Bibliophiles Unanimous! 5/8/22
2022-05-08 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Beloved Bibliophiles! This Sunday, May 8th, at 3 pm (PDT), our theme is What Shaped Your Worldview (Including Books)?

How do you experience and understand the world? Your world? What’s important to you?What do you love? What’s going on here? What made you you? Which books changed the way you see?

Here’s the link for the Zoom gathering:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 5/15/22
2022-05-15 - 2022-06-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

May 15, 2022

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he….

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death….

All truths wait in all things….

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars…
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

—from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
*

Albrecht Dürer’s painting reminds me of Walt Whitman’s poem. Both were born in May—Dürer on May 21st, 1471, Walt on May 31st, 1819. At the end of May, I like to get together with friends and read Song of Myself.

Meditation and mindfulness are important to me on my life journey. They help me to see and appreciate the miraculous nature of our human life on Earth. Walt’s poem has also been a great help to me. I’ve carried it with me since I was 18. It reminds me that my self is as big as the world, without beginning or end. It is the wisest and most exuberant utterance to come out of America. Maybe the world.

—Johnny Stallings
*

Timely Thoughts

People talk of time,
Speak of time with wonder—
But what is time,
Why all the thunder?

Where’s the lightning
The brilliant flash of proof?
Tangible time,
Intangible truth!

This talk creates storms,
And brings nightmares to life;
Nightmares I say,
And terrible strife.

We do not need time,
It is time that needs us.
Wait, what is time—
And why all the fuss?

—Joshua Barnes © 2022
*

Jude and Michel both wrote in response to Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditation “Long Live Impermanence.” (JS)

#273 Long Live Impermanence!

“If you suffer, it’s not because things are impermanent. It’s because you believe things are permanent. When a flower dies, you don’t suffer much, because you understand that flowers are impermanent. But you cannot accept the impermanence of your beloved one, and you suffer deeply when she passes away. If you look deeply into impermanence, you will do your best to make her happy right now. Aware of impermanence, you become positive, loving, and wise.

Impermanence is good news. Without impermanence, nothing would be possible. With impermanence, every door is open for change. Instead of complaining, we should say, ‘Long live impermanence!’ Impermanence is an instrument for our liberation.”

—from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh

My dad had a conflicted relationship with impermanence/permanence. Here are two stories that show that conflict:

He was a doctor and had witnessed many deaths in his medical career. His many patients loved him, and he always showed care and great concern for them. When it came to his own life and death, he was very clear—adamant, even: “If found unconscious, do not resuscitate!” To people visiting him in his late 80s, he had a small plate with slips of paper with the note printed on it. He would offer the plate to friends as if offering a plate of Oreos. “Here, take one,” he’d say, as they walked in the door.

He wrote his own obituary, professing no big deal that he’d died. Closing statement: “He’s dead. There’s no more Ed!” You get the picture.

We three daughters knew his wishes, so when his health was failing and he’d experienced a few hospital stays, we were in accord as to what to do. On his return from one hospital bout, in his very weakened condition, my sisters assigned me to talk to him about his choices. I knelt beside him, tears streaming down my cheeks, held his hand and explained, “Dad, we know your wishes, and we’ll honor that. You can choose to refuse to eat, if you believe it’s time. We can’t withhold food from you, but you can choose not to eat. Or you can choose not to drink water, but we’ve been told that that is a very painful way to do this. So you can do this, refuse to eat, if you want to—we won’t force you, you know that.” He looked at me a little sweetly puzzled and bewildered, and said, “But I like to eat.” At which we all burst out laughing, and I said, “Well, then let’s make you a bacon sandwich!”

The second story is more in keeping with his credo of impermanence.

A couple years after our mom died, Dad reignited a long-lost love story with a high school sweetie, Ginnie. Ginnie’s husband had died also, and she and Dad started exchanging flurries of letters between Vancouver, Wa. and Loudonville, Ohio. He told us he wanted Ginnie to come to Washington so they could get married. All he could talk about was Ginnie and her sweet brown eyes and soft brown hair. (We reminded him that she might look a little different at 90 yrs old than at 17.) To test the waters, we all made a trip to Ohio and reunited the two of them for a sweet, five day visit. We returned to the Pacific Northwest and they kept up the flurry of lovey letter writing.

We noticed at some point that Ginnie hadn’t been writing anymore. No letters for several months, so I called her caregiver in Loudonville, and she told me, chagrined that she’d forgotten to let us know, that Ginnie had died! Oh no! How are we going to break the news to Dad?!?! So again, I knelt down beside his reading chair and said, “Dad, I have some very sad news to tell you. I’m so sorry…but we just learned that Ginnie—your Ginnie has died.” Dad let the news sink in, then cocked his head and said, “Well… she was old.”

Impermanence acknowledged.

—Jude Russell
*

April 26, 2022

Wisdom rests here. How we face, accept and adapt to impermanence will play out in our suffering. Allow me to explain. (Read Thây’s writing first!) When I set up an ideal (not reality, but an interpretation of how I expect reality to be) and reality doesn’t fulfill my “ideal,” then I suffer—get upset or anxious, etc. When I can just exist in this moment as it is with no expectations, then I can be present, loving, compassionate and open to all the opportunities the now presents. I have freedom to flow with the reality as it is, instead of fighting with it for what I want it to be, but can’t have. Doing this I become a petulant selfish child demanding my way, attempting to force reality to fit in my box.

Sadly, it never works like this. We’ve all tried. I have never gotten this to resolve positively; only as more suffering in now, and later on too! Impermanence is the hero of my story of suffering. All I need to do for the thing I dislike, or wish were different, is wait. I don’t have to attach, judge, work to change anything; all I need is to accept what is. Shortly all will shift, and over time things will change. It may not always be my idea of better, but it will be different. If I accept, I avoid suffering. (Acceptance does not include grasping or holding on tightly—hold with open hands.) If I attempt to control, grasp, hold, define, judge, change—then I get suffering. Long live impermanence!

Here’s another passage from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh, and Michel’s meditation on it. (JS)

#267 How Strange

“At the moment of his awakening at the foot of the Bodhi tree, the Buddha declared, ‘How strange! All beings possess the capacity to be awakened, to understand, to love, to be free, yet they allow themselves to be carried away on the ocean of suffering.’ He saw that, day and night, we’re seeking what is already there within us.”

April 14, 2022

How strange, indeed! That we should spend (waste even) an entire lifetime in search of that which is already within us. We have only to awaken to what already is. Somehow that is the challenge/trial of our individual quests; to come to an end of self and a realization that what we seek is and has always been within us all along. Instead, many run around aimlessly for years and decades and lifetimes (multiples for some), looking to find our relief in something/someone external. Some seek money, fame, beauty, youth, knowledge, possessions, status, mates (trophies?), glory, progeny, legacy, food, alcohol, drugs, sex, anything to excess.

Can I (you-we) stop this endless running for just a moment, please? Look at the man/woman in the mirror. Is anything external satisfying the “itch” for which we quest to resolve? No?! Face the man/woman in the mirror; get to know him/her; learn to love, accept, and express compassion for him/her. And if I’m wrong (I doubt it on this one occasion) what has been lost? Nothing! You’ve only spent some time learning to come home to your true home—your true self. And if I’m right (since I’m only restating wisdom of wiser folks) you’ve started to heal and come home. Welcome home!

—Michel Deforge
*

Desert Song School

In this tattered paradise we left them—these
acres of muddy reed where the maze of ditch
and dike lets every wing and cry be sovereign—
when dawn starts the chant by sweet cacophony
of bittern, heron, crane and teal through mist
in harmony oblique, a mozart fledgling nested
in thistledown must mutter her first yearning
proclamation, her aria profundo, shrill or secret
to split silence be she egret, avocet, stilt or tern,
ibis, shoveler, shearling, pelican or snipe
to dwell inside a symphony, to try her tune
before she learns to fly or feed or seek a mate,
her one and only way with song, brief life cry
where waters glitter for the rising sun.

—Kim Stafford
*

Small Kindnesses

Last week I thought about my mother on Mother’s Day and on her birthday, Friday, May 13. Sometimes these anniversaries fall on the same day. I have always liked the pause of remembering my mother and being mindful of how much of her very cells I carry with me. She died from kidney failure when I was in my early 20’s, so this year I realized I have had 50 years of looking back on my mother’s kindness and my short time with her. I hope you all enjoyed thinking of your mom and loving-kindness.

Mother’s Day began as a holiday to mark and value peace and kindness toward all persons. Julia Ward Howe made a plea for no more sending our sons to wars. Mother’s Day had a lot of that meaning for us this year.

Kindness is something we all value. But sometimes we take it for granted. Especially small kindnesses. A couple of weeks ago, I was taking care of my grandsons. Sylvan, who is nine years old, is homeschooling. He had a zoom class on African history and culture that he attended that day. There was a story about the most wealthy King in Africa, pre-colonization. The King was especially known and loved for his generosity and kindness. The class teacher asked the kids if they could tell about someone who had been generous and kind to them recently. Or could they tell about something they had done for someone else out of kindness? The children, who had had all kinds of things to say earlier in class, made no comments. None of the kids had a response! The teacher even told of some small kindness done for her to prompt them, but nooo. I talked with Sylvan afterward and I realized as a youngster he takes things for granted that adults do for him, when he’s hungry he gets fed or helps fix the food, or if he needs a ride his parents take him. And when he is nice to someone there’s always a good reason for working things out. It made me realize that kindness is a concept. Children are naturally living in the moment. And it’s our consciousness that helps us be kind in our actions and aware of kindness done toward us. This consciousness helps open our hearts with mindfulness.

My friend Jennifer, referring to the bumper sticker “Practice random acts of kindness,” said that it’s a gift when we intentionally do something for a person to make life easier.

Here is a poem to prompt us to be aware of kindness and how it makes us feel:

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

—Danusha Lameris, from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection is an anthology that includes poems by Ross Gay, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others. The poems urge us in these polarized times to “move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.”

Wishing you and the world, Peace and Kindness

—Katie Radditz

peace, love, happiness & understanding 5/19/22
2022-05-19 - 2022-06-01
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

May 19, 2022

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

*

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade has suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

—Emily Dickinson
*

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
*

from My Wisdom

When people have a lot
they want more

When people have nothing
they will happily share it

*

Silence waits
for truth to break it

*

Calendars can weep too
They want us to have better days

*

Welcome to every minute
Feel lucky you’re still in it

*

No bird builds a wall

*

Won’t give up
our hopes
for anything!

*

Not your fault
You didn’t make the world

*

Refuse to give
mistakes
too much power

*

Babies want to help us
They laugh
for no reason

*

Pay close attention to
a drop of water
on the kitchen table

–Naomi Shihab Nye
*

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

–Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)
*

from Reconciliation: A Prayer

II.
Oh sun, moon, stars, our other relatives peering at us from the inside of god’s house walk with us as we climb into the next century naked but for the stories we have of each other. Keep us from giving up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles.

We sing our song which we’ve been promised has no beginning or end.

III.
All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.

IV.
We gather up these strands broken from the web of life. They shiver with our love, as we call them the names of our relatives and carry them to our home made of the four directions and sing:

Of the south, where we feasted and were given new clothes.

