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The Lake of Transformation

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

On a still day, to gaze at Crater Lake is to rest your eyes upon one of the most peaceful and majestic of all natural sites. It invokes an internal stillness, a reflection inside as clear as the ones mirrored by the stunning waters. The lake is unique, almost overwhelming in its pacific beauty. Yet its beauty was only made possible because of one of the most violent volcanic events in earthly history. The furious collapse of Mount Mazama dwarfs most eruptions with which modern man is familiar. The transformation from that to this has been astonishing.

Standing in awe of the lake again recently—enough in awe to forget sunscreen and get a solid burn as a souvenir—I was reminded of the Buddhist imagery of a lotus flower growing out of the muck, as a symbol of transformation. I was also reminded of how unimaginative white settlers were when choosing their place names. Couldn’t they do better than the original suggestion of “Blue Lake” and the darker “Crater Lake” that eventually stuck? To me, it seems it should at least be called Lotus Lake or the Lake of Transformation, so that all who come to view it might ponder the process of transformation and be inspired by the possibilities of similar transformation within.

But my view is only another of the layers of views. The settlers’ rough names and legends of the lake’s origins were themselves layered over the native perceptions of the lake’s beginnings of fire, connected to the tribes’ underworld gods and the spirit beings in all things. And that too was only a layer from behind the veil of human perception—a layer we’ll never pierce. It’s all layered over that ultimate beauty, the waters of the Lake of Transformation on a perfect blue still day.

Even the lake is only beautiful in that clear way for very short stretches of time. For much of the year, it’s sheltered and plastered by snow in prodigious amounts: 649 inches this year. As July closed in, some of that 54 feet of snow still piled in high drifts too deep to allow the buried roadways to emerge. And by October, those roads will disappear under snow again for the next eight months. It will take four months to plow them, from April’s beginning. It is an extreme place.

Maybe that too is a clear reflection of the human heart: a place of extreme beauty born out of extreme fire, and still only warmly beautiful in the best of seasons. We must cherish those seasons, and see their comings and goings not as decline and decay or linear trend, but as a cycle, a rhythm of waves to ride. Must appreciate the beauty of the long winters between, and bless their own role in transformation.

It takes patience, this transformation. In this lake’s case, thousands of years. In our own case, stretches of time that only seem that long, when we’re busy trying to transform. It takes faith that it can happen, indeed that it will, if we alternate periods of work with periods of rest in that transformation, and know that part of transforming is simply coming to view the waters of such places as the Lake of Transformation.

That is all we did. We simply came to view. But what we saw transformed us.

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Easter Rabbits and Machine Guns

Monday, April 25th, 2011

In the small town closest to the forests where I live, the annual Earth Day children’s parade passes right in front of the machine gun shop. Obviously, the “All Species Welcome” parade theme must include the species of people who mysteriously find automatic weapons a necessity here in the Oregon woods.

This year was a particularly joyous and confusing celebration, because the lateness of Easter meant that Earth Day and Good Friday coincided, leading to extra rabbit costumes parading past the weapons depot, although surprisingly, no one came dressed as Jesus.

The “All Species Welcome” parade is a sweet costume tradition to teach respect for the planet’s varied inhabitants, and every child gets a ribbon for participating. There were some fully adult children involved as well, but I noticed that they were not awarded ribbons—potentially leading to years of therapy over issues of discrimination and rejection.

Oddly, the all-species parade seemed to only include humans, albeit ones creatively dressed as everything from dung beetles to carrots, and the marvelous spider-on-wheels complete with Silly String web shot out of the back. Many people brought their dogs, but they were largely spectators, with the mutts looking quizzically at the passing parade of approximated species. The whole scene reminded me of the Martin Luther King, Jr. diversity celebrations I used to attend in a different, very white town: touching, heartfelt and largely theoretical.

It also reminded me that my own welcoming of species is also limited. The drumming red-breasted sapsuckers are welcome (see my post “Living with Drummers”), but I just had to eradicate a large unwelcome infestation of carpenter ants. We’re forever trying to keep the mice and blackberries at bay, and the bears are not welcome to ravage the garbage. All species are only welcome to a point, especially if they’re carrying machine guns.

