The Open Road: a learning community

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/13/20
2020-08-13 - 2020-08-19
Aaron Gilbert as Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Two Rivers prison, 2011)

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

My mind started to blossom…

August 13, 2020

Recently I suggested to Aaron Gilbert that he might write about what he’s learned about love while in prison. This is what he wrote:

July 26, 2020
Dear Johnny

….I have been contemplating on expanding on my ideas from my last letter and what I have learned about Love while in prison. Wow! There is just so much to it. I think of one thing, then it expands into so many different ideas. I will just try to keep it simple and hit the points that have truly meant the most.

Before I came to prison, I had a very narrow view of what love was. When you get to a place like this, you have two choices, you can either cling to positive things in your life or go down a very dark lonely path. I asked myself how did this happen, how did I get here? The answer was quite simple, it was because I didn’t care about anyone or anything, including myself. Through self-reflection, I started to try to figure out: why? Then I met Johnny.

I was very skeptical at first about what this man was all about. I just wanted to be in the play, but first we had to sit through this “dialogue group.” We would, or they would, talk about these foreign topics: Mythos, Identity, Silence, Love, etc. I just wanted it to be over so we could get on with rehearsals. I don’t know how long it took, but I remember exactly when it happened for me. I began to hear other people speak and the biggest thing I heard was the silence. Someone would have something to say and I remember wondering what Johnny was doing when he got that look on his face, then it hit me at once, he was LISTENING! I began to realize that he was truly caring for us just by listening to us. My mind started to blossom, I started to see the things I had been contemplating about love become something real. He volunteered a huge portion of his life to come and listen to us when most of the rest of society had written us off. This is one of the most pure forms of love I have ever felt and I wanted more.

For the first time in my life, I became engaged with people around me. At the end of class, Johnny would say “be kind to yourself.” I started to work on self-forgiveness and ask for forgiveness from the people I hurt. This love was transforming my life and I started to feel like a person of value.

The question then became: is it truly possible to love everyone? It is very complicated and I have a lot of work to do in this category, but I believe the answer is “yes, it is possible.” I have been in prison for almost fourteen years now, I have many friends that have committed the worst possible crimes, and they will never go home. When you know these guys without that stigma over their head, you realize that they are human as well, with the same basic needs as the rest of us, to love, to be loved and have companionship with others. You realize they are no less human than anyone else is, even though society wants us to think otherwise. These “lifers” are some of the most respectful caring people I have met in my life, not only on the inside. Most of these guys are doing good things for others, trying to make their environment a healthier place to live.

This is where I struggle because there are many people I don’t know that I may still be holding judgment against. I believe Love says if you forgive one person’s transgressions, you should be able to forgive them all. As I said, Love is a work in progress.

I have learned most everything I know about love from being in prison. It doesn’t seem right, but it is true. Mostly because one man was able to help my mind flower and start to soak in all the light of Love. The best part about it is I am not the only person he touched. I know of many more in the few short years I was part of Group Dialogue. I can’t imagine how many others have felt some of that love as well. I was reading The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh recently, and something that stood out, I am just paraphrasing, but he was saying of love “we can’t expect to fit people into our own little world about what we feel love is. We should truly try to understand them for who they are, even if they have wronged us we should try to understand why.” Imagine if we can all just take a little piece of that compassion, understanding, and listening and spread it, it has to make the world a better place, right?

Maybe next time I can expand a little more on the journey of life and what it means to me. This is just the most important thing I could say today. I do want to thank Johnny for you just being you. This world needs people like you in it now more than ever I believe. I know the impact you have had on me and many others has forever transformed us into better humans, so thank you for all that love….

Love & Respect
Aaron G.
*

Aaron was in the dialogue group at Two Rivers prison from April of 2010 to May of 2013, when he transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary. He’s serving the end of his sentence at South Fork Forest Camp. While at Two Rivers, he played Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Sir Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night” and Juror Number Six in “Twelve Angry Men.” In real life he’s a nice guy, but as a juror he wanted to convict the defendant quickly so he could go to a baseball game! (Just kidding, Aaron.)

It is kind of Aaron to say so many nice things about be. I, too, learned a lot about love in prison. One thing I learned is that the circle is a good shape for us humans. Everyone has an equal place in a circle. That’s important. In 2015, when I started going to Two Rivers once a month, instead of once a week, other people came forward to facilitate the dialogue group discussions and to direct the plays. I think we all have had a similar experience to what Aaron is talking about. Being in a circle with 16 or 20 people, sometimes talking, always listening, is a transformative experience. We get to know each other in a deep way and we get to know ourselves better too. I don’t know where the love comes from, but we all have felt it getting stronger and stronger. This world can be seen as a School for Love. When it is, even prison is a home for The Nonstop Love-In. As Aaron says, we all have the same basic needs: “…to love, to be loved and have companionship with others.”

Kim taught a poetry class at Coffee Creek prison. And wrote a poem about it:

Poetry Class
at the Women’s Prison

Put chairs in a circle. “Where
is everyone?” “Oh, they’re all
watching ‘Love after Lock-Up.’
It’s fake, but addicting.”

On every chair, put a notebook
and a pen. “You know what?
In this class I’m not an inmate,
I’m a person.” “Every time

that door opens, and another
joins our circle, we’re stronger.”
“It’s not so much what we write —
it’s how we listen.” Finally, the show

over, the room resonant,
we are the full twelve writing
in a ring, as onto scribbled pages
we bow to pray hard stories.

—Kim Stafford
*

Here’s a poem that Katie Radditz shared:

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

—James Wright

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/6/20
2020-08-06 - 2020-08-12
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

August 6, 2020

Some Thoughts On Culture That Nurtures

All human beings live inside cultures. Our language, our customs, the things we make, the way we interact, the stories we tell all help to co-create our culture. Our culture is supposed to help us understand ourselves and the complex, mysterious world in which we live. Culture is supposed to nurture us—help us to be confident, happy, imaginative, loving and kind. It should nurture our genius, help us to realize our fullest potential. Each of us is unique and has much to give to others which no one else can.

If we turn on the TV, we may find that many of the messages we get from the programs and from the commercials are unhelpful. They don’t make us wiser or kinder, happier or more free. They can make us more fearful and angry and depressed. We are taught who we should hate.

There are old and new stories about Paradise. It either happened a long time ago, or may happen sometime in the future. I try each day to tune myself to the Paradise that is already here. In this newsletter, I’m looking for things that will inspire, delight, enlighten, or in some way help the reader to bless this day.

Sometimes we need consolation:

Consolation

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

—Wisłowa Szymborska
*

I like happy endings. If I get into a conversation with friends where we talk about how terrible things are or how bleak the future looks I always try to end our talk on a positive note. Hopelessness and despair accomplish nothing—except to make us feel miserable. Life is short. This day is precious. I want to enjoy it.

Kirk Bromley shared this poem with Howard Thoresen, who sends it to all of us:

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

—Robert Frost
*

Here’s a poem Kim Stafford sent our way:

The Fact of Forgiveness

It is a given you have failed.
It goes without saying you were hurt
and so you hurt some others.
Of course you alone could have saved someone
or something you did not.
The midnight court of the sleepless mind
has reached its verdict: Life Sentence.
Life will be long and hard, but also mysterious
in how you are condemned to live
by beauty all the same.
Through the bars of your cell, you must watch
the moon grow full and generous.
A tune made for others will arrive at evening,
smuggled into your mind as if for you.
The world can’t keep its treasures from you—
no matter how little you deserve,
you have it all:
Moon, Sun, Sleep, Waking, Water, Air—
a bird dancing away out of sight
leaving the print of its flight
and a filament of song
for you.

—Kim Stafford
*

Kim’s poem reminded me of this passage from Shakespeare:

Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?
Guildenstern: Prison, my lord?
Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons. Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then, ‘tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
Rosencrantz: Why then your own ambition makes it one; ‘tis too narrow for your mind.
Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.

That’s it for now.

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

–Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/30/20
2020-07-30 - 2020-08-05
Cartoon by Gary Larson

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

Oh no! Not another Humor Issue!

July 30, 2020

A three-legged dog walks into a bar and says: “I’m lookin for the man who shot my paw.”

Why did the hipster burn his mouth?
He drank his coffee before it was cool.

I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high.
She looked at me surprised.

I got my daughter a fridge for her birthday.
I can’t wait to see her face light up when she opens it.

What did the pirate say when he became an octogenarian?
Aye matey.

A sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve food here.”

Why did the yogurt go to the art exhibition?
Because it was cultured.

How do you throw a space party?
You planet.

What did one hat say to the other?
You stay here. I’ll go on ahead.

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks what he’d like. The horse doesn’t reply because it’s a horse and obviously can’t speak or understand English. Several people get up and leave, sensing the danger in having a large live animal in an enclosed space.
*
A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.”
The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves.
“What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!”
Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream parlor. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?”
The boy licked his cone and replied: “Because the day I take the dollar the game is over!”
*
An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The fisherman replied that it only took a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish. The fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The businessman then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The businessman scoffed. “I am a Wharton MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then L.A., and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The fisherman asked, “But how long will this all take?”
To which the businessman replied, “Fifteen or 20 years.”
“But what then?”
The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.”
“Millions? Then what?”
The businessman said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your friends.”
*
A guy said to God, “God, is it true that to you a billion years is like a second?”
God said, “Yes.”
The guy said, “God, is it true that to you a billion dollars is like a penny?”
God said, “Yes.”
The guy said, “God, can I have a penny?”
God said, “Sure, just a second.”
*
A string bean took his friend, an eggplant, to the hospital.
String Bean: How is he, Doc? Can you save his life?
Doctor: I have good news and bad news. The good news is I can save his life. The bad news is he’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life.
*
Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way.
The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, “Morning, boys! How’s the water?”
The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, “What’s water?”

—“Borrowed” from the Internet and joke books by Johnny Stallings
*
One day the first grade teacher was reading the story of Chicken Little to her class. She came to the part of the story where Chicken Little tried to warn the farmer.
She read, “…. and so Chicken Little went up to the farmer and said, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”
The teacher paused, then asked the class, “And what do you think that farmer said?”
One little girl raised her hand and said, “I think he said: ‘I’ll be darned! A talking chicken!’”
—Will Weigler
*

For an extra bit of fun you might try this video of people singing and dancing on top of a train in India. (I’ve ridden in this train, but not on it.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmrmVs10X8

May all people be happy!

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/23/20
2020-07-23 - 2020-07-29
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 23, 2020

“The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist; a Spider’s Snare: it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold, and it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light the world converts itself into the thing you name, and all things find their right place under this new and capricious classification. Must I call the heaven and the earth a maypole and country fair with booths, or an anthill, or an old coat, in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears and the spirit leaps to the trope.”

(The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Linscott, pp. 197-198, (1841))
*

Battle or Picnic?

Life has often been described as a battle. Perhaps the most famous example is the Bhagavad Gita. Just as a great battle is about to begin, the warrior-prince Arjuna asks his charioteer and guru, the god Krishna, to drive their chariot between the two armies. Time stops. Filled with pity, and unwilling to kill his kinsmen who are on the opposing side, Arjuna refuses to fight. Krishna urges Arjuna to do his duty, to stand up and fight like a man. He teaches Arjuna that the highest liberation comes from the realization that one’s self is the unborn and undying Self of all—not other than God. Arjuna decides to join the fight, the battle begins, and everyone on both sides is slaughtered.

The Bhagavad Gita is a complex wisdom text which is located in the middle of a story about war. It is essentially about yoga and how to live a life of inner peace and freedom, but the plot of the epic in which it is set requires Arjuna to fight in the war. So, a central metaphor suggests that life is a battle, and the honorable thing is to boldly do what is required of you.

We are often reminded that life is a struggle or a battle. Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest is used to support this idea. Our economic system is predicated on the idea of a fierce competition which many people will inevitably lose. Too bad for them.

I like the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. In one of his talks at a meditation retreat, he began by saying: “Some people think that a meditation retreat is a kind of picnic…” When someone is an expert in a field, he usually warns newcomers that such expertise requires years of discipline and hard work. So, I was expecting Thich Nhat Hanh to continue by saying, “…but it’s not.” He surprised me by next saying: “I love picnics!” And I thought to myself: “I love picnics, too! Everyone loves picnics! Picnics are lovely!”

And it occurred to me that rather than thinking of life as a struggle, as some kind of ordeal, as a battle to be fought, I would think of my life as a picnic. Why not? As we learn from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s entertaining journal entry that I am using as the epigram for this essay, we can say anything we want. I have the feeling that life is everything-at-once. But I can’t imagine everything-at-once. So, for now, I’m going with “picnic.”

It’s a picnic to which everyone is invited. A gathering. A feast. Little kids are running around. Maybe there’s a softball game. There’s potato salad. Sandwiches. Lemonade. There might be pie. Ants. At a picnic, everyone has the feeling that life is good.

Since we’re here just a little while, doesn’t that sound good? As a metaphor, isn’t it preferable to a scene of chaos, confusion and carnage?

In the UNESCO Constitution, signed in November of 1945, it says: “…wars begin in the minds of men…” We should choose our metaphors wisely.

—Johnny Stallings (11/14/19)
*

Naomi Shihab Nye really goes to town with metaphors in this poem:

Sifter

When our English teacher gave
our first writing assignment of the year,
Become a kitchen implement
in 2 descriptive paragraphs, I did not think
butcher knife or frying pan,
I thought immediately
of soft flour sifting through the little holes
of the sifter and the sifter’s pleasing circular
swishing sound, and wrote it down.
Rhoda became a teaspoon,
Roberto a funnel,
Jim a muffin tin
and Forrest a soup pot.
We read our paragraphs out loud.
Abby was a blender. Everyone laughed
and acted giddy, but the more we thought about it,
we were all everything in the whole kitchen,
drawers and drainers,
singing teapot and grapefruit spoon
with serrated edges, we were all the
empty cup, the tray.
This, said our teacher, is the beauty of metaphor.
It opens doors.
What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes.
When good days came
I would try to contain them gently
the way flour remains
in the sifter until you turn the handle.
Time, time. I was a sweet sifter in time
and no one ever knew.

