A DAY IN THE FLOW

jenny in the sun

 

I've become convinced the visit by young friend in despair over his life was a spiritual experience. I did not see it at the time, because I did not want to interpret, rather merely to listen, not objectively, but subjectively, as in life, to someone talking straight from the heart. I had to listen with my heart to hear it. I let go of my own thoughts and gave over to his, flowed with his thought process, allowed him to lead his own way. I did indeed feel a flow, that I had aligned myself with the flow, allowed it to carry me as I heard my friend's story in minimalist language that sometimes had me thinking this was a Pinter play.  I did not realize it at the time that my own continuous mind play had settled down like a cat on a pillow in sunlight. All my mind was on what he was saying. I never wondered or thought about what I'd say, just followed what he said with what came spontaneously to mind. I did not realize my mind was so focused, never said, "let's pray about it," or even thought prayer within. I was thinking this was about him given a conundrum he had to find a way to settle for himself. I'm happy to assist, but it's his work to do. He was so turned off by religion, I did not want to imply I knew better than he did, because I don't, which helped me stay away from the clichés we use for God and love that misrepresent both.
 

sofia in the sun

 

He already knew the innermost self is nameless, it's called the soul, but any word naming it becomes meaningless. I wanted to honor his own insight by not using names of that which cannot be named. As he told me these insights he had figured out for himself, I told him they are the same as my own, because it's true and to affirm his thinking. Your thoughts are not weird. I also did not realize my heart was glowing with love vibration for this child of the most high traversing his own Valley of the Shadow of Death. I was with the flow of his story such that it felt like any social interaction, consciousness to consciousness. I did not realize that I had opened to the spirit within. Next day, yesterday, I carried some hay out into the meadow for the donkeys midday in the sunlight. Thought I'd sit with them and visit. I sat on the ground between them, talked to them, feeling a mild golden glow between us, feeling their inner stillness, not thinking of it as that, not thinking about it at all, just feeling their flow grazing hay in the sunlight after a cold night. Jack came up behind me and put his chin on my left shoulder, sniffed my ear, my face, my breath, extended his whole jaw over my shoulder and pressed the side of his head to the side of my head and held it there.
 

donkey jen

He raised his chin up over my head and placed it on my right shoulder. He moved his whole head over my shoulder. He pressed the side of his head to the side of my head again and we stayed like that awhile. He moved his head away, pushed my shoulder with his side a little bit, a body nudge. He turned around and backed up to me, very gently pressed his back knees to my back and stood there. I soon wondered what he was up to. I turned around to look. His tail was rising and his bung-hole was puckering toward dropping some donkey biscuits. I thought, What the hell? Jack's energy was very quiet, still and deliberate, and Jenny grazing quietly about two feet to my right. I realized Jack was aiming to gift me his shit. I knew it is not dirty to them like it is to us. I tend not to think it dirty. However, I did not feel like I wanted a steaming donkey biscuit rolling down inside my collar. I hesitated, because I felt this was important to Jack, but really didn't want to participate in whatever ritual Jack was performing.
 

donkeys in the sun

I rolled onto my feet and said, "I don't want you shitting on me, Jack." He looked disappointed like I'd hurt his feelings. I came to the house and later, wondering what Jack was doing, it came to me that I had been talking to him about us being friends for over two years, and this was his way of claiming me with his scent, a ritual of the bond between us, a blood brothers rite. He wanted my scent to be the same as his and Jenny's. The three of us are bonded as friends and he wanted us to smell alike. Then I was sorry to be so slow minded as to fail to get it in time to let him honor me with his scent. A shower is always an option. Perhaps I would have if I could have thought of it in time. I don't know. I woke that morning feeling in the spirit from the experience the night before. By in-the-spirit, I mean when everything flows with perfect timing. I went into town and felt mild joy with everyone I spoke with. That it put me in the spirit told me the experience night before with friend was, for both of us, a spiritual experience. I learned much from it and I believe he did too. Both of us benefited. I may be interpreting Jack by a projection of my own mind. Looked at as Jack, himself, the donkey I know, he likes to play straight-faced tricks on me. He more than likely wanted to see me jump.

jack contemplates his shadow

 

 

 

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HAN SHAN AND BACKWARDS BALLCAPS

brice marden

han shan series

 

