peace with purpose

A week is longer than a day, I've heard. And a week is usually long enough, I've often been told.

How long is long? And what is enough?

I've spent most of this week in sick-mode. Sleep. Drink tea. Sleep. Drink tea. This morning I have a pretty firm grasp on enough.

But.

Perhaps I can beat this sniffling aching misery into something else, a moments repose? Is that stretching things a bit, taking the "every cloud has a silver lining" route, which leads only to doom and despair? I'll try to avoid that.

But something did strike me between naps and cups of tea. Our bodies are insistently in the world. Always.

Play a game.

Sit quietly, resting your hands on your lap, palms up. Close your eyes and focus on your fingers. Notice anything? There are signals and sings and subtleties abundant [ ain't that biblical!]. They are not there, those sense and sensations and such, just because you are paying attention. They are always there. We choose not to notice them. They don't go away, but we don't feel them or hear them. They are energetically present, and like all energy, they have to go somewhere, become something.

Being sick breaks open that insistence, our bodies refuse being ignored. And so, between sleeps and honeyed Darjeeling, I can feel every hair on my head, each follicle. They hurt, it's that kind of bug. And who knew there were so many different parts to your knee -- and that each one of them can hurt in its own way.
And eyes! Sweet baby Jeebus reaching for the AC&C's, but how can something so small hurt so much?

And so on.

Then I go back to sleep.

But it struck me -- struck me, actually, like someone is hitting me -- that getting well seems to mean retreating into a body bathed in unintended silence, unintended silencing.

Someone -- his name is Anzieu I think -- argued somewhere that the body in "the west" is a silent body, that any noise or speech from the body is always alarming.  The body -- is it a dirty thing, a dangerous thing, a reminder-of-mortality thing -- is suppressed, erased. The body is a tremulous silence that frightens us, because it is never actually silent -- it is silenced, an act of ignoring.

Okay, I have a fever. This is wobbly. But...

We fear silence as much as we fear our bodies. We are embedded -- and embodied -- in a conundrum where we must silence our bodies and in doing so come to fear silence itself.

But maybe we can turn that on its head.

Maybe.

Not by letting our bodies speak. At least, not right away, the noise would be deafening since we are so out of practice.

Instead, maybe ... try silence rather than silencing?

I've been trying to find the moments where joy and laughter collide, where they spark and the light they make creates an empty fullness, an empty beauty that is all beauty inside a single spark.

It starts here.

Enter silence, enter laughter, enter joy. Tara Bauch calls this "the sacred pause".

• Simply stop for a few seconds throughout the day. Just a few seconds to start. Don't strain or demand, just stop.
  
• Feel yourself in the moment. Really feel yourself. What is your body doing right there, right then.
  
• Listen to this moment. What is it saying, what is it telling you or asking you? Does it have choices you didn't notice?
  
• Now, practice doing this throughout the day: before you get up as you lay in bed and listen to the night or the dawn; as you get out of the shower and the air relaxes against your wet skin; when you leave the house just stop at the door and rest for a few seconds; as you settle to eat, look at the food, at the room, at your hands, and your lovers and families.
  
• Your day, if you keep practicing, can be one long soft silent laughing pause where you surrender into the moment, into the deeper longings of being just there, just where you are.
• Surrender into silence, just now. Touch the laughter, just now.
• Joy is not empty, it is crowded with the spaciousness of silence.
  

See, that was easy wasn't it?

Not really. I know.

Beth Roth, a nurse practitioner who teaches meditation in Connecticut, writes:

• I have noticed that silence does not have a great reputation in our culture. When I teach meditation I immediately see what we’re up against. Silence connotes absence to most people, both in their view and in their actual experience. Silence marks the absence of conversation and social interaction, and signifies the absence of music, TV, radio, computers, and all our electronic companions. But most of all, silence threatens us with the loss of distraction. Silence endangers the world of activity, entertainment, and complexity that we habitually create and rely upon to confirm our identity as a separate self. Meditation students frequently share with me their abject terror that in silence they might disappear into a huge emptiness, become overwhelmed by some terrifying inner monster, or be descended upon by uninvited demons from afar.

But you see, that's not what actually happens. Oh, sure, for the first few minutes silence is scary, it's crowded and boisterous and confusing. And then it opens up into a spacious quiet which is nothing more than the capacity for attention -- open silent engaged attention -- that is always there, actually no farther away than your breath.

Like Roth, the place where I find the most engaging silence at the moment is when I walk my dogs. But there are other places where you can find this if want to try:

• at least once a week, eat a meal with others in silence
• arrange to go for a walk at least once a week with a friend, and remain silent
• when you meet your friends, don't "say" hello, just show it -- use touch instead of speech, perhaps
• find any place you can to insert silence, that sacred pause, from the smallest and silliest to wherever silence can fit
• try this simple practice -- Strong Back, Soft Front -- to ground yourself in open silence
  

There is a scene in the movie version of Cabaret where the two main characters, walking home one night, stand under a railway bridge and as train goes overhead, scream as loud as they can. And then the train is gone and they are there in an immense silence. And they laugh -- remember, laughter is the place where the heart breathes.

Now that is silence.

Because, as Wendell Berry reminds me, "the best of any song is bird song in the quiet. But first you must have the quiet."

So, setting aside Wendell Berry for a moment, let me feverishly flip this on its head again, thanks to these amazing womyn and their friends and co-conspirators.

This is about silence, right. Embracing silence to fulfill real speech.

Some history, for those so inclined:

    SlutWalk began as a small idea in Toronto in 2011 to fight back against victim-            blaming and sex-shaming around sexual violence. The co-founders were galvanized     into action and took their name from a Toronto police officer who referred to        
    women and survivors of sexual assault as "sluts" and suggested women 'dressing
    like sluts' were inviting their own victimization.

     The prevalence of this attitude in our culture at large drew many to this cause to     end blaming victims of sexual violence, and judging peoples' worth by their bodies     and what they do with them. In the last year, this fight has spread to over 200         cities around the world, where independent organizers have organized locally-            driven SlutWalks and SlutWalk-inspired events. SlutWalk started, and is still going,     because we and so many others around the world have had enough.


     We demand our bodies and all bodies be respected. Our worth as human beings is     not determined by our sexuality.
     No matter what I wear
     No matter what I look like
     No matter what my gender expression is
     No matter how much, how little or what kind of sex I have
     No matter what I've done before
     No matter where I come from
     No matter how my body has been 'devalued' by others
     No matter what I've been called
     MY BODY IS NOT AN INSULT.

    London’s Solidarity SlutWalk was the first march to be inspired by SlutWalk                 Toronto last year, and that tradition is going to be continued this year! We believe     that all individuals should be embraced, accepted, and celebrated regardless of any     aspect of one’s identity.

    This march is a space for each individual to take and leave what they wish and be     respected for those choices – your body, your identity, your rules.
    While rethinking the word slut, our focus is challenging the use of victim blaming
    and slut-shaming as reason to normalize sexual violence against all bodies.

Shaming is the most insidious form of silencing, the deepest form of silence. Embracing silence as a practice, being in your own silence, opens you to the power to see where silencing comes from, especially those forms of silencing which erase your actual presence, your actual body in the world, and in its place make you into a signpost on the streets of rape culture. Embracing the capacity for silence allows you to ground the speech of your heart and your spirit and your body -- your body in all of its wayward and promiscuous and self-determined beauties.

The Slut-Walk on May 12 -- I missed it, stuck inside of Mobile with the Buckley's Mixture Blues again -- was an act of both profound silence -- your corruption will not define me -- and profound speech -- my body speaks my will, not yours. Organized by V-Day Western and The Amazon Collective and allies and friends and partners, this was a place where embracing silence defeated silencing and became open loving speech.

Freedom is fulfilled by seeing the truth and then learning to embody it in every part of our life, creating liberation in “the sure heart's release.” It's possible to be free. Freedom isn't found in transcending the world or leaving the world, but here and now, in this very moment, in making each moment free.

And that's certainly that.

So there!

As soon as we think we know something, we lose our capacity to know at all.  

There is a famous saying in Zen: 'For the beginner there are many possibilities, but for the expert there are few.'

