The truth (dharma) was obscure, too profound and too pure

A mysterious song that has stayed with me for 38 years, especially the lines highlighted in green.  The lyrics frequently come to me when I wake up in distress.  I hear them sung out of context with the rest of the song, in fragments, and they bring with them something unerring and sustaining.

"Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)"

There's a long distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write
There's a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much but she's drifting 
like a satelite
There's a neon light ablaze in the green smoky haze, and laughter down on
Elizabeth Street
And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone where she bathed
in a stream of pure heat
Her father would emphasize you got to be more than street-wise but he practiced 
what he preached from the heart
A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted it to me the time and the place it 
would start.

There's a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage
And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage
And she winds back the clock and she turns back the page
Of a book that nobody could write
Oh, where are you tonight ?

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure, to live it you have to explode
In the last hour of need, we entirely agreed, sacrifice was the code of the road
I left town at dawn, with Marcel and St. John, strong men betitled by doubt
I couldn't tell her what my private thoughts were but she had some way of finding 
them out
He took dead-center aim but he missed just the same, she was waiting putting 
flowers on the shelf
She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair and discovered her invisible self.

There's a lion in the road, there's a demon escaped
There's a million dreams gone, there's a landscape being raped
As her beauty fades and I watch her undrape
I won't but then again, maybe I might
Oh, if I could just find you tonight.
I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the way
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees while the law looks the other way
Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes, the man you were loving 
couldn't never get clean
It felt outa place, my foot in his face, but he should-a stayed where his money 
was green
I bit into the root of forbidden fruit with the juice running down my leg
Then I dealt with your boss, who'd never known about loss and who always was too 
proud to beg
There's a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room and a pathway that 
leads up to the stars
If you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise, just remind me to show 
you the scars.

There's a new day at dawn and I've finally arrived
If I'm there in the morning, baby, you'll know I've survived
I can't believe it, I can't believe I'm alive
But without you it just doesn't seem right
Oh, where are you tonight ?

Although I'm quite fond of of words, right now I'm remembering, too, a much-loved local jazz musician and teacher, deeply kind and compassionate, who died a few years ago and of whom it was said at his celebration of life, "Music was his religion." No words, no thoughts, no God, no Buddha, no dharma, no sangha.  Pure music alone sustained him, and the music he created lives on to sustain others.  

Bob Dylan / Painted from memory and from photographs

In a beginning painting class in the early 1980s, I painted an image of Bob Dylan in watercolor.  During the 1980s, I often used photos of Bob Dylan as a starting point for drawings and paintings.

Bob Dylan is 75 years old today.  Happy Birthday, Bob!  Thank you!

ADDENDUM:  Just for fun, here are some songs collected by Bob about "Friends and Neighbors":



ADDENDUM:

Plague / Newborn babies wailing like a mourning dove

A cousin of mine brought this to my attention.

Just this morning I re-read the liner notes to Blood on the Tracks after a friend mentioned that he had just re-read them.  I remember standing in a record store in Bellingham in January 1975 reading those liner notes and weeping and then going home to listen for the first of many many times.  That was over 40 years ago.

The painting from 1990 above is titled "63rd Month / Talking 43-Hour Day With Roots Gathered From Coincidence."

This morning I woke up feeling something I couldn't define.  When I focused on the feeling, not the words about the feeling, my body sensations were minimal but murky and unpleasant nonetheless.  If pressed for a single word that matched the feeling, I could only come up with "flat." If asked for the color of the feeling, it would be a sickly tan.  Suddenly I heard Janis Joplin singing, "Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train, feeling just as faded as my jeans ..."

With that, the feeling shifted because I could hear a human voice singing accompanied by musical instruments.  The first time I heard that song was the morning my Richard arrived home from Vietnam.  We were riding in my 1965 Volkswagen, on our way out to the coast to surprise Richard's family, who didn't yet know that he was home.

Then I found this.

Don't know what else I want to say.  Don't know where I am going with this.  No easy answers.  Lots of questions.  Wait.  I know what I want to say.

We can refuse to live in fear.  We can know that we are not alone.  Any loving action, no matter how small, counts.

Porch Garden Meditation on 20 May 2016

Gift

On my birthday last year, October 1, a friend left a card and a container of blooming red and yellow tulips at my front door.  When the tulips had finished blooming, I put the bulbs in a larger pot.  When tulip season, as I know it, came and went, I wondered why the bulbs hadn't come up.  Turns out they are late bloomers, blooming this year just after Mother's Day.  Now I'm curious about the out of focus stalk of volunteer flowers in the foreground of the first photo.  Any day now they will open, too.

