began to sing
and I woke to see life on Earth as one
big coincidence, this swirl of stone, water,
cell, sun, and in good time all the rest—
and suddenly, there you were
telling me your name.

—Kim Stafford
*

A long time ago when I was visiting Johnny in Portland, he got a phone call from our friend Sam.
He was dying of cancer—finally—after ten years or more of fighting it, and he invited us down to Houston to attend his passing.
In those days it was easy to travel by air. We just went to the airport, bought tickets, and flew down to Houston.
In his last years, after an adventurous checkered business career, Sam had reinvented himself as an academic.
After a few years, he left Berkeley and got a job in a Texas border town, teaching social science in a small community college. The students were all Latin American—second generation children of Mexican immigrants—newly citizened Americans hoping to realize the American Dream.
Sam was a man of the world. He gave his students, not the usual politically correct canned curriculum, but his best practical wisdom—like an uncle—speaking what usually remains unsaid about what it takes to get by, to get ahead, to simply survive, in racist America.
His students adored him.
Sam met Johnny and me in the waiting room of the cancer ward, and made us feel at home.
It was a Friday evening. The head hospice nurse was a friend of Sam’s.
She said she was taking the weekend off to deal with family.
“This is goodbye, Sam. We won’t be seeing each other again.”
So they parted.
Sam said goodbye to Johnny and me.
The nurses took him away.
Visitors were not allowed, usually.
But they allowed one of his students, a young woman with whom he was deeply bonded, to be with him.
She cradled his head and gazed into his eyes as he died.
Johnny and I were reading in the waiting room. The attendants pushed the remains of Sam on a gurney past us through the waiting room and out into the corridor, heading for parts unknown.
We could see that Sam wasn’t there anymore.

—Charles Erickson
*

Looking back on my life, the text that changed, and continues to change, the way I see, experience and understand myself in the world and as the world is Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” Among many other things, he says: “All truths wait in all things.” And: “a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” And:

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass…

—Johnny Stallings
*

I have had many dark spots in my life & have always pulled through. There are 3 people in my life that have been my guiding lights for many years. Due to my incarceration I can not do the things for them like I want to or that they deserve. Things like paint the house or fix their car or be there when they need me. To cook them dinner to just show them how much I love them, with a hug and a smile. Or to bring them my appreciation, my love, my joy. The joy they showed me that lives in me.

One of them was with me full when I was in a very dark place in life. Yes, darker than prison. A prison within a prison. I was forced to face my demons, there would be no running this time and I had never felt so close to death. I was able to completely divulge my life and all its damage. Not judged, not disciplined, just accepted and loved and made to feel like all should feel. HUMAN. We are all so beautiful and amazing and shattered and broken just right.

We are the beautifully broken. In my life I have people that mean more to me than life itself. And lately being away from them is suffering in itself. They are my family, family I choose to be family. I wish to be able to show you all how much I love you by Being there in life with you. Like a son should be.

Johnny, Nancy, Howard! You always and forever will be not in my heart but a big piece of my heart, mind and soul. Love Rocky.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

Five Tanka Written Upon Spending the Night in a New Apartment

1.
I mop the floor with
apple cider vinegar,
note the orange leaves
that are somehow still hanging
in January.

2.
Can you hear me up
here? Sorry I’m so noisy!
My boots, my loud soul…
I’m setting up my new bed.
I’ve slept on too many floors.

3.
O lovely cooking
aromas wafting through wood!
My unpacked dishes…
A sharp red curry down there
calls to my empty white bowl.

4.
Around ten p.m.
I begin to unravel
my crisp new mattress.
Alone, I read directions:
This requires two people.

5.
It is a good thing
that I moved in yesterday.
Very cold today,
and brother turned his ankle.
On my own again.

—Alex Tretbar
*

Leftover Rainwater

Over the years I have been having a series of surgeries to correct a not ideal situation I was born with in my mouth. I found a good surgeon, a practicing Sikh, who periodically fixes something and the other day I was getting some stitches out and his assistant said, “Oh yeah, the doctor is a leftie”. And I had this little shock.

All these years and I never noticed he was working on me primarily with his left hand.

Not that it matters.

Except that I never noticed. I was a rebellious kid and my father used to regularly admonish me to pay attention.

Off in my own world I would think, fine, sure, I’ll get right on that. Not. My own world was much more interesting, intoxicating even, the collage I was making taking up the whole bedroom wall, the easy chairs with a tail and wings I was drawing everywhere, all the stories I was reading. I was busy.

Later as a teenager out in the world with only loose tethers to authority, I had to learn to pay attention. At least in a certain, hyper-vigilant, oh man this place is dangerous way. Is that car following me, are those gunshots, might there be drugs in that drink you just offered to share with me.

And then in my work life. Numbers. Nice safe numbers that need to be in certain places at certain times. Very important to pay attention then.

Then one day a girlfriend of a work colleague asked me to go to a yoga class with her. It was at a gym. The teacher was an older man, I had heard somewhere, I think he told us, he had been teaching Kung Fu and then there was an accident and he had to figure out how to make his body functional again.

Why him? Why then? He was weird. I often have an affinity for weird people, at least his kind. One class we would focus on our feet, one on our necks, and the girlfriend never came back but I did. He taught us this one posture that made us look like turtles that I still practice today. He only taught for 4 months or so, but somewhere in there I learned how to truly pay attention.

Then one day he was gone, retired they said.

Another teacher took his place, and she became my teacher. I followed her around from gym to studio to rented spaces to finally her own studio. By then I was paying a lot of attention to a wide range of things. And learned to teach the practices to others.

Always though with a memory of the slightly amused look my original teacher would get on his face…this how did I find myself here with the weights clanging and the grunting in the background with all these relatively normal people?

The other day, working with my own students and encouraging them to notice this or be aware of that or to bring their attention somewhere or to let it go, I could hear my father’s voice.

The irony of me now gently admonishing others to be in the moment, feel what they are feeling and notice things…

And the work I still have left to do. Every day there are so many new things to notice.

Perhaps a wild chickadee is taking a bath in leftover rainwater out back.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Dear Reader

For the March issue of peace, love, happiness & understanding (3/2/23) you are invited to send me a short writing in prose or poetry about something or someone you love.

—Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 1/29/23
2023-01-29 15:00 - 17:00
T. S. Eliot

Keith Scales

On Sunday, January 29th, Keith Scales will read T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
The reading starts at 3 p.m. (PST). Here’s the Zoom link:

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

DON’T MISS THIS!!!

peace, love & poetry
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 1/15/23
2023-01-15 - 2023-02-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

January 15, 2022

Roshi

I never really understood
what he said
but every now and then
I find myself
barking with the dog
or bending with the irises
or helping out
in other little ways

—Leonard Cohen
*

This song, written by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, feels like a meditation song to me:
Love Itself

The light came through the window,
Straight from the sun above,
And so inside my little room
There plunged the rays of Love.

In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door—
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door—
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.

Then I came back from where I’d been.
My room, it looked the same—
But there was nothing left between
The Nameless and the Name.

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door—
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.
Love Itself was gone.

—Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson
*
Alex Tretbar sent this poem by Jim Gauer:

Will This Thought Do?

So I don’t think I’ll work today. Today it seems best
To let this bench hold my end up. Today
Of what my part was, brooding
Over the sum of things, there remains
Only the sum of things, and that part
Seems best. Yes this morning, whatever is
Will do nicely in my absence: this sunlight
Looks fine, it seems to be holding
Its own without me; the crowded sidewalk
Is fully employed, it appears its task
Has come to be child’s play; even the trees
Are doing well, they seem to be working
As well as trees can, as trees
These truly work, and the things they do
Are all nicely done. What a relief
To be wide awake, knowing my wakefulness
Doesn’t need me, sure that my bench exists.
Never doubting its existence beneath me, knowing
For sure that it is truly beneath me
To sit on a bench that I doubt exists.
How sweet to be fully alive, for just this morning
To have nothing to live for, to think well of my thought,
The way a child thinks of his childhood, the way that a tree
Makes do with its boughs, the way this moment lives
On what it’s seized in its hands, because this morning
What the moment has seized in its hands
Is sweet and alive, and this thought will do.
Will this thought do? It seems it’s already done so.
Will this thought do? Today there could be no doubt.
Will this thought do? Today beyond the shadow
Of a doubt my thought is done with
All the light I doubted, and now
Its shadow believes it too.
At last I know I’m the genius that no one needs to listen to.
Ontologist of a morning that turned out better than he thought.
The thinker there on a park bench, resting his chin
In a hand I gave him, a hand I traded
For a day of rest, for a moment’s peace
I could have had no hand in, for an instant
Under just this sky that out of the clear blue
Has come to me, as silent as I am,
Full of birds I did not think up.
No I don’t think I’ll work today. Today it sounds best
To let the silence work its ends out. Today
Of what my words were, sounds
Forming the heart of things, there remains
Only the heart of things, and this heart
Rings true.

—Jim Gauer
*

From an early age I was Mr. Know-It-All. I was a big expert on every topic, especially the ones of which I was completely ignorant. The older I get, the less I know. I don’t know who I am or what’s going on here. The world is bigger than my descriptions, opinions and explanations of the world. I’ve met a few of the 8 billion people on the planet, but the inner lives of even my closest friends are hidden from me. Every night my dreams teach me that my inner world is full of mysterious people and places and events that I can’t remember when I wake up. I don’t know why we humans create so many problems for ourselves and for each other. Why can’t we be kind to ourselves and nice to each other? I don’t have solutions for our problems. I don’t have answers for anyone’s questions. Sitting quietly with a cup of coffee in the morning, everything I see is beautiful, miraculous, impossible, including the “cup” of “coffee” and whoever it is who is typing this.

—Johnny Stallings

Here is Michel’s meditation on a contemplation from For Someone Else by Chana Friedmol Uhlman:

December 3, 2022

Praying As One

In communal prayer we come together to stand before God.
Facing our lives, facing our existence
in communal prayer, I am not alone,
I don’t need to hold everything by myself.
I have partners. A sacred community.
We are like a philharmonic orchestra:…
Each person playing their own part…
There are many roles…
We are like a single body…
Not everything rests on my shoulders.
Here and now, I am not alone.
My existence began before me
and my friends are here surrounding me
playing together
focusing together
praying together
to the Master of the World.

Community is where everyone thrives, even hermits. (I think they’re in denial.) When I allow myself to connect with others—and allow others to connect to me—we develop a unity, a symbiosis, an interconnected reality where the whole is more,…everything, than the sum of its parts. As cliché as this may be, it’s no less true. Think about your communities; is there health and vibrant vitality, growth and expansion? Or, is there dis-ease, sickness of mind and contention? Or, like my living community: flu, cold, Covid, RSV, or other respiratory affliction in ⅓ or more; in addition to all of the above. I particularly like the idea of a healthy community, as in today’s contemplation. I like this because I don’t need to carry the community on my own; we can all play together as one. Any differences, and I hope they are myriad and plethoric, are what make a symphonic event out of a chaotic cacophony—be it life, love, music, prayer, or meditation. Together we, all of us, are more. I am dissatisfied with situations pushing us to be less. Let us come together and be symphonic.

—Michel Deforge
*

The Box

When I was a young poet, I went into schoolrooms
to ask children, “What if you had a treasure box
to fill now, and open when you’re old?
What would you put in it?”

Oh, they listed their first shoes, a tree, a best friend,
a crown, a dog, “all my stuff I love so much.”

I made books of their wishes. But now that I’m
old myself—what’s in my box? Waking in the night,
every night, I watch the parade of all I have lost,
but not lost, stumble from the dream house

and become a blessing before the morning’s light.

—Kim Stafford
*

This Altar of Earth and Sky

Before he died
The old farmer
Told his lazy son:
“I buried
a chest of gold
In the field.
Plow deep
And far
And wide
And you’re
Sure to find it.”
The son plowed
For a day
A week
A month
A year
And found
No gold
But the fields
Well-plowed
Yielded
A Bountiful
Harvest
And on his
Ambits
He noticed
Fences
That wanted
Mending
A coop, a stall
In need of repair
Herds and flocks
To water and feed.
In time
A treasure
Accrued
From his
Devotion
To land
And labor.

With my penchant
For idleness
I call to mind
That lazy son
And
Putter
Endlessly
In my
Front yard
And back
Ambling from
Garden
To garage
Workbench
To toolshed
A path
Well worn
Over 18 years
Through rituals
Of planting
Pruning
Construction
And repair.

In time
Any practice
Can become
A spiritual practice
Any object
Sacred:
This wheelbarrow
Hauling compost
That hammer
Setting a nail.
In time
The druid
Doffs his robes
And
Dons overalls
The monk
Sets down
His holy book
And lifts up
The common spade
Even
The high priest
Retires
From the temple
And returns
To this altar
Of earth and sky.

—Will Hornyak December 2022
*

#65 Don’t Underestimate Yourself

“Don’t underestimate yourself. You have the ability to wake up. You have the ability to be compassionate. You just need a little bit of practice to be able to touch the best that is in you. Enlightenment, mindfulness, understanding, and compassion are in you. Very simple practices—such as meditative walking, mindful breathing, or washing dishes mindfully—make it possible for you to leave hell and touch the positive seeds that are within you.”
–from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

“Don’t underestimate yourself. You have the ability to wake up.” Believe me, if this happened to me it can happen to you. I “woke up” back in March of 1994, and it came as a bolt out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting it, or hoping or praying for it. Indeed, I was not the praying sort at all—more agnostic, or…simply indifferent to any kind of religion. My father proudly pronounced that he was agnostic on even days and atheist on odd days. I was like that, only even less vocal about it.

What happened? One afternoon I was talking on the phone to an aspiring artist, helping her with contacts in architecture firms, encouraging her to call and show her work. I’d been helping her and a dozen other ‘emerging artists,’ as we called them, for 6 months or so. Believe me, it had not been in my nature to be so helpful—I’d sort of been roped into it. I’d been on tv in a segment on artists’ careers, and the anchorman had done a great job—I was expecting lots of commissions for more work! Instead, I was deluged with requests for help. Shoot! Not what I had in mind, but I offered a workshop, and another, with a couple dozen artists. I gave handouts, articles I’d used, helpful tips on how to present your work, etc. No sense in making others go through all the junk I had gone through. And I followed up with all of them every few weeks, just to see how they were doing, if maybe they were discouraged and thinking of giving up.

And then this afternoon of March 20, 1994, when talking to this one woman, she asked, “I don’t get it. Why are you doing this? You have a successful career, you’re very busy with your own work. What’s in it for you? What do you want from us???” And I said, “All I ask from you is that you do the same for somebody else some day. Isn’t that what it’s all about?” I don’t think that it was I who said those words. They just came out. And then I started crying, and crying. Something—everything—just opened up. I simply…understood…everything. The world, the universe, God—no, beyond God, not limited to God. I understood, and everything was complete, whole, filled with joy, with light, overwhelmed with love. These words can’t even express it adequately. I’m crying into the phone. This poor woman asks, “Are you alright?” I said, “Oh, you have no idea how alright I am!! Thank you!”

And that was it. My life changed from that instant. I knew I had to help others, to keep this alive, to continue to be imbued with joy. And I had to scramble to understand others, those not like me, since I’d had this moment of total understanding. I had to read, read, read to find out what this was all about. And I had to be quiet, and listen, to feel that beauty, that light, that joy.

The word that comes to mind is propelled. I was propelled to live my life differently than ever before. It is difficult, it can be frightening (but I am not afraid). It can be hard work (but I can’t live otherwise). If I’d had this moment of pure understanding, then I had to follow up with concrete understanding, of making connections with all those who I didn’t know, with all those who were not like me.

I must understand others. I have dragged my husband to five different states to work with Habitat for Humanity: Meridian, Mississippi; John’s Island, South Carolina; Bartlesville, Oklahoma; Charleston, West Virginia, etc.… I have mentored at-risk teenagers (still, and now in their forties); worked in homeless shelters; supported a Native American woman and her family for 18 years; tutored dyslexic teenagers and adults; tutored Hispanic adults; given art workshops to homeless teens…and, of course, the most wonderful and joyful (and stressful) of all, being a friend and supporter to inmates at Two Rivers Correctional Institution for the last six years.

Working my way to understanding (and loving!) others. After all of this litany, my point is that this just happened to me; I didn’t work to make it happen. And if I experienced this, so can we all. We can awaken. It is a life of joy. It is also sadness and grief and work, but that is all part of the beauty and the joy.

—Jude Russell
*

It’s still the beginning of a new year and there is a practice from the Buddhas’s time called “Beginning Anew.” It is a practice for keeping the community healthy with kindness and openness.

Thay writes, “Beginning Anew is not to ask for forgiveness. Beginning Anew is to change your mind and heart, to transform the ignorance that brought about wrong actions of body, speech, and mind, and to help you cultivate your mind of love. Your shame and guilt will disappear, and you will begin to experience the joy of being alive. All wrongdoings arise in the mind. It is through the mind that wrongdoings can disappear.”

At Plum Village, they practice the ceremony of Beginning Anew every week. Everyone sits in a circle with a vase of fresh flowers in the center. The ceremony has three parts: flower watering, expressing regrets, and expressing hurts and difficulties. This practice can prevent feelings of hurt from building up over the weeks and helps make the situation safe for everyone in the community.

They begin with flower watering. They take the vase of flowers in their hands to reflect the freshness and beauty of the flower. During flower watering, each person acknowledges the wholesome, wonderful qualities of the others. It is not flattery; it is to speak the truth. Everyone has some strong points that can be seen with awareness.

At my Thursday night sangha, one woman told us that she does this practice with and for herself at home. Although it is meant for a group or a family, she sees how valuable it is for herself living alone. One way she found to do it is to write herself a love letter. Inspired by how Thich Nhat Hanh would write love letters to world leaders that he disagreed with.

So this is an INVITATION!:

WRITE a love letter to yourself. You might acknowledge whatever you feel good about that you did this past year to nurture yourself or another, or how you may have helped someone, or how you learned something. How was your practice and your communication with others? How did you keep your heart open and yourself well? You may have regrets that you have dwelled on; acknowledge them but let them go with compassion for yourself. Maybe end with compassion for another that has done you a wrong. This is a practice like others – be a good listener to yourself, speak/write from the heart, and bear witness for deep understanding.

