not native fruit

more berkeley library photos

Here are some pictures of the Main Branch:
When I first lived in Berkeley, this was painted a kind of salmon-pink.  It was designed by the same architect who designed the North Berkeley Branch (pictured previously) and the Claremont Branch (pictured below).  They refurbished the whole thing, inside and out, a few years ago, and added a wing.

 
This used to be the main entrance.  There was a very fun curving double staircase with brass handrails inside.  The main reading room, two stories tall, was to the left as you entered (up the stairs, of course) and the stacks were straight ahead.  I loved the stacks: the silence  of hours of quiet perusal of old books permeated the narrow alleys with their open-work floors and metal staircases.



The note of the exotic, necessary to good libraries, is present in these panels on the exterior of the lobby.  Are they art nouveau?  I'm sure this style of faux-egyptian decoration has a name. 

Below is the library's modest insignia, which graces its buildings in several locations:

monastic journey vs hut-dwelling

I was supposed to travel down to Los Angeles yesterday for a four-day class with my daoist healing teacher, Jeffrey Yuen, but I didn't go.  In my opinion, monastic journeys must meet certain criteria: 1) they must be necessary, or 2) they must be meditative, or 3) they must be recreative in the deepest sense of that word.  If cloistered contemplative nuns can have a period of 'recreation' every day, I guess it's okay for the monastically-inclined, such as myself to be recreative.  For instance, I occasionally take a half day's jaunt to the ocean for purposes of renewal.

In the case of these classes, I recognize that it isn't 'necessary' for me to drive down for them, although that's the subject of another post.  It could be 'meditative' ...

solstice: afterglow

We are basking in the afterglow of our spiritual beacon's visit to the Bay Area.  What an experience to spend so much time with a radiant being who sees  into one's heart.  What peace and intimacy is found there.   

The Solstice is certainly the highest point of the year, the apex of the movement of the sun, the helix.  And for us the moments of time spent with our spiritual beacon represent the same: they are the highest points of our lives.  Because we are more ourselves than at any other time.

The big message for me during this visit was 'to connect within,' and of course, to have faith in that connection.  That inner connection is all there is, and everything else: the names of God, the beauties of nature, the spiritual songs, the exercises of the breath, the wisdom of the sutras, are all only aids to making that connection.

gertrude's fountain

"It happened on a certain day (in late Spring) that I went into the court before Prime, and seated myself near the fountain, and I began to consider the beauty of the place, which charmed me on account of the clear and flowing stream, the verdure of the trees which surrounded it, and the flight of the birds, and particularly of the doves - above all the sweet calm - apart from all, and considering within myself what would make this place most useful to me, I thought that it would be the friendship of a wise and intimate companion, who would sweeten my solitude or render it useful to others, when Thou, who art a torrent of inestimable pleasure, after having inspired me with the first impulse of this desire, Thou didst will to be also the fulfillment of it, inspiring me with the thought that if, by continual gratitude, I returned Thy graces to Thee, (I would be) as a stream (that) returns to its source.  (In that moment) my heart perceived Thee, O my most sweet God and my delight, present within...and although my mind takes pleasure in wandering after and in distracting itself with perishable things, yet...when I return into my heart, I find Thee there." Gertrude of Helfta, 1282

Gertrude, called 'the Great,' was a monastic woman who "was placed in the abbey in 1261 at the age of five, possibly as an orphan.  While circumstances led her to the convent, we know from her writings that she deeply and deliberately chose her monastic life as she matured." (p.282, Lillian Thomas Shank OCSO, The Echo Within, in Distant Echoes, ed by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank)  In fact this passage is her recollection, nine years later, of that embrace of vocation at the age of seventeen. 

This passage has always particularly charmed me, perhaps because my own garden has been such an important place of solitude and contemplation for me in my own life.  Things I find particularly interesting about the passage is that Gertrude found the confirmation of her faith within herself, and in the setting of a place in nature, a place familiar to her.  Also, by setting up her prayer or 'recollection' of gratitude, Gertrude creates a kind of energetic 'microcosmic orbit' similar to the daoists' model.  There is a cycling of energy between Gertrude and 'God,' a continual giving and receiving that is similar to the cycling of the breath. 

