if you let that silence in

Feeling really inward this evening. One of those times when you just want to sit and watch the changing of the light, as the evening sky goes from afternoon to sunset to the indigo of night. Reading until it's too dark to see anymore. That sort of mood. Wanting everyone to just go away and leave you alone, even though it's not that you want to push people away, just that it's hard to be around people when you're in that mood. This is exactly how depression and PTSD alienate: you don't feel like you can connect with anyone, because you're in a different universe than they are. Nothing connects. E.M. Forster's epigram and key phrase from his novel Howard's End was "Only connect." But at the end of his greatest novel, A Passage to India, there's a scene between two of the main characters that raises the doubt that we ever can connect. That it might just not be possible. We try hard but there are always rocks and hills that get in between us, get in our way. I feel on the other side of the mountains from everyone, in these evening moods. This is the ceremony of the changing of the light. No light to see by, till the carriage lights turn on and the sky tries to fill with stars. Which it won't tonight, because of clouds and cold. I need to get out and go grocery shopping, just a few odds and ends, but I don't want to move at all. I wrote a poem some years ago in this mood, and it had some legs, even got published. "La Madonna." A young wife's interior monologue, as she sits in silence, in a quiet moment between the flurry of her usual day. "In a minute," she says, before the poem ends. She'll rejoin the world in a minute. Sometimes you just want some time to yourself, to be still and silent and by yourself. One thing that experience has proven is that extraverts never really understand introverts; they never comprehend why we need to be still and silent for part of our day, how it recharges. I also feel in no rush to be around people these days, as they tend to be noisy and clueless and overbearing. PTSD for me means I get easily overstimulated. It just gets too loud and overwhelming sometimes. I get the sense that lots of my friends really don't understand that. I doubt few of them have even read this far. How do you get a quiet message through the personal and cultural noise? The voice of the divine isn't loud, it's a still small voice, a voice you must listen for, and it's easy to miss. Too much noise, not enough signal, that's the state of the world. It's mostly noise, very little signal. I've had friends marvel at the fact that when they come to visit, I don't have the TV on, or the radio, or even the stereo, using background noise to cover over that silence, that void and gap in conversation and communion that most people seem to be deathly afraid of. Geese are passing over, there's only a thin line of light on the western horizon, everything else has gone blue and grey. People are afraid of silence. We've all gotten so used to the loud noise of cultural that people are afraid of even gaps in conversation. We're so used to fast editing in the entertainment, sharp cuts and jerky camera shots and editing for maximum adrenaline stimulation, that people don't know what to do with themselves if the moment is too quiet. I have friends who are incapable of sitting in silent companionship, saying nothing, just holding space, just sharing the silence. The minute there's a gap in the noise, they try to generate signal. But it always comes out wrong. They stumble. But I'm afraid of the silences and gaps in fellowship. I'm comfortable with silence. The void is a longtime companion that I have come to know very well. Whole worlds can drop into those silences. When I'm driving across the loneliest two-lane highway in the world, a hundred miles from anywhere, out in the desert in Utah or Nevada, or on the unpaved roads of the northern Great Lakes backcountry, I sometimes pull the truck over, turn off the motor, get out, lean against the hood, and just listen to the silence. An hour of the total silence of the desert is worth a month of talk therapy. Things settle in place. Life stops. There's nothing but the present moment, nowhere to be, nothing to do, and most importantly nothing that needs to be said. I know a lot of very smart people who are incapable of silence, who process everything in words, whose lives make no sense to them until they talk it out or think it in their minds in words, till they fill the void gap with their own words. I know writers and poets who never shut up, and don't know how to. But I also know musicians who know the value of a long rest, of the fermata, of the breath-pause in between phrases, that tiny moment of absolute stillness that an entire world can fall through, between the end of one phrase and the beginning of the next. No words there, and none needed. The words fail us at that point, and that's where the bard and shaman know that poetry begins. Purple and grey band of light under the soft lip of steel clouds behind forks of bare trees as the wind stills for long enough for you to hear something in that evening silence that can feel the world. If you let it.

Darshan: video

Darshan, 2012

Music, Images & Words by Arthur Durkee.

AD: shakuhachi, synthesizers, meditation bells

This is basically a music video for my recent CD, Darshan, which was written to be used for yoga, meditation, Reiki, and other similar purposes. The setting is the same meditation hall in the Japanese garden that I go to when I can to get back to center, meditate, etc.

I am now thinking about doing more music videos for Darshan, as I think this turned out rather well. Stay tuned.

Meditation Hall

a windy day, fitful clouds, changing light
beach full of all ages cooling off in thick tree shade

stroll along water's edge till you reach the garden
sound of wind in trees, creek waterfall splashing



meditation hall rustic unfinished
open on two sides, two walls with benches
latticed windows, one tall, one round





be stillness
motionless music
silence of whipping leaves



round eye window
of the heart looking out—
distant worlds, so close

Heartlands: Notes Before a Premiere

As we approach the premiere(s) of "Heartlands," now less than a month away, I find myself struggling with tension, anxiety and worry. The premiere of a major piece of music which I wrote is bringing out anxiety caused by inherited latent perfectionism (thanks, Mom) and worry about my future. I want this to be the beginning of a new musical, not the end of one. So, pre-concert jitters, nerves, and worries.

Just to be clear, not all this tension and stress is negative. I'm also excited, breathless with anticipation, and hope. It's all mixed together. There is joy and gratitude in the mix as well.

Thus I must remind myself to let go, relax, breathe. This has been a very stressful period of life—not just because the mixed tension/anticipation regarding these concert premieres, but because of everything else going in life, as well. It's worth remembering that I wrote "Heartlands" in and around an episode of a chronic illness reaching its climax, followed by major surgery, then recovery, and gradual, slow return to something like normative health. It's worth remembering that all of this happened at the same time, all intertwined, and that none of these journeys are ended. Gratitude and fear are part of that mix as well.

My anxiety is partly because of the upcoming concert premieres—it's excitement and anticipation as much as it is worry or anxiety, as I said—and partly because I still am making no progress on moving forward with my medical journey. That's been stuck and causing me suffering for many months now, with no end to it in sight. I have been ignoring it recently, to some extent, focusing instead on the music and the arts-related career, doing marketing and website building and other tasks related to building this future. A lot of the time, as a result, emotionally I've been living in the future or the past, not the present moment. I've been coping with all this by making art, making things, making photographs, video, writing music, and more. It's a way to stay in my body most days, and not be lost to worry and anxiety. Sometimes temporary distraction is the correct response to an unsolvable problem.

I've been having many nightmares lately, and remembering them when I wake—anxiety dreams, really, stress dreams which I wake from already feeling tense and anxious. Starting off your day already tense is not wise.

•

Last night, though, in the last dream before waking, I encountered a Native American elder at a musical instrument store, who blessed me with tobacco smoke from his pipe. This musical instrument store, which I wandered into as it was adjacent to another store where I was friends with the owner, had several vintage Chapman Sticks for sale, and I was enjoying talking to owner as a player with inside knowledge about the history of the instrument. Then I asked to use the bathroom, and when I emerged I met a talkative Native man who seemed aware of that normally-hidden side of my self that is bound up with shamanism and spirituality; he took me over to another part of the store, or a place connected by the same space, where a quiet Native American elder was seated with his wife under a canopy, a square of tanned leather held aloft at the corners by wooden poles, decorated with feathers and beads. This elder took his medicine pipe and blew smoke over my body and aura, blessing me. This morning I woke from that dream, still aware of the anxiety I have been feeling lately, but aware too of feeling "talked to" by the spirits. Shut up and accept the blessings you've been given; shut up and be smoked; have faith that despite all your trials that you are indeed on the right path, the sacred way, the proper road for your life's purpose. When dreams are this lucid, this clear in their message, you'd best pay attention.