Being comfortable with 'not knowing' allows us to be present with openness, freshness, and joy.  

Someone once asked Hogen what the meaning, the purpose of his pilgrimage was.  Hogen responded: “I don’t know.” The other said “ not knowing is most intimate.”

The beginner is intimate with experience.  

The expert is mostly forgetful.

Oh no, he's lost his mind.

Not yet.

Letting go of the habit of knowing in order to experience the practice of understanding is harder and easier, both at the same time. Because we have the raw material already, we just don't notice it. Noticing, you see, is dangerous. And worse, it's work. You sweat, muscles ache, you get dirt under your fingernails.

It's like this: for years and decades and entire lifetimes, we are trained -- and we train ourselves -- to slide through experience coated in a thick layer of psychic glycerine. That includes "thinking". Our heads have been filled -- and we fill our heads -- with slippery thinkings and ideas and knowledges that are never quite our own. We don't actively make these things, they happen. Though of course, they come from somewhere, they really aren't ours, though they are. A conundrum inside a shoebox filled with other folks stuff.

Try this: take out a piece of paper and a pencil. Turn away from the screen, ignore the computer. Just write down the thoughts that pop up in your head, just make a list. [Actually, this is more difficult than it sounds, but relax and give it a try. Take your time.]

Your list might look something like this:

suchi   gramscian hegemony   where's my hat   look a squirrel   exams  hungry
can't find my pen   why is this empty   when does the bus leave   exams   cherries 

and on
and on
and on.

If we could compile a list of all the "thoughts" that pop into our head during a day, the list would be surprising in a least two ways. First, how damned weird it is. Sheesh, who knew I think about birds nest soup that often? And yurts, what's with all this stuff about yurts recently. And ocarinas, I mean, really ocarinas?

But the second surprise would be how many things on that list are thoughts, but are also thoughtless -- things planted, habits inserted, either by ourselves or by others, or some combination of the two.

Thinking, those thoughts that just appear to happen, is actually habituated and programmed. In some ways, just by experience -- things that "happened" trigger thoughts that will happen. In other ways, by training -- this is the "correct" way to think. But whichever process produces these thoughts, they are habits and those habits are constrictions. They contradict presence because they are anchored in a kind of absence -- the absence of willful attention.

But the capacity for willful attention is there, it is right in front of our brains and bodies if we pause at look for it. It is there in the space between these habituated thoughts. So while these thoughts, once full-blown and there for us to write down, all seem pre-ordained and unavoidable, in fact they have a history even if that history is quite brief. They begin out of the spaces between each thought and that is where attention can find its way into thinking about thinking in a way which invites non-thinking. And thinking about thinking non-thinking is where we can go to see how our transient habits hook us and take us out of experience, into some nether-world of always being away from where we are.

It is the spaces between thoughtless habits  and the habits of thoughtlessness -- and they are there, we don't have to search for them -- where we can "grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it the way your mom always told you not to do with your wee-wee in front of the neighbors. We dig deep into these thoughts and roll around in them like a pig rolling in its own doo-doo, feeling all that delicious coolness and drinking deep of their lovely stink." [Blame the wee-wee and doo-doo on Brad Warner!]

In meditation, for example, a common misunderstanding is that through meditation you will reach a state of calm blissful silence. It isn't helped that the image of the meditation centre with it's softly blowing curtains, polished wood floors, really hot models in flimsy clothes,  and seductive lighting creates a wistfulness for an empty peaceful serenity. It is the trap of habitual thoughtlessness, this idea that attention and mindfulness are a calm away from the turmoil.

Because the turmoil is actually the whole point. Not to escape it but to understand it, feel it, embrace it, experience it. And doing that, in breaking out of the habit of wanting thoughtless bliss, we become intimate with that turmoil rather than controlled by it. And in that intimacy, we actually experience the openness that those fixed and hook-like thoughts hide. That openness is there, described in some traditions of Buddhism for example as thinking of the mind as a large endless sky.

And that endless sky is right there for us to experience, in the space between our thoughts, the space where those thoughts emerge and take shape and then take over.

"It's as if you had vast, unlimited space" Pema Chödrön writes, "complete openness, total freedom, complete liberation —and the habit of the human race is to always, out of fear, grasp onto little parts of it." The little parts, those thoughts -- remember that list -- mask the spaces in between where intimacy can happen, intimacy with your own experience which makes intimacy with the experience of others possible.

I asked the peaceniks at one point during the winter to write about what they felt were the three most resistant obstacles to peace. These were wonderful discussions -- passionate and compassionate in equal parts. But there was a hook in asking that question that I didn't see at the time.

And that is simply this realization: the most resistant obstacle to peace is thinking about peace. In thinking "about" it, adding it to our list of "what are you thinking about right now" -- maybe between gramscian hegemony and suchi -- we end up stepping out of the open vastness of intimacy and hanging on to that hook that drags us out of the world. Peace becomes just another thoughtless thing on a list, it no longer moves and acts because we stop moving and acting.

Thinking non-thinking is an invitation to touch something embarrassing, prohibited, childish. Or something dangerous, alive, the sensuous emptiness of thoughts coming into being, resting and caressing in that place.

Often.

In public.

Whatever the prudes say.

Sure.

Maybe all we ever really have to offer ourselves is a willingness to touch ourselves in those empty spaces where we can think before we get hooked on thoughts.

There's an old joke:

A rabbi, a priest, and a minister are in a boat on a lake. The priest announces that he is going to prove the solidity of his faith, and walk on water. And he does, stepping out of the boat and walking across the lake. A few moments later, the minister announces he is going to do the same thing, steps out of the boat and walks across the water to the shore.

The rabbi, sensing a challenge, steps out of the boat and -- glurrrpppp -- sinks into the lake. He climbs back out of the boat and -- glurrrpppp -- sinks into the water again. And he climbs into the boat and -- glurrrpppp and glurrrpppp and glurrrppp....

The priest turns the minister, standing on the shore, and says " do you think we should tell him where the rocks are?"

I think what I'm saying here is this: be like the rabbi, and just keep stepping into the openness, sinking into the water -- glurrrpppp.

Have the faith to be intimate with the possibility of experience.

Go ahead. Touch it. You won't go blind, though maybe you'll lose your mind.

You have to start somewhere.

Tonight -- it is May 5th as I write this -- is the mid-point of the current cycle of the moon -- the full moon, which at this time of year is the Milk Moon, the moon of healing and of growth. Because of the alignment of the moon, sun, and earth, this moon will be large and heavy in the sky, the last "super" moon until August of 2014 where I am at the moment.

I came across this passage from an essay by Edward Hoagland this afternoon. Perhaps there really are no accidents:

"Although like snow, the moon will disappear predictably and reappear when it's supposed to, moonlight is an elixir with mystical reverberations that we can pine and yet grin over, even when "empty- armed." It's off-the-loop, a private swatch of time, unaccountable to anybody else if we have paused to gaze upward, and not burdened with the responsibility of naming birdcalls, identifying flowers, or the other complications of the hobby of nature study. One just admires a sickle moon, half-moon, full moon that, weightless and yet punctual, rises, hovering. Sometimes it may seem almost as if underwater, the way its dimensions and yellow-ruddy coloring appear to change to butter, or russet, or polar. The Hungry Moon, Harvest Moon, Hunter Moon, are each emotional, and expertise about their candlepower or mileage from the earth is a bit extraneous. Although our own cycles are no longer tied to whether they are waning or gibbous, we feel a vestigial tropism. This is our moon. It's full, we'll murmur; or It's a crescent, or like a cradle lying partly tipped. And a new moon is no moon."

New moon.

No moon.

New thought.

No thought.

See if you can find them. Let them say hello. Let them embrace you, and then you can embrace them in return.

It's really quite simple.

Glurrrpppp.

And that's that.

Sometimes this all just feels like a race, but one without a finish line.

Or maybe someone keeps moving it? The old cliche about "moving the goal posts"?

It snowed the other day, not uncommon in April in this part of Turtle Island, but it caught me and the dogs by surprise when we walked out into it early in the morning. I slipped on the stairs and looked down -- I had looked around but not down. Someone had put heavy rubber boots on my feet. And the dogs looked at me -- maybe wondering if I had changed my mind and was going back in the house in a pique.

