The Open Road: a learning community

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

Black History Month is coming up in February!

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

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

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

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

peace, love & justice

Johnny

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

January 15, 2023

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

—from “Paradise Lost” by John Milton
*

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

Prologue

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

Be Alive

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

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

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

—Kim Stafford
*

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

—Alex Tretbar
*

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

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

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

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

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

—Jude Russell
*

Jill sent this quote:

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

—Sofia Warren

—Jill Littlewood
*

The Pelican

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

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

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

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

We sit with it.

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

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

About the weather.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

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

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

—Emily Dickinson

—Johnny Stallings
*

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

Furry Bear

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

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

—A.A. Milne

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

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

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

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

This storm will pass.

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

—Katie Radditz

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

February 1, 2024

¡Saludos from sunny México!

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

The Key to Sweden

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

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

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

—Alex Tretbar
*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s enough for now.

—Johnny Stallings
*

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

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

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

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

The affiliation is loose and unstructured.

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

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

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

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

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

—Elizabeth Domike
*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Katie Radditz

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

February 15, 2023

when the mind is still
all views disappear

trying to quiet the mind
is just more activity

—Seng Ts’an
*

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

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

And a favorite quote for Valentine’s Day:

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

—William Blake
*

¡Greetings from Guanajuato!

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

In Centuries of Meditations Thomas Traherne wrote…

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

…which I changed to…

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

A longer passage from Thomas Traherne…

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

…in my argot becomes…

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

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

paz, amor y felicidad

Juanito
*

Kim wrote in response—and sent a poem:

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

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

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

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

Kim

Deep State II

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

—Kim Stafford
*

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

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

—from A Book of Uncommon Prayer by Brian Doyle
*

Walt Whitman says:

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

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

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

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

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

#318 “True Generosity”

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jude Russell
*

Mirror

Shipmates, we float on a sea of story.

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

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

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

Just not too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Elizabeth Domike
*

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

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

(i carry your heart with me)

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

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

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

—e. e. cummings

—Katie Radditz

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

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

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 3/7/24
2024-03-07 - 2024-04-03
Tree of World Literature, ceramic from Guadalajara, Mexico
Can you find…The Bible, Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Romeo & Juliet, The Little Prince, Metamorphoses, Aladdin, Faust, Les Miserables, The Inferno, The Iliad, The Odyssey?

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

March 7, 2024
Abundance!

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

&

Exuberance is Beauty.

—William Blake
*

Insatiableness is good, but not ingratitude.

—Thomas Traherne
*

I was reading On Dialogue: an essay in free thought by Robert Grudin, and it got me thinking about abundance in literature and in life—about too muchness. If I had a coat of arms, this might be my motto:

LOVE * SILENCE * LIFE ABUNDANT!

I want to live my life to the full! I want my cup to runneth over! And it is! It is! I admire the fictional character Alexis Zorba, from the novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. He’s based on a man Kazantzakis knew. Zorba loved “the whole catastrophe”!

In Chapter 3 of On Dialogue, “The Liberty of Ideas,” Grudin talks about copia, a Latin word that means “abundance,” from which we get the words “copious” and “copiousness.”

Literary copiousness is a kind of “overdoing it” that gives a special kind of delight. Grudin cites Rabelais as someone who uses copia for humorous effect. An example that came to my mind is this passage from King Lear:

Oswald
Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.
Kent
Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald
What dost thou know me for?
Kent
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service; and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

James Joyce overdid it in his novel Ulysses, and overdid overdoing it in Finnegans Wake. In Ulysses, he describes a man, “the citizen,” sitting in a pub:

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.

—James Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter 12, lines 151-167

Walt Whitman overdoes it in “Song of Myself.” I’ve always been inspired by the loud “YES!” he sings to Life—and to Death. Here are a couple excerpts:

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

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

&

I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be.

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly traveled, and still I mount and mount.

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long I was hugged close—long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

—Walt Whitman, from sections 24 & 44 of “Song of Myself”

Peace, Love & Life Abundant!
—Johnny
*

Here’s a poem from Will:

Some Tides

Just ooze in
Quiet as a shadow
Rising slower than
Old fishermen
At seasons end.
Others come
Quick as cats
Wind-whipped, hungry
Devouring acres of mud flats
In minutes.

This tide today
Pulled in to our little bay
Unhurried
Drew its soft, green
Blanket of brine
Over beds of oysters
Barnacled blocks of rip-rap
Kelp-strewn boulders
Beaches of stones
Rounded by
Endless comings and goings
Then
Tucked itself in
To every inlet
Coming to rest at last
Beneath dark, overhanging
Fir and Cedar boughs.

A family of seals arrived
Drawn no doubt
To a feast of edibles
Within this swelling sea
They approached my canoe
Wary but curious
Fifteen dark heads
Fifteen whiskered mouths
Fifteen pairs of eyes
So intent, so familiar
I couldn’t help but talk to them
Watch them surface, submerge, resurface.

Then, Bufflehead ducks, Mergansers, Canada geese arrived
To this watery place of plenty
Along with those peerless hunters
Great Blue Herons, perched on a single leg
In the shallows, beaks poised waiting
For that one careless minnow.

Then, far above, in a blue, cloudless sky
A Raven flew over the brimming bay
Its shrill cry reminding us all
That Raven made these seas to rise and fall
That Raven holds the rope to let loose their ebb
And pull forth their flood
That he has done so since the beginning of time
“And look,” he says, in his ancient tongue
“Caw! I have done it again today.”

—Will Hornyak, February 2024
*

I was talking with Kim about abundance, and he thought of “lagniappe.” This is the Preface to his book of poems The Lagniappe:

Preface

The title of this book, lagniappe, is a resonant word heard in New Orleans, where it means “a little extra…a bonus…a gift.” This term was first the Quechua word yapa (“to add, to increase, to help”) heard buy the hungry conquistadores in the Inca markets of the Andes. It meant a little gift smuggled into the bargaining for potatoes or grain. They took this word to Mexico, where it became Spanish: ñapa. And then to New Orleans, where it became French: lagniappe—as in, “Why did Irene pay for our dessert?” “It’s the lagniappe.”

So, as I age, I seek the bonus, the little extra. I hope to become a graceful ruin, if I am lucky, lasting past my prime into the years of bending lower, withering, and yet—if I choose the path of luck—in possession of lagniappe, some gifts of insight to offer to the young.

Who wrote the manual for growing old with grace? Who took time to compose the encyclopedia of life’s attritions, to gather the scripture of the elder age, to list the acts of aging apostles, to pen the proverbs that might guide our passage, to proffer the gospel for the elder soul? I look around to see who has done this, or who will do this, and it appears it may be me. Hence this draft of essential terms.

—Kim Stafford, 70
*
Brian Doyle exemplified Blake’s aphorism: “Exuberance is Beauty.” In his enthusiasm he sometimes wrote sentences that went on and on and on. In the posthumous collection of essays One Long River of Song, the first sentence of his essay on “Pants” contains 379 words! The final essay, “Last Prayer,” teaches us about living and dying in Abundance:

I could complain a little here about the long years of back pain and the occasional awful heartbreak, but Lord, those things were infinitesimal against the slather of gifts You gave mere me, a muddle of a man, so often selfish and small. But no man was ever more grateful for Your profligate generosity, and here at the very end, here in my last lines, I close my eyes and weep with joy that I was alive, and blessed beyond measure, and might well be headed back home to the incomprehensible Love from which I came, mewling, many years ago.

—Brian Doyle, from One Long River of Song

A Midsummer Night's Dream in Prison at Lewis & Clark Law School 3/7/24
2024-03-07 19:00 - 21:00
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison, a documentary by Bushra Azzouz, will be shown at Lewis & Clark Law School, (Room 7 or 8 Wood Hall Basement), on Thursday, March 7th, at 7 p.m. Following the screening there will be a Q & A with Brandon Gillespie (actor) and Johnny Stallings (director).

