A Postscript...

...to yesterday's entry. Sincere thanks to Cardozo, Carly, and Eli for thoughtful reminders, hints and suggestions. I have read them carefully and taken them to heart, and I do value the goodness of heart from which they came. My intention is to be patient, and to pursue this weighty problem with all the mindfulness I can muster. Funny, isn't it, how our unacknowledged addictions can blindside us? This seems to be the one that I'm given to address at this point in my life. As in so many other aspects of my life, I need above all to learn--and to practice--patience.

It's a lovely weekend here in Laguna Beach. It seems that I have drop-ins from various parts of the country and the world these days, so good wishes to all for a wonderful weekend in no matter where you may be.

Dismay

Those who have been kind enough to follow these entries for the past few weeks will know of my decision, a couple of weeks ago, to take a vacation from my habitual evening glass of wine. I did so, in part, to see what morning clarity of thought and increased mindfulness might follow; but also, in part, thinking to work a little on that spreading waistline and the sense of bloat that seemed to accompany the consumption of alcohol. I confidently expected to lose a few pounds.

Well... you can hardly imagine my dismay, stepping on the scales nearly two full weeks later, to discover that I have actually PUT ON weight! And not just a little: I'm SIX POUNDS heavier than I was two weeks ago. Dismay is too kind a word to describe my reaction. I was appalled, staggered, distressed... SIX POUNDS? After all that dedication, all those envious sidelong glances at my neighbor's glasses at the restaurant, all those noble moments of resistance at the refrigerator door (I bought an excellent bottle of Sancerre before making my decision. There it sits, cooling nicely.)

I sat glumly over one half of a "healthy muffin" at breakfast, brooding at this injustice. The temptation now, of course, is to go out and get pleasantly soused as a gesture of indignation. Maybe that would take some of this extra weight off. Is it possible that wine has been protecting me from obesity all these years? Perhaps I was entirely mistaken in believing that it contributed significantly to the flab? Any dieticians or nutritionists out there who can help me with this? I need to get to the bottom of it.

Before this travesty occured, I had been planning to write today about the "Chocolate Jesus", a six-foot sculpture of a naked Jesus on the cross by the artist Cosimo Cavallarro, which was to be shown starting Monday evening at the Lab Gallery inside Manhattan’s Roger Smith Hotel. Said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group, “This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever. It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding.” Aside from the bad taste, I'm not sure that it's any worse than the chocolate Easter eggs which represent, I was told as a child, the stone that was found rolled away from Christ's tomb on Easter morning. Or what about all those bunnies? What to they have to do with anything? I always understood that rabbits were the champs in the field of sexual reproduction...

Anyway, listen, it's always fun to tease the Christians. I applaud Cavallaro for his subversive action, and wonder who gets to break off the first piece and eat it. And what that piece might be. It would take some balls to go for the penis, no? (The picture I found is strategically cropped to avoid any possible embarrassment to sensitive viewers, but I would have to assume that it's circumcised.) But anyway, I'm off my chocolate now, given the first part of this entry. And what's next? A chocolate Buddha? God forbid. Well, no God. So, heavens forbid. No heavens either, actually. No matter. In the meantime, of course, cheers, skool, prosit, salute, salud, sante...Cheers...

Oh, by the way, I've discovered that you can indeed view the whole, and wholly naked chocolate Jesus. Try the link. And be sure to "launch!"

Yoga in Lebanon

What a delight to see, amidst the welter of dreadful and not-quite-so-dreadful events reported on the BBC World News last night, the image of young Lebanese children practicing yoga under the tutelage of Indian United Nations peacekeepers in that unhappy country. The children were filmed in a restful pose, humming away contentedly, while their teacher explained, in an interview, how much they have benefited from the practice. It has gone a long way, she told us, toward healing the emotional wounds of last summer's war, and the children enjoy it enormously.

Aside from the sheer pleasure of seeing these children so engaged in the practice, I found it wonderfully satisfying to see how cultural borders can be crossed and cultural heritages merged when people of goodwill come together. Here was a class of Muslim children in a deeply disturbed country in the Middle East who were able to immerse themselves in the spiritual practice of a wholly different culture, and to benefit immensely from the experience. It says something to me about the shared understanding of what it means to be living in this human body, and about the value of paying attention to it in the particularly mindful way that yoga demands of us. It also says something about the capacity that we all have, even children, to find an inner peace amidst the turmoil the surrounds us.

A very lovely vision, and a tiny seed of hope for the future of humankind.

Genocide

Thanks to Christi for her addition to my list of scandals, yesterday. And how could I have forgotten Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extreme rendition and those secret CIA prisons, and the "Justice" department's rationalizations to authorize torture? Not to mention the virtual neglect of yet another round of genocide in Darfur...

I was talking yesterday to my friend, the painter Mark Strickland, about his newest mural-sized painting "Indomitable Spirit". It's about the Holocaust. Arising in part out of his experience in sensitivity training with a group of actors in Rome, and in part out of a subsequent visit to the site of the Dachau concentration camp, it's a massive work which incorporates passages from Elie Wiesel's "Night" along with images of both agony and redemption. Our conversation turned my mind, of course, to the empty promises to "Never forget" and to the repeated acts of genocide in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and today in Darfur--acts which the world stood by and watched with apparent impotence and possible indifference.

All of which inspired a particularly uncomfortable meditation this morning, since I wanted to focus my mind on the reality of genocide, and on the stain it leaves on the consciousness of the human race. The effort led me on a three-step journey, unplanned in advance, but nonetheless powerful for that. The first step was the one I usually take, into as clear as possible a mindfulness of my own presence in the world--a body scan accompanying the observation of the breath, beginning with individual areas of the body and leading, finally, to a full body awareness, a heightened sense of my physical being in the context of everything around me until the boundaries start to evanesce and everything becomes a single, breathing universe.

Then, staying with the body, I found myself moving spontaneously into the second stage of the meditation, imagining myself the target of genocidal assailants: how it would be to have to watch the women and girls in my family raped and mutilated, our children pierced by bayonets or thrown into the flames of burning villages, my own body hacked apart by grinning sadists with machetes and left to rot in the blazing sun...

And then, moving even deeper into the darkness of the human heart and soul, I found it necessary to imagine myself the perpetrator, the one with the rifle or the machete in his hand, the one inflicting horrors on his fellow human beings, the one so dehumanized and so empty of consciousness and conscience that he is able to commit atrocities with a cold heart, contemptuous of the humanity of others. I tried insofar as possible to actually go through the motions, to feel these terrible actions in my body.

This last was the hardest part, and I'm sure there are those who will be puzzled, offended even, by the necessity I felt in going there. But I feel strongly that we will never begin to address the dreadful propensities of our species until we understand and acknowledge our part in them. It's all very well to point the finger at those "Nazis" or "the Janjaweed" and blame them for the atrocities--but in doing so, we conveniently dissociate ourselves from their actions without recognizing our part in having allowed them to happen. I think, too, that this is the only way I will ever be able to follow the Buddha's injunction to feel compassion for all living beings--including even those we loathe; because, to feel compassion, I have to find some place of empathy, no matter how vestigal, in my own experience.

The compassion that the Buddha teaches, I believe, is not a matter of tolerance or of forgiveness. Such acts would be unforgivable, even if we had the power to forgive them. It's not a suspension of judgment, either. Who can fail to judge behavior of this kind as heinous, heartless, reprehensible? All words seem feeble in the context of this kind of horror. No, but it's possible, I believe, to hold the perpetrators accountable for their deeds, and to be compassionate without absolving them of responsibility. And the first step toward such compassion would be the acknowledgment of shared humanity, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.

