BALANCE: SUNLIGHT AND RAIN

A quiet rainy day. It started overcast, then sprinkled and steadily more until it became a full rain falling straight down. The wild violet leaves covering the ground outside the window dance, randomly touched by drops of water dripping from leaves above. The rhododendron leaves catch a falling drop and dance in their random patterns too. I hear in my head voices complaining about the rain. I thought about giving a friend a call, then revised the thought: not while it's raining--he'll complain about it raining as long as I'll listen. Everywhere I go on a rainy day, somebody is complaining about the inconvenience. I just write it off as a case of somebody who wants to be spoiled and have everything just right all the time. I find it refreshing when somebody speaks in favor of rain, its nourishing quality, its ability to keep drought away. I'm recalling someone I knew in the early 1980s who said of a hot, dry summer, God is tired of hearing tv weathermen wanting clear, sunny days. OK, you want sunny days, you got em. You want everything in your life cheery and bright, here it is. Don't forget to enjoy the drought that follows. The sun is nourishing and the rain is nourishing, each in moderation. Too much sun and life forms wither. Too much rain and life forms wither. In my first years on the spiritual path, I found from going to special spiritual places and getting into the swoon of the spirit that later at home I come down from the lofty height and drop way down into depression, minor despair for at least the same amount of time. Balance. In my early years with Meher Baba, others would say to me, You gotta go to Baba's center in India. You'll love it. It's the best feeling. You gotta. Fortunately, I never had the money to go spend a couple weeks in India. A time came when I had the money and the time, but I remembered every time I experienced a spiritual high, next thing was spiritual low for the balance. I'd rather give up the high to avoid the low that follows. I don't want a bi-polar spiritual life.

Later, after several years, I'd hear, You haven't been to India yet? You gotta go! My thought I kept to myself, if I really gotta go, it will happen. It hasn't happened yet, so I must not gotta. Then it came to the place I am now, don't want to go to India. Don't want to deal with airports and sitting strapped in a seat with a window that looks onto the wing for endless hours, the Mumbai airport and the city with throngs of bobbing heads, stepping over the dying and the dead, the scent of old urine everywhere. Massive, intense poverty, arrogant Brahmans, humble Untouchables, racism that makes our racism look casual, chaos that makes our own look like order. Americans go to India to swoon in spiritual emotion and Indians come to America to swoon in money. So I go from a country that is only interested in money to one that has so little that people are only interested in money. Why spend a couple thousand dollars to go from one form of loving money to another form of same? Hindus and Muslims hate each other murderously. Hindus slaughter Muslims and Muslims slaughter Hindus at any provocation. A neighborhood of Hindus with machetes will run through a neighborhood of Muslims slashing everybody they see. It happens the other way around too. I have a problem with the hate in the American air, so why go someplace where they hate even more vehemently? Yes, I know, ignore all that and feel the spiritual high at Baba's tomb. Maybe I could, but why? I go home by way of mechanical flight, endure airports, grow weary of reading and look out the window at the wing for hours, feeling wow I did something big. Get home, cat is depressed and mad at me for being gone so long, everything in my life is on hold, a stack of bills and trash in the mailbox, then fall into depression for six months in grief because I can't have a spiritual high all the time, poor me. I must not be very advanced. I'm a slow-witted dolt who doesn't get anything, trapped in a limited body and mind, woe, aint it awful. Months of addressing this issue in self and reasoning self out of this thinking. 