Here’s a trailer for the film:

DON’T MISS THIS!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 3/10/24
2024-03-10 15:00 - 17:00
Ceramic Tree of World Literature from Guadalajara, Mexico.
Top center: The Bible. Bottom center: Moby Dick.
Upper left: Dante’s Inferno. Upper middle: Don Quixote & Sancho Panza.
Upper right: Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis above Aladdin from Arabian Nights.
Middle left: Faust & Mephistopheles. Middle: Shakespeare above Romeo & Juliet.
Middle right: Edgar Allen Poe & Jean Valjean from Les Miserables.
Lower left: Borges above Ulysses and the Sirens.
Lower right: Ruben Dario above Homer’s Trojan Horse.

Beloved Bibliophiles!
On Sunday, March 10th, at 3 p.m. PST, our theme will be World Literature. Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 3/15/24
2024-03-15 - 2024-04-14
photograph by Elizabeth Domike

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

March 15, 2023

Out breath
and in breath—
know that they are
proof that the world
is inexhaustible.

—Ryōkan (1758-1851)
*

Yoga

Yoga is Love

There are many ways to learn how to tolerate being uncomfortable.

Yoga has been one of those ways for me. I’d taken a few classes here and there and watched Lilias! as a teenager. I read then, too, voraciously about the austerities that the yogis performed along with some Buddhist texts. But it wasn’t until 1999 that I found myself going to a yoga class at my gym with a girlfriend of a work colleague who didn’t want to go alone.

It was that one class and the most unusual teacher, an older fellow, shaggy beard, who had been teaching martial arts until he was involved in a car accident from which he learned to rehabilitate himself from, by practicing yoga. Not your normal teacher in a gym, for him it was a short-term gig but after that first class I took every class he taught until one day he was gone.

His replacement was a Russian woman in her 30’s who came over on a visa to compete in fitness competitions and found a way to stay. Born is Siberia, trained as a grade schoolteacher she was able to have tea with our original teacher and find out the bones of what he had been teaching us.

Some classes we would spend an hour on our feet, another day, our necks.

My partner at the time told me after maybe the second class that he liked that I was going, which was unusual as he was a bit particular about time with me. He said I will take you any time you want to go, you are so much “nicer” afterwards.

Olga, my new teacher, did (and does) not have the common American affliction of low self-esteem.

After teaching at the gym for six months she told us she had engaged studio space nearby and was going to teach independently and had found a new teacher for herself and was transitioning from a more fitness-based style to a spine and breath centered style that was developed in India and transmitted to her teacher there.

Over the next four years she trained with him while we followed her around from studio space to studio space until she was fully certified as a yoga therapist and opened her own dedicated studio.

I was happy taking class from her and at my local studio for the next 13 years.

That is what I did, I worked, I wrote and read poetry and practiced yoga. Always curious, but (for a number of reasons) not interested in traveling either to India or to high priced retreats or trainings. I read, asked questions, and attended a few local workshops with visiting “master” teachers. Including Olga’s own, Gary Kraftsow. He trained in India with the family that trained BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois.

Olga finally started grandfathering me into her classes and workshops for teachers because I wanted to know stuff.

It was kind of a joke, just me, the perpetual student, and all the teachers. Eventually though it became clear that the only way I was going to retain the Sanskrit and more esoteric teachings was to take on the challenge to teach them myself. I took that training and began, much to my surprise, to teach right away, at work, of all places.

After all those years of showing up and taking class and feeling better in my body and avoiding injury and helping my nervous system stay on an even keel, I realized that I loved sharing the teachings with others.

The movement, the meditation, the breathing, the profound deep relaxation. This isn’t a metaphor, teaching for me is love. I love the folks who show up for class and I love being there as a guide for them into their own journey of discovery. Of course, I have my own practice, separate from teaching as well.

How many of us have the opportunity to fall in love every weekday over and over, in love with the shared experience, in love with the creativity (I now read a poem at the end of my morning classes), in love with the community the classes provide, in love with the intoxicating flow during class that is like taking a vacation from the doubts and tribulations of our lives as they are these days?

Each practice is new, even if the movements are similar. Each day is new, the body is a mystery manufacturing plant, astonishing in its ability to throw us for a loop and catch us as we spiral around back towards balance and integration once again.

In the intervening years discomfort has been there, always a companion, but so has the yoga.

I can vaguely make them out, holding hands, heading along the path ahead that leads towards the mystery just over the next rise; the one to which we all one day will return.

–Elizabeth Domike
*

Walk so that your footprints bear only the marks of peaceful joy and complete freedom. To do this, you have to learn to let go – let go of your sorrows, let go of your worries. That is the secret of walking meditation.
Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

When I was 11 years old, in the course of a devastating accident, I had an out-of-body experience. 30 years later, parasailing in Hawaii, I recognized the perspective. From a great height I could view my entire neighborhood. I could see residents coming out of their houses and running in the direction of some intense activity happening far below me. After a time, I heard distant screaming. Then, it was me screaming.

I might have been unconsciously trying to assimilate this experience a couple of years later when my mother came home from her book club with Forever Young, Forever Healthy, by Indra Devi; a kind of autobiography with instructions in the practice of yoga asanas. Devi had been the wife of a Czech diplomat in India. She had become an Indian movie star (hence the name) and had convinced the famous yogi Krishnamacharya to take her as a student—perhaps making her the first woman ever accepted into a yoga ashram. Years later, she opened a studio in Hollywood and taught yoga to movie stars and other famous people. Her book was a success and she followed it up with Yoga For Americans, a six week yoga course in book form. I was intrigued and began a practice of the asanas, which has continued more-or-less unbroken for 60 odd years.

Devi made some reference to the meditative aspect of yoga, but it was an encounter with another book, Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, that convinced me to adopt yoga—an idiosyncratic yoga to be sure—as my way of life. Devi’s yoga was basically exercise. She taught a progressive series of asanas adapted for Western people. Yogananda, on the other hand, created a syncretic religion focused on meditation and the attainment of “cosmic consciousness” or “oneness with God.” He named it Self-Realization Fellowship.

In the hyperbolic language of yogic literature, dedicated practice gives the yogi power over life and death. The authoritative Yoga Sutras lists eight primary siddhis, or magical powers, and many minor ones. Yogananda tells intoxicating stories of healings, appearing in two places at once, walking through walls, stalling passenger trains, and having casual conversations with God, whether in the form of Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, or an articulate glowing light. This was heady stuff for a 13 year old nerdy American boy with no athletic prowess and a considerable capacity for self-depreciation, and I became a committed “devotee.”

As the months and years went by, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling particularly integrated or powerful. While some “meditative experiences” did occur, I actually seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. I was not becoming more integrated, but less. At first I attributed this dissolution to weakness in my practice, but as time went on the Buddhist analysis of the self and of the intention of meditation seemed to confirm my experience. (This is, of course, an extremely condensed picture of my development.) At the university I encountered the Prajnaparamita literature and the Mahayana teachings of emptiness, no-self, and dependent origination or interbeing.

In 1968 I was drafted. The United States involvement in Vietnam was surging, and the anti-war movement was in full oppositional flower. Now, the first axiom of Yoga, philosophically and in practice, is ahimsa or harmlessness—“not to injure any creature by thought, word or deed”—and I applied for Conscientious Objector status, ascribing my dissent to this principle. As part of my application, I had to gather reference letters from as many people as possible. To my genuine surprise, the Self Realization Fellowship refused to support my appeal. The flamboyant Yogananda, with his long hair and ocher robe, had perhaps wisely required his followers to assume a conservative demeanor. The small organization did not want to become the object of government scrutiny. (Conversely, they may have actually believed in so-called conservative values.)

An FBI agent was assigned to my case. He spoke with friends and neighbors, teachers, acquaintances, and, in the end, he concluded I was sincere. The local draft board turned me down. I appealed to the State Board. An investigation followed; again the investigator concluded I was sincere and the board refused me. This sequence was repeated with the National Board and a Presidential appeal. I was able to read through these various reports due to the Freedom of Information Act. I steeled myself to go to prison. One evening, a friend advised me to write to my senator, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a hawkish Democrat who was a strong supporter of US involvement in Vietnam. I felt it was futile, but I wrote to him stating that I thought an injustice was about to occur. To everyone’s surprise, Jackson asked that my case be reviewed. Two days later I received my Conscientious Objector status. Thus yogic ahimsa was made a precedent in claiming CO standing.

