Godwise with Myopia

Cities’ even horizons continue to elope with their surroundings
and we just tug on our yellowing stockings,
lest we merge into a god,
where we may exquisitely influence every interaction,
or deny others their right of entropy,
or should we prepare for the chance to produce a fascist
as every parent must,
or blur our organisms until we are girdled by time.

Sometimes my body thinks it’s an old man,
the luxury of looping itself around intellectual work,
a natural instinct,
lookaftering wrinkles instead of ripening muscles
where motion carries the stink of a walking stick.
Our bodies have organized asymetrical souls
and we look godwise with myopia.
It’s my [heart] that thumps this chest, and this boxing….
this boxing
craters slowly as thrills wind away in the whorl of a stray tumpet.

-M.J. Sletten

Something astonishing I read today

Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,
so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.
Those who have no courage or honor
consider themselves free,
I am flying on the wings of thought,
and so, even in this cage,
I know a greater freedom.

-Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost, Guantanamo detainee from 1 May 2002 to 20 April 2005.  Currently disappeared in Pakistan and under fear of torture.  His Amnesty International link is here: http://bit.ly/1ogb3J

Source: p. 252 of “My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me,” by Mahvish Rukhsana Khan.  An excerpt from pp. 256-257:

Writing was difficult because detainees weren’t allowed paper or pens.  Abdur Rahim improvised, using his fingernails to etch prose into Styrofoam cups.  The better ones, he memorized.  Later, he was able to use stationery provided by the Red Cross and even mail some of his poetry home.  In three years at Guantanamo, Abdur Rahim wrote more than 25,000 verses in Pashto.

Jotunheimen’s “God Door”

Eager to begin the climb up Besseggen Ridge and my trek of Jotunheimen, I glanced at the nicely engraved stone set next to the trail—”God Tur!”  Using the two languages I know (Not Norwegian), I subconsciously translated this as “God” [English, self explanatory] and “Door” [in German Tur].    A bit strange but I was too distracted by the many ‘Hei Hei’s’ I had to give the Sunday-trippers and my overly-laden pack to give it much thought.  But the exclamation point!  Why put one at the end of such a solemn phrase?  This nagging issue was soon resolved as an older man passing smiled and enthusiastically exclaimed “Good Tour!”

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—All expansion on top of Glittertind.  The smooth snow caps broken by stretch-mark ice– turquoise lakes and dark grey rock surround. –

–Sun, wind, snow, and joy.  My mind dull and open with quiet ecstatic peace only found in the mountains.–

It was on the fourth day, hour eight, heading up a slippery green rock pass in a blowing snow, that Jotunheimen’s ‘God Door’ opened.  Sunlight burst a brief clearing, revealing the lakes and pointed peaks spread around, the wind-wave fans spread rhythmically on the water, and my mind was only capable of   “!”

“When real and non-real both are absent from before the mind, nothing else remains for the mind to do but rest in perfect peace, from concepts free. “

–Shantideva.

“It’s also called ‘the primordial continuity of the mind,’  ‘natural luminosity,’  ‘the ultimate  nature of the mind,’  ‘the natural state of consciousness,’  ‘essential simplicity,’  ‘primordial purity,’  and ’spontaneous presence.’ “

– Matthieu Ricard, “The Quantum and the Lotus”

Many names, but the experience is one.  It is the state I seek while wandering.  I was glad I found it briefly in Jotunheimen.

–The final day had it all:  packed up wet in a cold blowing rain and watched the cloud-mist roll until it broke, the sun lighting up the Hurrungane Range as if to send me off well.  Ingerdbu sun lunch–down to picturesque Vetti (how can I live there?), the waterfall above reaching and plummeting until perception is spent and the rocks begin to move upwards.  On out the mystic cart path road, deep in the cliffed valley, trees glowing above, turquoise glacier water running nearby.

My mountain eyes lasted through Bergen and the rest of the trip to Norway.

“Where does reality lie?  Is it not more accurate to say that we’re dealing with a set of interactions that create various transient phenomena, and behind this flow of endless transformations, we have no reason to postulate the existence of an intrinsic reality?”

