The Open Road: a learning community

peace, love, happiness & understanding 10/1/20
2020-10-01 - 2020-10-07
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

October 1, 2020

On September 27, at our Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom gathering, we were talking about “Nature, Ecology and the Environmental Crisis.” Katie Radditz mentioned Gary Snyder’s essay “Fire, Floods and Following the Dao,” from his book Back on the Fire, published in 2007. She mentioned how relevant it is to our current wildfires in Oregon, California and Washington. That reminded me of Gary Snyder’s great essay from 1969: “Four Changes,” which came at a time when a lot of people were waking up, and which helped that to happen. Later, it was published in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Turtle Island. But before getting to that, I’d like to start this issue with one of Kim’s recent poems:

Holy Smokes

Downwind from where the forest burns
we inhale the cindered souls of trees
that in a whoosh became particulate
and rode the wind to enter us. With
this breath take in the spirit whisker
of a mouse, incinerate wren’s cry
clenched and tumbled from the sky,
moss that leaped from green to nothing,
flailing leaf that in a fiery gasp
rushed through charcoal into dust
inside the billow flame that roiled and—
holy, holy, holy became the smoke-smudge
pall that smuggled mountains into us.

Now freighted for life with dusky mist,
even as we help sustain our neighbors
who lost everything but life, we survivors
are the walking shrine of little lives. We are them,
are earth mind suddenly, to weigh by human choice
what’s best for upward yearning seed of cedar,
footfall of mouse, wingbeat of wren.

—Kim Stafford
*

And now…

FOUR CHANGES

I. POPULATION

The Condition

Position: Human beings are but a part of the fabric of life — dependent on the whole fabric for their very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, we must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and we must act as gentle steward of the Earth’s community of being.
Situation: There are now too many human beings, and the problem is growing rapidly worse. It is potentially disastrous not only for the human race but for most other life forms.
Goal: The goal would be half of the present world population, or less.

Action

Social/Political: First, a massive effort to convince the governments and leaders of the world that the problem is severe. And that all talk about raising food-production — well intentioned as it is — simply puts off the only real solution: reduce population. Demand immediate participation by all countries in programs to legalize abortion, encourage vasectomy, sterilization (provided by free clinics), and try to correct traditional cultural attitudes that tend to force women into childbearing, remove income tax deductions for more than two children above a specified income level, and scale it so that lower-income families are forced to be careful too, or pay families to limit their number; take a vigorous stand against the policy of the right-wing in the Catholic hierarchy and any other institutions that exercise an irresponsible social force in regard to this question; oppose and correct simple-minded boosterism that equates population growth with continuing prosperity; work ceaselessly to have all political questions be seen in the light of this prime problem.
In many cases the governments are the wrong agents to address. Their most likely use of a problem or crisis is another excuse for extending their own powers. Abortion should be legal and voluntary. Great care should be taken that no one is ever tricked or forced into sterilizations. The whole population issue is fraught with contradictions, but the fact stands that by standards of planetary biological welfare, there are already too many human beings. The long-range answer is a steady, lower birthrate, area by area of the globe. The measure of optimum population should be based on what is best for the total ecological health of the region, including its wildlife population.
The Community: Explore other social structures and marriage forms, such as group marriage and polyandrous marriage, which provide family life but many less children. Share the pleasure of raising children widely, so that all need not directly reproduce in order to enter into this basic human experience. We must hope that no one woman would give birth to more than one child or two children, during this period of crisis. Adopt children. Let reverence for life and reverence for the feminine mean also a reverence for other species, and for future human lives, most of which are threatened.
Our Own Heads: “I am a child of all life, and all living beings are my brothers and sisters, my children and grandchildren. And there is a child within me waiting to be born, the baby of a new and wiser self.” Love, lovemaking, seen as the vehicle of mutual realization for a couple, where the creation of new selves and a new world of being is as important as reproducing our kind.

II. POLLUTION

The Condition

Position: Pollution is of two types. One sort results from an excess of some fairly ordinary substance—smoke, or solid waste—that cannot be absorbed or transmuted rapidly enough to offset its introduction into the environment, thus causing changes the great cycle is not prepared for. (All organisms have wastes and by-products, and these are indeed part of the total biosphere: energy is passed along the line, refracted in various ways. This is cycling, not pollution.) The other sort is powerful modern chemicals and poisons, products of recent technology that the biosphere is totally unprepared for. Such are DDT and similar chlorinated hydrocarbons—nuclear testing fallout and nuclear waste—poison gas, germ and virus storage and leakage by the military; and chemicals that are put into food, whose long-range effects on human begins have not been properly tested.
Situation: The human race in the last century has allowed its production and scattering of wastes, by-products, and various chemicals to become excessive. Pollution is directly harming life on the planet: which is to say, ruining the environment for humanity itself. We are fouling our air and water, and living in noise and filth that no “animal” would tolerate, while advertising and politicians try to tell us “we’ve never had it so good.” The dependence of modern governments on this kind of untruth leads to shameful mind-pollution through the mass media and much school education.
Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.

Action

Social/Political: Effective international legislation banning DDT and other poisons — with no fooling around. The collusion of certain scientists with the pesticide industry and agri-business that is trying to block this legislation must be brought out in the open. Strong penalties for water and air pollution by industries — “Pollution is somebody’s profit.” Phase out the internal combustion engine and fossil fuel use in general, do more research into non-polluting energy sources such as solar energy and the tides. No more kidding the public about nuclear waste disposal: it’s impossible to do it safely. So nuclear-power generated electricity cannot be seriously planned for as it stands now.
Stop all germ and chemical warfare research and experimentation; work toward a safe disposal of the present staggering and stupid stockpiles of H-Bombs, cobalt gunk, germ and poison tanks and cans. Provide incentives against the wasteful use of paper, and so on, which adds to the solid waste of cities, develop methods of re-cycling solid urban waste. Recycling should be the basic principle behind all waste-disposal thinking. Thus, all bottles should be re-usable; old cans should make more cans; old newspapers should go back into newsprint again. Establish stronger controls and conduct more research on chemicals in foods. A shift toward a more varied and sensitive type of agriculture (more small scale and subsistence farming) would eliminate much of the call for blanket use of pesticides.
The Community: DDT and such – don’t use them. Air pollution: use fewer cars. Cars pollute the air, and one or two people riding lonely in a huge car is an insult to intelligence and to the Earth. Share rides, legalize hitchhiking, have hitchhiker waiting stations along the highways. Also — a step toward the new world – walk more; look for the best routes through beautiful countryside for long-distance walking trips: San Francisco to Los Angeles down the Coast Range, for example. Learn how to use your own manure as fertilizer if you’re in the country, as the far East has done for centuries. There is a way, and it’s safe. Solid waste: boycott bulky wasteful Sunday papers which use up trees. It’s all just advertising anyway, which is artificially inducing more energy consumption. Refuse bags at the store and bring your own. Organize park and street clean-up festivals. Don’t work in any way for or with an industry that pollutes. Don’t be drafted into the military. Don’t waste. (A monk and an old master were once walking in the mountains. They noticed a little hut upstream. The monk said, “A wise hermit must live there” — the master said, “That’s no wise hermit, you see that lettuce leaf floating down the stream, he’s a Waster.” Just then an old man came running down the hill with his beard flying and caught the floating lettuce leaf.) Carry your own jug to the winery and have it filled from the barrel.
Our Own Heads: Part of the trouble with talking about DDT is that the use of it is not just a practical device, it’s almost an establishment religion. There is something in Western culture that wants to totally wipe out creepy-crawlies, totally, and feels repugnance for toadstools and snakes. This is fear of one’s own deepest inner-self wilderness areas, and the answer is, relax. Relax around bugs, snakes, and your own hairy dreams. Again, we all should share our crops with a certain percentage of bug life as “paying our dues.” Thoreau says, “How then can the harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first fruits but his last fruits also.” In the realm of thought, inner experience, consciousness, as in the outward realm of interconnection, there is a difference between balanced cycle, and the excess that cannot be handled. When the balance is right, the mind recycles from highest illuminations to the muddied blinding anger or grabiness that sometimes seizes us all. That is the alchemical “transmutation.”

III. CONSUMPTION

The Condition

Position: Everybody that lives eats food and is food in turn. This complicated animal, the human being, rests on a vast and delicate pyramid of energy transformation. To grossly use more than you need to destroy is biologically unsound. Much of the production and consumption of modern society is not necessary or conducive to spiritual and cultural growth, let alone survival; and is behind much greed and envy, age-old causes of social and international discord.
Situation: Humanity’s careless use of “resources” and its total dependence on certain substances such as fossil fuels (which are being exhausted, slowly but certainly) are having harmful effects on all the other members of the life-network. The complexity of modern technology renders whole populations vulnerable to the deadly consequences of the loss of any one key resource. Instead of independence we have over-dependence on life- giving substances such as water, which we squander. Many species of animals and birds have become extinct in the service of fashion fads — or fertilizer — or industrial oil. The soil is being used up; in fact, mankind has become a locust-like blight on the planet that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children — all the while in a kind of Addict’s Dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress — using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill.
Goal: Balance, harmony, humility, growth that is a mutual growth with Redwood and Quail — to be a good member of the great community of living creatures. True affluence is not needing anything.

