peace, love, happiness & understanding 1/1/26
2026-01-01 - 2026-02-04
photo by Abe Green

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

January 1, 2026

the Dalai Lama has a busy day today
he has to remind everybody
to be kind to each other

F. O. Matthiessen coined the phrase “American Renaissance” in his 1941 book with that title. He was referring to the period between 1850 and 1855, which saw the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

I’ve been thinking about the period between 1955 and the present as a “Second American Renaissance.” By an amazing coincidence this period coincides nicely with my own life. I was born in 1951. I’m using the term “renaissance” loosely to mean an exciting time of transformation and new ideas.

Though Mathiessen’s American Renaissance was short-lived, like the Italian Renaissance, it sowed seeds that continued to sprout everywhere. The Italian Renaissance lasted approximately 200 years, from 1400 to 1600. This Second American Renaissance, now about 70 years old, is still going strong.

When I think of the Italian Renaissance, the first people who come to mind are artists: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Botticelli. But there was more to it than painting. There were the Borgias and Medicis, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Galileo and Columbus. In the same way, the Second American Renaissance contains all kinds of big ideas and important changes.

Here are some of the Big Things that have happened:

Civil Rights Movement, Environmental Movement, Peace Movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, Humanistic Psychology and the Human Potential Movement, Eastern Influences: Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga & Zen, Rock & Roll, Trip to the Moon, Whole Earth Catalog, (return to) Organic Agriculture, vegan & vegetarian diets, advances in medical technology, computers, cell phones—and a Knowledge Explosion.

And something I’m going to call the “evolution of consciousness.” I am going to put forward the crazy idea that there is even an evolution of love and of peace and of happiness and of wisdom. Sounds New-Agey, doesn’t it? And the reason is simple: this is a New Age. There was a certain feeling that many of us had between 1968 and 1972 that a Big Change was underway. We were right.

During a “renaissance,” not everything is groovy. Michelangelo and Da Vinci were rare birds. Not everyone who was living in what we now call “Italy” between 1400 and 1600 were actively remaking the world. The popes and political leaders were horrible people! There was lots of senseless warfare going on—not to mention plagues! So it wasn’t a particularly happy time. But, as in Periclean Athens, things were happening in the human imagination that changed the potential of what it means to be a human being.

That’s what I mean by the phrase “evolution of consciousness.” In one way, consciousness, or awareness never changes. Like Life (with a capital “L”) it just is what it is. But human potential—for understanding and for loving—can change and does change, both for individuals and for cultures. As Heraclitus and the Buddhists say: everything is always changing.

Each of our lives is full of possibilities! Let’s make the most of them in the New Year!

—Johnny Stallings
*

Driven to Exclaim

How can I be so happy!
There’s so much bad news!
Inside, my heart is crying! But
outside, the crows are shouting!
Don’t they heed bad news—ruffians!
Hard times are coming! Hard times
are here! Everywhere I look, pain!
Why are leaders such angry children!
I’m such a child I want to stay up
late loving the ruined world!
Even the crows are shouting
strange joy! All I can do is crow!

—Kim Stafford, Winter Solstice 2025
*

The Robin and You

Extravagant in praise he bows to her.
Tells her she is a falcon-ness, a phoenix
and in his quiet moments a swan.

She knows she is a plain woods robin
and what matters is her song.
Early before the worms, she practices her art.

Her flash of red breast a surprise
only to those who have no feel for the natural world.
Wrapped inside themselves, amidst their suffering

she sings for them.
Her beak is the vessel, her mate the morning dew.
Her only audience, the wise and patient yew.

—Elizabeth Domike
*

There is still magic in the world, whether it be natural or man-made.

Across the Columbia River from Hood River is White Salmon, Washington. Every year in early December members of the White Salmon Chamber of Commerce climb in their cherry picker vehicles and head out to Dock Grade, a half-mile, one- way road that travels from Highway 14 up the hill to White Salmon. They are laden with close to a thousand Christmas ornaments, huge ornamental balls and stars to hang in the trees overhanging the road. The ornaments can be 8”-10” in diameter, and they are suspended 10’ to 30’ up in the bare-limbed trees. You drive up the road and are surrounded by a thousand floating orbs, spheres, globes and stars. It feels like you’re floating through space in a spaceship, with celestial elements surrounding you, enveloping you. Sunlight shines down and lights each ornament from above. It’s a feeling of magic. The kind of feeling you normally lose as you grow up and become “too old” for magic.

