April 17, 2018

The kitchen design guy from IKEA came out to plan, I paid for full service, and the terrific new kitchen with appliances was complete within 23 days! I can’t say enough good about the product and the process. Twenty three days! I didn’t think it could happen so quickly, so efficiently, or with such satisfactory results. Now for happy cooking.

My dear cousin Susan came for a weeks visit following the completion of the project. Great art, great food, great connection. I’ll return the favor by visiting her in Taos toward the end of the summer.

So, the hiatus announced on March 26 is lifted, and I will resume exposing the contents of my mind. Lucky you.

 

March 26, 2018

Hiatus – I love the way that word looks!

About a month ago I was looking at my little kitchen, shabby and sad, and a switch in the back of my head activated. Its message was, get thee out to IKEA and spend some money. And I did, and this week is the time it all comes together, new cabinets, new appliances, new countertop, new paint job thanks to the contributions of my BFF Ann. It’s going to be splendid I know.

In the meantime, my condo has been in disarray and dusty. You can imagine how I hate that, and the dogs and I have been out of sorts. So, thats all this blog gets for this week.

Hi, Atus! See you next week.

March 19, 2018

Sometimes I will post ideas that are incomplete. This is one such.

 

A circle of stones in a clearing

Burning wood, embers, smoke

Shadows flickering on the faces of my tribe

My own kind, like me

We band together for comfort

Security, safety

Huddled together

Around the campfire

Heres my tribe

In our little circle

We cannot see or know whats beyond

What’s it all about?

 

Humankind seems addicted to puzzling about the nature of things

And imagining explanations for the mysterious

And to searching for safety

Deeply adverse to the unknown

Fearful of whatever might lurk in the shadows

At the edge of the campfire

 

We all need :

Meaning – whats it all about?

Purpose – what am I to do?

Community – who are my tribe?

I have a good idea about what meaning and purpose mean to me

I puzzle about what it means to be in community

 

Ironic that I should have chosen a community of faith

When I do not share that faith

That I should have chosen a community built on belief

When I don’t share that belief

Scripture and prayer and the rites, and service

From my childhood they impelled me on,

Until the construct could no longer hold.

 

Scripture they say is the divinely inspired word

It seems to me to be a collection of stories

Dreamed up by the frightened tribe

Gathered round the campfire in the dark

Trying to make sense of it all

Dreaming of a mighty king to protect from the Enemy

To provide sustainence, to dispense favors

And to assure that whatever the individual is

Does not end at death

And to dispense rules for good behavior that will lead to a glorious afterlife

And proscribed behavior that will bring about punishment

 

And so the tribe builds beliefs

What we agree with we call right

What we disagree with we call wrong

What we like we call good (God)

What we hate we call evil (Devil)

And the tribe believes that I was born in sin and am prone to sin,

That I must have a savior to redeem me from my intrinsic fault

And the tribe believes that right and good behaviors

Advance the well-being and safety of the community, leading to heaven

And wrong and hateful behaviors are dangerous to the community,

Leading to hell and everlasting torment.

 

But then I grew up and away from this

To me it seems primitive and superstitious nonsense

How can I be part of a community based on scripture?

Belief is a trap

It comes between you and the ultimate reality

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 12 2018

Time passed

Or did it?

Was it maybe the wind,

was it a fever,

was it the hurt of love unrequited,

was it the Big Parade,

was it gone with the,

was it life itself passing,

was it gas?

Was it pass or fail,

perhaps pass in a pail,

pass the taters ma,

was it a passing fancy,

was it.

Stop now,

the impulse has passed.

Passed a big one.

Passed the final exit,

what now?

Lawsy Effie,

I cain’t believe she done passed,

praise wasshizname.

Stop.

Now.

February 4, 2018

 

Tiny little house

made of paper,

home for a wee beetle.

Webeetle weeble.

Wobbling.

Weeble people wobble

down the wide walk way

to wait for the widdle bus.

Wock on wide weeblewomen.

Whoa, wazzup witcha weeblemen?

Widdle weeblekid why ya whinin?

Wind it down now.

February 24, 2018

Be willing to look at the biggest picture. Be willing to seek the pattern that overlies all, for the Gestalt within which form and meaning can accrue. It will require seeing into the far distance beyond the province of the known, apprehension of the unknown, that which has not been experienced. It will require new perception, new lenses absolutely clear and powerful. It will necessitate the abandonment of the old instruments, the destruction of all internal filters, the elimination of all concepts. It demands pure seeing.