Along with my Shasta Daisies and Sweet William:

Light in dark times / An open window to the Pacific Ocean / A Mother's Day gift

Coast Salish lands

Make sure to watch the video at 2 of 10 in the photo section of the article.

On Mother's Day, an old friend who is a year older than I am and is being treated for breast cancer suggested that we take an hour's drive to the beach just beyond the Deception Pass bridge.  More than 40 years ago, I had walked on the beach in the first photo but until Mother's Day this year, I had no knowledge that there was a beach with waves just around the point.  The Deception Pass State Park West Beach looks out on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and out to the Pacific Ocean and then way way out across that vast ocean to Asia.

For years I have had a recurring dream that there is a beach with waves just down the road from Bellingham.  It is an exhilarating dream, filled with hope and promise and joy.  In the dream, I always ask myself how I could not have known that the open ocean was so close by.  Waking up from that dream was always bittersweet, and I would find myself yearning to return to my birthplace on the western side of California, where the open ocean is always so near.

A dream come true on Mother's Day.  There is a window to the open ocean, and that window is only an hour's drive from Bellingham.

Sweet that the land and sky and waters of the Coast Salish people are no longer threatened by the presence of coal port.

Sweet that the gift of good news came so close to Mother's Day.

The mother of us all.  Mother Earth.

Mother's Day 1987 and 2016

My mother and I had a difficult relationship while she was alive, although today I am remembering the events surrounding Mother's Day in 1987.  I had traveled from Bellingham, Washington, to the bluffs of the Pacific Ocean in Gualala, California, where my parents lived. When I arrived, my parents suggested that we all go out to a restaurant for a champagne breakfast.  At the time, I didn't know that I was an alcoholic.  Because of the events that followed my last drink, a glass of champagne, in May of 1987, I eventually came to understand that I am an alcoholic.  On my 21st birthday, in 1970, my mother bought a bottle of champagne and said, "Okay, now you are old enough to drink.  Let's go down to the basement and have a glass of champagne."

Once alcohol enters my system, I experience what has been identified as the "phenomenon of craving," the defining element of a real alcoholic.  It is not a pleasurable mellow feeling.  It is as if a bottomless thirst for alcohol is the only thing that exists.  I had experienced that for quite some time when I drank alcohol, probably from my earliest experience with alcohol, but my solution to that was to "be careful." I had no idea that I was an alcoholic.  I attempted to control my drinking.  However, if one is an alcoholic, control is impossible. Impossible because of a craving that tells me that it must be satisfied or I will die.

The simple solution for me has been not to drink at all.  I have not experienced that terrible all-consuming craving since 1987.

Let us just say that I didn't stay in Gualala to be with my mother on Mother's Day.  I was off and running with a craving that took 3 weeks to quiet down.  During that time, I felt suicidal.  For some life-saving reason, I tried to address that craving and suicidal depression by eating massive amounts of sugar.  However, something did give me the presence of mind to go to a florist and arrange for flowers to be delivered to my mother a few days later on Mother's Day.  My mother was ecstatic upon receiving the flowers.  I felt a twinge of guilt and remorse when I saw the photo she sent a few weeks later of her, radiant, with the gift of flowers.  I felt I didn't deserve to be loved because I was so angry at her.  In the years since 1987, that has changed.

We all deserve to be loved and we can be angry with those we love as long as we need to be.

I was so angry at my mother that I never wanted to have children because I couldn't bear the thought of a child being that angry at me.  I was afraid of being like my mother.  I wonder if that fear and anger kept me from ever getting pregnant.  Who knows?

A few nights ago I dreamed that my mother prepared a gift for me that came in the form of a generous harvest of colorful winter squashes and pumpkins, arranged like a farmer's market display one might see in October, the month of my birth in 1949.

Below is a photo of my mother, Josephine, at Anchor Bay, California, a few miles north of Gualala.  The photo was taken by my father.   The photo at the top of the blog is of my mother as a single woman in the 1940s, passionate about horses.  One of the sacrifices she made in marrying my father and having children was that she rarely rode a horse ever again.  I remember her saying in the last years of her life that she would like to ride a horse one more time.  However, she had an ankle injury, sustained while riding a horse, that prevented her from doing that in the way she had a young woman.