•

Part of me would love to run away, right now, spend time by the ocean, in the Florida Keys, in California, or spend time alone in the deserts and mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona. Time in the desert, time by the water, are good for clearing out the mind, for ridding oneself of mental clutter, for recharging those inner batteries, storing up serenity inside oneself that can last for awhile. I need a nature break. I could use a short camping trip, maybe nearby, since I'm too busy before the concerts to spare much time or energy. I have to remind myself to seek out peaceful places, near to home as well as far away, to find rest and solace of spirit. I have to remind myself to take time away from Everything to just be. Be still. Meditate. Rest. Recharge.

I find partial escape by looking at and preparing for printing those photographs that I have made in the Southwest, and by the Pacific. The images can take me back in memory, at least somewhat, and I can hear a little of that desert silence that I find so healing and refreshing, whenever I travel there. Some of the most healing moments, out in the desert, miles from anywhere, have been when I pull over, turn off the engine, get out of the truck, and just stand and listen to the silence for awhile. More than once, I've found that stillness, that silence, to be so refreshing, so penetrating into my mental clutter, so relieving of the stresses of the day, that ten minutes of desert silence are worth about a month of talk therapy. The outdoors is my refuge.

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," said Thoreau. Also the preservation of my psychological well-being.

•

Yesterday towards late afternoon I went and spent an hour in the Japanese garden a few miles from home. It was a windy day, full of fitful clouds and changing light. The beach at the manmade lake nearby was full of people, all ages cooling off from the high afternoon heat of the day, screaming kids, a volleyball game or two, and elders sitting peacefully in the shade offered by the thick trees. I went along the water's edge till I reached the Japanese part of the gardens, and spent the rest of my time there. People came through occasionally, but I had it mostly to myself for long stretches of time. Just the sounds of wind in the trees, and the water splashing in the waterfall and creek next to the open-sided meditation hall. Rustic, designed like an tea-room, with a latticed round window to the east, two walls open, two walls with benches for sitting.

I spent a long time at the meditation hall, just letting tension fall away. As I always do when in the japanese garden, I made some photographs—but photography for me is a form of meditation as much as it is art-making. And this time I shot several video elements which I will later assemble into a garden meditation video. I already have an idea for the music track: a shakuhachi solo with meditation bells, that I recorded a few months ago for a meditation CD, Darshan. Or maybe something newly recorded, but in that style. Music that is almost motionless, in contrast to the high winds recorded in my video shots.

•

I will go to the meditation hall in the garden again soon, if I need a break in the late afternoon. I don't have time to take a long roadtrip right now, not with my musical commitments reaching a peak level. But I can take short nature breaks, meditate out in the woods and gardens. I have to remind myself to do this, to cope, to maintain a level of serenity that enhances everything I do. Just keep breathing. Just keep swimming. Just be.

Video: bell ringing in an empty sky

bell ringing in an empty sky, a meditation video, 2012

•

This was made using time-lapse photography, photographed at 1 frame per second, played back at variable frame rates. Shot using a tripod; the pan effects were made by turning the tripod slowly as the camera clicked through frames. The only lightsource was the candles in frame.

Another experiment in using tools to make style. We learn by doing. Sometimes the tools themselves give you a clue towards what the subject matter is, and the tone and style in which to present it. Artists need to listen to their tools, usually more than they do. There's a wisdom in the hands that often supersedes the egocentric directions of the head.

Darshan

Soon after I completed Heartlands, the large choral commission I've been working on of throughout most of 2011, I was commissioned to make a CD of music for meditation, yoga practice, Reiki sessions, and other healing work. A friend's mother had been using my CD Trance for some time, and had given it some praise, so I was commissioned to make a new CD as a gift. I worked on this project in my recording studio for about a month, and completed the CD just before Xmas 2011. It's entirely instrumental music, prominently featuring shakuhachi, and Tibetan and Japanese meditation bells.

This year I plan to finally figure out how to market more of my music online, including this new CD as well as some older CDs. Here's the title track as a taste of things to come:

Darshan    

—AD, shakuhachi, computer music instruments



The musical soundscape was created in part by using some music apps on my new iPad. I got the iPad after completing Heartlands. I can see that for me the iPad is going to be a fantastic creative tool, both for music and photography, and likely in ways I haven't even thought of yet. The other cool thing about the iPad is that finally computer design and technology is approaching what I've wanted for years, after becoming a Star Trek fan. Design follows art in the best way possible.

"Darshan" is a Sanskrit word that means "see" or "seeing." In Hindu usage it refers to beholding the gods, or God, directly, and can also refer to those annual festivals when images of the gods are taken out of the temples and paraded through the streets for all to see. There is an implication that what we see also sees us: a mystical truth not limited to Hinduism, but found in most mystical traditions. As the great Medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."

"Darshan" in Indian philosophy also is used to describe worldviews and mindsets, the distinctive in which a systematized philosophy looks at things, including its exegesis of sacred texts. Yoga itself is considered a darshan. Yoga is a form of kinesthetic meditation, after all, like walking meditation or the highest levels of some martial arts.

So, Darshan is about the seeing the divine, the encounter with the divine. One realizes in the encounter that one is not separate from the divine, but all are part of the One. And one realizes that one's actions are not other than the will of the divine, which after all is made of all beings and what they will.



The blessing of doing this smaller commissioned piece of music is that it filled the gap between the completion of the writing of Heartlands, and the beginning of the rehearsal process. I have learned, as never before, that I need to always have something to work on. And the past few weeks have been very stressful, even dire and desperate at times. Multiple stressors all came home to roost at the same time. (Including having to change my dietary regimen (again!) just before the winter holiday season. The good news is that the new, even more restrictive dietary regimen is in fact effective, and I have made real progress losing weight this past week or so, for the first time ever since the surgery last summer.)

The wisdom of artistic perseverance is to make sure you are always working on multiple projects, and that as soon as you finish one, you start another. Don't wait. Dive right in. Never leave a gap in between projects, because a gap between projects is the door by which depression and despair can enter. It's not about doing make-work to keep yourself preoccupied or distracted: this is real work, not make-work. It's about knowing that I stay more grounded and focused when I have a big creative project of some kind to occupy my attention. It's a way of channelling one's energy in the best way, and preventing those inner voices of panic and depression form gaining a toe-hold. It helps with being able to cope with the day-to-day.

Therefore, as I completed the Darshan CD, I began writing a new song, maybe to become a new set of songs, for myself to sing and play. One of these will probably get premiered at a fundraiser in March. The style is more loose and jazz-pop-rock than formal. I'm still working on the lyrics, but after several false starts, the pattern fell into place, and progress has been made. All I anticipate needing to notate finally is melody-and-words, with chord symbols for the chord changes. I'll write lead sheets, in other words, instead of fully realized charts.

Then I'll do my best to learn to sing the song and play Stick at the same time.

I feel like my Stick playing is revitalized, as I wrote about after seeing Tony Levin in concert a couple of months ago, which I felt gave me permission to go my own way as a player; even to play simply and cleanly, and not need to become another solo Stick artist who can play anything. I have my limits, and I'm okay with them. Practice is what it takes to stretch them, that's all.

Begin Again, Keep Going

Having completed a large commission of songs for male chorus and piano, which occupied all of my attention for several months, and which produced a concert's worth of music, I have this past week been newly commissioned to do another, very different musical project. A CD I had made on commission almost a decade ago, a CD of trance music to be used as background for yoga classes, meditation, and similar situations, has led to a commission to make a sequel CD. Not a repetition, but the next level. I'm a better composer and musician now, or at least I hope I am, since time is meant to improve your art-making, not stagnate it.

