Thursday, November 21, 2013

Tales of Forgotten People:The Secret Travels of Those Who Were Devoted


Imagine an obscure religious woman who lives in the forest battling her voices; she has the PTSD of being a brilliant female in 12th century England.  She is a woman in a town, rebuffed by church officials and enclosing herself beside the church, refusing to budge.  The church walls up her room, leaving her to die, yet she outwits them via a hole in the roof through which she emerges at night to forage in the town, always returning to her chamber to sleep through the day except for the occasional pranks she plays with them by making noises and loud prayers.  She gains help from two monks who shield her activities from authorities and drop food to her when she cannot get out.  After several years, the church officials open the wall to find her sitting peacefully at prayer, clothed in robes and a gown. They offer her a hermitage nearby and she insists that she be in charge, will accept young women who will be guided by her, they will live by their own means through weaving and small crops, and they will only accept the ministrations of priests that she picks.   Big stonewalling, so she returns to her room and starts rebuilding the wall.  By now townspeople know of her and revere her, and come to her defense, essentially a demonstration at her room.   Church officials never relent but they do retreat, at least for a while. She determines that she will not be free of their meddling...after all, she has done miraculous things for several years and they are still unwilling or unable to see her as a free person in her own right. so she gathers supporters, prepares an expedition ostensibly for the Holy Land, but actually for a remote place. She makes a parting speech: “I tell you, a thousand years will pass before men will be able to loosen their heartstrings. Most men are so tied to their physical being that the things of heaven are remote to them and can be found only through the strictest control and suffering, which is such a shame since heaven is, in fact, here and now if one but gives up all to it without control, without pain, without wish for gain, with the greatest passion and devotion.” She and twenty others sail west and in fact land in America on what is now Long Island. She becomes a respected Algonquin priestess/leader and her followers settle with the tribe to disappear into their now forgotten history. She teaches the tribe about England’s ways and the local malcontents sail east, landing in Majorca and eventually getting to Portugal and Spain where they join the Basques in the high county.


A man from Italy walks to Afghanistan to find his grandfather who had traveled with Marco Polo; he finds his soul. He also finds a family left behind after his grandfather died (nod to Salman Rushdie).


A woman in colonial America walks out of her village and into the forest, following trails already formed over a thousand years. To one side she sees another trail, partially hidden in the bushes. Following that, she arrives in a little clearing with small bark huts around its edges. She builds herself one and waits. Eventually, the residents emerge from their hiding places. They regard each other silently and then all set to work making dinner together.


There are lives in history, real lives, individuals who found their own way, able to ignore society’s pressures and go with devotion until finding a sane way to live. They break cultural walls. Some of them are killed. Some survive to demonstrate that some can follow “right reason” and a devoted heart through all cultural insanity.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Dec. 2012


Musing, wondering if everyone lives in a small private hell.  If that is why we all spend our days working so committedly on other people’s chores, telling ourselves it is for the greater good, telling ourselves it means something that we do this.  

What does mean something is that we don’t sit alone with ourselves, our fear, our lack of self-esteem.  In fact, we live through others, using another’s, either employers’ or children’s or spouse’s, goals and plans to make meaning in our own lives.  This makes sense, in a sad way, seeing the horrors in the land - children massacred, mayhem on poor streets and in far off lands at war, even in places at peace where mores, simple custom, prevents full personhood to all.  

How does this happen?  Why do we persist in fashion, custom, tradition that cuts into the sinews of humanity.  Woven together, we become twisted up together into knots of little fascist thoughts of control and pride and honor.

Maybe this is my own private hell.  My little selfish life.  Reading, thinking, despairing.  I spend my time distracted with these things rather than with engagement with others, because I cannot fully enter into most forms of fellowship, cannot find it in myself to believe that the things we generally do together are real, honest, true, believably valuable.  Except for the briefest of moments.  In tiny encounters with others, openly shared or not, are quick glimpses of paradise here on earth, even in the midst of the loud, awful noise of our allegedly modern world.  These alone are what sustain me.

Nov. 2012


Today, extreme language describes rather dumb, rather minor discussions.  The looming “economic cliff” is perfect jargon for “let’s divert our emotions while ignoring the problem of, let’s face it, total and utter boredom within Western culture.”

Our passion for football, competition, devastating victories, adrenaline, being the best, all of these come from basic social and genetic imperatives that have been behind so-called Western progress.  If we do not give young people (men especially) challenges equal to the drive and energy that we have bred for for the past several thousand years, we will continue to have it come out in our politics in ways that tear us apart rather than in ways that lead to “progress.”