Of the west, where we gave up the best of us to the stars as food for the battle.

Of the north, where we cried because we were forsaken by our dreams.

Of the east because returned to us is the spirit of all we love.

–Joy Harjo (1951- ) (Currently Poet Laureate of the United States)
*

At Blackwater Pond

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

–Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
*

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

–Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012)
*

The Award

Though not
A contest
Life
Is
The award
& we
Have
Won.
*

Despite the Hunger

Despite
the hunger
we cannot
possess
more
than
this:
Peace
in a garden
of
our own.

–Alice Walker (1944- )

Take a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
2022-05-20 - 2022-05-29
Mask of the Punu people of southern Gabon (19th-20th Century)

Browse through the 375,000 high-resolution images of public domain works from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Here’s a link:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

You can read more about this mask here:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/318667

Peace, Love & Beauty

Johnny

Friends of Walt: An Archive
2022-05-29
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

To celebrate Walt’s 205th Birthday, Johnny Stallings performed “Song of Myself” on May 31st, in Muir Hall at Taborspace, in Portland.We read from and talked about “Song of Myself” for ¡Bibliophiles Unanimous! on Sunday,June 2nd. Here’s what Robert G. Ingersoll said at Walt Whitman’s funeral:

Robert Ingersoll’s Tribute to Walt Whitman

MY FRIENDS: Again we, in the mystery of Life, are brought face to face with the mystery of Death. A great man, a great American, the most eminent citizen of this Republic, lies dead before us, and we have met to pay a tribute to his greatness and his worth.
I know he needs no words of mine. His fame is secure. He laid the foundations of it deep in the human heart and brain.
He was, above all I have known, the poet of humanity, of sympathy. He was so great that he rose above the greatest that he met without arrogance, and so great that he stooped to the lowest without conscious condescension. He never claimed to be lower or greater than any of the sons of men.
He came into our generation a free, untrammeled spirit, with sympathy for all. His arm was beneath the form of the sick. He sympathized with the imprisoned and despised, and even on the brow of crime he was great enough to place the kiss of human sympathy.
One of the greatest lines in our literature is his, and the line is great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived. He said, speaking of an outcast: “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”
His charity was as wide as the sky, and wherever there was human suffering, human misfortune, the sympathy of Whitman bent above it as the firmament bends above the earth.
He was built on a broad and splendid plan—ample, without appearing to have limitations—passing easily for a brother of mountains and seas and constellations; caring nothing for the little maps and charts with which timid pilots hug the shore, but giving himself freely with recklessness of genius to winds and waves and tides; caring for nothing as long as the stars were above him.
He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god.
He was the poet of that divine democracy which gives equal rights to all the sons and daughters of men. He uttered the great American voice; uttered a song worthy of the great Republic. No man ever said more for the rights of humanity, more in favor of real democracy, of real justice.
He neither scorned nor cringed, was neither tyrant nor slave. He asked only to stand the equal of his fellows beneath the great flag of nature, the blue and stars.
He was the poet of Life. It was a joy simply to breathe. He loved the clouds; he enjoyed the breath of morning, the twilight, the wind, the winding streams. He loved to look at the sea when the waves burst into the whitecaps of joy. He loved the fields, the hills; he was acquainted with the trees, with birds, with all the beautiful objects of the earth. He not only saw these objects, but understood their meaning, and he used them that he might exhibit his heart to his fellow-men.
He was the poet of Love. He was not ashamed of that divine passion that has built every home in the world; that divine passion that has painted every picture and given us every real work of art; that divine passion that has made the world worth living in and has given some value to human life.
He was the poet of the natural, and taught men not to be ashamed of that which is natural. He was not only the poet of democracy, not only the poet of the great Republic, but he was the Poet of the human race. He was not confined to the limits of this country, but his sympathy went out over the seas to all the nations of the earth.
He stretched out his hand and felt himself the equal of all kings and of all princes, and the brother of all men, no matter how high, no matter how low.
He has uttered more supreme words than any writer of our century, possibly of almost any other. He was, above all things, a man, and above genius, above all the snow-capped peaks of intelligence, above all art, rises the true man, Greater than all is the true man, and he walked among his fellow-men as such.
He was the poet of Death. He accepted all life and all death, and he justified all. He had the courage to meet all, and was great enough and splendid enough to harmonize all and to accept all there is of life as a divine melody.
You know better than I what his life has been, but let me say one thing. Knowing, as he did, what others can know and what they cannot, he accepted and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and believed in none.
His philosophy was a sky that embraced all clouds and accounted for all clouds. He had a philosophy and a religion of his own, broader, as he believed—and as I believe—than others. He accepted all, he understood all, and he was above all.
He was absolutely true to himself. He had frankness and courage, and he was as candid as light. He was willing that all the sons of men should be absolutely acquainted with his heart and brain. He had nothing to conceal.
Frank, candid, pure, serene, noble, and yet for years he was maligned and slandered, simply because he had the candor of nature. He will be understood yet, and that for which he was condemned—his frankness, his candor—will add to the glory and greatness of his fame.
He wrote a liturgy for mankind; he wrote a great and splendid psalm of life, and he gave to us the gospel of humanity—the greatest gospel that can be preached.
He was not afraid to live, not afraid to die. For many years he and death were near neighbors. He was always willing and ready to meet and greet this king called death, and for many months he sat in the deepening twilight waiting for the night, waiting for the light.
He never lost his hope. When the mists filled the valleys, he looked upon the mountaintops, and when the mountains in darkness disappeared, he fixed his gaze upon the stars.
In his brain were the blessed memories of the day, and in his heart were mingled the dawn and dusk of life.
He was not afraid; he was cheerful every moment. The laughing nymphs of day did not desert him. They remained that they might clasp the hands and greet with smiles the veiled and silent sisters of the night. And when they did come, Walt Whitman stretched his hand to them. On one side were the nymphs of the day, and on the other the silent sisters of the night, and so, hand in hand, between smiles and tears, he reached his journey’s end.
From the frontier of life, from the western wave-kissed shore, he sent us messages of content and hope, and these messages seem now like strains of music blown by the “Mystic Trumpeter” from Death’s pale realm.
Today we give back to Mother Nature, to her clasp and kiss, one of the bravest, sweetest souls that ever lived in human clay.
Charitable as the air and generous as Nature, he was negligent of all except to do and say what he believed he should do and should say.
And I today thank him, not only for you but for myself—for all the brave words he has uttered. I thank him for all the great and splendid words he has said in favor of liberty, in favor of man and woman, in favor of motherhood, in favor of fathers, in favor of children, and I thank him for the brave words that he has said of death.
He has lived, he has died, and death is less terrible than it was before. Thousands and millions will walk down into the “dark valley of the shadow” holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long after we are dead the brave words he has spoken will sound like trumpets to the dying.
And so I lay this little wreath upon this great man’s tomb. I loved him living, and I love him still.

—Camden, New Jersey, March 30, 1892

The origin of Friends of Walt comes from an email that Kim Stafford sent me after our annual reading of “Song of Myself” to celebrate Walt Whitman’s Birthday on May 29th, 2022. Here’s what he wrote:

Following our shining session today, would you like to invite the group to send you citations for Whitmania, to be compiled and shared with everyone: title and author of biographies, the URL for the Billy Collins talk on YouTube, Will’s source of quotation for how Emily Dickinson appreciated Whitman, and anything else. A sort of reading list for us to peruse before the next annual reading?

Just a thought…and if you reply “Good idea–why don’t you do it?” … we can collaborate. (Perrin’s looking up citations now.)

Have I ever told you the story about how my father was saved from being lynched in Arkansas in the winter of 1942 because he was reading Whitman when the mob came? We could put that in the bibliography, too.

–Kim
*

Okay, so here we go!

Starting with a poem Kim wrote today (5/30/22) about how Walt Whitman saved his dad’s life:

The story about Whitman saving my dad…which is told in the first chapter of Down in My Heart…and which Keith Scales made into a little play to perform one time at the Portland Poetry Festival for my dad, after his last reading, early August 1993.

Memorial Day: How Walt Whitman
Saved My Farther from the Mob

One Sunday afternoon in 1942, three peace warriors
walked into a little town in Arkansas to loaf by the station
and take their ease. They were strangers there, so locals
gathered, curious. “What’s that you’re writing?” said one,
grabbing the page. “Why sir, it’s a poem.” “That aint poetry—
it don’t rhyme. It’s code. And you! What’s that you’re drawing?”
“Just a sketch.” “That aint no sketch, bub—it’s a map for Hitler.”
“Get a rope!” someone cried out, and time got bright and fast.
“And you!” the hothead shouted at my father, “What’s that book?”
and snatched it, slapped it open, and began to read aloud to prove
poetry had to rhyme. But lynching’s logic faltered as his fury
trailed off in a run of wild words, and time slowed down again.
“Call the sheriff!” someone shouted, as the crowd hummed
and muttered like a hive until the sheriff came, blustered
my father and his friends into his car, slammed the door,
turned and said, “Let’s get you boys out of town.”

Failing to catch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

–Kim Stafford
*

Perrin Kerns turned me on to some gorgeous videos by Jennifer Crandall. The URL address is

whitmanalabama.com.

Alan Benditt sent this link to a video of Charlie Rose talking with Allen Ginsberg, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell about Walt Whitman:

https://charlierose.com/videos/20510

This is our little homemade archive. Jeffrey Sher and Kim Stafford sent a link to the University of Nebraska’s vast online Whitman Archive. You can find all kinds of treasures here:

https://whitmanarchive.org

Kim said:

Today [5/30/22] I’ve been spending some time at this Grand Central Station of Walt Whitman sources, reading his fiction and journalism, some so pedestrian it makes Leaves of Grass even more miraculous.

Today, May 31, 2022, is Walt Whitman’s 203rd birthday. Happy Birthday, Walt!!! Howard Thoresen sent a link to the wax cylinder recording that Thomas Edison made of Walt Whitman, in his old age, reading or reciting his poem “America.” Here’s what Howard said:

This one has a lot of noise on it but I find it easier to hear than the cleaned up version (maybe because the text is on the screen):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBX2L_Re5Cc

Kim’s response to Howard (5/31/22):

Thank you, Howard. If we only we had Walt at 37 reading with full verve. But all the same, amazing to hear this voice.

Johnny, we might include for the page this mysterious ad from Volvo, where lines from “Song of the Open Road” are used without attribution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42ZMi0DnMtE

Walt selling freedom, Volvo selling cars…and a little love story folded in where the writer is scruffy hero with expensive wheels. Maybe there’s a Kerouac vibe implied as well.

–Kim
*

To celebrate Walt’s birthday today (5/31/22) I want to share one of my favorite short poems of his:

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.