But off we went. We all, all three of us, looked down a lot. It was slippery, we paid attention.

Attention, Mrs. Loman said so desperately, must be paid.

But not paid for. And that is where the problem starts, expecting reward or demanding a cost.

Peace offers no reward.

And it has no cost.

It is just what it is, and so nothing more and everything else.

Gnomic, right?

Vertiginous is a really nice word. It is a whole-body feeling, a sense of dangerous and uncontrolled floating, being cut loose, not ground underneath, no up or down. Sometimes it's the weird inner-ear thing -- who knew the inner ear makes it possible for us to stand up straight and not fall down, at least not all the time.

But other times it's a different encounter with the body released from its grounds, its moorings and lashings.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Ani Pema Chödrön starts by answering Moyers question about the Buddhist notion of the end of suffering, but the conversation gets all vertiginous as she takes us back to a moment when the moorings and lashings around her own body slipped off:

BILL MOYERS: The Buddha talked about the truth of suffering.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think he meant by suffering? And what do you Buddhists mean by suffering?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Suffering?

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Well, that's a complex question, but it doesn't mean that we could be free of that, if fire burns you, it won't hurt. If you get cut, it won't hurt. It also doesn't mean that if someone you love very dear, deeply, dies you won't feel sadness. And it doesn't mean that bad things won't happen to you anymore, you know? It doesn't mean that you won't have your personal tragedies and catastrophes and crisis. And it also certainly doesn't mean that you could avoid planes flying into the towers, you know? Do you know what I'm saying?

BILL MOYERS: I do know about that because--

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: So it's all about that the end of suffering has to do with how you relate with pain. Let's distinguish just for semantics, the difference between, let's call pain the unavoidable and let's call suffering what could what could lessen and dissolve in our lives. So, if there's sort of a basic phrase you could say that it isn't the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it's how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer. One of the things that this eighth century Indian Buddhist master, Shantideva, one of the things he says about this whole thing is work with little grievances such as the middle seat instead of the aisle seat or your favorite restaurant being closed or not being able to get into the movie. Or whatever it is, you know? He says "There's nothing that does not grow easier through familiarity." Putting up with little cares, I'll train myself to work with great adversity. So in other words, the premise there is that if you work with two, feeling hot and feeling cold, you work with mosquito bites and aisle and middle seats. And at that level, notice that you're hooked and work with not escalating it--

BILL MOYERS: You're hooked?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Yeah. That I'm hooked. Hooked is an interesting quality to me.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by it?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: I mean, not only has something, evoked a response in me but it's going to be difficult for me to let go. Anger is like that for sure. Prejudice is like that. Critical mindedness is like that. You don't want to let go. There's something delicious about finding fault with something. And that can be including finding fault with one's self, you know? So that's what I mean by hooked. You're sort of it because of the image of a fish and the hook and it has this juicy worm on it and you know the consequences aren't going to be good. But you cannot resist. And one of the main things we're addicted to is escalating aggression.

BILL MOYERS: So you escalate the anger.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: So I escalate the anger, you know? My teacher Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, he calls it pouring kerosene on the fire, you know? In an attempt to put it out, you pour kerosene on the fire.

BILL MOYERS: I like that. I like the idea of being hooked. It's a new metaphor for me in the-

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: The word in Tibetan is Shenpa. And I've been teaching a lot about it lately because when I heard this teaching from one of my main teachers, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, I thought this is fabulous. Because he says it isn't the words themselves that you're saying to yourself. It isn't the emotions. It's this charge behind them that's the Shenpa. It's this hooked quality this difficult to let go. In my case, I read a book by Chugyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And it really resonated, you know?

BILL MOYERS: What resonated?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: I'd have to go back a little bit further. I was at point in my life where I think it was the low point of my life. It evolved around a marriage breaking up. But-

BILL MOYERS: Your husband came home one day and said he was having an affair--

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: That's right. That's--

BILL MOYERS: He wanted a divorce, right?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: And what did you do?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: The first thing that happened, I had sort of an epiphany. Or I say in the book, I think, like a genuine spiritual experience which happens to people at a time of shock. Like car accidents and things. Which was time stood still. There was a completely timeless moment where all I saw was a light and heard the sounds. And it was like an eternal moment, you know? And then the mind came back. And I picked up a stone and threw it at him. You know?

You know?

The lashings and moorings come back and the hand reaches for a stone and you're back, but not really, because actually you are governed and the hand on the stone is like that hook and the fish.

That lesson -- to be good with vertigo, let it happen -- ain't easy but if we pay attention there are always chances popping up in unexpected places which let us practice, even if only for a few seconds.

Late last year I went to a show and sale of local artists -- painters, potters, poets and other playful things -- and there was an admission charge. I stepped up to the desk to pay, handed the woman there a five dollar bill and she hand me back a one dollar coin. Brain said to me, "you must have misread the poster, it's only $4."

Bonus!

I visited with friends, admired the goodies and then went to walk out to my car. As I passed a poster advertising the event, I read it -- Admission $5 Seniors $4.
I did not miss a step, because eye and brain sometimes take a while to get each others attention, but as I stepped off the last step into the gravel parking lot, what I had just read hit me  --smack! --  and I stopped, mid-step -- I mean this, one foot off the ground like some superannuated movement coach on the set of a remake of The Karate Kid -- and just stood there.

It wasn't long but there I was -- vertiginous.

Then I picked up a stone and threw it at her, by which I mean I walked back inside, and handed the woman behind the desk the dollar she had given me and mumbled " you undercharged me" and left.

There have been a few others lately, but that one is the least awkward so it will have to do.

Or perhaps I can enlist Wendell Berry to help me out. In one of his earlier essays, he writes about a sheep farmer and his flock, Henry Besuden. Mr. Besuden takes on his family farm in the 1920's, a farm that by then had been damaged and exhausted. And over the next 50 or more years, he works to regenerate the farm -- rebuilding its soil, its ecology, is living presence -- and to do that, among other things he raises Shropshire sheep. He raises them well, so well that while he is a very small stockman, he wins the annual competition for sheep stock in Chicago 12 times, of the 18 years he participated. He raises strong healthy sheep and with the sheep, he recovers his farm -- slowly, this is decades long work, and in 1976 he admits his farm is in good shape but a lot of work is left to be done.

Berry writes, always both lovingly and with a critical and moral eye, about Mr. Beruden's ability. Which is where attention and groundlessness and groudedness and simultaneity come in, which are really the only point I want to make this week.

Berry writes that "...the talent for what he "had to do" was in large measure the ability to bear the good outcome in mind.

    He told me a story that suggests very well the distinction and the effect of that     ability. On one of his trips to the International he competed against a western     sheepman who had selected his carload of fifty fat lambs out of ten thousand     head.

    After (Mr. Besudens) carload had won the class, this gentleman came up and         asked: "How many did you pick yours from, Mr. Besuden?"

    "About seventy-five."

    "Well," the western breeder said, "1 guess it's better to have the right                 seventy-five than the wrong ten thousand."

    But the ability to recognize the right seventy-five is worthless by itself. Just as     necessary is the ability to do the work and to pay attention. To pay attention,     above all- that is another of the persistent themes of Mr. Besuden's talk and of     his life. He is convinced that paying attention pays, and this sets him apart
    from the mechanized "modern" farmers who are pushed to accept more                 responsibility than they can properly meet, and to work at freeway speeds. He     wrote in his column of the importance of "little things done on time." He said         that they paid, but he knew that people did them for more than pay.

    He told me also about a farmer who wouldn't scrape the manure off his shoes     until he came to a spot that was bare of grass. "That's what I mean," he said.     "You have to keep it on your mind." "

The beginning of attention is paying attention. That moment, crane like in the soggy gravel parking lot, was just such a moment when the moorings and lashings released, even for a second, and that can be all it takes if we are paying attention.

It always begins with just beginning. And then beginning again and again, each step it's own complete act and then the next one and after that a few more and then you are actually moving within and not through, living inside the motion that is attention.

