Thursday, September 2, 2010

THE HANDMADE LIFE

Handmade postcard, Delfina Piretti

THE ALMOST ZONE

I have incurred a five-week hiatus in my journals; my father died on August 2nd, eight days after my last posting. In July, I wrote an essay I called The Almost Zone; reflections, among other things on war and my father, who served in WWII. Here is the last paragraph of the essay:

From The Almost Zone: Besides the clothes he wears - and he is helped in and out of them by the staff - the only objects my father has in his possession are his glasses and his walker. He lost his wallet soon after he moved into the Alzheimer's facility, he keeps nothing in his pockets, I took his ring off his finger and he no longer wears a wristwatch. My father has almost left this life, but his almost zone is very different than, say, my mother's in her last months. She was aware of all her objects and remembered everything, from who won last year's Wimbledon to how much yogurt was in the refridgerator. My father's almost zone in a crazy one; sometimes he thinks I'm his brother, between my visits he almost always thinks I'm overseas, he doesn't know where his living or why he lives there and remembers no ones name. He is trapped or liberated into a kind of relentless now. He's quite alert in the now, keen to respond and his dry and sarcastic wit can be as sharp as ever. The relentless now of war is said to be horrifying and intoxicating - though at other times tedious, mind-numbing boredom, drugery and idleness. I wonder how much my father's life now is like it was fifty-six years ago, when he was stationed in Guadalcanal or Tokyo?

William S. Scheffel 12-October 1921

to 02-August 2010.

In the almost-zone of my father's last two years of life we spent a great deal of time together. During this time and following my mother's death, I moved my father from his own apartment into an independent living center, then into assisted living and finally into an Alzheimer's facility. This time was a continuous lessen in the vulnerability all human beings are born into and return to in old age. In his last years, what my father desired most from others was also what he was able to give, what we all most want and most want to give: affection and love.

THE HANDMADE LIFE

The handmade postcard at the top of this journal, and the artworks below are all expressions of what I call the handmade life. As I wrote in the previous journal:

I first heard the term "the handmade life" from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' telling of the Hans Christian Anderson fairly tale The Red Shoes. In brief, the red shoes represent the glamor of the careerism, consumerism, acquisition and ambition. The wearer of the red shoes, though beginning with good intentions, is eventually "worn" by the shoes, swept into a life of speed one cannot control. Taking up the handmade life means taking off the shoes - an initially uncomfortable, disarming, confusing, lonely and very vulnerable process. It means saying "no" to a lot of things and saying "yes" to... slowness. Perhaps the foundation of recovering our connection to the "indigenous mind" is slowness.

All of the artworks on this post were done by my friends and many were given to me as gifts: postcards, greeting cards, birthday cards and condolences upon my mother's death. Most if not all were make of "junk" - things that have been or otherwise would be thrown away: old magazines, cardboard boxes, business cards. The products of imagination, accident, affection - premier creations of the handmade life.

Birdwoman, chipboard and acrylics
on plywood. Elizabeth Trulio

Oil pastel, Lisa Havelin

Collage, Cathy Hubiak

Collage, Theresa Luttenegger

Watercolor, Devin Scheffel

Ink drawing, Devin Scheffel

Collage, Melina Mejia Stock

"THE WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION"

Below is one of the most important poems, in my opinion, of the 20th Century; Rant by Diane di Prima. Diane is a teacher of mine; I've heard her perform Rant at least once and I have lived with the poem for many years. I once taught a course on it. I might easily call it the "western version" of the drala principle. It is an artist and human rights manifesto, an explication of our first suffering (when "we hesitated to speak," to quote Gaston Bachelard), the existential backboard upon which we etch our legacy, a warrior's song of courage, a diagram of the handmade life.

RANT

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes

there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
"find out for yourself"
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum

of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidirectional chess
which is divination
            & strategy

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination

it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
                        THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
                        THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
                        THE IMAGINATION

ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like of suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory

Dig it

There is no way out of the spiritual battle

the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death

bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/the flaming sword is yrself

the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant

intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun

the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central

Sunday, July 25, 2010

WAR, THE DRALA PRINCIPLE & THE HANDMADE LIFE

Ward Reilly, Vietnam era veteran, supporter of IVAW from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.

