tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5157212384387872202024-02-24T01:06:48.994-07:00THE DRALA PRINCIPLE:A Vestigial Curriculum
of the Western MountainBill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-33620524072954411882012-09-01T07:49:00.001-06:002012-09-01T07:49:13.609-06:00ART & VERTICAL TIME<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD3olbZV_LI2AkAgr8ajrkW7lBUg8a_aLjl8hZ-6vlLwwkouWJox3gLa69EVANNzGEpbbXLBrfmRJi62UbugxcP_mPno8R2KYkuCU6mTZnbrf91T4953PIt1lMIOIBjyuBs37hcsJD55U_/s1600/IMG_8324.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD3olbZV_LI2AkAgr8ajrkW7lBUg8a_aLjl8hZ-6vlLwwkouWJox3gLa69EVANNzGEpbbXLBrfmRJi62UbugxcP_mPno8R2KYkuCU6mTZnbrf91T4953PIt1lMIOIBjyuBs37hcsJD55U_/s320/IMG_8324.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Detail from Houses in Provence. Paul Cézanne, National Gallery of Art.</span></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The only "C" I received in college was in an art history class - an irony, since even then I loved art history. I did not enjoy the history of being pummeled by slides or committing rote facts to memory, which accounted for my grade. I was interested in a history of phenomenology: why a landscape by Paul Cézanne altered me, why a Kandinsky watercolor made me want to paint - made me have to paint. At that time I worked as a janitor, bought books on Paul Klee and Goya and painted canvases horizontally - on top of my bed - in a thirty-five dollar a month room. <a href="http://verticaltimeyoga.com/journalessaysa.html" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span><br />Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-4766690127085726312012-08-24T09:14:00.004-06:002012-09-01T07:52:00.865-06:00Food, Meals and the Portals of Vertical Time<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dear Friends,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Those of you who are followers of my blog know that I suspended publication last February, but may not know that I have resumed my work and writing under a new website, <a href="http://verticaltimeyoga.com/index.html" target="_blank">Vertical Time Yoga</a>. I have a mailing list in which I announce new postings and would very much like you to be on it, if you aren't already (you can sign up on the <a href="http://verticaltimeyoga.com/resources.html" target="_blank">Resource</a> page of my website). If you would prefer to follow me through this blog, I will also continue to announce my postings here, then link to my website. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Wishing you the very best,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Bill Scheffel</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Food, Meals and the Portals of Vertical Time</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Originally posted to <i>Vertical Time Yoga on</i> 12-Aug: 2012 </span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZifWylAL7qRqmaegitmiEo8ukbrdYmBp7CgkHObxyZjxlSS9vNR1wQslY8X4M3SoGDaxY5r7kjuHuwcBLANkP6fuuuEmSa8oefFz7rpsUD1BXXaNbdiim0blVDeNW_ha1K2lxJvgMj-oz/s1600/IMG_2562.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZifWylAL7qRqmaegitmiEo8ukbrdYmBp7CgkHObxyZjxlSS9vNR1wQslY8X4M3SoGDaxY5r7kjuHuwcBLANkP6fuuuEmSa8oefFz7rpsUD1BXXaNbdiim0blVDeNW_ha1K2lxJvgMj-oz/s320/IMG_2562.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="style28">For at least eight years I have enjoyed a feast
nearly every night. Feasts, although they can and have occurred in
restaurants are best taken at home, in an environment that is not fully
public, a place where the guests come by invitation. "Home" - as I have
had many opportunities to discover - can be a hotel room and the meal
simply a plate of crackers, cheese and fruit. Most of the feasts I have
taken has included a glass or two of wine. Most of these feasts I've
taken alone. In some years I might have eaten alone up to two-hundred or
more evenings. "Alone" I must put in parenthesis also, since my
intention at every feast has been to invite the dralas and dine with
them. Perhaps it is often the wine, but I would say the dralas generally
appear and we share each other's company. <a href="http://verticaltimeyoga.com/Journals%20-%20Previous/food,mealsandthe.html" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Food and Transformation</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Posted to V<i>ertical Time Yoga</i> on 24-Aug: 2012</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGVa23C5xdgKBjxkOqAzEbzQpK3mcaAiWzoD2YT2SmItyh_l6lRl36ZBJ0cvIViEurp6wrYP-TSJJEjwkkxwfHseO3kLV05xmn87ZNocr1KoKHWdSf87368sbSTvo_RW-ekbZcIzhHwMMw/s1600/IMG_6416.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGVa23C5xdgKBjxkOqAzEbzQpK3mcaAiWzoD2YT2SmItyh_l6lRl36ZBJ0cvIViEurp6wrYP-TSJJEjwkkxwfHseO3kLV05xmn87ZNocr1KoKHWdSf87368sbSTvo_RW-ekbZcIzhHwMMw/s320/IMG_6416.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><span class="style111">I. Goddess of the Hearth</span></b> </div>
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The photograph above shows a bowl of uncooked red
lentils. They are the main ingredient in a dal I make, the legacy of a
part-time business I had in Boulder the 1990s, <span class="style131">Cuisine of India Catering</span>. Since shortly after my father died in August 2012, I've been living out of a suitcase. <span class="style28">I have traveled in the United States and abroad</span> and have visited many friends <span class="style28">along the way</span>.
I've been living from the suitcase for twenty-three months and have
given the dal recipe to several of my friends and shown them how to make
it.<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="http://verticaltimeyoga.com/Journals%20-%20Previous/foodandtransfm.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;">Read more...</span></a></span> </span></div>
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Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-67136231160705126782012-02-09T07:50:00.000-07:002012-02-09T07:50:29.097-07:00NECESSARY ANGEL<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTMwTs8g52BzqNXfPwSNfrjDDYqFSOWF2npWShGU9E0T7v5Z0ePupd2mWiljORfIwCNTm4qWgkLDWtFQIh9NBWy_1K1H7GkAewenSdJPEvrn9il-0ig8lVDCJEklm4K4yNhFhGi-AjrGT/s1600/Figs.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTMwTs8g52BzqNXfPwSNfrjDDYqFSOWF2npWShGU9E0T7v5Z0ePupd2mWiljORfIwCNTm4qWgkLDWtFQIh9NBWy_1K1H7GkAewenSdJPEvrn9il-0ig8lVDCJEklm4K4yNhFhGi-AjrGT/s320/Figs.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">THE PLANET ON THE TABLE</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Ariel was glad he had written his poems.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">They were of a remembered time</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Or of something seen that he liked.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Other makings of the sun</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Were waste and welter</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And the ripe shrub writhed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">His self and the sun were one</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And his poems, although makings of his self,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Were no less makings of the sun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It was not important that they survive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What mattered was that they should bear</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Some lineament or character,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Some affluence, if only half-perceived,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In the poverty of their words,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Of the planet of which they were part.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> - <i>Wallace Stevens</i></span></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;">. . . . .<b><br />
</b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b> </b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b> </b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><b> </b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><b> </b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>A Video Interview with Henry Schaeffer</b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjajpvypY6m9nTH3y4rs146h6PhwyUp_PJYnZsAFASKx73Nq0OHGr1__XIpBxUWDi3ZkCv-heHRdShf8CznUSmD5zV-h0Nis06RvhLj_m6qPtuWwYjO6EXoOIXkai_90krxPLEmeUy8hQAf/s1600/Henry+Schaeffer.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjajpvypY6m9nTH3y4rs146h6PhwyUp_PJYnZsAFASKx73Nq0OHGr1__XIpBxUWDi3ZkCv-heHRdShf8CznUSmD5zV-h0Nis06RvhLj_m6qPtuWwYjO6EXoOIXkai_90krxPLEmeUy8hQAf/s320/Henry+Schaeffer.jpg" width="254" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Henry Schaeffer - January 2012, San Francisco.</span></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">Henry Schaeffer studied with Suzuki-roshi before meeting Chögyam Trungpa and becoming the latter teacher's student in 1970. In this video, Henry describes the first and second time he encountered Chögyam Trungpa. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Trungpa Rinpoche did not limit his teachings to Tibetan Buddhism or any spiritual idiom - even to "spirituality" itself. In a given talk, Trungpa Rinpoche might speak of farming, T.S. Eliot or the understanding of Christian monastics he conversed with in Great Britain. In this video, Henry describes how one of his own passions, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, coincidentally became a link to Chögyam Trungpa.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/35341029?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe><br />
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</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-49714311662784286572012-01-18T12:55:00.003-07:002012-01-18T13:09:29.550-07:00CREATIVE FECUNDITY<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">When the winter light of the San Francisco Bay Area is at its most heartbreakingly beautiful the atmosphere has been scoured by wind and rain the day before (as it was the day before I took this photograph). The scouring gives a stop sign, side of a warehouse or distant tanker the same exacting definition scissors give to fresh cut hair. The low sunlight mutes these same objects, softening them as if everything is covered in a microscopically thin layer of silk. Colors powder, harmonize and evoke the iconic promise that California is, a sense of well-being one notch shy of stupendous.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">On New Year's day (the day after I took this photograph) I walked with my friend Christine into the view we had from her window: Bayview-Hunter's Point, San Francisco (the view of the photograph). To be exact, our walk took us to a derelict patch of bayside near a decommissioned coal plant and the tankers anchored beyond it. We saw seagulls, plovers and even a kingfisher hunt the low-tide shoreline, thick with exposed mussels, seaweed, slabs of shattered concrete, rotting tires, chunks of old marble, bottle caps and broken glass. In this hunting ground of rust and detritus we met an artist of infinite sadness, a thirty-eight year old man from <span class="st">Guanajuato</span> Mexico wearing an Oakland Raider's baseball cap. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
Porfirio Vasquez spoke to us in very broken English and explained, with the help of newspaper articles about him, the works of art he had created and stood amidst. A working stonemason since he was thirteen, Vasquez had created yards and yards of sculptures from the stones and detritus of this semi-wasteland and bird sanctuary. Iguanas, herons, skeletons made of stones and driftwood. Automobiles made of wire and glass. Abstract stacks of stones. It was the work of a child, of a skilled mason, of an attenuated and lonely semi-genius. Porfirio Vasquez: obsessed, haunted, bringing forth a patch of his own visions; a homeless, Mexican William Blake with an injured left arm. Working perhaps in the service or at the mercy of the dralas.<br />
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To say anything more about Porfirio Vasquez or his art would be to speculate. These few paragraphs are a tribute to him - nothing more than a stone tossed into a pond, and the wave it creates no more significant than an echo. But what <i>makes</i> an echo, and what is on the other side of it? These questions <i>are</i> significant. It is the discovery of our own poetry and the imprint it makes on the world that counts a great deal in this sad, lovely and infinitely meaningful cosmos. In this way, Porfirio Vasquez serves as our mirror and walks beside us.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In this journal I am introducing another artist, in this case a website, and the principle person behind it. <a href="http://magazine.dharma.art.br/index/" target="_blank"><i>Dharma Arte</i></a> is published from Brazil. It is inspired by the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">dharma art</i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> teachings of </span><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Trungpa. It is published in Portuguese though most articles are also translated into English. It is a bilingual, cross-hemisphere, cross-cultural pollination system and experiment. It is an archive or abode for writings from or information about not only </span><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Trungpa, but other essential ancestors - some living, some no longer - of the particular post-modern terrain that dharma art is: John Cage, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Laurie Anderson. It is a canvas and publication of current practitioners of this terrain, from the well or semi-well known to the anonymous, including the anonymous of the favela. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The prime mover of Dharma Arte is Carlos Inada of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Carlos has worked tireless to launch and keep afloat this bi-lingual and elegant contraption. I will provide occasional links to Dharma Arte in the future, but please check it out for yourself, <a href="http://blogs.dharma.art.br/" target="_blank">especially their blog</a>. It is an expression of the creative vastness of the drala principle, as well as a site many readers might like to participate in. This is also the last week of Dharma Arte's annual fundraising drive, and if any of you are inspired to support them in this way, it would of course be welcome. </span></div><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_592727111"><br />
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</a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">From </span><a href="http://blogs.dharma.art.br/2012/01/george-steiner-language-and-silence/" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" target="_blank"><i>George Steiner: Language and Silence</i></a><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">, printed in <i>Dharma Arte</i>: In my view, [literature and philosophy] are under threat today. Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes. We no longer have writers like Balzac and Zola, geniuses of human comedy who could explore every domain. Proust also created an inexhaustible world, and Joyce’s Ulysses is still very close to Homer… Joyce is the bridge between the two great worlds of classicism and chaos. In the past, philosophy could also claim to be universal. The entire world was open to the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza. Today an immense part of the universe is closed to us... </span><a href="http://blogs.dharma.art.br/2012/01/george-steiner-language-and-silence/" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" target="_blank">(read more)</a></div></blockquote>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-14584197242204769462011-12-28T13:16:00.000-07:002011-12-28T13:16:43.973-07:00"DRALA" or "DRALHA"?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiimUGvYYOmq0FNQQOuQDRbmbztfPMVGlMSV5UX3UaOHqaXacsn9yZnxsOUMeokBwq0z_ruZ2FFuh40-QoKwmtSDAtbnTazyUXAi1sA_Lo51UFGE75Yl7Qb2u14zG4vy_dgV8t-yz2i_PmN/s1600/Statue+Budapest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
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</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Poetry is the other voice. Not the voice of history</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">or of anti-history, but the voice which, in history,</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">is saying something different. - Octavio Paz</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Though it is the still the end of the year, it already feels to me like the new one - these last days of 2011 are a <i>cusp</i>, defined as <i>a pointed end where two curves meet, in particular. </i>We might invent time, but the circle of our planet orbiting the sun is "real" and we are about to enter the next circle - or dreamtime - of our collective lives. 2012.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">It occurred to me that this would be a good time to return to the root of this website, which is the drala principle. I came across a definition of drala from the <a href="http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Drala" target="_blank">Rigpa Shedra Wiki</a>, the "online encyclopedia of Tibetan Buddhism." </span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><b>Drala or dralha</b></i>: dynamically active non-human beings inhabiting the air element, who are usually invisible to ordinary human perception...</span> <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Drala may be spelled two ways: ‘drala’ and ‘dralha’. These suggest two ways in which the inner aspect can be understood. ‘Drala’ connects it to la, one of the fundamental life-forces; so it can be seen as an aspect of our life-force which functions to protect us from our ‘enemies’. ‘Dralha’ connects it to lha, ‘deity’. This term should be understood to signify simultaneously both a natural force operating in the phenomenal world, and an aspect of our own pure awareness. </span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This text correlates to the teaching Lord Mukpo gave on drala, though over the course of an eight-year span of periodic talks on this subject, Lord Mukpo created a matrix for our understanding that amplifies and greatly expands upon these definitions, bringing forth the "universality" - as I like to put it - of the drala experience. In upcoming posts, I will comment on this "matrix," but for now, I will share comments Lord Mukpo gave at the end of a talk in 1981 to a gathering of senior students. Here the potential or reality of "meeting the dralas" is put in the most unequivocal and personal terms, an imperative on how this meeting is really up to us.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">I was hoping, quite wholeheartedly actually, quite wholeheartedly, that the drala principle would descend on you and become part of you. So far as I have seen here – maybe I have been coming at the wrong time of the day, but I have watched the things happening here – the sadhana was poorly attended, and it was very stiff, like what we have now ("sadhana" refers to sessions of meditation with a text we had been presented with) . There was no humor. </div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"> Usually, when you and I get together, we have some kind of fun. That is true of each of you. We always do. So that is the message: why don’t you use that kind of fun to improvise something else? I feel somewhat frustrated, myself - constipated as well. I feel that I could give you, impart to you, introduce to you, such wonderful ladies and gentlemen of the drala principle. They are longing to meet you! At this point I’m afraid I have to be very bold: they’re longing to meet you… Let’s actually do it, ladies and gentlemen. I have been working with you, all of you, for lots of years. So why on earth do you have to create a barrier to exclude the dralas from your life? For heaven’s sake, heaven and earth, can’t we just relax a little bit. And please, shed a few tears. That will help a lot. </div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><i style="color: #660000;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Writings on the Drala Principle</span></b></i><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Bonnie McCandless is a friend I met in my travels to Washington DC. Bonnie "searches for spiritual meaning in everyday life and often writes about those dark moments that deliver brightness." She has generously offered us an essay/story on the drala principle.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="color: #660000; text-align: left;"><i><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A NEW CHAIR</span></b></i></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">by Bonnie McCandless</span><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning at 9:45 a.m. I enter a dialysis center and, after weighing in, make my way to my chair for treatment that consists of 3 and ¾ hours of being hooked to a machine which filters the toxins out of my blood, doing the job that my defective kidneys can no longer do for themselves. I say “my chair” because I am usually assigned to occupy the same chair every time, giving me a sense of belonging but also boredom with the same view and the same technicians sticking me, hooking me up and monitoring me for the duration.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Yesterday was different. It was Veteran’s Day, the auspicious 11-11-11 date, a Friday before a long weekend. As often happens on such days, I received a phone call at 7:30 a.m. asking me if I want to come in early and I always answer yes. So I arrived at the center at 8:30 and my usual chair was not ready for me, so I was given a different chair, which made all the difference that day.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As I made myself comfortable in the chair – feet up, blanket draped over my legs, blood pressure cuff on my right arm, left arm exposed and ready for sticking – I felt a warmth on my face and looked up to see a shimmer of gold across the room. “Wow!” I said to Jarrod, the tech at my side, “look at those trees out the window! They look like gold coins blowing in the wind!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">He followed my gaze and smiled, nodding. “Nice,” he murmured and then returned his attention to preparing my arm for the access to the machine. First the arteriole, then the venous. “This one down and this up?” he asked.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I nodded, still mesmerized by the shining trees. Then I looked at his fingers on my arm. “No, “ I said. “The arteriole is usually sideways.” “Like this?” “Yes.” “Ok.” “And don’t be afraid to go deep,” I urged him and returned my gaze to outside the window across the room.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The room was outlined on the left by chairs filled with dialysis patients like myself and on the right by nurse stations and back rooms where other staff came and went on an irregular basis. There was a steady undercurrent of beeping from the filtration machines and a blinking of lights, each with a specific message signaling a particular need or task to be filled by the steady stream of nurses and techs. But the activity in the room fell away to a blurred background and the gold shimmering trees moved into the foreground of my vision, almost as if they moved into the room itself to greet me.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In reality, the sunlight hit the leaves from the east and the wind blew the branches back and forth so they seemed disembodied from their roots and the leaves actually shook like gold coins dancing in mid air. I stared in awe at the shimmering gold which now nearly filled the room. This mystical moment was pierced by physical pain as the needle entered my arteriole access. I winced slightly but held my arm still for Jarrod to find the artery where my clean blood would flow back into my body. He poked around a bit, went a little deeper, I winced more, nearly crying “ouch” and then he stopped, satisfied that he had found the right spot. He propped up the needle shaft with rolled-up gauze and taped the entire apparatus to my arm. I lost my distraction with the dralas and focused on the physical discomfort in my arm for a moment. Then the warmth from the golden shimmering leaves drew me back and I returned to the breath.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The venous entry was upwards, deep and clean. Nice draw. No pain. I closed my eyes and relaxed. When I opened them, the leaves were back outside the window and were turning red-brown-orange-yellow-green with bits of branches tying them together. The magical moment had passed and my blood was starting to process through the filtration process and return to the body, clean again.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I saw Jarrod glance across the room to the window and smile, and I knew the dralas had found him this morning too. Perhaps even the briefest moments of magical mystery can be transforming, even if we’re not trained to dwell in it? I was fortunate to have spent several years in Shambhala training in D.C. that built upon my chosen field of aesthetic education, but I don’t know if Jarrod has had such training. Anyway, it has been too many years now since I’ve been a regular student of the dralas. When we’re not “in training,” I guess we need to change chairs once in a while to capture a fresh view and reconnect mood with sense experience. The problem is that I don’t know how often my drala experiences are associated so much with pleasure as with pain, or with both together? And does it matter? What would </span><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Trungpa say?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I have a grumpy old kidney doctor who visits once a month and comments on blood pressure or fluid weight gains and spouts archaic clichés about dialysis keeping us alive and we should get over our anger issues and get into a good book or play video games to pass the time. But the physical pain of needles being stuck in my arm and the mental boredom of four hours of viewing the travel channels or cooking shows, watching the clock tick away, only to go home and take a 90 minute nap and wake up with a headache sometimes pushes my endurance to the limit. I think of my father’s experience with dialysis and his comment that he was ready to end it all himself rather than go through the excruciating anguish of being tied to a machine and how “congestive heart failure” saved him from that drastic choice, ironically suffering a heart attack in a dialysis chair and being called “code blue” from the dialysis unit and taken directly to the hospital unit, then to the morgue.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But I’m not my father, I tell myself. He couldn’t stand to stay indoors during a blizzard; he had to go out for his morning coffee and newspaper. I’m not that ADHD, though I did inherit a good swath of his ocd tendencies. But I look at the faces of the patients around me – the blank stares, the open-mouthed sleepers, the readers, the TV viewers, the chatters, the game players – and I can’t help but think that if not for the dralas, each one of us is maybe a step or two away from pulling the trigger some days. Except for those who are brought in daily on a stretcher and often taken out in a code blue, like my father; they seem half dead already.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I wonder how the dralas enter our lives when there is so much closed heart? What if I hadn’t seen those gold leaves yesterday? What is the limit of our endurance to sit in the same chair day after day and see the same clock ticking away? I hear the tech Theresa giggle and it turns my head. That’s a drala speaking to me. On TV I watch a Vietnamese woman prepare a colorful steaming noodle soup in an open-air stall in Ho Chi Min City and can almost smell the scents that go along with the street noises. That’s a drala scene I am vicariously experiencing. The social worker smiles with drala insight as she brings me good news yesterday. I have been granted a spot in a dialysis unit near my son’s home on the Friday after Thanksgiving, so my travel plans could now be completed. I would be able to visit with my son’s family for those few precious days – joust with my grandson, hold my new granddaughter, share stories with my daughter-in-law and be shocked once again at how much my son reminds me of his father. I know this visit will give me a new chair’s view on a variety of drala experiences and let my moods flow again, one at a time, in and out, like my breath. The dralas don’t always appear as gold coins in the wind, but I’m grateful that I’ve learned to be open to them whenever and wherever they arrive.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-79996156652866930652011-12-09T13:56:00.013-07:002011-12-11T06:51:12.645-07:00NINE MINUTES OF SILENCE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi21YrAu1kEOnAPQqxy8yP45bkApf7j9-I9SRUCYYOqTWDw9ARuUJDDc2B33wY8YKX02YNCFvO0Jz0HdbaC6c1sL73ah44G2cTmK531FTntthAsWA03hHTMXhkp8rOp8Lyh92OXnzMoVq9i/s1600/Camera.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi21YrAu1kEOnAPQqxy8yP45bkApf7j9-I9SRUCYYOqTWDw9ARuUJDDc2B33wY8YKX02YNCFvO0Jz0HdbaC6c1sL73ah44G2cTmK531FTntthAsWA03hHTMXhkp8rOp8Lyh92OXnzMoVq9i/s320/Camera.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Camera. <i>Newseum</i>, Washington, DC</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">The camera above was used to shoot one of the most iconic photographs of the Vietnam war. It is also an example of camera as weapon/art as weapon. The photograph, by photojournalist Eddie Adams (see below), shows a soldier (actually a general) of the South Vietnamese army executing an alleged Viet Cong prisoner. I saw the photograph and camera yesterday, when I visited the <i>Newseum</i>, Washington DC's museum of news history. I was in the basement, where the photos of Adams and other Pulitzer Prize winners were on display, including another, equally iconic and horrible: a young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm is shown running in terror away from her village, naked. Those two photographs may have done as much to end the Vietnam war as any single politician or protest march. They crossed bounds of heretofore journalistic propriety and invaded America's psyche in a kind of double reverse; shaming the nation's conscience and exposing the lie that we could win the <i>hearts and minds</i> of the Vietnamese through war. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Yet Eddie Adams had mixed feeling about the photograph and even came to consider it an act of violence, one that injured another man in the photograph. "I killed the general with my camera," he later said. "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two, or three American people?" Adams eventually made a personal apology to General Nguyen Ngoc Loan for the damage the photograph did to his reputation. A photograph can be like a bullet. A photograph <i>is</i> like a poem, which lives its own life and exists, as Octavio Paz wrote, "at the expense of the poet." </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"></blockquote></div></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4l8gY-IRYPh-vvmxZydwPWw7GS0TcGepyohuxuXOy8-0sYHysAqtQYSVkK5FfZPwkFET5YKeFaRNms4w06J5r0SoAsDInKKBgfS8zlsKAU_0RBC67qJJZ19R6UZeVp6TlyY77u5bqBOIj/s1600/Vietnam+execution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4l8gY-IRYPh-vvmxZydwPWw7GS0TcGepyohuxuXOy8-0sYHysAqtQYSVkK5FfZPwkFET5YKeFaRNms4w06J5r0SoAsDInKKBgfS8zlsKAU_0RBC67qJJZ19R6UZeVp6TlyY77u5bqBOIj/s320/Vietnam+execution.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Eddie Adams, Saigon Execution, 1969.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Newseum, Washington, DC</span></div><br />
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<i style="color: #660000;"><b>WHAT IS "OCCUPY WALL STREET"?</b></i></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj2MpgxUJh2SCZlBVfA8FhXfhsfvprZ9fHTk69CeSsrbx8t89hLICoSNbGXpk4_gPgyTYqC2WXUFYfgMGZeeoyoJuuzIrIgZ95M6OKIdXsoGN-lqp4h7roVi_8B_6ag30wgjLVUvT5WZQT/s1600/OWS+Flier.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj2MpgxUJh2SCZlBVfA8FhXfhsfvprZ9fHTk69CeSsrbx8t89hLICoSNbGXpk4_gPgyTYqC2WXUFYfgMGZeeoyoJuuzIrIgZ95M6OKIdXsoGN-lqp4h7roVi_8B_6ag30wgjLVUvT5WZQT/s320/OWS+Flier.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Occupy Wall Street flier.</span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">This photograph, too, has become iconic - at least at this moment in history. A young woman dancer, perfectly poised on the back of the bronze <i>Merrill Lynch</i> bull while protesters behind her struggle with gas masks in air clouded by tear gas. Not photojournalism or <i>cinéma vérité</i>, but Photoshopped from someone's imagination, it somehow feels as real as the Vietnam era photographs. Not an image of innocence lost, but of its triumph, even if fleeting and on only one foot.<br />
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I went to OWS Washington DC on Saturday for what had been advertized earlier in the week as "nine minutes of silence" on December third at three in the afternoon. I arrived at two forty-five (this time with only two roasted chickens), but no one seemed to know about the silence - another expectation that swiveled into something else. Below the statue of General McPherson I joined an "education circle" of about a dozen people. The discussion was largely Marxist based; the struggle of the working class, the institutionalized use of nationalism to prevent workers of the world from uniting, and the need for racial and GLTB equality. Worn-out slogans were mixed with touching anecdotes of life as a bus driver or resident of OWS DC. The group patiently allowed each other to speak and tolerated the incessant repetitions of some of the more ideological members of the circle.<br />
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We stood on the damp grass of McPherson square without any of us having much ground to stand on and just a minute or two to dispense our own views and feelings into the mix. People looked openly at each other when they spoke. As in my experience of getting a hug in Romania, I felt I received something very needed and long overdue. In this case, a circle of people talking freely, with open hearts, about what they cared about, a transmission of civic life, essential. <br />
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There are many ways to learn about/participate in OWS, and as I've poked around on the web or received links from someone's e-mail I have encountered what I sensed was there; a vision that is spiritually sound and somewhat unprecedented, perhaps even the arrival of "genius" as Gertrude Stein defined it; being <i>confused</i> because the current time is <i>always</i> confusing, but confused with "nowness" rather that the past, and thus able to express something new and therefore creatively apt (likewise, Lord Mukpo's definition of <i>nowness</i> was combining the wisdom of the past with the needs of the present moment; not copying, but <i>seeing</i>). <br />