This new CD I am recording now will be used for meditation, yoga, healing, massage, Reiki sessions, and so forth. Thus I'm writing it to sustain those purposes, not interrupt them. That calls for a particular kind of music. A particular tone and tempo very different from the dramatic, narrative songs I've been writing for most of this year. It will be completely non-verbal, instrumental music. It will use original recordings of Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist meditation bells, bells recorded from my own collection. It will use a fair bit of shakuhachi. No doubt there will be some synthesizers and keyboards in the mix, and Chapman Stick. It will have a variety of shapes and tones, but overall will hopefully take the listener deeper into meditative states of consciousness, the opposite of overstimulated, stressed-out, Type A caffeinated states of mind.

There's a lot of bland, boring New Age music out there. The best of that genre has always been music first, New Age music second. I think of musicians such as Paul Winter, Will Ackerman, and a few others, who pretty much invented the genre, but also transcended it. Contrast their vibrant, emotional music with the soulless boring pap of Stephen Halpern's random noodlings on electric piano. Contrast the powerful presence of the music in Stephan Micus recording against the flatlined neutral of most New Age music. Even ambient music, created in modern times by Brian Eno, inspired by Eric Satie's semi-joking idea for "furniture music" a century earlier, has more soul than most music you hear played in New Age bookstores, or most healing centers, massage offices, or new Age spiritual healing seminars. People often make the mistake of equating music meant to be unobtrusive and supportive with toneless, dull, bland, and spineless.

Yes, I do have strong opinions about New Age music.

That's because I was a participating witness to the development of this music from its start, back at its inception in the 1970s. Some roots of that style of music are ambient (Eno), folk, cool jazz, especially West Coast jazz, and the encounters of improvising musicians with the musics and spiritual values brought over from India, Japan, Tibet, and China in the 1960s. A lot of improvising musicians from the jazz and rock world contributed to growth of New Age music by introducing multicultural music into Western pop. The movement was strongly influenced both by world music, and by spiritual and moral ideas from the East.

If you want to blame someone, blame The Beatles: their introduction of Indian classical music into Britpop in the late 60s and early 70s, instigated by George Harrison's encounters with India, opened that door to a million and more people who otherwise would never have heard the music, or learned to meditate. The influence of popular culture icons, especially those as beloved, and as restless, as The Beatles, cannot be underestimated. George Harrison's post-Beatles solo albums have been part of the trend, seminal and central, even when basically pop music.

The music I tend to create, now, when asked to make healing music, or trance music, or meditation/yoga music, tends to be on the ambient side. Not static and unchanging, but not tonal or harmonic, not based on Western ideas of music theory, and essentially timeless. One of my influences is of course my years playing Indonesian gamelan music. Another strong influence is Buddhist music from Japan, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia, all of which I have listened to and studied for decades.

I am making it up as a I go along. It's an improvisation on a theme, a tone, an idea, a feeling. Most of my music is just so, whether notated or improvised. Art is improvised, life is improvised. It's all of a piece. So I keep going, making art, giving myself something to do that means something, a reason to go on, a purpose and a meaning, for my own life.

•

Music surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. —Pete Seeger

Hate, fear, all the corrosive forces of entropy, give way before music's power to make us all come together in harmony. So Mote It Be.

The Shamanic Art of Writing

I just spent an hour reading (re-reading) a novel so compelling that it pulled me entirely inside its own world building, so that I lost track of my own world, and my own self. This is what I call immersive reading. You become an active participant in the story, not merely a detached observer. When I emerged from the book after an hour of reading, I felt like I had lived an entire lifetime, and yet it was still the same bright morning. I found myself blinking in the light as though I had just woken from a very long night of dreaming.

For awhile, that other world seemed more real than this one, which also happens after particularly lucid and involving dreams. A week should have gone by in the world, while I was absent, but it was still Sunday, only Sunday, leaving me all the rest of future time to inhabit, even though I had just spent a lifetime in another universe. It is a strange sensation of two kinds of time overlapping, a lifetime's experience lived, and yet it wasn't yet tomorrow, as if time in the outer world had flowed much more slowly, had barely advanced. As if you have already lived a full lifetime, yet still have a full lifetime left to live.

(At least this is what happens for me. I've heard from some writers that they can never lose their sense of self when reading, never get wholly immersed in the worldbuilding of what they're reading, never turn off their inner editor and observer, never lose that part of their mind that sits in judgment, that edits, that comments on the writing as they go along. I struggle not to pity that lack of loss of self, because judging others is not a good game, yet I can't help feel sad for some writer who can't allow herself to fall into a book headfirst and inhabit that world, and that world alone, for the duration of the reading.)

Emerging from the other world, as if from a long dream, that sense of doubled time lasts for awhile. You only slowly begin to return to inhabit so-called normative time. Which is consensus time, really. Even so, one of the mysteries of consciousness is that time does change its rate of flow, both subjectively in terms of how we inhabit our lives, and objectively in terms of Einsteinian relativity. Most people think time is steady and constant—but it's not. Time is lumpy and uneven. It clumps. It takes longer to go around some objects in its flow than it does others. Space warps time; a heavy gravity field slows time down relative to its flow elsewhere.

And delightfully, when you lose your sense of self, in reading or in meditation, you lose your sense of time, and inhabit only the present Now. Physicists and experienced meditators agree about this: time is never as fixed as we think it is. Consciousness itself is time-binding; the ability to bind time into linear flow is in fact one definition of consciousness. And as Einstein said, The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. So it's no wonder that time goes away when the sense of self goes away, too. Consciousness is time, in this sense. Self-conscious self-awareness can become hell if we bind ourselves too tightly to time.

Sources tumble onto my table next to my writing desk, sometimes it seems of their own volition. Or I have been slowly gathering them, finding books and articles here and there over a period of time, not really consciously, till of a sudden a pattern emerges. When a pattern reveals itself, or takes shape, or suddenly becomes obvious, I am sometimes tempted to berate myself for not noticing the obvious earlier. But I've learned not to do that; instead, I remind myself that we all are much broader and deeper in mind than we usually realize, or admit to, and once again, the smarter, deeper, silent, unknown, more-tuned-in part of myself has been working behind the scenes until it was ready to dump realization on my doorstep once again, and bring me to my knees. I used to get annoyed, and resist. These days, even if I get annoyed, which is mostly annoyance at the timing, I accept affairs more readily, and just roll with it. That kind of acceptance comes with practice, with experience, with repetition. You learn to understand your own process, and accept its working habits. You learn to give up trying to mold your process into some idea of what you think it should be—"should" is a very coercive concept—and just let it unfold in its own time and manner.

And that's how I most often operate, creatively. I've learned that forcing the process never yields a good outcome: it either ends in a stubborn block, or I produce crap I wouldn't want to share with anyone, anyway. So my job is usually just to be prepared for whenever the process happens.

On the other hand, I've learned that I can coax and cajole, invite and hope. I can encourage that larger, smarter self that's responsible for most of my best work to come forward. I can invite in the wild things. i can leave the door open, and let the wolves wander through. I can open wide the windows inside my own soul, and let the wind and the silence move through, and blow away the accumulating dust.

All I have to work with are metaphors (wolves, windows) and analogies. This is too big and too mysterious a theme to write about definitively, or fully. I keep circling back to it, as part of my own process. I can only dip in and out, and hope each time I contemplate it to learn a little more, go a little deeper.

So here are few small aspects, in unreal order:

1. Because writing creates new worlds to inhabit, because it is worldbuilding, and travel between worlds, it is shamanic. Or at least it has the potential to be. Writing can activate its shamanic potential through content, style, and context of presentation. Traveling between your ordinary world and another one, invented or real, is what a shaman (or wizard) does. This isn't escapism, though; more on that later.

2. Sometimes we write to understand, rather than to describe or explain. Sometimes we don't what we think or fell until we write it out. The process of writing is the process of revelation, of becoming. The creative process is a process of self-discovery, but since we are all One, self-discovery also means discovery for others. The shamanic artist makes art in part to share the fruits of the journey of discovery. Traditionally, the shaman took a journey to the other worlds for the sake of healing the person, or the community: the knowledge brought back for healing was meant to be shared publicly, not kept privately. (Of course there are always confidences and secrets whose privacy one maintains.) If writing is shamanic, then it have that effect on readers.