Reconciliation after death is possible.  How?  I don't know, but I am experiencing it again today on Mother's Day.  Maybe my mother was an alcoholic, too.  Who knows?

Another view from the north side of the Columbia River gorge near Carson, Washington

Chuang Tau: "Bright Dazzlement asked Nonexistence, 'Sir, do you exist or do you not exist?' Unable to obtain any answer, Bright Dazzlement stared intently at the other's face and form -- all was vacuity and blankness.  He stared all day but could see nothing, listened but could hear no sound, stretched out his hand but grasped nothing.  'Perfect!' exclaimed Bright Dazzlement.  "Who can reach such perfection?  I can conceive of the existence of nonexistence, but not of the nonexistence of nonexistence.  Yet this man has reached the stage of nonexistence of nonexistence.  How could I ever reach such perfection?" (Chapter 22, "Knowledge Wandered North"

Journeys / Being of use

Journeys bring power and love
back into you.  If you
can't go somewhere,
move in the passageways of the self.
They are like shafts of light,
always changing, and you change
when you explore them.

(Djalal Ad-Din Rumi)


Last Sunday, I drove nearly the entire length of the state of Washington to meet with a friend from childhood and her husband of at least 40 years (whom I had not met before) and their shy sweet Bernese Mountain Dog.  In order to adopt a puppy, they had driven up from their home in a small community which is located high in the mountains of southeastern California.  We met in Carson, Washington, a tiny town located on the Columbia River gorge.

My old friend and I met when we were 12 or 13 years old.  We used to walk to junior high school together.  In high school, we took long walks from our homes in suburban Redwood City, California, into the beautiful grassy hills to the east of Redwood City.  We walked there in the days before Highway 280 cut through those rolling hills, before the hills were filled to the brim with houses, while the Vietnam War was still raging.  We were not part of the "in crowd."  We were both odd and eccentric and enjoyed each other's company.  My family went to church.  Her family didn't.  I remember the time she brought me to a Buddhist festival in Palo Alto.  We belonged to a small loosely connected group of young women who lived within walking distance of each other and went to the same high school.  Below is a photo of three of us.  If my memory serves me well, the photo was probably taken at the 16th birthday gathering for my old friend.  That would have been in 1965.  We are all wearing "Beatle" hats.  Her father was a psychiatrist. Their home was filled with books.

Here are the senior yearbook photos of my friend and me.  Neither of us enjoy being in front of a camera:

My parents chose that photo of me because they paid for the photos. I'd love to see the rest of photos and see what was not chosen by them.

After we graduated from high school in 1967, one of the things my friend did was become a surfer, and she spent weekends surfing in Santa Cruz.  Another thing she did was go to Stanford University, following the tradition of both of her parents.  After graduating from Stanford with a degree in English Literature, she went to law school and had a long career as a lawyer.  Her husband was a conscientious objector and, as a result of his alternative service in a library which had early computers, he had a long career in the field of computers.

In 1967, I left Redwood City to attend the University of California at Irvine, studying Art and English Literature.  My friend and I kept in touch.  She visited Irvine.  I visited her at Stanford.  It was the time of protests against the Vietnam War.  The man she loved achieved conscientious objector status.  The man I loved was drafted in April of 1969.  He was a high school dropout and a surfer.  We considered going to Canada.  He met with draft counselors in Oakland on the day before he went to Vietnam but felt sure that he would not be granted conscientious objector status.  He did not want to go to prison (although he ended up in prison years later for drug and alcohol-related offenses).  He did not want to go to Canada.  He made the fateful decision to go to Vietnam, serving as a helicopter mechanic, returning as a drug-addicted war-haunted man in December of 1970. We lived together for nearly 5 months.  We separated in the first weeks of May 1971 after a terrifying episode where the violence of the war that haunted him was directed at me.

In 1973, in an attempt to go on with my life, I left California.  My friend and I gradually lost touch with each other, although I did visit her at her law office in the early 1980s, and she contacted me
in the early 1990s.

A year ago, during the December holidays, she wrote a note letting me know that she and her husband had moved from the San Francisco Peninsula to a remote place in the Sierras.

That note led to our respective journeys to Carson, WA.

What got me started on this post was reading this article about Daniel Berrigan who died yesterday at age 94.

You have to struggle to stay alive and be of use as long as you can. 
(Daniel Berrigan)

I've also been listening to George Harrison's final album and wanted to share these thoughts from
George Harrison:



Lyrics from "Brainwashed":

The soul does not love.  It is love itself.
It does not exist.  It is existence itself.
It does not know.  It is knowledge itself.
How to Know God, page 130

And then I've also been meaning to share Joni Mitchell singing "God Must Be A Boogie Man."