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</b></i><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="color: black;">Just as our own physical or emotional pain is often an expression of something within us seeking communication, understanding, and healing, activists are often brave messengers of the pain of the "body politic" and we owe them a great deal (John Muir, Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk). It's not that everyone should carry a sign or engage in civil disobedience, but our own calling is inseparable from a collective suffering or environmental damage that we could help to alleviate. A central aspect of the drala principle is that the dralas are attracted to courage, especially the courage of vulnerability, speaking one's truth, and going "beyond enemy".</span></span></div></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: left;">At its heart, Occupy is not a protest. It’s about creating space. It’s about modeling a new way of being, that requires a fair amount of “unlearning” the way society and human nature has been taught. It’s asking the question: why? Why are things they way they are? Is it, in fact, human nature to be greedy, violent, and cruel? Or is it possible that these are symptoms of a systemic order? - Ian MacKenzie <a href="http://www.ianmack.com/"> </a></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: left;">Below is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtc-k6dhgs&sns=fb" target="_blank">an impressive video</a>, directed by documentary filmmaker <a href="http://www.ianmack.com/" target="_blank">Ian MacKenzie</a>, author of the quote above. The video is an articulation of the "mission statement" of OWS, as expressed by one individual, Charles Eisenstein, author of <a href="http://www.realitysandwich.com/homepage_sacred_economics" target="_blank">Sacred Economics</a>, who comes across as well-spoken, clear-seeing; someone possessing <i>shinjang</i> - a term from Tibetan Buddhism that means to be "thoroughly processed," possessing a mind adequately tamed through personal discipline, therefore clear and fully connected to the heart (for a more thorough definition, see below). I was so impressed by what Eisenstein says on this video that I transcribed it, though to really <i>feel</i> his message the video is essential. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizdbTtDdl4MASzwOrIbnPiD7tJjyL9AQQFLbv90N1UWw9wC-NLxjolPmsXdfzHVlZLPyD7dMugYhJ3Bl1ijfyoKK6vOedpT-LwcRiDncWxqrSMYGxM7LvPFswuObwO5cfrSQNeWZWI5g7W/s1600/Charles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizdbTtDdl4MASzwOrIbnPiD7tJjyL9AQQFLbv90N1UWw9wC-NLxjolPmsXdfzHVlZLPyD7dMugYhJ3Bl1ijfyoKK6vOedpT-LwcRiDncWxqrSMYGxM7LvPFswuObwO5cfrSQNeWZWI5g7W/s320/Charles.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Charles Eisenstein, author of <a href="http://www.realitysandwich.com/homepage_sacred_economics" target="_blank">Sacred Economics</a>.</span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i style="color: #660000;"><b>Occupy Wall Street - The Revolution is Love</b> </i> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtc-k6dhgs&sns=fb" target="_blank">Watch four-minute video</a></div></div></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This movement isn’t about the ninety-nine percent defeating or toppling the one percent. You know the next chapter of that story, which is the ninety-nine percent create a new one percent. That’s not what it’s about. What we want to do is create the more beautiful world our heart’s tell us is possible. A sacred world, a world that works for everybody. A world that is healing, a world of peace. <br />
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You can’t just say, We demand a world of peace. Demands have to be specific. Anything that can be articulated can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse and that entire political discourse is already too small. That is why making specific demands reduces the movement and takes the heart out of it. And so it’s a real paradox and I think the movement understands that. <br />
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The system isn’t working for the one percent either. If you were a CEO you would be making the same choices they do. The institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top, too, and all of the baubles of the rich are a kind of phony compensation for the loss of what’ really important, for the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning. <br />
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Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. Today we live in a money economy where we don’t really depend on the gifts of anybody but we buy everything, therefore we don’t really need anybody, because whoever grew my food, or made my clothes or built my house, if they died or I alienated them, that’s OK because I can just pay somebody else to do it. It’s really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is: we don’t need each other. <br />
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Maybe people get together and the fraternize, or maybe they consume together, but joint consumption doesn’t create intimacy. Only joint creativity and gifts create intimacy and connection. You have such gifts, which are important, just like every species has a an important gift to give to an ecosystem and the extinction of any species hurts everybody. <br />
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The same is true of each person, that you have a necessary and important gift to give. For a long time our minds have told us that maybe we are imagining things, that maybe it’s crazy to live according to what you want to give. But I think now, as more and more people wake up to the truth that we are here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that that other way isn’t working anyway, the more reinforcement we have from people around us that this isn’t crazy, this makes sense, this is how to live. As we get that reinforcement, then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart, which wants us to be in service. <br />
The shift of consciousness that inspires such things is universal in everybody, ninety-nine percent and one percent. It’s awakening in different people in different ways. I think love is the felt experience of connection to another being. <br />
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An economist says, essentially, that more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too. If you love somebody then their happiness is your happiness, their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. That’s love. Love is the expansion of the self to include the other. <br />
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That’s a different kind of revolution; there’s no one to fight, there’s no evil to fight, there’s no “other” in this revolution. Everybody has a unique calling. It’s really time to listen to that. That’s what the future is going to be. It’s time to get ready for it and help contribute to it and make it happen. </div></blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">. . .</div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCXwuosHm1C5rdpiOF42cErV_5pklETzs0Un9G4NJex2_RTNDl92eWfoFDXwKx7sK8OTV58XC6-WXAGUiot4lt7ljaqA8lFdKtVbEYetRFYxnpA9_zWiZBYbONdGLeahdPKvz20Z523NGU/s1600/Shinjang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCXwuosHm1C5rdpiOF42cErV_5pklETzs0Un9G4NJex2_RTNDl92eWfoFDXwKx7sK8OTV58XC6-WXAGUiot4lt7ljaqA8lFdKtVbEYetRFYxnpA9_zWiZBYbONdGLeahdPKvz20Z523NGU/s1600/Shinjang.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
<i><b><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Shinjang</span> -</span></b></i> from Mangala Sri Buti website. </div><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The experience of shinjang is like “mental endorphins”. It comes from practicing consistently. It provides mental space. We must build up shinjang to be effective, and then we must maintain it. Shinjang gives spaciousness, tranquility, clarity, and perspective of mind. There is a calm, a detachment, and a feeling of a thrill in- side to go deeper into practice. One feels pleasure with one’s mind and with one’s experience of mind at that moment. This comes up as a part of shinjang. We meditate to discover the truth. If we are meditating and yet are not connected to our heart to discover the truth then shinjang might not re- sult. One’s posture and concentration on the breath opens the channels to the heart. The heart opens and energy flows and soothes one’s whole body. The mind and heart become almost one. Then one can concentrate, penetrate (thoughts) without scatteredness, being wholly integrated. Even rising thoughts are not so disturbing. So, shinjang mind penetrates the body. Well-being comes from within and it will in- filtrate mind’s projection (i.e., the body). Shinjang affects the phenomenal world, society, one’s family and personal relationships, one’s health and the unknown future.</span></div></blockquote><div style="color: #660000;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"Lower-archy" as "natural heirarchy"?</span></b></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Lord Mukpo introduced the term "natural hierarchy" as an element of "Shambhala vision" and I am intrigued and drawn to the aptness of "lower-archy" and "horizontalism" to our time and its needs, as expressed in this excerpt from <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/164932/hard-times-occupy-boston" target="_blank">Hard Times at Occupy Boston, from <i>The Nation</i>:</a></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When Occupy Boston started, John locked up the independent bookstore he runs in Plymouth, packed about half of his inventory in a truck and set up the soon-to-be-named-by-consensus <i>Howard Zinn/Audre Lorde Library</i> inside a military tent at Dewey Square. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Like many of the campers, John’s life before the Occupation was anything but conventional. An autodidact, John passed up college and bounced from minimum-wage job to minimum-wage job. He worked at companies he loathed like McDonald’s and Jiffy Lube and “tried to intentionally slow the process from within.” When he found that strategy ineffective, he set out on his own as a “street hustler” and eventually helped start the enormously successful (if legally shady) Yankees Suck empire, which has sold tens of thousands of T-shirts to rabid Red Sox fans outside of Fenway Park. Two of his friends from the business, Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann, used the small fortune they made to travel to Iraq in 2005. They finagled their way into jobs with the Coalition Provisional Authority and wrote a book about it, Babylon By Bus. John was inspired by their adventurism and thought about joining them but opted to hitchhike across America instead. When he returned several years later, tragedy struck. His father, a carpenter, was installing eaves on a wealthy client’s boathouse when he fell to his death. John inherited his father’s home and opened the <i>Metacomet</i> bookstore, named after the Wampanoag chief who led the Native American uprising against the British colonists.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">John won’t say the word, but it’s clear that he’s the de facto leader of Occupy Boston. When he talks, other Occupiers listen. When problems arise at camp, people go to John. “If certain people are producing good ideas, they get noticed here. But the deference is to practicality, not personality,” says John with forced modesty. One camper told me that Occupy is less a “leaderless” movement than a “lower-archy”; power is never seized, he explained, but when you show wisdom, people grant you power, and that power can be taken away at any moment if you act irresponsibly. - <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/164932/hard-times-occupy-boston" target="_blank">Sam Graham-Felsen, The Nation.</a> </span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSfGOi5WDaExrxKnEuBZEQOBz26swlo9duMAboOBMhIzCSPeBYuHSZUK_YiNM4j5rZRwLY5jp7Kc_gP9G5VS5tyR5-sukPLctnrGObV-gHE6mZ-nd1Dbf6NTwaaZ-J9-je-5jLmXqX0q60/s1600/Planet+like+earth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSfGOi5WDaExrxKnEuBZEQOBz26swlo9duMAboOBMhIzCSPeBYuHSZUK_YiNM4j5rZRwLY5jp7Kc_gP9G5VS5tyR5-sukPLctnrGObV-gHE6mZ-nd1Dbf6NTwaaZ-J9-je-5jLmXqX0q60/s320/Planet+like+earth.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> WASHINGTON - A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside our solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, except for one hitch. The planet is in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard to find place that's not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, doesn't freeze or boil. And it has a shopping mall-like surface temperature of near 72 degrees, scientists say. </span><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/newly-discovered-planet-kepler-22b-eerily-similar-earth-nasa-finds-article-1.987369#ixzz1g2bLXBAK" target="_blank">Read more<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=515721238438787220&postID=7999615665286693065">...</a> </span></span></div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
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</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-28426268288520750412011-11-26T09:55:00.058-07:002011-11-27T04:20:30.943-07:00Thanksgiving Day, Occupy Wall Street DC<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJgCHwMamKeqBjwU6TQL-stg9HGXqHQ369fkJRjPqEDSipgtLl6qvaNAmVh2BKrXdwSRO-zSOuuOiQoJLY3hBtybgJwKBTh_TzOhqj_0Uf-Ne76gLY9tf_NNO8Z5C89ekCPSHFCv2KaA2v/s1600/Flag+detail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJgCHwMamKeqBjwU6TQL-stg9HGXqHQ369fkJRjPqEDSipgtLl6qvaNAmVh2BKrXdwSRO-zSOuuOiQoJLY3hBtybgJwKBTh_TzOhqj_0Uf-Ne76gLY9tf_NNO8Z5C89ekCPSHFCv2KaA2v/s320/Flag+detail.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
<i>Movements shift the public will - Rinku Sen</i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">I've written again about Occupy Wall Street DC, this time my experiences there on Thanksgiving day - see below. In the spirit of exploring the word "occupy," the two words "basic goodness," and how individuals can "shift the public will," I have another video clip to share. A seventeen year old Toronto high school student and victim of bullying, Jacques St. Pierre, wrote to Lady Gaga and several other celebrities to ask them to support the movement to end bullying in schools. To St. Pierre's astonishment, he recieved an a-mail from Lady Gaga herself a few days later, as reported in Huffington Post:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: left;">"The subject line said 'To Jacques from Lady Gaga,'" he told (CBS new correspondent Melanie) Nagy. "It said 'click on the link below to download the video for your assembly.' So no questions asked, Lady Gaga sent us a video. I watched it, and I started crying. I'm a huge fan. It's kind of embarrassing because I love her so much. I couldn't believe it."</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">I started to cry, too. Here's a link to the full <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/11/25/lady-gaga-bullying-video-jacques-st-pierre-etobicoke-school_n_1113216.html">Huggington Post article and video</a>. </div><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;">. . . </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisD78yg3aVIKUPkV0-vVQL3sw616YmSgdwA3yPAPZtXgskdM4o7mJXztpqU3N_wIKzcWd1RwnpAuymN3ylF-UK_GF21qEjYmNhoXDvDwUtdaUzOvVov5-liECyMGtJ0aRNDzsU1m3WMSw-/s1600/Gen+McPherson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisD78yg3aVIKUPkV0-vVQL3sw616YmSgdwA3yPAPZtXgskdM4o7mJXztpqU3N_wIKzcWd1RwnpAuymN3ylF-UK_GF21qEjYmNhoXDvDwUtdaUzOvVov5-liECyMGtJ0aRNDzsU1m3WMSw-/s320/Gen+McPherson.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Statue of General James B. McPherson,</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">McPherson Square, Washington D.C</span>. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="color: #660000; text-align: left;"><b>Thanksgiving Day, Occupy Wall Street DC</b><br />
<span style="color: black;">(<a href="http://westernmountain.org/downloads.html">Down load PDF of article</a>) </span><b><br />
</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I bought $80 worth of roasted chickens at the Peruvian rotisserie and hailed a cab for McPherson Square. The driver approved of what I was doing - donating food to the OWS tent city - and we were both in a good mood on an exquisite sixty-three degree Thanksgiving day, with no wind, a clear sky, and the fallen oak leaves still strong with a muted orange that made the sky all the more blue. I paid him eight dollars including tip for the ride, which meant I was still twelve dollars short of the $100 I told myself I would donate to OWS on this Thanksgiving day. I'd recently spent a hundred dollars or more on so many hotel rooms over so many nights - not to mention the hundreds of dollars over a lifetime on this or that pack of cigarettes, bottles of Côtes Du Rhône, DVD rentals, novels I never finished and clothes I thought I needed - that this was a small sacrifice indeed, as well as a more creative and interesting use of a hundred dollar bill. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">At the head of a line of folding utility tables where all the other food that had been donated - everything from turkey to pizza to glazed doughnuts - was being served was a young man who looked like he was in charge of something, at least for the moment. I told him I had five roasted chickens. He asked if they were cut, I said "no" and he escorted me to the kitchen tent, showed me the cutting board, and gave me a knife. After I'd hacked leg from thigh and breast from ribcage, I washed my hands with antiseptic gel from a dispenser bottle, since of course there was no running water, covered the chicken back up with aluminum foil - they wouldn't be needed until later since so many other people had also donated - and left the tent. The young man couldn't think of any more work that need to be done, so I began to mill around and get to know the place a little bit more for the second day in a row.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The first place I went was the library tent. Not surprisingly, it was by far the most orderly, if not serene, nine square yards of McPherson Square (though many of the private tents were also models of organized space usage). A young man named Brian told me the books had all arrived a few at a time, donations that had now filled the tent and were all organized into clearly labeled sections: education, democracy, identity politics, labor issues. As libraries are closing all over the country, in OWS they are springing up inside tents. Maybe this would be one of the best ways to continue the movement; street-side library tents? And what is more potentially transformative and powerfully non-violent than a book?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">An older man was inside the library with me, browsing the books in the posture of browsing; shoulders slightly hunched and head cocked to the side in order to read the spine titles. It's a posture of privacy and inquiry; one feels quite safe and comforted inhabiting it, protected from interruption and millimeters away from a book that might change ones life or at least provide the next footsteps in the lifelong educational growth that written language supplies us. That's what the man was looking at, the Language section. His posture reminded me of my father and of myself, men who like(d) to browse bookstore aisles.</div><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Outside of the library tent I ran into the woman who had given me the list of things I might donate to the encampment. She recognized me and smiled immediately. "I brought five roasted chickens," I said. Rene - I learned her name during our conversation - hugged me and kept her arm around me, escorting me in the direction she'd been walking. "I told you I'd be back," I said, "Yep, I see you are." Rene had the same alert presence as she did twenty-four hours ago, and added, "I've been up for forty-eight hours, working ever since the marchers from New York City arrived." She showed me to tents she had procured for them. "They're stuffed in there at night like sausages, but at least they are warm."</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJoERlTbx3PFnjMsvlCarOqv4pqOTfhdhlaQqRYRix1TKtoGn7JjREWUoc5rCwzRNKBj4mO8WUymCy7jGHOk8arv20IcLZJcwTfrAdosKjMkZUMd7QImUQ197MT54ZzLP44SU4GP8NzsXF/s1600/Prayer+flags+and+tent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJoERlTbx3PFnjMsvlCarOqv4pqOTfhdhlaQqRYRix1TKtoGn7JjREWUoc5rCwzRNKBj4mO8WUymCy7jGHOk8arv20IcLZJcwTfrAdosKjMkZUMd7QImUQ197MT54ZzLP44SU4GP8NzsXF/s320/Prayer+flags+and+tent.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Tent door, OWS DC</span>.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">The library tent, as well as the choice residential tent locations, face and open onto the circular sidewalk that rings the statue of General James B. McPherson, the only army commander to die in the field of battle during the Civil War. The bronze man and horse tower above the encampment in a synchronistic symbol of sacrifice. I walked down the sidewalks that bisect the park and as I got close to one tent a women emerged and gazing vaguely in my direction - though never directly at me - began to shout, "You come in the direction of this tent and you're charged immediately with attempted rape. I mean it, you're charged with rape and I'm not kidding mother fucker." As they were yesterday, the realities of mental illness, former abuse, and homelessness were represented in every quadrant of the square.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">As I walked on, an African American woman holding three chocolate chip cookies approached me and asked for money. As she began to spin the details of her story I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to her (now I had donated $108). She increased the dramatic enactment of her story, gave me the chocolate chip cookies, took me by the hand, and started to lead me to the street. It was logical and humane for her to try to get more from me, and when I said the twenty was all I could give she took it well and insisted that I eat all three cookies myself.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I ran into the librarian again who told me his name was Phil. He was twenty-four, exactly three years younger than my own son, and I could have easily guessed his age. A tall, muscular, and street-worn black man of my age approached us and reached with both hands into the pockets of his coat, pulled out something sticky and orange - a kind of grain, pumpkin, squash; I had no idea - and intermittently stuffed the food into his mouth, which spilled out again as he spoke to us. He zeroed in on me. I told him where I was from and where I had lived. It was hard to understand him, but he kept saying something about my age, "Born in the early 1950's" he said a number of times - certainly correct about my age and making me feel like that fact was the only one I know about my existence. There's few faster ways to have self-credentials rattled than to carry on a conversation with someone who is mentally ill. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I was taken back to the 1980s, after then-California-governor Ronald Reagan had closed the state mental institutions which responded by dumping their populations onto the street. At the Berkeley meditation center, which was so much a part of my life then, there always seemed to be a mentally ill person in the building - since they knew it was one that might accommodate them - and I often navigated the boundary between seeing if the person would behave reasonably, and therefore be allowed to stay in the room while we meditated or held a class, or if they had to be asked to leave. In those moments I always felt tested. Was my compassion real or a sham? To what degree was this person telling me the truth or hustling me? And where is the moral boundary between giving someone your time and telling them you have to go?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">As always in any moment of reality - not to mention any social configuration - there are many stories that could be told about OWS DC. I'm writing about the intersection between homelessness and the OWS movement - the very visceral reality of it - because this is the story that has most prominently come my way, and through it I am understanding something. Apropos to this understanding, I received an e-mail from a friend in response to the blog I wrote yesterday:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">Your piece on the encampment touches many of the feelings and thoughts I've been having about it here in Portland. The camp was taken down a week ago now, but as in DC, the camp had become a gathering of much of the city's homeless population after the initial momentum began to dwindle. One protester returned to his tent to sleep and was jabbed by a used needle someone had left behind - the media feasted on that incident.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: left;">My teacher once said, "Luxury is experiencing reality." Living here at McPherson Square is a bit more luxury than I'm willing to experience, but I think this is clearly the reality he was talking about. Closer to the elements and not shielded from pain. It makes perfect sense that homeless people would move in - just as they came to the Berkeley meditation center. Here they are not shunned and were in fact invited (as my friend told me they were in Portland). </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">That the homeless population might overpower the abilities of the OWS demonstrators - just as the cold might - is completely natural. Homelessness is part of a soup whose recipe includes most of the issues the protesters are aware of and protesting: PTSD from childhood abuse, alcohol and drug addiction in the family, napalm dropped in the Vietnam War, roadside bombs in Iraq, vets turned out on the street, sub-prime loans made in the poorest neighborhoods with contracts signed by machines, cancer caused from living near Superfund sites, and families without any medical insurance. Pain and neglect rolls downhill and OWS DC is a downhill collection site. A horrific and beautiful campground that I feel privileged to have entered and a lot happier for having done do. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnXpr_RaK9APICwhBY19cx_VhKCqwdDa3MJ8IkOuO2K8ycNUhYIRd86ii4tP9xhnwTMMvpp_1xjElKDzXC4wc05EAUvSaYf4YtDDNO8ZfZbibxR-ljC-ErnINsvOz48YwjxWKVTGFblSnZ/s1600/OWS+Sign.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnXpr_RaK9APICwhBY19cx_VhKCqwdDa3MJ8IkOuO2K8ycNUhYIRd86ii4tP9xhnwTMMvpp_1xjElKDzXC4wc05EAUvSaYf4YtDDNO8ZfZbibxR-ljC-ErnINsvOz48YwjxWKVTGFblSnZ/s320/OWS+Sign.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Just as there were many stories I could tell about the ninety-minutes I spent at McPherson Square on Thanksgiving day, 2011, there were many reasons why I had to come. The central reason I had to come... is that <i>I just knew I had to come</i>. That feeling had struck me when I was still in Turkey, when I first read about the OWS encampment in NYC. It wasn't until later in the day - at 2:28 AM as a matter of fact, when I was lying in bed wide awake - that it struck me that something had been "transmitted" to me by coming, and that I had entered OWS. It was a good feeling. I no longer felt outside of something I had admired and identified with, but inside it. And I knew that this feeling was the point, the message of that word "occupy," that it means - to quote Ram Dass from 1970 - "be here now." It means <i>be here now</i> with a 2011 twist, that we can be here now with a lot of other people, without any one particular agenda, but with an increased commitment to push and nudge global society in a more positive direction. It means to move, to the degree one can and is willing, outside of the comfort zone and into the chaos. It's not about seeking utopia, aggrandizing oneself, or being hopelessly idealistic, and therefore naive. It's about coming out of the closet.</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5614W8_VZ9WKBeiS6T4Q8HuO9s_-GXXHmeF8TziRY6iMpm0Ks9pzAi6YXQ2-bqt93Xg0afKJKKdhaJoTdskjCCNVzPvQ0X72j9wFPqFHknczABXBveEsmYQKEp99weY6EvkuavMUP6rSp/s1600/Library.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5614W8_VZ9WKBeiS6T4Q8HuO9s_-GXXHmeF8TziRY6iMpm0Ks9pzAi6YXQ2-bqt93Xg0afKJKKdhaJoTdskjCCNVzPvQ0X72j9wFPqFHknczABXBveEsmYQKEp99weY6EvkuavMUP6rSp/s320/Library.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Inside the library tent, OWS DC.</span></span></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-49127577595389967022011-11-24T09:23:00.005-07:002011-12-11T05:55:22.245-07:00Voyage to (Occupy Wall Street) Washington D.C.<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0bkiUzgOymDv-9sn4VoQ0yGaYLQ1ZfZxGo0dxeVtN658WIn2w1Zn5KaPMMpF81jQpFZJHtqZe0GcBU90hyphenhyphenP3uGawo9jvgFE2_ahyphenhyphenQy7tT8gXO4bxTs_XOwqmWlEtNkJ73ikQJbjlpWTga/s1600/OWS+DC.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0bkiUzgOymDv-9sn4VoQ0yGaYLQ1ZfZxGo0dxeVtN658WIn2w1Zn5KaPMMpF81jQpFZJHtqZe0GcBU90hyphenhyphenP3uGawo9jvgFE2_ahyphenhyphenQy7tT8gXO4bxTs_XOwqmWlEtNkJ73ikQJbjlpWTga/s320/OWS+DC.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">OWS encampment, Washington, D.C. </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">My blog this week is about my journey to Washington D.C. and encounter with the Occupy Wall Street movement. As I was writing this I watched an incredible interview on <i>Democracy Now</i> about Sonia Jacobs and Peter Pringle. Sonia and Peter were both convicted of murdering police officers - she in the U.S., Peter in Ireland - and sentenced to death. After years on death row, their convictions were overturned, they were exonerated and released from prison... and many years later met and married each other! What is equally remarkable is that they both credited surviving their ordeal, including years in solitary confinement, through <i>yoga and meditation</i>. <i><b>Their story is the finest Thanksgiving story for the rest of us that I could imagine</b></i><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>VOYAGE TO (OCCUPY WALL STREET) WASHINGTON D.C. </b></div><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b style="color: #660000;"><i>Tuesday</i></b><span style="color: #660000;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I took the Long Island Railroad into New York City. Just north of the Jamaica Queens stop, the train passed a refuse collection center. Men were hauling wet cardboard boxes to the side, separating recyclables from the other masses of garbage, and the seagulls swooped and circled overhead, keen with enthusiasm for the sea of rotting life below them. After all the houses and lawns and apartment buildings we'd passed, seeing the dump was like viewing a body opened for stomach surgery - an eight-second glimpse through the train window into what else is going on. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The refuse center suddenly brought me back to the Sunday market in Arad, where I could have bought a live peacock or rabbit and taken it with me on the train. But this was New York state, not Romania, and the only animal I could take on this train would be a seeing-eye dog. It was in Romania that I decided to return to the United States in time to support the group of OWS protesters who were marching from NYC to Washington DC. Now I was in the final stages of my plan, on a train to Penn Station where I would transfer to Amtrak and arrive in DC later in the day. Tomorrow the protesters would march on the capital and so would I. Or so I thought. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlceyDY-TvKN_3hXz1ZKO526Li-9s4BgbiG0eil2fQ4oBKdUm6UH0cM_BEXe7jY57nl4NsdEzn5cqKt01bfiUkGbrw83GXEgWWycfHRR3_ooTw2C9PJ8JJSB713PCV4DeB3xOzFrmLOmKH/s1600/Eye+Budapest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlceyDY-TvKN_3hXz1ZKO526Li-9s4BgbiG0eil2fQ4oBKdUm6UH0cM_BEXe7jY57nl4NsdEzn5cqKt01bfiUkGbrw83GXEgWWycfHRR3_ooTw2C9PJ8JJSB713PCV4DeB3xOzFrmLOmKH/s200/Eye+Budapest.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Graffiti, Budapest.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I arrived at my friend Lisa's apartment and tried to update my information about the marchers. It had been hard to find much information about them on the internet. Finally I found their blog, but even that said little about where they would be the next day. </div><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i style="color: #660000;"><b>Wednesday</b></i> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Still without specific information on the OWS marchers, Lisa and I decided to take the Metro to the Capitol. "They're bound to show up there sooner or later," I said. Before leaving the house I got an e-mail from a friend who I had told about my plans. He was enthused and supportive about them, but disclosed "I find it difficult to commit to one movement or another. Everything is changing and so do the movements and the conditions." That view, along with so many others, is also part of my own. Within the great Everything-Is-Changing how can we not each be versions of Walt Whitman contradicting ourselves? Yet as another poet-I-love wrote, it is impossible <i>not</i> to have a politics:</div><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: small;">There is no way out of the spiritual battle<br />
There is no way you can avoid taking sides<br />
There is no way you can not have a poetics<br />
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher<br />
<br />
you do it in the consciousness of making<br />
or not making yr world</span></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">from <i>Rant</i> by Diane Di Prima</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Capitol building was luminous from last night's pouring rain and this morning's sunlight, filtered by clouds but bright enough to electrify all of its white, its columns, its dome and the statue <i>Freedom</i> above it, the 15,000 pound cast bronze sculpture of woman holding a sword and draped in an Indian blanket, whose face the looks decidedly kind, warm, and at peace with herself. A drala of the feminine principle if there ever was one, standing above a legislative building with a military budget almost as large as all the other countries of the planet combined.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Beyond the luminosity the place was virtually deserted. The occasional clusters of tourists were swallowed by the immensity of the place, the pigeons were few, and there wasn't a protest sign in sight. Nope, the marchers clearly weren't here yet, but we had a feeling they never would be. We stopped to ask one of the Capitol policeman about the OWS march that we'd heard was converging on the Capitol. He scanned the day's schedule but there was nothing on it about any protest or political event.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ55rPCgfKf3FDXMh3ELuLwprVztZn9lxikNFyBkhMo1fuRv46RFwtSTtZkdw9fMCWN55MU2zQtij8LoHLhlkpDFOsV0dK0fnqx_M-wCj6mThL14NYALwAOhaxL4btyWQESEgsRV3peDPR/s1600/Ram+with+Cornucopia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ55rPCgfKf3FDXMh3ELuLwprVztZn9lxikNFyBkhMo1fuRv46RFwtSTtZkdw9fMCWN55MU2zQtij8LoHLhlkpDFOsV0dK0fnqx_M-wCj6mThL14NYALwAOhaxL4btyWQESEgsRV3peDPR/s320/Ram+with+Cornucopia.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Ram with cornucopia, Sam Rayburn House Office Building</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i style="color: #660000;"><b>McPherson Square</b></i></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Lisa knew that the OWS Washington DC tent city was located at McPherson Square, so that is where we went next, and where my own experience of OWS crossed over from virtual to visceral, where my story-line went from mediated and imagined to concrete--grass and a refugee camp of tents, tarps, and chaos, a sampling of particularity at 11:17 AM on the day before Thanksgiving.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Apart from of the statue of the Union general and namesake of the square, I discerned no particular center, central theme, or population. The dozens and dozens of tents and semi-tents seemed unoccupied at the moment and the majority of the people standing around were African American men; many of them homeless, some Vietnam era, some young, some mentally ill. One black man was given wide birth by the passers-by as he repeated the same series of gyrations and muscle-flexing, a dance-schizophrenia of working-something-out. The pigeons seemed to have gotten used to him and flocked at the birdseed near his feet. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Lisa and I walked through the encampment. I was not sure what she was feeling (I didn't really know what I felt until the middle of the night). I've had so many experiences in the last year of going to a new town, a new country, handing someone my passport, crossing the membrane from <i>other</i> to gradual inclusion. Now I was not just crossing into McPherson Square, but into another country. My trepidation, solidarity, and naïveté had to cross. My sense of being an ancestor to the movement but also an interloper and lightweight had to cross. I was keen to photograph and video tape what I was about to cross into and so my voyeur, paparazzi, and cliché-monger had to cross along with my Canon cameras and nascent memories that I would later write about.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> In those first moments I felt understanding for the David Brooks and the Newt Gingrich-ones, those who dismissed, scorned or mocked these protesters, people who would never see these encampments for themselves. But this place was also a stretch for the middle class, the swing voter, and just about anyone one else who lives a semi-comfortable life. Even for a so-called progressive or liberal, being here was different than honking in solidarity from your Volvo or sending a supportive e-mail. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">McPherson Square was thick in dreadlocks, hand-painted signs, wheelchairs and cigarette smoking. It was thin on infrastructure; mangy, wet, and deteriorating tarps, no toilets, no running water. It was thick with passers-through; dog-walkers, supporters, the curious, TV crews, gang-bangers and gang-banger look alikes. It was thin on defense against the cold, money, food and electricity (there were many solar panels). It was thick in stories, thick with the human sophistication that comes from interacting on the spot, on the street, with just about anybody in a place where just about anything could happen. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The iconic and necessary elements of these tent-cities were easy to find: the library tent, the first-aid tent, the mess tent. I reached the information tent and approached a multitasking African American woman in her late thirties who summarily asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to help. "We need blankets, socks, thermal underwear - if you have that kind of money - and food donations," she said, wrote these out on a yellow sticky-pad note and handed it to me. I asked if I could help on Thanksgiving and she said, "Of course. You can bring food and you can work in our kitchen." Her multi-tasking was minute-by-minute triage and she was good at it; assessing my sincerity, welcoming me without fooling herself that I'd come back with anything on the list, snapping at an approaching TV news crew that she didn't want to be photographed. You could put her in charge of anything, I thought, and she'd be good at it.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">. . .</div><br />