3. The artist is a shaman in the sense that he or she goes into the other worlds via imagination, intuition, vision, and brings back the archetypal gold of new truth, new beauty. Shamans are divers of the deep waters of the self, who dare to explore the hidden and invisible world of the psyche. What knowledge and wisdom is brought back aids in coping with what is. Thus writing is not escapism, it is completion and conjoining. Context matters.

4. Art, in whatever medium, when it is shamanic in nature and function, can be identified by its liminality and numinosity. Its effects on the reader (viewer, audience, etc.) can be traced by the event of personal transformation, no matter how large or small, either in the moment of art, or later on after contemplation. Art can change lives. One way that we recognize great art is that it does indeed have that kind of effect on people. Shamanic art also disturbs. It can be uncomfortable to confront.

5. In order for writing to become shamanic, the shadow, the darkness, the wolf at the door, must be allowed to enter. You have to let the outside night in. You have to give control over to the unconscious, to the inner forces, to that larger, smarter self. You have to let go of the ego-personality's need to be in charge, in control, to consciously direct art-making. You have to allow for unpredictability and chaos. You have to be willing to tell the hard truthful stories, the difficult ones that most people turn away from because the content disturbs them. You also have to be willing to tell the stories that transcend experience, that are almost impossible to fit into words, short of the exultant poetry of ecstatic praise. Don't stint. And don't censor yourself. Be a prophet. Be a voice crying in the wilderness.

6. Shamanic writing is about process, about change, about reorganizing the kernel of the word into a new, hopefully shape. The contents of the story matter less than that the story is told. The story must be told. The process of telling is essential to your own process of internal change. Don't censor yourself: write whatever it is that you must write.

7. If you assume there is only one reason to write, you kill a million universes in which other reasons are even more essential. Writing can be therapeutic, but the end-product of writing, the written poem or essay, etc., is not itself therapy, it is only the record of therapy, or the product of art therapy. No matter how attached to it you become, because writing it was therapeutic, don't assume it's good art. Making art can be cathartic, to both the maker and the viewer, but art is not inherently a catharsis. Don't confuse the process with the product or the purpose.

8. The archetypal stories are the oldest stories, and have been with us the longest. The narratives of shamanism, or myth, of deep psychological roleplay, all recycle the same stories. So don't fret about originality. If anything, if we write a numinous, evocative story it will evoke the oldest resonances in the psyche, and trigger the archetypes. That feeling you get when the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up. That feeling of standing on the threshold of a brave new world, about to take a first step into the unknown. So don't worry if your story isn't the most modern, the most ironically postmodern, the most original: let the old resonances in, let the oldest echoes ring through. That's how you get at the journey to the other worlds, by remembering you've already been there.

Guts

At first there's nothing you can do but endure.
It takes all your energy to like it, what's been done to you.
Nothing happens quickly. It's all slow, immersed in distance,
a blur of waiting, half-bored, for anything to happen.
A lot of full stops. Nothing flows except those fluids
you'd rather not think about. That damn nasal tube
with its transparent flex full of your inner flux being sucked away.
Disgusting. A charming portrait of soul reduced to nothingness.
And the button to cancel pain by that catheter stuck into your spine.
Makes it all numb. Mind unable to reboot, just floating along.
But the allergies to some of the pain meds means you don't
even get to have fun. Just the floating world, suffering alongside.

It's just as well we can't remember pain, after awhile. It's good it fades.
Otherwise we'd be in dread of it always floating back. We'd lock ourselves
into repetitious nightmares of avoidance, inflexible fears. Memory has
beneficent safety, an anodyne, ways of forgetting what it's not best
to retain. Rehearse what I want to recall, let go of the rest.
The garden's half-wild this summer, since I can't stoop to weed.
No kneeling. No bending over. No lifting things heavier than a water glass.
Getting stronger, but those staples in my gut made a zipper stitch
in my side if I bend over too soon, too far, too often. A long
afternoon's summer dog-day nap will suffice. I may miss all summer,
either napping or restlessly pacing the cage walls. The dog analogy's
a good one, a mutt in pain will pace in patterns I catch myself
emulating. It's the animal self that's in control now. Given so much attention
to the mortal flesh, its echoes of complaint, I've been forgetting
to sit and meditate. The zafu's gotten lonely for my sore ass.

I can't drink much wine yet, so the Chinese poets will have to
get high and chant poems on the moon-viewing porch
without my febrile contributions. The pain pills get in the way.
An ascetic's puritanical paradox: pills to prevent pain
as well prevent some pleasures. Things I'm told I cannot do.
I'm being good, and following all the rules, for once. No pain,
no brain, no rain. It's been so long, so long without unraveling,
I can't remember what it feels like to have a pain-free day.

My sliced open gut still complains, when I sit or lie on my side.
Things inside me still bitch about being jostled around,
cut loose, reattached, stapled up and told to wait, wait, wait.
Legitimate complaints, when I bend or flex the wrong way,
too fast. Some nights' sleep lost over being unable
to find the right configuration of limbs and guts along the futon.
Like some vigilant watchtower, a visceral reminder of limits.

Pain is a postal address along a long road towards new life.
You stop in to visit, never lingering. What burns you stirs you.
Guts and glory distant cousins who don't talk anymore.
Somewhere there's a fence line across an open desert,
a pointless boundary marker, nothing visible from the air.
The hardening zipper under where the staples came out,
firm to the probing finger, even though the skin looks new,
somewhat shiny, not very red anymore, just a pale ember.

And there are dismembered nights. Lying in the chair, restless, unable
to sleep, between the sore guts and the sore ass. No meditation
pillow can conquer a sore ass. At least not so soon after.
Can't toss and turn without hurting, can't lie still without pain,
can't find a comfortable place to lie, no place between.
Play that music loud, Mr. Composer, loud enough to drown out
the inner voices bitching about this and that. Drown in sound,
lose mind to music. Something like a switch that music can trip
when nothing else can. It pisses me off.

Last nights with family and friends in the house, then long nights
alone. I don't get tired as fast as I did, weeks ago, still don't
feel ready to be on my own. It's all too much. I could barely stand
to gather and take out the trash. Too much. Overwhelm is a
country where big things can't be made smaller by simply doing.
Maybe I should get a dog. I'm more comfortable with cats, though.
A simple presence in the house, even an aloof one. Not all purring
is a comfort. Some sound bellwether a breaking.

Nothing to be done but spill your guts. All over the page.
Nothing left but the recordings. Switch them off. They repeat
too often. And often. Boredom is the inability to escape the city
of hell. Dis is the place. You thrash, as much as you safely are able.
And turn over in your sleep. Maybe there will be dreams.
It's so hard to remember, lately.



•

Some Notes:

This poem, unlike most, has taken a long time to write. Most poems happen quickly, for me, then there might be a resting period, before I look it over again, polish it up, makes necessary changes. But the initial writing is usually one extended moment, one connected period of time, the time it takes to write it down. With this poem, though, I started it almost two weeks ago, and kept abandoning it, then coming back to it. I could not let go of it.

The subject wanted to be written about. I don't care if this poem is just a diary-poem; most things I'm writing at the moment, post-surgery, fall into what I am loosely calling The Surgery Diaries: reflections, responses, notes, journal thoughts, all about the process of surgery, and recovery, and the good and bad days that pile up together like so many stacks of rustling leaves.

I don't feel that it's very coherent, for a poem—on the other hand, between the surgery, the pain meds, the lingering traces of anaesthesia, and general post-surgery tiredness, I haven't been very coherent myself. Some days I feel very blurry indeed. Maybe this poem is a truer representation of my current state of scattered mind then something more polished and precise would be. Maybe it's therefore more true.