There is a seeing that is like a razor cleaving space, like a laser beam of incalculable intensity. It cuts absolutely through time and space, it penetrates to that which is beyond. You cannot will yourself to see this way, you cannot make any move to approach it. It is a grace, given from that place which is no place, that state which is no state. It comes from out of the blue. It is a slit in the fabric of things and times and places. Through this rent pours the unspeakable, the unknowable.

If you are full, if you are possessed by your self, there can be no room for the grace. Thought and knowledge and concept and memory might fill you up, might filter all that you see through the constantly recycling chaos within. Through these filters there is no true seeing. Thought and knowledge and concept must come to a stop, time which is their matrix must come to a stop. The rushing momentum forward must end. The momentum of time and thought must be burned away, the residue washed clean. The restless movement toward knowing must sit still.

How can this be? It might appear to be not possible, you might turn away, you might want to not see, the prospect might be dizzying, you might be terrified. Without your thought and time and memory what might there be? There might be emptiness.

If you were to let yourself in its totality become very still, if you were to sit very still, let your body come to rest, if you were to let your mind slow and come to a stop, if there were profound stillness of thought, if there were no movement whatsoever, then something unreached for might occur. In a state of total watchfulness there is the possibility that the grace might come to you, fall on you like a thunderbolt, might steal over you like a cloud, might empty you of your self, and you might become vacant, empty.

Beware if you are hoping for something to fill you up, to give you security, to establish meaning, to be a goal for you. Beware if you want it. It is not a goal, a state to be hoped for. You cannot reach for it, you can only be willing. But you must be very sure that you are willing to loose all attachments to time and place and things and persons. If that grace comes to you, all that you have known, all your identity, all will be seared away. You will be lost to all that was, you will be in the cloud of unknowing.

There is no known way to get there, there is no there to get to. It is outside the domain of any form of destination. It cannot be thought out in advance, it cannot be predicted. There is no imagining that can approach it. There is no way to desire or hope for this apprehension. It appears to be inaccessible, and for all constructions of thought this is the case. It has nothing whatsoever to do with thought, there is no room for thought. There can only be willingness and watchfulness and observation.

All that can be said is that its apprehension is the unwilled unintended result of the silent mind. Silence and seeing. The pattern in its incomprehensible immensity is there now, and always has been, and always will be. It is outside the realm of time. It exists in the pure fluid essence beyond any notions of light or dark or energy or anything that can be named. Simultaneously it is form and emptiness. It is the flux from which the bands of emanations originate. Immensity and silence and stillness and emptiness. Nothing else can be said.

February 18 2018

Here is a perceptual process

Transmitting information

Into and out of a bundle of memory cells

Housed in a bag of protoplasm

This calls itself “I”

It thinks that it is the center,

That its consciousness is all

And that its boundaries are the limits.

 

I look closely at my hand,

Focus on a fingertip

See the whorled ridges of my fingerprint

Without a tool I cannot see the cells

I cannot see the atomic structure

I cannot fathom beyond this.

 

But those few who use the tools conceptualize

And they intuit and imagine and finally obtain evidence

Within my fingertip

There are quarks in numbers

They are too small for me to comprehend

There are particles that come into existence

And are annihilated at the same instant

Higgs conceived a field that binds all together

The most sophisticated instrument on Earth

After millions of subatomic collisions

Has detected the boson that is the basis

I cannot fathom this.

 

I look at the night sky

Focus on the field of stars

See the Milky Way

Without an instrument I cannot know

Of the countless galaxies

Speeding away constantly expanding

I cannot fathom this

 

There is the audacious Hubble

There are the complex tools of mathematics and physics

They tell me that beyond this galaxy

And the billions of others

There may be no boundary

There may be vibrating strings of energy

Permeating all that is

There may be a space-time foam

Out of which multiple universes continue to emerge

As it was without beginning or end

I cannot fathom this

 

With the tools available to me

I can see between infrared and ultraviolet

An infinitesimally small spectrum

I can perceive vibrations of a tiny range of frequencies

Of the billions of vibrations passing through me at every moment

That I might be an almost invisible speck

Immeasurable in the vastness

Coming into existence and annihilated in the same instant

I cannot fathom this

 

So I imagine myself

A bundle of memories in a sack of protoplasm

I might imagine that I am the center of it all

That it is focused on me

I create god in my own image

This is hubris

 

What other response might I have

Look in wonder and amazement

Stand in awe

Keep silent

February 11, 2018

Mom and Dad took me to Saint Mark’s, the little Episcopal church in my home town and there were water and oil and the holy words and I became what’s now called a “Cradle Episcopalian”. I was six weeks old. And then a few years later there was the Bishop laying his hands on my head and intoning with his powerful voice “Defend oh Lord this Thy child with Thy heavenly grace that he may continue Thine forever – – – “.