–Walt Whitman
*

Will Hornyak recommended a talk that Billy Collins gave on Whitman. Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VYnkdcDQZA

Here’s an interview I did about “Song of Myself” on Marfa Public Radio in 2017:

Kim sent this:

Need we look further for where Whitman got his cadence than Emerson…perhaps from the essay you mentioned, “The Poet,” which Emerson must have composed, or perhaps revised, aloud, in preparation to deliver it as a lecture, oration, or operatic performance. Think of the young Whitman, after toiling on some journalistic task, encountering music like this last paragraph of Emerson’s essay:

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

–from the essay “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walt Whitman self-published his first book of poems, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, when he was 36 years old. It contained 12 poems, including the poem now titled “Song of Myself.” (In the original edition, the poems did not have titles.) He sent a copy of the poem to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then sent Whitman this letter:

CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, 21 July, 1855

DEAR SIR–

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. EMERSON
*

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: Annual Group Reading of "Song of Myself" 5/29/22
2022-05-29 15:00 - 18:00
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Sunday, May 29th, we celebrated Walt Whitman’s 203rd Birthday with our Annual Group Reading of “Song of Myself”!

Readers included: Alan Benditt, Steve Cackley, Nick Eldredge, Brent Gregston, Perrin Kerns, Andy Larkin, Ken Margolis, Todd Oleson, Katie Radditz, Jude Russell, Kristen Sagan, Toby Scales, Nancy Scharbach, Jeffrey Sher, Kim Stafford, Johnny Stallings, Howard Thoresen and Max Walter.

As always, reading this poem together brings readers and listeners alike into a state of Delirious Happiness and Cosmic Consciousness!

After the reading, Kim suggested that we share recommendations for books, articles, videos, et cetera, relating to Walt Whitman. So, on this website, I’m going to create a page called “Friends of Walt,” where people can share their thoughts and poems and inspirations and bibliographies. Here’s the link:

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 6/2/22
2022-06-02 - 2022-06-15
painting of Walt Whitman by Rick Bartow

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

June 2, 2022

Walt on my mind…and in my heart

Today (5/31/22) is Walt Whitman’s 203rd birthday. We celebrated last Sunday with a group reading of “Song of Myself” on Zoom. It was exhilarating! The readers were Alan Benditt, Steve Cackley, Nick Eldredge Brent Gregston, Perrin Kerns, Andy Larkin, Ken Margolis, Todd Oleson, Katie Radditz, Jude Russell, Kristen Sagan, Toby Scales, Jeffrey Sher, Nancy Scharbach, Kim Stafford, Johnny Stallings, Howard Thoresen and Max Walter.

In the fourth issue of “peace, love & happiness,” we celebrated Walt Whitman. Here’s the link:

https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-walt-whitman-issue-4-9-4-15/

We just inaugurated a Friends of Walt archive on the Open Road website. There are lots of treasures! Check it out!

https://openroadpdx.com/event/friends-of-walt-an-archive/

So, I’ve been thinking about my friend Walt a lot lately. He published his first book of poems, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. It contained 12 poems, including the one he later named “Song of Myself. (In the original edition, the poems didn’t have names.) He sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote back to him:

CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, 21 July, 1855

DEAR SIR–

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. EMERSON
*

Kim Stafford sent this:

Need we look further for where Whitman got his cadence than Emerson…perhaps from the essay you mentioned, “The Poet,” which Emerson must have composed, or perhaps revised, aloud, in preparation to deliver it as a lecture, oration, or operatic performance. Think of the young Whitman, after toiling on some journalistic task, encountering music like this last paragraph of Emerson’s essay:

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

–from the essay “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
During the Civil War, like our friend Ken Margolis, Walt did hospice work—giving comfort to the sick and dying. He had the first of a series of strokes in 1873, which left him partially paralyzed. His book Specimen Days was published in 1882. It’s a kind of journal that gives an account of his thoughts and experiences during the Civil War and up to the time it was published.
Walt continued to write poems and add them to Leaves of Grass. He revised it five times before he died, in 1892, at the age of 72. His friend Robert G. Ingersoll—(whose essay “Crimes Against Criminals” was featured in Issue #7 of “peace, love & happiness”: https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-newsletter-5-7-5-13/)–gave a speech at Walt Whitman’s grave. Here it is:

Address at the Funeral of Walt Whitman

Again, we, in the mystery of Life, are brought face to face with the mystery of Death. A great man, a great American, the most eminent citizen of this Republic, lies dead before us, and we have met to pay tribute to his greatness and his worth.

I know he needs no words of mine. His fame is secure. He laid the foundations of it deep in the human heart and brain. He was, above all I have known, the poet of humanity, of sympathy. He was so great that he rose above the greatest that he met without arrogance, and so great that he stooped to the lowest without conscious condescension. He never claimed to be lower or greater than any of the sons of men.

He came into our generation a free, untrammeled spirit, with sympathy for all. His arm was beneath the form of the sick. He sympathized with the imprisoned and despised, and even on the brow of crime he was great enough to place the kiss of human sympathy.

One of the greatest lines in our literature is his, and the line is great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived. He said, speaking of an outcast: “Not until the sun excludes you will I exclude you.”

His charity was as wide as the sky, and wherever there was human suffering, human misfortune, the sympathy of Whitman bent above it as the firmament bends above the earth.

He was built on a broad and splendid plan—ample, without appearing to have limitations—passing easily for a brother of mountains and seas and constellations; caring nothing for the little maps and charts with which timid pilots hug the shore, but giving himself freely with the recklessness of genius to winds and waves and tides; caring for nothing so long as the stars were above him. He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god.

He was the poet of that divine democracy which gives equal rights to all the sons and daughters of men. He uttered the great American voice; uttered a song worthy of the great Republic. No man has ever said more for the rights of humanity, more in favor of real democracy, of real justice. He neither scorned nor cringed; was neither tyrant nor slave. He asked only to stand the equal of his fellows beneath the great flag of nature, the blue and stars.

He was the poet of Life. It was a joy simply to breathe. He loved the clouds; he enjoyed the breath of morning, the twilight, the wind, the winding streams. He loved to look at the sea when the waves burst into the whitecaps of joy. He loved the fields, the hills; he was acquainted with the trees, with birds, with all the beautiful objects of the earth. He not only saw these objects, but understood their meaning, and he used them that he might exhibit his heart to his fellow-men.

He was the poet of Love. He was not ashamed of that divine passion that has built every home; that divine passion that has painted every picture and given us every real work of art; that divine passion that has made the world worth living in and has given some value to human life.

He was the poet of the natural, and taught men not to be ashamed of that which is natural. He was not only the poet of democracy, not only the poet of the great Republic, but he was the poet of the human race. He was not confined to the limits of this country, but his sympathy went out over the seas to all the nations of the earth.

He stretched out his hands and felt himself the equal of all kings and of all princes, and the brother of all men, no matter how high, no matter how low.

He has uttered more supreme words than any writer of our century, possibly of almost any other. He was, above all things, a man, and above genius, above all the snow-capped peaks of intelligence, above all art, rises the true man.

He was the poet of Death. He accepted all life and all death, and he justified all. He had the courage to meet all, and was great enough and splendid enough to harmonize all and to accept all there is as a divine melody.

You know better than I what his life has been, but let me say one thing: Knowing as he did, what others can know and what they can not, he accepted and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and believed in none. His philosophy was a sky that embraced all clouds and accounted for all clouds. He had a philosophy and a religion of his own, broader, as he believed—and as I believe—than others. He accepted all, he understood all, and he was above all.

He was absolutely true to himself. He had frankness and courage, and he was as candid as light. He was willing that all the sons of men should be absolutely acquainted with his heart and brain. He had nothing to conceal. Frank, candid, pure, serene, noble, and yet for years he was maligned and slandered, simply because he had the candor of nature. He will be understood yet, and that for which he was condemned—his frankness, his candor—will add to the glory and greatness of his fame.

He wrote a liturgy for mankind; he wrote a great and splendid psalm of life, and he gave to us the gospel of humanity—the greatest gospel that can be preached.

He was not afraid to live; not afraid to die. For many years he and Death lived near neighbors. He was always willing and ready to meet and greet this king called Death, and for many months he sat in the deepening twilight waiting for the night; waiting for the light.

He never lost his hope. When the mists filled the valleys, he looked upon the mountain tops, and when the mountains in darkness disappeared, fixed his gaze upon the stars.

In his brain were the blessed memories of the day and in his heart were mingled the dawn and dusk of life.

He was not afraid; he was cheerful every moment. The laughing nymphs of day did not desert him. They remained that they might clasp the hands and greet with smiles the veiled and silent sisters of the night. And when they did come, Walt Whitman stretched his hand to them. On one side were the nymphs of day, and on the other the silent sisters of the night, and so, hand in hand, between smiles and tears, he reached his journey’s end.

From the frontier of life, from the western wave-kissed shore, he sent us messages of content and hope, and these messages seem now like strains of music blown by the “Mystic Trumpeter” from Death’s pale realm.

Today we give back to Mother Nature, to her clasp and kiss, one of the bravest, sweetest souls that ever lived in human clay.

Charitable as the air and generous as Nature, he was negligent of all except to do and say what he believed he should do and should say.

And I today thank him, not only for you but for myself, for all the brave words he has uttered. I thank him for all the great and splendid words he has said in favor of liberty, in favor of man and woman, in favor of motherhood, in favor of fathers, in favor of children, and I thank him for the brave words that he has said of death.

He has lived, he has died, and death is less terrible than it was before. Thousands and millions will walk down into the “dark valley of the shadow” holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long after we are dead the brave words he has spoken will sound like trumpets to the dying.

And so I lay this little wreath upon this great man’s tomb. I loved him living, and I love him still.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, at Harleigh, Camden, New Jersey, March 30, 1892

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 6/15/22
2022-06-15 - 2022-07-14
Photo by Kim Stafford

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

June 15, 2022

For long years a bird in a cage;
Now, flying along with the clouds of heaven.

(quoted by R. H. Blyth, in Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p. 37)
*

Buddha nature
not
a gift
from
Buddha
but
from
nature.

—Alice Walker, from A Poem Traveled Down My Arm
*

Joseph Campbell quotes from Ulysses and then provides a brief commentary:

“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”

I mentioned this basic theme before with respect to the esthetic experience. Any object can open back to the mystery of the universe. You can take any object whatsoever—a stick or stone, a dog or a child—draw a ring around it so that it is seen as separate from everything else, and thus contemplate it in its mystery aspect—the aspect of the mystery of its being, which is the mystery of all being—and it will have there and then become a proper object of worshipful regard. So, any object can become an adequate base for meditation, since the whole mystery of man and of nature and of everything else is in any object that you want to regard. This idea, the anagogical inspiration of Joyce’s art, is what we are getting in this little moment.

—Joseph Campbell, from Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, p. 130.
*

Katie sent this:

”Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.”

—Max Ehrmann, 1872 – 1945
*

Well, it’s a beautiful morning here. The sky is full of massive cumulonimbus. The wind pushes them at an amazing speed. On the big grass-covered hill the wind blows the tall grass in waves and swirls, which makes it possible to truly see the shape and living being of the wind & how it kisses the Earth. To be allowed to partake in the beauty of life, in the simple rite of nature & to view “life” is a gift. I know that it’s not always an easy place, this world we live in. All we can do, any of us, is to live as best we as we can & don’t pass up the small moments of peace, or the deep breaths of life’s beauty that is alive all around us. How we view life in our mind reflects in the actions of our hearts, which are the paint brushes we use to allow others to truly see who we are. It’s the actions in deeds & words & the intent in our beings that either bind us to others or pull us apart.