—Naomi Shihab Nye
*

Howard Thoresen has often recommended to me the book Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

Jeff Kuehner sent a couple poems:

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell
*

There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
*

Here’s a link to a short (12 minutes) film on “Sacred Economics” featuring Charles Eisenstein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs

That’s it for this issue of “peace, love, happiness & understanding.” Tune in next week for another exciting episode.

—Johnny Stallings

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/16/20
2020-07-16 - 2020-07-22
Three amigos bringing in the New Year at Alma del Sol in Guanajuato, Mexico: Johnny Stallings, Hugo Anaya & Kim Stafford.

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 16, 2020

I asked Kim Stafford if he would write something for our newsletter about his experience as Poet Laureate. Like the generous writer and human being described in his essay, he said “Yes.”
*

To Be a Better Person
My 100 poetry events as Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate

When I met the Poet Laureate of Linn-Benton Community College I learned what my work as a poet is really about. This student poet, chosen by his teachers to serve as a writer and reader of poems at various campus events for a year, was telling me about his work teaching writing at the juvenile detention center as a volunteer, sharing poems with fellow students, opening meetings with a poem, and other acts of generous incantation. Then he said it: “I don’t write poems to become a better poet. I write poems to become a better person.”

That’s it! That’s what poetry is for—the writing of it, the reading of it, teaching, sharing, posting, publishing, handing off to a friend in need of lyric buoyancy. It’s not just a literary activity. It’s a human activity, a way to become more awake, more human, humane, compassionate, alive, and connected.

I wish I could remember that student’s name, but I will never forget what he taught me. And maybe something like that will be the legacy of my own work as wandering bard in Oregon. Years after I’m gone, people in little towns will say, “This guy came and told us the great thing about poetry is you can’t make money doing it—so you are completely free in how you do it. I can’t remember his name, but he said a poem could save your life. He said a poem could make you live at a deeper level, closer to community, more ready to take hard things in life as they come, and to help others with gentle words.”

As Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate from May 2018 through May 2020, I was a sitting duck, but a willing one. There was an “event request form” on the website of the Oregon Cultural Trust, and it took about five minutes for anyone—a librarian, teacher, writer, reader, or other individual—to fill out the form, it would come to me, and I could not say no. Would I drive to the Alvord Desert to read poems as part of an open air piano concert (with Hunter Noack of www.inalandscape.org)? Yes! Would I drive to Klamath Falls to read poems…to Gold Beach…to Astoria…to Madras, Stayton, Astoria, the Umatilla Reservation at Tamástslikt Cultural Center? Oh yes. Would I write with veterans for the V.A. Hospital? Would I work with inmates at Coffee Creek Women’s Prison, Columbia River Correctional Institution, at the Two Rivers Correctional Institution? Yes, of course. Would I do an assembly for 120 primary students…for seventeen immigrants becoming citizens…for the Oregon House of Representatives…for a winery, a business association, a city council? Absolutely. Would I meet with one young writer full of fury and eloquence to help her onto the path of poetry? Yes.

The job was a two-year rush of such encounters where all kinds of people wrote all kinds of things, and I traveled to meet with them and together raise the human spirit.

Now that the torch has been passed to a new Oregon Poet Laureate, Anis Mojgani (his event-request form is here: https://culturaltrust.org/oregon-poet-laureate/calendar/), I still feel I have the calling of poet as servant of the people. Since my official term ended in May, I’ve taught a class online in Scotland, done a radio interview with a station in Newport, put poetry prompts and other writer resources on my website (www.kimstaffordpoet.com), given several poetry readings online, and hatched public service projects with other artists for individuals and families sheltering at home.

In a way, the job of a poet laureate is the same as the job of any writer: Something came to my page that I would love to share with you. It’s about discovery, generosity, and connection:

Dew & Honey
Sip by sip in thimble cup
the meadow bees will drink it up
then ferry home to bounty’s hive
by flowers’ flavor hum and thrive
to show us how through word and song
by gesture small and patience long
in spite of our old foolish ways
we may fashion better days.

So, my friend, come sip and savor
syllables as crumbs of pleasure.
By sunrise, in our conversations,
we begin a better nation.

—Kim Stafford
*
Before visiting our dialogue group at Two Rivers prison, Kim wrote this poem and brought it with him as a gift for the men in the group:

Two Rivers

One river flows above ground—
everyone can see it shining
across the land, following the valley
and shaping the valley, never at rest.

And some people say, I know who
you are…I know what you’ve done…
what you lost…where you came from…
where you are going. I know.

But what do they know of you, really?
For another river flows below all that,
invisible, at the speed of a dream
inside you—intuitive, curious, innocent.

And you say, I know who I want to be…
I know what I’ve learned…I know what I love…
I need to know who I really am. So you remember,
you wonder, you write, you shape story,

and you say to yourself on the page,
Hidden river, spill your secrets
at the wellspring. I hold forth
my cup no one else can see.

—Kim Stafford
*

The ending of his poem reminds me of this brief quote from Sylvia Plath:

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully if only you were interested in them.

—Sylvia Plath
*

In the spirit of Kim’s essay, here’s some life advice from Walt Whitman:

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

from the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
*

Recently, I was listening to a talk Cornel West gave at the University of Oregon on April 26, 2019 called “What It Means to Be Human.” It’s always a joy to be enlivened by his lively mind! Here’s a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aekb3ppKm5w&t=480s

I was talking with Kim about “the poet’s job.” A short time later he sent me some of his aphorisms on the subject. Here they are:

It is the poet’s job to turn fact into food, loss into learning, and pain into song.

The poet’s work is to be the Eric Snowden of the inner life: All shall be revealed.

All a writer can do is compose clues to what can never be spoken, footnotes to the inexpressible.

A poet’s remedy for myriad troubles: Cook up a feast of words, and see what you learn.

Like a bird lifting from a twig, the poet steps away from all freight. Even as you plod the road, your soul is in flight.

A poet’s work is to compose a filmed parade of images with a sound track of percussive words.

Poetry is the moonlight of the interior life—waxing and waning, causing the soul to flood and ebb.

Everyone should compose their own text for the tee shirt they wear along the summer avenue—so we could be known by what we are willing to say.

—Kim Stafford
*

And he sent some quotes from other poets:

The poet’s job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

—Jane Kenyon
*

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

—Mary Oliver
*

Want to take workshop from Kim? Go to his website, click on workshops, and sign up for one. Here’s the link:

www.kimstaffordpoet.com
*

I recently read Susan Griffin’s long essay “The Eros of Everyday Life” again. I read it with the kind of pleasure I’ve been getting from standing in the backyard in the summer sun, picking blackberries, putting them into my mouth one at a time and crushing them between my tongue and the top of my mouth. Here’s a quote:

Everything I encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving a tracery, placing me in that beautiful paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything.

—Susan Griffin
*
That’s it for now, y’all. Until next time…

—Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/9/20
2020-07-09 - 2020-07-15
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 9, 2020

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

—e.e. cummings
*

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!…

—from “On Another’s Sorrow” by William Blake
*

Lonnie Glinksi, who was in our dialogue and theater groups at Two Rivers prison—(he played Ophelia in our 2015 production of “Hamlet”)—sent me a letter on June 4th. With his permission, I’m sharing a slightly edited version:

Dear Johnny

In recent days I have suffered a loss of a dear man who has moved on. He turned 91 last month. With a few adaptations he loved to play ping pong, though spending most of the day in a wheelchair.
He is an artist that draws wonderful pictures. He spent much energy writing poems, telling stories of his life, and trying to write songs, but he never quite got the hang of that.
We would argue over topics, would fight over the songs. We would laugh at each other for no reason at all. And while he was here, he was the person I could talk to about topics and feelings of which I now write.
With the recent Supreme Court decision regarding unanimous verdicts, it appears he will be going home or for re-trial. No one will tell me where he moved on to; I only know he is not here.
While that spark of joy for him remains alive in my heart, the waves of grief that wash through my body repeatedly attempt to drown out that joy. The experience of having the spark and the grief of his leaving at the same time is new for me.
I had a pen-pal through the U.U. outreach by that I could write to about such things, but he came down with cancer. He promised to write if he could, but has not written. The grief of that loss is different than the current one.
Although uncomfortable, I am not attempting to make it go away. Instead I just watch it, feel it, know it is there. Repeatedly, it washes through me like a wave when I look at the place where he used to sit.
Lee was hard of hearing and had to see your lips for conversations. Since he couldn’t hear himself he spoke really loudly, irritating those without that challenge. Now I expect to hear that voice while I’m in my cell, through the multiple voices and dayroom noises, and it isn’t there. Another wave.
Then I feel the spark, the joy for his experience and what he has to look forward to. So I watch this spark, feel this spark, and like the wave, I leave it be.

—Lonnie Glinski
*

I was Zooming with some friends this morning (7/3), and the subject came up of “All the Problems in the World”—a familiar theme in our conversations. All of us were feeling that the problems are so many and so old and so big that, for each of us, our efforts to make the world a better place were puny and woefully inadequate. One friend said: “Homelessness. I have a spare bedroom: I should be letting a homeless person sleep here.” And I remembered my friend Nick. Lonnie’s letter makes me think that I should do the laptop equivalent of putting pen to paper and say a few things about Nick. I’m terrible at remembering dates. How long ago was it that he died? I pulled up his obituary:

Consoletti, Nick, May 10, 1947 to May 31, 2012. Nick Consoletti, Ph.D., passed away at home in Hillsboro on May 31, 2012, at the age of 65. Nick was a philosopher, scholar, musician, brilliant conversationalist and poet, dedicated traveler and a tremendously kind, loving and loyal friend. Our authentic and gentle friend is greatly loved and missed.

I met Nick in the late Seventies. In a coffee shop, of course. Most of the people who knew him probably met him in a coffee shop. This one was in the basement of an old brick building on the Portland State University campus. In addition to coffee shops, Nick liked college campuses and libraries—places you could meet people who liked to talk about “All the Problems in the World,” and how they could be solved. His two favorite authors were Buckminster Fuller—a man who had practical solutions for All the Problems in the World—and J. Krishnamurti, who also had ideas about how the world could be transformed. According to him, we just needed to be free of fear, free of ideas of past and future, free from authorities (inner and outer), free from ambition and ideologies and nationalism, free from our opinions, from “the known,” from our carefully constructed autobiographies. Here’s a Krishnamurti quote: “Thought is always old; thought is never new; thought can never be free.”

But back to Nick. He had a heavy backpack, which included a sleeping bag, books, and maybe a tent. In coffee shops and on college campuses, Nick would meet people who might offer him a couch to crash on. Over a period of 30 years or so, Nick probably stayed with me, on average, one or two nights a month. He hitchhiked from one end of the country to the other, but mostly up and down the West Coast, from the Bay Area to Seattle, with stops in Eugene and Portland. Once a year, he would go all the way down to Ojai, in Southern California for Krishnamurti’s annual talks.

Nick didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or eat meat. He never asked for money, but if given five or ten bucks, he would quietly put it in his pocket. He played the dulcimer in coffee shops with a nearby hat for possible donations. He was a walking encyclopedia. He attended LOTS of conferences that featured cutting-edge thinkers. He wanted to hear them in person: Gregory Bateson, David Bohm, Erich Jantsch—it was a very long list! Whatever topic you might mention, Nick would instantly tell you the name of an article or book that would educate you further on the subject.

His main interest was in “appropriate technology,” or how we humans can live in a sustainable way on this planet, without relentlessly destroying the health of the ecosphere. He was baffled by the fact that so much was known about how we could live more sustainably, and yet we persist in living in ways which indicate a lack of concern for future generations. Nick would have loved Greta Thunberg!

In the brief obituary, you might notice that he had a Ph.D. degree and that he died at home. Nick didn’t have a “home”—his own apartment—until the last year of his life: after his kidneys failed and he had to stay in one place for his twice-weekly dialysis treatments.

Inspired by David Bohm’s ideas about dialogue, Nick—without money and without a home—earned his doctorate by facilitating a dialogue group and writing a dissertation about it. After he got his degree, he applied to some colleges, but was never offered a job. He continued to be an exemplary Coffee Shop Philosopher right up until the end. When I decided to “do something” at Two Rivers prison in 2006, maybe it was Nick’s example that inspired me to start a dialogue group, rather than “teach a class.” I learned a lot from Nick. I miss him.

—Johnny Stallings

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/2/20
2020-07-02 - 2020-07-08
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 2, 2020

This is a simple story I tell myself about our human life on Earth. We start out as perfect innocent beings. Then something happens to us. We become “adulterated.” We learn to think and talk. We learn and co-create stories about who we are and about the world in which we live and our relation to it. We become grownups. Which is great. But. We are now stuck with our stories, which we repeat over and over. We have lost much of the spontaneous joy and wonder we had when we were very small. And the maps we have made of the world, though useful and even necessary, are an extreme over-simplification—(like this one)—of our life.

But that is not the end of the story. Once we have achieved something like “well-adjusted normal,” we want more. We want a life rich in meaning. We want happiness! Love! We want to live in such a way that we bless each day, that our life gets better and better as it goes along, until we are amazed at what a miracle it all is.

Here are two of William Blake’s poems of innocence:

Infant Joy

“I have no name:
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee
*

Laughing Song

When the green hills laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing “Ha, Ha, He!”

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread,
Come live & be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of “Ha, Ha, He!”
*

But then something happens to these innocent children:

The School Boy

I love to rise in a summer morn
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the sky-lark sings with me.
O! what sweet company.

But to go to school in a summer morn,
O! it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour,
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning’s bower,
Worn thro’ with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring?