Action

Social/Political: It must be demonstrated ceaselessly that a continually “growing economy” is no longer healthy, but a cancer. And that the criminal waste which is allowed in the name of competition — especially that ultimate in wasteful needless competition, hot wars and cold wars with “communism” (or “capitalism”) — must be halted totally with ferocious energy and decision. Economics must be seen as a small sub-branch of Ecology, and production/distribution/consumption handled by companies or unions or cooperatives with the same elegance and spareness one sees in nature. Soil banks; open space; logging to be truly based on sustained yield (the US Forest Service is sadly now the lackey of business). Protection for all predators and varmints. “Support your right to arm bears.” Damn the International Whaling Commission which is selling out the last of our precious, wise whales! Ban absolutely all further development of roads and concessions in National Parks and Wilderness Areas; build auto campgrounds in the least desirable areas. Initiate consumer boycotts of dishonest and unnecessary products. Establish Co-ops. Politically, blast both “Communist” and “Capitalist” myths of progress, and all crude notions of conquering or controlling nature.
The Community: Sharing and creating. The inherent aptness of communal life — where large tools are owned jointly and used efficiently. The power of renunciation: If enough Americans refused to buy a new car for one given year it would permanently alter the American economy. Recycling clothes and equipment. Support handicrafts — gardening, home skills, midwifery, herbs — all the things that can make us independent, beautiful and whole. Learn to break the habit of acquiring unnecessary possessions, a monkey on everybody’s back — but avoid a self-abnegating anti-joyous self-righteousness. Simplicity is light, carefree, neat, and loving — not a self-punishing ascetic trip.
(The great Chinese poet Tu Fu said, “The ideas of a poet should be noble and simple.”) Don’t shoot a deer if you don’t know how to use all the meat and preserve that which you can’t eat, to tan the hide and use the leather — to use it all, with gratitude, right down to the sinew and hooves. Simplicity and mindfulness in diet are the starting point for many people.
Our Own Heads: It is hard to even begin to gauge how such a complication of possessions, the notions of “my and mine,” stand between us and a true, clear, liberated way of seeing the world. To live lightly on the Earth, to be aware and alive, to be free of egotism, to be in contact with plants and animals, starts with simple, concrete acts. The inner principle is the insight that we are interdependent energy-fields of great potential wisdom and compassion expressed in each person as a superb mind, a handsome and complex body, and the almost magical capacity of language. To these potentials and capacities, “owning things” can add nothing of authenticity. “Clad in the sky, with the Earth for a pillow.”

IV. TRANSFORMATION

The Condition

Position: Everyone is the result of four forces — the conditions of this known-universe (matter/energy forms, and ceaseless change); the biology of his or her species; individual genetic heritage; and the culture one is born into. Within this web of forces there are certain spaces and loops that allow to some persons the experience of inner freedom and illumination. The gradual exploration of some of these spaces constitutes “evolution” and, for human cultures, what “history” could increasingly be. We have it within our deepest powers not only to change our “selves” but to change our culture. If humans are to remain on Earth they must transform the five-millennia-long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically-sensitive, harmony-oriented, wild-minded scientific/spiritual culture. “Wildness is the state of complete awareness. That’s why we need it.”
Situation: Civilization, which has made us so successful a species, has overshot itself and now threatens us with its inertia. There is also some evidence that civilized life isn’t good for the human gene pool. To achieve the changes, we must change the very foundations of our society and our minds.
Goal: Nothing short of total transformation will do much good. What we envision is a planet on which the human population lives harmoniously and dynamically by employing various sophisticated and unobtrusive technologies in a world environment that is ‘”left natural.” Specific points in this vision:

A healthy and spare population of all races, much less in number than today.
Cultural and individual pluralism, unified by a type of world tribal council. Division by natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary political boundaries.
A technology of communication, education, and quiet transportation, land-use being sensitive to the properties of each region. Allowing, thus, the Bison to return to much of the high plains. Careful but intensive agriculture in the great alluvial valleys; deserts left wild for those who would live there by skill. Computer technicians who run the plant part of the year and walk along with the Elk in their migrations during the rest.
A basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power and property-seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world.
Women totally free and equal. A new kind of family — responsible, but more festive and relaxed is implicit.

Action

Social/Political: It seems evident that there are throughout the world certain social and religious forces that have worked through history toward an ecologically and culturally enlightened state of affairs. Let these be encouraged: Gnostics, hip Marxists, Teilhard de Chardin Catholics, Druids, Taoists, Biologists, Witches, Yogins, Bhikkus, Quakers, Sufis, Tibetans, Zens, Shaman, Bushmen, American Indians, Polynesians, Anarchists, Alchemists . . . the list is long. Primitive cultures, communal and ashram movements, cooperative ventures. Since it doesn’t seem practical or even desirable to think that direct bloody force will achieve much, it would be best to consider this change a continuing “revolution of consciousness” which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one’s on the side of the transforming energy. We must take over “science and technology” and release its real possibilities and powers in the service of this planet — which, after all, produced us and it. More concretely, no transformation without our feet on the ground. Stewardship means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there. The tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters, local politics, even while holding in mind the largest scale of potential change. Get a sense of workable territory. Learn about it and start acting point by point. On all levels, from national to local, the need to move toward steady state economy, equilibrium, dynamic balance, inner growth stressed must be taught – maturity, diversity, climax, creativity.
The Community: New schools, new classes, walking in the woods and cleaning up the streets. Find psychological techniques for creating an awareness of “self” that includes the social and natural environment. “Consideration of what specific language forms — symbolic systems — and social institutions constitute obstacles to ecological awareness.” Without falling into facile interpretations of McLuhan, we can hope to use the media. Let no one be ignorant of the facts of biology and related disciplines; bring up our children as part of the wildlife. Some communities can establish themselves in backwater rural areas and flourish — others maintain themselves in urban centers, and the two types work together — a two-way flow of experience, people, money, and home-grown vegetables. Ultimately cities may exist only as joyous tribal gatherings and fairs, to dissolve after a few weeks. Investigating new lifestyles is our work, as is the exploration of ways to explore our inner realms — with the known dangers of crashing that go with such. Master the archaic and the primitive as models of basic nature-related cultures — as well as the most imaginative extensions of science — and build a community where these two vectors cross.
Our Own Heads: Are where it starts. Knowing that we are the first human beings in history to have so much of our past cultures and previous experiences available to our study, and being free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity – the first members of a civilized society since the early Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our selfhood there, our family there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are — which gives us a fair chance to penetrate some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea of “human survival” or “survival of the biosphere” and to draw our strength from the realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process that is beyond qualities and beyond birth and death. “No need to survive! In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of the kalpa, what survives?” — “The iron tree blooms in the void.”
Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move.

—Gary Snyder (Summer of 1969)
*

Here’s a link to an audio recording of Gary Snyder reading “Four Changes”:

https://www.garynabhan.com/news/2020/04/four-changes-by-gary-snyder/

peace, love & ecology

Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/24/20
2020-09-24 - 2020-09-30
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 24, 2020

HOW HIPPIES MAY STILL SAVE THE WORLD

Shortly before the Era of Social Distancing began, my friend Bill Faricy and I were eating granola for breakfast and we got to thinking about hippies and what we have given to the world. Granola, for one. And whole wheat bread. Brown rice. Organic food. Recycling. Yoga. Vegetarianism. Holistic medicine. Natural childbirth and breastfeeding. Nonviolence. Massage. Bright colors! Free love. Good vibes. The list got longer and longer.

The most challenging problem that we humans face is that the way we are living is destroying the ecological health of our planet. Hippies intuited this, and began trying to live in harmony with Mother Earth. The changes were not just on the outside, with long hair and geodesic domes. There were deeper changes in thinking, feeling and imagining.

It was obvious that hippies were not going along with the status quo. The status quo is by its nature static, and resistant to change. The hippies clothing styles were mocked, but the peace symbol and the peace hand gesture—which are now emojis—represented something which threatened the foundation of an economy built on militarism and endless war.

The hippies laid-back attitudes were inimical to the Protestant ethic of Hard Work, and to the Spirit of Capitalism. Great efforts had been made and billions of dollars spent to turn citizens into Consumers and the hippies were opting out!—making their own sandals and growing their own food. At every turn the hippies weren’t going along with The Program, and The Program was designed to create Endless Progress and Prosperity. What was wrong with them?

It turned out that there was something wrong with the global project of turning the planet into a Theme Park for Humans. The War On Nature is one we don’t want to “win.” The hippie chanteuse sang: “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I was born in 1951, and I didn’t hear the word “ecology” before 1968 or ’69. Around 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, it became evident to anyone who was curious and who read books that there were too many people on the planet for its “carrying capacity,” and that we were not only cutting down all the trees and catching all the fish, but we were poisoning the world with our toxic chemicals and nuclear waste.

Hippies may have invented granola, and coined the expression “Have a nice day!,” but most of the things on my list of contributions made by the hippies are older things that hippies revived and gave momentum to, like yoga, massage and good vibes. Hippies weren’t the first vegetarians. Credit Buddha and Mahavira for that, about 500 BC, with their doctrines of nonviolence (ahimsa). Hippies didn’t discover organic food. Before pesticides were invented, no one ate food with poison on it. And the alarm was sounded not by hippies, but by Rachel Carson—definitely a non-hippie scientist. But the hippies read her book Silent Spring, which was published in 1965, and started organizations like the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides (www.pesticide.org).

Hippies started nonprofit organizations by the tens (or hundreds) of thousands. There are currently 1.5 million nonprofit corporations in the United States. I started two myself. There are an estimated 10 million non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the world. Hippies didn’t start them all, but hippies are part of a long tradition of nonviolent revolutionary change from the bottom up.

“Hippies” is a word like “gypsies” that can refer to all kinds of people, all over the world. There is a caricatured picture of the long-haired, barefoot, stoned hippie that the mainstream media perpetuates. And surely there is a shadow side to hippie culture. I’m just giving one hippie’s perspective on positive contributions that hippies have made, and how the Hippie Way of understanding and being-in-the-world can help us to make the transition to the Post Fossil Fuel Era as gently and beautifully as possible.

I don’t want to convert anybody to Hippieism. I became a hippie effortlessly. I looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, and thought and acted in certain ways, and people pointed at me and said: “Look, Martha, a hippie!” I wrote an email to a woman in Lebanon in 2012 and signed it: “peace & love, Johnny.” She knew I was a hippie.