The rays of the sun are exploding through one of the massive clouds…such beauty…it can never belong to just one being, it belongs to us all.

—Rocky Hutchinson (5/23/22)
*

This is from Nicole Rush:

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters, by Portia Nelson

Chapter 1

I walk down the street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in.
I am lost.
I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same place. But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there.
I still fall in.
It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

Chapter 4

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5

I walk down another street.

I have spent a lot of my life stuck somewhere in Chapters 1 – 4. Sometimes I really just didn’t see the hole. Perhaps I was distracted. Maybe I’m just clumsy, tripped and fell in. Or maybe it felt exciting to always be falling in and figuring a way out. Maybe it kept me from walking where I knew I should but was afraid to go.

I was in an intensely emotional and complex relationship with my ex-husband for 21 years. There were moments I saw him in the hole and willingly climbed in just so I could be with him. Other times I saw him in there and felt thankful to be on the other side, standing alone. And I left him there. And other times we fell in the hole together. Sometimes I was stuck down there hoping he’d hear me calling out, wanting to be rescued, but he couldn’t save me because I had pushed him in a different hole. He was stuck, too, calling out for me. And I pretended not to hear him. Then we both climbed out but we were on different sides of the street, walking in different directions.

The choice was always there. I suppose sometimes I close my eyes because walking inside of the dream feels easier than being present. But when my eyes are open I see that I have a choice. I see the path I am meant to walk down, even if it isn’t the one I am used to.

Today I am walking down a new street. I have a vague idea where I’m going but if I don’t make it there, I know it’ll be okay. I’m paying attention to each step I take. I’m looking out for the holes. When I see one, I know I can leap over or turn onto a new street.

Mindfulness is like spectacles for our consciousness. Sitting in stillness, welcoming where we are, wherever we are, allows us to access the clarity to witness ourselves. There’s no use in judging ourselves for being in a hole – what good does that do? It certainly doesn’t make the hole go away or help us climb out. When we see ourselves from a place of compassion we can then reach inside and touch the wisdom that is always resting there. That wisdom and awareness is what shows us when it’s time to turn the corner.

In gratitude

—Nicole Rush
*

(This is from Alice Walker’s book The Cushion in the Road) (JS):

Life Lessons: Gratitude Is My Only Prayer

July 27, 2011

Many years ago I was drubbed by a mysterious illness (later self-diagnosed as Lyme disease) that brought me to my knees. At the same time critics pilloried me: my work, it appeared, severely offended them. Moreover, my love life crashed around my feet. Still, one day, after years of being under a cloud of sickness and censor, I realized I was not only rising from my ashes, but shining. From that time to this I’ve lost the need for lengthy prayers. I have only one, but it is constant. Thank you, I say, before eating, working, moving. Loving. Thank you. It is enough.

These are other “life lessons” that have helped clear my path.

If you love doing it, it isn’t “work.”

I have written over thirty books, yet looking back I hardly remember the work it took to create them because I enjoyed writing them so much. It’s the same with everything: I can spend two hours grubbing about in my garden, dazed with pleasure and intent, and it feels like five minutes. Therefore, before I embark on any new venture, I ask myself: will the joy of doing this make me lose track of any concern for time? If the answer is yes, I proceed!

A bad mood is temporary. So is depression.

I learned this when I was much younger. I used to be depressed quite often, a chemical imbalance made intolerable by my monthly cycle. I used to want to do away with myself. Somehow I managed to keep a journal during these periods, tracking every weird turn in my emotional life. Over months—possibly years—I discerned something quite interesting: my moods and depressions had a beginning, middle and end. Aha, I thought, I need only learn to witness them and wait them out. This I began to do until, by my thirties, they were mostly gone.

To have peace of mind is to be wealthy.
(Also to know when you have enough!)

When I was much younger I thought people were made happy by the things they possessed. I also wanted things. I now have lots of things, and I enjoy them. But if they were taken away I could still be quite happy, though I might miss them. I’ve learned that things are not what make happiness, but rather a calm stability of Being and serenity of spirit. The peace I experience in my own mind is my most prized possession.

Love everyone and everything you can!
(They don’t even have to know about it.)

I used to think the most important thing about love was to receive it. Now I understand it is more important to feel it and to give it. That the good feeling we associate with love is generated by us, not by a lover of us. Their love is very nice, and I welcome it, but the feeling of actually generating love within one’s self is so exquisite it almost leaves being loved by another in the dust! My greatest joy comes from loving everything and everyone I can. And it is amazing how big this can get! Daffodils, coconuts, frogs, catamarans, indie movies, dogs, bougainvillea, tribal art, snowstorms, old people, the Alps, chickens, my various “children,” regardless of what they think of me, and so on.

When in doubt, find a nice hammock.

People who work hard often work too hard. I’ve learned to take time out and swing in one of the many hammocks I have wherever I live. From a hammock the world seems quite doable, especially if one is listening to a good audiobook and having lemonade. From my hammock I send out good wishes to all of human- and animal- and plant-kind. May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms. May peace prevail.

(This piece was written for a magazine in the Middle East.)

—Alice Walker
*

(My old friend Marc Frank sent me this poem; ruhi ruki rumi is his pen name.) (JS)

ah these words that
want to come out

who’s voice speaks
to utter out things

i hear the inner voice
write what i tell you ‘write’

i listen to the voice within
out of silence it comes in

i feel the feeling inside
sounds in the head reside

words come one after another like drops appear

take heed take warning
times are more than changing

time to hold onto God
no matter your thought

if Einstein spent the last weeks of his life mathematically wanting
to know God’s mind

why wouldn’t you
who comes & goes

ah the intrigue of your game my eye begin to see the joke of all things

—ruhi ruki rumi
*

#358- So Many Reasons to be Happy

“We have so many reasons to be happy. The earth is filled with love for us, and patience. Whenever she sees us suffering, she will protect us. With the earth as a refuge, we need not be afraid of anything, even dying. Walking mindfully on the earth, we are nourished by the trees, the bushes , the flowers, and the sunshine. Touching the earth is a very deep practice that can restore our peace and our joy.”

(from Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh)

…and nourished by the creatures therein, as well. In prison, men have infrequent opportunities to experience or interact with nature. I, on the other hand, am constantly living in and relating to nature. Because it is such an integral part of me, I find that I always want to bring some experience into our discussion in the dialogue group; I am hesitant, however, because of the enforced paucity of nature in their daily lives of incarceration.

But they find a way. Five years or so ago, an inmate described an experience that got him out of a cycle of anger, depression, and repeated solitary confinement in ‘the hole.’ He was in for murder and life without parole. One day while in ‘the hole,’ he discovered a praying mantis on the floor in a corner. He was going to step on it, crush it with his shoe, but stopped when he noticed the mantis’ legs sawing away. He sat down and watched the mantis’ movements with fascination. When his lunch came, he tore off a piece of lettuce and placed it in front of the creature. The mantis devoured it. The inmate continued to feed and observe the activity of the insect—water from a plastic spoon, other bits of vegetation, bread crumbs, dead flies, etc.

Weeks passed, and months. The mantis stayed alive because of the inmate’s care. They were in ‘the hole’ together for eight months. Over those months, the inmate’s behavior changed, softened, and he realized that he wanted his life to be one of caring and not one of anger and destruction. He was released from segregation and put back into the general prison population, and eventually was approved to join our group.

He never saw the praying mantis again. His story told us that even a minute connection to nature can change a life, save a life—of an insect and of a man.

—Jude Russell
*

This is one excerpt from the many entries in Michel Deforge’s May meditation journal—inspired by a meditation in Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh:

May 8, 2022; Mother’s Day!; #281 Loving Words

This is so fitting for today. So often it is the mother (or gentle nurturer) who speaks the loving words into our lives as children. For some this didn’t, or couldn’t, happen. For others the ideals got warped somehow. BUT, we are not our past traumas! We can speak these words of love and encouragement into our own lives and the lives of others. When we catch someone doing a kind, loving, compassionate deed for any other being we can praise them privately….

Do you speak loving words into your life? Does it sound too “weird,” too touchy-feely (for a men’s prison—or other environ)? I get it. I’m not experienced at this either. Ponder the words you long to hear from your own mother (or surrogate), or father—the words rarely, if ever, spoken to/about you. Let go of feelings and recriminations, guessing why these words went unsaid, and focus on what you want to hear. Now speak those words to yourself—words of love, compassion, approval, admiration, support, encouragement, recognition of success, pick-me-ups for sadness or “failure.”

We all know the words we want and need to hear. We might even speak some to our friends, family and loved ones; they likely need this as much as any of us. Mother’s Day doesn’t have to be the only day to celebrate our own mothers—as Carl is fond of observing—we just need to celebrate the people in our lives whom we love when it occurs to us. (This may take some effort to occur more than rarely, but it can be done.)

I don’t know why I’ve delayed telling my friends that “I like you,” and give a reason why, so it’s not just patronizingly said for the sake of saying it. Yet, I do put it off. Could it be the rare chance encounters with not enough time for meaningful speech? Probably. Must we wave and scurry on our way? Always?! What happens to my life if I write a letter, or slow down and really greet a friend—looking him in the eyes and saying some loving words I genuinely mean?

I may be delayed a few seconds from an appointment I’m already tardy to attend. What if I never express my joy at seeing someone, and a tragic event occurs and the opportunity is lost? While in college Psych class, an exercise demonstrated that regrets are often easily avoided if we can overcome social fears. (We have these barriers among friends? Still?!) Will he reject, rebuff, stop liking me, get weirded out by my affection or kind words…? The internal dialogue of our old neuroses and no-longer-helpful or necessary post-trauma coping skills does not serve our better selves. I don’t know how to surpass these barriers of fear—except through love. The challenge becomes being courageous enough to be first to say, “I love you,” “I like you because…,” “You’re special to me…,” “You matter in my life…” I think the picture is clear. So…why do I still stand here wanting to speak, yet stay silent? I’m not alone in this…

—Michel Deforge
*

Dear friends,

This past week, I drove along the Columbia River all the way to Walla Walla and noticed how the rolling hills of the Gorge are green. I don’t ever remember on our way to Umatilla, these velvety brown hills ever being tinged with green. But this Spring, well almost summer, they are asparagus and sage green, and they are full of yellow and purple wild flowers.

It was so uplifting and I felt deep gratitude for the long spring rains.

We were not even gone a week, but on our return our yard looked like a tropical jungle, the paths barely passable for the giant ferns and drooping maple branches. And the rhododendrons have the biggest red flowers we have ever had in our yard.

I paused to think how important it is to have beauty, abundant nature to quiet our minds to wonder and open our hearts to fearlessness and to soften.

In the mornings since Russia invaded Ukraine, I join a Shambhala group in Ukraine for morning meditation. The sangha members in Ukraine feel supported by our ongoing presence and help; we foreign participants feel equal support in facing from afar the destruction and fear of the war. So familiar, this feeling like being together in dialogue or at a play in prison.