I'd rather stay home. God, the spirit, the way, creator-sustainer-destroyer, is not localized in India. It's not localized in tombs, shrines, naked men covered with ashes in long beards. I'd just as soon jump into the local waste-water treatment plant for a swim as to bathe in the Ganges. I keep an African mask on the wall that for me is an emblem of balance, a visual reminder. I prefer the waves of my flow to stay at moderate levels, not too high, not too low, a slight pendulum swing, not the full arc. A nice rainy day reminds me that rain is always something to welcome, even when it's too much and the water runs in torrents out of the creek beds. Too much wet, even unto monsoon, is better than too much dry. I've come to a place in the life where I would rather have warm, sunny days and overcast rainy days in waves of moderation that keep the green world happy, and through the green world everything else. I don't want the rush of a spiritual high. There was a time I craved the spiritual high, because I thought I was supposed to. So many people were into the high I felt like it was the real deal and I need to get it too. I don't think it's the real deal anymore. I don't think it has any real importance. Living my life has become my spiritual practice. I have come to see that at least in this phase of my inner growth, everyday life is the shrine I worship at, my home my mosque. I used to feel like I could find that woo-woo feeling in the woods among the silent trees. I can recall a few times in the past that woo-woo feeling took me over for a day and made me believe I was doing something really special. Then I crashed for a period of time. I don't like the crash. And I don't believe the high is all that important. This summer has been a good one of balanced weather. Three days to a week of sunny days, then three or so days of light rain and overcast. The temperature has mostly been in the lower 70s during the day and lower 60s, sometimes 50s at night. This is the balance I've come to like in my spiritual life. Sunlight and rain in balance, keeping my interior life lush and green sparkling with wildflowers.

I don't want to go to church to hear a self-called preacher bombast about Satan. In the course of a phone conversation with my Christian mother, she'll say Satan a dozen times and never the name of Jesus once. She warned me a couple years ago that I'm not afraid enough of Satan, "You better watch out." My thought: I'm not the one paying attention to Faux news and giving my power to people spewing hate. She's never one time said to me anything about the power of love, but multiple, multiple times stressed the power of Satan. It tells me her "Christian" church is awfully dedicated to the dark side. OK, they like the dark side. It's good for them. I grew up in that inner darkness that called  itself Christian and ran for my life. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist church from time to time, primarily for the singing, and the Primitive preachers are true to the spirit. However, when the expectations begin, I'm gone. In church, expectations start immediately. My last visit to a Primitive church a man said to me, How long's it been since we seen ye last, brother? I said about a year (actually 2). He said, You need to do a little better'n 'at. My unspoken thought: I will do much better; you'll never see me here again. In my own personal belief system, love is not about intimidating others into believing what I believe with the threat of hell if you don't see it my way. I call it arrogance, not love. The Lord told them to admonish the ones that don't walk the line. And the Lord told me to go my own way, bye-bye. I like to maintain my balance doing right by others and myself. I don't even want woo-woo spirit in my life anymore. I've come to where I see the spiritual path is right here at home in my own life among the people I live among. No need to seek enlightened masters to make me spiritual. No need to observe any ritual or belong to a group, abstain from liquor, read scripture, or anything. A brief visit with someone I see in town by chance can be as great a spiritual experience as praying at a tomb in India.          

photos by tj worthington

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OLD MAN RIVER

Talking with my neighbor Gary this afternoon, we were connecting a battery charger to the battery in my car, trying to figure out how to read the needle. He suggested something and said, "Wouldn't you think?" All I could say was, "I don't know what to think, ever, about anything." Everything in this world is a confusion to me anymore. I've spent my life trying to understand it and have failed. I know less now than when I started wondering. I've come to the Socrates place of saying the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Jesus affirmed Socrates by quoting him when he said, "Know thyself." In one way of looking at it, what else can we know, but ourselves? Our experience is our own, even shared experience. Self is about the most enigmatic subject there is to study. Self-awareness is the beginning of the spiritual path, the path of know thyself. Shedding false selves periodically, moving forward, moving in on the reality of the soul is how I have to characterize the path. No matter how far along the path one is, the goal continues infinitely far ahead, like Ralph Stanley's Great High Mountain. Therein lies the allure for me, even mystique. It's the road that goes ever on. I'm drawn to moving with my own flow. When I get there, when I ride the rhythm of my flow, contact with the world "out there," like bank, grocery store, gas station, can rattle my flow such that I fall down on the bed returning home and don't move for an hour. I lost touch with my flow, going with traffic, driving in parking lots looking all the way around for somebody backing up or no telling what, anything, paranoia about highway patrol--quotas have gone up appreciably in the last couple years. I see scatter-brained behavior everywhere, people with more to do than they can handle trying to keep up, multi-tasking, tweeting, stopping whatever they're doing to answer the cell phone. Conversation in America amounts to interrupting anecdotes with anecdotes. Interruption is the nature of conversation now. Cell phones interrupt with urgency. I've become so weary of interruption as expected conversational etiquette, I'd rather not talk. Now, when interrupted, I let go of everything that went before, intentionally forget it, knowing we're not coming back to it, let it go from mind because it is over. Superficially is the only way I can talk comfortably with anybody in this time. It's an unspoken code in America that when you see two people talking, you are duty bound to interrupt them. It's inescapable.  

