If you’ve read previous posts here, you’ve heard about my Nanowrimo experience. One of the perks of such an online endeavor — beyond the solace of knowing that thousands are struggling right along with you, engaged in the same mad attempt, maybe chewing the end of a pencil like a trapped animal gnaws off its own leg to escape, or staring blindly at a computer screen, in either case despairing of ever writing another readable word — is the series of pep talks by published novelists.
Towards the end of the Nano-month, author Janet Fitch posted one such talk which I’ve copied and saved — both for my own benefit and for the writing classes I teach. As I was re-reading it recently, it struck me as peculiarly applicable to our own lives. You probably suspected we’re all just characters in somebody’s novel — it’s not a new idea. But this should be no surprise in any case — we tell stories constantly. Why shouldn’t storytelling advice also bear some connection to living IRL?
Here’s Fitch writing about “getting stuck” with a character, and what to do about it:
So you have these options, but which one to go for? When in doubt, make trouble for your character. Don’t let her stand on the edge of the pool, dipping her toe. Come up behind her and give her a good hard shove. That’s my advice to you now. Make trouble for your character. In life we try to avoid trouble. We chew on our choices endlessly. We go to shrinks, we talk to our friends. In fiction, this is deadly. Protagonists need to screw up, act impulsively, have enemies, get into TROUBLE.
The difficulty is that we create protagonists we love. And we love them like our children. We want to protect them from harm, keep them safe, make sure they won’t get hurt, or not so bad. Maybe a skinned knee. Certainly not a car wreck. But the essence of fiction writing is creating a character you love and, frankly, torturing him. You are both sadist and savior. Find the thing he loves most and take it away from him. Find the thing he fears and shove him shoulder deep into it. Find the person who is absolutely worst for him and have him delivered into that character’s hands. Having him make a choice which is absolutely wrong.
You’ll find the story will take on an energy of its own, like a wound-up spring, and then you’ll just have to follow it, like a fox hunt, over hill, over dale.
Imagine this as the rule of thumb that God (fill in your favorite entity to blame — corporations aren’t exempt, now that they’re people too) follows with us, and our lives may start to make a lot more sense. If it’s true that all the growth is in the hassle, maybe we should seek out a moderate degree of hassle from time to time, rather than letting it back up and accumulate and swell until it spills over and clobbers us when we’re least expecting it. Instead, take it on in smaller doses. But whatever we do, you’ll have noticed that we end up in relationships with people who manage to uncover our weaknesses with uncanny accuracy and poke and prod them in their most sensitive spots, as well as with people who will love us regardless — quirks, warts, fetishes and all. And we provide the same service to others.
As we become more fully conscious, and assume at least some of the responsibility for the characters we play, we even get to revise them. Meanwhile, when you think your life’s a disaster, it may just be going through some heavy rewriting behind the scenes. Whole chapters get chucked. Motivations get rearranged. You’re on your way to a normal daily ordinary even humdrum lunch, and something changes in your life forever. Or, on the other hand, if nothing is happening and nothing just keeps on happening in your life, maybe the show is on a commercial break, or mid-season hiatus. Don’t change the channel yet — stay tuned for the next episode.
Writer and AODA Archdruid John Michael Greer observes in a 1/11/12 blog post:
As human beings, we think with stories as inevitably as we eat with mouths and walk with feet; the stories we tell ourselves about the world define the way we make sense of the “blooming, buzzing confusion,” in William James’ phrase, that the world out there throws at our sense organs. In what we are pleased to call “primitive societies,” a rich body of mythology and legend provides each person with a range of narratives that can be applied to any given situation and make sense of it. Learning the stories, and learning how to apply them to life’s events, is the core of a child’s education in these societies, and a learned person is very often distinguished, more than anything else, by the number of traditional stories he or she knows by heart.
In one very real sense, then, Druidry is “merely” a rich source of stories that provide alternative ways of understanding our existence and experience. The important thing is to have, ready at hand and from a tried and wise source, an ample supply of story alternatives that teach us and help us and entertain us as they do so. The “single story” of much modern life just isn’t enough. I’ll be talking more about this in a coming post.
On first sight (or much later, depending on the particular script we’re following), the world can be a forbidding place. We all go through emotional and psychological winters at times. Nothing seems to provide warmth or comfort, so we hunker down and endure. And we can get so good at this kind of half-life that we mistake merely surviving for full-hearted thriving. Well-meaning friends or family who try to console us with various messages of hope or endurance (“This too shall pass”) can’t budge us from our heaviness.
The hidden changes implicit in the imminent shift of energy and consciousness which Druids symbolize and celebrate in Imbolc also find expression in the starkly beautiful lines of “First Sight” by British poet Philip Larkin.
First Sight
Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
For that is how at least some changes arrive — immeasurable, ungraspable, unlike anything that went before, so that we can’t even anticipate or recognize them ahead of time. Nothing of the past prepares us. The new comes on us “utterly unlike” the present. Only long memory serves to recognize them sometimes, and hail and welcome them — memory often consciously denied to us in one human lifetime, but accessible through dream and intuition and the “far memory” that we may call “past lives” or the “collective unconscious” or the “knower behind the thoughts” or “gut instinct.” This is memory as trees know it, the rings of years that grow into the wood, the cell memory we humans also carry with us, the salts of ancient oceans that pulse in the same proportions in our blood.
This is the promise of light renewed, that miracle we often cynically dismiss but deeply long for, the story we are always telling ourselves: maybe this time, maybe next week, one more year. This marriage, that job, this new chance, here, now, finally, at last.
It’s important to note that this event is not “supernatural” or “religious” in the commonly understood sense of “coming from outside our world” or depending on a deity. We don’t need to look that far, though we’re welcome to if we wish. It is earth’s immeasurable surprise, after all, issuing from this world, this land, dirt under our feet, air that surrounds us, sun on our skin. Put another way, the whole world is telling us “Pay attention!”
Another Irish name for Imbolc is Oimelc — “ewe’s milk.” In the agrarian societies all our ancestors came from, the pregnant ewes have been preparing for the lambs to come, their udders swelling with milk. There are signs of change and renewal all around us, but in our rush towards “anywhere but here,” we’ve often lost sight of and contact with the markers that would center and align us with the natural order of balance and harmony we crave.
In North America, the equivalent “secular” holiday is Groundhog’s Day, which one way or another says winter will in fact eventually end. Punxsutawney Phil emerges from the earth and his plump hibernation sleepiness to prophesy renewal, either seeing his shadow on a sunny day, or huddling under February clouds as secular augurs read the omens and declare them to the assembled faithful. (We don’t so much abandon ritual and religion as slip it past the censor of the modern and supposedly irreligious mind, clothing it in other guises less objectionable. If you doubt it, take a look at the grand mythologizing that surrounds Phil on sites like this one.)