There are many stories about how yoga came into the world. One of my favorites is that Shiva, the Lord of Yoga, created all the forms of life by assuming the appropriate asana for each being. The practice of yoga asanas is an act of identifying with the god, and through him identifying with all creation. In a typical asana session one becomes a dog, a cat, a frog, a cobra, an eagle, a mythic hero, a baby Krishna, a tree—even an abstract being such as a triangle. There is no limit to the possibilities of identification.

To me, the practice of Hatha Yoga is a form of meditation, no different from sitting still or from the practice of walking described in the quotation above. It should never be done as mere exercise or as a bitter medicine that is supposed to be good for one. I think it’s hilarious when someone refers to me as “disciplined.” For me, yoga is play, something so enjoyable I begin to smile the moment my foot kisses the mat. I never hurt myself “doing my yoga”. I don’t stretch or pull my muscles beyond my capacity. Whether in sitting meditation or in asana practice, I like the sports phrase “playing the edge”—testing one’s limits without trying to go beyond them. Hanging out, exploring the edge of possibility, that edge expands without effort. Ahimsa, the first principle of Yoga, applies to oneself as well as others.

Although I studied yoga somewhat extensively, I was not one of those western pioneers of the ‘60s who journeyed to the east and practiced at the feet of the gurus. I remained in America, was a dilentantic student at best, and devoted more time to the study and practice of theater than to Indian metaphysics. Any interpretations I have of Yoga or of Buddhist theory and practice are likely, in the language of Harold Bloom, to constitute a misreading. Nevertheless I am bold enough to claim to be a yogi with a small “y”. The study and practice of Yoga as I understood it has been an unqualified blessing in my life. Whether “kissing the Earth with my feet” or turning the World topsy turvy by standing on my head, I find stability in insecurity and certainty in not-knowing. To anyone who thinks of yoga as a remote or inaccessible regimen, I invite you in this moment to bring your attention to how you are sitting (or standing) and breathing. In a moment of attention without any effort to improve, you can experience yoga, which is the ending of division and conflict.

—Howard Thoresen
*

I initially began a serious yoga practice shortly after the birth of my first daughter. It began as an escape. I had gone from an independent, young woman pursuing my education and supporting myself, to partnered with a child in a short time. I was looking for something that could be mine. Looking back, I see I needed to grieve for my life before children—for my former identity—and I was searching for a way to complete my metamorphosis. I was looking to relieve the spiritual suffering I couldn’t articulate at the time.

I met a woman teaching Kundalini yoga. I was drawn in from the first class and started going as often as I could. I liked using mantras and the resonance of speaking these new and foreign powerful words aloud and in community. It felt like tangible strength. I was reconnecting. I was breathing and transforming. And with a flexibility of body comes a flexibility of mind.

Throughout the years my practice ebbed and flowed. I went from Kundalini to Ashtanga to shadow yoga and back to Ashtanga. There were times I was practicing daily separated by periods with little to no time on the mat. But yoga has been a part of my life since that first class. There is asana and there is everything else. It is the inner practices of yoga (concentration, meditation) that have been the most profound for me. What is striking about yoga to me is its ability to gently guide. I make better, more conscious decisions, as a yogini.

In 2018, I traveled to Kathmandu to become a certified yoga and meditation teacher. I had no intention of teaching. I simply desired to dive deep and solidify what I began so many years ago – to take a new shape as a person content with the unknown. I am happy, as I now understand that gratitude and presence is love in action and are accessible any time.

Yoga has now led me to the healing potential of Ayurveda and I am now an Ayurvedic Wellness Counselor, committing myself to a life of balance and wonder. I continue to practice meditation daily and asana on a regular basis and imagine I will do so for the rest of the days within my one wild and precious life.

In gratitude and light
—Nicole Rush

The Nonstop Love-In by Johnny Stallings
2024-03-23 - 2024-04-23
Dear Friends!
I’m excited to be publishing my first book! The Nonstop Love-In: poems, stories, essays & other writings is published by Open Road Press.
There was a Book Launch at Ross Island Grocery & Cafe on March 23, 2024. There was a Book Reading & Signing at Belmont Books, in Portland, on April 17.
You can buy a copy of the book from Belmont Books.
Multnomah County Library has ordered 12 copies. You can place a hold now! It’s also available as an ebook from Multnomah County Library, or on Kindle from Amazon.
You can order a copy of the book from Open Road Press. Make out your check for $20 (includes shipping) to “Open Road Press” and mail it to:
Open Road Press
4110 SE Hawthorne Blvd., PMB 268
Portland, OR 97214

You can also get a copy by emailing me at:
stallingsjohnny@gmail.com.

The book can be ordered from the websites of:
IngramSpark
Powell’s
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

A portion of the proceeds goes to Open Road Press to seed future publications.
The release date was Saturday, March 23rd, 2024.
We had a great Book Launch that very evening at Ross Island Grocery & Cafe. It was a total Love-In!

From the back cover:

If you know Johnny, you will love this book. If you don’t, after reading, you will want to meet him—by reading this book. Who else can provide such a good-humored, big-hearted, modern Socratic quest into the nature of human happiness, and the myriad paths to finding joy? Johnny lived in India—and in the remote Eastern Oregon town of Ashwood. He’s spent years in prison—as a generous visitor creating dialog circles to bring lively thought to shadowed lives. And all the time he was writing these zesty morsels of insight, poem, story, meditation, and manifesto just for you.

—Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change

Get your copy today!
Makes a great gift!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Book launch for The Nonstop Love-In by Johnny Stallings! 3/23/24
2024-03-23 18:00 - 20:00
Dear Friends!

I’m excited to be publishing my first book–The Nonstop Love-In! The release date is Saturday, March 23rd, 2024.
There will be a Book Launch that very evening at Ross Island Grocery & Cafe, 3502 S. Corbett Ave. Food & drink from 6 to 7. Reading and signing from 7 to 8.

From the back cover:

If you know Johnny, you will love this book. If you don’t, after reading, you will want to meet him—by reading this book. Who else can provide such a good-humored, big-hearted, modern Socratic quest into the nature of human happiness, and the myriad paths to finding joy? Johnny lived in India—and in the remote Eastern Oregon town of Ashwood. He’s spent years in prison—as a generous visitor creating dialog circles to bring lively thought to shadowed lives. And all the time he was writing these zesty morsels of insight, poem, story, meditation, and manifesto just for you.

—Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change

I hope to see you there!!!

The book is available now to pre-order, from Powell’s…

https://www.powells.com/book/the-nonstop-love-in-9798989801107

Barnes and Noble…

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-nonstop-love-in-johnny-stallings/1144757191

and Amazon!

Order yours today!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous Live! Book Launch for The Nonstop Love-In by Johnny Stallings 3/23/24
2024-03-23 18:00 - 20:00

peace, love, happiness & understanding 4/4/24
2024-04-04 - 2024-05-01
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

April 4, 2024

Creativity!

Kim sent some helpful words on the subject of creativity by Martha Graham, a couple of poems, and an essay:

Letter from Martha Graham to Agnes deMille

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open…
No artist is pleased…
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest.

(Martha Graham was a revolutionary dancer and choreographer in New York in the mid-twentieth century, here writing a letter to her friend Agnes deMille)
*

Wild Visioning

They say her name is Susan, and she holds these
“Why not?” sessions somewhere east, up the Gorge.
She’ll ask, Why should we believe only one can say,
“I have a dream…”? She says, “Why have freedom
if we don’t sing out loud the best we could ever say?”

So they practice wild imagining. People get fierce
and joyful, saying, “What if I…What if we…?”
They start with dark news, and turn it inside out.
They vision, then they plan, and then they act.
Once they shake things up, they’re hard to stop.
They summon mayors. Then city councils catch
the fever. Then voters start to see things otherwise.
Some friends went to learn what it’s all about. They
never came back. Now they’re comets, lighting
our way across the sky. —And you? And I?