Yesterday, Slava, one of the hosts in Ukraine gave his daily check in on how he and his family and town are doing. His bookshelves and Buddhist altar and photos are usually in the background. Like most zoom get togethers look. But yesterday he was outside on his bicycle in the mountains. He had taken a retreat weekend away from the war, and he said summer had come at last after a cold spring! Just like Portland. He posted a photo that helps him remember his true nature, calling it our basic goodness. He wanted us to be able to meditate with a picture of Ukraine that is beautiful. From a vast hill full of yellow and pink and white wildflowers the scene swept down to a river valley and mountains jutted up on the other side. It could have been the Columbia gorge.

What ensued after meditation was a joyous discussion about how regeneration in Spring, especially the beauty of blossoms, is this instant reminder that can help us stay centered and true to ourselves and our Humanity, no matter how discouraging the news and life can be. A reminder even that it is not us against them, but a confusing, political, global state of affairs.

When we drove back home through the Gorge we got so happy thinking that in August there will be peaches again near Umatilla at Peach Beach. Hope blossoms! So here are two poems for blossoms to keep our humanity solid and our hearts open to loving life despite the sorrow it can bring:

How It Might Continue

Wherever we go, the chance for joy,
whole orchards of amazement—

one more reason to always travel
with our pockets full of exclamation marks,

so we might scatter them for others
like apple seeds.

Some will dry out, some will blow away,
but some will take root

and grow exuberant groves
filled with long thin fruits

that resemble one hand clapping—
so much enthusiasm as they flutter back and forth

that although nothing’s heard
and though nothing’s really changed,

people everywhere for years to come
will swear that the world

is ripe with applause, will fill
their own pockets with new seeds to scatter.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
*

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee
*

May we be at peace,

—Katie Radditz

Bibliophiles Unanimous! BLOOMSDAY! 6/16/22
2022-06-16 19:00 - 21:00
Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom, from the film “Bloom,” directed by Sean Walsh (2003)

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

–James Joyce, Ulysses

BLOOMSDAY!

Beloved Bibliophiles!

On Thursday, June 16th, at 7 p.m. (PDT) we will celebrate together on Zoom the day in 1904 when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus wandered the streets of Dublin, while Molly Bloom entertained a visitor at home.

Everyone is welcome to bring favorite passages to read from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. We will talk about James Joyce, and about the novel and our experience of it. Here’s the link (for this event only):

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81191011051

This will be fun for those who have read Ulysses and for those who haven’t.

(For those who want to do a little homework in preparation for Thursday’s festivities, you might take a look at Mythic Worlds, Modern Words by Joseph Campbell, Stuart Gilbert’s classic study James Joyce’s Ulysses, or watch the 2003 film “Bloom,” with Stephen Rea in the role of Leopold Bloom.)

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: A Conversation With Susan Griffin 6/26/22
2022-06-26 14:00 - 16:00
A Conversation With Susan Griffin

On Sunday, June 26th, Susan Griffin was our Special Guest. She talked about the book she is currently writing, a biography of Phoebe Hearst. She read some poems about her sister.

She read from her newest book, Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something.: A Writer’s Guide and talked about the writing process. This book will be available January 17, 2023. You can pre-order it now from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Out-Silence-Sound-Nothing-Something/dp/1640094105/ref=sr_1_1

From the back cover of the book:

“In an elegant but contemporary voice, award-winning author Susan Griffin breaks down the creative process step-by-step, guiding the reader through a practical course in how to begin and end a work of literature, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry, or prose.

The distinguished author of more than twenty-two books…Susan Griffin distills daily wisdom garnered from more than five decades teaching creative writing and editing manuscripts, as well as from her own writing. This collection of brief but ultimately pithy chapters designed to help beginning writers get started also guides experienced writers through blocks and difficulties of all kinds.

Organized according to a practical timeline, Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something. elucidates the process of writing from beginning to end, presenting an approach that is similar to the practice of meditation as it encourages and enlarges the mind’s intrinsic capacity for creativity. An autobiographical account, a sometimes humorous, at times moving essay called “How I Learned to Write” is threaded throughout the book.”

I read Susan Griffin’s book Woman and Nature when it came out in 1978. I was 27 years old. Although my women friends were all feminists, this book went deeper and taught me more about the history of how men had thought about and talked about women than anything I had encountered up to that time. In her book she explored the relationship between the oppression of women and the destruction of the natural world. The end of the book is a vision and a prophecy of a transformation in the way we live in and love the world and each other.

Woman and Nature changed the way I see and understand the world. Over the past more than forty years, I have returned again and again to her luminous prose in the hope of becoming a wiser and more loving person. Another personal favorite of mind is The Eros of Everyday Life.

Poet, playwright, philosopher, essayist, teacher–Susan Griffin’s books include:

Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978)
A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1993)
The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995)
Bending Home: Selected New Poems, 1967-1998 (1998)
What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows (1999)
The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues (2001)
Wrestling With the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen (2008)

Everyone who came to the Zoom gathering enjoyed Susan’s warmth and wisdom.

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 7/7/22
2022-07-07 - 2022-08-03
Bryan Joyner

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 7, 2022

(Note to readers: peace, love, happiness & understanding is going to be coming out on the first Thursday of every month, instead of every other Thursday.)

I met Bryan Joyner at Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI), in Portland. He came regularly to the weekly “Arts in Prison” group that I facilitated there for a number of years, through Open Hearts Open Minds (openheartsopenminds.net). He also was an enthusiastic participant in the Music Program that Matt Insley and I started there, along with Mark Mojdehi and Patrick Seraya. The OHOM’s Music Program is still going strong, under the guidance of Nate Query, who is the bass player for the Decemberists. Bryan got out of prison in May of 202O. In cooperation with Superintendant James Hanley at CRCI, Nate, Taiyah Marshal and David Pettinger did an extensive interview with Bryan, which is on YouTube. With Bryan’s permission, I have transcribed and edited a portion of the interview, especially for our friends in prison who don’t have access to the Internet.

Interview With Bryan Joyner

Bryan Joyner. ….I like authentic music that sounds like itself. I don’t like copycatters, or people that mimic, and stuff. I stick to the originals—people that I think have good lifetime in their music, and make good music that I can relate to. I also listen to a lot of R & B, a lot of Soul Music, a lot of Seventies and Eighties. Those are my primary “go to” music to listen to. Gangsta Rap, that hardcore street stuff, kind of amplifies some of my negative anti-social behaviors that I don’t agree with anymore. So I don’t like to listen to that stuff, because that’s what it’s promoting. Whereas, R & B really makes you get in touch with that other side of yourself—it makes you really realize that love is important—more important than any of this other stuff. And that helps me with my personal point of view. So, when I’m comin’ at a rhyme, no matter what it’s about my personal point of view, I like to be calm. I want to be calm and I want to be grounded. I want to come at it understanding that people are going to listen to this; how is that gonna affect them? That’s important to me, as far as my presence, my presentation.

David Pettinger. That’s really beautiful to hear. When you talk about love and things like that—when do you find yourself looking for those moments of growth? And seeing that love can be healing? When do you look for it, and how do you reach levels of personal growth?

Bryan. Uh, pain. Pain. When you see pain, love needs to be administered. When you see suffering, when you see pain. And pain can be interpreted on the external differently than from the internal. A lot of people can deal with a lot of pain, can cope—or not necessarily cope well—with a lot of pain. But if you can recognize that someone else is in pain, then you know that love is needed in that area, for that person. It probably is just as much needed for yourself in that area, as well. Self first. So, if you see pain and then you feel it, you can empathize with it, and you can recognize it. That is an area in yourself that you need love at, too. So, I think that’s how I recognize it.

I think by healing the pain in yourself, you involuntarily give people the permission to heal themselves as well—through the example of how the process works, and trusting in the process of healing. Because healing don’t happen like a snap of a finger. Man, it doesn’t. The pain still is there even after you heal. It’s just about really accepting that you can’t change it. And once you can do that, the process can begin.

Taiyah Marshal. I think you touched on something that I think most people just walkin’ around in the world need to tap into, which is empathy—having real empathy for those who had various different experiences. It’s incredible how disconnected people can be nowadays. You have obviously gone through a lot. How have you reconnected and rounded yourself out? With writing? You say you’re not making music right now. You’re focusing on getting yourself together, which is completely understandable. How do you tap into that?

Bryan. Uh, narcissism is a big aspect of the disconnection that the world is experiencing now. Being in love with things and feelings and thoughts, versus people. And yourself. The narcissist doesn’t feel what other people feel, because they’re distracted with their own ego, and creating a version of themselves that is beyond reality. And it’s just psychological. We all suffer from it, we all deal with it to a certain extent, because it’s part of the culture to be self-serving and to be the king in my house. It’s mine. It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine. Feeling empathy for another person is something that is a natural ability. It’s like breathing. Okay? It is breathing. When we were children we had no other ability than to empathize, and then cry. The only way a child can protect themselves is through the sense of empathy, through the sense of feeling, and hearing, and sensing danger. ‘Cause there’s no other defense mechanism that a child has. They don’t have claws. They don’t have sharp teeth. They can’t run fast. They’re not that smart. Y’know? There’s no way for them to defend themselves, except preemptively through empathy. They sense danger, or they sense safety, or they sense love.

When you grow up in a world where everything is dangerous, or is perceived to be dangerous, you lose a sense of empathy and feelin’ things out, and you become more psychological—where things become labels. People become constructs to manipulate like a chess piece, like a pawn. And this is the type of behavior that is actually encouraged in our society from day one. Honestly. We’re living in a technological world where people don’t have to even see you to talk to you. Look at this! We ain’t even around each other, havin’ a whole conversation. The disconnect is part of the structure of society that we live in. So, honestly, in some way we’re ordered to be a narcissist, that dog-eat-dog mentality. “I gotta get mine, even if I gotta take it from you.” These kind of traits are encouraged.

And loving traits are presented as being weak. Like, lame. A victim, y’know. You’re a victim if you care. If you help the old lady across the street. I have always had a sense of empathy, but once my personality took over, I was disconnected as well. And being incarcerated, it was like I was in a bubble. I realized that I am only gonna be able to eat what is in this bubble. So I started reading. I started meditating. I started praying. And what happened was I opened myself up. I opened up my heart chakra by doin’ that. My heart chakra was open and it still is, to the point where now those things that I used to purposely ignore—the pain from other people, the suffering—I started to let it in my bubble. And I started to realize there’s a connection we have with everyone that is intrinsic. It’s natural. It’s the same thing as the air that we breathe. We’re all breathin’ the same air. It’s the same. When the sun hits your skin and it hits mine, we’re both warm. ‘Cause that’s what the sun does. And empathy does that. It’s like a connecting bond that’s invisible. And so, it’s easy to take for granted because we live in a material world and we praise that materialism, and it creates a sickness of self-importance, self-grandiosity, selfishness, self-centeredness—that the world revolves around me. And that is a complete disconnect from what’s actually happening, which is that we all need each other—that the love that I feel for you is the love that I actually have for myself. And that’s why I’m reflecting it off of you. So I think that empathy is very important, and what I had to do personally to tap into that was to really take a look at myself, and how I was connecting with people. And I wasn’t connecting with people. I’m a know-it-all. And my personality was in full effect all the time. It’s like an alternate ego. It is an alternate. The ego is alternate from the self. You know what I mean? Bein’ my true self at this point of time in my life…I’m 41. I’ve basically been an egomaniac for 20 of those years—tryin’ to create this version of myself that was strong enough to live in this society. I survived. It did its job, and now it’s time to go home and allow God to point me in a direction, to show me the path. Period.