 

 

I can't defeat a social trend so pervasive it has become the nature of the American character. And I cannot say this shortening of collective attention span down to nothing is necessarily a bad thing, because I don't know. I don't want to live in another country, so I adjust to the social context of the moment. Americans have become collectively addicted to distraction. The attention span that thirty years ago was about that of a cat is now nonexistent. There is little to no attention span left. Television has been sacred from the beginning. By now it is the holy of holies. I have not paid attention to television since 1961, but for brief spells for a car race and at other people's houses. I call it MBC, Mammon's Broadcasting Corporations. Mammon is a false god, and not a benevolent one, the ultimate trickster. The continuous broadside of sound demanding attention and flashing visuals equally demanding attention makes me crazy after a few hours. Beyond a few hours my head goes numb and I fall into a grumpy mood. I want to be home and hear the birds. A nation of people obsessed with money, where money is the only value, has its foundation in the shifting, whispering sand. Andy Warhol suggested attaching the amount of money somebody paid for one of his paintings to the wall instead of buying the painting. Anyone who sees the painting sees how much it cost. Ah, you have a Warhol!, more impressed by its dollar value than the image. The only thing the painting means on the wall is I-can-afford-it. This has a great deal to do with why I feel it refreshing when I see art on somebody's wall that is an image put there in appreciation, whatever it is. I have friends with a stunning waterfall painting on the wall, a print that came with the frame for maybe ten dollars. It has a waterfall in it that is painted in such a way it pulls the eye closer and closer. The closer you look, the more the waterfall looks like water. It's a gorgeous waterfall painting that looks almost like it's in motion. The image is loved in the home for its subjective aesthetic value instead of its dollar value. They appreciate that they got so much for so little.

Earlier, when I realized the car's battery was dead from trying to start it, I opened the door, turned in the seat with feet on the ground, looking at the bank of wildflowers across the road, thinking: dying really is a solution. One more reason to rejoice when I see it coming. I recall my fear of death falling away some years ago. I've had to watch it ever since, it's so easy to relax into accidents by any of two hundred thousand ways. Before, I had an automatic pilot that took care of self-preservation. Now I have to pay attention to self-preservation and remind self not to be frivolous with this life. It is important to be in the body until this journey is completed and the time is right to move on to what's next. I do it consciously by understanding this lifetime needs to come to its own balance before going on. I don't know when that time is. It's important not to know. It has to be important; nobody knows their time but on death row. I catch myself drifting into thinking not much matters because I don't have a lot of time left. Another mind tells me it matters right up to the last second. I even look for ways to perk myself up, give self incentive, legitimate reason, not fake reason. I think I can distinguish the fake reason as ego, thoughts about legacy. Twice I have been asked by peers what I will leave for my legacy. I answer, Nothing, not even a tombstone. But you have to leave some kind of legacy. Why? The only thing important to me in this lifetime has been my own spiritual path. I take the path for a human path, not a tightrope with hellfire for a net, but a path through a loving universe where the only problem is the human mind, the driver's seat of illusion.

