not native fruit

daoist wisdom of the ordinary

Here is something I really liked from "Daoist texts with commentary by Thomas Cleary" (with my own comments in [ ] brackets). 

“Ordinary expressions and common sayings accord with the path of sages; you should turn to them for careful research.  If you use everyday activities to search in reverse, everything in the world turns to jewels.” [This reminds me of how I felt about the Book of Proverbs when I was 21-22.]

“The Tao is not far from people;  what people consider the Tao is far from people.  [This was true in Catholicism too.  People thought the mystics were so extraordinary that there was no way on earth we could have any of their experiences.  We grew up with that bias and discouragement.]  The Tao is essence and life is the eternal Tao, the eternal Tao is the Tao of daily life; it’s just that while people use it daily they do not know it.

“If you carefully investigate the principles, you do not need to read a thousand classics and ten thousand texts; there are great revelations of the celestial mechanism right in ordinary expressions and common sayings.  For example, good people are called really genuine, truthful, conscientious, reasonable, respectable, aware of proper proportion, aware of when to go forward and when to withdraw, circumspect, perceptive, having their feet on the ground; bad people are said to be inhuman, lacking conscience, and unreasonable – they hurt others to benefit themselves, are self-deceived, violate nature and reason, take suffering for pleasure, take the false for the real, pick up one thing and forget another, without knowing death and life, without knowing good and bad, only knowing one and not two, only aware of the existence of themselves and not that of others.”  (p. 156, The Taoist Classics, Volume Two, from ‘Understanding Reality.’)

grandmother's gift / nostalgia

my grandmother katie, gnarled with arthritis, sat in her rocking chair - orange-painted in the moorish style - on our front porch nearly every evening in the summertime and on, into the early fall.  She gently rocked herself just a little bit, looking pensive, sometimes bitter, and always very far away.  Loud sounds, sudden movements, racket from the neighborhood children could disturb her reverie.  

after i'd grown up, i sometimes wondered if she had been mentally ill or just plain mean, but after i did some work with an emdr therapist, i realized that she was simply more identified with an earlier time and place in her life, and she wished to 'be there' in reverie so much that she was very much put out when she was brought back to the present by one of us.

this realization led to the awareness that both she and my mother were very much identified with the mountains, with the people there, and with all their secrets.  at any rate, ever so much of my mother and grandmother's reality was kept a secret from me, but being a part of them, i could feel a lot of it, just couldn't put it into words.  out of frustration at my constant feeling of exclusion, i tried to reject them.  at different times in my life, i've realized that i can't reject them, because they are just too much a part of me.  they belong to me, and i belong to them, and i might as well accept that fact.

and now, wonder of wonders, i find myself feeding on nostalgia in my later years, just like grandma.

to help me understand my own experience, i'm reading a book about nostalgia called "Yesterday's Self" by Andrea Deciu Ritivoi (Philosophy, Sociology, Literary Studies).  the author considers how nostalgia may play a role in helping us to integrate our ongoing identity especially when there has been a rupture of some sort in our process like becoming a refugee, a war-bride, an exile, or experiencing a trauma in relation to immigration or some other major change of place. 

at one time nostalgia was indeed considered to be a medical (psychiatric) condition, at another time it indicated that you were a person of superior sensibility, an artist perhaps.  the book goes on to discuss all sorts of interesting aspects forming the notion of identity.  can you believe there are people spending their lives thinking about 'identity' and getting paid to do so? 

i've only read the first couple of chapters, but in them the author promises to share with us from the stories of two women who immigrated to the united states from poland after the second world war, one of whom felt that her identity was indissolubly linked with poland and with the person she had been there, while the other woman finds links in her new american life with the self she once was in poland, thus carrying her polish identity forward into its new form in america.  sounds like this comparison will be interesting.  the author loves literature and wishes also to look at two literary figures, odysseus and robinson crusoe, to further explore the notions of identity and nostalgia. having been, at one time in my life, a philosophy major at uc berkeley when the mind-brain identity theory was hot, i find this book riveting.  i will keep you posted.

paula gunn allen

I”ve just discovered – or re-discovered – the feminist author, Paula Gunn Allen, who is widely credited with inventing the field of Native American Literary Studies, but who viewed herself as a multi-diverse person, with recent ancestry of  Laguna Pueblo, Lakota Sioux, Scots and Lebanese.  Sounds like my family.  And yes, I do relate to a great deal of what she has to say.

I think it’s interesting that she approaches the Native American literary tradition (oral in its origins) from a mixed-ethnic perspective.  In so many ways, I think this makes it easier to be a bridge-builder, a peace-maker, and we still need people who can do that, even in this age of Diversity with a capital D.  Thank goodness for the blends (who acknowledge they are blends - in realtiy, we are all blends, of course).