Not Descanso Gardens...

.... maybe, but OUR garden.












A bit smaller in scale, of course. Including the fish! But not too shabby, all the same... And then there are these...


... BOYS DOING MEN'S WORK

Seriously... I have been counting scandals. I think they result for the most part from people, from the president on down, being unqualified for their jobs. They're boys doing men's work. They should not be holding the high offices they hold. They lack the maturity of perspective, let alone compassion. I look at Bush, I look at Cheney, I look at Gonzales... I see grown-up little boys. They think politics is a win-lose game. They think government is evil. How did we end up like this?

My own partial list of scandals would include:

the Iraq war scandal
the returning veterans scandal
the Walter Reed scandal
the failed intelligence scandal
the misused intelligence scandal
the scandal of endless untruths
the Valerie Plame scandal
the Pat Tillman scandal
the health care scandal
the Enron scandal
the Tom Delay scandal
the attendant lobbying and corruption scandals
the firing of federal prosecutors scandal
the lying Attorney General scandal
the mismanagement of the Justice Department scandal
the mismanagement of the Defense Department scandal
the cronyism scandal
the Hurricane Katrina scandal
the new David Stockman scandal
the 2000 election scandal
the 2004 election scandal
the voter exclusion scandal
the War on Drugs scandal
the prison overpopulation scandal
the scandalous neglect of education
the scandalous neglect of health care
the scandalous neglect of the environment
the scandalous neglect of science

Please, add your own scandals... Feel free. I'm headed back to the garden.

Descanso Gardens

Ellie and I took a walk at Descanso Gardens on Sunday afternoon.


















Enough said.

Oh, and... speaking of nature, what a fantastic series starting on Discovery Channel's Planet Earth! I find the hyperbole of the narration a bit irritating, but the images are superb.

Critical Space

It seems to have been a big art week. More today: we're off to the Getty later this morning. But first, yesterday. We saw "Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists, 1980-2006" at the Municipal Gallery, then went on to "Wack!" at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art--a major revisiting of the feminist art movement that began a half decade ago. More of these at a later date: I plan to address them in my next entry on Artscene Visual Radio in "The Art of Outrage." For now, I have more to say about another exhibit at the Geffen, "Andrea Zittel: Critical Space."

It's a show that should appeal to the Buddhist sensibility, because it's all about mindful living and modesty of means. Amongst the favorite maxims she lists on one prominent section of the gallery wall, try this: "Sometimes if you can't change a situation, you just have to change the way you think about a situation." Than Geoff would not disagree. Or this: "What you own, owns you." Zittel's work hovers comfortably between art and design. It deals, as the title suggests, with space, and the way in which we occupy space in a world where its use is increasingly "critical," with dwindling resources and an exponentially expanding population. (Visit Zittel's A-Z website for a more complete picture of what she is about. You'll be amazed--and perhaps a little humbled.)

With a Quaker craftsman's eye for simplicity and exquisite detail, Zittel creates miniature--but practical--living spaces where every legitimate need is planned and nothing is in excess. One notable piece included in the current show is an entire dwelling that appears to fold up into a single large crate, ready for instant transportation. A combination of advanced, hi-tech design sense and bare-bones modesty, these living and work spaces have the privacy of a monk's cell and the convenience of contemporary utilitarianism. She sees constraint--whether spatial, financial, or practical--as a challenge to the imagination, a form of liberation rather than a constriction. "What makes us feel liberated," she writes--another of those maxims--"is not total freedom but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves."

Zittel is clearly fascinated with the contingencies of daily living. Nothing is unworthy of her meticulous attention, from cutlery to dish design, from place settings to furniture, from bed and floor coverings to clothes, which she calls "uniforms." These were initially conceived, as the brochure accompanying the exhibit tells us, "as a solution to maximize Zittel's extremely limited resources. In the uniforms one can see both an expression of personal fantasy--unusual combinations of color and material--and a clear evolution of material choices." The dresses, as I understand it, were constructed by the artist out of handy raw materials and were designed as multi-purpose wearables. The term "uniform" seems accurate: their designer elegance covers for the simple, practical necessity of having something distinctive and yet inexpensive to wear in any circumstance--whether hiking in the desert (Zittel's home base is in Joshua Tree) or attending a social function in the New York art world.

I admire the quiet integrity of this artist, and the breadth and consistency of her vision. I admire the fact the she uses her creative faculties to address the realities of the world we live in, and proposes practical solutions to some of our most pressing problems. I admire her ability to combine a highly sophisticated familiarity with design and technology with a pleasing simplicity and a frank utilitarianism. I admire the humor and the appreciation for the small things that make life immediate and pleasurable.

Avoiding, for the most part, the glitz of the contemporary art world despite the attention that is now gives her, she seems more than anything to enjoy doing her work. That, at least, is the impression I get from this engaging exhibition. Pay attention to the small things, she seems to say: the big ones will take care of themselves. Very Buddhist...

A Funeral... and More Art

This morning we leave after breakfast for the funeral of the daughter of a man we have known for many years as a friend of the family. She was forty-nine years old, and had battled for five years with lung cancer. She had never smoked. There's an irony. My father smoked cigarettes for his entire life and died in his mid-eighties without ever having been afflicted with that terrible disease. I myself had never met this still-young woman, but knew of her as a notably successful writer--at the opposite end of the political spectrum from my own. We can hardly imagine the pain of a father being called upon to watch his daughter suffer for so long, and then to lose her in this way, and it is with that especially in mind that we plan to attend her funeral. (I think, too, in this context, of John and Elizabeth Edwards, and her continuing, very public battle with the disease. I wish them well...)

MORE ABOUT ART

I enjoyed reading Carly's spoof of "installation art" in yesterday's comments--provoked, presumably, at least in part, by my enthusiasm for Lita Albuquerque's "Stellar Axis." I don't think, though, that artists need confine themselves these days to the traditional media of painting and sculpture--though I love both these approaches to making art. It seems to me that works like Robert Smithson's famous "Spiral Jetty" and James Turrell's Roden Crater Project have a significant place in the canon of contemporary art. Why not use light as a medium? Why not use "landscape" as medium in a more literal way than in paint on canvas? If it offers me a different and challenging new way to see the world, or the opportunity to see myself in the context of the world, I say--to paraphrase a once hubristic president--Bring it on!

Case in point, the exhibition Ellie and I saw at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on our gallery tour yesterday. Joel Tauber's "Sick-Amour" is an interior installation documenting an outdoor intervention--the artist's attempt to rescue and restore to health a sycamore in the parking lot at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Tauber takes his tree-hugging seriously: he falls in love with his tree, and the exhibit is part love story. His installation creates a kind of electronic tree at the center of the gallery, from whose "branches" hang multiple video monitors with visual narratives and sound tracks (available through dangling earphone sets), along with "jewelry" designed for the cosmetic decoration of the object of his love.

This whimsical play has its serious side, of course, because the theme of the work concerns the protection of nature from the ravages of the human species and its demands. The videos describe the natural patterns of the tree's growth, and the way in which the parking lot surrounding the tree deprives its root system of needed water: the artist is seen subversively jack-hammering at the tarmac and fending off the suspicious inquiries of city authorities. I wish him luck. The tree--I trust he'll forgive my appropriation of his copyrighted image in this small-circulation context!--looks at once beautiful and sad to me. Its lonely presence in the parking lot has a certain poignancy that is curiously, almost anthropomorphically appealing.