The second INVITATION!!

WRITE a love letter to Thay. Dear Thay! Thank him for what he has taught you this past year. Was there a special meditation you read and responded to from Your True Home?Is there a difference in the way you breathe or walk? Do you take more time to listen and notice what you are noticing?

Debbie Buchanan passed on an Ode written by Joe Lamb—a veteran, a writer, a meditator, an arborist—published in Nostos, a magazine of Poerty and Art. It is titled : “A Letter to Thich Nhat Hanh.” Here’s a little excerpt:

Dear Thich Nhat Hanh,

Thank you for teaching me walking meditation. Walking exceptionally slowly through forests, feeling the earth with each step, slowing down to notice the shapes of leaves, the smell of bark, the sound of my own breath.

Thank you for the reminder that microaggressions build up in the unconscious where they can radiate out into the world. More importantly, I want to thank you, for the many reminders that micro kindnesses also build up and radiate out into the world, that micro acts of compassion can heal and nourish people we may never even meet….

It’s misleading to say you taught me. We were never introduced. (He knows him from “a couple of lectures” and from a writing workshop with a two of Thay’s other students, Maxine and Therese.)

Was it you who taught our sangha to walk slowly, counting our breaths, feeling our presence on the earth? Or was it Maxine and Therese? Where does the self stop and the other begin? Where does the teacher stop and the student begin? You complicated this confusion when you said that you are not only the man we see wearing a monk’s robe, you are also a cloud, a river, a forest.

You said this was not religion or philosophy, but rather just an observation about biology, about the earth itself. Thank you for that marvelous confusion….

Yes, of course, we are water….

Yes of course I am forest….

So thank you for that great gift of reminding my anxious brain – always fussing with imaginary futures, always trying to heal the wounded past – that right here, right now, I am in the world, an astoundingly beautiful world, and the world is in me.

—from Joe Lamb’s “Letter to Thich Nhat Hanh”

The letter reminds me how lucky we have been to have a great wisdom teacher alive while we are here too. And how Thay and the monks and nuns would say to us, “We are here because you are here.”

Thank you all for your reading, responding, and your practice. Feel free to share your letters.

Happy New Year!

–Katie Radditz

peace, love, happiness & understanding 1/5/23
2023-01-05 - 2023-02-01
Gertrude Stein (by Picasso)

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

January 5, 2023

So now to come to the real question of punctuation, periods, commas, colons, semi-colons and capitals and small letters. I have had a long and complicated life with all these.
—Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 1935

A Carafe in Bb Major
by Alex Tretbar (Guest Editor)

“The difference is spreading.”

Last night I sat down to read the final pages of Gertrude Stein’s small, strange book Tender Buttons. I don’t use bookmarks, as I’m usually able to quickly identify where I left off. I remembered reading the section titled “Cups” on page 49 of my edition, but I saw nothing familiar in the following subsection, “Rhubarb,” which consists of a single sentence: “Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.” So I read “Rhubarb” and moved on.

The book is divided into three parts: “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” On page 60 I read “A Center in a Table,” the final section of “Food,” then turned the page and began “Rooms,” which begins as follows:

Act so that there is no use in a center. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation.

That initial imperative —“Act so that there is no use in a center”—rang through me in such a way that I knew I wasn’t reading or hearing it for the first time, and the heavy declarative statement that concludes the paragraph—“There was an occupation”—struck me with the ghostly certainty of déjà vu (“already seen”), or, more accurately, déjà lu (“already read”).

I read eleven pages of Tender Buttons on the evening of December 21st, then read the same eleven pages again on the evening of December 22nd, remembering none of them until reaching “Rooms.” How could I read so many pages before stumbling across a certain phrasing or arrangement of words that would seem to indicate I had read them before, and recently? The answer is not that Tender Buttons is forgettable. The answer is that Tender Buttons is slippery. As Juliana Spahr writes, it is “a book always in the process of being read over and over.” It acts as if there is no use in a center.

“Lying in a conundrum…”

I served 64 months in the Oregon prison system, and was released on July 22nd, 2022. I spent the final ten days of my sentence in quarantine, in the hole, and I had made grand literary plans for those ten days. In my luggage of plastic trash bags, alongside a half jar of coffee and other essentials, I had stowed a stack of poetry collections, anthologies, and magazines, and I was looking forward to the 240 hours of unfettered reading. I didn’t bring any fiction, save for the handful of short stories sprinkled throughout the magazines, and I came to regret that decision.

Now, it wasn’t ten days of traditional segregation: I had all of my canteen luxuries, I was granted time each day for phone calls and microwaving, and the general vibe was not punitive. Plus, after all, my prison sentence was about to end. But the pressure cooker of the cell came to seem like the anteroom between hell and heaven, despite my knowing that prison isn’t (necessarily) hell, and liberty isn’t (necessarily) heaven. I continued waking up at 5, drinking cold tap water coffee, and reading and writing, but the onslaught of poetry’s nonstop ellipsis, misdirection and elusion/allusion began to erode my ability to pass the hours calmly. I thought of Ezra Pound slowly losing it, writing his lonely Cantos in the oblivion of St. Elizabeths. I craved narrative: A then B, so C. I wanted fiction. Characters doing things, and things happening to characters. Undreamlike causation.

One of the books I brought with me was an issue of Fonograf Editions, and on its cover was a pink and purple abstraction “indebted to [the Russian painter Kasimir] Malevich’s Suprematist artistic vision, one that believed that ‘the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.’” But in that ten-day moment before release, I was sick of the avant-garde, sick of abstraction, and sick of poetry. I wanted objects—like a milk carton passed through a hole in a metal door—to appear familiar. Tender Buttons may have been a torturous book to possess at that time.

Images brand our spirits, and the twin sigils of the final cell I lived in were:

Yes, a ridiculous pairing, but I believe that there is no highbrow, no lowbrow. There is only brow, and beneath it the all-seeing eye through which we witness our lives.

“Nickel, what is nickel…”

Stein renders the familiar unfamiliar. Her prose poems (if you can call them that, if you can call them anything at all) approach “A Table” or “A Shawl” from unexpected angles, with grammatically impenetrable constructions, and for this reason her work is often cited as bearing the Cubist torch into literature. Here is the first and most famous piece from Tender Buttons, titled “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass”:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

What are we to make of this? Tender Buttons has engendered much academic handwringing and dissection over the past century, and you are not alone if, in reading the above excerpt, you find yourself shaking your head or scoffing. Perhaps the most agreed-upon facet of Tender Buttons is that we can agree upon nothing when regarding it. It is an object “simultaneously considered to be a masterpiece of verbal Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax.” Like Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the book “is perhaps more often written about than actually read” (Poets.org).

And yet I recommend that everyone read it. Unlike the behemoth works of Joyce or Proust, it can be read in a single evening or two, and there is no constellation of characters and motives and histories to keep straight. There are few, if any, people in Tender Buttons (personal pronouns are haunting in their rare surfacing), and nothing really happens. But there is music, and undeniable passion—even be it bridled or obscured by syntax. Just look at those first seven words of the book: “A kind in glass and a cousin.” Never mind what it “meant” to Stein, or what it “means” to me. It is just a beautiful arrangement of, as Coleridge defined poetry, “the best words in the best order.” The poet Charles Bernstein has provided some of the best advice for readers of Tender Buttons, and it is worth quoting him at length:

The sections of the work are not “about” subjects that are discussed but are their own discrete word objects (verbal constellations). Meaning in these works is not something to be extracted or deciphered but rather to be responded to, so that the reader’s associations create a cascading perceptual experience, guided by the uncanny arrangement of the words. The more readers can associate with the multiple vectors of each word or phrase meanings, the more fully they can feast on the unfolding semantic banquet of the work. The key is not to puzzle it out but to let the figurative plenitude of each work play out; for, indeed, this work is not invested in a predetermining structure or in precluding or abstracting meaning. Tender Buttons does not resist figuration but entices it. And the work is rife with linguistic and philosophical investigation as well as an uncannily acute self-awareness of its own processes.

“A letter was nicely sent.”

I was exhibiting an uncannily acute self-awareness of my own processes. (Have you ever felt clairvoyant in the knowledge that you know what you are about to do? Is it not strange that, before we go to pick up the plastic mug of cold predawn coffee, we know that we are about to pick up the plastic mug of cold predawn coffee? And even if we decide, in auto-rebellion, not to pick up the mug, we construct a new future the knowledge of which is instantaneously and irrevocably ours—until we change our minds again. I used to take drugs, I think, for a simple reason: I didn’t want to know what happened next. I wanted to be surprised.)

Alas, in a single afternoon of quarantine I devoured the handful of short stories available to me, and once again I was left with poetry, the desolation of my processes, my circuits and orbits and feedback loops. For five years I had been invested in a predetermined structure, and that structure was beginning to dissolve. Reading poems—whether they were straightforwardly narrative or relentlessly experimental—repulsed me, and so did writing them.

The last letter I sent from prison contained the last poem I wrote in prison. Ironically or perhaps not, it was a letter to someone living in the same building as me, another prisoner. Distance is often nonphysical. Here’s the poem:

Special Features

there isn’t a thing to say
so close to the relinquished
light of a star
what really comprises the common dust
of living rooms & cells
panting
panting
the television is panting
is
underwater
with grief
I look what I think is west
is west it’s hard to tell
amid so many competing surfaces
amid
amid
amid absent flowers & oxidized materials
you can oversanitize to the point where everything becomes
is permanently
clean
& the action movie soundtrack
convinces me of climax
a nonexistent curtain falls
the show is
the story is over / I am asleep
in the deleted scenes of my life

To me—the writer of this poem who had forgotten its contents until now, digging through my notebooks, reading it now with the privilege of distance—the poem reeks of wordsickness. But it’s okay to be sick of words. Even the sun can make us sneeze.

“Book was there, it was there.”

A pink is not of vitamin, is it. Smaller
and smalling. What recedes fortifies
and running now, a mauve. Crossing
a street requiring friends in need of.
We are not a wobble. We nosy. Let us
consider longing now the ultimate form.

Or, as my friend Irene Cooper puts it:

no commas
~for GS & ABT

pop buttons pop projections of rimming. collect the close & closings tendered against the winded heart. red petals the threaded plain & some cleavage is rising. plastics are crashing are the rain sugaring the cavity are a red tempest in a chest. in closure some button slips its absence & is too much is intolerable is undone & so open. open.

Or, as my friend Laura Winberry puts it:

the buttons are as tender as we make them

[essayistic interpretations of cubism in non-prosaic form, in conversation with Miss Stein]

a trach tube is or isn’t a direct pathway to living
(well or at all). so is a catheter, a pic line, a drip
like a bright sweep through the body every eight
hours or so.

it doesn’t all have to be so tragic. we see
things and beings through to some kind of end
then start again. so many moments are synonymous
with continue.

when mom asides about the new nurse I think
he’s born-again Christian as if he were
also diseased he’s too neat—I laugh.

after a night in his tender she admits to being wrong—
he’s lovely and my buddy let me tell you his life story.

the subject seen from a multitude of viewpoints
crescendos into a tenderness of context. what was once
angular, disjointed, rearranged
becomes whole.

I think what I mean to say is multi
-dimensional, -faceted, -plying as in
nothing is ever what it seems.

I don’t yet know how to call this tender,
but something in my body
tells me I will.

Or, as the late Trish Keenan of the band Broadcast puts it, in the song “Tender Buttons”:

The cortex
The comb
The codeine
The comma
The context

Such is Stein’s influence. And the funny thing is that when I first came across that unlikely pair of words—“tender” and “buttons”—it wasn’t in the form of Stein’s book. It was the Broadcast song, a complicatedly hopeful acoustic-electric drone in the key of B-flat major.

The website Last.fm allows users to log the songs they listen to on their computers and mobile devices, and this evening I performed a search of my account, which I created in 2006. I searched for “Tender Buttons,” and found that I listened to the song for the first time at 12:38 p.m. on October 22, 2009, 14 days after my 20th birthday. According to Wunderground.com, it was 54 degrees Fahrenheit in Lawrence, Kansas, at that very moment, the sky was cloudy, and the wind was blowing around 15 miles per hour from the north-northwest. I was probably stoned on that 295th day of the Gregorian calendar, a Thursday, skipping class and lazing on the green couch of a flophouse attic.

If I remember correctly, I was heartbroken at that time, and I would spend many hours by the attic window, watching the leaves of a great tree tremble in the wind. It was years before I knew who Gertrude Stein was, a time when my addiction was still like a kitten: small and manageable, asleep and purring, contained within my palm.

The codeine, the comma, the context.

Stein’s Enigmas
by Kim Stafford

Tender Buttons has been called the stuff of genius, and of intentional obfuscation. Nothing but an utterly original mind could produce such a range of response. Gertrude Stein once said of Paris, it’s not so much what it gives you—it’s what it doesn’t take away. Paris clearly didn’t take away Stein’s almost childish instinct for feral experimentation, and readers have been struggling and reveling ever since in what her pen splashed forth.

For a reader, Tender Buttons offers a challenge, a series of jokes, secrets, a scatter of debris, a net of clues, hints, hunches, all with a rich dose of affection for true freedom of speech.

For a writer, the lessons are many, and a bit different. First off, the lines in her book seem to say, apart from what they are saying, or not saying: Go your own weird way. The lines are presenting evidence that language belongs to each of us, and all of us, and none of us. Language, by Stein’s witness, is a freakish, frisky, irreverent rush of possibility, not to be imprisoned by any grammarian’s so-called rules. Yes, such freedom by a writer may lose some readers, but may also gain the fierce loyalty of some others.

A printer friend was meeting with a poet to talk about designing a broadside for a poem. Said the printer, “Wouldn’t it be easier to read if you arranged the lines this way, instead of what you have?”
“I’m a poet,” was the reply. “Is my goal to make things easy?”
“Ah,” said the printer. “You taught me something there.”

And Stein’s book, over a century old, is still teaching us something, perhaps a different set of lessons for each reader who makes it through the book. What the book seems to want to teach me is to question my practice, when I’m in danger of making too much sense and too little music. To question my goal when I’m trying to persuade instead of sing. To question my purpose on earth when I’m relying on the rational instead of birdsong.

I can’t do what Stein has done—or can I? Is it just that I haven’t tried? What’s to stop me from breaking the rules I’ve followed so obediently for so many years, to stop me from achieving escape velocity from the firmament of the clear, the cogent, and the utterly tamed?

Some years ago at a conference for artists, the Indigenous old-time folk singer Buffy St. Marie was to give a talk, and I thought, foolishly, that she would coast along on her former fame, maybe play a few classics, and be done. Instead, she sang ideas at us with fierceness that stunned me. Among many calls to trust our own way as artists, she used a word I had only associated with the fight for Indigenous rights. She told us an artist must maintain complete sovereignty over what we do and how we do it, saying, this is my poem, song, painting…this is my language, my tune, my colors…and the way I do what I do belongs to me.

Last summer, I met a pine tree in Scotland, alone on a hill, its trunk crooked, its branches quirky, lopsided, eccentric in the extreme. It was more ruin in wood than civilized for the lumber trade. Perhaps it had been left alone when they cut the others, simply because it managed to be strange.

In the tree’s presence, I found myself jamming words together with maybe 5% of the freedom of a Gertrude Stein, but still more in keeping with the tree before me than what I might have written without my encounter with Tender Buttons. For what if polite forms of language are lying, really, about the true, knotted complexity of the world, and what Stein does in Tender Buttons hews more closely to the rugged real?

Lone Pine in Scotland

One flung green gown on one hung
shade skirt growing outward, glowing
inward, light-hungry, root-thirsty, long
wind-limber, limb-laddered, ever loyal
to the nation of its kind, but hermit here,
monkish nun hospitable to wasp and crow,
rain-wet silhouette of old trunk with young
twigs, buds, needles, cones glistening for
dawn above by dusk below, earth-offered,
ring-hearted, bark-guarded, pitch-scented,
pollen-dusted citizen, sentinel, sovereign.

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 1/1/23
2023-01-01 15:00 - 16:00
Start the New Year right with Bibliophiles Unanimous!

We had a great time with our annual group reading of A Christmas Carol on December 18th.
On Sunday, January 1st, at 3 p.m. (PST) our theme will be SONG LYRICS. Bring your favorites!
Here’s the Zoom link:

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

This is gonna be fun! (You get extra points if you sing the songs.)

peace, love & music
Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: Annual Group Reading of A Christmas Carol
2022-12-18 15:00 - 17:00
illustration by Arthur Rackham

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

On Sunday, December 18, at 3 p.m. (PST), we will have our annual group reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Todd Oleson of Walla Walla, Washington, and Keith Scales of Eureka Springs, Arkansas will be among the stellar cast. Gather round the warm light of your computer screen and enjoy this wonderful tale of love and transformation.

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

Bring the kids & grandkids!

As Tiny Tim says:
God Bless Us, Every One!

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 12/15/22
2022-12-15 - 2023-01-14
photo by Howard Thoresen

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

December 15, 2022

often when walking in the streets of lower Manhattan or on the promenade along the Hudson River
a young father crosses my path chatting gaily with his son or carrying his daughter on his shoulders
pointing to the statue
or a young woman and a young man stroll beside me
their bodies entwined their eyes shining the involuntary smiles
and i sigh in the knowledge that i will never be a young father or a young lover
or i read about some young actor who at 23 has a resume as long as i had at 60 and a better
the scientist, the painter, the family man, the social worker, the deep sea diver, the marathon runner
when there arises in me a longing to have another life
to have been a different person
to live for a thousand years
i remember the stories of the yogis i read as a young boy—the siddhi of having more than one body and thus of working out innumerable skeins of karma which to them was a terrible task but to me sounds delightful
there arises another something that feels like a conviction “i am already doing this. all these bodies are mine, not just the human but the dogs and cats and cockroaches, the breakdancer and the ballerina, the blah blah blah
these are my bodies my pasts and my futures, i am life flowing through a million lives”
the guru said he had the power to enter the highest state at will and i think so do i
i have only to shift my eyes in one direction or another and i am all beings and all being
but it isn’t a trance, i don’t fall down or have to be taken care of by awed disciples
i can continue to meander and people don’t know that i am them or maybe they do

—Howard Thoresen
*

Dec. 17, 1834
There is in every man a determination of character to a peculiar end, counteracted often by unfavorable fortune, but more apparent the more he is at liberty. This is called his genius, or his nature, or his turn of mind. The object of Education should be to remove all obstructions & let this natural force have free play & exhibit its peculiar product. It seems to be true that no man in this is deluded. This determination of his character is to something in nature; something real. This object is called his Idea. It is that which rules his most advised actions, those especially that are most his, & is most distinctly discerned by him in those days or moments when he derives the sincerest satisfaction from his life.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte, p. 132
*

#264 Compassionate Listening

“Compassionate listening is crucial. We listen with the willingness to relieve the suffering of the other person, not to judge or argue with her. We listen with all our attention. Even if we hear something that is not true, we continue to listen deeply so the other person can express her pain and release the tensions within herself. If we reply to her or correct her, the practice will not bear fruit. If we need to tell the other person that her perception was not correct, we can do that a few days later privately and calmly.”
(from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh)

Recently in a discussion group, we have been experiencing a certain degree of ‘dialogue imbalance,’ I’ll call it. One or two well-meaning members have been imposing advice (and veiled judgment) upon others who are sharing their thoughts and feelings. This has caused those ‘counseled’ to withdraw and become reluctant to share.