Gertrude lived at a time when 'holy women' were receiving many 'divine graces' in the context of lives of devotion and prayer, whether solitary, in ordinary life or in spiritual communities.  After some time, the institutional church noticed that this outpouring of spiritual energy was taking place independently of the ritualized life of the church, and instituted various means of male supervision of this 'charismatic' phenomenon.

berkeley library photos

This is our local library branch.  Coming from a city like Philadelphia which boasts fabulous library buildings, this building seemed to me like it could (possibly) be classified as a library, although just barely.  (Find a link to photos of Philly's Libraries here.)  Actually, there are several attractive libraries in Berkeley, especially the Main branch and the tiny Claremont branch on Ashby Avenue in the Elmwood district.  (photos soon)  The interior of the North Branch, pictured here, is heavily wainscotted in dark wood, 'California Mission' style.

Here are some more shots of the North Berkeley branch:

The three windows at the top, including the circular one, are actually faced with reflective mirrors.  The rippling red tiles at the roofline are the same kind used to decorate many homes in the area, including our own.  They create a relaxed, low-profile, adobe look that I find comfortable.


Here's a closeup of the panel above the door.

This library was built in 1936 by the architect responsible for several of Berkeley's public buildings, creating a repeating design element throughout the city.  I wonder if he was inspired by, the homes of the area, or if the houses reflected his style. (See the plaque below for details). So much of Berkeley seems to have been built in the 1920's and '30's. Our house was built in 1926.

Libraries should have some element of the exotic, since they hold the promise of taking people to far away places, distant times and unfamiliar people.  The North Berkeley branch fulfills this dictum (my own, btw) with these tiled window treatments:

They're not terribly impressive, but they are kind of quaint and charming.  Things are not built on quite so grand a scale in the east-bay, as compared, let's say with the east coast. 
Here's another set of alhambra-suggestive windows on the other side:

And here's a view of the rear of the library.  One thing I have to say for Berkeley it has wonderful plant life:
Of course the library is closed today, it's Sunday afternoon.   Nevertheless, several frenzied vehicles have sped up to the curb, their occupants racing to return library materials.  With those few exceptions, I've walked around the library in quiet solitude, enjoying the late afternoon light and the lengthy evening. (The vehicular intercepts have seemed comical by contrast.)  I'd been walking around the neighborhood with my 96-year old friend and her dog, Toto.  Afterward, I decided to go home and get my camera to take these pictures.  I love this corner and drive past this library several times a week, walk past less often.  Here is a picture of a small triangle, recently planted with a 'sand garden':



Here's a closeup of the plants:


It's a peaceful, sleepy place, a place of grit and sunshine, a nowhere place in a nowhere special world: the world of the everyday.

monks/friends

I liked this very much recently from The Hermitary (June 2): "the visit to or by a kindred spirit could be satisfying but also disturbing. Returning from a visit to an old friend stirs in Meng Hao-jan a sense of loneliness that disrupts the continuity of his cherished and taken-for-granted "depths of quiet." Instead, Meng aches for friendship "morning after morning," so that he must now consciously distract himself with the same routines that he once merged unconsciously into his daily life. The poem reveals the pathos of solitude and the complexity of the hermit psychology. Contrary to stereotype, the poem suggests that eremitical life is not a series of peak experiences but time and emotion eked out and spread out as if on a table for the soul to contemplate without adornment."  I used to feel this way a lot, and now I kind of take it for granted.  There's no avoiding the pain of separation, and after awhile it isn't painful anymore.  One recognizes that it's just a part of the many cycles of life.