Is it art? Of course it is. Tauber could, certainly, have chosen to make a painting of the tree--and a painting could have made some of the same associations. But there's a great deal of the narrative here that would have been impossible to convey in a two-dimensional, static medium. By combining a complex of media, including sound and video, photography, performance, installation, and documentary information he allows himself a far broader "canvas" than would otherwise be available. If anyone wants to call it something other than art, they're welcome to do so, so far as I'm concerned. For me, it's a "Gesamtkunstwerk" appropriate to the media available to creative minds today.

I might get an argument from Carly on this. I'd welcome that--as well as thoughts from others on the limitations of art. If you believe it has them.

Tattoos... and Soldiers & Refugees

Please tell me what you think about tattoos... The subject came up at group last night, after one of our artists brought in two paintings of young women with tattoos--one an IV drug addict, the other a hooker. His theory--I trust I represent him accurately--is that tattoos, along with body piercings and other such practices, suggests a return to tribalism among young people in the context of a society whose systems they reject. One reader of these pages, I know, has been conducting his own informal poll about shaved heads. Are they related to the tattoo phenomenon, I wonder? I have a few ideas myself, but I'd be really interested to hear what you-all think...

***

Speaking of tattoos, there was a piece on CNN this morning about their growing appeal in Iraq, where they were previously forbidden. Some take it as new expression of freedom. Others, distressingly, believe that tattoos will help their relatives identify them in the event of their death and dismemberment in one of those all-too-frequent deadly bomb attacks. Faithful Islamists decry them as a desecration of the body given us by God. Meantime, according to the CNN report, the tattoo artists are doing good business.

I also watched the first half of Richard Engel's "War Zone Diary" after group last night--I admit I was too tired to watch the whole two hours, and I had forgotten to record it. But I found it to be a very moving account, precisely because it was so personal. Interspersed with mini-interviews with himself recorded on a personal hand-held camera, the piece took an up-close look at people in dire, life-threatening situations and listened without slant or judgment to their stories.

It was a harrowing experience, just to watch this footage. Aside from the gore, the burned bodies, the severed body parts--and there was no shortage of these--the reality of war was brought home in the "band of brothers" intimacy and courage of American soldiers separated from their loved ones, as well as in the pain and grief of Iraqi war victims. There were those who had lost or were forced to abandon their homes, the dispossessed and the refugees. There were those who were trapped by their circumstances in the middle of the battle. There were those who were maimed in body or in mind. There were those who had chosen to take up their own weapons to join in the fight. All people. All living in close, first-hand proximity with suffering and death, and seen through the lens of a camera that seemed to want to get beyond the news and beyond the emnities, to the very human heart of the matter.

Kudos to Richard Engel for this "diary." Like this diary of mine, in its more fortunate, sheltered way, "War Zone Diary" tries to look out on the world with an honest gaze, and to take things--in a good way--personally.


LES'S GREENS: a dream

Ellie and I are visiting my good friend Les. He shows us the greens he has been cultivating in the basement of his home with great love and care, and of which he is genuinely proud. Arugula? Perhaps. They are exotic, highly prized greens, a rarity and a special culinary treat. Les has been planting them in stages: some are young and tender, some advanced in growth. As he tells us about them with great, affectionate pride, I casually reach out and pull one of the taller ones from the ground, with the suggestion that we share it three ways between us. Les is devastated. He can't believe I would be so thoughtless and insensitive. He can't see how our friendship can ever be renewed. Ellie, too, is appalled. I realize now what a dreadful thing I did, and feel mortified by my action. Les has taken refuge under one of the shelves in this greenhouse he has created, and is too distressed to speak. I try to apologize. I beg him to accept a make-up, some act of service that will restore the good faith between us. I am still unable to reach him as the dream comes to an end.

Wine... and a Stunning Art Work!

One of the convenient little stories I have always told myself, as I neatly avoided any real thought about the matter, is that a glass or two of wine--or sometimes three, or four...--is a necessary accompaniment to every social event, whether eating out at a friend's house or at a restaurant, or having guests at home. I have also long suspected that my spreading girth and the concomitant feeling of physical bloat result in part from the consumption of alcohol, so I decided this week to question that unmindful assumption, and to put it to the test.

So... Having taken an easy weekend off from this peculiarly seductive palliative, I decided on Monday that my first real test would be that evening. We had been invited by friends to meet their visitors from New York over dinner in their home. Instead of the usual glass of wine before dinner, I requested water. In all honesty, I did find myself eyeing the vodka in my neighbor's glass with a certain envy, and even watched Ellie enjoy a glass of wine with a wishful thought to share in her enjoyment. I had, however, made my decision and I abided by it. I noticed that the world had not come to an end by the time we headed homeward, nor had the sky fallen. I had not been socially incapacitated for want of a glass of wine, and I think that my friends had not found me in ill-humor. In a word, I had survived.

Last night, dinner at home with friends. I served wine... and water for myself. Again, I survived the evening with no ill effects and with no noticeable loss of pleasant social interaction. Nobody even noticed, and I was even rather pleased with myself for having made the stretch. It does not escape my attention, this morning, that I am reluctant to say that I'm feeling better for the omission. I guess that's a part of the story: I hate to have to acknowledge the simple truth that some things are good for me, and some things not. And to admit it to myself makes it all somehow binding--because who in their right senses wants to continue doing things that are demonstrably bad. Well, to use the less judgmental Buddhist term, unskillful. And some major part of me does not want to surrender the pleasure of a good glass of wine.

And yet... here's another piece learned from the day-long retreat last Saturday--a piece that struck me when Than Geoff uttered the words and has stuck with me since then. It makes good sense, he said, "to sacrifice a smaller for a greater pleasure." This is the principle that led to my final victory over nicotine. After years of unsuccessfully trying No, no, no, shouldn't, mustn't, and so on, I finally gave myself permission to smoke; but with the understanding that my ability to climb a set of stairs, for example, without huffing and puffing, or to lay my head down on the pillow at night without a pounding heart were more rewarding pleasures than that next, foul-tasting, foul-smelling cigarette. I managed to choose the greater benefit. That was about twenty years ago.

My intention as of this moment is to continue to observe the physical effects and the inner thoughts and feelings for a while. And to keep noticing my reluctance to commit! I will report further as this experiment progresses.

Our guests for the evening, by the way, were the artist Lita Albuquerque and her husband. After dinner, she showed us some spectacular pictures of her recent Stellar Axis installation in Antarctica, which entailed the replication of star alignments at both North and South poles with the use of ninety-nine cobalt blue spheres of widely differing sizes. The visual effect was stunning, as you'll see if you check out the Stellar Axis site and click on the link to her related blog. I'm fascinated by the photographs and the story of the installation process, but am most knocked out by those pictures (including the aerial shots) that document the spheres they were meant to be seen, in isolation against the whiteness and the distant mountains of one of the purest remaining places on the face of the planet Earth.

No God

So. No God. And yet a yearning, for me, to somehow "make sense of it all"--for a bigger context in which to place this tiny manifestation of life which I'm given to live out. It pleases me to think that there is more than just this being born, growing old, and dying, and having no greater significance in the process than any other fragment of organic matter. I know that others find this form of consolation in their God and, some, in their conviction that a good life, free from pain and suffering, awaits them when they leave this world. Usually, for believers, this is "heaven." The other place is reserved for... well, others.

