A Lark

Jan., 26 2012               Sydney Harbor, Australia Day Event

    These fellows were competing in a best-dressed boating event this past Thursday in honor of Australia Day. Previously known as Anniversary Day, Foundation Day, since 1788 January 26 has been Australia's  official national day.

    I attended a lovely house party last Saturday in honor of the coming day. The view was not of Sydney's harbor but a breath taking view of the San Francisco Bay. The living room was hung with Australian flags featuring the most prominent star of the Southern Cross.

    I was chatting with a slight man wearing a yellow fleece jacket. Emblazoned, like the Southern Cross itself, with A U S T R A L I A. "Is that for the occasion?" I asked. We had been speaking together for sometime and I felt we had approached a genuine exchange. I had no idea what was coming.

    He told me that thirty years ago on January 26 he arrived in Melbourne. He was a refugee from the "chaos" of Asia. He was, he said, a Vietnamese boat person. He spoke of the beauty of the manicured parks and the quiet of the afternoon. He said he was taken by this noise he could not quite place. He was strolling through a broad swath of green, one of Melbourne's many parks, when he realized what the mechanical twitch and click followed by a swirl of clean, drinkable water was. He searched his mind, some sort of mechanical irrigation...but what was the word?

    Water sprinklers! Sending arc after arc of bright water sparkling in the late afternoon sun. What a thing to see, he said, smiling at the memory. Something he had never seen before. Something he had to puzzle out on his own; the first of many of the West's inventions. And that was almost thirty years to the day.

                Understanding-is-the-essence-obtained-from-information-intentionally-learned-and-from-all-kinds-of-experiencings-personally-experienced. -- G.I. Gurdjieff

    "Sin  is the denial to thrive."

--From Whitley Strieber's book, The Key: A True Encounter

 

Sunrise, sunset over the Sonoran Desert as the old song goes, "Swiftly go the days."

    A recent survey on successful aging showed surprising results. Those healthy folks over seventy have a greater happiness index than those in their thirties. Why? Perhaps the older you are the more you realize just how quickly life passes by, like the wink of an eye. But do I believe that, really? So with that as a preface, I'd like invite you, again, to consider joining me this March in the desert for a seminar, an exploration of broken dreams...interested? As my mother would say: "If you think it's too late, you better do it today!"

    In the 20th century, the year 1939 to be exact, a baby was born, as he later said, "Into the Bright." Franklin Jones was his name and he possessed an uncanny awareness. Why was this? What did this mean, if anything? How did he, if he did, parlay this awareness?

    Perhaps he had a break through into the pointless point of view? He grew into a  young, hip, funny, articulate man. Many considered him the first American born guru. He had a meteoric rise. He was also brought low years later by sex scandals and subsequent law suits filed by many former followers.

    Do we in the West really understand this relationship between he who is taken as the guru and the so called student? How do we understand the discipline? The nature of the experience of non relationship, non personalizing, the student toward the teacher and the teacher toward the student; which the student can personalize as cold if not experienced in the embodied moment. The material one has to work with is experienced vis a vis the person, that is, the person distilled, observed. Observed by whom, then is a question.

    Is there something higher, available, reaching through, past the persona?  Where was it, how was it; somewhere Jones lost "the bright."

    I certainly do not know. However, the January 2012 release of William Patrick Patterson's book, Adi Da Samraj--Realized or Deluded, The First Critical Appraisal of the Life and Teachings of Adi Da Samraj, opens the door.

    In the early 1970's, Joseph Campbell sagely cautioned the parade of young Americans eagerly seeking gurus from the East, to pause, explore the wisdom cultures of their own heritage.

    Who listened? Well, I went to Rome and sat with tears streaming as the morning light dawned with many a golden hued stream through St. Peter's alabaster altar window. Realizing, I was exeriencng the objective moment...throughout the centuries, all looking toward the window were available to receive the stream of light through the golden alabaster; all could be born into into this bright?

Looking South on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan

    To Absent Friends

    My Venetian friend shared an Italian tradition with my family while visiting with us here in Northern California a couple of years ago. She raised her glass and then lightly returned it to the glass dining room table. "To absent friends," she said, adding that this is how she would remember us and toast to us when she returned home. It's a moment the husband and I share when celebrating around the table, we toast to you, Laura.

    Tonight, I invite you to do the same. Pause, remember an absent friend, touch the table top then drink to their essence.

    In early November, Bill Lipsky died. He was 78 years-old and had endured heart attacks before a stroke ended his life. This is who I will toast tonight, an absent friend. And this is what I will bring to mind:

                                    Lipsky on Ninth Avenue

                            You look like a mad but polite Odessa angel

                               lost somewhere off the Cape of Random Fogs.

                                Perhaps a battleship sank you.

                                   Perhaps you got tired.

                            Or a boy with a slingshot took you for a stork.

                            You had a message to deliver that you have forgotten:

                                prophecy?  revelation?  revolution?  vision?

