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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.

Posted in Liquid, Part of the Wind, The Beauty of Doubt, The Sun on Your Face, Wild Grace | No Comments »

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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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

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Part of the Wind, The Beauty of Doubt, The Sun on Your Face | 1 Comment »

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.

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Webs of Convergence

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

After too long on the computer, my brain begins to act like the operating system. It freezes up, gives me error messages that make no sense, and strays off to places I had no intention of visiting. It becomes as unstable as Vista, as slow as my vintage PC.

The best remedy is to stop and seek the solace of the forests—the natural, beautiful antithesis of the artificial technical world. Or so it seems. But when I step out into the trees to regain balance, I immediately run into… the original World Wide Web.

Spiders are as profuse as wandering thoughts here. They each have their little web sites wherever I walk, hoping to snare the time and life of random passers-by. I have to brush web designers out of my face at every step. Their creations distract me from what I really came to experience. There may even be viruses contained in their bite. In other words, it’s exactly the same as online.

The convergence of the wild and electronic fascinates me. The more complex our designed systems become, the more organic and life-like their properties. We haven’t yet truly created artificial intelligence—and our natural intelligence is debatable—but the converging patterns confirm that everything we do remains a part of nature.

My crashing mind thus wonders: Is how the organic rises out of the technical parallel to how earthly life rose out of molten rock and other supposedly lifeless elements? Are we subconsciously repeating the steps of evolution and creation? As we continue to unleash technical genius upon the world without the ability to conceive of its results, will our systems develop truly independent life? Is this repetition too, and was all of life therefore a complete surprise to God? And if software replicates life, is it possible that humanity was designed by a committee whose primary desire was a paycheck? That would explain a lot.

I don’t know, though. I can’t see clearly enough with all these webs in my face. And the spiders’ FAQ lists don’t answer my wild questions. Such lists rarely do.

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Hidden Stories

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

I couldn’t help but notice yesterday that Abraham Lincoln was sitting on the floor of my office. Not sure how he got there, but there he was in stern, familiar profile, staring off in the distance from the face of a penny. I could tell from a distance that his face was worn, rubbed soft by many years of hands. So I picked him up and read the date: 1953. This particular incarnation of Abraham Lincoln has been making quiet journeys around the world for fifty-seven years.

I rubbed his face for a moment, wishing I was better at massage. He did not seem inclined to tell me how he got into my office, or what his motives might be. (Even with revered politicians, it’s always best to check.) The mystery set me to wondering more deeply about the decades of his journeys, but across this world of wisdom, surveillance and databases, no one will ever have any idea where this particular penny has been. The creative game of www.wheresgeorge.com is a playful beginning with money tracking, but rudimentary. Only imagination can speculate. When the penny was new, it might’ve had enough value for significance in purchase. It might’ve helped buy Cold War essentials, then turned to being traded for a child’s candied solace. If I touched it in my own childhood, it probably helped buy baseball cards. Who knows how many times it helped balance a transaction of exacting finance? Did it ever participate in a financial crime? Was it tossed into the street, or ignored there until someone observant and frugal scooped it up? Where across the face of the planet has it reached? It’s been far more places than most people who’ve touched it, I’d wager. (Want to bet one cent?) The amount of stories irretrievably contained within that penny are beyond tally. Fifty-seven years is a long, long time, as anyone with arthritis or a bad job can tell you.

The notion of hidden stories set me to looking around my office again. I have no idea where my telephone was built, or who made it. The desk had its own life before reaching here, first as an oak tree somewhere, then in other lives before I found it on Craigslist. Many books on my shelf were first read by others I’ve never met. Every item with which we’re surrounded has stories, lives, meanings and feelings coded within that are permanently beyond reach. To avoid being sad about this, I had to surrender to the impossibility of knowing and to the beauty of mystery. I had to remember the question we were asked behind barbed wire and Defense Department security clearances when I was a young aerospace engineer: Do you have a Need to Know? It was a paranoid question then but is a wise one now. Too often our perceptions are cluttered with information that only obscures the purity of our aliveness. If I could explore every story within any penny I touch, I’d never get anything else done. The impossibility of knowing serves us as much as it hinders us.

Soothed, I looked around my office once more. Alas, I didn’t find any more money.

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Interdependence Days

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Independence is a brilliant but complicated partner. She’s gorgeous, inspiring, talented and free beyond measure. She’s highly desirable, and can choose any lover she wants—yet she remains unattainable past a point, and true marriage with her remains elusive.

I’m in love with independence too, no matter my conflicted emotions about her complexities; and my own complex feelings came forth on the Fourth of July. As we watched spectacular fireworks, I felt tranquil but separate from the day’s original meanings. Yes, our ancestors courageously declared independence from an apparently tyrannical empire. I deeply celebrate the resulting constitutional principles. The results of that independence have been magical, yet weird and incomplete. Are we really independent from Britain now? Is it even possible in a global culture? True, King George doesn’t rule us anymore, and that’s excellent. Still we’re inextricably tied to the English through culture, economy, international law. Independent from the creative works of Sir Paul McCartney and friends? No thanks. Is Queen Elizabeth the enemy? Hardly. What about Tony Heyward and company? I know BP long ago changed its name from British Petroleum, instead becoming Brutal Polluters and suffering Bad Publicity from the Big Problem in the gulf due to Bonehead Policies—most of which stem from our own personal gasoline habits, which rule us more than any government does. The enemy is primarily within. And independence? Not from oil, Britain, consumerism or the onrushing beauty of integrated global society. All of our independence fades before our reintegration into something greater. I celebrate that, right alongside the continued vitality of this country’s constitutional principles. I’m glad we’re not independent from Britain.

