Sauntering Existentialist – Page 3

October 27, 2015October 28, 2015

Feeding the Beast – Toxic Masculinity and God the Father

It’s been a few thousand years now that we’ve been worshiping at the altar of the Father God. The creator, who through an act of his will brought everything we know and all that we don’t into being. The One God to rule them all binds our Abrahamic religions like a cock ring, too small for pleasure, primed for pain. This beastly preoccupation with might and right leaves us awash in toxic masculinity, embroiled in never-ending wars both at home and abroad.

They say Neanderthals were the barbarians
So where are they now?
If this is the 21st Century
why does it feel
like the Wild West?
Wake up my brothers
before you drag your sisters down
into a cold, dark grave

Insisting on believing in a creator described only as He presents some pretty formidable challenges to our experience of life and reality. What to do about those pesky women? Eve, as we are told, was an afterthought, yanked from Adam’s sleeping form and apparently born to raise Cain. Puns aside, we all know she made trouble, right from the beginning. Martin Luther knew what to do about her:

“The rule remains with the husband, and the wife is compelled to obey him by God’s command. He rules the home and the state, wages war; defends his possessions, tills the soil, builds, plants, etc. The woman on the other hand Is like a nail driven Into the wall …so the wife should stay at home and look after the affairs of the household, as one who has been deprived of the ability of administering those affairs that are outside and that concern the state. She does not go beyond her most personal duties.”

We had God the Son for a time, preaching a gospel of kindness and peace. We saw where that got him and in these apocryphal times his word seems but a whisper. Maybe it’s the Antichrist’s fault. The Beast, evil personified and projected outward, because it’s not something that lurks within. Hitler gained a lot of power through the mass projections of the people of the Third Reich. While many of us don’t understand the rage that drove the German people to war, we need to recognize how our projections make it easier for us to be controlled. All because we can no sooner admit the beast than we can admit our divine nature. Sex and death drive the news. If we’re not looking at boobs we’re hearing about natural disasters, mayhem and murder. When women are not fully and fairly represented, neither is life. Nurturing professions are undervalued, teachers are unsupported and pornography and child abuse proliferates. True intimacy can only occur when love abides, between people and within each of us.

It’s time to withdraw our misguided projections and honor the divine and the animal aspects of our nature. We create the world we live in every day of our lives. Perhaps God is not so very distant, after all.

Whose Eyes?

Whose eyes are these,
blinking the world into being?
From the ground, to the air
From the ocean and deep below
Whose eyes are those?
That dog, love shining in his eyes,
Grandma chasing her little girl
Street eyes, turned inside
Eyes, searching mine
to see a friend or a foe?
So many eyes, pouring
thoughts and feelings into each other
like pitchers of light
mingling laughter and tears
Streaming through the cosmos
There’s a soul of kindness inside
each and every pair.
Smile the next time you look
into someone’s eyes.
God will see you.

October 4, 2015February 15, 2016

Catitude – the Wisdom of Fiona

With the passing of a beloved pet it’s natural to reflect on all the ones who came before. Each had a special legacy, memories and moments that are touchstones in the lives we shared. Fiona, my cat who just departed after 16 years, gave me the gift of Catitude.

Catitude is attitude and gratitude, from a cat’s perspective. Catitude is knowing what you want and not being afraid to ask, or quietly persist if needed. It’s the freedom to be yourself and to know that when you purr, the world purrs with you. There is only one master of the universe and you are it, or at least you should be.

Sometimes this can lead to disenchantment, as the world fails to meet expectations. Fiona’s wishes were not always granted, but she did not fall into the kind of ennui Henri the Cat so aptly personifies. Research has shown that dogs evoke a kind of maternal bonding in their human companions. We treat them as adoring, often goofy children, the kind that love you no matter what. Cats, not so much.

While humans have designed 340 dog breeds, cats have remained truer to their original domesticated form, even with 70 recognized breeds found around the world. They formed a partnership of convenience with humans, replacing weasels, (who were too ornery) as efficient rodent assassins. Once they were deified in Egypt, our relationship changed forever.

Cat people tend to either love their “fur babies” or they enjoy the elegant and generally quieter companionship of their cat friends. Artists have a particular affinity for a well-designed feline. Fiona’s appealing form and her obvious happiness when I worked in my studio made her my muse, infusing the space with her aesthetic presence. The only other time she seemed as content was when she was sleeping, with an angelic smile that need not beg forgiveness for the day’s petty misdeeds.