We all need to express shared vulnerability, not impose answers, solutions, corrections or advice. Any and all of these evoke frustration and feelings of being misunderstood (and judged) instead of being heard.

This can be a challenge. People want to help, and we are a solution-driven, solution-finding society. We believe that the best way to help is to find/give answers, when often the most meaningful help is simply…to listen.

—Jude Russell
*

I Know Nothing

I know nothing about music, but when the piccolo
got lost in the cave, and shadows began to weep,
I wished I did. That way, I could follow the scales
beading a dragon’s neck all the way to the tail,
melody oozing slow as honey from the strings
weaving a shroud for the hangman’s daughter
after her singing silence robbed my sorry hoard.
I wish I knew the first few notes violas scribbled
to reveal how percussion crushed the grass bowing
toward the river where the horns flowed fast.
And when the soloist turned her words to silver
shining past my mind, I wished I could mesh
that lingering flame burning the English horn
to sear my soul long after the concert ended.

—Kim Stafford
*

Parts of Me

Part of me is ready to begin.
Another part is already finished.

Other parts—unknown—keep themselves to themselves.

Part of me is party to silent movies
playing for no one
at a drive-in theater in the sky.

We are all of us part of each other.

Part of me doesn’t believe that, though. Part of me stubs its toe
on trashcans in bowling alleys, chair legs in cemeteries.

Part of me is gripping its part of me’s head
like a housewife testing a melon, in market.

Part of me’s frightened of what I just said.

Part of me wants a lobotomy, but cries for its mommy
instead. Part of me’s still an egg.

Part of me’s already dead.

Part of me is the start of me. Part of me’s also the end of me.
Part of me part of me part of me.

The part of me that thinks it is smart of me
to write about all of the parts of me
is one of the very worst parts of me—take it from [part of] me.

Part of me tires of parroting you, pardoning me, petering out & catching the flu.
But part of me also revels in blue, resorts to leaving the zoo.

Part of me finds it hard to write
when part of someone else
is reading over part of me’s shoulder.

Part of me never knows how far apart
the parts of me are.

Part of me’s tired of faltering, and in the end,
the art of me consists of weaving together the far-flung parts of me.

Part of me parts the curtains and shows you all of me.

—Alex Tretbar
*

Sometimes I sit down to write a poem and sometimes I’m writing in my journal and something I’ve written seems like it could be a little poem. Here are some old and some recent examples:

What the Crow Said

“Caw,” said the crow
I didn’t say anything
I just wrote down what the crow said
*

My Retirement Plan

I’m waiting for the elves to arrive
with bags of gold
*

a guy drives by in a blue car
covered with cherry blossom petals
*

couple of guys
unloading mattresses
from a Frito-Lay truck
what the hell is going on?
*

last night I was playing miniature golf in my dream
*

cold night
sitting by the woodstove
the happiest man alive
*

holy holy holy is the bean plant
cup of coffee
the stuffed animals on the window sill
that have been loved unto baldness
the song sparrow
the sunlight
and even the man sitting at his laptop
failing once again to say the unsayable
*

Christmas Prayer

Thank you, Jesus,
for giving me this day off work.
*

the Buddha’s best sermon
was when he gave that guy a flower
*

Y’know those paperweights
with a little house
and little trees
and if you turn it upside-down
and then rightside-up again
it snows?
I’m sitting in that little house.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Marcus Aurelius vs. Marie Howe

I have been in the habit these past weeks of picking up Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and finding a quote to ponder for the day. There was one quote last week that became the center of my conversations with three very different people.

Look attentively on each particular thing you do, and ask yourself if death be a terror because it deprives you of this.

Wow. I was immediately struck by how profound this statement is. To me, this is a reminder to pay close attention and choose wisely how each day is spent. And then I started to feel a little insignificant. Marcus Aurelius, was, after all, an emperor, and wrote Meditations as a record for himself of self-improvement. Perhaps the idea of looking so closely through the lens of death robbing me of such importance is not for the everyday person.

I shared this quote with my daughter and we discussed my thoughts as I continued to chew on its meaning and she sat back for a moment and then said, “Yeah but what about What the Living Do?”

What the Living Do is a poem within a book of the same name written by Marie Howe. Howe wrote the collection of poems about her brother who died of AIDS-related complications in his 20s. The poem simply and eloquently reminds us that the everyday moments – both good, bad and indifferent – are what make up a human life.

When I look back at my 48 years lived, which includes the birth of four children, a marriage, a divorce and falling in love again, these big life events are not what stand out to me. Life is driving through Delaware in July at sunset and seeing people in their Sunday best eating ice cream cones. Life is smelling the perfume my mother wore when she’d get dressed up and go out on the town – the scent taking me back to sitting on her bed as a child, watching her put her jewelry on. Life is listening to my son tell me casually about his day on the ride home from school, my heart filling up with his words, unbeknownst to him. And life is feeling butterflies on a morning walk through my neighborhood in summer as I resonate on the poem from my lover as I swiftly prance down the sidewalk, smelling every rose I can reach to stick my nose into.

The ordinary is the extraordinary. And when I look again at what Marcus Aureilus has to say, I think he understood this as well. It isn’t about what we do but how we perceive. It is in the looking that we can spot the miracles.

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some
utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the
crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the
everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the
sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in
here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the
street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday,
hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee
down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush:
This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you
called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the
winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and
more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of
myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a
cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat
that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

—poem by Marie Howe

—Nicole Rush
*

November 2, 2022 CALL OF THE HEART

The initial bedrock from which speech grows is the voice.
When the voice is born, before words and prior to sentences,
one’s desires are already beginning to sprout.
Being revealed is the possibility of the turning to another, of a conversation.

The voice precedes words.
The way the words of the prayer sound becomes their meaning,
paving for them a path to their destination.
It’s as if the melody of the prayer
lifts the words on its wings,
whispers between the pages of the prayerbook,
amongst the prayer shawls,
ascends from the place of prayer to the Holy Ark,
soars through the windows, out to the boundless skies.

—from Prepare My Prayer by Rabbi Dov Singer

This causes me to think of infants, to wonder at the sounds. The process of self-discovery, of self-awareness; hearing the sounds, giving meaning, learning speech, communicating needs and wants. Primal, unyielding. With age comes inhibitions, filters, separating the sounds from the heart connecting to the mind. Struggle begins to communicate what is felt, using only words. And it fails—miserably. Life then moves on, striving to reconnect mind and heart. Each strives and finds a way, in time. Sound and heart rejoin; satisfying communication resumes. Heart and mind join as one.

This is the struggle, to communicate with heart and mind in one voice to convey deepest feelings, sensations to another. Reaching out with voice to connect, to be heard, to be seen. Finding others, uniting in common cause, raising voices on high, drawing close. We reach out, yearning to connect, finding our voices, expressing heart’s desires. Throughout life we continue to use voice and sound, still striving to communicate as we did when infants, crying out from the heart to the One who hears.

—Michel Deforge

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 12/4/22
2022-12-04 15:00 - 17:00
photo by Kim Stafford

Beloved Bibliophiles!
Katie suggested Silence as our topic for Sunday, December 4th, at 3 pm (PST). I’m sure we’ll all have lots to say on this subject.
Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

love & silence
Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 12/1/22
2022-12-01 - 2023-01-04
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

December 1, 2022

This coolness!
It is the entrance
To Paradise!
—Issa (1763-1828)

Happy Day! There’s a new book of “Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth,” edited by Norman Waddell, titled Poetry and Zen.

Reginald Horace Blyth (1898-1964) was instrumental in introducing haiku poetry and Zen Buddhism to the West. He was a student and friend of D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966), who wrote many books and essays about Zen. Blyth’s four volumes titled Haiku are probably what he is most well-known for. These books were a big influence on Gary Snyder and Richard Wright, among many other writers. My favorite book by Blyth is Zen in English Literature and Oriental Culture, his first book, which he wrote while he was a prisoner of war in Japan, and which was published in Japan right after World War II. (Strangely, after being a prisoner of war, he was tutor to the Crown Prince for 16 years!) Every time I finish reading the book, I start reading it again from the beginning. The boldness of his thought reminds me of Emerson and Thoreau. And he’s terrifically funny!

Excited by getting Poetry and Zen, I thought Blyth would be a good subject for the next peace, love, happiness & understanding. I know a couple of other people for whom Blyth is a blithe companion on their life journey. I asked my friend Howard Thoresen if he would write something. This is what he wrote:

The first thing I remember hearing about R.H. Blyth was that he “had given up Zen for haiku.” Over many decades I have sometimes suspected I got it wrong; perhaps it was Lafcadio Hearn or one of the other early western luminaries of the cult of Zen and Haiku. Or maybe I had just imagined it. But in sniffing around the internet I came across this quote from Alan Watts: “R.H. Blyth, who was a great Zen man, wrote me once and said ‘How are you these days? As for me, I have abandoned satori (enlightenment) altogether and I’m trying to become as deeply attached as I can to as many people and things as possible.”

This quote doesn’t exactly say that he “had given up Zen for haiku” but perhaps my version is like an early translation of an ancient Japanese poem into modern English.

Blyth, as quoted by Watts, expresses my own attitude; I am an administrative director of a Zen temple, and I have a lifelong meditation habit, but I have never taken the precepts; and, when people ask, I say, “My Buddhism is all about attachment.” I am working for the temple because I am attached to people in the community and that attachment is a common thread running through everyone and everything in my life. My attachment to Johnny Stallings is the reason I am writing at this moment.

In my nosing it appears that many modern pundits think Blyth didn’t understand Zen or Haiku; the same charge is leveled at Watts and other famous English language interpreters of Chinese and Japanese literature, some of whom never even bothered to learn the original languages.

Harold Bloom, in a series of books beginning with The Anxiety of Influence, developed a theory that all reading is misreading. You can never actually know all the things an author knows, you can never embody the author’s experience, so you are necessarily misreading or mistranslating.

On a withered branch
A crow is perched
In the autumn evening
—Bashō

This Blyth translation brought to my mind a famous koan:

An old lady supports a monk and builds a meditation hut for him on her property. After 20 years or so, she decides to test his enlightenment. She instructs a beautiful young woman to embrace the monk and then ask him, “What now?” The young woman does as she is told and the monk says, “A withered tree grows on a cold rock in winter. Nowhere is there any warmth.” When the old lady hears this, she exclaims, “Twenty years of meditation and no loving kindness? Burn down the hut!”

A more recent translation of Bashō’s haiku by Andrew Fitzsimons would never have called up that koan:

On a leafless bough
The perching and pausing of a crow
The end of Autumn

Someone else would have to tell me which is the more accurate translation or which is the better poem.

In this haiku, one translator sees the crow perching on a withered branch and the other sees it perching and pausing on a leafless bough. As I write, I am seeing my own crow, and as you read, so are you. Even if we study the history of haiku and the history of Zen and the history of crows and branches, we will never see what Bashō saw back in the Japan of the 1600s, although we tell ourselves that we do.

Did the word “branch” call up that curious koan in your mind? Probably not.

I love this theory of misreading, although, of course, I am probably misreading Bloom.

Maybe Blyth misread the ancient poets, but those of us who encountered his many volumes on haiku and Zen in eastern and western culture when we were young (he finds haiku “embedded” in the western classics) are happy that he did. In his charming and glorious misreadings, he opened a door to a way of seeing, hearing, writing and interpreting that wouldn’t have existed without him. As is similarly true of Alan Watts, it seems probable to me that many of the pundits who sneer at the earlier popularizers of “eastern thought” owe their very interest, not to mention their careers, to these “influencers.”
______________________________________

Was R.H. Blyth a major influence in my life? Is he still? I would not have thought so, but…

Earlier I said that my own attitude about satori resonates with Blyth as reported by Watts. Is it possible that my hearing or mishearing of this quotation back in the 1960’s—before I had any involvement with Zen and before I had any acquaintance with Blyth’s writings—had a determining affect on the evolution of my thinking? Of my way of life? Certainly it has stayed with me through all these years.

And many haiku, encountered first in Blyth, have also been lifelong companions:

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!

You light the fire;
I’ll show you something nice—
A great ball of snow!

For you fleas too
The night must be long,
It must be lonely.

A red sky
For you snail;
Are you glad about it?

…and, oh, so many more.
————————————————————————

I confess I never thought much about the man whose writing had such an influence on my thinking. If anyone had asked I probably would have imagined him as a stereotypical Englishman of the early 20th Century, wearing a bowler hat and a suit and sharing with the Japanese a fondness for proper form and tea. What a superficial and chauvinistic person I am!

In this new book, Poetry and Zen, Letters and Uncollected Writings of R.H. Blyth, edited with an introduction by Norman Waddell, I encounter a sort of superhuman, who taught himself European and Asian languages (without the aid of the internet); who played a number of musical instruments as well as repairing and building organs; who worshipped Bach; who practiced serious Zen under a master’s guidance, wrote books, taught, and engaged with scholars, artists, and politicians. He was also a vegetarian and a pacifist and as a result was imprisoned during both World Wars. He is one of those intellectuals who seem to know about everything and are able to synthesize their knowledge and share it with wit and grace. He found the insight of Zen and haiku in the western canon, and was as likely to quote Jesus or Wordsworth as Basho. He had a friendly relationship with D. T. Suzuki, the foremost interpreter of Buddhism to the west in the first half of the 20th Century. Suzuki praised Blyth’s haiku translations as better than his own.

Blyth’s Zen teacher was Kayama Taigi Roshi. In a passage I love, he describes his teacher’s teishos (dharma talks):

I found them completely different from any Christian sermon I had ever heard. One thing I remember when I took sanzen with him. He told me not to smoke while I was taking a pee. This next teaching is a bit indelicate. He spoke about how you feel when after relieving your bowels your finger breaks through the toilet paper as you’re wiping yourself—and he said that when that happens you must focus with great intensity on that feeling…. I suppose he meant getting intimately in touch with your own essential filth. Having your fingers touching your own shit puts you in touch with the fundamental self.

I believe that going forward I will always think of that “breakthrough” of finger through toilet paper to shit as the quintessential evocation of Zen insight—insofar as I understand it.

Regarding his four volumes of Haiku through the seasons, the poet Allen Ginsberg “stressed to his class how fundamental those texts had been for the young poets [Snyder, Whalen, himself]—a bible, an encyclopedia, a primer in direct perception and use of concrete details, as well as in the mind that was still enough to catch these and the hand that was confident enough to set them down on paper.”

Since this is a wandering, formless essay, I’ll repeat the story here of how I once heard Ginsberg read at Cooper Union. At the back of the hall a commotion broke out and Ginsberg, from the stage asked what was going on. Someone said, “There’s a huge cockroach walking around here!” And Ginsberg said, “Let’s write a haiku about it!” and took suggestions from the audience and reworked and edited it—alas, I didn’t write it down.

So what could I say to summarize my experience, my life, with R.H. Blyth? As I think is clear from what I have already said, he was a wonderful companion and teacher of whom I was mostly unaware. In a Zen center where we had a bulletin board, I used to post a haiku every season; and my exercise was to read through the volume of the particular season we were in—occasionally straying. These volumes were just there—treasures of wisdom and delight, I assumed them the way I assumed the support of my parents without considering their human fullness. Now and then I wake up for a moment and gasp, “Did I thank my parents? Did I actually say the words to them, ‘Thank you’ ?” But I have so many supporters, lovers, parents, friends, blades of grass—These haiku, these tiny glimpses of eternity, remind me to be aware, to be grateful for all the treasures that surround me. Thank you, Dr. Blyth!

In Poetry and Zen (pp. 6-7, Shambhala. Kindle Edition), Blyth writes about the aim of life, so I’ll let that be the last word here:

The aim of life, its only aim, is to be free. Free of what? Free to do what? Only to be free, that is all. Free through ourselves, free through others; free to be sad, to be in pain; free to grow old and die. This is what our soul desires, and this freedom it must have; and shall have.

–Howard Thoresen

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 11/20/22
2022-11-20 15:00 - 17:00
Joy Harjo

Beloved Bibliophiles!

At our Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom gathering on November 20th, Katie Radditz, Martha Ragland, Elizabeth Domike and I talked about American Indian Authors and Culture. Martha read two poems by Joy Harjo, who was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2019-2022. She is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). Here are the poems:

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
I sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Suicide Watch
1.
I was on a train stopped sporadically at checkpoints.
What tribe are you, what nation, what race, what sex, what unworthy soul?
2.
I could not sleep, because I could not wake up.
No mirror could give me back what I wanted.
3.
I was given a drug to help me sleep.
Then another drug to wake up.
Then a drug was given to me to make me happy.
They all made me sadder.
4.
Death will gamble with anyone.
There are many fools down here who believe they will win.
5.
You know, said my teacher, you can continue to wallow, or
You can stand up here with me in the sunlight and watch the battle.
6.
I sat across from a girl whose illness wanted to jump over to me.
No! I said, but not aloud.
I would have been taken for crazy.
7.
We will always become those we have ever judged or condemned.
8.
This is not mine. It belongs to the soldiers who raped the young women on the Trail of Tears. It belongs to Andrew Jackson. It belongs to the missionaries. It belongs to the thieves of our language. It belongs to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It no longer belongs to me.
9.
I became fascinated by the dance of dragonflies over the river.
I found myself first there.
—Joy Harjo
*

Katie and Jude both had high praise for Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Katie recommended that we read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. She found this list of “10 Books by Indigenous Authors You Should Read” on the Literary Hub website:

Louise Erdrich, The Round House
Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
James Welch, Fools Crow
Janet Campbell Hale, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit
Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman
Paula Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows

For descriptions of the books, click here:

https://lithub.com/10-books-by-indigenous-authors-you-should-read/

Dave Duncan couldn’t come for Bibliophiles Unanimous!, but he sent the first two pages from My Indian Boyhood by Chief Luther Standing Bear, who was the boy Ota K’te (Plenty Kill). He said reading those two pages gave him a better perspective on the issue of sports teams using Indians and Indian themes as their mascots.

