Boundless Love

Not sure what year it was.  1974?  I was doing the dishes in the kitchen while the man I was living with was in the living room watching TV.  From a room away I heard the sound of a man singing in a way that to me was irresistible.  I stopping washing the dishes and walked to the next room to see who was singing on the TV.  It was John Prine.

Thank you so much, John Prine, for your boundless generosity all these years.

A true Boundless Love story:

https://theboot.com/john-prine-fiona-prine/

Sending love and gratitude to John Prine

Dear to our hearts

"... money doesn't talk, it swears ..."

For more detail about the Opportunity Atlas, read here.

For more detail about the blue-red map, read here.

When I listen to John Prine sing "Caravan of Fools," I can't help but think of the red states and those senators who voted for the new supreme court justice.



When I enter "Redwood City, California" into the Opportunity Atlas, I am given a much more detailed view of the currently mostly exceedingly high-income part of California where my family lived from 1957-1974 in a middle class neighborhood built during the post-WWI baby boom.  A detailed view of nearby cities shows East Palo Alto standing out today as a low income area.  East Palo Alto has a population of African Americans, Latinos and Pacific Islanders and was a low-income area when I was growing up.

In 1973, I left California and settled in a small town in Washington State, 25 miles from the Canadian border.  My youngest sister came to live in Washington State soon after.  My middle sister lived in California until the 1990s, at which time her job moved her to a series of refineries on the East Coast and in the South and Southwest.  She currently lives in Mississippi not far from the Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, in one of the poorest states in the U.S.  Checking the Opportunity Atlas, I see that she lives in a pocket where the income averages $36,000, substantially higher than the surrounding area.

My parents arrived in Southern California from Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1930s.  My sisters and I were born on the San Francisco Peninsula during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the population there was mostly middle-class and white.  The middle class neighborhood where I grew up is not far from Silicon Valley.  The cost of living there now is in the category of highest in the U.S. and the population is much more diverse than it was in the 1950s.  Young people of all races who are now growing up where I grew up are seen by the Opportunity Atlas as having nearly unlimited opportunity.

Although I am living on my $948 Social Security check, my tiny low-end condominium is in a neighborhood near the top of the income scale presented in the Opportunity Atlas map.  Although the Opportunity Atlas map above shows Washington State to be at the top of the income scale, when one looks more deeply into the map via the function that allows a closer look, there are pockets at the bottom of income scale all along Interstate 5 at the points where there are Indian Reservations.  Among the lowest income areas outside of the South are Indian Reservations.  In the Midwest, they are in the midst of the wealthiest section of the U.S.

Adjacent to Bellingham is the Lummi Nation, where the average income is at the bottom of the scale.

Given what is at stake in the coming elections, I am choosing to believe in the sanity of enough of the American people.  All we need is enough.  A landslide would be heartening, but enough is going to be good enough for now.   Except for Minnesota, the states that voted Democratic are not the states that present a picture of having a high average income, although each has areas with incomes at the top of the scale and at the bottom of the scale.

May voices of the poor, the voices of the declining numbers in the middle class, and the voices of those of us who are comparatively rich, and the voices of those who are financially rich and rich in compassion throughout the U.S. rise up and say, "No," to the Republican administration in November.

And a note from Velveteen Rabbi

A coincidence of cosmic shepherds and poets

"... Jesus was a good guy, he didn't need this shit ..." (from "Jesus The Missing Years," by John Prine, at 2:46.  I hope you have time to listen to the entire song.)

For my birthday, not long after I watched the birthday greeting card video featuring a shepherd, a friend gave me a copy of the CD, "The Tree of Forgiveness," by John Prine.  She had just discovered his music and thought that I might like it, too. 

The first time I heard John Prine's voice was in the 1970s when I was in my mid-20s.  I was washing the dinner dishes while my former husband sat in the living room watching television.  My mind was far away and unsettled.  Suddenly I thought I heard Bob Dylan's voice coming from the living room.  I had been listening to Bob Dylan since I was 14 years old, and he had become my cosmic shepherd and poet.  I turned abruptly from the dishes and ran to the living room, fearing that he would be gone by the time I got there.  Instead of Bob Dylan, I saw a younger man singing.  That man turned out to be John Prine.  I don't remember what he was singing.  It didn't matter.  He had my attention.  I knew that, once again, I was hearing the voice of a man that I could trust and learn from, a voice of someone who had experienced both joy and sorrow and had a sense of humor.  I had found another member of what in the years that followed became for me a vast community of cosmic shepherds and poets, many of whom had died before I was born.  Cosmic shepherds and poets continue to be born.  Sounds like a story from a John Prine song.

Yesterday this came up on on my blog reading list:

“We could say the search for meaning – which is a holy search – becomes imperiled whenever the poet-self and the shepherd-self are out of balance. If one is only a shepherd, she will risk being pedantic and overly serious; her ego will get in the way of her true service, and she will forget that each being shares the burden of caretaking – it is not up to her alone. The image of one shepherd over many no longer holds. Similar to how it has been said that the next Buddha is the sangha, the Jewish view of redemption imagines a shepherd-collective, a community of shepherds taking turns taking care. 

If one is only a poet, without a good measure of shepherd mixed in, there is a risk the poems will not reach outward and be in dialogue; that they will not intend towards the transformative – which is where all poems must intend, even if they fail. The poet brings to the shepherd an appreciation for the multiplicity of truths, for the impossibility of fixing anything. Without the poet-self, we become ideologues. The shepherd brings to the poet a reminder that too often our search becomes self-serving, discovery of self for its own sake; that others become stepping stones for us on the road to some imagined “actualization.” Often the search for meaning unwittingly becomes a defense against whatever or whoever is quietly sitting across from us in the café, across the table, by the side of the road, the other in our life as it is.”

—Josh Boettiger

Coincidence?

Then "What the Figtree Said," a poem by shepherd-poet, Denise Levertov, came to mind:

"... I served Christ the Poet, who spoke in images ..."

and I found what she wrote in her poem "On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX":

"... Every sorrow and desolation he saw and sorrowed in kinship ..."  

In the past few weeks, I came across this quote:

“We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other.”  (Thaddeus Golas, from Love and Pain)

There is now a growing world-wide community of shepherds and poets who see and sorrow in kinship.  Some of us belong to the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.  Some of us, including me, don't.  We respect each other.  We work together.  We aren't going away any time soon.  We are a beloved community that doesn't condone the shit that went down before and is going down in 2018.  They can't crucify all of us, but they will try.  A diverse community, we will survive against all odds.

"Lummi Nation Sees No Compromise On Gateway Pacific"

Read here.

Photo and headline from Bellingham Herald.



May the Lummi message be heard and may Mr. Peabody's coal trains be stopped from shipping coal to China through the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal.

April 14, 2010

The first time I ever heard John Prine singing must have been 1974 on Austin City Limits. It was while I was doing dishes in the kitchen. My boyfriend was watching television in living room of the dilapidated rental house we lived in. I was lost in negative thoughts. That wasn't a very good time in my life. I'd made some serious mistakes and couldn't figure out how to remedy them. At first I thought I was hearing Bob Dylan singing, so I ran into the living room, expecting to see Bob Dylan. Nope. It was John Prine.

He didn't sound like Bob Dylan. He sounded like John Prine. It was a happy moment. I wasn't one of those from my generation who had had positive experiences with Illegal Smiles but I loved him and his music otherwise. Still do.

Listen.