*

How to Make a Poem

Let it open like a flower—but you won’t
need the bud, blossom, scent, or petals.

Let it beat like a heart—without naming
anatomy, blood, valves, counting the pulse.

Let it be warm as sunlight fingering
through storms to find you shivering.

And may it address the world of silences,
of kinship short a few right words.

Now take down the scaffold. Let it grow
by brevity: Open hearts warm the world.

*

Kim does a good deed every day. He writes a poem. In addition to being a writer, Kim has been a teacher of writing for many years. He is a treasure trove of ideas on this subject. He even sent an essay on someone else’s essay!:

Creativity
How Naomi Shihab Nye does it…for example in her essay “Maintenance”

She likes eccentrics and she remembers details about them. She looks at her subject—housework, order, maintenance—sideways, while looking directly at people. The essay begins as a catalog of people, with each including observation, location, dialog, and now and then an oblique observation on maintenance, and the deeper meaning of maintenance: keeping a place for the life of the spirit.

One trick is to keep changing categories as a way of keeping the range of interest broad, the opportunity to include rich details wide, the essay in the realm of daily life: “Barbara has the best taste of any person I’ve ever known—the best khaki-colored linen clothing, the best books, the name of the best masseuse.”

The narrative voice can move from one topic to another—maintenance, feminism: “I never felt women were more doomed to do housework than men; I thought women were lucky. Men had to maintain questionably pleasurable associations with less tangible elements—mortgage payments, fan belts and alternators, the IRS. I preferred songs, and the way people who washed dishes immediately became exempt from after-dinner conversation.”

She takes every opportunity to bring detail to her sentences: on Thoreau, “A wealthy woman with a floral breakfast nook once told me I would ‘get over him,’ but I have not—documented here, I have not.”

And she lets Marta Alejandro have the last word. “Is your house still as big as it used to be?”

—Kim Stafford

(If you want a copy of Naomi Shihab Nye’s essay “Maintenance,” let me know and I can mail or email it to you.)—JS
*

Actor, writer and director Keith Scales sent a couple of quotes and a poem on the subject of creativity:

Here’s from William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech:

(His output was the result of) “a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something that did not exist before.”

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

—W.B. Yeats

And:

“Don’t talk about it or you’ll lose it:”

—Ernest Hemingway, from The Sun Also Rises

—Keith Scales

*

Deborah Buchanan wrote about her creative process:

My Process of Creativity

I waste a lot of time. I do the laundry. I cook something. I procrastinate—I’m a champion at waiting for another hour, another day, maybe another lifetime. All the while I am pondering, turning ideas and phrases over in my head. Or maybe I turn my attention aside and let whatever the idea is gestate in darkness. Many, many slips of paper with little notes on them. Look at my kitchen counter right now—phrases, words, topics, the beginnings of poems. Some I come back to and a flash happens. Other times I wonder, What could I have been thinking? I listen for a dream. In fact, some of my best poems began as a dream, a voice that spoke to me. In all this, time doesn’t matter. Some poems wait for years, others die on the vine. All of that is okay. I remind myself that Stanley Kunitz wasn’t particularly prolific—he said he only wrote a poem that spoke to him, he didn’t force things. There is also a quote from Theodore Roethke that I have repeated to myself countless times. It goes something like this: “A poet spends his life standing outside in the rain, waiting for the lightning to strike.” A perfect image in the Northwest.

Here is one poem I wrote about the process.

Her Gaze Never Drops

The muse is angry,
her words sting,
she wants to be inside you,
a deep place you rarely find.
It is like a seed, the shell broken.
Through the cracks, words.
Here, this is yours,
see the clear tunnel.
Where have you been?

The fist can be hot, the sound hard.
We stand in the open,
crackling vibrations around us,
listening our only option.

Another poem, which comes with a story. Many years ago I was at the Gurukula Botanical Reserve in India’s Western Ghats. Wolfgang was showing me around, plant lover to plant lover. When we were in the orchid area he pointed to some dirt and said, “This is where the underground white orchid flower blooms.” Well, as an earth sign I went wild. I tried and tried to write a poem about that. Only nine years later as I was at a workshop and learning about the fungus on plant roots did an idea come. This is the result.

white orchid

waxy petals unfurl slowly against the tropical earth pale insects burrow in
drawn by fragrance escaping molecule by molecule through soft loam
surrounding the tendril of whitened stem piercing soil branching off
a flower then another creeping underground this life unseen unheeded
above ground our life drawing sustenance from the dark explosion

And a final story and poem. One summer I spent a week camping out on the Zumwalt Prairie as part of Fishtrap’s annual workshop. In a discussion I used the phrase retroactive prayers. A friend said, What a great poem idea. Again, many years passed and I couldn’t think of any way to use those two words. Then this last winter I wrote the following poem as part of a song cycle.

So my advice: Pay attention to suggestions, forget time, let the world offer itself to you. And delete, delete, delete.

Retroactive Prayers

Moist pads on frog feet turn leathery,
streams and ponds evaporate,
water’s flow drains, then vanishes.

We didn’t think of them, we turn trying to see

Ants and beetles, roaches and worms too numerous
to count, all refugees from untallied worlds, wander this
damaged landscape—habitats scorched, flooded—buried.

We turn, we turn trying to see

Flocks of birds drawn to the sky, called by season’s
change, by earth’s magnetic lines— overcome
by heat and ash countless bodies drop to earth.

We didn’t think of them, we didn’t think

Wanting what is lost, our prayers reach out
to these abandoned lives, reach to recover and embrace,
to become each other’s prayer of remembrance.

—Deborah Buchanan
*

Andy Larkin shared some thoughts about creativity from the ancient Mexicans:

Here through art I shall live forever…
A singer, from my heart I strew my songs
I carve a great stone, I paint thick wood
My song is in them…
I shall leave my song-image on earth

Toltecayootl a ycaya ninemiz ye nicã ayyo.
Ac ya nechcuiliz ac ye nohuan oyaz onicas a anniihcuihuana ayayyan cuica-nitl y yehetl y noxochiuh nõcuicayhuitequi on teixpã ayyo.
Hueyn tetl nictequin Tomahuac quahuitl nic ycuiloa yã cuicatl ytech aya oncan no mitoz in quemanõ in can niyaz nocuicamachio nicyacauhtiaz in tlpc

–Nahuatl poem (circa 1570)
Cantares Mexicanos, fol. 27r-27v

The Cantares Mexicanos is a collection of lyrical poetry from the courts of the Triple Alliance (Aztec). I think the poet was the philosopher-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl (Fasting Coyote). He’s the tough-looking guy on the Mexican 100 peso note.

Also:

The Artist

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist, capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist: draws out all from his heart;
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents; arranges material, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things, works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

-Nahuatl poem from the Codex Matritensis,
fol. 115 v. (208), ca. 1540—1585

—Andy Larkin
*

Elizabeth Domike is a poet and yoga teacher:

Sisters

We’ve talked about boundaries as sisters to creativity. These days I lean on them heavily. Not teaching yoga for an institution, but for the specific students who have been drawn to the material I share, some of the boundaries I have are defined. Say for time.

Every week I send a reminder with a theme for the next five days. And I head that with a photograph, one I have (most often) taken during the previous week. This is something I hold close when out and about it the world. What would work, what would set the tone, represent the world here and now in this place.

Every weekday morning I choose a poem to read at the end of class. I’ve tried doing this in advance and it doesn’t work as well as those spontaneous moments reading poems in the early dark. It is a kind of meditative practice after writing 750 Words and exploring the nature of my thoughts and emotions there so close to the dream state. For the poem I choose a key word or words, like relief, or old trees, or hyacinth. And then I read what comes up and choose one that has the length and tone that I think might work and might inspire an image or thoughtfulness to carry us all through the day… a tiny bit richer.

Then during the class, although I do prepare, (sometimes for hours, depending on the material), I let go, responding to who is there and what their needs might be. Each practice, an all-consuming creative act. This took years for me to be confident enough to do. It is a kind of free fall, with the invisible ropes being the structure I have spent time revisiting again and again.