My own parents shared this belief--not perhaps so much in eternal damnation, but certainly in a return to their God's loving arms. Their ashes now lie side by side in the graveyard of a tiny church overlooking the sea in a small village in Wales. It would be nice to think of the two of them wandering, ageless and at peace, hand in hand through the fields of paradise in their Christian heaven. But I think that's fantasy. Is it any more or less reasonable to believe in their return to another cycle of life on this earth, in some other form? My mother, particularly, was very fond of birds. (Birds. Hmmm... some Freudian reverberations here? I wonder...)

I think it's the suffering that all of us experience in this life that drives our need to imagine a "better place" to go to when we're finally released from it. Enter the Buddha, who learned through hard experience and shared with us his wisdom about suffering. His four noble truths teach us that suffering is unavoidable, since we are all subject to aging, sickness and death; that the origin of suffering lies in our attachment--whether to the desire for those things that please us or the avoidance of those that don't; that there is an achievable end to suffering; and that there is a path we can follow to achieve that end. Unfortunately, it does involve some work, some sacrifice, and an awful lot of honest self examination.

It was certainly a period of acute suffering in my life that led me in this direction. Since early manhood, I had drifted through life with relative impunity: youth tends to get you out of a good number of scrapes, and allows you to bounce back up with relative ease when you've been knocked down. I managed to breeze through it all quite nicely--as some of us are privileged to do--without God, or thoughts of God, or serious consideration of my own mortality, and without more than the average share of suffering: a broken heart now and then, the occasional worry about jobs or money... Until life slapped me with a challenge I couldn't easily brush off, or sidestep, or ignore. The story is no longer important here, though I have written about it in unsparing detail elsewhere. What matters is that I needed the kind of help for which some people turn to God. I found Buddhism.

At least, it was the form of Buddhism that was close at hand--the form practiced by a friend who offered it to me in a spirit of generous desire to help. I had known in a general way about meditation in the past--especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a surge of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies--but had never seriously entertained the idea of trying it myself. While I admired those who had the patience for it, I simply assumed that my head was too busy to tolerate a prolonged period of silence. What my friend offered was something I saw as a possibility to keep me busy while I meditated--and that something was a repeated chant: nam myo ho renge kyo. Not only could I chant, I could chant for something--the end to my suffering, for example--and would be rewarded with results.

Many will recognize this as soka gakkai Buddhism. I chanted for a year and a half. It was my introduction to practice. And it did bring results. It took me a year and a half, though, to fully realize my discomfort with this kind of goal-oriented practice, and to realize that I did not, in fact, need the chant as what I eventually came to see as a diversion for my mind. I discovered that I could sit in silence. Fifteen minutes, at first, seemed like a very long time, but those early fifteen minute sits opened up the door for a practice that has proved an invaluable guide to life's vicissitudes for, now, more than ten years. And to a growing familiarity with the teachings that support it.

No God, then. No belief. Not even a willing suspension of disbelief. No Oz. No curtain. Just an increasing understanding of the value of mind-fulness at each and every moment along the way, and of how the mind creates its own suffering by attachment to its causes. The notion that I determine my own karma through my actions and their consequences is more reasonable to me, and somehow more comforting, than the belief in stories that have no discernable basis in the only reality I know through my lived experience.

God

Okay. God. As I mentioned yesterday, God has been on my mind, and I've been meaning to write about him/her/it for a few days now. What set me off, perhaps, was this Op-Ed piece by Sam Harris in an issue of the Los Angeles Times last week about what he sees to be the gullibility of a vast majority of Americans in religious matters, and their frequently literal belief in stories so absurd--the Creation, let's say, for one glaring example--as to defy our faculty of reason. He wrote the piece, in part, in praise of Pete Stark, the California congressman who appears to be the only one who has the guts to avow his disbelief in God in public.

Imagine how successful a candidate for President might be if he or she took a similar public stand. Given the overwhelming majority of Americans who claim belief in God and who are willing to judge character based on similar belief, they wouldn't stand a chance. It seems that every candidate must make this public avowal of piety as a prerequisite for running for office, and seek the favors of the Almighty with as much fervor as he (let's call him he, if only for convenience) is thanked by triumphant sports heroes or Grammy winners--or by those fortunate enough to have survived car wrecks or natural disasters.

I think that I have never "believed" in God. Even as a child, brought up in the home of a minister of the Church of England and taken to church every Sunday, I don't think I actually "believed" in that bearded old guy up in the sky somewhere who dispensed favors in response to the prayers I was taught to say, kneeling by my bed each night, and was reputed to reward good and punish bad behavior. Santa Claus was more real to me than God--and I was more ready to suspend my disbelief in this particular old man with a beard. His favors were more... well, tangible. At least by the time I reached puberty, with reason budding in the brain along with the hormones in an even more interesting organ, the God I was required to "worship" as a part of my school's curriculum mattered less to me than the cigarettes I used to sneak behind the hedges on the Sussex Downs.

Which accounts in part for my growing appreciation for Buddhist thought and practice. It's a religion that first addresses the practical realities of life. No sin, no guilt. Just an honest appraisal of what's going to work and what's going to cause harm. "Past mistakes," says Than Geoff, "do not mean that you have to suffer." Just be aware of the negative outcome of your action, and work to do better next time. No God. No need for one. At the day-long retreat that Ellie and I attended last Saturday, Than Geoff told the story of how he was accosted, in his monk's robes, at a local bookstore, by a man who wanted to talk to him about "religion." Than Geoff agreed to spare a few minutes, and the man's first question was the demand to know if he believed in God. Than Geoff's simple "No" put an end to the conversation, but the man continued to stalk him through the bookstore in evident anger, until our monk felt nearly threatened enough to summon the manager of the store.

Interesting, then, and not a little dismaying, to realize that the existence of God is a matter of such fearful importance to people who might otherwise appear relatively sane. And sad, too, because, as Sam Harris noted in his Op-Ed piece, "Every one of the world's 'great' religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos." How strange that any reasonable person, looking at the marvelously intricate workings of every aspect of physical reality, from the leaf of a humble plant to the miracle of the human body, to the solar system and the vastness of the universe, would want to understand it all in the simplistic light of a creation myth. I love the quotation from Carl Sagan that I have used before, in another context, and it seems to me that it's worth repeating here.

"In some respects," Sagan wrote, "science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better that we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more sublte, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."

God must be even greater than we dreamed! A fine idea. My disbelief, perhaps, is directed at those "little gods" with whom believers seek to intimidate us or limit our potential.

On a related topic, I happened to watch a history program on public television last night--the story of the months between D-Day and VE-Day told with original color footage from the period and with the texts of letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home. Included, of course, was the liberation of two of the concentration camps--Buchenwald and Dachau--and the all-too familiar images of the innumerable dead and the relative handful of piteous survivors. The piece I had never seen before was the service for the dead at Buchenwald, conducted in Hebrew by a US army rabbi. The faces of the survivors as they listened to that ancient liturgy were one of the most moving scenes of the holocaust that I can remember--a mixture of disbelief, of indelible grief and pain, and of such tentative and mistrustful joy...

