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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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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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Autumn’s Leading Edge

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Autumn’s sharp leading edge cuts into the soft greens of Oregon summer. The long light is fading, the crickets are slowing, and I hear wistful tones in others’ voices. The wistful tones would’ve once been my own, in younger days when seasonal sadness seemed endemic. I’ll miss the light and warmth too—not to mention baseball season—but in recent years, my wistfulness is fleeting to the point of subliminal. No longer do my moods fall and drift when the leaves do.

What seasons changed inside? From where did this equanimity come? It wasn’t in accomplishment, or any other form of external attainment. I didn’t find it on Craigslist, or in the pockets of a forgotten jacket. It was somewhere in the learning of a quiet embrace: I learned to hold the purpose of the seasons, as I feel them in my individual way. Summer’s time of outdoor exploration is brilliant and precious. It’s for celebration of that light; for activity and motion, wandering across the face of the wild earth. But the pace of that can’t be constant. Fall begins the slowing down, the letting go; and if there’s anything that lightens emotions, it’s letting go. Old wounds, unrealized expectations, the need to be in exploratory motion—these can fall away with the leaves. Who needs them? There is new life within the fall to find.

Come winter, there will be hibernation, reflection. It will be time to go inward and embrace the experience of the previous year, to rest by the fireside and wonder at the storms. I choose a creative project for each winter, and there will be many to select from this time, with abundance at hand. Then spring will bring its inevitable rejuvenation—a celebration of another form. I remember having a conversation with Canadian musician Harry Manx, who said to me (in a month I can’t remember): “This is one of my favorite seasons!” Then he looked at me and smiled further, adding, “I have four, you know.”

I have four as well. No need to hang onto a passing favorite when it’s equally replaced by another. No need for nostalgia or looking forward. Only a desire to look more deeply into the current day. This past Sunday, we looked into the day from along the trail to Parker Falls, a little-used trail not far from home. The leaf, the caterpillar you’ve already seen here were there.

The sky above us was painting its beautiful kinetic art.

The falls held rainbows, just as we held them in our vision.

The creek held the greens and the yellows of the deep, steep canyons.

The forest surrounded us with its gathering release, ready to let go, to slow down, to embrace the nourishing coolness and wetness surely on its way. Everywhere there is new life coming, so no need to restrictively grip the old. To embrace and to let go: paradoxically, they’re one and the same at times like these.

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F.W.A. (Flowaz With Attitude)

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Despite that the natural green growing world is my refuge of spirit and tranquility, it’s a rough mean place—as rough as the ghetto streets. As I wrote in Wild Grace: “The myth of nature’s boundless benevolence can be shattered in three words: things eat you.” They also bite, sting or poison you, shoot you with acrid skunk juice, and (if you’re not careful) make your shoe soles smell like the local wildlife’s fecal remnants. Given that we’re a part of nature still, it’s no surprise that harsh defensive tactics translate to city streets and pacifist’s gardens.

Still, I never expected to be flipped off by a bunch of flowers.

I find myself wondering: is this the floral equivalent of gangsta rap? Surely neither nature nor gardener intended their beautiful blooms to remind anyone of rude and violent music. But everything is interconnected—that’s the familiar spiritual truth. There are few degrees of separation between this meditative arrangement and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. There’s no true separation at all.

Personally, I’m at peace with that. I was never a fan of Niggaz With Attitude, given their misogyny and advocacy of violent mayhem—I preferred Public Enemy’s wildly creative and conscious raps—but I understood where N.W.A.’s attitude came from. My little high school trips into Compton for basketball and football playoffs were enough to convince me that living there could’ve made me violent too. As warped as it may be, violence is a defensive tactic in a harsh climate—a tragic survival adaptation. Alas, it’s still nature’s brutal way. So I get why N.W.A. shunned the “gangsta rap” label and insisted they made “reality rap,” because for them, it was reality.

That claim could easily lead me into another rap, about how much we create our own reality. (That’s a useful attitude, but incomplete in its truth. Ask genocide refugees in Rwandan camps if it’s only their viewpoint holding them back.) But I’d rather look at flowers than rap. This day, I thought about how this bunch of blooms—like N.W.A.—stood there blindly flipping off every passer-by, regardless of whether they deserved it. I wondered what insects might be brutally eating each other on and underneath the flowers, below my threshold of notice. I turned and left the Flowaz With Attitude to work on their new CD, Straight Outta Compost. It too will sell millions, if authorities say it shouldn’t.

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The Loudness of Silence

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Growing up in the din of California suburbia, an electric buzz seemed endemic to the earth. Traffic seemed a feature as fundamental as air. Other aspects of experience were obscured. Blue skies in summer, untainted by smog? I never even considered the possibility. Moonlight as primary illumination, strong enough to hike by? It wasn’t just that I didn’t experience it. I didn’t even know it existed to experience. Sonic and physical pure open space were beyond me as a child.

Still, genetic memory is a layer far deeper than conscious knowing. It remains present in all of us, and the memories of silence and forests remained present in my youthful form, growing into a yearning that first had no exact expression. I became drawn to distant open green spaces. I longed to reach them in their distance from me, knowing in an undefined way that they were home, even if I’d never known them. I’d stare at pictures of lush groves as I would an alien landscape, yet it was like looking in a mirror. I was seeing my own roots, my home, my lands of origin. I’d simply never been there yet.