Our relationship was complicated, which brings me to the gratitude side of Catitude. Some relationships are challenging. They impel us to find new responses to old aspects of ourselves that never seem to go away, even when we project them onto others. This mirroring tendency is one way cats have shown us how to withdraw our projections and release the stress of the day. Hanging out with your cat, letting your senses respond to the flow of the tall grass and waving tree branches swaying in the wind is healing. It releases the mind from fears of a world in turmoil and gives the soul space to breathe.

A love that’s not easy reminds us that other beings might wish we were somehow different. And that we can’t always be right, or wrong. It helps us see through another’s eyes and recognize their truth instead of disregarding an irritating point of view. Our compassion grows with the challenge of a dynamic relationship.

We learn the mystery of life and death with the loss of our dear ones; a part of our soul has left with them. My cats have taught me much of love, death and the circle of life.

We miss you, Fiona. Thanks for sharing your life and your death. May love carry you into the mystery and bring you home.

September 20, 2015September 20, 2015

Big Sky Love

I’ll miss you, Texas
You and your giant clouds,
close enough to touch
Blue sky wrapping round
the mighty oaks standing tall,
like broccoli on the horizon

And dragon flies, big as goldfish
skimming waves of grass,
rippling like an ocean
in the golden afternoon light

I can’t say goodbye to cypress trees
and limestone springs, reminding me
that dinosaurs roam these lands
when the seas come and go
You have sunk a taproot deep in my heart
and perfumed the forest of my mind

June 28, 2015June 28, 2015

Sauntering the Catskills

My daughter and her husband married in West Kill, New York and invited us to join them at the Spruceton Inn for a weekend in the Catskills. The wedding was beautiful, the innkeepers delightful and the setting, well . . . . .

I met new family members and saw something I had never seen before.

We took a walk on the waterfalls trail just down the road. I loved the little villages sprinkled along Hwy 87 and Hwy 32 (to and from Albany). Take maps – cell phone signals are scarce. Somehow, I didn’t mind.

May 17, 2015April 19, 2016

In This Place – the poetry of Constantine Cavafy

Many thanks to Eric Banks of Conspirare for introducing me to Constantine Cavafy, a Greek poet who lived primarily in Alexandria and Instanbul in the early 20th Century. From poets.org:

Perhaps the most original and influential Greek poet of the 20th century, his uncompromising distaste for the kind of rhetoric common among his contemporaries and his refusal to enter into the marketplace may have prevented him from realizing all but a few rewards for his genius. He continued to live in Alexandria until his death on April 29, 1933, from cancer of the larynx. It is recorded that his last motion before dying was to draw a circle on a sheet of blank paper, and then to place a period in the middle of it.

Cavafy’s poem below is the inspiration for this tribute to our field, which is where I am “In this place”

In this place (1929)
This is my home, the heart of my neighborhood,
The houses and cafes of my quarter,
These are the buildings that stand all around me,
And the streets that I wander every day;
In this place, year after year.

I have recreated these surroundings
In my joy and in my sorrow:
Through a lifetime of experience,
And in abundant detail.
This place has been entirely transformed
Into pure emotion, for me.

While Cavafy often writes from an urban perspective, his love of nature shines through in The morning sea, reflecting his sauntering eye and heart, as these photos reflect mine.

The morning sea (1915)

Let me stand here.
Let me enjoy this view for a while.
The morning sea
And the cloudless sky;
The brilliant blue
Against the pale yellow shore;
these colors are utterly beautiful,
As they shimmer in the sunlight.

Let me stand here.
Let me pretend that I can take this all in.
(I will tell you honestly
That this is what I saw when I arrived.)
And I will not be distracted
By my daydreams,
By my memories,
And those images of my past delights.

The first verse of this next beautiful poem is one of the most sublime of any I have encountered.

Beside an open window (1896)

On this clear autumn night,
Beside an open window,
For hour after hour, I remain,
In the perfect, voluptuous quiet.

The rain drips lightly from the leaves,
A sigh from this delicate universe
Resounds within my own vulnerable nature;
It is a sweet sigh, and rises up like a blessing.

My window looks out upon an unfamiliar world.
A murmuring spring evokes memories
That are fragrant and indescribable to me.

Near my window, a pair of wings flutters by;
The dewy spirits of autumn
Approach and encircle me,
And in the purest of languages, they speak.

I begin to feel a vague and widespread hope;
And in the sacred silence of creation,
My ears encounter faint and distant melodies,
I hear a crystalline, mystical music,
From the chorus of the stars.