In this video you can hear Vietnam era veteran Ward Reilly tell his version of the "handmade life" as he speaks in a Warrior Writers workshop, a group of Iraq veteran writers and artists (more below).

. . . . . . . . .

I was a culture assassin for the United States government. That’s what I was trained to do in the Special Forces. You go into a simple and indigenous society and train them to fight or train them to do something for the U.S. Government and then try to replace their system of government with our system of government.
Jacob George

WAR

Jacob George is the Afghanistan war veteran who appeared in the videos I featured in last week's posting and who started the bicycle project, A Ride to the End. In the second video Jacob discloses, "I was a cultural assassin for the United States government." When I heard that I realized I'd encountered the narrative, a synchronous connection between victory over war, the IVAW Convention and the drala principle.

The United States in its role as one of the world's latest empires (since 1991 the only empire) has unleashed drone strikes, depleted uranium bullets and death squads in the name of democracy upon third-world countries for decades. In these nearly continuous wars (many covert and unreported at the time, such as the carpet-bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s) the worst of the violence typically hits the countryside, rural areas where collateral damage goes particularly unnoticed or uncared about, places were life is still "indigenous and simple."

The United-States-as-Empire is not alone among countries in profiting as a delivery system for violence, nor can the historical complexity of conflict zones be reduced to a slogan or single explanation. The tactics of extrication from violence are not simple, obvious or easily done (Obama's dilemma), but Jacob's statement raises a crucial question: To what degree is modern war a war on the drala principle?

UNLEARNING

Today a friend showed me a recent interview with Maladoma Somé. Born into the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, Maladoma was forced at the age of four into a Jesuit boarding school. Eventually he was able to return to his village and receive the initiations of his own tradition, a process he called "unlearning." A person trained in both indigenous and modern culture, Maladoma has become one of our most articulate advocates and teachers of the drala principle.He has come to believe that,

"the intellect, as it is programmed by modernity, may not be equipped to comprehend certain kinds of reality. The modern mind has alienated itself from indigenous cognition in order to obtain a kind of control over the world." Maladoma Somé July 2010 issue of The Sun.

This "control over the world" Maladoma Somé speaks of is the war on the drala principle - and it has brought us to the brink of environmental catastrophe. The roots of war as a war on the drala principle has much to do with the rise of modernity and with it, a sharply increased disassociation between the human body and the earth. In the dynamic of this disassociation, the understanding that we must cooperate with nature often loses out to an urge to control it.

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time they destroy one another. - Chögyam Trungpa

In 1939, Chögyam Trungpa-Lord Mukpo was born into the medieval world of Tibet, which was also a simple and indigenous world. Among the great Tibetan Buddhist teachers of his generation, he was alone in speaking about our disassociation from nature as the destruction of the drala principle (of course by the late 1970s, countless environmental writers, historians and and scholars had written on this subject; more on this next week). It is these very teachings that has galvanized the creation of this blog. The drala principle is a way (a universal principle active among countless teachings today) to reprogram the modern mind to reconnect with and inhabit the indigenous mind, a mind that has not been lost forever (after all, indigenous means inborn, innate).

Demeter, Rome.

Fundamental aspects of our humanity - our dream life, our poetic mind, what we refer to as shamanic experiences, and our relationship to the spirit world (whether one consider "spirits" as nature itself or as specific living but invisible beings, such as angels) - are denied by modernity. Some are simply neglected or left to die by the roadside (poetry); others became taboos, objects to shame under the broad heading of "superstition" and for continuous centuries were suppressed or destroyed by imperialism/colonialism, a kind of mono-theistic need to destroy what others believe (and what monotheism once "believed" itself; the angels and archangels are spirits after all).

Here are some of things Lord Mukpo said in 1979 about the war on the drala principle. (This is from a lightly edited transcript, truer to the speech of his talks than the more heavily edited books in print.).

Christendom abandoned any sort of drala principle a long time ago. Whatever drala principles remained were regarded as superstition. The Christian empire of early medieval times desecrated the drala principle.

