You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
There it was on a public television broadcast, a curator proclaiming that no other artist had made as many bad lithographs (and maybe other kinds of prints) as Picasso. But, came the rejoinder, no other artist had made so many of genius, either. The freedom of one was necessary to open the other.
I took the message to heart. Genius, of course, is another matter.
In mid-March, the buzzards return, soon followed by hawks.
“Buzzards,” as one acquaintance long ago explained, “is what cowboys call turkey vultures.”
But buzzard is so much more fun to say, fast or slow.
Yes, a few linger around here all winter, along with a number of hawks. But one day, looking up, you realize the balance has changed.
They’ve mostly headed for Florida again. Along with the rest of the “snow birds.”
I’m sitting in the car on a sunny afternoon, waiting for my wife or a daughter to emerge from the supermarket.
I watch a young woman pace nervously (am I being redundant), then climb on the trunk to look around or perhaps be seen by someone. She repeats this several times.
Finally, I break the ice, offer to make a phone call or help in some other way. She laughs and declines the offer.
“I’m waiting for some guy,” she says.
Oh, yes, I should have known. I think of all the other times I was waiting for some girl or woman. We know it’s a common scene.
And then he pulls up, much older than I’d expected. He goes to the driver-side window, waves a coat-hanger, and goes to work.
So it wasn’t just some guy, after all. So much for the romance that usually accompanies the story. Unless that happened somewhere down the road once she got going.
As a child, we could listen to the grandfathers and uncles talk about the good old days and their friends on the farms they left behind. Those conversations have been lost but remain a part of my heritage, my shaping — I have renounced those things, but return with a sense of ambivalence, that something more is lost — that there is no direction or depth in the changes.
The prairie was endless for the Amerindian, who lived securely within its radiance of circles, rippling harmonies, its ecologies — man, four-legged brothers, and spirits. Then the white man broke this, with straight lines: plows and axes. Like a bottle, the endless prairie was broken; its essence oozed away, like a bleeding wound. In breaking the tall grassed prairie, the white man created a new one — a desert of desolate spaces he could not understand, replenish, or be replenished by. He was depleting that which he came to find, forever. The history we consider is blazed by changes — turmoil, revolts, new kingdoms overriding the old; the Israeli history of ancient tentacles — it is not a history of land and people eternal, but rather a history of decay, of individual men or, at best, their generations as the whole thing changes in directions no one can foresee — the concept of PROGRESS with its central OGRE . . . the hidden desires to somehow make static or permanent the very creations of the destruction, which must obviously fail. In this new prairie the automobile was created and perfected — a means for fleeing, for destroying the COMMON UNITY of persons living through necessity in some kind of harmonic chord with the land (even the pioneers who broke the prairie and its Indian harmonies, had at least the peasants’ sense of the value of earth to man — they knew the traces of tribe in themselves and could still revere Mother Earth) — but with AUTO the prairie could be leveled even more — consider the vertical element that had been eliminated when BUFFALO were exterminated! enclaves of community become vulnerable, to escape as well as invasion — The Endless Prairie we have now can be broken. Pilgrimage made. The mind freed. We have our options, to fly away, or to enter inner circles. Either way, to become Indians (of America or Asia — both have ways). To focus, not upon the flatness, but on the hidden paths appearing in the Small Things.
As I used to chant: Hari Om Prasad!
I like a faith that values questions. Especially the ones that elude easy answer. The ones that keep us on our toes. The ones that keep us digging.
What have you done today has much more meaning than one that asks what you believe.
Questions of where have you encountered the Holy One? … and where have you served? … are more fitting.
The matters of peace and joy and hope and justice and, well, it’s a long list – are meaningless unless we manifest them in our daily encounters. Like St. Paul’s insistence on praying without ceasing, it’s an impossible task, which is precisely the point. Keep trying! And maybe you find out it’s not just up to you alone, but the Holy One as well. Again, we return to relationship.
I began these reflections as a matter of yoga and the question of whether it’s religion. Are you letting go of yourself (and your tensions and anger and desires and …) as you exercise? In your meditation? In your service to others during the day? Are you sensing the presence of the Holy One throughout?
Are you aware of the obstacles and barriers that arise as well?