On the day after electoral loss, conservative angst translates in to war language: have to fight to protect freedom that is in jeopardy due to liberal thinking...etc.  We continue to buy into crisis after crisis.  None of us can find the essential juices that fuel lives.  While we, none of us, believe we are facing life and death.  What are our real needs?  Do we know?  

While we scurry about arguing about markets, we fail to understand the true costs of those markets, confront the mathematics of overpopulation and climate change, consumption and need.  Both liberal and conservative, we prefer mental mazes to that which might repaint our picture of the good life.  We are obviously a species that gets caught in intellectual bubbles.

How do we break out?  Can we save ourselves?  Because I fully believe that we are in jeopardy.  

Now, we have always been in jeopardy.  What I am talking about is not another manufactured crisis, though, but rather a plea for us to reconnect with the inner knowing that has allowed the species to survive.  Can we embrace jeopardy itself?  To do that we have to put people back into the line of fire, so to speak:

Reinstate the draft, and fight our wars openly, shall I say, cleanly (if they have to be fought at all).  Stop agricultural subsidies that produce, for example, high fructose corn syrup and ethanol instead of food with high nutritional content.  Encourage people to grow food locally.  Make clean water and healthy oceans an international priority.  Help people use alternate transportation - bicycles, electric vehicles, walking - by down regulating car size, truck capacities, things like that.  

Dislocate modern society in ways that engage people in their lives.  Give up the idea of “career” and take up the idea of “living.”  I would rather we risk it.  I'll do without yearly Oscars and Monday Night Football.  Can we risk experiencing actual life?  If not, I believe we will not be able to awaken for the real crises that are coming towards us.

lost in america


The threat today is not external.  
In spite of trendy outward focus on terrorism, 
Americans feel the shattered world reaching inward, 
verbal shards pierce hearts, 
shrapnel from an exploded heritage, 
no longer present, 
and we wonder, 
was it real?  
did we really once believe in civil equality, 
civil discourse and protected speech,
that we could be free
to pursue happiness?  
how could we, 
we who once thought it possible,
how could we piss it away?

Shams i Tabrizi - quotes



I wonder what these people think this way of friendship with God is!  He is God who created the heavens and the earth, and who made the universe come into existence.  They think that His love is easy - as if they could just sit with Him, and they talk or listen.  Do you think this is some kind of beef soup you can just take, drink up, and leave?
[Rumi’s Sun: The Teachings of Shams of Tabriz, tr. Refik Algan and Camille Adams Helminski]

What harm comes to the dervish [seeker] from the sourness of others?  If the whole world were swallowed by the sea, what would it matter to a duck?

Sometimes a person may have a single shameful aspect, and yet it veils all of the person’s thousand positive qualities;  what one needs is a single positive quality capable of veiling a thousand disgraceful aspects.

There is a kind of person who has no defects except that he is resentful; this state veils all of his positive qualities.  

On listening to SXSW on the radio



What should I be listening for?  The emotion behind the words?  An accuracy of pitch?  Tight execution of the song?  Artistic overview?  Should I be watching for a generosity towards the audience?  A centered presence on stage?  In short, am I looking for kinship or for some inner aesthetic pleasure when I listen to a band or watch some performance?  Perhaps this is the question for all of my day: what do I recognize, what do I seek, what do I find?

Stanislaw Lem's Cry of the Heart


Somewhere, in one of his stories, Stanislaw Lem wrote about the memento mori, the shadow line of human life.  He said something about how we are taken there outside of our control and “we, like children, argue as if we had a choice (sic)”  Or something like that.  It may have been in More Tales of Pirx The Pilot, though that, too, is a strange remembrance from insights long ago, constructed reality from faded, patched up mental debris.  

I loved his sense that “enough is maturity,” that humans would remain adolescent if possible, that we argue as if we had a choice about growing old or dying.  These were new thoughts for me then.  I was just over forty, and aware for the first time that I was getting older, becoming an older person, in spite of feeling no different inside than I did at ten.  

Perhaps I am an anomaly, but puberty made barely a dent on me mentally, emotionally, psychologically.  I still feel as if I were eight and as if I were an agent of my own in very strange company, that the adult world looks alien and fairly stupidly bent on ignoring obvious stuff.  I still think that clothes for women look silly, even demented, and that the grown men around me appear stiff and rigid as if their insides were squeezed all together into too small a space.  There aren’t that many adult humans who seem grown, in these parts even still.

I remember agreeing that, yes, enough IS maturity and that I had enough of everything most of the time, a life of privilege considering the world at large, and that I was grateful, even for the aging that was taking me, unasked, into older age where, at the very least, I no longer had to worry if I was cool and I might dress as I like without forty-seven explanations.