May Love bless and keep us always.

Tea With Milk

Mandala #19 (finished on April 19, 2016)

Good Morning, Good Morning

I've got nothing to say, but it's okay.  Good morning, good morning.
(The Beatles)

One Week In April Meditation

Choral

Spring morning near Lake Whatcom

Listen

Whatcom County was established on March 9, 1854, by the Washington territorial government from a portion of Island County. The name Whatcom derives from a Nooksack word meaning "noisy water" and it was the name of a Nooksack chief.

Listen to Ianthe read her father's poem

If you have the time, read Ianthe's book, You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir.

Oboe enjoying the sunshine:

Cesar Chavez Day 2016

Easter Long Ago

The photo was taken in Taft, California, at Easter in the mid to late 1950s.  My sister and I are wearing dark matching dresses.  My mother is wearing dark glasses.  With us is our nearby neighbor and her daughters.  Not sure where my baby sister was.  Although I remember being 2 years old and living in an apartment in San Mateo, California, and have many vivid memories from the time we lived in Taft, I have no memory to go with this photo.  A friend with a beautiful sense of humor referred to those lapses we have as "repressed happy memories."

Like A Rolling Stone Meditation / When There Is No Resurrection, We Are Allowed To Mourn And To Discover That Love Is Stronger Than Death

When I woke up this morning at 5 o'clock, my first thought was of Mary Magdalene and her grief.  Something moved me to read the four very different second-hand versions of her experience on the third day after Jesus died (Mark 16:1-11, Luke 24:1-11, Matthew 28:1-10, John 20:1-8), which left me wondering what Mary Magdalene would have written about her experience on the third day after Jesus died.  

I remembered that Jesus said, "Blessed are those who mourn."

Below is a photo of an ancient rolling stone in Israel:

And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, And laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.  (Matthew 27:59-60 KJV)

Then I found this, from which I copied and pasted the following:

Burial customs 

When Jewish people heard that someone they loved had died, they tore the front part of their inner clothing. The tear was several inches long,  a symbol of grief: it represented the tearing pain in their hearts.

It was the women’s task to prepare a dead body for burial. The body was washed, and hair and nails were cut. Then it was gently wiped with a mixture of spices and wrapped in linen strips of various sizes and widths. While this was happening, prayers from the Scriptures were chanted.

The body was wrapped in a shroud, but was otherwise uncovered.

Tombs were visited and watched for three days by family members and friends. On the third day after death, the body was examined. This was to make sure that the person was really dead, for accidental burial of someone still alive could happen. 

At this stage the body would be treated by the women of the family with oils and perfumes. The women's visits to the tombs of Jesus and Lazarus are connected with this ritual.

'The Dead Christ', by Andrea Mantegna

The ossuary

After visiting the tomb on the third day by which time it had decomposed. The bones were then collected and stored in an ossuary, a ‘bone box’, with the large bones at the bottom and the smaller bones and skull placed on top.

Some years ago in the fall, after visiting the grave of the man I loved for so many years, the man who had died the previous spring on Passover, I visited a beautiful Catholic monastery that is located on a mountain hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur.  I was exploring the possibility of joining the Catholic Church because it was the church of Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Bruce Springsteen, and St. Francis, among others, and of several dear friends of mine, all of whom had found what they were looking for when they made the Catholic Church their home.  The stumbling block for me was that I didn't believe in the resurrection.  I believed that people I respected and trusted believed, but that was as far as I could go.  

That fall day in Big Sur, there was a retreat taking place at the monastery and a kindly monk in his 50s or 60s was speaking to the group in the church when I entered it.  No one seemed to mind my presence or question it.  I sat down and listened. After the monk finished speaking, as people were milling around, I formulated the question that I wanted to ask of him.  

My question was, "Is it possible to be a Christian without believing in the resurrection?"  

As I recall, his face became very stern.  As I recall, he said, "There is no Christianity without the resurrection." That was that.  That was the end of the conversation.  I appreciated his honesty and saw a door closing for me.  Just now, reading about Warren Zevon's experience and his questions for a Catholic priest, I see another door opening.  Maybe it was the one Warren Zevon was knocking on and that Bob Dylan sang about knocking on, the door we can't see with our eyes:

"And there's no exit in any direction / 'Cept the one you can't see with your eyes"

(Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Series of Dreams")

Who knows?  I sure don't.  