My wife and I returned late yesterday afternoon to a cold house — we heat only with wood — back from an overnight to Boston where we visited my wife’s cousin Sue in the hospital. She’s due to go home soon after stem-cell replacement therapy and chemo for lymphoma. So far the treatment’s working, and her toughness and optimism are heartening.
Our indoor thermometer read 49 degrees, and as we shivered in the last afternoon light and I rekindled a fire in our woodstove, I caught myself glancing a couple of times at a calendar, the way you do after a trip, to reorient yourself to times and days. Late January. The last glimmer of sun over our front yard showed a typical Vermont winter scene — new snow, bare trees, and that deceptive bright calm that makes you believe you really don’t need to bundle yourself up and protect every extremity against single-digit New England winter days. A single step outside offers a brisk corrective to that particular illusion.
Yes, frostbite lurks for the unwary, but there’s a subtle shift nonetheless. Birds know it, plumped against the cold, heads cocked and alert for anyone else finding food, and so does the ivy drowsing beside my wife’s loom. It’s perked up recently, as if waking from its own vegetative hibernation.
Sue’s bright spirits, beyond her own brand of courage, are in keeping with the changing season. Imbolc approaches, the holiday also celebrated variously as Candlemas or St. Brigid’s Day on Feb. 1/2. The northeastern U.S. lies in the grip of winter, and yet the holiday looks forward to spring. The Irish word imbolc means “in the belly” — the fetal lambs growing and approaching the time of their birth into a larger world, full of darkness and light. Brigid draws devotees who keep shrines lit with light and fire. The Wikipedia entry nicely sums up her importance: “Saint Brigid is one of the few saints who stands on the boundary between pagan mythology, Druidism and Christian spirituality.”
Verses in her honor abound:
Fire in the forge that
shapes and tempers.
Fire of the hearth that
nourishes and heals.
Fire in the head that
incites and inspires.
You can feel the change with your eyes, on your skin, in your bones — a slightly different angle of light, longer days, a listening quality, if you go quiet enough to hear it. A reason to celebrate with light and flame.
There’s an old Japanese saying I encountered while living and working in Tokyo two decades ago that often comes to my mind this time of year. “What is the bravest of living things? The plum tree, because it puts forth its blossoms in the snow.” There’s a bravery in certitude, a trust that, as Genesis 8 declares, “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
There’s deep comfort in homely things — things of home — the soapstone stove, the hearth stones that accumulate wood-ash and need sweeping a few times a day, the armfuls of oak logs I bring to feed our fire.
Late this morning as I finish the final draft of this post, the stove still ticking and pinging softly as it heats and cools with each charge of wood, the wall thermometer finally reads 67. My wife reads in bed, the sky lowers gray, and a fine snow clouds the air as it descends.
Historical novelist Mary Stewart writes vividly of 500 C.E. Britain in her “Merlin Trilogy,” which begins with The Crystal Cave and the childhood and youth of Merlin the enchanter, who will become Arthur’s chief adviser. Here (1970 edition, pp. 174-5) are Merlin and his father Ambrosius discussing the Druids. At this time, in Stewart’s conception, laws are already in place banning Druid gatherings and practices. Merlin has recently discovered that the tutor his father has arranged for him is a Druid.
* * *
I looked up, then nodded. “You know about him.” It was a conclusion, not a question.
“I know he is a priest of the old religion. Yes.”
“You don’t mind this?”
“I cannot yet afford to throw aside valuable tools because I don’t like their design,” he said. “He is useful, so I use him. You will do the same, if you are wise.”
“He wants to take me to the next meeting.”
He raised his brows but said nothing.
“Will you forbid this?” I asked.
“No. Will you go?”
“Yes.” I said slowly, and very seriously, searching for the words: “My lord, when you are looking for … what I am looking for, you have to look in strange places. Men can never look at the sun, except downwards, at his reflection in things of earth. If he is reflected in a dirty puddle, he is still the sun. There is nowhere I will not look, to find him.”
Of course, anyone who followed this noble-sounding principle to even reasonable lengths would have a very interesting and possibly very exhausting time of it. As I mentioned in my post about Open Source religion, when virtually every human practice with any numinous quality about it can be and has been pressed into service as a vehicle for religious encounter and a means to experience a god or God, then sacred sex won’t even top the list of things a person might do “to find him.”
Yet Merlin (and Stewart) have a point. Spiritual inquiry and practice require a kind of courage, if they are to remain fresh and not decline into dead forms and mere gestures of religion. It is these things that the media quite rightly criticize. When I’m in the grip of a quest, I only hope I can continue to be brave enough to follow out conclusions and — if need be — “look in strange places.” It looks like courage to an observer, but I find that ultimately it’s a kind of honesty with oneself. I want to keep looking. Anything less feels suffocating and aggressively pointless, like painting garbage or eating styrofoam. Any self-disgust we feel almost always arises from living a lie, which poisons our hours and toils and pleasures.
“Things of earth” cannot ultimately satisfy the inner hunger we feel, but they are valuable pointers, sacraments in the full sense, vehicles of the sacred. To return to everyone’s favorite numinous topic, pursue sex of any variety, sacred or otherwise, and you’ll prove again for yourself one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Of course, along the way, as a witty recent post on Yahoo Answers has it, it may often happen that “The road of excess leads to the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet of Gluttony, which leads to the Bordello of Lust, which then leads to the Courthouse of Divorce, the Turnpike of Bankruptcy, the Freeway of Despair, and finally, the Road to Perdition.” Blake did after all call these the Proverbs of Hell.
We just don’t discuss what comes after Hell. Blake says it’s wisdom. Hard-earned, yes. And there are easier ways, which is one good thing that the Wise are here for. Rather than following any prescription (or Prescriber) blindly, I hope to ask why, and when, and under what conditions the strictures or recommendations apply.
So we return and begin (again) with the things of earth, these sacred objects and substances. As sacraments, earth, air, fire and water can show us the holy, the numinous. Their daily embodiments in food and drink and alcohol, precious metals and gems and sex, pleasure and learning and science, music and literature and theater, sports and war and craft, are our earliest teachers. They are part of the democracy of incarnate living, the access points to the divine that all of us meet and know in our own ways.
Drink deep, fellow traveler, and let us trade tales over the fire. And when you depart, here’s an elemental chant by Libana, well-known in Pagan circles, to accompany you on your going.