It's always a challenge to depict state-of-consciousness in a poem, rather than merely describe it, or just talk about it. Depiction is harder, because you have to convey the experience being depicted, so that the reader feels like they're inside the experience, not divorced or distanced from it. Not all readers are comfortable with that. Some poets seem to write cerebrally precisely as a way of distancing themselves from their emotions. To the contrary, I prefer immersion. I prefer to depict. I prefer to recreate an experience, a state of mind, a vision, in the reader's mind. "Show, don't tell." I'm almost always on the side of "showing." Like Julian of Norwich, whose Showings are her account of what was shown to her in her many mystical experiences.

Just as I prefer passionate Dionysian immersion to cool intellectual distancing. William Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet, once defined poetry as "Emotion recollected in tranquility." Wordsworth was all for the primacy of craft over the passion of the moment, at least in theory; in practice, his finely-crafted poems are in fact very moving. Nevertheless, I find again and again that I disagree with his famous pronouncement. Not that I object to craft—but the proper place of craft is in service of the emotion. The cerebral poets err on the side of tranquility rather than viscerality. They prefer the cool laying-out of description over the heated immersion of evocation.

But poetry, like prayer, like hymns, like worship, began as evocation, as sounds and words spoken and sung to evoke the gods, to evoke an experience. I listen to certain pieces of music to evoke a mood. A shamanic journey can be triggered by music, and you ride the drumming there and back again. Jan Garbarek's music has always had that power, for me: something i can ride, there and back again. It can be cathartic.

Poetry is nowadays given too little credit for being cathartic. It is given too much credit for being a cerebral game, and not enough use for healing. Catharsis. Ekstasis. Eros. The Hmong peoples say, in their pantheistic shamanic religious tradition, "The spirit enters you, and you fall down." The ancient Greeks talked about "a god entered him, and he began to prophesy;" poetry for them was literally a divine art. Music has that power, for me. So does a poem, at least some poems, including some that I have written; albeit some of these same poems I feel I only took dictation on, or I was merely the receiver tuned into the akashic broadcast.

This poem, written in fits and stutters, may not in fact do what I want it to do. Time will tell, as always. It may not make it all the way to ekstasis, albeit the writing of it has been at least somewhat cathartic, else I shouldn't have kept returning to it. Time will tell if can stand up to other poems in its series, or genre, or subject matter. Writing a "perfect" poem wasn't my concern, here, and out of my blurred consciousness perfection was not likely anyway, unless the daimon entered me, and I fell down. (Which has happened with other poems in this series.)

Lest I damn the poem further with faint praise, lest I depict my own incoherence here as well as in the poem, I will finish by saying, this is what I have to do, some nights, in order to find the peace it takes be able to fall asleep. For the past month, since my surgery, family and friends have stayed with me, helping me, caring for me, assisting me during the post-surgery recovery, making food, cleaning, helping me with all those necessary and delightfully ordinary tasks one cannot do while one is still recovering. I will never take any of this for granted again: Being able to bend over, to pick up something that weighs more than ten pounds, to walk around the block, to have the stamina to cook all day then clean up the kitchen. My gratitude to my family and friends is deep and sincere.

And tonight begins the first night when I am truly on my own again. Do I fell ready to handle things on my own? Not hardly. Just having to take out the trash tonight was so overwhelming that I needed to sit in my chair, listening to evocative shamanic music, before I could get up and complete the task. I am deliberately, in this writing, in the poem, in the dark shamanic music I've been editing in my music software concurrently, trying to tire myself out enough that my tired yet anxious mind will shut down, drown itself out, and let me fall asleep. Which is one more reason I was able to finish this poem tonight: just to be able to feel like I got one godsbedamned creative thing done tonight, on a day that otherwise felt blurred, anxious, and harsh. Just one bloody little piece of creative work done, tonight, even if in the long run it's not my best work. Perfection is not the accomplishment here; completion is.

Zen Calligraphy and Healing

The last several days have been very difficult. The at-home nurses tell me, out of their extensive experience, that there is a trial-and-error period for new ileostomy patients like myself, while the stoma is still healing, changing size and shape, that involves finding the right appliances to use for the long term. Well, it has indeed been a trial full of many errors. In the past several days, the ostomy bags have come loose many times, leaked many times, needed to be replaced often, and I've lost sleep over it. This morning I really hit the exhaustion wall. I was so exhausted I couldn't even cry out my frustration anymore. Now, tonight, having rested all day long, I do feel better, and I'm hoping that I can get better sleep tonight, better than the past three days.



A few days into this trial, I pulled out the brushes and ink and brush pens, and sat down at my table on the porch to make some enso, to try and center and settle my mind. You can always tell how grounded and centered you are by drawing enso. Enso are circle cosmograms, that represent the circle of all things.



If you are grounded and centered, you will be able to draw a nearly perfect circle with a single stroke of the ink-filled brush. If your mind is not at ease, not empty, not in the state of no-mind, your enso circles will be imperfect, not circles, maybe not even round. I pulled out a stack of my good calligraphy cardstock paper, and made several enso. I started out poorly, and then gradually slowed down, took some breaths, and did some better enso. A kind of brush meditation.



Then it occurred to me that I also needed to do slogan practice. Slogan practice, used in both Japanese Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, is meditation on wisdom sayings. Slogans can be almost stereotypical, but contemplation of them can take you very deep, past the words, past the thought, into the being. So I took some of the enso that I had just made, changed brushes, and began filling them in with slogans and other sayings, and even a few drawings.







I realized that I needed to make art. But not just art to make art. When this healing process has setbacks like the drama I've been having around the ostomy bags failing for so many days and nights—setbacks that really frustrate, and more than once brought me to helpless tears—I thought I might take some of these enso and slogans and make them into a poster for myself.



I will put one or two of them up on the walls, where I can see them often, to remind me to find my center and return to my ground of being, when I fall off. Zen sayings as art posters to remind myself to return to center. To calm the mind. To let go of the suffering and just be in the moment.



Sometimes the frustration edges over into despair, and you feel like these trials will never be over. The nurses and doctors tell me they will, but not all of me believes that yet. I'm in the middle of this mess, it's my body, no one else's, and this has been really hard. My artist friend Alex, who has his own experience with bodily trials, reminds me that me feelings in this difficult time are legitimate and well-earned. He helped me today by validating what I was feeling, rather than trying to "fix" it.





So I will put up a couple of the most resonant of this Zen calligraphy enso drawings on my walls, where they will remind me to slow down, be patient, and go with the flow. Get through the process, don't fight it. Wisdom I very much need to hear right now.





I also remind myself that life will go on, even if right now it's not of very good quality. I will endure. I will not fade away. I will somehow make it through. How, and when, at this moment I cannot envision. All I really want right now is to catch up on the rest and recuperation that has eluded me these past few days.

Blood Warhols

More Warhol-style collages made in Photoshop, from photos made during my most recent blood transfusion.


Blood Warhol 1


Blood Warhol 2


Blood Warhol 3

The blood is the life.

Hands into hearts filled with blood.

Three collages made in Photoshop from photos taken during my most recent blood transfusion, in the hospital outpatient ward, a needle in the back of my hand, not always pleasant, sometimes painful, but worth remembering.

When you sit down to make art out of your life experience, sometimes it's worth it to make art you don't like to look at. I get a lot of flak for making this kind of art, and even more flak for writing poetry about it. (Particularly from poets, when those poems challenge them in ways they don't like to be challenged, formally, or in terms of content, or with ways of writing poems alien to their own. Poets, probably because they're so insecure in the market-driven world, are often very intolerant of difference. Gays and lesbians, too, can be intolerant of difference, and sometimes for the same reason: we can be very uncertain of our place in the world.)

But that is the essence of Tantric practice: facing directly those things you don't like to look at, whether they are fears, toxic patterns, death, life, love, sex, hate, or other sometimes corrosive emotions and situations. It's a list of things we'd all rather avoid, most of us, and the list is as long as your personal list of phobias and neuroses. At the root of most or all of these lies fear.

