The Cascadian Wanderer

 When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind. It’s been a long time. I left there long ago, I had to ramble and walk away my blues and move on, through old and new troubles and worries and wounds and pains. Now I’m home, here, far from that place in time. But when I woke up this morning, you were on my mind…

 On the porch with coffee this morning the eternal mountain valley, the trees and mountain ridges and sky, are faded into a quiet sentinel background, mute and unseen. Word has come that a friend from long ago is dying, and will soon leave this life.

I am old now, and great chunks of memory rest deeply dormant in me, unrecalled for so long I think they are lost. Then a message arrives, a moment comes, a certain quality of air and light, a faint ephemeral wisp of breath in the mountain morning air. Memory stirs… and there it is, resurrected, slowly rising in salient bits and particular pieces, history filtered and sifted and reduced to essence. The essence remains, and rises again in memory.

The memories gather slowly, ancient shadows laboring up through the archeological layers of my life as I wait, wondering how much will surface now in memory, how much has left and is gone.

These are the days when death is more visible to me. The older we become, the more often these messages appear; someone we know, or once knew, is preparing to leave or has left this life. We pause, and remember. We consider the fact before us, the third and last fact of this life.

It has come round often in recent days. A ten year old nephew dies suddenly in his sleep; a friend, rejecting a third round of chemo and radiation chooses to live out the rest of her life rather than endure those agonies again; Robin Williams leaves this life. And not so far back, still feeling like it happened yesterday, my brother dies, my uncle dies; and then there is, so very far back in time, still clear and present as the day it happened, the time my father dies and his leaving informs me, for the first time in my life, of this third and final fact of life.

We come here; we live here; we leave here. Each day, all around us, the vast, dynamic, organic continuum of human life is filling with new arrivals, filled with lives living unique legends, and emptying with constant departures.

The poet observes there is a season and time and purpose for all things, and here it is, one of those moments. A friend, now far distant on the earth from that place shared so long ago, is leaving. We stand, solemn and silent, attending the moment with them, honoring the life lived.

It’s said that there is no new thing under the sun, and I believe that. I also believe one of those things which exists as an eternal, unchanging principle in creation is that the individual life of a human being is always a brand new thing, unique and particular, and it is the one thing each of us does better than anyone else ever has, or ever will. It is the one thing which is eternally new under the sun.

We live our life. It’s the rarest thing in the universe, this life we live. It’s a unique gem, exclusive, it can’t be duplicated and never will be. We live in creation, and we call it that because every life is a new creation, the first and last of its kind.

When those we know leave us we feel the loss of their presence in life, and the presence they hold in our particular lives no matter how transient or how long ago. We remember the connections shared, the part of their life which lent itself to our own as we each lived the discreet experience of our individual lives. And that feeling of loss leads us to a deeper contemplation of one thing which all lives share, that constant, ancient thing which has always been present under the sun; the time of leaving life.

The other day I came across a Latin phrase, damnatio memoriae, which translates as “cancelled in memory.” It refers to a historical practice of the Roman Empire. It involved the official condemnation, by the Roman Senate, of the memory of a Roman emperor . It describes the effect sought as all records, monuments, and every evidence of the very existence of the Emperor is utterly destroyed. It is the opposite of apotheosis, which means that a deceased emperor is believed to have ascended to heaven.

The phrase “cancelled in memory” caught my mind. It seemed to be the collective fate of everyone.

I thought first of all the ancient people who lived in what are now the ruins of history, the long forgotten everyday citizens living long forgotten everyday lives in Akkadia and Babylonia, Troy and Pompeii, living in the cliff caves of the Dead Sea, and the cliff dwellings in Mancos Canyon and Mesa Verde.

I though of my brother, dead now for only two years and yet, even so recently gone as that, nevertheless fading in memory. He is still held bright in the hearts of those who loved him. Yet soon they too will leave life, and their memories of him with them, and sooner or later, in a hundred years or perhaps more, a final article of his particular, unique life – maybe an old photograph hung upon a wall with no memory of the particulars and personality of his life – will be taken down, and put away, and lost. And he will become cancelled in memory, as will we all.

It is the same for all of us. And that is how it ought to be. We come here, we live here, we leave here. Our focus and purpose and essential reason for being is embodied in these three things. Acclaim, recognition, fame, achievement – nothing sought in our desire to not leave, to not die, but instead to remain in memory – can overcome this final basic fact of our existence.