What makes a language “sacred”? I find that it’s in sacred language that we most clearly hear echoes of the love we are and the love we seek. Much that I write here is an exploration through the channel or “ray” of wisdom and my search for it. But the channel or ray of love is at least as potent, and for many people more accessible.
Here’s an adaptation of a prose-poem by 17th century Anglican writer Thomas Traherne, who lived only to age 38. In his writing he captures something of this love.
The whole world is the theater for our love.
We are made to love, both to satisfy this necessity within us
and also to answer the love of creation around us.
By love our souls are joined and married to the world around us.
If we focus upon only one part of creation,
we are not loving it too much, but the other parts too little.
Never was anything in this world loved too much.
What a treasure is a grain of sand when it is truly understood!
All infinite goodness and wisdom and power are in it.
What a world this would be if everything were loved as it should be.*
This then is one noble and worthwhile task, if we choose to accept it: to love everything in the world as it should be loved. We hear of those who “love too much,” or those who, like Othello, loved “not wisely but too well.” We may recollect, too, those who love their abusers and do not flee them: here’s a needed perspective on their situation. A complete and powerful guide to living, summed up in ten lines.
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*Sections 65-67, “Second Century,” from Centuries of Meditation by 17th century writer and Anglican priest Thomas Traherne, adapted by Higginbotham, Paganism, 149-150. You can find Traherne’s complete original here.
The image is of a stained glass window “by Tom Denny, reflecting the thinking of Traherne, in Audley Chapel, off Lady Chapel, Hereford Cathedral, dedicated in March 2007.”
So if you found my previous post about fear and death (and nerds — yay!) a bit too off-putting, here’s a reprieve. What else might a new “religious operating system” have on offer? In a Huffington Post article from some time ago (Sept. 2010) titled “The God Project: Hinduism as Open Source Faith,” author Josh Schrei asserts that the principal distinction between Hinduism and other more familiar Western faiths is not that the former is polytheistic and the latter are monotheistic, but that “Hinduism is Open Source and most other faiths are Closed Source.” (We’re already increasingly familiar with the open-source approach from computer systems like Linux and community-edited resources like wikis.) In this series on what a more responsive and contemporary religious design might look like (here are previous parts one and two), this perspective can offer useful insight.
If we consider god, the concept of god, the practices that lead one to god, and the ideas, thoughts and philosophies around the nature of the human mind the source code, then India has been the place where the doors have been thrown wide open and the coders have been given free rein to craft, invent, reinvent, refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of the spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated, and documented. Atheists and goddess worshipers, heretics who’ve sought god through booze, sex, and meat, ash-covered hermits, dualists and non-dualists, nihilists and hedonists, poets and singers, students and saints, children and outcasts … all have contributed their lines of code to the Hindu string. The results of India’s God Project — as I like to refer to Hinduism — have been absolutely staggering. The body of knowledge — scientific, faith-based, and experience-based — that has been accrued on the nature of mind, consciousness, and human behavior, and the number of practical methods that have been specifically identified to work with one’s own mind are without compare. The Sanskrit language itself contains a massive lexicon of words — far more than any other historic or modern language — that deal specifically with states of mental cognition, perception, awareness, and behavioral psychology.
It’s important to note that despite Schrei’s admiration for Hinduism (and its sacred language Sanskrit — more in a coming post), the West has all of these same resources — we just have developed them outside explicitly religious spheres. Instead, psychology, so-called “secular” hard sciences, social experimentation, counter-cultural trends and other sources have contributed to an equally wide spread of understandings. The difference is that far fewer of them would be something we would tag with the label “religion,” especially since the pursuit of things like ecstatic experience — apart from some Charismatic and Pentecostal varieties — generally lies outside what we in the West call or perceive as “religion.”
The underlying principle that drives such a range of activity perceived as “religious” also stands in sharp contrast with religion in the West. (Of course there are exceptions. To name just one from “inside religion,” think of Brother Lawrence and his Practice of the Presence of God.) As Schrei remarks, “At the heart of the Indic source code are the Vedas, which immediately establish the primacy of inquiry in Indic thought.” To put it another way, India and Hinduism didn’t need their own version of the American 60s and its byword “question authority,” because implicit in open-source religion is “authorize questions.” Nor did they need debates over Creation or Evolution, because scientific inquiry could be seen as a religious undertaking. Schrei continues:
In the Rig Veda, the oldest of all Hindu texts (and possibly the oldest of all spiritual texts on the planet), God, or Prajapati, is summarized as one big mysterious question and we the people are basically invited to answer it. “Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?” While the god of the Old Testament was shouting command(ment)s, Prajapati was asking: “Who am I?”
This tendency to inquire restores authority to its rightful place. In an era in the West when so many faux authorities have been revealed as spiritually hollow or actively deceitful, we’ve arrived at a widespread cynical distrust of any claims to authority. But true authorities do still exist. Their hallmark is an invitation to question and find out for ourselves. Jesus says, “Ask and you will know, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you.” These aren’t the words of one who fears inquiry. To paraphrase another of his sayings, when we can learn and know the truth about something, we will meet an increase of freedom regarding it. It will not intimidate us, or lead us to false worship, or mislead us. One identifier of truth is the freedom it conveys to us.
Authorities also benefit us because out of their experience they can guide us toward the most fruitful avenues of inquiry, and spare us much spinning in circles, pursuing wild geese, and squandering the resources of a particular lifetime. Whether we choose to follow good advice is a wholly separate matter. Authorities can point out pitfalls, and save us from reinventing the wheel. At a time when so many look East for wisdom, only recently have we been rediscovering the wisdom of the West hidden on our doorsteps.
Examples abound. The Eastern Orthodox church has preserved a wealth of spiritual practices and living exemplars in places like Mount Athos in Greece. The Pagan resurgence over the last decades has done much useful weeding and culling of overlooked and nearly forgotten traditions rich in valuable methods for addressing deeply the alienation, disruption, dis-ease, physical illness and spiritual starvation so many experience. Individuals within Western monotheisms like Rob Bell and his book Love Wins have served as useful agents for reform and introspection. While it may not be always true, as Dr. Wayne Dyer claims, that “every problem has a spiritual solution,” we’ve only just begun to regain perspectives we discounted and abandoned through the past several centuries, mostly through the seductions of our increasing mastery of a few select processes of the physical plane and their capacity to provide us with comforts, sensations, entertainments and objects unknown until about 75 years ago. We’ve self-identified as “consumers” rather than spiritual beings. Hamlet identified the problem centuries ago: “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?” Or as another of the Wise asked, “What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Let us be soul-finders and soul-nourishers. Otherwise, why bother?