As a matter of fact, I just had this experience today.  I met with two wonderful kindred spirits today.  People I see once or twice a year at best.  People with whom I can talk at a level that I find really rare in my experience.  What else is there to say?  I also spent a few minutes with old friends with whom I lived (briefly) at an ashram in India.  I felt a powerful waft of the intense light and bliss we spent our days in 'there.'  But as they say, where there is intense light there is also intense darkness.  In this case the darkness was nothing nefarious, but only the sheer difficulty of life in rural India for one used to all the amenities of western life, the illnesses, the mental and emotional states of some of the fellow-pilgrims.  It was all more than I could bear, and I became intensely grateful for my quiet little life here in Berkeley.  Still, it was a lovely moment to recall that light and beauty, purity and goodness, and my time of immersion in it.

In this still relatively new experience of blogging (new for me), I find that I like to write in response to other people's blogs a lot.  For instance, the Hermitary and the Cassandra Pages today both wrote about libraries, and I'd like to post a photo of one of our local libraries.  It's so quaint and old-fashioned but one would have to be able to get the trees in the photo to get the effect.  I'll try for a shot soon but it won't be for a while yet.  Libraries are something I can read about, write about, think about, infinitely!  Thank you both for the posts!

temple in urban solitude

Without my husband, I wonder if I would have had the chance to experience so much solitude.  In my twenties it was fine with him for me to stay at home and keep house, take care of my aging parents and visit the aging members of the parish.  They were all strangers to me, but I was very religious then, and so that was my motivation: "I was sick and you visited me." 

Of course, I believed that children would come along in the course of time, and they didn't.   I went on to study theology and then chinese medicine, still visiting the sick.  But over time I grew to really appreciate living in our environment of small cottages, trees, gardens, and wildlife.  At night deer wander up and down our streets year round; raccoons, opossoms, skunks and of course squirrels and bird-life are among the neighbors we see every day.  Just a few blocks away is Tilden Park, a parkland that runs along the ridge of the eastbay hills spanning several counties.  Nature counterbalances the urban intensity of this area.  There were similar alleviations in Philadelphia, where I grew up, as well.  For example, the Fairmount Park system, the Skuylkill River, and Wissahickon Creek.

After interacting with people all day long at work, my husband used to want just a quiet evening, and so I got used to quiet days and quiet evenings as well.  Quiet weekends. On vacations, we went backpacking in the mountains or camping in the desert.  Sometimes we visited friends in the forests of Oregon or friends in the mountains and deserts.  Lots of mountains and deserts!  Our family being what it was, there wasn't much happening in that department.  Our spiritual community became our 'family,' but that was very small at that time.

Contemplative prayer was my spiritual path for many years, but now my spiritual teacher for the past sixteen years is more 'active' in her ministry, so I have been doing more service, mostly at home on the computer, and I also organize a small soup kitchen and attend once or twice a month.  We also have a small gathering here at the house once a week for a prayer service known as a puja.  It is very lovely.  Beauty is also a part of our new path.  (I see this path as a continuation of the previous one, and an expansion of it, even though it goes by a different name.) 

One thing I have learned in the course of all this, is that solitude is something that happens 'inside your own skin.'  The body is the temple of the spirit.  This is literally true, and we can enter that temple at any time.  But I have to say I am very happy to live in an environment that reflects that reality back to me.  More about this environment in my next post.

frau trude and ursula hegi's trudi montag

I've been reading a very cool essay on 'freeing the ensorcelled world' by Dave over at Via Negativa, (the article is on his personal page, here) and it made me recall Marie-Louise von Franz' book 'The Shadow and Evil in Fairytales.'  In it she talks about the basic mistrust of 'village' people towards one who spends a lot of time alone or out in the wilderness on their own.  She has many 'tales' with which to illustrate the common attitude towards those who 'go their own way.' 

This topic actually fits in well with the previous topic about monks, and reinforces our awareness of the need for community in the monkish life, whether as a vowed community or a loose-knit community of friends, co-workers, church or other groups.  No one is a monk entirely alone.  Even Tenzin Palmo depended to some extent on others to do what she did.  Going far back in time we see that Anthony of Egypt had regular bread deliveries made by local church members to the tomb where he was initially living, and later when he removed to the 'inner mountain,' a colony formed around him, and many petitioners sought his counsel.  He also visited Christians in jail.