But there’s the natural magic—the magic of nature. A terrible wildfire (one of many!) swept through Catherine Creek, a wildflower lover’s mecca, and left the entire area blackened, crushed, destroyed, last summer. A friend has been working on restoration there and she told me to head out and take a look—“Just go!” she said. So after the drive up Dock Grade I drove the ten miles out to Catherine Creek and started tromping around: charred, blackened tree trunks and limbs, and shrubs nothing more than crusty twigs. Heartbreaking. What am I doing out here??!!? But! I look down and I see thousands of tiny blades of green grasses, and atop many of them, the soft purple blossoms of the grass widows: the first wildflowers of spring! In bloom! In December!. They hardly ever appear before late February or early March. People make the trek out to Catherine Creek just to see the grass widows in March, knowing that blossoms mean spring! But here they are, nodding up at me, saying, Yep, the fires of summer gave us a jumpstart. Thought you’d like that. Like???!!! I love it! The magic of nature. The magic of life.

And this was all in just one day!

—Jude Russell
*

“Know that you are a child of the universe.”
—Yogi tea bag wisdom

Musings on a Winter sunny day…

When Winter comes in cold and bright, after days of rain that have turned Summer’s brown grasses back to green, I think, “Oh no, Spring is coming too soon.” I love the long winter dark, which is my excuse for reading and being cozy under quilts even in the daytime, and by the wood stove in the evenings.

Here it is New Year’s Eve and Spring is in the air, coming up all around us in Autumn’s left over leaves—crocuses, scilla, hyacinth, a first pink camellia in bloom, daphne budding out.

Thoreau wrote of this wonder in Walden, about the ponds in Winter, the first crack of the ice signifying Spring has begun. Frozen ponds are rare in the Northwest, and snow in the mountains is a month late, but we have subtle signs. Even in my body that wants to hibernate, I also want to go out looking for sprouts and buds, returning birds and bunnies.

Recently I read about Thoreau’s extraordinary Kalendar. He had a daily habit of walking and noting what was happening through the season in his Nature neighborhood. His Journal is the record of these practices, and the Kalendar is their culminating gesture: the final major endeavor of his life.

The charts of general phenomena derived from Thoreau’s long-held sense that ‘our thoughts & sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons,’ and his equally long-standing desire to more fully experience and comprehend the complex network of relations—what we would now call the ecosystem—of which he knew himself to be a part. Though Thoreau had for many years been keeping lists and charts of individual observations of the natural world—bird migration times, the flowering and leafing out of trees—the Kalendar was a discovery: a crystallization of his long-developing ideas about time, the natural world, and the nature of perception.”

Reading through this makes me aware of how extraordinary it is to be alive, to be here at all at such a blip in the planet’s life. I also see this wonder in my puppy’s exploration of Nature. Being a Border Collie, she is dumbfounded by the squirrels that run up trees, and by birds and even airplanes in the sky—because these are moving things she cannot herd. She at least has chickens and rabbits and a giant Golden Retriever who visits on weekends. Then there is my granddaughter’s wonder at everything new—mushrooms coming out of the ground in leaves that have turned red!!

So, thank goodness for the seasons that return on their own timeline with no prompting from us. Hopefully we all fall in love with the magic of life and finally save as much as we can for the children and creatures coming along.

Here is a poem from my friend Barbara, a gardener and a writer:

Winter Solstice

The long nights recede
As the light slowly returns
And my heart lifts up
Stars in the night sky
Yield to an early sunrise,
Pink and orange sky
And evenings stretch out;
The light lingers longer now,
Warming the new buds
I come more alive:
The light feeds my hungry soul,
Starving for beauty.
More revealed each hour,
Leaves, buds, flowers greet the day
As the sun warms them
Welcome light’s return
Our gift for surviving the
Dark, cold winter nights.