Taiyah. First of all, I just want to commend you for all that self-awareness and self- growth, to be able to identify that and work on yourself is not an easy thing. You have to kill that ego. And I wish you the best on your journey.

Bryan. Thank you very much.

David. One thing I was curious about is which sources of literature did you find to be the most helpful?

Bryan. Oh, my gosh, I’m glad that you asked me that. This is somethin’ I’ll share for everyone, and this is somethin’, I’m tellin’ you bro, is gonna open you up. Check this out. One of the most inspirational and perception-altering books that I’ve ever read was My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. He also wrote a book called Ishmael. And these two books together changed my life. Like, there’s a life before you read the book, and a life after you read the book. Those two books completely messed me up. It had broke down the mental constructs I had in my mind about what this world is, and what is intended. Another book that I read that was perspective and mind-altering was A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. He has another one called The Power of Now. They’re basically the same book, but one gives you the narrative, without anything—just gives it to you raw. And the other one is coming from a perspective of someone that’s unconscious, asking questions, and then the questions being answered by Eckhart Tolle. The material is pretty much the same thing, but if you’re one of those kind of people that have questions, The Power of Now is more for you, and if you’re someone that has already started the journey A New Earth would be easier to read. So, those four books were entirely transformative for me. The last book I will give you is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. That story is about me. I can literally break down the chapters and the pages where…I’m tellin’ you, this guy is tellin’ my story, in a metaphorical way. And right now, just to compare that story, I’m at the end, in Egypt, gettin’ my ass beat by some guys who are tellin’ me that I’m a fool for bein’ out here lookin’ for a treasure. Right? And what I found was, the treasure is in me. Okay? That’s the metaphor of all that is that you already have the treasure inside of you. And that just changed the way that I look at everything. Those authors will be the people that I want to talk to personally, and just thank them for their expression in this world full of evil and hate and misery and suffering. Those are the gems that make life worth livin’ for me. And inside my little bubble, man, I just knew that there was a God. I just knew. If there were any doubts in my mind, there are none now at all. And my ego is in full effect, pushing everything away from me, only wanting what it wants, when it wants it, how I want it. And you can’t live like that and be at peace. You can’t just use people. You will never be at peace, ‘cause you gotta do the next thing to keep the manipulation goin’. You’ll never be able to rest, your soul will never rest. So bein’ in that state of constant high vigilance and constant alert, it is exhausting. It’s exhausting. Those are the books that really inspired me. Another person that inspires me is Prince. Rest in peace, The Prince. Shout out for Prince. That man was a genius! He was a genius. He had it. He knew some of the secrets to life. He knew. And I watch documentaries of him and it just blows my mind—the poise, the knowing that he has. The confidence in knowing those secrets. It just exudes from him in his aura. It’s beautiful. I hope that answers your question. (Laughs.)

David. In talking about The Alchemist, it sounds like you feel very seen in that artwork. Is that something that you try to convey to other people through your music or different forms of expression?

Bryan. Yes and no. There’s a side of me that doesn’t care what people think. I write the music that I like. But then there’s a technical side of me where it’s like: “Okay, what if somebody else listens to this?” Some of the messages that I implant in my music are personal, but I’m sayin’ it in a way where somebody else can pick it up, if they were interested. You can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink. And so I put water in it, but I don’t put the cup in there.

David. I definitely really respect that approach to things. You’re telling your story, there are pieces for someone that should they so see fit to find out for themselves, they can.

Bryan. Yeah. Absolutely. LOVE, as an acronym, is Letting Others Voluntarily Evolve. That’s the greatest kind of love that you can give a person is not to do it for them, but to allow them to figure it out on their own. And just be there for them when they fall down. Don’t try to prevent their experience. Like a little kid—if you don’t let them fall off their bike, they won’t grow up to buy a Lamborghini. Or a Buick. Whatever. Whichever they want to go for. But you can’t stop them from having that experience of falling off the bike because they need it in order to grow. And so, lovin’ someone sometimes is seein’ them feel pain, and empathizing with them, listening to what they have to say, being around them in a physical way, where you can put your arm around them. Not tellin’ them what to do, or doin’ it for them, or givin’ them the money that they need. It’s just really about just bein’ there, and feelin’ what they feel, and allowing them to release some of that, knowing that they connected with another person. And that’s what a narcissist will not do. They will not do that. As soon as they feel something they don’t want to feel—pheew!, they’re gone. It’s very important to feel those feelings with that person, and allow bein’ there for them to be how you love ‘em. Empathy is very important, and it’s comin’ back in style. I’m tellin’ ya! We just gotta keep on doin’ it. It’s gonna come back in style. It’s gonna be jazzy again.

Taiyah ….What was the creative process able to look like while you were in?

Bryan. ….They had the Music Program. That’s where I met Nate at. And Nate brought in his bass guitar, and they would play the tunes, and we would just make up…it would just be like freestyle, on the fly, whatever come up, however your vibe is feelin’. And, y’know, I really connected with Nate, because he’s just sincere. I mean, it is what it is, and he’s just authentic and genuine. He doesn’t say much, but when he’s talkin’ he means it. That was something that I picked up instantly. We were able, on a musical vibe, to get to know each other very fast. There’s still a lot I need to learn about him as friends, but this guy—there’s some things he ain’t got to say that I know. (Laughs.) Nate is amazing! You know what I mean? And I always respected how he found the time to volunteer and bring himself in, his vibe, y’know, his love. Bring in love. That’s basically what it was. And he was showin’ love and he was showin’ a sense of empathy, and not only feelin’ what we felt, but allowing us to feel what he felt. That was the most awesome part of it all—was the receiving of genuine love. That was how I perceived it at the time, and it really was something that I looked forward to every Monday morning, early. That was a really good experience for me being incarcerated—to have that outlet. That outlet. Outlet. Out let. In a prison, which is captive, to have an outlet makes all of the difference of the experience of being incarcerated. Having that outlet. That was the best part. So, even though I don’t do music in prison, at that point in time I was doin’ music in prison. It was happenin’. I was just as sharp, I was just as good. Maybe the content was a little lacking, because of the confinement mentality. Sometimes that can happen in prison. But all of the swag was there, the flow was there, it was all good. You run out of things to talk about sometimes, but if you’re bein’ honest, you don’t run out of things to talk about. And live instruments, for me—it’s like havin’ a conversation. And if you’re bein’ honest, you can talk about it. If you gotta make it up, and you gotta think about it—there’s a difference in that. The writing process in prison versus out of prison is completely different. It’s more restrictive in prison. It’s more limited, as far as influence and subject matter. But it’s pretty much the same as long as you’re being honest.

….Prison is a business. Okay? It’s a business. They’re not in the business of rehabilitation. They’re in the business of storage. So, to not rehabilitate somebody is a definite flip—in money. You flip that money if that person goes back out and does the same thing again. That money just got flipped. Okay. You lose money in this business if someone heals themselves. So, the promotion of healing in any kind of way, creatively or cognitively, is very important. It’s crucial, ‘cause not only does the person suffer, the community suffers as well. And we’re only as healthy as our sickest part of our community. People on the outside can point their finger and say “those people are bad,” while they steal from their job every day and get away with it. “Ah, look at those guys. He’s such and animal.” And she’s cheatin’ on her husband. Prison gives a place where people can point the finger and feel good about themselves that they’re not there, because they don’t do “those” things. But we’re all connected. So these types of programs, whether it be music, art, poetry, comedy, business planning—all of these things are healing tools and they need to be administered to prisons. ‘Cause it’s basically sick in there.

David. I really appreciate that answer….Are there more things we could be doing to push Columbia River?

Bryan. Stuff like this. Talkin’ to people that were there, gaining true insight into the mentality of the participants, broadcasting it, getting the footage and showing the community what this is and getting the community support out in any kind of way, shape or form—from any venue, any merchant, any citizen that is willing to participate and support it. Find the guys that were in the program and keep in touch with them. If they have the talent, if they have the skills, if they have the desire to better themselves, keep in touch with them. Pull them into the programs that are facilitating these type of things. Eventually, I want to get permission to come back in. And once I come back in, boy, I’m down to earth. We’re gonna make this happen. If you’re really about that, I will be able to tell by your energy, by your vibe. I’m gonna be feelin’ you, and I’m gonna understand where you’re at, where you’re comin’ from and, if there’s somethin’ there, where you’re goin’. I’m gonna be able to understand that, and I want to. A lot of the young brothers looked up to me because of my consistency—the fact that I was consistent, that I wasn’t making up stories, that it was always like this with me. I would love to participate and join the movement. For real. And I’m still part of the movement. I haven’t been back to prison since. I got myself together. I’ve been on a spiritual journey of really detaching from my past. Attachments! And freeing myself psychologically and emotionally, so that my spirit can grow.

A lot of these guys are on that journey and have no clue. They just have no insight, or anything to reflect off that that’s what they’re going through. All that they know is that they love music and when they do it they feel free. (Laughs.) That’s all that they know, so they show up. And that’s the beginning. That’s the beginning of being in connection with God. When you do the thing that you love to do, you fall into a state of prayer, a state of connection with God. Because there’s nothin’ else happenin’. The past doesn’t exist. The future is not there. You’re just locked into now—the moment of. And in that moment you are being your true self. There’s no ego there. There’s no constructs. There’s no sense of time. You ain’t worried about no bills. Nothin’ else is happening. And that is like meditation. Music can be a meditative practice.

Share with the community. Allow people to experience these individuals that have important places in our society that they’re not allowed…they’re not bein’ able to hone that skill, that inner peace, that sense of worth in themselves. And when someone is interested in what you say: “Hey, we want to give you an interview. We wanna hear what you have to say.” Even for me. I was like, “For real? You care? You wanna know? What? Me? Me? You wanna know what I think? Wow!” And to be incarcerated, and have that same type of privilege—that person will walk with their head up high. They’ll know that they have something that they’re connected to, that they can do good, that will ultimately give them a sense of self-worth, of self-importance, of value. It may be superficial, in a way, but just “in a way,”—not really. If that person is a narcissist, tryin’ to feed their ego, it will be superficial. But a person that is really trying to figure out this thing called “life,” that is like a milestone. That is like a touchdown—in a game that they were losing a hundred to zero. And to walk out of that building with at least seven points feels better than just straight getting skunked.

Taiyah. I want to take it back to you, because you’re on your spiritual journey. I want to hear what are some affirmations, or practices that you do in your day-to-day, to stay in the now, to stay in the present, and just amplify that positive energy.