So there was support, and there was also, of course, its opposite.  I remember Pir Vilayat, the late head of the Sufi Order of the West, saying that he had to endure a long period when people criticized him and expressed their belief that he was not good enough to head up the Order, but that eventually, he probably evolved more, and the people around him became more able to 'see' him and to accept him in that role. 

But anyway, that's not really what I want to talk about in this post.  I'm more fascinated with an instance of conflated identity I've stumbled across by re-reading portions of two of my most all-time favorite books.  In my perusal of Marie-Louise's 'Shadow and Evil', I came across this story, which made me think of Ursula Hegi's protagonist, Trudi Montag, in Stones from the River, (who is also a central character in the collection of short stories, Floating In My Mother's Palm.) Trudi is a dwarf who grew up running the village's local pay-library, the place where people came for paperbacks, novellas, 'stories.'  She continues this work into her middle-age and is 40 years old at the time of this passage.  Here is Ursula Hegi - (her narrator is an adolescent girl who has been forbidden to visit the pay-library):

"By the time I was twelve, Trudi Montag had inherited the pay-library.  Though she was in her early forties, she was less than one meter twenty tall.  She knew everything.  As soon as it happened.  Before it happened.  She had the dubious gift of guessing what went on behind closed doors.  These insights she embroidered into stories which she circulated around town.  Bearer of news - good and bad - she walked through the streets of Burgdorf on O-shaped legs, wearing cardigans that never quite closed over the wide bosom of her striped housedresses, moving with the assurance one usually sees in women who are truly beautiful.  To each encounter she brought her friendly curiosity; yet, when people saw her advancing toward them, they expected the worst; even good news barely made up for that first sense of dread they'd felt at the sight of her.

"On the surface Burgdorf was a town of great virtues while  underneath all kinds of transgressions were hushed up.  Herr Pastor Beier, who listened to the confessions of countless sins, could be counted on to whitewash them all through absolution, but Trudi Montag would not let the town forget any of its flaws.  Every day at noon, as soon as the bells from St. Martin's rang, she closed her library for two hours, and set out to carry the morning's gossip through town.  Like an ancient trader, she bartered until she had extracted a piece of gossip from her listeners. In her pay-library Trudi Montag told me that my mother had stopped going to church after my brother, Joachim, had died, and that our housekeeper's son, Rolf, was illegitimate.  [more scandalous stories, such as the suicide of the narrator's uncle.] 

"In front of the pay-library stood an old chestnut tree that carried huge blossom candles in the spring.  I'd flatten myself against its trunk, scanning the street to make sure my father wouldn't see me before I entered.  The kitchen behind the library led into a living room with a huge gold fish tank and a blue velvet sofa.  If I sat next to Trudi Montag on the sofa, I'd find myself sliding towards her along the slope created by her weight.  Instead of pictures, she had mirrors on her living room walls, small mirrors of all shapes in ornate frames.  I'd lean my head against the velvet and listen to her stories." (pp. 20-22, with apologies to the author for leaving out delicious details in the interest of brevity.)

And here is Marie-Louise, discussing how fairy tales account for 'spirit possession' in disobedient children, but my real point is the similarity between this character, called Frau Trude, and the character of Trudi Montag:  "Grimm story (No. 43) called 'Frau Trude'.  'There was once a little girl who was obstinate and prying and rather impertinent, and she didn't always do what her parents told her.  One day she said to her parents that she had heard so much about Frau Trude she would go to see what she was like.  People said that she looked so funny and that everything she had looked so wonderful, and that there were such strange things in her house, and the girl was very curious and wanted to see it.  Her parents forbade her to do this and said that Mrs. Trude was a very bad woman who did evil things and that she would not be their child any longer is she went there.  But the girl paid no attention to what her parents said and went all the same.  When she got there Frau Trude asked her why she was so white...[it turns out the child sees things there that frighten her, like the blood-soaked butcher, the hewer of trees, and so forth, and then Frau Trude "turned the girl into a block of wood which she threw onto the fire and when it was glowing red she warmed herself by it and said, 'That gives a good light!'  "  (pp.139-140)

Anyway, I'm wondering if Ursula Hegi intended Trudi Montag to possess echoes of Frau Trude, or if it is just one of those strange coincidences, or better yet, an unconscious dip by Hegi into the collective unconscious, producing an instance of synchronicity.  Anyway, this bit of apophenia enriches the character of Trudi Montag for me even more!  I happen to feel that this is one of the best books of fiction in the world, or rather the two of them together, and in non-fiction, 'Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tale' is way way up there too.