Those inclined to criticize contemporary Druidry have made much about how the specific practices and beliefs of ancient Druids are forever lost to us simply because they left no written records, and because the references to Druids in the works of classical Greek and Roman authors are mostly based on secondhand accounts and sometimes markedly biased. Without such historical continuity, they claim, it is impossible to be a “real” Druid today, and thus all contemporary Druidry is a kind of whistling in the wind, at best a version of dress-up for adults. But what such writers and speakers often forget is the surviving body of legend, myth, teaching and wisdom in Celtic literature. Here is Druidry in compact and literary form, meant to be preserved as story, a link-up with the perennial wisdom that never dies.
To pick just one example, the stories from the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of myth, legend and teaching have wonderful relevance and serve as a storehouse of much Druid teaching. Sustained meditation on these stories will reveal much of use and value to the aspirant after a Druidry that is authentic simply because it is grounded in knowledge and practice. As a pragmatist more than a reconstructionist, I’m much more interested in what works than in what may be historically accurate. The former leads one to inner discoveries. The latter is engaging as a worthwhile scholarly endeavor first, and only as a possible source of spiritual insight second. And that is as it should be. History is not spirituality, though it can inform it. But even if we can accurately deduce from an always incomplete archaeological record what a Bronze Age Druid may have done, it’s still not automatically fit and appropriate for a contemporary 21st century person to adopt. That’s a decision we must make apart from the reconstruction, which cannot guide us by itself. Stories, however, though formed in a particular culture, often reach toward universals far better than physical objects and actions.
The story of Taliesin (this link is to a public domain text — more modern and well annotated versions are available) in the Mabinogion moves us into a world of myth and initiation. In the tale, the boy Gwion passes through ordeals and transformations, becoming at length the poet and sage Taliesin, whose name means “shining brow” — one who has a “fire in the head” and is alive with wisdom and poetic inspiration. As with figures from other traditions whose heads are encircled with halos, or shining with an otherworldly brightness, Taliesin belongs to the company of the “twice-born,” who have fulfilled their humanity by making the most of it. In my next post, I’ll talk about the first key in the story — persistence.
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First image is a triskele or triskelion, a pan-European symbol associated with the Celts.
Second image is of Taliesin from Caitlin and John Matthews’ Arthurian Tarot.
“Whenever I get bored or depressed, I do laundry,” said an acquaintance. “Afterwards I may still be bored or depressed, but at least I’ve done something that needed doing. And often enough I feel better.” As a treatment, the success rate of this strategy may or may not equal that of therapy or medication, but as far as clean clothes production goes, it’s got the other two beat hands down. At least I can be depressed and dressed.
How different the quiet of depression and the quiet of peace! (I’m writing about peace and using exclamation points. Hm.) One deadens and stifles, the other ripples outward and invites attention, a kind of relaxed wakefulness. We say we want peace, and the holiday season bombards us with prayers and songs and sermons and wishes for it. There are prayers for peace in the ceremonies of many religious teachings and spiritual practices, Druidry included. But rather than asking somebody else for it, I can begin differently. Peace starts in the center, and that’s where I am — or where I can put myself, with the help of recollection and intent. “Come back to yourself,” my life keeps saying, “and remember who you are and what it is you want.” If I start peace (or anything else) within myself, however small, however tentative, it spreads from there outward. After all, it works for every other state I create, whether positive or negative — and I know this from sometimes painful experience! “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is still some of the best advice ever given. If I want change, who else do I expect to bring it about? And if someone else did, how in the world would such changes be right for me? Gandhi knew the secret lies in the approach.
In my early twenties, Lou Gramm and Foreigner were singing “I want to know what love is. I want you to show me.” It’s a lovely ballad — I’ve got it playing on Youtube the second time through as I write this paragraph, nostalgia back in full force — but it’s precisely backward in the end. As loveless as I can sometimes feel, if I start the flow, jumpstart it if necessary, I prime the pump, and it will launch within me from that point. Do that, and I become more loveable in a human sense, because in the divine sense I’ve made myself another center for love to happen in, and from which it can spread.
But neither love nor peace are things I can hold on to as things. “We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate,” says the German poet Rilke in his poem “To Holderin” (Stephen Mitchell, trans.) “From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward.” Whatever I long for in a world of time and space needs to be re-won every day, though in that process of re-winning, not always successful, it begins to gather around me like a fragrance, a habit. Both the customary behavior, and the clothing a monk or nun wears, have the same name. The connection’s not accidental.
The American “farmer-poet” Wendell Berry captures it in these lines:
Geese appear high over us
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for a new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
So if we’re looking for a “religious operating system,” a ROS, we’ve got some design parameters that poets and others tell us are already in place. “What we need is here.” But try telling that to an unemployed person, or someone dying of a particularly nasty disease. And of course, if I tell someone else these things, I’ve missed the point. What they need is indeed here, but my work is to find out this truth for myself. I can’t do others’ work for them, and it wouldn’t be a good world if I could (though that doesn’t stop me sometimes from trying). I don’t know how their discoveries will change their lives. I only know, after I do the work, how my discoveries will change mine.
A recent article in the New York Times about the rise of the Nones, people who aren’t affiliated with any religion, but who aren’t necessarily atheists, offers this observation, from which I drew the title for this blog entry:
“We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system…
In this single command, Jesus is profoundly Druidic. Catch the moment, he says. Watch the divine as it swirls around and in you. You can witness the marvelous if you simply pay attention. Listen! Look! Seeing and hearing are a good start. Now do more. Put yourself into your attention. Make it purposeful. Don’t just hear — listen. Don’t just see — look.
“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). A wonderful assertion– one to test, to try out, to prove to oneself, not merely to accept passively. A promise. Singleness of vision, the devotion and dedication to witnessing what is really there, as opposed to what we assume or fear, wish or ignore. Some have seen this passage as a reference to the yogic “third eye” chakra, the Hindu Shiv Netra or Sufi Tisra Til. Why not both, and something else besides?
In the second half of her poem “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver says:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Shouldn’t all attention bring to light more and better questions? Wouldn’t we be bored to tears with a life of all things answered? Give me bigger and deeper questions, give me earth whole again, give me all I already have. Give me birth in this moment. We are constantly being born, arriving at ourselves, a remembering, a finding out of the utter strangeness of being alive, and being human in this moment, our eternity, the only time there is. The past is only memory, and changing. The future is hopes and fears. Take the now with both hands.