If you are, it’s religion.
As for teaching kids in a classroom, what’s wrong with that? Just don’t confine it to a box with labels and wrapping.
So now we’re down to the core conundrum in the separation of church and state issue. How do you live your faith without demanding others do it for you? Or, to a lesser extent, live it the way you would?
Inhale, stretch. Exhale, touch your toes. You still have to do it! Close your eyes, then, and feel what’s happening within.
I suppose most Americans think they have an understanding of what “religion” is. Their definition likely starts with a statement about believing in God, perhaps qualifying that in some context with Jesus or some other touchstone.
The matter of belief and practice, though, can be quite distinct – one doesn’t necessarily entail the other. Many claim to believe yet do nothing meaningful in response. Where’s the faith that redirects and transforms lives? Where’s the love and hope and joy?
Douglas Gwyn titled a 1989 volume Unmasking the Idols, and while the work was addressed to Quakers, I love his awareness of the importance of “unmasking the deep-seated problem of idolatry in our lives [as] necessarily our first task” in our spiritual lives.
Quite simply, it starts with us individually. But I also sense we as a nation need to identify all of the false religion that shapes our public policies and priorities. We could start with celebrities, professional athletics, consumerism, the workplace, corporate enterprise, military expenditures, personal success … well, you get the idea. We worship a lot of things – a lot of things we shouldn’t for our own long-range health.
For one thing, I want us to have other measures of worth than a dollar sign. (Or, in terms of organized religion, an IRS tax deduction.)
We can even look at stripping away the superstitions and customs that accompany our traditions.
The idols even appear when we’re objecting to what is perceived as religion in the public schools. I could, for example, point to the objections to anything mentioning Jesus in relation to Christmas, while substituting carols to witches for Halloween. (I’m with the fundamentalists on that one.) Or the ways we’ll bend in our claims of tolerance, but only in one direction.
Jesus was oh-so-right about that plank in our own eye!
Still, the question of exactly what defines religion is elusive. “Preparation for death” comes as close as anything I’ve heard, once I realized it’s really talking about preparation for life – whatever that mysterious state is – and then life more abundantly, as Jesus promises.
I would take it a step further. Not belief in a Holy One, but a daily, personal relationship. But how do you define that? And how do you keep it pure? Maybe we’re back to the exercises, one way or another.
Discussion over whether yoga is or isn’t a religion – and whether the physical exercises have any place in a public school curriculum – triggers another of my emotional hot buttons. This one has to do with the marginalization of religion – authentic religion, at least – from public consciousness.
I think we’re poorer as a consequence. If we can’t talk openly about our deepest experiences of life – birth, love, family, failures and successes, and especially death – and the ecstasy and despair that can accompany them, how are we to comprehend and direct our place in the wider world? In America, sex is no longer a taboo subject – just listen to the celebrity gossip, for starters – but don’t you dare talk about spiritual faith or ask someone their income and spending. (Never mind that I do address those matters in the Talking Money category at my blog Chicken Farmer I Still Love You.)
Let me point out that the kind of discussion I’m encouraging precludes dogmatic or doctrinaire pat answers. It’s based in direct experience, rather than speculation. It’s not a matter of arguing one’s correctness or trying to convert another, but rather to relate the personal struggle with the greatest questions and challenges of life.
What does it mean to do good? To love? To seek peace? To pursue justice? And how does your faith make you a better person or create a more just and humane society?
Bill Moyers’ Genesis: A Living Conversation series on PBS in the 1990s demonstrated how this could work, and led to some of the most profound discussions I’ve ever heard in the public arena.
Too often what I see in terms of religion in America is a kind of generic homogeneity. I much prefer those who see importance in what the Amish call the distinctives – the practices that set us apart and strengthen our particular awareness. We can’t all live like the Amish, but we can learn from them. We can learn from those who make room to pray seven times a day or who feed the homeless or observe a strict Sabbath.
Settling for the lowest common denominator in this case means settling on nothing at all. I much prefer celebrating the alternative.
I also prefer listening to those who are finding joy and lightness in their spiritual encounters rather than those who are laboring under guilt or gloom. I’ll let you go ahead and quote chapter and verse on that.