I pondered the significance of this while watching the parade’s celebratory aftermath. I watched a man in a cow costume consuming an all-beef hot dog—an act dangerously close to bovine cannibalism. Meanwhile, a woman in a zebra suit was busy duct-taping up the side of a leaking, inflatable whale, which sat in front of the giant “It’s the real thing” Coca-Cola ad on the side of the building next door. The whale wasn’t the real thing, and neither was the Coca-Cola ad, since it’s now merely preserved as a historical artifact. I believe the woman in the zebra suit was real, although I didn’t verify.

The celebration was all a perfect, amusing microcosm of the collision between ecological funk and the rural junk that piles up here. Our best intentions to care for the land’s life collide with the yards of rusting cars out near the clearcuts. We do our bizarre, imperfect best to all get along. And as a part of that, it’s good to gather and celebrate kids who are willing to dress up as bees, snails and other creatures great and small. Awareness of the earth and its life is a beautiful thing. The machine gun shop, however, was closed for Easter.

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Returning to Newness

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

I’ve hiked the Brice Creek trail for thirty years now. Among the Central Oregon trails near my home, it is home. It’s an exquisite stretch that wends its way along the waters through old growth and new, with elegant color in smooth stones beneath the creek’s clear waters. I know where the river bends are, there are favorite trees I greet. Memories are associated with the flow, stretching over several miles and much of my life. The more I’ve come to know Brice, the more I believe it to be one of Oregon’s most beautiful rivers, equal in color and grace to the Smith River near the coast, although smaller.

Yet every time I see it, I realize I’ve never seen it before. And that’s not just because I still forget sometimes where the trail begins to zigzag up the hillside to parallel the old flume, or because encroaching maturity begins to devil my memory. It’s because the river and I are so different each time we see each other.

You can’t stand in the same river twice. I recall that vintage wisdom (imperfectly). In fact, it echoed in my head repeatedly this past Sunday, as we walked the familiar trail that was different than ever before. A tree fell across it since last visit. The logs in the eddy by the carved rock channel had changed, as had the accumulation of logs downstream from the wide waterfall. The colors in the rocks had shifted with the recent flows, as lichens and other colors in the vegetative pallet blossomed. The light was different—and different again, five minutes later. Winter’s fallen leaves were in their final state of graceful decay, and spring’s new growths had already announced their optimistic efforts. Everywhere I looked I saw something previously unseen, and I saw it with a vision slightly different, informed by new experience. The newness was only heightened by my comfort and familiarity.

I was thinking this, as we watched the clouds part into wispy white and pure blue, remarking on the warmth of the wind and the speed at which the white wisps whipped by. It was a leisurely restorative hike back along the river, playing with foggy lenses as we crossed the bridge back to the car. Just a few gentle drops caressed us, from the newly returning grey. We enclosed ourselves in the machine, restored and enlivened by the new familiar creek.

Then it hit. A wall of wind and water came from the sky with a suddenness and edge I’ve never experienced. In a matter of moments, torrents of rain and 70 m.p.h. winds hit, ripping huge branches from the trees of the grove we were driving through, crashing around us as I punched it and slalomed through. If a full tree toppled, we were doomed.

We were lucky. We escaped with just one tiny dent on my hood I discovered later. We made it through to the next sudden road blockage, where several of us then had to get out to clear fallen trees and branches to continue. That got us to the next place down the line, the epicenter, where a massive tree had uprooted and come down across the road, thankfully killing no one but the fence on the other side. Three or four men with chainsaws were already there, cutting rounds out of it to make it possible to get through. The sudden wind already past, we threaded our way through a carpet of branches across most of the miles home. We made it… until a hundred yards from the house, where a century-old maple had come down across the road. Even the upper branches were an impenetrable wall. It would take neighbors and chain saws to get us through—and since the power was now out for the foreseeable future, our electric chainsaw was just another useless ornament. (These are the times when the myth of independence shows its illusions.) We are fortunate to have those neighbors. We are fortunate to have these memories.

Indeed, everywhere I looked I saw something previously unseen, especially in the moments after I thought I’d finished looking. You can’t stand in the same windstorm twice. In the twenty minutes since we’d left it, Brice Creek had undoubtedly shifted into another form, with fallen trees as new natural sculpture, transitioning from standing to laying down to nurture the soil. I can’t wait to go back, and see again what I’ve never seen before.