My hair isn’t long at present, and I only occasionally wear a hippie-style shirt from somewhere like Nepal or Africa or Guatemala. But I think like a hippie. I believe in Peace and Love—the core hippie values. I love Mother Earth and everyone who lives here—people, plants, animals, clouds, rivers, stones.

This subject is too big for this kind of short essay. Here are the most important hippie ideas:

Nature is Sacred
Money isn’t Everything; (Money and Wealth are not the same thing)
Local Organic Agriculture
Local Economics
Community
Peace & Nonviolence
Children raised to be free, rather than obedient
Meditation & Mindfulness
Live the life you love; (Do your own thing)
Love Everyone!

I don’t have room to elaborate on all these ideas, but I’ll say a few more things. We can’t continue to destroy the ecological health of the planet. Short term financial profit is not a good enough reason to do it. It’s suicidal. And omnicidal.

One hundred years from now, food will be grown closer to where it is eaten. And most things we need will be made locally. The ecological damage inherent in large scale industrial production is unsustainable. The current economic system is unjust and inherently unstable. That which is unsustainable can’t be sustained.

If all children were raised in a loving, nurturing environment, respected as people, allowed to realize their full human potential and follow their hearts’ desires, our world would be transformed utterly. It’s a tall order. To do it, adults will have to become more loving and kind. At present, at home and around the world, physical, psychological and emotional abuse of children is the norm. (See For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller.)

Meditation and mindfulness, which hippies were instrumental in helping to bring from the East to the West, can help us to co-create a Culture That Nurtures, a culture of Peace, Love, Happiness & Understanding.

We need to aspire to love everyone unconditionally. No exceptions. No enemies. No “others.” One Human Family. It’s easy! (Much easier than what we’re doing now.) As Bob Marley sang:

One love!
One heart!

I’ll close this issue of peace, love, happiness & understanding with some Good Vibes:

Love’s In Need Of Love Today

(Spoken.) “When you say that you kill in the
Name of God or in the name of Allah,
You are truly cursing God, for that is not of God.
When you say that you hate in the name of God or Allah,
You are lying to God, for that is not of our Father.
Let us pray that we see the light.”

Good morn or evening friends
Here’s your friendly announcer
I have serious news to pass on to everybody
What I’m about to say
Could mean the world’s disaster
Could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain

It’s that
Love’s in need of love today
Don’t delay
Send your’s in right away
Hate’s goin’ round
Breaking many hearts
Stop it please
Before it’s gone too far

—Stevie Wonder
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paZEqzrrO-4)
*

What the World Needs Now

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some, but for everyone

—Burt Bacharach
(sung by Dionne Warwick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg)
*

All You Need Is Love

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy

Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy

[chorus] All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

[repeat] Love, love, love…

[chorus]

Nothing you can know that isn’t known
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

—John Lennon
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7xMfIp-irg)
*

Get Together

Love is but a song we sing
Fear’s the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why
[Chorus] Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Some may come and some may go
We will surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass
[Chorus]

If you hear the song I sing
You will understand (listen!)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It’s there at your command

[Chorus] Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

—Chet Powers (recorded by The Kingston Trio and by The Youngbloods)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deW7_D5qems)
*

And a hippie classic:

San Francisco

If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair

All across the nation
Such a strange vibration
People in motion

There’s a whole generation
With a new explanation
People in motion
People in motion

For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there

—written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas (performed Scott McKenzie)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0vkKy504U)

peace & love
Johnny

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: PRISON THEATRE Book Tour with Ashley Lucas
2020-09-20 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
On Sunday, September 20th, we hosted a virtual book for Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration by Ashley Lucas. We had a good turnout on Zoom–Ashley was in Michigan, Howard in New York, Al and Nick in Seattle, lots of friends in Portland and Carlos from Peru! Prison Theatre was published by Methuen Drama on September 3, 2020. An interview with Ashley is featured in the September 3rd issue of the peace, love, happiness & understanding journal.

The fourth Shakespeare in Prisons Conference is highlighting Ashley’s book. Here are some links:

Ashley being interviewed about her Prison Theatre book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76dfvyk_bB0&t=6s
Ashley talking with returned citizens who have performed in plays in prison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mGM-3t30g
Conversation between Ashley and prison theatre directors. (Note. I’m in this one (JS)):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGYQEqUIUdQ

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/17/20
2020-09-17 - 2020-09-23
The Platters

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 17, 2020

It’s smoky. For the past week, Portland has had the worst air quality of any major city on the planet. And there’s a lot of competition! But, for now, our air is worse than the air in Delhi, India or Shanghai, China. Nancy and I have been joking about meeting in smoky places, like in the song by the Corsairs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGDvR-7ughY). And then, of course, there’s the Platters’ hit: “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2di83WAOhU). And we can’t forget Smokey Robinson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv9cWgkpIZ4). My friend Nick Eldredge is a fan of Smokey Stover. Notary sojack.

Aaron Gilbert wrote that he has been fighting fires. Kim Stafford sent me an email on Monday:

This morning early, reading about inmates on the fire lines, it came to this.

Inmate Fights Fire

When it gets really bad, they want me out—out there
on that fire-line, sweating sparks, staring down flames
I look up to as I dig like some fiend. Dollar an hour
to be a crispy critter to save somebody’s home. Yeah, they
figure the same jinx of brave and stupid got me convicted
might make me right to stand my ground for fire.

Like these boots? Like this hickory handle I flick
back and forth so my shovel slashes dirt, leaves
no food fire can eat? I like leaning back to see
that red sun staring through these skeleton trees
like bars in my cellblock window. And the wind
brings me smoke for free. Free?

When my sentence ends, you think I’ll walk free?
You think they’ll look at me to say, “He’s good”?
They plot their own fire-line to keep me on the dark side.
Got it? Like my face tattoo says “Bad Man. Don’t Hire.”
You can walk out the prison gate, but try walking through
the reputation wall to freedom after they call you felon.

I served my time. Serious good behavior. And after?
Give me a chance. Or shall I say, I’ve been burned.

—Kim Stafford
*

Part of that poem reminded me of Randall Brown’s song “One Second Chance.” I met Randall in the Arts In Prison group at Columbia River Correctional Institution. At one point in his life he was living in Nashville and earning his living writing songs. Just as Kim adopted a persona for his poem, Randall, who never imagined he would actually go to prison, wrote a song about a guy who has just gotten out of prison. Here are the lyrics:

It says here you’re from Houston
And you’re certified to drive a truck
But it doesn’t say what you’ve been doin’
For the last five years
Then he watched his eyes keep readin’
Then he watched his eyes look up
And he watched another job he needed just disappear

‘Cause when they get to the line
Have you been convicted of a crime
They say thanks for comin’ and they don’t call you back
I ain’t askin’ for every job under the sun
I just want one
Second chance

On August 22nd
Little Jacob’s turnin’ nine
But his momma moved him
A half a state away
I left another message
On her phone at home last night
And she finally had her lawyer
Call today

She knows he can’t afford
To take this thing to court
And I’m tryin’ hard to make her understand
I’m not askin’ for every weekend of every month
I just want one
Second chance

I was young and I was stupid
I regret it everyday
I ain’t saying I didn’t do it
But I’ve paid for my mistakes
It’s a lost and empty feeling when they don’t want you around
I’ve finally got my freedom but what good is it now

There’s some day’s when it feels like it’s been a 100 years
Sometimes it seems like only yesterday
We were painting Jacob’s nursery
Counting days until he was here
Next thing I knew I’d thrown it all away
Now I know I can’t go back
To the life I used to have
When I still held the whole world in my hands
I had a job I had a wife I had a son
Now I just want one
Second chance

—Randall Brown
*
Randall says:

I’ve been out almost 2 years. My current job is foreman for a construction company. I’ve just accepted a position as an operations manager for a commercial construction company in Portland.
When I got out I was nervous because of the stigma we get as inmates. But my reentry to society went great. I was able to find work within a few days. I did get divorced while in, but I’ve found a woman who accepts me for me and not my past.
*

Thinking about smoke and fires, I naturally thought of Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra”:

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings–even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.
“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”
“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”
And he showed himself in his true form of
SMOKEY THE BEAR
A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display–indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;
Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;
Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth: all true paths lead through mountains—
With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;
Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;
Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;
Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.
Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him…
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.
Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana
Sphataya hum traka ham mam
“I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND
BE THIS RAGING FURY DESTROYED”
And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:
And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL:
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.
Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT
thus we have heard.

(may be reproduced free forever)

—Gary Snyder
*
That reminds me of a joke…

What do Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear have in common?
Same middle name.

And now it’s time to sing along to the Smokey the Bear Song with Eddy Arnold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myz93sXW66Y

peace & love

—Johnny

Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue
2020-09-15 - 2020-10-14
Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

September 15, 2020

Welcome to our first meditation and mindfulness dialogue! The numbers below refer to passages from the book Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh. (JS)

#159 A Healing Mantra
Although I myself am locked within walls & a structure of rules, the cosmos still sustains me and it still nourishes me. I am isolated yet I feel no alienation from the world. I cannot touch a tree or a cloud, but yet I still feel them. I know they are there for me just outside the walls. For now, my friends & my family are the light of the sun, and the door of my heart is filled with love, light & sun from theirs. Being stripped to the simplest form of oneself will allow you to be filled full of all the beauty that the cosmos has to offer. Empty yourself to be filled with the wonders of life.
—Rocky Hutchinson
*
#49 – What is a leaf?
Is one of my favorites! In segregation we have paintings that are of different scenes. At first it was cool, then I and others got over it. But since putting this wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh in perspective you see more than a painting. For it opens my eyes to the time, the painter, the painter’s years of art skills, everything down to what makes paint…paint. There are so many miracles that came together to make these paintings! It’s amazing. Now I try to be mindful of what miracles come into place to make people I meet, foods I eat. Being conscious of what had to come together to create your best friend or your favorite food gives you much more appreciation for how they come to be in your life.
Thank you for giving me a chance, Johnny. I’m really working on myself. My goal is day by day. (Today be less ego-oriented.) Trying to not care who judges me for being me. Because that’s not my problem, I am happy and peaceful. It’s been a sacrifice, but as I’m learning sacrifice is the way to a peaceful life!
Peace Love Happiness
—Jake Green
*
Originally, I had no intention of sharing this, as it was written by inspiration to myself as though it were a summation of what I see as the core of my soul, for lack of better words, and also like a mantra and daily meditation. Here it is:

I am the good man.
I am the good decisions that I make.
I am compassion, I do not fake.
I am kindness, I am love.
I am by choice, not by chance.
I am intent, not happenstance.
I am in servitude of good.
I am alive and I am living.
I am grateful I am.