Just that, actually.

Always beginning means never ending. And then it becomes okay when the lashing and moorings slip off and you are of the ground and air and motion and not just on it. Not in it, but just in.

And that's where attention lives.

According to my calendar -- which means the calendar I make up day by day by day -- Tuesday marks an interesting moment in the year. It is Beltane, which stands at the mid-point between the birth of the first lambs -- Imbolc -- and the coming of the summer solstice -- Litha.

There is this old joke that time was invented so everything didn't happen all at once. Perhaps the joke is on us. The illusion of time hides the reality that everything does happen all at once and never again. Time just might be a sly joke we play on ourselves, and of course, the joke is then both on us and in us.

On Monday -- you know, April 30th on the papal fiat we call the official calendar -- I will do a couple of things, just to pay attention to this transience and simultaneity.

Care to join me?

At your back door, early in the morning of April 30, offer this or some other words...

Spring is the season of integrity
and innocence, the gathering light
a child that is the midwife to beauty
and power, to the senses embracing
the warming hearts of the year.


Then, that night, the last night of Imbolc, say something like this at the front door of your house...

My door is a flame of welcome,
my door is a fragrant invitation,
my door is the thin threshold
of my body dreaming strength
into the flesh of summer,
into new journeys, new promises of the dance.

See, simple.

Just words.

Another way of beginning and ending and beginning, always beginning.

Little things done on time.

Like beginning. And never stopping.

Just beginning, and then beginning again.

Grounded in the groundless constant instant of always knowing where to scrape the dung from your boots.

Always beginning -- like Beltane -- isn't a game, but it is a dance.

Care to dance?

When asked about the Truth, Hotei simply put down his bag.
When asked why he was called Hotei, he also put down his bag.
When asked what, after the bag, was important,
he picked up the bag and walked away.”
( The Sound of One Hand, pg. 205)

This is the final "formal" post for the peacenik class, but it isn't the end of the conversation. Over the next several days I will reconfigure this place, do a few things to un-school it, and turn it back into a conversation, so we can continue trying to answer this very simple question:

• Where have we gone, where have we been, where are we now, and where shall we go next?

Desire is the very opposite of love. Love says, “I want you to be happy.” Desire says, “I want you to make me happy.” Desire is like salty water—the more you drink, the thirstier you become.

So why are we still drinking?

The crux of the matter is laziness, a lack of willing energy. Even when we know what we should be doing, we choose what seems to be the easier path. We’re standing in our own light: we don’t see who we really are.  Because it is easier that way. We like things easy. That's the biggest trick ego plays on us -- convincing us that easy is better. And it isn't. It's just easy. When things are easy -- when we let that shroud of ease drop over our eyes and our skin and our breath -- we lose the one thing we need most, the joy and passion of the hard work of being fully and conscientiously and honestly, compassionately and with great vulnerability and risk, right there, in that moment where good can happen. That is the only moment where good can happen.

And it's not hard work, really, but it isn't easy either. It is just what it is, the work that is needed.

Nobody else can do our work for us—it’s up to us to do it or not. The key is to do the work, the messy constant work. Take the key, open the door, and walk out of the prison. There are obstacles only if you choose to wait.

Early morning now and I remember   
corriendo a la madrugada from a different   
English poem,   
I remember from the difficulties of the talk   
an argument   
athwart the wine the dinner and the dancing   
meant to welcome you

you did not understand the commonplace expression   
of my heart:

the truth is in the life
la verdad de la vida

Early morning:
do you say la mañanita?
But then we lose   
the idea of the sky uncurling to the light:

Early morning and I do not think we lose:   
the rose we left behind   
broken to a glass of water on the table   
at the restaurant stands   
even sweeter   
por la mañanita

    ~ June Jordan from Problems of Translation:Problems of Language

A couple of years ago I read Stephen Legault's Carry Tiger to Mountain, a meditation on activism and leadership. While the conflation of acting and leading troubles me -- we don't really need more leaders, we need more taking action -- Legault's use of the Tao te Ching as a source for thinking through the obstacles and challenges of acting with conscience and consciousness in the world and in our communities helped me grasp how buddhism -- note the lower case 'b' -- can be a powerful too for understanding the nature of being with our natures and in the nature we are of. It is the focus on this moment, this immediate presence, which keeps me coming back to buddhism as a place to ask questions and look at how answers can be made.

Buddhism’s Four Reminders help us return to the present moment. It is through this presence that we can be with obstacles and questions with compassion and  fear and kindness and deep attention. Presence is our deeper well and our most refreshing water.

The four reminders are:

Our precious human birth: the work we do is hard. We’re often times struggling against seemingly impossible odds, and we’re doing so because something that we love is threatened. This creates terrible pressures and leads to anxiety, stress and fear. But remembering our precious human birth – the simple fact that each of us is alive and here on this marvelous troubled planet – allows us to extend ourselves to one another in a way that might overcome our fear. We can open our hearts and act with love, not fear, and in doing so return to the present moment of our work.

The truth of impermanence: This might be our last moment on earth. We’re just passing through and nobody can say for certain what happens next. This can cause a lot of anxiety. That’s OK. But it can also help us return to the present and create a thankfulness for the gift of being able to work together to make the world a better place.

The law of karma: Every action has a reaction. Everything we do, everything we say, creates energy that can help us or hinder us in our efforts to succeed in our efforts. I often times act out of pure habit, and speak from a life of fear based reaction. But I’m learning – very slowly – to interrupt my habitual way of responding to the world, and taking a moment to pause. In that empty space I can sometimes chart a new course, one that emerges not from habit, but from love. I’d like to believe that this moment will yield results for the things I believe are important in the world. None of us exists in isolation, however, so there is a key ingredient we must not overlook: a meaningful life must answer the question, “What have I brought to the world?” If I can look at a day and see that virtue, happiness,  even truth are prominent elements, I can say, “You know, I’m a happy camper.” I can live a meaningful life even if I only have ten minutes left.

The futility of what in Buddhism is called samsara: According to Pema Chodron, samsara is the act of preferring death over life: “It comes from always trying to create safety zones. We get stuck here because we cling to a funny little identity that gives us some kind of security. Painful though it may be.” I for one have long been attached to the story of myself, and my place in the world. It’s served me from time to time, but I’m pretty sure that if I was to abandon the idea of a fixed identity and instead embraced the uncertainty of every moment, I could be more available to those I seek to serve.

We can start by simply saying to ourselves and those around us:

I am going to continue to try and make the world a better place through my service to people, to places, to wild creatures, and to my own wild future. The Four Reminders might make this possible.

It seems so relentless, doesn't it? So unstoppable and omnipresent, these ugly forces, ploys and deeply unhappy people, there's just no way to escape. But this, of course, is probably the biggest lie of all.

Here's the magic idea that costs nothing and has been available always: It is not either/or. It is not one or the other. Of course there exists this entire world completely divorced from reality TV, fast food, TV commercials, diet crazes, feeding tubes and gross pizzas, hot dogs and unhappy wedding dresses three sizes too small.

It is like a secret garden. It's a place where intelligence meets grace and humor, where you snap out of all cultural lethargy and realize your infinite capacity to see all the silly stories and brutal machinations at play: the politics, the ads, the industries, the feeding tubes filling you with fear and hot dogs and death.

You don't read about this place much. It's not easy to write about (even though, for some reason, I sure keep trying). You can't buy it. You can't really market it. I can't give you the address. But it's available always and forever. Isn't that good to know, at the very least? Are you there already?

Autobiography in Five Chapters

Chapter 1

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I'm lost. I'm helpless. It isn't my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2:

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place, but it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3:

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I fall in. It's a habit. But my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault and I get out immediately.

Chapter 4:

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5:

I try walking down a different street.

Something Ram Dass once said, that "I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies," resonates for me as we come to this point in the practice of trying to practice peace together.

Where it isn't love and compassion, truth and trust, vulnerability and power, that is where each of our work lies.

or just a different way through the forest, walking with the trees, walking to the river...

walking

breathing

that's all

singing sūtras for the insects in the wilderness,

—the wideness, the foolish loving spaces
  full of heart.