–Matthieu Ricard

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.  

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die;  and you suffer and get old.  

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 

-William Stafford

Body Intelligence

Rumi gets funky with ontology.  Funny to see this popping up on pg. 152 of Selected Poems:

Muhammed said, “Don’t theorize

about essence!” All speculations

are just more layers of covering.

Human beings love coverings!

They think the designs on the curtains

are what’s being concealed.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Don’t claim them.  Feel the artistry

moving through, and be silent.

The Sheikh Who Played With Children

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From the Coleman Barks translation published as “Selected Poems” by Penguin Classics in 2004, p. 44.  Of all the poems in this collection, I found The Sheikh Who Played With Children to be Rumi’s most accessible, humorous, and instructive for everyday life.  Budding politicians, take note:

A certain young man was asking around,

“I need to find a wise person.  I have a problem.”

A bystander said, “There’s no one with intelligence

in our town except that man over there

playing with the children,

the one riding the stick-horse.

He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity

like the night sky, but he conceals it

in the madness of child’s play.”

The young seeker approached the children, “Dear father,

you who have become as a child, tell me a secret.”

“Go away.  This is not a day

for secrets.”

“But please!  Ride your horse this way, just for a minute.”

The sheikh play-galloped over.

“Speak quickly.  I can’t hold this one still for long.

Whoops.  Don’t let him kick you.

This is a wild one!”

The young man felt he couldn’t ask his serious question

in the crazy atmosphere, so he joked,

“I need to get married.

Is there someone suitable on this street?”

“There are three kinds of women in the world.

Two are griefs, and one is a treasure to the soul.

The first, when you marry her, is all yours.

The second is half-yours, and the third

is not yours at all.

Now get out of here,

before this horse kicks you in the head!  Easy now!”

The sheikh rode off among the children.

The young man shouted, “Tell me more about the kinds of women!”

The sheikh, on his cane horsie, came closer,

“The virgin of your first love is all yours.  She will make you feel happy and free.  A childless widow

is the second.  She will be half-yours.  The third,

who is nothing to you, is a married woman with a child.

By her first husband she had a child, and all her love

goes into that child.  She will have no connection with you.

Now watch out.

Back away.

I’m going to turn this rascal around!”

He gave a loud whoop and rode back,

calling the children around him.

“One more question, Master!”

The sheikh circled,

“What is it?  Quickly!  That rider over there needs me.

I think I’m in love.”

“What is this playing that you do?

Why do you hide your intelligence so?”

“The people here

want to put me in charge.  They want me to be

judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts.

The knowing I have doesn’t want that.  It wants to enjoy itself.

I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time

I’m eating the sweetness.”

Knowledge that is acquired

is not like this.  Those who have it worry if

audiences like it or not.

It’s a bait for popularity.

Disputational knowing wants customers.

It has no soul.

Robust and energetic

before a responsive crowd, it slumps when no one is there.

The only real customer is God.

Chew quietly

your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay

playfully childish.

Your face

will turn rosy with illumination

like the rosebud flowers.

Nothingness: The Joke

“I wonder, why is it that we can’t stop laughing at the notion that none of us really exists, and that the walloping concreteness of all the hard facts to be faced is an energetic performance of nothingness?

The joke derives from the fact that, although Westerners speak of “conquering space,” they have a radical prejudice and a positive blind spot with respect to the importance of nothingness.  They balk at it as people used to balk at thinking of the world as round.  To them, nothingness is the awful-awful, the end, the demise which, we most fervently hope, is not to be the ultimate destiny of man and the universe.  Yet this is due to a freaky lapse in our logic which affects our theology, our science, our philosophy, and our most vivid emotions.  No one seems to have realized that you can’t have something without nothing. How can you know “is” without understanding “isn’t”?  Try to imagine a solid without any space through and around it.  Try to imagine space without any solid, including yourself, within it.  For if something implies nothing, then nothing–in turn– implies something.  To be or not to be is not the question, for reality, like electricity, is a pulsation of positive and negative energy.  The big bang with which this universe is supposed to have started was, as they say in Zen, “the void gnashing its teeth.”  Put in more scientific jargon:  Every approach to the limit of absolute inertia condenses by inversion into a departure from the limit of absolute energy.  Flip—total void equals big bang.