What I do know is that when there have been coworkers and others along the way who can tell me about their daily faith, and welcome my replies, we’ve both been encouraged and strengthened. It’s been a special bond unlike any other.
So, is yoga a religion? Well, first we need to be more specific! Just what do we mean by religion?
As everyone’s been saying, New England had a strange summer. It felt shorter than normal, and despite some uncommonly hot spikes, was overall on the cool side. June was drier than usual, while July was wetter. And we swimmers were finding the ocean already growing uncomfortable toward the end of August, rather than leading into the glorious days of September we often anticipate. (The Gulf of Maine takes time to warm, after all.) I barely got my value’s worth out of my season pass to Fort Foster beach, unlike last year, even though I’m officially fully retired now.
As the buzz went, the fall foliage was better than we’d had in years, although it seemed to run about a week ahead of schedule and then essentially drifted off. And, after a few near misses in September, we were finally hit with killing frosts before the last week of October.
Not that many years ago, I would have said that was the end of the garden season, but that’s no longer the case. The cold gives the Brussels sprouts and kale a sweet edge, the parsley hangs in well for a few more weeks, and root crops like carrots, parsnips, turnips, and leeks can stay in the ground until it’s too frozen to spade.
Maybe part of my sense of a shortened summer can be laid to my revived activity as a novelist, thanks to the Smashwords publishing. With Hippie Drum released at the end of May, I found myself busy getting the word out through June and then spent much of August and September revising and formatting more works. Unexpectedly, but with a renewed sense of direction, I even drafted large sections of new material. What all this meant, of course, was time at the keyboard instead of outdoors.
Now that Ashram is in circulation again, I’m once more reflecting on attempting to establish a right balance in my life – time for exercise and home projects, for instance, renewed cooking and expanded social activity. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally reach that sweet spot.
For now, that includes cleaning up the garden, removing the dead zinnia stalks, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes. Pruning the raspberries. Turning compost. And then there’s moving the fig tree to the cellar, putting the hoses and Smoking Garden lights away, dismantling the hammock, stacking the tomato cages.
Already I’m looking at the dandelion leaves and calculating how soon they’ll be emerging from winter and heading to our plates.
Just don’t tell me it’s going to be a hard winter or there will be tons of snow to shovel.
Balance means savoring just one day at a time, right? Or can it mean all of them?
Each fall, we play a little game in our household. The goal is to see how long we can hold off before we begin using the furnace to heat the house. Yes, October and even September can be pretty chilly where we live, but since we have steam radiators, getting a right equilibrium for the furnace in the basement can be difficult – the boiler’s just getting going when it has to back off. Seems to waste a lot of fuel, from what we see, and that, in turn, wastes money.
So what we do is use the wood-fired stove in the kitchen to take the chill out of the house. The kitchen gets toasty warm, but enough heat percolates through the rest of the house to be tolerable. Someone, usually me, needs to get up in the middle of the night to reload the Jotul, but similar stories have been told throughout history. (When I worked the second shift, I could refill the stove when I got home from work and then sleep peacefully, knowing it would still be burning when my wife rose for the day.) We do use a couple of electric radiators, as needed, in rooms where we’re seated and working, but other than that, the goal is to get us to at least the first of November.
We’ve made it! But what’s this unseasonable heat wave? Highs near 70? In November?
Now, to see how much longer we can extend this. December? January? We’ve done it, at times. Did I mention it helps to dress warm?
Our yard is claimed by the neighborhood cats. We have no idea where most of them live. The gray one prowls everything. “You’d think after five years here, they’d finally come up to me,” Rachel once said, and nothing’s changed.
The white-bibbed black cat often snoozes in our berm (the bank of shrubs and ivy between the sidewalk and Swamp), while the solid black one beside the catnip watches the bird feeder, and then there are Heifer Cat, Smoky, and Nimrod, who once caught a squirrel in our viewing. Who knows what their owners call them.
My favorite incident was watching a peregrine falcon raid the thistle feeder as I was showering. All the other birds fled in the commotion, but the fearless cat I named Spooky came marching forward, as a hawk. Everything happened so fast, what are you, kitty, really nuts? But the scene cleared without further incident. Hip-hip, for Spooky.
Jnana's Red Barn 