I've characterized the spiritual path in my own vision something like water from a mountain spring flowing on its way to the ocean. I'd call the spring the time of self-awareness, committing to the path. It makes a fast-moving stream that rushes down waterfalls, splashes over rocks, races through rapids, churning, dramatic. The self predominant before, changing fast. Changes happen first on the inside and manifest on the outside in sometimes chaotic, seemingly out of control ways occurring so fast, simultaneously and in succession, it makes the head spin and question one's own authenticity. As a result of understandings and insights, we change first on the inside. Some of the ways of thinking that went before are not practical any longer. They don't work, don't satisfy. People we know and are close to drift away, one at a time, and we wonder what is going wrong. I thought I was becoming a better person and my friends are abandoning me. It's a lonesome period of time until waking one morning and realizing you're in a world of new friends, friends more compatible with the new self than the ones that fell away. The waterfall changes to fast moving creek into fast moving river, and slows its pace at lower elevations, widens with smooth surface, flows into the delta, twists back and forth like a serpent sunning on a rock, turning in on itself, taking its time in slow motion. Closer to the sea it stops and backs up at high tide and flows again with the lowering tide. I feel like I've been through the waterfalls, rapids period and the fast-moving river period that lasted at least 20 years. My path has characterized the second half of this lifetime. I feel like I've gone through the slow-moving river and now am flowing in the delta, slowly, slowly, twisting this way and that, direction changing continually. Meandering is the word. I feel like I've been meandering within over the last few years. I feel honored in this lifetime to have the chance to complete this cycle in the Way from a mountain spring to the sea. I don't believe this is the path of my enlightenment in one lifetime. I see it a  cycle through this lifetime in self-awareness, saying in signs I've done well not to get side-tracked, passing through opportunities for distraction, indulging some and letting them go, returning to the flow, allowing the flow, trusting the flow that just keeps rolling along.       

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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EVERYDAY LIFE AS SPIRITUAL PATH

michael heizer

My friend Carole and I were talking on the phone this morning, as we do every morning, and, as usual, we talked freely in a free-flowing way, whatever comes up. We have nothing to hide from one another, no hesitations about trust, and where our belief systems are concerned, she is the only one I know with mine, and I'm the only one she knows with hers. I believe I can say I know her higher self and she knows mine. I use higher self because it is even hard to find in oneself, let alone somebody else. Our spiritual interior lives are both educated from the East, India in particular. Yet India is only the present location of ancient wisdom that goes all the way back to Neolithic times. I point out that our higher selves look to the East, noting there is nothing in the West to look to for anything having to do with one's interior life, like wisdom. I once told a zealous fundamentalist baptist that I looked to the wisdom of the East, even had a guru. It was all over the place next day that I'm a devil worshipper. That's no big deal. Anybody who knows me, knows it's not so, and people that don't know me, I don't care. Just another anonymous name to gloat in self-righteousness over. I knew that would be next, and said it just to see. He was not somebody I have ever spoken to with anything near the word trust, a preacher's husband, and my respect for this guy is an empty bag. I do things like that to amuse myself when a moment arises. When my buddy Justin was in high school running with a rowdy bunch, more like a crowd, he told everybody to stay away from that old man at Air Bellows, "He'll shoot your ass! He don't care!" Justin didn't tell me what he'd done until a decade later. His dad and I were friends, and Justin had been my friend since he was his baby's age. He said he told them this to keep them from doing shit to me. He said, "I knew the shit they got into, I wanted to keep them away from you." I thanked him, sincerely. I knew the kind of shit they got into, too, though not from the inside like he did.

 

michael heizer

 

Carole and I agree daily that we like not having much future in this world. We tend away from the news and more toward the spiritual, meaning the spirit in everyday life, living in relation to the spirit, the flow of the spirit. Neither of us meditates or goes to workshops or anything to do with "spirituality" and certainly have no involvement with religion. She watches no tv and listens to NPR radio seldom, same as I do. She reads historical novels, mostly, from the library. Every couple weeks she takes home a stack of books. And she reads books having to do with Meher Baba, as do I. My reading is all over the place. I've been interested in contemporary fiction and art films from mainland China over the last decade or more, and the history of China. I like reading American, French and Chinese poetry, as well as American and world fiction. Poetry is the only source I've found in the West that concerns one's interior life, the life we really live. That started changing with the New Age period of the 1980s. I worked in bookstores from 1965 to 1975. Very little spiritual kinds of books were available. What was available was largely out of print and hard to find. Since 1975, spirituality has become a whole new genre of American writing. Some of it is nonsensical and some of it has very practical relevance. It's good to have the whole spectrum to pick from. At the time I fell in with Meher Baba, I was most interested in American poetry, the Twentieth Century, and for the first time realized poetry had been my source for spirituality through the time of the life I rejected all that. Brought up in the belief system of Kansas fundamentalism, which makes Southern fundamentalism look logical, I see the bozo Westboro preacher that died recently from Topeka is a good example of the fundamentalism I came up in. I left that mind like an arrow pulled all the way back as far as it can go and let go. I feel like my life in that time amounted to an arrow being held at full tension until the string almost broke with frustration, anger, confusion, depression, suppression. The arrow took off like a rocket and sent me as far away from that mind inside myself as the full strength of the bow could push it, full speed.  