I guess the point is that when we stray outside the perspective of innocence, a perspective that is reinforced in 'polite society' and in the neat and tidy life of the 'middle-class' village, we may become frightened, we may suffer, but all of that is just a source of energy to the 'old earth mother,' the 'baba yaga' or whatever we want to call her.  Frau Trude.  She's seen it all.

'secular' monks of today and the 'inner monk'

This brings me to the topic I am most interested in at present, because I'm exploring it in my own life right now.  What does it mean to be monk-like in a secular sense today?  By this I mean, where can we see people who, like the monks of Ladakh, live in society, working and following their daily spiritual practice?  Can their spiritual practice be an appreciation or an awareness of the present moment? [For example, the old orders of Catholic monks appreciate the 'Hours' (and thus the quotidian) in their daily routine of chanting and prayer, read out of their 'ordinaries.']  Can we see these appreciators of the present moment all around us?  Do they have to have taken vows publically, or can the vows be taken in their hearts?    How do they stay honest to those vows?  Do they have to be religious, or not?  Maybe I'm so interested in this because I'd like to move out of my familiar religious moorings into the vast ocean of the world, and experience the spiritual life in that context.  Is it possible?  I think it is.

One of the people I'm studying with this end in mind is the poet, Wallace Stevens.  He loved nature, sought to experience it in the way that humans only can: through the senses, but inevitably interpreted and embroidered upon by the creative human imagination (the mind, called in the Hindu tradtion, 'the sugar-cane bow of the mind'.)  To support this supposition, I'd like to quote Meng-Han of the Hermitary, who writes that "simplicity [a monastic virtue] carves out a psychological dimension that is removed from the artificial world and placed squarely within the natural world, as much as this can be. In an urban environment, simplicity has a personal touch, perhaps an intellectual or creative cast, or an engagement with objects and people that comes from an authentic core of selflessness."  (This is to be found in his May 2005 archives) I see this kind of simplicity in Stevens, and also in other observant reflective artists, right here on these blogs, such as Paula of 'Paula's House of Toast,' or Abdul-Walid of Acerbia.  Stevens gives us a wonderful record of his monastic struggles in his letters and in his poetry.  Monks struggle, no doubt about that.  All their journals attest to that.  See the Philokalia for example.

The word 'monk' derives from a Greek adjective, 'monos' meaning 'solitary, alone.'  My view is that we all have an 'inner monk' and that inner monk may take up more of our psychic space or less, depending.  Everyone connects at times to that part of himself or herself that feels alone, sole, and sometimes, lonely. The aim of the monastic life, however, is to not feel 'lonely' in our solitude - eventually - but rather to feel our vast 'connectedness' in the grounding of our solitude.  (Perhaps we can explore this more in another post.)

Some of the other characteristics we associate with monastics include: attention, contemplation, simplicity, humility, industry, prayer, hospitality, silence, service, study, awareness - would anyone like to name a few more?  Joy, compassion, and how about appreciation of beauty?  Julian of Norwich had an appreciation of the beauty and wonder of the ordinary things of life, the 'hoarded ordinaries:'  "Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made."  She goes on to realize that 'all that is made' lasts in time because it is loved by God.  It does seem to me as though saints (in the ordinary sense) and artists share this kind of loving along with 'God.'

Is celibacy required to fulfill the definition of 'monos?'  I don't think so, just because, in my view, the purpose of celibacy in monastic life is to conserve energy for awareness and perception.  Romantic and sexual relationships can really be disruptive and drain our energy, OR they can feed the soul.  Actually, in the end, both kinds can play a major role in forming the shape of our spiritual life.  But we definitely don't want to waste our (creative) energy.  We can still feel our sense of 'monos' even when we're living in relationship.  Monks all do that.