I started with her book on Pochahontas, which may be her most recent one.  She starts off by saying that we can’t just look at the facts if we want to know Pochahontas, because for one thing, there simply aren’t that many.  Rather, “a biography of Pocahontas must tell her life in terms of the myths, the spirits, the supernaturals, and the worldview that informed her actions and character.”  (p.2)  We don’t look at her as somehow standing above others, whether in terms of achievement or in terms of victimhood, because that would separate her from the “entire life system: that community of living things, geography, climate, spirit people, and supernaturals – (because) what is (to be) emphasized is the interactive nature of that person’s life.”  (p.2) 

For me, all of this makes perfect sense, because that is most certainly how I understand my own life.  Of course, as I get older, I want to understand my life even more than before, and I do understand it more than ever.  I’m interested in Pocahontas because she is a First Contact Native American, and member of a tribe that was closely related to my own native ancestors through my mother’s paternal grandmother, and possibly maternal grandmother as well.  I’m interested in that period of contact, and especially in that part of the east-coast’s First Contact story, which differed so much from either New England’s or the territories south of Virginia.

Here is something Paula Gunn Allen wrote that I particularly like: “A life comprises all the currents that flow through it and that it flows through.  Nor is it ever finished.  A person, like life itself, has neither beginning nor end.  It just is, here and there, self and other, present and absent.  In that way, Pocahontas’s life continues on, as the books, poetry, songs, dramas, and films centering on her prove.”  (p.2)

I really feel this way about my great-grandmother who seems to have been quite a powerful person – in my eyes, her life is continuing on, and she has some kind of unusual power to let others know about herself and who she is (was).  I seem to be the chief vessel for that transmission, but some people get a direct transmission from her photo.  She was a ‘Moor Indian’ from Delaware, who lived most of her adult life in the Pennsylvania mountains and the end of her life in Philadelphia.  I’m trying to get something published about her, but if that doesn’t work, I will have a whole page available about her on-line soon.

Anyway, I’m sorry to have to report that Paula Gunn Allen, a voice for many, has passed on from this plane of existence – last year, in May of 2008 – but she certainly is a living being in my consciousness.  I hope to continue to pass on to you what are, for me, thought-provoking passages from her work, as I discover them.

berkeley wilderness

Does anyone out there remember the book 'In Wilderness Is The Preservation Of The World' ?  Since exploring my ancestry I've joined a number of Native American online groups and have discovered that we do indeed all share a great love of nature, just as it is, with minimal amendments. 

I'm just writing this today, because I am so aware of how wonderful it is to live in a city where nature is appreciated and loved without having to be manicured, sprayed and disinfected.  Interestingly enough, Berkeley was the home place of the Sierra Club and its founder.  I don't reflect on this much, but I love how things are allowed to grow kind of free around here, and how, even though we are in the middle of a huge metropolitan area, we hear birds singing and calling all day, have night-time visitations by deer, raccoon, possums.  And even in the daytime sometimes will have a deer browsing in the yard. 

I think one of the things I found most deadening about some of the more manicured kinds of suburbs I visited as a young woman, was the lack of wildlife and insect life.  The overall 'park'-like feel, which is nice enough in itself, but I still want to feel more wilderness in my environment.  We are so fortunate here in the East Bay to have Tilden Park, Wildcat Park and others.  They may be called 'parks' but a lot of the land is close to being in a wild state.

Right now there's a big campaign to spray Berkeley for the Apple Moth.  If I remember right, we successfully resisted the Medfly spraying campaign years ago, and yes our apples had big larvae in them every year, but so what, we just cut that part out.  Is it such a huge inconvenience that we can't 'just bite in' to an apple?  I realize for commercial purposes it doesn't do to have big ugly insect excresences inside the fruit, but Berkeley is hardly the agrarian capitol of the world.  I agree that Berkeley doesn't need to be sprayed for the Apple Moth!

We need more wilderness desperately.  We can cultivate little patches of wilderness wherever we are, as long as we agree to live alongside the birds and the bees, let them have their own space, their own access to clean air and water, the right to be.  Nature is the real beauty of life.  Let's appreciate it while we can.

rilke/niels lyhne/danishness?

In "Letters to the Poet As A Young Man" Rilke recommends that his student read the nineteenth-century Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen in order to meet the master of contemplative literature.  So, of course, I had to check Jacobsen out.  Our local library had in its possession his novel Niels Lyhne (pronounced Nils Lu-na), so I checked it out.  And as promised, it is one of the most precious, ruminative pieces of self-absorbed fiction anyone, even Marcel Proust, could ever desire.  It is absolutely beautiful, as well.  So attentive, so in tune with the silence of the contemplative life.  I've only just begun it, thumbed through and read a few paragraphs here and there, so I can't say much more about it just now.