Things are changing so fast within, it makes me wonder what is going on. I have my friends I like to see, and do see them, and find the circle shrinking. Not because of people dying out, rather that I am drawing inward at a noticeable rate. Like when I'm used to driving fifty and then am going eighty. It takes more focus. The purpose behind the change from urban living to country road was to move inward, solitude however I define it. I saw my house a monastic retreat, a monastery of one following no religion, the still point of my interior journey to the heart of things invisible. I could not lock myself down in a belief system evolved over centuries and millennia of filtering through the male ego. I mythologized self an American Han Shan living outside the world on Cold Mountain. The likeness was thin, though the spirit close. Han Shan's Cold Mountain has accompanied my time in the mountains like he and I lived parallel lives in different times, different parts of the world, he in the mountains of southern China, I in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, America. It is here that I chose to live out my life in the world, not of it.

 

 

han shan

 

 

70

 

Talking about food won't make you full,

Babbling of clothes won't keep out the cold.

A bowl of rice is what fills the belly;

It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm.

And yet, without stopping to consider this,

You complain that Buddha is hard to find.

Turn your mind within! There he is!

Why look for him abroad?

 

                         ----Han Shan

                           tr Burton Watson

 

 

han shan

 

Han Shan has been my companion in these hills. Many others too, Robert Bly, John Berryman, Henry Miller, Tu Fu, a long list of good reading, Julio Cortazar, Naguib Mahfouz. I have a way of seeing other people's stories, poems in relation to mind, heart and spirit. I like my scriptures to have all three. Poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, histories, I read in the same spirit as reading scriptures. I say, why do a select number of books about God take precedence over a story of someone's life, the poetry of Nirala, Rumi, Hafiz, Rilke, Yeats? Possibly that a scripture is something one can read many times and see new meaning every time as one advances along one's path. The Gospel of John is about as incredible as scripture gets, and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist Sutras, discourses of masters who have reached enlightenment. What I mean by mixing poetry and fiction and stories of people's lives with scripture is the subject of all the scriptures is the human heart. The people I know, I know by their hearts. Since letting go of desires, I have unfolded to know the people I know by their hearts.

 

 

brice marden

han shan series

 

It's not like I see good and evil in somebody's heart. Not at all. The heart is where the other is coming from. I don't mean heart like purity or perfection, but heart as in where we're coming from on the inside. Everyone else is coming from the same place in themselves. Some may have the energies blocked off and don't flow so well emotionally. I see what we call good in everybody's heart. I see the heart of everyone I know is where the real individual is. That's who I like to connect with in people I know. Somebody whose heart is not open is of no interest to me. I like to know real people, people who live their lives as themselves without masks. My friend Lucas, retired English professor, once said, "When I see a guy with his ballcap on backwards, I know he has nothing to say that I want to hear." When I need a good laugh, I don't need to rent a Marx Bros movie. Only need to remember Lucas saying that. I have laughed over this sentence a thousand times, at least. I think it every time I see a backwards hat. It comes to mind and I laugh sometimes out loud. I know he knows what he is saying. He's talking from experience.

 

 

 

My experience with ballcaps backward is mountain boys who drive pickups, work construction jobs, a style of a given generation, the tattoo generation that listens to heavy metal. Them and guys in punk bands are the hat-on-backwards people of my experience. I think they're cool people. It is as in-yer-face an anti-intellectual statement as The Sex Pistols. It's a style, like long hair is a style, short hair is a style, hat forward is a style, hat backward a style, brim straight across a style, brim bent in a curve a style. Milly Richardson wears ragged old tshirts with holes in them. It's her style. Ross, her brother, wears cammo pants all the time. It's his style. Justin wears a tshirt, the image a deer head with big rack. It says, White Tail Hunter. It is truly Justin's style. Kid Rock is Justin's style. If I looked askance at Milly's ratty tshirts I'd take her for nobody home. But when I know Milly and Justin by their hearts, who they are, I see full human beings, the whole person present, people I'm happy to have the opportunity to know.