When Lisa and I left McPherson Park we walked west on K Street. We went from virtual refugee camp to <i>Hilton Hotel</i> and <i>Capital City Club & Spa</i>. We went from pizza on damp cardboard to steak and lobster and white tablecloths, from donation buckets to <i>Bank of America</i> ATMs. The encampment was no more than a vulnerable, fleeting moment in time. It could be decimated overnight by a 2:00 AM police raid or simply by a change of heart in the protesters. I suddenly felt a different ninety-nine percent versus one-percent equation. The encampment was representing, consciously and unconsciously and through its diverse demographics, 99% of the realities we find difficult to face, and the rest of K Street was expending 99% of its energy pretending these realities were otherwise. <br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY1QPhynaZdsB-dIsnD0wLARlBeOUqLpjHIfsdowlvsvclFLzZNuir3x0IVw2KsxLP8tHBx34IK0jw7WXFI6rs2_LcER3OLHKxEG29QVmArPAJcWIVaVu_UGmN2_LxeuQfE68xQBtV0w7m/s1600/Non+violence+works.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY1QPhynaZdsB-dIsnD0wLARlBeOUqLpjHIfsdowlvsvclFLzZNuir3x0IVw2KsxLP8tHBx34IK0jw7WXFI6rs2_LcER3OLHKxEG29QVmArPAJcWIVaVu_UGmN2_LxeuQfE68xQBtV0w7m/s320/Non+violence+works.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Sign, OWS Washington DC</span></div><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>Non-Violence Works</b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Did you ever see Dr. Martin Luther King yelling at a police officer or kicking a car?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Did you ever see Gandhi deface a statue? </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Did breaking windows or burning cars stop the IMF or World Trade Organizaton?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Disorganized minds cannot organize anything. Do you think the government is scared of a stoned protester?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Intoxication, fighting police and vandalism is how you protest a bad soccer referee. Should we follow the soccer hooligans or Mahatma Gandhi?</div></blockquote><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-70421805843186906622011-11-15T05:26:00.001-07:002012-01-29T11:13:11.922-07:00VOYAGE TO ROMANIA<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4BKzx3g1VI4l9UutCaNo8aQvYbd3kku6Ke-ZVo_sCRV0h0kjGy1DX5y3nYO4d689Xve7qokb-J_Nplj1rBdGc4VmCs643s7-WOCBSu86sLZUOSpanLvA7P-moJYblzL8nwr8f4idg45ri/s1600/Telephone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4BKzx3g1VI4l9UutCaNo8aQvYbd3kku6Ke-ZVo_sCRV0h0kjGy1DX5y3nYO4d689Xve7qokb-J_Nplj1rBdGc4VmCs643s7-WOCBSu86sLZUOSpanLvA7P-moJYblzL8nwr8f4idg45ri/s320/Telephone.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Note: This is a story about six days I spent in Romania this month. The echo of my time there is like the one from Cambodia; being in a country where the pace remains more connected to the earth-rhythm than elsewhere, ostensibly because the country is still poor. For me, the rhythm is a mirror showing what contemporary life has lost - and what the people in Romania are in the process of loosing - but it is also about the different kind of future we will have when we turn back toward that more earthly, sustainable rhythm. </span><i style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Bill</i><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">. . .</div><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Bucharest</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I’d found a $128 flight from Istanbul to Bucharest and sensed this was the route to begin my journey back to the U.S. In the late afternoon on October 31st I found myself on a bus from the Bucharest Airport to the hotel where I'd made a reservation, chosen once again through the internet. Only later did I realize I had arrived in Romania on Halloween.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The passengers on the bus I turned to for directions were diligently kind, which formed my first impression of Romania. The woman behind me deliberated at great length just where I should get off for Magheru 8-10, the address of my hotel, and when she asked the man across the aisle for his advice, he knew with certainty and just about took my hand and led me off the bus when it came to my stop. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Ambassador Hotel displayed the flags of the European Union, its entrance was embedded between two sex shops - just as one internet review claimed it would be - and the lobby itself was a chaos of pillars, worn out sofas and florescent lighting. I handed over my passport and once I'd established a bit of rapport with the desk clerk asked him if I could have a room had a good view. He retrieved the key he was about to give me and handed me another. Room #314 was at the end of a hallway and was large, with two balcony windows and a bathtub so enormous it suggested the disquiet of accidental drowning. The walls seemed to be yellow, painted very long ago and lit by weak energy saving light bulbs. Except for a rotary-dial telephone, the room seemed it had been left unchanged for decades and I imagined I could have been a minor Politburo authority just arrived from Moscow. Across the street was an immense Communist-era apartment building, its concrete peeling apart and enduring at the same time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I turned on the tap and eventually the tub did fill and I took a bath, the hot water bringing my nervous system back to earth. Armed with directions from the desk clerk I set out for dinner and a walk of ten or twelve blocks to get to where the restaurants would be. What Bucharest would look like in the day was largely obscured in the dark and instead consisted of headlights, the sound of traffic and the streetlamps lighting the grey surfaces of sidewalks, buildings and asphalt, a kind of contemporary anywhere. Eventually I had the good fortune to find a small restaurant and a kind waiter, a man who spoke enough English that we could eventually even exchange irony over the size the dinner (large). My broccoli soup came in a deep tureen and was so good I came back the next night and had it again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The soup, the spaghetti carbonara and two glasses of good red wine erased everything I’d been missing after three months of eating nothing but Turkish food and I left the restaurant with a sated and gratified well-being. I was walking down a mostly deserted street when an elderly woman approached me from the opposite direction and began speaking to me in Romanian. I knew she was asking for money, but her demeanor and dress - as if she'd come from the office - belied this. When I spoke the woman switched to English and began to explain to me the short-form of her story. She had worked her adult life in some ministry, spoke five languages and now she was retired, her pension had been cut and food prices were rising. She had no family and no other way to survive but to beg to make up the shortfall. We spoke for some time and I gave her 10 lei (about three dollars) – later I wished I’d given here 50. She told me her name was Ellen and thanked me profusely. “No, I thank you,” I said and meant it. Affection flowed between us in a kind of shock that we were now parting. I thought about Ellen for a long time. I wondered if I would be in her shoes one day, or who among my friends might be. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI1w5RcOK2b1b0lf2g7GluL-4oMrXy-jwgLOZMS1B6FrqokWtmhNdunSLYr5JERaEViOlhKHvP3H8-1zjmLGuweFcIkUBMjEyKCLRFji9nrVntaCv5w7OIGEYF0-aAbLiha2GLtV12xbGI/s1600/Inner+Courtyard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI1w5RcOK2b1b0lf2g7GluL-4oMrXy-jwgLOZMS1B6FrqokWtmhNdunSLYr5JERaEViOlhKHvP3H8-1zjmLGuweFcIkUBMjEyKCLRFji9nrVntaCv5w7OIGEYF0-aAbLiha2GLtV12xbGI/s400/Inner+Courtyard.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Inner courtyard. Timisoara, Romania.</span></span></div><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Timisoara</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When I arrived in Timisoara I tried to avoid, as I always do, taking a taxi. Not just because I would rather take a bus or metro and thus find my own way to my hotel, but because I dislike getting ripped off by taxis drivers and one is never more a sitting duck than when one has just arrived in a country and doesn’t even know the foreign exchange value of its currency. I bought a ticket for the bus and waited at the stop as the small crowd in the small airport gradually emptied and left me with no idea at all when the next bus would arrive. Finally a seeming taxi-driver approached me and I surrendered to what seemed to be the better part of common sense.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As we got into his grey BWM sedan I realized he wasn’t an official taxi driver at all and I was engaged in a form of transportation not recommended by one’s embassy. The steering wheel air bag had been removed, leaving an unsettling cavity in it’s place. I was suddenly regretting my suitcase was locked in the trunk. Even before we were out of the parking lot I realized the driver was not a criminal but quite kind, reasonably fair and was gradually able to answer my question about train travel, though we had not a single word in common, that there were no trains from Timisoara to Budapest. For that I’d have to go to Arad. I wondered if I was closer or farther from my destination – my return to the U.S. It is after wondering such things that I realize, sometimes with a sinking feeling, sometimes with almost an elation, that I don't exactly have a destination. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">. . .</div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Hotel Delpack was the first hotel on my trip in which I could see chickens from my window. The hotel was a modern, three-story cube in an otherwise rural neighborhood of one-story houses and a two square-block cemetery. Besides the chickens I encountered an even more welcome sight that first morning: crows. A large flock of them circled the city, moving cavalierly in and out of various formations then scattering into their own temporary destinies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I spent two nights in room #211, in numerology a four. I decided to find its symbolic meaning through the internet: fours represent stability, calmness, home; the four directions and the four seasons. On my first night it seemed to work that way. I sat in meditation before dinner and I’d never felt the forty-five minute transformation to be any greater. To simply sit, let ones thoughts scatter. Like the crows did. That particular sense of well-being-for-no-reason arrived and carried me well into the next day. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Timisoara is the Tahrir Square of late 20th Century Romanian history. The revolution that overthrew the twenty-eight year dictatorship to Nicolae Ceaușescu and the even longer reign of communism began here and then spread to Bucharest. Since then, democracy and so-called free enterprise have transformed the country and the twenty to thirty-somethings one sees on the street would have no more memory of the Communist ear than I do of the Eisenhower presidency. For those of my generation, growing up in Romania would be the polar opposite of growing up in California. Instead of free education and the Beach Boys followed by the Jefferson Airplane one had farm collectivization, forced-labor camps and secret police. It is thought one of every four Romanians became an informer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My experiences in Timisoara revealed very little of its history per se. I didn't visit museums or read guidebooks, but instead simply wandered in the general direction of the central city. Instead of learning of Romania's cataclysms in WWII - the fascist Iron Guard, the eventual alignment with Nazi Germany, the campaigns against the Soviet Union and the deportation and murder of its Jews - during the day, I studied them on the internet in the evening. In the day I wandered the streets and saw a veritable Louvre of peeling paint and exposed bricks. The layers of history as visual texture. I came across a wall that displayed all of this, plus a defunct pay telephone - a scene that was a combination of Marcel Duchamp and musuem of technology, the telephone as useless as a phonograph without any records in the room.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The chickens I'd seen reminded me of a quote from Milan Kundera, who once wrote that human goodness "can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.... </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Mankind’s true moral test (which lies deeply buried from view) consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: the animals. And in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I felt this way even about the telephone - the unmerciful development of our technology just to go ever faster more conveniently - much less the chickens in the yard of my hotel. Like most people, I've eaten so many chickens I could never calculate the amount (currently the world population of chickens on any given day is over twenty-four billion). It is for that reason they have become a totem. They ask so little, feeding on garbage and living traditionally in our yards with little other demand than the rooster's need to crow, yet giving us so much through their eggs and their life. If only they could have a decent life, the one they've always had, instead of being stockpiled, just as pigs are, in cages and grown like hydroponic lettuce or a silicon chip. Just seeing chickens rooting around in the dirt is enough to cheer me and give me hope for our collective future. </span><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;">. . .</div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On my third day in Timisoara, the day of my departure, my state of mind was quite different than the day before. I felt anxiety. Perhaps only because I was leaving this home and had no idea what the next one, the next hotel, would be like. But when I went to meditate the anxiety spoke to me, told me its subject – and in that moment changed. To sadness. I began to feel the sadness was about Romania. Was it something collective I’d walked into (just as I walked into something collective in Cambodia) and was now feeling? The moment told me not to avoid it.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht5v9c7m85RYmLmbGUv8yQfX_bUrxzV_dgPvXkG4io6sHbQa-V3QYNmVLQPOHL8QJsoU8gtVNXFnYMySJE_NRvnj375Dw_4fjjpQ0IPYZ3-G65_VSPh6szJyE-Dmg9PcpRntaGAzONCmJz/s1600/Timisoara+square.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht5v9c7m85RYmLmbGUv8yQfX_bUrxzV_dgPvXkG4io6sHbQa-V3QYNmVLQPOHL8QJsoU8gtVNXFnYMySJE_NRvnj375Dw_4fjjpQ0IPYZ3-G65_VSPh6szJyE-Dmg9PcpRntaGAzONCmJz/s320/Timisoara+square.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Historic town square, Timisoara.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Arad</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">After two days in Timisoara I found myself on a train to Arad and my first chance to see the countryside of Romania. Early November at 4:00 PM, the sun low; farmland harvested and now picked at by crows and blackbirds, stubble burning in untended fires, late model tractors and small towns huddled around a central church whose steeple penetrates the sky and dominates the horizon. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I had missed my train and had to wait two hours for the next one and now I had almost missed my stop for Arad. Assumptions are usually wrong and if followed usually lead to great or smaller misfortunes. I’d assumed my departure train was late but I was reading the sign for arrivals. I assumed I wasn’t yet in Arad since most of the passengers weren’t departing the train. Fortunately, I asked someone at the last minute, who said, Yes, Arad!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When I got off the train at Arad it came with the same kind of thud as my suitcase produced hitting the floor. Suddenly, in this small and derelict train terminal I felt as far from home as I ever had in my life - not to mention I don’t currently have a home. I wasn’t ripped off by my taxi driver but the sight of my hotel gave me a second sinking feeling. The <i>Xo Residence</i> was as bland as a <i>Motel Six</i> and looked eerily out of place and slightly elicit on a street of small houses and boarded up shops. Everything pivoted when I walked through the door and was greeting by a young woman with shaved eyebrows and a low cut sweater. She helped me in every way, from calling to find when the trains left for Budapest to assuring me I had a room with a good window, but mostly by her smile and kindness. She took me to room #1.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There is not much you can do to make a hotel room home other than to accept it, and after that feeling at home often comes quickly. Last summer I spent a few days in a Denver hotel room with the number 2319. During that time I had the experience that we <i>never go anywhere</i>. It was an on and off again phenomenological truth with me for those few days, something more than the punitive cliche that we never get away from ourselves, but instead a feeling of continuous homecoming. I felt that way as soon as I locked the door behind me in room #1. It didn’t hurt that the WiFi worked and that there were plenty of chickens in the neighbor’s courtyard. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I didn't know it, but one more event was about to cheer me even further. I had began my evening walk and search for a place to eat dinner and had reached Boulevard Revolutiei where the restaurants supposed were - though I found only a monstrously large MacDonald's, a Turkish döner hole-in-the-wall and a handful of bars that also served food. As I made my way down the street, suddenly I saw a number of young women dressed in white gowns and looking like they had come from a wedding - though this was Friday night. As I got closer I saw they had wings attached to their gowns, were handing out flyers. The first of these costumed angels I reached immediately offered to hug me. Was my journey from abjectness at the train terminal to about-to-be-hugged by a beautiful angel a joke from the dralas, a set up to amuse them? </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">. . . </span></div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I had dinner two nights in a row at Pomo D’Ora, an Italian restaurant I had found and immediately chose over the McDonalds and </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">döner </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">joint. I sat at the same table each night, drank the same wine (Romanian, from a box. It was good.) and had the same waitress. On the second night I learned her name: Florina. She, too, had shaved eyebrows. Florina was married and in her late twenties and told me she was born and raised in a village about 150 kilometers from Arad, a village by the name of Avram-Iancu. This most musical five syllable name, with its consonants enclosed in vowels, is also the name of a famous Romanian revolutionary of the 19th Century. I learned this when I asked Florina what her village was known for. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I also asked Florina how she liked living in Arad. She liked it OK, but not like her village. When she spoke about Avram-Inacu, that’s when her eyes lit up. Florina had grown up in a village whose economy was based on raising pigs and growing vegetables. It was the warmth and familiarity of the community there that she missed. “Of course I have lots of friend here in Arad,” she said, “but it’s not the same.” Florina grew up in a village that raised pigs yet she could easily have worked in any restaurant in the world. She moved gracefully, was at ease when our eyes met. She was naturally warm and yet reserved in just the right way; you felt she wouldn’t lose track or your order or anyone's, it was all one piece and Florina was as much of a dancer as waitress. Florina didn’t know how good, how capable she was. Though she did know the melancholy of being displaced from the town of her cheerful youth and the earth that sustained it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">During the meal I went to Avram-Iancu myself in some small way. I was raised in a town that was only thirteen thousand people. It was a town of gamboling casinos, ski lifts and motels rather than pig pens and carrot patches but I, too, lived in a world of seeming stability. Doctor Whitely gave me me antibiotics when my throat was sore in kindergarten just as he did when I was a freshman in high school. And above all, I had nature, all that I wanted of it. Creeks, pinecones, secret paths only I knew about. Florina must have had the same.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">. . . </span></div><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On the morning of my last day in Arad I had time to take a walk before leaving for the train station. I passed the drain pipe that had been lit by the sun when I first saw it and radiated the inner, compelling vitality the moment had given it. When I saw it last night it was dark, a different object entirely. I was different too (could the drainpipe know?). I walked all the way to <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Boulevard Revolutiei</span> again, found a good bakery and bought provisions for the train. On the way home I came across the large semi-outdoor market that I had encountered the day before. But today - Sunday - it was also a livestock market. Living geese, ducks, rabbits, peacocks and, of course, chickens everywhere. It was a scene of unregulated animal well-being - at least before the slaughter - and human beings enjoying the animals, the barter, each other and the morning sun. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My time in Romania had come into symmetry with myself and no guide book could have taken taken me here. There wasn't a cash register or bar code in sight. Only cages and men with great knowledge of the content of the cages beside them. Neither peacock or person seemed to be going anywhere, though any sale could part them. It is an accepted fact that people often look like their dogs but I'd never seen a gentleman who looked like his rabbit. Lit by the sun, the man squinted with the same expression as the rabbit, while the rabbit sat as impassively as the man. </div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">At the station I bought a second class ticket from Arad to Budapest for thirty-three, U.S. It wasn't until we were in Hungary that I realized my train had virtually limped out of Romania. I could see we were going slow, but only when the train speed almost doubled after it picket up passengers at the Hungarian border did I realize how slow. Perhaps this was a homage to the difference between Romania and Hungary, how much more "developed" the latter country is. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Hard to believe it was the same train. And suddenly everyone on it looked as different from Romanians as the Romanians do from the Turkish, perhaps even more so. It was a shock to be in a different country having just gotten barely used to the one I was in. On the way to Budapest we passed through farmlands and small towns, just like in Romania, but everything looked more prosperous and maintained. Thank God I could still see plenty of chickens running around. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHTYZYyGeD6SUOQ3DRaPlbcHojgQ8jcgQaj5RPsliyPMsXDIqR1pKplcfuO0yYncvN4tft3ZBipZuxLyf2dWNClp-0WzCi5xcAnlLbQKP67nPGr0iVQOs4r51opj75yemXgat9FC98mpgS/s1600/Chicken+market.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHTYZYyGeD6SUOQ3DRaPlbcHojgQ8jcgQaj5RPsliyPMsXDIqR1pKplcfuO0yYncvN4tft3ZBipZuxLyf2dWNClp-0WzCi5xcAnlLbQKP67nPGr0iVQOs4r51opj75yemXgat9FC98mpgS/s400/Chicken+market.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Market, Arad.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHtSLxwHLmdR-ODEIBBUuoTku4Ss8kYcPGWTAxOF_cR7gOHVSnZpszwj4HJqFyD1EpTEFnnIj_bYEbRFJ-Uer_csZ6jWmihycvemDBxd0M0YP-eeKKX_qfR4ka-6q7mEsP8kJ-nFQPGZB6/s1600/Arad+group.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHtSLxwHLmdR-ODEIBBUuoTku4Ss8kYcPGWTAxOF_cR7gOHVSnZpszwj4HJqFyD1EpTEFnnIj_bYEbRFJ-Uer_csZ6jWmihycvemDBxd0M0YP-eeKKX_qfR4ka-6q7mEsP8kJ-nFQPGZB6/s320/Arad+group.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The rewards of aimless wandering: I encounterd the angels who</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> hugged me on Friday night again the next day. Arad, Romania.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-7156247685838394772011-11-11T03:25:00.003-07:002011-11-11T03:42:27.282-07:00THE GOOD SOMETHING & THE HAND OF GOD<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpzfVTBNaZhd-vxSuwz_nKRwTR-GuPT6otXLpaqlXwqXLIKo70xVo-F1ZMqOwtVlENdAuM5jMtA_b6J1VFL8ueyfz9ZQIC-t7ReOVW_UC6oBldKmF8aDKksgqJt1IOQdgXJM6LO9txMkYT/s1600/004.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpzfVTBNaZhd-vxSuwz_nKRwTR-GuPT6otXLpaqlXwqXLIKo70xVo-F1ZMqOwtVlENdAuM5jMtA_b6J1VFL8ueyfz9ZQIC-t7ReOVW_UC6oBldKmF8aDKksgqJt1IOQdgXJM6LO9txMkYT/s320/004.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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</div></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I've spent over a month without posting a blog, an indication of my state of mind and the journey of my experience. The intangible qualities that kept me sometimes in rapt inspiration ceased; as when a straw empties the liquid in a drink, the end comes suddenly and the new emptiness-of-ability-to-write takes some getting used to. During this time I've traveled from Turkey to Romania and finally Budapest, where I am now, but my outer reality became as much about the internet footage and related stories I read about Occupy Wall Street and related events as it was about Istanbul or Bucharest and I began to feel a visceral connection to these occupations. This is something that mirrored my inner journey, one that wore away more of what I had known. Now I have my return ticket to the U.S. and I am looking forward to arriving in New York City, exchanging the role of wanderer (or crazy stranger) with that of citizen.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Among other things I've gestated during this time is an expansion of my blog (and website), in that I am beginning a <u>request for submission of articles</u> on dralas and the drala principle. I've had one such article for some time and it's author, Patricia Friedson has kindly giving me permission to share it. This is a most genuine writing about drala and I'm sure it will move you. <b>Please consider writing something of your own and sending it to me. </b> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It seems to me the organizations and protests that are occurring all over the world are rooted in something that is expressed in the essay below. It is a political consciousness that is emerging, put also a poetic one; perhaps that is why the protests are not oriented to one side or party or issue alone, but are instead an expression of wanting to reclaim something that has been lost, that is being lost, is almost becoming irredeemably lost - qualities of humanity and the environmental integrity of our planet earth.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">. . . </div><blockquote class="tr_bq">We may have been interested in our world when we were little children, but then we were taught how to handle it by our parents who had already developed a system to deal with the world and to shield themselves from it at the same time. As we accepted that system, we lost contact with the freshness and curiosity of experience. - Chögyam Trungpa. </blockquote></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4kCo1XN1PikvPKA9ZqdD-aD43zFPX2G_bDBfx_D76e_OPPxK3jhIdrEew_THiH4Cw01FTzoNQh67ICrXaYd3LHsh2uf1ycKt5Bx3vzAzV3HqnR5dQmbzdMqWqTjsDqkqIddhXcTpJuQh0/s1600/003.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4kCo1XN1PikvPKA9ZqdD-aD43zFPX2G_bDBfx_D76e_OPPxK3jhIdrEew_THiH4Cw01FTzoNQh67ICrXaYd3LHsh2uf1ycKt5Bx3vzAzV3HqnR5dQmbzdMqWqTjsDqkqIddhXcTpJuQh0/s320/003.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div style="color: #660000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Good Something</b></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">by Patricia Friedson</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Dear Bill - Thank you for your website. And thank you especially for the part about dralas. I had never heard the term drala until a few days ago, when I was researching Buddhism on the net, and came across the poem that starts "Born a monk ..." on a different website. Then I started googling dralas, and so thankfully came to your site. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Reading the excerpt from <span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span> Trungpa Rinpoche made me remember childhood. I was a fairly unsupervised kid, and spent a lot of time rambling around in nature just kind of "being with" things; a tree, a particular place where moss grew, the neighbor's dog, or lying on an apartment house roof, looking up through the clotheslines and windy laundry at the blue sky and moving clouds. There were always clothespins that had been dropped or fallen off the line. Some of them were made of colored plastic, deep translucent colors like stained glass. I remember a moment, lying on that roof, on a windy day of deep blue sky and fluffy white sailing ship clouds. I was lying on the roof, holding a red clothespin up to the light. Its color was amazing; like wine or pomegranate or cherry, gleaming with deep, rich light. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It was a moment when everything "came together" - the sky, the wind, being up high, the sound of my mom humming as she hung up laundry a few feet away, the wonderful color of the red clothespin, and the marvel that it was colored, yet clear; colored light came through it - and also some very tall pines or cedars that grew next to the apartment building, so that their treetops were right along part of the roof, and the wind rustled and sighed through them. Somehow in that moment, it all came together. It felt like "something" good and kind came out of the tree tops, and sat near me. Because the moment was right somehow. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Now I realize that childhood was full of moments like that. Often it was nature that I was "being with," but sometimes it was a poem, or a piece of music; a Scottish folk song or a Mozart Rondo, or a photograph of a person's face in <i>National Geographic</i>, somehow it was a deep "being with" the "is-ness" of things. In a deep, wordless way that seemed to lead to the mystery of being alive at all. That made a deep connection, with people, with nature, colors, sounds, sorrows, joys, and with Something Invisible, some Good, Sweet thing that seemed always to be there at those times. I thought of it as God, but not at all like going to church. At least, not the services. But sometimes, in the quiet of an empty church, in the stillness with candles flickering in colored glass holders and the scent of incense and the kind of sad feeling in the air of many prayers lingering there, then sometimes it felt like the Good Something was there, a sweetness, a gentleness, a cleanness, that I thought could see me, could see everyone, though we could not see it. <br />
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It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to talk to that presence. Or presences. Because it had different flavors, different feelings, but it always seemed at heart the same. Sometimes it made me want to draw pictures or write poems, to express it somehow. Other times it was just about being with it, for as long as it stayed. Sometimes I would wake up late at night, and it would feel like Something Good was there, and I would get up and sit on the stairs, trying to stay awake, to be with it. I remember one time it was a winter night, and it all seemed so important, the cold, the snow, the night sky and the crystal clarity of stars, it just was what it was, the winter nightness of a winter night, yet with that was Something, a longing, a mystery, a goodness. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As I became a teen-ager, these experiences went away. I still loved life, poetry, music; I traveled and experienced many religions. But except for rare moments, not with the purity of childhood. Now I am 61. And reading about the dralas made these childhood memories come flooding back. Are these memories at all on the right track? Is it part of it, a place to start in understanding Dralas? <br />
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Whatever the Dralas are, they seem so needed, it is something the world needs so much. I don't understand it, I don't know what I am doing, but I very much want to help if I can. Thank you for any help you can give me about this, and thank you for putting Dralas on the net. When I read about them, it was the first time in a long time that I felt not so alone, somewhere deep in myself. Although I am very fortunate, with family, friends, students, neighbors, animals, a lot of good company. But reading about the Dralas was like hearing the language of one's homeland spoken, for the first time in a long, long time. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