We sometimes desire to be remembered as the ancient sage is remembered, or the divine messenger is remembered, or the paragon of thought or science or art is remembered. We desire that the exquisite value of our life, which we sense as being real and true and irreplaceable and unique, would be recognized and remembered. And so desiring, and so fearing the loss of such treasure, we feel the loss of ourselves and the loss of others, and mourn and grieve it when each of us leaves this life.

Yet we grieve for beauty, and grace, and the miraculous thing which each life is. We are put in touch with how precious, how rare, how exquisitely perfect the content of every life is, filled with joys and this deep grief and the countless shades of existence that occur across the infinite spectrum between darkness and light.

And then, after all these thoughts and many more, a simple answer floats lightly up through memory in a simple song from 1965, and I hear this, carrying me beyond my reveries and contemplative reflections: 

“…When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad.”

 And I raise my coffee cup to Barbara, and Scott, and Louis and me, and all the others there, and remember my favorite things about those people, places, and times we shared; and I savor the wonderful apotheosis that each and every one of our lives is.

We Five, 1965: “My Favorite Things” (Rodgers and Hammerstein)

We Five, 1965: “You were on My Mind”

Molly Ivins coined the nickname “Shrub” for George W. Bush. She championed freedom, and her strong stands typically supported democratic principles, the underdog, the disenfranchised, the overlooked and the neglected. She despised greed, stupidity, selfishness and ignorance. She spoke often and well in her opposition to the Bush administration’s suspension of habeas corpus for suspected terrorists. Molly left us in January, 2007. I expect God is currently busy answering a couple of questions I’m sure she had.

Molly was a sequoia among shrubs. She towered in grandeur, rooted in the uncompromising hard-core political badlands of Texas. She synthesized the breath of life by applying light to the noxious and ignoble gasses of politicians. Her honesty and clarity and vivacious, uncompromising independence were unavoidable and unforgettable. Her absence in the skyline marks the loss of a national treasure.

Molly was a dervish in a donnybrook, slapping foreheads and inspiring flashes of light in dark places, hollering to the world at large to “Think, dammit!” Who now will come with the spirit of a rollicking God and iron-principled independent warrior to stand tall in the fray, gleefully kickin’ butts and taking names later?

Whoever it is, they will appear in the darkness bearing a torch passed to them by Molly Ivins.

Godspeed, Molly. You raised hell and earned Heaven. Well done.

On the front porch with coffee this morning, a cloud of birds flying through my mind. The life and death of Robin Williams occupies my thoughts. Inchoate, without sequence or arrangement, reflections – true reflections, wisps in the mirror of my own experience – tumble around in the dark vault:

 …The human brain, the machine of God; the ancient limbic core, the vault of the amygdala, the hippocampus messenger, the sapient and sentient cerebral cortex. The limbic fires which smolder like banked coals in memory, ever-constant in their resurrection when, unbidden by the higher cortex, they flare into consuming flames in the goading moment and we hear the limbic scream…

 A quote from William Gibson:
“What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda.”

…The “divine madness” of artistic genius. The manic, inspired, sensitive, ruthlessly responsive genius of Robin Williams, the laughing clown with sad eyes, the kind person…

 –There are only two types of humor, the kind that is mean and the kind that is wise. The mean kind causes separation, supports specialness, is anger for the self directed outward toward others. The wise kind brings us together, tells us it’s this way for all of us, confusing, baffling, absurd at times and ludicrous at others, but we’re all in it together and sometimes all we can do is laugh, soothe it with endorphins, let it be what it is and take our remedy as we can.

 Limbic messages to the cortical complex are clear: Danger. Do something about it. Explore until you find the solution. Those red-hot priority messages will not moderate, the dopamine will not subside until the prefrontal cortex discovers a place, condition, behavior, awareness, etc. which provides a solution to the signal pain.

 The prefrontal cortex, doing what it does, seeks solutions that moderate the screaming limbic brain. It may learn new modes of perception and rearrange its own definitions of pain. It may shut down its own system, become catatonic, cut off the flow of input to the core brain. Isolation, reduction of input, can become the drug of choice. It  might learn that dopamine blockers – alcohol, nicotine, certain drugs – work well and serve to lessen the limbic scream. Or the production of endorphins can become a drug of choice. It might learn the calming response in prayer, the peace of the meditative center, the conditioned response to assert that beyond the level of cognitive perception all is well and good and pains are just part of the whole thing, no need to get upset. It all seems a less than complete explanation. It serves to tie together observations of the process limited to the science of brain chemistry, yet I question an explanation that includes only a sum of parts, because there is the thing always present which is greater than that sum, more than a mere aggregate of local fragments.