Here, Lord Mukpo criticised Christendom, the conquering forces of a merged church and state, and not Christianity, which he did not condemn, to say the least. He befriended Thomas Merton, visited monasteries and abbeys when he lived in England and hosted annual Buddhist Christian conferences at Naropo University in the early 1980s. He was sincerely interested in the contemplative traditions of Christianity and supporting their revival. In the above quote he is talking about a Christianity far removed from its founder's intent, the kind Constantine was the first to propagate (an emperor who murdered his own son and wife), the man who set a precedent for the next 2000 years: Christianity as an intolerant empire (see Eduardo Galeano trilogy Memory of Fire for a chronicle of the disaster Christian Spain and other European countries visited on the indigenous world of Latin America).

Nowadays we make fun of the Greek gods or the Roman gods. We think they're funny; we think they're just a story. Because we have been indoctrinated by the Christian tradition, we never pay any attention to the ancient traditions... I feel our attitudes toward those ancient civilizations are not very justified. There were numerous traditions that understood how things worked. But nobody knows the sacred rites on any one of those traditions (any more)...

A key statement here is that these local-indigenous drala traditions "understood how things work." What Lord Mukpo means is that drala traditions, by definition, are elemental, they are linked, without exception, not just to the representatives of fire, water, wind and earth as deities, but to the function of fire, water, wind and earth; when to plant, how to harvest, the behavior of the landscape and needs of that watershed .

You can go to Rome, you can go to Paris, you can go to Athens and you can see the statues. They were the ancient gods. But what has become of those gods?... Suppose you were a Hellenistic practitioner, and you related with those gods, those dralas. How would you feel? Those people were bound to have incantations intended to provoke and invoke all sorts of drala principles.... But we have ignored all that. We think: "Ha. Ha. They had those sculptures and those things happening (referring to the way a typical tourists view the sight of antiquity)." So now a great tradition has become a tourist piece. It's very sad."

Statue, Rome.

We have to think back to those days. We have to think back. To some people it might be very shocking to reignite paganism altogether... The influence of one particular religion has harmed the indigenous traditions of Western Europe altogether. There are lot of gods in the Western tradition. The Greek and Roman deities are not the only ones... There is one Scandinavian deity who is referred to as the all knowing. He has four faces... What happened to all those gods? Even their shrines have been dismantled. Ladies and gentlemen, there were lots of drala figures within the European tradition. The drala principle exists everywhere - always, everywhere. But with the invasion of Christendom, when one God was announced, many of the other gods - the other dralas, we could say - were completely undermined; they were forgotten. People weren't even allowed to mention them.

I sat listening to the talk these excerpts are from over thirty years ago. Of all the talks I heard Lord Mukpo give on any subject, this was the perhaps the most interesting, the most galvanizing, the most unusual (to consider it brings tears to my eyes, always). His passion for the subject was so great he talked for what seemed like for hours; this is arguably the longest talk he ever gave - which could be an argument for how important he considered the subject of the drala principle to be!

Again, Lord Mukpo was not condemning the religion and faith of Christianity and, in fact, he's not really talking about Christianity. He is talking, I believe, about a kind of paranoia that arises in the human psyche. When this paranoia is mixed with ideology and greed it unleashes a "one god" principle; zealous, aggressive, in need of ideology and with little empathy for other. I studied the legacy of this in Cambodia, when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge declared the country would go back to "year zero," a fatal experiment in an extremely single-sided Maoism (atheism is also a form of one-god.)

Lord Mukpo's Tibet - and all its dralas - came under Chinese occupation in 1950; the ongoing decimation of Tibetan culture was particularly acute during the Cultural Revolution, the zenith of the one-god principle of Mao. But Tibet was not free of this either. Internecine campaigns of suppression - including war - by the dominant schools, such as the Gelukpo, against the "lessor" sects were long part of Tibet's history. The Rime movement, which Lord Mukpo embraced and taught from, was founded by Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo in the 19th Century. Rime means "lack of bias" and was founded not to synthesize the various traditions and sects of Tibetan Buddhism but to respect their differences and preserve each as a distinct lineage (the opposite of the one-god principle and a model for tolerance and respect for diversity so many people now embrace).

