tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72848861751561649092024-03-12T17:37:42.124-07:00The View from HereObservations, Poems, and Essays
by Francesca Hamptonocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-25057438891749214322023-12-16T15:05:00.000-08:002023-12-16T15:33:42.508-08:00Catching Up Letter from Cesca December 2024<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgozVrUO2Y1mKq_-jYN1vCLx6zwUxcRUw6oXVzzuuWSmzHFR-Gc-guOeZ4wFpwy2xIGszGnWX0HG0k6j8SxLl6m7A-7j_fNF4XdLu156HBXFJgcYuZGQRd3jOnWKl-d05jKrCB_RZ12aYTjxrc_EmYtZ-44Rr5647jDuF7jWxBajiSozfyzoKh2fNjkMdJT" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgozVrUO2Y1mKq_-jYN1vCLx6zwUxcRUw6oXVzzuuWSmzHFR-Gc-guOeZ4wFpwy2xIGszGnWX0HG0k6j8SxLl6m7A-7j_fNF4XdLu156HBXFJgcYuZGQRd3jOnWKl-d05jKrCB_RZ12aYTjxrc_EmYtZ-44Rr5647jDuF7jWxBajiSozfyzoKh2fNjkMdJT=w200-h150" width="200" /></a></div> <span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="text-wrap: nowrap;"> </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="text-wrap: nowrap;"> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjGe-e5DRuUvl44HjbsiB7sdoNPrMrY77ClKy-unyetIOykv_6OjrcpYw2lhG7pjJUkoJZAtdyoxL7BDQvfXDIbkjLIB9V0eIIX0eW00I-PwmXb9xTgfZllx3FcKuQE-DhMN_TR2fUaAIaSsbZnCyOHruNzZKVAXqrkiy03yDLufZ43srDuB4mVLl39bkn6" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjGe-e5DRuUvl44HjbsiB7sdoNPrMrY77ClKy-unyetIOykv_6OjrcpYw2lhG7pjJUkoJZAtdyoxL7BDQvfXDIbkjLIB9V0eIIX0eW00I-PwmXb9xTgfZllx3FcKuQE-DhMN_TR2fUaAIaSsbZnCyOHruNzZKVAXqrkiy03yDLufZ43srDuB4mVLl39bkn6=w200-h150" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtdCZ8NiN0I1epCf1EoG2H7Q0MUZUov9_u6-dS6DyHwfI5Mg_ghYO9t1giQA61H3Na7YrKfW3lptxu78d_6m_oceJi76bXrWklTdN3ZQ1GKRC6X5IpyiHxSGgYG_Njep1m3gEF8E6hlk3qjbuGElkxFMYdcf5Mm1MTwfBZARu2nLQbJ5MujtTx8JQsekvL" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtdCZ8NiN0I1epCf1EoG2H7Q0MUZUov9_u6-dS6DyHwfI5Mg_ghYO9t1giQA61H3Na7YrKfW3lptxu78d_6m_oceJi76bXrWklTdN3ZQ1GKRC6X5IpyiHxSGgYG_Njep1m3gEF8E6hlk3qjbuGElkxFMYdcf5Mm1MTwfBZARu2nLQbJ5MujtTx8JQsekvL=w200-h150" width="200" /></a></div></span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="text-wrap: nowrap;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hello dear ones, </span><br /></span></span><span id="docs-internal-guid-d3d00cdb-7fff-db9c-ebf7-110516b9807d"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Not a very regular letter-writer anymore but I guess few are. We seem to communicate ever more via social media but in tiny bursts and sparkles, not nearly as illuminating as those fine long hand-written letters used to be. So this is my attempt at a catch up, small as my news is, with all of you who still mean so much to me. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I’m 75 this year, days away from having to confess to 76, at which point I will be 1.28 years away from life expectancy for women in America. What a thought! For long years it seemed as if I and all the friends I saw regularly barely seemed to age, year after year. We felt 25. We looked to be healthfully in the adult middle somewhere. But then came 70 and one by one I see us all coming nose to nose with the discovery that our elders weren’t kidding. We still feel 25, well, maybe 40, but old age is real and sometimes daunting and we are all holding different karmic hands. Suddenly from one day to the next there is a pain that was not there before, or a body part that refuses anymore to work properly. Our youthful beauty and grace are almost entirely found only in old photos - that now astound us - as we take full measure of the distance we have traveled. And there have been deaths among my circle this year and last. That too is real. For myself, none of the cards laid down so far have been mortal. I have some symptoms of spinal stenosis now, sore sitting bones and an arthritic hip that keep me from easily traveling far, sitting long, or walking far. But with a bit of experimentation I can still do all of those. And still teach - 10 hours a week - and love it. And still walk the giant white dog Enzy from downstairs on slow rounds through local forests or by the beach - almost every day. We adore each other. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="text-wrap: nowrap;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I even managed a real trip last summer, the first since settling in to take care of Mom in 20014. I flew to Portland to stay with a delightful new friend, Aliza, and her husband Alan. Three days of great conversations and meals and very limited walks, and a final wonderful literary breakfast with my kindred spirit cousin Kelley who made the time to drive down and hang out with us in Aliza’s kitchen. A few more days for a quality visit with my brother Chris and his wife Paulette in their wonderful Oregon country home. Then the flight back, wandering through a sky city of white clouds in battlements and mist meadows. I had forgotten how magical it is to travel, every minute. But also felt intense relief to be home at the end. Oh yes. 75. Real. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Home is still my sea-view apartment in Santa Cruz which most of you have visited. I have covered the walls with new sets of my photos as I take a renewed interest in photography lately and spangled the outdoors with lights and flowers. I share it with a delightful slight middle-aged woman named Gloria, who works marathon hours and rarely emerges from her room but, when she does, we get along splendidly. What a relief to find such a perfect person. We each have a cat, dedicated to reminding us of the virtues of taking naps and living precisely in this moment - at least between snacks. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="text-wrap: nowrap;"> </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The book I published last year, </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Leo Learns to Meditate</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, won its first prize a couple of months ago and putters along in sales. Never likely to make me rich or famous, but I am indeed glad to have added it to the world’s conversation. I am currently working my way through a series of retrospective articles that will make a kind of memoir. Almost finished, and not at all sure who might ever read them, but creativity and sharing, in whatever form, is so essential, I think to being alive and feeling good about it. I’ll let you know when the book is (self) published if anyone feels curious to take a look. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And so my darlings, let us renew our courage for life and wish each other Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukha, Happy Solstice, and a new year coming. May humanity survive it. And learn from it, and find a way through to being better than we ever have been. That is always and ever possible. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Much love to all,</span></span></p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Cesca</span></span></p><div><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-73127695314386804902023-08-02T15:13:00.004-07:002023-08-02T15:29:46.228-07:00<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><h2 style="text-align: center;">I Never Knew I Was a Bell</h2><p style="text-align: center;"><img height="500" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/C4K_jAkuWhLKLosq78uNy_UQmRiRgXo6G_BDhriZCEB7X8OvigXbpIvWUXLGos3a6rY4_7diDIeYYzXGev_8zSg-VPL24taC4bPzj6EiZzaCkA4BvbELCHxypchvAYAbugAQj8ImbgeKcpS4X4jI1sM" style="color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;" width="624" /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 48px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Taking “refuge” is the first step in becoming a Buddhist, and if you are lucky, the last as you leave this life. “I take refuge in the Guru, in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha. Big thoughts for a novice who barely knows what these words might mean or what such a refuge might offer or even from what it was meant to save you. Thoughts so big that even 48 years after meeting the man who became my first refuge, I struggle to understand them more deeply. And time is growing short. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Some of my favorite words from anything I have ever read were those of Annie Dillard describing her first experience of spiritual breakthrough in </span><span class="s2" style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration-line: underline;">Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.</span><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"> She was 29 years old. Her book won the Nobel Prize for literature. “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Truly, meeting a spiritual teacher with whom you have a real connection can be such an experience. It was for me.</span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>48 years later, I remember only a little of the first lecture I received from the Tibetan lama, Thubten Yeshe. What I do recall, vividly, is the overwhelming effect it had on me. My first impression of the wry, laughing man who sat in front of that lecture room in Westwood CA was simple curiosity. Lama Yeshe’s English on that first visit was barely serviceable, just a few steps above sign language, yet his ability to speak directly to the hearts of young westerners was already spot on. For long minutes he would sit in silence, eyes closed, and then return to the room with a roguish smile and a fierce loving gaze that raked the room, finding us one by one. I have never been the same. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>In metaphorical phrases and gesture, he spoke of dissatisfaction, of the suffering of our restless lives, and how every thing and every one we add with such effort to our life must, in the end, be lost. Ergo, placing all of our hopes for happiness in them makes no sense. “I love this flower!” He would say, holding up an imaginary blossom and pretending to swoon with delight. Then his face would fall into melodramatic sorrow as the visualized flower wilted. Following his gaze, we too could see the deconstruction of an aging flower as if it were real, the loosening petals, dark stains spreading over the bright color, the scattering fall. Then he invited us to think of our own lives as no different in their impermanence than this flower. Shock. Impossible to believe fully at twenty-something, but we tried. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>He talked of a path out that can lead one out of suffering, loss, and dissatisfaction, one he would walk with us if we dared trust him. “Never believe because I tell you to believe,” he said. “Argue with this monk your whole life. Check up. Examine the teachings for yourself and see if they are true like people check gold before they buy.” Yet he also dared us, steeped in scientific agnosticism as most of us were, to try out belief and faith for the parts we could not yet accept. “If, after checking you still have big doubts, put them on the shelf for now,” he urged us. “Examine, think critically, but also give yourself permission to try out the teachings as if everything I say were true. Experiment. Give yourself a year, two years, pretending they are true, and see what happens.” It was exactly the key I needed to unlock my ever-skeptical mind and experience something new, unimagined in my culture. When the talk had finished, I drove to the nighttime Redondo beach where two years before I had started my exploration of Buddhism. I had come to the end of my signposts. My whole body was humming. Indeed, I felt, like Annie Dillard, that body and mind had been lifted and struck. I rang like a bell. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>The course at Lake Arrowhead began days later and I found a way to go. The lamas - Lama Yeshe and his spiritual “son” Lama Zopa Rinpoche whom he had been given to care for in their exile in India and with whom he always traveled - began presenting Tibetan Buddhism on their first visit to Los Angeles very much as they had received it in the monastery of Sera near Lhasa. This was no gentle course in relaxation and spiritual glitter, no promise of instant enlightenment in a single weekend for a large fee. What they taught was unfiltered Lam Rim, the stages of the path, first brought to Tibet by Atisha in the 11th century from the Indian monastic university of Nalanda, refined and expanded by the founder of the Gelugpa sect Tzongkhapa in the 14th century. It began with Four Noble Truths: Life is inevitably unsatisfying, and constantly vulnerable to real suffering. This suffering has causes. There is in fact a way to go beyond suffering forever. There is a path that can take you there, step by step. This is the beginning of that path. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I had no such overview when I began. Rather I was in that state that Zen Buddhists like to laud as “beginner’s mind”. Every smallest detail of the course at Arrowhead left me entranced or confounded or hugely upset. For starters, tradition said we should make prostrations as we entered, full length, on the ground, and not just a neat little European bow. I had seen westerners doing this once in Nepal and recoiled from the idea. How unAmerican could you get? Yet at Arrowhead, I tried prostrations out and found them calming, a ceremony of beginning that aided in collecting the mind. And I was reassured to see the lama also prostrated before he began - to the chair he would occupy, representing Buddha’s true gift, his teachings. We prostrated to “bodhi” the possibility of “waking up.” I took my first objection off the shelf. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I sat crosslegged without much difficulty in those days, though a full double lotus has ever been beyond me. I loved the sense of three-point balance as my knees pressed the ground on either side, my back opened in a gentle arch, my head balanced unstrained on top of an erect spine, chin and eyes lowered. The slow creeping complaints of tendons and sinews that came after a quarter-hour or so plagued us all, however, and there was much twitching about. Almost no one sat in chairs in those early days and we secretly studied each other for leg-crossing prowess, or at least stoicism. Now in old age, I am grateful centers have moved past insistence on customs more cultural than essential, along with all that twitching and enduring and relief - or pride - when you have made it to the end of a session without running out of the room in humiliation. The point is, after all, to concentrate while keeping your back straight. Sit how you like, or even lie down. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The lamas came twice a day for long teaching sessions and their assistants, the ordained Australian doctor Rick Ribush and the American nun Thubten Wangmo, skillfully lead us in meditation sessions afterward to try to visualize what had been taught in more detail. It was not all smooth sailing. The first themes of a classic Lam Rim course for beginners in need of motivation to practice are about as far from the happy talk of the Age of Aquarius as one can get, a direct assault on all our favorite fantasies in the seventies. We soldiered our way through impermanence, all the ways we have been suffering even if we hadn’t yet noticed. We worked through the stages of our inevitable death, and then through all the realms in which one can be reborn starting with the hell realms, searingly hot or cold. Hard to take in, especially the one filled with obsessed soldiers who hack or stab each other to death every day and rise the next morning whole enough to do it again, a dystopian Valhalla. These fun births, we were informed, result from anger or killing and last eons. We, meditated on the delights of being born as a hungry ghost, a being suffering from past greed, who wanders a desolate world looking for anything at all to eat yet can barely swallow and always suffers from heartburn if he or she manages even a crumb. Or we might make it to the realm of animals, beaten, overworked, hunted and nearly always dying young, house cats excepted of course. Then there is the realm of the Titans, richer and more powerful than humans (think Game of Thrones) but living a life of privileged paranoia, absorbed in ceaseless jealousy and plotting. And above them, the long-lived gods of the desire realm, good-looking and rich without effort (the Kardashians), frolicking in a life sprinkled with rose petals. But do you really want to be born there, the lamas challenged? Long life gods never have incentive to improve themselves and are doomed to slowly use up the good karma that got them there. They suffer terrible fear at the end, as they begin to sense the great fall back to the hell realms that lie directly ahead of them. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>But then there are we, lucky humans, right in the middle, with life just frustrating enough to want to improve it, but not so horrific for most of us that we can’t focus beyond survival. Further, among humans there are those few, those very few, endowed with all the qualities of the precious human rebirth, born at a time and in a place where the teachings of the path to Enlightenment are accessible, healthy, with enough wealth for some leisure and freedom of choice. Not a slave or a prisoner or a cripple. Not raised by barbarians and favorably inclined toward wisdom when we hear it. Lots of requirements actually, and we have met them all, we are here sitting on our cushions in front of a fully qualified lama. It took eons of good karma to get here and we must not waste it. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>All of this news was alternately upsetting and exhilarating of course. People like me went on long walks to sulk and thrash it out. Some left. A very few, like Cherie Green sitting just to my right, sat still as master meditators from first to last, their faces radiant, their hearts instinctively filled with their answer: “Yes, now and forever yes.” Cherie was newly married, newly graduated, newly employed as a successful preschool teacher, from a well-to-do Jewish family. She went home, I later learned, and told her stunned husband she needed a divorce in order to become a Buddhist nun. This took a long while, for the lamas insisted she get the permission of her parents and ease out of her old life with the least pain possible for others, but within a year she was ordained, and, brilliant, energetic woman that she is, has gone on to become the teacher and author Thubten Chodron, one of the leading lights in the expansion of Buddhism to the West. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>For me, it was only the overwhelming presence of Lama Yeshe, and later of the Dalai Lama, that held me in orbit for the long years of assessing the teachings themselves. I did get flashes of that feeling, “Yes, now and forever”, as I worked through the meditations and new ways of seeing. There was so much here I never wanted to lose, but many ideas also that I found medieval or dubious at first. Some I still do. My shelf was groaning. Were we in a cult? Going through this experience has given me a certain sympathy for those who join cults. There is some hunger in all of us to touch magic, to find that special person with answers and directions to follow, a loving super parent who promises not to abandon us even past the lonely outposts of old age and death. The passionate feelings generated in “finding religion” are as strong as they come. Indeed, they have led to some of the greatest flowerings of civilization and kindness and the worst and ugliest of conflicts. People who are sure they are working for the higher good can be dangerous. In my lifetime I have also watched many fall under the spell of religious con men, those who would waken these secret hopes only to manipulate and use them to make easy money or experience the thrill of power over others. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>So had I found a real refuge? Where is the line between religion and cult? “Check the one who would be your teacher for even twelve years or more,” the Dalai Lama warns newcomers to Buddhism - if indeed you really feel you must convert at all. “Before committing to be a disciple to someone,” he advises, “consider the person only as a spiritual friend.” He then lists the requirements: A true teacher must follow his or her vows of morality and practice what he or she preaches, and, if not enlightened, at least know considerably more than you. A true teacher does not make up sensational new teachings or focus on profit. He or she passes along a lineage of teachings that can be traced to the Buddha, teachings that have been tried and found true and expounded upon by generations of meditators and debaters, although they may add the surety of their own experiences. He or she should not be interested in becoming rich, or admired. Nor should a teacher praise him or herself, nor ever take advantage of disciples sexually, but only work sincerely for their welfare. If people wish to argue or to leave there must never be pressure not to do so. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>I was not aware of this list of teacher qualifications when I began my long involvement with the Buddhist path, and looking back, I would have been vulnerable. I have seen other groups come to grief on one point or another of His Holiness's warnings, not to mention countless con men swooping in to fish in the tide that is Buddhism coming to the west, not excluding some Tibetans. There is also the phenomenon of those who get a taste of genuine egoless spiritual experience, and then miss the moment when ego has run around to the head of the line again to take credit for everything. <i>Why, look at that. I have experienced an extraordinary moment. I must be special to have had such an experience. Follow me, friends, the special one. (And leave large bills in the donation box). </i>Last but not least there are those who are sincere but never took time to learn the path fully and teach a partial or garbled version. Gratefully, in half a century now of careful observation, though I still have arguments for them, I have never encountered any of these faults in the teachers I chose. They knew what they were teaching well. They were sincere. They acted from compassion. They have taken me on an extraordinary journey. </span><br /><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><span> </span>At Lake Arrowhead California, in 1975, that journey had just begun, but I had, at last, found my first teacher in Lama Yeshe. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span></span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: center;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span></p>ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-79724854537158677912021-04-03T15:57:00.000-07:002021-04-03T15:57:00.903-07:00<p><a href="https://www.vajrapani.org/remembering-age/?fbclid=IwAR3CG47umpFLyLvNVyjYHAYUFadR3-zMaoTmlFqbWjAQJffnYTAb4rwNEfE" target="_blank"> Remembering Age Delbanco</a></p>ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-91200553771736571562020-06-01T00:54:00.003-07:002022-03-05T14:33:54.579-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhkQSgDqePbMSmtLk107HgUxMKXRJ-qusXAxc95ubRyiwajqa0wKX7ktl_rOZDBsKyqEV8_cOZBq6RbslUHmQhpMcQNuJZltFciHN5352ZLw-Y7eiAy9nJWYRctLiXVw5afGIZzUCRcGRM5Am3yC1A0bn95nv8QiUGqIQsGB101bLEzPgaMBchgy237pw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhkQSgDqePbMSmtLk107HgUxMKXRJ-qusXAxc95ubRyiwajqa0wKX7ktl_rOZDBsKyqEV8_cOZBq6RbslUHmQhpMcQNuJZltFciHN5352ZLw-Y7eiAy9nJWYRctLiXVw5afGIZzUCRcGRM5Am3yC1A0bn95nv8QiUGqIQsGB101bLEzPgaMBchgy237pw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0M21ojBg97aCNMarK_XUflR1Hdusm8N_cBb2Ff1dswcSbgCNQItsDaihIn4EipIe71K2yyiSvhFQbCl68lOJIedYU1ILKJWwXMDfepyVNSul5Mos-qwEj4sg1_ygH-TZwWqjw1Zn35dHnOHh1OLVjY6l7GC38CS8Ut6qZECR-YmYvc4D_iToTiHsoRg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="352" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0M21ojBg97aCNMarK_XUflR1Hdusm8N_cBb2Ff1dswcSbgCNQItsDaihIn4EipIe71K2yyiSvhFQbCl68lOJIedYU1ILKJWwXMDfepyVNSul5Mos-qwEj4sg1_ygH-TZwWqjw1Zn35dHnOHh1OLVjY6l7GC38CS8Ut6qZECR-YmYvc4D_iToTiHsoRg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /></div></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: large;">Connected</span></span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the games on my kindle is a program called Crossstitch. I looked at it askance when I first saw it in the kindle app library. What a monumental waste of time THIS program was. Even as a child, eyeing elderly women around me as they labored to embroider designs with yarn onto little circles - filling their every free hour with making things, as they had been taught as children - it seemed a waste of time. I never slowed even to really look at the designs they created, much less those done in cross-stitch style, with squares of color. The designs looked jagged and simplistic even from across the waiting room at the doctor’s office. But squares of color are a natural In the age of digital, aren't they? And now that I myself am old and spend more time in doctors waiting rooms, suddenly I have discovered this absorbing activity - that takes me so far away from the reality of being there - is something I seek.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The program on my Kindle offers me a wide variety of pictures to unveil, roses in vases, ships in fjords, farmhouses in the country. There is even one I'm working on now that conceals paintings of the old masters and allows me to reveal them bit by tiny vivid bit, their colors hidden behind a maze of letters. When I push the button that makes the whole picture look farther away or close up, the beauty of the colored squares now thrills me with their beauty, and yet I am not even the artist who made the painting or the technician who turned it to digital or the crosshatch creator who decided how to label the squares. I don’t care. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I select the letter H and as I pass my forefinger over the squares marked with it, dun yellow is filled into its place. I select S and royal blue fills a long line that marks the edge of a far shore. Green is next, indeed there are four letters with subtly differing shades of green, and even though, close up, I cannot see what I create, when I stand back there it is a tree growing under my warm finger as it somehow activates electronics on the face of the Kindle and somehow by some unfathomable miracle creates a tree. As the tree grows larger, subtle shadows and brightnesses emerge and then the near shore of the lake and then a boat far out upon it. A bridge is in the distance, likely built by Turkish prisoners two hundred years before. And a carriage is moving across it, a carriage that long ago could have held a man on his way to court a woman he would eventually marry. (Have their 5 times great grandchildren passed me on a freeway somewhere?) And beyond the bridge are the clouds of that day, that particular afternoon and the sun that set that day emerges from the little squares of color This was an image once seen by an artist who sat upon that bank at least 120 years ago. On that day he looked up and beheld that cloud. He flicked grey and mauve and hints of green onto his canvas to hold it down as it moved away. He recreated that day’s sun setting, that tree which had leaved out slowly over weeks in a spring just past, looked just as he recreated it. The boat on the lake was perhaps owned by an old man, lost in his own thoughts, who had set sail from a small village nearby and passed in front of the artist’s vision, and off again, into history’s oblivion. It is so slow this unveiling of a world past. It is time travel, intimacy with the dead. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did he rise that morning in his garret, the artist, brush his beard and dress in his white shirt and black pants and gather his art supplies and think to himself, today I will record in these inks made of lapis lazuli and the stains of flowers all the echoes of colors in the world I see around me. I will put them onto a canvas of woven flax and linen, made and sold by peasants who live nearby who sold it to me in the market last week. If my work pleases, it will find its way one day to a museum. Here, hundreds of people will walk by, year after year. They will mark this day that I will soon record. They will remember it and find beauty in it. They will photograph my work and put it in books. And when I am gone from memory or even fame, my colors will find life again under the thumbs of old women activating electrons on devices I cannot imagine. They will see again this tree I will sit under. They will watch again the boat from the village pass serenely across the lake. And the sun of this afternoon, this one singular afternoon, will take them over an hour to recreate and they will feel again the warmth of its colors in their hearts. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This life we look out upon is in the nature of a dream, the Buddhist lamas told me. How many dreams are woven into this single image? My own, the artist’s, the old boatman, dead a century, the thoughts of the man in the carriage, the prisoners of war, 200 years in the ground when the image was painted, who built the bridge, brick by dun yellow brick. The makers of digital devices, ensconced in their elegant apartments in Silicon Valley, admiring their bank accounts, looking for new image resource banks. We are all connected, are we not? The colored dots of each day of our lives fill in one by one. And the world is made from them, and named, and remembered, and its echoes go on ahead of us to lives unknown. </span></div>
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-71352518653300993842019-06-15T18:29:00.003-07:002023-04-09T15:24:02.016-07:00Lessons in Black<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
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<span style="font-size: 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">November 28, 1969. The corner of 42nd
ave and Central in Los Angeles was a familiar place to me, a place I had made
my way to weekly for three years in a long city-crossing series of bus rides
from UCLA to the heart of what then was called “the Ghetto.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On that block stood Operation Bootstrap, a
unique self-help community center and vocational school started by two former
civil rights workers. I had begun volunteering after the Watts Riots in 1965.
On this night however, the school was closed and I arrived driving a
dilapidated Chevy station wagon, at the end of a caravan of Communist Party
members that had been summoned by the Black Panther Party. I was 21, still a
student at UCLA, still a roamer of beaches and hills and not a Communist. And
barefoot for some reason I cannot now recall. But it allows me to remember now
the feeling of the warm city sidewalk under my feet as we walked toward the
open door, nervous young Black Panthers with rifles and berets manning both
sides of it. They gestured up to the roofs of the buildings on the opposite
side of the street and, with a start, we took in the rifles extending all along
the Central Avenue roofline held by men lying on their stomachs. The Los
Angeles Police Department was massed in force. Inside, we were shown the
entrance to an upper room where seven or eight young mothers with infants in
arms had been attending a class in new baby care when the confrontation began.
We had been summoned to escort them home, and, one by one, we did. I dropped
off the woman and child I was assigned and drove home without incident.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I did not then take in the real peril
all of us were in - a peril the Black Panthers were to face in earnest two
weeks later. I found myself in the company of Communists because I had chosen
that night of all nights to find out for myself what Communism was direct from
a comrade’s mouth. Somehow I had located their offices in LA and driven there
in my old Chevy from the North Hollywood apartment I shared with my father. For
two hours, an eager young man, not much older than me, had done his best to
explain the theories and imaginings of the Communist movement. A cell leader
working to find converts in local factories by day, he was eager to tackle<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a college student studying history. He was
filled with idealism. And I had been primed, oddly, by the far right of the
Republican Party, to want to hear him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Some time during the 1950’s McCarthy
hearings, not so long after the birth of television, these men, those<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>most terrified by the threats posed by the rise
of Communist ideology after WWII,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>held a
series of televised giant “educational” events in a football arena filled with
people in which they tried to explain to Americans in detail their opinions of
the false promises and dangers of this movement. It was the first time my
child’s brain had ever tried to follow abstract thought. And, ironically, all I
took away from watching<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was that
Communists wanted to help poor people. That sounded nice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later, as a fifth grader I even undertook to
teach myself Russian. Studying in secret, I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>managed to memorize the alphabet and finally say “Shto eto? Eto
karandash.” (What is it? It’s a pencil)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>before I lost interest. Later, as a college student, my curiosity was
renewed when the Great Leap Forward in China was being promoted on college
campuses all over the nation as a glorious thing, said to be liberating
millions from feudal suffering. Mao’s “Little Red Book was passed out for free
on college political tables leading to the UCLA cafeteria. I read of the dramatic
idealism of the fighters in <u>Red Star Over China</u> and was moved by their
passion to make this world fairer. Listening to the earnest young man, however,
I grew more and more troubled by the future he painted. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“But when is it finished?” I
interrupted him. “When do we stop being revolutionaries and begin being free
people again? Free to do other things?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Like art?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“Never,” he blurted. “The revolution
must constantly be renewed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“But what mechanisms are there to
control the leadership if it becomes corrupt?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“That could never happen. All power
will belong to the people.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“All poor people are not saints,” I
pointed out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“ How will the Communist
system prevent the rise of a corrupt strong man?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">And so we went on until we could go
no more and I became and have remained ever after, dismayed by this unique
human experiment, despite its admirable first goals to rid the world of very
real injustice. Indeed, even then my doubts were proving valid as events of the
sixties and the nationwide purges under Stalin and Mao unfolded. So I thanked
him, ticked Communism off my list of interests and was about to leave when the
call came. “The Black Panther Party needs volunteers!” someone shouted across
the room. “White ones.” He went on to explain they needed young people they
thought the police would hesitate to shoot, because their LA headquarters were
surrounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What made me turn back at
the door and go with the Communists? That is easy to answer. I considered the
Black Panther Party, though I did not know them well, as my neighbors. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">In the segregated world of the
sixties, I know that too needs explanation, so let me go back four years from
that night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In August of 1965, when<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was seventeen years old, newly graduated
from Santa Monica High School, I was living in Malibu with my mother, her
second husband, Charlie Farrell, and my then seven-year-old brother, Chris.