After the Zoom, Jude sent this:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I am thankful for all of you!

I’d like to add The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, to the list of Indigenous authors. I did just get it from the local bookstore and am about 75 pages into it and know it’s going to be great! But the person who recommended it to me told me to be sure and look in the back for the author’s (totally biased) (as she fully acknowledges) lists of favorite books. She divides the (voluminous) list into categories: Indigenous Lives, Indigenous Poetry, Sublime Books, Books for Banned Love, Ghost-Managing Book List, Short Perfect Novels, Incarceration (“The Sentence” has two meanings here)…etc. etc. It is a wonderful list!

Elizabeth shared this prose poem:

The White Paws

The fox with broken legs has a gift others do not. He removes his paws and they go walking through the woods at night alone. The paws stop to touch pondwater, to brush a blade of saltgrass. They tap the backs of passing beetles in the dark. At dawn, they return to the fox, whispering of rabbits curled in damp caverns, of green oak leaves and sand. The fox listens carefully; he gleans secrets of the world this way. He learns of the earth without lifting his nose from his long, broken limbs. Always, when the paws return they say we missed you, always he listens. How young, how simple they seem beside his face which is mottled and pocked. He gentles the paws like children. He hopes when he dies they live on without him. When his bones rattle and shake in wind, he hopes the paws walk through autumn leaves, pad softly through newfallen snow. He dreams they will drift across a black lake dappled with rain; that, above it, they’ll rise; they’ll glow like four pale moons.

—Dara Yen Elerath

Ken Margolis wasn’t able to come to the Zoom get together, but he sent this to me in an email:

It was about fifteen years ago, I guess, that the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation was founded. I was asked to help set up their operation, and worked with them on a part time basis for about a year and a half. Joy was on the board, and was the board member I got closest to. Joy is so attached to the earth, that if she jumped up, the earth would follow her. She’s a poet, singer, entertainer who is committed to her culture. I went to one of her shows in a tavern in Albuquerque. She told stories reside poems, chanted, and pretty soon a band came up, and it turned into music, kind of Indian jazz. My impression of Joy is that her life is a work of art.
*

I was in Mexico when we Zoomed. I talked about how, in my view, the distinction between “Native Americans” and “Mexicans” is an arbitrary one. Mexico is full of Indians! This is too big a subject to go into here, but another name for most Mexicans (and for most of the people in Central and South America is “Indians” or “Native Americans”—even though many Native Americans south of the Rio Grande speak and write Spanish and Portuguese, just as many Native Americans north of the Rio Grande speak and write English. (Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.)

After the Zoom was over, some other books by and about Native Americans came to my mind including:

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt
Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country by Jarold Ramsey
Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo
Naked Against the Rain: The People of the Lower Columbia River 1770-1830 by Rick Rubin
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda
Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains compiled by W. C. Vanderwerth
The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander
Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napolean

On the day after Thanksgiving, which on my calendar is designated Native American Heritage Day, I went to the library and found Joe Sacco’s book Paying the Land. I checked it out and read it. It’s great. It’s about the Dene people in the Northwest Territories. YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!

peace & love
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 11/15/22
2022-11-15 - 2022-12-14
Atmopadesha Satakam of Narayana Guru
Verse 5

Worldly people, having slept,
wake and think many thoughts,
Ever wakefully witnessing all this shines an unlit lamp,
Precious beyond words, that never fades;
Ever seeing this, one should go forward.

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

November 15, 2022

Johnny and Nancy are taking a break in their Guanajuato casita, so I am writing to you today from home in Portland. I love how your contributions of stories and poems have many creatures trotting through them. I have just returned from a drive through the middle of Oregon – walking in the Painted Hills, looking for the Honey Mushroom, learning some of our devastating past history and how small towns are redeeming some of it by what they save. People were kind, helpful, available all along the way. We waved and sent best wishes as we stopped on the Columbia banks near Two Rivers on the way home.

Rose this morning, to such a gorgeous day, leaves drifting down in a breeze like dry rain drops. The trees are trying to turn gold and red, but most are hanging onto summer greens. Even though it was freezing this morning! On my early morning walk, the lawns and meadows were bright white with frost. Still in the magic of it, I sense a sigh of relief in the air too now that voting is over and we are finding a new path forward.

Thay would have loved to read our newsletter too! Thank you for sharing your practice. In gratitude, Katie

A Brief Comment on This Month’s Cover
Atmopadesha Satakam, Verse 5

(Atmopadesha Satakam or “One Hundred Verses of Self-Instruction” is a wisdom text composed in the late 19th century by Narayana Guru, a contemplative master of the Advaita Vedanta tradition.)

Worldly people, having slept, wake and think many thoughts;
Ever wakefully witnessing all this shines an unlit lamp,
Precious beyond words, that never fades;
Ever seeing this, one should go forward.

This is a verse of practical instruction about the rhythm of psychological transformations that all people undergo on a daily basis. Emerging from a deep slumber, where there is no thought, we find ourselves either in a dream state, with its fantastic contents, or we wake up and encounter a physical world, one which triggers a stream of related thoughts, imaginations and memories. Our thoughts come in an endless, seemingly irresistible flow, one after the other, sometimes through association with other thoughts, and sometimes just “out of the blue”. Our thoughts are pleasurable or painful or neutral, and they shape our lives for good or ill, seemingly often without our consent or control. As the Buddha noticed centuries ago in the Dhammapada: “what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday…our life is the creation of our mind.” We experience our thoughts sequentially, but if we could somehow step back and visualize an entire day’s worth of thoughts, they might collectively resemble a cloud of birds or school of fish, with individual perceptions, conceptions and imaginations sometimes strongly but often barely related with one another. After a period of busy mental activity, our energy is spent, sleep eventually returns and the cloud of thoughts subsides.

Narayana Guru doesn’t say that we should manage or suppress our thoughts or aim to improve them; instead he makes a simple observation: thoughts are objects of a pre-existing self-founded awareness, without which they could never arise. Here he paints the metaphoric picture of a lamp, perhaps the kind of hanging oil lamp with cotton wicks familiar to people in South India. The lamp is unlit, and “never shall go out again”. Interestingly, light itself is invisible, as is awareness. The Guru identifies this light, this awareness, as the very basis of thought and our fundamental nature.

This basic observation can help us recognize that we contain what the Buddhist meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa called “a source of tremendous sanity”. “Ever seeing this”, becoming familiar with this truth and cultivating an identity with this simple awareness, can place our thoughts, whatever they may be, in an entirely new and peaceful context. It’s a powerful mode of practice.

– Andy Larkin

The Moth Vote

No more streetlights! (Let them all go dark).
We will have the moon. The minnow vote:
No more herons! We will glitter free.
Rivers agree: Go around the opposition.
Butterflies in solidarity: Don’t pin us down.
Skunk’s campaign slogan: It makes scents.
The race for top turtle got off to a slow start:
Easy does it. In the possum campaign, scandal
got no traction: We all sleep around. Nail-biter?
Cliff-hanger, dead-heat, re-count, run-off?
That’s the law of tooth and claw. But in
the end, mud won by a landslide.

– Kim Stafford

The World Calls to Us

An owl cuts wild ascents and swoops against the dusk
as plaintive hooting rises out of the surrounding woods—
night’s denizens alive on our hillside.
One evening with light shadowing the Coast Range
a great horned owl stood at the top of a Douglas Fir,
commanding the view—still, so still—staring at us.
No other sounds, no other birds on the currents, simply the one owl,
an envoy of import speaking clearly. He rose and left, stately
and languidly, only to come later in the same tree with the same call.
Another time we heard wings glide through the air,
angle lower, fly closely overhead, soft underside
gleaming white, and disappear silently into the twilight.
Owls are Athena’s animal, symbol of haughty wisdom
like the goddess herself, fierce raptors bringing insight
and the gift of clarity, however mysterious.
They come to warn of deception or lies, they come
to prepare us for death, the great departure, they come
as a call to our quickening pulse, our bowed heads.

– Debbie Buchanan

Field Notes on Owls

We hear the owl call every night – sometimes the Great Horned sometimes the Barred Owl (I like to think of her as the Bard of our neighborhood.) Their hoots are distinctive and it feels like they call good night to us as well as to the creatures they may be hunting. Because I don’t have a church nearby or a land line phone, I don’t have a bell sounding randomly near by. I now like to think of the Owl as the bell, reminding me to breathe, to inter-be with all that is inside and out, and be present to the wonder of being alive in this cosmos.

We also hear the geese day and night calling to one another, or calling for us to look up, as they migrate. It makes me wonder about the owls who seem to stay. Do they migrate? Do they hibernate? What happens to them during the winter? Amazed that I know so little about my neighbors, I looked up these questions. So a bit of fascinating science: Owls basically do neither. Owls have no need to hibernate. Their bodies are uniquely adapted to survive harsh temperatures, making it easier for them to deal with the cold and even hunt down prey when there’s snow. For the most part, owls do not have a need to migrate either. They also don’t have the innate instinct to migrate that several bird species have. However, some species of owls do engage in movement during the winter.

When owls move, they are moving due to a lack of food in the area and are hunting for more accessible and abundant prey to catch. This behavior is known as irruption. A new word to me! I hope you can hear owls where you are and will stop to listen and breathe and be filled with wonder for being alive.

– Katie Radditz

Perceiving the Presence:

This may be a practice for me to work on, being open to become aware of the presence of another. The idea expands to develop awareness of the Source of Life in Nature around me, a more general awareness, I suspect. . . . .Why or how could any of us human beings, or any beings anywhere merit the attention, let alone the presence of the Source of Life; why should any of us “blips” matter? Yet, I hope that I, we – all of us, do some how, that it is possible to stand in the Presence.

(to Michael, question of the ages, contemplation of the sages. And yet, here we are ALIVE and co-creating together, conscious and mindful. Per haps we are experiencing this presence right now. Thank you for the ques tion and for your generous letter from which I could only take a portion for this week. -Katie)

Up Against the Wall

We all hit walls in our lives. Sometimes they seem to rise out of nowhere, catching us by surprise. And others we “saw” them coming and still ran flat-faced into another wall. . . . When we stop running we have time to look up and see how vast the starry sky, the galaxy, even the universe. Until we do there’s just forward and back, lost in the darkness, running. It’s in the stop where all comes clear. It’s in the stop we connect with NOW. It’s in the stop we pause to breathe. . . Look up! Revel in your place. Smile. Be aware. You’re here NOW. Exactly where you need to be. Be here, now, fully your self, in this moment.

– Michel Deforge

Sonoran Desert

Little lizard curves left,
eyes leading as he leans
into the air,
smells caught
on flickering tongue,
toes twitching.
Movement ripples
through the ground,
little lizard,
denizen of desert and stone,
hot sand and red cliffs
stops a moment, shudders
and disappears into the chaparral.

– Debbie Buchanan

Johnny Writes:

We all use the first person pronoun “I” every day. What does it refer to?

The first answer that comes to mind is: “The guy sitting here typing this: Johnny Stallings.” But who or what is Johnny Stallings? And can the “I” refer to something bigger? Here are two entries from Encyclopædia Jonnica:

Johnny Stallings. A fictional character. As Shakespeare said: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” I spend a certain amount of time pretending to be Johnny Stallings. If I don’t, who will? A lot of the time, though, I feel no such responsibility or obligation.

Stillness. Awake and alert, when thought and language fall away, a lovely state of serenity ensues, to which there is no boundary. Indescribable.

Advaita Vedantins speak of a universal Self that is the self of everyone. Buddhists say there is no self. Growing up, as we learn language and create an identity, we construct a self. Actors mysteriously become all kinds of people from play to play. How do they do that? Does the “I” of “I had an idea” refer to the same thing as the “I” of “I mowed the lawn”?

Walt Whitman has inspired me to imagine what “I” might mean in more fluid ways. Who or what exactly is the self of his great poem “Song of Myself”? Here are some lines to ponder from his poem:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. [1]

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise….
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.
I resist any thing better than my own diversity, [16]

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less….
I know I am deathless….
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself [20]

Walt Whitman, a kosmos….
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from…
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds….
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy [24]

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me….
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me [25]

All truths wait in all things….
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps, [30]

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over….
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes [31]

Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest….
I am the hounded slave….
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person….
I take part, I see and hear the whole [33]

I….Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,
See myself in prison shaped like another man….
Not a youngster is taken in larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp [37]

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself. [40]

Immense have been the preparations for me….
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings….
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb [44]

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is….
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass [48]

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me….
I do not know it—it is without name—it is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. [50]

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) [51]

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” [52]

If Walt Whitman’s I is so variegated and vast—what about yours and mine?

-“Johnny Stallings”

A Lion’s Pride

The lion asked the leopard, “May I have a spot?” But the leopard sneered and scoffed, “Surely I think not!”
So the lion went on his way, his head held high in pride, looking for acceptance, with purpose in his stride.
The lion then asked Cheetah, “may I borrow some of your speed?” But the cheetah sped into the distance and ignored the lion’s need.
The lion asked Hyena, “Will you teach me any tricks?” But the hyena only laughed and giggled while licking at his lips. So the lion went on his way again, his head held high in pride, looking for acceptance, with purpose in his stride.
The Lion then came to a pool where the other lions drank; he sat down most unhappy to think upon the bank.
He looked around while waiting for his anger to subside, and saw each and every lion brimming full of pride.
It was then that Lion rose in the epiphany of thought, and sped his way through the other lions at a slow but steady trot.
He licked his lips and giggled, while letting out a roar, for in his pride he found acceptance and was wanting of no more.

– Joshua Barnes
(I wrote my story of the lion to my baby niece and nephew. My first short story poem. Let me know what you think; I’d love the feedback.)

The Order of Interbeing

Thich Nhat Hanh’s largest sangha, that includes all of us practitioners, is called the Order of Interbeing. He would like to include the verb Inter-Be into the dictionary so that we can refer to ourselves as interbeings. We inter-are with everything that is, a huge but subtle difference from “we are all connected.” It’s expansive and freeing – like a response to Walt Whitman. When I grasp this, it opens my heart to the beings around me – the lion, the owl, the hummer, the lizard, the moth. It can move me from awareness to compassion, beyond the I that is doing anything. The following is my favorite writing by Thay, especially nice to read when you are holding and looking at a piece of paper. I am picturing you, poets all, now wherever you are reading.

– Katie

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.”

– Thích Nhất Hạnh

Look Deeply into Your Perceptions

#154 Thich Nhat Hanh, Your True Home

“In most cases, our perceptions are inaccurate, and we suffer because we are too sure of them. Look at your perceptions and smile to them. Breathe, look deeply into their nature, and you will see that there are many errors in them. For example, that person you are thinking about has no desire to harm you, but you think that he does. It is important not to be a victim of your false perceptions. If you are a victim of your false perceptions, you will suffer a lot. You have to sit down and look at perceptions very calmly. You have to look into the deepest part of their nature in order to detect what is false about them.”

I must realize that this is a difficult one for me, because I see that just one or two months ago I wrote about Learning to Release our own Views. Ummm Hmmm.

Do I ever ‘sit down and look at perceptions very calmly’? Do I ever ‘look into the deepest part of their nature’? The more accurate question would be ‘Do I Listen to and Look more deeply into my (right wing/conservative) neighbor’s perceptions in order to discover flaws in my own perceptions? HOW CAN I? I ask you, when his comments are constantly peppered with ‘facts’ about 2000 mules, and massive voter fraud, and Democratic pedophilia…what does looking deeply into inaccuracies in my own perceptions accomplish? I’m looking squarely at the ‘inaccuracies’ in his perceptions. Sorry, but that’s the way I see it, at least in terms of politics.

Fortunately, I can leave that on the doorstep and appreciate him for being the friendly, helpful neighbor that he is. We share vegetables and garden tools and advice; he helps us with our interminable irrigation problems; and, most importantly, without our feeble requesting, he regularly clears our driveway of mounds of snow with his massive snowplowing vehicle.

So when I look deeply into my perceptions, I have to admit that my neighbor is a pretty fine person…and that my perceptions are inaccurate.

– Jude Russell

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: Neruda, Mistral, García Márquez, et cetera 11/6/22
2022-11-06 15:00 - 17:00
Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriela Mistral

Pablo Neruda

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, November 6th, at 3 pm (PST), our topic will be: Neruda, Mistral, García Márquez, et cetera. We’ll talk about our favorite Spanish language authors, including these three Nobel Prize winners, read poems, and so on.

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

paz, amor y felicidad
Juanito en Guanajuato

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 10/15/22
2022-10-15 - 2022-11-14
photo by Kim Stafford

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

October 15, 2020

Why the Beach?

Half the horizon is ancient: no wires, no roads, no
development. Maybe a boat out there tracing lonesome.
Waves make a roar, a whisper, a heartbeat. People
are here to be here. They walk barefoot, like children.
Children run wild. Weather rules it all. Something
bigger is in charge of you. And every night, she
reasserts her sovereignty. And every night, she
cleans up. Yesterday’s tracks are gone, even
the dance of a dog’s joy. Lots of soaring goes on—
gulls, crows, pelicans, maybe a kite, maybe your gaze,
your spirit spiraling the sky. Each day an old man
walks to pick up litter. Each day an old woman walks
to find the perfect stone. You can walk without a plan.
You can sing the wind. You can cry in peace. You can
remember being small. You can be small beside immensity.
You can be the simple you. When you said, “I’m
going to the beach,” no one said, “Why?”

