Voyage to (Occupy Wall Street) Washington D.C.

 OWS encampment, Washington, D.C. 

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 Democracy Now 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 yoga and meditation. Their story is the finest Thanksgiving story for the rest of us that I could imagine

VOYAGE TO (OCCUPY WALL STREET) WASHINGTON D.C.

Tuesday

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.

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.

Graffiti, Budapest.

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.

Wednesday

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 not to have a politics:

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

from Rant by Diane Di Prima

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 Freedom 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.

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.

Ram with cornucopia, Sam Rayburn House Office Building

McPherson Square

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.

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.

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 other 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.

 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. 

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.

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.

.  .  .

When Lisa and I left McPherson Park we walked west on K Street. We went from virtual refugee camp to Hilton Hotel and Capital City Club & Spa. We went from pizza on damp cardboard to steak and lobster and white tablecloths, from donation buckets to Bank of America 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.

 Sign, OWS Washington DC

Non-Violence Works

Did you ever see Dr. Martin Luther King yelling at a police officer or kicking a car?

Did you ever see Gandhi deface a statue?

Did breaking windows or burning cars stop the IMF or World Trade Organizaton?

Disorganized minds cannot organize anything. Do you think the government is scared of a stoned protester?

Intoxication, fighting police and vandalism is how you protest a bad soccer referee. Should we follow the soccer hooligans or Mahatma Gandhi?

VOYAGE TO ROMANIA

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. Bill

.  .  .

Bucharest

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inner courtyard. Timisoara, Romania.

Timisoara

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.

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. 

.  .  .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.... 

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.

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. 

.  .  .

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.

Historic town square, Timisoara.

Arad

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. 

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!”

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 Xo Residence was as bland as a Motel Six 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.

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 never go anywhere. 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. 

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?

.  .  .

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 döner 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.

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.

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.

. . .

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 Boulevard Revolutiei 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. 

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.

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. 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.

Market, Arad.

The rewards of aimless wandering: I encounterd the angels who
hugged me on Friday night again the next day. Arad, Romania.

THE GOOD SOMETHING & THE HAND OF GOD

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.

Among other things I've gestated during this time is an expansion of my blog (and website), in that I am beginning a request for submission of articles 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. Please consider writing something of your own and sending it to me. 

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.

.  .  .

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.

The Good Something

by Patricia Friedson

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.



Reading the excerpt from Chögyam 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. 

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.



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 National Geographic, 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.



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.  



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?  



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.


Gratefully, Wishing You all the best, 

Patricia

.  .  .

 

Arad, Romania

.  .  .

THE HAND OF GOD - video interview with Tom Pathe

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 The Hand of God 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.

BURSA & GEMLIK

Blue door, Bursa.

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 Atamer Doğa Resort in nearby Gemlik, a coastal town on the Sea of Marmara. 

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. 

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 Atamer. 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 anything, and in moments of fully discovering the poignancy of trying we find ourselves in love.

After reading Stephen Hirtenstein 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 tathāgatas. 

.  .  .

I will now describe the influences that brought me to Bursa.

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 (Karma Pakshi and Dōgen Zenji were  contemporaries of Ibn Arabi, as was St. Francis of Assisi).

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. 

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 one, so to speak, those of Shambhala.
 

.  .  . 

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 basic goodness, which he once described this way (these words are form my own transcripts and convey the unedited conversation he was having with the audience):

"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?" 

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 first mind to us. In the same talk he explained his name, that Lord is like "the sky" and Mukpo is like "sunshine in the midst of the sky." If any of us fully experienced our own name as he did his we would 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":

“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.

 

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, Journey to the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat, 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).

And as it has turned out, I've been in Bursa for over a month.

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, Allah the Generous One, the Raiser of the Dead, the Guardian of All Existence, the Ever Present. This is our being, 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-symphonic beauty 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."

Bursa.

INFINITY OF TRACES

 

Click here to go to The Chronicles of CTR

I happened upon this audio recording from The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche a few nights ago, a treasure. In it Rigdzin Shikpo recounts with what seems to be great fidelity and personal understanding the meditation instruction he received from Chögyam Trungpa in 1965. The recording documents not just the fruitional nature of 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 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 stories Rigdzin Shikpo's wife Shenon Hookam tells about meeting Chögyam Trungpa and about her and Rigdzin's lifelong involvement with his teaching. I have transcribed Rigdzin Shikpo's audio recording (scroll down to end of post).  

.  .  .

BURSA

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.

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.

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. 

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 and 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.

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.

 .  .  .

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. 

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, All the relative thoughts that happen in your mind in connection with cause and effect are the agents of the dralas. 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."
 
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.

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.  

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.  .  .  .

From The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Rigdzin Shikpo, formerly known as Michael Hookham, talks about his training with Trungpa Rinpoche in the 1960s, beginning while Rinpoche was studying at Oxford.

Tribute to Trungpa Rinpoche

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.

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 complete openness. 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. 

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 natural perfection. 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.

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 absolute spontaneity 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.

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 the tree of life. 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.

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.

Two Musicians and One Titanic Musician

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. The first two musicians are high-energy and magnetic in the way the best street players are, and the third is a huge musician, of truly titanic proportions. 
 

Two Musicians and One Titanic Musician from Bill Scheffel on Vimeo.