In our current time, when the Soviet Union collapsed, collectively we went from two one-gods - Communism and the Free World or The West (terms of great irony)- to a single one-god; the free market capitalism of The West. The drala principle has not fared well under any of these systems. In 1931 Stalin, out of spite and whim but for no practical necessity, razed The Temple of Christ the Savior (considered as an "eighth" wonder of the world) and replaced it with a Soviet office building (one-god eating another one-god!). Far more significantly, and as an illustration of modernity as war on the indigenous, we can see the one-god epitome of the Soviet centrally planned state as environmental disaster almost beyond comprehension (but not widely known) in the destruction of the Aral Sea.This plight of the Aral Sea is brought to light in the following 10-minute documentary, a devastating work of great beauty.

A 10-minute documentary on the Arel Sea.

Lord Mukpo believed that reestablishing a sane and effective culture required combining the wisdom of the past (the indigenous, the drala-principle) with the reality of the present, including our technology. Like Gurdjieff and C.G. Jung, Lord Mukpo could see that contemporary humanity was ill equipped to handle its own inventions. To combine the wisdom of the past with our current technology would be to reestablish a morality (which he called sacred view) toward our environment in which we would refrain from consumerism and the culture of convenience, not to mention such blatant insanities as mountain-top removal or pumping dry our aquifers.

THE HANDMADE LIFE

This has been a long digression since citing Jacob George's quote or reporting directly on the Iraq Veterans Against the War Convention, but the accidental narrative has returned here, in the theme of the handmade life, which is the theme of Jacob's bicycle ride for peace [as well as (with a couple of caveats) the phenomena of blogging].

I first heard the term "the handmade life" from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' telling of the Hans Christian Anderson fairly tale The Red Shoes. In brief, the red shoes represent the glamor of the careerism, consumerism, acquisition and ambition. The wearer of the red shoes, though beginning with good intentions, is eventually "worn" by the shoes, swept into a life of speed one cannot control. Taking up the handmade life means taking off the shoes - an initially uncomfortable, disarming, confusing, lonely and very vulnerable process. It means saying "no" to a lot of things and saying "yes" to... slowness. Perhaps the foundation of recovering our connection to the "indigenous mind" is slowness.

We often ask what we can do in the face of war, environmental catastrophe, personal depression or even simple stress. The handmade life is always available to us as remedy and creative opportunity. The handmade life ranges from taking a mindful breath to fulfilling a vision (for instance Allen Ginsberg's vision of Blake when he lived in Harlem). The handmade life is the principle of creativity and of the drala principle. The handmade life came front and center to me at the IVAW Convention, in particular though the book depicted below and meeting some of those who contributed to it:

Warrior Writers: Remaking Sense is an anthology of poems and prose from Iraq veterans (as well as the name of their website), some of whom I met in a writing workshop held during the conference. The subtitle of the book, Remaking Sense, echoes the theme of slowness and the handmade life; once we slow down we can begin to deconstruct our experience, identify what is toxic and what is healthy, what to refrain from and what to cultivate. For these young Iraq veterans, healing from war and recovering from PTSD are matters of life and death. More than one veteran told me writing had saved her life.

Here is a video I made as a guest in the Warrior Writers writing workshop. In this sequence, participants are talking about the role of art in their lives.

WARRIOR WRITERS of Iraq Veterans Against the War from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.

More on the handmade life in the next posting.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

VICTORY OVER WAR

An entire body of Chögyam Trungpa-Lord Mukpo's teachings was captured in a phrase he gave to his students, Victory Over War. Initially, this body of teachings had to do with protection; that a talk on Buddhism, say, needed to be given under a correct set of circumstances in order to be effective. A certain precision, decorum and beauty needed to be established for an audience to open to the teachings. The audience needed to feel safe and welcomed, yet also provoked toward clarity, becoming awake.

Lord Mukpo translated these principles into issues of aggression, the military and war. Any society needs members who are sworn to protect it (firemen, policemen, soldiers); pacifism is not always possible, but meeting aggression simply with more aggression is counterproductive, wrong and typically horrible: war begets war. An opportunity to further explore the possibilities of Victory Over War arose for me in these last two weeks.

Daughter of an Iraq era veteran.

IRAQ VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR

Annual Convention, July 8-11 - Austin, Texas

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Democracy Now with Amy Goodman interviewing three U.S. solders speaking out against the war in Afghanistan. It was mentioned that the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) were having their annual convention in Austin, Texas on July 8-11. Within a couple of minutes of hearing that I went to the IVAW website. At that moment I knew I was going to the convention myself.