—Joseph Opyd
*
#6 Concentration
Concentration is an interesting concept in prison—Why should I want to concentrate on my situation being what it is? But as I’ve grown spiritually, I’ve come to realize how useful concentration can be.
There is a lot to complain about in life, but there is also a lot to enjoy! Concentration, or focusing on what I think as I’m thinking it, and what I feel as I’m feeling it, has taught me that my life is richer if I concentrate on the “good” and the “bad”—accepting both for what they are and their role in my life. The passage in the book (#6) talks of the power of concentration in creating happiness at any time. I do think this is important, however the more useful aspect of concentration for me is being able to be fully—(or as close as I can come for now)—aware of the situations that I find myself in, and what ripples I make in that environment. Concentration, or mindfulness, has also helped me embrace the “bad” parts of life. By being mindful of the roots of my reactions and feelings when a “bad” thing happens I have learned to cope, embrace and/or overcome these situations, while gaining a little more skill in mindfulness.
My point is that by being mindful I have learned that there is value in all situations. While I suffer I learn, while I’m happy I learn. Mindfulness is our tool to dig through the layers of our minds and be really truly in the moment, allowing us to remove reaction and embrace each event for what it is truly worth, “good,” or “bad.”
—Cody Dalton
*
I find myself, my soul, my beliefs and my being saturated in belonging—belonging to a love so deep, so real, so unreal. Coming from a life of nothing and going to a life full of love I never knew I could be a part of. A love that I knew was there, there for others, but for me…well, it was only window shopping.
Now I long to be drenched in the core of my soul, always and forever drowning in this love, this love that has pierced my cosmic veil. This love for all, for beauty, for the ones who opened so many doors into and onto the mind, heart and truth that dwells within my being.

#191 Love is Understanding
When we do not understand things we fear them. There was a time for myself, and not too long ago, when I was fearful of myself. Fearful of who I used to be, and fearful of the things I had done. Fearful of what I was capable of. I did not fully understand myself, because I was hiding from myself. When I opened up and allowed someone in, someone who is truly there for me—only then did I have the strength to face myself and understand why I did what I did, who I am, and who I was. Only then did I find the compassion to forgive my demons, and leave them, and forgive myself. Love is understanding not just our own faults, but the faults of others—loving them and loving ourselves.
—Rocky Hutchinson
*
#4 Ambassador of the Cosmos
I love Thich Nhat Hanh’s word “interbeing” and what it suggests to my imagination—the interdependence and interconnectedness of everyone and everything! In this passage he doesn’t use the word, but he describes how when he looks deeply into a piece of bread, he sees the sunshine, the rain and the earth without which there would be no bread. Some people imagine that they are somehow “independent,” but with every breath we take, oxygen revitalizes our blood, and we exhale carbon dioxide which nourishes the trees, which produce oxygen… I’m glad I get to be part of this whole miraculous process that has no beginning or end.
—Johnny Stallings
*
What is it that you really know? Not just what you have been told or what you think or have read or surmise but something that you deeply know. And how is that different from the other kind of knowing where you think it or have heard it? I think starting with what your base understanding is one of the most crucial steps in meditation. Knowing your own inner ground….and what you don’t know. Write it down. And maybe a few months or years from now you can come back to it and see if anything has changed.

What Do I Know?

Closing my eyes,
a silent darkness,
light
at the edges.
My breath moves
up and down,
holding each moment,
inhalation
then release.
The human heart
is quixotic,
malleable,
almost like a berry
in the palm of my hand.
In my ears,
a deeper space
that stretches out,
a disappearing
reverberation.
We touch nothingness.

—Deborah Buchanan, from Layers of Sediment
*
When I invited people who don’t live in prison to be part of our new meditation and mindfulness community, I included Jake Green’s meditations on “What is a Leaf?” Scott Teitsworth was reminded by Jake’s “sweet words” of a passage from a book he edited by his guru, Nitya Chaitanya Yati. (JS)
Even when you do something as simple as sip a cup of coffee or tea, think about what you are doing. Your morning tea begins in some far-off land, where very poor people get up at four o’clock. They crowd onto a battered bus, then walk to the plantation where ripe leaves are waiting to cut into their fingers. Leeches climb on them to drink their blood. All day long they fill their baskets, then they go home to a meager supper. The tea leaves are hauled to huge mills employing hundreds of people, where they are cleaned, dried, and made into the kind of blend you want. Then it is put in tins or boxes, and sent by truck down the mountains and out to the coast. The shipyard is filled with more poor laborers, who load the tea onboard ships. Then across the ocean it comes to your port.The distributors parcel and package it and send it to your local market, where you buy it and take it home. Thus the whole world participates in one cup of tea. If you like sugar with your tea, there is another world of production and distribution behind that spoonful of white grains you tip into the cup. So should you not look into the numinous aspect of just a cup of tea?
If you become sensitive to the numinous aspect of life, gratitude will naturally fill your whole being. Each time you put a morsel of food in your mouth or sip your tea or coffee, you will become so grateful to the corporate life of mankind for giving you so much for so little effort. You will see nothing but the unity underlying the many forms of the world. Great will be your joy to share, to give, to receive. Then you won’t fight. The belligerency comes in where you see only your own personal interests—“my home,” “my family,” or just“my self.” The superficial form of your self interest should be subsumed in the ocean of the general interest, and you should feel the world is your country, your home. That humanity is your family, filled with your brothers and sisters.
The Guru* wants us to really feel this: to stand united, to find peace and become peacemakers. We have to first be peacemakers in our own lives. We bring peace to ourselves. By putting all the peaces together, we make peace with the world.If you fragment it, you lose it. So let us gather all the peaces together in one meaning, in one divine thread of love and compassion and understanding.

—from That Alone: The Core of Wisdom by Nitya Chaitanya Yati pp. 140-141
*Narayana Guru (1856-1928). This book is a long commentary inspired by a philosophical poem by Narayana Guru, Ātmopadeśa Shatakam.
—Scott Teitsworth
*
#7 Why we suffer
Thich Nhat Hanh reminds me that all things change, and I will suffer if I refuse this truth, like a stone in the river trying to stop water’s journey, I will be rolled and all my rough edges worn away. When he speaks of the river, I remember a time we went to a back channel and wandered along in a canoe, and I entered a kind of trance of well-being as the river flowed and sunlight splashed everything alive. When I suffer sometimes, when I wake at night and remember my failures, I go back to the river in my mind, and try to see it for what it is:

Call me the scruffy hermit of willow islands.
Call me the skipping stone eager to squander all
for a few joyful episodes of buoyancy. I could be
counting money? I could be a hero of fame?
Call me one lost to water’s wonders, far gone
down a back channel gaping at water beads
dripping brilliant from the paddle’s blade.