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Optimistic Presence

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

It’s my belief that the wisdom of the world is encoded within the elements of every animate and inanimate being, always ready to reveal itself if we’re aware enough to recognize it.

In that regard, I was taught the same wise lesson last week by surprising icicles and an inattentive baseball player. In fact, it was that repeated lesson which reminded me in general of the earth’s encoded wisdom.

It was damp in these Oregon woods, last Sunday, but not as cold as it had been in recent days. Time for a breather with the trees before another week of deadlines set in. Given the rain and general gray, I was tempted to leave my camera behind, figuring that the conditions left me little chance of using it. But I remembered one of the lessons the elements had previously taught me: Be ready to embrace the opportunity you cannot foresee. I took the camera. And as we walked the deer trail along the little seasonal stream we call Homestead Creek, what revealed itself was a rarity of icicles. Given water still warm enough to run, but air cold enough to deeply freeze the creek mist, the smallest streamside shoots had become the catalyst for ice forms many times their own tiny thickness. The temporary sculptures were magnificent, unexpected, and the first time I’ve ever seen them in over thirty years of walking this land. Had I not brought my camera, I would have missed capturing one of the property’s rarest beauties.

Back inside, I was working on my next book. As you may know, it’s taking me into the world of Major League Baseball alongside MLB.com’s beat writer for the San Francisco Giants, Chris Haft. We’re working on a book about last season called Castoffs, Misfits and the Power of Oneness. I was reviewing video and watched an odd little scene when the Giants were attempting to intentionally walk Adam LaRoche of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Assuming that outcome, LaRoche stood there with a bat on his shoulder as Giants pitcher Santiago Casilla accidentally lobbed an easy pitch right over the heart of the plate—which LaRoche could’ve clobbered, perhaps winning the game, had he been ready. But he wasn’t ready. He stood there dumbly as the pitch floated by him, forever lost. Be ready to embrace the opportunity you cannot foresee.

It’s a lesson that the world has given me so many times over the years. Remembering it at every moment has been the hardest part of successfully creating a zig-zag life that’s only gone where I could never have imagined.

How do you prepare for what you cannot expect? That’s the great question, and it seems the answer is through optimistic presence: being as attentive and mindful to whatever’s in front of you, without assumption of what it will be, and always with a mindset that the moment might have opportunity and beauty subtly encoded within it. Of course I’ve done that imperfectly even after all the times of receiving the lesson, but I’ve been amazed at how much opportunity and beauty have revealed themselves when I’ve come from that place of optimistic presence.

I was grateful to icicles and Adam LaRoche for being my teachers this time, even if neither knew or practiced the lessons themselves. And I wondered what lesson I might accidentally teach some other mindful traveler with my own inattentiveness, at a different moment down the line.

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The Nature of Las Vegas

Friday, February 18th, 2011

If indeed everything remains a part of nature, as I maintain that it does, then even the Las Vegas Strip must somehow be a part of the natural order, even if one that seems upside down and headless. From a spiritual perspective, it might be argued that (depending on your beliefs) the existence of Las Vegas is evidence that God has serious mental issues, or that evolution does not always work, or that the grand cosmic plan is just really, really kinky. It is inarguable, however, that if you want to see the amazing Cirque du Soleil show “The Beatles: Love,” you have to go to Vegas.

So we went to Vegas. It was worth it. But was it nature?

Yes, I still argue, the Vegas Strip is nature, just as toxic waste and plastic and Lady Gaga’s egg are still nature, because at the root they’re all made from natural elements and their continued existence (and decay) remains dependent upon natural forces. It’s all inextricably part of this vast wilderness of a universe—at least until we figure out how to send our garbage through a wormhole.

Nonetheless, Las Vegas is also one of the most artificial expressions of nature anywhere. (Hopefully, anyway. But who knows what goes on, on the planets in the vicinity of Sirius?) It’s the only place I’ve ever seen in which humanity imitates its own cities. There’s a fake Paris, gondolas in the canals of a so-called Venice, a small imitation New York, plus the Sphinx and a pyramid and other atrociously mimicked Egyptian elements. At the time of our visit, most of these areas were incongruously decorated for Chinese New Year.