            Walking on walking,
                    under foot   earth turns
            Streams and mountains never stay the same.



                              The space goes on.
                              But the wet black brush
                              tip drawn to a point,
                                       lifts away.

And that was that...

One day Mara was traveling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara's attendant asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth." "Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?" his attendant asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this, they usually make a belief out of it."

You know, it doesn't take grand goals or righteousness or complex planning at all, but simple things like asking what is to be done, and then answering the question as simply -- and so as fully -- as you can.

Breathe.

That's it, really.

I know, that's a lot of tuition and time and rolling on the floor playing the sausage game just for one word -- breathe.

What is empire? I don't mean what do the seminar room savants and pious pontificators mean by empire. They don't know -- have no answers -- because you see, they are empire. They consume life and living and livelihoods and -- like all inefficient digestive systems -- spit empire out their butts.

Empire is being afraid to breathe.

Empire wins because it convinces us to hold our breath, to wait, to postpone.

what waits for its moment wanes,
lessens,
shivers beside its newness,
leaves, imitates rest.

    the moon has no attendants
    and the arc its light creates
    is not a reflection,
    not a fading promise.

what waits, wanes.

            ~ March 2012

I've been wobbling around the turbulence of our translucent sister and lover and mother -- that's the moon, in case you are wondering -- this year, because this year is full of turbulence -- some opaque, some translucent. I've been trying to reconcile being in place, being of a place, and being place itself. It keeps coming back to the empire of distances -- that is the empire that keeps winning by convincing us to suffocate ourselves and call it living.

And all roads keep leading to the breath. Your breath. My breath. Ours.

Empire -- the distancing of power over, power against -- wins when we no longer kiss the air with our breath and then let the air kiss us back. It ends in the indiscreet everydayness of resisting suffocation. Empire ends when we make our breath the only option we have, because in each breath we allow ourselves to feel there is wisdom and promise, not disguise and retreat.

I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action with a poem. The title of it is “A Song For Many Movements” and this reading is dedicated to Winnie Mandela. Winnie Mandela is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile somewhere in South Africa. She had been in prison and had been released and was picked up again after she spoke out against the recent jailing of black school children who were singing freedom songs and who were charged with public violence…

“A Song for Many Movements.”

    Nobody wants to die on the way
    and caught between ghosts of whiteness
    and the real water
    none of us wanted to leave
    our bones
    on the way to salvation
    three planets to the left
    a century of light years ago
    our spices are separate and particular
    but our skins sine in complimentary keys
    at a quarter to eight mean time
    we were telling the same stories
    over and over and over.

    Broken down gods survive
    in the crevasses and mudpots
    of every beleaguered city
    where it is obvious
    there are too many bodies
    to cart to the ovens
    or gallows
    and our uses have become
    more important than our silence
    after the fall
    too many empty cases
    of blood to bury or burn
    there will be no body left
    to listen
    and our labor
    has become more important
    than our silence

    Our labor has become
    more important
    than our silence.

        I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago, I was told my two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between the telling and the actual surgery, there was a three week period of the agony of and involuntary reorganization  of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.

        But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

        In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my own mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for in my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed I would have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

        I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

        The women who sustained me through that period were black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge— within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle, and otherwise, conscious or not— I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

        What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am black, because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?


         And, of course, I am afraid— you can hear it in my voice— because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”

        On the cause of silence, each one of us draws her own fear— fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson— that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, black or not. And that visibility which makes you most vulnerable is also our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind us into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in out corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners as mute as bottles, and still we will be no less afraid.

        In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-American festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoka, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in the self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia— self-determination— the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza and the principle for today is Ujima— collective work and responsibility— the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.

        Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

        And it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps of judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I was to have been born mute or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

        And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance, “I can’t possibility teach black women’s writing— their experience is so different than mine,” yet how many years have your spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: “She’s a white woman, what could he possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.

        We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

        The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

We are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace—and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible. To be incapable of such willingness is merely to resign ourselves to the absurdity we are in; and yet, if you are like me, you are unsure to what extent you are capable of it.

Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer:

None.

Please, no children.

Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

If that is your answer too, then you must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least obeyed:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you...”

That is where it begins, where it must begin.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
or books that are written in a foreign tongue.
The point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live your way some distant day into the answers.
~ Rilke

And this is perhaps the biggest obstacle of all, a short comment on FB -- damn you Mark Zuckerberg, I'm your slave!!!! -- that sums up why the end of empire will not happen in seminar rooms and lecture halls but in taking back your breath as the only tool you need:

"it made up for having to, mere minutes later, stand next to Christie Blatchford while I waited for my latte at Starbucks..."

Pause. Reflect. Gasp for air.

Radical change -- you know, change that goes to the roots of the need for transformation -- isn't waiting for it's latte at Starbucks.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
-- Mary Oliver

On the path of compassion, there's nothing to get, and everything to get rid of. Obviously, the first thing to let go of is trying to 'get' love, and instead to give it. That's the secret of peace, of compassion. How can we give ourselves? By not holding back. By not wanting for ourselves. If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are growing peace and compassion.

When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best.  When we dance we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor. When we dance, the journey itself is the point.  When we play music the playing itself is the point.  When we live peace, the living itself is the point.

Some of you might recall this tiny practice I suggested earlier in the year:

To set out today with the intention that every time you meet someone, see someone, you will think to yourself:

This person may die tonight. What can I do, bring, give, to make her day full, his final day complete.

Now, if you are like me, this can easily become something like:

This person may die tonight. What can I do to speed up the process?

Because anger or frustration or despair -- ours -- gets in the way of seeing the other person, fully seeing. And I fail in this as much -- perhaps even more -- than anyone I know. Fallibility is not a curse or a lapse, it is just what it is -- something that takes practice to overcome, to move beyond, to embrace and then let it go.

Sometimes it helps to turn the intention around:

Tonight I may die. What can I do to leave only peace, compassion, and joy in my final day?

Not any easier. Peaceableness starts there though, with your own intention to act. Intention takes practice. Peace takes practice.

And how long will it take me to learn these lessons, you silly old queen?

Well, as long as you've got, I'm afraid. Practicing -- learning, trying and failing and trying and failing -- takes your entire life.

Sorry, no shortcuts.

Because, if you want to stop failing, you have to stop giving up.

If it helps, try singing this to every single person you meet every single day. Can't hurt.

I know what you're thinking, some of you -- what about love, that other kind of love -- between soul mates, that personal love between our most intimate collaborators, what about that? How will I have any love left for that? Eh, smart guy?

Isn't that the thing we should strive for, really. To be lovers in all ways at all times? So there is no need to conserve, to save a little extra for one when there is always enough to go around. Love and peace? It is loaves and fishes time -- it multiplies, it feeds all it needs to feed.

So let me repeat myself, because I can:

On the path of compassion, there's nothing to get, and everything to get rid of. Obviously, the first thing to let go of is trying to 'get' love, and instead to give it. That's the secret of peace, of compassion. How can we give ourselves? By not holding back. By not wanting for ourselves. If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are growing peace and compassion.

Perhaps poetry, speech of heart and mind and skin?

I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference.

Nothing “obliges” us to behave as honorable human beings except each others’ possible examples of honesty and generosity and courage and lucidity, suggesting a greater social compact.

I’ve been having this devilish exchange with my little sister Bó – you just might meet her on Monday, fork in hand – and she recently used the word priorities [ or more accurately, I did and she challenged me on it].  This is what followed, edited a tiny bit because sometimes emails get wonky, and makes my point – yes, I have one, and it is not at the end of long stick, though sometimes it might be:

priorities are either done -- the prior to -- or unknowable -- as in
we are prior to it, so can’t know it, only fantasize it.

but nothing makes that much sense, does it?

are we what we were? or are we what we plan to be?

we are certainly never what we will be because,
and here I go all wonky, we never "will be".

so am I what I was? [this was the crux of the thing for me, what
this “was” is, what it does or doesn’t do, can I be without it,
or can I ever be, with it?  Not an easy question.]

two ways of doing this:

one is the ballistic model of trajectories -- our life is
like a cannon ball shot from a gun, it has an arc which
determines the next point in the arc, by a law of
physics or some such thingie. we know where we
came from [ by the same law, where we is goin’].

the other is our life is a feather or a whisp of smoke
and it's path -- how it got to where it is -- disappears the
moment it arrives and where it will go next is a contingency
inside a paradox inside a conundrum.

the one way is the way the choices made for us -- at birth
and along the way -- wants us to believe in. inevitability
makes us powerless, though predictability creates the illusion
of power.

the other way is just the journey itself. there is no path, no way
back and no way forward. just the journey. no departures and no
goals.

oh, though, that scares the shit out of me, that one does.

but maybe it comes to grasping that we never left and we've
already arrived, so enjoy the ride.

i'll stop now. i'm getting "motionlessness" sickness.