Gratefully, Wishing You all the best, </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Patricia</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">. . .</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhBlcYPG2VOUXGLOk8ARmQHA-PCueq3M-pEQJRYALpq_exRl0WQaqJKgpHR95aGO8E8T2AmIMxUt58GwWuuyBGWK2OMtgfJuIvFhWhoOOqC1X2YamjG-R5UDUHS4-T7xwIYRVG8CWq7qpI/s1600/Man+on+bench.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhBlcYPG2VOUXGLOk8ARmQHA-PCueq3M-pEQJRYALpq_exRl0WQaqJKgpHR95aGO8E8T2AmIMxUt58GwWuuyBGWK2OMtgfJuIvFhWhoOOqC1X2YamjG-R5UDUHS4-T7xwIYRVG8CWq7qpI/s400/Man+on+bench.jpg" width="300" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Arad, Romania </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
. . .<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">THE HAND OF GOD - video interview with Tom Pathe</span></b></span></div><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Almost three years ago, I film-interviewed my dear friend Tom Pathe. I recently came across this video again and realized I should share it. I’ve titled it <i>The Hand of God</i> to reinforce the journey of freedom that Tom has been on, that the Buddhist path is, and that the drala principle epitomizes. Tom is an early student of Chogyam Trungpa-Lord Mukpo and has been a rolfer nearly as long. Tom has not hesitated to allow the teachings not just of Lord Mukpo, but two indigenous traditions he studied within, to guide and become him. If you have a human body this video interview will be of interest, much less if you’ve ever received or given bodywork. Tom has been continuously plummeting the cataract of discovery of our “inner body.” May you follow carefully the eight minutes of this talk. It’s about gravity, man. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/28570745?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe></div></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-74990669984742945292011-09-28T02:56:00.001-06:002011-09-28T02:59:35.199-06:00BURSA & GEMLIK<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibCF6y0lzsIku7TjiUU10RbFbRcZOZMnaqZ53omdjyhhTGAw8qNcBRGydhIiC-9W00W1ox4vZiGPshm_ht3xbj8QpHchkuRWjLeCc8Up-D4ZVjmhJqmrsZsNNEqvlsx8oYd6oQaDuGgmgx/s1600/Blue+door.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibCF6y0lzsIku7TjiUU10RbFbRcZOZMnaqZ53omdjyhhTGAw8qNcBRGydhIiC-9W00W1ox4vZiGPshm_ht3xbj8QpHchkuRWjLeCc8Up-D4ZVjmhJqmrsZsNNEqvlsx8oYd6oQaDuGgmgx/s320/Blue+door.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Blue door, Bursa.</span></div><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My hotel in Bursa was hosting a convention I didn't know about and when I went to extend my reservation I leaned instead that I'd have to move out for five days. For my exile I chose a place I found on the internet, The<i> Atamer Doğa Resort</i> in nearby Gemlik, a coastal town on the Sea of Marmara. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Gemlik is an explosion of apartment buildings on the edge of a bay, one side occupied by the cranes that unload container ships and some kind of refinery, with dozens of smokestacks emitting white smoke and fumes day and night. The shoreline is thick with algae blooms and the refinery adds it quotient to the orange haze that not so distant Istanbul and other nearby cities generate. An inferno of industrialization occurs on the still waters of the Sea of Marmara. The hillsides are covered with olive trees and swallows with bright green bellies hunt in the morning. As I began my first walk in Gemlik, I left my room and descended down a vine-choked stairway and stumbled upon a arbor of untended and ripe grapes which I began to consume. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The world is carrying on a latent conversation, speaking to each of us personally but requiring a reversal of how we perceive, the echo of the gunshot being the point rather than the bullet. I saw this once again on my first day at the<i> Atamer</i>. That morning I'd read something from the Ibn 'Arabi scholar Stephen Hirtenstein, who wrote, "The inherent loneliness felt when we are among other people is because they seem to be somehow like us, contradicting our reality which has no likeness." This struck me as an analog to something Lord Mukpo conveyed so deeply and often, that because we can never completely convey our experience to someone else, sadness is an unconditional aspect of our being. The echo tells us nothing in life can be compared to <i>anything</i>, and in moments of fully discovering the poignancy of trying we find ourselves in love.</span></span><br />
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</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> After reading </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Stephen Hirtenstein</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> I had decided to take a walk, - the very walk in which I'd encountered the grapes. Soon enough I left the road to scurry up the hillside into the olive orchards. The grasses and other plants lay horizontal, parched by season's end and long faded. Only the olive trees were green. I picked an olive and polished it in my fingers, removing the dusty residue to reveal an even brighter green, the same color as the swallow's belly. The trees of the orchard were planted symmetrically, as ordered as a military formation. But their trunks were varied and primordially undomesticated and each revealed an unfathomably singularity and dignity. I was standing in a hillside of </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">tathāgatas</span>.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">. . .</span></span></b></div><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I will now describe the influences that brought me to Bursa.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In 2000, I took a trip to Spain and spent several days in Cordoba. I mostly wandered around, visiting the well known places in the old city, as well as the sides streets and modern avenues. Just outside of the old city gates and across the Guadalquivir river, I came across a museum dedicated to Ibn Arabi and went in. About all I remember of the museum is the large wax statue of Ibn Arabi, cast heroically as Jesus might be, and that I had encountered a major figure of world history and spirituality of whom I know nothing. I became enthralled by the Moorish history of Cordoba and the echoes of that time that could still be found; the visual ones of the architecture, and a spiritual echo that represented the enlightenment of the Sufis of Ibn Arabi's era - perhaps a time as thick with realized masters as Tibet or Japan were during their eras of great spiritual attainment (</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Karma Pakshi and </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Dōgen Zenji</span><b> </b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">were contemporaries of Ibn Arabi, as was St. Francis of Assisi). <br />
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Nine years later I rediscovered Ibn 'Arabi, though on a less extensive trip that simply required walking from my house to the storage shed along side it and retrieving a book with some of his quotes. A moment had occurred in my morning meditation, something from Cordoba spilling into a 2009 March day with snow on the ground. I became activated with a sense of new discovery and imperative, the energy of the dralas, and this continued for weeks. During this time, I remembered the book in my shed, a compilation of various Sufi teachings on love, and once I'd retrieved it, and then purchased others by Ibn 'Arabi, I began to read him regularly, which was to have his thought and metaphors enter my bloodstream, thought so thick with beauty and unexpected meaning I could feel my cells change. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I realized almost that I was being redirected or sent back into school. That moment of meditation was unequivocal, Lord Mukpo's dream time has suddenly incorporated my forgotten trip to Moorish Spain into it's geography and in an almost diabolical twist, I was shot into the language of God. The non-theistic terrain of Buddhism no longer had "theism" opposing it, which enhanced my confusion but also and my faith. Since then I've periodically inhabited as isthmus eaten away from two sides, the language of Buddhism and the language of mystical Islam, with the waters around being <i>one</i>, so to speak, those of Shambhala. <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>. . . </b> </span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Our world is a globalized, geographical everywhere, with its ruined wells, witch hunts, emptied out libraries and dislocated ancestors, but also with it's enduring beauty, spread of knowledge and growing interconnected consciousness. Lord Mukpo brought the Shambhala teachings into this darkness and potentiality with language visions such as the term <i>basic goodness</i>, which he once described this way (these words are form my own transcripts and convey the unedited conversation he was having with the audience): </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"The basic goodness is based on your first mind. Your first thought. Before your thought you have a gasp - aahh! (sudden inhale) "What should I think?" Before you think, even before you have a gasp there is that space that is the purity, that there is a… can you understand what I'm talking about?" </span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Lord Mukpo paused to ask the audience if they understood, and of course we mostly didn't. He was inviting us into "an ocean without shore" - to mix metaphors and switch to one of Ibn Arabi's - so how could we? He was simultaneously transmitting this <i>first mind</i> to us. In the same talk he explained his name, that <i>Lord</i> is like "the sky" and <i>Mukpo</i> is like "sunshine in the midst of the sky." If any of us fully experienced our own name as he did his we <i>would</i> be an ocean without shore ("or space infused with knowing," as Tulku Urygen would put it). One is utterly confused in the face of such a language/transmission yet one might "cross over" into it for a moment, an instant, loosing reverence points, the way we can feel tipsy looking down at the surf when we wade into it. Here is an example of Ibn Arabi describing the experience of "first mind":</span></span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">“The moment” (waqt) is an expression for your state in time. The state does not attach itself to the past or future. It is an existent between two nonexistents. And if your Moment is the wellspring of your state, you are the son or daughter of your Moment, and your Moment determines what you are, because it is existent and you are nonexistent, you are illusory and it is affirmed. </span></span> </blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMJotD06EZB2mrek0MjBFEtJuCSUbt3yNk3nLbtMU_97Cq6SWEjiLXXOLjCjakhB9gt-iiCMYjNPyRR26YjceNejKimc0b6hpUOw3aeumC3y-Jk55-goS-mE47mq0_lOJPnyilyh2djA2C/s1600/Allah+the+Generous.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMJotD06EZB2mrek0MjBFEtJuCSUbt3yNk3nLbtMU_97Cq6SWEjiLXXOLjCjakhB9gt-iiCMYjNPyRR26YjceNejKimc0b6hpUOw3aeumC3y-Jk55-goS-mE47mq0_lOJPnyilyh2djA2C/s400/Allah+the+Generous.jpg" width="283" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The calligraphy above is from Ulu Cami in Bursa (I took the photograph looking up, the calligraphy is high on a column, the camera slightly crooked). I'd first seen this calligraphy in one of the Ibn 'Arabi books I purchased in 2009, <i>Journey to the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat</i>, which was illustrated with copies, as noted in the introductions, of "the monumental mural compositions of calligraphy approximately eight feet in height" from the Grand Mosque in Bursa, Turkey. I'd never seen anything quite like these calligraphies and in that moment of learning where the originals were I realized I would go there (that is what the thought in the moment said; or course I forgot about it).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And as it has turned out, I've been in Bursa for over a month. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As I look at the calligraphy now it reminds me of the olive orchard, of some of the oldest olive trees, which were as densely irregular with their ancient growth as these brush stokes are uniform, but each convey the majesty of form and space as something we can never be apart from or escape and so our only option in the end is to surrender, awaken. The supremely stylized Arabic of the calligraphy says, <i>Allah the Generous One, the Raiser of the Dead, the Guardian of All Existence, the Ever Present</i>. This is our <i>being</i>, right down to the non-existent but apparent cells of our toenails. I hold out this calligraphy as evidence of the obvious realization-lineages within Islam, of an awesome and nearly hallucinogenic-</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">symphonic beauty </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">and as example of the long ways most of us have to go. It compels humility and an embrace of what is at hand. As Lord Mukpo said, in reminding us of the inevitable alternation between glimpses of the unconditioned and our relative life, how we are always returned to the life we have, "Instead of experiencing the boundless cosmic drink, the elixir of life, we might have to stick with Budweiser."</span></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf_b2fviaJt1O_sOEXInBee9ake9pRjrKbyAT8jn5npkyHYL5EDNKjAxk5XeOJf78fjrBUk0uJZyttp2Xr21aFvyu7MifqjxxQD3VQkGshZVE5DDwto56fNyHpdLJaMkvMwDi3vWXaLAPR/s1600/Two+women.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf_b2fviaJt1O_sOEXInBee9ake9pRjrKbyAT8jn5npkyHYL5EDNKjAxk5XeOJf78fjrBUk0uJZyttp2Xr21aFvyu7MifqjxxQD3VQkGshZVE5DDwto56fNyHpdLJaMkvMwDi3vWXaLAPR/s320/Two+women.jpg" width="228" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bursa.</span><br />
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</span></span></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-22658026683840218352011-09-19T07:31:00.005-06:002011-09-20T03:34:10.793-06:00INFINITY OF TRACES<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixTwcFbecupI3lV5MqZrymBYWGFhKLmhLEtYnE2XyIQ8gzyV4ecT6l-HYVsn-IrH3WxHXYLOwxM7g4HIsSEUvI-k59nyk81aqbPJB6OzdrJY-vHxM0rzqWT-DSp-V1xqIsB6Z0v14d-37R/s1600/Bulb+and+arabic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixTwcFbecupI3lV5MqZrymBYWGFhKLmhLEtYnE2XyIQ8gzyV4ecT6l-HYVsn-IrH3WxHXYLOwxM7g4HIsSEUvI-k59nyk81aqbPJB6OzdrJY-vHxM0rzqWT-DSp-V1xqIsB6Z0v14d-37R/s320/Bulb+and+arabic.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRcb0wbLKAUuPZgfDlg0wMOyD4XgMUUaRK-8UmPv-JWa8qjSL-Sh9tX-3YJk39XJOfGqnoqFb7oe6otz99dDUYRcSGrmmgwszGkZb5k323Uc33HRe9UFIGl-wyJ23J2EmJAtq-iq_V8jzp/s1600/Bursa+at+sunset.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFaMivyhGt4-FEix_uGWaWg1hWfdUWqZfbcqcqAvfbTHgY66mySuX3zkNvR7QhlXSd_a93JZUiL85La6hAuQFQc06wy4mQThZp08W2H0kS2xfnd6asqzf5I1gsoF1Ym6xckl24-QlDfOZq/s320/Rigden+Shikpo.jpg" width="286" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.chronicleproject.com/tributes/12.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Click here to go to The Chronicles of CTR</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I happened upon this audio recording from </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_537664312" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Chronicles of </a><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="style20"><a href="http://www.chronicleproject.com/tributes/12.html">Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche</a> a few nights ago, a treasure. In it </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Rigdzin Shikpo recounts with what seems to be great fidelity and personal understanding the meditation instruction he received from </span><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="style20">Chögyam Trungpa in 1965. The recording documents not just the fruitional nature of </span></span><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="style20">Chögyam Trungpa's initial teaching but perhaps something of the "non-linear" element of a great teacher's work, since the language of these instructions is not unlike the teachings of Shabhala Level Five, the program </span></span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Chögyam Trungpa/Lord Mukpo personally taught during the last decade of his life, a language of profound simplicity, immediacy and tenderness. Another remarkable document on The Chronicles are <a href="http://www.chronicleproject.com/shenpen_hookham.html">stories Rigdzin Shikpo's wife Shenon Hookam</a> tells about meeting </span></span></span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Chögyam Trungpa and about her and Rigdzin's lifelong involvement with his teaching. I have transcribed </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Rigdzin Shikpo's </span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">audio recording (scroll down to end of post). </span></span></span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtk-aYsyth8HWQ7PUOnegW7ihIKxaZz4A2rWjq4bK2QTrPxRoL8rTNV2U9fMrjBnAQfeacJlkxRnrCzbb5R_UMpYqdsnCSE7B3NTgKyohghPoU82J05xaMBo0oURF324UYQG-_S4gT6H2j/s1600/Faucit.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>. . . </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">BURSA</span></span></div><br />
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<br />
</div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My sixth-floor hotel room has a windowed door that opens onto a small patio and comes with a view of the traffic circle and much of the city of Bursa. In this Mediterranean climate, it has not been warmer than 89F or cooler than 70F for the last three weeks and so I leave the door open. I'm in my room most of the day, writing, but often looking out at the city and its constantly changing light.<br />
<br />
The dual towers of the coal plant are across town and loom behind a building that partially obscures them. I hear the traffic circle day and night, the horns and acceleration. The atmosphere above the basin of this city that has been occupied since antiquity and was the westernmost edge of the silk route fills with various forms of burnt fuel and processed chemicals and by the time the sun is low in the sky the buildings catch fire; even the blue of a nearby wall the sun hits at 5:00 PM is hot and cinematic. In this irresistible glow of late afternoon global warming is made into a tactile newsprint of itself, a scrim that didn't used to be here. <br />
<br />
I bought a while button-down dress shirt at Brooks Brothers before I left Washington D.C. and wear it every day when I go out. I wondered why I was paying eighty dollars for a shirt but the hunch was right, it’s holding up well and is the right piece of clothing to be wearing, with my black belt and denim pants. It dresses me up just enough so that I feel employed in something rather than someone just wandering around, which is what I mostly do when I’m wearing the shirt. <br />
<br />
Sometimes I’m in Ulu Cami, the city's great mosque that was completed fifteen years before the battle of Agincourt, and the local Starbucks on the same day. The Starbucks, too, seems like a scrim, glass walls along the front, inside of which what has been going on for a long time continues. The main difference between the Starbucks and the traditional tea shops is the latter are frequently by men and from an initial glance they look centuries apart; the most traditional tea shop looking a bit derelict and the men perched on tiny stools, whereas the Starbucks comes in its standard uniform of throw away cups and chocolate brownies with men <i>and</i> women at the tables. Something remains intact, certainly in the tea shops but even in the Starbucks, an atmosphere of manners and tradition and enjoyment, things that haven't gotten as mangled or gone akimbo as elsewhere. Everyone sits and visits, not a single person carries a cup out onto the street, as if even that much multi-tasking hasn't taken hold.<br />
<br />
There was a celebration day during Ramadan (or Ramazan in Turkish) and not just Ulu Cami but the entire area of the older, historic city – and it is a labyrinth of commerce and countless shops indeed – was flush with people. Like a penguin I was in it and sometimes pressed to the bodies of those around me, their touch, familiarity with each other, ways they were enjoying themselves. The unmangled factor was there in the familial enjoyment and chaste atmosphere of celebration, mores that seemed to have missed me as I journeyed with the culture of my own generation though the sexual revolution. The tenderness made we weep inside and I was ashamed for having missed things about love, and for America's need for a global enemy, the projection of Islam as a necessarily oppressive force. <br />
</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> . . . </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
My experience of the drala principle and the drala has often occurred near water; Boulder Creek, the River Arno, the Mekong. I came down with food poisoning three days after I arrived in Bursa and lay in bed for thirty-two hours, for much of the time unable to drink water because it made me vomit again. I slept through most of it, two nights and the entire day in between, a long and rare and frequently disturbed sleep. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Each time I woke I had a vivid and specific memory, as if I was being taken to earlier times in order to retrieve something: a certain hike I took in southern Utah; my mother's turquoise bracet; the zocalo in Mexico City. For some time I've been writing these moments down, the thought I have when I first wake, even if just from a nap (sometimes especially a nap), as if this was one of the moments Lord Mukpo's dream-time spills in, as he once said, <i>All the relative thoughts that happen in your mind in connection with cause and effect are the agents of the dralas</i>. As if finding a clue that amplified the logic of dream time, on the day I recovered my health I came across a quote about history by Antonio Gramsci, that it "has deposited us" in an "infinity of traces without leaving an inventory" and as part of becoming conscious it is necessary "to compile such an inventory." <br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This morning the swallows were out, acrobatic as ever. I lay on my back and stared up at them, though the open door; wing gusts of acceleration, then glides or turns in the next instant. Swallows fly in unpredictable changes of direction according to the insects they sight in their hunt. As I watched them my body relaxed discernibly, the patterns of their movement so at home in my optic nerve. The swallows were hunting and the insects where dying, that's what one narrative said. Another narrative was about the traces, that as we notice and record them, they accumulate into the steps of an unknown but optimal path. Realization feeds upon the erratic.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">After three weeks in Bursa, writing, studying, doing my practice, wandering and taking my meals, without having had a single conversation beyond the ones it takes to order food or ask the desk clerks to help me with my Turkish, I recognize that what brought me here was an unimaginable sequence of blessings in a free-fall, accidents occurring beside other things I momentarily took more seriously according to the infections I had at the time. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">. . . </span></span><br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
. . . . <br />
<div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">From The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche</span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Rigdzin Shikpo, formerly known as Michael Hookham, talks about his training with Trungpa Rinpoche in the 1960s, beginning while Rinpoche was studying at Oxford. </span><br />
<b><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /> <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Tribute to Trungpa Rinpoche</span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I and a friend first met Trungpa Rinpoche in 1965 in London. We both had been very impressed by his teaching and asked if we could meet him and talk further and get some teaching from him at his flat in Oxford, the flat he called Anitya, meaning impermanence. We went and stayed there for a long weekend, going up on Friday and getting some teachings from him in the evening, staying over Saturday and Sunday and getting some final instructions in the morning on Monday. The most astonishing thing about this period of time for us was that he was very enthusiastic in teaching us something of dzochen or Maha Ati as he called it. We perhaps didn’t realize at the time just how profound this teaching was, but nevertheless it was something that was very impressive and very telling for us, and in fact has something that stayed with us right up to the present the day. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The first aspect of the teaching he wanted to bring across to us was a very practical aspect, and that is the teaching of what he called <i>complete openness</i>. He said this is the way that you had to act to everybody and to every situation you encountered, you had to be completely open, without having prejudice mind and you had to train yourself in that particular way. And that this was the keynote of the essence of formless meditation itself and no matter what kind of thing arose in meditation, no matter how emotional it might be, no matter how confusing the quality of openness, opening yourself out to what was there always had to be present. It wasn’t a question of indulging in the experience, but allowing yourself to feel it in a very complete way, and then be able to let go of it when you’d done that. So the essence of formless meditation was really this teaching of complete openness. And it wasn’t simply that the complete openness was a meditation instruction, but simply he said that everything was completely open in nature. It didn’t matter what it was, the nature of everything you encountered, all situations and all people, no matter what the experience might be, complete openness was the keynote. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Another thing he mentioned at that time he said it’s not just a question of things of being open, which one might interpret perhaps as some kind of ultimate emptiness, but that things form some kind of coherent pattern just naturally, and this he called <i>natural perfection</i>. As things manifest to you naturally in your life and in your experience they formed patterns that have meaning and significance in a way that he sometimes described as the mandala principle. There isn’t anything that is not significant and not valuable. And there is nothing you can say about your experience that doesn’t make it perfect, even if you were to experience something negative, then the perfection involved in that is of course the fact is that you had yourself constricted or interfered in some way with the natural flow or natural expression of that pattern, and as you did that then the pattern changed and it formed a different kind of natural pattern that might seem to our minds rather confused or rather negative, but it was simply the natural outcome of one’s personal participation with the pattern, along with the participation of all other beings and everything that went up to make up that natural situation.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The important thing in one’s life and in ones behavior was to see this kind natural patterning and to go with that, not in the sense, again, of indulging in it, but to be able to experience it and to open out to it and then to allow the third aspect, which he described as very important, which was to allow the quality of <i>absolute spontaneity</i> to arise. Absolute spontaneity isn’t really something that you can say, “I’m going to be spontaneous”; that of course wouldn’t make any sense, and you can’t in any way make spontaneity happen, of course, but it is possible to lay some kind of ground for that spontaneity to arise, and the important thing there is to not have preconceived, solid ideas about notions of causality, why you think that the volitions that you have should arise in a particular way, such as, well I think in this way because it’s the way am, or I think in this way because it’s the force of my notions that make me think like this, or maybe I think it’s a series of associations that makes me behave or think in this way, but in fact, as you allow yourself to open up into something of that ground from which actions arise, you realize the actions that you called “yours” don’t arise from ego at all, they are not ego centered, and they simply arise from some bases which is actually beyond thought, beyond concepts. You could say its like a fountain of goodness, that all actions are fundamentally good in nature. When it seems that they don’t work and there is some negativity involved, one can see that it is one’s modifications and constrictions in how one treats one’s experience that makes that negativity there, and makes me think that I perhaps performed this particular action, and the egocentricity that is involved in that makes it not a spontaneous act. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">You had to bring the three together, the natural perfection of everything, the complete openness and spontaneity all came together and that it was possible in the general experience of one’s life and one’s Buddhist practice to make those three things a complete unity, and then if you do that you have the experience of what is called <i>the tree of life</i>. That everything that arises has something of significance or value, that nothing in your life is to be considered, as it were, an accidental event, everything had to do with dharma, everything is the living dharma, as he would sometimes say, that on this day the dharma wants me to do this particular thing, or the dharma wants me to do this - that is something that obviously you have to find out for yourself - but his idea was that dharma was alive with these three particular qualities and that was the basis for him for the whole of the dharma and particularly this formless meditation. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And as I said that was something he said to take to heart and we did our best and of course even in those weekends with the instructions were straight from his mouth, as it were, when we went back to our hotel and started to meditate we would say to ourselves, “Well, we can’t force meditation into a particular way or frame it in a certain way,” but of course we couldn’t have not guided the meditation along a bit, to shove it in a particular direction, it took years, to learn to abandon yourself to this quality of spontaneity and to rely on natural perfection and to realize that complete openness was the only way.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioECLpuIrO0cPGA99VVIWw-l6XeSmMWRzcyEgv6cBrEdkowT428TCoA1p7nQ1D238rAnq8IYmOiYsamYBHHeoVnPjEFVF58JFeQ1UWHAAyw3s9Vhnd4wByKKY7BCxC3PBP04uoGy5Nyo7Z/s1600/Embrace.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioECLpuIrO0cPGA99VVIWw-l6XeSmMWRzcyEgv6cBrEdkowT428TCoA1p7nQ1D238rAnq8IYmOiYsamYBHHeoVnPjEFVF58JFeQ1UWHAAyw3s9Vhnd4wByKKY7BCxC3PBP04uoGy5Nyo7Z/s320/Embrace.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7jMj8DhrCGoeZ2GRAj4jNfPX2UmC2tgwjgRvdC5fvEOUOTHcCIAevoHD5gyMAIiyRKkk01AgV4bFXwMOi3iEHONU8OmjE5BG-i9OOuduR9jTeXN9sVsh8x8YAuXtycnPzMKy_MLB7lrYt/s1600/Bottle+fountain2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-2122104977225602762011-09-02T06:50:00.004-06:002011-09-02T23:27:13.924-06:00Two Musicians and One Titanic Musician<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7o7C4a6oG0RAN0ASvYMfFyM-EMnAHbqOK7AiSq4wcGKt4J5M9IR7GlqFCwpZJrach42Go5UOj-gc319-yIVbfl-0b0b-KyXk7zh1_nQlIIjxnIrzFLluWdPvgFFms5JYIYnXW0WcvDK6E/s1600/drum.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7o7C4a6oG0RAN0ASvYMfFyM-EMnAHbqOK7AiSq4wcGKt4J5M9IR7GlqFCwpZJrach42Go5UOj-gc319-yIVbfl-0b0b-KyXk7zh1_nQlIIjxnIrzFLluWdPvgFFms5JYIYnXW0WcvDK6E/s320/drum.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In the spirit of bliss, I offer this six-minute video tribute to three artists, street musicians I encountered in Washington D.C. and New York City. </span><style>
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</style><span style="font-size: small;">The first two musicians are high-energy and magnetic in the way the best street players are, and the third is a <i>huge</i> musician, of truly titanic proportions. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="225" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/28515170" width="400"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/28515170">Two Musicians and One Titanic Musician</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user3312432">Bill Scheffel</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
<br />
</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-53882169720555638062011-08-26T07:48:00.005-06:002011-09-10T00:36:13.595-06:00VISCERAL<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisDXN-1TIDNVVnATUbT3E5QdLiAI3Q0_2_nZLg9GaYYZ7jkqQs9V7MM4GGtTkg_qk7vQy3HypTxcKNTFnncwxEb-xFaXN0EyNAHUKdfvPaZFS66fTW5DfcJ4J6KtmOm0JbEI_88grBh_Al/s1600/3+Ulu+5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisDXN-1TIDNVVnATUbT3E5QdLiAI3Q0_2_nZLg9GaYYZ7jkqQs9V7MM4GGtTkg_qk7vQy3HypTxcKNTFnncwxEb-xFaXN0EyNAHUKdfvPaZFS66fTW5DfcJ4J6KtmOm0JbEI_88grBh_Al/s1600/3+Ulu+5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisDXN-1TIDNVVnATUbT3E5QdLiAI3Q0_2_nZLg9GaYYZ7jkqQs9V7MM4GGtTkg_qk7vQy3HypTxcKNTFnncwxEb-xFaXN0EyNAHUKdfvPaZFS66fTW5DfcJ4J6KtmOm0JbEI_88grBh_Al/s320/3+Ulu+5.jpg" width="261" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Calligraphy by Mehmet Shefik, Ulu Camii, Bursa, Turkey.</span><br />