Malibu was not yet the series of gated communities of celebrities and the
hyper-rich that it was to become, but it was rich enough - Charlie was a
well-paid engineer at Hughes Aircraft -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and we counted several actors as our neighbors. The days were mild and
clear, the sea clean and blue. The beaches were much wider than they are now,
and not crowded. We lived squarely within the California Dream. What a puzzlement
then, one day, to see smoke rising from the heart of Los Angeles on our far
horizon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“What’s that?” I remember asking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“There is a riot in Watts,” I was
told. I frowned. This was a place name I had never heard before. “The Negroes
are burning their ghetto.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The fires and the riots went on for
six days, and I had more questions. “What are Negroes doing in LA?” I remember
asking. “What is a ghetto? Why are they burning it?” I had barely glimpsed
people of other races in my cloistered world. Looking back in my high school
year book, I now see dark faces,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but
they led separate lives in the early 60’s. And for me, their presence had never
really registered. Put to the question, I would have said that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Negroes” or “colored people” as descendents
of African slaves were then named, all lived in the south. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I did not know it yet, but I suffered from a learned myopia that was
nearly universal among northern whites of my generation, even in liberal
families. The world I grew up in was saturated in the attitudes of the Jim Crow
era. In school my US history textbook informed me that slavery had been a good
experience for most Africans, providing them, not only with civilization and
religious instruction, but free food, and rent,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>not to mention a steady job. I do remember wondering if that could
really be true. Hadn’t I also heard that slaves often tried to run away? But in
fact, I and most of my peers were almost comically out of touch with the
history and realities of race in America as the Civil Rights Era dawned. I did
not know people of color were routinely excluded from the hotels we stayed at,
even in California, nor that most of the restaurants we patronized did the
same, as well as the companies hiring for the jobs which supported our middle
class lives. I was shocked to discover a couple of years later that even the
purchase agreement of our Malibu house stated that the property could not be
sold to “coloreds.” My mother had always declared that Negroes were equal. That
we should never ever discriminate. She did this so vocally and so predictably
whenever someone “colored” came into view, even in their presence, that I
always became acutely uncomfortable as if I were being told not to look at or
question a person with some terrible disability. I can only imagine how keenly
the person she was talking about must have wanted to get out of her range. And
yet, with my step father, she signed that lease. It was required by the real
estate office and they really wanted the house. How could it really hurt anyone?
She never noticed when, at five,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
picked up and repeated the childhood rhyme circulating around me when we played
hide and seek, “catch a nigger by his toe, if he hollers, let him go.” It was
how she had learned the song. It was how it had <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">always</i> been sung. There was no malice in it, but no awareness
either. Just as we played cowboys and Indians and always shot down the Indians.
We were walking blind in a moral minefield and never noticed any of it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I had heard nothing of the racism and
police brutality African Americans regularly suffered, nor the family ordeals
generated by being “last hired, first fired.” Interracial marriage was a felony
in most states. Interracial dating created apocalyptic levels of shock in every
person who walked by, of either race. It was almost unheard of. What I thought
I knew about the lives of African Americans, came from glimpses of white actors
in black face on vaudeville stages,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aw shucks</i> jiving of the
characters on TV’s Amos and Andy, or the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Yassuhs”, and “Yassims” muttered by actors posing as self-abasing
slaves who opened the mansion door for their white masters in movies about the
old South. These were always shown as broken clowns of human beings,
demonstrating in every gesture what “slavish” means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, these grotesque screen portrayals
fit well with the propagandized history I was receiving in elementary school.
Those who think there has been no progress in America might do well to dig up
some of these old films. <u>Gone with the Wind</u>, saturated with racist
myopia as it is, looks positively enlightened by contrast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Movies about Africa were worse and they were
an endlessly popular genre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For years my
child’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>image of Africa was lines of
gibbering simpletons wearing clothes like diapers with boxes on their heads,
following behind handsome resourceful white men in neatly ironed khaki. At the
first sign of danger, these diaper men would throw down the boxes and flee in
terror, gibbering in a higher register. When the movie “Zulu” was made in 1964,
of the South African battle of Rorke’s Drift in which a trained regiment of
highly coordinated Zulu warriors attacks a British military station, it was a
revelation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In high school, and even in
college, the history of Africa was presented almost exclusively as the history
of white colonization. We have indeed come a long way, however far there
remains to go. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I - and most of the rest of “white”
America - were at the beginning of that journey in 1965. But I was keen to
start. When Watts went up in flames, I asked my father if he would drive me
there so I could see for myself. He drove me through quickly once the streets
had opened again, doors locked and windows up, and I remember only flashes of
what seemed then a foreign country. Traffic moved steadily but broken windows
still lined the streets. I did not notice the residential areas behind the grim
boulevards, thousands of row houses, many as neat as a pin with well kept
gardens. Or see the Sunday parade of elegant older ladies in large flowery hats
on their way to church that I later became aware of. So much of Watts in those
days was populated by a generation of law-abiding country people who had
escaped the old South. They carried with them values of hard work and family
loyalty and hope. But those hopes were being dashed as they fought to make a
living or realize any kind of personal dream in still racist California. And
they were losing their children to the violence and despair of race-based
gangs. The Slauson Street Gang. The Crips. The Bloods. They were all started in
those years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Several months after the start of my
student life at UCLA, a small notice caught my attention on a library bulletin
board. Operation Bootstrap, a black self-help organization in south central Los
Angeles was seeking volunteers. My curiosity about the riots still strong, I
decided to go. It was a long journey from perky Westwood to Watts on a city bus
in those days. I needed three buses to get there, if memory serves. The streets
grew ever more functional and drab as each bus drove farther south, hundreds of
blocks of factories or small poor businesses, empty, littered vacant lots,
liquor stores on every corner. Gradually the color of the passers-by on
sidewalks grew darker as we passed through Asian neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods
and finally neighborhoods that were exclusively “Negro.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those getting on the bus looked tired and
dispirited. There were young women with a long day of menial work behind them
and a whole life of it ahead. There were young men who swung into seats,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>edgy and miserable from their endless
fruitless search for any job that would last more than a few days. Grey-haired
men and women, old before their time, gazed blankly out the windows, illusions
gone. And there was anger to be seen through those windows. I remember a sudden
flare of fury as women outside a liquor store began to fight, screaming
insults, dragging each other down to their knees with hands buried in their
opponents hair. A drunken young prostitute staggered diagonally across a major
street, her shirt ripped, yelling obscenities at passers by. To me it seemed a
fearful, alien planet. I was nervous even to walk a block by myself in those
early days. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">But I soon had friends. Operation
Bootstrap itself, on 42nd and Central Avenue, proved to be a large cinderblock
building with a sizable central room and several smaller ones. My offer to
volunteer was greeted warmly by the three men who started it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bob Bailey, Robert Hall and Louis Smith and
been involved, only months before,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in
the Freedom Rides to help bring voting rights to blacks in the South. In Los
Angeles, their goal was to lift residents up “by their<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>bootstraps” by offering them free
skills-based education right in the neighborhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea was that students would quickly be
able to make a real living from learning keypunch or going into the arts or
helping to build a toy factory, funded by Mattel, that made black dolls.
Teachers from local universities and businesses volunteered to offer free
classes. Lou Smith was also in the midst of a concerted outreach to educate and
involve college students like me. He didn’t just want to get jobs for a few
people. He wanted to change the culture. It was his notice on that bulletin
board at UCLA that had brought me so far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And so my education in black began in earnest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As I worked at the front desk as a
receptionist, he began with short lectures. I learned about the realities of
slavery, about the old South and the new 1960’s version, the cattle prods, the
jail house beatings, the realities of Jim Crow for the people who lived there.
I learned about “field negroes” vs “house negroes,” a schism created in the
antebellum south, that was still poisoning attitudes within the black
community. Those with darker skins, more African hair or features, were not
seen as attractive. But that was changing even as I absorbed the lessons he was
teaching me. Stokley Carmichael had arrived in Watts for a series of evening
harangues and at long last “Negroes” were hearing the novel idea, “black is
beautiful.” “Black” became their proud new identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was truly a movement of consciousness for
a whole nation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">My own mind was moving as well,
peeling off layers of unconscious bias as if I were an onion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lou’s lessons sometimes took effect days
after I received them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One I remember
particularly. At UCLA one day, I attended a science fiction film made in Japan.
A space ship landed and aliens from Mars emerged, a prince of Mars and his many
robed attendants. Science fiction was in its movie infancy in those days. Such
improbable characters were routine. But the audience and I began to laugh out
loud. The reason? The royalty from Mars were all Japanese! And then, mid laugh,
I stopped. And for the first time, realized. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I remember the same lesson coming
home as I really looked at the graphic in my UCLA anthropology textbook one
day. The Evolution of Man was illustrated, starting with a monkey, rising to
brute, to ape man, and at last to glorious<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">homo sapiens. </i>I had never before noticed how odd it was that this pinnacle of creation was
always pictured as a robust white man with reddish hair wearing tennis shorts. Of
course he would be white. The European version of mankind, I finally realized
with real shock, was exclusively what my culture had always presented to me as what “human
beings” looked like. All others were exotics, variations from this norm, odd people always being studied by scientists who shared photos of them in National Geographic Magazine. And
that final image was male because of course women were a specialized variation
too, not the main event of the species. When the Japanese put themselves
forward as aliens who looked like human beings, what I experienced for the
first time was the shock of cognitive dissonance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">There were other revelations, some
perhaps more than Lou even intended. In the garage behind Operation Bootstrap,
once a week, “encounter sessions” were organized. College professors from USC
and UCLA, a sprinkling of young volunteers like myself, and some 30-40
neighborhood people, speaking to each other with passion, love, despair, and
sometimes fury across the racial divide. Lou or Bob started it off and young
men stood to harangue the professors with the stories of the police brutality
they had endured and all that was wrong with America. The crowd swayed and
amened and people called out supportive comments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The professors were conciliatory, eager to
learn. For they carried what all whites in those days carried, a keen sense of
guilt for the injustices that were all around us then, even for slavery itself.
In the sixties there were still people alive who had known people born into
slavery. This was not ancient history. And the terrible aftermath of Jim Crow
was certainly not over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I struggled with that
concept. White guilt. I still do. It may have been a necessary part of the
healing process in our society then. I am not so sure it is now. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As the lessons continued,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>black Americans grew to impossible stature in
my mind, handsome, powerful, daring, worldly wise in ways the whites my own age
could not hope to attain to. I found myself frowning at the “honkey” boys in
college. They now seemed meek, ungraceful, unmasculine, even childish. It was
black men and women who had my attention, and because of Lou Smith, my
trust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This false image itself became
one more layer of my onion however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
night, after such a garage encounter session, two men I didn’t know, but Lou
did, invited me to coffee afterwards. One, I later learned was Bunchy Carter,
founder of the LA Chapter of the Black Panthers, the other his friend, Wilbert
Terry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember no unease as they
drove me south, deeper into the ghetto, and finally stopped at their apartment.
The conversations sparked in the encounter session<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>continued on a friendlier level, though I
can’t now remember what we said. It was Terry, mainly who talked. It was Terry,
who, an hour after i got there, pulled a gun out of his pocket and pointed it
at me. “Do you know what this is?” he enquired, clearly curious what I would do
or say next.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I frowned at the small silver object
in his hand. “It's a piece,” he informed me, puzzled at my lack of
comprehension. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“A piece of what?” I asked him.
Confused by this sudden turn in the conversation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“It’s a gun, bitch.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">The statement seemed to hang in the
air, but I finally got it. And the fact that the gun was pointed at the middle
of my chest. This was producing a most remarkable sensation. My body had gone
cold, then riveted on the line the bullet would take. It felt as if all my
organs were moving, congealing at that point into a ball of ice. “What are you
doing?” I asked him, finding it hard to concentrate on anything but those
physical sensations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You’re scaring
me.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">“Go into the bedroom,” Terry
commanded. “Take off your clothes.” He was confident, clearly on familiar
ground. I would obey with a gun pointed at me. That is what one did after all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Instead I sat down on the couch. I
had never had a gun pointed at me before, never experienced violence or
coercion of any kind from my fellow human beings. I was 20-years-old and,
entering the fugue state of emotional shock, still could barely take in that my
hosts had become so uncivil. I continued simply to argue, and to refuse. For
some reason still mysterious to me, Terry never took the next step. He didn’t
hit me or take my arm or try to move me by force. Instead he began to talk. He
talked for almost another hour, waving the gun at me, unleashing all his fury
at whites. He demanded to know why it was okay for white men to molest black
women, but now that I was in his neighborhood, I thought I should be exempt. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Carter interjected a few comments,
and, oddly, seemed to be on my side, or at least not on Terry’s. From time to
time he attempted to shift the conversation to a kind of banter, an invitation.