Ten Simple Verses On Anger: Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you say something unkind, when you
do something in retaliation, your anger increases.
You make the other person suffer, and they try hard
to say or do something back to make you suffer,
and get relief from their suffering. That is
how conflict escalates.”

“Just like our organs, our anger is part of us.
When we are angry, we have to go back to ourselves
and take good care of our anger. We cannot say,
‘Go away, anger, I don’t want you.’ When you have
a stomachache, you don’t say, ‘I don’t want you
stomach, go away.’ No, you take care of it.
In the same way, we have to embrace and
take good care of our anger.”

“Just because anger or hate is present does not
mean that the capacity to love and accept
is not there; love is always with you.”

“When you are angry, and you suffer, please go
back and inspect very deeply the content, the nature
of your perceptions. If you are capable of removing
the wrong perception, peace and happiness will
be restored in you, and you will be able to
love the other person again.”

“When you get angry with someone, please don’t
pretend that you are not angry. Don’t pretend that
you don’t suffer. If the other person is dear to you,
then you have to confess that you are angry, and that
you suffer. Tell him or her in a calm, loving way.”

“In the beginning you may not understand the
nature of your anger, or why it has come to be.
But if you know how to embrace it with the
energy of mindfulness, it will begin
to become clear to you.”

“Anger is like a howling baby, suffering and crying.
Your anger is your baby. The baby needs his mother
to embrace him. You are the mother.
Embrace your baby.”

“Anger has roots in non-anger elements. It
has roots in the way we live our daily life. If we
take good care of everything in us, without
discrimination, we prevent our negative energies
from dominating. We reduce the strength
of our negative seeds so that they
won’t overwhelm us.”

“In a time of anger or despair, even if we feel
overwhelmed, our love is still there. Our capacity to
communicate, to forgive, to be compassionate is
still there. You have to believe this. We are more
than our anger, we are more than our suffering.
We must recognize that we do have within
us the capacity to love, to understand,
to be compassionate, always.”

“When we embrace anger and take good care of
our anger, we obtain relief. We can look deeply into
it and gain many insights. One of the first insights
may be that the seed of anger in us has grown too
big, and is the main cause of our misery. As we
begin to see this reality, we realize that the other
person, whom our anger is directed at, is only
a secondary cause. The other person is
not the real cause of our anger.”

Okay, I know what some of you are thinking. Poetry? Anger? Vietnamese monks? So what's next, holding hands and singing "kumbaya" out of tune? What's all this feel good woo-hoo shit?

Simple, grasshopper, really really simple, it's speech:

Taking love back from the oppressor’s language, the oppressor’s grip on our most intimate speech, so all speech can be our most intimate.

See, it's simple.

Breathe. Words breathing love. That is all peace has to offer, and all it takes to be peace.

This is what should be done
    By one who is skilled in goodness,
    And who knows the path of peace:
    Let them be able and upright,
    Straightforward and gentle in speech.
    Humble and not conceited,
    Contented and easily satisfied.
    Unburdened with demands and frugal in their ways.
    Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful.

Wishing: In gladness and in saftey,
    May all beings be at ease.
    Whatever living beings there may be;
    Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
    The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
    The seen and the unseen,
    Those living near and far away,
    Those born and to-be-born,
    May all beings be at ease!

Radiating kindness over the entire world
    Spreading upwards to the skies,
    And downwards to the depths;
    Outwards and unbounded,
    Freed from hatred and ill-will.
    Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
    Free from drowsiness,
    One should sustain this recollection.
    This is said to be the sublime abiding.

...adapted from the Metta Sutra

How?

"I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself, things like clean air, green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one's abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfying nookie." ~ Paul Goodman

We all want models, plans, someone else to tell us how. But what peaceable societies, communities, places tell us is there is no plan, there is only acting, doing, being, breathing.

My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bed we are delicate
and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves
tough and delicate we play rings
around each other our daytime candle burns
with its peculiar light and if the snow
begins to fall outside filling the branches
and if the night falls without announcement
there are the pleasures of winter
sudden, wild and delicate your fingers
exact my tongue exact at the same moment
stopping to laugh at a joke
my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter

~ Adrienne Rich

Breathe. Words breathing love.
That's the model.
Keep looking.
And then embrace.

Breathe me.

It's not a secret dream, though maybe it has secret places where it restores its energy, its capacities.

But it comes back again and again to
the simplicity of the dance, the simplicity of the embrace, the simplicity of movement in touch with each other.

Peace -- living peace -- is not like election results. Votes are counted, your side won or lost. Peace is movement and action, a persistent yearning and not a goal.

Breathe me. Breathe you. Breathe us.

"My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power
reconstitute the world."
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Peace opens the atlas of a difficult world,
and finds its path,
its maps,
its journeys.

Remember, Monday is about eating together, feeding each other, as one more practice, one more exercise at the great sweaty endless gymnasium of peace. When we eat together, we bridge the gaps between us by sharing our food and the stories of our lives. And the moments we spend together at the table form the basis of something remarkably profound. Call it what you will, but at the very least it is not just about food. It is about the way food can connect us.

is where you are.

It really is about stories, sometimes stories we don't know are being told.

This is a real conversation I had recently with one of my colleagues:

Them: Who was that group you were with in the atrium the other day?

Me: When?

Them: The other day, there was a large display about something.

Me: Oh, right, they were students from the peace class. [ We were having what we decided to call a huggle, btw -- about some pretty important stuff and important stuff always demands huggles....]

Them: Do you think you might be too friendly, is that a good idea?

Me: Ummmm...

Them: I don't think hugging like that is...

Me: Ummmm... [I know, I'm an eloquent little bugger, aren't I?]

Them: You know, it creates the wrong impression...

Me: Ummmmmmmmm...

I'm not very good at impression management. Actually, I'm not very "good" at most things, since like everyone else, I try to make it up as I go along. Oh, sure, I have guidelines and I do have a sense of intentions and goals, but mostly it's just me stumbling as gracefully as possible, one more ragged soul taking flight.

You see, there is no owners manual. Life is just what it is, after all. Which doesn't quite mean anything goes, though it does mean anything might happen. If you let it.

Sort of like thinking about what you see as the main obstacles to peace. Because I was re-reading those short pieces you wrote and smiling and feeling proud. Not because I taught you anything. Nope. Doesn't work that way. Instead, I was proud and laughing at how much YOU know. Listen to yourself more often, folks, and act on it, no matter what happens.

A student once asked a teacher why the Japanese make their teacups so thin and delicate that they break easily.

"It's not that they're too delicate," he answered, "but that you don't know how to handle them."

Peaceableness is like that. It isn't delicate at all. It is robust and energetic and demanding and intense. But it is also breakable -- always breakable -- because we don't know how to handle it. Maybe even more to the point -- I do have a point -- we don't know where to look for it.

There is this calendar --- we are given a calendar when we are born, even if we aren't given an owner's manual -- and the dates on that calendar are circled with compromise.

But you can create a new calendar, if you choose to, a calendar written on your own rushing sky, creating your own borderlines, and then crossing them.

Last Sunday was just one such flashing rush against borderlines.

Two members of our group decided to create a moment of peace by refusing violence and compromise. It really was simple, but as I told you last week, the motivation, the intention, was not simple at all.