                            Perhaps that is why you are walking so fast:

                            you used to have big grey wings like a sea gull.

                                                                                            ---Marge Piercy

 

On the topic of transformation...butterflies are often depicted as they so brilliantly illustrate the possibility of going inward, receiving and emerging, liberated and winged.

    If you need a trans-formative gift, please visit this website...bugsunderglass. Kevin Clarke is both a biologist and an artist, or perhaps an artist first.

    Greet Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myrna, and his three golden apples representing transformation. For this worker of miracles had a faith and a compassion that according to legend was so great he could indeed work wonders for the benefit of others.

    These three golden apples changed into golden balls when the Saint rolled them through the open door of a modest home. The home belonged to three young sisters, destitute orphans. The eldest had cried and cried, prayed on her knees on the cold stone floor; but could think of no other means of surviving the winter other than leading her younger sisters down her sorrowful path of prostitution. Of course, with the gift of the golden balls, the three sisters were able to survive and conduct themselves piously.

     So Saint Nicholas transformed the fruit into real gold? Alchemical stories date from ancient days, but what if one were to read deeper into the mythology?  Perhaps the transforming gold is coin from another realm? What if the gold was more akin to that halo surrounding the Saint? What if gold were energy? What if one could transform fractured dreams and use the losses life presents to spin one's own gold? 

 

Welcoming Vertigo! (Or, Happy Birthday!)
    The Grand Canyon Skywalk is the first ever cantilever-shaped glass walkway to suspend more than 4,000 feet above the canyon's floor and extend 70 feet from the canyon's rim. Located at Grand Canyon West's Eagle Point, the Skywalk is open from dawn to dusk, seven days a week.

    I discovered I suffered from vertigo years ago when the husband and I decided to hike the Bright Angel trail from the South Rim to the Colorado River far, far below. We had hiked and hiked in preparation. We arrived a day early and scouted the trail. We aimed to be on the trail by 6 am as we had to meet the rafters by noon. Not twenty minutes into our descent we rounded a switch back and they enormity of the canyon yawned wide. The loose talus trail was bordered on the left by the canyon wall but to the right...nothing but blue sky and the river far below.

    Vertigo hits you in the gut and then leaves you center-less. I was spilling over the edge while in reality I was plastered against the canyon wall; barely able to squeak the husband's name. By the time he noticed I was not following him down the trail, I was drenched in sweat yet trembling with fear's cold and shame.

    What a hike!  I baby-stepped down the trail with my right hand on the husband's shoulder and my eyes glued on the wall to the left. I did so many things wrong.  My tennis shoes were not appropriate as they had very little tread. The loose talus rolled under foot. I wore a visor rather than a hat which would have protected the crown of the head. It took us the entire six hours to reach the river. Where upon the husband through me in the creek because I was clearly on the verge of sun stroke, or he had simply had enough. I was never quite clear on that score.

    It took us six days to raft the Colorado and reach the broad lake and make our way slowly back to civilization. My lesson? The only way out is through...through it all and I'm holding on to that today, December 9, my birthday. The only way out is through, through it all,  rapid after rapid. Hey, maybe next year I'll try that Skywalk.

 

OPENING TO WHAT IS... 

  A new study from Yale University suggests that the brains of experienced meditators may actually work differently than brains of those who don't meditate. The study gives scientists a window into the meditating mind, providing evidence that the practice appears to change the way the brain works and could give meditators a leg up when it comes to dealing with mental disorders.

    Dr. Judson Brewer, medical director of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic, and his colleagues asked ten experienced meditators and thirteen people with no meditation experience to practice three basic meditation techniques: concentration, loving-kindness, and choiceless awareness. The team then used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe the participants' brain activity when they were practicing the meditative techniques and when they were instructed not to think of anything in particular.

    In a report published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reported  that the experienced meditators had decreased activity in an area of the brain called the default mode network, a region that is usually at work when the mind wanders. Even when the meditators weren't meditating, this region of their brain was much quieter than in their inexperienced counterparts.

 

    In truth, what the founding fathers of the United States of America created was a plutocracy. An emerging colonial power established a Republic where all men were created equal. That is, if you were white, male and a land and slave owner, you were equal to all other men just like you.

 

    Get a fresh take on the OWS movement here...click this link.

    Watching the news this morning was maddening. The Occupy Oakland protesters interrupted the Oakland City Council news conference at Lake Merritt. In dazzling fall sunshine the protesters began their fist pumping vocal assault; while those at the podium childishly began to chant with raised voices:  "Occupy Oakland Must Go!  Occupy Oakland Must Go!" And so on and on...no reasoned dialogue in sight. Both sides encased in their righteous indignation.  Speaking from experience, when angry,  I can be so locked down in my "rightness" that I can hear nothing but the blood pounding in my ears.  And that amped up anger is exhausting, unless the fire is continually fed as it has been in Oakland.

    But I have hope. Sample this reasoned, seasoned, historical perspective found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JpnBcToMM