April 1, 2015

Palomino and the Dream Machine

My friend Jim Ostdick has just produced an e-book available on Amazon with vignettes from several thousand road miles circumpedaling the US on his Long Haul Trucker touring bike: Palomino and the Dream Machine: A Retired Dude’s Bicycle Tour Around the Lower Forty-Eight United States

He has chronicled some of this journey on his blog, but how much better to find them in one place for download on your kindle? And so reasonable! Here are excerpts, reprinted by permission of the author from two of my favorite yarns:

Santa Barbie Land

2-20-15

The cool morning fog had nearly lifted by the time I exited Hwy 101 and headed south on Hollister Avenue into Goleta CA. Goleta is a suburb of Santa Barbara, a sprawl that includes Isla Vista and UCSB.

I was starved due to the previous night’s grab bag dinner, so I pulled into the first strip mall shopping center on my side of the road and started scouting for breakfast. Dismounting, I pushed the Dream Machine along a crowded row of businesses. Sushi. Subway. Phone store. Beauty salon.

Just as I was approaching the salon, with its neon signs flashing “Nails” and “Waxes” and “Tints,” the door popped open and out came Little Miss Perfect, Santa Barbie herself.

This early 20s girl was just the right height, just the right shape, < 5% body fat, tanned, toned, waxed tantalizingly bare except for her shining straight brown just right shoulder length perfectly trimmed model hair, color-matched, with upper and lower nails perfectly formed to easily slip into expensive slithery garments. She probably had perfect teeth, but I couldn’t tell you that because she didn’t show them to me.

She smelled really good. Her battery operated green eyes, though, were avoidance tools, focused on some plane unattainable to those mere mortals who poop and pee.

As she passed – glided – in front of me, her perfect little nose wrinkled slightly, disapprovingly, as if to announce “eww, it sweats” not to me personally but to me as part of that general population of beasts that are not shaped, waxed, toned, trimmed, polished, and related to hedge fund managers.

She disappeared and I continued, suddenly a lot more interested in the Cajun Kitchen Cafe and breakfast. I, as you know, heart breakfast. Continued

Bunkie Rhymes with Funky

4-4-14

Bunkie LA is dead in the center of Louisiana swamp country. It is the home of Zutty Singleton and that, for some people at least, says it all. Bunkie, my friends, put the “o” in “oh nooooo.” It put the “ew” in “mildew.” It put the “ick” in “icky.” And long, long ago, Bunkie LA put the “eak” in “freak.”

This is where the woodsy woods woodsy meets the swampy swamp swampy. The result, of course, is the creepy creep creepsy. The landscape has some charm in the daytime if the Sun is out and the humidity is reasonably low, but generally that’s not the case. Usually, the sky is overcast and the air stunningly muggy or else lightning bolts are flying through the air alongside baseball-sized hail stones.

At night, you can forget it. This place is just plain haunted by dusk. You’ve heard of voodoo and all that. Hmphh, that’s for amateurs. Your average Louisiana grandma can turn a frog into a panther and back just by picking her nose and looking cross eyed. Everybody here is somebody else at least half the time. They live in two towns simultaneously and delve into nefarious mischief with rats and boars. Just this morning there was a picture in The Acadian of a boar with a boar body and a rat’s head. Maybe it was a rat with a rat’s head and a boar body, who knows. The editor of the paper, who went to newspaper school in AMERICA, implored citizens to cut this stuff out. It’s making him look bad to his college buddies.

Chicot State Park is just down the road. I rode through the park this morning during a brief break between the overnight tornado and the afternoon hurricane. A narrow asphalt road bisects the Park’s woods for about five miles. Beautiful pines and cypresses and palmettos grow in giant puddles of dark, shiny water with sunbeams shooting through gaps in the canopy. As nice as it appeared, I just knew it was a ruse. The Park was like the pretty girl in the horror movie whose hair goes all stringy right before her face melts and her teeth turn green. I was sure that if I parked the Dream Machine and set one foot in the woods I would be instantly covered in water moccasins and yanked into the murky depths by red-eyed rat boars.

Bunkie LA holds the Louisiana Corn Festival every June. Do not go. The corn is really opossum snout that just looks like corn until you get up close to it. And you know what happens after that. Stay home and find something constructive to do.

Peace, Love, and the Sheer Terror of Bicycling Through the Bayou,

Palomino

December 24, 2014December 24, 2014

Whose Eyes?

Whose eyes are these,
blinking the world into being?

From the ground, to the air
From the ocean and deep below
Whose eyes are those?

That dog, love shining in her eyes,
Grandpa chasing his little boy
Street eyes, turned inside
Eyes, searching mine
to see a friend or foe?