O! father & mother, if buds are nip’d
And blossoms blown away,
And if the tender plants are strip’d
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay,

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
*

The GARDEN of LOVE

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

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

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
*

Here’s William Wordsworth’s account:

Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,—
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng.
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday;—
Thou child of joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!
Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning
This sweet May-morning;
And the children are culling
On every side
In a thousand valleys far and wide
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day…
*

This is about the first third of Wordsworth’s poem. For the complete poem, click this link:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood

He is sad that he has lost something that he vividly remembers having as a child: “There hath past away a glory from the earth.” William Blake and Thomas Traherne were able to find it, or something like it, in the later part of their lives. Here is Thomas Traherne’s poem “Innocence,” along with a link:

Innocence

But that which most I wonder at, which most
I did esteem my bliss, which most I boast,
And ever shall enjoy, is that within
I felt no stain, nor spot of sin.

No darkness then did overshade,
But all within was pure and bright,
No guilt did crush, nor fear invade
But all my soul was full of light.

A joyful sense and purity
Is all I can remember;
The very night to me was bright,
’Twas summer in December.

A serious meditation did employ
My soul within, which taken up with joy
Did seem no outward thing to note, but fly
All objects that do feed the eye.

While it those very objects did
Admire, and prize, and praise, and love,
Which in their glory most are hid,
Which presence only doth remove.

Their constant daily presence I
Rejoicing at, did see;
And that which takes them from the eye
Of others, offer’d them to me.

No inward inclination did I feel
To avarice or pride: my soul did kneel
In admiration all the day. No lust, nor strife,
Polluted then my infant life.

No fraud nor anger in me mov’d,
No malice, jealousy, or spite;
All that I saw I truly lov’d.
Contentment only and delight

Were in my soul. O Heav’n! what bliss
Did I enjoy and feel!
What powerful delight did this
Inspire! for this I daily kneel.

Whether it be that nature is so pure,
And custom only vicious; or that sure
God did by miracle the guilt remove,
And make my soul to feel his love

So early: or that ’twas one day,
Wherein this happiness I found;
Whose strength and brightness so do ray,
That still it seems me to surround;

What ere it is, it is a light
So endless unto me
That I a world of true delight
Did then and to this day do see.

That prospect was the gate of Heav’n, that day
The ancient light of Eden did convey
Into my soul: I was an Adam there
A little Adam in a sphere

Of joys! O there my ravish’d sense
Was entertain’d in Paradise,
And had a sight of innocence
Which was beyond all bound and price.

An antepast of Heaven sure!
I on the earth did reign;
Within, without me, all was pure;
I must become a child again.

–Thomas Traherne

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45414/innocence.)

Here’s what Hamlet had to say. I’ve used it in a previous newsletter (4/23/20), but, hey!, some things are worth reading more than once. Hamlet knows intellectually that the world is beautiful and people are glorious, but he just can’t feel it:

Hamlet.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why it appears nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman, neither.
*

I have the nutty idea that every child is an incarnation of the Divine. Recently, I had the good fortune to meet Zak and Rina’s daughter Nina, who was born on May 6th. She proved once again—(like every baby I’ve ever met)—that Augustine was wrong. We are born in innocence, not in sin. Our job is to welcome each new arrival on this planet and to co-create a culture that nurtures their well-being.

—Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 6/25/20
2020-06-25 - 2020-07-01
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

June 25, 2020

Jon Roush sent this poem:

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

—Emily Dickinson
*

A short time after I got the poem from Jon, I got a letter from Josh Underhill (5/30/20). He seems to be thinking along the same lines as Emily. After some preliminaries, here’s what he had to say:

I am not sure if I agree with your words “I don’t feel like I have much influence on the world, but I create my world…” I do however agree each of us lives and creates our world from moment to moment and we choose whether or not to live in hell or paradise. Because I believe that, and you seem to also, our own moment to moments, and our own choice in living in hell or paradise I believe influences the world. Everything we do from moment to moment, our hell or paradise, all has a ripple effect in the world. Even a smile to someone passing on the sidewalk may transform their day, causing them to not flip-off the car that cuts them off that would have ended up in a road rage and loss of life. You can not say you haven’t changed our lives in Group Dialogue, changed our world, and in that changed the way we address the world, in turn changing the world of those around us, our friends and families. The ripple effect. I have something on this subject that I’ll see if I can find to include with this letter, which maybe you can put in an upcoming newsletter. We all on this world are connected, interdependent of one another and without others around us changing the world, our world withers and dies. So see, everything you do influences the world.
The thing that scares me about this belief is those things done in wrong or hurt, what many of us are guilty of, and has sent some to prison for. Those things we each have done, what ripple effect did it have on the world? That is something I will not get into right now, and in some ways don’t want to think about. Guess that’s the choice of living in hell or paradise.

Josh appended this quote to his letter:

The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.

—Frederick Buechner
*

After reading Josh’s letter, I wondered what exactly I had written to him (4/20/20). Here are a few excerpts:

It’s a beautiful Spring day today. We have bright yellow goldfinches and bright red house finches flying around our back yard. I enjoyed your quote from Mr. Shin about being present to what you are doing in the moment. Moments are important. We are so busy thinking about the past and imagining the future that we need to be reminded to pay attention to where we are and to what’s happening within us and around us….
For me, meditation and mindfulness have been very helpful for my well-being. My mind is not as noisy as it once was. I can easily find my way to what I call “The Golden World….”
Have you finished reading Ishmael yet? The stories we tell ourselves shape the world in which we live. This is true individually and collectively. When we change our stories, we change our world—and to some extent we even change the world. I don’t feel like I have much influence on “the world,” but I create “my world” from moment to moment, and whether I live in a paradise or in a hell is more-or-less up to me. Outside factors impinge on my happiness, but how I process my experience and knowledge makes a big difference in whether I am enjoying my life or am miserable.
Ishmael is about the stories we have been telling ourselves collectively that have brought us to a situation where we are destroying the ecological health of our beautiful planet. In order to live in ways that are not so destructive, we will need new stories.
William Blake said: “every thing that lives is Holy.” That’s a good start.
May all people be happy.
May we be peaceful and at ease.
May we be well in body and mind.
May we live in love.
*
When I wrote to Josh to ask his permission to publish excerpts from our exchange of letters in this newsletter, he said “yes,” and asked me to also include some things I wrote (6/9/20) in reply to his letter. I’m including a couple sentences in square brackets, although Josh, who is modest, didn’t ask me to :

Everything has a ripple effect—good things and bad things. The Big World—what I was calling “the world”—has a LOT of forces in play. I think there are way more good deeds than bad deeds being done right now everywhere in the world. Basically, people are good and want to be helpful to each other. The good deeds are often subtle, like the example you gave, of smiling at someone as you pass on the sidewalk. But the wrong and hurtful things that you mention in your letter sometimes create more of a wave than a ripple….
A man in our dialogue group who was serving a life sentence once said that he could never undo the deed or make amends to the loved ones of the person he killed. He said he hoped that by living a good life, he would be able to help so many people that in the balance, at the end of his life, the good would outweigh the bad….
I think it is wise of you not to dwell on the negative ripples that went out from what you’ve done in the past…. Shame and guilt don’t help you or anyone else….
[You have nurtured and strengthened what is best in you—your kindness and generosity, your thoughtfulness toward others. You are living the life of a good man, and that not only benefits others with a ripple effect, it benefits you every hour of every day of your life….]
Be kind to yourself. Don’t engage in negative self-talk. Don’t put yourself down or belittle yourself. Don’t engage with shame or guilt. Don’t dwell in the past. Love everyone!—including Josh Underhill. That beautiful innocent person you were when you were three years old is still who you are in essence. You are worthy to love and be loved.
Yes, there are ripple effects that result from our negative thoughts and actions. But your job and my job is to:
Accentuate the positive,
Eliminate the negative,
Latch on to the affirmative,
And don’t mess with Mr. In-Between!
*

(Note: Josh and I and other actors sang this Johnny Mercer song together after one of the plays we did at Two Rivers prison.)

Let’s close with more Emily:

A letter is a joy of Earth —
It is denied the Gods —

&

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

—This issue was co-edited by Josh Underhill & Johnny Stallings

peace, love & happiness 6/18/20
2020-06-18 - 2020-06-24
When the Morning Stars Sang Together by William Blake

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter

June 18, 2020

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.

—from William Blake’s letter to John Trusler, August 16, 1799
*

“I always say to myself: What is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment?”

—R. Buckminster Fuller, from I Seem To Be a Verb
*

Nancy and I have been worrying about the men and women who are in prisons and jails at this difficult time. I was telling Kim about a conversation I had with Rocky Hutchinson—that I was touched to learn that Rocky was worrying about us. The next day, while my coffee buddies and I were having Zoom fellowship, this poem from Kim arrived in my email box:

Inmate Calls Home

Mom, I been all night worried—
this virus thing, they say it gets everywhere.
So don’t go out, okay? Get food, sit tight.
Read. Just read. You like that. Make calls.
Not great, I know. You love those friends.
Nights, I hear you tell them things.
Mom, I been worried—cabin fever. Yeah,
on the inside we’re used to that. Lots of practice.
Time just turns like a silly dancer, you watch it.
But Mom, what you gonna do with all that time?
No visits, no go where you want, no bench
in that park you like.
Nights, Mom, no worry. No worry,
okay? Me, I’m good. I’m so good.

—Kim Stafford
*

Howard Thoresen sent a couple of poems:

Life-and-Death

Water isn’t formed by being ladled
into a bucket
Simply the water of the whole Universe has been ladled
Into a bucket
The water does not disappear because it has been
Scattered over the ground
It is only that the water of the whole Universe
Has been emptied into the whole Universe
Life is not born because a person is born
The life of the whole Universe has been ladled
Into the hardened “idea” called “I”
Life does not disappear because a person dies
Simply, the life of the whole Universe has
Been poured out of this hardened “idea” of “I”
back into the Universe.

—Uchiyama Roshi
*

It Is I Who Must Begin

It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try —
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
— to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
— as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

— Václav Havel
*

Reminders from Walt:

I…peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good and their adjuncts all good….

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

—from “Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
*

And a very short story:

A woman went to see her therapist, who was also a woman. “I have a problem,” she began.
“Yes?” the therapist said, in that way that therapists do.
“It’s my husband,” the woman said.
“I don’t see your husband here,” said the therapist.
“He’s not here,” said the woman.
“Where is your problem?” asked the therapist.
“In my mind,” the woman said, and suddenly realized highest perfect enlightenment.

—Johnny Stallings

peace, love & happiness 6/11/20
2020-06-11 - 2020-06-17
painting of George Floyd by Lukas Carlson

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter

June 11, 2020

The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.
*

I recently posted this on my FaceBook page:

At the root of racism, injustice and violence are ignorance, fear, and a lack of imagination and love.

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

I also posted a link to Martin Luther King’s sermon “Loving Your Enemies” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522wcqUlS0Y), along with these “comments”:

Love is creative understanding goodwill for all men.

—from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Loving Your Enemies”
*

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

—Buddha, from the Dhammapada
*

Who loves not, knows not God; for God is love.

1 John 4:8
*

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
*

Blake also said:

Every thing that lives is Holy

and:

Children of the future Age
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.

and:

Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations
*

Here are some more thoughts:
there is one human family
we all belong
we need each other more than we know
we came here to love and be loved
at the core of every human being is something radiantly beautiful
Thich Nhat Han speaks of “interbeing”
at the most fundamental level, we are not separate from each other
or from the flowing river of life

Again, Blake:

Can I see another’s woe
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?….
No no never can it be,
Never, never can it be.
*

In 1855, Walt Whitman said:

Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion….

In all people I see myself, none more, and not one a barley-corn less….

I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

—from “Song of Myself”
*

One of the best books I’ve read in recent years is Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Written as a letter to his son, it’s powerful and poignant. Highly recommended! If you’d like to learn more about the racist dimension of our society, especially in relation to the criminal justice system, you might read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and watch the documentary “13th,” by Ava DuVernay.
Here’s a link to Cornel West speaking about love and justice:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/10/cornel-west-george-floyd-cooper-ac360-vpx.cnn

I’ll close this issue with passages from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Loving Your Enemies”:

We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way….
So this morning, as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, “I love you. I would rather die than hate you.” And I’m foolish enough to believe that through the power of this love somewhere, men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed. And then we will be in God’s kingdom.

—delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery Alabama, November 17, 1957, from the book A Knock at Midnight

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: the Open Road Literary Salon
2020-06-07
“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

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

If you missed our 2021 Valentine’s Day Special, you can enjoy the poems we read by clicking on this phrase: Valentine’s Day Special! LOVE POEMS. Or you could get inspiration from the STORY POEMS we shared on Sunday, March 28th. Or: MYSTICAL POETRY & PROSE from Animist, Polytheist, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian & Muslim mystics (4/11/21). Or Poetry (9/25/22). Or American Indian Authors and Culture (11/20/22).

We had a lovely group reading on Zoom of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on his birthday (May 31, 2020), and have been carrying on a lively literary salon ever since on Sunday afternoons at 3 p.m. You’re invited!
I know that in our busy world not everyone can come every week, or stay for the whole thing, but if this sounds like fun to you, please join us this Sunday or some other Sunday.
Don’t worry, this is not a college class! It’s non-competitive. There’s no homework. No one is expected to know anything, learn anything or improve in any way. It’s just a way to get together and enjoy each other’s company–a locus for the Nonstop Love-In that is happening always and everywhere.