I'm not sure if this is really something ethnically Danish, or if it's more symptomatic of the nineteenth century, generally.  The nature-writing is superb.  Not grandiose, as much American nature writing is, but homey.  Not ecstatic waterfalls, but cottage gardens. 

Sometimes I wonder if my contemporaries among the Danes 'rebelled' against this melodic sweetness and love of nature.  It still shows up in some of their films, like "Italian for Beginners," "Mifune," and others - urbane Danes rediscovering their rustic roots.  Maybe that phase of rebellion against the past is over, over there, because after all, over here there is a kind of revival of Bertram-style nature writing, for example, Thirteen Moons.  The pendulum appears to have swung yet again.  Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier is lyrical, descriptive, attentive, contemplative - all my favorite things, by the way. 

Sometimes I feel like my husband and I have not made such a great adjustment to 'modern times.'  We seem to be holdovers from the nineteenth century, and now we're living in the twenty-first.  Not sure if this 'backwardness' is related to being part native american and delaware moor, two cultures self-identified with the past, yet embedded in the present-day just like everyone else.  Sometimes we think it's the spot we live in, here in Berkeley, on the grounds of former native american settlements.

I've heard it said that many Danes are surprised and perhaps a bit discomfited that American Danes seem to be stuck in an image of 'danishness' that belongs to the nineteenth century.  That's when they left Denmark to emigrate to America, and Denmark has become 'frozen' for them as it was at that moment in the past.  Every year there are various festivals of Danishness that celebrate the 'Denmark that was.'  This disparity in self-image creates a rift with contemporary Danish Danes.  These are some of the strange facts of ethnicity.

For an example of sentimental, nature-loving, nineteenth-century Danish Lieder, try picking out the tune of "Vandring i Skoven" (music notated in a previous post, Wandering in the Forest.)

the prayer hut

“As it was, the hut felt just right: flimsy, isolated, almost furtive, a place to pray truly, a theft of time from a greedy world.  A place where prayer still felt like what it really was, something dangerous.  “Is not my Word like a fire?  saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”  He had drifted; you always drifted.  Mike found his breath and rode it into the flame again, and memory sweltered and cracked in that soft fire, into shards of regret and bewilderment, benediction and dread: the mystery, the burning knot, the impossibility of self and world.  The slipshod walls of scrap and junk sighed and settled like a hearth; the fear within him burned and burned, and he sat at the heart of the fire it fed and breathed cool air. "

from The Monk Upstairs, by Tim Farrington, HarperSanFrancisco, 2007

quietness, by borges

The following is a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, which I have copied from the frontispiece of "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai. 

Boast of Quietness

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.

                               ~ Jorge Luis Borges

collective depression

my friend paula says she thinks the country is feeling a collective depression due to waking up to the realities of the Iraq war, our 'leadership,' etc.  The various 9/11 retrospectives certainly add to our collective melancholy. Even though the new school year is beginning, and there is a lot of superficial movement going on, there is also an underlying sense of stagnation that is apparent to me in many of the lives around me.

When I feel like this, my mind often starts going back to the past, thinking 'oh, things were better back then.' and soon after, 'how can i get back there?'  Well, the answer is, I can't go back to the past.  What I can do is appreciate my past; be thankful for the many gifts and also for the lessons learned. 

I can reflect on how beautiful my parents were - not experts in 'parenting' necessarily, but beautiful people, peaceful, harmonious within themselves, and I had the opportunity to absorb their qualities for almost forty years.  I can recall my years in the Christian faith, when the sunshine of God's love shone in my heart's imagination almost everyday, and I can remember some of the wonderful people I met during those years.  But I can't go back to those days of simple faith and fellowship.  I can recall the period when Amma was new in my life, and I was overwhelmed by realizations, insights, graces, and the sheer fun of exploring a whole new continent and culture and possibilities.

Now I'm in a different time-zone, and I have to discover what's going to get me out of bed every morning now. 

vintage fragment

i used to write what i called 'fragments.'  i came across this one recently while cleaning through old shelves of notebooks.  i think i wrote it about twenty-five years ago.

Susann clambered up the pile of old cans and crates to the top of the old stone wall that separated the alley from the railroad tracks.  She swung her legs over the edge and dangled her heels against the jutting gray stones, sparkling silver with mica and sandwiched together between layers of ivory concrete.  She looked over the rows upon rows of black-creosote-painted tracks, their smell pungent in her nostrils as she chewed an apple meditatively.  Of course, the apple was too mealy, but the sun was shining and her bare legs were comfortably cold in the late autumn air.  Her sweater, too small for her, worn and shrunk by many washings, was short in the sleeves and too billowy in front where she had stretched it out of shape by pulling on it and rolling her arms in it.  Now it was more or less wrapped around her long flat-chested bodice and tucked under to hold.