The Ascent of Man - a prose poem




Silent streaming photons bathe the plant on all sides.  It lifts its head towards warmth and it breathes.  Tiny thrills of energy wave out along tender branching stalks and a sense of peace opens its internal pipes, throbbing with moistured nutrient earth particles.  It drinks carbon from the surrounding air, and extracts minuscule ionic trace minerals which knit the carbon into long flows of new form.  

The flower moves upward into air, day by day, and this day will be a good one.  Its body grows from thin air and sunlight upward into free space and outward, shading tiny ecosystems beneath its leaves where molds and insects live and farm their own domains, destinies intertwined.  It’s funny, but we humans don’t usually remember that organic growth is almost entirely from air and sun, free and clear of eco-nomic expert knowledge of proteins and fat. 

Our eco-sense is mostly some nonsense about fertilizers, after the fact, once removed through the flesh of others.  Yet, everything is given.  We did not invent the sun and the air, the grass that makes our beef, nor the bacteria that allow cows to digest that grass.  We grow independent of our thought, in spite of infantile wishes to remain small, dependent, fed, clothed, pampered by others.  

We gain stature and strength we did not ask for, but, once found, we revel and want more.  Our lofty minds, so fluid, automatically assume shapes from ancestral dreams we do not even know.  (By the time our minds discover ourselves, we have already lost them.)  And yet, we grow.  Our bodies drink air and the air that plants drank, water and the water that fell from that air eons ago.

We emerge upward, and climb and build and scale and challenge ourselves, each other.  This is how it happens, I guess: the games that hone skills become life work, of course, and the life work become games, deception with each other, ourselves.  So wrapped up in skills we forgot.  

We forgot how it is all given, a given that we did not create.  We grew out of thin air, after all, before we even knew it, and then we were there, playing with the pieces, stealing bananas from each other, at first perhaps for fun, but then in earnest.

Clouds form above the flowers, carrying virtual rain high across the heavens - it’s over our heads, that’s for sure - and then they vanish, all on their own, outside of our knowledge.  We can telephone for help, for fun, to annoy or to comfort, but we cannot telephone for rain.  Over our heads, clouds follow messages like virtual wires crossing the heavens, find special fields on which to pour their blessings with an inner eco-sensitivity foreign to us any more.  

We scratch our heads, looking up and down, how to manage this wild far field of moisture-bearing ether?  No?  Well then, we’ll dam the ground flows in concrete, taking and giving according to our own eco-sense of fair-play.  Damn it all, we have visions of power generated from these hijacked waters and we’ll sell it to the ground.  We have to mean something, don’t we?

The flowers have formed blossoms, attracted insect partners, and become full with pollen.  The bees have drunk and flown sluggishly back to their villages, full of treasure.  New seeds formed and petals blew away with the wind, in full maturity.  Tiny ecosystems bloomed below in molds and insects harvested for later need.  Man crouches where he was, pounding ground that is shifting beneath him.  He struggles to stand upright, suddenly discovering that schoolyard struts  are no longer adequate.  He must support his own full weight now.


March, 2012


March, 2012
Looking around Austin, I see business as usual, but there is no business as usual.  The earth has turned toward a different star.  Most people sense this but do not turn to look at what it means.  I see cars driving about and people dressed for success, having lunch and buying organic on the way home from work, but they seem as if the dead walking.  It is so sad, this Occupy time.  And so hopeful.  

Finally.  Finally humanity has a moment again to reflect, to reassess, to reassemble perhaps, like after the plague or the fall of Rome.  And so, my need.  I feel as if all I can do is to wait, as if I were already dead myself, waiting for some greater good to place me where I can be of help, as if I cannot help without commission from outside, as if everything I might do, however good in itself, will be another form of personal ego.

I would like to see Safe Smiles Zones, painted into the sidewalks.  Smiles Stores, where people leave and take  useable goods without money.  Sunshine Hats, which can be exchanged on the fly between strangers.    Sidewalk Studies, where people can stop to sit and talk.  

The next era will be one of connections, locality, smallness perhaps, networks.  The time of individual ego has been exhausted into its logical endpoint: 1% owning 99% to no observable purpose other than because they could.  Perhaps our species has become equally as useless, meaningless, as boring to the gods as the dinosaurs, living only to eat, create wastes, and die.  

I long for meaning.  It is time for magic and sacredness and joy, subtlety, the sublime.  Perhaps the need now is to reach inside for these things, to dig past my conditioning, past the childhood dregs and accustomed responses, to look and seek for those connections, that magic, sacredness and joy.  Time to go past fears.  