The point is to embrace those things you'd rather flee from, use that power they generate in you when you face them, and redirect it towards your own greatest good. Betterment. Enlightenment. Whatever you want to call it.

Most people run from their fears. The Tantric practice is to run towards them.

In Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, a monk was sometimes sent to practice graveyard meditation, which is the practice of going to the burial yards, and meditating all night long while sitting on a fresh corpse. If that doesn't push your buttons, bring out every feeling of fear and revulsion you've ever felt, then you're not human. It's supposed to push your buttons. That's the point: When your buttons are pushed, then you're engaged with your whole being with the moment.

And that's only one short step away from what enlightenment really is, which is not what most people think it is. It's not nirvana, it's not some magical blissful cessation of all upset, chaos, or drama. It's not the end of strife. What it is, is living in the present moment, without emotional or mental baggage, with a sense of being one with everything, and being able to sense the connections. The Lakota say "All My Relations" at the end of their prayers, invoking and connecting to all of Creation. The Navajo finish many sacred songs with the phrase "It is finished in beauty," which is one translation of the word "hozho," which means "balance" and "peace" as well. See the pattern yet? At the culmination of the corpse meditation, after you have contemplated your own death and the ephemeral and groundless nature of your own emotions, there arrives a peacefulness and tranquility and detachment wherein you realize what matters in life and what doesn't, what's worth paying attention to, and what's not worth getting upset about. Which is most things. Most personal dramas get put into perspective when you're meditating all night while sitting on a corpse.

Which is why I keep coming back to the photos I have taken of my own medical procedures, of the blood transfusions in particular. Remembering what the needle feels like in the back of your hand while looking at the photo: that is a Tantric practice. It's like meditating while sitting on your own corpse, on the temporary nature of your own incarnation, on the limitations and short duration of their lives.

The Universe will go on a very long time after we're all dead. That puts your drama into perspective.

I might not survive another day, another week, another year. The medical treatments I still have to undergo, not the least of them a life-changing surgery, could be the death of me. Each blood transfusion could kill me as well as save me: it is always a risk. Even if a small risk, because the medical technicians are really good at what they do, it's still a risk.

I've never thought of myself as particularly brave or heroic or as anything special, and I've always run towards the fears instead of away from them. I learned very early in life that that's what you have to do. I've never felt there was a choice, even when I didn't really want to do it. There are just some things you have to do, and you can't avoid doing them.

I learned that by growing up a gay boy in a hostile culture: we all learn to navigate dangerous waters very early, we learn to be observers of life and people, almost the same way an anthropologist in the field observes the people in the culture she is studying, we learn to hold back our personal truths from public scrutiny, and public discourse. We learn early that we have to cope with doing things we'd rather not do. I learned a lot of life-lessons from being bullied for many years in school. One of them was to always turn towards the lion's roar, rather than to try to run away from it. If you try to run away, you get eaten.

I don't want to get eaten. I'm the spiritual predator, the Black Dragon, not the sheep, the spiritual prey. I'm the Warrior who can be killed but never defeated. And I'm the Vampire, the dark archetype that even at the last fights to his utmost to survive. I'm in love with the world, and with life, and I'm not ready to let go of it. Not yet. I won't be here forever, so every moment is all the more precious. The preciousness of life is in direct proportion to our awareness of its short, ephemeral nature. This, too, you learn from sitting on the corpse all night: That what cannot less is therefore all the more rich.

So I run towards the fears. Nothing in life terrifies me more, right now, then the surgery and recovery and life-changing things about to happen to me. The outcome may very well be a real improvement to my life. But I'm not there yet. Today, that hasn't happened yet, and there's no guarantees. There is no "reward" for good behavior, for doing everything right, for thinking the right thoughts, for following good advice, for right livelihood. You cannot think your way out of these problems. Sometimes you can only endure.

If I must face this fear, I will. It doesn't seem like there's a choice. Avoidance and denial are not valid choices. Running away only postpones the inevitable. My aunt who avoided and denied illness and death her entire life was not in the end able to avoid either, and her last illness killed her. Nobody here gets out alive. When you fight back against the bullies, they stop. Well, first they escalate, but once they figure out you're not easy prey anymore, they go in search of easier prey than you—that's because bullies are fundamentally lazy, stupid, and ignorant: they are ruled by their own fears, and they always run away from the corpse. Facing up to it is the last thing they want to do. So when you run towards your fears, the bullies scatter. Another thing I learned early in life.

So I make art, and poems, out of this illness, out of these fears. And the fears scatter. At least for awhile. For tonight is good enough. And if you don't want to stare at this corpse, don't: no one is forcing you to look. You can make your own choices, and they don't have to be mine.

Zen, Meditation, Writing, Expectations

I constantly marvel how people raised in Western culture misunderstand Buddhism. Particularly Zen. I've been noticing this a lot lately. There was a recent documentary on public television; there have been some writerly friends posting about Zen, and their doubts about it; and more. Not too long ago I got into it with a very smart man who is a philosopher and former Anglican priestly type, who I think made some of the usual mistakes Westerners make about Zen.

Misconceptions abound. Particularly, it seems to me, that verbal-dominant persons such as many writers (and philosophers) are prone to misunderstanding Buddhism. First of all, they tend to treat it as a mental problem/solution, like they treat psychology a mental problem to be solved, ignoring that it's much more than that, which psychology is also. It's not all mental, and it's certainly not all rational. The emotions must be taken in account, or the equations will never balance.

The Medieval belief was that the body is in the soul; the modern belief is that the soul is in the body (I've even read articles that try to locate it in particular regions of the brain, say, the pineal gland). The Medieval belief is more elegant and attractive in some ways, since it reminds us that the mind, and the self we know about, the personality-ego, are just parts in a larger system.

A lot of this discussion comes up when people see their spiritual leaders fail in some way. Fail to live up to the standards expected of them. Fail to be perfect. A lot of these expectations are tacit, discovered only in the act of transgression.

But the true issue is disillusionment, based on false expectations. We put people on pedestals. We especially put our spiritual directors and psychologists on pedestals. It's called transference; it's a form of projection well known to psychologists, especially Jungians; Jung wrote a whole book about it.

Thus when spiritual leaders screw up, we condemn them far more strongly than they deserve to be condemned, simply because they didn't live up to our expectations. After all, in reality they're just as human as we are, just as weak, just as fallible. Perhaps they've learned some spiritual and psychological truths we haven't yet, which is why they're further down that road towards enlightenment than we are; but they're still human. Even Jesus got mad; even the Dalai Lama has a bad day every so often. It was only our expectations that made them seem perfect.

The expectations of perfect behavior in our spiritual leaders is particularly problematic, because we're demanding forms of behavior we wouldn't reasonably demand anyone else to live up to. Speaking as a recovering perfectionist, I know whereof I speak. Of course, religious institutions can be complicit in building these expectations, by requiring their priests to take on unreasonable vows of inhumanly perfected behavior.

There is a legitimate place in life, I believe for a spirituality of imperfectionism.

And make no mistake, those expectations of perfection are ours. They are a projection—a psychological tendency to project those undeveloped aspects of ourselves onto others, onto the world outside—both positive and negative aspects that we do not wish to see within ourselves. We project our expectations of perfection onto people we place in authority over us. Always forgetting that no one really ever has authority over us.

It's amazing how alive you feel, on that day you suddenly that you're free. That you're already empowered. That you already have the power to make the choices in your own life, and that no one can stop you from doing so. That you were always free.

That stunning realization of your own freedom, that you're already free to be who you are, and no one has any power over you that you didn't give away to them—that is a small satori, a small enlightenment experience, a first step on the path towards eventual realization. Your Zen teacher waits for that day with great patience, and when it happens, is no less pleased than you are.