—Kim Stafford
*

#321 Be There For Breakfast

“”When you eat your breakfast, even if it is just a small bite early in the morning, eat in such a way that freedom is possible While eating breakfast, don’t think of the future, of what you are going to do. Your practice is to simply eat breakfast. Your breakfast is there for you; you have to be there for your breakfast. You can chew each morsel of food with joy and freedom.” Thich Nhat Hanh (from Your True Home)

A few years ago I was hiking with several women friends, and they were talking about a streamlined new model of a Vitamix blender/food processor. “You can put anything in there to make a breakfast smoothie,” they said. “Kale, arugula, garlic, blueberries, yogurt, zucchini, ice cream…you name it. All these good -for-you foods blended so you can’t taste a thing except something like a sort of vanilla milkshake flavor. Better yet, you can just drink it down in a minute and be out the door!”

I thought about that for a minute, kind of confused, and said, “But I like to CHEW my food!” And it’s true; I love the squish of blueberries and the crunch of an almond and the squeeze of a raisin and the creamy splash of almond milk — well, you get the picture.

Plus it’s about fifteen minutes of time when I don’t have to do anything except eat food. Nor do I do much talking to my husband when I am eating breakfast, because that can totally suck away my concentration, my attention to that luscious bowl of cereal and fruit and nuts.

I might have trouble paying attention to a number of other things in life, but paying attention to breakfast is not one of them.

—Jude Russell
*

I love Thomas Traherne. I often start my day by reading his poems and meditations. Here are a couple of his meditations:

48
Love is so divine and perfect a thing, that it is worthy to be the very end and being of the Deity. It is His goodness, and it is His glory. We therefore so vastly delight in Love, because all these excellencies and all other whatsoever lie within it. By Loving a Soul does propagate and beget itself. By Loving it does dilate and magnify itself. By Loving it does enlarge and delight itself. By Loving also it delighteth others, as by Loving it doth honor and enrich itself. But above all by Loving it does attain itself. Love also being the end of Souls, which are never perfect till they are in act what they are in power. They were made to love, and are dark and vain and comfortless till they do it. Till they love they are idle, or mis-employed. Till they love they are desolate; without their objects, and narrow and little, and dishonorable: but when they shine by Love upon all objects, they are accompanied with them and enlightened by them. Till we become therefore all Act as God is, we can never rest, nor ever be satisfied.

49
Love is so noble that it enjoyeth others’ enjoyments, delighteth in giving all unto its object, and in seeing all given to its object. So that whosoever loveth all mankind, he enjoyeth all the goodness of God to the whole world: and endeavoreth the benefit of Kingdoms and Ages, with all whom He is present by Love, which is the best manner of presence that is possible.

(from Centuries of Meditations, Second Century)

peace, love & happiness to y’all
—Johnny
*

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful.
And then it’s amazing again. And
in between the amazing and the awful
it’s ordinary and mundane and routine.
Breathe in the amazing, hold on through
the awful, and relax and exhale during
the ordinary. That’s just living
heart-breaking, soul-healing, amazing,
awful, ordinary life. And it’s
breathtakingly beautiful.

—LR Knost, from The Idealist Facebook page, sent by Jason Beito
*

Ashes and mist,
Memories and smiles,
Tears.
Unexpected joy,
Acceptance and fate
Fulfilled.
So much gained,
out of a life lost,
Understanding.
Good times echo,
Bad times too,
Togetherness.
The love we all
Have,
Is never ending,
It has no boundaries,
And if there are boundaries,
Love breaks them all.

Love you mom.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

Here are some excerpts from Michel Deforge’s meditation journal. The numbers refer to meditations in Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh.

September 5, 2022 #353 Why Hurry to the Grave?

This is a curious question. I wonder…how many of us are hurrying towards the final conclusion? It’s kind of a cop-out—to run pell mell ahead towards an obvious end. Some cheat and check out early. Some live life at an aggressive pace, most failing to participate in the few brief precious moments as they fly by. It’s almost as if they are in a hurry to find out what’s next. Which would be great, except for one thing. No one has reliably and credibly done so and revealed what is the next step after death. So, why hurry?

More importantly: why not slow down and enjoy the moments we have NOW? Is it not in our best interest to not only live a rich, textured, deeply rewarding life, one where it is possible to savor each moment, instead of scratching our noggins wondering, “What just happened? Was I there?” It is certainly possible to live robustly and not have clue one what going on, or why. Many do this, or hope/believe they do. I propose that the age-old addage “stop and smell the roses” was coined by one who realized life was warping past him and, somehow, this was the cause of life’s dissatisfaction. For a moment, maybe, he did settle and renewed his energy, vitality, spirit, inner self/being. We too can do this with mindfulness practices—simply focusing on the relaxing act of breathing and allowing awareness to expand and welcome everything.

September 7, 2022 #355 Your Suffering Needs You

Thây aks us to think of suffering as a pet, one needing attention. I like this. Wouldn’t any compassionate being attend to the needs of an animal (pet) which could not attend to its own needs? Of course. Look at all the people up in arms about having pets (and children) unattended in hot summer cars (ovens). I think it’s possible to do better for our own suffering. I’ve seen lately, having created anxiety for myself over an aversion I developed, that suffering is self-imposed. No one creates suffering for me. Suffering occurs as part of my response to events, regardless of who initiated the events. Suffering is merely a state of mind—one way of seeing events unfold, never as they are. Suffering is self-inflicted, by choice. (Active or passive, known or unknown.) We can end it any time with a different choice.

But, Thây here is asking us to “take care of” self. It’s more than your suffering that needs attending. We also have bodies, minds, sensations, emotions: these all will benefit from attention and compassionate treatment. It is so very easy to get tied up chasing life experiences that a time out to care for mind and body are either neglected entirely, or provided only cursory attention to resolve immediate needs. For example, a “quick shower,” a “brief meditation,” a “hasty meal. I’m not suggesting that we always drop everything (frequently) and take a “spa day.” Yet…what would it hurt to have a regular mindfulness practice of more than 5-15 minutes? Or, to plan a soothing hot shower, maybe after a rigorous physical exertion. (We don’t have bathing tubs or I’d suggest a long hot soak!) A mindfulness practice is not just the time spent sitting on a cushion in meditation practice—it’s more than this. I see an opportunity to bring awareness (even if informally) to any thing I do….

September 8, 2022 #356 The Buddha’s Highest Teaching

This is an idea for which I have little to say. Maybe that’s good. In the end, each of us must find our own way. Whatever path (or stage of the same one) we are on, it is the personal decision that commits to and follows the path. Our only certainty is that, at some future point, the road will end for each of us, or we’ll transition to another “plane” to continue our journey—no one really knows.

Pain, although unpleasant at the time, is important. It reminds us to be present NOW. Nothing keeps me focused on the present like pain. If I don’t attend to NOW, looking ahead or behind too much, pain will happen and bring me back to this. Pain—temporary discomfort to sharp, searing, stabbing fire—is only temporary. The challenge I faced this past operation [for a hip replacement] is to welcome pain as the friend it is, instead of an enemy to be feared. Pain reminded me to breathe. It was a stream I had to pass (wade) through—one which I could not go around. The only way is through, with breathing.

Pain is our teacher, providing experiences of what to do/not do—essentially teaching each of us attentiveness to NOW. Some lessons are unavoidable. They make us more resilient when other pains arrive. Still, it’s: “Just breathe!” That’s the solution. Pray, chant mantra, meditate, exercise, move with purpose and extreme focus—be in the “flow”—all of this in preparation for attention to NOW. When I lose my NOW-focus, pain isn’t far behind to bring me back home. Maybe that’s Thây’s, or the Buddha’s, point: we’re never too far away that we can’t get back with a breath or two.

September 9, 2022 The Simple Act of Walking

I’ve oft heard others grouse that “back in the olde days” life was more…(whatever they miss). But what if what we miss is the relaxed pace of life? The solution is simple—become a Luddite! No! Walk!

As one who recently was restored to the gift of walking, relatively pain-free—(my second surgery now looms)—I realize I forgot how wonderful walking can be. Although I am limited to a 1/16 mile concrete track/walkway—(check TRCI out at Google Earth)—being able to walk for any length of time is a treat. Now I can stroll, or meander, get some exercise, or just stand outside and breathe….

Walking takes time. As a result, life operates at a slower pace. Yet we yearn for this pace.

The solution is easy: Walk more! Make it a choice, preferably a happy one. Revel in your ability to stroll, promenade, wander, roam. Breathe. Smile. Be aware of your surroundings. And above all, enjoy a walk! Do it for me!!

—Michel Deforge
*

October 10, 2022

Today is the recognition and celebration of Native Americans, known now as Indigenous People’s Day. This is only the second year our state has officially designated the second Monday in October for this holiday. It is not only an honoring of Native American’s past but a pause for the present and future generations suffering from loss of lives and language and culture and years of institutional oppression.

Driving out to Two Rivers has become a meditation for me on the presence of these ancestors and those still here struggling. The Columbia River and the expanse of the Gorge time-worn hills has a way of making my heart and mind expand with spaciousness. Passing through Celilo and Umatilla and further on toward Joseph or Warm Springs we know so many stories and become affected once again by their stories. Their present story is more than casinos or being devastated by past trauma. Oregon has many Indigenous communities across the state; it is home to nine federally recognized tribes, mostly confederated which include many tribes. Native organizations and communities now partner with their own voices and their own leaders, with a variety of cultural centers from universities to Arts Councils.

As part of our mindfulness community, we can share a sacred practice in the Buddhist tradition, called Touching the Earth. Its focus is on spiritual awareness, recognizing and connecting with our ancestors of our blood family, our spiritual family, and our ancestors of this land.

Here are Thay’s words for touching our ancestors of this place we live. To begin, you might want to make an altar with something from your blood ancestors or spiritual ancestors, and something from the earth. Take a few breaths in and out. Feel your feet, or your whole body lying down—supported by the Earth. Feel the spaciousness of your mind and heart, as we practice for our own understanding of interbeing and for peace for all beings.

From Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Creating True Peace:

“In gratitude, I bow to this land and all of the ancestors who made it available.”

(Sound a bell if you have something at hand, or maybe hum a deep tune, then touch the earth.)

“I see that I am whole, protected, and nourished by this land and all of the living beings who have been here and made life easy and possible for me through all their efforts. I see Chief Seattle, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the others known and unknown. I see all those who have made this country a refuge for people of so many origins and colors, by their talent, perseverance, and love—those who have worked hard to build schools, hospitals, bridges, and roads, to protect human rights, to develop science and technology, and to fight for freedom and social justice. I see myself touching my ancestors of Native American origin who have lived on this land for such a long time and known the ways to live in peace and harmony with nature, protecting the mountains, forests, animals, vegetation, and minerals of this land. I feel the energy of this land penetrating my body and soul, supporting and accepting me. I vow to cultivate and maintain this energy and transmit it to future generations. I vow to contribute my part in transforming the violence, hate, and delusion that still lie deep in the collective consciousness of this society so that future generations will have more safety, joy, and peace. I ask this land for its protection and support.”

Thank you for your practice and may we become more Native to this place as our Mindfulness evolves,

with love,
—Katie Radditz
*

Prayer For the Great Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

after a Mohawk prayer.

—Gary Snyder (sent by Jeffrey Sher)

I have always experienced this poem as a meditation though I do not have a formal practice. The sense of gratitude pervades my life: I look out my kitchen window and witness a hummingbird feeding on the last of the hot lips salvia and am filled with awe and gratitude. Taking a shower and having the luxury of clean hot water and once again I feel a deep sense gratitude. I think of the wonderful friends I have been fortunate to have over the years and am flooded with gratitude. There are so many moments in life that are worthy of a moment’s reflection upon how fortunate most of us are. Gratitude is the response to the gift we have been given.

—Jeffrey Sher

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 10/9/22
2022-10-09 15:00 - 17:00
Emily Dickinson

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, October 9th, at 3 pm, we will gather together on Zoom once again to enjoy MORE POETRY. Bring some poems that you would like to read.

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 10/6/22
2022-10-06 - 2022-11-02
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

October 6, 2022

Amanda Waldroupe gave permission to reprint this article that was published by The Guardian (theguardian.com/us) on September 28, 2022.

The story of one US governor’s historic use of clemency: ‘We are a nation of second chances’
Amanda Waldroupe