It was a pretty afternoon for spring, with the newly deepening sun that makes March so hopeful. As Londoners may know, Victoria Park has it's requisite "honour the war dead" memorials, in this instance a tank with a crude sign on it that reads "Holy Roller".  I'm no theologian, and I realize that smarter dudes than me -- it's almost always dudes, but that's another story -- have argued for a theory of "just war" [The Wikipedia article  - HERE - is brief and pretty good as a summary of the main points of this "theory" which, btw, is enshrined for all to see in the Catholic Catechism which is also where queer kids are told they are disordered and immoral so I would take that source with a grain of salt -- whoops, got distracted, sorry.]

Like I started out to say, not being a theologian -- or a theoretician for that matter -- I'm not sure what a tank is doing in a public park, even as a symbol. Machines with a single purpose -- blowing stuff and folks up -- strikes me as an odd symbol of much more than blowing stuff and people up.

But more important were the events I told you about last week, an attack on a clearly vulnerable man by a group of thugs, about which there was no response by the police.

Sumbal and Kyle decided that at least for a few minutes on a blustery spring day, they were going to say no to that attack, and no to the tank as a symbol of -- well, a symbol of violence, of attacking the vulnerable with impugnity [ all wrapped up in whatever invisible sky people rationalizations the theologians and theoreticians have to offer.]

Because you see, even if the old queen isn't a theologian or a theoretician, I do remember something someone said:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,
for they shall possess the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

If that isn't clear enough, perhaps Aisha, Carol, Louise, Nitanju, Shirley, and Ysaye might settle the question for you:

So there they were, two souls laughing, joined by a few other laughing souls, your humble little queen included, standing in a park and just witnessing, for a moment, that peace is something done -- in small steps or large ones, but it is something done.

Ain't no lesson here, my pretties and folkies, no lesson at all. Maybe a tiny piece of wisdom. Let it get in your way and let it hug you, even for a minute.

Remember hugs?

Is this the poetry of a presence that is also an act, of words that are speech, speech that is breath, breath that is embrace?

"I can’t write a poem to manipulate you; it will not succeed. Perhaps you have read such poems and decided you don’t care for poetry; something turned you away. I can’t write a poem from dishonest motives; it will betray its shoddy provenance, like an ill-made tool, a scissors, a drill, it will not serve its purpose, it will come apart in your hands at the point of stress. I can’t write a poem simply from good intentions, wanting to set things right, make it all better; the energy will leak out of it, it will end by meaning less than it says.

I can’t write a poem that transcends my own limits, though poetry has often pushed me beyond old horizons, and writing a poem has shown me how far out a part of me was walking beyond the rest. I can expect a reader to feel my limits as I cannot, in terms of her or his own landscape, to ask: But what has this to do with me? Do I exist in this poem? And this is not a simple or naive question. We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend.

Someone writing a poem believes in a reader, in readers, of that poem. The “who” of that reader quivers like a jellyfish. Self-reference is always possible: that my “I” is a universal “we,” that the reader is my clone. That sending letters to myself is enough for attention to be paid. That my chip of mirror contains the world.

But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers."

The heartbeat of strangers, the strangeness of hearts beating, keeping cold away until all of the sidewalks are dry.

It's all about wobbling, about wobbly passions and shaking things up.

Peace is briefer than a falling star, but never -- not ever -- a vain promise. It gives.

It's as simple as remembering to approach -- touch, embrace -- everyone you meet, enemy or friend, stranger or lover, with grace and kindness.

You never know what despair or grief or anger or pain they are carrying with them.

And you'll never know what love they have to give you, or you to them, if you don't touch, embrace, hold each person as close as you must hold yourself.

Compassion is always risky but it is only dangerous when it fails. If you don't take the risk -- to touch, to feel, to speak -- more than 18 bucks will go up in smoke.

I want to talk about community, because to great a focus on what you or I can do, how you or I can be peaceable, practice peace, understand peace in other places, misses a key point -- if I can echo an old cranky theologian named Martin Buber:
    “When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou     to them, then they are no thing among things nor do they consist of things.          They are no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a     condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities.      They are Thou and I and fill the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but         them or I ; but everything lives in their light.”

Being is companionable, which means being without community is not being at all. Indeed, it's impossible. The simple fact -- I am because You are -- can't be avoided, though we can and do go to great lengths to avoid saying the words.

So, what can I -- you know, this I that I am because You are -- say about community, you might ask? Be patient with me and read this short excerpt from an essay by Wendell Berry. Then I'll reveal the judgements of the moon and stars below:

For many years my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

The old bucket started out a far better one than you can buy now. I think it has been hanging on that post for something like fifty years. I think so because I remember hearing, when I was just a small boy, a story about a bucket that must have been this one. Several of my grandfather’s black hired hands went out on an early spring day to burn a tobacco plantbed, and they took along some eggs to boil and eat with their dinner. When dinner came time and they look around for something to boil the eggs in, they could find only an old bucket that at one time had been filled with tar. The boiling water softened the residue of tar, and one of the eggs came out of the water black. The hands made much sport of seeing who would have to eat the black egg, welcoming their laughter in the midst of their days work. The man who had to eat the black egg was Floyd Scott, whom I remember well. Dry scales of tar still adhere to the inside of the bucket.

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture. And these two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

In the woods, the bucket is no metaphor; it simply reveals what is always happening in the woods, if the woods is let alone. Of course, in most places in my part of the country, the human community did not leave the woods alone. It felled the trees, and replaced them with pastures and crops. But this did not revoke the law of the woods, which is that the ground must be protected by a cover of vegetation, and that the growth of the years must return—or be returned—to the ground to rot and build soil. A good local culture, in one of its most important functions, is a collection of the memories, ways, and skills necessary for the observance, within the bounds of domesticity, of this natural law. If the local culture cannot preserve and improve the local soil, then, as both reason and history inform us, the local community will decay and perish, and the work of soil-building will be resumed by nature.

A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this. Once we have acknowledged this principle, we can only be alarmed at the extent to which it has been ignored. For though our present society does generate a centripetal force of great power, this is not a local force, but one centered almost exclusively in our great commercial and industrial cities, which have drawn irresistibly into themselves both the products of the countryside and the people and talents of the country communities.

~ Wendell Berry: The Work of Local Culture

If you've gotten this far, and you've paid attention, you will notice that Berry is using the word culture in a way quite different from what social science types mean by culture -- which usually translates as the delusions folks in other societies have about the way the world works since they are nowhere near as smart as social science types like us. [ Google Victor Turner and communitas if you would like to see the lengths to which social science types will go to try and disguise their contempt for other ways of being, but that's just the old queen being cranky.]

Berry wants us to reclaim a sense of the word culture that links it directly to the processes of fertility, cyclicity and regeneration, growth and decay and new growth -- in a word, nature -- that we have lost. And where did we lose it? That is an easy answer -- we lost it when we lost our commitment to community as a process of culture in this generative sense.

Which is not to say this has been lost everywhere, or even that it has been completely lost in each of our own lives. It's there -- this culturing community process -- but we are usually too distracted to notice it.

So here's a simple strategy for thinking about community -- yours, ours, theirs. Ask how each of these three things are expressed, practiced, understood. Knowing the answers is the best starting point I can think of for talking about community and culture, and the best starting point for recognizing community and for making community over and over again. Here they are:

Organicity: this is not only about connecting with soil and air, though it is about that in unavoidable ways. Have a listen to the Q&A with Wendell Berry in my note last week, and pay attention to how he locates what he means by community. As simply as possible: Community is placed. It is about being in a physical place, as physical particles of the organic unity of that place. It is grounded in both a physical sense -- it is connected to, part of, indivisible from the ground it moves on and in and it is grounded in the meaning that being grounded to the land creates in its own creation. I know, that's complicated sentence, but try this instead: “If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.” The organicity of community is this knowing -- in an embodied way -- where you are from, where you are.