</span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since selling or mostly giving away my possessions, save some of my library, papers and singular and precious things such as family photographs, art works of my son, myself and others - putting all this in a five-by-five foot storage locker - I have been living out of a suitcase, staying in hotel rooms (mostly) or with friends for almost a year now. I feel the reality of this renunciation each day, though I can't claim it as an especially heroic act. I was a lousy homeowner and am so easily distracted (or subject to multitasking) that it has only been through simplifying my life to this seemingly utmost degree that I can achieve any kind of focus (that feels right in my heart). Another way of putting it is cultural speed and my need to slow down have kept me on a surfboard rather than a boat, which is precarious and visceral and gives me a chance to get to the "fundamental principles" (as a surfboard would tell the rider more about the ocean than a passenger in a boat). This is also how I feel about meditation, that is is something fundamental, and so I always shared Gary Snyder's statement about mediation in the classes I taught at Naropa University:</span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"> Meditation is fundamental, you can't subtract anything from that. It's so fundamental it's been with us for forty or fifty thousand years in one form or another. It's not even something that's specifically Buddhist. It's as fundamental a human activity as taking naps is to wolves, or soaring in circles is to hawks or eagles. It's how you contact the basics and base of yourself.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">It is precisely this sensibility that animates the passion of my exploration between the teachings of Lord Mukpo and those of Ibn 'Arabi, between Buddhism and Islam, and between the so-called profane and the so-called sacred - which I continue this week with a series of photographs and prose entries, taken and written from surfboard.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Quote from <i>The Real Work: Interviews and Talks</i>, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">1974 to 1979, by Gary Snyder. Pg. 83. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><b><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></b></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>COPY</b> </span></div></div><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">While I was walking down Tophane Iskelesi Cadessi I turned to the right and saw a wall and on it a poster and I made a copy of a portion of it ("copy" is how my photographic hero Daido Moriyami speaks of what the camera does): the woman above. This photograph stayed with me as one I wanted to write about, to decipher its symbol. I left Istanbul and traveled to Bursa and during yesterday's breakfast I read a sentence that the photograph seemed to be waiting for: <i>The intermediary "symbolizes" with the worlds it mediates</i>. In the word <i>decipher</i>, "de" expresses reversal and "cipher" is <i>a figurative person or thing of no importance (one who does the bidding</i>). This particular meaning of cipher comes about because cipher itself traces to the Arabic <i>ṣifr</i> or zero. Yesterday I read the quote on symbolism and today over breakfast, unknowingly, I wrote down the Turkish word for zero, which is <i>sıfır</i>. Now I am at the moment where the etymological synchronicity with events and their time sequence has became a platform suspended in air (I have vertigo). Symbolism is a form of dance where the partners change unexpectedly and you just have to stay with it. </div><blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[<i>The intermediary "symbolizes" with the worlds it mediates. </i>Pg. 216<i>, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi </i>by Henry Corbin<i>.</i>]</span></div></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">ECHO</span></b></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUlbK50GRTHyylFrY5vNsZefj6_eR6rFDOVstE-lJg6dcDnCYGaEzx9212T_JXzrTssyH8iWarZ-soGSLQD3WEpIOri4q3Wr6Ob3yIFUH9iHGqPVzKKvG_EUtOkVlovVZLsPCYLTIPVz5P/s1600/Somali+man.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUlbK50GRTHyylFrY5vNsZefj6_eR6rFDOVstE-lJg6dcDnCYGaEzx9212T_JXzrTssyH8iWarZ-soGSLQD3WEpIOri4q3Wr6Ob3yIFUH9iHGqPVzKKvG_EUtOkVlovVZLsPCYLTIPVz5P/s320/Somali+man.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">This is a photograph I took of a photograph I came across in the <i>Hürriyet Daily News </i>earlier this month. The original picture was taken by an unnamed Reuters photographer whose connection with the man shown in the photograph was visceral or primary. The photographer's photograph was copied by the newspaper and now by me; an echo of an echo of a starving man walking somewhere in Somalia, with his dead child wrapped in what looks like the remains of a cardboard box. Photographs could be called <i>intermediaries</i> and I have stayed with this one. It calls out for causes, and the article sites this most immediate one: drought. "It should be the rainy season" but no rain is falling. Other immediate causes are displacement by war and less directly rocketing food prices as global demand increases, commodity speculators manipulate markets, supplies dwindle and as wealthy countries (as well as individuals) <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/food-water-africa-land-grab">buy vast tracts of land</a> in Africa and other less "developed" countries to guarantee food for their own people. Ever increasing tracts of farmland in, say, Sudan or Kenya is now owned by China or Saudi Arabia, and local farmers are displaced from the land and countries are dispossessed of their own farming resources. Global warming will increase drought and desertification, especially in Africa, all of this making the man in the photograph an intermediary of the highest order. Membranes are typically so thin they seem miraculous and unbearably vulnerable: our skin and the blood so close to the surface, so easily spilled; topsoil, so meager compared to the earth's diameter to be laughable; our atmosphere that once seemed so infinite.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b>ENVY</b></div><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTUVLArqn7dacL5t0INC4agy7FCGIGciDXpqbf9lCtsPjjQhr_tXVm5nUhM_9Gb05NrZVSuQRg7G_aQef1jeaKJMDMGFgTSaNvNlcFSpRxmRW7EC236JmDvqImTLyMEqtQ5OWml8wm2saC/s1600/Ferry+row.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTUVLArqn7dacL5t0INC4agy7FCGIGciDXpqbf9lCtsPjjQhr_tXVm5nUhM_9Gb05NrZVSuQRg7G_aQef1jeaKJMDMGFgTSaNvNlcFSpRxmRW7EC236JmDvqImTLyMEqtQ5OWml8wm2saC/s320/Ferry+row.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">I took a passenger ferry from Istanbul to Bursa. I thought I purchased a window seat but what I ended up with was a seat against a wall, below a television monitor and facing the other passengers; the perspective from which I took this photograph (it seems a small point-and shoot-camera can be used almost anywhere now; no one notices, no one cares). The woman in the center of the photograph was cloaked in a burqa; it was not just her dress but how she held herself that contrasted so greatly with the woman beside her, attired without elegance and slumped in her seat. Putting aside the complexities and furor of debate about the burqa (which exist everywhere, including or especially Muslim countries), and how difficult it is to confront from a feminist perspective (my own), in that moment, <i>for</i> that moment, I envied her. What an experience to be invisible to others and thus take up no social mask, as well as be freed from having to engage in small talk (though traveling in Turkey has left me largely without either the mask or the talk). I studied her as I could because she impressed me in other ways and my potential to judge or dismiss became instead to inquire: this woman was in individual human being and therefore, as we all are, a mystery comprised of complexities who ultimately thinks like no one else (not even herself). Soon after the ferry embarked the woman opened her Quran and read it for the entire journey. To read something that demands contemplation is itself a form contemplation, and potentially to be admired. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secularist founder of modern Turkey, dismissed Islam and once claimed the entire "Turkish nation resembled those who commit the Quran to memory without understanding the meaning of a single word and thus becoming senile." Atatürk's view was materialistic in the way Lenin's was (in the way modernity <i>en mass</i> is) and set one wave of history into motion. Removed from historical-political generalizations, I sat in the anecdotal, seat 324 of the Yenikapi-Bursa ferry, and observed the other passengers. The woman in the burqa carried a potency, a high-frequency focus, quite ennobled. Her clothing extended to her hands, the black gloves she turned the pages of her book with.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Quote from <i>Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography</i>, </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">by </span><span class="st"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sükrü Hanioglu. Pg. 132</span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>SEED </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidkrrumHrLtIuEThOeIvEsPJGF5fFtKmLkq1zLHHVaPj5mvRikME1E_SL7SvV1_M6nYSqLl6UU-59Zcl0Lr16ULt9CcorwLot7TB-nAvaTdIdbCYNePESkHUjSG8ueDWYIdHLpyH5dSmmZ/s1600/3+Ulu+2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidkrrumHrLtIuEThOeIvEsPJGF5fFtKmLkq1zLHHVaPj5mvRikME1E_SL7SvV1_M6nYSqLl6UU-59Zcl0Lr16ULt9CcorwLot7TB-nAvaTdIdbCYNePESkHUjSG8ueDWYIdHLpyH5dSmmZ/s400/3+Ulu+2.jpg" width="297" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Ulu Camii, Bursa, Turkey.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Nearly two years I bought a book by Ibn 'Abrabi (<i>Journey to the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat</i>) that was illustrated with reproductions of the "monumental mural compositions" by Nineteenth Century calligrapher Mehmet Shefik. The racing freedom of Arabic had always appealed to me, particularly in these highly stylized and energized works. The text explained the calligraphies were made for Ulu Camii (Grand Mosque) in Bursa, Turkey. And now, because of the book, I was standing in front of them, photographing them, experiencing the reality of Ulu Camii.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">My "reality" of Ulu Camii consisted of the plastic bag I had wrapped my sandals in and now carried in my left hand, and of a rapidly decreasing sense of self-consciousness. My experience inside the mosques I've visited - including the prayer ceremony I once took part in - is one of solitude <i>and</i> fraternity, and that the mosque, in its greatest conceptions (as Chartres, say, is to Christianity), is a space of inwardness, extremely personal even. Allah, the divine or the unconditioned not expressed so much though a vaulted ceiling (though some domes are huge) but in an intimate nook, the wall in front of one, or simply the carpet below, and that an ideal (or enlightened) "society" would momentarily occur not only as people prayed together, but as they congregated somewhat informally and haphazardly in the various sections of the mosque's omnidirectional space (the <i>mihrab</i> not being the "front" so much as a direction) and in these "gatherings" the highest conversational <i>prajna</i> (understanding, cognitive acuity, or wisdom) might occur, a Socratic salon that would not argue dogma but open portals beyond it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I had sensed all of this eleven years ago when I visited the Cathedral and former <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral%E2%80%93Mosque_of_C%C3%B3rdoba">Great Mosque of Córdoba</a>. In that astounding work, 856 columns and countless arches create a labyrinth of contemplative space and here, in Ulu Camii, though the arcitecture was different the potential was not only the same, but continues to be realized (the Mosque of Córdoba no longer functions as a mosque but as a Cathedral and museum). </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmpy1_BS8EIK0kR3c7DI5dyfAY0y0UHVFU6_zLbUivgGUa9xwjDLD3jxYfSR2p0pn6Vd07qCkNX7txRo5vISDf5DlF2JxpWhBqDgsCAEUJg8pNcdzxlBc2uIZRZhTk_hJZ_qx_3ndnrL7X/s1600/3+Ulu+3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmpy1_BS8EIK0kR3c7DI5dyfAY0y0UHVFU6_zLbUivgGUa9xwjDLD3jxYfSR2p0pn6Vd07qCkNX7txRo5vISDf5DlF2JxpWhBqDgsCAEUJg8pNcdzxlBc2uIZRZhTk_hJZ_qx_3ndnrL7X/s320/3+Ulu+3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Inside Ulu Camii is a large ablution fountain which one may both wash and drink from at length. Outside the mosque I'd washed and drank from the ablution fountain there, and inside I drank again, making my reality <i>water</i> (its consciousness), there was a tangibility to this, as if I "entered" the Camii <i>through</i> the water. The "real" murals didn't impress me as much as when I'd seen them in the book (that <i>seeing</i> was the kind of imaginative moment or "transmission" that seldom arrives again in the form of a now-met external expectation-destination). I was transfixed by the <i>welcome</i> of the atmosphere and I felt in no way an intruder, nor did I detect the slightest glance of disapproval. Muslims often speak of Islam as a religion of peace and I felt a tremendous, palpable peace in the Camii, also very strong and potent. When I left Ulu Camii I experienced an unmistakable sense of being "changed" though a kind of blessing or spiritual grace, the same thing I felt in a single moment of Lord Mukpo's presence, or other great teachers of the Tibetan lineages. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">TRACE</span></b><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBlO3TwPrglcB6wwLcmxHokTc09HqhXnAR9M4DPPZ6FAJJFZa1sl3cJWqUX5FlV3DurWODYSpYyUq0jSuTZjyJBabeL1g-uV2aXYVEEVaOBEWW48BPz1wj5ILFcHZPgtGVxBAuz6iHErcR/s1600/3+Blue.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBlO3TwPrglcB6wwLcmxHokTc09HqhXnAR9M4DPPZ6FAJJFZa1sl3cJWqUX5FlV3DurWODYSpYyUq0jSuTZjyJBabeL1g-uV2aXYVEEVaOBEWW48BPz1wj5ILFcHZPgtGVxBAuz6iHErcR/s400/3+Blue.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">I took this picture of the surface of the Bosphorus when I was still in Istanbul, from a viewing platform at the half-way point of the Galata Bridge. The photograph suspends the movement of the water into a simulacrum of the mountain ranges found on land (or below the sea). My experience of the drala principle and the <i>drala</i> has often (unexpectedly) corolated with water (Boulder Creek, the River Arno, the Mekong) and so made me more devoted to water, its element, idea and necessity. I came down with food poisoning the day after visiting Ulu Camii and lay in bed for thirty-two hours, for much of the time unable to drink water because it made me vomit again. I slept most of it, two nights and the entire day in between - though I also woke up dozens of times. Each time I woke, it was as if I'd just been taken to an earlier time of my life in order to feel its particular suffering, duration, or epiphany: a certain hike I took in southern Utah when I was nineteen; a desk I worked at doing accounting; the first time I took my son to Mexico.<br />
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I've been working with this process for some time: writing down, if I remember to, the thought I have when I first wake, even if just from a nap (sometimes especially a nap) as if this was one of the moments Lord Mukpo's dream-time could spill in; as he once said, "All the relative thoughts that happen in your mind in connection with cause and effect are the agents of the dralas." Yesterday I was too sick to write anything down, but the whole episode aligned with a memorable and poetic statement by Antonio Gramsci I had read the day before, that history "has deposited you in an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory" and as part of becoming conscious it is necessary "to compile such an inventory." </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Quote from <i>Orientalism</i>, by Edward Said, pg 25</span>.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">. . . . . . . . . . . </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiol8-eLDQOW2mIObkzLV1J9p4CuRrMGI7JDX8C6dcZMBIM0x9sx4E7Pa-BcLYv4ZgqVYIKpiMLRA0edb18SUcgGFyZCVch4x0uwJk-hRmwGKh0XiO3ZGNirqg98P3WvVivnh0xghcrTwxF/s1600/3+Ulu+6+sm.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiol8-eLDQOW2mIObkzLV1J9p4CuRrMGI7JDX8C6dcZMBIM0x9sx4E7Pa-BcLYv4ZgqVYIKpiMLRA0edb18SUcgGFyZCVch4x0uwJk-hRmwGKh0XiO3ZGNirqg98P3WvVivnh0xghcrTwxF/s400/3+Ulu+6+sm.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiiIpZRIfQPjuJsNScGGV5lk7A8E_Pu2xynQzM8ziAVZCL43gPiRkGfFyWv_D_KwydJUYJa16UgveKjRJ3KnsnJHosCeqDS2H5BRBCQ3cZ9jg62wxBg0KXb6bXuWYqriPOv3Cb-TKHUbyf/s1600/3+Ulu+4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiiIpZRIfQPjuJsNScGGV5lk7A8E_Pu2xynQzM8ziAVZCL43gPiRkGfFyWv_D_KwydJUYJa16UgveKjRJ3KnsnJHosCeqDS2H5BRBCQ3cZ9jg62wxBg0KXb6bXuWYqriPOv3Cb-TKHUbyf/s400/3+Ulu+4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcrGENMVL5TD-oSEcVzYSR9jiXv5E-knnfTc8noh7N2zrWAr-9Bk0k3ngFRsa9VyWj_J2C_Se8syCQI34hVk3jPMWNkwUvcHty2qUFTb0YZ8GGqaGikxDaeag3ivRBIrpwbX_ro7e0CDIX/s1600/3+Ulu+1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcrGENMVL5TD-oSEcVzYSR9jiXv5E-knnfTc8noh7N2zrWAr-9Bk0k3ngFRsa9VyWj_J2C_Se8syCQI34hVk3jPMWNkwUvcHty2qUFTb0YZ8GGqaGikxDaeag3ivRBIrpwbX_ro7e0CDIX/s400/3+Ulu+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div></div></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-33872178671671804832011-08-20T01:46:00.005-06:002011-08-21T01:39:51.477-06:00SUN AND GATE<div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This <i>Western Mountain</i> blog of writings and photographs is from Turkey, where I am exploring relationships between (Vajrayana) Buddhism and (mystical) Islam, and more specifically between the teachings of Lord Mukpo and Ibn ‘Arabi. I have always heard and felt called to a “universal voice” and trajectory in Lord Mukpo’s teachings (particularly those of Shambhala and the drala principle), and that “universality” is also part of my exploration. An exploration occurring mostly haphazardly and anecdotally, as confusions and new discoveries - whether they occur on the street, so to speak, or in bed at 3:33 AM. But there is also an element of concentration, holding the themes I’ve mentioned and mixing them with a good deal of reading and practice.</span></span> <i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">- Bill Scheffel</span></i><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">CRANE</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV4KDU1kuzkxhpFVtjkfS0fT4VzGI3QUGWZk23upfFykG1zmzj9mPNZEHWhCHl3cg1XAn_0rbqbsjNsI4rwuZjEZcAD7H4OTDsr6lMS41fK5ONbjei_umARk1UUgMQlpG2Bw6XTFYR-63x/s1600/2+Crane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV4KDU1kuzkxhpFVtjkfS0fT4VzGI3QUGWZk23upfFykG1zmzj9mPNZEHWhCHl3cg1XAn_0rbqbsjNsI4rwuZjEZcAD7H4OTDsr6lMS41fK5ONbjei_umARk1UUgMQlpG2Bw6XTFYR-63x/s400/2+Crane.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This is the view from my hotel window, room #1501, brought closer by the zoom lens of my camera. Normally I cannot see the highrise buildings in the distance with the detail shown here. Normally I cannot see a second sun, a fugitive image of the camera’s projection. The sensor in the camera, with its correspondence to the processing in my own brain, has created a second sunset, imbedded on the endless apartment covered hillside of Western Istanbul. The camera believes the projected sun to be true, just as I believe my own projections are real. The camera and I have much to learn from each other. </span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">9-Aug: 2011 Istanbul</span></span></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">GATE</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFaJ7Ni1eZn7oFON9L5QQ9LGX6uIk1dkjopFAdxD7_kBTEThFT9boyYQEDAQbtJU95xrqpjyWMMZcXgHFywI2kYIFd1Oqjid4mYZORoq-SIGtucbDivQUmkfqvcIVyD4nDQ38rFwPQKLYM/s1600/2+Gate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFaJ7Ni1eZn7oFON9L5QQ9LGX6uIk1dkjopFAdxD7_kBTEThFT9boyYQEDAQbtJU95xrqpjyWMMZcXgHFywI2kYIFd1Oqjid4mYZORoq-SIGtucbDivQUmkfqvcIVyD4nDQ38rFwPQKLYM/s400/2+Gate.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Yesterday I took a walk in the early evening. I walked out of Beyoğlu and across the Galata Bridge. I walked through the pedestrian underpass at Eminönü and into the thicket of streets that I have leaned instinctively to find my way through, the streets of Eminönü, Beyazit and Sultanahmet as they meet in the ancient center of Istanbul. The sights were my companions, as always. Random, disjointed, sudden encounters, each as distinct from the next as one book is from another. Many were bewildering, bludgeoning; incessant, commercial, covered with grime and advertising. Mosques were everywhere and this one offered a garish pink wall nearby and a courtyard of weeds. I allowed the camera to find a perspective I could not have. I let it peer like the periscope of a submarine through the iron linkage of a closed gate. The shutter opened and the camera saw. It saw my own epiphany. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">10-Aug:2011 Istanbul</span></i></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">YELLOW LIGHT</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQMaBot2FxCn5qB5ui-0K5OGEj3KqMP8tPAJfJ0kDkbSAA2CAeDwRJ8-jiLNsK5AxsztaVqay-r73Oq8nVSWVVuz0aG1cM1dcoTTWBUuKbmTSLTuW7lcEHYKg442lXMdl2LkVqLyxItd3z/s1600/2+Yellow+Light.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQMaBot2FxCn5qB5ui-0K5OGEj3KqMP8tPAJfJ0kDkbSAA2CAeDwRJ8-jiLNsK5AxsztaVqay-r73Oq8nVSWVVuz0aG1cM1dcoTTWBUuKbmTSLTuW7lcEHYKg442lXMdl2LkVqLyxItd3z/s400/2+Yellow+Light.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This was the amber light that greeted me just before I crossed Atatürk Bridge, on my walk to Fatih Mosque and the district around it. The amber light is our relative truth expressed in a color, <i>Caution</i>. The amber light brings faint panic - if we are driving. Some speed up (some joke the yellow light means speed up), some brake. Each country, each city, has its own ways of driving (I would never drive in Istanbul). As a pedestrian I saw the amber light as a foil for the graying, cloudy and multi-hued blue sky, a contrasting globe too gorgeous not to stop for. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><i><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">11-Aug: 2011 Istanbul</span></i></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">BOSPHORUS</span></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcTxfiFP8rOzPf790dAh9ZQ3E-9lEBrrajvgLPk27G9wFAcH5XVg4YY_zuXfKa-S8c9T5Vv7ZKEPOke7pk0tAY1zWuXrBsTkt43g8JcRAAtD-U1I1m63vF8sRn_Cqh0IwZUOsMY5-mMof8/s1600/2+Bosphorus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcTxfiFP8rOzPf790dAh9ZQ3E-9lEBrrajvgLPk27G9wFAcH5XVg4YY_zuXfKa-S8c9T5Vv7ZKEPOke7pk0tAY1zWuXrBsTkt43g8JcRAAtD-U1I1m63vF8sRn_Cqh0IwZUOsMY5-mMof8/s400/2+Bosphorus.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I took this photograph as I did the others, in my first week back in Istanbul - only days ago, but now it seems like weeks. All the photographs have so receded from recent memory they could as easily be from someone else’s camera. Like playing cards shuffled in a deck their linearity has been dissolved and “unreal” things appear, as this photograph shows: there is not this kind of space in Istanbul, seldom a time when only two men are seen to fish, not always this kind of clear sky, or a boat appearing like one that might have taken Joseph Conrad up a river. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">15-Aug: 2011 Istanbul</span></i></span><br />
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<blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">GNOSIS</span></b></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLrzFuEDfLT-NLmlsLviMACfJ75KJu6fw7J_F1GDC9BRh-jgMxasxavjGrAp-gVYVnjqBcUmVeYvtbItghMKh-Diry3R3nxwucRZNWAOZzlG1-iqcxtr7HE65BhE9BOTNzTQONUBOOCkp0/s1600/2+Gnosis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLrzFuEDfLT-NLmlsLviMACfJ75KJu6fw7J_F1GDC9BRh-jgMxasxavjGrAp-gVYVnjqBcUmVeYvtbItghMKh-Diry3R3nxwucRZNWAOZzlG1-iqcxtr7HE65BhE9BOTNzTQONUBOOCkp0/s400/2+Gnosis.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><i>gnosis </i></b>|ˈnōsis|</span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">noun</span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">knowledge of spiritual mysteries.</span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Greek <i>gnōsis</i> ‘knowledge’ </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(related to <i>gignōskein</i> ‘know’ ).</span></span></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Spirit traces to the Latin <i>spiritus</i> or “breath” and in this sense every moment (of breath) is a “spiritual mystery.” One day the phrase, <i>See the you of diamond light that others see when seeing you</i>, occurred to me as I was speaking with a friend. As I observe passengers in airports, order eggs and coffee from waiters or fleetingly meet the glance of subway riders my perceptions sometimes shift or “crossover” into seeing others as Lord Mukpo might (or is), as if this is the only way to experience real sympathy. <i>The world is seeing us as we see the world</i>, that is what this graffiti told me, that primordial wisdom had symbolically found its way to a side street of pimps and graffiti covered walls. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">16-Aug: 2011 Istanbul</span></i></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">SUN AND CRANE</span></b></span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm32N2vx9OzP2ua-Cmskzsu1cduxxDo36a17ST6kdfCOPU9_2Ph5gukjsjBKbmpVBi0m2MhO2de5zravvNTXYHIxQ0X6ccOpTuwrRTuoRdAMgBhp9gepOCLJUvzJBhBBYLaKm0Z3bVKkQu/s1600/2+Sun+and+Crane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm32N2vx9OzP2ua-Cmskzsu1cduxxDo36a17ST6kdfCOPU9_2Ph5gukjsjBKbmpVBi0m2MhO2de5zravvNTXYHIxQ0X6ccOpTuwrRTuoRdAMgBhp9gepOCLJUvzJBhBBYLaKm0Z3bVKkQu/s400/2+Sun+and+Crane.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This is the sun and crane nine days later (after the arm of the crane had been assembled). The sun was setting as I took the photograph and now, as I am writing about it (moments later), the sun in the photograph and the “real” sun have (both) set. The buildings are there, the newer ones, as well as the minaret to the left, which might have been built six-hundred years ago (depending on which Istanbul mosque it belongs to) and resides in the collision of time and events and apparent objects that play upon the optic nerve. When the nerve is gone the memories scatter. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s experience of time, the most “all embracing of the Days of God is the Day of Essence,” which he described as not the longest of days (as we would have thought), but from our standpoint the shortest. As William C. Chittick writes: “Its length being one instant, which is the present moment, which is defined precisely as the instant that cannot be divided into parts. But, this shortest of the Divine Days lasts forever.”</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">19-Aug: 2011 Istanbul</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Quote from Ibn ‘Arabi: Heir to the Prophets</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">by William C. Chittick</span></i><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-41382044623080402882011-08-02T10:02:00.002-06:002011-08-02T10:50:10.351-06:00Father as Ancestor, Part II<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">To my fathers...</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWYoYg00K_yiw46MXFFiCwZ-LBrYhx4pvSsH7cHC4xLLU2XGS6Rn2Foa_w0Ho5aqs3dmxHXYngMrYc1ci4eTeqqg5o7GCwPZU_lZorGkcIJGfqGzdcDDuNEnmhf-p3WUEJmFNhcT78Idqi/s1600/Lord+Mukpo+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWYoYg00K_yiw46MXFFiCwZ-LBrYhx4pvSsH7cHC4xLLU2XGS6Rn2Foa_w0Ho5aqs3dmxHXYngMrYc1ci4eTeqqg5o7GCwPZU_lZorGkcIJGfqGzdcDDuNEnmhf-p3WUEJmFNhcT78Idqi/s320/Lord+Mukpo+small.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20">Chögyam Trungpa</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">February 28, 1939 - April 4, 1987</span></span> </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo by Cynthia McAdams</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2g6YMzJW88NYJ6ze021Z5vvdr4HouNv3BXw39sEi22ZPpTSn7dGaJsIaBF84qlR-nEfwWASpNHTPAUZBs0NdPoQOaj8gLq14L_IjoeEdyYkxsKW5MSqRWNmRcvT9bI6yiNwPhDVzy7CMj/s1600/Father+sepia+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2g6YMzJW88NYJ6ze021Z5vvdr4HouNv3BXw39sEi22ZPpTSn7dGaJsIaBF84qlR-nEfwWASpNHTPAUZBs0NdPoQOaj8gLq14L_IjoeEdyYkxsKW5MSqRWNmRcvT9bI6yiNwPhDVzy7CMj/s200/Father+sepia+2.jpg" width="150" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">William S. Scheffel</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">October 12, 1921 - August 2, 2010</span></span> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
<a href="http://westernmountain.org/downloads.html">Download a PDF of this posting.</a><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20">Chögyam Trungpa, or Lord Mukpo, is my spiritual father or root teacher. My own father, William S. Scheffel, died exactly one year ago today. In the memory and living presence of both of my fathers I offer the following prose poems, poems I wrote in three different countries and in three different years. The pieces are not about my fathers per se, but about their imprint, their echo, their request.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><blockquote><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Faith </span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Unconditional faith is not something to believe in but something to know. It is not forcing myself to believe but encountering something believable, something undeniable, something innate. The encounter itself is intangible, a substance I cannot collect, bring home, or experiment on. I cannot prove its existence or even that it happened. Faith is packaged intangibility as terrain, an invisible homeland we emerged from, or once crossed over, or slept on for a night - that continues to exist as a spiritual echo or postcard. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The text says, “That mind of sadness, possessing faith, free from thought is the profound tradition of the genuine great warriors.” Faith is an innate aspect of the mind of sadness - which is unconditional sadness: the all-embracing mercy, love and compassion that is an ocean without shore, distributed evenly and without beginning or end throughout the timeless and unbounded cosmos. It discovers us as gravity, intangible attraction. The mind of sadness possesses faith as the universe is possessed by gravity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The mind free from thought is like the moon without space probes or discarded fuel tanks. A perfect sphere of non-interference that has no diameter. The thought that goes looking for something it can never find is freed by outer space and faith flares in countless unique constellations. The profound tradition of genuine great warriors are those who open to witness this immensity without location.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">These warriors have journeyed though countless light years of aloneness. Since awake travels at the speed of light they became ever closer to themselves. On an endless journey, they have nothing to dispense but gravity itself; compassion or mercy in all its faces - terrible fires or the miracle of water. The most perfect geniuses of awakened warrior-ship travel faster than the speed of light, which explains how they might arise between the thought we just had and the one we haven’t had yet. The gap in thought is our invisible homeland and our faith the felt evidence of each of their visits. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span> </blockquote><blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>31-May: 2009</i></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Boulder, Colorado</i></div></blockquote><br />
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</div><blockquote><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In Paris</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In Paris it was difficult to determine what the situation required of me. Was it grief, sharing, practice? It must have been all three because only those three were real. Sometimes the coffee was real, the blue of a cup as I photographed it. The Metro stops were real, the beauty of their names: <i>Anvers, Pigalle, Blanche</i>. The grief was real (points of exhaustion in the free-fall without station as one ages and those one loves are gone or far away, is that not demanding enough?) It would have been best to become still. And we did, in practice. Dominique, Sylvie, Lou, Alimone, Valerie. I discovered a voice of my own, made friends with it, shared it in stillness, finding accurate descriptions of mind’s cognizant nature functioning in the emergent, thickly inhabited easterly now. Each morning I pushed back the shutters of a window three stores above the sidewalks of <i>Rue de Mont-Dore</i>. Nothing mitigated a haunting sense of <i>withoutness</i>. Except the sharing. Dominique twice bought a cheese made in Switzerland one cuts with a special blade into the shape of crumpled flower petals, no thicker. <i>Cote de Rhone</i> and cheese and endive and walnuts and conversations, always about beauty and what we want to commit ourselves to: <i>incessant spotlight imaging the future</i>. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">16-March: 2011</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Istanbul</span></i></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><blockquote><i><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It is the Street </span></b></i></blockquote><blockquote style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It is the street that works on me, tutors me, undoes me. It is as if I have never seen the streets before, any of them (though I have walked them for weeks). A violet wall. Charcoal in a bucket brings flames to the corn husk. Bananas dry in the sun lit upon by fly swarms. So many restaurants (mostly tables on the street-side) you never know where you should eat. Or what. There are as many smells as colors. Motorbike horns and frying oil airborne, drift by the boy who runs in a green shirt but without any shoes. Often I take the road that borders the causeway and try but cannot find the place in the scent of sewage that is awful. The logic of the street is survival, accommodation and change. People have found themselves economies. Some wash clothes. Some flatten bananas and grill them. Some sell gas out of liter bottles. Thousands of men drive motorbike taxis, wait on corners for passengers: slyly humorous, predatorily alert and quick to call out or guffaw. The sidewalk (to call it that) is intently inhabited, used, each person accommodated as they survive while changing economies worm along the street, behind fences, tearing down older houses and erecting new ones. This accounts for the variety of architecture but not its incoherence, a kind of rampant imagining of new wealth and how to express it. I am a wanderer, a foreigner, a walker, a post-meditater, a writer walking the street as it is walking me. </blockquote><blockquote style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>26-August:2006 </i><br />
<i>Phnom Penh</i></blockquote><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu-7jrBLv5E82oNkdefxEI0LPx7QvOVIpVqHwxSjZ42JGgMCaOT6Br91Xqt97XkHqq8DO9eHfpySEyzvEAfwRTnto0UnxnKkfsMI2cRLZw3aYHUt5rKM1siEjNCBsayTS_3yX-6KQlQzmX/s1600/Brother+Stray+Dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu-7jrBLv5E82oNkdefxEI0LPx7QvOVIpVqHwxSjZ42JGgMCaOT6Br91Xqt97XkHqq8DO9eHfpySEyzvEAfwRTnto0UnxnKkfsMI2cRLZw3aYHUt5rKM1siEjNCBsayTS_3yX-6KQlQzmX/s200/Brother+Stray+Dog.jpg" width="159" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Bill Scheffel</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsxwLzmaXuakorjRS2Pq2_w5lJHtChvFuRt9GvQeeNCCydxOUyXnMDw9TOCcfX6QJubVqtWuocV37jEwfhdTjtx_MXF0R-AyNU6M8OfEO-0tLNx25DX-kyqtTAt013_hbPw4lKmUgf777R/s1600/3LD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsxwLzmaXuakorjRS2Pq2_w5lJHtChvFuRt9GvQeeNCCydxOUyXnMDw9TOCcfX6QJubVqtWuocV37jEwfhdTjtx_MXF0R-AyNU6M8OfEO-0tLNx25DX-kyqtTAt013_hbPw4lKmUgf777R/s320/3LD.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"Stray Dog"</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-4921462725551112782011-06-05T09:41:00.004-06:002011-06-05T11:13:25.472-06:00ALONENESS, FAITH, TRANSMISSION, DURATION.<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="225" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24608664" width="400"></iframe><a href="http://vimeo.com/24608664">Jakusho Kwong-roshi: On Becoming a Teacher</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user3312432">Bill Scheffel</a>.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://dralaprinciple.blogspot.com/2010/03/jakusho-kwong-roshi-on-chogyam-trungpa.html">[Please see my previous video-writing on Kwong-roshi and SMZC.]</a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">That </span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> Trungpa Rinpoche and Shunryu Suzuki-roshi shared a close friendship is familiar lineage lore for many and a central story in the history of Buddhism coming to the West. It is also part of the living memory of those who knew both teachers. Perhaps Jakusho Kwong-roshi stands as a premier witness of this friendship. Kwong-roshi became one of Suzuki-roshi dharma heirs and drew inspiration and guidance from Trungpa Rinpoche after Suzuki-roshi's death. Perhaps not a lot of people know that Kwong-roshi erected a stupa on his land, <a href="http://www.smzc.net/">Sonoma Mountain Zen Center</a>, in honor of Trunpa Rinpoche - that is how deep the gratitude and lineage exchange goes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">This video is taken from footage I gathered at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center during two trips I made in 2008 and 2009. My initial intention was to interview Kwong-roshi about his relationship with </span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> Trungpa and about the drala principle. But Roshi went on to discuss many other subjects - and in the handful of days I spent during my visits I received an intimate glimpse of life at SMZC (one that added to times I did retreat there in the 1980s). Roshi was very generous with his time, as was his wife Shinko, his son Nyoze, and the other residents. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In this footage, Kwong-roshi talks about what it means to become a teacher, for having to become a teacher was the position Kwong-roshi found himself in in 1971, the year Suzuki-roshi died. In this interview, Kwong-roshi shares many aspects of this journey, and also gives us glimpses into what it meant to know and study with </span><span style="font-size: small;">Suzuki-roshi and </span><span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> Trunpga. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Please see a <a href="http://dralaprinciple.blogspot.com/2010/03/jakusho-kwong-roshi-on-chogyam-trungpa.html">previous blog from 2010</a> for additional footage of Kwong-roshi as well as for more of his biography. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">. . . . . </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><br />