Here’s the a list of the topics we’ve used so far:

Poetry Corner (favorite poems old and new) 6/7/20
Can a book change the way you see and experience the world? (give examples) 6/14
The Quintessential Hippie Library (you could start with the Whole Earth Catalog and The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda and go from there—some of you surely know what I’m talking about) 6/21
What are your five all-time favorite novels? or six? or whatever? 6/28
Religion and Spirituality (what sacred-mystic-poetic texts have most enriched your life?) 7/5
What writers taught you most about the way the world works—sociologically, politically, economically, ecologically, philosophically, mythologically, psychologically, anthropologically, scientifically, aesthetically, fundamentally? 7/12
Books With Pictures in Them (this would include art books as well as illustrated books and children’s books) (another question: what are the most gorgeous books you own, or wish you owned?) 7/19
featured poet: William Blake 7/26
Oddball Books (books found off the beaten path, books the other people probably haven’t heard of, books that are unlike other books, books that explore non-mainstream ways of seeing and understanding the world, y’know: oddball books) 8/2
Idea Books (nonfiction books that you learned something from that has stayed with you) 8/9
Well-Written Books (what writers write in a way that thrills you?) 8/16
Books About Books (literary criticism, books about reading, writing, writers, words, the alphabet, libraries, et cetera) 8/23
Films Based on Books: which are the best? 8/30
Poetry Corner. Read us poems you’ve written, or some of your favorites from other writers. 9/6
Multicultural. Books not written in English and/or not written by white guys. Fiction or nonfiction 9/13
Guest Author: Ashley Lucas. This was a Special Event–a Virtual Book Tour. Ashley’s new book, Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration had just been published. Ashley (in Michigan) read from her book, answered questions and hosted a conversation. Howard joined us from New York, Al and Nick from Seattle, lots of Oregonians, and Carlos from Peru! You might want to read this Interview with Ashley Lucas. 9/20
Nature, Ecology & the Environmental Crisis. 9/27
No Bibliophiles Unanimous on 10/4.
Positive Futures, Utopian Visions. Mainly thinking nonfiction here, but novels that give a positive vision of the future would also be good (if there are any.) 10/11
The Bible. What does this book mean to you? What have you learned from it? What is its role in our society? What is its role in Western Literature? Considered as a myth (sacred story), what does it say about us, our world, and our relationship to the Divine? 10/18
Shakespeare. 10/25
Kids Books. For Children of All Ages. Bring kids’ books to read. Bring kids if you can. What were your favorites when you were a kid? 11/1
Irish Writers 11/8
Economics 11/15 Know of any well-written books that have helped to illuminate this arcane subject for you?
Read any good books lately? A favorite question of bibliophiles 11/22
Mythology with Will Hornyak. Any authors, books, articles that have drawn you closer to the world of myth? What myths do you live by? 12/6
Poetry’s Task with Kim Stafford. 12/20/20
Favorite Women Poets with Deborah Buchanan & Katie Radditz. 1/3/21
SPECIAL EVENT!!!: A Play Reading with Howard Thoresen, Alan Benditt & Andrew Larkin. This is gonna be F-U-N! Contact Johnny for details. 1/17/21
Identity & Mythos: The Stories We Tell Ourselves. 1/31/21
Valentine’s Day Special! LOVE POEMS. 1/14/21
FACTORY by Antler. Group Poetry Reading! 2/28/21
Poems & Books About Work. We’ll talk about Antler’s poem “Factory,” share poems about work, talk about books on the subject of work, and regale each other with some of our own work experiences. 3/14/21
Story Poems. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Edward Lear, Robert Service–y’know, Story Poems. Poems that tell a story. 3/28/21
MYSTICAL POETRY & PROSE from Animist, Polytheist, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian & Muslim mystics. 4/11/21
SHAKESPEARE’S 457th BIRTHDAY!!! Bring along some of your favorite passages from the Immortal Bard. 4/25/21
ALL THINGS GREEK. Stratis Panourios, our hierophant, from Athens, led a dialogos about Greek drama. 5/16/21
Annual Group Reading of SONG OF MYSELF to celebrate Walt Whitman’s 202nd birthday! 5/30/21
Bloomsday Celebration! 6/13/21
PLAYS!: Plays you’ve read, plays you’ve seen, plays you’ve performed. 6/27/21
What are your favorite 50 books from the past 50 years? (Books published since 1971.) 7/11/21
What are Your Favorite Documentary Films? 7/25/21
Poetry Corner! 8/8/21
What Do You Read?, How Do You Read? & Why Do You Read? 8/22/21
Women’s Liberation! 9/5/21
Books With Pictures In Them with Special Guest Professor Andrew D. Larkin 9/19/21
Looking Glass Bookstore with Special Guests Bill Kloster and Katie Radditz 10/3/21
Poems That Are Funny 10/17/21
Nature 10/31/21
Nature Poetry 11/14/21
Mythology 11/28/21
Group Reading of “A Christmas Carol” 12/12/21
Read Any Good Books Lately? 1/9/22
Favorite Fictional Characters 2/27/22
For Women’s History Month: Women Writers and Characters 3/13/22
War & Peace & Spring! 3/27/22
Gary Snyder & Friends 4/10/22
Of Strange Shadows: TheMysteries of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with Keith Scales (Celebrating William Shakespeare’s 458th Birthday) 4/24/22
What Shaped Your Worldview (Including Books)? 5/8/22
Annual Group Reading of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” 5/29/22
Bloomsday Celebration 6/16/22
A Conversation With Susan Griffin 6/26/22
Authors & Writings That Make You Happy! 7/10/22
Authors & Writings That Make You Happy! 7/24/22
Read Any Good Books Lately? 8/28/22
Read Something You Wrote 9/11/22
POETRY 9/25/22
More Poems 10/9/22
Neruda, Mistral, García Márquez, et cetera 11/6/22
American Indian Authors and Culture 11/20/22
Silence 12/4/22
Annual Group Reading of A Christmas Carol 12/18/22
Song Lyrics1/1/2023
Hope 1/15/23
Keith Scales Reads T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets 1/29/23
Valentine’s Day Special: “What have you learned about love from books & plays & poems?” 2/12/23
Snowed In! 2/26/23
Memorize a Poem! 3/12/23
“sweet spring… 4/9/23
Shakespeare’s Birthday Extravaganza!!! 4/23/23
Psychology 5/7/23
Favorite Women Authors 5/21/23
Poetry Reading: Featured Poets are Elizabeth Domike & Alex Tretbar 6/4/23
Visions of Utopia & Paradise 6/18/23
What’s Going On? 7/30/23
What Are Your Top Ten (or Fifteen) Favorite Novels of All Time? 8/13/23
Mother Goose & Friends 9/10/23
Black Elk’s Vision 9/24/23
SPECIAL EVENT!: Mythic Ireland with Will Hornyak 10/8/23
Peace & War 10/22/23
Wisdom 12/3/23
A Child’s Christmas in Wales read by Keith Scales 12/17/23
What are the best books you read in 2023 & what books are you looking forward to reading in 2024? 12/31/23
Histories! 1/14/23
Who do you admire, and why? 2/25/24
World Literature 3/10/24
Book Launch for The Nonstop Love-In by Johnny Stallings 3/23/24
Mysteries! 4/7/24
Sci-Fi! 5/5/24
Old Poems! 5/19/24
Song of Myself 6/2/24
102. Books That Give You Something New Every Time You Read Them 6/16/24

I hope to see you at our next Sunday Zoom gathering!
peace & love
Johnny

peace, love & happiness 6/4/20
2020-06-04 - 2020-06-10
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter

June 4, 2020

Most of the writing I’ve done in my life has been in journals and letters. I found this letter that I wrote in 2010 to a man serving time in a Texas prison. He was suffering from depression, so I wrote this letter to him. (I have edited it slightly.)

July 29, 2010

Dear E

Some thoughts on depression.
I think a lot of suffering comes from “bad mental habits.” I would estimate that 99% of our suffering is self-inflicted.
In my own life, I find three practices very helpful.
Meditation
Dialogue
Study

Meditation
You don’t need a meditation teacher or tradition. All you need to do is spend some time every day sitting quietly. Doing nothing. Paying attention. Watching your thoughts. Being still. Being calm. Breathing in and out. Forget about the past, forget about the future. Forget about The Autobiography of E.
Thought and language give rise to concepts like “self” and “other.” “Inside” and “outside.” “Body” and “mind.” “Life” and “death.” In silence, there are no such categories. In silence, there are no problems. In silence, there are no boundaries.
Do not waste another minute of your precious human life in self-pity or regret. Go forward.
Count your blessings.
Everything you see is utterly miraculous. Your body is miraculous: your hands, your eyes, your brain, your lungs, your stomach, your heart.
You are perfect. There is nothing wrong with you. You are basically good. Love, happiness and freedom are your birthrights.
Everyone you see around you is beautiful inside. Look for that beauty.
Water the seeds inside you of peace, love, happiness and understanding.
Do not water the seeds of fear, anger, regret, sorrow, self-pity.
Prison is a great place to find the peace which passeth understanding.
Prison is a great place to learn to love yourself and everyone else, without exception.
Prison is a great place to learn how to stop making yourself miserable and be happy.
Prison is a great place to be free.

Dialogue
We need each other more than we know.
Dialogue is a way of breaking out of our isolation, getting out of our rut, connecting with others.
You said that there is one person who you can have a really good conversation with, and that he has helped you to see things in a better perspective.
Take good care of that relationship. Honor it. Spend time with him.
There are other guys in prison whom you can have meaningful dialogue with if you are patient and make an effort.
The trick is to get below the superficial level where most conversation takes place and down to stuff that is more meaningful.
My prison dialogue group has taught me that everyone hungers for meaningful dialogue, even if they don’t know it.
We all need to learn the art of giving expression to who we are below the surface, and to eliciting that from others.
I know that in prison especially people tend to “do their own time,” and obviously you don’t want to naïvely open yourself up to someone who would take advantage of your openness in some way, but the cost of not communicating authentically with others is loneliness and isolation. So, it’s worth the effort.
It’s important to speak and to be heard, to see and be seen, and ultimately to love and be loved.
If we talk about the weather or about sports, neither of us will learn anything that we don’t already know, but if you ask “What is your story?” and really listen you will find that this other person is just as interesting as you are. You will learn things you didn’t know.
Not just “Where did you go to high school?,” but “Have you ever loved a woman?” Not “What are you in for?,” but “What is your heart’s desire?”
So, now I will ask you that question, as par of our ongoing dialogue.
What is your heart’s desire?

Study
I hated school. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that school felt like a prison to me. I spent the whole time looking out the window, dreaming of escape.
I feel like precious years of my life were stolen from me. I’m still angry at the world of adults that locked me up like that.
What was my crime?
My parents expected me to go to college after high school, but I dropped out after half a year.
At that point my education began. I started reading things I wanted to read, following my curiosity. I never stopped doing that.
I think that if I was in prison, I would do my best to pretend that it was my monastery, my university.
Part of my approach to reading is that I mostly read things that I expect will change me, open my heart or my mind, or both. Of course sometimes I read for pure entertainment. Books that are funny lighten our mood. Stories feed our imagination.
Mostly, I read to gain a better understanding of us human beings and the world in which we live. For me, this kind of reading can be tremendously exciting and make my life more meaningful. It enlarges my world.
Here are some of the books I have discovered on my lifelong reading journey:
First of all, there are foundational books. These are the classics—the books that have been most important to humanity—that people have read and re-read. Millions of people have used the spiritual classics as a guide to their lives. The spiritual classics include the Bible, the Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Dhammapada, and Buddhist sutras.
In addition to those basic spiritual texts, there are the classics of literature, from the Odyssey of Homer to Ulysses by James Joyce. The literary critic Harold Bloom puts William Shakespeare at the center of what he calls the Western Canon.
I find I am especially nourished by the writings and sayings of various saints, yogis, prophets, mystics, poets, and spiritual geniuses, ancient and modern. What they all have in common is something that might be called “depth.” It’s a long list but here are some of my favorites:
Lao Tzu, Seng Ts’an, Han Shan, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Traherne, Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Narayana Guru, Ramana Maharshi, R.H. Blyth, J. Krishnamurti, Shunryu Suzuki, Martin Luther King, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Susan Griffin, Wendell Berry and Thich Nhat Hanh.
These people—along with my close personal friends—profoundly affected the way I see, experience and understand my life, the world, and their inseparability.
I have more I want to write about books, but I have to do some stuff right now, so I think I’ll save it for another letter and get this in the mail to you.
peace & love
Johnny

Song of Myself on Zoom!!!
2020-05-31 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
We had a very successful group reading of “Song of Myself” to celebrate Walt Whitman’s 201st Birthday on Sunday, May 31st, at 3 pm on Zoom.

We recorded it, but haven’t uploaded it to YouTube yet. If you want to see it, contact us through this website, or email me if you know my email address.

peace & love
Johnny Stallings

peace, love & happiness 5/28/20
2020-05-28 - 2020-06-03
painting by Charles Erickson

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness
May 28, 2020

In 1681 William Penn, an English Quaker, was granted territory in North America by King Charles II. The land was named Pennsylvania. Penn planned to build the city of Philadelphia, which means “brotherly love.” Before coming to America, on August 18, 1681, he wrote this letter to the Native American chiefs:

MY FRIENDS, There is a Great God and Power, that hath made the world and all things therein, to whom you and I and all people owe their being and well-being; and to whom you and I must one day give an account for all that we do in the world. This Great God hath written his Law in our hearts, by which we are taught and commanded to love and help, and do good to one another, and not to do harm and mischief unto one another. Now this Great God hath been pleased to make me concerned in your part of the world, and the king of the country where I live hath given me a great province therein; but I desire to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbors and friends; else what would the Great God do to us? who hath made us not to devour and destroy one another, but to live soberly and kindly together in the world. Now I would have you well observe that I am very sensible of the unkindness and injustice that hath been too much exercised towards you by the people of these parts of the world, who have sought themselves, and to make great advantages by you, rather than to be examples of justice and goodness unto you, which I hear hath been matter of trouble unto you, and caused great grudgings and animosities, sometimes to the shedding of blood, which hath made the Great God angry. But I am not such a man, as is well known in my own country. I have great love and regard towards you, and I desire to win and gain your love and friendship by a kind, just, and peaceable life, and the people I send are of the same mind, and shall in all things behave themselves accordingly; and if in any thing any shall offend you or your people, you shall have a full and speedy satisfaction for the same, by an equal number of just men on both sides, that by no means you may have just occasion of being offended against them.
—William Penn (1644-1718)
*
Another Seventeenth Century Englishman had this to say:

28
Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of a monarch, in her husband’s chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you.

29
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

30
Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there, than in your own house: Till you remember how lately you were made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice in the palace of your glory, than if it had been made to-day morning.

31
Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it, that you had rather suffer the flames of Hell than willingly be guilty of their error. There is so much blindness and ingratitude and damned folly in it. The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.

—Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) from Centuries of Meditations, First Century, also quoted by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, pp. 67-68
*
This was written more recently:

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
*
Her poem reminded me of this line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud.

It’s a good line, but he’s just getting warmed up:

And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes….

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least….

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
*

Walt’s 201st birthday is this Sunday, May 31st. We’re going to have a group reading of “Song of Myself” at 3 pm (West Coast Time). To enjoy this exhilarating event, go to the Zoom website and click on “Join a Meeting.” The meeting ID number is 892-8123-9555. Then, the password is 623246. I hope to see you there!
—Johnny Stallings

peace, love & happiness 5/21/20
2020-05-21 - 2020-05-27
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness

May 21, 2020

The Subject Tonight is Love
The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well,
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all
Die!

—Hafiz, version by Daniel Ladinsky
*
I wrote this essay last Fall:

The Noble Ninefold Path

“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” he said. We did and we did. The actor who Marc Antony is 34 years old. He has spent the last 17 of those years in prison, which is where Nancy and I were watching this production of Julius Caesar. After the performance, the actors talked to the audience about how much they love each other, and tried to express how much that means to them “in a place like this.”
I didn’t direct this production, but in 2008 I directed a production of Hamlet at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon, and have directed a number of plays in prison since then—mostly by William Shakespeare. For thirteen years I went to prison more-or-less every week and facilitated meaning-of-life dialogues. After doing this for a number of months, one day I mentioned the word “love.” It’s a word you are not supposed to say in prison. It is taboo outside of prison as well. But that’s another story.
Inviting men in prison to talk about love had a strange effect. We all began to love each other. Over the years this love deepened to the point where we could all feel it. It was palpable.
I’m not the first person to notice this, but I’ve come to understand in a deep way that everyone needs to love and be loved. Like a puppy at the Humane Society, we are all waiting for someone to take us home.
What the men in prison taught me about living in love got me to thinking about how in philosophical traditions and in many spiritual traditions knowing is privileged over loving. I looked again at the noble eightfold path and it wasn’t there. There was no mention of love!
I’m not a Buddhist and certainly not a scholar of Buddhism, but I realized something had to be done about this and so, with an utter lack of humility, I would like to suggest a revision to one of the Buddha’s most fundamental teachings and propose to all and sundry the adoption of:
The Noble Ninefold Path
right understanding
right thinking
right speech
right action
right living
right effort
right mindfulness
right meditation
right loving
This may sound like a joke, but it’s not. I’m not suggesting that all the books on Buddhism be revised. What I’m suggesting is that if you use the noble eightfold path as a guide to your practice you could add one more thing to the list. And that it would be helpful to do so. It’s not a trivial addition.
One could argue that the Mahayana tradition has already done something like this with the bodhisattva ideal of compassion for all beings. Fair enough. Many modern Buddhist teachers—I’m thinking at the moment of Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön and Jack Kornfield—put a big emphasis on love. This idea of adding one more item to the eightfold path is done, I hope, in that same spirit.
Peace, love and happiness—the hippie virtues—all tend to be scoffed at by “smart people”—maybe because these are arts which are not taught in school.
One meaning of nirvana is a kind of floating away from this world of cares—the world of samsara. But in later Buddhism, the duality is abolished: samsara and nirvana are not two.
For “intellectuals” and intellectual traditions the head is more important than the heart. This is not surprising. That’s kind of what “intellectual” means. But it seems to me that being a whole human being is preferable to performing the role of Mr. Know-It-All. Love and understanding need each other.
Head without heart leads to tragedy. In my lifetime, a bunch of geniuses had all kinds of reasons why it was a good idea to drop jellied gasoline on families planting rice in paddies. Had they listened to their hearts, the whole thing could never have happened.
What is “right loving”? I don’t know. Like all the other “rights” of the noble ninefold path, you do your best to figure it out as you go along. Love, of course, includes compassion. But love is much more than that. I love to see a beautiful flower. I don’t feel compassion for it. I love it because it’s beautiful. I love it without even knowing why I love it. Thich Nhat Hanh—that sweet man!—reminds us that we are all flowers.
My own aspiration is to love the heck out of everyone and every thing. “Unconditional love” means loving no matter what and for no reason.
In the Bible it says: “Who loves not, knows not God; for God is Love.”
William Blake says:
Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclin’d,
Lawless, wing’d & unconfin’d,
And breaks all chains from every mind.
A good way to end this little essay might be with the Meta Prayer:
May all beings be happy!
May we be peaceful and at ease!
May we be well in body and mind!
May we live in love!
—Johnny Stallings
*

I shared “The Noble Ninefold Path” with a few people. I sent a copy to Shad Alexander, who lives at Two Rivers prison. He sent this reply, which I am sharing with his permission:

Regarding the “Ninefold Path,” (if I may indulge my inner nerd)… Love is not explicitly stated in the bulletpoint framework of the Eightfold Path because it is implicitly enmeshed throughout the entire path structure, and each individual path factor. The whole thing is about love. Buddha challenged us to rise above romantic love, or sexual love, or selfishly focused love, as it is commonly expressed (both then and now). He separated out the main characteristics of selfless love into qualities that each of us can strive to embody. Mettā is translated as “unconditional love,” or “universal love,” or “loving-kindness,” but a better translation involves a flavor of wishing goodwill for all others. Karunā is usually translated as “compassion,” but again the English falls flat. Karuna is the inspiration to take some action, even a trivial or symbolic action, to ease the suffering of others. If you see a homeless person panhandling, metta is the wish that the person’s life conditions will improve, karuna is giving the person a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich. Neither action will solve homelessness or hunger, but together they are “drops in the bucket” which may someday result in a shift our culture and society at large. Muditā is translated as “vicarious joy,” or perhaps the opposite of jealousy—this is the quality of feeling glad for someone else’s success. This is the cooperative and non-competitive quality of love. Upekkhā means equanimity or non-reactivity. As regards to love, this is the unconditional aspect of love. (In a broader use of the term, upekkhā is the Holy Grail of the entire practice, not reacting with attachment to the ups and downs of life.) All four of these qualities together are Buddhist concept of “love.” Buddha called these “God’s Temple” or “Living Like God.”* (A quick side note: Buddha refused to acknowledge if he believed in God as a deity or not. But he taught his followers that they could become “like God” through the experience of love.)
The four qualities of love are both tools that can be used to achieve the final goal of liberation, and they are side-effects of having achieved the final goal. Using Metta as an example: I still harbor a lot criticism towards others, so my instructions are to pretend like I have a lot of metta towards others. If I pretend long enough, it inevitably sinks in. (Buddha was the original person to coin the idea of “Fake it until you make it.”) On the other end of the spectrum, enlightened meditation masters assure me that in advanced stages of meditation, love for all beings is a natural expression from the realization that all living things are interconnected and interdependent.
Bringing this all back to the claim that the entire Eightfold path is about love… The Eightfold path begins and ends with “Right Understanding.” A beginner’s understanding is: “All living beings are terrified of punishment, all fear death. Comparing oneself to others, one should neither kill nor cause to kill. All living beings love life. Comparing oneself to others, one should neither kill nor cause to kill.” (Dhammapada.) That novice understanding leads a person to train their mind towards thoughts of non-harm and cooperation (love); to train their speech towards words that promote love; to act with love; to choose a livelihood that does not harm others (love); to make earnest efforts to free themselves from harmful thoughts/actions and to engage in loving thoughts and actions. These efforts result in increasing mindfulness, a living embodied awareness of of “Am I living with love?” or “Am I living absent of love?” Meditation is a tool to help us open up to the fullest potential of love, but once that fullest potential is achieved, meditation from a place of pure love tips the scales towards a more ultimate Right Understanding: all beings are interconnected and interdependent. To love myself is to love all others.
Or so I have been told…
(The word “sammā,” we translate as “right, proper, perfect,” as in Right Speech, Right Thoughts, etc. But what is meant by “right?” Samma has a nuance of “the absence of harmfulness” or the presence of metta/karuna/mudita/upekkha. So maybe a better translation would be “understanding with love,” “thought with love,” “speech with love,” etc.)
* The term is “Brahma-vihāra,” God-Abiding.
—Shad Alexander
*

A bonus for people who get the email version of this newsletter—links to videos of two contemporary bodhisattvas, Alokananda Roy and Fritzi Horstman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OspzzO7gAiw&t=455s

https://vimeo.com/398088783?fbclid=IwAR3wrd-7igOwlGZo_R5jSI5IERo54Dld59nWAnXMSbTB11H8AEYK-RzRZRE

May we live in love.
—Johnny Stallings

peace, love & happiness newsletter 5/14/20
2020-05-14 - 2020-05-20
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness

May 14, 2020

A human being is part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
—Albert Einstein
*
Father Gregory Boyle is the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles. In 1992, he founded Homeboy Industries, which is is the largest and most successful gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world.
https://homeboyindustries.org/our-story/father-greg/
He is the author of the Tattoos on the Heart and is featured in the documentary film “G-Dog.” In a TED talk he gave in 2012, he uses a similar image to Albert Einstein’s “circle of compassion.” In the context of this talk he is not talking about “all living creatures,” but about “the easily despised.” Here’s an excerpt from that talk:

What we all want to create and form is a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it. I suspect that Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills correctly when she suggested that the problem in the world is that we’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other. So, how do we stand against forgetting that? How do we create and imagine a circle of compassion, and then imagine nobody standing outside that circle? And to that end, what we hope to do—all of us, I think—is to inch our way out to the margins, so that we can stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. That we can stand with those whose dignity has been denied, with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. Occasionally, you get very fortunate and blessed to be able to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out. With the demonized, so that the demonizing will stop. And with the disposable, so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. I suspect that if kinship was our goal we would no longer be promoting justice, we would, in fact, be celebrating it. For: no kinship, no justice. No kinship, no peace.
—from Gregory Boyle’s TED talk on Compassion and Kinship
*
I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this 20 minute talk. It makes me cry every time. Here’s a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipR0kWt1Fkc&t=208s

*
Below is a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh which I read regularly to remind me who I am. It’s followed by his story of how he came to write the poem. Its content is not unrelated to what Albert Einstein says in the quote that opens this newsletter.

Please Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when Spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
*
After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.
There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.
She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.
When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.
After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
*
And one more poem:

A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida

My son as a child saying
God
is anything, even a little stone in the middle of the road, in Florida
Yesterday
Nancy, my friend, after long illness:
You know what can lift me up, take me right out of despair?
No, what?
Anything.

—Muriel Rukeyser

peace, love & happiness newsletter 5/7/20
2020-05-07 - 2020-05-13
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter

May 7, 2020

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a free thinker, orator and essayist. He was a friend of Mark Twain. He gave the eulogy at Walt Whitman’s funeral. Below is an abridged version of an address he gave to the State Bar Association at Albany, N.Y., on January 1st, 1890:

