Song / "... Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace ..."

Earlier today this photo was brought to my attention here, where I read these words of James Baldwin:

One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.

 The photo of James Baldwin reminded me of another photo,

which prompted me to look for the photo of this moment:

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Young people carrying a 60-year-old song forward:

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"... Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground ..."

-- Lyrics from "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," written by Bob Dylan in March 1962

Summer of 2021 Fire Meditation / Listening to Crow Rez Radio

Yesterday was mixed overcast and cool.  Late in the afternoon I noticed that the patterns of light on my porch had taken on the faint sickly yellowish cast that I now recognize as a sign that smoke from fires near and far has filled our skies -- that the air that I am breathing has smoke in it, although I cannot smell the smoke and find myself hoping beyond hoping that things won't get worse before they get better.

This morning at 3 a.m. when I went out on my porch, I saw that the waning moon in the sky to the northeast was reddish yellow instead of white.  I've closed my windows and brought out my portable air cleaner and portable air conditioner from their places in my hall closets, placed them in my living room and turned them on for the duration.

When I went to my laptop to ask Google about where was the best place to set up my air cleaner and air conditioner, I noticed that this had appeared spontaneously.  I'm listening to it as I write this post.  

Trying to remember which year it was that we in the northwestern corner of Washington State first experienced hazardous air from wildfires, I found that it was late summer in 2015.  The red sun seen through the trees in the photo above is from that summer.

Growing up in California in the 1950s and early 1960s, I remember hearing about the season of fires in Southern California.  The home of my Uncle John Wald, a radio announcer, was one that a fire in 1961 spared.  I remember hearing my mother saying that the houses on either side of his were destroyed.  For some reason, the fire jumped over his home.

October 1967, in my weeks of college at University of California at Irvine, was the first time I experienced what is beginning to be the late summer experience here and for much of the western United States.  The sky darkens with smoke and the sun turns red.  I remembering thinking in 1967 that what I was seeing looked "like Mars." It was just as disconcerting then as it is now.

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Ojibwe prophecy speaks of a time during the seventh fire when our people will have a choice between two paths. The first path is well-worn and scorched. The second path is new and green. It is our choice as communities and as individuals how we will proceed.

-- Winona LaDuke

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“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

-- Camille Paglia

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So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

-- Gaston Bachelard

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If the Lord comes and burns - as you say he will - I am not going away; I am going to stay here and stand the fire, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego! And Jesus will walk with me through the fire and keep me from harm.

-- Sojourner Truth

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Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.

-- Bruce Springsteen

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I try to keep that fire burning inside of me.

-- Rita Marley

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Technology is, of course, a double edged sword. Fire can cook our food but also burn us.

-- Jason Silva

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I remember June 8, 1972. I saw the airplane. And it's so loud, so close to me. Suddenly, the fire everywhere around me. The fire burned off my clothes. And I saw my arm got burned with the fire. I thought, oh, my goodness, I get burned. People will see me different way.

-- Kim Phuc Phan Thi

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Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

-- Buddha

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“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice -- there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

-- Frank Zappa

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Bob Dylan 2021:

So many possibilities beyond what we know.  

Right here, right now.

Against all odds.

Crow Rez Radio

Morning Meditation on a poem by David Whyte / Larger, freer, and more loving / "A noble truth is a sacred creed"

 THE TRUELOVE

by David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

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Oh, I'm sailing away, my own true love ... (Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Boots of Spanish Leather")

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Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within (James Baldwin)

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him (James Baldwin)

Be a light unto yourself; betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the Truth. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves (Buddha)

Love is all there is, it makes the world go 'round
Love and only love, it can't be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won't be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who's tried (Bob Dylan, lyrics from "I Threw It All Away")

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True love needs no company (Bob Dylan, lyrics from "If Dogs Run Free")

The truth was obscure, Too profound and too pure, To live it you had to explode (Bob Dylan)

A noble truth is a sacred creed (Bob Dylan, lyric from "Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum," 2001)

Voices from Oakland, California / The Audacity of Hope in MMXX

The interview at the Oakland Public Library is well worth spending time with.  It took me the good part of this last week to hear all of it.  I recommend the whole interview, if you have time, along with Tommy Orange's book which ends with two pages of acknowledgments ending with:

"The Native community in Oakland.  My living Cheyenne relatives, and my ancestors who made it through unimaginable hardship, who prayed hard for us next ones here now, doing our best to pray and work hard for those to come."

While working on this post, I stopped to listen to this bookstore reading and discussion of There There in Washington, D.C., in 2018:



From There There:

Part I

Prologue

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
-- Bertolt Brecht

Part III

Return

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
-- James Baldwin

"Tony remembers something his grandma said to him when she was teaching him how to dance.  You have to dance like birds sing in the morning," she said, and showed him how light she could be on her feet.  She bounced and her toes pointed in just the right way.  Dancer's feet.  Dancer's gravity." (p. 290)

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"Welcome to a brilliant and generous artist who has already enlarged the landscape of American fiction.  There There is a comic vision haunted by profound sadness.  Tommy Orange is a new writer with an old heart." (Louise Erdrich)

"... and the sequel has everything to do with how to come back from something that we can't even all agree on having happened ..." (Tommy Orange, from the last minutes of the Oakland Public Library interview)

James Baldwin and Ocean Vuong / Leah Siegel covering Buckley covering Buckley / Learning Spanish / NAMI class