In my own life, I see all those monastic characteristics being cultivated by my husband and myself.  (By the way, we're not celibate.  As I read over the last post, I saw it could be read as if I were saying that.  Not.  I meant rather, that we'd made our own vows relating to our spiritual aspirations, and that because of that we fit in well with the folks at the Franciscan School.)  I also saw this in many of the people around me when I was growing up in Philadelphia, many of whom had grown up within a generation or two of living in the many spiritual communities of Pennsylvania.  I certainly see some of these qualities in Stevens, too, even though he enjoyed gourmet food, liked to be inebriated (and later, probably had to be), but no one ever said monks are perfect. 

And this brings me to another question of interest to me: is it possible to be a dedicated secular monk without having had a prior spiritual formation in the context of some spiritual community?  Wallace Stevens had at least some upbringing in 'church,' enough to miss it when he'd evolved away from it intellectually, and to have possibly sublimated it into his poetry and romantic life.  Most of us have had some degree of spiritual formation that acts as a sort of 'base' or grounding for our further evolution.  I'd like to hear from someone who feels they haven't had this, and yet have still evolved a monk-like approach to life, and about what is the shape of that experience.

One of the things I especially like about America - now this is going a bit far afield - is that it has attempted (not so much currently) to be a secular society that maintains a moral standard.  But this 'secular society' is rooted in the Judeo-Christian culture (in its interplay with indigenous native american culture, it might be added.)  Anyway, I find it interesting to see how we've done this, and I don't much like the idea of undoing it. I feel we haven't fully explored the potential of our secular world-view with its ability to enjoy freedom of religion, and spiritual diversity.

To return to my topic, anyway, I just want to say that I'm seeing anyone who values their solitude and uses it to cultivate their awareness of the world around them, or of their own inner terrain, or to contemplate and cherish beauty, truth, humanity or nature as a kind of monk.

more on monks

I was thinking of writing an essay on monks, similar to the series of five essays on being black in America written recently by Abdul-Walid.  I don’t think I could muster five essays on the subject, but you never know.  This used to be a subject of great interest to me.  Mostly because as a young person I had various ‘spiritual experiences’ that led me to investigate a particular direction.  Even before that, as a child I think I was ear-marked by the nuns for the religious life. I grew up Catholic, I was gentle and brainy, and I liked to pray, but then a sudden growth spurt invited various forms of sexual abuse, which kind of skewed my life away from the convent.  Not that sexual experience is a barrier to the convent.  It isn’t, but in my case it was.

Once I emerged from that maelstrom into young adulthood, I went on to serve as a ‘lay minister’ (no pun intended), and took communion to the shut-ins, etcetera, throughout my twenties, reading scripture from the pulpit in church on Sundays, taking spiritual direction from the Jesuits (the Graduate Theological Union is in our neighborhood), teaching various classes in the parish, and eventually being recruited by local prelates for study at the GTU, which I did in my early thirties, earning a master’s degree in theology, and meeting a lot of interesting people.  Throughout all of these years, my husband G and I tried unsuccessfully to produce offspring, which was a source of great sorrow to me.  I did the pastoral side of my theological work in the area of grieving.

One of the first things I learned at GTU is that there were lots of people living lives of dedication to various ideals: truth, beauty, God, goodness, Love, etcetera, and that some of them took vows publically to become ministers, nuns, priests, monks.  They took vows, but as I learned at GTU, no one can take a vow to live something if they are not already living it in their daily lives.  In other words, when people take a vow of celibacy, they have to be living celibate lives already.  You can’t take a vow and start living celibately the next day.  So, that showed me that the most important thing is the way we live our lives, not whether we go through a ceremony or join an organization.  Those latter things are important, too, but not AS important as the former. 

Also, I became aware that many lay people were living lives of Intent.  They had the intention to be of service,...