And I have nothing but love and respect for those who do believe in the resurrection.  May we all live in peace, no matter what we believe or don't believe on Easter Day 2016.

Resting on the Wings of a Bird of Peace

Life, death, and mourning.

Version sung on behalf of a man:

God, full of mercy, who dwells in the heights, provide a sure rest upon the Divine Presence's wings, within the range of the holy, pure and glorious, whose shining resemble the sky's, to the soul of (Hebrew name of deceased) son of (Hebrew name of his father) for a charity was given to the memory of his soul. Therefore, the Master of Mercy will protect him forever, from behind the hiding of his wings, and will tie his soul with the rope of life. The Everlasting is his heritage, and he shall rest peacefully upon his lying place, and let us say: Amen.

Good Friday Meditation

Good Friday

For earthworms, spring and robins bring death.
For cautious robins, death does not exist.
For young human children, death is astonishing news.

Years later, spring and robins arrive.
We are not surprised when the earthworms die,
not surprised when the robins run from us.

But death, now, is the absence of news,
abrupt and extraordinary in its silence.

In 1980, in a beginning painting class at the Fairhaven College of Western Washington University, I painted "Recurring Dream" in watercolor.  It was the first painting that I sold.  A neighbor close to me in age and born in Scotland, bought it, had it framed, and put it in a place of honor in his home. The poem was written in 2006 when I was 56 years old.

After coming across this article in the past few weeks, I've given much thought to the statistical breakdown of the Syrian refugees who have entered the United States as of November 2015:

Muslims -- 2098
Christians -- 53

and the remaining 33:

Yazidis -- 1
Jehovah's Witnesses -- 8
Baha'i -- 2
Zoroastrians -- 6
Other religions -- 6
No religion -- 7
Atheists -- 3

I wonder if Buddhism is considered an "other religion" or "no religion." I wonder if any of the refugees are Buddhist.  

Understanding that part of the process for Syrians being admitted to the United States is to identify themselves with a category that defines their belief system led me to wonder if, in order to leave everything behind and accept an uncertain future with a very real risk of death, a person would need to believe in something, and that it wouldn't necessarily fall into a category on the State Department Refugee Processing list.  Belief in a principle perhaps.  For example, "I never know what good will come from my focused efforts, but I do know what will come from not trying."

If I were a Syrian refugee, I would have to check "No religion." I would do that only because there would be no other option for me.  Still, it wouldn't sit well with me because it seems to imply no beliefs at all, not even the sustaining beliefs of an atheist.  How could I leave Syria without having some sort of belief system to sustain me?

At the Catholic hospital where I used to work, the patient intake forms had a category of "Undecided" under the heading of religion.  I like that someone suggested that as an option, but I couldn't check that one either.  I have decided not to affiliate myself with any religion or spiritual tradition, but to be open and willing to listen to the profound insights of those who do affiliate themselves, including atheists and agnostics.

A dear friend of mine who died peacefully as an atheist in early 80s said that there was "something" that she couldn't define that she had experienced and come to believe in.  She had lived in anguish for years after the death of her oldest son in a climbing accident in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State.  Her son had been climbing with his younger brother and had slipped and fallen to his death.  His body was never found.  Sometime around 1997, my friend had an experience that she didn't define as religious but which she came to believe was real and true.  She knew that she was not alone and was able to find the peace that had eluded her for so long.  She was sustained by what she called "something."

I had an experience like that, too, in 1987.  I believe in "something."  It is not an "other religion."  It is not "no religion."

What is it?  Good question.  I don't know for sure.

That "something" might be the principle of the power of love and forgiveness or the principle expressed in what Anne Frank wrote:

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."

On the Good Friday in 2006, when I wrote my poem, I was struck for the first time by the conviction that Jesus had really lived and really died.  That he was dead.  Using a meditation technique I had learned, where one explores an idea visually and allows it to unfold, I pictured myself sitting in meditation in Jesus' tomb, contemplating his lifeless body, waiting to see if there was the resurrection that is promised by Christianity.  It seems to me that this technique is Jungian in nature, involving allowing a thought to lead one to unexpected places in the unconscious.  In the meditation, I sat there until Easter morning and witnessed the fact that Jesus did not rise from the dead.  There was a peaceful silence in which I was allowed to grieve, not as a Christian, but as a human being facing the death of someone who believed in the power of love and forgiveness and taught those principles during his short life.  He didn't have to rise from the dead to make a lasting impression on me.  In the meditation, the finality of his death gave me permission to enter a grief journey which eventually confirmed my belief in "something." 