Ten days later I unpacked my bags in room 200 of a dormitory on the Huston Tillitson University campus, an historically black school founded in the Nineteenth Century (it turns out Huston Tillitson was the only place, among those contacted in Austin, that was willing to host the Convention.) Over the next three days I took hours of video, met dozens of people, immersed myself in the convention, but also spent hours alone in my dorm room, downloading video footage, writing, collecting my thoughts - and sometimes simply escaping from social overwhelm and a certain anxiety (perhaps these arose, not just from arriving as a stranger, but from hidden collective and personal aspects of war I was encountering?).

Ones expectations are not always fulfilled, but in the case of the IVAW Convention mine were. I expected to find kind, mature and committed human beings who would be an inspiration to others. I found this and more. This was an age and gender diverse group of friendly, thoughtful, well-tattooed, well-spoken, courageous, shattered (occasionally I would see this) and perhaps above all creative people. A colony of artist-activist-leaders.

Personal stories of the horrors of war were not particularly on display or subjects of the workshops. I learned only a few of the stories of what these men and women faced when they refused to deploy, became conscientious objectors in active duty, deserted or simply announced their opposition to United States military policy. Many were new, many who had attended previously had not returned. A growing but no doubt vulnerable colony as burnout, finances and other life priorities created a 2010 Annual Convention that was somewhat smaller than hoped for yet was also their "first" (previous conventions had been held in conjunction with and supported by Vietnam Veterans Against the War).

I will publish more videos and journals about the convention over the following weeks. For now, I have some photographs below and, especially, the following video-interview. Jacob George and Spencer Hindmarsh are riding their bicycles, along with other veterans, across the U.S. until our government ends the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their website explains further:

Do you support war? Do you have a job? Do you pay taxes? Then yes, you support war. You’re supporting two wars actually. We are here today, to ask every single one of you to STOP SUPPORTING WAR. But how, how do we stop supporting war? How do we stop a war? Since our elected government has decided to continue funding this war with money coming from your paychecks, the first thing you can do is QUIT YOUR JOB. If you feel strongly enough about not supporting war to do that, you might be interested in taking the next step. Get a bicycle and join us for a ride. We are going town to town, spreading this message face to face and we are not stopping until BOTH WARS END!

Most would probably consider this statement absurdly impractical and wildly idealist, but I would say quiet the contrary. If only, say, a quarter of 1% or our population did this that would create a protest of almost a million people - which could easily galvanize popular opinion into a war-paradigm shift. But think of an even greater impact. A mass shift to bicycles could immediately begin to rescue our planet from runaway global warming. In short, Jacob and Spence's suggestion is sane, continuing to do what we are doing is insane. Plus these guys are cool.

Jacob George & Spence Hindmarsh of A RIDE TILL THE END from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.

[If you watch and enjoy this video, please see the YouTube link at the bottom of this page. That video profiles Jacob and his brother Jordan, is a documentary of sections of their ride and give essential background to their views and courage.]

Faces of some of the veterans - not just from Iraq,
but from Afghanistan and the Vietnam era - who attended
the IVAW Convention.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

AN OCEAN WITHOUT SHORE

INVOKING DRALA

One of Lord Mukpo's instructions for invoking drala is a three-step process that begins with a sudden flash of mindfulness, bringing one's aspiration onto the spot - coffee shop, intimate conversation or hospital bed. The second step is to remember our ancestral lineage, the lineages that culminate in this very moment we inhabit. Just as we are usually distracted from where we are, we typically feel alone and alienated, forgetting that we represent those who came before us, as well as our own teachers and all of the "transmissions" we have received.

For example, if I reflect for a moment, countless teachers and/or "transmission moments" come to mind. Once I visited the shrine of The Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. A moving walkway, like those found in airports, transported one past the supposed relic of Juan Diego. I rode the walkway again and again, and though the relic look fabricated, every time I passed in front of it my heart opened, I could literally feel my chest soften and expand. If I take that moment to heart, I feel not only connected to the Virgin of Guadalupe, but responsible to her, responsible to be a vehicle of her compassion. I can join my primary aspiration, Lord Mukpo's teachings and presence in my life, with this momentary recollection of The Virgin of Guadalupe.