Last October, Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, signed an executive order granting clemency to 73 people who had committed crimes as juveniles, clearing a path for them to apply for parole.
The move marked the high point in a remarkable arc: as Brown approaches the end of her second term in January, she has granted commutations or pardons to 1,147 people – more than all of Oregon’s governors from the last 50 years combined.
The story of clemency in Oregon is one of major societal developments colliding: the pressure the Covid-19 pandemic put on the prison system and growing momentum for criminal justice reform.
It’s also a story of a governor’s personal convictions and how she came to embrace clemency as a tool for criminal justice reform and as an act of grace, exercising the belief that compassionate mercy and ensuring public safety are not mutually exclusive.
“If you are confident that you can keep people safe, you’ve given victims the opportunity to have their voices heard and made sure their concerns are addressed, and individuals have gone through an extensive amount of rehabilitation and shown accountability, what is the point of continuing to incarcerate someone, other than retribution?” Brown said in a June interview.
Notable clemency acts
When Brown, a Democrat, became governor in Oregon in 2015, she received the power of executive clemency – an umbrella term referring to the ability of American governors and the president to grant mercy to criminal defendants. Clemency includes pardons, which fully forgive someone who has committed a crime; commutations, which change prison sentences, often resulting in early release; reprieves, which pause punishment; and eliminating court-related fines and fees.
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Brown was one of 18 governors across the US who used clemency to quickly reduce prison populations in the hopes of curbing virus transmission.
She approved the early release of 963 people who had committed nonviolent crimes and met six additional criteria – not enough, according to estimates by the state’s department of corrections, to enable physical distancing, and far less than California, which released about 5,300 people, and New Jersey, which released 40% of its prison population.
But Brown’s clemency acts stand out in other ways. Brown removed one year from the sentences of 41 prisoners who worked as firefighters during the 2020 wildfire season, the most destructive in Oregon history.
She has pardoned 63 people. Most notably, she has commuted the sentences of 144 people convicted of crimes as serious as murder, yet have demonstrated “extraordinary evidence of rehabilitation”.
Democratic and Republican governors in North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas and Ohio have granted clemency for similar reasons. Yet Brown’s numbers are among the highest in the US, and the impact of her decisions are profound: Oregon’s prison population declined for the first time since the passage of the state’s Measure 11 mandatory minimum sentencing law in 1994.
Measure 11 codified mandatory sentences for 16 violent crimes, required juveniles over the age of 15 charged with those crimes to be tried as adults, and ended earned time. Since its passage, Oregon’s prison population tripled to nearly 15,000 people and three new prisons were built.
Brown also stands out for who she grants clemency to. Forty per cent of Brown’s commutations are Black, in response to Black Oregonians being incarcerated at a rate five times higher than their share of the state’s population. Nearly two dozen other clemency recipients were convicted as juveniles. Many were sentenced to life without parole and other lengthy sentences.
‘Eradicating racism and colonialism’
Brown’s acts reflect the governor’s values and beliefs. She accepts research in adolescent development showing people are not fully mature until their mid-20s. She was the first Oregon governor to visit the state’s women’s prison. She believes people are not defined by their worst acts and are capable of redemption. “We are a nation of second chances,” she said.
A voracious reader, she cited books such as Just Mercy, The New Jim Crow, The Other Wes Moore, and Picking Cotton as influences. Before holding elected office, Brown worked as a lawyer representing families and children in the foster care system, as well as people who violated their parole. She says she has always opposed Measure 11 as “a one-size-fits-all approach” that eliminated a judge’s ability to consider “facts and underlying circumstances of individual cases”.
George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 further galvanized her in “eradicating racism and colonialism” in Oregon, she said. (The state’s first constitution made it illegal for Black people to live on or own property in Oregon.)
Brown’s use of clemency is “well within established tradition”, said Rachel Barkow, a professor at NYU School of Law and an expert on clemency.
The use of clemency has been virtually non-existent since the “tough on crime” movement began in the 1980s, coinciding with Willie Horton committing rape while on furlough.
But for much of history, presidents and governors regularly used clemency. Governors cited a prisoner’s “exceptional rehabilitation” or, in exposing wrongful convictions, listed witness recantation, flawed evidence and police misconduct. “For one abuse of the pardon power,” a 1911 Colorado Board of Pardon report noted, “there are a thousand abuses of the convicting power.”
Alexander Hamilton argued in The Federalist Papers that clemency is a necessary check on a justice system capable of leveling excessive punishment. Without clemency, he argued, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel”.
The push to curb Covid-19 via clemency eclipsed another, growing movement. In August 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a campaign urging governors to use clemency as a “corrective tool” to mass incarceration.
‘We’ve educated her’
Brown slowly became emboldened due to the work of a progressive lawyer and the legal clinic she directs.
Aliza Kaplan, a lawyer and professor of lawyering at Lewis & Clark Law School, founded the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic in 2015 to provide pro bono legal services to criminal defendants. By then, Kaplan was well-known in criminal justice circles for co-founding the New England Innocence Project and working as the deputy director of the National Innocence Project. In 2011, she moved to Oregon to join Lewis & Clark. Within years, in addition to starting the clinic, she helped launch an innocence project, an organization challenging bad forensic evidence, and another within the public defender’s office assisting people after their incarceration.
“I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t believe people change and redemption isn’t possible,” Kaplan said. “That’s too cruel of a world for me.”
The clinic launched its clemency project in 2016. Knowing Brown’s legal background, Kaplan and Venetia Mayhew, the project’s first staff attorney, decided that the first applicants would be women, people convicted as juveniles, and those convicted of violent crimes and serving long prison sentences – people who, Kaplan said, “committed horrible crimes but have transformed”.
Mayhew interviewed clients at Oregon’s prisons, wrote applications and oversaw clinic students assigned to applications. Clients “understood they had to talk about the crime and what they are most ashamed of”, Mayhew said. “It was all about building trust. I spent time with them, got to know them.” At the same time, Kaplan took members of Brown’s staff to Oregon’s prisons to meet clients and other prisoners.
The clinic’s applications are unique. They are narratives, drawn from interviews, trial records, police reports, and prison records, telling the story of a client’s life from childhood up to the crime, their trial, incarceration and work to change. “It’s not about blaming their history or background, it’s part of understanding who they are,” Kaplan said. “The legal system leaves out a lot of the personal stuff.” The applications include photos, the applicant’s résumé, and letters from family, friends, correction officers, employers and volunteers.
The clinic’s early efforts were hit or miss. During her first three years in office, Brown granted two pardons and one commutation. “It was heartbreaking,” Mayhew remembered. “I felt like a snake oil salesman, peddling hope.”
In 2018, Brown’s numbers ticked up: she granted three commutations to people convicted as juveniles.
In 2019, Kaplan and Mayhew published an article built from Mayhew’s research of every Oregon governor’s clemency acts, proving clemency was not rare: governors regularly released up to a third of Oregon’s prison population, recognized rehabilitation and corrected wrongful convictions.
That year, Brown commuted a murder conviction for the first time, in the case of a woman sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 25 years, a sentence both the judge and prosecutor thought too harsh.
After that, Brown’s clemency numbers shot up: in 2020, she granted 65 pardons and commutations; in 2021, she granted 36.
Brown approves approximately 7% of the applications her office receives. The clinic’s success rate is far higher: 45 of 179 applications have been approved (an additional 116 are pending; 18 have been denied).
Each application tells an individual story. Collectively, they exposed systemic inequities: of people who were exposed to drugs as children, endured child abuse, neglect and sexual abuse, or became inescapably entrenched in gangs.
“We’ve educated her,” Kaplan reflected. “But she already had it in her.”
Making the world a better place
Over time, Brown and her legal counsel have created a six-month process to winnow out all but the 10% of applications that reach Brown’s desk.
Brown’s decisions, she said, do not result from satisfying a checklist, but a “totality of circumstances”. Applicants’ expressions of accountability and remorse are critical. “It’s not just ‘I understand, and I regret, and I feel remorse’,” Brown said. “How is that lived? What are the actions to show that?”
She values a “lifetime commitment” to community service, inspired by her mother’s decades of volunteering for the American Cancer Society. It is proof applicants “understand what they have done and are committed to making the world a better place”, Brown argued.
Brown also gives a lot of weight to applicants’ plans post-release.
“They want him to succeed if she grants it,” Kaplan said. Kaplan spoke via telephone with a clinic alumna, now working as a public defender, on an early June afternoon. Brown’s counsel requested a more detailed release plan – a strong sign the application is moving forward.
The application was open on Kaplan’s laptop. Beyond her laptop, taped to a window in her office, a piece of paper reads “Imagine”. Another, at her office entrance, says “Empathy”.
Leaning forward toward the phone, Kaplan rattled off potential questions: family he could live with, jobs he wants to apply for, exercise. “The more detail, the more we can show what his life could be like,” she said.
A release plan, submitted in July, included information about plans to join a gym to work out and play pickup basketball games for stress relief, living with two relatives, and applying for jobs at a nearby ferry.
If the application makes it to Brown’s desk, it will receive thorough consideration. She is known to read the applications carefully. “They’re incredibly extensive,” the governor said.
“How do you plan to deal with your sobriety?” Brown said at an interview with one of the clinic’s clients in 2020. “What kind of job do you want to get?”
When the interview ended, Brown granted the client clemency.
Everyone present began crying, Kaplan remembered.
Inspiring hope
Brown says her clemency acts are “part and parcel” of recent criminal justice reforms in Oregon.
In 2020, Brown supported the end of non-unanimous jury decisions in criminal cases when she signed on to a brief, written by Kaplan, urging such a move in the US supreme court case Ramos v Louisiana. In doing so, she opposed her own state justice department. (Oregon and Louisiana were the two states left using such juries, which convict criminal defendants without a unanimous vote and have racist origins.)
In recent years, the Oregon legislature passed laws redefining aggravated murder and restricting death penalty eligibility, broadening expungement and allowing district attorneys and defendants to petition to change a prison sentence.
In 2019, legislation gutting Measure 11’s provisions relating to juvenile offenders passed, in recognition of supreme court rulings, based on decades of research in adolescent development, ending harsh sentences for people under 18.
Brown made that law retroactive when, last October, she signed the executive order commuting the sentences of 73 juvenile offenders. They “are capable of tremendous transformation”, Brown wrote, citing research in adolescent development.
It wasn’t the first time clemency was used to make a law retroactive: in 1974, the legislature passed a new criminal code, and the then-governor, Tom McCall, commuted the sentences of 48 people to prevent “disparity” and “unequal treatment”.
Brown’s executive order prompted a firestorm of media coverage. The fiercest response came from Kevin Mannix, a lawyer, former Republican state legislator, and author of Measure 11. Representing two district attorneys and three crime victims, Mannix sued Brown in January, attempting to overturn the group commutations related to Covid-19, the firefighters and the executive order.
“The governor is not the super legislature,” Mannix argued in a June interview. He said the “process” dictates the governor not “decide on a broad brush”, and that “the victim is heard and the district attorney is heard”.
Mannix thinks “there may be individual cases” where prisoners show rehabilitation. “I don’t want to say no one is capable of rehabilitation,” he said. But those convicted of violent crimes, he believes, should be “incapacitated” and “taken off the streets”.
The lawsuit and local media coverage galvanized criticism from district attorneys that Brown’s decisions lack transparency and that she is disregarding crime victims. State law requires district attorneys to keep victims apprised of defendants’ appeals, as well as submit statements to the governor’s office in response to clemency applications.
Brown has acknowledged victims of violent crime are “traumatized – sometimes violently and irreparably”. Her office recently hired a victim’s advocate to work directly with victims. Her clemency reports also reveal that not all victims oppose clemency: some are neutral, while others are supportive. Victims opposed to clemency “have been given more attention in the press”, said Mary Zinkin, founder and executive director of the Portland-based Center for Trauma Support Services. “They do not represent all crime survivors.”
Due to the controversy, Kaplan and Mayhew regularly receive hate mail. Soon afterward, Kaplan received a thank you card signed by the dozens of inmates at a men’s prison. Kaplan and her colleagues, one wrote, “is inspiring a lot of hope inside these walls”.
‘Prison cleaned me up’
Brown’s office has received more than 2,100 clemency applications since 2020 –100 times more than five years ago.
In January, Kaplan and her students wrote a “step-by-step guide” to clemency that circulates in the prisons. And there are more lawyers than ever telling their stories; clemency is now a major part of pro bono work at four large law firms, and more than a half-dozen lawyers – graduates of Lewis & Clark or mentored by Mayhew, now in private practice – represent dozens of clemency cases.
“People just see that word ‘murderer’,” said Patty Butterfield. “But did that person [Brown] is letting out change their life in prison? Did they clean up their act?”
Butterfield received clemency in April 2020. Butterfield was 74 years old – one of the oldest people in Oregon’s prison system. She had served 23 years for shooting her abusive boyfriend during a fight, injuries which later killed him.
In prison, she maintained a spotless disciplinary record and became a mother figure to younger female prisoners. “I changed my life,” Butterfield said. “Prison cleaned me up, gave me a sense of worth again.”
She began crying as she recalled Mayhew calling to tell her she had been granted clemency. She now lives in central California with friends, who have given her free rein of the garden. “I love doing yard work here,” she said.
In March, a county judge upheld Brown’s Covid-19 and firefighter commutations but halted the parole hearings for the juvenile offenders. Brown appealed, the Oregon court of appeals heard oral argument in June, and, in early August, issued a 44-page opinion entirely rejecting Mannix’s case. Mannix has asked the Oregon supreme court to review the decision. The court has not yet indicated whether it will.
The recent controversy does not dissuade Brown, who leaves office in January, from continuing to grant clemency. She said: “I have the ability to make these decisions” – just like all governors before her.

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: POETRY 9/25/22
2022-09-25 - 2022-10-08
poem written and engraved by William Blake, from “Songs of Innocence”

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On September 25th we read poems to each other via Zoom. Here are some of the poems we read:

Martha read this poem by Andrea Hollander:

Overture
Portland, Oregon, February 2012

So I stepped off the streetcar
and walked to the bus stop,
marveling at the city around me,
and at the young woman I could never be
standing as if beautiful
with her tattooed neck
and metal studs through her nose and ears,
and actually she was beautiful,
singing a familiar tune, its notes of grace
filling the space between the two of us,
and suddenly too a limping man
with his cardboard WILL-WORK-FOR-FOOD sign
like the title of a poem and not his life,
but who was he then,
because he began to hum, and the woman,
teeth not yellow like his, smiling at him,
reached into the breast pocket
of her denim jacket while she sang,
and fluttered a five-dollar bill toward him
like some butterfly, which reminded me
of my mother, who sang on the bed of her death
as if song could keep her alive, or maybe
it was I who imagined this, a prayer
not for the dead but from the dying,
my mother in her purple gown
singing as if Death were not the name
of anything, but part of an overture,
her brown eyes earnest like those
of the woman at the bus stop in my new city
where I did not yet know who I would become
but now it seemed I was at least a singer
at a bus stop, for my own voice joined in
without my permission and the three of us hovered
in the mellifluous air on the darkening sidewalk
as the bus came to us and lifted us
together and away.

—Andrea Hollander
*

Jude read a poem by Vern Rutsala and some Autumn-themed haikus:

The Fat Man

I call everyone
shriveled. Dried apples
fit for cellars,
nothing more.
They have no folds,
No flesh to touch—
Gangling reminders
of the grave.

Existence melts
in my mouth.
I relish, I taste
the sweet jams of life;
I gorge and worship
the place of love:
all kitchens everywhere.

Diet is sin:
an effort
to turn limbs
to razors that slice
a lover’s hands.
Right angles
pierce my eye;
I love the arc
soft ovals, the curve—
things molded
to be touched,
the soothers of sight.

I feel at least
ten souls
swimming in my flesh,
I feed them
with both hands.
Someday
I will become
a mountain.
I eat the world.

–Vern Rutsala
*
The Boddhisattva’s Necklace

When from the moor the autumn mists have fled,
A spider’s web holds dew on every thread.

–Hakuyu

Inspiration

The autumn wind: leaves patterning the air;
And for the poet, haiku everywhere.

–Kyoshi

Sacrilege

Before this perfect white inviolate
Chrysanthemum—the scissors hesitate.

–Buson
*

Elizabeth read this poem by Margaret Atwood:

The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of sensible cut
and unalarming shades of beige,
I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:
no prophetess mane of mine,
complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.

In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.

In my dreams there is glamour.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendour.
The Arabs ride against Crusaders
with scimitars that could sever
silk in the air.
A swift cut to the horse’s neck
and a hunk of armour crashes down
like a tower. Fire against metal.
A poet might say: romance against banality.
When awake, I know better.

Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.
True, valour sometimes counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right—
though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes,
or the absence of them.
It’s no use pinning all those medals
across the chests of the dead.
Impressive, but I know too much.
Grand exploits merely depress me.

In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar
or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)
The word glory figures a lot on gateways.
Of course I pick a flower or two
from each, and press it in the hotel Bible
for a souvenir.
I’m just as human as you.

But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.

–Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House (1995)
*

Nick read this poem he wrote:

extreme close-up
sleight of hand
when the unique individual life cycle of a plant or animal has run its course
there’s a significant final event that triggers the return of its physical form
to an elemental state releasing any remaining life-energy to parts and
dimensions that can be seen as scientific or metaphysical or both
meanwhile the swift dispersal of animating energy and
the timely return of the physical form to its essential state
are familiar steps in the universal process of renewal
a creative procedure so routine
that we barely notice
and seldom
celebrate
its seamless
efficiency
as in the larger domain of
imploding stars and merging galaxies
when the relentless wheel of cosmic creation
spins the remains of a failing form into a new possibility
active energies are released and recombined in chaotic harmony
with those fundamental laws of physics we humans have managed to grasp
as well as laws still drifting beyond the firelight of our understanding
microscopic or galactic
every combination or collision or expansion of originating energies
generates a new creative surge in the essential power
that keeps our universe expanding and unfurling
across potentially endless time and space
extreme close-up sleight of hand
occurring everywhere
always
Nick Eldredge
2022
*

Dave read Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve:

Bittersweet Symphony

‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life
Tryna make ends meet
You’re a slave to money then you die
I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down
You know the one that takes you to the places
Where all the veins meet yeahNo change, I can change
I can change, I can change
But I’m here in my mold
I am here in my mold
But I’m a million different people
From one day to the next
I can’t change my mold
No, no, no, no, no
Have you ever been down?Well I’ve never prayed
But tonight I’m on my knees yeah
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah
I let the melody shine,
Let it cleanse my mind,
I feel free now
But the airwaves are clean and there’s nobody singing to me nowNo change, I can change
I can change, I can change
But I’m here in my mold
I am here in my mold
And I’m a million different people
From one day to the next
I can’t change my mold
No, no, no, no, no
Have you ever been down?
I can’t change it you know
I can’t change it‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, this life
Tryna make ends meet
Tryna find some money then you die
I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down
You know the one that takes you to the places
Where all the veins meet yeahYou know I can change, I can change
I can change, I can change
But I’m here in my mold
I am here in my mold
And I’m a million different people
From one day to the next
I can’t change my mold
No, no, no, no, noI can’t change my mold
No, no, no, no, no
I can’t change my mold
No, no, no, no, no[Ad-libs:]
You’ve gotta change my mold, no, no, no
It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence
Gotta, can’t change my violence, melody and silence
I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been downBeen down
Ever been down
Ever been down
Ever been down
Ever been down
Have you ever been down?
Have you ever been down?

–Richard Ashcroft
*

Johnny read this poem by Wordsworth and a couple poems by William Stafford:

We Are Seven

-—A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.

“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.

“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.

“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”

“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”

Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”

“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”

“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.

“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.

“And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.

“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.

“So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.

“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”

“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”

“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”

–William Wordsworth
*

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

&

God snaps your picture–don’t look away–
this room right now, your face tilted
exactly as it is before you can think
or control it. Go ahead, let it betray
all the secret emergencies and still hold
that partial disguise you call your character.

Even your lip, they say, the way it curves
or doesn’t, or can’t decide, will deliver
bales of evidence. The camera, wide open,
stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years
or so–after that you have become
whatever the veneer is, all the way through.

Now you want to explain. Your mother
was a certain–how to express it?–influence.
Yes. And your father, whatever he was,
you couldn’t change that. No. And your town
of course had its limits. Go on, keep talking–
Hold it. Don’t move. That’s you forever.

–William Stafford
*

Because Halloween is coming soon, Todd read this poem by Robert Frost:

The Witch Of Coos

I staid the night for shelter at a farm
Behind the mountains, with a mother and son,
Two old-believers. They did all the talking.

MOTHER: Folks think a witch who has familiar spirits
She could call up to pass a winter evening,
But won’t, should be burned at the stake or something.
Summoning spirits isn’t ‘Button, button,
Who’s got the button,’ I would have them know.
SON: Mother can make a common table rear
And kick with two legs like an army mule.
MOTHER: And when I’ve done it, what good have I done?
Rather than tip a table for you, let me
Tell you what Ralle the Sioux Control once told me.
He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him
How could that be – I thought the dead were souls,
He broke my trance. Don’t that make you suspicious
That there’s something the dead are keeping back?
Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back.
SON: You wouldn’t want to tell him what we have
Up attic, mother?
MOTHER: Bones – a skeleton.
SON: But the headboard of mother’s bed is pushed
Against the’ attic door: the door is nailed.
It’s harmless. Mother hears it in the night
Halting perplexed behind the barrier
Of door and headboard. Where it wants to get
Is back into the cellar where it came from.
MOTHER: We’ll never let them, will we, son! We’ll never !
SON: It left the cellar forty years ago
And carried itself like a pile of dishes
Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen,
Another from the kitchen to the bedroom,
Another from the bedroom to the attic,
Right past both father and mother, and neither stopped it.
Father had gone upstairs; mother was downstairs.
I was a baby: I don’t know where I was.
MOTHER: The only fault my husband found with me –
I went to sleep before I went to bed,
Especially in winter when the bed
Might just as well be ice and the clothes snow.
The night the bones came up the cellar-stairs
Toffile had gone to bed alone and left me,
But left an open door to cool the room off
So as to sort of turn me out of it.
I was just coming to myself enough
To wonder where the cold was coming from,
When I heard Toffile upstairs in the bedroom
And thought I heard him downstairs in the cellar.
The board we had laid down to walk dry-shod on
When there was water in the cellar in spring
Struck the hard cellar bottom. And then someone
Began the stairs, two footsteps for each step,
The way a man with one leg and a crutch,
Or a little child, comes up. It wasn’t Toffile:
It wasn’t anyone who could be there.
The bulkhead double-doors were double-locked
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
The cellar windows were banked up with sawdust
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
It was the bones. I knew them – and good reason.
My first impulse was to get to the knob
And hold the door. But the bones didn’t try
The door; they halted helpless on the landing,
Waiting for things to happen in their favour.’
The faintest restless rustling ran all through them.
I never could have done the thing I did
If the wish hadn’t been too strong in me
To see how they were mounted for this walk.
I had a vision of them put together
Not like a man, but like a chandelier.
So suddenly I flung the door wide on him.
A moment he stood balancing with emotion,
And all but lost himself. (A tongue of fire
Flashed out and licked along his upper teeth.
Smoke rolled inside the sockets of his eyes.)
Then he came at me with one hand outstretched,
The way he did in life once; but this time
I struck the hand off brittle on the floor,
And fell back from him on the floor myself.
The finger-pieces slid in all directions.
(Where did I see one of those pieces lately?
Hand me my button-box- it must be there.)