He suggested I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>join their “stable.” They
kissed the women who prostituted for them he assured me. They were emotionally
supportive pimps. For a college girl whose head was still full of over-the-top
historical romances, this was not a strong argument. To this day I wonder at
the profound loneliness of any woman who would think it was. They had clearly
found it a successful recruiting message in the past. So I continued to sit on
the couch, rigid, refusing all suggestions and commands, but I did not feel the
full shock of fear until suddenly, when Terry wasn’t looking, Carter took away
and hid the little pistol he had set down on the mantel. Was I then in real
danger of being murdered? He knew his friend. Was Terry crazy enough to do
that? My frozen mind and body began to emerge from its shock. I stood up. When
Carter, still arguing with Terry, brusquely gestured to the door and said I
could go if I liked, I slipped out into the hall and down the stairs. I
couldn’t hear whatever arguments Carter used to stop Terry from pulling me back
in. I just got in my car and drove. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">At home, my father was still out. I
went to bed, shaking in every limb,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
never told him of my near escape, though, much later I did tell Lou.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He grimaced, but said little. And in April, 1968
came another lesson when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember Lou
pushing me out of the building and into my car minutes after the news first came
on the radio. “Drive!” He commanded. “Go now!” I remember angry hands slapping
my car at intersections as the electrifying news spread across LA on the radio.
I drove and made it home and followed the news that night as activists and LA
police barely stopped Watts from erupting once again. Across the nation 110
other cities burst into riot and unrest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For over a year, any thought or mention of
that night with Carter and Terry made my hands shake uncontrollably. A inch
wide swatch of hair on one side of my head turned white. And yet, thanks to the
grudging intervention of Carter, I was not raped, and not physically
harmed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes me admire, today,
the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>courage of young people in inner
cities who often experience multiple episodes of such armed bullying in their
teens. It was far more than I could handle at age 20. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I never talked to Carter or Terry
again. I often thought of them with anger, but I was shocked when I learned it
was Carter who was gunned down a year later, with John Huggins in an event
hosted by the Black Student’s Union at UCLA. A member of the US organization
led by Ron Karenga (Bootstrap’s neighbors on the other side) took offense at
something they said and shot them both. Reading his biography today, I have
learned that Bunchy Carter is credited with starting the Black Panther
organization in Los Angeles - something I didn’t know when I met him, and
before that was a leader in the Slauson Street Gang with the nickname “Mayor of
the Ghetto.” I am almost sorry to reveal that, according to what he said to me that night, he was also a pimp because the BPP he led was truly trying to move beyond gangs and create a
political movement that lifted and empowered black youth. They offered classes,
free community breakfasts, and role models who tried to protect others from
bullying police. He had been rapidly evolving, from gang member, to prisoner,
to Black Muslim, to community activist and leader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where he would have ended up if he had not
been assassinated, no one can say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor
what the Black Panther Party would have become if its leaders all over the
country had not been assassinated or imprisoned<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the FBI, as they were over the
next years. Reading today the memoir written by Elaine Brown - one of their
last surviving leaders - I can see the immaturity, as well as the earnest
courage, of their ideas. They carried guns and postured in sexy black leather
and demanded respect and obedience, but they also really tried to help. I
believe now that their self-righteous approach was destined to skirt closer to
fascism than the communism they were accused of. But they were so young, in
their early twenties. It took real courage to do what they did in those Jim
Crow tainted days, learning everything for themselves from the ground up,
putting their lives on the line, and fighting with each other as often as with
those outside. It was those internecine struggles the FBI encouraged that lead
to Carter’s death. Of Terry, I never heard more, nor wanted to. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus it was that the (hopefully)
final layer of my personal onion came loose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I looked down one day at my yellow-toned freckled and tanned arms and
began to object to being labelled “white.” It was not just that the color was
inaccurate, I began to bristle at the idea that my identity was a color.
Calling any person a skin color tells you almost nothing important about them
as a person any more than the color of their eyes or hair. It may hint strongly
at a history or a social status, but it also may not. The label “white” was
used to make assumptions about me that were rarely true. “Black people<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>know all about white people,” I was told
repeatedly in those days. “All the movies and TV shows are about white people.
We know you. You do not know us.” But I have never seen a TV show or movie that
comes even close to the life I personally lead or the thoughts I personally
have. I did not know the people around me at Operation Bootstrap perfectly, but
I had made tremendous efforts over three years, and some progress, in doing so.
I finally woke up and realized very few such efforts were being made in
reverse. For most at Operation Bootstrap, excepting Lou Smith, even after those
three years, I was still, first and mostly, only a color.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">From the lessons at Bootstrap and
from reading history, and most of all from the years of world travel that were
to follow, I have learned that “white people” are not unique, not even in their
racial blindness. To think they are is to show ignorance of the experience of
oppressed groups in almost every country and time - Koreans in Japan,
untouchables in India, Tibetans in China, Muslims in Tibet, Shia in Iraq, Tutsi
in Rwanda, non-Communists in Cambodia, Jews in Germany and Russia, Palestinians
in Israel, Armenians in Turkey, Rohingya in Myanmar. The list goes on. The
European Age of Imperialism was real and terrible in its effects and attitudes,
but to elevate Europeans to a status as unique monsters no other group will
ever match creates a kind of racism in the negative. A silly idea. There is so
very much impressive competition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">Meeting a person and taking their
skin color as a critically defining characteristic, to me now, is the bottom
line of racism. Being able to forget about skin color altogether, or take it as
no more than a detail of personal appearance like eye color, or height, is the
liberation from racism we all seek. Moving contrary to the dawning era of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“political correctness” I also began to push
back against arguments for “white guilt.” Today I no longer accept
responsibility for actions that took place before I was born, on issues I had
no part of creating. Nor do I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>accept
guilt for decisions I do not make now or for thoughts I do not have. What I do
feel morally responsible for are my actions now, and for the thoughts I share.
I still support efforts to repair the damage of the past, such as affirmative
action in school placements and job placements, but not reparations. None of those alive now have ever legally been slave owners nor have
any been their slaves by law. We do not owe each other money. Life is hard in myriad
ways for everyone. What we owe each other is fairness going forward. We owe
each other honest awareness of the lingering effects of the past and the need to
ensure they do not persist or give unfair advantage. When abuses occur in our
society because of current racist attitudes, we owe each other real listening,
protection, just laws, and a just response - in both directions. And there is another reason. Asking "whites" who are, for the most part, already struggling, to pay enormous taxes to provide reparations for the sins of their ancestors (regardless of when those ancestors arrived or what they personally did) cannot possibly bring about a healed or united America going forward. It would instead spawn a hurricane of aggrieved feelings, charges and countercharges. Have we so soon forgotten the effects of the reparations demanded of Germany after WWI? They devastated German's already war-damaged economy and spawned a generation of poor and bitter young people who felt unjustly punished for the sins of their fathers. Their solution was to idolize the man who told them to stop feeling guilty and be strong again. Take back what used to be theirs. Be supermen. And thus </span><span style="font-size: 13.3333px;">was </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Adolph Hitler enabled to bring hell on earth to a whole continent. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">As I see each new generation of
“black” American youngsters wake up to the horrors in their history, I can
acknowledge their anger, maybe even accept their need to aim it at me for a
time as they come to grips with it. But in the end I have come to agree with
Morgan Freeman’s revolutionary conclusion: “The way to finally end racism is to
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stop talking about race</i>... I don’t
want to call you a white man anymore. Don’t call me a black man. I am Morgan
Freeman.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It serves up no justice to
say, as I so often hear said these days, “It doesn’t matter if you personally
are racist. You are part of a racist system.” By all means call out racist
attitudes that are really manifesting in action or speech, but so often the people
who are shaming others are guilty of exactly that same myopia. And “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">systems</i>” consist only of people and the institutional
rules they think they are following. So let’s really talk when things feel
wrong. And really listen. And every person in the conversation maybe look in
the mirror a little longer as we change together old rules and habits that
still need changing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">I am Francesca, complexion light
yellow-brown with freckles. Eyes blue. Wavy hair gone white. 5’6”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weight secret. Nice to meet you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-54996522174807248772019-06-04T18:54:00.002-07:002019-06-06T15:47:02.953-07:00Did You Notice?<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWqnZIO3kkZAtzb5PjLDy3d-dA2v2Ayo0yM4DEuhs-l8x34AdvulmWjx3_vfKPMa2kvMghDxiA3pXYKqHAMuXLVhIpGAQtdPLK9uJtXOtI12t9MxNK3ZNDbNwO3lxL2c0WAu_Sj5OzJLPc/s1600/blue+buddha+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1206" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWqnZIO3kkZAtzb5PjLDy3d-dA2v2Ayo0yM4DEuhs-l8x34AdvulmWjx3_vfKPMa2kvMghDxiA3pXYKqHAMuXLVhIpGAQtdPLK9uJtXOtI12t9MxNK3ZNDbNwO3lxL2c0WAu_Sj5OzJLPc/s320/blue+buddha+2.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Did you notice?</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">That peculiar lack of ground beneath our feet,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">That dust made of all the things that were </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">that girds our toes. It is the dust </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">that steals promises. It's clear now. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Form can never hold. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Standing in the last years of life</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I look back at a story dreamed, and half told </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">and unfinished In every line.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I see my protagonists age and shift, disappear or decline</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">So many I loved, honored and emulated, I see now,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">they do vanish in a day. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">They were here, then they were distant</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Sending messages from far away</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I thought of them</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I loved the bits of story we had made together</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">And then one day, a day like any other, </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">One of them was gone, and then another. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Stories become shattered mirrors,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">shards of memory. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">And soon enough, memory will fade to white. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Were any of us here at all? It is almost night. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">The best of friends, a loving father, </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">teachers who swore allegiance til the end of time</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">So many gone</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Into urns or stupas or white dust above a wave </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Who can stand on this ground?</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">We cannot write our story and think it will stay. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">"Life is a dream," Buddhist lamas told us</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">And then went the same way. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">So I open my hands to the sun. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I watch the children pass, full of today. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">In the end, what I hold to</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Is love. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><br /></span></div>
ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-5596047120589949472019-03-04T00:24:00.002-08:002019-06-09T20:12:03.657-07:00<!--[if !mso]>
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Name="List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_w7hljib2bblc"></a><span lang="EN"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Becoming Cesca<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoSubtitle" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_kzl6swm864tc"></a><span lang="EN">High School Days<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN">All my life I have
been attracted to stories of the steppes of Asia, and the nomad peoples who
roamed them. Scythians and Sarmatians, Parthians and Hiung-nu, Visigoths and
Magyars. As an adolescent I heard some echo of their lives in the music of
Rimsky Kosakof. I did not care if it was romanticized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tried to visualize stepping outside my yurt
to behold seas of endless grass, or long trains of horses and camels and packed
wagon carts, or the horse battles between archers with tattoos and braided hair,
or the great trading centers at the edge of the deserts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As drums found their rhythm and violins rose,
I imagined horses at a gallop, and even fantasized centaurs, half woman, half
horse with streaming long hair and tails, who galloped in fierce dignity next
to our car as my parents drove. I imagined these creatures even somehow
creating the Russian symphonies that enfolded them. They confounded the US
military with their power and beauty and broke through attempts to encircle
them in massed charges. On long trips I maintained this fantasy for hours. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">Maybe
this yearning comes from some lost past life. Maybe only from this one, for
most of my childhood, we moved every year. At least, after my parent’s divorce
when I was four, I moved. I looked forward to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>it. At first they lived only blocks apart, and I trudged between them,
pajamas in a pillow slip. As their divorce took hold, the distances grew
longer. I lived with one or the other in places too many to mention, Westwood
and Fullerton and Manhattan Beach with my mother,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Menlo Park and San Francisco with my father.
When I lived with my mother, my father would come, as often as he could, to
take me away on weekend adventures, to climb cliffs next to the sea, or ride
horses in the mountain pastures of Arrowhead. He taught me to stop chattering
and be still, as we listened to the conversations between trees in a
mountain forest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He showed me how to
climb down sandstone cliffs above breaking waves and helped me notice the
tapestry of jewels slowly forming as we looked down on the city of Los Angeles
in the twilight from the hills of Palos Verdes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">But
as my parents began to settle into their adult patterns more solidly, our moves
at last became rarer. In my high school days I moved with my mother into the first
of three Malibu houses and stayed with her for several years. Living over<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>twenty miles from my high school, I rose each
morning before the sun, hating the cold and the shock of it,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and went out to take the bus that ferried us
an hour along the coast to Santa Monica High School. In the late afternoons I
roamed the long beaches and dry hills of Malibu. With my brother Chris, then
six and seven, we went out to lean into the Santa Ana winds that came each fall
from the hills east of us, turning the sea flat and indigo blue and pushing
against us so strongly that we could lean diagonally into it, our arms held out
like airplane wings. Three more moves were made with my mother, but these came,
not from any urge to adventure, but as my mother’s new husband, Charlie Farrell
mounted the ladder of Hughes Aircraft promotions and invested in better houses.
We remained in the same familiar area. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">In
the first one, on Malibu Canyon Road, I learned to play beach volleyball,
babysat 10-year-old neighbor Christie Brinkley, and wore bikinis. At 15,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I gathered the admiring glances of older men
like talismans, bits of secret strength I planned to use only when needed one
day when I really wanted a man’s love, as if the power endowed by youthful
beauty were ever something one could store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For the time being, I remained as virginal as ever, an outsider to the
coy games of young people. The sea and sky and dun hills were still my balance
pole, my refuge.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimNz8svXtjP9hPR1ftC3d68RtR414ITp1_bNUcoLbOf4mV3Of8PK3l6XC2lVjdLsWbIsCugQVZ8-NQ1MiyeVfBt147jSqAaswzw3gIYkaEbQzT8lPO1wkzJrtT9YJjcjJ4n2BGjLWqOJNj/s1600/Picture2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="445" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimNz8svXtjP9hPR1ftC3d68RtR414ITp1_bNUcoLbOf4mV3Of8PK3l6XC2lVjdLsWbIsCugQVZ8-NQ1MiyeVfBt147jSqAaswzw3gIYkaEbQzT8lPO1wkzJrtT9YJjcjJ4n2BGjLWqOJNj/s320/Picture2.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>High school itself therefore came as a
shock to me at 14, a cultural dissonance so jarring it almost shattered me that
first year. I had always liked school. I liked carrying books and notebooks. I
loved reading and new knowledge. I had had good teachers, and was even jumped
by my elementary school teacher to fourth grade half way through my third grade
class. One English teacher in 6th grade was so inspiring, I went home and
manually copied our entire textbook of grammar rules into my own notebook, just
to see the pages fill. She taught us English with real devotion, from
diagramming sentences to punctuation to writing short stories. Every detail
mattered to her. The foundation she gave me was so strong it gave me almost
everything I needed years later when I in turn began to teach English to
immigrants and try my own hand at writing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">A
teacher in junior high invited me to come after school for lessons on the
philosophy of Plato. For the first time my mind examined philosophy and
understood there are questions to be asked, a bigger picture to stand back and
see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How are two differently shaped
tables still a table? How should a leader of men be trained?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I was 13, my algebra teacher turned out
to be a survivor of Auschwitz. She told us she had maintained her sanity as a
16-year-old there by working out theorems in her head. With her stories and
emotionally charged understanding of math, she made every formula feel
important and elegant. They had saved her life after all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">But
my first memory of Santa Monica High School is sitting in some risers with a
hundred other freshmen, being trained to follow the school cheers for the
football team by a male cheerleader. All around me other novice students roared
with faux enthusiasm, on cue, for a school we had all just entered a few days
before. Their bodies swayed in unison, their hands clapped on command. The
young man in front of us howled and spelled out words and strode back and
forth, orchestrating our responses with total self confidence. I sat stunned.