That joining is the third step of this evoking drala practice.The second step, a recognition of our ancestral heritage could be "transmissions" we have received from nature, the intangible or drala-presence of flowers, deer or jagged peaks. In any case, "joining" occurs as a sudden beauty and tenderness in our heart, a free-fall in which aggression is momentarily impossible.

"LORD MUKPO'S DREAM TIME"

Lord Mukpo's Dream Time is a personal metaphor for my spiritual practice, including the practice of invoking drala. The phrase came to me one day while I was in Cambodia and announced itself as the title of my film - a film I had yet to make or even really conceive of! I felt intimidated, that it would be strange and presumptuous to use the title of my teacher in this way - yet I felt without doubt that he was telling me to use it!

I am offering a definition of this phrase below. Lord Mukpo refers, of course, to Chögyam Trungpa and for me the phrase is a kind of "guru yoga," a way of remembering my teacher. But it is also meant, I believe, as a kind of general principle, where Lord Mukpo simply refers to an individuals spiritual or human aspiration and Kingdom (as used below) refers to the fulfillment of one's highest aspiration in life, in this lifetime. It describes the often arduous path making our life one of real benefit to ourselves and others.

Lord Mukpo is "haunting us," available to those who will listen, who have a heart connection, who have in their heart (which everyone does!) the truth to establish a kingdom. To any available human being, Lord Mukpo wants to "capture" them into his dream time. His purpose is simply to encourage people to develop their kingdom. As each kingdom is established, it contributes to the fabric of the Kingdom of Shambhala. An individual kingdom cannot exist, by definition of egolessness, so as we develop our kingdom we capsize - but sink upward - into the ultimately non-dualistic or primordially awake Kingdom of Shambhala, which can also be called Lord Mukpo’s Dream Time. Once we exhaust our limited identity - that of our ego - through the courage and sacrifice of establishing our kingdom, we cease having our own dream - which is really a nightmare or prison. We cease being able to have our own dream. From that point on he - as our primordial nature - is dreaming us.

CAMBODIA: LORD MUKPO'S DREAM TIME - PART II

I have begun work on the successor to my first film, Cambodia: Lord Mukpo's Dream Time. Like that film, this one is being assembled incidentally, as I go along and almost by accident. This film will likely include the event that brought me back from Cambodia to the United States in 2007: the final months of my mother's life. The footage here, which documents that time, serves as a likely beginning.

Provisional footage for Lord Mukpo's Dream Time, Part II from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.

PETER ORLOVSKY, 1933 - 2010.

Peter Orlovsky. Photo by Allen Ginsberg.

Peter Orlovsky, poet, central figure of the beat poets and writers, lifelong companion of Allen Ginsberg and student of Chögyam Trungpa died on May 30th. I met Peter in 2002 while I was leading a meditation and arts program at Karma Chöling, Vermont. Peter was living there at the time, dealing with mental and physical challenges. Allen Ginsberg had died four years earlier. Peter seemed to be in a good deal of grief and anguish, an old man in suspenders and a large, drooping belly who seemed unrecognized and out of place in the midst of people mostly forty to fifty years younger. I invited him to attend our writing workshop and we all discovered almost immediately that we had a real poet in the room. A man of the working class, a kind of innocent butcher or plumber who was rough hewn, somewhat medicated and unbelievably, strangely gentle. And funny. A man with a tender smile and uncensored statements that rang about as true as they get.

Peter Orlovsky, Karma Chöling Meditation

Center, Barnet Vermont, 2002.

Karma Chöling.

I encouraged Peter to read his poetry to the entire community and one night he agreed to do so. Please enjoy the five-minute audio below in which Peter reads a poem and gives a very funny account of how Allen Ginsberg got the title for Howl.

Peter Orlovsky discussing the naming of Howl and reading Snail Poem.

Tal Varon was a student in the meditation and arts program. He wrote a detailed and wonderful tribute to Peter which you can find below.

Read a tribute to Peter Orlovsky by Tal Varon on

The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

BORN INTO THIS

Hear Charles Bukowski read Born Into This.