“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)
A regular menagerie of a sentence! Sheep, wolves, serpents and doves. If inanimate things like stones can testify to divinity (see previous post) and proclaim truth in the face of human delusion, then certainly birds and beasts can do the job, too.
Here Jesus is admonishing his followers, as he commissions them to spread his teaching, that the world is full of wolves. His disciples won’t appear on the scene with an army at their beck and call. They don’t carry letters of introduction, or a case of free product samples to tempt the potential client. No email blast or flurry of tweets precedes their arrival. No, if they’re to succeed, they’ll need specific attributes which he characterizes as the wisdom of serpents and the harmlessness of doves. And note that you can’t transpose those qualities; who would welcome a person “wise as a dove” or “harmless as a serpent”?! Bad advertizing. It’s a recipe for disaster. But more importantly, would serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness actually work? Hold that thought.
A persistent tradition in the UK at least eight centuries old has Jesus spending some of the “lost” years — between his appearance in the temple at 12 and the start of his public ministry around age 30 — in Britain, studying with Druids. William Blake, associated with revival Druidry during his lifetime in the 19th century, penned the famous hymn “Jerusalem” (this version hails from the last night of the ’09 Proms, a popular annual summer music series in the U.K.). The lyrics were put to music about a century later, and the piece has become a perennial favorite, a kind of unofficial British national anthem:
And did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England’s mountains green?
and was the holy lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
These lines of the opening stanza seem innocuous enough, if fanciful. A Middle-Easterner would surely have it rough during a British winter — it isn’t always “green.” The tradition continues from there, claiming that after Christ’s death, Joseph of Arimathea (who provided a tomb for the body) either sent part of the Grail to England, or made the journey himself and founded a church in Glastonbury, or planted there a thorn tree long venerated as holy.* Whatever the truth of these events, it makes for a striking symbol and image.
But Blake continues, and this is when his poem turns odd:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
As a proto-Druid, Blake gets his ecological digs in here: the “dark Satanic mills” of the early industrial revolution are already at work spewing smoke and ash over London. While most Druids today have no intention of attempting to “build Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land,” the song brings divinity one step closer. Who complains if some versions of our ancient history bring with them a delicious shiver of magic or imaginative religious reconstruction? But is the way to achieve divinity on our shores through “mental fight” and metaphorical battle? The sudden shift to the quadruple imperative of “Bring … bring … bring … bring” summons up images of a bronze-age charioteer. But what of the “arrows of desire”? Here the image is of Eros, Cupid, the piercing quality of sudden strong feeling. Is it the poet speaking as “I” in the last stanzas? Or as someone else? Is it Blake’s idea of Jesus?
You may not remember, but I asked you a few paragraphs back to hold the thought of serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness. Some of the “wisdom” accrues from the belief that serpents are uncanny beasts, for they are able to shed their skin and achieve a kind of rebirth or immortality. And the serpent in the Garden that haunts the Western pysche tempted Eve not to the Tree of Life (Eve! EVE!! The other tree! Eat from the OTHER tree!!) but the Tree of Knowledge. As I tease my students, “Major mistake. Become immortal first, and then get the knowledge of good and evil.” The harmlessness of doves is less problematic. Though city dwellers may have their foremost associations with pigeons as flocking beggars in parks, or as producers of statue-staining and public-building-defacing birdshit.
But consider again. If you know something — I mean really know something of life-changing power — you need to come across as seriously harmless. Otherwise people have this nasty tendency to string you up, burn you at the stake, remove the supreme discomfort of your ideas and presence at all costs. Your wisdom puts you in mortal danger. So reassure people first, and work your changes quietly, harmlessly. A major piece of strategy! Some devious or disgusting trick you’d expect to discover about that other political party — the one you don‘t belong to and affect to despise as the epitome of all things vile and loathsome. Is that why this year’s political reality-show contestants (I mean presidential candidates) come across as less than competent? (Repeat after me: “All candidates vile and and loathsome, all con-men big or small, all morons foul and putrid, Democrats/Republicans have them all!”**)
So animals embody a divinely-commissioned strategy for survival. The wisdom of the serpent, long despised, is not dead, but sleeps in each of us, waiting the touch of the divine longing to rouse and waken it in the service of life. The son of God (we are all children of the divine) summons it forth from us. It lives, tree of knowledge and tree of life united, identical, twining its way around our hearts, which know — when our heads deny it — which way to go, what we need, where to find answers others say are “forbidden” or “not for mortals to know.” On the contrary — they’re specifically intended for mortals to realize.
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*The Glastonbury thorn has lately made headlines. It (there are actually several in the area, believed to spring from a single parent) was hacked down two years ago this month (with some historical precedent, if you read the article) and then recovered enough by March of 2011 to put forth a new shoot. Another demonstration, as if we needed it, that old things do not just disappear because we hack at them or find them out of place or inconvenient. They have a habit of return, of springing back to life. Another habit from the natural world for us to imitate …
**This uncharacteristically acerbic side-note is not part of the actual blog.
“And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” (Luke 19:39-40)
What shall we do till the stones start to speak,
or whom can we turn to and trust in these days?
Can we hear even echoes of truths that we seek,
catch mere flickers of fire to illumine our ways?
The stones broadcast secrets we now scarcely hear —
the earth bears true witness, though leaders stay mute,
to remind us of love that is stronger than fear.
Goal and path rise within us — there’s no other route.
The animals know much — in each neighboring eye
is the ghost of the knowledge hard-won from their days:
make the most of each moment, for this body will die —
tomorrow’s new compost, though it shouldn’t amaze
us when walls turn to doors: we walk through them to find
the doors of our hearts were more narrow by far.
Trust the paint-box you’re given, though your dear ones are blind,
though your culture berates you, fear sets up a bar.
We must watch as we journey, be mindful of stones
that mumble or shout, rousing sleepers to wake.
Learn to feel the right path in the set of our bones,
trust the deep self to know the next step to take.
There are many kinds of freedom. I do not wish to speak about all of them, or to give the impression that all of them reduce to one type. There is political liberty, or the freedom from coercion by public power. There is the political freedom of enfranchisement, or the distribution of public power through the vote. There is freedom as independence, or freedom from the power and opinions of others, which tends to reinforce and isolate individuality. There is freedom from pain, hunger, cold, illness, violence, and ignorance: a freedom that can only be purchased by institutions that limit independence and liberty. There is the freedom to enjoy one’s time or friends in peace, which requires cooperation more than independence for, as James Branch Cabell said, you can live at peace only as long as your neighbor chooses. There are freedoms, then, that individuals claim against communities and freedoms that only communities can create for their members.