It's a well-worn speculation, of course, to wonder how any all-powerful God could allow his Chosen People to be treated in this way--and indeed how any God could stand by and watch his creations slaughter each other with such glorious abandon as they did in World War II, when sixty million people lost their lives in excruciating circumstances. It's man and his sinfulness, believers like to say, not God in his goodness that permits such things. Maybe so. Meantime, however, our various gods pursue their good work in this world, apparently inspiring humans to the most godless acts. The current occupant of the most powerful office in this country--I have difficulty bringing myself to refer to him as a "president"--apparently believes that his own infallible God is guiding his actions in the world, and look what they have brought about: the death of countless thousands of innocent souls and a chaotic situation that only promises more violence and death.

Let people believe whatever they want, I say. If they choose to believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that the Great Poobah rules the planet Mars, more power to them. But please let's be agnostic, at the very least, when we make public policy and put the lives of men and women at risk. Let's be more like the courageous Pete Stark and build our public policy on reason, not by surrendering to fantasies of some supreme being who avenges himself mercilessly on those who have the gall not to believe in him.

Far from God creating us in his image, it seems to me that we have created our various gods in ours. And it's none too flattering a self-portrait.

Birds

What is it about me and birds? Was I a bird in some previous incarnation? Am I being prepared to be one in a future life? You're not going to believe this, but I swear it's true. Ellie and I decided that we would do our Sunday meditation in our back patio this morning. We spent yesterday at a day-long retreat with Than Geoff, so we figured, well, we'd just stay quietly at home today, and the back patio is a wonderful place to sit.

So there we were. Sitting silent, peaceful, with eyes closed, breathing in the cool morning air. There was the sound of water from our Buddha fountain, the breeze in the eucalyptus leaves, the songs of birds. Now and then, there was the whirr of a hummingbird flitting around, gathering nectar from the springtime blossoms... Then all of a sudden, with a zipping sound that could have lasted no more than a pair of seconds, this one hummingbird made a beeline for my head. I heard it pass directly over me and as it passed I felt something soft and moist drop in my hair. Then it was gone.

I had been targeted. What are the chances of a hummingbird happening past and shitting on your head? The experience was as distracting from my meditation as had been the car keys--remember them, from last Sunday? See my entry, "Clinging"--the week before. While the impulse to confirm the evidence of my senses was powerful, I resisted the temptation to reach up and check my hair for bird poop, and struggled instead through the rest of my sit with excitement at having been thus selected for a blessing from above and with doubt as to whether this miracle had actually happened, or whether it was rather the result of an overactive imagination. I sat, then, breathing, eyes closed, for the rest of the sit, and worked to discipline the mind. ( I was also impatient to tell Ellie of this strange event, and my brain kept wanting to get the words together for this entry in The Buddha Diaries. "Not now" was Than Geoff's suggestion...)

Ellie was in charge of the timing and the bell, and when she rang it I asked her to check my hair for the forensic evidence. There was none. Whatever had fallen on my head--and I'm quite sure that something fell--had vaporized by the end of the meditation. Perhaps, I speculated, the bird had been bathing in the Buddha fountain, as they sometimes do, and had shed a drop of water as he flew away... Could it have been the tip of a wing, in flight? I actually have no idea. But I did hear, very clearly, the whirr of his passage close above my head. And I did feel something fall, or touch me...

Well, I'll take it as a Sunday blessing, and be grateful. Perhaps it's no more than another lesson on the ease with which my mind becomes distracted from the task that I assign it. I was going to write about God today... He'll have to wait until tomorrow now.

Water on Mars

Did you hear they'd discovered huge amounts of water on Mars? Buried in all the news of yesterday was that tiny item, that the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter had found a stash of ice at one of the poles about 11 kilometers deep--a resource that would cover the entire planet, if unfrozen, with thirty-six feet of water! I predict that over the course of the centuries to come--assuming that there are some for us Earthlings--this discovery will prove more important to the history of humankind that all of the disasters cooked up by our current president.



We know the story of how life as we know it crawled out of the water--at least those of us who don't believe that God created the world and all its creatures in a single week six thousand years ago. We also know that all life forms (is that true--all?) depend on water. But I'm thinking more about the future, when our species might well need that water for its own extraterrestrial survival. When we bolt the hole we have polluted beyond habitability, will we be seeking other places to despoil? Knowing us, I think we might. And all that Martian water could certainly come in handy.

That's all for today. Back to the taxes. Have a good weekend, all!

Learning to Yell

Sometimes I wish I had greater familiarity and skills with the Internet. I was driving out on a quick errand yesterday, for example, and caught just a snippet of a report on our local public radio station that I would love to have heard in full. It was part of an interview with an American trainer charged with educating police in Afghanistan to do a more effective job. I heard about sixty seconds of the piece before I had to leave the car, but I would have loved to have been able to track it down later on the computer to hear the whole thing. I tried. Alas, no luck.

The part that caught my attention was where the trainer was expressing a certain frustration in his work because his Afghan trainees possessed what he saw as a kind of cultural trait of modesty and natural--or learned--"politeness" that ran against the grain of what he was trying to achieve. "These people don't know how to yell at another person," he was complaining. (My memory of his words may be somewhat less than precise.) "You have to teach them how to yell." When you're ordering someone to surrender a lethal weapon that they're threatening you with, I guess it's not hard to see what the man means. If you can't show your assailant, in your voice, that you mean business, well... you could very quickly end up dead.

The interviewer allowed us to eavesdrop on a yelling education session, and you could see what the instructor meant. Well, rather, you could hear it. The model yell--from the American--was impeccable: a full-throated, angry, assertive, emasculating bellow. And you could hear the sincere effort on the part of the student to emulate the effect. And yet... well, the poor man just couldn't reproduce his teacher's excellently-simulated rage. You could hear the apology for being rude even as he did his best to bark out the order. His voice said, Excuse me, I wouldn't want to trouble you, but...

I couldn't help but chuckle at the contrast, but it was also at a deeper level quite disturbing. Obviously, in a life-or-death situation where you're confronted by a desperate or ruthless assailant, you've got to get results--and the American instructor's voice made it clear that there was no choice in the matter. His voice commanded compliance, unambiguous and brooking no hesitation or denial. The bully voice--and with it, certainly--the bully attitude of the American was undoubtedly what was needed for success in a combative situation. And yet the cultural comparison it invited left me with a sneaking preference and affection for his reluctant student, whose disinclination to impose his will on someone else left him open to attack--but was far more appealing, far more human in my estimation.

Okay, to repeat a lesson that I cited early on in these pages: the Buddha never said you have to be a doormat, and there comes a point where it's simply foolish to fall victim to aggression from those who wish you ill. Still, it does seem to me that we, as a country, have crossed that moral line between the righteous protector/defender and the bully. It's sad enough that in the most powerful quarters of our government, aggression seems to have become an accepted modus operandi, a reaction of choice. It's even sadder that we feel obliged to teach others--even if against their better nature--to be bullies like ourselves.

I'm not a pacifist. I lived through World War II. And while the argument that violence leads only to more violence has a dreadful and undeniable logic to it, I still believe that there are times when it is necessary. I have the sick feeling that it might be necessary in Afghanistan, where a ruthless band of fanatics is still ready to kill and maim in order to achieve its goals. But the results of violent intervention are all too evident in Iraq, where our rash and foolhardy aggression has succeeded only in re-igniting a bloody history of internecine strife that is centuries old and obviously beyond our competence and control. The lesson, it seems to me, where violence is concerned, is the wisdom that is arrived at only through thoroughly self-questioning foresight and restraint.

A NOTE...