Safeway, Boulder Colorado

"Let me say before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By 'they' I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and meaninglessness."

- Thomas Merton, from his essay Rain and the Rhinoceros

For this week, I am sharing:

1. An essay sparked by the quote from Rain and the Rhinoceros.
2. A film about Alice Scheffel.
3. A film from New Orleans.
4. News on the Niger Delta.
5. A photo-essay from New Orleans.
6. Several links related to the oil catastrophe.

The quote above was sent to me by Jim Hartz (friend, longtime meditator and poet-activist; acute observer, synthesizer and devotee of the thought and teachings of Chogyam Trungpa, Thomas Merton, Noam Chomsky and many others). It comprises an axis I find myself situated upon; on one end the gratuitous nature of reality where most of our true pleasures and most of what is good for us is indeed free; on the other end the ever-gushing oil catastrophe, a worldwide sonar igniting rage, accusation and countless one-way streets of political opinion not acted upon, a recurring dream eating from the inside out our inventions of rising standards of living and other delusional happy endings. It is still free, and we are in it.

Bouquet in the home of Jay and Doug,
Portland, Oregon.

Alice Scheffel in 2006, age 89.

ALICE SCHEFFEL ON NATURE AND MEMORY

The catastrophe of our invented necessity for ever higher standards of living contrasts with the drala principle, which could simply be called the spirit of appreciation. Appreciation fills one with contentment, does not in itself require consuming and stays as part of the makeup of our psyche (or as a positive seed in the alaya vijnana, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say). My mother, Alice Scheffel was a warrior of this kind, someone who understood that life in its gratuitous beauty - as nature - was something to appreciate and serve. She did this in her best moments and often. Although driven to do, as we all are in contemporary culture, she took the time to step out of the frenzy of shopping or vacuuming - and with a sense of humor. She came to know Chögyam Trungp/Lord Mukpo through his photograph and a single conversation she and I had about him a few months before she died. From then on, she felt Lord Mukpo to be present in her life in the same kind of practical and not particularly religious way she felt Christ to be with her. My mom would entirely endorse this teaching:

Give yourself a break. That doesn’t mean to say that you should drive to the closest bar and have lots to drink or go to a movie. Just enjoy the day, your normal existence. Allow yourself to sit in your home or take a drive into the mountains. Park your car somewhere; just sit; just be. It sounds very simplistic, but it has a lot of magic. You begin to pick up on clouds, sunshine and weather, the mountains, your past, your chatter with your grand-mother and your grandfather, your own mother, your own father. You begin to pick up on a lot of things. Just let them pass like the chatter of a brook as it hits the rocks. We have to give ourselves some time to be.

We’ve been clouded by going to school, looking for a job—our lives are cluttered by all sorts of things. Your friends want you to come have a drink with them, which you don’t want to do. Life is crowded with all sorts of garbage. In themselves, those things aren’t garbage, but they’re cumbersome when they get in the way of how to relax, how to be, how to trust, how to be a warrior. We’ve missed so many possibilities for that, but there are so many more possibilities that we can catch. We have to learn to be kinder to ourselves, much more kind. Smile a lot, although nobody is watching you smile. Listen to your own brook, echoing yourself. You can do a good job.

In the sitting practice of meditation, when you begin to be still, hundreds of thousands, millions, and billions of thoughts will go through your mind. But they just pass through, and only the worthy ones leave their fish eggs behind. We have to leave our-selves some time to be. You’re not going to see the Shambhala vision, you’re not even going to survive, by not leaving yourself a minute to be, a minute to smile. If you don’t grant yourself a good time, you’re not going to get any Shambhala wisdom, even if you’re at the top of your class technically speaking. Please, I beg you, please, give yourself a good time.

Chögyam Trungpa, from The Great Eastern Sun.

Alice Scheffel died at age niney-one of liver cancer. I was her primary care giver during her last five months of life, December 2007 to April 2008. During this time I video-documented my mother's daily life, the things she had to say and her interactions with others. Her letting go was lucid and inspiring - she showed me the way. The footage in this scene was taken as I asked my mother the question, "Do you miss going out into nature?"

Watch video on larger player (recommended).

Alice Scheffel on Nature and Memory from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.