CRIMES AGAINST CRIMINALS
All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation. Imprisonment, torture, death, constituted a trinity under whose protection society might feel secure.
In addition to these, nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposures to public ridicule and contempt. Connected with the court of justice was the chamber of torture. The ingenuity of man was exhausted in the construction of instruments that would surely reach the most sensitive nerve. All this was done in the interest of civilization—for the protection of virtue, and the well-being of states. Curiously it was found that the penalty of death made little difference. Thieves and highwaymen, heretics and blasphemers, went on their way….
The fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.
For petty offences men were degraded—given to the mercy of the rabble. Their ears were cut off, their nostrils slit, their foreheads branded. They were tied to the tails of carts and flogged from one town to another. And yet, in spite of all, the poor wretches obstinately refused to become good and useful citizens.
Degradation has been thoroughly tried, with its maimings and brandings, and the result was that those who inflicted the punishments became as degraded as their victims.
Only a few years ago there were more than two hundred offences in Great Britain punishable by death. The gallows-tree bore fruit through all the year, and the hangman was the busiest official in the kingdom—but the criminals increased.
Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and headsmen—and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities and crimes have accomplished little for the preservation of property or life. It is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.
Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim?…
For my part, I sympathize sincerely with all failures, with the victims of society, with those who have fallen, with the imprisoned, with the hopeless, with those who have been stained by verdicts of guilty, and with those who, in the moment of passion have destroyed, as with a blow, the future of their lives.
How perilous, after all, is the state of man. It is the work of a life to build a great and splendid character. It is the work of a moment to destroy it utterly, from turret to foundation stone. How cruel hypocrisy is!
Is there any remedy? Can anything be done for the reformation of the criminal?
He should be treated with kindness. Every right should be given him, consistent with the safety of society. He should neither be degraded nor robbed. The State should set the highest and noblest example. The powerful should never be cruel, and in the breast of the supreme there should be no desire for revenge.
A man in a moment of want steals the property of another, and he is sent to the penitentiary—first, as it is claimed, for the purpose of deterring others; and secondly, of reforming him. The circumstances of each individual case are rarely inquired into. Investigation stops when the simple fact of the larceny has been ascertained. No distinctions are made except as between first and subsequent offenses. Nothing is allowed for surroundings.
All will admit that the industrious must be protected. In this world it is necessary to work. Labor is the foundation of all prosperity. Larceny is the enemy of industry. Society has the right to protect itself. The question is, Has it the right to punish?—has it the right to degrade?—or should it endeavor to reform the convict?
A man is taken to the penitentiary. He is clad in the garments of a convict. He is degraded—he loses his name—he is designated by a number. He is no longer treated as a human being—he becomes the slave of the State. Nothing is done for his improvement—nothing for his reformation. He is driven like a beast of burden; robbed of his labor; leased, it may be, by the State to a contractor, who gets out of his hands, out of his muscles, out of his poor brain, all the toil that he can. He is not allowed to speak with a fellow-prisoner. At night he is alone in his cell. The relations that should exist between men are destroyed. He is a convict. He is no longer worthy to associate even with his keepers. The jailer is immensely his superior, and the man who turns the key upon him at night regards himself, in comparison, as a model of honesty, of virtue and manhood. The convict is pavement on which those who watch him walk. He remains for the time of his sentence, and when that expires he goes forth a branded man. He is given money enough to pay his fare back to the place from whence he came….
The men in the penitentiaries do not work for themselves. Their labor belongs to others. They have no interest in their toil—no reason for doing the best they can—and the result is that the product of their labor is poor. This product comes in competition with the work of mechanics, honest men, who have families to support, and the cry is that convict labor takes the bread from the mouths of virtuous people.
Why should the State take without compensation the labor of these men; and why should they, after having been imprisoned for years, be turned out without the means of support? Would it not be far better, far more economical, to pay these men for their labor, to lay aside their earnings from day to day, from month to month, and from year to year—to put this money at interest, so that when the convict is released after five years of imprisonment he will have several hundred dollars of his own—not merely money enough to pay his way back to the place from which he was sent, but enough to make it possible for him to commence business on his own account, enough to keep the wolf of crime from the door of his heart?
Suppose the convict comes out with five hundred dollars. This would be to most of that class a fortune. It would form a breastwork, a fortress, behind which the man could fight temptation. This would give him food and raiment, enable him to go to some other State or country where he could redeem himself. If this were done, thousands of convicts would feel under immense obligation to the Government. They would think of the penitentiary as the place in which they were saved—in which they were redeemed—and they would feel that the verdict of guilty rescued them from the abyss of crime. Under these circumstances, the law would appear beneficent, and the heart of the poor convict, instead of being filled with malice, would overflow with gratitude. He would see the propriety of the course pursued by the Government. He would recognize and feel and experience the benefits of this course, and the result would be good, not only to him, but to the nation as well.
If the convict worked for himself, he would do the best he could, and the wares produced in the penitentiaries would not cheapen the labor of other men….
Those who are the fiercest to destroy and hang their fellow-men for having committed crimes, are, for the most part, at heart, criminals themselves.
As long as nations meet on the fields of war—as long as they sustain the relations of savages to each other—as long as they put the laurel and the oak on the brows of those who kill—just so long will citizens resort to violence, and the quarrels of individuals be settled by dagger and revolver.
If we are to change the conduct of men, we must change their conditions. Extreme poverty and crime go hand in hand. Destitution multiplies temptations and destroys the finer feelings. The bodies and souls of men are apt to be clad in like garments. If the body is covered with rags, the soul is generally in the same condition. Selfrespect is gone—the man looks down—he has neither hope nor courage. He becomes sinister—he envies the prosperous—hates the fortunate, and despises himself.
As long as children are raised in the tenement and gutter, the prisons will be full. The gulf between the rich and poor will grow wider and wider. One will depend on cunning, the other on force. It is a great question whether those who live in luxury can afford to allow others to exist in want. The value of property depends, not on the prosperity of the few, but on the prosperity of a very large majority. Life and property must be secure, or that subtle thing called “value” takes its leave. The poverty of the many is a perpetual menace. If we expect a prosperous and peaceful country, the citizens must have homes. The more homes, the more patriots, the more virtue, and the more security for all that gives worth to life….
The home, after all, is the unit of civilization, of good government; and to secure homes for a great majority of our citizens, would be to lay the foundation of our Government deeper and broader and stronger than that of any nation that has existed among men….
Of one thing we may be assured—and that is, that criminals will never be reformed by being robbed, humiliated and degraded.
Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort—as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.
All the penalties, all the punishments, are inflicted under a belief that man can do right under all circumstances—that his conduct is absolutely under his control, and that his will is a pilot that can, in spite of winds and tides, reach any port desired. All this is, in my judgment, a mistake. It is a denial of the integrity of nature. It is based upon the supernatural and miraculous, and as long as this mistake remains the corner-stone of criminal jurisprudence, reformation will be impossible.
We must take into consideration the nature of man—the facts of mind—the power of temptation—the limitations of the intellect—the force of habit—the result of heredity—the power of passion—the domination of want—the diseases of the brain—the tyranny of appetite—the cruelty of conditions—the results of association—the effects of poverty and wealth, of helplessness and power.
Until these subtle things are understood—until we know that man, in spite of all, can certainly pursue the highway of the right, society should not impoverish and degrade, should not chain and kill those who, after all, may be the helpless victims of unknown causes that are deaf and blind….
We do not know. Our ignorance should make us hesitate. Our weakness should make us merciful.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, Address delivered before the State Bar Association at Albany, N. Y.,
January 1, 1890
*
Ingersoll’s talk reminds me of these words of the Buddha:

In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.
*
For the full speech, and all the writings and speeches of Ingersoll, click this link:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38813/38813-h/38813-h.htm#Klink0005

—Johnny Stallings

Storyteller William Kennedy Hornyak Presents: Erin's Daughters
2020-05-02 19:00 - 20:30 | Immersion Brewing Barrel Room, 550 Industrial Way S., Bend, OR
PERFORMANCES:

Saturday May 2 7:00 p.m.
Immersion Brewing Barrel Room
550 SE Industrial Way S.
Bend, OR
music by Peter Lepanto

Saturday May 16 7:30 p.m.
Artichoke Music 2007 SE Powell Blvd. Portland
*Contact Artichoke music for res. and tickets

All Shows $15.00 Cash at the Door Unless Otherwise Noted *
Reservations Recommended: hornyak.will@gmail.com or 503 697-5808

STORYTELLING WORKSHOPS:
Well Told: Crafting Personal Narratives
We all have stories to tell and a unique voice and style with which to tell them. Truly memorable personal stories have a mythic quality to them. They provide a window to a larger world through the ordinary moments of our lives. The work of telling personal narratives is often to distill the universal from the personal, to find the common veins of meaning that connect to us all. During this workshop we will write, hear and tell stories from our lives and explore the varied threads of meaning that run through them. We will use traditional folktales and myths as a backdrop for our own stories. We will create a supportive environment to develop our own storytelling voices and styles of telling. We will consider the basics of a well-told tale and the tools required for all storytellers, be it for rendering personal narratives or traditional tales. No previous storytelling experience is required.

Bend Sunday May 3 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
Place T.B.D. $40.00

Portland Sunday May 17 10 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Place T.B.D. $40.00

Reservations: hornyak.will@gmail.com

peace, love & happiness 4/30/20
2020-04-30 - 2020-05-06
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness

April 30, 2020
The little tags on my Yogi Tea bags are reminding me that
People who love are happy.
and exhorting me to
Live light, travel light, spread the light, be the light.
*
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum.
(from “Measure for Measure” by William Shakespeare, Act 1, scene 3)
*
I was taking a virtual tour of the Rijksmuseum [click on link] and came upon the wonderful painting “The Merry Family” by Jan Steen (1626-1679). The commentator on the painting said that this was supposed to be a kind of cautionary tale: if the adults get drunk, horse around, and play music they are setting a bad example for the children. To me the painting sends a different “message.” It is a picture of human happiness. It reminds me of a poem by one of my dad’s favorite poets, Carl Sandburg:

HAPPINESS
I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
—Carl Sandburg
*
Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” is a celebration of earthly pleasures. The Fool’s name is Feste, which suggests “festive” and “festival”—a joyful feast. Malvolio, the Puritan, wants everyone to stop drinking and dancing and singing and go to bed. He’s outnumbered. Sir Toby Belch sums up the play’s philosophy:
“Care’s an enemy to life.”
*
I love Louis Armstrong. I got to see him perform a couple times. His joy is sublime!
I recently woke up with this song in my head, “A Lot of Living to Do”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvQDJXR85c
*
I’m no Oscar Wilde, but in the course of my long life I’ve come up with an aphorism or two. Here’s one:
Happiness is the art of not making yourself miserable.

William Blake wrote many doozies. For example:
The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.
*
Here’s the first poem in The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
Strange all and new to me;
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.
*
One of my favorite short poems by Walt Whitman is this one:

BEGINNING MY STUDIES
Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
*
An Old Tale
Once there was a king who wanted to be happy. His wise counselors informed him that he needed to acquire the shirt of a happy man. So, he sent his soldiers out in quest of such a shirt. One by one they returned empty-handed. None of them could find a happy man. Finally, the last soldier returned.
The king asked, “Did you find a happy man?”
“Yes,” the soldier said.
“Where’s his shirt?,” asked the king.
“He didn’t have one.”
*
May all people be happy.
—Johnny Stallings
*
Kim Stafford kindly shared this excerpt from his book-in-progress, Writing for Happiness:

I invite you to use writing to live in accordance with the Dao, to write in order to achieve fluent response to events, to behave in synch with “happ,” what happens. This is a different path to happiness than what I once understood, because it does not avoid the difficult, but by the hands-on process of writing, incorporates the difficult into the search for equanimity. To be with happ is to be happ-y. That is, to be honest, a realist, practical about the available dimensions of joy that exist within a matrix of complexity and difficulty.
The pursuit of happiness may be an inalienable right, but it is also a stern task. “You don’t get to the good life by living the good life,” says the tough immigrant proverb, and so it is with happiness. You don’t get to be truly happy by coasting along avoiding the difficult. Life is suffering, after all, and happiness can’t change that, even as it flickers and is snuffed, and flickers again.
But the pursuit of happiness calls to us all the same. I believe that an enhanced definition of happiness makes the task possible—that to be “happy” is to live in accordance with what happens—and that the serious play of writing, jotting, scribbling, composing can be a way to pursue—and attain—a responsible and generous kind of happiness.
—Kim Stafford

peace, love & happiness newsletter 4/23/20
2020-04-23 - 2020-04-29
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter
April 23, 2020
William Shakespeare Issue

William Shakespeare’s birthday is celebrated on April 23rd. He turns 456 today. Alexandre Dumas said: “After God, Shakespeare has created most.” It’s the general consensus that he is the greatest poet in the English language and the greatest playwright in any language.
Actors have the great good fortune to enjoy Shakespeare in ways that readers, teachers, directors and scholars do not. We get to play the parts, to live the life of the characters he created. But when it comes time to talk about what the plays mean, we are dumb.
I don’t know what the plays Hamlet or King Lear mean, but I know what it feels like to be Hamlet, to be Lear. Hamlet is in the dark about who he is, and why he says and does the things he says and does, just as you and I are ignorant of who we are and why we say and do the things we say and do. Hamlet says: “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.” The English professor will tell you why Hamlet has lost all his mirth, but Hamlet doesn’t know. He feels that it is gone.
An actor doesn’t pretend to be other people, he becomes them. When a play ends, it’s like waking from a dream.
Will Shakespeare breathed his own life into the characters he created, and now when I breathe, he breathes through me. Is this to consider too curiously?
When I, as Lear, speak the words…
“None does offend. None, I say. None.”
…I’m not standing outside or apart, thinking, “Well, he’s mad, you know.” I’m speaking the Truth. And because I’ve said it and meant it and felt it and believed it, the Johnny Stallings character I pretend to be in “real life” is changed irrevocably.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

There’s not enough room in our little newsletter to include The Complete Works, so I’ll just share a few of my favorite passages:

Jaques.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

—As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7
*
Bottom.
And most dear actors, eat no onions
nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 4, scene 2
*
Hamlet.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why it appears nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman, neither.

—Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2
*
Duke Senior.
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

—As You Like It, Act 2, scene 1
*
Hamlet.
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam—and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?

—Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2
*
Prospero.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

—The Tempest, Act 4, scene 1
*
Portia.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings,
But mercy is above this sceptered sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings.
It is an attribute to God himself.
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this-
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

—The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, scene 1
*
Juliet.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep. The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.

—Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2
*
From the sublime, to the ridiculous:

Oswald.
Where may we set our horses?
Kent.
I’ the mire.
Oswald.
Prithee, if thou lovest me, tell me.
Kent.
I love thee not.
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, pandar, 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.

—King Lear, Act 2, scene 2
*
And back to the sublime:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

—Sonnet 116
*
Happy Birthday, Will. Thanks for everything! I’ve spent a lot of my life pretending to be the people you imagined into being.

—Johnny Stallings

Hamilton Cheifetz: Inside Chamber Music Classes
2020-04-22 - 2020-05-14
Monday, March 30 was scheduled to be the first of eight Inside Chamber Music classes, and since they have been postponed, Friends of Chamber Music and I are going to post some music and stories from last Spring’s classes. Here is a recent one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Ui8k-16dY

–Hamilton

peace, love & happiness newsletter 4/16/20
2020-04-16 - 2020-04-22
photo by Prabu Muruganantham

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter
April 16, 2020
Spring with Rumi
Guest Editor: Prabu Muruganantham

After I read the Walt Whitman issue of the Open Road newsletter last week I suggested the idea of publishing an issue for Rumi’s poetry to Johnny and offered to collaborate with him on it. An hour later I received a reply:
“Okay.
Next week you can be Guest Editor.
Let’s talk about it after you get off from work today.”
I felt a bit nervous to say yes as I don’t have any experience as an editor. Also the guilt that I have not read that much Rumi, despite two copies of The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks sitting in my book shelf for over a year, added to that nervousness. Then I asked myself why my mind immediately went to Rumi upon reading a few lines by Whitman. What could be the thread in my Indian mind that connects a 19th Century American poet with a 13th Century Persian poet? What is common between a transcendentalist and an Islamic mystic? The connection, at least in my mind, lies in their unitive vision of all beings.
A poet’s eye sees past this world of separateness that we inhabit. A poet’s words capture a few glimpses of their unitive vision. Through the poet, our vision also becomes expansive. It elevates us from our ordinary existence. It is an ecstatic state of blooming, of being born again by breaking open the shells that we have constructed for our selves. Whitman and Rumi’s poetry transport me to this ecstatic state. This is the association in my mind that made me think of one upon reading the other. I thought I will use Johnny’s invitation as an opportunity to expand my vision further.
One of the first Rumi poems I ever read was “A Just Finishing Candle” . The imagery in this poem is so powerful that it has stayed with me since I first read those lines. Here is the poem:

A Just Finishing Candle
A candle light is made to become entirely flame.
In that annihilating moment
it has no shadow.

It is nothing but a tongue of light
describing a refuge.