—Barbara Blossom

Speaking of watching the wild, here is a funny aside from Gina Wilson, who sent this:

Gayle Highpine writes in her book on making friends with wild birds:

“To survive among us, they (birds) have to watch what we are doing, and we are odd and different from the other ground creatures they see. Cows and squirrels and cats and deer are understandable, and predictable. If you see enough cows, you have a good idea what to expect from any cow you see. But humans are different. They do different things—sometimes humans do things that nobody’s ever seen. Sometimes a human may change its clothing overnight and yet it is the same human.”

Gina wrote: Never thought about how we change our “skin”—often numerous times a day!

—Katie Radditz

An Sceal (The Story) with Will Hornyak
2026-01-22 - 2026-02-01
The Open Road Recommends:

An Sceal (The Story) Will Hornyak joins Portland’s brilliant Corrib Theatre folks to celebrate St. Brigit and Imbolc with dance, drama, singing & storytelling.
Thursday, January 22, 1 pm
Sunday, January 25, 8:30 pm
Thursday, January 29, 1 pm
Sunday, February 1, 8:30 pm
T.C. O’Leary’s Pub, 2926 NE Alberta, in Portland
Tickets & info: https://www.corribtheatre.org/tickets

peace, love, happiness & understanding 2/5/26
2026-02-05 - 2026-03-04
Bodhidharma

THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding

February 5, 2026

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

—Emily Dickinson
*

Beginning My Studies

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

—Walt Whitman
*

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

—William Stafford
*

“…I believe there is a limit to the number of times a man can profitably inform his neighbor, or be informed by him, that the inexpressible cannot be expressed.”

—Owen Barfield, from the essay “Imagination and Inspiration” in The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays, p. 180
*

A man who encountered the Buddha for the first time was impressed by his radiance.
He asked: “Are you a man or a god?”
Buddha replied: “I’m awake.”
*

some thoughts on Zen

According to legend, one day many people had gathered to hear the Buddha speak. Instead of speaking, he held up a flower. One man, Kasyapa, smiled, and realized enlightenment. Zen Buddhism traces it’s origin to this “Flower Sermon.”

That just about sums it up.

A thousand years later, Bodhidharma traveled from India to China, and sat for nine years facing the wall of a cave. Buddhism had been in China for many centuries by this time, but this emphasis on sitting in silence was what launched the Zen tradition of Buddhism. Bodhidharma is known as the “First Zen Patriarch.”

The Third Zen Patriarch, Seng Ts’an, produced the first Zen text—Hsin Hsin Ming. As an account of what the Zen way of experiencing the world, it is unsurpassed. Here are 28 of the 73 couplets:

the great way (Tao) is not difficult
it has no preferences

make the smallest distinction
and heaven and earth are far apart

conflict between liking and not liking
is the disease of the mind

if its deep meaning is not understood
we strive in vain to quiet the mind

it is perfect like vast space
nothing lacking, nothing left over

don’t get entangled in outer things
or abide in inner emptiness

when the mind is still
all views disappear

trying to quiet the mind
is just more activity

the more talking and thinking
the farther you go from what is

look within for just a moment
and go beyond appearance and emptiness

don’t seek truth
just let go of your views

when the mind is still
the ten thousand things do not offend

without an object of thought, there can be no thinking subject
without a thinker, there are no things

the great way is vast
to live in accord with it is neither easy nor hard

following our nature, we are in harmony with the way
wandering freely, without a care

fixed ideas can’t encompass what is true
they sink into darkness, become unhealthy

if you want to take the one vehicle
don’t reject mental or sensory experience

to accept everything
is to be enlightened

seeking the mind with the mind
isn’t that a big mistake?

profit and loss, right and wrong
get rid of them once and for all

understanding the mystery of one suchness
difficulties are forgotten

no descriptions or analogies are possible
of this state where relations have come to an end

empty, clear, your light shines
without mental effort

thought can’t reach this
beyond knowing, imagining, feeling

in the realm of things as they are
there is no self or other

no here, no there
the whole world right before our eyes

the tiny is as large as the vast
when boundaries are gone

beyond words
no past, no future, no now

Lao Tzu’s advice in the Tao Te Ching to do nothing (wu wei), and the Zen practice of sitting in silence had a big influence on Chinese and Japanese culture, and, more recently, on the lives of many people in the rest of the world.