Is that a religion? Or something else?  

So many of the words that are attributed to Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, sound to me like Zen koans.  One of Jesus' koans is:  

"Who do you think I am?"

To my ears, Jesus is saying, "It's up to you to decide." 

John Lennon decided this:

"Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary.  It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

John Lennon also said:

"I'm not anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-religion."

On that Good Friday in 2006, because of an heartfelt experience in meditation -- not a theory, not a borrowed belief -- I decided that, for me, Jesus was someone who lived and taught about the power of love and forgiveness and then died an agonizing death in the company of two other equally suffering men.  As is the case with so many human beings throughout history, Jesus did not die without suffering.  I knew then that if my death involved suffering, I would not be suffering alone. I decided that Jesus, as I understood him through experience, left me with a peaceful silence in which I could grieve and know that I was not alone in my grief and also know that my grief would eventually heal me.  

In 2000, I wrote this poem which seems now to be a harbinger of the poem I wrote on Good Friday in 2006:

Evolution of Forgiveness

In this silence

I am looking for relief,

trusting grief,

loving the child never conceived,

loving all the shattered children

who dared not trust, love or grieve,

loving the silent holy night,

the wild blue sky of day,

the courage of redwood trees,

the beloved ocean, 

still mirroring our wild hearts,

calling to us:

Trust your grief.

Brussels Meditation

1.  "Woman Trying To Remember What She is Trying To Forget." Gouache and watercolor on paper by am, from 1986.

2.  "Mandala #18:  Hallelujah." Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils on Bristol board by am, finished on March 24, 2016, at 6:20 a.m.

Watch. Listen

dxʷshudičup honored by Coast Salish Tribal Leaders

From the Facebook page of  Miranda Belarde-Lewis:

Bernie Sanders receiving his Lushootseed name from Coast Salish Tribal Leaders. 


dxʷshudičup (pronounced dooh-s-who-dee-choop) is the Coast Salish name given to Bernie Sanders. The Lushootseed meaning is "the one lighting the fires for change and unity." 

We breathe as the ocean breathes

(Pencil on paper, by am, Life Drawing in the Fine Arts Department in the evenings at Western Washington University in the late 1980s)

"In Celtic thought the body is an echo of the soul.  It is born and dies, and in that sense is passing like an echo, but it carries within it the sounds of the eternal."

"While we may cherish our various rich religious inheritances, the essence of our being cannot be contained by the boundaries of religion.  The soul is neither Jewish nor Christian, neither Muslim nor Hindu.  It defies the limitations of any one tradition.  As the 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart says, 'the soul is naked of all things that bear names.'"
(J. Philip Newell)

Not Knowing

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." Charles Péguy

"Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door" Emily Dickinson

Thanks to Sabine for the inspiration this morning.

Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In / Early Morning Reflection

It was still fairly dark outside. I was in my kitchen and noticed something moving to my right. It was my reflection in the window.

Early Morning Light

Summer of 2016 with Mavis and Bob / Another Side of Christianity

Face to face with a certain kind of fear some of us have and face to face with a certain kind of fearlessness

Every so often when I feel frightened, and that 10-letter word repeats itself in my mind, I suddenly remember this song by Bob Dylan, particularly the lyrics below, and I know that I'm not alone and not all that far from the light that is always there, always has been, and always will be, no matter what happens.

... It frightens me
the awful truth
of how sweet life can be ...

Not everything is up to me, but some of it is.  It's a daily practice, discerning what is and what isn't.

I know that not everyone has this fear.  If Bob Dylan hadn't mentioned it in this song, it might have taken me a lot longer to figure out just what it is that frightens me sometimes.   It's not a fear that makes much sense but it is real.  Being able to name it takes away much of its power.

It's one of the Four Noble Truths.  How sweet life can be.

When I look out the window in the late afternoon and know by the light that there is a rainbow somewhere:

And then I turn and see a rainbow:

Or when I look out before dawn and see:

Followed by:

And then this:

How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness?
(Bob Dylan lyrics from "When He Returns"-- 1979)



YouTube comment on the above video:

Max Autonomy3 months ago I'm an atheist, but I still love the emotional genuineness of this powerful song.

Well a childish dream is a deathless need
And a noble truth is a sacred dream
(Bob Dylan lyrics from "Tweddle-Dee &Tweedle-Dum -- 2001)