—Kim Stafford
*
I look through my study cards. Today’s contemplation is “Observation of the Mind.” Do I have solid mindfulness established, or is my mind more of the scattered quality? To what degree are desire/lust, anger, and confusion present or absent in my mind? This is not about judgement; as humans, we spend so much time with these mental qualities that we might as well use them as meditation tools. This is more like a checklist, is a quality present or absent? The card reminds me: all mental contents arise and pass away. Can I observe that right now? Can I see that my thoughts now are different than my thoughts 10 minutes ago? Bonus points if I can train myself to have some awareness of others, that other people also have rapidly changing mental qualities. “Your True Home” (YTH) speaks about this exercise at item 120, “Mindfulness of the Mind.” Another exercise I can do with my mind, and its contents, is to ask if current thoughts are beneficial to my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me, or if they detract from wellbeing. Again, this is not about judgement or criticism, it is about taking inventory of the mind. Flipping through YTH, I find this in item 47.
—Shad Alexander
*
Spaciousness
It is 4:45 am. A small glimmer of light in the eastern sky, but a mass of stars still predominates in the dome above. My favorite time of the day: mornnight. My mind is rested and fresh, still empty.
I have two and a half days of precious spaciousness. My husband is away for a couple days of bike riding while I had planned to go away camping with women friends. My outing was cancelled because of high winds, falling trees and fire danger. David said, “Oh well, I won’t go if you’re going to be here alone.” I said, with a duplicitous smile, “Oh no, you go ahead. You don’t want to disappoint your friends by not showing up. I’ll be fine.”
Don’t get me wrong; I love my husband, but he should know, after 36 years, that I treasure these infrequent, but cherished times of aloneness. And this one is serendipitous spaciousness. I am never lonely being alone. I am filled with empty spaciousness. The house feels bigger. It is breathing and expanding, and I breathe and expand, in tandem, like singing a harmonious duet.
Duet. Round: In my family we played duets on the piano and sang rounds. “Go to Joan Glover and tell her I love her, and by the light of the moon I will come to her.” Repeat one bar after the first has been sung. Etc. And, “Orléans, Beaugency, Notre-Dame de Cléry, Vendôme, Vendôme…” Sung as a round, it sounds like cathedral bells tolling throughout the city. We sang dozens of rounds.
Spaciousness allows my mind to remember things like this. My mind can rest or wander; either way, it awakens refreshed, mindful.
—Jude Russell
*
Reading some passages in Your True Home, I was again impressed with how beautifully Thich Nhat Hanh expresses complex Buddhist concepts in clear, easy to understand language. One of these concepts that touched me this morning was #9: I Have Arrived. So much of our lives are concerned with striving–we want to learn things, we want to get better at things, we want to excel, we want to create. And this striving is wonderful: it has produced our art, science, architecture, literature, airplanes, medicine…our civilization, the civilizations that came before us and those that will come after us. But the most important thing about life–greater than any discovery, creation, or attainment– is the simple fact that we are alive. When we’re in great danger, or facing a serious illness, we often remember that nothing is more important than protecting our precious life. But the practice of meditation is taking time to appreciate this fact without the stimulus of danger. If we open our eyes and ears we can remember how fantastic it is, how precious, how exciting, how beautiful, how crazy it is that we are here. We have arrived. We are not only alive but we can be aware of our life and we can appreciate our life. Meditation practice is taking time to appreciate this amazing fact.
—Howard Thoresen
*
I’ve tried to learn meditation a few different times and I’ve never succeeded. My self-discipline is spotty, my posture’s always off, and I forget the proper hand positions. My body gets uncomfortable and my brain rebels against meditating. My thoughts increase instead of quieting down. Plus, I’m not a very Buddhist-like person, thanks to my intemperate ways. I gave up trying to meditate years ago.
After giving up, though, a funny thing started happening. I noticed that my mind would sometimes quiet down on its own, without much effort from me. When I’m outside I get absorbed by the awesome fullness of life. When I sit in my house and pay attention I feel content with my heartbeat and the peace in my local airspace. When I let my thinking and my judgements be calm the outer and inner worlds do just fine. This balance doesn’t last indefinitely; there are things to do—groceries, e-mails, etc. But I can return pretty easily to what Alan Watts calls “sitting quietly, doing nothing.” I’ll leave the meditating to the pros. I’m simply grateful for the moment, and being part of it, and having people to share it with.
—Bill Faricy
*
78 The Wounded Child
I was planning on writing about another part of the book, but I read this, this morning, and it kind of hit me like I needed to write about this instead.
I guess a good question is: what is the child inside of us? I suppose it is part of us, the child that is, just because we grow into adulthood we don’t necessarily leave that child behind—he or she comes with us. I believe children are more susceptible, at a young age, especially to trauma. I think a traumatic experience as a child can have more of an effect than experiencing that same trauma at an older age.
I sometimes struggle with a lack of self worth, and have some insecurities. I am sure most people do, and maybe being in prison just heightens them. For instance, sometimes I struggle to even call my family. I will convince myself that they don’t want to hear from me and they have better things to do than talking to me.
I have recently reconnected with a girlfriend from my past. Talking to her has been great, but when she says, “I love you,” in my mind I say that doesn’t make sense. I have made so many mistakes. Am I worthy of Love? I feel I have worked very hard these last fourteen years to become a better human being. I try to be kind and compassionate to others. Is that enough? I don’t have much else. What if I screw up again? I think maybe that is the child inside of me that is scared.
I think in these moments of insecurity if we are able to recognize the source, and why we are feeling this way, we can begin to heal them. I realize I have done some amazing things with my time in prison. I have met some amazing people along the way that have taught me so much about life and its true meaning. I am not angry anymore and have become a very patient, understanding person. Maybe sometimes too patient—it may take me a couple days to answer someone’s question sometimes. I want to make sure I understand what they are asking before I answer though. Geez! I do truly believe that all humans are worthy of being loved, so I guess that includes myself. Dang it! I know the best thing I can do for myself is continue to live a healthy clean life, love others, and surround myself with like-minded people—and when she answers my call, enjoy it for all it’s worth in the here and now. My hope is that someday I will be a successful productive member of society, and when that child inside comes calling I can reassure him that we have the tools to live a healthy life, and everything is going to be okay.
—Aaron Gilbert
*
Your True Home: It is in the now, the breath, the fully aware moment. I can’t add to or take away from it. And, if I hold on to it, I get stuck because new “now” moments have begun piling up behind this one. If I touch it, let it go—not holding on to anything—then I can flow from one now to the next, feeling everything. I see a connection to Kristen’s topic of “Contentment.” When I can be content with life as it is, instead of wasting energy with how it was, I have one less roadblock to the “now” moment.” When I can allow my guard down, for myself at least (if not for others), I can enter that moment to begin the experience as it is. Then I can breathe and allow each “now” moment to come and go as they wish.
In spite of all this “now” mindfulness, “in the moment” talk is that I can’t, (won’t or don’t), just let go of ego, barriers, worries past and present, judgements, etc. Well, not for as long as I think, or tell myself I should. I tell myself that I “want” to do this. I attend the Zen practice sessions so I can practice being more skilled at this—sometimes I even succeed at something, which leads me back to all that I judge. (Thanks, Jake.) I “need” to let go. Once in a while, I do somehow, more by happy accident than skillful action, manage to set everything down, breathe, and contentedly exist. The more often I struggle with this, the more often I manage to stumble into aware, conscious breathing, where thoughts come and go without my bidding, or following another white rabbit. Someday, I want to arrive at my True Home.
Even this work is plagued by ego, self-aware judgement, criticism, worry about the opinions of others—that I don’t somehow measure up to some arbitrary standard. (All of this is more in my head than in reality.) It all comes from awareness that I am no expert, guru, or skilled practitioner of mindfulness, but find myself at the beginning. Always At The Beginning!!—just like everyone else: breathing, just breathing, being gentle and kind when I see I have followed another wild hare off into some dark forest and away from my thoughtful breath.
—Michel Deforge
*
This is one of my favorite guided meditations from Thich Nhat Hanh.
It begins with his signature meditation on being aware of our most basic source of life.
Take three deep breaths then breathing normally, gently, follow someone saying to you the following, or say to yourself:

“Breathing in I am aware that I am breathing in. Breathing out I am aware of breathing out.”
In, out. . . . . in, out . . . .
In, out. . . . . in, out . . . .
In, out. . . . . in, out . . . .

Breathing in, I see myself as a flower.
Breathing out, I feel fresh.
Flower/Fresh (say this to yourself, for three in and out breaths)

Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain.
Breathing out, I feel solid.
Mountain/Solid

Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain lake.
Breathing out, I reflect things as they are.
Water/Reflecting

Breathing in, I see myself as the sky or space.
Breathing out, I feel free.
Space/Free.

Some of my reflections on this practice.
On being a flower:
When I sit and see myself as a plum blossom, I feel delicate and careful, I want to be aware of the subtle fragrance and the fresh air. I feel still and listen for the insects and the breeze in the tree.
Later, when I want to thank someone, like my yoga teacher or a friend that brings a gift, I remember feeling like a flower, and I will put my palms together and offer a “flower bud” of thanks.
On being a mountain:
Moving from feeling like something delicate to feeling solid as a mountain, grounds me and I feel a strength, and a knowing that makes me feel more steady than any fleeting emotions.
On being a mountain lake:
The water is still, we can reflect what is aroud us, like trees on the shore that are inverted but without distortion. Such a sense of calm.
On being the sky :
The feeling of spaciousness fills me with each breath. Beyond judgement, I feel space in and out, and appreciate the space we need to give one another to be fully human and unique.
This simple meditation moves us through an expansive experience with just four images that are familiar to us all, because we are alive on this planet.
There is a song that goes along with this meditation, that can help tune us up. I will find a copy with the music and send it next time if you all are interested.
I hope you will find some peace, be well.
A plum blossom to you, Katie
(I wish I could send you some plums that are growing now on the plum tree)
—Katie Radditz
*
Our dialogue begins. Thank you. We’re off to a good start!
Today, on September 15th, I’m mailing this to just under a dozen people living in prison and emailing it to just under two dozen people who aren’t. It’s a conversation. Feel free to write and email me in response to something somebody shared. That will be the basis of the next letter, which will go out on October 15th. Also, between now and then, please send me your ruminations on passages from Your True Home or other poems or texts. Or just your thoughts. Or a poem.
May all people be happy.
May we live in peace and love.

—Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/10/20
2020-09-10 - 2020-09-16
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 10, 2020

The Paradise of Books

Cervantes says that Don Quixote stayed up day and night reading books until he fried his brain and went completely mad. The hero of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte, has watched so much television that he can’t tell what’s real from what’s not.
Since June 7th, I have been hosting a Zoom gathering on Sunday afternoons at 3 pm, Bibliophiles Unanimous!

(https://openroadpdx.com/event/bibliophiles-unanimous/).

We’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It’s not like a “regular book club,” where each month everyone agrees to read the same book and then talk about it. I think the impetus for that kind of book group is that we all hunger for more connection with each other, especially a shared cultural framework that is not limited to Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. It’s why, when we’ve just read a book or seen a movie, we say to all our friends and to anyone who will listen: You must read this book! (Or see this movie!)

Our weekly Zoom gathering is a meandering dialogue. Topics have ranged from poetry, to books with pictures, to oddball books, to books that changed the way you see and experience the world.

Our house is filled with books. The bookshelves are filled to overflowing. I’m sitting in a nest of books. I think of many of the books and their authors as my friends. Even though I’m just sitting here, I can easily imagine myself to be walking along the open road with Walt Whitman by my side. On my life journey, he has taught me so many things! Like this one: “I am not contained between my hat and boots.” And: “All truths wait in all things.” And: “Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.” It’s good to know these things.

Things I read are constantly changing my inner landscape. Want to see the world in a new way? Try this:

In the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, it is written that animals are divided into:

those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look like flies.

—from Other Inquisitions, by Jorge Luis Borges
*

As a young man, Jack Kerouac’s books On the Road and The Dharma Bums gave me permission to explore the big world, follow my heart’s desire, and live a life relatively free of societal constraints.