Every fiber of me was discomfited by this elaborate charade of emotion, fake
passion for a team I had never seen, a belonging I did not feel. I seemed to be
alone in my alienation. Young people swayed and followed the choreographed hand
gestures and chatted all around me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
we were released,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I went to the ladies
room and took two aspirin for a headache. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">In
the halls, as bells rang and students surged between classes, I felt buffeted
in the current. I remember lockers banging shut all along the walls as I
stopped to retrieve the books for the next class, struggling with my first<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>combination lock. In “home room,” speakers
blared with announcements and more false camaraderie. Listening to the
hectoring urgent voices, I came to understand I was now a tribal member of
Santa Monica High School. Samohi. Meant to be dedicated to screeching
encouragement as our “warriors” overcame our enemies on the field of play,
triumphing in debate clubs and spelling bees, obeying my roster of teachers,
following the dress code like a supplicant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My headaches became daily occurrences
and in the third week something broke. If found myself walking outside of
class, when all around me were rushing the other way. I came to the school’s
edge - there were not yet walls around Santa Monica High School - and I kept
walking. An odd hazy state had invaded my mind. I did not know why I was
walking and did not want to think about it. I went a mile and then another, and
found myself at last in Palisades Park, the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>mile long strip of green lawn and palm trees that runs along the top of
the cliffs above the sea in Santa Monica. I found a phone and fished a dime out
of my pocket. I came to understand how desperate I was only when I burst into
tears and found I could barely get the words out. “Hamp, come and get me,
please.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">What
my father did next, I will always be grateful for, and even more for what he
did not do. He did not take me right back to school. He did not read any riot
acts. He did not even frown at my truancy. Instead he arrived to rescue me in
his latest dilapidated Cadillac, leaving his much needed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>job to take care of his daughter who needed
him even more that day. He gave me a giant hug, and then took me to a most
remarkable place. The Fellowship Temple on Sunset Blvd is a vast parkland with
a quiet lake in the middle. Speakers hung from the trees and played soft
classical music. A charmingly overwrought Hindu temple graced the far end. The
discrete boxes placed here and there on the trail contained little cards with
helpful quotations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was in fact my first
exposure to eastern thought in any form and it soothed me back to sanity that
day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">I
dutifully let myself be bused back to Samohi the next day and found I could
bear it a little better. My English class in particular offered a place that
came to seem like refuge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This teacher
did not dither over grammer, but rather enthused over Thoreau and Emerson. I
was asked to ponder the Oversoul. And marvel at the simple crystalline life of
Thoreau on Walden Pond. He planted beans. He fished. He sat in the sun for
hours, simply present to the world. His life was a Buddhist meditation, though
neither he, nor I, nor even perhaps my teacher knew it at the time. Still, it
healed me to hear about him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">I
had other good English teachers as the years progressed. One in particular
introduced me to William Faulkner. I was assigned <u>The Sound and the Fury </u>and
went on to read almost all his other works on my own. I moved in a Faulknerian
trance for months as I did so, transported by his fierce clarion stories of
indomitable southerners, the diamond hard core of courage and dedication to
memory found in the shabbiest of his human characters. And the language! The
words just so, resplendent or plain, as the stories needed. I tried to emulate
him in torrents of purple prose and even gained an honorable mention for a story
of a southern boy in a shack - a world as far from my own experience as it
would be possible to imagine. I do wish now my teachers had been a bit more
exacting of those novice errors, but it was a beginning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">When
the second<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>year of school rolled around
I hadn’t yet made the lifelong friends I would soon find, but I had begun to
take an interest in school activities. We had frequent schoolwide “assemblies”
in which we all waited, pleased to be out of class, for whatever our earnest
young principal had planned for us. The first one was an account of his own
adventures as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. I have not forgotten the
highlight of his talk even today, five decades later, for he told us about his
tapeworm. When it was last removed, departing from his corpus inch by inch, it
was over a yard long, an image that brought shrieks of horrified delight from
even the most stoically cool teen among us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the following assembly, in November of
1963, was even harder to forget. It began as simply odd. An over-weight
middle-aged man had been invited to demonstrate his skills as a typist, typing
away on an old Underwood in front of a thousand restless sophomores, a
microphone set next to the keys as he kept time to a Beethoven symphony.
Whether he had more than that to dazzle us with I do not know for he had barely
gotten through a few bars when the principals’s assistant came to the mic and
stopped him. “Our President, John F. Kennedy,” she announced in a shaky voice,
“has been shot in Dallas. We are waiting for news but….” I am sure she had not
intended us to leave. But we knew who Kennedy was. We were teenagers, but we
had experienced his dramatic election. We had shuddered through the Cuban
missle crisis with him, understanding, for the first time in our sheltered
lives, that the danger of a nuclear war was real and not just a mockery-worthy
exercise in squeezing under our desks once a month. Defying his own advisors,
John Kennedy had steered us through this darkest passage. He had spoken in
Germany and challenged us to ask ourselves what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we, the young people, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>could
do for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">country</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of us idolized
him. Against the protests of teachers who tried to stop us, we simply rose as
one body and began to exit, most weeping in shock, blindly headed out, away
from this bearer of terrible news. Many of the boys in that class were soon to
become the first casualities of the Vietnam war, then just starting, but on
that day almost none of us knew anything of death. It was our first
bereavement. And like everything else emotional at 16, it hit us like a grenade
to the heart. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the others, I walked out of the
auditorium and kept going, and wept, and stayed at home in the days that
followed as the whole nation joined in an immense<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>spasm of sorrow. I think there were none who
did not stop what they were doing to watch the slow procession of horse
soldiers escort his casket up Pennsylvania Avenue to his funeral. Something
more than a great president was passing. We could all feel it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">My
life grew larger when I found my first real friend in high school, Kathy
Epling. She was new to everything at first, even more than I had been, for her
first years of puberty had been lived in Japan with her military family. She
was a pretty girl with a slight build and flipped blonde hair, courtesy of her
adamantly conformist parents, still wedded to the fifties. But she was
enthusiastically friendly, so very glad to find someone to talk to, someone who
loved nature and books as she did. She invited me to her home and showed me all
her pictures and told her stories. She read aloud to me her outstanding poetry.
And she shared her enhusiasm for the books she read, constantly and widely,
more than me. It was later revealed (by a counselor driving outside the lines)
that Kathy Epling had the highest IQ in our high school of 3000 students. Our
friendship, though we did not know it yet, was to become one of those rare
sisterhoods of spirit that last a lifetime. We did not always live so close by
as we did in those days, but she became the sister I did not have and stayed
that way until her death in 2016.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIW2moQZ0026nFt28BUTLqu_KzWF20op0LO80KlUwIpAJhodkGZHok9gKB4oXYQUx8CIZ7rJ29ymc9VuujpMbyAbMcDE4E-ZhDDVQFXGo5LrrOMSsPeV0cwXIvoDiBSVGD_HTgGSLY7Qzs/s1600/Picture3.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="377" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIW2moQZ0026nFt28BUTLqu_KzWF20op0LO80KlUwIpAJhodkGZHok9gKB4oXYQUx8CIZ7rJ29ymc9VuujpMbyAbMcDE4E-ZhDDVQFXGo5LrrOMSsPeV0cwXIvoDiBSVGD_HTgGSLY7Qzs/s320/Picture3.png" width="301" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">Together
we began to change, as the world around us entered a time now known as “the
Sixties” though it was already near the middle of that decade. It began, for
me, with a song that came one afternoon on the radio, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”
by the Beatles. Aside from learning how to do the “Twist,” I had barely noticed
the dawning of rock and roll before that song. I knew nothing of the rise of
this still obscure English rock group. But their song seized my mind like a
visitation. Today I listen to the same song and wonder at the karma of its
effect on my generation because little of its power is left for me now. But in
1964 I found it simply riveting. I wanted to listen to nothing else for days,
playing it over and over. There was another herald of change in those weeks. A
boy appeared in the central plaza of the high school with his hair to his
shoulders - a style that for us simply meant “hair like a girl’s.” It was such
a startling thing to see, we gathered around him a hundred strong, wanting to
know what on earth he was thinking. I cannot remember his answers, but soon
others were following. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">Girls,
including myself, began to role up our skirts at the waist, and to ask why we
were never allowed to come to school in pants. I remember the school’s first
reactions. A<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>group of girls known as the
“girls’ council” was delegated to examine miscreants like myself and decide on
punishment. I remember kneeling on the floor in front of their line of chairs,
as they checked to see whether or not my skirt touched the floor. It failed the
test and I frowned at their authority over me, though the punishment was only
an hour of after school “detention.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
the dam did not hold long. Soon there were special days in which girls were
allowed to come in pants. Hair was growing over shoulders everywhere and was
back combed into buffants above. Make up was reaching levels of application
that Cleopatra would have envied, and even I explored the magical powers of
false eyelashes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">The
main event in high school is, of course, falling in love. Solitary child of
nature that I was in those days, I was still no stranger to this emotion. I had
fallen in love with someone every year since the second grade, where my heart
was first broken by seven-year-old Steven, who invited me to be his partner in
the circle dance, “Pickin up Paw-paws, Put em in the Basket.” The very next
week, however, Steven fell under the Jezebel spell of my best friend Debbie. I
was left to take my chances as he heroically shielded Debbie with his own body
in our daily dodgeball games. Though I did develop a certain agility she
lacked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">In
the spring of my second year of high school, I was taken aback when a handsome
senior named Bob Hensley began to flirt in the biology class we shared. He was
blonde and tall and athletic, naturally graceful. I ran around the track in PE,
my head pivoting to keep Bob in view as he worked on pole vaulting. Though I
was still a sophomore, he invited me to his prom and held my hand as we, and
several thousand seniors from throughout the LA basin, were given the keys to
Disneyland for “senior night”. It was thrilling to walk by his side in that
shining place, something new to me to stay up all night and be “a girl on a
date with a senior.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But somehow, I was
simply too immature to go even the smallest step further. I found myself unable
to kiss Bob good-night, or let myself be kissed. I was nervous about it to such
a degree that, after a few more puzzled efforts, he gave up at last. Oddly, the
next boy that asked me out got that first kiss without a fuss. Strange karma.
The last I saw of Bob was after his graduation that June. He declared he was
going to go by a new name, Chad. He was going into military service, excited to
be flying the next week to an exotic place called Vietnam. I never learned if
he survived it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">The
next year a remarkable young man named Eric Thiermann sat next to me in Mr.
Freed’s Spanish class, and returned my smiles. The sangfroid of the current
generation was not much part of ours, or at least it was not a remotest quality
of mine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the Spanish teacher gently
teased me about my apparently obvious infatuation one day, I was so mortified,
I buried my head in my arms and would not look up until the bell rang to
release us from the class. Eric was made of sterner stuff though. After class,
he invited me to that year’s prom. I accepted before I even noticed the words
coming out of my mouth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">Eric
came from a large and uniquely active and creative family. His father was a
leader in the Quaker movement, his mother an artist. They lived in a large rambling
house with at least an acre of trees and brush in Topanga Canyon. Here Eric had
perfected his skills as a magician, with the cooperation of a long suffering
dove. Indeed demonstrating those skills made up the bulk of his speech when he
ran later that year for Student Vice President and the dove lifted from a top
hat to fly about the auditorium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
opponent’s campaign promise to push for a pickle in our cafeteria hamburgers
did not hold a candle. Everyone began to adore Eric, both that year and even
more the next when he became class president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">That
first step into stardom had not yet come for him when he invited me out,
however. Though he didn’t show it, I think he was as nervous as I was, for he
revealed the fact that he and his father had rehearsed the procedure of the
whole evening to come, even making reservations at an elegant Mexican
restaurant in downtown LA where I was to be treated to a post prom dinner. As
for me, in the days before, my mother took me off to a salon for evening gowns.