I also believe independence is often mistaken for the individual right to inconsiderately do whatever the hell we please, and can too easily turn into isolation. I revisit the words of Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, on the public radio program New Dimensions: “The great fallacy of the United States is that it was built on individuality. That’s the greatest lie ever was told, because it was not. It was built on community politics. People got out in the communities and helped each other; farmers lent each other horses and tractors, and built barns. America was a much better place when she was a family, not an individual.” Same goes for the wider world. Tranquility is in interdependence, not independence, and certainly not in isolation.

I pondered this while staring at our minor league baseball program before the fireworks began—a game ostensibly between the Redcoats and Patriots, according to the playful scoreboard. (Two teams in opposition, but like the early states and Britain, actually partners in a larger shared game.) Our little battles, our illusions of difference and independence, showed themselves even in the program. In upcoming weeks, two sides as opposed as the colonial Americans and vintage British will celebrate pre-game events at the stadium: first will be a “Green Day,” a health and sustainability fair, bound to be attended by the ecologically minded, and bound to be avoided by those who will instead go to the following week’s “Logging Night,” featuring a performance by chainsaw juggler Mad Chad. But loggers are dependent upon a sustainable eco-system, and wood products made possible by the loggers have a cherished place in the homes of most of the ecologically focused. Independence? She’s an exquisite illusion again; an unattainable siren of the screen.

The Buddhist truth inevitably returns: interconnectedness is the ultimate reality. Independence, as beautiful and desirable as she may be, is as fleeting as the fireworks, and as bound to burn you close up. Best to watch and celebrate a lack of tyranny, and then walk home hand in hand, not independent, but respectfully and equally intertwined, man and woman, United States and Britain, friend and supposed opponent. Happy Interdependence Days. Might as well keep celebrating them, because they’ll never be over.

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A Journey with Tranquility

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

It’s tempting to write that the path I wish to follow and share with you is a journey to tranquility—as if peace is a destination, a state of being that we can someday attain and eternally keep. If only it were possible to arrive that way and stay, I’m tempted to wish! But even that wish is attractive illusion. Many masters have phrased the deeper truth in their own way, speaking of tranquility as the journey itself, peace as the path. In choosing the epigraph for my new book Grace and Tranquility, I chose Thich Nhat Hanh’s eloquent summary: “Peace is every step.” Footprints 195x300 A Journey with TranquilityMy book is one of those steps, so is this online journey, and so is my collaborative album with the elegant band Gypsy Soul. As I write this, all of these steps are being released into the public light. I take the steps not as the next master of tranquility—I’m not some ethereal peaceful soul floating above the detritus of messy human emotion—but as another student willing to learn alongside you. It’s no accident that the first line of the title track to the musical version of Grace and Tranquility is, “I am just a student/Of the art of being human…” It’s an art that requires lifelong practice, and to practice with diligence and share with honesty is the best I can offer. It’s my revision of the old writer’s adage, “write what you know,” which I believe should be instead, “write what you want to know.” It’s in our explorations that wisdom is found. It’s in our admission of not knowing that our growth can be attained. How is it that I can deepen the grace with which I move in the world? How can I take this very next step with more tranquility? How can my own attempts at this deepening serve your own? That’s what I’m here for, in these words that draw from my books and move beyond them. This is the living moment-to-moment journey with tranquility, and I hope you’ll join me for every peaceful step.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Hardest Good Days, Letting Wounds Go, Liquid, Older Than Its Name, Part of the Wind, Sleep Is the Ocean, The Beauty of Doubt, The Sun on Your Face, Walking Softly Beyond, Wild Grace | 1 Comment »

Visionaries

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Who are the visionaries of the ages before us to which we still turn? They are the masters who managed to bring tranquil beauty into the troubles around them. The ones who practiced peace in times of war, brought insistent integrity into calming the illness of violence, found nobility in resistance, reached for poetry instead of weapons, forgiveness instead of vengeance. And for every iconic soul who has found a place in historic memory for choosing that tranquil path—often at great cost—there are countless ones who have chosen the same in small anonymous ways, through equally pure gestures that will never be known beyond their own neighborhoods. We must be those choosing grace and tranquility, not for glory but for service and its joys, unremembered though it may be.

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Appreciating the Storm

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Taking time for beauty is more important than ever when the surrounding storm is raging. To appreciate the beauty within the storm will return us to tranquility more quickly than any other path. Around all that is dead and dormant, there is always color, life and fire that will birth new living wonders from within what appears to be empty.

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