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</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmaJr-lzUu7t18yxNc_UNaopRHdvq2UvNDvQ6SwYDeF9MVZwmmhGjn8N6KTDtxAiTF4y6ymbk5N67aEhWy2QbprNLc5MmrgOUfxoCu298G-fz2uaGgQx7K03QRk2YN-fH3AKmyHvC5xi9j/s1600/Roshi+%2526+Shinnko+2nd+plus+kitchen+etc.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmaJr-lzUu7t18yxNc_UNaopRHdvq2UvNDvQ6SwYDeF9MVZwmmhGjn8N6KTDtxAiTF4y6ymbk5N67aEhWy2QbprNLc5MmrgOUfxoCu298G-fz2uaGgQx7K03QRk2YN-fH3AKmyHvC5xi9j/s320/Roshi+%2526+Shinnko+2nd+plus+kitchen+etc.png" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Sonoma Mountain Zen Center Kitchen</span></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpEG64gKbcYUSA_lPWgLiRzKnvX6Bwqi0igBb1a9amvl13d4TsET74p4myLhEGEyCAfpdzoWUZcPjqunlMxhs-XXg1hE_4xC5waa3JD8Bk6dWKwgLVHEyI2PC1fe2qmCkJVXMuUYDAP8yv/s1600/Orioki+sets.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpEG64gKbcYUSA_lPWgLiRzKnvX6Bwqi0igBb1a9amvl13d4TsET74p4myLhEGEyCAfpdzoWUZcPjqunlMxhs-XXg1hE_4xC5waa3JD8Bk6dWKwgLVHEyI2PC1fe2qmCkJVXMuUYDAP8yv/s320/Orioki+sets.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cry%C5%8Dki">Ōryōki sets</a>. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKRuAFnL4-3cgg4yNT8mLxlvH3tCGStxEtCyg8CFVEJ1uiZhdNAcaAi4IKwBcvD-EX0DVMeurKlcB6_yW7iSwkwZNdw_9J9MgKE97h3kg5pZBc1cdVUaYcEawy7F1MlznMPzsa2ia0fvv/s1600/Orioki.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKRuAFnL4-3cgg4yNT8mLxlvH3tCGStxEtCyg8CFVEJ1uiZhdNAcaAi4IKwBcvD-EX0DVMeurKlcB6_yW7iSwkwZNdw_9J9MgKE97h3kg5pZBc1cdVUaYcEawy7F1MlznMPzsa2ia0fvv/s320/Orioki.png" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Ōryōki lunch.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGP-L8CYRGa3tBMdKzI6xh2IzBuBK9oWwEJOPSdyR7rElKJEbrDajdgz6NrdvCazOn0RjwKU0gyqgiMW0i2A9cTDDe9s5hnGoeVEXvtaWOPaTx4fuuYYxN4iq9ZLXiASfkG4qgQDBrzgDn/s1600/Roshi+w+baby.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGP-L8CYRGa3tBMdKzI6xh2IzBuBK9oWwEJOPSdyR7rElKJEbrDajdgz6NrdvCazOn0RjwKU0gyqgiMW0i2A9cTDDe9s5hnGoeVEXvtaWOPaTx4fuuYYxN4iq9ZLXiASfkG4qgQDBrzgDn/s320/Roshi+w+baby.png" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Jakusho Kwong-roshi with future generation.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUkSx2mRKQZSXrKHYGMhh-D_X0RawrHSWOCVetrHe-fFqh064J0QWyXyojJxJp4QV-YBz0RAx1xix8mT38xoe-v1Hzfi9HjOP9s6ZQiFjcaq4O2wf9c-rjQzn8OFYI65ldhJThf2nQ217b/s1600/Roshi+%2526+Shinnko+1+08-2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUkSx2mRKQZSXrKHYGMhh-D_X0RawrHSWOCVetrHe-fFqh064J0QWyXyojJxJp4QV-YBz0RAx1xix8mT38xoe-v1Hzfi9HjOP9s6ZQiFjcaq4O2wf9c-rjQzn8OFYI65ldhJThf2nQ217b/s320/Roshi+%2526+Shinnko+1+08-2.png" width="320" /></a><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Shinko</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Kwong.</span></div><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIw-OcIyDP-MWv_0q11lqFPBLyZZ5s_EESuT043_YTSPXV90YoezqrTt6hku5iMU3WnTle8_25Pqh_AP0i5CcUyMZo4pg_97kuCh6Gy3lrbAoaiBpmOltzkBT1irVkgnqfQsaWduW1MqvS/s1600/Damian.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIw-OcIyDP-MWv_0q11lqFPBLyZZ5s_EESuT043_YTSPXV90YoezqrTt6hku5iMU3WnTle8_25Pqh_AP0i5CcUyMZo4pg_97kuCh6Gy3lrbAoaiBpmOltzkBT1irVkgnqfQsaWduW1MqvS/s320/Damian.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Nyoze Kwong.</span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWIe0Y7cJ4Jo2cIt3D6hwOjJvpLyOk3Y0rZg2OpaUgpHX8C0Bp-c_yLX9_pR23vpXQbrVJbUaMvS8RG9tHsEt2DBzG2lZsEC7DayB8ehXMVNy_IDumWRcwul4PxTE1pEq1OeXJNxMBTA2b/s1600/Roshi+with+baby.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWIe0Y7cJ4Jo2cIt3D6hwOjJvpLyOk3Y0rZg2OpaUgpHX8C0Bp-c_yLX9_pR23vpXQbrVJbUaMvS8RG9tHsEt2DBzG2lZsEC7DayB8ehXMVNy_IDumWRcwul4PxTE1pEq1OeXJNxMBTA2b/s320/Roshi+with+baby.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Sonoma Mountain Zen Center zendo.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
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Photos above and below from Shinko's</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">birthday party, 2008.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioGm8E3BKo-maxbgph7NED1aqWaeClryQ4tSvt_brj6heTd1hOqxZP1JVAFdRgoDZIMufjFACU_QQSxZFqk3P6LHmswYqV_RFJamIf0LeqnY4bIadLhiG5oNGnDKkVuHRSreEuVeGN-fed/s1600/Shinko%2527s+party+and+various2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioGm8E3BKo-maxbgph7NED1aqWaeClryQ4tSvt_brj6heTd1hOqxZP1JVAFdRgoDZIMufjFACU_QQSxZFqk3P6LHmswYqV_RFJamIf0LeqnY4bIadLhiG5oNGnDKkVuHRSreEuVeGN-fed/s1600/Shinko%2527s+party+and+various2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioGm8E3BKo-maxbgph7NED1aqWaeClryQ4tSvt_brj6heTd1hOqxZP1JVAFdRgoDZIMufjFACU_QQSxZFqk3P6LHmswYqV_RFJamIf0LeqnY4bIadLhiG5oNGnDKkVuHRSreEuVeGN-fed/s320/Shinko%2527s+party+and+various2.png" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUkSx2mRKQZSXrKHYGMhh-D_X0RawrHSWOCVetrHe-fFqh064J0QWyXyojJxJp4QV-YBz0RAx1xix8mT38xoe-v1Hzfi9HjOP9s6ZQiFjcaq4O2wf9c-rjQzn8OFYI65ldhJThf2nQ217b/s1600/Roshi+%2526+Shinnko+1+08-2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibHKPwG3bIHA7jsrj0peA9VlsI1EVZ136bHH40JPn_3hu58peiC-y3LBdg56jPz9ZVpNLKhmxnMU8JL3iRdJM1iJGxWKHe_5OZPr2SfkQ0O6X4d6I0taJ744BNCleJEezc-X9doyPmb2D1/s1600/Stupa.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibHKPwG3bIHA7jsrj0peA9VlsI1EVZ136bHH40JPn_3hu58peiC-y3LBdg56jPz9ZVpNLKhmxnMU8JL3iRdJM1iJGxWKHe_5OZPr2SfkQ0O6X4d6I0taJ744BNCleJEezc-X9doyPmb2D1/s320/Stupa.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Stupa for </span><span class="Verdana12pt" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="style20">Chögyam</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> Trungpa.</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJxALpj0W1oh6TiNzXA1P78UXz4slXkz8r3DOV8D8L5jkO6RxOJ0UR0l7AzxbT96UojBJLakJZBMMQqX9m9RTy8cUkhTHUEuJK12JMOQOo9CslcOa8iY5xzSsrVqImgprixRNh0Ra_JCMf/s1600/Prayer+flags.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJxALpj0W1oh6TiNzXA1P78UXz4slXkz8r3DOV8D8L5jkO6RxOJ0UR0l7AzxbT96UojBJLakJZBMMQqX9m9RTy8cUkhTHUEuJK12JMOQOo9CslcOa8iY5xzSsrVqImgprixRNh0Ra_JCMf/s320/Prayer+flags.png" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Path to stupas.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizpL_FOcU7an-uOydbQ2Pu1ZYW5YR2R5qBv9v1m_RY8f0q3qd1O3ZozsPAHuCeknreVjQH06Mc4vktG-4_7EaskYMayZ38HIWtcNMyFtrzcLZZKLLIuxMCZ2IX3OrhoE07P_IaRJ5VOOvw/s1600/Signs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNbir7xefxHiTu-ngqsy9CH6gGiibVJA2ZMl6MxR8aks9QZh5v15sUZwnvH_e0f2UDNs3RkNfZALbCCGJ7RuNaQLW6KaozPPRUtMnhiDkso8iybEXCTf47A8IaKzFp1LJYe7Hu2o_jI_XD/s1600/Roshi+stupa.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNbir7xefxHiTu-ngqsy9CH6gGiibVJA2ZMl6MxR8aks9QZh5v15sUZwnvH_e0f2UDNs3RkNfZALbCCGJ7RuNaQLW6KaozPPRUtMnhiDkso8iybEXCTf47A8IaKzFp1LJYe7Hu2o_jI_XD/s320/Roshi+stupa.png" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Stupa for Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.</span></span><br />
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</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-22285451405735370282011-05-30T14:08:00.001-06:002011-07-10T15:29:16.692-06:00DECLINE OF THE AUTOMOBILE<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWQVKKQiC2nOxyFeGnuQccr4hCB0QC4NqosYxOQy7vyDYB_wrW0Xdb4CNPDg-WujbX6Hiw8NcQ_rEYvtHUopNrxGpgTFLVDv9kRALgXNQnZylBtYIsrqXmxMDgudssAW6t43NstkP1QxlL/s1600/Metro+DC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWQVKKQiC2nOxyFeGnuQccr4hCB0QC4NqosYxOQy7vyDYB_wrW0Xdb4CNPDg-WujbX6Hiw8NcQ_rEYvtHUopNrxGpgTFLVDv9kRALgXNQnZylBtYIsrqXmxMDgudssAW6t43NstkP1QxlL/s400/Metro+DC.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i> </i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://westernmountain.org/downloads.html">[Download this article]</a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I hurled myself toward my personal god: Simplicity. </span></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">- </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Charles Bukowski.</span></i></span></div><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I sold my last automobile six years ago and I hope to never own another one. After I'd taken the car away from him, I drove my father's car intermittently over these last couple of years, but I sold it too. Studebaker, Mercury Comet, Dodge Coronet, Toyota Camry: middle-class cars of the American dream. Thousands of pounds of steel and vinyl. Untold gallons of gas. Countless oil changes. Dead batteries. A couple of speeding tickets. Exhaust.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A car is an easy thing to get. Six years ago, my dad had a hard time accepting I was going to sell my car, go car-less at age fifty-one. He said I could never borrow his car (even though he lived two blocks away and used it every other day). Even said he'd pay me to keep owning a car. I told him, "Dad, there's 400 million cars on the planet, I can always get another one if I need to." Once I sold my car he insisted I could borrow his whenever I wanted to (I only borrowed it twice). </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My son has never owned a car, has hardly ever even driven one (though he drives reasonable well). My dad recognized the problems with cars, he certainly accepted the issues of global warming, but driving his automobile was as essential to him as reading, both occupations he could do in quiet solitude. I was always at war with the car. In my formative years, Joni Mitchell songs about paving paradise overshadowed the notion of the car as anything other than doomsday machine. I understood cars were toxic just as I understood cigarettes were. I smoked for a number of years, but I knew cigarettes were deadly long before the Surgeon General's statement came printed on the box.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My son is post-automobile in the way Jackson Pollock was post-modern. It's a kind of instinct, a need to throw paint. A different use of the body. In terms of the body, driving a car was one of the ways I damaged mine, forced it into unnatural positions and long periods of confinement (sitting at a desk was another). My dad held up well under the car's influence. He never had an accident, never neglected routine maintenance, never stopped driving until forced to. He drove semi-demented and nearly deaf until age eighty-seven, kind of like the Japanese who never heard WWII ended and kept themselves hidden and fully armed in the Philippine jungles. You had to pry the keys from my father's hand whereas I'd have given them to you in a second. My son hardly knows what a set of car keys feels like. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">They say life begins at forty, but mine began at fifty - when I sold my car. I know now I could have sold it a decade earlier, given myself an additional ten good years. I'm not here to criticize others or claim going carless is for everyone, even if everyone could. Most of us still have little choice in the matter of driving. We haven't put in place the options, any more than we've erected windmills or cut-back on air-conditioning (also an easy thing to live without). I'm here to share the possibility of giving up the car for those who can, who want to, who need to; for those who dream of it, for those who are being destroyed by it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There are reasons besides "global warming" to give up the car (we know the production of beef generates as much CO2 per carnivore; I know flying in aircraft makes me still every bit the commuter). We have to examine the automobile as environment, what it does to our space. We have to examine the automobile as violence, what it does to others space. And we have to imagine the alternative paradigm: what could we become without one?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Step back to a farthest perspective: time. The most commonplace knowledge tells us the automobile saves time: If I drive I'm at work in twenty minutes, if I walk it'll take me two hours. What we don't realize is the automobile <i>uses up time</i>. Even if cars go electric, as long as we generate electricity with fossil fuels (or power cars directly with them) we are using up non-renewable resources. The millions of years (of dying, decomposing plant life) that it took to create our coal reserves, tar sand pits, and petroleum deposits is being used up almost instantly (the start of the industrial revolution to now). We are using up time, using up the possibilities of certain types of life on this planet (time is running out). If murder means to use up all of another person's time instantly, cars are tools of homicide - as are power lawn movers and leaf blowers (snub-nosed 38s compared to the assault rifle). </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Once he entered his 80s, I was always afraid my dad would kill someone with his car. He drove so slowly there was little danger he would kill himself, but he could take out a bicyclist in a second (I saw him nearly do it more than a few times) or splatter a pedestrian in a heartbeat. His supreme confidence in his own abilities must have brought down a form of luck, as if certain kinds of hubris actually please the gods. His only havoc was to sometimes scrape the side of another car when he pulled from a parking space (since he couldn't hear the scrape he had no idea he'd made one). The state of Colorado flattered him by issuing a ten-year valid drivers license with no physical exam when he was eighty-six. Yet he complained, "What will I do when this expires!"</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Before the days of MADD and the laws they gradually helped enact I would occasionally drive so drunk I saw double. Once I drove from Oakland to San Francisco this way. Yet the times I've momentarily fallen asleep driving (always in the afternoon, never while drinking) are far more chilling remembrances. What gods were smiling then? A couple of weeks after I sold my car I made a list of the benefits of doing so. While I admitted to myself I could easily be killed riding my bicycle (I was now doing much more of it) at least I wouldn't kill anyone else. Not with a car anyway.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It took me a long time to understand how devastating it was to take my father's car away from him (I'm only now beginning to understand). Curiously, my father drove into his own trap. He forgot where his doctor's office was and drove to the emergency room instead. Once there, the triage nurse recognized both his dementia and the near-crime of his driving. The nurse called me and said my father had no business ever driving again and I must come down and pick up him. He was angry at <i>me</i>, I could tell. I hung up the phone and nearly fell to my knees, the moment I'd been praying for had come - for I knew if <i>I</i> had tried to take my father's keys away he'd never have forgiven me. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My father's doctor was called in to explain it: "Bill, you'll never drive again" he told my dad. I nodded in agreement. The doctor said it again, I nodded again. He said it a third time - each of the three times my father's expression of refusal grew darker. We left the office. The classic stages of loss-grief had begun within my father but I had no way of knowing that then. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance: these gods cannot be denied. My father's depression had already begun. Denial lasted four months (ended with him following me out onto street, screaming at me). Bargaining, like death, came without warning, "Just let me drive to the bank once in a while" he'd plead. Acceptance seemingly came only when he longer could seldom remember he'd ever owned a car: Alzheimer's.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">see how we all face the unforeseen series of events that deny or take away our seeming autonomy (the events always occurring, the autonomy always seeming). My father's narrative was his own and he was as entitled to it as anyone. A car was like a cigarette (he smoked until forty-five) or a book - something to be alone with, in control of, in communion thereby. To quietly examine his freshly-waxed, well-maintained Toyota Camry parked there (in a spotless garage). To Drive a two-lane highway through the desert with sage brush growing and a thunderstorm sky. A simple ride to Safeway for toilet paper and a head of cauliflower. All of it beautiful, an expression of peace. All of it gone with the car keys gone.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My several year-long joy of liberating myself from the automobile overlapped my father's reluctant journey of giving it up. It wasn't the first time my enthusiasm confronted his gloom and it was natural though impatient of me to more of less say, "Get over it, Dad." Fortunately a guardian angel came into his life, just weeks after his Camry left it. Annette was a fifty-two year old nurse from Tennessee, working temporarily for an elder-care agency and born on the same day as my mother. Born also with the sense of humor necessary to survive her life story (another story) and my father's humor. Annette found every ounce of my fathers sardonic gloom and semi self-effacing sarcasm amusing. Everything he said made her laugh. And even though he couldn't hear some of what Annette said, he could recognize that she loved him and loved his company. I hired Annette to take my dad on long drives twice a week, which he of course could hardly wait to do (an example of my optimism trumping his pessimism).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In May, 2005 my father was still driving and I was preparing to sell my own car. I'd placed the ad in the newspaper. Someone called, took the test drive, brought it to her mechanic, gave me a cashiers check for seven grand, drove away in my former 1999, Toyota Corolla. The next day I woke up, walked out of my house and stared at the empty driveway. The automobile was gone, in its place a vacancy, a complete absence of vehicle. The driveway was black, buckled, the sun was already heating it, the ants were out. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I felt depressed, worthless, vacated - like I had a hole in me. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I went inside, got dressed, ate breakfast, put my shoes on. I walked back out and across the driveway and all the way into town. I got coffee in town and did whatever else I did. Then I walked home. I never missed my car again.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A few years before I turned fifty I began to realize that life was asking me for greater simplicity, that I was heading toward an inevitable and steeper downward slope (downward because I could not escape it). In answer to the question, How do you know you are making progress on the spiritual path, </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I heard a Buddhist teacher once reply, </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>That you have more devotion and you've simplified your life</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Selling my car was a sacrifice the dralas requested, a significant offering to simplicities' god. In return I bought less, shopped less (or more carefully). My legs strengthened, I took fresh air, had periodic epiphanies as I passed by cattail marshes or walked in heavy rain. Strange privileges and tremendous good fortune came my way. I walked across the cities I visited, New Orleans, Paris, Kuala Lumpur. Ones cosmic insignificance became vivified walking alone in a city of fourteen million (in which I knew no one at all). Cultural history poured into me though I seldom entered a museum or read a book. In Cambodia, because I spent a good deal of time there, I (temporarily) leaned how to walk: more slowly, without haste, tutored by the Cambodians. I encountered the archetype of pedestrian: present-tense, insignificant, alert, gauging and traversing the thin planetary membrane of life we walk upright upon. In this time, a pleasure on the edge of species collapse and other realities of a changing planet.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Now I have arrived in Mendota Heights, a town on the edge of St. Paul. My friend Lisa picked me up at the Minneapolis Airport in a 1939 GM LaSalle. A friend of Lisa's who restores cars loaned it to her and now she wants to buy it. The car is almost like an Elvis sighting. One encounters an iconic image from the vast collection of inner images our automobile culture has supplied us with. It is a sculpture of bulging fenders and an upholstered interior so large its a more comfortable and elegant living room than the one in Lisa's home. It is a superbly crafted impunity tool with three sets of ashtray, eight spark plugs and a 126 inch wheelbase. It is a beautiful dream, American. A white-walled room big enough for sex and raising a family in. It's a dream-totem animal, the seed-syllable of the interstate system Eisenhower installed that became the foundation of the military indy complex he later warned us about. Thousands of miles of grassland and forest were cleared then asphalted to create a pasture big enough for the GM LaSalle.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Years ago, I realized it was time to sell my own car when a black dumptruck loaded with sand nearly hit me from behind. I saw the near-miss in my rearview mirror. Strangely, I'd seen two black dumptrucks earlier that day. It was a cluster of omens that underscored a gradual discovery: that driving shredded my nervous system. Even driving the two miles to <i>Office Depot</i> for a cartridge of printer ink left me feeling awful, as if some part of me rode underneath the car scraping asphalt. So I wasn't entirely at ease getting into Elvis - the '39 LaSalle - much less riding without a seatbelt. But Lisa had arrived in a car that drove straight into my story and the decline of the automobile could not have been made clearer that the experience of riding in this one.</span></span></div></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-19010344706171226422011-05-24T08:06:00.006-06:002011-05-24T12:26:08.927-06:00FATHER AS ANCESTOR<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNLSyIlZTUAfgHQu8Bp1lDfM8eQ39Q10lDSq9zhzyU0BHpXBw7G3DmMip78XcfRzFkj9YEi1dLFitSCcxz12LBrdBmKpFN66_B8PdMX3WkyMdKCUW6454RmYEk0gy2uuibpwv_wuBNgRBd/s1600/Basilica+column2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNLSyIlZTUAfgHQu8Bp1lDfM8eQ39Q10lDSq9zhzyU0BHpXBw7G3DmMip78XcfRzFkj9YEi1dLFitSCcxz12LBrdBmKpFN66_B8PdMX3WkyMdKCUW6454RmYEk0gy2uuibpwv_wuBNgRBd/s400/Basilica+column2.jpg" width="353" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene</i>,</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Vézelay, France.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_920015203"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://westernmountain.org/downloads.html">[Download a PDF of this essay] </a></div><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'm writing about my father. I'm writing for the first anniversary of his death. August second is over two months from now but I want to be prepared. Though death comes without warning the anniversary of death comes with plenty of lead-time. Why should I wait until the last minute to write? I might not be able to find the words then, whereas now I feel I have some. I want to explore my father as <i>father</i> (horizontal time?) and as <i>ancestor</i> (vertical?). </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I'm recalling a time last November <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">in Vézelay, France. It</span></span> was a moment in the <i>Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene</i>,<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> when I offered a votive candle to the memory of my father (I also offered one for my mother). I recognized I could never show my father this church, never show him a photograph of it, never have him know I was here. For a moment the sadness was acute. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>But the atmosphere in the room was thinking in vertical time</i>. Suddenly, I felt my father approaching me from the "future," like a aircraft that had circled the earth and was now appearing on the horizon.</span></span><br />
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Just as the border, say, between the United States and Mexico divides the countries, it is also where they touch. Vertical time divides the past from the future. <i>Father</i> in the past, <i>ancestor</i> from the future - I inhabit their division and they meet within me. My skin touches them both. They write to me with the invisible ink of their thought. </span></span><br />
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My father last lived in an Alzheimer's facility and died in his room. I didn't have the ringer to my cell phone on. The staff finally reached me through e-mail. I got in my car and reached <i>The</i> <i>Balfour</i> in twenty minutes, probably two hours after my father died. I arrived in his room a blank, unable to find myself, much less be of help to him (as my Buddhist training said I might). The room was empty and I was unable to stay for even an hour. </span></span><br />
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The next day we brought my father to my house in a pine box. We set him in the living room, next to the white orchid. I laid a Cambodian silk across the lower half of the casket - the top half was open, revealing my father's head and chest. He wore a blue shirt. When the mortuary men left I played Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto. The room was full and I felt we could remain like this indefinitely.</span></span><br />
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The three days passed slowly and quickly. My son arrived from Portland and there were now three generations in the room. At night he slept near the corpse. Friends of mine who knew my father visited, spent a long time looking at him. My father rested on dry ice. He shrunk some, but his skin became more transparent, there was a beauty. His jaw was firm, an offering of Scotch sat on the pine plank above his heart. The three days could not go on forever, but there were some of the best my father and I ever had. </span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghjWaBUxGFzwa3yhklGkSQlEcRkIBW0tWmgLY305BAANAtGPgPYr5MO-p4MA-gBlySU4vylsNA-WgVQaFt0N1xZElY0qy0XCmLDdrYH077kxDFGt1Blr4TgpLPCCoeqie0rjrPm2m0PdvD/s1600/Column+and+fire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghjWaBUxGFzwa3yhklGkSQlEcRkIBW0tWmgLY305BAANAtGPgPYr5MO-p4MA-gBlySU4vylsNA-WgVQaFt0N1xZElY0qy0XCmLDdrYH077kxDFGt1Blr4TgpLPCCoeqie0rjrPm2m0PdvD/s400/Column+and+fire.jpg" width="292" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Column detail, <i>Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene</i>.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On the third day after my father's death, my son and a handful of my friends joined me and we performed the <i>Sukavati</i> (Buddhist funeral ceremony) together, enacted yet another event my father never could have dreamed would happen. The next day a few of us took my father to the mortuary. My son kept my father's eyeglasses and I kept the diamond ring he wore on his right hand. We performed another small ceremony (speaking, laughing, crying) before my father and his pine box were inserted into the furnace. We saw the fire begin. I picked up his ashes a few days later.</span></span><br />
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Six-weeks after the cremation I left Boulder and traveled in a strange zigzag, dictated by hunches and people who came into my life. Perhaps it was not until this February, seven months after my father died, that I began to come apart at the seams. It happened in Paris. One day I felt awful, like I'd been emotionally poisoned. Like something was attacking me (or I was attacking myself). It didn't seem like grief. And what is "grief"? It's clear what grief is when you're missing someone horribly or simply crying. But grief must happen at a cellular level, the molecules of ourselves adjusting to the severe transformation of going from having a parent to being homeless (for example). An inner savage initiation before the ancestor arrives from the future. </span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbZV90gnGnzAzIy-b2KwKsdxY9Lvun-Xd_zMHl_qht3NtN8wSjN8mi2CzQ4rx7UTa4zRQob0ebEkLh8VLWbMPVX64WbTYlugcCI7d_BHQMxfnBl73L0dscLjw8eYu9qz4IAa3KVX4eyQph/s1600/Columns+with+angel+and+man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbZV90gnGnzAzIy-b2KwKsdxY9Lvun-Xd_zMHl_qht3NtN8wSjN8mi2CzQ4rx7UTa4zRQob0ebEkLh8VLWbMPVX64WbTYlugcCI7d_BHQMxfnBl73L0dscLjw8eYu9qz4IAa3KVX4eyQph/s400/Columns+with+angel+and+man.jpg" width="321" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Exterior detail, <i>Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene</i>.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">II. </span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Soon after my father died I experienced an unexpected phenomena that has never left me: that he was now <i>in complete agreement with me</i>. It was as if his life was a tennis match in which we were opponents. The match was video-taped and now he could watch it (as memory) while simultaneously seeing me for who I was now, as if the match had never been played. Since now there was nothing to argue about - and knowing that our intentions toward each had always been good - he was in complete agreement with me. </span></span><br />
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To say my father (as ancestor) is "in agreement with me" is to say he encourages me toward the tasks I have chosen to fulfill. These tasks, in part, are endeavors or potentials he could not complete (or even failed at) and, in another part, have nothing to do with him. He is completely detached and one-hundred percent encouraging. My job, as "the living" is to release rage (and other emotions) and avoid succumbing to guilt. To wipe the sweat from my face and leave it on the towel. To put aside botched shots. To walk alone with my ancestor behind me. To face his arrival.</span></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Fg2_E5YVccTFq7Rdg8zqpP4TmUBZmmR0hHpXp9-S8ksiC_LFS_iP6hM8E_F5P6CQN1Z9T35MLLaBX1XpNtsUwFNVMhtp7En1aoVxUujYroZUNUXqAX4QSNm2yDtvTghodaS97DANn2U5/s1600/Grave+-+Vezalay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Fg2_E5YVccTFq7Rdg8zqpP4TmUBZmmR0hHpXp9-S8ksiC_LFS_iP6hM8E_F5P6CQN1Z9T35MLLaBX1XpNtsUwFNVMhtp7En1aoVxUujYroZUNUXqAX4QSNm2yDtvTghodaS97DANn2U5/s320/Grave+-+Vezalay.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Grave. Vézelay, France.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;">III.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Hospice bereavement literature has lists of the emotions, physical sensations and behaviors one might encounter after the death of a loved one. Two diagrams show differing shotgun blasts: one from close range (the sudden, accidental death of a child, say, or a wife) the other from considerable distance (news a friend one hadn't seen in a decade had died). In the first, the pellets are so clumped together one might say, "I feel like I've been shot in the gut." In the second, only a couple of pellets have even hit the target, and none of them centrally. The effect may hardly be noticed (or felt).</span></span><br />
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"Grief" is not an emotion (or verb), it cannot be defined (as a noun), nor easily recognized (as a known object). Grief is a journey, a cluster of intangible relationships moving through an expanding space. Split in half by horizontal time, the initiation of grief narrows the seeming place we occupy between the past and the future. Our non-existence becomes thinner, less able to be hidden (from ourselves). As I became thinner I tried to spread out, as if I could ooze backward in time and attach myself to something. I wasn't just missing my father - or even missing him at all - but exploring the lost forms: house, dishes, clothes, books (I got rid of almost everything). I encountered split-second decisions of hope that these things still did exist (like a pigeon thinking gravel is a poppy seed). </span></span><br />