These practices have taught me that everything I do, can in some way, be expressed creatively. And most times is, without me even trying. Any experience of connecting to the sources we carry within and translating them into the language of the present moment is, in my opinion, an offering, a gift, a blessing for us all.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

Here are a few of my poems that might relate to the subject of creativity in some way:

The trick of a poem is:
Don’t say too much.
If you do
*

i want to go to the place where poems come from
*

the unwritten poem
is completely useless
*

if i could put into words what i see out this window
i would do with language what no one has yet done
if i could say what this bean plant means
everyone would fall down and worship my poem
well, probably not
because, as it is, we don’t kneel before the bean plant
and water its roots with our tears

holy holy holy is the bean plant
the 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 with his laptop
failing once again to say the unsayable
*

Like all good topics, the subject of “creativity” is endless. Many creative people have written about what they do, but most of the inspiration we get from them comes directly from the poems they’ve written, the paintings they’ve painted, the music they’ve played, the dances they’ve danced, the meals they’ve cooked, the gardens they’ve grown, the films they’ve made. A couple inspiring documentaries about artists at work are “Rivers and Tides” (2001) and “Shangri-La” (2019).

On Saturday, March 23rd, there was a wonderful book launch for my first book, The Nonstop Love-In: poems, stories, essays & other writings. It was a Love-In! The Multnomah County Library has ordered some copies. Check it out! You can get a copy at Belmont Books in Portland. You can order a copy by emailing me at: stallingsjohnny@gmail.com. It’s also available from the websites of Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon & IngramSpark. Coming soon to Powell’s Books on Hawthorne!

peace, love & happiness
—Johnny Stallings

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 4/7/24
2024-04-07 15:00 - 17:00
¡Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, April 7th, at 3 p.m. PDT, our theme will be Mysteries! What are your favorite mystery stories and novels?
Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Day of Mindfulness Retreat with Katie Radditz 4/12/24
2024-04-12 09:30 - 15:00
Hello all you on the Open Road

I wanted to let you know of a Day of Mindfulness I’m offering on Friday, April 12th, from 9:30 to 3 at the First Unitarian Church in Portland. (The entrance is on SW Salmon Street, between 11th & 12th.)

Bring a sack lunch!

The focus will be on developing equanimity and practices for opening our hearts. Inspired by Loving-Kindness practice and the Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue.

I would love to see you there. I hope you will be able to come!

love and peace,

Katie Radditz

The event is free, but please click on this link to register:

https://www.firstunitarianportland.org/events-calendar/

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 4/15/24
2024-04-15 - 2024-05-14
photo by Abe Green

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

April 15, 2024

Jude wrote this for the March issue:

TOUCH THE EARTH

“Walking is a form of touching the earth. We touch the earth with our feet, and we heal the earth, we heal ourselves, and we heal humankind. Whenever you have an extra five, ten, or fifteen minutes, enjoy walking. With every step it’s possible to bring healing and nourishment to our body and to our mind. Every step taken in mindfulness and freedom can help heal and transform, and the world will be healed and transformed together with us.” —Thich Nhat Hanh, from Your True Home #232

I am so, so lucky to live where I do. Every morning, rain or shine—or snow—I take my dog, Lolo, and we walk up to the irrigation canal (or the ditch, as most ingloriously call it) and walk for at least a half hour, usually more. Most mornings the mountain is accompanying us. Some mornings her cloudy cloak is covering her shoulders; if so the cloak is tinged with pink and peach with the rising sun. I hear an owl, a red-winged blackbird. I smell the red-flowering currant and the heady mock-orange draping the path.

But it’s what’s at my feet that settles my heart: moss and grasses, ferns, frilly lichens, maybe the golden newts wriggling to escape my footsteps. The path itself is made up of pine needles, fir needles, smushed oak leaves, aspen leaves—all of which exhale their delicious scents at each step. There’s the earth itself, the dirt: moist and crumbly in the spring, dry and powdery in the summer, muddy after a fall rain.

And winter? I try to celebrate winter up here in the snowy woods. It is beautiful—for awhile. The sculpting snow transforms and heightens and softens every branch, every shrub, every leaf. The ‘for awhile’ part last…for awhile; but come early March, when crusty, pockmarked snow still covers my trail, I long for all those delectable senses of the earth uncovered. I am more than ready now! C’mon SPRING!

—Jude Russell
*
3/18/24
5:30 a.m.
HAPPY SPRING TIME

Dear Johnny

Hello and good day to you my friend, it’s a beautiful morning here so far. I’m in the day room now and the TV is still off! So nice and peaceful. I really don’t like the TV very much…most of the time.

I’ve been thinking…the day I get out—if I release from here or Columbia River [prison]—I need to stop at Multnomah Falls, “or any waterfall,” & stand under it and let it wash over me. I just have this overwhelming feeling that I need to stand under a waterfall, let it cleanse my soul.

For almost a year now I’ve been having these subtle changes take place in me. All of the prison “things” that seem to plague everyone, stress, anger, frustrations, turmoil, etc., for me most of them have slipped away. All of those things just don’t matter as much & it’s sad to see others stuck in this frame of mind in here when you really don’t have to be at all, anytime. It’s really only a choice of a state of mind….

In two years from now I will be starting my new chance at life, a re-birth, the spots & stains from my past remain as a reminder of where I came from, never will go back to.

All of the things in the world that used to call on me have become mute and they have no appeal to me at all. I can feel the calling of a beautiful path, full of simple joys, filled with friends and a family, like I’ve never had in my life before. For the first time in my life good things await me.

The sun is just now filling the sky with its colors…the beauty we witness and have is a universal gift to everyone. Life can be so beautiful…if we look. Coming from a dark place in life, the beauty of it all for me always seems to be a gift from within the veil, wrapping me in itself. Thank you for giving my heart eyes to see the things only few can see, my friends!

Love,

Rocky Hutchinson
*

Ken Margolis shared this poem by Billy Collins:

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lake shore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door—
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—
just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing affectionately down at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

—Billy Collins
*

Jill Littlewood sent a quote and a poem:

There’s no money in poetry but then there’s no poetry in money either.
—Robert Graves
*

Because These Failures Are My Job

This morning I failed to notice the pearl-gray moment
just before sunrise when everything lightens;
failed also to find bird song under the grinding of garbage trucks,
and later, walking through woods, to stop thinking, thinking,
for even five consecutive steps. Then there was the failure to name
the exact shade of blue overhead, not sapphire, not azure, not delft,
to savor the soft squelch of pine needles underfoot.
Later I found the fork raised halfway to my mouth
while I was still chewing the last untasted bite,
and so it went, until finally, wading into sleep’s thick undertow,
I felt myself drift from dream to dream,
forever failing to comprehend where I am falling from or to:
this blurred life with only moments caught
in attention’s loose sieve —
tiny pearls fished out of oblivion’s sea,
laid out here as offering or apology or thank you

—Alison Luterman
*

Thoughts on presence and absence

As I age and find that this appears to be a time of perpetual loss—of friends, loved ones, abilities—and all of the minor affronts and assaults that living a fairly long life brings, I have spent some time in reflection about the importance of remaining aware and grateful for what remains present in my life. I believe it is all too easy to reflect on the unavoidable losses and become consumed with what is absent. And of course this is not merely an affliction of the aging and aged. In my years as a psychotherapist, I often noticed how people often focused upon what was absent in their lives: the job lost, the fractured friendship ended, the fantasy trip not taken, etc. And with this focus on what was absent, what was both actually or potentially present and the vitality and affirmation of the potential current richness always still available was lost. Yes, I can no longer run a marathon, but I can walk along the river and be grateful for that opportunity. Shall I mourn and obsess over the loss of a friendship for reasons that I never understood, or shall I rejoice in the meaningful friendships that I do have? I think there is always a choice to put one’s emotional energy and focus on what is missing— Absence—or what is available right now—Presence. And in attending to what is present a deep sense of Gratitude often emerges. While I am not a formal meditator, this is my practice. Give it a try sometime!