I don’t remember ever truly dressing up before that, and I had no opinions on
style yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My mother purchased an
alarming gold extravaganza, so stiff and voluminous it pretty much stood up by
itself if you set it on the floor. Living in Malibu, we had several near
neighbors who were well-known actors and even more who were Hollywood support
professionals. A make-up artist who had given Joan Crawford her thick eyebrows
was invited in to do my make up. My long red brown hair was coiffed and sprayed
for the first time in my life. My eyebrows soon rivalled Joan’s. Red
lipstick<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was liberally applied . My
beach adapted feet were coffined in shiny black three inch high heels. I was
still staring at myself in shock in the bedroom mirror when Erik rang the
doorbell, orchid corsage held up in mute offering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I came to stand before him, he looked in
dismay at my gold satin bosom, where he was meant to pin it, but my mother and
a cousin stepped in to help. Then it was a great relief to leave all the
fluttering adults behind and get into his old car. We drove south on Highway 1
in stunned silence for a time and then, as I myself had rehearsed, not wanting
to appear shallow, I opened the conversation by asking him his thoughts on
death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">The
evening did improve however. When we got to the venue, I made a beeline for the
ladies room. I pulled my hair down and let it hang down my back to my waist. I
washed my face free of most of the congealing make-up. I put my high heels in a
corner and went out to dance. My dress still quivered like a giant bowl of
golden jello, but we did have fun. Then it was time to go to the
restaurant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here the manager informed
us, to Eric’s mortification, that in the evening the restaurant was also a bar
and underage persons could not be admitted. But it didn’t matter. Neither of us
was hungry. We drove instead to the grass hills of UCLA and ran under the
moonlight in our finery, laughing. A night to remember. Unfortunately when the
next school dance came around, a “girl ask boy” dance,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>my chronic shyness again hobbled me. I
struggled for two weeks to gather my courage to ask him to go with me but could
not. Another girl asked him, and he accepted. Linda Deutsch, who played the
violin beautifully and had soulful dark eyes and bobbed black hair, became his
girlfriend for the rest of our time in high school. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">My
mind shifts through the long forgotten photo cards of memory for more of those
days and finds only flashes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pairs
volleyball on the beach, and my ace serve that knocked men back on their heels,
if they stopped it at all, silent punishment for the condescension they so often
showed women athletes in those days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Good girl, you got it!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a
time, in Malibu, and later in college, I was indeed an athlete, playing
serious volleyball 20+ hours a week. Outplaying the casual male players who
showed up, certain that no woman at any level of skill could out-do them at
anything, was my recompense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember
trying out for the lead in the school play, Sound of Music. For days I had
practiced alone the soaring lyrics of “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of
Music.” I was ever more confident my mezzo soprano voice would impress them. I
had, after all, sung musicals alone, playing all parts, for years, when no
adults were home. When I stood up to sing before others in an auditorium,
however, things went awry. The directors indeed seemed impressed with my first
lines. But they noticed what I had not, that in learning the song directly from
a record, I had learned it with Julie Andrew’s British accent. When they asked
me to sing with an American accent, I was so undone, only a squawk came out,
and no amount of sympathetic urging could unfreeze my vocal cords. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN">Odd
how these roads not taken come back to me now, as I enter the last chapters of
my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At 17 almost every day is a
crossroads, though you do not recognize it until later. So much that happened
then shaped my life. But so much more that was to form me was still to come.
College and the full sea change of “The Sixties”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>lay straight ahead. And life offers no
re-dos.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-37156868939700157082018-11-23T14:20:00.003-08:002018-11-23T14:20:57.151-08:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Facing Samsara</span></h3>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlxPS3qtg4j7v7ib0fS26TFijjPGQJtN8KgWFyu3pEd1DYnvXOnYNioRE_hKn9ole4WNeKhzXc9D6dWVu-niIx7iiogMUDJJh7h0-a04qsSxuoSkd3tgTB-rDw_DQS0sC3XxNByPoI-KT0/s1600/ghostly+dancers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1209" data-original-width="1600" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlxPS3qtg4j7v7ib0fS26TFijjPGQJtN8KgWFyu3pEd1DYnvXOnYNioRE_hKn9ole4WNeKhzXc9D6dWVu-niIx7iiogMUDJJh7h0-a04qsSxuoSkd3tgTB-rDw_DQS0sC3XxNByPoI-KT0/s400/ghostly+dancers.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">When I feel overwhelmed by the horror of the fate that has overtaken certain people in the news today, certain groups, or certain animals and even ecosystems, it helps me sometimes to walk my mind toward it rather than away. We have been born into a reality in which everything and everyone is impermanent. There is no person or animal that will not die after enough days have passed, most often in discomfort and fear. Samsara is a rough neighborhood. Looking around me, I rem</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">ind myself that every single person i see will experience death within a hundred years. Most in far less. Every single cute toddler, wagging puppy, noble elephant, whispering pine. Every friend will be lost, or will lose me. Every bit of my youthful beauty, my possessions, my wealth will be lost. Even the memory of me in the mind of others will fade and disappear. It is the way this place works, the reason the Buddha left his palace, the first Noble Truth. He went out to seek an answer to the terrible realization of the suffering all around him. He finally grasped that holding tightly to whatever has come to feel precious and safe cannot help anyone in the end. What does? Loving others. Helping wherever we can. Seeking wisdom that is bigger than one lifetime. Gaining the rare and difficult power of focused attention. What else is there to do after all, with this time here we have been given?</span>ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-16333993225499109952018-10-28T16:49:00.001-07:002019-09-14T13:27:59.039-07:00<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<b>When Monsters are Real</b></h3>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOamE6pl_bTs4JCl_k7hscQuPHiwgjEpyJmaVlqwQl0vZRCVq56j1a4IxvJcuCzorJnvjBCJLKw-wdYox6c4K-bnLGLSrKY17oZ6vusY22FAzGAjWkTrcpZiHOuF-HEoZ1a3E3m83_DLtW/s1600/hieronymus+bosch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="800" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOamE6pl_bTs4JCl_k7hscQuPHiwgjEpyJmaVlqwQl0vZRCVq56j1a4IxvJcuCzorJnvjBCJLKw-wdYox6c4K-bnLGLSrKY17oZ6vusY22FAzGAjWkTrcpZiHOuF-HEoZ1a3E3m83_DLtW/s320/hieronymus+bosch.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<div>
It seems I almost died four weeks ago now. Though that realization has grown on me only slowly. A stomach ache came and went over a weekend in late September and then started to grow in earnest. An ambulance came to collect me on Monday night. I left behind my 95 year old mother with my cousin Patricia and went off to place my life in the hands of strangers. The monster I had dreaded since reading in my teens a vivid description of a medieval man's miseries with gall stones was now upon me. My doctor had actually warned me I had stones in there, but I had had them for years with no consequence. It seems 30% of Americans carry them. Not all, fortunately, will have to meet the monster. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Oddly, there is a certain peace that comes with acute crises. One lives utterly in the moment, intent on the drip by drip revelation of new experiences. "Beginner's mind," Zen priest David Suzuki called it. Curtains were drawn around me in the ER. I watched the staff appear and disappear as I listened deep inside to the ruin afoot. The nurses in the ER were brusque, ever busy and matter of fact, but also kind. The pain was growing. And nausea began. By the time i received a room, I had entered the full anguish of pain and vomiting brought about by an unknown foe. But even then, some part of me was able to simply watch, dispassionate and intrigued. Was it Buddhist training? Or what all people experience? I listened in the night to the mysterious sounds of my acute care unit, of others, unknown but nearby, suffering as I was. On the other side of a rigid plastic wall divider, a woman next door moaned and then made phone calls to a lover and then a friend. I could feel the thick fabric at my shoulder shift as she moved against it. I vomited again. In the end, though we had listened for hours to each other's misery, I never saw her. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The drugs began Monday night after nurses had struggled to gain entrance to my apparently vein free arms for an IV connection. Bruises and blood. Anti-nausea medication eased the worst then, and Dilaudid for pain. When they were administered in sequence, I floated and slept. But it was when I woke and lay with my eyes shut that the strangest part of my experiences there unfolded. There were images behind my closed eyes, almost but not quite as visible as they would have been if my eyes were open. Several times I did open them to check if some shadow or change in light was affecting me but the answer was always no. When I kept them closed, and focused my eyes on the imagery that came, I had a frontline seat to Dante's inferno. Or perhaps, one friend suggested, the universal unconscious, or was it the bowels of creation? I would very much like to know, because I was not causing these images. I had never seen or imagined them and indeed i could not change them even when I tried. The strongest element was texture, darkly sparkling earth, or kelp or shag carpet or cliffs of moving dark tendrils. Water poured out everywhere, foul or muddied, torrents of excrement, mud with small rocks, or simply water. And everywhere there was heaving movement, fecundity, primal creation or decay. Half made faces emerged from the moving earth, pink flesh lumped and unformed with only an eye or a nostril fully made. Skulls, fantastically lined elderly faces with eyes closed, copulating couples, infants, demons, animals and innocents. The moving earth or waving tendrils of grass or fabric folded them ever deeper into crevices, or writhed slowly open, revealing them. The images were of intricate dark beauty, detail beyond detail. A goat appeared purple and blue, and then a fox with a fantastic fringe of carved ivory rising from his ruff. Faces dead or those being born, I could not tell. Eerie in the luminous dark, like the cocaine dreams of a great artist. What on earth was I looking at? Once the dark purples and blues and reds and blacks, the muted greens, were replaced with imagery entirely of bronzed gold. A hill of sand lit by a hidden sun. Figures rose from the sand, made of sand, and the wind rose and blew them once again into non-existence, back into the hill. These images occupied my mind for much of the time I was alone and awake in the room. I could not make them stop and wondered if I was seeing the bardo. If I concentrated on changing them or even just lightening them, faint sparks flickered deep in the distance, that was all.<br />
<br />
All was not grim, however. My nurses were kind. One in particular, Bob, is an old friend, a fellow Buddhist who is a nurse and has cared for my father on previous visits. His gentle humor and help with the temperamental IV made the suffering much less.<br />
<br />
There were tests on Tuesday. A surgeon, Dr. Brian Waddle, appeared with brief questions, and disappeared. "You are so lucky," Bob assured me. "He is the best." I later learned I was to be taken into surgery on an emergency basis on Wednesday morning. Blood tests showed the battle against infection was rising to critical levels in my body, though I had no fever yet. It was still contained, but now felt like something about to break open. The surgery on Wednesday morning showed why. I was put completely under, unlike my joint replacements. As I came back to consciousness, there was no sense of time having passed. I only remember the staff muttering about how bad it - my misbehaving gall bladder - had been as they repositioned my limp body in the recovery room. Indeed though no stones were blocking any ducts, the whole organ had been black and <i>gangrenous</i>. A word to strike fear indeed, the name of my monster. Dr. Waddle, returned briefly the next morning, and assured me we do not particularly need gall bladders, and that mine was now gone, incipient stones and all. Amoxicillin was prescribed to deal with the left over infection and so it has.<br />
<br />
They sent me home Thursday, so weak I could barely walk, following the hospital's new early release policy in the age of MRSA infections and merciless insurance companies. I was frightened to leave so early, but, indeed, it lifted my spirits and dimmed my Hieronymous Bosche eyelid show to sit on my front porch in the sunshine a while. In my absence, Patricia and George had managed, with considerable strain, they later shared, to keep my mother going for two days. But it was my brother Chris who arrived like the cavalry and stayed to save the day. After telling them he could not help, he had changed his mind and flown to their rescue all the way from a job assignment in Pennsylvania. For eight days he stayed with mom and me, a perfect kind carer for both of us, even while maintaining his work schedule as a computer network tech from my kitchen table. He endured with perfect calm and kindness mom's dementia eccentricities (she often thought he was an old boyfriend) and incontinence and my inability to help for several days. This was a brother, an ally, that I did not know I had. If this illness brought anything good, it was this above all, to regain that severed connection.<br />
<br />
So that is my story dear reader. There were more tumultuous days before it all settled down. Wildly oscillating blood pressure, a drainage tube that left a pain in my side for days when it was removed. More monsters scuttled under the bed for those days and left me sleepless far into restless nights. Would one of them emerge to become real? Twice I reached a level of panic that believed one had. But in the end, after a visit to the Land of Medicine Buddha they all receded. Bodily strength and health returned. Hieronymous is back in the museum where he belongs. And I am left with my life, and apparently even my health, and great gratitude to all who helped me recover it.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-74041383154574129062018-07-27T23:20:00.002-07:002019-03-16T15:19:43.732-07:00<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN">Child of Zorro <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2157cd19-7fff-df03-6174-a9e8ff327202"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Life in my father’s house was life in a pirate’s lair, or the hideout of Zorro. Everywhere there were riches, the kind that fill a child’s heart and mind. There was a real shrunken head from the Amazon, with three inch black hair and a face like a walnut. From China, there was a wooden carving of an uncharacteristically stern-faced Kwan Yin standing within a tiny wooden house whose doors latched with brass. There were crabs, sealed in amber. There was a large picture of a serene topless woman emerging from a base of jade with a crown topped by a basket of fruit and flowers. Bookcases were everywhere, cobbled of giant grey bricks and golden cedar boards, bursting with books of art and stories and history. Mexican ranchero music or classical symphonies filled the rooms - Swann Lake by Tschiakovsky, rolling waves of basso piano by Rachmaninof and the heart rending violins of Sheherezade. To go along with them, , were stories of princes and princesses,courtesy of my father’s imagination, Peter and the Wolf, or the classic tale of the Sheik’s new wife who saved her own life by her ability to tell endlessly fascinating stories. One day when i was only seven, he told me all about Noche Triste, when the Spaniards fled the Aztec army by night and died in the canals of Tenochtitlan, for my father was mesmerized by Mexico. At last, at bed time, “Hamp” would sit by my bed and make up another installment of the adventures of Cesca and her friend, Oscar the Octopus and engage in mock battles with me, our hands arranged with four fingers down for horses’ feet and the middle finger raised as a horse head, galloping across the folds of the blankets. </span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2157cd19-7fff-df03-6174-a9e8ff327202"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the back yard were Hamp’s projects. One month it was all the objects he had gathered to try and seal those tiny crabs into wax made to look like amber. This was a gruesome but, to me at three, fascinating failure, as the tiny crabs died in their bucket and disintegrated. Months of stone pounding followed, as Hamp conceived the notion to gouge holes in basalt rocks and sell them as bohemian candle holders. One day, with hoots of triumph, he invented the submarine sandwich (though, alas, he never marketed his eureka moment). On Saturdays, he washed down our car with a hose in the hot sun, and I stomped through the puddles and shrieked with joy when he turned the hose toward the sky and let it rain down on me. When real storms came, he would take my mother and me onto the breakwater, to hunker down as the waves crashed and sprayed us. He taught me to leap confidently between slanted rock faces almost as soon as I could run. </span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2157cd19-7fff-df03-6174-a9e8ff327202"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did not know it then, but I was living with a man who had created himself in opposition to almost all he had grown up with. The life first handed him as a boy was anything but Bohemian and free, for my father was a child of the original Mormons. His great grandfather, Jonathan Hampton, was a carpenter with Brigham Young when they were both converted, and was among his original circle in their first migrations. He died of exposure guarding Joseph Smith. Hamp’s great-grandmother, Julia Foster, after Jonathan’s death and many travails, became one of Brigham Young’s wives. For a time, she was in charge of the “Lion House” where most of his 50 spouses lived. Her son by Jonathan was named after Brigham Young and served as the sheriff of Salt Lake City through the years of turmoil when the federal government pushed hard into their polygamous haven. This Brigham Young Hampton himself had three wives and many children by them. He served time in his own jail more than once, courtesy of the feds. His last wife, a 19 year-old English girl who ran away to follow Mormon preachers, eventually served as warden of the city jail, after losing four children in two months to diptheria. In pictures of her in middle age, her mouth is hard as iron. They all seemed to have mouths like that, men and women both. It was not a time for free spirits or easy living. </span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2157cd19-7fff-df03-6174-a9e8ff327202"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My father’s first memories were of Salt Lake. He showed me pictures of a house on a hill down which he slid his homemade toboggan in winter and watched in summer as ice was delivered in cut blocks to his mother’s ice box, wrapped in hay and carried in wagons down from the high lakes. The first black box telephones hung on kitchen walls. His father was a cattleman, a broker, who traveled the western states buying beefstock to send by train to the hungry cities of the west. His mother, a distant descendent of Scottish royalty, was a school teacher. And when the two argued on how best to raise him, it was she who won, giving him his first ecstatic taste of good books and classical music in the weekly radio broadcasts of the Mormon symphonic choir. His father, he told me, withdrew from the field and rarely taught him anything. This left him as an adult bereft of the handy skills most men of his generation regarded as normal. He could barely wield a hammer. I remember one of the earliest pictures of his childhood, a baby looking up round-eyed into the face of his other grandfather, David Crockett Stuart, a rebel calvalryman who had also converted to Mormonism after the Civil War. There is another, years later, of a gangly boy of 10 in overalls with a thatch of black hair and ears that stick out, standing in a field, the one which, in winter, he so proudly used for his toboggan. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There were no snowy fields where he raised me, only sunny beaches. And both of those stern great-grandfathers were gone, as well as my paternal grandparents. There was no formality in our house, nor church on the weekends. As early as four I was alllowed to roam with great freedom. My friends and I chalked hop scotch grids onto the hot cement of the Manhattan Beach strand, a wide sidewalk with a low wall that marked the line between the beach towns and the wide white sand beach that fronts Los Angeles for miles. We swung on the baby swings on the sand near my house, my friends and I, or hiked off to what seemed then a formidable distance to the “big swings” two blocks away. On these we swung for an hour at a time, pumping upward into the blue sky and sliding back to earth hanging upside down, our blonde hair tickling the sand as we reached the nadir of each arc. To explore In the other direction was to come to the mysterious fogged windows of the Hilton Hotel “plunge,” a large indoor pool. We climbed up into the indented windowsills and tried to make out the misted figures of people unfathomably swimming indoors when the shining Pacific beckoned only yards away. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One day I went a bit further. Another half block to a children’s bookstore. Here I found a giant book called </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Grasshopper and the Ants</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and settled down happily to read. When the owner realized how young I was, and unaccompanied, he called the police. When the officer urged me into his car, I hung onto this book and somehow it came with me, a kindness, I now realize, from the owner. I was only a few blocks from home, and not lost, but the officer drove me back and saw me home safe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That night, my father and I poured over the giant pages and the vivid drawings, all about the grasshoppers and the ants. We laughed together about how we both would rather be the live-gloriously-for-today grasshopper than one of the dull industrious ants who had to take him in when winter came. In every way this was how we were living. When Hamp went off each day to university and then to work, in those days selling encyclopedias door to door, or insurance, it was as if the human ants of the real world were determined to try and shape him into someone he wanted with all his heart not to be. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was on the weekends that my father recovered himself. Friends from college came over for raucous joyful parties, animatedly sharing talk of Picasso or Chagall or giggling over Sigmund Freud’s pronouncements on sex. They listened to jazz and endlessly flirted. In the summertimes, there was volleyball and beer and red wine on the beach and for me, long culinary experiments with stirring sand soup at the water’s edge, or dripping it into castle battlements. In the winters, as the big swells thundered onto the shore in front of us, Hamp, would take me out to the seawalls to duck as the waves shattered against the breakwater and spray drenched us from above. He began to bring home the first of hundreds of children’s books from the library for me to devour, a half dozen every week. I was four when he and my mother began to bicker over money and his flirtations with other women. Their marriage ended eventually and they began to live a few blocks apart. But I moved back and forth between them almost weekly and, loved so well, remember no suffering from their parting. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was when he was 11 years old, that my father’s Salt Lake City childhood had begun to darken. His beloved mother, Stella, developed a headache that would not abate, and took to her bed. She was never to rise from it healthy again, though her invalidism lasted two years before she died. It was determined at her autopsy that her tumor could indeed have been excised safely if they had taken the chance, but they did not. The loss of his safe world and the loving, educated woman at the heart of it affected my father profoundly. He became withdrawn, and barely spoke. He also suffered horribly from migraines caused by allergies to both chocolate and safflower oil, though it was years til he realized the connection. These migraines left him sick and stunned many days each month, and cut him off from other boys his age. The medicines doctors gave him put him into a mental fog, unable to perform at school. His classmates, ironic in their cruelty, nicknamed him “Speed.” His widowed father at last left Salt Lake City behind, taking Hamp and his younger sister Bernice to Long Beach California to start a new life. With cattle train cars to monitor, he took his children to live with his sisters on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles as he himself found an apartment on the mainland.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In spite of all these traumatic changes, Catalina was the making of my father. The island was wild then, a windswept landscape of scrub-covered hills and ravines, eucapyptus and vivid blue bays below tall cliffs. Giant wild goats roamed the hills, and in the south, there were the surviving remnants of the buffalo, brought there to recover their numbers. The Wrigley family owned the island then. They and everyone else who lived on Catalina were all in Avalon. True wilderness waited beyond the ridges which circled the town.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hamp’s aunts doted on him and his sister Bernice. He found friends and began to roam the hills, growing stronger by the month, and wilder. The migraines receded and as a teen, he found himself tall and wryly good-looking, with a sharp intelligence and a physical prowess that startled the boys who had once called him “Speed.” He kept the nickname, but now they meant it. With these friends, he would earn money when the tourists on the big ferry threw sparkling coins into the crystalline waters of Avalon Harbor and clapped their hands in delight as the lithe island boys dived for them. With his best friend Paul Shonafelt, Hamp took his love of the sea further and began to dive for abalone. They rented a large open boat that came with a primitive dive suit topped by a metal head piece that filled with air pumped from above. (So risky that its owner later died while using it). When that palled, they hunted goats with rifles and cooked them over open fires. When they were home, these handsome beach boys of wild Catalina also drew the attention of young women coming over on the yachts. Sixteen now, with the worldwide tumult the 1930’s seeming far away, my someday father regularly took girls from the yachts to the weekend dances in the great round of the Avalon ballroom that still overlooks the point. By the end of those last two years on the island, he told me, he had made out with a girl in every alcove of the upper balcony.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This self-reliance and love of nature gained on Catalina became part of the heritage my father passed on to me. As I grew towards adolescence, I remember no rules about where I could go when I left my front door. The untamable Pacific held my riveted attention from the very beginning, a refuge from all the tangles of human life at my back. When I was about ten, my mother fell in love with a man named Charlie Farrell and became pregnant by him. He was a Catholic and neither his family nor the church would approve their union without a formal papal dispensation. Amidst the years of painful dramas that followed, I moved in with my father full time in Manhattan Beach. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We lived at first in a sandy lot in a round-roofed quonset hut, a left over from WWII. I remember at age ten washing the dishes, looking out of its windows at the beach far below, marveling to consider I was now the “lady of the house.” I had never willingly washed a dish before. Now the act seemed cloaked in new dignity. I went mad and even made my bed and then his. Each afternoon after school, while my father was still at work, I turned on our record player to play musicals like The King and I and Kismet and learned every role and every song. These I sang at the top of my lungs doing the dishes. Sometimes I enacted whole plays by myself. I felt myself a free woman, not a child. I was mistress of our house. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I grew older still, I roamed for miles along the enormous sweep of beach below, riding my bike with my best friend Susan West and her brother Peter. Some days, I ran with a pack of dogs who came together to explore the shore in the mornings. In the summers, I swam with my friends at least five hours a day with no parent in attendance for any of us. My father made a stab at getting me sitters sometimes, as he very often went out to parties in the evenings, but to me their presence was only puzzling. I remember one night, bored with lying in my bed, I peeked out of my room about 10pm to find my unwanted sitter asleep. I stole out of the house and went happily down to the long abandoned beach, gleaming in moonlight. I walked along its shore a mile north to where an oil tanker pier reached out from the city of El Segundo. It was not made for pedestrians, and certainly not for the public. To walk on it meant holding onto water pipes as I ducked under a roof that held rail cars and placed my feet carefully along the top of the great rounded pipe that held the oil. I made my way out to where the waves broke just below the oil pipe, spraying my feet in their charge through the pier’s stanchions, exploding in foam at one set of pillars after another. When I had had enough, I climbed back under the pier and then back along the empty mile of shoreline. By midnight I had slipped back into my bed, the sitter still unaware. I was eleven years old. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My father left Catalina when he was 18, but the seeds planted there had already defined his life to come. One was a fierce yearning to be more than the cattlemen and ranchers and country sheriffs he came from. He wanted no part of the missionaries sent time and again by the church in Salt Lake to woo him back. He studied the lives of the islands’ visitors, and what moved him most was their education, the sense of a wider world they brought to the island. He yearned to go to college, to study history and art and know more of what they knew. And from them he learned about beauty and about love. Indeed, he fell in love over and over as the young women came and left. In the great symphonies of the time, the music of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky Korsakov and Glazunov, he heard his own secret heart. Finally, with talk of a possible war in Europe finally reaching even the island, he learned to admire military strength. One afternoon in 1936 he was riveted by a submarine that rose for a day of R and R in Avalon harbor, and only months later he left the island as the navy’s newest recruit. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For three years he sailed with them, feeling the thrill of loading the big guns of the destroyer West Virginia and learning morse code so well in the radio room he could decode incoming messages as easily as words being spoken. He also learned the sting of humiliation as, in port after port, middle class girls scorned his status as a lowly navy private in favor of officers with college educations. It only reinforced his determination to pull himself up by his bootstraps. When his tour was over, he was demobilized from the West Virginia in New York and made his way back to Long Beach, burning with the need to start college. He worked for his father from time to time, riding rail cars full of lowing cows back to the distribution centers of LA. He learned how to fly a small plane and got his pilot’s license. And at last, he attended Long Beach City college and then got accepted into The University of California at Los Angeles. His first major there was Latin American studies, for he had conceived a dream to own a plantation in Brazil. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hitler and Tojo, however, had other ideas of course, ideas that derailed the dreams of half his generation. My father never made it to Brazil. It was war on two continents that instead dominated his youth. Their impact on him, however, was not the story you may be expecting. Though he was already a trained veteran and an eager soldier, and was to follow the doings of soldiers all his life, my father was handed a startlingly different fate for the times. By the end of seven years of military service, he had never served a day overseas, even all through WWII, nor fired a gun in anger. When the attack on Pearl Harbor came, his destroyer, the West Virginia, was the first boat sunk (with very first Japanese bomb actually blowing through the radio room where he had once worked), but Ralph Hampton was not sitting in it. He had already been demobilized. Attending college, in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, he assumed he would be called up again. Having just got out of the military, however, and so very hungry for learning, he kept on at his classes, intensely following the news, and waited to be called. Months went by and no call up came. Still it was only a matter of time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At last in 1944, wanting to serve but also to avoid the infantry, he applied to the Air Force, keeping to himself the affliction of his migraines - now down to one every month or two. When they loaded his system with the shots given to new recruits, however, he fell ill with the worst one of his life and only confessed what it was after three days when his doctor began to speculate that brain surgery might be called for. Thus was the door to a pilot’s life closed. The infantry it was. And yet the army, for some reason known only to its overworked clerks, overlooked his previous training and started him off from scratch again. He went to several training locations until at last, in 1944, he was sent to Fresno California. And here his life took another unexpected turn. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At 26, my father was already a romantic to the most intense degree. He had already been in love several times, each time rocked to his adolescent socks. Yet still, he once confided to me, even in his mid twenties, he was a gentleman and a technical virgin, yearning, as he was to yearn all his life, after the image of a perfect woman. When he was posted to Fresno, for a time at least, he found her. In the library of Fresno State College, he and his friend, on a day leave from their base, came upon my mother, Lenore Patricia Joint, working on her homework. Here was a red haired blue-eyed beauty, a smart girl going to college, a lively funny charming girl who totally swept him into euphoria, for she returned his instant ardor. Every day he could get away he came to see her, taking her for long bike rides and sodas at the Five and Dime. The fact that she had a beau already serving in the military did not faze him. “All’s fair in love and war,” he wrote her. “I’m going to keep heckling you.” He was in love. On weekends, when he could manage, he also went down to see his father in Long Beach. He would travel back in his father’s most recently disgarded old Lincoln, the poetry of Omar Khayyam perched on the wheel spokes as he drove north, memorizing the verses with the wind in his hair and my future mother in his heart. “Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness - And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He was driving home from such a trip, pushing his luck by being AWOL a few hours, when the call came for his unit to ship out. Now. The buddy who was supposed to call him to come back in time should this happen wasn’t even able to get to a phone. When my father arrived back at the base, still starry-eyed from his journey, all the friends he had trained with for months were gone, on their way to the bloody forests of the Ardenne to try and hold the embattled front line at the Battle of the Bulge. Novice soldiers thrown against veterans, most of them died there. Back in Fresno, my father sat stunned in the empty barracks, hoping to be sent after them but, after a reprimand and brief punishment, he learned he had simply become a man without a unit. After weeks of consternation, his final assignment for the duration of the war became a lonely telegraph station in the desert near Tucumcari New Mexico. Here he worked at night under a sky brilliant with stars, passing messages between ships at sea and military units in combat - feeling the terrible hum of war all over the globe and yet utterly apart from it. It was a frustration that stung him all his life. Had his life NOT gone this way, however, I would never have been born. Had he not had the unique childhood and youth that he had, I would not have had mine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Child psychologists in America today tell us a stable home life is essential for children’s mental health, a house number that remains ever the same, routine in all things, standardized “consequences” and layers of security. They would wrap children in a comfort blanket of familiarity and boundaries and have parents follow neat algorithms for punishment and rewards and endless planned activities. I cannot imagine a childhood more different from my own and I am deeply grateful these ideas were not even close to what my Hamp or my mother Lenore followed. They just loved me. They trusted my honesty and my abilities and let me know it every day. They listened. My father’s parenting was simply the passionate wish to share all that had come to hold beauty and meaning for him as soon as I could grasp it. We shared it together. Zorro became my very best friend and stayed that way all his life. </span></div>