Meanwhile, real lions live in the MGM Grand Hotel, between the casino and the pseudo-rainforest restaurant, where electronically-animated creatures move on the walls and false thunderstorms rage exactly every thirty minutes. Down the street there are actual dolphins. Or if you go the other direction, there’s a beach with waves and sand, although it was closed when we were there. The beach was, ahem, broken. And although Vegas is a terribly dry desert, there are huge ponds and dancing fountains synchronized to music, down the street from where the fake volcano explodes every hour above the waterfalls. Keep going and watch the Sirens of Treasure Island skillfully sing and dance their way through a very sexual pirate battle on the high seas. Or just turn and watch the sidewalk and see hordes of people with three-foot-high margaritas slung on lanyards around their neck, running the gauntlet of fringe workers (almost always Mexican) who are paid to stand and hand out flyers for legal prostitution. To that end, in sidewalk news racks, you can pick up depressing, barbaric catalogs that advertise with such headlines as “Affordable College Girls.” You can see all sorts of other frightening creatures too, including Barry Manilow, Donny & Marie Osmond and Carrot Top, all of whom are permanent Vegas fixtures, apparently. You can also see the bizarre anonymous jobs that are created as the side effect of the spectacles: My job is to prevent Elvis impersonators from making money on MGM property. My job is to provide security for a fifteen-foot long falsely gilded rabbit. And so on. You see all these things while wandering through the intentional mazes of the casinos, built for confusion so that exits are not easy to find, and without clocks so that gamblers don’t notice how late it’s getting. And you have no choice but to wander through them, because the downtown monorail is built so that there is no path to it except through the casinos, where grim cigarette smoke lingers along with the other traps built to ingeniously empty your wallet, no matter the price to your soul.

Ah, nature. As beautiful as a pristine waterfall, yes?

The strange thing is, the heights of culture can be found within the artifice and grim vice. The blown glass creations of Chihuly bring staggering beauty to the lobby ceiling in the Bellagio, for example. For another, Cirque du Soleil, whose performance was astonishing in grace, precision and beauty. The very core of human evolution is found in these kinds of grace, in my view, so there it was: the pinnacle of realization of human potential, right there alongside the offensively ostentatious and squalid. They’re inseparable somehow. And that’s natural.

I’ve never been to India—despite the dubious elements of it recreated in Vegas—but have heard tales of parallel juxtaposition, a hundred times deeper and greater. Some of the world’s highest wisdom thrives in India, where its closest neighbor is poverty so miserable that living it shouldn’t even be called existence. What is it about the extremes, which draw each other?

Merely another natural principle, I suppose. And so is the principle that opportunistic species rise and crash hard across the earth. Like barn mice that breed in staggering numbers, only to die as quickly, the casinos and vices have proliferated at a dizzying rate. And now, if the tides do not turn, they too will crash as hard. The Vegas strip casinos have lost $6.6 billion in the past two years. That’s right, over six billion. They have gambled upon massive gambling and are now losing big. Will they recover? They’re gambling that they will. But what if the economic tides have simply turned, and insufficient numbers of people will now travel from Asia to buy made-in-China Vegas souvenirs after losing all their money at the poker tables? What do you do with a slightly-used pyramid or the other enormous re-creations of man’s most iconic structures? How much will a fake volcano fetch on E-Bay?

Never fear. Nature will still be the one to sort it all out. Nature’s beautiful thread is the fabric of all.

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Release, Receive, Renew

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

For the first year in almost a decade, I didn’t spend this New Year’s Eve walking around in circles. And I missed it, for walking around in circles has been one of the most enlightening things I’ve ever done.

Perhaps I should clarify. First of all, I suppose it’s not technically correct to say that I was walking around in circles, for the nearly-circular patterns of a labyrinth in truth lead a clear path from edge to center, along nearly concentric lines. There is no way to get lost, or go wrong. There is only one step in front of the other, with great trust that the path will reveal itself. In that way, the labyrinth mirrors the daily path of life ahead of us and behind us—one of many ways in which that meditation offers insight into where we’ve been and where we’re going. Having discovered that power, I spent most of the past decade celebrating the turn of the year at Ashland’s annual Sacred Walk to the new year, a labyrinth meditation ceremony with considerable community power around it. Since I no longer live in Ashland, I didn’t attend this year, and found no similar ceremony elsewhere to immerse myself in.