... to all those kind enough to read these pages, and especially those who take the time to respond: THANK YOU! I really am thrilled to hear from you. A couple of things, though. One, I'd like to respond more often to your responses--and often just don't have the additional time. And two, be aware that when you just post a comment and send it from the blog, it arrives in the form of a "no-reply" message with no real email address to respond to. If you do want to make yourself known beyond the comment--and I'd certainly welcome that--you'd need to send an email from your own mail spot (i.e. not the blog's) and send it to me at PeterAtLarge@mac.com. Thanks--and metta to all!

Showing Up

We sat with one of our artists' groups last night, and the discussion started out centering around the question of giving oneself permission NOT to work. One of the things we like to stress is the need to simply show up, as a first step to getting the work done--but of course showing up to oneself does not necessarily mean showing up in the studio or, in my case, at the writing desk. There are times when it's enough to show up in different ways. As Ellie often points out, getting the work done as an artist can sometimes mean doing the dishes, or taking a walk, or gardening, or reading a book, or seeing the work of another artist at an exhibition... And, as someone else pointed out, the mind continues to do its work even when we're not aware of its activity. One painter in our midst gave the example of several years spent without access to paint or studio--but also without deviating from his sense of himself or his intention as an artist.

All very true. Still, my own thinking is that the actual practice of creative activity is as essential as the practice involved in meditation. In my experience, showing up in other ways is fine, but it doesn't get the writing done. I've heard people tell me many times that their form of meditation is to listen to music or gaze at a flower. Or, of course, in that now famous phrase, to carry water or chop wood. I myself see this as being one of the desirable results of meditation--to do even the smallest things in a full state of consciousness. Meditation, for me, though, is different. Meditation is showing up in that particular way, sitting in silence with closed eyes and attention on the breath.

As I see it, too, it's not a matter of just watching the restless processes of the mind, or of giving the mind a rest. It's true, certainly, that the mind is working constantly, and all too often in useless pursuits. Mindfulness, as I understand it, is about being aware of what it's up to at any given moment. Meditation, though, gives me the opportunity to grab a hold of the mind and direct it, to train it to do my bidding for a while and not its own. Left to its own devices, it can fly off in a hundred different directions. Sitting is when I try my best--and always with only qualified success--to get it to do exactly what I tell it to do. The breath gives me object of attention. When the mind wanders, bring it back...

As for the choice not to show up in the studio or at the writing desk, I want to be sure that if I make that choice, it's not dictated by some old unconscious habit of mind but in full, honest consciousness. In my own experience, fear is both the great enemy and the great friend. If some old interior voice is telling me that I'm wasting my time, that I'll never succeed, that I should find a more profitable way to spend my energy... I want to be fully aware that it's that old interior voice and not some wishful, inspired notion that doing the dishes is as great as showing up at the writing desk. I want to be sure that my mind is not inventing wonderful excuses to cover for my fear. If I get to be conscious of the pattern that's controlling my behavior--be it fear or some other mindless, learned reaction--then the feeling becomes my friend.

My own fear works in subversive ways. Most commonly, it insists that I won't have anything more to say the next time I sit down at the computer, and compensates by plaguing me at unwanted moments--even during meditation--with constant worries about what to say, what to say... Of course, this has a completely paralyzing effect on all creative thought. I asked Than Geoff, this past Sunday, whether his mind still wants to write when he's meditating and, if so, what he does about it. He conceded that yes, he still catches himself writing and that when he does, his response is a simple "Not now." I especially liked his answer when another sitter asked him how long he meditates each day. "Five hours," he said--and must have noticed our reaction, because he added, cheerfully: "But I'm a professional." We all had a good laugh at that.

Well, I'm no professional in that sphere, and I don't claim to know the answers about how it should be done. But I am beginning to understand what works for me. And when my mind begins to write while I'm trying to sit, I remind myself to respond with a simple, Not now.

Diagnosis

That's it, then. A diagnosis. Did I mention a week or two ago that I had to go in for a CT scan? My doctor at Kaiser had recommended it after hearing me complain, in the past several months, about numbness in my two outer toes on the right side and, increasingly, pain in my right leg and right hip. The lower back pain has been going on for years. I guess that's so common it's barely worth mentioning. Anyway, they loaded me onto their machine and slid me through that huge electronic donut a couple of times to take pictures and now, lo and behold! A diagnosis. A name for the pain. It's "spinal stenosis." "Moderate," the doctor reported, "to severe."

Sounds pretty bad, no? But then I guess all medical names sound awful. To judge by this picture (NOT my picture, friends! I culled it from the Internet and I hope it's a lot worse than mine!) it looks pretty awful, too. The cause? Who'd have guessed it? Aging. Here's a medical decription.

"Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal. That’s the long vertical space, encased by your vertebrae, that protects the spinal cord (see picture).


"The size of your spinal canal is genetically determined, but it can be narrowed by the effects of gravity such as arthritis, spinal misalignment, disc herniations, etc.... That’s why spinal stenosis is more common as we age. A small canal limits the room for the nerves and spinal cord causing low back and leg pain, especially when standing and walking. Sitting and curling up in a ball temporarily enlarge the canal and relieve the pain."

I include all this--the description and the picture--in part in the interest of clarity, but mostly to scare myself with the facts, and to remind myself of the importance of my meditation practice, particularly now that age has begun to take its toll on the physical body. I hope and believe that it will help me watch the inevitable deterioration with some equanimity, and that I may learn to observe and experience all those inevitable aches and pains without becoming attached to them and turning them needlessly into suffering. In other words, to age with as much grace and acceptance as possible.

Which does NOT mean, of course, capitulating to the ravages of time without reasonable care and resistance. In reading up on spinal stenosis, I believe that the best way to address it is with exercise: I plan to increase the relatively little time I have devoted to my yoga stretches, and try to generally exercise more.

Ah, and then there's the unmentionable... uh, diet. The plain truth of the matter is that I'm fifteen pounds heavier than I should be. That's fifteen pounds that my back has to carry around and hold up straight. Fifteen pounds of extra stress. No joke, really. I keep intending to do something about it, but the good intentions don't get translated into the necessary action. I know that it's something I can address with mindfulness, but this remains one (more!) place in my life where the need to match intention with action is all too evident.

Note to self: meditate on what it is about me that needs to console itself with an overconsumption of food... Ouch! Time to "curl up in a ball... to relieve the pain"?!

The Clinging Mind

Here's something in the "no accidents" department: yesterday afternoon I was reading the articles about freedom by Ajahn Buddhadasa and Santikaro in the current issue of Inquiring Mind, reminding myself that true freedom is not what we so glibly talk about in our society, nor what our President seeks to promote in other parts of the world by making war. It's not about lacking nothing in the way of material confort, nor about the "freedom" to do whatever I want. True freedom, as the dharma teaches it, is the mind's freedom from both clinging and aversion. It's about separating the mind from "me" and what is "mine", and recognizing the delusion of being attached to material well-being.

Okay, there's the wisdom. I read it. I get it. So it seems. Then I drive over to our late-afternoon sangha (once a month, as I think I have mentioned before, Than Geoff comes up from the Metta Forest Monastery for a teaching session, and we meet in the afternoon rather than the morning) and park my new Toyota Prius outside our friend Eva's house. I arrive early purposely, knowing how crowded it's getting these days when Than Geoff comes, and find a seat. The bell announcing the start of the meditation hour sounds at precisely five o'clock... and by three minutes past I'm in a state of total panic. I'm convinced I forgot to take the key out of the car and lock it...