These are freedoms of the body, and they’re vital. Without them, our lives reduce to an animal struggle, below the level of anything one calls civilization. Think of films like The Road or any of a growing number of post-apocalypse films and novels over the past century. Without some basic physical freedoms, it’s true, we’re too occupied with survival to accomplish much else. They’re some version of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But they’re also necessary without being sufficient. There are further freedoms we eventually learn we need with an almost instinctive bodily hunger. Without them we’re malnourished.
A neighborhood elm — free in autumn
Suber goes on to make an important observation about kinds of freedom from a different perspective, one sometimes downplayed or ignored in current discussion of rights and freedoms.
“A distinction first made explicit by Kant is that between positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from —from coercion, constraint, compulsion. Positive freedom is freedom to —to guide oneself from within without taking one’s rule from outside, to be one’s own master and legislator.”
Negative freedom is the kind of freedom many people seem to mean, if they talk about freedom at all. It’s the kind of freedom that libertarians typically build their platforms around. However, one kind doesn’t automatically guarantee the other will arrive with the burgers and the beer, so we can all party. As Suber notes,
“Kierkegaard seems to have been the first to notice that one can attain negative without positive freedom. One can cut oneself loose from enslaving influences and yet have developed no internal or home-grown sources of guidance at all. Kierkegaard in fact finds this state, beyond negative freedom and short of positive freedom, to be a recurring predicament for human beings in the modern world. He calls it hovering, to be free from everything, hence to have no basis for the choices one is then free to make; to be independent but empty.”
“A basis for the choices one is free to make.” Now we’re getting a little closer to what freedom is for. And I’m setting the stage for one kind of freedom we’ve neglected so far and Suber at first seems to leave out. This is spiritual freedom. The word “spiritual” gets bitch-slapped around a lot, so let me explain what I mean here. When people are centered on “a path with heart,” they can endure remarkable physical setbacks and obstacles and still achieve their goals, or die trying without feeling they have failed. Throw them in jail, torture them, exile them, they just keep rolling and rising back up, like the old 70s “weebles wobble but they won’t fall down” ads. Think Gandhi, think Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, think any number of freedom fighters, rebels (whether we like their politics or not), ornery patriots, and similar cussedly independent folks. There’s an integrity to their choices we can admire, even if the choices themselves happen to be abhorrent to us.
Yes, we can call to mind great spiritual heroes — some of them end up as founders of religions – but we have examples closer to home. Most of us know, or know about, people who are “survivors.” They get ill, they go broke, their families desert them, business goes bad, marriages fail, kids land in jail — but they bounce back. They have what an older generation called “inner resources.” We don’t hear about those kinds of resources much, maybe because we don’t have them much in evidence. But the seeds of them are still in us (and seem to emerge most often in hardship). The rest of the time they just make us restless, usually because we’re often living less than authentically. Face it, I get lazy when my life is easy. I want things to stay the same, which they almost always resolutely, infuriatingly, refuse to do. Like they’re refusing to do right now in the West, not to mention many other parts of the world.
What is needed, then, is the judgment to decide what to do with the freedoms we already have, and Suber proceeds to examine what that kind of judgment looks like.
A surprising test for freedom of judgment, in fact, is whether complexity overpowers, intimidates, and defeats us, or challenges, arouses, and incites us to comprehend it. In our spiritual apprenticeship complexity prevents us from feeling our power or wanting to control our own fate. We are happy to learn more first. Freedom before this point is merely self-assertion without the foundation of judgment needed for making choices. But as Hobbes said, if he spent his life reading books by other people, he’d never know more than they did. When we emerge from this dependency into our own freedom it is because we are ready to direct ourselves and make the decisions that this requires.
Bald Eagle — flight as freedom
So are we really free in the U.S. right now? Ignore for a moment whatever your local conspiracy theorist or naysayer or grumpy partisan has to say. The vast majority of Americans have food and shelter. Most of us have a car, won’t get stopped at state borders, and so have freedom of movement (if we can afford the gas). We have freedom from pain and suffering to a larger degree than any other time in history, with all the painkillers and routine buffers from the hard corners of reality that our heated and air-conditioned and work-saving-device-crammed houses and cars and buses and planes can provide. Most Americans live better and longer than medieval kings and queens, with a vast array of entertainments at our command.
Are we free? Material things are enjoyable — you don’t see me volunteering to give mine up just yet — but they can’t help us “emerge from this dependency into our own freedom … because we are ready to direct ourselves and make the decisions that this requires.” When our things get threatened, we complain out of a supposed “freedom” that is “merely self-assertion without the foundation of judgment needed for making choices.” We have the freedom to complain and criticize. But where is the judgment for the choices and changes we need to make?
There is one more factor I want to consider. I mentioned Aung San Suu Kyi earlier, the Myanmar freedom fighter and legally elected official confined to house arrest for years. One of her most famous speeches is her “Freedom From Fear” speech, which begins: “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” This is one of the last great “unfreedoms” we face. Think how much fear there is in headlines, on talk shows, in the news, in people’s faces. Suber observes:
The larger kinds of unfreedom abroad in the world and within … are not affected in the slightest until people who recognize them as unfreedom rouse themselves to challenge them.
Religions aren’t always up to the job of helping people wake up and “recognize unfreedoms,” either. I’m including Druidry here along with the rest. One problem with Christianity (to pick on a religion I know and which has had longer to make an impact) is that it has defined freedom theologically and thus very narrowly. That is, until I am saved, I am a slave to sin and subject to its penalties of wasted chances and dissatisfaction and emptiness, and ultimately to damnation. After I am saved by the substitutionary atonement of Christ, who died in my place and paid the price for sin that otherwise I would have had to pay myself, I am free from the penalties of sin, and therefore able to go to heaven at death. But I am no more free immediately after salvation than I was before from the responsibility of judgment, and the consequences of my own and others’ bad and good judgments. My dissatisfaction with Christianity isn’t that it doesn’t save people; it’s that it seems to transform too few of them into better versions of themselves. Where’s the “new creature” promised in the New Testament? A saved jackass or a damned jackass is still a jackass. Salvation may get you to heaven, but we have to live with you till then.
To offer you any kind of definitive “answer” to what freedom is for is to promote an unfreedom. I’m working closer to my own answers, but you need to find your own. Suber acknowledges this:
To take one’s judgments from others is exactly the unfreedom to be avoided. To negate the judgments of others, without more, takes one just as directly to dependency and enslavement, though by a path that is one step longer. To judge by standards that one finds inescapable is still bad faith, for one has chosen to adhere to them, and is not taking responsibility for that choice. To recognize that we are responsible for all our judgments, including our standards of judgment, is the beginning of positive freedom and self-direction. Then we will recognize that all the noisy certitudes of the world are not primarily candidates for truth but appeals to our judgment.