So many eyes, pouring
thoughts and feelings into each other
like pitchers of light
mingling laughter and tears
Streaming through the cosmos

There’s a soul of kindness inside
each and every pair.
Smile the next time

you look into someone’s eyes. God will see you.

December 9, 2014December 11, 2014

Speaking truth to fear – A Neolithic perspective

The hashtags keep multiplying: #Ferguson, #EricGarner, #CrimingWhileWhite, #ICantBreathe. The list has no real beginning and there’s no end in sight to media presentations of social pathology – rape, murder, war or our immanent destruction of the earth. It’s depressing and real, although imbalanced. For every step forward, must we take 4 steps back? How can we gain and maintain ground in our struggle to become more humane people?

Alicia Keyes’ new song is a powerful reminder of many who have given their lives for the advancement of love. Paul Alexander Wolf, half a world away, reminds us that civil rights has always meant rights for all people. Our political legacy holds both the best and the cruelest of our intentions. My friend Licia Berry writes about being broken open, something we experience both personally and culturally.

The proliferation of inflammatory “news programs” spewing racially charged misinformation has never been so successful, with recent November ratings for Fox News far surpassing its rivals. Hate speech is fear mongering. White America is losing all the ground it gained during the industrial revolution and a series of highly profitable wars, a real bummer for the lower 99%. Judgement Day may become very unappealing for Christians who aren’t taken up in the Rapture. Post apocalyptic fantasy is big money at the box office, yet another sign of the decline of Western civilization.

How do we avoid creating a world held captive by the exquisite corpse of our unexpressed guilt and shame? Perhaps we can start by looking at where we came from. If we can face that truth, it might give us the platform we need to move beyond our fear of immigrants, people of color and the many other excuses we cling to for denying our shared humanity.

Pictured here is a sample map of the genomic composition of someone’s ancestry. It’s similar to the maps my family and I have from the DNA tests we ordered from 23andMe. My own chart is largely Northern European, but my primary MtDNA (mother’s) genome is from a very early Neolithic migration from India/Anatolia into Southeastern Europe. These were farmers, bringing agriculture and livestock to the hunter-gatherers who had survived centuries of glaciation in caves. Interbreeding with small populations of Neanderthals, these cave dwellers also included other early Homo Sapiens populations like the now extinct Heidelbergensis and the Denisovans.

Modern homo sapiens sapiens can be traced back to an original pair of humans we fondly call Adam and Eve, in Africa, roughly 150,000 – 100,000 years ago. The map to the right shows broad patterns of migration out of Africa, everyone’s original homeland. Human beings are travelers, we are immigrants who have explored our world for hundreds of thousands of years. Migration is the human condition, it was then and it is now. Trying to stop the flow of humanity as we continue to seek shelter: #WeCantBreathe. It might be a good idea to come to some kind of peace before we seriously consider colonizing Mars, which is fast becoming more science than fiction. As one who grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series, I appreciated the diversity of life forms in those stories and hope we will meet teachers who will help us outgrow our barbaric reliance on war and violence. A girl can dream.

Time will tell whether we can love the Earth enough not to destroy her. Aside from a common history of love and war we must acknowledge that once homo sapiens were all dark skinned. It’s the Neanderthal influence that gave Europeans their light hair and eyes. We also received genes that boosted our immune systems and helped us survive the cold. Over time, as more people settled in cooler environments, our skin and hair paled as an adaptation to lower UV levels. But our common heritage is both African and dark brown.

Before I took this trip back in time and opened the horizon of my imagination to pre-history, I felt burdened by the violence, the racism and the lack of charity we show one another. Passing laws that prohibit the feeding of the poor, that malign migrants or other races while proclaiming Christian righteousness? We are so afraid that the centuries of colonial domination will turn against us, so afraid to look an American Indian person in the eye and realize we have committed genocide, decimating the native population by 97% in our heedless conquest of the New World. Afraid to stand before a black person and acknowledge the undeniable and ongoing history of violence and racism American European immigrants have perpetuated. The more we hate ourselves, the easier it is to hate each other. There is another choice. We can choose love, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King states so passionately below. How to make amends? Time to find out.