—Jeffrey Sher
*

On Friday, Johnny and I spent a Day of Mindfulness, in dialogue and meditation practice on keeping our hearts open.

We read this poem together in our group of 24 people:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

— Naomi Shihab Nye
*
I have been thinking of Naomi—how her heart is aching for her Palestinian friends and family, her loved-ones. I feel her warmth and hear her voice, reading the poems in her 2019 book, The Tiny Journalist.

Some excerpts from My Wisdom:

When people have a lot
they want more

When people have nothing
they will happily share it

No bird builds a wall

Open palms
hold more
*

In Some Countries

There were people who had a hundred handbags
People who hired maids to take care of their maids.

You could float down the Rhine and see castles.
Dogs wore coats for daily walks in Central Park.

A dog’s diamond collar glistened.
We were not dreaming of these things for ourselves.

We needed basics, starting small.
Hello, you look like a human being to me.

It’s hard to know what open roads mean
if you’ve always had them.

We can’t imagine
the luxury of open reads.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

—Katie Radditz
*

After Hours

Lately I have been too cold by furnace,
warm as I shoulder the bag of ice

in the aisle of ignored announcement:
it is closing time, and no clerk

can I convince that I have already gone,
am home, removing every bulb

with ceremony, with a touch like hers, how
when something is removed it is itself

again, holy in the original sense
of being set aside, and always when I wake

it is like this, my bed more public a place
than I should like it, a bird or bothered person

in conversation I cannot parse, machines
are being fixed all around me, and I like it:

to be broken and unreachable, to be a camera
without film and yet recording.

—Alex Tretbar
(first published in Colorado Review)
*

Katie Radditz and Pat Malone led “A Day of Mindfulness” at First Unitarian Church last Friday. It was a lovely way to spend a day. Several people said they “needed it,” because they felt overwhelmed—mostly by the daily news. Katie and I started this monthly Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue in September of 2020 as a way of reaching in to friends in prison with support and encouragement for their spiritual practice. (“Spiritual practice” can be anything that gives our lives meaning.) Since then, a lot of our prison friends have “graduated.” This currently goes to 10 men in prison and about 70 people “on the outside.” It comes out on the 15th of every month. If you get this, feel free to contribute.
Here are some things from my “Translating Traherne” project:

26
All things are spiritual—being objects not just of the eye, but of the mind. The more you value each thing, the happier you will be. Pigs eat acorns, but don’t consider the sun and rain and soil that nourished the tree from which the acorns came. We can appreciate the endless miracles of life and live in joy, or live in ignorance and be miserable.

27
You never enjoy the world aright, till you see that a grain of sand is a perfect miracle. Everything is here for your delight—not just because things are beautiful, or useful, but because our life is woven into the tapestry of all that is. Wine quenches more than our thirst when we feel it to be one of the countless miracles which are ours to enjoy, and give thanks. When the happiness of others makes us happy, life is good. To be grateful for all our blessings is to be blessed, to live in Paradise.

28
Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Paradise—until you look upon the earth and sky with boundless joy. If you are grateful for everything, no one who ever lived has more reason to be happy than you.

29
You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars—till you perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because people are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in all of creation, as misers do in gold, you never enjoy the world.

—Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) from Centuries of Meditations, versions by Johnny Stallings

peace & love, y’all
Johnny

The Nonstop Love-In Book Reading & Signing 4/17/24
2024-04-17 19:00 - 20:30
¡Dear Friends!
There will be a Book Reading & Signing of The Nonstop Love-In by Johnny Stallings at Belmont Books, 3415 SE Belmont, in Portland, on Wednesday, March 17th, at 7 pm.
I hope you can come!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Fabulous Deck Boys! 4/26/24
2024-04-26 19:00 - 21:00
The Fabulous Deck Boys!
featuring Jeffrey Sher
will be rocking Ross Island Grocery & Cafe
3502 S. Corbett Ave.
this Friday from 7 to 9 pm.

peace, love, happiness & understanding 5/2/24
2024-05-02 - 2024-06-05
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

May 2, 2024

Katie sent this poem. Joy Harjo was Poet Laureate from 2019-2022.

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the stars’ stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and here.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

—Joy Harjo
*

Birthing Your Secret Self

Music can get you without being seen.
Painting can move you without a word.
Poetry works because you can’t explain.
Drawing distills your vision’s blur to lines.
With film, you swim a different river.
Live theater plucks you from time’s prison.
Puppets lift you into antic life. Dance
tugs your dreams from darkness to stand
and stamp, pivot, swoon and swirl. So,
freed from gravity, from barren facts,
your spirit sings its colors hid too long.
By art, slow days are quickened, and
all your torn hopes healed as by these
magic acts to your inner eye at last
rising tall you stand revealed.

—Kim Stafford
*

Not So Much

I used to be captured by longing.
Not so much anymore. The ghost
of it resonates, rain on an
industrial drum outside a warehouse
near an old dock, quiet on a Sunday afternoon.

The place the ache left remains.
Wind comes up then whistles
through big sky, open horizon.
The possibilities aren’t quite as endless
as they used to be. Blue petals

of a flower open anyway.
There is a break in the clouds.
I go for a walk.
Even if it is just in my mind.
More space has opened up to roam.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

“MAD”

It never makes Sense.
Once you’re down the rabbit hole,
You’ll never come up.

Oh no! I must be morbidly mad;
For can’t you see that everything that falls upon me—
the good, the bad, the pretty, the ugly was eloquently
envisioned to carry me (no, not you! Rather simply just me.)
through the event horizon to a new reality?

My mind, it ebbs and it flows on the shore with the
rocks. I mustn’t be late! Tick…Tock…alas it
does seem, I am in need, of a new “cuckoo” clock.

The stars in the sky, they seem so high.
That is of course unless you view them from my
mind’s eye. A light year’s not far, and an eon’s not
long.

Will you come with me to a new dimension?

—Brandon Lee Roy
*

3-26-24
5:40 a.m.
Dear Johnny

It’s a beautiful rainy Spring morning here. I just wanted to start sending pieces for both newsletters again. I should never be too busy for this.

When I read “The Open Road” & “Mindfulness & Meditation” I feel the Love & emotions that every one has in them. The amount of wisdom I get is…stunning, to say the least. To me they are works of art from everyone’s heart. Nothing in these compilations we all participate in are simple information; they’re complex, beautiful & cultivate positive growth within each of us in some way. In some way each of us needs some piece of them to complete some part of us…for me, that’s how it feels.

Love You All
Love, Rocky
All of the ways I’ve seen, all the paths I’ve walked, all that life was, is & will be—can it be that I have found in it all the paths that set my heart ablaze with love and the will to be free from self doubt & self limitations?

Even confined within the concrete walls, the fences, the endless spools of razor wire, through the fightings, cuttings, stabbings and broken bones, the lying, backstabbing, manipulations, and the fear of the prison guards who play with our lives, minds and souls, I’ve found this path.

The path is not an easy one to navigate all the time. Every day has its distractions & traps to overcome, same as life outside the walls of prison. But the golden path is the path I’m on, and no one can take me off of it but me. I’ve no plans of trekking away from it any time soon.

The world keeps spinning, eclipses happen like a cosmic clock, my heart is like yours—limited beats full of wounds, love and joy. It rages like a thunderstorm on the sea in my chest, the engine of my soul driving along my golden daily path.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

Here’s an old poem:

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 lay 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 (April 7, 1770-April 23, 1850)

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 5/5/24
2024-05-05 15:00 - 17:00
¡Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, May 5th, at 3 p.m. PDT, our theme will be Sci-Fi! What are your favorite Science Fiction books and movies?
Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 5/15/24
2024-05-15 - 2024-06-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

May 15, 2024

Katie sent this:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

–John Wesley (1703-1791)
*

For so long I wandered in the darkness and stayed from the light, I was safe there, I was out of sight.
Not knowing what it was that led along in life, a thread pulled on my heart, some would call it luck, I am alive.
Whatever it is, I’ve always followed my heart and when I’ve not done so…things don’t work out so well for me.
We all have a passion inside of us; driven by it, great things come from each of us for others, for all we love in life.
To give to each other the love we have in our hearts, is truly what is important in life, it keeps all of us together.