And then there were books that furthered my exploration of the nature and meaning of my human existence. The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, inspired me to become a vegetarian, and to begin meditating in quest of samādhi—“the peace which passeth understanding.” J. Krishnamurti spoke of “freedom from the known,” and other radical ideas. The I Ching, Tao Te Ching, and the poems of Han Shan were a window into the ancient Chinese ways of seeing and being. More recently, I’ve added the Hsin Hsin Ming of Seng Ts’an to that list. Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind taught many hippies of my generation about Zen meditation. I’ve learned about Haiku, Zen and Japanese Culture from R. H. Blyth. My favorite books by him are Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics and Volume 1 of his four-volume series, Haiku, titled Eastern Culture.

I learned about Advaita Vedanta from the Bhagavad Gita, Talks With Ramana Maharshi, the Vivekachudāmani of Shankara and The Philosophy of the Upanishads by Paul Deussen. Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy shows how the world’s religions express the same fundamental truths. Joseph Campbell’s vast knowledge of world mythology also illuminates how “Elementary Ideas” are given different costumes or masks in different cultures. (I enjoy listening to talks he gave more than reading his books—they bring out his lively mind and engaging personality better.)

For now, I’ll mention just a few books that gave me a better understanding of the world in which we live. Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin woke me up to the centuries of oppression of women by men, and gave me a sense of the importance of listening to women’s voices and helping to co-create a more just world. Magical Child and Evolution’s End by Joseph Chilton Pearce, and For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Childrearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller gave me unforgettable lessons in how our systematic physical, emotional and psychological abuse of children thwarts human potential and sows seeds for every kind of violence—from suicide to genocide. In my view, the one thing that the world needs most is more lovingkindness.
*

Some poems came my way this week. Josh Barnes sent me this sonnet:

Sonnet #1

Each snowdrift piles higher than the last,
The ground’s surface has long frozen over;
A frigid picture—Nature’s wild past
That beckons the heart—taunting, Come closer;
But as times change the beauty is melted,
Leaving a dreadful Silence in its stead,
For the ones that would’ve truly felt it
Are lying inside their graves, long dead;
But beauty shed need not mean beauty lost,
And life has many a surprise in store,
Like rivers that spring from ‘neath the frost,
Then freely flow from the glaciers to pour;
Endless the stream of life in its beauty,
The circle of life doing its duty.

—Joshua Barnes
*

Doug Marx shared some poems from his “Sheltering In Place” series. He prefaced his reading by saying that the poems are not his voice, but the voice of a persona. He said it’s as if these poems are being dictated to him. Here’s one:

Sheltering in Place #12

The crows are freaking out about the mask.
We’re not speaking.

Now they squawk
and flee me when they see me coming up the walk
in my orange and yellow
tie-dye pandemic disguise.

I can’t blame them.
They can’t see what I’m hiding from
and neither can I.
They don’t know the real me anymore
and neither do I.

I don’t ask why, I just don’t want to die.

How explain four million
nine hundred and eighteen thousand
four hundred and twenty
down,

or one hundred and sixty thousand
two hundred and ninety
gone.

Their world isn’t falling apart right now.
The spider webs are still holding.

Flashbacks of the old life come at me
like phantom reds and blues
in the mind of a man five months blind.

Some humans freak out about the mask too
and would as soon kill you as wear one.

I can’t explain anything to them either.
The death look in their eyes terrifies me.

When I see one coming I squawk
and cross the street.

Welcome to the masquerade.
You are on your own.

—Doug Marx
*

Dear Readers:

Please send me your poems and short writings, or poems and short writings you love, and which have inspired you, that were written by somebody else.
We’ll end this issue with a poem that Nick Eldredge wrote. It hangs on his wall as a reminder…

¡Gracias!

Juanito

YARD SALE
sat & sun 9 to 4
everything I know
must go
slightly used certainties
preowned philosophies
refurbished realities
bargains galore

peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/3/20
2020-09-03 - 2020-09-09
After The Winter’s Tale at Two Rivers prison in 2014: Ashley Lucas and Jeffrey Sanders.
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 3, 2020

Interview with Ashley Lucas

Johnny Stallings. Your book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration comes out today, published by Methuen Drama. Can you tell our readers what it’s about and how you came to write it?

Ashley Lucas. I traveled to ten different countries to see as much theatre inside prisons as I could. When I started, I thought the book might be more focused on how theatre in prisons gets made, which is certainly something the book discusses, but I realized when I really started talking to incarcerated people about their work that what I most wanted to know was why theatre matters to them. The vast majority of people I met in my research had little to no relationship to theatre prior to their incarceration, yet somehow once they started doing theatre inside the walls, it became deeply important to them. I wanted to find out what that was about. Most of these folks didn’t see themselves as training to become professional theatre makers after their release from prison. They told me stories that revealed that they were using the theatre to accomplish other things besides the staging of plays. They were building communities, developing professional skills, creating social change, and maintaining hope as a way to survive the harsh world of the prison. The book endeavors to make the people that I met feel alive and present to readers who likely will never get to meet the extraordinary folks I encountered in prisons.

The process of how I came to write the book is multifaceted. On a very practical level, back in 2013, Methuen Drama invited me to write a book about theatre in prisons around the world, but in a certain sense I had begun this journey long before that invitation arrived to mark the official start of my research. My father spent twenty years in Texas prisons, and in a sense I grew up in prison visiting rooms. I started acting in community theatre productions when I was in middle school, just a few years before my father’s incarceration began. In that sense, both theatre making and visiting prisons have been major cultural practices that shaped my life from adolescence. Nearly a decade into my father’s incarceration, I was in graduate school working on my Ph.D. in theatre and ethnic studies when I decided to write an interview-based play about people who have family members in prisons. When I started performing my play Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass as a one-woman show, I started getting invited into prisons to share it with incarcerated audiences. People began introducing me to other folks who made theatre in prisons, and that was how I came to realize that theatre was actually happening inside these facilities. My work as a scholar shifted to follow my artistic practice, and I began to research prison theatre companies. That led me to a job at the University of Michigan, which recruited me to teach theatre and also become the Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP). (I’m now the Former Director and continue to teach in the program, while the fabulous Nora Krinitsky serves as the current Director.) My work as a playwright/performer, administrator of a prison arts program, teacher of students who facilitate theatre workshops in prisons, and scholar who studies such programs informs how and why I wrote this book. Fundamentally, my experiences as the daughter of someone who served two decades in prison shapes my approach to writing this book more than anything else.

Johnny. Before asking my next questions, I want to mention that the Prison Creative Arts Project is the largest prison arts organization on Planet Earth. So, my next questions… After seven years of travel and work on the book, are you excited that it’s coming out today? Who do you hope will read it? What do you hope the book will do to them?

Ashley. I am so grateful that I was able to finish all of my research travels as planned before the advent of the global pandemic. It would have made me so sad to miss out on meeting any of the extraordinary theatre companies and artists I had the honor to meet in my journeys. I am both excited and a little overwhelmed that the book is finally coming out. At the PCAP we’re just starting new correspondence programming in lieu of the work we have always done in prisons in person. It’s very sad not to be able to be physically present with all of the people we care about inside prisons, but the fact that we are being allowed to start this new correspondence programming gives us the ability to send books into prisons for the first time in PCAP’s thirty-year history. We’re sending all participants in our theatre workshops a copy of my book, and I pray that the men and women who receive it will find it both a consolation and an inspiration in this terribly difficult time. It’s always really tough to be in prison, but the pandemic adds layers of pain, fear, and physical torment that are not always part of an incarcerated person’s daily life. Good books have helped me through the hardest moments of my life (and are helping me now). I pray that my book can be a layer of support for people on both sides of prison walls who really need it right now. I think Prison Theatre has the potential to do this for folks because it’s full of stories of people who have used their artistic talents as mechanisms for survival in very trying circumstances.

Johnny. I get the impression from your book that you are also making a case to prison administrators and the general public that theatre in prison is more than just a way for prison residents to while away the time. It has value. You’ve already said that prison theatre helps to build community, develop professional skills, create social change, and maintain hope. Let’s talk about love. In your travels, in 2014, you visited Open Hearts Open Minds’ production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon, and you write about that experience in your book. What happened in the Visiting Room where the play was performed?

Ashley. Yes, I hope that the book has many audiences. I hope that prison administrators with open hearts who truly wish for the world to be a safer place rather than a more punitive one will read the book and see how much theatre programming can do to improve the lives of everyone inside the prison—the incarcerated folks and the staff—and the lives of those connected to them in the outside world (ie. their families and the general public coming to see the plays).

I am so happy that you brought up love! I find that people are terrified to talk about the concept of love in connection with prisons. There seems to be an automatic assumption that the only kind of love that can happen in prisons is sexual, romantic, or aggressive, and of course, the truth is that because people in prison are complex human beings, just like the rest of us, all forms of love and affection exist inside prisons. We love our friends, our mentors, the people who become our chosen families. A prison that recognizes the humanity of the people inside it and actually wants them to be empathetic and driven to make positive contributions to the lives of others should actually cultivate a broad range of opportunities for safe and loving relationships among people, in much the same ways that a good school, religious congregation, or community organization would. The theatre is an extraordinary vehicle for emotional openness, vulnerability, and love. If we can’t enable one another to be vulnerable in safe ways, then we are cultivating a culture of isolation and aggression. Since the vast majority of people in prison will live again in freedom some day, we need to invest in their emotional wellbeing and stability. People cannot be well if they do not feel that they are loved, admired, and appreciated for their unique gifts and abilities.