Stated in bare words this looks too simple.  Yet I regard it as my most important philosophical discovery, and if we could understand it thoroughly, we would no longer have the horrors about death, darkness, night, silence, and the unknown.  But the remaining question is how to get one’s feelings, those easy victims of habit, to recognize that it takes nothing to start something.”

-Alan Watts

The Solution of the Problem of Life

“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.  Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.  The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.  (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted.”

-Wittgenstein

The Hills are Shadows–Wrangell-St.Elias N.P.

“….the hills are shadows,

And they flow from form to form,

And nothing stands.” 

-Unknown Zen Poet 

The peaks hide from and seek my vision as I stroll the undulations of ice.  A glance downwards reveals an infinity of tiny silt-bottomed pools from pin to head size—oval tubular worlds missed by looking across the glistening crystal patched surface of the glacier.  The sound of wind chimes draws me into a narrow dripping crevasse.  The ice I kick down tinkles endlessly. 

 

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The Root Glacier splits and spreads below me; the dark rock covered section joins the Kennicott, the white ice bends towards ice-fall beginnings.  A giant playground of lakes, rivers, chutes, waterfalls, and walls among which I toil with my new seemingly super-power inducing crampons and ice axe. 

“The natural world therefore reveals its content, its fullness of wonder, when respect hinders us from investigating it in such a way as to shatter it to abstractions.  If I must cross every skyline to find out what is beyond, I shall never appreciate the true depth of sky seen between trees upon the ridge of a hill.  If I must map the canyons and count the trees, I shall never enter into the sound of a hidden waterfall.  If I must explore and investigate every trail, that path which vanishes into the forest far up on the mountainside will be found at last to lead merely back to the suburbs.  The the mind which pursues every road to its end, every road leads nowhere.  To abstain is not to postpone the cold disillusionment of the true facts but to see that one arrives by staying rather than going, that to be forever looking beyond is to remain blind to what is here.” 

-Alan Watts “Nature, Man And Woman. 

My hiking buddy Mike, who is new to the back-country [I nearly had to physically strip the Carhartts off him in the McCarthy Parking lot], is enjoying the view with a friendly camp fox on day three of our sun-speckled hike.  This after having persevered a mildly bloodying moraine slide-descent, crotch deep slush, and a night on the glacier–as well as some vertiginous vistas.

A tour of the 1938 abandoned Kennecott Mine, a burger in McCarthy, and our sunburned smiling faces turned to the road.

The Predicament of the Human Ego as Taoist Philosophy Sees It.

“If the positive and negative, the good and the evil, are indeed correlative, no course of action can be recommended, including even the course of inaction.  Nothing will make anything better which will not also make it worse.  But this is exactly the predicament of the human ego as Taoist philosophy sees it.  It is always wanting to control its situation so as to improve it, but neither action nor, with the motive of improvement, inaction will succeed.  Recognizing the trap in which it finds itself, the mind has no alternative but to surrender that ’straining after the good’ which constitutes the ego.  It does not surrender cunningly, with the thought that this will make things better.  It surrenders unconditionally—not because it is good to do nothing, but because nothing can be done.  All at once there descends upon it, quite spontaneously, a profound and completely uncontrived stillness—a quietude that envelops the whole world like the first fall of heavy snow, or like a windless afternoon in the mountains, where silence makes itself known in the undisturbed hum of insects in the grass.

In this stillness there is no sense of passivity, of submitting to necessity, for there is no longer any differentiation between the mind and its experience.  All acts, one’s own and others’, seem to be happening freely from a single source.  Life keeps moving on, and yet remains profoundly rooted in the present, seeking no result, for the present has spread out from its constriction in an elusive pin-point of strained consciousness to an all-embracing eternity.” 

-Alan Watts “Nature, Man and Woman”