 

brice marden

han shan series

 

 

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JUST SAY NO TO OBEDIENCE

 

 

This silly cartoon struck me funny. At the same time I laugh, sorrow is mixed in with the mirth. First thing I thought was my weariness of cartoon references to Jesus healing the sick for free, as if a medical profession is measured by religion. I'm tired of political chicanery making comparisons to Jesus, like what-would-Jesus-do? How can I guess what Jesus would do? He wasn't always sweet and politically correct. There is the ancient saying that God works in strange ways. Like I wouldn't presume what God might "do," I wouldn't presume what Jesus might do. Jesus was simply open to the flow of the Spirit, and I would never presume to guess what "the Spirit" might do in any circumstance. My most recent obvious answer to a prayer came the next day and in a very surprise form that reminded me, God works in strange (unpredictable) ways. This is why I would rather pray for help on a difficult decision where I cannot see what is the best way to go for all concerned. I may not pray as much as I'm "supposed to," though I prefer to take responsibility for my own decisions and learn how to make better decisions for myself as I go along. It's when I'm stumped that I go to prayer. And when I see things unfold, I think: I would never have seen that solution.

 

magritte

 

 

Maybe if I prayed more the Spirit would flow through me too. Then I'd get crucified. I don't want that, so I don't push it. Like I was thinking of my friend Jr Maxwell I took for a man of wisdom, a wise man. He saw himself a fool and laughed off any suggestion of wisdom. But the way I saw it, a wise man in this world could only be a fool. Living in this world goes so counter to wisdom that someone with wisdom could only be dismissed a fool. I see babies come into this world straight from the spirit world where love IS. I see their eyes wide open loving everything they see, the spirit of love beaming in their eyes. Then I see, a step at a time, the light in the eyes shaded over a little bit at a time as the child is taught how we live in this world, until by the time a kid is ready for school, the light in the eyes is long gone, further in some than in others, and I watch that process all through life until we get to men in their 70s and 80s locked down in mental compartments, a lifetime of conclusions hardened into cement in the man's head until the thinking process has hardened unto reaction. When a man gets there, he shuts out understanding as pussy (feminine--weak) and can't take anything seriously spoken by a feminine voice, even on evening news.

 

 

 

Having lunch today with a woman friend I would freely call intellectual, a brilliant woman, a brilliant human being, and, in my way of seeing, very much a true human being, I told her that in this phase of my life I have seen men really deficient in their own humanity. I know very few who are what I would call a true human being. That doesn't mean there are none. I'm wondering if it has to do with several thousand years in our evolution of consciousness, boys growing up to be warriors, obedience the rule among warriors. It's the rank that matters, not the man. Do as you're told, not what you think is right. I see the men of the right wing in America today, about half the male population, the cement-heads who believe killing solves problems. Short of killing, hitting solves problems. Isn't that the great American truth. At the rate of 30,000 a year we Americans kill one another with guns. How many by other means? We're the killingest people on earth. All my life I have seen the passion for killing in especially working class men, the warrior class. Pop entertainment knows that killing is guaranteed box-office, so we grow up watching movies and tv where killing is hip, no consequences, no funerals, no life, faceless, a mushroom. 

 

robert longo, bodyhammers

 

 

A man I have known for a lot of years has wanted to kill somebody all the time I've known him. The passion must have its beginning in his childhood. My guess is he'd discover on the psychiatric couch after about five years that it was his daddy he wanted to kill. He likes to threaten that he will kill somebody, from time to time, but he'll never get it done. He's a bully and bullies are chicken. Bullies only pick on smaller, weaker, dependent. They never do anything that requires courage. Having no courage makes them bullies. I don't know any women with this kind of affliction. Surely there are some, maybe several. They might be playing roller derby. The movie BONNIE AND CLYDE comes to mind, Clyde showing Bonnie his gun and Bonnie running her fingers along the barrel made me think of two young people I knew who were once lovers not long out of high school. Seeing them as Bonnie and Clyde gave me a better understanding than I had before of what Bonnie and Clyde were like as people. Kids not long out of high school, or that age anyway, "look at my gun, baby," and she's so impressed. I have an underlying feeling that the rate of murder in America may be the karmic return on how the early white people on this continent took it. They killed an entire continent of people with guns, killed in the wild wastefully, unto extinctions that are ongoing, wiping out the natural world that sustains us. It seems a karmic debt that is being paid by people killing people in the world of the conqueror at such an alarming rate, and nobody is alarmed. It's no more than an eye-popping statistic the first time you see it. The second and third time it's familiar, no longer interesting.  

 

 

robert longo, legacy

 

 

 

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