That is, all these supposed “certitudes” are jumping up and down, waving flags, cheering and whistling and shouting and saying to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” rather than “Here I am. Do what I tell you.”
For me, more and more I find as the years pass, freedom is for loving more. Nothing else matches up, noting else offers the challenge and delight and fulfillment. It’s life-long. I’m most loving of myself and others when I’m free, and — paradoxically? — I’m most free when I’m loving. What’s freedom for in your life?
Years ago now, I remember furiously reading behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity on a plane. I was making lots of notes and highlighting the text and writing exclamation points in the margins — at one point my seat-mate, who hadn’t spoken to me otherwise, asked if I was prepping for a class. I still have that copy, a cheap paperback, yellowing on my shelf.
But I wasn’t reading to complete an assignment. I loathed Skinner’s conclusions, and I was gathering ammunition against them — all the false premises and counter-points and fallacies and over-generalizations I could muster. The most egregious of Skinner’s conclusions were that since — apart from genetics — we are machines controlled by our environment, there was no need to sustain delusional beliefs in freedom and dignity. There is no such thing as an “autonomous” person who thinks and decides and chooses. Any talk of political rights, a “soul,” consciousness, or freedom or any of a large number of other psychological states, was pointless, unfounded — an obstacle, in fact, to human progress. We’re formed and motivated by reward and punishment, by reinforcement, Skinner claimed. And he asserted that a “science of human behavior” made designing any human culture we wished both a possibility and a demonstration of his conclusions.
A few years later I found out that linguist and critic Noam Chomsky had already done the job of demolition years before — 40 years ago, now — in a 1971 article in the New York Review of Books. Chomsky takes Skinner down quite unapologetically:
Skinner is saying nothing about freedom and dignity, though he uses the words “freedom” and “dignity” in several odd and idiosyncratic senses. His speculations are devoid of scientific content and do not even hint at general outlines of a possible science of human behavior. Furthermore, Skinner imposes certain arbitrary limitations on scientific research which virtually guarantee continued failure.
I mention my personal story here because at the time I didn’t feel “free” to ignore Skinner — another way of saying I didn’t want to. My freedom in this case was a choice, though one strongly influenced by emotion.
Here’s why I didn’t feel free — why I “had to” critique Skinner — again in Chomsky’s words:
Noam Chomsky
There is, of course, no doubt that behavior can be controlled, for example, by threat of violence or a pattern of deprivation and reward. This much is not at issue, and the conclusion is consistent with a belief in “autonomous man.” If a tyrant has the power to require certain acts, whether by threat of punishment or by allowing only those who perform these acts to escape from deprivation (e.g., by restricting employment to such people), his subjects may choose to obey — though some may have the dignity to refuse. They will understand the difference between this compulsion and the laws that govern falling bodies.
Of course, they are not free. Sanctions backed by force restrict freedom, as does differential reward. An increase in wages, in Marx’s phrase, “would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves, and would not restore, either to the worker or to the work, their human significance and worth.” But it would be absurd to conclude merely from the fact that freedom is limited, that “autonomous man” is an illusion, or to overlook the distinction between a person who chooses to conform, in the face of threat or force or deprivation, and a person who “chooses” to obey Newtonian principles as he falls from a high tower.
The inference remains absurd even where we can predict the course of action that most “autonomous men” would select, under conditions of extreme duress and limited opportunity for survival. The absurdity merely becomes more obvious when we consider the real social world, in which determinable “probabilities of response” are so slight as to have virtually no predictive value. And it would be not absurd but grotesque to argue that since circumstances can be arranged under which behavior is quite predictable — as in a prison, for example, or the concentration camp society “designed” above — therefore there need be no concern for the freedom and dignity of “autonomous man.” When such conclusions are taken to be the result of a “scientific analysis,” one can only be amazed at human gullibility.
OK, there we have the arguments of two white Euro males. We’re equally gullible, of course, when we think freedom is some absolute thing, so that if we “have” it, it can’t be “taken” from us except by violating our “rights.” Societies organize and provide some things at the cost of others. It’s always a trade-off. Security in exchange for loss of freedom of movement has been a hot-button issue for some time now, with gated communities, and recent talk of a fence across the southern U.S. border, with the Dept. of Homeland Security scanning us every time we want to fly on a plane, opening our luggage, and fondling our pill bottles and mini-toothpaste tubes. Have I tried to take away your freedom by slanting my comments here, to influence you and nudge you in the direction I want, so I can manipulate you later on? Do you have the freedom to stop reading right now, or send me a nasty message? You know the answers. But how valuable is that freedom?
Changing gears, we have the pop version of freedom in Kris Kristofferson’s song “Me and Bobby McGee.” Here’s the chorus:
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, no no
Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues
You know feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.
Is freedom “feeling good”? To repeat, if we feel good, are we “free”? After a medical misdiagnosis of mental illness, electroshock therapy cured my mother of some “delusions” that were actually caused by the onset of dementia, but I can’t ever say she was more free as a result. Something in her shifted after that treatment. It certainly sharpened the decline already under way. It didn’t matter if she “felt good,” though of course I didn’t want to deprive her of whatever positives we could salvage from the situation. In the other sense the song mentions, she was nearly “free.” She had (almost) “nothing left to lose.”
But the song doesn’t exactly say that. The lyrics assert, “Feeling good was easy when he sang the blues.” In other words, if I have an antidote for my pain, or an outlet or expression for it like the Blues, it’s at least somewhat easier for me to feel good. But actual freedom is a wash in this case, when I’m suffering. Take away the suffering, and then I can begin to consider whether or not I’m “free.” Until then, I got “nothing.”
The radically down and out, the homeless, the street crazies, the druggies — they’re free in many senses that I’m not. Far fewer obligations, responsibilities, commitments, possessions. Little of the self-building we do by putting on the right clothes, driving the right car, working at the right job, eating lunch with the right colleagues, and so on. (I can see it start early, in school, with the cliques and claques and in-out groups.)
But I’m in no hurry for that kind of freedom, at least at the cost the homeless pay.
I’ve allowed myself to ramble a bit in this post, rather than arguing closely toward a conclusion. Is that freedom?
A singe grosbeak inspects our feeder, and as I look out through the living room picture window at the bird plumped against the cold, there’s a reflection in the glass of flames from the woodstove inside. In its orange vigor, my fire faces west, Druidically inappropriate, but very welcome on this grade A gray day.