That left me to recreate the ritual in private ways; to find a labyrinth within my home forests and the thickets of my imagination, in which to accomplish the three main aspects of the meditation associated with the labyrinth walk. The first aspect, done on the path inward along the labyrinth, is to release whatever may need release from the old year. The second, at the center, is simply to receive whatever communication of spirit may appear. And the third, along the walk back out of the labyrinth, is to renew whatever may need refreshing as one year passes and another begins. In participating in each year’s Sacred Walk, I generally found it wise to walk the labyrinth multiple times with those aspects in mind, waiting for the one profound walk to rise forth from among them. Inevitably, it did.

This year I walked the labyrinths of the woods and the living room, thinking of what there is to release, receive, renew.

To release, it always seems I need to release my expectations of what the year would be—good and bad. Every season is a surprise; nothing expected manifests in the same way as the dream. In some senses, that brings disappointment; but in others, relief or even elation. Disappointed expectations can be positive as much as negative, and if so, offer a great chance to see the ways in which we’re underestimating the world—not giving it enough credit for resilience, unexpected positive outcome, love hidden in corners that were invisible until the sudden moment of discovery.

The same goes with successes, not as narrowly and externally defined as they are in the worlds of career and finance, but including successes within the heart and its ability to give, as well. If I only achieved the successes I expected or intended each year, what a disappointment each year’s transitional meditation would be. Success is rarely where imagined; but the qualities within the desired success can usually be found in the unexpected events and shared moments within the year.

So it is that every year I find I must let go of expected forms of relationship as well. Again, I may need to let go of expected limitations that didn’t prove to exist, just as often as I need to let go of heightened hopes that didn’t prove to be realized. In the end, if one approaches relationship with integrity, compassion and respect—with the desire to give primary, as the path to receiving—more often than not, the forms will find their ever-shifting ways, and the heart will remain full.

In the center of the labyrinth this year, where the meditation is simply to wait to receive whatever message arrives, this year the message for me was simple: affirmation, for all the difficult changes I undertook in 2010. It was difficult to let go of all I spent seventeen years building in Ashland, with radio, my creative world, relationship, friendship, home. Yet every motion I’ve taken has been met with the assurance of support that I’m on the right path, to open new creative horizons, to be home by my aging mother, to begin new relationships in all shifting forms. It was a huge sigh of relief at the center of the labyrinth, in the new forest where I found it. I felt a similar sense of relief for the world at large, too, even as old forms crash hard around us. That is necessary to give the new room to grow.

And so I walk outward again, into the new year, into the meditation of renewal. I need to renew my energy for all the demands of another challenging year—as if there was ever any other kind. Each year gives the opportunity to renew the desire to live according to mindful principles, no matter how imperfectly I always do so. I have to renew the quest to keep healthy in body, mind and spirit; to risk another level of intimate growth. I look inward during the winter hibernation season to make sure that I’ve cared for myself enough to care for the others around me, whatever that may prove to mean—although if I do that renewal sustainably, and do the giving cleanly, it’s within the giving that the renewal actually comes. It’s good to remember that, one step at a time, out of the labyrinth.

It’s also good to remember that although it may not be visibly printed upon the soil, in a life lived consciously, the days do mimic the labyrinth, and there is one path forward to trust, already waiting to be discovered. The renewal of that vision is what January brings, and may we all trust it as 2011 reveals its path through our human wilderness.

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Salt and Pepper Teachers

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

It’s easy to fall prey to the illusion that our most masterful teachers will be human, or perhaps divine. But when the entirety of the earth is suffused with wisdom, our teachers may be the animals beside us, the plants, the soil, or even what we term inanimate.

I was reminded of that last week when I was given a wise lesson by a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

The salt and pepper shakers I’d been using were perfectly functional, but aesthetically as miserable as an ‘80s hair band. (Don’t ask what made me choose such tragic ugliness as a reference point.) I’d been looking for months for just the right pair to replace them, without success. No problem: I was looking patiently.