I sat up on the floor and shouted, ‘Toffile,
It’s coming up to you.’ It had its choice
Of the door to the cellar or the hall.
It took the hall door for the novelty,
And set off briskly for so slow a thing,
Still going every which way in the joints, though,
So that it looked like lightning or a scribble,
From the slap I had just now given its hand.
I listened till it almost climbed the stairs
From the hall to the only finished bedroom,
Before I got up to do anything;
Then ran and shouted, ‘Shut the bedroom door,
Toffile, for my sake!’ ‘Company?’ he said,
‘Don’t make me get up; I’m too warm in bed.’
So lying forward weakly on the handrail
I pushed myself upstairs, and in the light
(The kitchen had been dark) I had to own
I could see nothing. ‘Toffile, I don’t see it.
It’s with us in the room though. It’s the bones.’
‘What bones?’ ‘The cellar bones- out of the grave.’
That made him throw his bare legs out of bed
And sit up by me and take hold of me.
I wanted to put out the light and see
If I could see it, or else mow the room,
With our arms at the level of our knees,
And bring the chalk-pile down. ‘I’ll tell you what-
It’s looking for another door to try.
The uncommonly deep snow has made him think
Of his old song, The Wild Colonial Boy,
He always used to sing along the tote-road.
He’s after an open door to get out-doors.
Let’s trap him with an open door up attic.’
Toffile agreed to that, and sure enough,
Almost the moment he was given an opening,
The steps began to climb the attic stairs.
I heard them. Toffile didn’t seem to hear them.
‘Quick !’ I slammed to the door and held the knob.
‘Toffile, get nails.’ I made him nail the door shut,
And push the headboard of the bed against it.
Then we asked was there anything
Up attic that we’d ever want again.
The attic was less to us than the cellar.
If the bones liked the attic, let them have it.
Let them stay in the attic. When they sometimes
Come down the stairs at night and stand perplexed
Behind the door and headboard of the bed,
Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fingers,
With sounds like the dry rattling of a shutter,
That’s what I sit up in the dark to say-
To no one any more since Toffile died.
Let them stay in the attic since they went there.
I promised Toffile to be cruel to them
For helping them be cruel once to him.
SON: We think they had a grave down in the cellar.
MOTHER: We know they had a grave down in the cellar.
SON: We never could find out whose bones they were.
MOTHER: Yes, we could too, son. Tell the truth for once.
They were a man’s his father killed for me.
I mean a man he killed instead of me.
The least I could do was to help dig their grave.
We were about it one night in the cellar.
Son knows the story: but ’twas not for him
To tell the truth, suppose the time had come.
Son looks surprised to see me end a lie
We’d kept all these years between ourselves
So as to have it ready for outsiders.
But to-night I don’t care enough to lie-
I don’t remember why I ever cared.
Toffile, if he were here, I don’t believe
Could tell you why he ever cared himself-

She hadn’t found the finger-bone she wanted
Among the buttons poured out in her lap.
I verified the name next morning: Toffile.
The rural letter-box said Toffile Lajway.

—Robert Frost (1922)
*

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 9/15/22
2022-09-15 - 2022-10-14
photo by Howard Thoresen

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

September 15, 2022

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 proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions: but all proprieties 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 (1636-1674), writing about his childhood, from Centuries of Meditations, Third Century, Meditation 3
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Slowness

Eighteen years ago I was living in a small homesteader’s cabin in Central Oregon. One day I was chopping vegetables, preparing a meal with great efficiency, when for some reason, or no reason, I suddenly slowed down. Instead of moving rapidly from cutting board to stove, I walked s-l-o-w-l-y. And something happened. It was quiet. I hadn’t noticed it, but my mind had been busy with something or other, while I was busy preparing dinner. Now I wasn’t “preparing dinner.” As I took each step, my bare feet felt the floor. It felt like a blessing to be walking, to be alive. The broccoli was beautiful. Everything was perfect.

I have performed this experiment thousands of times since then. I know that if I slow down I see what I’m looking at. I taste what I’m eating. Every thing is beautiful. Perfect.

—Johnny Stallings
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Will We Wake?

The main project of life is to wake from the dark—
to rise up, to step forth foraging for the good. Do we
have it in us now? When the newsreel at the Sunday
matinee is a bad dream, you leave the theater, right?
You decide it’s high time to choose a different story.
Why worship lies, denial, heartless swagger, when,
outside, the sun shines on both suffering and true joy?
Aren’t we here to leave the cave of fables, help
the hurt, and begin to repair the injured Earth?

Am I preaching to the choir? Yes, I speak to
those already singing. Sing ever more ravishing
songs, I say, so sleepers may awake.

—Kim Stafford
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#292 Every Step a Prayer

“In the spirit of Buddhism, anything you do that is accompanied by mindfulness, concentration, and insight can be considered a prayer. When you drink your tea in forgetfulness, you are not truly alive because you’re not there, you’re not mindful, and you’re not concentrated. That moment is not a moment of practice.
When you hold your cup and drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, it’s like you’re performing a sacred ritual, and that is a prayer. When you walk, if you enjoy every step, if every step nourishes and transforms you, then every step is a prayer. When you sit in solidity and freedom, when you breathe in and out in mindfulness, when you touch the wonders of life, that is meditation and that is also prayer.”
from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

Well, I love this idea: every step a prayer, anything done in mindfulness, concentration and insight can be considered a prayer, a meditation.
Sometimes just the word, ‘meditation’ can sound daunting and not attainable—or attainable only with difficulty. And the idea of prayer, the same. Does meditation require a Buddhist temple, a zafu, half-closed eyes, touching fingertips? Does prayer require a church, prayer book, kneeling in a pew, fingers steepled solemnly? Thank goodness—no!
It simply requires paying attention to whatever you’re doing, in that moment, and always. It may be difficult, but it isn’t daunting. I can breathe deeply and place each boot on the trail and look up at the mountain in front of me and feel the cool air bathing my arms and listen to the chuckle of the creek beside me…
And that is prayer? That is meditation? Piece of cake! I’m on it!

—Jude Russell
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August 7, 2022 #328 Anywhere You Go (from Your True Home)
I like Thây’s point that mindful practice isn’t limited to an ashram, zendo, or other “formal” space for practice. First, I settle in and pay attention to my breath. Then, I open up my awareness to all that is around me—without any judgement and/or without assigning any “meaning” to the NOW moments as they pass. And, that’s it. I can participate in the NOW by simply (and only) attending to my breath—grounding in the NOW— and not spinning stories about what is going on around me. I can simply breathe and simply enjoy the experience of NOW. Nothing more is needed.

August 8, 2022 #329 A New Holiday (from Your True Home)
I like this one! It reminds me of an aphorism my friend Carl likes to share from time to time—it’s his view of birthdays. In essence he expresses the same ideal. Why wait for a “special” day to celebrate a friend’s life and import in one’s own life? Celebrate every day. Happy un-birthday all! Thây’s idea goes only one small step further: Why not celebrate every day by living NOW?—breathing deeply of each moment, touching Earth, seeing sky, hearing all life as it surrounds, leave nothing out.

Embrace the NOW for all it has to offer. Celebrate life as it is, NOW. We can let go of how we “want” or “think” life should be and embrace it for what it is NOW. We can celebrate alone or with others, as much or as little as we choose. Let us enter Today (NOW), live fully within, celebrate through conscious, deliberate breath and touch NOW.

August 9, 2022 #330 A Loving Community of Two (from Your True Home)
This is simple life guidance. It expresses the ideal of “real” love requires and external object of love; therefore, love is action, or requires action to be seen, felt and known. Love can’t simply be spoken, or, worse, unspoken. (Some operate from there. “Oh, she knows I love her.” My reply: “Oh really?! How?”)

I thought, recently, that I had finally found one who would draw me out of my shell. One who would challenge my façades and masks. One who would “complete me.” One in whom I could trust and with whom I could, as Thây suggests today, practice (learn) being a two-person community of love. Instead…well, it wasn’t what I hoped for; it was more infatuation with my own ideals embodied in another person—(Was I even on the right track? I don’t know any more.)—than a joining together of mutual love, respect and admiration. But it gave me hope—hope that someday I will find a person who is a positive match, and with whom I can build a loving community.

—from the meditation journal of Michel Deforge

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 9/11/22
2022-09-11 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, September 11th, at 3 pm, we will gather together on Zoom once again. Todd suggested that we read things that we have written, so our topic is Read Something You Wrote. If you don’t want to do that, you have the option for reading something that someone else wrote.

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/1/22
2022-09-01 - 2022-10-05
The River of Life by William Blake

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 1, 2022

William Blake

I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s.
—William Blake

William Blake might be the most imaginative person who ever lived. Along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, he is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. His paintings, drawings and etchings are enshrined in museums around the world. He is a Christian, but his Christianity is unique to him. In the English poetic tradition, he saw himself as part of a tradition that included Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. As a prophet, he saw himself as in the tradition of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, John of Patmos, Dante and Milton. He created his own mythology.

In issue #16 (July 2, 2020) of peace, love, happiness & understanding, I included three poems by Blake: “Infant Joy,” “Laughing Song,” and “The School Boy.” These poems illustrated the theme of innocence and experience that I was exploring in that issue—especially how we lose the innocence of our childhood, and the question of whether we can regain that lost innocence

(https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-7-2-20/).

Here are some of my favorite poems, quotes and writings of William Blake:

Love to faults is always blind;
Always is to joy inclin’d,
Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d,
And breaks all chains from every mind.
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Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations.
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Children of the future Age
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
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The GARDEN of LOVE

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
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To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
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Some aphorisms from “THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL”:

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
One thought fills immensity.
The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
Exuberance is Beauty.
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From the Preface to Blake’s poem “Milton”:

Shakespeare & Milton were both curb’d by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.
Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.
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The Little Vagabond

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm:
Besides I can tell where I am us’d well,
Such usage in heaven will never do well.

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing,
And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel,
But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel.
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From “THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL”:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
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From Enion’s lament from “The Four Zoas, Night the Second”:

“…What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun
And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season
When the red blood is fill’d with wine & with the marrow of lambs.
It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;
To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies’ house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, & the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive & vine sing & laugh round our door, & our children bring fruits & flowers.
Then the groan & the dolor are quite forgotten, & the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, & the poor in the prison, & the soldier in the field
When the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing & thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.”
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Two passages from “A Vision of the Last Judgment”:

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The Price of Enterance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People’s by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo, Wo, Wo to you Hypocrites.

and:

The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment & that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, That Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation; these people flatter themselves: I will not Flatter them. Error is Created. Truth is Eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.
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Blake created a mythology that he elaborated in what are known as his “prophetic” poems. Carl Jung spoke of four basic functions: thinking, feeling, sensing (sense perception), and intuition. Blake had a similar idea. He said: “Four Mighty Ones are in every Man.” These four “zoas” are Los (Imagination), Luvah (Love or Emotion), Urizen (Reason), and Tharmas (the Senses or Body). The biggest difference is that Jung uses the term “intuition,” while Blake uses the term “imagination.” For Blake, a healthy person, or a healthy Humanity, should have these four things in balance. In his day, he felt that Reason had usurped the throne, and everything was tyrannizing over everything else. Imagination, especially, was in prison.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If these quotes have piqued your interest, start by exploring Blake: Complete Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes. Abridged versions of Blake, leave out all kinds of treasures that he wrote in his notebooks, et cetera. A good introduction to William Blake is Eternity’s Sunrise by Leo Damrosch. If you want to really get into William Blake, the best book is Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry. S. Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary is a helpful guide to Blake’s mythology. You can find out about Zoas and Enion and Albion and Vala and Nobodaddy and the Eyes of God, et cetera…

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing which stands in the way.
—William Blake (November 28, 1757-August 12, 1827)

Max Walter performs Spirit of Carl Sandburg
2022-08-28 19:00 - 20:30
Max Walter will perform his solo show “Spirit of Carl Sandburg” this Sunday, August 28th, at 7 pm (PDT). The performance is in Bellingham, Washington. For those of us who can’t be there, here is the link to the website from where you can live stream the performance:

Spirit of Carl Sandburg – Center for Spiritual Living Bellingham (csl-bellingham.org)

I’m really looking forward to this!

peace & love
Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 8/28/22
2022-08-28 15:00 - 17:00
painting by Mark Andres

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, August 28th, at 3 pm, we will gather once again on Zoom to talk about books and other things. We will attempt to answer the question: Read Any Good Books Lately?

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 8/15/22
2022-08-15 - 2022-09-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

August 15, 2022

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.

—opening lines from The Dhammapada, sayings of the Buddha, translated by Thomas Byrom
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Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, [to] get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel (thanks to Mark Alter for this)
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The Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

—Pat Schneider, shared by Jeffrey Sher
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You are enough

Peace Is This Moment Without Judgment
~Dorothy Hunt

Do you think peace requires an end to war?
Or tigers eating only vegetables?
Does peace require an absence from your boss, your spouse, yourself? …
Do you think peace will come some other place than here?
Some other time than Now? In some other heart than yours?

Peace is this moment without judgment.
That is all. This moment in the Heart-space
where everything that is is welcome.
Peace is this moment without thinking
that it should be some other way,
that you should feel some other thing,
that your life should unfold according to your plans.

Peace is this moment without judgment,
this moment in the heart-space where
everything that is is welcome.

I’ve been thinking a lot about equanimity in conversation and relationships lately and where that often breaks down. Our choice of words, tone of voice and sometimes the decision to speak or not speak—all contribute to our ability to cultivate equanimity.

It is difficult enough sometimes when we are alone to create a space for equanimity to enter. It can be much more difficult to create that space when we are inside of an interaction with another person who is having their own experience. They are on their own journey. A journey you have no control over.

An interaction does not have to be a reaction. This is where, when things get heated in a conversation, I often break down. My ego says, “Prove your point!” “Tell her how you are right and she is wrong!” Or “Don’t stop until you win the argument!”

The ego can fool us into believing that we are not enough and can make things appear black and white.
If I’m right, he’s wrong.
I either want something or I don’t.

But there is a gray area. It begins with awareness.
Awareness shows up as an open mind, flexibility, lack of bias and positive expectations.
Awareness is knowing that you are enough.

Understanding what we carry within us and thoughtfully using our words to express ourselves is a huge practice.

Pema Chödrön says that when feelings of attraction or aversion arise, we can “use our biases as stepping-stones for connecting with the confusion of others.” When we become intimate with and accepting of our own feelings, we see more clearly how everyone gets hooked by their hopes and fears. From this, “a bigger perspective can emerge.”

Today, start with knowing that you are enough.

Practice

I invite you to imagine a calming, blue circle of light within your throat. The throat being the place of right speech, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively.

With every inhale, imagine the blue light gaining more and more clarity.
With every exhale, allowing your light to be shared.

—Nicole Rush
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#152 The Biggest Obstacle

“Often it is our own knowledge that is the biggest obstacle to us touching suchness. That is why it’s very important to learn how to release our own views. Knowledge is the obstacle to knowledge. If you are dogmatic in your way of thinking, it is very difficult to receive new insights, to conceive of new theories and understandings about the world.”
—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

“Learning how to release our own views…” Indeed! This is a big one.

I must admit that I am sometimes snide, judgmental and knee-jerk defensive. This I am ashamed to admit. I have to say that it comes from a long ago place—older sister comes to mind, but my overall nature is one of positivity, connection, engagement and desire for understanding. The negative part—might I say ‘sliver?’—comes from a lack of knowledge or understanding on my part. I know that. And I am very aware when it arises in my mind.

I seek understanding. I seek connection. Almost every Saturday I make the drive out I84 to Umatilla to Two Rivers Correctional Institution. Every week I pass by the small towns of Biggs, Rufus, pass the signs to Ione and Heppner, Irrigon. I understand that in these towns just the word ‘liberal,’ or ‘liberalism’ in its present day connotation (even though ‘liberal’ comes from the Latin, liber, meaning free, which don’t we all, conservative or otherwise, believe in?) can conjure uncertainty, mistrust, fear, often anger in the hearts and minds of many of these residents—across the country. David and I enjoy riding our bikes in the wide open country surrounding these quiet places. When we drive into town, bikes instead of guns hitched to the back of our car, wrapped in Spandex instead of Carhartts, I stifle the urge to ask for a soy latte and go for black coffee every time. Still, don’t we just scream ‘liberal yuppies’ to the locals? Yet each time I’m faced with this I try to engage and find commonalities: ‘I see you have peach pie on the menu. Do you bake them all yourself? Yes? I bet it’s the best! I‘ve never quite been able to get the consistency right; can you give me some tips?’ Like that. I’m sincere, and it usually works. It’s an ice breaker. There are always commonalities.

More on releasing our views: When I arrive at TRCI, I make my way to room 19-27 and meet with our group of 12-20 men. I love them. I love being with them, listening to their thoughts, their hopes and fears. I admire them; I believe in them. We do not talk about politics or religion—that is part of the understanding. If we were to talk about politics, undoubtedly I would find some BIG differences in our views. BUT!!! I would still love them! And because of this, I would be able to listen to them open-mindedly if we were to talk about politics. I have no doubt.

One more on releasing our own views: After the stunning screening of Midsummer Night’s Dream last Sunday, I floated out of the theater. There on the sidewalk I saw one of our released men who had been in the theater. He called out, ‘Hey, Jude!’ I cried out and gave him a big hug. His head was shaved, he had earphones slung around his neck, underneath his tank top he was covered with tatts. Clearly, if I had seen him on the street and didn’t know him, I might have clutched my purse closer, shifted my eyes, hurried my step, perhaps even crossed the street. Scary (a little). But I know him. He is a wonderful man! I love him!

Whether it’s knowledge about things or people, being open to differences, taking the time to learn, to introduce ourselves, talk to and understand others not like us is the basis of love. It all leads to love.

“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” Simone de Beauvoir

—Jude Russell
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July 17, 2022

First, let me say that I believe I am going out tomorrow for surgery on my hip. (One or the other, don’t know yet which is first.) I am feeling excited, nervous—all butterfly-tingly with uncertainty because this is all new to me.

This is my first major hospital thing; invasive, life-altering surgery ever….It’s going to take weeks to heal and recover. And, no one (who is special to me, or who really cares about me) is going to be there with me. In fact I can’t even call or email anyone, even though I’m 98% certain it’s tomorrow, because “If I know then they ‘HAVE TO RESCHEDULE,’ because I’m not supposed to know. Yet, I know!

So, it’s also exciting because it’s something new and scary. I’ll have a story to tell—soon. I’m certain all will go well, everything will be “normal.” BUT, what if it’s not?! (dramatic voice for effect and heightened suspense…) Oh! So, what if? Even death is a great adventure. I’d be wherever the next step lands. No matter what. I’d be where I am. My only death-fear is the process of lingering in a slow, agonizing sort of death. (I’m just back from theatre and feeling a bit dramatic-excited too.)