—Rocky Hutchinson 4-18-24
*

#16 Embrace Them With Great Tenderness

“Do not fight against pain and do not fight against irritation or jealousy. Embrace them with great tenderness, as though you were embracing a little baby. Your anger is yourself, and you should not be violent toward it. The same goes with all of your emotions.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh, from Your True Home

Oh how important it is to remember this! I am so glad that Thich Nhat Hanh is here to verify, to validate this aching truth for me.

After fifteen years of inexpressible joy with my dear pooch, my dear dog, Lolo (yes, named for Lolo Pass in the mountains, to replace her shelter name of…Tiffany), she is deteriorating rapidly, and I doubt we have six more months with her. Where once not long ago she could hike 10-12 miles with me, now she can walk only a couple short walks around our property. Her kidneys are failing and her hind legs wobble and collapse until I prop her up and give her a little pep talk.

My heart is breaking. Yes, we’ve had 15½ joyful years with her, so true, but now comes what I have dreaded—accompanying yet another dog through the death process.

My heart is breaking, and yet I realized that this great sadness is so filled with love that it is beautiful, that I am fortunate to be feeling this sadness, because it is all love for this creature. My heart is full, and whether it is sadness or joy, the important thing is that my heart is full, and alive.

—Jude Russell
*

Beauty Blind

Have I grown blind to the attractions of the ordinary?
Have I lost the mundane matrix in background weave
of common days, where the blossom distracts me
from the stem’s grace, which distracts me
from the leaf’s holy hue, which distracts me
from earth, essential earth, each crumb of origin?

Any bright young face in the crowd can steal
my attention from all beautiful variations
of the human tribe, from the honest old, the brutal
broken, the pluck and persistence of the unseen.
Wake up, sleepy wisdom. See as sky sees,
pouring light in bounty over all of us.

—Kim Stafford
*

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.
—Rumi

As is the world right now!

—Jill Littlewood
*

From the Rubaiyat:

The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
—Omar Khayyam

—J Kahn
*

Rhododendrons are in bloom! Our whole neighborhood is a gigantic garden.

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’ th’ sun,
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

[“Who” here means “Anyone who”]

This song comes from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. The play and the song belong to the pastoral tradition in literature, where rural life is imagined as idyllic and innocent. Usually shepherds are involved. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence are in that tradition.

This morning I’m thinking about how we live inside the worlds we imagine. In our lives, innocence gives way to experience. And then maybe…I don’t know what…another kind of innocence. Here’s a poem from my book The Nonstop Love-In that may be about that:

let’s pretend

instead of pretending that we are afraid
that we must improve
that we have enemies
that the future will arrive someday

let’s pretend everything is sacred
pretend this is Paradise
pretend every moment is precious
pretend we love everyone

pretend our joy knows no bounds
pretend we are the whole wide world

—Johnny Stallings
*

GRATITUDE

“The Hebrew term for gratitude translates as ‘recognizing the good.’ Myriad benefits come to us every day, but most of us find it easy to overlook them and instead focus on what we lack. This trait is an invitation to sensitize yourself to the good and to the gifts that are certain to be present in your life at every moment, even if at the same moment there happen to be difficulties.

—AWAKEN TO THE GOOD AND GIVE THANKS

PRACTICE: Say ‘thank you’ to every person who does even the slightest thing that is helpful or beneficial to you.”
—Alan Morinis, from Every Day, Holy Day

It is easy to obscure my daily Positive experiences or overlook the seemingly-small kindnesses of others during the day. Yet, I know from previous experience (now lapsed) that any effort to see and appreciate these moments only expands my joy and positive experiences throughout the day. I enjoy the mantra for today. Giving thanks is the easy part, mostly. The seeing of good or Positives—thus awakening—is my threshold of challenge. I can’t help but recall the Robin Williams movie, “Awakenings”; noticing how easy it is to fall into a torpor of catatonia for others’ kindnesses—not even “seeing” that which is slapping my face, repeatedly. Like the patients, I need an “L-Dopa” therapy to shock me from my torpor to sharp alert and to fully present experience of my world and life as it is. Here’s to awakenings for even slight helps, benefits or “good” moments Today!

I’ve wanted a “new” mindfulness practice: Providence has afforded me this Mussar practice—combining Judaism, meditation and mindfulness into a regular practice. I learned recently in a read on Hasidis that Zen, which I practiced earlier (2014-2020), is very akin to Jewish Kabbalah practices, and now I have Mussar exercises for my meditation moments daily!

P.S. Having an audience for writing is a helpful focus and—THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

—Michel Deforge

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 5/19/24
2024-05-19 15:00 - 17:00
¡Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, May 19th, at 3 p.m. PDT, our theme will be Old Poems! What are some of your favorite poems that were written before 1900?

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

AS THE SKY BEGINS TO CHANGE: Kim Stafford Poetry Reading
2024-05-21 18:00 - 19:30
Hey Everyone!

Kim will be reading from his latest book at Broadway Books (1714 NE Broadway) this evening (5/21/24) at 6 pm.

It will be wonderful!

peace, love & poetry

Johnny

Johnny Stallings performs Walt Whitman's Song of Myself
2024-05-31 19:30 - 21:00
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

Johnny Stallings
performs

Walt Whitman’s

Song of Myself

Friday, May 31 * 7:30 p.m. * Muir Hall at Taborspace
5441 SE Belmont

this event is free

¡Bibliophiles Unanimous! 6/2/24
2024-06-02 15:00 - 17:00
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

¡Beloved Bibliophiles!

On May 31st, Walt Whitman turned 205! We celebrated at Taborpsace with a birthday cake and “Song of Myself.” This Sunday at 3 p.m. (PDT), we will read together from Song of Myself and talk about the passages that delight and inspires us.

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 6/6/24
2024-06-06 - 2024-07-03
The Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

June 6, 2024

Live righteously and love everyone.

—tag on Yogi Tea bag
*

Alex sent this poem:

The Province of Clocks

There aren’t many leaves left in the galaxy
magnolia planted on the museum grounds.

Ravens explode from the county hospital
roof as a result of internal pressure, recalling

to me the nurse who caressed my hand
-cuffed wrists at two in the morning

when I was sick and awaiting arraignment. She didn’t
have to do that. Now when I’m bored and uncurious

I try to remember what it was like to remember
how I held my face so close to the juniper, redirected

a moth from annihilation, and asked my grief
for the hour. Contrary to popular belief, clocks have more

to do with space than time, and all guns really do is move
a thing very quickly into you.

—Alex Tretbar

first published in the journal Sixth Finch
*

Ken Margolis shared this:

“Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience. Furthermore, while many of the young believe that the world can be made better by sudden changes in social order and by bloody and exhausting revolutions, most older people have learned that hatred and cruelty never produce anything but their own kind. The only hope of mankind is love in its various forms and manifestations—the source of them all being love of life, which, as we know, increases and ripens with the years.”

—from the “Author’s Note” to the book Old Love by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1997) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978—the only Yiddish writer to do so.
*

I invited Elizabeth to write about her personal experience with blogs. Here’s what she wrote:

About Those Web Logs (Blogs)

I didn’t start writing regularly on the internet until the summer of 2000. Before then I had been posting poetry drafts for workshopping on a site called Open Diary. Not because I was workshopping the poems there. I was posting there because I met a couple of guys that wanted to workshop poems and instead of printing our poems out to share at our weekly coffeeshop meetings, one of the guys suggested we use this online diary site. We could put our poems up, we could see them, critique them, and hey maybe if we got lucky someone else would as well.

That was in 1998. We used what we called “diary names”. There were three of us at that first meeting. When we put up our draft poems there was a front-page feature that folks out in the world would scroll through and click on something that interested them. There was the ability to leave notes on someone’s post. I think we had rudimentary hashtags too, so people interested in poetry might find us that way.