Before Christmas, I wasn’t even consciously looking at all. In fact, we were driving north from Ashland after I returned there to emcee the annual Gypsy Soul holiday benefit concert for the WinterSpring Center for Transforming Grief and Loss. It was a fine show for a great cause, and for the past decade, one of the holiday traditions I cherish the most.

I don’t cherish driving in conditions of winter ice. The storms were setting in and the passes were looking risky—until they looked impassable due to some form of colossal accident. Interstate 5 was completely stopped for thirty miles south of the disaster, and we suddenly found ourselves sitting motionless in the “fast” lane, wondering what speed is slower than zero. It was a bit of a Zen koan. The offramp to Grants Pass was a mere hundred feet away, but how to get there? A line-up of semis sat motionless between us and it. We pondered our gathering need to go to the bathroom. We pondered our existence. We pondered the apparent impossibility of anything except sitting there until darkness fell.

Fortunately, several vehicles ahead, someone managed to squeeze their car between two of the trucks onto the shoulder of the highway, then another car followed, then another. Several of us were able to sequentially weave between the trucks onto the highway shoulder, and therefore onto the offramp and the relative freedom of Grants Pass. On a Sunday in Grants Pass most things remain closed, unlike in most cities, which have decided that commerce must never stop, like voices on a television set. Grants Pass remains wiser, though losing that wisdom slowly.

Looking merely for someplace to kill time—preferably one with a bathroom—we wandered into what appeared to be a wine shop, although the odd metal sculptures wrapped around some of the display-window wine bottles should have been an indication that it might not be an ordinary one. We wandered back farther in the store where the wine racks suddenly turned into a large selection of lamp parts. A catacomb of sorts appeared behind that, with an ancient intriguing sign pointing up the stairs to the mezzanine, warning that no one under the age of 18 would be allowed to go there unsupervised. X-rated lamp parts, perhaps? Things too frightening for impressionable minds, such as vintage pictures of Joseph McCarthy?

Actually, more vast catacombs of odd items. More rooms of lamp parts. Toys from eras before my lifetime. Assorted second-hand oddities defying description, most of it exceptionally well-organized, and unsold for at least a generation. It was a remarkable collection of… something. It was a delightful cross between a thrift store, a haunted house, a museum, and that random dream I had last Tuesday.

It included a very large collection of salt and pepper shakers. I immediately found the exact pair I’d been looking for, where they’d been resting for months, years, decades. Beautifully sculpted and polished wood, in perfect condition, a little dusty, but who isn’t? Six bucks. I took them down with us to the first floor, where the shop’s dog began to follow us around as if we knew something important. We begged use of the bathroom, after promising not to bother the cat sequestered there. We checked the road cameras, praising the wizardry of the iPhone and other modern gadgets, and saw traffic now moving enough to make a run home before the ice and darkness set in. We bid our adieus to the kind shop owners and dog, and went off into the journey.

It wasn’t until later, smiling at the beautiful salt and pepper shakers on my table—again remembering how one of my radio colleagues once accidentally called such things “salt and pecker shapers” on the air—that I realized what a great lesson the random experience and the salt and pepper shakers had given me. It’s a reminder of a lesson already known, in truth, for I’ve found it in many places across the bizarre path of my life and so-called “career.” It is this:

If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll most likely find it eventually—but not in the expected form or place. You have to have open eyes at all times, for the biggest challenge is in recognizing that what you seek is right in front of you when you least expect it. With relationships or career opportunities as much as with objects, it’s often harder to recognize open doors at hand than it is to create them. The obvious doors, which are most frequently knocked upon the hardest, are rarely the ones that open to you. It’s the unnoticed ones that are begging for you to knock them up, so to speak. The goal is to live a life of calm presence; the inner stillness then allows you enough attentiveness through open eyes to recognize what you seek, when it appears in unexpected form. Life gives you a daily test, with a bit of a smile and smirk: Are you paying attention? Life seems to think it’s funny to find out.

I’ll be reminded of that every time I grind pepper on the salad or salt the potatoes. I‘ll be taught by them as I am by fire hydrants, ever since I read of someone’s vision of a fire hydrant as a saint: just standing there with infinite patience, waiting to be of service.