I hope that the chapter I wrote in Prison Theatre about the Open Hearts Open Minds production of Winter’s Tale helps readers to feel in some measure the magic of that production. The acting, costumes, music, and sets were all absolutely beautiful, but the incredible joy and love that that performance brought to everyone in the room really altered the world of the prison. The visiting room where the performance was held was full of families and children. I was blessed to sit by a woman named Sharon Lemm whose son Joseph Opyd was in the cast. She had been at Two Rivers prison for the Open Hearts Open Minds production the year before, and when she realized that a number of men in the cast had no families there to support them—indeed some no longer had contact with their families at all—she promptly adopted the entire theatre troupe and became known as Momma Sharon. Her extraordinary spirit exemplifies something larger that was happening at Two Rivers that day. All kinds of human connections were forming. Families were mixing with one another to celebrate the cast. The prison staff were engaged and even proud of the work they’d seen the incarcerated men do. Audience members like me who were until that day strangers to almost everybody in the room were welcomed with open arms—literally, there were people hugging all over that prison visiting room! It was such a glorious evening, a celebration of life in spite of the prison in which we found one another. That play helped break down all kinds of barriers that divide people and helped us all to see what we shared in our common humanity.

Johnny. One thing that keeps people away from theatre is money. Not charging admission means that more family members, and even small children, come to see the plays. By making the play free it is a pure gift from actors to audience. What we discovered is that, in the case of our prison productions, the gift was reciprocal. It means so much to the actors that family and strangers have traveled a long way, and come inside a prison(!), to see them, and to appreciate them with thunderous applause. For the volunteers with Open Hearts Open Minds programs, volunteering in prison is not some kind of noble act of charity. It’s a profound reciprocal giving. Have you noticed something similar in your work supervising college students who go into prisons in Michigan?

Ashley. Yes, absolutely! Many people I meet want to talk about what a great thing our program is doing for folks in prisons, but in truth the most demonstrable growth I can see, as someone whose worked with the program for years, is in the college students. Most of them have never set foot in a prison prior to joining PCAP and don’t believe they have any connection to the carceral system. Then they spend a semester collaborating with incarcerated people and come to love and respect those folks in a way that reshapes their entire world view. The experience of meaningful and prolonged interaction with people who live in very different circumstances than you do expands your understanding of how things like state power, structural inequality, racism, and social justice work. My students and the currently and formerly incarcerated folks with whom we work also come to see the arts as active forces that can help us to build coalitions, address problems, and create opportunities. Fundamentally, my students are not going into prisons to teach or to provide social services. Our mission is to equalize power dynamics as much as the prisons will allow us to do so and approach one another as collaborators with a shared stake in the community and artistic outcomes of our projects. In this way, we all learn and grow together. My students will often tell me that going to prison is the best part of their week, and none of them like prisons. Being in community with other people who take you and your artistic gifts seriously is an incredible joy, a great blessing—one that can be harder to find in the outside world where our presence in a classroom or other public space is often taken for granted. People in prison treasure their time with people from the free world, and they remind us of what a gift it is to be truly present with others.

Johnny. Thank you so much, Ashley, for taking the time to share with our readers. Congratulations on completing this vast project! It’s going to make the world a kinder place. How can people order your book?

Ashley. Thank you, Johnny! I’m so grateful that this book project enabled me to get to know you better and to meet the extraordinary folks at Open Hearts Open Minds. I hope very much to return to visit you and the incarcerated folks with whom you work.

My book is available from all major booksellers, and I encourage you to support local and independent bookstores when ordering. My favorite independent bookstore is Literarity Book Shop in my hometown of El Paso, Texas: https://www.facebook.com/LiterarityBooks/. My friend Bill Clark who owns it has my book in stock and ships anywhere in the United States. You can reach him through the store’s Facebook page or by emailing him directly to order: bclark@literarity.com. Local bookstores sustain our communities, and they need our support!
You can also order directly from the publisher’s website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/prison-theatre-and-the-global-crisis-of-incarceration-9781472508416/.

Note to our readers: Ashley will be doing a virtual book tour, which includes being the special guest of The Open Road’s Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom gathering on Sunday, September 20th, at 3 pm, Pacific Time. Here’s the link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82169567543

I hope you’ll join us!

And to clarify a couple of points… I’m no longer doing theatre inside Oregon prisons. Open Hearts Open Minds is moving forward under the leadership of the amazing Carla Grant as Executive Director. To learn more about what they’re doing, here’s a link to their website: www.openheartsopenminds.net.

I do have a lot of prison pen pals, and The Open Road (openroadpdx.org) has a Prison Education Project and a Meditation & Mindfulness Project for people who live in prison and for those who don’t. This “peace, love, happiness & understanding” journal is mailed every week to 33 friends inside prison walls and emailed to 130 friends on the outside.

peace & love

—Johnny

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/27/20
2020-08-27 - 2020-09-02
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding
August 27, 2020

Meditation & Mindfulness

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

—Luke 17: 20-21, King James Version
*

The Open Road is inaugurating a Meditation & Mindfulness Project for people who live in prison and for those who don’t. We aren’t promoting any religious tradition, we just want to support and encourage each other to be more peaceful, loving, happy and free. It seems to me that whatever one’s religious beliefs, and for atheists and agnostics as well, meditation and mindfulness are a doorway to the Golden World—a feeling of perfect well-being. Everyone experiences these perfect moments. Meditation and mindfulness are ways to nurture and strengthen the feeling that our life on earth is a blessing and a miracle. Meditation and mindfulness can be enjoyed by anyone.
*

“…Our blessedness, like His, is infinite.
His glory endless is and doth surround
And fill all worlds without or end or bound.
What hinders then but we in Heaven may be
Even here on Earth did we but rightly see?”

—Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), from “Thoughts—IV”
*

To people in our society, where working hard, making money, high achievement and getting things done are considered so important, to sit still and do nothing seems like a big waste of time.
*

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

—Pico Iyer, from The Art of Stillness
*

Walt Whitman spoke to his friend Ellen O’Connor of his ability to stop thinking at will, and to make his brain “negative”:

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 a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

—Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”
*

I began practicing meditation at the age of nineteen. That was fifty years ago! I can’t imagine my life without it. I’m certain I would have suffered a LOT more. Ninety-nine per cent of our suffering is self-inflicted. Here’s a little poem I wrote:

when you see how simple it is to be happy
you’ll kick yourself
for spending so much time being miserable

—Johnny Stallings, from everything I touch
*

Nautilus Hall Press has just published three chapbooks by Deborah Buchanan: “Layers of Sediment,” “The World A Well,” and “Moment Before.” The covers are beautifully illustrated by Andrew Larkin. They are grouped as a set, “Like Fluttering Silk,” and can be ordered from Deborah by emailing her at dlbadger@gmail.com. The cost of the set is $25, plus $5 for shipping and handling. Here’s a poem from “Layers of Sediment”:

Early Morning Hours

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

—Deborah Buchanan
*

The word “meditation” can mean a lot of different things. It can mean sitting still with your back straight. Other things that give us a feeling of inner peace can also be ways of meditating: going for a walk, listening to music, or playing music, drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning, reading. Even thinking and talking can be done in a meditative way.
*

Ask the world to reveal its quietude—
not the silence of machines when they are still,
but the true quiet by which birdsongs,
trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms
become what they are, and are nothing else.

—Wendell Berry from Given
*

Why meditate? One reason is: “to stay sane.” The noise inside our heads can actually drive us completely mad. Here’s what Aldous Huxley says about it:

Unrestrained and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous….If we pass in review the words we have given vent to in the course of the average day, we shall find that the greater number of them may be classified under three main heads: words inspired by malice and uncharitableness towards our neighbours; words inspired by greed, sensuality and self-love; words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason, but merely for the sake of making a distracting noise. These are idle words; and we shall find, if we look into the matter, that they tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity. And if the unspoken words of our mind’s endless, idiot monologue are counted, the majority for idleness becomes, for most of us, overwhelmingly large.

—Aldous Huxley, from The Perennial Philosophy
*

What is mindfulness? Thich Nhat Hanh says:

Mindfulness is when you are truly there, mind and body together. You breathe in and out mindfully, you bring your mind back to your body, and you are there. When your mind is there with your body, you are established in the present moment. Then you can recognize the many conditions of happiness that are in you and around you, and happiness just comes naturally.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, from Your True Home, #218

He’s fond of saying: “The present moment is a wonderful moment.”
*
Kim Stafford sent this:

Finding Deep Calm

I have a Palestinian friend named Gheed living in Gaza City, where life is hard and much of each day is spent trying to be safe. Most days, power is only on for four hours, and then darkness. Food is hard to come by. There is often danger in the streets.
I know how in prison, some are put in “segregation,” in solitary. But in Gaza, the whole country is in segregation, surrounded by walls, razor wire, under frequent attack.
But my friend Gheed seeks beauty, anyway. She takes photographs of her cup of coffee…of a flower…of light at the window. And she sent this message to the world, in Arabic:

عظيمٌ هذا الهدوء العميق الذي أحيا فيه وأنمو ضدّ هذا العالم، هدوءٌ أحصدُ فيهِ ما ليس في استطاعةِ أحدٍ أنْ ينتزعه مني، ولو بقوة الحديد والنار ..”
— غوتة

I was able to find a translation, and it turns out she has been reading Goethe, a writer in Germany in the early 19th century. This is what she has translated into Arabic from Goethe:

Great is this deep calm in which I live and grow against this world, a calm in which I reap what no one can take away from me, even by the power of iron and fire.
– Goethe

I love to think of my friend in the danger and difficulty of Gaza finding deep calm. And I love to think that this calm can be sought by anyone anywhere. It is our right to feel this. And it is possible.

—Kim Stafford
*

People who live in prison who want to participate in the Open Road Meditation and Mindfulness Project can write to me at this address:

Johnny Stallings
The Open Road
PMB 268
4110 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR 97214

People who don’t live in prison, who want to be part of our merry band of mindful meditators can email me at stallingsjohnny@gmail.com, or contact me through the Open Road website (openroadpdx.org).
*

Meditation and mindfulness can be very simple. Hafiz says:

And at times, when we really need to know
something about perfection

the movement of your breath might do, or the
beating of our hearts.