Now there's a silent hour ahead of me--not to mention a second hour of dharma talk--and my car is out there on the street, unlocked, with the key in place, ripe for the plucking by anyone who happens to walk past. I distinctly remember opening the windows on this hot day. Did I forget to close them, compounding the vulnerability...?

Breathe... bring the attention to the breath...

So I'm sitting here trying to meditate and by now my mind is in high gear. Not everyone knows how to start a Prius, even with the electronic key in hand. It's not an ignition key, and there's nowhere to insert it. And those who know about this idiosyncracy are already Prius owners, right? Noble people, conscious of the environment--surely not the kind of people who would steal a car. Even if I had left the car with the windows open and the key inside, no fellow Prius owner would act in so dastardly a fashion.

Uh-oh, forgot to breathe... I hear Than Geoff's injunction: bring the attention back to the breath...

Besides, there's not that much foot traffic on this street. How many people would be walking past to notice that my Prius was unlocked? Was this a likely area for car thieves? No. And even if someone did manage to steal the car, I'm insured, right? But... do insurance companies pay up, even in cases where it's demonstrably the owner's fault for having left the key in the car and the windows open?

It's a physical sensation now. I'm actually sweating with anxiety. My body is overheated with sheer panic. And the mind continues to race... Should I get up? Pick my way through the serried ranks of sitters, risk disturbing them, to check up on my car...? Maybe wait until the meditation hour is over, then slip out before the dharma talk starts? Would that be rude? Would I look foolish?

Breathe...

And then of course it dawns on me that this is precisely what I was reading about just a short time ago. What I'm actually experiencing, here and now, is a real-life demonstration of my own lack of freedom, my desperate clinging to a material possession because I think it's "mine" and I'm terrified that someone will take it from me. My car! My Prius! My new Prius! My ecologically-friendly machine, the very symbol of my advanced consciousness and my social responsibility! Time to get a grip on my hungry ghost! A car? What's a car? Just a heap of metal, really. Not me. Not mine...

Breathe... breathe...

Absurd, no? So what I now need to do, here in my sit, is to learn to let it go. Not mine. Just a thing. And wach the clinging mind refuse to stop chewing on it, like an untrained puppy.

Breathe... But what if...? Breathe.

I can report here that I did in fact get through the hour. The worst of the agony began to subside after the first twenty minutes or so. The anxiety died down a bit later. By the end of the sit I had managed to let it slip my mind and fully focus on the breath--aside from those moments when the mind took time out to congratulate itself for being so focused and attentive.

And then of course at the end of the sit, when movement was permitted once again, I reached down to pat my pocket and discovered that the car key had been there safely all along.

What a gift! Having read those two articles in Inquiring Mind, I had been alerted that very afternoon to the mind's inclination to cling--whether to pleasure or aversion--and here I was given a magnificently dramatized opportunity to watch it in action. I can't say that it was a particularly comfortable experience, but it was certainly a great teaching, and one that I won't very soon forget.

Intimidation

This thought has been taking shape slowly in my mind--as a result, perhaps, of digesting all the new information that has been emerging this past week about the misguided and incompetent efforts of our current administration in Washington to keep all the consequences of their actions under control: Intimidation differs from terrorism only in degree. It's a matter of scaring people into bending to your will. In its effort to combat terrorism, this government has been practicing institutional intimidation on an unprecedented scale. We see it in every aspect of public life. The latest example is in the Justice Department, which has been intimidating its own prosecutorial staff by dismissing those who fail to perform according to the administration's political contingencies in its relentless quest for a permanent Republican majority. Oh, and then there were the revelations, yesterday, that the FBI has been systematically abusing the so-called "Patriot" Act to obtain massive amounts of information about private citizens. We are now a nation governed by fear, with a president himself elected through a process of intimidation.


Speaking of intimidation, Ellie and I watched this movie about the Dixie Chicks last night. It's based on the story of the group's fall from public grace--at least in the "country" territory from which their music sprang--and their refusal to be intimidated by an angry, ignorant lynch mob of former fans who were infuriated by the off-hand remark by Natalie Maines on a London stage, at the time of the start of Bush's invasion of Iraq, that she was ashamed that the president came from Texas. It makes for a compelling story, and a heartening one, to see their sorely tested solidarity and their spirit of fiercely-protected independence finally win out over the bully tactics of mindless fans and the radio stations that capitulated to their fury. I'm happy that these women are "Not Ready to Make Nice." They seem like a gutsy trio, with more of a sense of what this country is about than Bush and all his powerful friends in Congress and the corporate empires that seek to run our lives.

If this Buddhist path I'm on is about freedom, a part of that is surely the freedom from intimidation of all kinds, whether personal or institutional. Three cheers, then, for the Dixie Chicks, for modeling the courage to resist.

The Truth

I've been reading a good deal about the I. "Scooter" Libby conviction. Now that it has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that he was the "fall guy" for an administration plan to avenge itself on Ambassador Joseph Wilson by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, and that he seriously perjured himself in the process, I'm wondering why he shouldn't be required to compensate for his lies by telling the truth? There's lots of outrage around about the prospect of a presidential pardon. I myself would not be opposed to it, so long as the man were first to tell us everything he knows about the involvement of Bush, Karl Rove, and his boss, Cheney. We deserve no less than the truth from our government. And simple ethics would seem to forbid pardon without an acknowledgment of responsibility and an act of reparation. So let's hear it from Libby, and then let's think about forgiving him for having allowed himself to be so poorly used by unscrupulous men.

Another note for the day: if devout Muslims needed more food for outrage, it seems to me they need look no further than the hub of their own religion. Today's New York Times article on Mecca and the price of progress



is a sad reminder that there is no longer any room in the contemporary world for a sacred place. The global reach of such international business interests as Starbucks and Tiffany's is more powerful, it seems, than the ancient call of religion.

That's as much wisdom as I can muster for today. You may not be hearing much from me in the next couple of days: in just a few minutes I'm off for my twice-a-year, two-day teaching gig at a local university. But, as the governor of our great state of California is noted to have said, I'll be back...

tags technorati : Scooter Libby, Libby, mecca, pardon, reparation, buddhism, bush, cheney

A Visitation

(First. though. a quick follow-up on yesterday's entry about Ann Coulter. "Pollyannish," my wife, Ellie, declared after reading it. "You should be sending metta to the victims of her venom"--I paraphrase a bit here--"and to all those who are misguided enough to be influenced by her words." True enough. A good thought. But poor Ann needs it too. I agree with Carly, in the comments yesterday: the first person she poisons is herself.)

Yesterday, a truly exceptional event--a visitation of a kind. Outside my study window we have a fountain, inherited from the previous owner of our house, where birds often come to drink. About four feet tall, it's topped by a sphere through which the water bubbles over into a bowl, spouting out through four pipes and splashing down into a wider, lower bowl before being pumped back up to the top. I have often seen hummingbirds hovering above the sphere, and I always regard it as a blessing, a special favor from whatever gods there be.

Well, yesterday, I chanced to look up from my writing and was greeted with the vision of a hawk. He was perched there, magnificent and imperious, on the lip of the upper bowl, no more than a few feet from where I sat. Amazing! I called Ellie urgently to come down from upstairs and share this extraordinary moment with me, and she hurried down to catch a glimpse of the bird before he spread his wings and drifted off to a spot further down the yard. Then he was gone.