We made it home safely. With that caveat, I recommend random experience.

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Divine Light

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

IMGP9016 300x200 Divine LightLight has no mass, no home, no lover, no identity as distinct as our own names. Yet it’s one of the most fundamental forces in the universe, illuminating our entire perception of reality. It’s one of the most powerful creatures in the universe, as alive as anything, nearly omnipotent in how it sheds light on all, though it may not see what it illuminates. It’s as much a part of nature as a moose or a mosquito, and as divine as any spirit I’ve encountered.

Thus, when I took a few brief minutes to photograph my newly-installed Christmas lights last night, I felt I was photographing both nature and spirit. It was another realization of always being a part of nature, no matter how much illusion tempts me to believe in separateness.

This is what I saw in my living room, as sacred and wild as any mystic’s vision. It was totally beyond me—I just found it. It was also as psychedelic as any trip, reminding me of the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who needs to travel beyond the front door to find the outer frontiers? It was evidence again that what we see is more limited by our imagination than by the supposed reality we face.

So come tripping with me, deep into the heart of nature and light. This is my Christmas prayer. Can you recognize oneness here? It’s all I see.

IMGP9025 300x200 Divine Light

IMGP9060 300x200 Divine Light

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White Thanksgiving, Clear Gratitude

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

As soon as I cancelled all of my appointments today, I began to love the snow. Before that, it was menacing, as it had been transforming itself to roadway ice in places I was committed to crossing. I wondered at the incompleteness of our own inventions: creating transportation that only works when the weather is right, and then building our lives around it. What kind of wisdom is that? The car itself, marvel that it is, remains one of the most ill-advised ideas our species has had. A fully-packed day planner with a life scheduled down to the minute is right alongside it, as a clever idea that does huge accidental harm.

Little on the day planner is actually as vital as it seems, and once I let go of my compulsive need to follow through meticulously on every plan, I began to be grateful. I could stay home in the snow, write, and go inward as a form of early Thanksgiving. I’m deeply grateful to be living this far in the woods; happy to have begun to land on the other side of a steep canyon of life changes.

In the process, I’ve become newly grateful. Of course I’m grateful for a beautiful home, for the family within and around it, for love, for friends, for the green grace of the earth itself. The central gratitude list (upon which the previous sentence only touches) stays steady over time, as often as I remind myself to refresh it. With a huge set of life shifts accomplished in the recent past, though, I thought to myself as I walked, what am I newly grateful for? With new vistas come new visions, and I must have a few. I’ve found these inside, as a beginning:

I’m grateful for risk. The need to take risks challenges me inside, to make bold moves from a basis of well-considered faith. It makes me stop to consider what’s vital, and what I’m willing to let go of in order to stay true to that vitality.

I’m grateful for mystery. You never really want to know how the story turns out in advance. That would vaporize the intrigue of being alive. It would lead to complacency, thinking it’s pre-destined, how tomorrow’s going to turn out. And it would scare the hell out of us all, knowing the exact forms of our inevitable difficulties and demise. (I often wonder how I would’ve felt in my twenties, had I known I’d get cancer at thirty-two.)

I’m grateful for exertion. It’s been a hard year, at least in comparison to the comfort zone I had in my previous life phase. I’ve traded that ease for new challenges, and in doing so, am reminded how important hard work is in conditioning. Not just physical hard work, but also emotional, spiritual and intellectual. Exertion leads to the maintenance of good, sharp edges. It keeps you toned. It gives you the elation of the runner’s endorphin rush.

I’m grateful for inherent courage. Before cancer, I believed that courage was something only some people had. Then, when I saw first-hand that there was simply no choice about courage in illness—dying takes courage, and healing does too—I began to realize that all of us have it. It’s just a matter of tapping into it, and allowing ourselves to rely on what’s already there. That knowledge has served me well this year, launching off into new phases in a downtrodden age, with faith that I can scale the walls of tough economics, isolation and other challenges known and unknown. I didn’t need to find courage: I knew it was there when needed. It’s there for you too.