This is liberation: knowing that you always were free to do anything you wanted to do. That you always had the power to make choices even when you thought you didn't. And that you might still choose to conform to societal expectations: but you do so by choice, and the choice is yours.

Zen practice is all about stripping away those kinds of illusions that projection and transference embody, till we see what's really there, and stop dwelling on what we think is there. Zen practice is about quieting the mind—something many verbal people like writers inherently resist doing. Smart, verbally-oriented, intellctually-oriented people tend to be prone to mind-drama; and meditation, Zen or otherwise) is about quieting the mind. Some writers seem to think quieting their internal verbal dramas will damage their psychological driving forces behind their creativity. But there have always been writers who are also meditators, and for whom the experience of satori has enhanced rather than made useless their creativity. These writers find instead that quieting the mind brings out new depths of creative, rooted experience. Don't take my word for it; many writers who practice Zen meditation have said exactly that.

Far too many Westerners still tend to equate enlightenment with a static state of non-being, or of nihilistic escapism. One of the basic Buddhist truths is that life contains suffering—but that's a universal truth. Everybody hurts. Everybody suffers. It's just life. What the Buddha discovered was a way to alleviate that suffering—not by making it go away by ignoring it or avoiding it, not by escapism, not by denial—but simply by ceasing our usual reactiveness to suffering. Most people are aching tangles of knee-jerk reactions, unconscious responses, and twitchy reactionary self-justifications. The purpose of meditation is to quiet the mind, to get it to cease being so reactive. Zen practice is an effective form of meditation, that does indeed put out the fires of suffering, given time and practice.

A great deal of suffering that people create for themselves is based in the notion that they must be In The Right. That their worth as well as their self-esteem is diminished if they are ever wrong, or seen to be wrong. This can range from self-recriminations we continue to make against ourselves long after we made a painful mistake, to a fear of making future mistakes or appearing to be imperfect in the eyes of others. Letting go of the mind-drama we create for ourselves can be as simple as being okay with being imperfect, and forgiving ourselves for our own past mistakes. Which is the first footstep onto the road to forgiving others, as well.

Freedom of action, freedom of thought, freedom of practice, freedom to make mistakes: some of the greatest, most revered Zen priests have been rule-breakers. They exemplified in their persons the tactics of mistake, the trickster's foolishness, and the spirituality of imperfection—often quite consciously, to teach their followers to get over their projections of perfectionism onto the world. One of the things you learn to let go of, to become free, is social expectations, and judgments of others. If a Zen master "fails" to live up to expectations in his or her behavior, is that the master's fault, or the fault of the student's illusory expectations? Ikkyu was a drinker, a lover of women, a frequenter of the wilder parts of town—and a great Zen master and poet. Ryokan was a recluse, a hermit, who had a longtime love affair with a Buddhist nun, in which they gave each other their hearts and poems alike—and Ryokan is considered both a great love poet and and a great Zen poet. Other great Zen masters have explored "the red thread of passion," and because they did it with Zen detachment, as as a way of learning to overcome their own limitations, it did no harm to anyone. The essence of the Tantric practice is to harness the power of even the more corrosive emotions—lust, jealousy, rage, fear—as fuel for enlightenment.

There are masters who, when you put them up on a pedestal, will quite deliberately take a swan dive to teach you these truths. To teach you that your judgmental expectations are one of the things that you do that causes your own suffering. You're not detached if you judge your teacher to have failed, especially if he or she has failed to live up to your projections. The lesson is that your projections are at fault, not their behavior.

For many people, the freedom of liberation is terrifying. Perhaps more terrifying than death. They will resist any effort to assist them towards enlightenment; they will reject any reminder that they are already free. For some, they seem unready for the responsibility that freedom entails: being accountable for one's actions is, after all, a very necessary aspect of growing up and becoming an adult. For others, they would rather cling to the belief that they're a victim of fate, that some outside force—projection, again—is what is holding them back, rather than their own hesitation. Well, it's understandable: actions do have consequences. But knowing one has the choice can be liberation, because one can choose to act in the full knowledge of the consequences.

When you see people doing the right thing, simply because it's the right thing to do, with no expectation of reward, remember that one is seeing a person acting out of choice, out of a place of personal empowered liberation. Pay attention to their attitude while they're in action; you will probably note that they are acting for the highest good of all concerned, not for selfish gain or ego reinforcement. It's just the right thing to do. You just do it. These people are role models for liberated action.

Of course, I'm using words here to describe experiences that are profoundly non-verbal, so I can't possibly get it right. Such things as can't be put into words do exist, no matter what writers who are dedicated to the primacy of words try to tell us; that even these fall inarticulate in such attempts is proof enough. But that is no judgment, rather it is an acknowledgment that there are things going on here beyond the purely verbal, the merely mental, the just intellectual.

A spirituality of imperfection also acknowledges that talking about this stuff, much less acting on it, is hard. But therefore so is being judgmental of the actions of others, particularly when you don't have all the facts, don't really know what's going on. Expectations of perfect behavior will inevitably lead to disappointment. Imperfectionism, by contrast, leaves the door open to forgiveness. There is very little that cannot, eventually, be redeemed.

Awakenings

Not bad, to have made it into sleep this far,
as though sleep were another country, its agents waiting
to see a passport stamped with dream destinations.
Getting to sleep is one thing, waking up another.
The Buddha, after everything, woke up, and sketched out
a map for awakeners to follow. Even the fish
under glass, underfoot, fish nobody eats even though
they inhabit a restaurant's garden pond, even these
have a chance at waking up, assuming they ever sleep.
The monkey mind fishes around for ladders to climb,
knobs and vines to grasp, to keep going, to never stop,
keeping you awake when you'd rather nap. The Buddha
was a scientist of self, his first experimental subject
his own mirror, discerning in his meditations how to winnow
what works from what doesn't. Having awakened, the same
old stuff. Hard to tell the difference. The way to sleep
is also the middle way, between endless monkey chitter
and the deadness of sleep-inducing drugs. Mostly, I just sit,
not pretending to do more than that. It's enough.
Eventually the clatter fades, even those distant voices
at the end of the row, heard as human hum, with no content.
Like the backlit silhouette of a naked youth emerging
from sparkling sea-glint, gender indeterminate, ambiguous,
recognizably human, that's enough. Clothes make the man
even when the man's not a man, but someone other.
Emerging, are you a boy, are you a girl, and should it matter?
That's just another tin mental box to emerge from.
Buddha's monkey doesn't care; a hole's a hole.
Waking in the morning with the unknown sleeper sharing
your pillow, a dream that pops like those cartoon
thought-bubbles the instant you both awaken. A quick
meeting of eyes before both vanish to their separate days,
or wherever waking leads you.

Slowing Down

We were watching my DVD of the 1980 TV mini-series filmed in Japan, Shogun, based on the James Clavell novel, and starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune. This was a long TV mini-series in terms of air-time; one of the original mini-series, and one of the longest. I remember how it gripped the nation, people spending a week in suspence about what happened next. It also spawned a new genre, the mini-series itself, leading to other memorable watching events such as Noble House (based on another Clavell novel) and the original version of The Bourne Identity (also starring Chamberlain, the king of the mini-series actors).

Shogun is very long. There is a lot of cultural detail in the epic that would be edited out these days. If it were broadcast now, it would probably only be half as long. Scenes in this long film are themselves often long and detailed, but nonetheless they are carefully edited. Editing during the quiet moments of the narrative lingers on the characters' facial reactions, giving the audience time to keep pace with their emotions. Editing during the moments of battle is faster, without losing detail, and echoes the pace of the action. It's rare to find film editing this careful or slow-paced these days; only one or two recent films come to mind. Everything has to be edited faster, choppier, more frenetically; it keeps us moving briskly along.