 There is still the unknowable mystery, unexplained, the connection of all, each to each, in creation itself. Jesus connected spiritually, or at least represented the connection in terms of spirituality. Vitruvius and later Leonardo da Vinci found it in the golden ratios; mathematicians see it in nature in the recurrence of specific bases such as the Fibonacci series. Harmony, connectedness – suffusing all of creation and traced again and again in religion and the arts down through human history.

This life holds, inextricably intertwined, the bitter and the sweet. There is a fire in us which both consumes and creates; in the middle of the consuming limbic fire the light of humanity shines out in the glory of its own genius, forged in that fire. Our lives are not about the moment when the fire, flaring out, overcomes us. It is about the moments when we overcome it, and move on, seeking and embracing that unknowable mystery, unexplained, and the connection of all, each to each, in creation itself.

It is what Is. Let it Be.

RIP, Robin Williams. You are my brother. It’s not about how you died, or why. It’s about how you lived. In the middle of the flames, your light shined out to us all. Nanu Nanu, Mork. You lived it.

On the porch with coffee early this late July morning the valley is still; even the blue jay who comes to instigate an argument in the cedars gives up for lack of opposition and leaves me in silence. The past days have produced a surfeit of input which churns inchoately within.

Now the impulse forms to connect the bits together, to find the common thread and draw it through, to find the plot of the story there and arrange it until it is orderly and coherent, and arrange it in a sequence of words – nothing more, really, than a personalized totem of gathered bits of feather and bone – which make sense to me.

The first piece concerns a poster circulating widely on the internet featuring a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama. That quote has been on my mind of late. It’s a great quote and very wise and true. It says,

 “When asked what surprised him about humanity the most, the Dalai Lama replied:

 “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

I wanted to learn more about the sentiment expressed and so I sought a further context for it. I thought it would be helpful to find the interview or work in which it first appeared. I discovered another side to this quote, a cautionary tale about the validity of info on the internet which reminds us all that it’s up to each of us to examine and question and verify the validity of “facts” we all too often assume are true but prove to be artful misrepresentations of fact.

The actual author behind the sentiment of this quote is a fellow named Jim Brown. Through an odd chain of events his work took form on the net as represented above. When he found out what had happened he graciously allowed that while not thrilled with the circumstances, “If God can use it, then so be it.” Mr. Brown died in 2002. A reminder to us all that there are anonymous (and magnanimous) sages everywhere. Here is the original work:

 I dreamed I had an interview with God.

 “So you would like to interview me?” God asked. “If you have the time”, I said … God Smiled.

“My time is eternity, … what questions do you have in mind for me?”

“What surprises you most about humankind?”

 God answered.

“That they get bored with childhood, they rush to grow up and then long to be children again”

“That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health.”

“That by thinking anxiously about the future, that they forget the present, such that they live neither in the present or the future.”

“That they live as if they will never die and die as if they had never lived.”

 God’s hand took mine and we were silent for a while.  And then I asked.

“As a parent, what are some of life’s lessons that you want your children to learn?”

God replied with a smile.

 “To learn they cannot make anyone love them, what they can do is let themselves be loved.”

“To learn that it is not good to compare themselves to other.”

“To learn that a rich person is not the one who has the most, but the one who needs the least.”

“To learn that it only takes a few seconds to open profound wounds in persons we love and it takes many years to heal them.”

“To learn to forgive by practicing forgiveness.”

“To learn that there are persons who love them dearly, but simply do not know how to express or show their feelings.”

“To learn that two people can look at the same thing and see it differently.”

‘To learn that it is not always enough that they be forgiven by others, but that they must forgive themselves.”

“And to learn that I am here … ALWAYS.”

 James J. Lachard (Jim Brown)

This account can be found at Center for Global Leadership.

The next bit circulating in my mind of late is about karma, and the links of the karmic chain which bind us to samsara, the suffering which the world offers to us. It begins with an extension of something I observed another person do. Later I thought, “Wow. That’s something I’ve never seen before. That person just formed a karmic link, tethering themselves to a source of suffering and setting up the whole karmic cycle of getting back what they’ve chained themselves to over and over again…” The thought cut through all the complexity I associate with karma and attachment and personal perspective and self-fulfilling manifestations of belief which contribute to suffering.