I’d never been to silence either, not really. It was shocking to finally turn twenty under an Oregon forest sky, blue in August, without electricity or other city to impede. (Without running water or telephones either, but that’s another story.) It was incredibly, deliciously quiet. It was a revelation that millions, perhaps billions of modern humans have yet to have.

Peaceful, however? Not necessarily. I quickly learned that external silence gave space for inner voices to play—and play loudly, they often did. In the silence, obsessive thoughts became larger and more repetitive. The scale of dreams and feelings climbed wildly. And without electricity, no recorded music or television could block them out. Yet that did not keep music from rising to a crashing din within. I spent most of that first silent summer with a small phrase of music in my head, looping endlessly, that I almost knew but could not quite recall. I could hear the guitar, the harmonies, but what was the next line? What was the song? It nearly drove me mad, until I was later back in college in California and randomly heard the answer playing across the courtyard. (“St. Elmo’s Fire” by Brian Eno, from Another Green World. How appropriate.)

Having stillness and silence nearly bring me madness instead of peace was a revelation of its own; one I saw play out in many minds years later, when I was resident artist at Wilbur Hot Springs, one of the quietest and most special places I’ve yet experienced, again without electricity or distraction. Over and over, people would arrive, thinking they had found paradise—then discover all their unheard feelings rushing up at them with unexpected intensity. It’s only in silence that you discover what the city has hidden from you, not only in the world, but within your own heart. For those able to handle the inner clamor, the result is transformative. Those buried emotions can be exhumed at last, their ghosts released from wandering through the catacombs of the soul. Eventually, true quiet does return. Eventually, tranquility that’s real settles in. Finally, a walk under that pure moonlight without the intrusion of streetlights or the torture of inner distraction.

Are you really ready to be this alive again? That’s the question the forests seem to ask me now, as I walk within them daily, home at last and unable to distance myself from the challenges of silence. Are you able to handle the cuts of sharp inner edges? The trees dare me. Can you learn to release the thoughts which begin again as soon as they end? Only sometimes, so far.

It’s the same internally and externally. There may be fewer noises out here, but each individual one then stands out. It’s harder to ignore them. I feel like the baseball player who can more easily shut out the drone of a large crowd than a small one, because in the latter the individual heckler’s voice can slice right through. Yet I love the forest acoustics—the way an owl’s soft evening call resonates in return through the trees. I love knowing what my quietest discontents are, alongside my deepest joys. I love knowing exactly what the same trees look like, day after day after day. They stand there without motion or complaint, with a steadiness our own souls will never know. Silence? They know it better than we ever will. They practice it constantly. I admire them for it. And thirty years since I first saw them standing where they still are now, on this land, they’re far taller and stronger, and they’ve never once bragged about it, or even thought to. I can only do my imperfect best to emulate them in their silence. I can only still my mind once in awhile, and tonight if I’m lucky, I’ll do so enough for a peaceful night’s sleep. It’s beautifully dark, the moon has disappeared for the month, and instead the magic of night reveals the true stars. It’s silent, just as I will try to be, though tonight the noise of spirit is roaring inside once more.

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SOAL and the Living Sea of Perceptions

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

To release a book is to contribute one drop to the great sea of human perceptions. It may disappear in the great scheme of things, or it may catch the light and sparkle for centuries. Either way it will be small yet vital, a part of the rich human record left for others to help make sense of us later, just as it helps us now to make sense of the world around us.

In releasing Grace and Tranquility, I’m contributing another tiny drop. If I’ve been skillful in expression and if I work hard in outreach, it will assist a few of us in some small way in finding our daily tranquility, and in recalling the gifts of the natural world’s wisdom.

A book is not self-contained, though; it’s a touchstone for the life around it as well as the ideas within it. A book is a living creature in its own right, and in its season of freshness, the heart of it is the human experience created around it. For me, the core experience is going out with the ideas, the photographs, the emotions and spirit within the book, to share them with individuals and gatherings. It’s there that the wisdom becomes both shared and internalized—a part of body experience, not just an abstract concept of mind.

The more senses involved, the deeper the shared effect will be—and so it is that I’ve long sought to create experiences that reach across media boundaries in that great sea of perception. It’s one of the great blessings of my life to have the opportunity for collaboration with a band as exceptional as Gypsy Soul, on the musical version of Grace and Tranquility and on the living events rising from it. The first of those is imminent: as part of the Southern Oregon Arts and Lecture series (SOAL), we’ll be merging live music, reading and photography in the beautiful gardens of Eden Vale Winery in the orchards near Medford on Saturday, July 17th at 7:30 p.m. We’ll share Grace and Tranquility with all in attendance, under the sky and stars. We’re honored to join a series whose other participants include Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly, best-selling author/historian Douglas Brinkley and master Rumi translator Coleman Barks.

Of all the ones essential in creating this little pool in the living sea of perceptions—and there are many—the most essential is you, the receiver, the audience. Without audience there’s no shared experience, no electric connection of spirit, no holding of our inner expressions to the light. So we hope you’ll join us for that SOAL connection; that we together can create a little more grace and tranquility together, for one beautiful night under the open sky.

For information on SOAL and the event with Eric Alan and Gypsy Soul, visit www.jclf.org .

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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 »

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