I didn’t get much traffic, but the two male poets got more, and I would look at their notes and click on those people’s diaries. These were people writing regularly all over the world about their lives behind this porous wall of assumed anonymity.

There was flirting, there was drama, as more and more folks coming to the local open mic readings found out we were doing this and joined. People started writing more than poetry and those of us still writing poetry and reading it were parsing it for the juiciest possible details about each other. Factions developed. Feelings were expressed. It was a free for all.

I was reading about the daily lives of people all over the English-speaking world that I stumbled upon or who had found me. I remember a particular day clearly, keeping the poetry page, I decided to set up a page to talk about myself and my life, so I didn’t feel like I was lurking, I was participating. There were ads but somewhere around 2003 or so we got the option to have no ads if we paid a modest amount either monthly or annually.

There were various levels of privacy available too. You could have Friends Only; this is before Facebook became ubiquitous. But I decided to keep my writing public. This became an issue when my family and coworkers started reading what I was writing. Did I mention drama? Crazy drama with misinterpretation and envy and grudges and…

It was kind of fun in an I know this probably isn’t a good idea transgressive sort of way.

Now you would think, oh, well the thing to do then is manage privacy to minimize the drama, but being a person who likes a challenge I decided to figure out a way to write regularly about my life that my family and close friends could read and be okay with. This took a couple of years, and I would say that the biggest lesson I learned is that the only story that is mine to tell is…mine.

Still to this day, things can get a little slippery in this arena if I know someone isn’t reading my posts or a perceived affront occurs… but mostly, I manage the impulse and keep things on the understated side. So… no trainwrecks.

One of the poets I started this adventure with I became very close to, and he pretty much only posted poetry. He didn’t have the diary impulse. His diary name was Mr. Finch and mine was (and still is) noko. Noko was my first cat, a gorgeous Norwegian Forest Cat. Johnny’s diary name is Walt, for obvious reasons.

But oh, Mr. Finch was able to create drama. And he had strong (right wing I might add) opinions.

And then he got sick. By then we were inseparable. I wrote about his illness. He had lung cancer that had spread to his brain. Taking care of him was this isolating thing. I was working full time and caring for him and I wrote about it all on this diary, blog thing, as often as I could.

People we had connected to all over the world were following along. They left unbelievably supportive and useful notes. We would read them together. And it helped. It helped us get through the hard days and the days where silly things happened and the days, deep breath, I needed to interact with his insane family full of alcoholics and one particularly challenging niece with M.S. and a crush on him. But we won’t go there, okay.

At some point the guy running the website decided he couldn’t do it anymore. There was much distress. Eventually another guy decided he would set up a new website and many of us went there. It is called Prosebox. It works a lot better than Open Diary ever did, costs a modest sum to use without ads, allows pictures if one hosts them elsewhere.

When Mr. Finch and I, (we often called each other by our diary names) started a poetry press, open mic reading, we also started a Blogspot blog. We both wrote on that. It is a blogger’s blog called Meander Knot Press. I haven’t written on there since 2016 but it is still extant.

The reach of the writing I do on Prosebox, usually twice a week and noting every few days is small, meaningful, and broadly international. A number of people who “read me”, I read as well and (for some of us 24 years) our communications have developed into deep caring connections. I have met some people in person over the years. Never a disappointment.

I have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Medium and Substack. But I barely use any of them. I do read some accounts on Substack regularly. This has become the place where folks who are not part of a media organization go to say things they have to say. People put up a certain amount of content for free or you can subscribe for more.

Substack has expanded recently to include podcasts. I love podcasts, the voice is so intimate.

The most popular Substack is by the historian Heather Cox Richardson: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/. It is called Letters From an American. If you give your email address you can have access for free to some material. There is now a feature where if you subscribe, (I do for $5 a month) you get access to her reading her posts out loud. I wasn’t finding time to read them regularly, but I can listen when I am doing chores and I happily do.

A popular independent and successful blog is The Marginalian by Maria Popova that I know a number of you subscribe to. You can find her here: https://www.themarginalian.org/about/

The thing is… people are busy. When I get asked why I would write about myself regularly and make it public…that is crazy… I just smile. I don’t expect anyone to read what I write unless they find something to connect to there. I wrote a post a few hours ago with a picture of wild blackberries in bloom and a widow in Midland Canada who was born in Singapore and married a missionary and a retired maths teacher with partial dementia from Victoria Australia read it and left notes.

The sweet serendipity of it all makes my heart sing a happy song. It appears the years of effort were worthwhile.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

“The Marginalian” was originally called “Brain-Pickings.” I’ve been getting it in my Inbox for years. It is one of the inspirations for “peace, love, happiness & understanding.” I like to think of this as a “journal,” rather than a “newsletter.” There’s no news in it. When Covid was arriving in early 2020, Nancy and I were thinking about how it was going to make life in prison even worse! I thought some of our friends in prison might enjoy getting something in the mail every week, especially something with upbeat, inspirational content. (I rely on poems a lot.) These days it comes out on or about the first Thursday of the month. I mail it to about 2o people in prison, and email it to a little over 100 people “on the outside.” (Does emailing it make it a “blog”?) Since the Spring of 202o, a lot of our friends who were then in prison are out now. Hallelujah!

On the Open Road website there is a peace, love, happiness & understanding Archive: https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-archive/. This is the 95th Issue!

Walt Whitman’s 205th birthday was on May 31st. We celebrated with a cake and I performed my hour-long version of his poem “Song of Myself.” I’ve been doing that for a long time. It seems to make everyone happy—including me.

It’s weird to me that 169 years after Walt wrote this poem, it is not more widely read, appreciated, and enjoyed than it is. Many people I ask about the poem say they haven’t read it—or that they read it long ago, in school.

Chapter Two of the book Black Elk Speaks and “Song of Myself” seem to me to be the most important texts that have come from America. As a wisdom text, I have found it to be more helpful in changing the way I see and feel and experience the world than the Sermon on the Mount, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Tao Te Ching. High praise!—but true, I think, for me.

Here are some things about Walt Whitman and “Song of Myself” from the Open Road website:

https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-walt-whitman-issue-4-9-4-15/
https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-6-2-22/
https://openroadpdx.com/event/friends-of-walt-an-archive/

And there’s an essay titled “Walt and Me” in my book The Nonstop Love-In, which is available from the Multnomah County Library:

https://multcolib.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S152C2348579

It can also be ordered from Open Road Press

https://openroadpdx.com/open-road-press/

and from Powell’s Books and Amazon.

Well, that’s about it for this time.

Much love to y’all,
Johnny

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

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

June 15, 2024

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

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

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

—Lyn Slater (sent by Jill Littlewood)
*

How

small birds flit
from bough
to bough to bough

to bough to bough to bough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Will Hornyak, June 2024
*

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

June 5, 2024

Dear Rocky

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

peace & love
Johnny
*

One Trick Pony

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

—Kim Stafford
*

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

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

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

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

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

May 6, 2024

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

May 7, 2024

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

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

—Michel Deforge
*

Katie Radditz sent this poem by Rilke:

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

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 – 1926
*

Elizabeth Domike sent this poem by Stanley Moss:

Bright Day

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

—Stanley Moss
*

Our Lady of the Mangoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Gail Lester, Guanajuato, March, 2024

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

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

49 – What is a leaf?

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

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

Peace Love Happiness

–Jake

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

–Johnny Stallings
Executive Director, The Open Road

¡Bibliophiles Unanimous! 6/16/24
2024-06-16 15:00 - 17:00
“The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.”
–from Apocalypse by D. H. Lawrence

¡Beloved Bibliophiles!

On June 16th, our topic will be Books That Give You Something New Every Time You Read Them.

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

The Fabulous Deck Boys 6/21/24
2024-06-21 19:00 - 21:00
Music Lovers!

On Friday, June 21st, from 7 to 9 pm, Deck Boys (https://www.deckboys.com)–featuring the inimitable Jeffrey Sher!–are gonna rock the Ross Island Grocery & Cafe, 3502 S. Corbett, Ave, in Portland.

If you want to have a good time, this is the place to be.

peace, love & music

Johnny