Susann liked it down here by the railroad tracks.  It was peaceful and deserted and different.  Trains moved through the maze of tracks very slowly, and not very frequently anymore.  Bits of broken glass shone like jewels among the stubble here, and the old tin cans rusted by the side of the tracks, the twisted chunks of wire and metal strewn about, reminded her of the people she saw around the city, sitting in doorways, slumped over on the subway, everyday.  People who had been refused, and were now refuse.  Poor people.  And not just the really poor, poor people, but also a lot of the nicer people too.  Little Mr. Benton, who sat still and quiet for hours at his newspaper stand, and if you spoke to him, would grin into your eyes until his whole yellow face was a mass of long wrinkles, and who would talk loudly and with great gusto except none of the kids could understand him.  He spoke something called ‘geechie,’ which, Susann thought, might possibly mean he was crazy.

And then there was quiet Mrs. Jones, who always seemed to be pulling a loaded shopping cart, usually with clothes in it, a big turtle-shaped old black woman, whose knees and feet seemed painfully distended, yet who always smiled, and when she spoke in her soft deep rich voice, and called you ‘honey-chile’ or ‘angel-lamb’, it made you feel so good inside.  All these old, funny-shaped, funny-talking, used-clothing-wearing people.

A cold invigorating breeze occasionally blew down as if funneled into Susann, reminding her of the tartness of a winesap apple, the kind of apple she wished she were eating right now instead of this old mealy one, and making her dream of the North, a land of snow and ice, of short days and green skies at sunset.

anthony bloom on prayer and silence

I've been doing something of a retrospective on early spiritual influences, and I came across this book by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, called 'Living Prayer,' which both my mother and I, and our small group of contemplatives, read back in the early 1970's.  The language is rather heavy, which I find much of biblical language to be, with the exception of some of the more beautiful passages such as psalm 23 and the beatitudes, so I am changing some of the words in the excerpt below, marked by [].

"[Prayer] to me means a relationship.  I used not to be a believer, then one day I discovered God and immediately he appeared to me to tbe the supreme value and the total meaning of life, [yet] at the same time a person.  I think that [prayer] can mean nothing at all to someone for whom there is no object of [prayer].  Therefore, as a foreword to this book on prayer, what I would like to convey is my certitude in the personal reality of a God with whom a relationship can be established.  Then I would ask my reader to treat God as a neighbor, as someone, and value this knowledge in the same terms in which he values a relationship with a brother or a friend."

This is exactly what my mother impressed on me when I was six years old.  When I told her that I didn't know what to do while sitting through mass in church, she said that I was to silently talk to God as if he were my friend.  Because of the Catholic teaching (catechism) that I had already imbibed, I soon realized with chagrin that there was nothing I could tell God that he didn't already know.  I used to tell God jokes, even though I knew he must already know the punchline, but just to be friendly.  It turned into a habit of prayer.  And even now, after so many decades, and many changes and evolutions in my ideas about God, after a theological education and exposure to Buddhist and to Daoist thought and practice, I still find value in this simple, basic lesson on prayer.

I also find that the way Bloom uses the word 'someone' in relation to God is very different from the evangelical approach that I have encountered that insists on a 'personal relationship' with God.  Bloom seems to imply that to some degree this 'person' is a fiction, but a fiction that has a reality behind it that is ultimately mysterious to us, and which we struggle to characterize.  Paradoxically, we find this reality to be both personal and impersonal, and in prayer we tap the seemingly 'personal' side of God.

What I like most about Bloom's approach to prayer is the value he places on silence.  He writes, "One of the reasons why communal worship or private prayer seem to be so dead or so conventional is that the act of [prayer], which takes place in the heart communing with God, is too often missing.  We all know in human relationships that love and friendship are deep when we can be silent with someone.  As long as we need to talk in order to keep in touch, we can saefely assume that the relationship is still superificial; and so, if we want to worship God, we must first of all learn to feel happy, being silent together with [her].  This is an easier thing to do than one might think at first.

"Once the Cure d'Ars, a French saint of the eighteenth century, asked an old peasant what he was doing sitting for hours in the church, seemingly not even praying; the peasant replied: 'I look at him, he looks at me and we are happy together.'  That man had learned to speak without breaking the silence of intimacy by words."

I feel I was very fortunate to have had mentors in prayer like Anthony Bloom, my mother, and for the impersonal side of God, my lovingly silent, seafaring father.  Gifts.