So, that’s me. That’s my moment, right now. That’s where I’m starting….

July 19, 2022

I thought yesterday was to be my surgery. Turns out it was the final consult to confirm the procedure and answer any remaining concerns. So, I’ll go soon, just not yesterday. I, at first, was excited/anxious at the thought of getting this done and the recovery adventure started. By the time I was called out at 12 p.m. I was nervous. Then, when I was told it was only another consult—well, I was needing to focus on breathing and contemplate what the heck was transpiring….There was lots of energy to funnel or transform through breathing. By the time I saw the doctor I was at ease.

July 25, 2022

Tomorrow should, most likely (I hope) be my first hip replacement. I am very much feeling the excitement of anticipation for the long awaited “good” thing. I would liken this to what I felt on Christmas Eve: going to bed early, believing all the myths surrounding, only to wake early (too early! Like 4 or 5 a.m. too early) and anxiously await my parents’ “sleeping in” and late waking before I could selfishly dig in for a “big-haul.”

July 29, 2022 #322 Concentrated Pleasure (from Your True Home)

Well, I’m recovering from hip replacement. While I’m not a “great” practitioner—i.e. meditating frequently—I have managed to survive two challenging nights so far, through deliberate breathing. It helps. Pain is still a challenge, but that will fade as healing continues.

It’s peculiar how at each turn of my life GOD places just what I need to read or hear right in the midst of my path. Today’s comments from Thây are no different. I am at the phase where I make many small walking journeys. Journeys to the toilet, eight feet away; or to my door and back, ten-plus feet; or up and down the long haul of the Infirmary, 50 or more for the whole trip. Any one, and each one, will be a perfect chance to focus 100% of my attention on what I’m doing—i.e. walking fully with both sides. It isn’t as easy as I desire, but it is a thing I can do….

323
The Kingdom of God Is Right Here

The Kingdom of God is not a mere notion. It is a reality that can be touched in everyday life. The Kingdom of God is now or never, and we all have the ability to touch it—not only with our minds, but with our feet. The energy of mindfulness helps you with this. With one mindful step, you touch the Kingdom of God.
—Thich Nhat Hanh, from Your True Home

July 31, 2022 #323 The Kingdom of God Is Right Here

I am in day 4, over 100 hours from my hip replacement on Wednesday, July 27th, from 7:30 a.m. to about 8:40. It has been an interesting and challenging journey since.

Pain was a piece of the early challenges and it has since faded to a memory of what I once knew as an intensity never before felt pre-surgery. My balance is not back to 100%, but I am strengthening as I can, as often as I can. I have been blessed by Creator GOD with a strong healthy body and mind, and a quick recovery. I anticipate seeing the provider on Monday, August 1st, and moving back to my unit shortly thereafter….So, for all my friends, well-wishers and benefactors, I am well on my way to a full and lasting recovery from surgery.

Today’s reading is accurate. The Kingdom of God is now. Many have taught that it is later. I fear this is due to a refusal or inability to see living in the NOW as part of life as it was created to be. Each of us can experience “Heaven on Earth” in the now, through mindfulness. I also hope and suspect (believe) that a paradise, aka heaven, nirvana, etc., will be awaiting us as this life ends. Thanks to religious syncretism it may be impossible to know for certain, until we transition to the next stage of life—after death.

Like Thây, I think it is possible to perceive, “taste,” sample, get a sense of that life in the NOW through mindfulness….

I haven’t written much this month….I wish each one well, as TRCI has “outbreaks” and further quarantining…I hope your journey into NOW is as life affirming and assisting as I’ve experienced.

(Yesterday (8/14) I got an email from Michel Deforge. (JS))

I’m two weeks, five days since [hip] surgery and I’m doing great! Today, I walked for 20 minutes while carrying my walker, instead of using it for balance. The last 3 minutes were balanced without even taking the walker with me. I was able to do 10 stand ups (reverse squatting – getting up from sitting surface), along with some leg raises earlier this morning. So, yes I’m doing quite well on my recovery! I hope to get the other one done in early September. TBD…

—Michel Deforge
*
Prophets to Live By

Such great days for the prophecy business—
in news and views it’s hard to choose one voice
that rings true, someone to put your money on,
someone whose claims might go the distance

The best is yet to come! shout redwings teetering
on cattail spires, while in cedar shadows raven scoffs
Things will only get worse. Which will you believe
when the crows begin, It shall come to pass…and list

their raucous tabloid hints, while from the shadows
unknown voices whistle, hoot, and shriek? How can you
keep your own counsel then? How can you take them all
with a grain of salt, but seek your own conclusions when

there’s a moment of silence, a dusky breath held, then
a song sparrow chants, Did anyone notice dawn?

—Kim Stafford
*

I enjoy books, especially books that change the way I see, experience and understand the world. Many books have helped me on my spiritual journey. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda got me interested in meditation, on a quest for samādhi. Many meditators of my generation learned about zazen, “sitting meditation,” from Shunryu Suzuki’s book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I read a lot of books by J. Krishnamurti, whose original approach to “freedom from the known” is very stimulating. My favorites among his many books are The Only Revolution and Krishnamurti’s Notebook. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” expanded my vision in many ways. Many religious traditions make a distinction between “the spirit,” which is sacred, and “the flesh,” which is not. For Walt, everyone and everything is sacred. People can spend years striving to achieve enlightenment. In Talks With Ramana Maharshi, the South Indian sage reminds people again and again that there is nothing to strive for since our true self is always already Divine. Similarly, Bankei (1622-1693) taught that our “unborn Buddha nature” is our true nature. It’s who we are. Norman Wadell’s translation of Bankei’s talks, The Unborn is excellent. My favorite ancient wisdom text is Tao Te Ching. The translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English is my favorite, along with its gorgeous black and white photographs. A book I like to read and re-read is Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R. H. Blyth. The past couple years I’ve been listening to lively audio recordings of talks by Alan Watts, and reading the poems and meditations of Thomas Traherne, the Seventeenth Century Christian mystic. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of my favorite guides for living a life soaked in peace, love and happiness. I long ago lost count of how many people I’ve given his book Your True Home. Well, that’s a few of my favorites for now.

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

—Johnny Stallings

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/4/22
2022-08-04 - 2022-08-31
Edith Mirante in Chin State, Burma

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding
August 4, 2022

ADVENTURE TALES!

I asked some friends to send in stories of adventures they had. First to reply was Edith Mirante, who is a member of the Society of Women Geographers:

The Society of Woman Geographers was established in 1925 at a time when women were excluded from membership in most professional organizations, such as the Explorers Club, who would not admit women until 1981. It is based in Washington, D.C., and has 500 members.

The society was organized by four friends, Gertrude Emerson Sen, Marguerite Harrison, Blair Niles and Gertrude Mathews Shelby, to bring together women interested in geography, world exploration, anthropology and related fields. Membership was restricted to women who had “done distinctive work whereby they have added to the world’s store of knowledge concerning the countries on which they have specialized, and have published in magazines or in book form a record of their work.”

—from Wikipedia

Here’s what Edith wrote:

Being an adventurer is intrinsic to my personality. I’ve always sought the “unsafe path” and accepted the dangers & misadventures that come with that. I try to use those reckless proclivities for good, investigating human rights issues and environmental crises in remote, sometimes war torn, regions — especially the frontiers of Burma (Myanmar). My three books, Burmese Looking Glass, Down the Rat Hole and The Wind in the Bamboo are adventure stories as much as political & historical narratives.

=======

In the Pines, Burma

I had gotten used to riding on the back of small motorbikes, which had only recently replaced study mountain ponies in Chin State, a rugged, mostly roadless region of western Burma (Myanmar.) I managed not to upset the balance — or fall off — even on convoluted dirt tracks and rickety bamboo bridges, as I researched the region’s environmental issues in 2016 with the assistance of some motorbiking local enviro activists.

Mining (nickel and other minerals) was of particular interest to me. I had read in a local news outlet that Valvum, a village reachable from Tedim town was the site of “ongoing coal mining work managed by a Japanese company.” Low-grade, highly polluting coal is mined in some areas of Burma and with coal’s disastrous climate-changing effects for the whole world, the Valvum operation was certainly worth investigating.

Gunning the bikes up and down narrow, rock-strewn trails, we got to Valvum mid-morning. I drank tea with some women who were smoking cheroots in a dark, smoky house. Burma was enjoying a period of relative freedom for civil society after decades of brutal military dictatorship. But those changes were recent and I was concerned about possible scrutiny of our visit, whether by government agents or mining company thugs. So I tried to make sure I wouldn’t be getting anyone in trouble by visiting the mine. A village representative reassured us: “It is no problem to go there. They are expecting you there.”

Past the village the swerve, wobble and roll of our bikes disturbed the silence of khasi pine and rhododendron forest until a fence appeared and a couple of mine employees waved us through the gate. The owner, a 70 year old Japanese eccentric married to a local woman, was away, they told me. But they were happy to show me the operation: “Here are the four ovens where we make the coal.” So it turned out to be not a coal mine at all. This was a charcoal making project. The words for coal and charcoal are very similar in Burmese, as in English.

Although charcoal is used for household cooking throughout Burma, this product was apparently for export to Japan, where special charcoals are often used as air freshener, commanding high prices for small amounts. I was certainly relieved that it was not a coal mine. But I learned that this charcoal business was having its own environmental impact: depleting the area around Valvum of four types of trees, described in the local language as thal sing, lim sing, nai sing and se sing.

I mentioned that bamboo, a plentiful and thoroughly renewable resource, could be used instead for export quality charcoal. In Japan bamboo charcoal is prized and costly, for incense or just displayed in a bowl to purify the air. Chin State reminded me of Appalachia in many ways (the rhody forests, the Christian hymns resounding in mountain churches, those blue ridges, hollers and mines.) One place’s pollution or deforestation is another part of the world’s clean breath of air.

Leaving Valvum we reached the main road, where I had to wrap up in scarves like a nomad raider to keep the dust out of my lungs. Six years on, that entire region has become a horrifying conflict zone. Since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup in Myanmar, entire towns and villages have been burned across Chin State by the shock troops of the regime. Civilians fled to neighboring India. The young environmentalists I knew and other activists fight back with guerrilla tactics, as armed convoys invade their land. The pine forests are now resistance strongholds.

—Edith Mirante, 2022
for more about Chin State:
https://www.projectmaje.org/chin_report_2021.htm
*

VW Bug in Mud

We had this bright idea to take a short cut on a road that faded from gravel to dirt to mud. “Maybe if we go fast enough we can get through that big puddle.” Nope. We were stalled with wheels spinning, car body resting in muck. Did I mention we were ten miles from anywhere…my baby sister was with us…it was dusk? Well, we gathered a heap of flat rocks, lifted the car high enough to place pavers under each wheel (playing mighty Archimedes with a dead tree we plucked from the ground), laud down stones to fill the ruts, revved it, and roared onward…arriving home to the frightened family around midnight. A sturdy lesson in foolishness and self-reliance.

—Kim Stafford
*

a seagull conversation

on a chilly autumn afternoon
with the barest minimum of experience
I’m cautiously paddling a kayak
around and among a group of small islands
off the jagged coast of Connecticut
gently encouraged and accompanied by
an athletic younger brother and his mate
each in their own kayak
maneuvering with skill far superior to my own

at the moment
I have unintentionally wandered out of their sight
suddenly alone in an unfamiliar domain
I calm a rising concern with assurances
my partners are almost certainly
on the far side of the next small island
or the island just beyond

meanwhile
I contemplate the territorial agreement
the local cormorants and seagulls appear to have made
occupying alternate perching rocks
twelve to fifteen feet apart
that surround the island I’m slowly moving past

clenched postures and cold stares make it clear
agreement has also been reached
that my presence is entirely unwelcome

as I round the narrow end of the island
one of the gulls hunkered on a rock just ahead
confronts me with the abrasive, demanding cry
that seems to express the hardcore seagull personality

after a tense moment, I try to soften the mood
with a modestly accurate but gentler seagull impression

the gull’s harsh scream in response
is a furious reply to a personal insult

my attempt to back away with a shorter, less ragged cry
brings a jagged challenge to deadly combat

my third pass at making peace is cut short
by a piercing shriek that must be a crippling curse

and the gull lifts its wings and rises from its perch

I pause and drift for a moment
resting the double-blade paddle across my lap
and watch the departing gull fly slowly but deliberately
in a remarkably straight line away from the nose of my kayak

I’m just beginning to consider the possibility
of feeling guilty about disturbing this gull in the first place
when the bird makes a tight turn mid-air
precisely reversing its course
now heading on a line directly toward my kayak

in the time it takes to think: what the hell?
I see a slender rope of firm black and white matter
almost two feet long and growing
descending from beneath the bird’s tail

swiftly lengthening and steadily on-coming
this two-tone cord of seagull rebuke
is truly surreal and completely unnerving

as the gull and dangling cord close in
I panic and thrust the right side of my paddle into the air
hoping to deflect the incoming projectile

my awkward parry is completely mistimed
and the sudden movement sends the kayak tipping wildly to the left
I manage to right the boat but a generous amount of ocean water
has washed into the kayak’s snug seating compartment

the frigid ocean stings as it soaks into my pants
but I can’t take my eyes off the approaching nightmare cord
which the gull suddenly releases
dropping it into the water a couple of feet in front of my kayak

relief begins to flood my mind before I realize
this cunning seagull has very nearly
sent me tumbling into the icy autumn Atlantic

later that evening, in warm dry clothes
comes the bottom line:
if the intruder’s pants are wet
the seagull’s point is made

—Nick Eldredge 2022
*

I’ve had an adventure or two in my day. Most of them a long time ago. I lived in India for a couple years. I was a gold miner in Northern California. I had a job where I was paid for sleeping. Another job was testing beet pulp pellets for hardness, durability and fine particle content. Once, when free climbing in the Wallowa Mountains, I found myself on a rock ledge from where I could not go up and could not go back down. Somehow, I lived to tell the tale. But that is not the tale I’m going to tell now…

I was awakened by a phone call in the middle of the night in the Fall of 1998. It was World Class Oddball Ken Campbell calling from London. “Johnny,” he said. “Would you like to enroll in the School for Phils?” “I don’t know, Ken. What is the School for Phils?” Ken explained that the little voices inside his head were telling him that it was important to usher in the Millennium by performing The Warp every weekend of 1999, and that he needed to train up a team of Phils, because if someone tried to play the part of Philip Masters every weekend for a year, it would kill them.

“When does the School for Phils begin?” “One week from today.” “It’s tempting. I’d have to quit my job…” “Are you in?”

A week later, I found myself in a smoke-filled basement in Camden Town. There were about six guys, besides myself. Oliver Senton was giving us a briefing. He had played the part of Philip Masters. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it is the longest part in the longest play in the English language. After a few days, enrollment in the School for Phils had dwindled to one. Me.

The Warp is a play unlike any other. It’s Neil Oram’s autobiography, from 1959 to 1979, in roughly the same way that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is autobiographical. As in Kerouac’s book, the names have been changed, but the events recounted actually happened. At least this was Neil’s version of what happened and he was completely sincere when he said he didn’t make anything up. Neil Oram has the most astonishing memory of anyone I have ever met. When he wrote his play in 1979, he could remember conversations he had fifteen and twenty years earlier.

Rehearsals couldn’t begin until I was “off book.” It took me four months to learn my lines. I started every day at 8 a.m., seven days a week, and worked on my lines till midnight. When I got tested, it took more than eight hours to say my lines, with someone giving me just my cues. The other actors all knew their parts. We only rehearsed for five days, with everyone lining up to do their scenes with me. When we performed the play at the Roundhouse, the performance began at 8 pm on Saturday and ended at 7 pm the following day. I was onstage the whole time.

A play that is more than 20 hours long sounds like it might be boring. When Ken directed The Warp there was not a dull moment. He was a comic genius, the funniest man I have ever known. I don’t know how Neil felt about this, but Ken directed his earnest account of his life journey for maximum laughs.

The first time I saw the play, I was playing a small part, Ralph Beak. He doesn’t come onstage for at least the first twelve hours, so I got to watch the first half of the play as an audience member, and it was the most exhilarating theatrical experience of my life. The energy that the actors brought to every scene was incredible! There are dozens of characters and more than 120 scenes. In every scene the actors were trying to outdo the previous scene. After eight hours of this barrage on my nervous system I was in a state of ecstasy. I felt like I had died and gone to Theater Paradise.

I had a little time off from line-learning, when our theater company would perform Macbeth in Pidgin English at the Piccadilly Theatre on London’s West End.

I performed the part of Philip Masters in The Warp three times, in early 1999, before returning to The States. At the end of the 23 hour-long performances, the audience stood up and shouted and cheered for about ten minutes. It’s the only time in my acting career that I got to feel what rock stars must feel when the crowd goes wild.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Reflections On the Art of “The Adventure”

The Oxford Dictionary suggests adventure might be a “daring enterprise,” describes adventurism as a “tendency to take risks,” and offers up synonyms such as “audacious, brave, reckless, valiant,” and “risky.”

Defining adventure seems very subjective and individual to me. Certainly one person’s daring is another person’s ho-hum. I do feel (for myself) it requires “loose ends,” cannot be over-planned, must include improvisation and unknowns, and necessitates I be “in the moment.” Thus I might say our entire life is an adventure as we navigate the surges, eddies, and constant strivings that are elements of being alive.

Rather than describe one specific episode of bravado, I’ve conceived a list of possibilities I hope will touch many:

—(Here’s the big one) Being with “me”…phew! (Can you relate?)
—Family reunions (‘nough said)
—First stroke of brush on canvas
—The turn of a thought
—Being member of Johnny’s dialogue group
—Hiking in bear country
—Being a part of OHOM circle of friends
—Making new friends
—Imagining in new ways
—Prison
—Going to the library/book store
—Writing first word of poem/essay
—Stepping onstage in front of an audience

Here’s a few more:

—Agreeing
—Listening
—Changing
—Loving
—Smiling
—Commitment
—Birth/Death

And as a last thought:

—This moment!

Conclusion: we all, at every moment are engaged in the living act of
“The Adventure”

Peace and Love To All

—Abe Green 2022

(Note to readers: peace, love, happiness & understanding now comes out on the first Thursday of every month, instead of every other Thursday.)