Look at this
Just-finishing candle stub
as someone who is finally safe
from virtue and vice,
the pride and the shame
we claim from those.

The wax of the candle has been completely melted and the candle is this bright tongue of light. It is serene at this annihilating moment. It illuminates the space with its whole life.
Spring is sprouting with life again. I take walks every day to greet the buds, sprouts, flowers and leaves. A few weeks ago was my birthday, and I wanted to see a long time friend of mine. She is one of the first friends that I made when I migrated to Portland five years ago from India. In our busy world of appointments and schedules, she is someone I can visit whenever I wanted company. I am always welcomed at her abode. She lives by the road side on the nearby hill, but you would easily miss her from a car. I finished my work and started to hike up the hill.
It was an early spring evening. The sun was going to hide behind the opposite side of the hill. His lights were slowly turning to become crimson. The slats thick cedar trunk was radiating red. Is it the sunlight or the redness of the bark that brings forth this glow? My mind started to ponder. From the depth of my memories rose a few lines of Rumi:

The Sunrise Ruby

…I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight.
This is how Hallaj said, I am God,
and told the truth!
The Ruby and sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Completely become hearing and ear,
and wear this sun-ruby as earring.
The evening glow was at its zenith when I reached my friend’s abode. She wore her pink and purple gown to greet her guest. Her petal-like fingers waved at me. Magnolia is her name. Every time she greets me her smile is new and the same as freshness. I wondered at her magic. She moved the wind and whispered into my ears:

“You too are flowering
like me, anew
every spring
of the year,
every day of
the spring
and
every hour
of the day.”
Since then I have been struggling to express this flowering of my being, that she so elegantly whispered into my ears, through words. My words always fall short.
Whenever I attempt to write about it I feel the urge to drop my pen and pick up a flute. This poem by Rumi beautifully expresses my feeling,

Where Everything Is Music
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of the instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is a sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
*
What follows are some thoughts on Rumi from my friends Kim, Johnny, Nancy, Katie and Bill.
Rumi’s Reach
How far does Rumi reach, from all those centuries ago? How does he still bring spring to us with his arresting proposals for a whole new way to see things?
Twenty five years ago, when I had first met Perrin, who was to become my wife, in our first phone conversation she read me a quote by Rumi that was on her fridge. The same quotation was on my fridge. What else did we need to know?
I have a friend in Iran, Alireza, who told me he was in a cab in Tehran when he heard a sentence on the radio that arrested him. “That must be Rumi,” he thought. But then he learned the sentence had been written by Thoreau. Who was this Thoreau? he wondered. And this began a project that took him seven years–to translate Walden into Farsi so Iranian readers could know about Thoreau, the Rumi of America.
On my journeys around Oregon as Poet Laureate, people often asked me, “What difference can poetry make for all our troubles. It’s just a little thing, and our troubles are great.” I tried to answer, but did not feel satisfied, so I sent an email message to Alireza in Iran, and asked him. This is what he wrote me: “The real question should be, ‘What can violence do?’ The answer would be: ‘Nothing.’ Violence can’t help us. Only poetry can help us. Poetry is oxygen. It helps us live. A good poem will satisfy your thirst. But a great poem–like that of Rumi–will deepen your thirst. Then the only remedy will be more poetry. More connection. More life.”
—Kim Stafford
*
Long ago, I had a very short stay in college, but during that brief interlude I managed to find myself in classrooms at Portland State College where Nitya Chaitanya Yati was teaching the Bhagavad Gita and Nazeer El Azma taught a course in Sufism. Times have changed.
Back then, I read Rumi’s mystical poetry in a translation by A. J. Arberry. Fast forward about 25 years, and, thanks to Coleman Barks, this 13th Century Persian poet was the best-selling poet in America.
At a reading in Manhattan, Coleman Barks said that back in the day a bunch of people would sit around all day with Rumi. They would play music and dance, and Rumi would periodically recite poems and stories off the top of his head that were written down by scribes. Hanging out with Coleman Barks in a bookstore for an hour and-a-half felt a little bit like that. With his help, this is one of Rumi’s best known poems:

The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
—Jelaluddin Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

—Johnny Stallings
*
Two Ways of Talking
We have this way of talking, and we have another.
Apart from what we wish and what we fear may happen,
we are alive with other life, as clear stones
take form in the mountain.
Rumi
“We have this way of talking,” which is inherently practical. We use language to understand and relate with the world around us. Nouns signify and classify; verbs reflect the changing and changeable nature of ourselves as well as all that we perceive and interact with; adjectives and adverbs mirror continuous elaboration. The practical way of talking is a tool, a skill, an approach that serves us well, enabling us to discover many things, meet many needs, satisfy many desires. This way of talking aids in our many activities aimed at obtaining “what we wish” and preventing “what we fear may happen.”
The education children are given at home and at school is geared toward enhancing their facility in this way of talking, fostering greater flexibility, breadth, and clarity in both comprehension and expression. Our pursuits as adults further develop our skills, particularly in our chosen fields of interest, vocational and recreational. Unfortunately, the specifying nature of this way of talking also leads to difficulties in communication. When we are ignorant of another’s language, whether of a different geographical area or a different field, misunderstandings can easily arise, creating a seedbed for conflict and hostility.
“This way of talking” is not sufficient expression or reflection of all that we are or all that the world is. So “we have another.” We have exercised it less, explored it less, listened to it less, but it has always continued as an option for us all, and the dynamic practice of a few. This language, the mystical, seeks to express the essential nature of life, the “other life” we are alive with. We all have moments, or more, characterized by utter clarity, where our blinders fall away and no particular thing is so real to us as an all-embracing unity in which all things and our own beingness merge. This expansion of our narrow sense of self brings a release of fear, a sense of completeness which has the dynamic quality of love. Intuitively we know and we know what and how we know.
But when we as individuals, or collectively, seek to convey that knowledge with our usual way of talking, confusion reigns. Categorizing nouns, acting verbs, and elaborating adjectives and adverbs are inadequate to express unitive reality. Specificity violates the nature of that reality, resulting in fractions between different religions and philosophies. And vagueness provides a context for delusion and illusion in which individuals and groups proffer and seek to acquire powers beyond the normal reach of human faculties, pursuing exotic ways of manipulating “what we wish and what we fear may happen.”
Honest communication of the “other life we are alive with” requires another way of talking. The mystical has its own integrity and forms of expression where potent symbols are used to awaken another’s intuition of the same vibrant reality. Visual images and music are emphasized, even when words are also used, conveying to the reader far more than their surface meaning. When Rumi tells us “we are alive with other life, as clear stones take form in the mountain,” the inner brightness or encouragement we feel can’t be explained by a mere analysis of the words and symbols he uses. But in answer to his song and his vision, an affirmation arises from the core of our being. It thrills us like the whisper of a great secret or the recovery of a buried treasure. Whenever we hear the musical compositions, see the artistic creations, or read the writings of mystics, we are reminded of this other way of talking, which we all have. The language may be foreign, archaic, obscure, yet somehow it strikes a chord of familiarity in us, as we resonate with their experience.
This other way of talking does not attempt to manipulate or accomplish; it is simply an outpouring of love and wonder. In our practical words we ask, “What is its purpose and value?” Like a tide, it can carry us beyond the barriers which divide us from each other, which hide our true nature from ourselves. We are reminded that we are more than our wishes and fears and the tangled web of actions they lead us to. We are alive with other life as clear stones take form in the mountain.

—Nancy Yeilding (Originally published in Gurukulam Magazine, 1987)
*
Hi Prabu
Your essay is inspiring and embraces what Rumi continually offers to us across time and landscape. So generous to walk us through your thought process and feelings along the way. It’s wonderful to make the connection with Whitman and Kim with Thoreau through his Persian friend.
Below is my favorite Rumi poem. i had forgotten that it even has Spring in the title and first line! When i walk alone in the Magnolia grove in Forest Park the last two lines always come to me. Have you been there?
This is the high time for standing beneath that attic of purple blossoms. I wish we could all meet up for a picnic there in its winter garden circle.
My Magnolia suddenly burst out with white blossoms just in time for Easter / Resurrection day.

COME TO THE ORCHARD IN SPRING
Come to the orchard in spring.
There is light and wine and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

–poem by Rumi, interpreted by Coleman Barks

I have stories of Coleman Barks, who came often to Looking Glass Bookstore, in the days when he was publishing his own books.
Once, he came with a dancer to PCC for a performance of dance, song and poetry. Several of us had dinner together at a Persian Restaurant. We were with a friend from Iran who was writing a book about Darius and Persian history from a cultural perspective. Coleman struggled with the question of his worthiness to be the translator of Rumi’s poems. But Rumi spoke through him, in that ecstatic way that he spoke with Shams, with the beloved between them. That ecstatic conversation is called Sohbet in Fārsī; we don’t really have a comparable word, except maybe “communing.” When Coleman came over to talk with our friend—(both of these men, burly, bigger than life gentle souls, who were strangers in a strange land)—he asked Coleman, “If Rumi came back and was here now, would you recognize him?”
Coleman bent and kissed his hand.
Here is another Spring poem:

Listening
Another year, another Spring!
The fragrance of love arrives.
So dancy, this new light on the ground, and in the tree.
The one who heals us lets whatever hurts the soul
dissolve to a listening intelligence, where what we most deeply want, union with eternity, grows up around and inside us now!
—Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

—Katie Radditz
*
On a long relationship with Rumi
Many years ago, in reading through an anthology of sacred poetry, I was drawn to the poems of Rumi. Though I had read a few of his poems before, I was completely taken by what I read. The images that he created and the reaction and insight they created for me were very affecting. Thus began a 30 year love affair with Rumi’s stories and poems that continues….
Jelaluddin Rumi was born in 1207 and, following in the footsteps of his father, became the sheik in the dervish learning community in Konya, Turkey. He was considered a great scholar and leader, but his life changed when he met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering sufi mystic. From this mysterious and esoteric friendship came a new depth of spiritual enlightenment. When Shams disappeared Rumi began his transformation from scholar to artist, and his poems and stories that shifted fantastically—from theory to folklore to jokes and ecstatic poetry—began to flow. Rumi describes it himself in a poem:

In your light I learn how to love,
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
Where no one sees you,
But sometimes I do,
And that sight becomes this art

Reading Rumi’s poems often transports me to a magical, mystical place. They are filled with passion, insight and a connection with the divine which talk about everything from awe, silence, emptiness and love to the everyday infused with the deepest sense of God and wonder.
Often his poems feel like they strike a nerve deep inside consciousness and some new insight or understanding or just the silence of the Self can be seen for a brief moment. And often they express so deeply our yearning to return to God.
How is it possible to describe the indescribable, express the inexpressible, within a few lines of poetry? A sudden image takes you deep inside, to the core of your being. The ecstasy that Rumi experienced comes through in much of that poetry. That longing for union with God was so strong and his experience of that union so deep and ecstatic that it permeated every fiber of his being.
Over the centuries, enlightened masters have tried to give a glimpse of their experience of union, but there are no words that can explain. So students and readers are left with a glimpse of what it might be like to achieve that union. Rumi’s poems are often a gateway or glimpse into that reality that is unique to his poems.
It’s hard to pick just one or two poems, but I’ll leave with one short favorite:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

—Bill Hughes

peace, love & happiness: Walt Whitman Issue 4/9/20
2020-04-09 - 2020-04-15
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter
April 9, 2020
The Walt Whitman Issue

Miracles

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

–Walt Whitman
*
This issue is devoted to one of my best friends: Walt Whitman. I read “Song of Myself” when I was 18 or 19 years old and it changed my life. It continues to transform the way I experience and understand the world. I’ve been performing an abridged version of “Song of Myself” for many years. It’s written in the first person, and if you recite it aloud, and feel it and mean it as you say the words, something good happens to you. If you do it often enough, over time, it changes you. A famous line is:
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.”
You could read that line and think: “Walt Whitman thinks that a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars…and that a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” Or you could say it and feel it and mean and believe it to be true. And it will be true for you in that moment.
When I performed the poem in Marfa, Texas, a few years back, I was interviewed on Marfa Public Radio. Here’s a link to that interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0D6WmHaSE8&t=237s
Walt Whitman has inspired a LOT of poets. Many have acknowledged their debt to him, including Allen Ginsberg and Pablo Neruda. Here’s a poem I wrote in 2010:

Teach me to see, Walt!