Mutuality: More than just interdependence -- relying on others which is always inescapable though we, in our cultural surround, seem hell-bent on ignoring that -- mutuality recognizes the indivisibility of each of our coming into being in the world with the world itself, a world populated by others coming into being and a world that comes into being because of and through our presence in it. Remember ubuntu:  from the Zulu proverb- "Umuntu ngumuntu
nbabantu" which translates as"a person is a person through other persons." Mutuality goes further than just person, however, to account for community itself -- that is, the congregation of other persons through which I or you are a person -- to the entire surround within which being person happens and because of which it is possible to be a person. What is that entire surround? See organicity above, as these concepts can't be separated from each other. But let me play with some ideas from Wendell Berry -- I know, I keep mentioning him but he offers, for me anyway, the most challenging and compelling understanding of community as the practice of peaceableness.

Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community and its world, its place. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to their vows to the community – in whatever ways they say their vows, make their promises for today, something beyond the statist notion of marriage.  They make these promises to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is, as it is a joining in which they "die" into their union with one another and into their community.  “At the very heart of community life”, Berry writes, “we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing...” Lovers, in their surrender to each other, give community life by drawing life into their surrender.  The lover is not the hidden secret of two bodies, but the promise to all bodies of an embodied mutuality.

Sufficiency: This is the simplest of the three, and so it's the one most often ignored. Someone -- I can never find the quote when I want it -- said that we will never know what is too much until we know was it enough. And sufficiency simply drops out of the conversation because the first two essential things -- you know, organicity and mutuality -- are suppressed. In understanding peaceable communities, the first stop in the knowledge train in figuring out what is meant by the ideas of "more" and "enough". And most importantly, which of these has the most power, the most sway over people's lives and actions. Recently Mark Morford wrote, snarky as always:

• We would need, according to recent measures, 1.5 Earths to sustain our current rate of consumption, and you can point to China and India all you want but they're far from the primary culprits (that would be, of course, us) and anyway the odds are very good you're pointing to them on your iPad and your smart phone as you sit at a fine cafe gorging on five times more food than the average Hindu eats in a year. It absolutely cannot be sustained much longer, is what they're (still) saying, this rapaciousness, this constant craving for more. They say we're pushing the planet to her absolute breaking point quicker than ever, no really we are, and in fact she's actually now well past the breaking point in many categories and has run out of many natural resources, ores and precious minerals and essential planetary nutrients, not to mention thousands of animal species and sufficient fresh water and nuanced human thinking. The oceans? Don't even start.
• This is the current reality: The hardcore global meltdown discussed 50, 20, ten years ago? The great recoil? No longer just a possibility. It's happening now. It's already underway, you just don't feel it yet because we're so goddamn wealthy we can cushion the blow with cash credit cards and cheap foreign labor and oh my God this artisanal boutique coffee at $5 a cup is ridiculously overrated. But never mind that now.
• What's that you say? You've heard it all before? The end is nigh and civilization as we know it is on track for serious collapse, meltdown, infrastructure implosion unless -- and this might be the biggest unless in modern world history -- unless there's a major and they do mean major overhaul of how culture, greed and entitlement operate? Sure you have. So did the Romans. 
• And there's your main culprit, by the way: Greed culture. Consumerism run wild. Ravaging and raping the planet's resources faster and faster because the population is still growing like a weed; after all, everyone loves better food, new cars and shiny bleepy sexy iStuff because, well, who wouldn't? It's totally pleasurable, even magical. 
• Except when it's not. Except when seven billion people are all craving and clawing for the same shiny things, except when stunning gadget-making factories in China employ nearly one million people and still can't hire people fast enough, except when everything we've been told we should love, crave and buy uses copper and nickel, petroleum and a billion gallons of fresh water to manufacture. 

What Morford is pointing to is a failure of the principle of sufficiency as one of the essential aspects of peaceable communities. And sufficiency fails because the other two -- organicity and mutuality, in case you have forgotten -- fail.

In looking at community, in trying to grasp how peaceable communities work and why some communities are not peaceable, these essential properties need to be the starting point of our questions. And of our actions.

Peaceable communities are placed, they are embodied in their relationship to the world which is around them, of which they are a part, and which their actions also create.

In a word, peaceable communities are resilient. Resilience has a simple formula:

Organicity + mutuality + sufficiency = resilience.

And notice one other thing: those three essential things which produce the ground of resilience from which peaceable communities flourish are not ideas, ideals, philosophies, theories. Leave those to the text books and the seminar rooms where they belong and where they can do the least damage.

These three things are acts, practices, ways of being by doing.

They are work. Hard work. In peaceable communities, everyone has dirt under their fingernails.

Let me try an example, from something quite recent, to illustrate how these things can be seen as connected and as important to understanding what to ask -- and what is usually not asked -- about what community is and where it is to be found. I received this email from a dear kind soul:

"Dear friends:
On Tuesday night around 10pm I witnessed a horrible act of senseless violence.I was sitting in Victoria park with a friend when we heard screaming and a cry for help.Six or seven young men had circled a person and were kicking him repeatedly in the head, stomach and chest. After they ran away, I went to the sobbing figure to help.

The victim did not know the people who had so violently abused him. He had never come in contact with them, and did not know what he had done to upset them.He told me that they were trying to kill him.

After the ambulance arrived, we were told that the police would not be coming to take a statement and that it was best that we went home.It became very apparent that the police were not concerned with this act of violence and were not going to do anything to help anyone. This is unacceptable.

I couldn't help but recognize the contrast between the time when this very park was declared a safe-space and Tuesday night, when senseless violence appeared naturalized enough to negate police action.

Upon talking to (friends) it was decided that the only thing we could do is offer our presence.

If the police will not keep "public" space safe,the responsibility becomes ours."

This is the first chapter of a story that is still growing, but it starts from an embodied encounter with the world, with others, with acting in and because of community in the peaceable and complex sense I am trying to describe here. It says one simple thing, from which all the other complicated things grow:

Community is "placed".

I have been thinking about the vegetable garden I will start work on this year and came across this:

COMPANION PLANTING

Many plants have natural substances in their roots, flowers, leaves etc. that can alternately repel (anti-feedants) and/or attract insects depending on your needs. In some situations they can also help enhance the growth rate and flavor of other varieties. Experience shows us that using companion planting through out the landscape is an important part of integrated pest management. In essence companion planting helps bring a balanced eco-system to your landscape, allowing nature to do its' job. Nature integrates a diversity of plants, insects, animals, and other organisms into every ecosystem so there is no waste. The death of one organism can create food for another, meaning symbiotic relationships all around.

We consider companion planting  to be a holistic concept due to the many intricate levels in which it works with the ecology. By using companion planting, many gardeners find that they can discourage harmful pests without losing the beneficial allies. There are many varieties of herbs, flowers, etc. that can be used for companion plants. Be open to experimenting and find what works for you. Some possibilities would be using certain plants as a border, backdrop or interplanting in your flower or vegetable beds where you have specific needs. Use plants that are native to your area so the insects you want to attract already know what to look for! Plants with open cup shaped flowers are the most popular with beneficial insects.

Companion planting can combine beauty and purpose to give you an enjoyable, healthy environment. Have fun, let your imagination soar. There are many ways you can find to incorporate these useful plants in your garden, orchard, flower beds etc.

And this got me thinking about you folks.

You know, as vegetables and flowers and weeds and grains, planted and planting community.

Or this, from Martin Buber again:
"Here is an infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone,     wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or other             people. I often hear people prizing their solitude, but that is only because             there are still people somewhere on earth, even though in the far distance. I       knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I     shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed,         close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can     open the door again and see a human being looking at me."

Companion planting. It's really as simple as that.

And, equally simple, are my thanks to Kyle and Sumbal, who sparked the ideas that shaped my comments here. Sun. Warmth. Laughter. Amazing what they can do. Here is a tiny little present for the two of you. Feel free to dance, to separate the words from the music so you can find both. Let everyday day be "turbulent and heartbreaking in hundreds of new ways..." That too is the judgement of the moon and stars:

"You've got to shake your fists at lightning now
You've got to roar like forest fire
You've got to spread your light like blazes
All across the sky
They're going to aim the hoses on you
Show 'em you won't expire
Not till you burn up every passion
Not even when you die
Come on now
You've got to try
If you're feeling contempt
Well then you tell it
If you're tired of the silent night
Jesus well then you yell it
Condemned to wires and hammers
Strike every chord that you feel
That broken trees
And elephant ivories conceal..."