The idea of sitting in silence seems to many people like a big waste of time. The practice goes back to before the time of the Buddha in India. The Japanese word “zen” is a translation of the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which means “meditation,” or sitting silently. Sometimes, in the quiet, thought and language fall away.

I came upon this idea of blissful silence in Paramahansa Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi when I was 19 years old. He called it samādhi. I wanted to get that!

The Zen texts which are dearest to my heart, and to which I’ve returned again and again are: the Hsin Hsin Ming of Seng Ts’an, Cold Mountain: 100 Poems of Han Shan, translated by Burton Watson, Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, 1622-1693, translated by Norman Waddell, “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R.H. Blyth, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki & the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Han Shan lived in China sometime during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). He spent the last part of his life living the simple life of a hermit in the mountains, writing poems like these:

Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,
Here lives an idle man,
In the daytime wandering over green mountains,
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff.
Swiftly the springs and autumns pass,
But my mind is at peace, free from dust or delusion.
How pleasant, to know I need nothing to lean on,
To be as still as the waters of the autumn river!

The clear water sparkles like crystal,
You can see through it easily, right to the bottom.
Mind free from every thought,
Nothing in the myriad realms can move it.
Since it can not be wantonly roused,
Forever and forever it will stay unchanged.
When you have learned to know in this way,
You will know there is no inside or out!

Bankei gave talks to large groups of people. He said we all have unborn Buddha-mind. He said: “Don’t exchange your unborn Buddha-mind for the mind of a hungry ghost!”

Many of the things Walt Whitman says in “Song of Myself” express what to me is the essence of Zen. Here are a few examples:

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

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

All truths wait in all things.

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

…to glance with an eye, or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times…

Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics is one of my favorite books. I read it slowly. When I get to the end, I start at the beginning again. Blyth explores the Zen way of seeing and being in the world. We come to see beauty and perfection in ordinary things.

For many people of my generation, Shunryu Suzuki served as a contemporary exemplar of the Zen way. He taught us how to sit.

Thich Nhat Hanh is the most congenial Zen teacher to me. I love his friendliness, his gentleness, his sweetness, his joy. He seems to radiate deep peace and love. His book Your True Home has been for me the most useful guide for how to live my human life on Earth. I’ve given away dozens of copies to my friends.

peace & love
Johnny
*

If you want peace love happiness and understanding NOW, RIGHT NOW, all I can say, my friends, is watch (google, facebook, instagram, etc.) the 18 Buddhist monks as they walk for peace. They are walking 2300 (!) miles from their monastery in Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, D.C. They cover approximately 20 miles per day, and have walked between 1900-2000 miles from October 26th when they began.

Their leader is 44 yr old Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, and he began this journey in an attempt to foster and promote peace in his fellow man, in a troubled world. When they began there were a few curious onlookers—a very few. Most just curious to see these burnt-orange robed men walking, mostly barefoot, (but booted and bundled when heavy snow began to fall), along the roadways, first through Texas, then Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia… Soon, however, there were hundreds, and then thousands, tens of thousands followers, the monks now with multiple police escorts to manage the crowds. Men, women, children all lining the roads, bowing their heads offering prayers and heartfelt thank yous, shedding tears, tears of relief, and peace and joy to witness this moment of beauty, this moment of peace in a fractured world. This respite from pain.

The Venerable Bhikkhu says he has been overwhelmed at the response; he never expected this tremendous show of peace, love, happiness and understanding. Now millions are watching, witnessing their progress towards Washington, DC.

The peace which passeth all understanding. This is it.

—Jude Russell

Humanism 2/14/26
2026-02-14 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
HUMANISM

Johnny Stallings will host a dialogue on Humanism on Saturday, February 14th, 2026, at 2 pm (PST).
Here’s the Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82751789337