A short film, Water, Science, Responsibility and Home.

After I made my first two documentary films - one thirty minutes long, the other sixty - I gained tremendous respect for the colossal amount of time and concentration it takes to edit shot footage into something that can be called a film. I also began to look for an easier way to make a living (very so to speak) and imagined making a series of very short films (phew!) on a single subject that could be seen in the order the viewer chooses (as poems are read).

This nine-minute film below comprises four interviews I shot in New Orleans, approximately four weeks after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and just as the oil was beginning to contact the Louisiana coast. These were random encounters, people I approached on the long walks I too there, mostly in the Ninth Ward. I asked questions about water issues, our relationship to our environment and about the oil catastrophe. As I edited this group of interviews I realized they could be seen individually or as a continuous ensemble, a semi-realization of my imagined notion of future film-making. Here I am presenting the four together, an ensemble title, Water, Science, Responsibility and Home.

Watch video on larger player (suggested).

Water, Science, Responsibility, Home from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.

Essential to know about the Niger Delta
(and Ecuador, and many other places):

The New York Times: Far From Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old

BODO, Nigeria — Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab... read more.

New Orleans Photo Essay

I ran into a friend, Mike Smith, yesterday. Decades-long manager of the Trident Cafe and Bookstore here in Boulder, Mike reminded me he is a native son of Lafayette, Louisiana and asked me if I had more photographs of New Orleans - a question that launched the following photo-essay.

Times Picayune, May 10, 2010.

One day, during my stay in New Orleans I spread the Times Picayune on my hotel room floor and photographed the front page, May 10th. Louisiana Govenor Bobby Jindal and others are being shown the first sightings of oil on the Louisiana shore.

Garden District, New Orleans.

It was already in the low 90s in May when I was there, but more than one New Orleans resident warned me that August is the month you would do almost anything to be anywhere but here. The living analog of that statement are the old trees of New Orleans (mostly unknown species to me, who grew up among ponderosa pines and Douglas fir) who offer a shade and cooler micro-climate so palpable and necessary that just standing under one is a lesson in global warming and climate change.

Near Paris Ave and Hwy 610.

Ninth Ward.

A city with street names and thus intersections like North Rampart and Piety must have always been the home of poets or at least decent historians (Robert E. Lee Blvd and Paris Ave). Where I live you can't find much cracked and peeling paint or a red door inside a yellow frame. I really don't know why the sight of old walls and decaying architecture makes me so deliriously happy.

Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

These two photographs, with their elements of similarly cracked streets and parallel perspectives, for me represent Lord Mukpo's Dream Time (so to speak), a hunch I had before I took my trip and something bordering conviction when I look back upon it: that going to New Orleans was like going to Cambodia. Katrina and the Khmer Rouge each being initiatory cataclysms, still lingering as defining histories with people wandering around in their aftermath hard at work and somehow warmer, crazier, more real than the rest of us. Each place's future seems disturbingly parallel, too. New Orleans (the Gulf Coast) helpless as the oil increases and increases; Cambodia helpless among powerful neighbors, with its supply of the Mekong River downstream of dams the Chinese are building and the Himalayan glaciers that are melting.

The man below (now I can't even remember his name) worked for a rental company and drove me to and from my hotel during a 48-hour interval. Our time together was warm and humorous. I asked if he had remained in New Orleans during Katrina and he said he had. He had, in fact, spent two days on the roof of his house. "Oh, you were one of them," I said.

He laughed in admitting, "Yep."

Church on St. Bernard Ave.

I walked by many churches in New Orleans, wondering what their congregations and services were like. Most of all I walked by houses. New Orleans is a city of single family houses, many of them small but with surprisingly large yards. Many of the houses are of course empty, abandoned, waiting to be restored or destroyed; the casualties of urban decay, violence, foreclosure or hurricane Katrina. There is no hesitation in New Orleans to paint houses in bright and saturated color which creates a visual tonic and a seeming, emergent prosperity as these newly painted houses dominate those beside them. These house are like exotic birds, flamingos foraging in a wasteland. The abandoned and destroyed houses are equally compelling, as if their stories are not the singular ones of inhabited homes, but are the stories of every previous occupant - ghost stories - and of a cataclysmic history that emptied them.