Bryan. I would say: meditation. Meditation, for me, is listening—to God. It is when you let your thoughts do what they do, and don’t hold onto them. You don’t grab one, and turn it all around and look at it from every angle, try and dissect it. You just kinda let it go by. And let ‘em all go by, all of the things, all of the clutter. It comes to a point where you don’t hear it anymore. I work every day, and something that I always tell myself is that I gotta do it. I gotta do this for myself. I have to make sure that I’m okay. It’s my responsibility to make sure that I’m okay. And right now I’m understanding the dynamic of my ego versus my soul. And that my persona is not healthy. So, I’ve been praying a lot. My favorite prayer is: “Thank you, God. Thank you, God.” It’s my favorite prayer. It seems to be the simplest prayer, but it’s more complicated than that—for me. And when the things happen for me that I don’t want to happen, or that I didn’t expect to happen, or that I was tryin’ to prevent from happening, I still say: “Thank you, God. Thank you. Thank you, God.” That is an affirmation for myself that has been the balancing factor in my life. And it has taken my spiritual practices at this point of time in my life and allowed them to land on something solid. Whereas, though, the void in my heart was…I was just trying to throw everything in there. I threw people in there! I threw my daughter in the void. I threw my girlfriend in the void. I was tryin’ to fill that sucker up with whatever I could get my hands on—whatever I could put in that void to not feel it. And then I realized that the only thing that will close the void is God. That’s the only thing that can fit in there and completely take it away. And that’s an affirmation. Only God can heal me. Only God can fulfill me. Only God can complete me. Only God can make me whole again. Those are affirmations that I believe in, and I say to myself, periodically throughout the day, that allow me to re-calibrate, to re-focus, to get back in accordance. Sometimes I’ll be in lapse, and don’t even know it. I’ll be complaining. I’ll be disgruntled—“Man, who do you think…? Why would they do that?”—kind of attitude. And then I gotta take a step back and say: “Whoa. Thank you, God. Just thank you for lettin’ this happen. This is a ‘you’ thing, not a ‘me’ thing.” And it allows me to let go of psychological, egotistical, narcissistic control of trying to make things what I want them to be versus what they are—and what they will be, naturally.

For example, I’m at a homeless shelter, and I’m on the bottom bunk, and this other guy needs the bottom bunk. Now, I’m six-two, two hundred and forty pounds; what the hell I look like climbing up a goddam bunk on the top? Right? But this guy needed it. And so, instead of me complaining and manipulating the situation to where I keep the bottom bunk, I just said, “You know what? Let him have it.” Y’know? “Thank you, God. Thank you God for whatever this is about. Thank you.” And I was able to let that go. But, ironically enough, I needed to get around to a couple places because I don’t have a car, and this guy was like, “I’ll take you.” (Laughs.) What a coincidink! You know what I’m sayin’? But it’s not. It’s life! It’s not a reward, it’s not special, it’s not magic—that’s the way God works. And sometimes we block our own blessings by trying to make it what we want it to be versus what it actually is.

So, writing, meditating, praying, reading are daily practices. Listening to music. I love R & B and stuff like that. If there’s somethin’ new and hot, I’m on it, I’m lookin’ for it. My day-to-day just consists of praying, meditating, and focusing on the next thing to do by writing it down. And reading the literature that I need to read to understand what I need to do next—stuff like that. It’s really simple. It’s complicated to some. They just don’t want to do it. It’s hard to stay focused on one thing too long. For me, it’s just about bein’ humble, man, just appreciating life for what it is right now. Going day by day and just be the best me I can be right now. And stayin’ in that energy as long as I can before that other energy pop up, like: “What they think they lookin’ at? Who do they think they are?” I still got that in me. I think we all do at some point in time, but for me it’s about keepin’ that guy in check. And also loving that side of myself, so that I can heal. We got a side of ourself that we really don’t show everybody, because we don’t like it. We keep it to ourselves. And after a while that water gets stagnant, and the mosquitos start coming, and it gets all infested and nasty inside of ourselves. We’re 90% water, so we have to have a constant influx and flow of energy inside of us to go out. We have to have those outlets that mean something to us, that are actually outlets. Because meditation might be an outlet to me, and to the next person it’s not. But I know that meditation is definitely healthy, that’s somethin’ I can bank on, that’s going to be 100% good for me. You can never meditate too much. Meditating, sitting in one spot, letting your thoughts go by, and tryin’ to listen to what God got to tell you. I mean, sounds legit to me, so that’s what I do. (Laughs.)

David. That’s really beautiful to hear. I really have been enjoying this conversation. I feel like there’s a lot of things that, as a society, we need to hear. And I feel a lot of this is resonant to me, like your spiritual journey. If feels very healing and good to hear—sharing all these things.

Bryan. Thank you, guys.

Nate. Bryan, I’m still here too, and, man, I really appreciate you goin’ deep on everything you have to offer. You’ve really given me a lot to think about and I really appreciate your doing this.

Bryan. Thank you, bro. I really appreciate you inviting me in. It’s been a pleasure. There was nothin’ that I said that I felt embarrassed about, or apprehensive. I just told the truth. I just told you what I know. Sometimes I felt like I was going a little bit off track, I just tried to dial it back and bring it back home.

Nate. Nah, man, you’re good.

Bryan. Thank you, brother. I appreciate you, man.

The full interview is on YouTube:

peace & love
Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 7/10/22
2022-07-10 15:00
Daniel Pinkwater

Beloved Bibliophiles!

This Sunday, July 10th, at 3 p.m. (PDT), our theme will be Authors and Writings That Make You Happy.

Novels, stories, poems and plays that made you laugh, lifted your spirits, gave you a feeling of well-being. Which authors are most reliable for cheering you up?

Here’s the link for the Zoom gathering:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness

Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue 7/15/22
2022-07-15 - 2022-08-14
photograph taken in Iceland by Kim Stafford

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

July 15, 2022

Remember?

Remember that day
when the war ended
and you climbed
from your trenches
and we oozed
from our bunkers
leaving
grenades, guns
bullets and bayonets
behind?
Remember how we
all sang in the streets
danced in the fountains
crazy with joy?
Remember how
clouds lifted
hearts rose
hatred, vengeance
bitterness and rage
fell away like
grave clothes?
Remember how
we stood
tall and happy
in the morning
light
eyeing the world
and one another
with new eyes?
Remember how
in that ecstasy
we forgot
if ours was
a red state
or blue
liberal cause or
conservative stand?

Remember
how easily
we remembered
who we were
from whence we had come
where we were going
why we were here
and what we should do?

I will never forget
that day
when the war ended
and trust sprouted
and spread like
a green
sea of grass
across every divide
over every division
uniting all
into one state
of grace
indivisible
at peace
under heaven.

—Will Hornyak July 10, 2022
*
#223 Benefit From The Positive Elements

“If the presence of the other is refreshing and healing to you, keep hold of this presence and nourish yourself with it. If there are negative things around you, you can always find something that is healthy, refreshing and healing, and with your mindfulness you can recognize its presence in your life.

You need to recognize that these kinds of positive elements exist and that you can benefit from their refreshing and helpful presence. If you are facing a sunset, a marvelous spectacle, give yourself a chance to be in touch with it. Give yourself five minutes, breathing deeply, and you will be truly there. Touch the beauty of nature in a deep way. That will do your body and mind a great deal of good.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” is the embodiment of this page from Your True Home, and I speak it silently to myself each day on entering my time of meditation.

I can’t deny that I am often agitated and fearful about the world, particularly about our country, when I sit down to meditate. And I quietly breathe in, and out, and remind myself:

The Peace of Wild Things

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

—Wendell Berry

I am so fortunate to be surrounded by beauty. I look to the north and see snow-clad Mt. Adams, and to the south, fleecy Mt. Hood —my two sentinels. To the east the sun rises over Surveyor’s Ridge and to the west it sets over Mt. Defiance. And above me either the “day-blind stars, waiting with their light,” or the visible blaze of stars in the deep and silent night sky.

Wendell Berry and Thich That Hanh know the score.

—Jude Russell
*

I read Thomas Traherne’s poem “Silence” this morning. It begins:

A quiet silent person may possess
All that is great or high in Blessedness.
The inward work is the supreme…
A man who seemeth idle to the view
Of others, may the greatest business do.

Later in the poem, he describes Adam, in the Garden, before the Fall:

The first and only work he had to do,
Was in himself to feel his bliss, to view
His sacred treasures, to admire, rejoice,
Sing praises with a sweet and heavenly voice,
See, prize, give hourly thanks within, and love,
Which is the high and only work above
Them all.

Traherne felt that, as a child, he lived in that same Paradise:

A world of innocence as then was mine,
In which the joys of Paradise did shine:
And while I was not here I was in Heaven,
Not resting one, but every, day in seven,
For ever minding with a lively sense,
The universe in all its excellence.
No other thoughts did intervene, to cloy,
Divert, extinguish, or eclipse my joy,
No other customs, new-found wants, or dreams
Invented here polluted my pure streams…

As an adult, by writing poems in which he gives thanks and praises to God, who created “the universe in all its excellence,” he could again enter the Garden of Paradise which he knew as a child:

He was an ocean of delights from Whom
The living springs and golden streams did come:
My bosom was an ocean into which
They all did run. And me they did enrich.
A vast and infinite capacity,
Did make my bosom like the Deity,
In whose mysterious and celestial mind
All ages and all worlds together shin’d,
Who tho’ He nothing said did always reign,
And in Himself Eternity contain.
The world was more in me, than I in it.
The King of Glory in my soul did sit,
And to Himself in me he always gave
All that He takes delight to see me have,
For so my spirit was an endless Sphere,
Like God Himself, and Heaven, and Earth was there.

—Thomas Traherne (1636-1674)

A quiet silent person may possess this Blessedness. It’s our birthright.

—Johnny
*

Poems from Kim are always welcome:

Pain & Grace

Far from here, pain abounds—
war, storm, crime, cruelty.
News freights that here to us.
Close to home, grace abounds—
rain, leaf, birdsong, touch.
Poetry sends this there to them.
This disjunction puzzles everyone.
Unknown beauties must be there.
And here, we have hurts in plenty.
So what is worth the telling? Let me
be the journalist of old affections.
In the tyrant’s prison, may there be
a song.

A Right to Rest

When you’re well, it’s Up and at ’em!
Rise and shine! Daylight in the swamp!
And there you stride into the storm of all
that calls you to be the hero of action and
accomplishment. You’ll earn rest when
spent at dusk, stumbling for home.
But when you’re under the weather, it’s
Take it easy…Kick back…Doze. At last,
your puritan self will let you be a slacker,
shiftless, a lazy bum. Now’s the time
for frailty, for faltering, when sickness
takes pity on your weary soul.

Covid Guest

For years you traveled in my country.
People told stories of your wanderings,
counted how many you met when they
could take off the mask of reticence.
Some shut their doors, shunned your
touch, but others took you in, hosted
your companionship, even grew intimate.
How their breath came fast as you dazzled
and left them utterly amazed.
Now you come to my house, and at last
we meet. “Don’t be a stranger,” you say,
offering your hand. And I take you in.

—Kim Stafford
*

Congratulations to Michel Deforge, who has now written more than 300 meditations in his journal, inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditations in Your True Home. In our Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue what we have shared of Michel’s writings is only the tip of the iceberg. Here are some things from his June journal:

June 6, 2022 #299 Definition of Hell

I love Thây’s solution—compassion. Any place I go, I will meet men and women who have created their own hell on earth. All I can do, and need to do, to ease their suffering is bring my compassion (from love and understanding) into his or her life—mine too! I don’t have to be the “best” or be all-compassionate. I merely need to breathe (consciously), share some compassion cultivated from understanding the person before me in that moment—no history past, or future yet to be formed: simply he and me, in the now. Johnny is our example, here at TRCI; it’s repeatable.