Ocean Vuong's book On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was brought to my attention in the last month or so, and I put a hold on a copy at our public library.  I found the book to be extraordinary as well as difficult and worth the difficulty.  Ocean Vuong, like Toni Morrison, took me to places I've never been before (but not as "a tour guide to pre-made worlds" but as a "world maker," to use Ocean Vuong's words from the interview) and changed the way I see the world.  Before finishing the book, I took a 50-minute break to listen to Ocean Vuong and Jacqueline Woodson.  Previously, while reading the book, I had listened to several other interviews with Ocean Vuong in which he reminded me of a young Bob Dylan.  In the above Strand Bookstore interview, Ocean Vuong lights a James Baldwin votive candle before the interview begins, in honor of James Baldwin's illuminating presence.  In that moment, I realized that what I was perceiving as a similarity to Bob Dylan was actually a similarity to James Baldwin.  Bob Dylan's work and way of being in the world were strongly influenced by James Baldwin.  That is what I was seeing in Ocean Vuong.  James Baldwin lives on through his literary descendants.  Ocean Vuong is one of the most recent in that literary family tree.

Some quotes from Ocean Vuong:

"... the merciful light in the midst of all this darkness ..." (from the interview)

"Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it." (p. 231, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)

This morning, I discovered this version of "Once I Was A Soldier" by Leah Siegel and wanted to share it.  I've never heard a woman sing that song before.



Beginning on September 4, I made a commitment to learn to speak Spanish, building on two years of Spanish in high school (escuela secundaria) 52 years ago.  There is a Spanish Conversation group that meets weekly at our local Senior Center around a table in a small meeting room and is facilitated by an engaging woman in her 60s from Mexico.  It is immersion in Spanish rather than a formal class.  I speak like a baby and that's okay!

In addition, I signed up for a evening class offered by our local branch of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).  The class is for families and friends of people who suffer from mental illness and meets two nights a week for six weeks.  My hope is to learn how to take care of myself in the numerous encounters I have regularly with people who suffer from mental illnesses and to learn how I can be supportive of those who suffer from mental illnesses.  Once again, there are no easy answers, and I am open to learning what I can.

The next six weeks will be full, with not much time for posting.  I will be reading your blogs, sending love as always.

Here's a volunteer Mimulus that appeared on my porch:

"Taking The Arrow Out Of The Heart"

Taking The Arrow Out Of The Heart, by Alice Walker

Quote from Standing Our Ground: The Triumph Of Faith Over Gun Violence,

"As James Baldwin put it more than half a century ago in Notes of a Native Son,  "The fight begins ... in the heart, and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair." (p. 101)

"... It is not despair ..." (James Baldwin) / "... so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late ..." (Bob Dylan)

Thanks to the Doonesbury video archive on May 9 and Brain Pickings for the inspiration for this post.

After reading about A Rap on Race at Brain Pickings, I downloaded it for free and have been reading it in the last few days.  Although I usually find it difficult, if not impossible, to read anything book length from a computer screen, Open Library's format is easily readable for me.  I'm more than half finished.  It's sobering, well worth reading, provoking a meditation on what has changed and what hasn't changed since 1971, when James Baldwin was 47 years old and Margaret Mead was 70.

It's an entirely different experience to listen to the conversation and hear the emotion in the two voices.  I located the end of the edited conversation (below at what was transcribed for page 256) from the YouTube video for anyone who would like to read along.  Otherwise, I was unable to match the transcript with the quotes I selected below:



Page 25:
James Baldwin:  I realized I was looking at death.  That man wanted to kill me.

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Page 117:
Margaret Mead:  No. We only talk about ignorance of something that is known.  We don't have a word for the impossibility of knowing something yet.

James Baldwin:  Exactly.  There isn't a word for that, is there?  No word that I know.  And yet that is where everyone begins.

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Page 135:
James Baldwin:  The life of everybody on this planet is menaced by, to put it too simply, the extraordinary and even willful ignorance of people in high places.

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Page 138:
Margaret Mead:  And how are we going to -- at a period when there are so many people who have failed to be fitted into the social system in any way, so they are going around shooting twenty people or throwing bombs at random -- how are we going to protect this system which is so vulnerable?

James Baldwin:  I don't think, in this case, that it can be protected.

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It's a conversation with a growing edginess to it, a difficult conversation.  Curious, I just turned to the last page to see who had the last word.

Page 256:  (Listen beginning at 1:43:46.  Interesting that the transcript doesn't quite match what was said)
James Baldwin:  We're talking about that.  I have to talk about my beginnings, and I did begin here auctioned like a mule, bred as though I were a stallion.  I was in my country, which I paid for and I'm paying for.  Treated as not even a beast is treated.  Died in ditches not even as a mule is murdered.  And I have to remember that.  I have to redeem that.  I cannot let it go for nothing.  The only reason I'm here is to bear witness.

I don't really like my life, you know.  I don't really want another drink. I've seen enough of the world's cities to make me vomit forever.  But I've got something to do.  It has nothing in it any longer for me.  What I wanted is what everybody wanted.  You wanted it, too.  Everybody wanted it.  It will come.  It comes in different shapes and forms.  It is not despair, and the price one pays is everybody's price.

But on top of that particular price, which is universal, there is something gratuitous which I will not forgive, you know.  It's difficult to be born, difficult to learn to walk, difficult to grow old, difficult to die and difficult to live for everybody, everywhere, forever.  But no one has the right to put on top of that another burden, another price which nobody can pay, and a burden which really nobody can bear.  I know it's universal, Margaret, but the fact that it is universal doesn't mean that I'll accept it.

WITNESSES

Today is the third day of Kwanzaa (Ujima = Collective work and responsibility), the third day of the twelve days of Christmas and the 7th day of Hanukkah.

"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

(James Baldwin)