 A grandchild, rebuffed in seeking to play with his independent little sister, wails, “You never want to play with me!” And I feel compelled to offer him a way to free him of this superlative prison, to avert him from this hammer-blow at the forge which will help form the karmic link which attaches him to separation and suffering. I say, “Hey, wait a minute. She doesn’t want to play with you now, but she has played with you lots of times, and she’ll play with you lots more times, too, right?” He allows that this is so, but I can see the link has formed. He is separated from her now, and by extension from all, and will suffer for it in the returns from his belief.

 It’s simple. What we believe in is what forms our suffering and/or our happiness. Until we cease to believe in the link, we are chained to suffering by it.

Until we exercise a positive denial of its usefulness and reality; until we regret and repent of our attachment to it; until we rely upon the truth of compassion which is within us and which is the essence of our existence; until we engage in virtuous activity which produces true satisfaction and happiness; and until we resolve to be vigilant in our own ways and means for all these things – we will be chained to the sufferings our own mistaken beliefs keep us fastened to, and which are visited upon us over and over again.

Another piece circulating in mind of late concerns the putative quote (above) which has become attributed to the Dalai Lama. It resonates in me as a sad, reflective feeling when I observe the way many people live their lives. When I behold their ways and means, their lives appear  to be afflicted with, and dominated by, an empty busyness characterized by pursuit, and struggle.

I think this busyness of pursuit and struggle results from attachments to religion, cultural mores, societal ideology, political affiliation and personal, self-centric desires. These things fill the experience of contemporary humanity with self-perpetuating rings upon rings upon rings of busyness.

The karmic link to busyness is the strongest link of our time. It is composed of a multitude of small attachments formed by the current propagandas of complexly evolved institutions of society, culture and religion. We are taught these attachments in our families and our schools, and they are enforced and perpetuated in our social experience.

I sense the eternal way and focus of humanity has been lost somehow, and replaced with a multitude of ways and perspective points which perpetuate busyness and ignore realization of the spirit within all.

Back at the desk after a short adjournment to the porch to gather my thoughts into hopefully better words. On the porch the jay returned, chiding me for a moment, and then flew away, leaving the valley still again and slowly filling with the morning sun.

The chiding brings forth a reflection of me, of what I am doing, a reminder that it would be best to rest rather than chatter and chide, to let myself fill with peace and warmth and light rather than concern myself with this needle and thread I am playing with, with this stringing together of things better left to be as they are. Yet there is an irritating mote here, something accreting around it, and I will see it through.

I can be wrong, and so I have become vigilant about my perspective and whether or not I am being nearsighted when I look at something. The closer we are to what we see, the less is seen. It’s the old choice: when you look at the whole parade, are you seeing it through a knothole or looking at it over the top of the fence?

A recent study about Americans affiliated with the Tea Party determined that certain parts of their belief system, reflected in their politics as a lack of understanding of the circumstances of persons who were not considered “successful,” was due to a mistaken assumption that all people are afforded the same social and economic and educational opportunities and if a person does not succeed in America it is because they are lazy or inadequate or in some other way undeserving of compassionate regard. This mistaken assumption had at its root a myopic view of others, one which assumed that the experience of the beholder was universal.

An abstract of the study is available at http://asr.sagepub.com/content/79/4/630 and the full article can be found in American Sociological Review, August 2014 vol. 79 no. 4 630-652.

The point being that it is best to take a broad view rather than a narrow one, and that the further we move back from a subject the more we see. It is good to always check our perspective point. If we’re too close we only see our own reflection. Further removed, it is more likely we will see more and so be more informed, less subjective, more objective, and less likely to be mistaken in our thoughts. The world is a small place to a myopic mind. The more we allow ourselves to see, the more we do see, the more the universe becomes a larger, infinitely more wonderful experience for us.

I took an online test for Social Intelligence recently. It’s part of a study being done by “Lab in the Wild,” an adjunct of the Intelligent Interactive Systems Group at Harvard. The test is designed to measure how well a person can read emotions of others just by looking at their eyes.

The test proved to be of use to me in helping identify how perceptive I am in this regard, and by extension gave me a basis of comparison to others about how often the conclusions I take from observed information prove to be valid. The result validated my faith in my own observations as being highly accurate while also informing me that I am not perfect, which was actually a more comfortable outcome for me than if I had scored perfectly. I’m comfortable with my lack of perfection and when it is in evidence I take it as a reminder to be on my toes about the judgments and conclusions I take from my personal perspective. On the other hand, the test also indicated to me that I am better off relying on my own impressions of such things than the perceptions of nearly all other observers.