 

michael heizer

 

The problem I had that I did not know I had in that time of brow-beating religion was not understanding yet that God and religion are about as equal as a flame and a rock. I was rejecting false religion believing it the nature of God. It was fifteen years of peeling away the onion layers of bullshit I'd been fed in the name of God. Getting down to the core of that kind of thinking, it comes from ego, not God. I had to wash my mind of about everything I'd been taught by way of religion, threw the baby out with the bath water. It all had to go. I needed to get myself down to neutral. About the time I had convinced myself to my own satisfaction "God is dead," I learned it is not God that's dead, but religion. Meher Baba taught me that in a very short time, a couple days. God is alive and well and very much active in our everyday lives. That's where God lives, in our everyday lives. Our everyday lives is what all the gospels are about, not wearing a tie to church. God takes a human voice and explains the real thing is in our hearts, our attitudes toward life, extending ourselves to the benefit of others. Not because it's God's commandment. It's simply sound counsel. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is as much a natural law as gravity. What we put out into the world comes back. Donkeys are the first example to come to mind. They return what they get right now, like cats and children. It is automatic behavior in all living beings to return what we receive immediately. You might say it's the nature of life. I feel like Jesus was saying, use this principle to make your life better, use it for a path to inner peace. Be conscious of words and behavior, mindful. Like Melvin told a friend who is on his way to prison, First one that disrespects you in any way, knock him on his ass. That tells everybody you'll fight and they'll leave you alone. In other words, you give back what you receive right now. It works the other way too. Regard others with inner peace, no hidden agendas, respect, and everything that comes back is of the same nature. If you want to be respected, respect the people around you in every interaction. Soon you'll live in a world full of respect and wonder what happened that changed everybody.

 

michael heizer

  

 I'm thinking about  friend I've not seen in a lot of years. She'd been hanging with an odd bunch of people that kept her on the verge of bonkers all the time. Something changed in her. She came to some new understandings of her relationship to the world around her. Friends started dropping away, so fast and so many she became a little bit hysterical. She was telling me about this on the phone, and I felt I had insight into what was happening, because I'd noticed in myself that when I change within, the people around me change, some fall away and new ones come in. I suggested she wait and see what happens. I said those old friends have to go with your old way of thinking; they're interwoven. With patience, you'll see new people coming in and new circumstances. It was the biggest change of her life. Right away, circumstances started changing for her and more reliable people came into her life. At the time, I wasn't sure that what worked for me would work for her too, but it was all I had to offer. I find in myself, I have cycles too. From one cycle to the next, a rather remarkable change occurs in that some people fall away and others come in. My cycles tend to seven years. In one cycle, I did the radio show at the local AM station of mountain music for seven years. In that time, about all my life had to do with the music in the area. Next cycle I started making videos at regional music venues for YouTube and writing articles about the music of the region for an old-time music magazine. Had the inspiration for the next one today. It won't be until October, giving plenty of time to consider how I want to approach it. I want to write about the Hillbilly Show, an annual event in Sparta for the last 20 years, this the 20th. Theme this year will be music of the county.  I will be the one making video of the whole show to put on dvd for sale to the people that want them. The one we've used in the past to make video of the show puts the equivalent of a cell phone on a tripod and lets it run. I will be doing some hand-held and tripod some, move around, different angles, lively images. Use the zoom. This cycle has about two more years. I went into this cycle curious to see if I'd make it through it. Made it this far.  

 

michael heizer

 

 

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