June 23, 2022 #309 How to Listen to the Dharma

This could apply to any time I (and you) are listening to a talk, a lecture, a debate, a sermon, maybe even a discussion on wise and salient topics. I imagine, even if it’s silly, foolish, wastrel chatter I (and you) can allow the noise to wash over and pass on through. Engaging with intellect risks trapping all sorts of ideas, notions—pond scum, if you will. Wholesome talk/listening can also be reviewed later and maybe bear fruit. Listen to wisdom by letting it just soak in, without any interference or additives. Your life seeds will be better for it in the long run.

June 26, 2022 #310 Here to Love

This is a simple one. Breathe, smile, be aware, and love. I wonder how often and easily any of us can get into a mental mess by giving too much thought to Love: What it is/is not, how it “works.” Maybe, and I don’t really know from my own experience, we simply need to breathe, smile, be present to the reality of now—including the object of love (self, other, or object not self), and then choose to contemplate loving thoughts toward our object of love. I think an appropriate love will arise. (Provided the contemplation was appropriate.) Of course, another option comes to mind: Breathe, smile and just be. Just breathe and be, simply, as if in mindful meditative practice. Allow life to continue, just to observe, without judgement, what happens.

June 29, 2022 #312 None Other Than Enlightenment

All these skills and practice come together, as I continue practicing on my own, to reveal a freedom from suffering and a life of “nirvana.” It’s no special secret. If I (we) do this work, we will reap the rewards of enlightenment in all of our efforts and interactions with reality. And it all starts with deliberate breathing.

On June 30th, Michel wrote this:

Johnny and friends,

I don’t know precisely when, but I am given to believe that I will go to my first hip replacement surgery in July. I’m hoping the week following the 4th, but I have to wait and see. At the same time, TRCI is locking back down as infections of Covid rise. (Big sigh!) If I go “dark” you’ll know I went to the infirmary and didn’t have my writing tools to keep journalling. We’ll see.

I hope everyone is well and I will be back “on track” as soon as I am able.

Take care, with much love and gratitude,

Michel
*

Katie says:

While I was typing this up I was doing meditation with the Shambhala sanghas in New York and Ukraine, and one person read Thay’s poem “Please Call Me by My True Names.”

So magical this life.

Ada Limón – born 1976 – has just been named the new Poet Laureate of the United States. We need her poems today; so glad to share them.

“Right now, so often we are going numb to grief and numb to tragedy and numb to crisis,” Limón said. “Poetry is a way back in, to recognizing that we are feeling human beings. And feeling grief and feeling trauma can actually allow us to feel joy again.”

Here are a few of my favorites of her poems –

A New National Anthem

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?

The Raincoat

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

Burying Beetle

I like to imagine even the plants
want attention, so I weed for four
hours straight, assuring the tomatoes
feel July’s hot breath on the neck,
the Japanese maple can stretch,
the sweet potatoes, spider plants,
the Asiatic lilies can flourish in this
place we’ve dared to say we “own.”
Each nicked spindle of morning glory
or kudzu or purslane or yellow rocket
(Barbarea vulgaris, for Christ’s sake),
and I find myself missing everyone I know.
I don’t know why. First come the piles
of nutsedge and creeper and then an
ache that fills the skin like the Cercospora
blight that’s killing the blue skyrocket juniper
slowly from the inside out. Sure, I know
what it is to be lonely, but today’s special
is a physical need to be touched by someone
decent, a pulsing palm to the back. My man
is in South Africa still, and people just keep
dying even when I try to pretend they’re
not. The crown vetch and the curly dock
are almost eliminated as I survey the neatness
of my work. I don’t feel I deserve this time,
or the small plot of earth I get to mold into
someplace livable. I lost God awhile ago.
And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture
the plants deepening right now into the soil,
wanting to live, so I lie down among them,
in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered
in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt
that’s been turned and turned like a problem
in the mind.
—Ada Limón

Carrying Thay Into the Future

Thay founded Plum Village Monastery in the French countryside in 1982. His first monastery in the West and his home for many years, Plum Village has been a refuge and mindfulness center for those displaced and suffering from war, to those searching for the ease of feeling at home in a peaceful community. Over the next four decades, Plum Village drew more and more practitioners while Thay went on to found 10 more monasteries and practice centers around the world.

“I can see very clearly that wherever you are, you are my continuation, and in one way or another, you are carrying me into the future,” Thay has said of those who follow the Plum Village path of mindfulness. “We, teacher and student, will continue to climb the hill of the century, offering our love, understanding, freedom, and solidity to the world.”

—Katie Radditz

Bibliophiles Unanimous! 7/24/22
2022-07-24 15:00 - 17:00
Beloved Bibliophiles!

We had so much fun last time with AUTHORS AND WRITINGS THAT MAKE YOU HAPPY! that we’re doing it again on Sunday, July 24th, at 3 p.m. (PDT).

Novels, stories, poems and plays that make you laugh, lift your spirits, give you a feeling of well-being. Which authors are the most reliable for cheering you up?

Here’s the link for the Zoom gathering:

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

I hope to see you there.

May all people be happy!

Johnny

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

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

ADVENTURE TALES!

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

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

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

—from Wikipedia

Here’s what Edith wrote:

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

=======

In the Pines, Burma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VW Bug in Mud

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

—Kim Stafford
*

a seagull conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the gull lifts its wings and rises from its perch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Nick Eldredge 2022
*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings
*

Reflections On the Art of “The Adventure”

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

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

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

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

Here’s a few more:

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

And as a last thought:

—This moment!

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

Peace and Love To All

—Abe Green 2022

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

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

August 15, 2022

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

—opening lines from The Dhammapada, sayings of the Buddha, translated by Thomas Byrom
*

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, [to] get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel (thanks to Mark Alter for this)
*

The Patience of Ordinary Things

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

—Pat Schneider, shared by Jeffrey Sher
*

You are enough

Peace Is This Moment Without Judgment
~Dorothy Hunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, start with knowing that you are enough.

Practice

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

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

—Nicole Rush
*

#152 The Biggest Obstacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jude Russell
*

July 17, 2022

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

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

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

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

July 19, 2022

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

July 25, 2022

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

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

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

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

323
The Kingdom of God Is Right Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Michel Deforge
*
Prophets to Live By

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

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

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

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

—Kim Stafford
*

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

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

—Johnny Stallings

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

Beloved Bibliophiles!

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

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

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

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

I’m really looking forward to this!

peace & love
Johnny

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

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 1, 2022

William Blake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations.
*

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

The GARDEN of LOVE

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

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

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

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
*

Some aphorisms from “THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL”:

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

From the Preface to Blake’s poem “Milton”:

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

The Little Vagabond

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

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

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

And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel,
But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel.
*

From “THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL”:

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

From Enion’s lament from “The Four Zoas, Night the Second”:

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

Two passages from “A Vision of the Last Judgment”:

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

and:

The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment & that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, That Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation; these people flatter themselves: I will not Flatter them. Error is Created. Truth is Eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.
*

Blake created a mythology that he elaborated in what are known as his “prophetic” poems. Carl Jung spoke of four basic functions: thinking, feeling, sensing (sense perception), and intuition. Blake had a similar idea. He said: “Four Mighty Ones are in every Man.” These four “zoas” are Los (Imagination), Luvah (Love or Emotion), Urizen (Reason), and Tharmas (the Senses or Body). The biggest difference is that Jung uses the term “intuition,” while Blake uses the term “imagination.” For Blake, a healthy person, or a healthy Humanity, should have these four things in balance. In his day, he felt that Reason had usurped the throne, and everything was tyrannizing over everything else. Imagination, especially, was in prison.

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

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

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

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

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

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

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

September 15, 2022

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

—Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), writing about his childhood, from Centuries of Meditations, Third Century, Meditation 3
*

Slowness

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

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

—Johnny Stallings
*

Will We Wake?

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

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

—Kim Stafford
*

#292 Every Step a Prayer

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

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

—Jude Russell
*

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

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

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

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

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

—from the meditation journal of Michel Deforge

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

Beloved Bibliophiles!

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

Martha read this poem by Andrea Hollander:

Overture
Portland, Oregon, February 2012

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

—Andrea Hollander
*

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

The Fat Man

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

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

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

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

–Vern Rutsala
*
The Boddhisattva’s Necklace

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

–Hakuyu

Inspiration

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

–Kyoshi

Sacrilege

Before this perfect white inviolate
Chrysanthemum—the scissors hesitate.

–Buson
*

Elizabeth read this poem by Margaret Atwood:

The Loneliness of the Military Historian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick read this poem he wrote:

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

Dave read Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve:

Bittersweet Symphony

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

–Richard Ashcroft
*

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

We Are Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–William Wordsworth
*

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border

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

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

&

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

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

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

–William Stafford
*

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

The Witch Of Coos

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

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

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

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

—Robert Frost (1922)
*

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

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

October 6, 2022

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

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

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

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

Beloved Bibliophiles!

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

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

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

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

October 15, 2020

Why the Beach?

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

—Kim Stafford
*

#321 Be There For Breakfast

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

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

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

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

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

—Jude Russell
*

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

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

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

(from Centuries of Meditations, Second Century)

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

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

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

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

Love you mom.

—Rocky Hutchinson
*

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

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

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

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

September 7, 2022 #355 Your Suffering Needs You

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 9, 2022 The Simple Act of Walking

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

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

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

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

—Michel Deforge
*

October 10, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with love,
—Katie Radditz
*

Prayer For the Great Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

after a Mohawk prayer.

—Gary Snyder (sent by Jeffrey Sher)

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

—Jeffrey Sher

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

Gabriela Mistral

Pablo Neruda

Beloved Bibliophiles!

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

Here’s the link:

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

I hope to see you there!

paz, amor y felicidad
Juanito en Guanajuato

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

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

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

November 15, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Andy Larkin

The Moth Vote

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

– Kim Stafford

The World Calls to Us

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

– Debbie Buchanan

Field Notes on Owls

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

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

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

– Katie Radditz

Perceiving the Presence:

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

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

Up Against the Wall

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

– Michel Deforge

Sonoran Desert

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

– Debbie Buchanan

Johnny Writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-“Johnny Stallings”

A Lion’s Pride

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

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

The Order of Interbeing

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

– Katie

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

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

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

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

– Thích Nhất Hạnh

Look Deeply into Your Perceptions

#154 Thich Nhat Hanh, Your True Home

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

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

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

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

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

– Jude Russell

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

Beloved Bibliophiles!

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

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

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

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

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

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

For descriptions of the books, click here:

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

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

After the Zoom, Jude sent this:

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

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

Elizabeth shared this prose poem:

The White Paws

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

—Dara Yen Elerath

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

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

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

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

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

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

peace & love
Johnny

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

December 1, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Blyth translation brought to my mind a famous koan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Howard Thoresen

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

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

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

I hope to see you there!

love & silence
Johnny