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Taken as a whole, and unavoidably taken alone, the journey is quite beautiful - if one has the resources to make sense of it, to embrace it: community, meditation-prayer, art, dralas (not necessary in that order)? If there does arrive that grace or creative blessing. </span></span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">IV.</span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This morning it occurred to me the shotgun metaphor also works for the last two-plus years of my father's life, the stages of losing control. As if prior to my mother's death - twenty-seven months before his own - my father was still "in control" of his life (in the ways we typically feel we are). When she died, it was as if the shell was detonated and - in extremely slow motion - the pellets emerged (the elements of his control) and the empty casing (his body) spun end over end, finally coming to rest on the ground (then cremated).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Final events, Bill Scheffel (I have the same name as my father): moved from his apartment to "independent living" (<i>Villas Atrium</i>), then to "assisted living" (<i>Shawnee Gardens</i>), finally a "memory care facility" (<i>The Balfour</i>). He began to cancel his own rent checks. He stopped taking all his medications (claimed he hadn't taken them for years). </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I disconnected the battery cables in his automobile. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">His knees weakened but his handshake became stronger. His name was taped to his eyeglasses. He remembered no ones name. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Sometimes thought I was his brother. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Had no idea when he last saw me. Was considered "a gentlemen" wherever he lived (<i>Villas, Shawnee, Balfour</i>). Had friends in a way he never had before. Had no idea he had these friends. Didn't necessarily know where he was at any given time or that </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Obama was president</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">. Flirted. Ate everything on his plate. Fell often. Always excited to see me. Always sad when I left. Misplaced his wristwatch. Lost his wallet. Could barely stand up. Shook hands hard. Knees gave out, back mangled, poked at his food, moments of panic. Died alone in his room after dinner.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Dogen said <i>we each have all the provisions we need for this lifetim</i>e. My father was afraid of being alone yet endured tremendous aloneness - and was nearly deaf - for the last years of his life. Until he could no longer make his bed - or even know it <i>was</i> his bed - he made it well, with the same military precision he brought to writing a check, to everything. He loved his car and bathed it in <i>Armor All</i>. In those final two-plus years he came into the lives of countless people - including my own - as an agent of dignity with a devastating handshake. Many brain cells left him yet the accuracy of his sarcasm remained as intact as Nolan Ryan's fastball. His affection for the world may have finally resided in his sardonic, self-effacing complaints, his uncannily durable insistence that the glass was half-empty. That his pessimism and my optimism are in complete agreement is a small miracle.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ziCzTCHl7vKH60IsyzlYpSdq5xJrKcVmm-Vf66RcZN6-jFIFiF0hOoJ5_srW6bc4DzrRroyhRoScnVM-NxfhuPLJgkRhyphenhyphen0JEHI0GTV5hHLK20TJBST_nUZ9WSdzAqwiXH5Ud87Kgp61q/s1600/Column+angel+kiss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ziCzTCHl7vKH60IsyzlYpSdq5xJrKcVmm-Vf66RcZN6-jFIFiF0hOoJ5_srW6bc4DzrRroyhRoScnVM-NxfhuPLJgkRhyphenhyphen0JEHI0GTV5hHLK20TJBST_nUZ9WSdzAqwiXH5Ud87Kgp61q/s400/Column+angel+kiss.jpg" width="306" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;">C</span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">olumn detail, <i>Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene</i>.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9GnIbOXx2gPUK4IEvjz-NImxqCDjtokWCq-Vaq4Um3TpMqzEZYJqp3mzHBtUolpa0ge9JAAsgsaFxOutdB6NsFtvsLfkSsxOKRuaRuy-qf4YlA1wm5IkVJMLwBm88wRNfpnWuttMtDWfp/s1600/Dad+and+me+non-smile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9GnIbOXx2gPUK4IEvjz-NImxqCDjtokWCq-Vaq4Um3TpMqzEZYJqp3mzHBtUolpa0ge9JAAsgsaFxOutdB6NsFtvsLfkSsxOKRuaRuy-qf4YlA1wm5IkVJMLwBm88wRNfpnWuttMtDWfp/s200/Dad+and+me+non-smile.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>T</i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>he Balfour. </i>July, 2010.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqu9uO83f-IkmMJqSozykXTD3YF8KPe3UFIDy-d-14FVic0DgjCrLcCWoYK_HojNtnnTxL4iuzqIuZpHDl-vbRVk4kUIciPnQ3xIGzXfhGzvMwsTGfQAO_1fbq8yBDtRknk9cIoyu7xOFc/s1600/Dad+and+me+smile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqu9uO83f-IkmMJqSozykXTD3YF8KPe3UFIDy-d-14FVic0DgjCrLcCWoYK_HojNtnnTxL4iuzqIuZpHDl-vbRVk4kUIciPnQ3xIGzXfhGzvMwsTGfQAO_1fbq8yBDtRknk9cIoyu7xOFc/s200/Dad+and+me+smile.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-13764421959401622732011-05-07T11:03:00.021-06:002013-02-01T11:29:18.458-07:00Penn Station and Vertical Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSFF4EDVAdxyZYPy1Ne8KjuAJYblTuwXqfxPDZrGTTyN-Z1udQ1x82QEuqDpEtafoYJf-Rf84u14Y5ipShRqKYKluE0ohaxixQddXyhFwQojY0e2xD9tKdp71YPNj90mSv2LLhsIW449kD/s1600/Grand+dolley.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSFF4EDVAdxyZYPy1Ne8KjuAJYblTuwXqfxPDZrGTTyN-Z1udQ1x82QEuqDpEtafoYJf-Rf84u14Y5ipShRqKYKluE0ohaxixQddXyhFwQojY0e2xD9tKdp71YPNj90mSv2LLhsIW449kD/s640/Grand+dolley.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Main concourse, Grand Central Terminal, NYC.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(This was written in early April.) My inquiry into vertical time continues. Today’s assignment has put me on a train from Plandome, Long Island to Penn Station, NYC. It was last Saturday I discovered New York’s Pennsylvania Station was once a grand terminal, like Gare (now Musée) d’Orsay in Paris or Grand Central Terminal - typically called <i>Station</i> (three avenues west and ten streets uptown of Penn). Last Saturday I learned the original Penn Station was demolished in 1964, and that knowledge has left me feeling a lingering pain ever since.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Now I’m on the Long Island Railroad, sitting i<span style="font-size: small;">n</span> a set of three-by-three seats with what I have discovered to be two Iranian men. I’ve gradually came to recognize the Farsi these men are speaking from soundtracks of the many Iranian films I have seen and by remembering that Don, my host in Plandome, told me of the many Iranians who board the train at the Great Neck stop. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Daily life occurs in cycles that repeat themselves wherever we go. I wash my face in the morning the same way in Plandome as I did in Istanbul, only the experience of vertical time differentiates repetition into moments of the eternal now. If I say my “prayer to water” before washing it makes a great difference, pulling me into vertical-time awareness and out the desultory state of mind I often wake up into in the morning. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As for the eternal now, it would not take a GPS system to describe where I am at this moment: I am sitting at a marble counter drinking an Americano on the lower level of Grand Central Station, almost directly below the famous clock stationed above me on the main concourse. The echoing mixture of human voices, rolling suitcase wheels and clattering porcelain create the muted, ambient racket that is part of being in such immense places of human coming and going. Just like in Istanbul, I could sit here all day and perhaps never see the same face twice. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The destruction of Penn Station echoes the feeling Istanbul aroused in me as I walked through it: the destruction the human population explosion and exodus from the countryside and the short-term profit making of modern architecture has taken upon culture and nature. In Istanbul, six-story concrete apartment buildings without beauty and without any public space between or around them extend almost infinitely and have leveled any sense of the history or landscape that preceded them. Yet stripped of judgment and comparison, even the apartments reveal an impossible, tenacious beauty – the unconditional beauty of vertical time. Beauty, yes – but not the <i>same</i> beauty that preceded them.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The beauty of Aya Sophia, the </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Süleymaniye Mosque (both in Istanbul) and Grand Central Station are similar expressions of vertical time, places designed to stop habitual mind and shift consciousness into a stunningly beautiful visionary nowness. They are successful works of art and treasures of humanity. Accidents of history, as well as human intervention, have saved them to this day. I hope the following photo essay will exemplify the ideas I’ve raised and perhaps inspire you to build or preserve in the spirit of vertical time in your own life, which can be done anywhere, with anything, beginning with our body itself.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy09JI5REWxsRgT1Zazd0S9s04t9XQdz9rXatjpgVtQPvxtIrSBWxSezKNFc1-FWNMzJRG2tkUyr3pPDV4Ya4T0aWl3fMiqKM_yf5cMTpSZ30XLVBi3qYS_3aJidQLXmST8eDGpuhov72t/s1600/Musee+dOrsay.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy09JI5REWxsRgT1Zazd0S9s04t9XQdz9rXatjpgVtQPvxtIrSBWxSezKNFc1-FWNMzJRG2tkUyr3pPDV4Ya4T0aWl3fMiqKM_yf5cMTpSZ30XLVBi3qYS_3aJidQLXmST8eDGpuhov72t/s400/Musee+dOrsay.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">M<span style="font-size: small;">usée d’Orsay, Paris. Converted in 1980-1986 by the French government </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">from a train station into a museum. Thanks to the successful efforts to preserve a grand building that was no longer able to be effective as a railroad terminal, this building is often referred to as the "most beautiful museum in Europe." </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pennsylvania Station, upon completion in 1910. Once the largest publicly traded corporation in the world, the Pennsylvania Railroad built the station as an expression of corporate largess and power, yes, but also of beauty, modeling it on the Caracalla Baths of ancient Rome and sparing nothing to create a masterpiece of art and craft designed to last hundreds of years, a true public space. </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqzM9-h4nqpbZmr2fS5zGbEJt3W03HtN6hNZEMWCq3u7ZB9lzR8_8Fwg9Z8p01hUoNyS2qd4NSxHYvlgWYltAmz1Aqv-RYDmaCm18j4fjxwGNMnijNr7wCfoQrmeXMElsbeyEt6eaD70M/s1600/Penn+inside.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqzM9-h4nqpbZmr2fS5zGbEJt3W03HtN6hNZEMWCq3u7ZB9lzR8_8Fwg9Z8p01hUoNyS2qd4NSxHYvlgWYltAmz1Aqv-RYDmaCm18j4fjxwGNMnijNr7wCfoQrmeXMElsbeyEt6eaD70M/s400/Penn+inside.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Inside the original Penn Station. </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Due to the rise of the automobile, by the 1950s the Pennsylvania Railroad was losing money and nearly bankrupt. Management made a deal with New York City to surrender its property above ground and gain a 25% stake in the planned Madison Square Garden. Penn Station would soon become a subterranean passage with low ceilings and no natural light. Demolition was finally scheduled to begin in 1963, but as the New York Times wrote, </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimPpWFwVz6w1J7WDfz7G47HaLYguzKe7NBX48kK-3I9lH3SfA6OgcEbeDv8GEwsQ9CWO6k0Wnbh45SD5DTHA7maMXhj_Zs_sV82SCw_aytsBZN7CpHMZWTt_WRwa_peRCB0sMMURoHlCqE/s1600/Penn+pickets.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimPpWFwVz6w1J7WDfz7G47HaLYguzKe7NBX48kK-3I9lH3SfA6OgcEbeDv8GEwsQ9CWO6k0Wnbh45SD5DTHA7maMXhj_Zs_sV82SCw_aytsBZN7CpHMZWTt_WRwa_peRCB0sMMURoHlCqE/s400/Penn+pickets.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Demonstrations to preserve Penn Station were unable to save it, but did establish the social conscience and political will that went on to save Grand Central Terminal and many other great buildings from a similar fate.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOOEOZNsLu0XDgQEjUZKPiMzY-gsaM-QNL-cQJfn7rzGf-lHF0QWV637WbL_arE6f8hEkoEuK_112IHlohO0M5UDWwm_NK7xUsH8k-ouXx3Rc2G_Wu8T5D2RaNmTj0D4LFf4RtAOzYCWhH/s1600/Penn+Chase.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOOEOZNsLu0XDgQEjUZKPiMzY-gsaM-QNL-cQJfn7rzGf-lHF0QWV637WbL_arE6f8hEkoEuK_112IHlohO0M5UDWwm_NK7xUsH8k-ouXx3Rc2G_Wu8T5D2RaNmTj0D4LFf4RtAOzYCWhH/s640/Penn+Chase.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Penn Station now. Ironically, the station is dreadfully cramped and congested and serious efforts have long been underway to built a new Penn Station, a vision to restore the grandeur of the original Penn, whose vastness was designed to give the passengers an experience of transition - and an encounter with <i>space</i> - so that to commute would also be to <i>commune</i>. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Among the heating ducts of Long Island Railroad's </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Track 17; Penn Station as one encounters it today.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ImQsol1fSL1kljzjwe6sV-JbvnbCqyT6s5AXgoa2SlHSUnV0_701Hg0JOoUndDfT6fEf-HLjLdNoigNHZiATYOE6u2We1mZMs_6RsOCwOMyIuVbQGrQuer0m6VY6FyBUSlte1fmbmCzF/s1600/Grand+man+at+stairs.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ImQsol1fSL1kljzjwe6sV-JbvnbCqyT6s5AXgoa2SlHSUnV0_701Hg0JOoUndDfT6fEf-HLjLdNoigNHZiATYOE6u2We1mZMs_6RsOCwOMyIuVbQGrQuer0m6VY6FyBUSlte1fmbmCzF/s640/Grand+man+at+stairs.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Entering the main concourse, </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Grand Central Terminal. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul. </span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNmbVMHXuapFHzLiJEH4AwPJj0-P3-LF0n2soyvnktrH6UeNldWLTEVgnuhP_0VNBwVX8utjHaf0P5OrVCb9EAAbF1cc1VEPEqCf1UX5LUi-snGy9EgyaVjqZoLejtfBHUpb43rJH4Gl3N/s1600/Grand+sunlight.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNmbVMHXuapFHzLiJEH4AwPJj0-P3-LF0n2soyvnktrH6UeNldWLTEVgnuhP_0VNBwVX8utjHaf0P5OrVCb9EAAbF1cc1VEPEqCf1UX5LUi-snGy9EgyaVjqZoLejtfBHUpb43rJH4Gl3N/s400/Grand+sunlight.JPG" width="400" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Grand Central Terminal, main concourse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Grand Central Terminal, main concourse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Elevators into the main concourse, Grand Central Terminal.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <span style="font-size: small;">Aya Sophia, Istanbul.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Ceiling, main concourse, Grand Central Terminal. For decades blackened by the tar and nicotine of cigarette smoke, a thorough restoration revealed the mural of the original ceiling, a view of the constellations based on a medieval manuscript that depicted the stars backwards - reversed, as in a mirror - the way that God above would view them. </span></span></span></span></div>
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Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-11038962138610166962011-05-05T14:09:00.002-06:002011-05-06T03:49:50.431-06:00Tribute to Eamon Killoran<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY24tlZluaHyJK852MHyga3T_bXfl2duhL3vtDkRkdhyYwlVkS_OfOm6jIvhMNdVhfrLY7whu8f8psfzXiVdXrmS-jlcxzzpWb3vUpZlDheBLo8nWA0YtP8r-PUwTmiirqERQYORntvVai/s1600/Eamon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY24tlZluaHyJK852MHyga3T_bXfl2duhL3vtDkRkdhyYwlVkS_OfOm6jIvhMNdVhfrLY7whu8f8psfzXiVdXrmS-jlcxzzpWb3vUpZlDheBLo8nWA0YtP8r-PUwTmiirqERQYORntvVai/s400/Eamon.jpg" width="315" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(Eamon Killoran became a member of the Buddhist community founded by </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the 1970s. Eamon and I met in this community and maintained a thirty-five year friendship until his death, April 18, 2011. He was a devoted practitioner of Buddhism and all things related to the drala principle. - Bill Scheffel)</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The photograph above shows Eamon Killoran eleven months ago. A few weeks after this picture was taken, Eamon learned he had cancer. In less than a year he was dead. I took the photograph of him in Portland, Oregon, soon after I had arrived for lunch at the home of mutual friends. My first impression of Eamon was his beauty. That a transparency had come to his complexion - as it often does to people well into their seventies. That his beard and his eyebrows were now the same luminous grey. That he smiled with his familiar stature and sense of reserve, but none-the-less, extremely warmly. I had the feeling of falling in love with him, as if in this moment our thirty-six year friendship was being restored, renewed, amplified. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Eamon looked you in the eye and spoke – it seemed - with his jaw slightly clenched. His words were typically few, often emerged reluctantly and were astonishingly compelling. On the one hand you felt you had to converse honestly, that his long silences might set you up to make a fool out of yourself or at least display a fumbling frivolousness. On the other hand, what he had to say seemed to come like something out of Melville, a story or confession that becomes enthralling in a hurry.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Over lunch we were reminded that Eamon’s first wife was a member of the Black Panther Party (they had two children together). Eamon loved literature and it was stories like these that made me want him to write his own memoir. Eamon’s father was an Irish cop operating in the more corrupt strata of the New York City police department. One day, his younger brother, barely old enough to walk, discovered their father’s loaded revolver and accidentally killed himself. Alcohol, firearms, gambling. By adolescence, Eamon was faced with the conscious decision to become a criminal or not. As a young man he wandered widely, one day getting a job on a ship. He went on to serve as a merchant seaman throughout his adult life. He understood exactly what had happened on the Exxon Valdez since he had served for decades on similar tankers. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Eamon and I entered the dharma in California, shared countless programs at the Berkeley Dharmadhatu, went to seminary one year apart and became Kusung (Tibetan; personal servant) together in 1980. We waited together, alternately nervous or giddy and with a sense of impending joyous doom each time The Varja Regent or The Vidyadhara was about to emerge from a gate at San Francisco International Airport. We performed the same Kusung tasks: bringing our left arm under The Vidhadhara’s right so we could assist and steady him as he walked. We helped choose suits from his wardrobe and put on his socks. We filled our minds with every detail we could – the day’s schedule, its meals, who wanted an interview - before beginning a shift and then spent the next twelve hours in a concentrated free-fall, a near lifetime spent in very awake and orderly chaos of a day (or night) with Chögyam Trungpa. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It was this history, at once long ago and primordially imprinted in my heart that brought me to write what I did after learning by phone, two weeks ago, that Eamon had died: </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">With his passing I feel my own life evaporate: its traces, the countless sacred impressions and tracks of our gurus, that they literally walked along side us, took water from our hands, even kissed us. These traces are as beautiful, profound and mysterious as the nebula we see through our telescopes. Flaring. Awesome. Where do they go?</span></span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The living presence of The Vidyadhara’s love carried Eamon on a very steady devotional course. Perhaps spending nearly six-months a year at sea helped keep his remarkable marriage to Michele very alive. It certainly gave him a lot of time to practice – and to be very alone with The Vidyadara’s mind and teaching. One might know the way The Vidyadhara loved Eamon by understanding how Eamon loved The Vidyadhara - but who can describe unconditional love? If I had to venture a guess I would say it was because of Eamon’s reliability, a particular form of Chögyam Trungpa’s own elemental ethos, the bond he had with all of us: never give up. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It must have been Eamon’s reliability that created a trajectory from his tough, early life, through to the end, his cremation at Shambhala Mountain Center. I was in Boston when I leaned Eamon died and I was not able to attend the event, but our dear mutual friend told me a flock of seagulls appeared out of nowhere when Eamon’s body was removed from The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya in the morning. I told her a flock of seagulls is as astonishing as the circular rainbow that appeared at the Vidyadhara’s parinirvana! </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Eamon remained a devoted father to Meadow and Zackary, the children from his first marriage. When he married Michele in the mid 1970s they formed a union and a household that was home to Eamon’s children and to Lucas, Michele’s son from her first marriage. The household became a court when The Vidyadhara stayed there, as he did numerous times. When Eamon and Michele moved to Shambhala Mountain Center in 1991, Eamon began a four-year tenure as SMC co-director, along with Catherina Pressman. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche selected Eamon for the job and Eamon remained actively involved in The Sakyong’s service and Shambhala Mountain Center for the rest of his life. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Within this outward life of reliable service, Eamon did not seem a man doing things merely because he felt obliged to, even less the follower of a party-line. In late 2003, I spent an evening with Eamon a few months after Michele died. I could feel the world he inhabited; that his home was genuinely at the Buddhist community’s service, that he practiced Chakrasamvara sadhana intently, that he was alone and semi-shattered with a diverse stack of books and that there was a bottle of Scotch on the table between us. I felt the challenge, as I always did, of disclosing something genuine as we talked. I felt back-up against the wall by his even more penetrating silences and matter of fact description of what life was like without Michele. I don’t really remember what we talked about, but unlike so many other conversations I’ve had over the subsequent eight years, I remember just what it felt like to be with him, simply spacious and true. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Last fall I began corresponding with Eamon from Istanbul, a city he had spent time in as a young merchant seaman. I wrote about my “psychic crush” – not an infatuation, but the way I often felt having my mother and father die in the last three years, as well as having just about every other damn part of my life fall apart in this time. Eamon wrote back, telling me of his own psychic crush:</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> I think I've been living with it to various degrees since Michele's sudden going. I never really finished packing away her things, just did some more of that recently. Part of that is laziness, inertia, some of it just waiting, living, until it's obviously time.</span></span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">He also wrote to me about writing (I was still after him to begin his memoir): </span></span></div><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I make small movements towards writing, then get overwhelmed and lastly stopped at the point where I didn't really know whether I wanted to tell the truth or not. Or try anyway. That movement also keeps getting placed on hold as different dharmic activities demand most of my time, and then and then . . .</span></span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">From Istanbul I also wrote to Eamon about seagulls (a man who’d seen his share). After living in Istanbul, one can hardly think of the city without seeing seagulls or hearing their cry. I wrote to Eamon, pointing out that as we humans overrun the planet “the animals that remain survivors in our midst seem like analogs, as if a dialog is going on if we could listen or observe more closely.” </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When I wrote that sentence, I didn’t really know what I meant by analogs - but a few months later that flock of seagulls appeared above Eamon’s body. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrAZe2BVbjuLldrZje4SC5j7434Y_uBssTzPZjCQrFzPoqAYukeweMYsStTqpAxlMKqi_GxHUriazVhQ5GmjeUvY_XNwvNfNdz7Sbuy1KTtbV4irKG9rk1BDCngohK6195QP1x3ALts9ZV/s1600/Seagulls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrAZe2BVbjuLldrZje4SC5j7434Y_uBssTzPZjCQrFzPoqAYukeweMYsStTqpAxlMKqi_GxHUriazVhQ5GmjeUvY_XNwvNfNdz7Sbuy1KTtbV4irKG9rk1BDCngohK6195QP1x3ALts9ZV/s400/Seagulls.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Eminönü Ferry, Istanbul</span></span></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-19658064871670437832011-04-17T10:28:00.002-06:002011-04-17T11:12:35.415-06:00ANCESTORS & VERTICAL TIME<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFqe2bxGwhM6WD4iTuH9-JHw5wIDTPWakTL-1Orr5bpgURpPcCgal79MeV5bR9kuD05pZW7V3-nQcC7MJBecrcJ7aI7TLDGvVrGTV4dwk_sSGhiVaJ2kKiTdMkI3k0yG349nre3Sig737H/s1600/Vezalay3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFqe2bxGwhM6WD4iTuH9-JHw5wIDTPWakTL-1Orr5bpgURpPcCgal79MeV5bR9kuD05pZW7V3-nQcC7MJBecrcJ7aI7TLDGvVrGTV4dwk_sSGhiVaJ2kKiTdMkI3k0yG349nre3Sig737H/s400/Vezalay3.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Vézelay, France.</span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My mother, Alice Scheffel, died on April 17th, 2008 - exactly three years ago - and I am suddenly finding myself preparing a blog entry to acknowledge her on this day, an inspiration that came to me only an hour ago. In presenting this entry for my mother, perhaps it will become a moment for readers to remember, and feel the presence of, their own ancestors. </span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">. . . </span></span></span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Several coincidences align to present this tribute. The first, that my mother maintained her lifelong connection to Christianity and to the inspiration of Jesus, while also throwing off what had become for her the dogma of the church - in her case Episcopal - which eventually meant no longer attending church or particularly reading the bible. Instead she turned to authors who had also chosen to speak beyond the confines of doctrine - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong">Bishop John Shelby Spong,</a> for instance - and embraced an affiliation with Buddhism, a sense of kinship and ease with the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and Chögyam Trungpa in particular. She faced death with a confidence and even, I must say, a sense of celebration I am still in awe of (and only wish I could write more about now.)</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Another coincidence is that in 2004 I traveled a route through northern Italy partially designed to see the frescoes and paintings of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_della_Francesca">Piero della Francesca</a> and in particular his fresco of Mary Magdalene, a work I had so long admired in reproduction that it had nearly become a deity and altar in my room, the expression of the feminine I most adored. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Last year - through a thicket of such coincidences I can still hardly believe them - I found myself traveling with a friend to the <a href="http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/vezelay-church">Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene</a> in </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Vézelay, France. It was inside the church that my long-standing admiration for Piero's Mary merged with the atmosphere of one of the most beautiful (and living) buildings I'd ever entered. It was inside the church that I also had an encounter with my ancestors, my mother and father (my father died last August). A few days later I wrote about my time there:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Late in the 10th Century, a monk named Baudillon brought bone relics of Mary Magdalene to </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Vézelay.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> in 1050 the Pope confirmed them as genuine and for these subsequent 1,000 years a continuous stream of pilgrims, including Richard the Lionhearted and Thomas Becket, have made stops here. A crypt in the Basilica holds the well-lit relic, a bone fragment that looks like it came from a leg or arm and also resembles a spear. </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A spear can represent vertical time, but so can a six-inch long piece of femur. If a bullet was shot through a telephone book the hollow path of its trail would be a vertical but invisible spear penetrating each of the hundreds of pages of the book (and on each page hundreds of names). In the same way, hundreds of qualities of Mary Magdalene have come to make “Mary Magdalene”. It is the qualities that Mary evokes in those who think about her that make her Mary. </span></span></blockquote><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYKmWwGUh_ep2zVj90LziLrCGncjgwnj9I5VZpUX0XfSIAbAAkmwJZKz5TYl-39lARYtc07e0QJw431X_1dei4JjN1uyQrdtb16A2t39Lot_PVP5_O9bU_xxm-PAMI2kSPPtYIgGBu3oF_/s1600/Piero+della+Francesca+%257C+Saint+Mary+Magdalen+%25281460%2529+%257C+Podere+Santa+Pia%252C+Holiday+house+in+the+south+of+Tuscany.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYKmWwGUh_ep2zVj90LziLrCGncjgwnj9I5VZpUX0XfSIAbAAkmwJZKz5TYl-39lARYtc07e0QJw431X_1dei4JjN1uyQrdtb16A2t39Lot_PVP5_O9bU_xxm-PAMI2kSPPtYIgGBu3oF_/s320/Piero+della+Francesca+%257C+Saint+Mary+Magdalen+%25281460%2529+%257C+Podere+Santa+Pia%252C+Holiday+house+in+the+south+of+Tuscany.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Detail of Piero Della Francesca's</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Mary Magdalene. Arezzo, Italy.</span></span></div><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">During my inspection of the church, I deposited four Euros in a cash box in exchange for two votive candles, lit them, and stood in front of another Mary Magdalene, this one a stone sculpture depicting Mary comforting a baby. I lit and offered the candles for my parents, Alice and Bill. I wasn’t sure which verb tense to use as I prayed for my parents who felt with me (present), behind me (past) and in front of me (future). When I thought of how much they would have loved seeing this basilica my heart was heavy in the same way it was when I thought of how I could never tell them I was here. Thus I proved to myself that time as <i>quantity</i> is heavy, even a burden and tragedy. But the atmosphere in the room was thinking in <i>vertical time</i>, which made it completely possible to realize my parents are in my present, past and future at once. </span></span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOHWIdHg97fgHJEsbHb-nYXSrUnBzulbvmFObk51W5P_m9BPVBkTQaHzhbqxD-dOumw44ZI3DzFZh8Dxx9uldHNxWPJlZHzEQO0XbfM3bsvpQvxGEh1vwsXMNS1_8RCYqdhakSqbwIwZGf/s1600/Vezalay5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOHWIdHg97fgHJEsbHb-nYXSrUnBzulbvmFObk51W5P_m9BPVBkTQaHzhbqxD-dOumw44ZI3DzFZh8Dxx9uldHNxWPJlZHzEQO0XbfM3bsvpQvxGEh1vwsXMNS1_8RCYqdhakSqbwIwZGf/s400/Vezalay5.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGARAZhJHNL9c6qjtWgItoZLnZyjwvRKBfwCpGngDaav05oUFSmBP4R9cGDXaAW9MicIHKgOiIMxQlA9lRWy0bCUaA30P5uDxJqmLbY8wdHxM9M9fS-U15XHlqDtBZ-akYbalkdVgslvTn/s1600/Alice+by+blue+wall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGARAZhJHNL9c6qjtWgItoZLnZyjwvRKBfwCpGngDaav05oUFSmBP4R9cGDXaAW9MicIHKgOiIMxQlA9lRWy0bCUaA30P5uDxJqmLbY8wdHxM9M9fS-U15XHlqDtBZ-akYbalkdVgslvTn/s320/Alice+by+blue+wall.jpg" width="240" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Alice Scheffel, spring 2007.</span></span></span></div><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm9Q0DpoWvUhk0Ag0yfapLtKuPBF9ioFQaO8qND9EkWmI6fnJOWxfqRj1KXU6CRMRI0CTdudMsZbZ9dA6jcRYPc5gTQdyIeVcpMOvEKa-wz5mYklFXxoWBz3c-_rFZ7FqaPSXZD2pWtbxI/s1600/Alice+1+week+before.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm9Q0DpoWvUhk0Ag0yfapLtKuPBF9ioFQaO8qND9EkWmI6fnJOWxfqRj1KXU6CRMRI0CTdudMsZbZ9dA6jcRYPc5gTQdyIeVcpMOvEKa-wz5mYklFXxoWBz3c-_rFZ7FqaPSXZD2pWtbxI/s320/Alice+1+week+before.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Alice, one week before she</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">died (on April 17, 2008).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <object height="225" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12880691&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12880691&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"></embed></object> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/12880691">Alice Scheffel on Nature and Memory</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user3312432">Bill Scheffel</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</span></span><br />
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</div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-92080267817046009052011-03-05T06:16:00.000-07:002011-03-05T06:16:29.806-07:00Sympathy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: #990000; font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">All the dreams you show up in are not your own. <i>Gil Scott-Heron</i></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5w0fzZe4i7cnBDvG5aidU9zqrlEtSQZdgN6zFS8JBIhZWDGQoDY2Q0l3S944ZJa4-pW3y7Vh7sjmJtl0AHyqnFXG8SHU6jqOP306DwNxWK863eKvII5ADmunFI6Ty5yvtKr_yDkf6OyfF/s1600/Women+in+Portland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5w0fzZe4i7cnBDvG5aidU9zqrlEtSQZdgN6zFS8JBIhZWDGQoDY2Q0l3S944ZJa4-pW3y7Vh7sjmJtl0AHyqnFXG8SHU6jqOP306DwNxWK863eKvII5ADmunFI6Ty5yvtKr_yDkf6OyfF/s320/Women+in+Portland.jpg" width="277" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Demonstration in support of Egypt uprising,</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Portland, Oregon.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/20113341535651130.html">From Wadah Khanfar, Director General of <i>Aljeezera</i></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Pleases enjoy this video on what the Arab revolutions mean.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">I extend my apologies for my long and unannounced gap in publishing <i>The Drala Principle</i>. In short, travel and engagement with the subjects I write about became so compelling and at times demanding that I could not write, only experience and assimilate. Since the end of October I traveled with a friend through central and southern France (a pilgrimage to sites we felt called to visit) then spent five weeks alone and on retreat in Istanbul (a retreat both in my hotel room and through silent wandering on the streets). During this time I realized I must sell my home and most of my possessions and resume life from a suitcase. In the past three weeks, post-home, I have traveled to Portland Oregon, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., New York City and Paris, where I am now, staying with a friend (as I have stayed with other friends along the way).</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">a home is</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">with bank account</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">though still going </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">homeless</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">no shrine</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">no photograph</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">no return ticket</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">I live in the abode</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">of friendship</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">which is the home</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">each friendship</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">occurs in</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">when seen</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">from a distance it is:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">a dream </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">yet a house</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">an atmosphere </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">yet also a body</span><br />