I was driving up Burnside
and I saw a man standing, waiting for the bus
he was not four feet tall
meanwhile, I was listening to a Modern Scholar lecture, “where great professors teach you!”
a lecture about Walt Whitman
I was on my way to Romeo & Juliet rehearsal
at Catlin Gabel High School
the small man is the center of his own world
there is such infinite variety!
everyone I see is a world
I noticed this man—his seriousness
he is a miracle
and it is a miracle that I see him
and I wished that, like Walt, I could be amazed by everyone I see
I thought to myself: “I’ll write a poem called ‘Teach me to see, Walt!’”
I scrawled a note to myself, while driving, to remind me
that was yesterday
I just looked at the note
and was reminded of a moment that I had forgotten
a moment where I saw this man
and felt something that I wanted to find words for
more than six billion people on this earth (we are told)
each one amazing
each one with their own subjectivity
looking out at the world
seeing it, feeling it
each understanding it in her or his own way
and the world itself—vast!
endless variety
the trees standing
the clouds floating and changing
the frantic swimmers in a drop of blood seen through a microscope
the stars in the night sky
Walt, you taught me a lot about wonder
but I’m still learning how to see
because if I knew how to look at the world with my eyes open and my heart open
if I wasn’t such a sleepwalker
such a daydreamer
wouldn’t my cheeks be always wet with tears?

sitting on the couch now
writing down these words
a little while ago a squirrel sat poised on a branch of the old pear tree in the back yard and scratched its head
the squirrel is gone now
those squirrels stay busy!
I guess that’s enough for this poem

—Johnny Stallings
*
I’ll close my portion of the newsletter with some great quotes from “Song of Myself”:

All truths wait in all things.
*
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 touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
*
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
*
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
*
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less.
*
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.
*
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy.
*
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God…
*
Perrin Kerns sent a link to an amazing website for a film called Whitman, Alabama:
https://whitmanalabama.com
In it, many of the sections of “Song of Myself” are read by a wonderful array of human beings. The accompanying texts about the people are deeply moving.
*
Here’s a story from Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Kim Stafford:

How could I not love Whitman, as his poetry saved my father’s life? It was the spring of 1942, and my dad was interned as a conscientious objector in a small town in western Arkansas. One Sunday, he and two pacifist friends were surrounded by a mob, threatened for their perceived “support of Hitler,” and someone shouted “Get a rope!” As the sentiment that these three “slackers” should be strung up rippled through the crowd, the decision turned–improbably–on whether poetry had to rhyme. One piece of evidence seized by a hothead in the crowd was a poem written by my dad’s friend Chuck, was a poem Chuck had written–which didn’t rhyme. “That’s not a poem,” the hothead shouted. “It doesn’t rhyme!”
“And you, what are you holding there!” My father held out his copy of Leaves of Grass, which he had been reading.
“I’ll show you what poetry sounds like,” the hothead shouted, and he open the book to read a passage at random…but soon his voice trailed off. “Well I don’t know what that is, but it aint poetry,” he muttered.
This pause allowed time for someone in the crowd (“a saint,” my father said) to shout “Call the Sheriff!” And when the sheriff arrived, he cooled things down, and drove my father and his friends away to safety.
So, if Whitman’s poetry had rhymed, my father would have become a statistic, and I would not be here, reading the story of this encounter in my father’s book, Down in My Heart: Peace Witness in Wartime.
–Kim Stafford

12 Angry Lebanese
2020-04-09 - 2020-04-26
Zeina Daccache is making her documentaries available for free during this difficult time, starting with 12 Angry Lebanese. It’s a great documentary feature about a production of the play 12 Angry Men at Roumieh Prison in Lebanon. Zeina directed the play and the film. This is a rare opportunity to see this remarkable film. Don’t miss it!

peace, love & happiness newsletter 4/2/20 - 4/8/20
2020-04-02 - 2020-04-08
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter
April 2, 2020

Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?….
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.

—Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”
*

Dear Friends of The Open Road

Here’s a link to a song from Mexico that should perk you up, “Mexico Lindo y Querido”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvDdtEVAo-U.
*

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

—Ryokan (1758-1831)
(translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi)
*

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love

(all the merry little birds are
flying in the floating in the
very spirits singing in
are winging in the blossoming)

lovers go and lovers come
awandering awondering
but any two are perfectly
alone there’s nobody else alive

(such a sky and such a sun
i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes)

not a tree can count his leaves
each herself by opening
but shining who by thousands mean
only one amazing thing

(secretly adoring shyly
tiny winging darting floating
merry in the blossoming
always joyful selves are singing)

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love

e. e. cummings
*
In 1952 and 1953, E. E. Cummings gave six nonlectures at Harvard University. They are collected in a wonderful book called i: six nonlectures. At the end of each nonlecture he recited some of his favorite poems by other poets. After the second, the theme was “Spring,” including this song from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”:

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
Those pretty country folks would lie,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

And therefore take the present time,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crownèd with the prime
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

(word note: in the last verse, the word “prime” means “Spring”)

Dennis Wiancko sent me a link to a short film featuring Time Person of the Year for 2019, Greta Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q0xUXo2zEY.

There are ideas about how to nurtures culture and community without gathering together at The Open Road website (openroadpdx.org). Have a look!

That’s it from me (Johnny) for this issue.
*

Here are two poems from Kim Stafford:

From the Train

Below the tracks, beyond
the chain-link fence topped
with rusted barbwire, out
on the floodplain where
like my battered spirit
every forsaken surface
of shattered wall or car
carcass is festooned with
graffiti in a riot swirl
of color code, and brambles
swarm over heaps of debris —
purple flowers are falling
from the smoldering jacaranda
surging beauty from earth,
billowing blossoms,
utterly failing to take
a realistic view.

Dennis Takes Us to the Old Trees

Sometimes it takes a miracle of misfortunes
to make a beautiful life — earthquake, hurricane,
war. Sometimes the story, told right, can turn
hardship inside out, and show tough beauty
yet. When the fire came roaring up the ridge,
Dennis said, as we stepped the path down
into the ravine that saved the old ones,
it crested and swept west, taking the tops
of these few ancient firs, and left them
in austere majesty, their proof of pluck
a candelabra of tangled limbs high
in silhouette, looming where we lean back
to gaze up and wonder how we might
be marked by hurt but still stand like that,
last of our kind, telling the children:
If you must live through fire, be with
your own grove of sturdy companions
gazing up, after, at the far stars.

—Kim Stafford
*

Ken Margolis reminded me of this great Neruda poem.

I ask for silence

Now, let’s count to twelve
and all be quiet.

For one time on this earth
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a fragrant moment,
without haste, without locomotives;
we would all be together
in an awkward instant.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his raw hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk along in the shade
with their brothers,
doing nothing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what’s happening!
I want nothing to do with death.
If we weren’t so unanimous
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
maybe a vast silence
would interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death.
Maybe the earth is teaching us—
when everything seems dead
and later everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you be quiet, and I will go.

—Pablo Neruda

Quality Folk Dojo
2020-04-01 12:00 - 13:00
Sing and play live online via Zoom with Kate Power & Steve Einhorn!
Click on the phrase Quality Folk to go to their website and register.

peace, love & happiness humor issue 3/26 - 4/1
2020-03-26 - 2020-04-02
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter
March 26, 2020
The Humor Issue

Never criticize someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.
That way, when you criticize them, you’ll be a mile away, and you’ll have their shoes.

What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?
Same middle name.

What did the mayonnaise say when the refrigerator door was opened?
Close the door, I’m dressing.

And God said to John, “Come forth and you shall be granted eternal life.”
But John came fifth and won a toaster.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather did.
Not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car.

Two cows are grazing in a field. One cow says to the other, “You ever worry about that mad cow disease?”
The other cow says, “Why would I care? I’m a helicopter.”

I told my physical therapist that I broke my arm in two places.
He told me to stop going to those places.

I was wondering why the ball was getting bigger.
Then it hit me.

Two windmills are standing in a wind farm. One asks, “What’s your favorite kind of music?”
The other says, “I’m a big metal fan.”

Is it ignorance or apathy that’s destroying the world today?
I don’t know and I don’t really care.

They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian.
Well, they’re not laughing now!
—stolen from the Internet by Johnny

Clams never give any money to charity…
they’re shellfish.

Moth goes to a podiatrist. He tells the podiatrist, “I got depressed after I lost my job. Started drinkin’. My wife left me. My kids hate me. My life feels empty and meaningless…”
The podiatrist interrupted him. “I think maybe you want to see a psychiatrist. Why did you come to me?”
“The light was on.”

How many Zen Buddhists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Two. One to screw it in. One not to screw it in.

How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Blue giraffe in a red bathtub.

A favorite from my childhood…
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Dwayne.
Dwayne who?
Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning.

And perhaps the greatest joke of all time…
Guess what?
Chicken butt.
—Johnny Stallings

Three sisters were growing old together, and one evening the oldest was just stepping into the bath when when she called out, “Was I just stepping into the bath, or stepping out of the bath?” The middle sister started up the stairs to help, but paused halfway and said aloud, “Was I going up the stairs, or down the stairs?” The youngest sister, in the kitchen below, said to herself, “I hope I never get so forgetful–knock on wood…Someone’s at the door–I’ll get it!”
—Kim Stafford
*
A priest, a Rabbi and a minister walk into a bar.
“What is this,” says the bartender, “some kind of joke?”

So…a guy goes to his doctor. After the exam the doc says, “Well, I’d like to send you to a specialist, I think your hearing may be going.”
“No,” the guy says, “my hearing is fine, but you know, Doc, now that you mention it, I think my wife may be having trouble with her hearing, but she won’t have it checked. What should I do?”
“Well,” says the Doc, “why don’t you figure out a way to test her hearing at home?”
So the guy goes home that night. He opens the front door and he can see, through the living room, his wife at the kitchen sink with her back toward him.
“Honey,” he calls out, “What’s for dinner?”
No answer.
So he walks into the living room, and calls again, “Honey, what’s for dinner?”
No answer.
So he walks into the kitchen, puts his hands on her shoulders and asks into her ear, “Honey, what’s for dinner?”
She turns her face up to his and says, “For the third time, chicken.”
—Ken Margolis
*
Q: Why couldn’t the teddy bear have any dessert?
A: Because he was already stuffed !
love & giggles,
—“Grandpa Bill” Faricy
*
Why didn’t the invisible man take the job?
Because he just couldn’t see himself doing it.

Why didn’t the chicken cross the road?
Because he was sick and tired of always having his motivations questioned.

Why did the chicken the road?
Because his father was a brutal alcoholic.

What did the buffalo say to his son when he left home?
Bison

What’s black and white and green…black and white and green….black and white and green?
Two zebras fighting over a pickle.
—Will Hornyak
*
Thanks to Deborah Buchanan for recommending Charlie Chaplin. Here’s a link to The Rink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eelQxCpLa4
My dad once said to me: “John, if anyone says you’re a wit, they’d be half right.”
So much for now.

May all people be happy!

–Johnny

peace, love & happiness newsletter 3/19 - 3/25
2020-03-26
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness
Spring Equinox
March 19, 2020
Dear Friends of The Open Road
Today I’m inaugurating a weekly peace, love & happiness newsletter. There will be an online version and a print version for people who are living in prison. It’s an experiment. I predict that it will be somewhat unpredictable. Hopefully, it will nurture culture and community at a time when gathering together is not encouraged.
Last night Prabu let me know about the Metropolitan Opera’s new “Nightly Opera Stream” program. You can learn more about it at the Open Road website (openroadpdx.org), or directly from the Met’s website at metopera.org. It’s just the kind of thing we need right now. And here’s a link to an article on “All the virtual concerts, plays, museums and other culture you can enjoy from home”:
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/what-to-do-at-home-streaming-art-museums-concerts-coronavirus-trnd/index.html.
Lately, I’ve been reading things by Alan Watts, and listening to audio recordings that were made of his talks. Many of his talks have been transcribed, edited and published since his death in 1973. When I was young, I didn’t take him seriously—maybe because he wasn’t from India or Japan. I was a snob! These days I really enjoy his wit, knowledge and insight into questions of philosophy, religion and psychology, East and West. Here’s a quote:
What I am really saying is that you
don’t need to do anything,
because if you see yourself in the correct way,
you are all as much extraordinary phenomena
of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns
in running water, the flickering of fire,
the arrangement of the stars,
and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that,
and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
(opening quote by Alan Watts, from his book Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, edited by Mark Watts and Marc Allen)
Here are a couple good prayers:
Serenity Prayer
Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Metta Prayer
May all beings be happy.
May we be peaceful and at ease.
May we be well in body and mind.
May we live in love.
Well that’s it for me for this issue.
Now I’d like to tag Kim and Katie and Deborah. In future issues I want to include things from you, the readers, so send me your poems and ruminations, et cetera.
—Johnny Stallings
*
Dear Johnny,
Your mention of the spring equinox reminded me of this poem of spring rain, a long time favorite of mine, a lover of rain and mystery and evocative words. The poem is by Yang Wan-li from the Sung Dynasty in China (his lifespan: 1127 to 1279 AD).
Night Rain at Kuang-k’ou
The river is clear and calm;
a fast rain falls in the gorge.
At midnight the cold, splashing sound begins,
like thousands of pearls spilling into a glass plate,
each drop penetrating the bone.
In my dream I scratch my head and get up to listen.
I listen and listen, until the dawn.
All my life I have heard rain,
and I am an old man;
but now for the first time I understand
the sound of spring rain
on the river at night.
Yang Wan-li, from Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow
—Deborah Buchanan
*
EAGLE POEM
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Joy Harjo, our National Poet Laureate
“Eagle Poem” from In Mad Love and War.
Spring Equinox is one my favorite and most cosmic times of year to be joyful about just being alive on Planet Earth. As pink Azaleas, yellow Forsythia, and luscious
Magnolia blossoms fill the air, may we find kindness and equanimity this Spring day.
Love and peace, dear friends.
—Katie Radditz
We’ll conclude with a couple poems that Kim Stafford, Oregon’s Poet Laureate, sent for us to include in our first peace, love & happiness newsletter:
*
Foolish Young Flowering Tree
It’s winter—dark days, still too cold
for bird or blossom—dull sky,
and all our hearts in shadow.
But there—at a ragged cleft
darkened by cedars of gloom
a flash of light cries out—
the incandescent wisp of wild
plum—far too early to be
so happy, so naive, a child
refusing to obey the rules of grief.

Trees in the Wind
Even the sturdy spruce is teaching:
you are rooted and strong, yet you give.
Some call it dancing, this strength.
And the wind has a far place to be, is
pure volition, whimsical, yet it hugs
the planet in a life-sustaining grip.
Some call it happiness, this shimmer
of feeling that runs over bone, along tendon—
in the sense of hap: what happens to us.
So we are all chameleon, capricious
outside, but sturdy inside, where,
helplessly, we are who we are.
When I was young, a Danish girl asked me
what the old song means: There are changes
in the ocean, and changes in the sea,
there are changes in my true love,
but no changes in me.
—Kim Stafford

Monica Faricy and Friends: EVENT CANCELED
2020-03-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Mississippi Pizza, 3552 N. Mississippi Ave., Portland, OR
Canceled due to public health concerns.
Hopefully, this event will be re-scheduled.
Featuring:
GLITTERFOX
MORGAN FARICY
C.J. JOHNSON
“FOOD FOR THOUGHT” FUNDRAISER
Snacks for 8th grade Science class Lane Middle School
DONATION: $5-$10

Reading by Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford at Milwaukie Public Library
2020-03-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Milwaukie Public Library, 10660 SE 21st Ave., Milwaukie, Oregon
This is a featured event of the Milwaukie Poetry Series.