—Hafiz (1320-1389), version by Daniel Ladinsky
*

Seng Ts’an says:

when the mind is still
all views disappear

and

empty, clear, your light shines
without mental effort

–Sent Ts’an (529-606 A.d.)

peace, love, happiness & understanding 8/20/20
2020-08-20 - 2020-08-26
Sal Dale as Hermia, Steve Jamison as Lysander, Allen Mills (hidden) as Puck, Bradley Foote as Oberon, Zeb Harrington as Demetrius and Aaron Gilbert as Helena in the 2010 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon.

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

August 20, 2020

Kim Stafford and I were talking about those moments when life feels perfect. He had written a poem that morning, which he read to me and then sent in an email:

Practical Illusions

When I lose track of time, I feel free
for a little while. And when I feel free,
I can tackle the impossible. I can break
a miracle down to a series of steps,
so magic begins to enter, beauty intrudes,
then I’m in thrall to curiosity and wonder,
friendship with the future returns, and all
my regrets fill a basket of quirky souvenirs.

I’ve lived in exile from joy, daunted by
mortality, taking what they call a realistic view
by counting up my hours and days of failure.
There’s no shortage there, and I’m expert
on musing, dwelling, brooding on my losses.
But then the turning comes as I lean close in
to creation, something out of nothing. It begins
with surrender to anything I love to do.

—Kim Stafford
*

Last year, about this time, I wrote this poem:

Kim Stafford, Ace Reporter

he carries a tiny notebook around with him
ever on the alert
looking, listening
words are spoken, inspiration strikes, events unfold
he takes out his little notebook, jots things down
he’s collecting all the latest news
later, he will file his next report—
What’s Going On Here On Planet Earth

–Johnny Stallings
*

Katie responded to Aaron Gilbert’s letter in last week’s issue of “peace, love, happiness & understanding”:

This is fantastic, Johnny. It’s amazing for me to read what Aaron wrote about his blossoming. So articulate and open and still on his quest to love and forgive. It takes me back to my own blossoming that came from seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in prison. Like in Shakespeare’s time the men had to play all the roles, of course. Incredible to see them though. In a fantastic costume from the Portland Opera, here came Aaron playing Helena in all her loveliness. I happened to be sitting next to his mom, who had traveled hundreds of miles to see the play and was proud and astonished and happy to be there. Along with the rest of us, she got to see Aaron transformed through this role he had mastered. It made me realize the power of literary art and embodying a character in a play. We were all uplifted and transported into some other possible realm. The prison walls even became precious for providing such a container and program for learning and listening and trusting one another enough to produce such a work of art together. The best part was the post-play reflection, hearing the men talk about their experience through the whole process—the accomplishment of reading, memorizing, acting, actually getting to touch another person, coordinating the action. But most of all loving each other and being loved by each other and by their director and costumer. It was heartbreaking to see the men leave by one door back to their cells. We walked out the gates, moved by tears and laughter, transformed, as they were, and dedicated to returning again and again, till they too walk out as free men. I’m grateful to you, Johnny, for imagining and following your heart to create such an experience for us all.

—Katie Radditz
*

On my birthday, or around New Year’s Day, I often read through my journal for the previous year to remind myself of things that happened. This morning I was doing that and found something that ties into what Aaron wrote for last week’s issue and to Katie’s response. I had copied a letter to Howard Thoresen into my journal. Here’s what I wrote to him:

september 8, 2019

¡howardito!

nancy is with her mom this weekend, so i went out to two rivers by myself yesterday
i brought up the subject of julius caesar and the men talked about how awesome it was and how good it is to have a way to form strong bonds of friendship
then i told them that october 5th will be my last day facilitating the dialogue group
carl alsup (brutus) told me what a big impact i have had on the lives of many men there
then stuart morton (cassius) got the bright idea that we should go around the circle and everyone should say something to me
(this is a thing we’ve done a few times
i got the idea from jack kornfield
the chosen person listens while everyone says what they most admire, etc., about him
i think it can be a kind of medicine for people who are suffering from feelings of worthlessness, et cetera)
anyhow, they really gave me the full treatment
when you were here you said that you can’t take a compliment
i don’t know, but i think 40 minutes of something like this would overcome your resistance and do something to you
just thinking about the experience is making me cry
it seems that my ability to see their innate goodness and beauty has helped many of the men to see it in themselves and in others
to feel loved and to love
for many of the men, and for me, this represents a profound change in the way we experience our human life on earth
it’s a gift we have given to each other
well, that’s about it for now

jake merriman is coming over shortly
the men report that during the final performance he cried through the whole play
which gladdens my heart

peace, love & happiness
juanito
*

Walt Whitman said:

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.
*

I have a hunch that when Kim began writing the poem “Practical Illusions” he didn’t know how it would end. He begins with the freedom he feels when he loses track of time, then, like a beachcomber, he picks things up and examines them, and ends by speaking of surrendering to anything he loves to do. One of the things he loves to do is write poems. He gets pleasure from taking us on this journey and we get pleasure from accompanying him. Walt Whitman asks:

Who wishes to walk with me?

The end of the poem calls to my mind the idea of following your heart’s desire. When an opportunity arises to give free advice to young people, that’s what I say: “Follow your heart’s desire.” When I was young, my dad said to me with great seriousness, as if imparting important wisdom: “John, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.” I didn’t say anything to him at the time, but I remember thinking: “Not me! That’s not how I’m gonna live my life.” I never came up with a plan of what I want to do with my life. Like a hummingbird, I just go from one flower to the next. Today is my 69th birthday. I’m eating a red pear from our red pear tree. I’m the happiest man on earth.

Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) said this about a defect in his university education:

“There was never a tutor that did professly teach Felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences.”

(Thomas Traherne, from Centuries of Meditations, Third Century, number 37)
*

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

—Johnny

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

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peace, love, happiness & understanding

My mind started to blossom…

August 13, 2020

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

July 26, 2020
Dear Johnny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love & Respect
Aaron G.
*

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

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

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

Poetry Class
at the Women’s Prison

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

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

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

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

—Kim Stafford
*

Here’s a poem that Katie Radditz shared:

A Blessing

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

—James Wright

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

August 6, 2020

Some Thoughts On Culture That Nurtures

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

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

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

Sometimes we need consolation:

Consolation

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

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

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

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

—Wisłowa Szymborska
*

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

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

The Tuft of Flowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Robert Frost
*

Here’s a poem Kim Stafford sent our way:

The Fact of Forgiveness

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

—Kim Stafford
*

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

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

That’s it for now.

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

–Johnny

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

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peace, love, happiness & understanding

Oh no! Not another Humor Issue!

July 30, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you throw a space party?
You planet.

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

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

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

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

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

May all people be happy!

Johnny

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

July 23, 2020

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

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

Battle or Picnic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings (11/14/19)
*

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

Sifter

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

—Naomi Shihab Nye
*

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

Jeff Kuehner sent a couple poems:

The Panther

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

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

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

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

There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
*

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings

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

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

July 16, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Rivers

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

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

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

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

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

—Kim Stafford
*

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

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

—Sylvia Plath
*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Kim Stafford
*

And he sent some quotes from other poets:

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

—Jane Kenyon
*

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

—Mary Oliver
*

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

www.kimstaffordpoet.com
*

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

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

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

—Johnny

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

July 9, 2020

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

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

—e.e. cummings
*

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Johnny

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

—Lonnie Glinski
*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings

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

July 2, 2020

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

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

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

Infant Joy

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

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

Laughing Song

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

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

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

But then something happens to these innocent children:

The School Boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GARDEN of LOVE

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

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

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

Here’s William Wordsworth’s account:

Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

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

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

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

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

Innocence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Thomas Traherne

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

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

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

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

—Johnny

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

June 25, 2020

Jon Roush sent this poem:

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

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

—Emily Dickinson
*

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

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

Josh appended this quote to his letter:

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

—Frederick Buechner
*

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

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

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

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

Let’s close with more Emily:

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

&

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

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

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

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter

June 18, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Inmate Calls Home

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

—Kim Stafford
*

Howard Thoresen sent a couple of poems:

Life-and-Death

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

—Uchiyama Roshi
*

It Is I Who Must Begin

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

— Václav Havel
*

Reminders from Walt:

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

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

—from “Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
*

And a very short story:

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

—Johnny Stallings

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

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love & happiness newsletter

June 11, 2020

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

—Martin Luther King, Jr.
*

I recently posted this on my FaceBook page:

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

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

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

Love is creative understanding goodwill for all men.

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

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

—Buddha, from the Dhammapada
*

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

1 John 4:8
*

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

—William Blake
*

Blake also said:

Every thing that lives is Holy

and:

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

and:

Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations
*

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

Again, Blake:

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

In 1855, Walt Whitman said:

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

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

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

—from “Song of Myself”
*

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliophiles Unanimous!: the Open Road Literary Salon
2020-06-07
“The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.”
–from Apocalypse by D. H. Lawrence

¡Beloved Bibliophiles!

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

Here’s the Zoom link:

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

I hope to see you there!

peace, love & happiness
Johnny

From the back cover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 4, 2020

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

July 29, 2010

Dear E

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

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

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

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

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

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

peace & love
Johnny Stallings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

—- Naomi Shihab Nye
*
Her poem reminded me of this line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 21, 2020

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

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

The Noble Ninefold Path

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

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

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

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

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

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

May we live in love.
—Johnny Stallings

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

May 14, 2020

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

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

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

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

Please Call Me By My True Names

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

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

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

—Muriel Rukeyser

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

May 7, 2020

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

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reservations: hornyak.will@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Johnny Stallings

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

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

–Hamilton