How I came to love the splendor of the liturgy, the ceremonial, the unparalleled magnificence of the language in 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Yes I was an acolyte of course, and a licensed teenage lay minister, reading evening prayer every Sunday. It was a romance, beautiful enough to seduce a boy and adolescent. And it was all absolutely and irrevocably true and unquestionable. Heaven and Hell, sin and salvation, ten commandments, the stern but all loving father, the sacrificial son on the cross, the holy ghost flitting about. Billy’s gong to be a priest, all the LOLs in the church were convinced. (For those of you who have known only the recent electronic language, LOL long before you came along meant Little Old Lady, laughing or not).

This was The Way It Is. The path to salvation. Don’t go down the road to perdition, it leads to the fiery pit. Follow the Yellow Brick Road, set off for Oz, bring your heart and mind and courage and the little dog, don’t fall asleep in the field of flowers, get to Emerald City, find the Wizard, so you can go home. Click those ruby slippers, say those words, there’s no place like home, amen brother. And so this was my belief and faith. Thus it is in the unexamined cocoon of an encapsulated life, never going beyond those safe boundaries. Family and church and society  all endeavor to keep you within the straight and narrow, and woe be unto you if you grow out into the wide world and see its staggering expanse and richness and complexity. Beyond Mom and Dad, St Mark’s, and the confines of my home town, my education, and my conditioning, the old map of the world no longer represents what I have seen and experienced.

Why am I recounting this?  No, I haven’t recently re-seen the Wizard of Oz. But after seventy six years of quest and experience, I have seen that there are many paths to an ultimate reality, some of them rich and complex, some austere, some of them incomprehensibly mysterious. I have also seen what Krishnamurti said, “truth is a pathless land”. And what Lao Tsu said, “the Dao of which you can speak is not the true Dao”  (you can substitute God or Truth or Energy or any other absolute). Middle Age mystics sought to surrender the mind and ego to the cloud of unknowing, within which a glimpse of the nature of reality might begin. In the end I cannot know. Its not a Yellow Brick Road, the path to reality dissolves into the unknown. Give up knowing. Amen.

February 4, 2018

Heres an orange

Put it on the windowsill

Lovely firm fragrant

A couple of days later,

Whats that?

A small patch of mold?

An aggressive growth

By the next morning

Grey slimy smelly

Completely ruined

In an instant

 

Heres a blue planet

Millions of years

In its course around the sun

Lovely teeming with life

Astonishingly rich and beautiful

Whats that?

One aggressive species

Gone from a few thousand to ten billion

In the blink of an eye

Heedless and wanton

Leaving a lifeless ruin

In an instant

January 28, 2018

Are you oriented as to time, place, and person?

Or are you nuts?

Well lets see

Time is always and only time

This time is now this instant

Oops now its gone

Heres another, Cant grab it

It it really January 28 2018

Of course not

That designation is an invention, not real

It was that now, now its this now

Is it the now of the unfathomable time of the Universe

Is it the now of the 18 hour life of a Mayfly

Or the instantaneous coming into being and annihilation of a particle in an atom smasher

Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once

Was it Einstein who said that?

Properly oriented in time is meaningless,

So, no I’m not.

 

Time is always and only time and place is always and only place

So now, that is this particular now,

Oriented as to place

The place of now is an object that you might call a chair

Located in a small collection of boxes

A set that you might call a home

In a larger collection of such sets that you might call a condominium

In a neighborhood in a town

Whats its name?

Is it the place at this table in this room?

Is it the place on this tiny planet in this insignificant solar system

In the unimaginable immensity of this universe

One among countless bubbling up out of the space-time foam

On this chair, am I oriented?

Lost in whistling space without a mind

So, no not oriented.

 

And now

This particular now, comes the fun part

Oriented as to person

Here, in this particular here and now,

What is this thing/event/occurrence?

All together, say I AM!

And what exactly is that?

Not the standard responses from acculturated sources

Priests and psychologists and parents

But really, what is it that says I?

Is it an ageing seed producing pod of the species homosapiens

Is it a body driven by a little entity in the skull just behind the eyes

A perceptual process in a sack of protoplasm

A bundle of memories projecting into the future

A hallucinating dervish imagining a world

A shadow and a dream

You may think it has a name and a place and a time

Whatever it is it’s here and then gone

You can’t put a finger on it, you can’t

But you think you know who you are and where and when

You cannot know

Perhaps you are stark raving mad.

The shrink might conclude, mad as a hatter

Completely nuts