The point here being that I trust my judgments and have faith in my conclusions, and this faith is not a myopic opinion. I’ve ascertained the validity of other perceptive capabilities I possess in the same way and so also have faith in the empathic and empathetic perceptions I have of the internal environments, psyches and spiritual condition of others.

So. Bona fides established, for what they’re worth – which proves to be very little to the myopic mind (which I can do nothing for) – I may finally be approaching the purpose of all this, which seems to be a statement about the emptiness and busyness present in so many human lives today. I think it needs to be said – and heard, where it can be. The credentials I offer are only given at all because they may, for some, provide enough faith in the speaker to allow them to listen to and consider what is spoken.

I take a break and tell my wife, “Boy, honey I am having a grand old time putting into words all the stuff we’ve been talking about the past week or so!” She knows me, of course, and we both know this words thing is ultimately nothing more than an eccentricity of mine, an amusing compulsion, and we smile about it together often. “And,” I continue, “I will either by God finish it or die in the dumping attempt!”

She laughs out loud – it’s always such a great, understanding, sincere, heartfelt thing when she laughs – and now, here I am again, doing what the jay chided me for.

It’s summertime and Facebook is rife with busyness. Busyness filling emptiness. On these pages there’s a sort of no-calorie, no-sustenance aura fizzing and popping out of the ubiquitous rum punches and umbrellas and exotic locales as the world rushes about occupying itself with busyness, tweeting and instagraming and otherwise archiving evidence of their brief existence in a better life.

It’s all there: the boat, the lake, the fish; the cruise ship photographs signifying something was seen, albeit miles away, and not for long because time at the railing is pressed by the imminent seven course glut and floor show to follow; the mad dashes in local jitneys across ancient landscapes and through cultures with thousand-year histories to make a timely arrival upon tasteful cobble-stoned pavements surrounded by purveyors of gelati and espresso and vendors plying fine mesh money nets to seine the pockets of the surging schools of touristas on their annual migration from where they have come, to back where they have come from – and where they are busy in other emptiness-filling ways, painfully acquiring the dispensations which allow them this mindless journey, which is for most a sacramental obligation for vague reasons, a signatory rite of passage which when stamped and validated becomes a diploma of attainment, a t-shirt proudly displayed, a baseball cap signifying membership in the team which plays this game.

Lenore and I share a joke together about traveling through the world the way most other people do. We say, “We don’t travel.” Because we don’t travel in the world. For over thirty years we’ve taken the road less traveled, the road that travels through life.

While other people embraced priorities of struggle and work and future gain, we followed our inner lights and walked our road together, gaining the worth of each day as it came and not building up the deficit of experience which accumulates when a person sacrifices their life now for the hope of a life they want to engage in later. As Robert Frost observed, it has made all the difference.

As a result of our conscious mutual choice to be here, now, living and loving together in every day, loving each other and living each day as it came the best we could, there’s no need for us to make up any deficit, no need to travel in the world seeking something not yet found.

We’ve traveled. We’ve been there, done that, lived in that place and experienced the things and found the answers together that so many people on this earth delay seeking for so long, and then begin to desperately seek so late in life, and so often can’t find because the habits of the years have built barriers between them and what they seek.

Often we want to say to these people, “Just stop. And look. And listen. It’s right here, where you are, it’s all around you, it’s in you, it’s in the moment you decide to love and share and be with each other.”

A wise word doesn’t travel as far as people think, but here it is. You’ll catch what you chase, and it will catch you. If you chase the future, you’ll always be there and miss what is here right now.

-30-

Some things said well have the misfortune to become overexposed and then considered as cliches because of it. A connotation is assigned to them which conveys contempt. Desiderata does not deserve that. The link to GoodReads.com says it well: “…what it says remains timeless and reserves for its author a niche in that poetical pantheon to which belong those writers who have, at least once, seen an eternal truth clear.”

I read it over and over and am always filled with its perfection and completeness.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

© Max Ehrmann 1927

NOTE: Also, contrary to what is stated at GoodReads, the work is not protected by US copyright law and is available in the public realm. In the late 1970’s the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit  determined copyright had been forfeited because the poem had been authorized for publication without a copyright notice in the 1940s – and that the poem is therefore in the public domain.

This morning on the porch with coffee I was pleased knowing that any time I have made my wife laugh is worth more to me than all my writing. So I went and told her this, and it pleased her, and she laughed.