I’m grateful for opportunity’s camouflage. It’s tied in with mystery, how the subtlety of opportunity requires honing your vision. Often, the hard part is not getting doors to open, but recognizing the open doors that are already beckoning. They may not look anything like a door, or be in a direction opposite to where you thought you wanted to go. It takes the stealth of a native tracker to find opportunity in this wild civilization. And while you’re looking for it, your sharp vision allows you to see all sorts of other things for which you weren’t even looking.

It’s been one of those years: risky, mysterious, hard-working, at times courageous, and with opportunity lurking in the most unexpected places. I’ve seen many vivid, unexpected visions along the path. As I settle down into the clear gratitude of a white Thanksgiving—more snow falling even now—I’m truly grateful for gratitude itself. It was the first thought I put up on my Facebook page: “Gratitude is the shortest path to happiness.” And I’ve never yet been tempted to change it. That too, is part of gratitude’s central list—a list that spirals endlessly, beyond the bounds of these words. I’m grateful that you’re there to receive them.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Hardest Good Days, Letting Wounds Go, The Beauty of Doubt | No Comments »

Dung Beetles and Voters

Friday, November 12th, 2010

Dead ballot pamphlet pages blow across the valley like more fallen leaves, and nature does not appear to care. At the grand level, nature had no partisan preference for Kitzhaber or Dudley in Oregon’s governor race, DeFazio or Robinson for Congress. It expressed no opinion on prison sentences or lottery funding for parks and beaches. Nature is not a registered voter, even in the Green Party. It doesn’t smoke its own medicinal weed. It doesn’t care if corporations are considered people, or if they were instead declared to be deer, with a hunting season open each October. (Ballot initiative, anyone?) Nature’s vastness stands impassively by as we hold our tiny elections. To nature, we’re the equivalent of a dung beetle struggling mightily to roll its little ball of dung to wherever it seems important to go.

This is not to say that nature doesn’t need dung beetles and voters. We’re all a small but integral element of the natural system, and this election was vital to us though lost in the grand scheme. This is our dung, and it matters here. So it’s still worth asking what nature’s great wisdom says about this election, even if the answers die beyond the thin protective shell of our atmosphere.

Nature mostly exhibits a grand curiosity and a desire for competitive experiment. Without prejudice, it pits species against species, individual against individual, Ducks against Beavers, Democrats against Republicans. Whichever is most successful persists. If one is too successful and trashes its own habitat via mindless rampage, soon it will suffer and die back of imbalance. Then greater balance will return. Beautiful, elegant, harsh system. Especially harsh if your own dung is what chokes you.

In this and other recent elections, I heard nature’s voice through the campaign mantras more clearly than through the results—for below the bitter surface partisanship, a grand unity has emerged. Every seemingly opposite side has screamed the same theme: Change! Take our country back! Get rid of the elected failures! The differences in the vague partisan strategies for fixing the pain pale against the agreement that something has gone fundamentally wrong in this country, this state, this beautiful little valley we call home.

Nature is perfectly willing to let us experiment if we collectively feel that the solution to our deep sense of loss is to imprison our sickest violent ones for longer. It’s willing to let us cling to haphazard prohibitions, even if they feed violent cartels. It permits us to pursue an addict’s strategies for easing our suffering, hooked on the same two parties, the same broken governance system. Nature even allows blind priorities that don’t value nature itself—for awhile. Economy, jobs, safety, health care, transportation: they’re all tied in to the fouled larger habitat, poisoned by the dung of humanity’s rampage. This may not be a recession. Our pain may instead be the beginning of nature’s next experiment with a different form of balance.

Author Thomas Berry once summarized it on the public radio program New Dimensions: “We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night. It’s not just pollution of the air, or toxicity of the planet, or loss of jobs. It’s a loss of soul, of imagination, of the experience of what it is to be a human being.”

Maybe the preservation of soul is what nature is subtly offering us a chance to vote for, on the higher level—to prioritize the planet’s soul as a way of saving our own. Maybe it’s asking us to take a step back down in importance; to nurture the greater abundance so that we can return better to thriving within it, rather than increasingly picking scraps off of its dying carcass. But if we don’t? No worries. Nature has plenty of time, other planets, other experiments out there in the great yawning void. We can vote ourselves to death if we damn well please. That will just leave more room for the dung beetles to thrive.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Hardest Good Days | No Comments »

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