This mirrors modern life, of course, which seems to continually accelerate without ever taking time out. When was the last time you got out of your car to watch a sunset, smell the wind, feel the air cool around you? When was the last time you sat and did nothing—with the TV and radio turned off—in silence?

Anything that slows you down is a good thing.

That may seem impossible to believe, or to achieve, but consider this: Life is as much about how you get where you're going as it is about adding to the list of things you've achieved and places you've gone. Life is not a tally sheet of projects to be checked off, unless it is also a narrative of how you got them done. When and how much don't matter as much as how, itself.

Watching a slower-paced, slower-edited, longer and more detailed TV series like Shogun was a reminder of the changes that have happened in the interim. Hour-long TV dramas used to be about 48 minutes long, the rest taken up by commercials; now they're about 42 minutes long, so more commercials can be packed in. So when you watch a program that is commercial-free, suddenly it seems to be longer, and time move differently. I'm not making any judgments here, just pointing out changes. Switching from the DVD to the broadcast TV to catch the weather news was a jolt: a change in pacing that just pointed out how frenetic TV has become. How much louder it has to shout to get your attention. After all, you're reading this instead of watching TV—or perhaps you're doing both, multi-tasking.

Commercial TV is designed to speed you up, to convince you to try to pack more things into your day. (One could begin by questioning what those things are, or why they're so important to pack into your day.)

There was a counter-culture saying that ran around for some years: Kill Your Television! I never took that literally, but as a metaphor for non-attachment along the lines of the Zen slogan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! Meaning: Don't get attached to forms or goals, and don't make your mentors into gods, just follow the road. These days I take Kill your television to mean not literally destroying your televsion—although you could unplug it—but to detach from its addictive qualities. Sometimes you want it, so you can watch a DVD, or the weather channel.

Or you could just turn it off awhile, and have a conversation. Or sit in silence.

Outside on the lawn deer are grazing peacefully, unconcerned.

Visionary Poetry 7: Orders of magnitude

There is perhaps a distinction between the infrequent Big Vision, which can be life-changing, and the ordinary visionary experience, which can be of lower dramatic content, but no less life-changing, over time. There are many legitimate mystics whose visions are quiet and personal. We hear most often about the dramatic experiences of the mystics, because in part we are addicted to drama, and think that all life-changing experiences have to come as rupture. Well, they might, but they're not required to. They can be slow and quiet, and grow over years into a restlessness that makes a person change his or her life because there is, finally, in the end, no other choice.

I think that the distinction being made between the Big Vision and the little vision(s) is a false one, an illusory one, because it it not in fact a difference in kind, but merely a difference in scale, intensity, volume. Either path of vision can lead us to where we want to arrive. And I think it also to be a mistake to think that little visions can give us only consolation (such a condescending word!), while only the Big Visions can be life-changing. I think that's a real misunderstanding that requires clarification at this point.

I am reminded of the tradition of quietism in contemplative meditation, which, over time, can lead to visionary experiences. But the root of the practice is to let all things rise, and let go of them, and let them pass on, without getting attached to them. This is Meditation 101, and forms of it appear in all of the world's sacred traditions; because it is so universal, it is not limited by or tied to any one religion, but in fact is fundamental to the human birthright. So, we can refer to it as spiritual technology.

Not everyone is temperamentally suited to having Big Visions, and in fact Big Visions can distract us from the Way, because they take up too much energy and attention, especially when other people start oohing and ahhing over them. The quiet mystic, who keeps seeing golden light in the garden of a calm afternoon, is no less a mystic, and the vision is no less a vision, for being less dramatic than having a blinding white light knock you off your horse (St. Paul), or angels dictate to you visual maps of cosmology (Hildegard of Bingen).

We are attached to Big Visions simply because we are attached to drama. Ego likes drama. Psyche does not require it, however.

Meditation, or contemplation, or quietism, is spiritual practice via several practical techniques of meditation practice, the gradual calming and silencing of the mind and the ego's need for drama and self-display. This is a variety of visionary experience: but it is, in the words of Meister Eckhart, "a sinking and cooling," an experience of the void of nothingness, of silence, of non-action. It is the opposite of Big Visions, but no less life-changing. The experience of nothingness, the Void itself, was one of my own key Big Visions, and it was truly horrifying, at first, to feel such emptiness. It was the loss of meaning, of the roots of everything I had believed to that date, and I struggled for years after that vision of the Void to try to find or create a meaning for my existence. (I wrote three Sutras about it, in that series of spiritual-exercise poems.) But the Void is also the place where there's nothing to be done, no big agenda, no great missions or purposes—and that is a relief, as well. The second vision of the Void that was given to me, was of a place of rest, calm, and tranquility. Nothing exists, and there is not meaning, so there is nothing to be done. What a relief!

I think it's possible to get too attached to the Big Vision, and the big dramas around big visions, and come to think that only Big Visions can be life-changing. Experience, and the mystical record, have shown us otherwise. Hollywood is very attached to the Big Vision; yet how much more profound are most small visions, such Little Mysteries.

Now here's a paradox for you: I personally am prone to Big Visions; I've had several in this lifetime, and written about them in various poems over the years; and yes, they've been life-changing experiences. Two of my spiritual teachers, who I view as much further down the path than I, and both of whom are very wise individuals—neither of them have Big Visions. They're both very intuitive, even clairvoyant, if you will, but neither experiences the drama of Red-Sea-parting visions that I experience. So, what's the lesson here? The lesson is simple: intuition is a birthright of us all; guidance is ordinary; visionary and mystical experiences are common and no big deal; they happen to everybody. My Big Visions, which I still get, are no longer so life-changing; they're cumulative, for one thing, and while the first few can seem like a Big Deal, after awhile they're all No Big Deal. The Big Vision becomes the ordinary, everyday little vision.

The whole purpose of practice, according to some visionaries, is to let go of the Big Visions, as well, and realize that visionary experiences are all very ordinary. The secret of enlightenment is really very plain and simple: chop wood, carry water. You don't need to do anything different after the Vision. You don't need to go announce it in the streets, and proclaim it from the hills. You can quietly create ripples of mindful action that have, in the end, perhaps more power to make the world a finer place, because it all goes on quite normally, behind the scenes, below the radar, out of the spotlight. The divine has in more than one tradition been described as "the still small voice," after all the Big Drama has passed on. And you can write poems about your experiences, and the ways your life has changed as a result: quiet, creative responses that create ripples that spread in all directions.

A good sourcebook for reading the mystics and visionary poets, as well as a guide to the mystical pathway, is Matthew Fox's Original Blessing. Each chapter is prefaced by lengthy quotations from various mystics from various traditions, and the annotated bibliography itself is worth the price of admission, and can serve as a reading guide for anyone who wants to pursue this topic. Numerous poets are included in Fox' listings, too, including but not limited to: Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Vallejo, Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, D.H. Lawrence, Dante, others.

The first stage of the experience of the Void, the experience of Nothingness, is letting go of images and letting silence be silence. Silence doesn't need to be filled: not by our clamoring voices; not by anything. I have noticed, after all I've been through, that I am quite comfortable being silent with my friends; when we are looking at a beautiful sky, just being silent is enough. The vast majority of people can't bear the silence, and need, it seems, to fill that void with chatter.

Meister Eckhart:

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

The ground of the soul is dark.

Nothing in Creation is so like God as stillness.

Tao Te Ching: The Tao is beyond words and beyond things. It is not expressed either by word or in silence. Where there is no longer word or silence Tao is apprehended.

The paradox, then, is that behind the veil of drama that is the surface of every Big Vision, which we imagine must be life-changing in order to be authentic, is the quiet, even silent, slow absence of drama, and that is where the truly life-changing truthes lie, and are activated.

It is possible to become enlightened while peeling an orange. It is possible to achieve true mindfulness while doing nothing special. It is possible to find such inner stillness that Spirit floods in, with no hindrances made by oir filters and assumptions. All these things happen, every day.