I'm a great respecter of the lore of our Native Americans when it comes to animals and birds, so I went online to check out what significance this visitation might have. Here's what I read:

The Hawk
In Native American cultures the hawk represents a messenger. It often appears in our life when we need to pay attention to the subtle messages found in our surroundings and from those we come in contact with. As with all messages received it is important to recognize its underlying truth. Because there are so many varieties of hawk, its messages vary and can affect all levels of our psyche.

One thing that all hawks have in common is the skill to move between the seen and unseen realms gracefully connecting both worlds together. Their acute vision compliments this ability and their discriminating nature keeps them out of harm's way. The broader vision of the hawk allows them to see what the future holds. In man, this symbolizes prophetic insight. If this medicine is underdeveloped, a tendency towards over-analyzing everything is common. In so doing, clear vision is lost. Those who hold this totem should remember to keep their analytical mind under control and not allow it to run wild.

The hawk has many foraging techniques. The most typical in their pursuit of prey is swiftly following the animal's efforts to escape. Once the hawk has secured the prey with its powerful talons, the bird dismembers it with its sharply pointed, strong beak. In man, this suggests that we can run but we cannot hide from our destiny. Sooner of later it will catch up with us.

The destiny of all humankind is to awaken from their spiritual amnesia and realign with the original intention of their soul. When the hawk flies into our life we will be asked to evaluate who we have become and rip out the threads of our self created illusions. This enables our inner truth to surface.

Hawk signifies union with Great Spirit. A bird of the heavens, the hawk orchestrates the changes necessary for our spiritual growth. Having this totem can be bitter sweet. If we accept its presence in our life, we will be asked to surrender anything that doesn't honor the integrity of all life--be it an idea, a feeling or an action. Although hard work is involved the rewards the hawk offers us are great.

There's a lot here to think about. I love the idea of the hawk as messenger, and connect that with the next-to-last paragraph about the need "to awaken from spiritual amnesia" and "rip out the threads of our self-created illusions." That sounds pretty Buddhist to me, as does the injunction to "surrender anything that doesn't honor the integrity of all life." For the moment, enough to be grateful to this great creature for his visit, and to make note of how inspiring it is for the human soul to be brought face to face with the spirit of the wild.

Metta

Okay, let's send some metta out this morning. Goodwill. Compassion. I'm thinking particularly of Ann Coulter, whose smirking aspersions on Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were replayed ad nauseam on every news station last night. The first, spontaneous thoughts that came to my mind were expressed in words like "vile" and "despicable"--not to mention more personally insulting barbs about her "soulless face" and her "skinny ass." It took me a while to come to the realization that my reaction, of course, was no better than, indeed identical in spirit to her original remarks. Nice going, Buddhist Pete. I thought about the eight-fold path... Right speech. Smearing other people is no way to honor myself, nor to arrive at greater insight or wisdom. So this morning I made a point of practicing some metta and sending it particularly in her direction. May she be happy. May she find true happiness in her life, and the source of happiness...

Ishmael

I picked up a copy of "Ishmael" yesterday, and started to reread it after, what? fifteen years since I first read it. The pages of my paperback edition have turned brown with the years, but it's still an amazing read. A novel of sorts, by Daniel Quinn, it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue about the relationship between us humans and the planet we inhabit. The participants are two characters, a teacher and a student. I know it sounds kind of boring when I desribe it that way. Perhaps it will help when I add, for the benefit of those who have not come across this marvelous book, that the teacher is a gigantic, full-grown gorilla whose name, of course, is Ishmael. Since his physical configuration disallows the command of human speech, he communicates through a kind of mental telepathy whose vehicle is the eyes.

A strange premise? Let me quote a passage from the beginning of the book which conveys some sense of its tone, its content, and the quality of thought. Ishmael starts out with a question: "Among the people of your culture...," he asks,

"... which want to destroy the world?"
" As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."
"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world."
"Yes, that's so."
"Why don't you stop?"
I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."
"You're captives of a system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."
"Yes, that's the way it seems."
"So. You are captives--and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?--your captivity and the captivity of the world."
"Yes, that's so. I've just never thought of it that way."

Which, so far as I'm concerned, is what the Buddhist meditation practice is all about. It's about learning to recognize in what ways I am captive to systems that control the way I think and the way I act, and learning to free myself from them. It's about learning to be human, and to live in as enlightened a manner as possible. Ishmael will soon begin to instruct his student about the difference between the culture he calls the Leavers and the culture he calls the Takers. The people of our culture--the one that is destroying the world--are the Takers. The Leavers are those who leave no footprint where they walk, and for whom all resources are renewable. We Takers, believing unquestioningly in the myth that this our god-given right, are busy taking the planet from them.

"Ishmael" was first published in 1992. Its warning was already obvious by then, to anyone who wished to see. But in the world of power politics, Al Gore's was the only voice in the wilderness--and look what happened to him. The fact that we have begun to resurrect him now from the oblivion to which we sought to consign him does not compensate for the ridicule to which he was subjected for so many years. It's sad that Quinn's voice, one of the relatively few, along with Gore's, was not more widely heard, or at least more widely heeded, fifteen years ago. We have squandered a good deal of the precious time that has been granted us to save ourselves, and save the planet Earth--if not for our own species, then for some future species on the evolutionary path.

In the meantime, may we all learn to leave more and take less. May we all learn to free ourselves from those systems we have designed for our own destruction. May we all be more conscious of what it is we do.

The Earth Is Flat

Where are their heads? I suspect they may be ensconced in that proverbial nether region where, it's often reported, the sun don't shine. I refer, regrettably, to the leaders of several Christian groups who, according to an article in today's New York Times, "have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming." "We have observed," the letter says, "that [the Reverend Richard] Cizik (the Association's vice-president) and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time." Like abortion. And homosexuality. And the need to promote "the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."

As though global warming were not THE great moral issue of our time! But then, the Times reports, "they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it."

It's intolerable to me that such men (mostly, yes, men) in leadership positions publicly deny--and presumably teach their flocks to deny--what has been demonstrably proven to the satisfaction of the vast majority of scientists who have devoted their lives to the study of our Earth. To deny the facts of evolution is one thing. That's plain nutty, but not dangerous--except, of course, in that it promotes ignorance as an article of faith. But to deny what science has shown to be a looming and imminent threat to our species is not only ignorant, it's folly, and folly of the worst, most dangerous kind. It's willfully suicidal--and we know what evangelicals think about the sanctity of life, so it's also deadly hypocritical.

I have not known Buddhists to promote ignorance. Indeed, the opposite, for "enlightenment" is the goal. Is there, somewhere, some sect of Buddhists who still insist that the world is flat and deny the work of scientists devoted to expanding the understanding of our species and the world we live in? Do their leaders exercise the dire influence of these American evangelicals? If so, I'd like to hear about it...

Meantime, forgive my Saturday rant. I'll say no more. Instead, let me note down here a piece of a dream from last night. (The rest of it, alas, is forgotten.)


TWO EGRETS

I am energized, at the top of my form. Ready to go. I find myself running with exquisite ease along the top of a levee, a sandy path. I run "like the wind", hardly touching the ground. I am elated. On reaching a break in the levee where tidal water flows through the breach, I dive in without hesitation and cut effortlessly through the water until I reach other other side. Only now do I begin to sense the danger. The tide is rushing back in, the water flowing so fast that it stirs up mud from the bottom and, looking back, I realize that it would be foolish to attempt the return swim. In gathering darkness, I hear a voice. It says, "Are those herons?" I look around and spot two tall, white birds standing side by side in a patch of reeds, quite beautiful and serene. "No," I hear myself say. "Those are not herons. They are egrets."