Nov. 2011

I am now posting stuff I wrote over the last two years, I hope vaguely in order, up to the present.  It documents the growing sense of unreality I sense throughout our modern life and times.  At times, I have felt great anger, sometimes over losing what feels like the lifeblood, the vital, primal, messy, daring, surging, stirring, sometimes scary, energy of the earth.  That energy seems far away, muted, tied down, as if we little Lilliputians have nailed the gods of the planet to the ground under miles of thin plastic filaments, staked out the gods to perish under a hot sun, and then went off to dance around a campfire over which the last living mammoth roasts in pieces.  Anyway, here's the first post (warning, it's a bit of a rant):


November, 2011

When I was laid off in 2008, I lost medical insurance.  During graduate school, I was on the student plan (at $165 or so a year).  Since being graduated, I applied and was turned down for private medical insurance, because I "had had cancer."  Since I am 63, I cannot yet use Medicaire.  Since I am 63 and had breast cancer 12 years ago, I am apparently uninsurable...though I have not actually used insurance and have had good checkups since then.


Today talked for three hours to an insurance company which offered to give me insurance at twice the normal premium.  They decided that I am hypertensive, use tobacco, and that I require medication for high cholesterol...all incorrect.  My blood pressure averages about 120/75, I do not use any tobacco, and, while my LDL is and has been about 215, the HDL/LDL ratio is terrific.  They, however, diagnose me over the phone, overruling my doctor, whom I saw last week.  Anything for a bigger premium.  am angry and frustrated, underneath the sense of health and well-being, eroding me somewhat.  

I did not ask to be laid off (the month that I turned 60).  I did not really love working in corporations but was willing and able, and expected to continue for 10 more years.  Now, it seems that insurance companies have decided that, since I did not die from breast cancer 12 years ago, they will helpfully create the situation where that could still happen.  Good times!  (The medical system declared me free and clear of cancer after 10 years of good health, but what do they know?).

I was laid off, in part, because the work I was doing (high performance microprocessor design)  went to India.  Remember voting about that?  Neither do I.  If you think that politicians are protecting “good jobs” (remember that slogan?), think again.

Hey, I never asked for a health system run by insurance companies with Wall Street values.  I bet you didn’t either.  I left medical school (years ago) because I could see that doctors were becoming irrelevant...  That is the case now, as my case demonstrates.  Feel warm and fuzzy now?

None of us has had a choice about either how the medical system works or who has access.  Same with the food industry.  We spend twice what other rich countries do on health care and yet are unique in leaving millions of citizens without access to it.  The nutrient density of our food had dropped significantly over the last 50 years, as processing and agribusiness has taken over the food supply.  None of us has had a direct say in any of this.  If you are not upset about these things, WHY NOT?

Enough kvetching.  Life is grand.  Too bad that our country isn’t, so much.

I am the 99%.



Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Well, I'm back.

Well, after four years I am back.  I have written a lot during this time, and will post some of it in succeeding posts.  From August, 2008, until May, 2011, I attended Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary in Richmond, Indiana, and received an M. Div. with an emphasis in writing.  The program was intensive, varied, and, for the most part, really interesting.  My goals at the start were (1) to study the greatest mystery we know about, (2) to learn writing within a non-competitive, non-gimmicky, say-what-you-mean-as-much-as-possible framework, and (3) to learn a lot more about liberal, unprogrammed Quakerism.  I would say that I achieved (2), made progress on (1), and, to put it bluntly, lost interest in (3).

During the fall of 2011, throughout 2012 and much of 2013, I rejoined my Quaker Meeting, serving on committees, going to Yearly Meeting, serving as Recording Clerk, and teaching classes on Quakerism and on the Bible.  I spent some time at Pendle Hill at an FGC consultation.  I read more Quaker books and I transcribed many (over two hundred) pages of early Quaker writing from Early English Books Online.  I came to the conclusion that, at least in my case, modern Quakerism has lost its convincement.

Between 2006 and 2011, I participated in a group that calls itself Sufi, learning Arabic prayers, going to dhikrs (chanting prayer sessions) and gatherings.  Due to misconduct at the leadership levels, I left that group and approached another, more grounded, less doctrinaire Sufi group.  (Yes, yes, these are my opinions...just settle down).

So now it is almost 2014.  I am sixty-five years old, retired with a smallish, but workable income, relatively healthy (so far), and free to divest, to jettison baggage, baloney, and bullshit dreams.  It feels pretty good.