In the northern U.S. that’s an image of this time of year: reflections, of heat inside, of life still proceeding outdoors and in, of the time of year itself.
The interval between Thanksgiving and the December holidays can be a delicious space, a “meanwhile” or middle-time for re-tooling and starting to close up shop on the current year. To feel that it’s often too busy, or merely filled with worsening weather forecasts, as though that is all it has to offer, is to miss something profoundly meditative about these days. What’s the opposite of miss? Attend, intercept, catch, be there. Whatever it is, that’s what I want to do.
There is as well in November and early December a late-autumnal melancholy, it’s true. The peak of Thanksgiving has passed, and some may see the next months as a pretty solid trudge through the valleys (in our boots, scarves and gloves, and hauling snow-shovels) until the climb to the next holiday.
So when I can take a look from this end of the year at a season at the other side of summer, I do. Off to that start of spring transience which mirrors something in us now as well. I followed a link from an article in today’s NY Times and there on the page was the sudden pure pleasure of “Sakura Park,” a poem by the late Rachel Wetzsteon (pronounced “wet-stone”). Take a visit to late spring, six months ago, or six months to come. The cherry trees (the sakura of the title) are in bloom …
Sakura Park
The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter
like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on
and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles
a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
But the petals scatter faster,
seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor,
and at least I’ve got by pumping heart
some rules of conduct: refuse to choose
between turning pages and turning heads
though the stubborn dine alone. Get over
“getting over”: dark clouds don’t fade
but drift with ever deeper colors.
Give up on rooted happiness
(the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve
(a poor park but my own) will follow.
There is still a chance the empty gazebo
will draw crowds from the greater world.
And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:
the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.
Yes, that’s a poet for you — insisting on a connection between cherry petals and the growth of self, when all the cherry need do is be a self beautifully ready to attract bees, produce fruit and fulfill its cherry-tree-ness.
And yes, there’s a whiff of early middle-aged cynicism creeping in here (Wetzsteon died at 42), the dry rot that afflicts so many who tell themselves to be content with meanwhiles. “Give up on rooted happiness!” she urges. There is still green chance and raw luck and sweet grace in the world, but until they salvage something greater than what’s at hand, be content with meanwhiles, the poet advises, the “far from nothing” moments that hum with possibility even now. So it’s back to trees, where maybe we should have remained.
Too often we are literally “self-important.” We worry about the self like a barefoot child abandoned in a parking lot, or an opened can of tuna that will spoil unless we eat or cook or refrigerate it. The cherry tree sends out blossoms unworried about November. Not because November won’t come, but because it’s not November when it’s April. And when November comes, the tree will be a cherry in November, awaiting the next humming moment.
And yes, if I meditate among the swaying branches and crackling leaves this time of year (trying to fluff myself against the cold like an outsized bird, so I can sit or kneel a few minutes without shivering and breaking my focus), the “stolid tree on fire” matters more than it did before, and my own concerns matter less. Restoration that we seek, visit all who long for it. Find it in the silent witnesses of trees. We who listen for “a voice that will save us” forget what burns in front of us, the fire in the stove in the living room, this day passing with us into “later” and darkness and tomorrow, the trees wintering, summering and wintering again, the air itself, with its metallic crispness on the tongue and in the nose, the fire that burns in all things.
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The 50,000-word deadline this Wednesday 11/30 at midnight looms before us “wrimos,” and I’m finally within range. Woo-hah! The Nanowrimo site obligingly lets participants grab icons of progress — anything to keep us writing. Much of what I’m drafting now is detail, filling in missing scenes, background, snatches of dialog with disembodied characters, pieces of Harhanu physiology and psychology — and I suppose, not surprisingly, a brand-new and potentially primary character — because of course what I expressly did not need at this point is a strong new presence telling me “when you are done, you are not done, for I have more” — to paraphrase Omar Khayyam in his Rubaiyat. He already has a name (Tehengin) which he obligingly repeated to me till I got it right. But, probably, I do need him — in some way which I’m sure he’ll inform me about. In detail.
So anyway, here I dance at 44212 words, taking a break to blog, before I return to dance some more. Wish me well in this home stretch.
With so much attention to freedom these days, both freedom from and freedom to (they can feel like — and amount to — very different things), it’s strange there’s so little discussion of what to do with it once we get it. We’re supposed to know intuitively, like eating or breathing. Let me “do my own thing,” “don’t fence me in,” “don’t tread on me,” “a man’s home is his castle,” “do what you want,” and countless other phrases and proverbs and old saws and aphorisms to capture that sense of a supposedly “inalienable right” to do — what? Along with life and the often asymptotic* happiness we’re supposedly in pursuit of, this third leg of the American Independence tripod got declared and delivered to us and we haven’t done a paternity test to see whether it’s our baby. Liberty. As in “see Statue of.” As in Patrick Henry, who gave himself and his audience only two choices (“liberty or death”), proving he was definitely not a true American, because as we all know, Americans love their choices. “Have it your way,” goes the old Burger King advertizing jingle. OK, my way. But once I get it, how do I know I have it? Is it like a lottery ticket — changing in value by the day, and up to me to claim it if I won it? And then what? What’s freedom for?
More to come in Part II.
*An asymptote, if the Wikipedia definition above doesn’t do it for you, is a curve that keeps edging ever closer to a line, but never actually arrives. (Unless you want to count infinity.) Think of it as a geometric tease.
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Passing the halfway mark of 25,000 words a couple of days ago felt as big this year as reaching 10K last year did — a milestone. Inevitably I’ve fallen behind — this time by about 5000 words. Got nothing written at all on Monday, and Tuesday was little better. Today’s quota is 30K. I’ve gotten down 3000 words so far, in a burst of catching up, and hope for another few hundred by day’s end, which will bring me within striking distance. I’m at 28,125 as I write this. (Yes, my break from writing a novel is writing a blog entry.) Definitely some interesting material has come through. I’ve put my poor succubus Alza in a number of implausible, erotic, challenging, historical and dangerous situations, just to see what sticks.
I’ve also found out that in order for an important historical meeting to occur, she needs to be about a century older than I’d made her. Not sure how she feels about that. Will no doubt find out. And I’ve gotten down a description of her original appearance that she has just discovered, the “face she had before she was born,” as the Zen masters like to say — before she shape-shifted the first time in her life among humans. That discovery seems to give her a stability and sense of self nothing else has. Here’s a striking image I found online and used for inspiration as Alza. It comes, both appropriately and ironically at once, from an Australian evangelical website, in the form of a pamphlet providing counsel to victims of Incubi and Succubi.
A Druid Way 