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<i><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">26-Feb: 2011</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Paris</span></i></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">I suppose like nearly everyone, I have been moved by the popular and decidedly non-violent demonstrations/revolutions in the Arab world. I took the photograph above in Portland Oregon, a moment when my son and I came upon a rally in support of the people of Egypt. Perhaps the photo captures the same feelings of pride and determination, courage and joy that so animated the footage we saw from Tahrir square. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">The next day I witnesses something else that reminded me of Tahrir. As I was waiting for the airport tram, a well-dressed man standing beside me began to pick up garbage, first a discarded beer can, then the fallen newspapers, plastic bags and litter of the entire block, which he combed methodically. I felt inspired by his act and slightly ashamed I hadn't seen fit to do the same. When he returned to the stop beside me I thanked him. I told him his act reminded me of Tahrir square and what was perhaps most inspiring of all, that the people there and in other parts of Cairo performed their own spontaneous security patrols, emergency assistance and garbage collection. A generous, caring and sympathetic camaraderie - that was impossible not to sympathize with. Perhaps the way toward a more democratic and humane future for all of us. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is in this spirit that I salute all of you on this day, which for many is also a New Year's celebration, that of <i>losar</i>, Tibetan New Year or Shambhala Day. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx81eDaWtAITi1CRUqpntOmNdDTHKX3gYqHDq24aK7eEzwQ6tg7aq1wZjgUpyStHhRhHycZ8KSWohrdHjyuBo2u8wOhVJr3kUYvetU2zOfIaz94fC06ZbGsyjOtpcebnnBJ_Mw-zf7_u2_/s1600/Luxembourg+boy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx81eDaWtAITi1CRUqpntOmNdDTHKX3gYqHDq24aK7eEzwQ6tg7aq1wZjgUpyStHhRhHycZ8KSWohrdHjyuBo2u8wOhVJr3kUYvetU2zOfIaz94fC06ZbGsyjOtpcebnnBJ_Mw-zf7_u2_/s320/Luxembourg+boy.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Luxembourg Garden, Paris</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</span></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-53153080472983917552010-10-14T05:17:00.021-06:002010-10-17T09:08:47.132-06:00PRINCIPLES OF DHARMA ART<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b style="color: #660000;">"If you can really visualize this it will be there in the morning" </b></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN1AfmiXCD8f_IKBipbfK-yR-7fbEMfLosBbD_KIi3J0ZYs9sZpU-dXz3PKYr3u78qG0H5RRBXY2mY2Qo8GJP37cvPFDu9HpkSbXoQmWzwGKmRH-30W_xkoThb6ZoncbWs2cCkeoF4PB1t/s1600/Tori+gate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN1AfmiXCD8f_IKBipbfK-yR-7fbEMfLosBbD_KIi3J0ZYs9sZpU-dXz3PKYr3u78qG0H5RRBXY2mY2Qo8GJP37cvPFDu9HpkSbXoQmWzwGKmRH-30W_xkoThb6ZoncbWs2cCkeoF4PB1t/s400/Tori+gate.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Drawing by Jack Niland.</span> </div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"If you can <i>really</i> visualize this it will be there in the morning." Venerable </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Chögyam</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Trungpa Rinpoche. Snow Lion Inn, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, October 1972</span>.</blockquote><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The first book of Chögyam Trungpa’s that I read was his first book of teachings in English (besides his autobiography, Born in Tibet), <i>Meditation in Action</i>. The year was 1970 and I was a Sophomore in High School. I had already had my LSD experiences and carried the book around in my back pocket as an emblem of a new, emerging identity (as I carried books by Alan Watts and Albert Camus), a cognoscenti of the spiritual search, no longer dropping acid or eating meat. Over the next six years, I acquired other equally stimulating and confusing identities, for a while forgot about the book and its author. In 1976 I stumbled into one of his meditation centers, met Chögyam Trungpa a few months later and studied at Naropa Institute that summer. That first, single year was such an acceleration of the real and the possible, such a collision between myself and the irresistible and overwhelming world of Chögyam Trungpa, that 1976 alone could be a year to digest, practice with and be in service to for the rest of my life.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ7xXTCeBkWhSfw2LKlZ12_GrOTIGUC845tYsrrd7I1tFTx0vXTRUlttH521ucGzUNcLdJAciPrU-CJ6_D2wPfyHd1h7P7h9zC3Tk2sVEJNEUO_ZPE2zjt3-v2i3c-MqoZ-rN2FndCrcRM/s1600/Jack+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ7xXTCeBkWhSfw2LKlZ12_GrOTIGUC845tYsrrd7I1tFTx0vXTRUlttH521ucGzUNcLdJAciPrU-CJ6_D2wPfyHd1h7P7h9zC3Tk2sVEJNEUO_ZPE2zjt3-v2i3c-MqoZ-rN2FndCrcRM/s400/Jack+1.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> Jack Niland in his NYC apartment.</span></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<b style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Jack Niland, Dharma Art International Treasure</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My meeting with Jack Niland two weeks ago was a kind of re-union with 1976 or, I might say, 1976 required me finally to have this meeting (no more than an accident). That summer, Jack taught a four-week class on the “dharma art” principles he had learned from Chögyam Trungpa. I sat on the floor with the seven or eight other students and listened to Jack’s lectures, his pure, smitten and unflagging enthusiasm for such things as how the rods and cones of the eye corresponded to the design matrices of Tibetan thangkas, how the earth was a “rinky-dink” planet compared to many other world-systems, how a dot was the first work of art and how the aesthetic and moral catastrophes of the late nineteen-seventies could be transformed into wakefulness through art – all of these, teachings and tales conveyed to Jack by Chögyam Trungpa.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The class did drawings and other "dharma art" exercise and I took copious notes. My notebook probably contained at least an outline of everything Jack had received from CTR, but a few years later I somehow lost it. I still think about the notebook and still feel its loss. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl0FxCNijmsFHNBXEtbpLYoth7gbUYLCgPKALiTXn0yOofIimM026qr_J8WKsE_3neKIZnmGI4CoHLJjnSiUEC9W00Qh1tu3K8Ew2229ODKdaU10xKAJuYk5mzI-b32jrC9NMB8HJKgogq/s1600/KCL_40_tee(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl0FxCNijmsFHNBXEtbpLYoth7gbUYLCgPKALiTXn0yOofIimM026qr_J8WKsE_3neKIZnmGI4CoHLJjnSiUEC9W00Qh1tu3K8Ew2229ODKdaU10xKAJuYk5mzI-b32jrC9NMB8HJKgogq/s320/KCL_40_tee(2).jpg" width="198" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl0FxCNijmsFHNBXEtbpLYoth7gbUYLCgPKALiTXn0yOofIimM026qr_J8WKsE_3neKIZnmGI4CoHLJjnSiUEC9W00Qh1tu3K8Ew2229ODKdaU10xKAJuYk5mzI-b32jrC9NMB8HJKgogq/s1600/KCL_40_tee(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Jack Niland's design for the 40th anniversary celebration</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">of Karme Choling (originally called <i>Tail of the Tiger</i>).</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Earlier this year, I received and invitation to write an article about Chögyam Trungpa for an anthology on “artists of the Counterculture.” In the beginning of the article I described Jack’s story of first meeting Chögyam Trungpa, which can be heard on <a href="http://www.chronicleproject.com/radio_home.html">The Chronicles of CTR</a> - (PLEASE listen to this recording!) </span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">At that time, Jack Niland, a young aspiring artist from suburban New Jersey was about to become one of Chögyam Trungpa’s first students. Niland, though just back from living in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and after countless LSD trips, still had no satisfying insight into striking moments of perception he’d experienced as a child: how, for instance, an electric fan clipped afternoon sunlight to produce mesmerizing geometric designs inside his eye. Even the beauty of a schoolgirl in his first-grade class lingered as a haunting apex of the real. Niland not only wanted to reproduce such moments, but to understand them. Academic studies left him bored and feeling sidelined; Niland wanted personal access to the doors of perception. He’d had studied at Cooper Union and conversed with Jerry Garcia but had not found answers to his questions. He was about to take yet another road trip when his sister told him, “Jack, The Dalai Lama has moved to Vermont.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">“Cool!” Niland said, “We’ll visit him on our way to Canada!” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A few days later, Niland found his way to “Tail of the Tiger” a fledgling, semi-impoverished spiritual community in northern Vermont</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> with a young Tibetan teacher in residence, a lama who of course was not the Dalai Lama but thirty-year old Chögyam. Niland knocked on the front door of the farmhouse which was the living quarters of the community and was forthright ushered to a small room where Chögyam Trungpa sat by a table with a pad of drawing paper, a brush and a bottle of India ink. </span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4LDmgL9FftL8WnUXx8-00anQmwNa27TmXvQs0bLIyDZnepiWh-DGRRYcVRK4Y1_X0bAXzafge0hOlvuvisecuOs5Ijn9kirciDhK9f6GJDQ_HPBM1cEPJT1Eap_TKX8FXIdXJruOYR3fO/s1600/JAck+and+Tao.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4LDmgL9FftL8WnUXx8-00anQmwNa27TmXvQs0bLIyDZnepiWh-DGRRYcVRK4Y1_X0bAXzafge0hOlvuvisecuOs5Ijn9kirciDhK9f6GJDQ_HPBM1cEPJT1Eap_TKX8FXIdXJruOYR3fO/s320/JAck+and+Tao.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Jack Niland and Tao, when Jack met </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Chögyam</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Trungpa in 1970. Photo by Roland Sherman. </span></span></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">“There was this little Tibetan hippy guy, this cherubic guy with long hair and a huge grin, Niland recalled, “who looked up and said, ‘Oh, I’ve been waiting for you!’”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Trungpa, with “radiant energy and unbelievable charisma” immediately enlisted Niland to assist him in making his “very first work of art in North America,” a calligraphy of the Tibetan syllable Ah. As he drew the syllable, Trungpa called Niland's attention to the “dot,” the first moment when pencil, pen or brush meets paper, which is not only the beginning of any line but also the moment form materializes from space. Trungpa called Niland’s attention again and again to the significance of the dot, how the dot is the first moment of arising in space, how the dot is in our hearts, how our mind is a dot. The splash of India ink is really the center of the cosmos.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As he was listening to Trungpa, Niland realized he had found someone who understood the phenomenology of perception. When he mentioned his experience with the fan, Trungpa replied, “Sure, sure, I understand, those colors come from the rods and cones in the eye. Tibetan thangkas are all based on that.” For Niland, Trungpa was the opposite of art history lectures and theories of aesthetics. Sitting in that room with him, Niland had no idea who Chögyam Trungpa was, he just knew Trungpa wasn’t explaining electricity but handing him the current. The syllable <i>Ah</i>, Trungpa added, means what it sounds like, a baby’s sense of wonder. If the <i>Ah</i>, a “pre-thought” and innocent moment of surprise, astonishment, even shock, was Chögyam Trungpa’s first work of art in North America, it was also the signature of his behavior, what it meant to encounter him.</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: x-large;">. . . . . </span> </span></div><br />
<b style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">The First Western Thangka</span></b><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDokGh27qBADNzT0_kXi7FP0qYne-RIAm7Mgek9hRd84KOTg330Gk0OMsRbHLPB-oa2BlJ8OZXeM8yC4Vn2dR7m58uSvRqmkHmnlSUna8Fdq320nO_pDWCMiNG3LK51jXCOKam_9yICjUq/s1600/First+west+tangka+per+CTR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDokGh27qBADNzT0_kXi7FP0qYne-RIAm7Mgek9hRd84KOTg330Gk0OMsRbHLPB-oa2BlJ8OZXeM8yC4Vn2dR7m58uSvRqmkHmnlSUna8Fdq320nO_pDWCMiNG3LK51jXCOKam_9yICjUq/s320/First+west+tangka+per+CTR.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A thangka painted by Jack Niland </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">according to </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Chögyam Trungpa's instructions.</span></span></span></div><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">According to Chögyam Trungpa, this is the “first Western thangka.” It is a portrait of Sara Kapp, an early and close student of Trungpa’s, who was also Jack’s romantic partner for many years. Jack painted the thangka in the fall of 1970 according to Trungpa’s instructions. <br />
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Chögyam Trungpa fully believed in developing “Western thangkas,” works based on the discoveries of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan painting but in no way requiring the wholesale importation of Tibetan iconography. A fully-functional Western thangka would have to utilize images that arise from the Western psyche; or, we could say, from the “first thoughts” of the artist-practitioner. As I wrote last week, <i>Images arising from our unconscious - from space itself - are not yet tethered to our hopes and fears, but can represent pure moments of meaning or "first thought."</i> The valid image of, say, a wrathful deity could as easily be that of a Hell’s Angel on a bike rather than a red demon with multiple arms. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">To appreciate that a thangka could be Western and still convey sacredness one, of course, needs to go no further than Giotto, Vermeer or Jasper Johns. But the principles of dharma art are an every-person’s art in that (visual) art emerges from a primordial language of mind and cosmos, a language it is impossible not to possess and that becomes evident even in the simplest of diagrams or drawings, if we know how to associate with them.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBIiv3CO7ARSuZ9PJH7ib1r-v9d24vWWXKTUyP0GsUmspPvTlMPuQqfqJXqPc8A4xr-v5KU8jhW2iyNAsEcS759GsFejBoSgKpC0sh_ey7usg2LMaMzunqa2DyTlno1YoKs7N51VNbiux/s1600/Sacred+geometry+of+space.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBIiv3CO7ARSuZ9PJH7ib1r-v9d24vWWXKTUyP0GsUmspPvTlMPuQqfqJXqPc8A4xr-v5KU8jhW2iyNAsEcS759GsFejBoSgKpC0sh_ey7usg2LMaMzunqa2DyTlno1YoKs7N51VNbiux/s640/Sacred+geometry+of+space.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Drawing by Jack Niland.</span></div><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In a sense, these diagrams are little more than doodles, but just as it is impossible not to have narrative in writing, it is impossible not to have primordial-ness in doodling. A dot, as we know, is the expression of mind and the first discovering of mind and a line can be none other than the connection of two dots – a simple unity more intriguing than a m</span></span>ö<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">bius-strip, something neither one nor two. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Jack has been doing drawings like the one above for decades. What could be more beautiful or compelling than this diagram which combines dot, circle and square? And it really “works,” not only as something visually arresting, but as a yantra or vehicle for meditation. I tried it and these are the words that came to me. </span></span><br />
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<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Breath is drawn from all of space, the latter best expressed by the circle. The end of the in-breath is a dot because there clearly is an end, a turning point where breathing in is no longer possible. A point of non-existence. With the out-breath we discover the world, which is a kind of order, the things around us have lines and ninety-degree angles: buildings, telephone wires, trees and the flight of a bird. A square turned 45-degrees inside another square creates a dynamic space, an energy-infused space, a space with lots so of stuff going on. One's own in-breath brings completion – the circle – through the new beginning of the dot, which is also the return to simplicity, becoming primordially refreshed. Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Breathing in I know I am alive; breathing out I smile at myself.”</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">One doesn’t need to continuously reference what one is doing to “dharma art principles” but can, instead, trust ones own associations (as I not only trusted what I wrote above but found it helped me!). Associative mind is the mind of poetry, dream studies and dharma art. In associative mind, one allows the first thought connections with a subject to be accepted – the only way to write a poem, the only way to understand a dream. If we learn the fundamental principles (such as those of painting thangkas) we can become accurate in our creativity and accept all kinds of associations. Accuracy rather than indulgence was another important teaching Chögyam Trungpa gave us about art.</span></span><br />
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<div style="color: #660000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>The Law of Correspondences</b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
One of the concepts I find most arresting as I study the universality of the drala principle is the so-called <i>law of correspondences</i>, the Hermetic notion of <i>as above, so below</i>, the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. We could also say that human (instead of saying "spiritual") systems<i> correspond</i>. That fundamental principles correspond is surely the basis of dharma art. It is not that all systems are the same but that all systems of truth find <i>analogs</i> in other systems and these mutual reflections, besides offering bonds of understanding between peoples, help us understand our own path – and often our own path calls upon us to take up seemingly new and different paths as our own correspondences lead us to our own primordialness.<br />
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For me, a good example of all these dimensions of the laws of correspondence is the I Ching and it’s elegant and unfathomable binary simplicity (yang or yin, solid or broken), its ability to describe any and all time scenarios we find ourselves in, and its profound spiritual guidance which seems to stand outside of any religion – or feeling of being religious. </div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Learning the meaning of each of the I Ching’s hexagrams is a matter of accumulated associations, matching ones own experience and first thoughts to the gradually internalized or even memorized textual meanings the each hexagram. Eventually, each hexagram becomes an abode one shares – if only for a fleeting second –with the dralas, an abode that has been created through mutual the participation of ones own thoughts and the “thoughts” of the drala (who are a “source” of our own thoughts). </span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ5cU8gTtjrzCqoFGD86ni0_HeE_ZnS_KLMgy8nK_iHkAn0RxgI7Sv8tADgwrcC8Y4T8XjwQj1kiZeO_KRtXG-OKJ_kDop_gKxL3OTE8MW-mcxQvSyLW8ORTntZrcKzxAsvsTNZd5jcthG/s1600/I+Ching+%2361+hex+only.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ5cU8gTtjrzCqoFGD86ni0_HeE_ZnS_KLMgy8nK_iHkAn0RxgI7Sv8tADgwrcC8Y4T8XjwQj1kiZeO_KRtXG-OKJ_kDop_gKxL3OTE8MW-mcxQvSyLW8ORTntZrcKzxAsvsTNZd5jcthG/s1600/I+Ching+%2361+hex+only.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Inner Truth, hexagram #61</span></span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Inner Truth</i>, hexagram #61, is a good example of such an abode. The foundation of all hexagrams are the lower and upper trigrams, and the foundation of the trigrams are the elements themselves, the phenomenal world which is our collective above. The lower trigram is the joyous lake; the upper one, the penetrating wind/wood. Joy within and gentleness without are the most immediately evident aspects of this abode. When we know something is true we suddenly feel so centered (this hexagram is visually symmetrical) that we don’t necessarily even feel the need to express it. The joy of truth is carried gently by the wind and can reach others even if we are not speaking, even if we are not even with them. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(More on Jack Niland soon.) </span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik0WDKJS7jUKMeJDt903rwOWDSfH3ZGF_LyV2arkLZPMzNoEk5wHrVtJC6qMhhmfo_ao7XSJC8amK3N3LI9081vZo6VfYpIULI3xBPb24XMSVGxqtwxdkwPPx7uwxR4UDuBEhyvmLgj9Jy/s1600/A+-+stomach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" />Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-515721238438787220.post-55952837831795057102010-10-01T06:47:00.003-06:002010-10-01T08:48:10.642-06:00"AN OPEN, EXPLORATORY ADVENTURE WITH NO CONCLUSIONS"<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><b style="color: #660000;">History is the dream of what can be. - <i>Diane di Prima</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrpr2Lf3FhHxitRyVwOM_uzlZPo7C_cd9hyphenhyphenV1jziJ8RNsantVfXOp4IKr09zxDwV6-m0lBTBmvyL5uL55SSpexbwoPcXB4DTTC_v-firsfl_xvqKBPwZLiCVeiAcwuvfLw5gyU_2fbT0Q/s1600/Postcard+and+dorje.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrpr2Lf3FhHxitRyVwOM_uzlZPo7C_cd9hyphenhyphenV1jziJ8RNsantVfXOp4IKr09zxDwV6-m0lBTBmvyL5uL55SSpexbwoPcXB4DTTC_v-firsfl_xvqKBPwZLiCVeiAcwuvfLw5gyU_2fbT0Q/s320/Postcard+and+dorje.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Postcard (by Delfina Piretti) with dorje. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">Since my last journal (Sept. 3rd), I have left Boulder Colorado and traveled, with my son Devin to Turkey, via Boston, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York City. I have taken the post card Delfina Piretti made for me seven years ago, as I have on all my trips abroad. It was her tribute to the <i>Western Mountain</i> (the same image I used at the top of the last post) and now I have photographed it in Istanbul, with a Buddhist dorje on it, a symbol of "indestructible truth." </div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">This journal is a continuation of the theme of imagination and a tribute to three people I have encountered on my journey - John Perks, Madeline Bruser and Jack Niland - each of who have contributed to and extended Lord Mukpo's teaching legacy. Each of the three I first imagined visiting earlier this year. Without making much of a plan, it happened. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #20124d; text-align: left;"><b>First, a continuation of the theme of imagination...</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;">The war that matters is the war against the imagination. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;">All other wars are subsumed in it.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><i>Diane di Prima </i></div><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>. . . . . . . . </b></span></div></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: left;">The <i>war against the imagination</i> must be traced to ourselves and the acquired conditioning we receive that supports the mechanism of war within us. As used in the drala principle and in Diane di Prima's poem <i>Rant</i>, imagination has nothing to do with fantasy, mere daydreams or avoidance of reality. Imagination is the communicative and subtle expression of reality. Images arising from our unconscious - from space itself - are not yet tethered to our hopes and fears, but can represent pure moments of meaning or "first thought." The potentialities can be taken up as guidance and, depending on the strength of our character and the firmness of our determination, can become the foundation of "establishing our kingdom" (to cite the words of Lord Mukpo).</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKI4SGIv_NsoHBZjHqdp37hEGHukUFr55W3q1Ox6EuOcxQDokClfGVnRmnM-3JLWBZs1x_AGoVUXi2QGsetFPh-m4wtmUB3m3YIrtsfWXd0pYoOOhavSx0Oho8fHkdVa2P6ltDsONSnWJ4/s1600/Istanbul+group.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKI4SGIv_NsoHBZjHqdp37hEGHukUFr55W3q1Ox6EuOcxQDokClfGVnRmnM-3JLWBZs1x_AGoVUXi2QGsetFPh-m4wtmUB3m3YIrtsfWXd0pYoOOhavSx0Oho8fHkdVa2P6ltDsONSnWJ4/s320/Istanbul+group.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Istanbul, 2005.</span></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Ideas and images of the imagination arise unbidden and suddenly. They are not manufactured by our ego and contain unimaginable (no pun intended) potential; they are expressions of what Tulku Ugen calls the "unconfined capacity" of mind. </div></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9VdIIMNW6ZbBQNsIAUoBW3dL93egtB8RxyR3Pfj81Mh8ojuc0Ej-11RkrqwJHqmEasMoOequRRVhqrlqmeOTF9P6QURhyphenhyphentisliepqhf9rjgtjQC5edieFCHnHjwctJ4LwXJXjHD5fxfc3/s1600/Tarot+cards.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9VdIIMNW6ZbBQNsIAUoBW3dL93egtB8RxyR3Pfj81Mh8ojuc0Ej-11RkrqwJHqmEasMoOequRRVhqrlqmeOTF9P6QURhyphenhyphentisliepqhf9rjgtjQC5edieFCHnHjwctJ4LwXJXjHD5fxfc3/s320/Tarot+cards.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Tarot cards chosen by Jesse Goldman</span><br />
<blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">history is a living weapon in yr hand</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> and you have imagined it, it is thus that you</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> "find out for yourself"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> history is the dream of what can be</span></blockquote><blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> - from <i>Rant </i></div></blockquote></blockquote><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Nearly every line of Rant is a point of entry, a valid chunk of imagination explication. Instead of the dull and mordant notion of history - and our life - receding into an irretrievable past, history (as Rilke told us) is circular and comes toward us from the future. The "living weapon" is this unconfined capacity of mind which offers us a vacant future, one of pure potential, instead of the narrow route of habit which usually dominates us. But as di Prima says, one must "find out for yourself."</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghmS4eYgpvrnAInYuUupvGtc-CrOB2NtreVZg4x_oDa3EXiP-M_qwWaftr9_Kxjp2gk5RPtJabDgdcE0QNWFpZ_86Y2Rp_cF2-ce2lJRqUcrmiDZZu9wHg6i1LDKDJjPbDiscGhXRU_KB6/s1600/Devin+on+piano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghmS4eYgpvrnAInYuUupvGtc-CrOB2NtreVZg4x_oDa3EXiP-M_qwWaftr9_Kxjp2gk5RPtJabDgdcE0QNWFpZ_86Y2Rp_cF2-ce2lJRqUcrmiDZZu9wHg6i1LDKDJjPbDiscGhXRU_KB6/s320/Devin+on+piano.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Devin at the piano.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="color: #660000;">Madeline Bruser</span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br />
</b></div><div style="text-align: left;">Last last year, my son Devin read a book on playing the piano by <a href="http://www.artofpracticing.com/"><span style="color: black;">Madeline Bruser</span></a> that changed his way of playing (and ruined his life, as changes in our habits can do, shifting him away from a highly rigorous and ambitious routine of daily practice into... well, he has ended up in Istanbul). After reading parts of her book, I, too, wanted to meet her. Madeline was an serious and accomplished classical pianist long before she met Ch<span class="Verdana12pt"><span class="style44">ö</span></span>gyam Trungpa, but a single opportunity of playing for him in 1979 changed her life and her way of playing the piano forever. The short version of the story is that Trungpa ignored and seemingly mocked Madeline's playing - at the time, a highly dramatic style - until, barely able to maintain her composure any longer, Madeline suddenly clicked into a new mode of playing, far less self conscious and far more natural, actual. She could only remain in the mode for a few moments, but after that night she could never return to her previous way of playing. From the gap of reality Trungpa opened, Madeline went on to develop a way of playing that become a way of teaching others. She wrote a book, <i>The Art of Practicing</i>, and eventually retired from performing in order to devote all her energies to sharing what she has learned with others. In Madeline's words:</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">In connecting so much with music I was also connecting to my whole life more. Professionally, the key moment came when I discovered a new posture at the piano which came directly from meditation practice, from sitting still and upright for a set period of time every day, no matter what emotions were going through my body. That discipline, after eight years, resulted in my being able to maintain simple, upright posture at the piano too, no matter how emotional the music was. I was able to just let the music flow through me without reacting against it or manipulating it. It just happened that way I just found myself playing that way. Then I had my students try this posture, and they all played 100 percent better on the spot. And that was like light bulbs going on in my head I suddenly realized that I had something important to teach, and that became more exciting to me than performing.</div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwPJvmgJhKlLaObdx8nCwAvfcsqhnxjFrIfg4K1-hauMeMNFuagCjDNSuqPDRAYir0WZaaMTFjR0zp2Yeea93zujTaoJgW3ArxIjr6lywy9bxQYR0AiN05BpfU1zPZaHgM8pwLRh8kfnR6/s1600/Madeline+5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwPJvmgJhKlLaObdx8nCwAvfcsqhnxjFrIfg4K1-hauMeMNFuagCjDNSuqPDRAYir0WZaaMTFjR0zp2Yeea93zujTaoJgW3ArxIjr6lywy9bxQYR0AiN05BpfU1zPZaHgM8pwLRh8kfnR6/s200/Madeline+5.png" width="185" /></a></div></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Madeline Bruser</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;">I respect - and am honored to share - Madeline's assimilation of her experiences and lessons from her teachers, her own diligence and rigor, her commitment to the way of the piano. I visited Madeline at her NYC apartment and 99th and West End Avenue. In upcoming weeks, I will post a video interview with Madeline, a document of our two hour conversation.</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><b style="color: #660000;">John Perks</b></div><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7J9RWUUiOfdOtQZq5Ka03e5yWGPkXke-hLbB-PecPJKbgSvjO3spPnXQNsIllb03k6I3pitnF4INe2QtMWHN6Iv2KQ6btXc1VYpQIaxbJiGT5aTtG2rDeigRnlmlS8wCjj0b_jk3XTAPS/s1600/Celtic+sign.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7J9RWUUiOfdOtQZq5Ka03e5yWGPkXke-hLbB-PecPJKbgSvjO3spPnXQNsIllb03k6I3pitnF4INe2QtMWHN6Iv2KQ6btXc1VYpQIaxbJiGT5aTtG2rDeigRnlmlS8wCjj0b_jk3XTAPS/s320/Celtic+sign.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Adanaire Celtic Buddhist Center, Saxtons River, VT</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikTvwAM1ZRWul7eBbRWbX-jtn63oRC0Lge1pWlux-AnvcYmbkGVt5nSqCFFCpqPVg535NCMGPmKLk_AjrTKJWVanunw-__ArlkpkSjW6GJqJdcC_L0EJpUPSdCWTb4uahgFjWg0mpKUHBD/s1600/Mystic+John.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikTvwAM1ZRWul7eBbRWbX-jtn63oRC0Lge1pWlux-AnvcYmbkGVt5nSqCFFCpqPVg535NCMGPmKLk_AjrTKJWVanunw-__ArlkpkSjW6GJqJdcC_L0EJpUPSdCWTb4uahgFjWg0mpKUHBD/s320/Mystic+John.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">John Perks</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">As the maple leaves were accelerating their turn to red, I rented a car in Lebanon New Hampshire and took the short drive sought to Saxtons River Vermont, home of a longtime friend, John Perks, founder of Celtic Buddhism and known within that community as The Venerable Seonaidh Perks. John is also the author of The Mahasiddha and His Idiot Servant, a memoir of his time with Chögyam Trungpa. The photograph above - and the fact that John went on to be Bill Cosby's butler - shows John to be the man he is and as I perceive him: the recipient of many experiences, with a profound, incessant and activated sense of humor, affectionate, loving, exploring and contributing to the human journey, a sane and lunatic tributary from the mind-transmission of Lord Mukpo (it could not be otherwise). John was quick to dress up for my proposed photo shoot and I assured him his choice of costume would dispel the sense that others might have that he is crazy. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBw9TmrGXLgbDtsfouw78iYkgit3ISilEkSmO-cGRQSwl4QwCpc3XXSr8v2bHNtssiiDNS2zo-479PQHMJc6VjXIdDDZR4qXm1QdJVuLIntz8Pw5QUctdEieICmtF0JrJzVggNPqSecnAl/s1600/John+in+western.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBw9TmrGXLgbDtsfouw78iYkgit3ISilEkSmO-cGRQSwl4QwCpc3XXSr8v2bHNtssiiDNS2zo-479PQHMJc6VjXIdDDZR4qXm1QdJVuLIntz8Pw5QUctdEieICmtF0JrJzVggNPqSecnAl/s320/John+in+western.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Venerable Seonaidh Perks</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA-9RM9C6Hpij5VOoH_85xpc1gM1VHdZgP25Sm-NcZPTUfXv3QNoJ1hQaMbIwq4HK0jKRjXlbPAa6h4B01om0A26y65Dqt-PIkZaqtQ-L9OPcc_wIY4zNA5duy6kDRR5kQojST09RyPBv6/s1600/John+and+Julia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA-9RM9C6Hpij5VOoH_85xpc1gM1VHdZgP25Sm-NcZPTUfXv3QNoJ1hQaMbIwq4HK0jKRjXlbPAa6h4B01om0A26y65Dqt-PIkZaqtQ-L9OPcc_wIY4zNA5duy6kDRR5kQojST09RyPBv6/s320/John+and+Julia.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Julia and John Perks</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">I can't pretend to know what Celtic Buddhism is, though what I encountered at <i>Adanaire</i> - of John, his wife, the land they live on, the stones and shrines he showed me, even the beef bourguignon he cooked for me - was animate with the drala teaching principles; their universality, their common sense, their way of making the spiritual obvious. For instance, from the Celtic Buddhism website, John gives this definition of having a teacher:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>With the teacher, whoever is your teacher, in Celtic Buddhism we say <i>Anam Cara</i>. It’s a Celtic term that means “soul mate” actually, so that the relationship between you and your teacher is a similar aspect – it’s one of being soulmates. We’ll talk about the Anam Cara system possibly in our next talk. In any case, when that transmission occurs maybe nothing special happens for a while. Then, because of one’s whole openness and sensitivity towards another being, one’s teacher, then even after that teacher is no longer physically present, still the relationship is there and is still continuing. So that lineage is very much like that.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXDa7vfEcjh31QR5PKlvFBLnWJxrRMaa9vEPGnhDUgR1HE6-pbZR_9sM4JZb02QjXrKVXoRKJx76PdljjA5vM5zEsTaxt3nD7V56xkTpOVHgQcLYp5EIAZRPGpNyUK1Kkr67-_kFNHk17W/s1600/Stone+of+Perks+land.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXDa7vfEcjh31QR5PKlvFBLnWJxrRMaa9vEPGnhDUgR1HE6-pbZR_9sM4JZb02QjXrKVXoRKJx76PdljjA5vM5zEsTaxt3nD7V56xkTpOVHgQcLYp5EIAZRPGpNyUK1Kkr67-_kFNHk17W/s320/Stone+of+Perks+land.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Central stone of stone circle, Adanaire</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">From the website, the origin of the Celtic Buddhist lineage:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>Trungpa Rinpoche felt that a culture needed to deal with its own history, mythology and social structure in its relationship to Buddhism. He felt that these cultural aspects were difficult to ‘see' because of their transparency, and that through investigation one could come to understand his or her cultural biases and their illusory nature. In Seonaidh's travels with Trungpa, particularly in Ireland, they had many long discussions about the early nature-based Celtic religion and also the Celtic Christian Church. Before Rinpoche's death in 1987, he told Seonaidh that he should go out on his own and start a lineage.</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: left;">The Venerable Seonaidh Perks says of Celtic Buddhism: </div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">It's still a big question mark as to what Celtic Buddhism is going to evolve into. It's important to make the question mark very big, so that it remains a big open question. Not only about oneself, but the society in which one lives. Celtic Buddhism could be viewed as an open exploratory adventure with no conclusions.</div></blockquote><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWiy9mD67zwKcCZ6uCuygR6eUFGAqcGyh9QSKN3J9Ow7Wcdxh5-1atz5JBdjoaXnpPqTOjlIieaV8x5OO14OhXqybx0ZN97ydKlQi4FYlK7f99IeMde9aGAqUvRqO7jCWV_wJ94_3EGltd/s1600/Farmhouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWiy9mD67zwKcCZ6uCuygR6eUFGAqcGyh9QSKN3J9Ow7Wcdxh5-1atz5JBdjoaXnpPqTOjlIieaV8x5OO14OhXqybx0ZN97ydKlQi4FYlK7f99IeMde9aGAqUvRqO7jCWV_wJ94_3EGltd/s320/Farmhouse.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">View from stone circle back to farmhouse, Anadaire. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><b style="color: #660000;">Jack Niland</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I've run out of time to feature Jack Niland in the post, so I will do so next week. Jack is a mind and lineage holder of Lord Mukpo's legacy, someone fated to receive teachings on art and Buddhism no one else necessarily did, meeting Trungpa/Lord Mukpo early after his arrival in the United States. In fact, Jack did not even know who Trungpa was in 1970 when he was ushered into a room - seemingly by accident - to meet him. Trungpa immediately announced, "Oh, I've been waiting for you!" Below are two products of Jack's continuing work with the principles of art and dharma; the first a design motif, the second a pair of identical silk-screened tee-shirts he gave Devin and me.</div><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTjXNCCoMkRbWFGb3hULnagdElPb9JJuXst90x68jVR4UPa6XAN7hHRi0GduJW5X7MwlsR2PGi4mWw4uWOfQRIAMDx8bfZfG-0RdJBYw0jW-V9bBHDdV2ryiZlFPki3T6AcRbVdJYpbBoS/s1600/Trident+by+Jack.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTjXNCCoMkRbWFGb3hULnagdElPb9JJuXst90x68jVR4UPa6XAN7hHRi0GduJW5X7MwlsR2PGi4mWw4uWOfQRIAMDx8bfZfG-0RdJBYw0jW-V9bBHDdV2ryiZlFPki3T6AcRbVdJYpbBoS/s320/Trident+by+Jack.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">A current design Jack is working on.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmVILjplRcUbzTpvIpaYlOFBHgZvjIbIrnL6fTS8iuVKdlLpGi1LeCLmiujlQ4CUFIdY_aVB-gy0cl3dWhceh4KXW2ijLzfrXl2QYZIoY6spy3sAP1Fq6IjYA8vePhn1VZh01znizmsvnI/s1600/Dev+and+bill+in+Jack%27s+tshirt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmVILjplRcUbzTpvIpaYlOFBHgZvjIbIrnL6fTS8iuVKdlLpGi1LeCLmiujlQ4CUFIdY_aVB-gy0cl3dWhceh4KXW2ijLzfrXl2QYZIoY6spy3sAP1Fq6IjYA8vePhn1VZh01znizmsvnI/s320/Dev+and+bill+in+Jack%27s+tshirt.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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</a></div>Bill Scheffelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11792378918556126881noreply@blogger.com2