October 30, 2014November 14, 2014

Indigenous women’s wisdom – healing waters

There is an international indigenous council of 13 Grandmothers who travel the world to bring healing prayers to the earth and her inhabitants. I met Hopi Grandmother Constance Mirabal in 1998, which I’ve written about in my post Magically Real and took part in a wisdom circle that Grandmother Florademayo led at the gathering. There were a number of indigenous women leading wisdom circles, which is a testament to the many programs at Ghost Ranch that honor our sacred connection to the earth. The opening prayer was led by Florademayo, who prayed and wept as she entered into spirit. Tears flowed often from our native presenters, sometimes as they felt personal grief and always on behalf of the divine mother. I’ve been in sweat lodges, sun dances, pow wows and meetings with Native American medicine people. I have witnessed the ways in which they enter other dimensions when the visions flow. Some of the dream symbols Florademayo shared with us were the healing power of triangles (shout out to Bucky Fuller) and her vision of the coming renewal of humanity, symbolized by the birth of the golden baby. The baby is a cross-cultural motif seen by people the world over. Florademayo’s passion for collecting seeds is another part of the renewal and the protection of heritage plants. The blue corn pictured here is a symbol of the Hopi people. There is a compassion, directness and humor about many of the indigenous people I’ve met. There is also a reservoir of sorrow, released in tears that often flow in healing ceremonies. For those of European descent, white guilt is no stranger at these gatherings. We had moments when it was the elephant in the room and others when it was on full display. It’s hard to avoid – the collective unconscious is burdened with pain and unspoken apologies for the sins of our fathers, which continue to this day. When she was asked by Hyun Kyung how she dealt with the anguish of her peoples’ genocide, Florademayo said, “You accept the past, move forward and quit looking back.” Perhaps our only hope for our planet and our humanity is to come together in healing for our past, our present and thus, our future. The collective shadow is in dire need of integration. It can no longer be projected onto the other, for we are all other and we are all one. Our world needs us to become the humane beings we really are. I shared my poem, these tears of joy with Grandmother Florademayo, affirming our connection to the beauty of the living light. May we continue to heal in love.

Moved to Tears

I sat in the morning sun watching the garden grow
Light glistening on spider webs
spun in moon’s rays just hours ago
Hummingbird gulped nectar
fueling its dizzy, spiraling flight

The light found me, seeping into my essence,
opening the eye that sees behind the veil
I saw the breath of the earth, rising up in radiating
needles of light, knitting the fabric of life
growing around and through me

So infused was I, witnessing this moment of creation
that tears fell softly down my cheeks
Moving beyond sorrow or joy
Naked in the presence of my Soul

The breath and the light, commingled
In loving recognition that moments
such as these are rare glimpses beneath
the endless parade of dos and don’ts
that occupy our daily lives

In the garden, sipping the wine of early morning’s light
I am moved to see what loving hand molds
This day into being

October 27, 2014October 13, 2015

Hyun Kyung Chung – Soul on Fire

Professor Chung Hyung Kyung teaches at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, when she is not researching or talking with people around the world who are inspired by her story and her wisdom. Kidnapped and tortured in Korea as a university student, Hyun Kyung survived, emigrated to the United States and completed her graduate work in theology. She describes herself as a good Presbyterian girl growing up in Korea and has lived in a monastery in Tibet practicing Buddhist meditation, which she has incorporated into her faith and her feminism.

The Ted talk pictured above will give you a sense of her vibrant presence and how she views her Christian and Buddhist practice. An ongoing theme in her talk was breaking open – that hearts will be broken, but from that brokenness comes new life and new ways for the light to enter. She started her presentation with an invitation to forgive those who have wronged us and spoke about a series of men who were sent to torture her. Making a connection with her oppressors allowed her to postpone the inevitable torment, until she met a man whom she described as having suffered “soul loss.” Her talk was in honor of the man whose dead eyes betrayed no empathy for the young woman who had to choose between saving her lover or protecting her friends after withstanding the most violent abuse.

Dr. Irene Martinez with Rev. Shannon White and Evelyn Porter — Dr. Irene Martinez (center) with Rev Shannon White

I spoke with many women who had been abused or even tortured. Some, as a result of government persecution and others, personally. They were all challenged to forgive what none could forget and they moved forward with courage and humor, some days better than others. Their hearts were broken and mended by an ongoing effort to live and love with respect for all. Dr. Irene Martinez was one of the wisdom circle presenters who spoke of her experience as a political prisoner in Argentina. In all these stories of abuse, the support of women for one another shined through, underscoring the intrinsically relational nature of who we are. We are partners in the dance of life, with much light to share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRWm2YNPFA4

Dr. Chung will lead a group of women across the DMZ into North Korea next summer. Women from the North and South have been meeting periodically to exchange recipes, talk about daily life and come to agreement that we all want a peaceful life. Our hearts are with them as they reach out in sisterhood across the barriers inflicted by war and famine in support of peace and healing.