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-34194310597790361352016-05-22T17:47:00.002-07:002016-05-26T14:30:57.886-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>From the Overlander Project: Traveling Blind</b></span></span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-3da41b1f-db12-8ee0-341c-a6bb96e7a7d8" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It began when i was still a child of seven or so, I cannot now remember exactly when. It continued into my twenties. When I woke, still standing in a dream, the feeling would start, a piercing of the heart, a yearning, an anguish. It was not there every morning, but frequently, and when it was, the sensation could become so strong at times it was almost physical pain - but not quite. It was so demanding of my emotions it was like fresh grief - but not quite. While it lasted, it was so unsettling that the sensation itself was a kind of pain. I would lie there asking the feeling to reveal what it was. Was I sad? Sorry? Guilty? Sick? I had, and still have, no words to offer for it. In a few minutes the sensation would fade, even as I still stretched my mind toward it, trying to understand the message - in vain. The only way I can explain it is that it is what I imagine a person might feel who had fallen perfectly in love with someone, and then suffered amnesia. Great loss - without the hint of a referent. It was only when i began to study Buddhism that the mysterious feeling stopped. Interestingly, when I slack off on my practice for long, it returns, a bodily signpost. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Buddhist lamas have a teaching story of a giant sea turtle who swims the oceans of the world. On the surface is a golden ring, tossed in waves, swirled in currents, drifting endlessly. The turtle is not looking for the ring; indeed, he is blind. His chances of encountering it are further reduced by the fact that he rises to the surface only once in a hundred years. Yet given the vastness of time, and the endless nature of the experience of consciousness, the day will come when, without knowing where he is, the turtle will rise to the surface and find his blind face lifted precisely through that golden circle. That is the likelihood, the teachings say, that a person living at random will experience a “perfect human rebirth,” a birth in which one is born into that very precise set of situations in which one might be able to find a true path to Enlightenment, appreciate its value in time, and practice it to its end. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We do find our way to birth, of course, again and again reaching blindly for life. The lamas say we are born as insects, as animals, as hell beings, as hungry spirits, or even as long-lived gods who are condemned to exhaust their wonderful karma in the course of long pleasant years and descend again to a hellish next life. Once in a very great while, we take birth as a human being. This, they emphasize, is the most fortunate of births, for it provides the critical elements of incentive and choice that the others lack: the incentive of enough suffering that one yearns to find a way out of it, and occasionally, a real chance to change one’s course, if only one can figure out which way to go. Being born into a human life, it is as if the tortoise, just a little, cracks open those blind eyes and sees where he was, yet still has no knowledge of even the existence of a gold ring, let alone its whereabouts. And human birth contains its own perils. One may be born in a place of constant danger, warfare or criminality. One may be born crippled, or ill, or into great poverty, where one’s only thought each day is to find a way to live to the next. One may be born with ordinary comforts, but waste the precious days of life pursuing phantoms of desire or anger, or simple trivia, clutching at appearances with no more essence than smoke until the day one’s own body fails, and in hours or days, is turned again to dust. One may be born rich and comfortable, but into a family or a culture which places no value on wisdom. In many human situations, one may be encouraged, even forced, into actions which take one down again, to the the lowest realm of that endless sea of births and deaths. And the misery goes on. When I look back on my life, therefore, I see it as rare good fortune to have stumbled upon the signposts I did. I was, after all, traveling blind.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Signpost #1</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is 1971 and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am 23 years old, leaning against a wall in a bus station in Amsterdam. In my lap I hold a book by the Bengali poet Rabindinrath Tagore. I smile with pure pleasure as i visualize life in ancient India by the flickering light of his imagery and metaphors. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ah, who was it coloured that little frock, my child, and covered</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">your sweet limbs with that little red tunic?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You have come out in the morning to play in the courtyard,</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">tottering and tumbling as you run.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But who was it colored that little frock, my child?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What is it makes you laugh, my little life-bud?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Mother smiles at you standing on the threshold.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She claps her hands and her bracelets jingle, and you dance</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">with your bamboo stick in your hand like a tiny little shepherd.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From Rabindinrath Tagore “The Unheeded Pageant”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have never found a writer who delights me more. I have carried the book with me for weeks, my secret treasure. But on that day, distracted by the crowd as I rise, I lose it. Yet even as I mourn, that very same day I find another book, left behind by another traveler. It is Evans Wentz’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tibetan Book of the Dead.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In the end it is this second book I carry the rest of the journey, and struggle to understand when I read. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha. Thine own consciousness, not formed into anything, in reality void, and the intellect, shining and blissful, -- these two, -- are inseparable. The union of them is the Dharma-Kāya state of Perfect Enlightenment.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Tibetan Book of the Dead Or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">English translation by Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup Compiled and Edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Signpost 2:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is 1973 and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am 25-years old, living in Hermosa Beach, California, in a house I share with my father. Curious, I have purchased a book called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pillars of Zen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and read a few pages. I close the book, pleased with its clear instructions, and prop it in the windowsill of my tiny gabled bedroom window. The breaking edge of the Pacific is far away and barely visible, the restless immensity of the ocean lost in the dark beyond. I am alone in the house, my father out for the evening, but I think I have the idea now, of how to meditate. I straighten my back, setting my legs and hands in the cross-legged pose described by the book. I lower my chin to gaze with half-closed eyes in front of me. I light a candle and stare into it, hoping for magic. The room blurs. The fire grows large and fuzzy as my staring eyes grow moist. My heart pounds briefly with expectation. The angels stay away.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Soon after that I began the second of my long journeys. This time I headed west, across the Pacific, working my way towards the Asia. I was 26, and had $2000 dollars I had saved to round the world. My parents fretted, but traveling like this as a young person without a real itinerary or a plan is a rare opportunity to open oneself to change, to possibility, even to a kind of magic. You skim above myriad set lives, each rooted in place as solidly as if their legs extended into the earth, while you feel your own self so remarkably unbound, the whole fixed world wheeling beneath you. There is an endless array of dangers as well of course, and any door you walk through at that age is likely to shape your entire life to come. But you don’t know that yet. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I went to Hawaii, to Western Samoa, to Fiji, and at last to New Zealand where I worked in a hospital for brain-damaged children in Nelson for three months. I lived in a ramshackle old house at the head of the sound, sharing with, a vibrant, kind, gay man I had met long before on the kibbutz in Israel. Eventually, coffers replenished from the expenses of the first leg, I took off, hitchhiking the country. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Signpost 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am on the North Island, working my way northwest, towards the ancient Kauri forests and Land’s End, a spit of sand that extends like a god’s finger, pointing north. It is mid-afternoon and I know I must stop soon. I look up the next youth hostel in my tattered traveler’s book. Not far. A car stops for me, a bright-eyed man at the wheel. “I live nearby, he tells me, “several people and I, on a commune.” I am intrigued. He asks if I would like to see it and, with the fearlessness of youth, I readily agree. In a movie, perhaps, he would turn out to be an ax murderer, and I a fool. But in real life, good people are far more common than in movies, and he certainly is one. He drives me up the long drive, and on the way he begins to tell me his story. He established this place, he says, for those who, like him, are looking for the way to Enlightenment. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I frown, not at all sure what this means. More than blurry candles? </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Recently, he continues, he had a life-changing experience with meditation. For years he has practiced what he knows of the Zen tradition of Buddhism, gathering ideas from books. And then one recent day - staggeringly, he found himself standing at some inner brink. He knew, without doubt, if he went one step further, he would lose himself forever. After so long an effort, he did not hesitate. He went the final step.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I study his face as he struggles to express what that moment was like. “Like dying,” he manages at last, “and like finally waking up.”. There is joy in his wide open eyes, as if the experience still fills him from within. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Do you want to stay here with us?” he asks abruptly. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A feeling is growing in me, a powerful emotion I can hardly name. I open my mouth to say yes. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But then he hesitates. “No,” he says. We should wait for a sign that it is right.” He turns the car around and goes back to the drive entry point. “Stand back on the road and hold out your thumb,” he instructs me. I’ll wait just back here. If the next car does not pick you up, you can stay.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I get out, clutching my backpack and stare at his backing car and then at the road east, the road from which I have come. Wait for a sign? I want so very much to be allowed to stay with this magical person. To learn what he means by “waking up.” All day I have hitchhiked, and each ride has been preceded by a hundred or more cars that did not stop for me. I look now at the darkening highway and see the the lights of someone coming. Obedient to my new friend, I hold out my thumb, willing the approaching car to ignore me, to pass by. But it does not pass by. Horrified, I glance back at the Zen man as a couple opens the door for me and gestures. I cannot see his face as his car engine starts up, but a hand comes out of his window to wave good-bye. The door of my ride closes me in and only with the greatest difficulty do I manage to tell them I need to go to the youth hostel. The piercing feeling, for the first time, has come at night. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have written elsewhere in this memoir, of my first real lecture in Buddhism in Thailand and the overwhelming effect it had on me. But even after that, the turtle was still traveling blind. When I arrived in Nepal in the spring of 1973, my future teachers of Tibetan Buddhism were only a short bus ride away, and even as I arrived, were starting a now historic course for westerners on a hill called Kopan. Most of the community of people I now call Buddhist friends attended this course. Yet when I heard of it, in a hotel in Kathmandu, I was not aroused to investigate. Instead I curled up on a cushion on the rooftop lounge area, reading the book provided by Phra Khantipalo. After a few days, I went north to Pokhara and there conceived a naive desire to hike in the Himalayas. With, in hindsight, an astonishing lack of preparation, I did not even carry food with me, nor a tent, nor purchase good shoes nor a real coat. I started up the two week trail to Jomson, a half way point to the Kingdom of Mustang, in my flip flops, long dress and a sweater carried in a light backpack. confident the occasional tea shops along the trail would provide and, even more foolishly, that the mountains would be as warm as the valleys. Fortunately for me a handsome young man named Scott Taylor soon became a fellow walker. He shared his plastic tarp when it rained, and his onions and potatoes, boiled in a pot, when we did not always make it to the next tea shop.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My fragile attraction to Buddhism was set aside by a growing infatuation for Scott. We made it only four days up the trail. Then, plagued by hail storms, and for him, stomach troubles, we doubled back to Kathmandu. Instead of mountains, we explored the medieval streets and the ancient wooden temples where saddhus gathered with tridents and red-hennaed hair, staring at nothing with their otherworldly gaze. We smoked hashish with other western travelers on rooftops, where Scott pulled out the violin he carried and sent passionate string music up to wheeling flocks of starlings and out to the distant white peaks of the Himalaya. I fell in love, and when he left, unwilling to form a more permanent liaison, I staggered under the loss. I slept for three days, got up to walk for miles, and slept again. All thoughts of Buddhism left my mind. The turtle had lost her way again.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Still in taciturn mourning, I made my way across India and the Middle East toward Europe, traveling first to Delhi with a group of cheerful English boys, and then west with a Finnish couple in a VW van. With them, I explored the Taj Mahal, and a mosque in Peshawar, helped pay off bandits who stopped our car in the outback of Afghanistan, and watched Mt. Ararat recede in a moonlit sky as we entered Turkey. At last, from a Greek youth hostel, I waved good-bye as their battered VW turned northward toward Finland. At each stop I had written long hopeful letters back to Scott and waited fruitlessly for poste restante workers to search through boxes holding travelers’ mail. Once, in Athens, I thought I saw him on a street, though whoever it was did not acknowledge my startled wave and disappeared in the crowd. My mother arrived and I went with her on a tour of Greek Islands ending in Crete. While we stayed in a pleasant Cretan hotel, we learned that the Greek government had declared war on Turkey, and from the top floor of the hotel, we searched the horizon for sign of the US 6th fleet sailing by, headed for the main battleground off Cypress. Restaurants stopped serving Americans, banks closed, ferries stopped. Trucks from the mountain villages roared by filled with young military recruits. A week later we were evacuated as war refugees as the Greek military dictatorship fell. On a day during which the entire population of Athens walked to the airport to greet the triumphantly returning politician Karamanlis, my mother and I, oblivious to history in the making, caught a train north. We crossed Europe, crossed America, and finally, at long last, came home to California. Now exhausted, ill, and without funds, no longer a traveler, I finally received Scott’s answering letter. “Where are you? He asked cheerily from Italy. Want to get together again and travel somewhere?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was another wrong door not taken - though clearly not by any choice of mine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Signpost #4 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is 1975 and I have been home for a year, working at a string of barely tolerable jobs, living with my father in Hermosa Beach. Reading the LA Times one morning, I stumble on a column. John Schwartz, a minor director in Hollywood at the time, has talked to a young man, Chuck Thomas, newly returned from India with a riveting tale of young western backpackers, traveling the exotic orient at random, who had encountered a Tibetan Buddhist lama and invited him to come and teach in Los Angeles. Indeed he is giving a talk that very night, in Westwood near UCLA where I had gone to school. I decide to go. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I still remember that first talk, the overwhelming effect on me of the gentle laughing man who sat in front of the room. Lama Yeshe’s English was barely serviceable in those early years, yet his ability to speak directly to the hearts of young westerners was already spot on. For long minutes he would sit in silence, eyes closed or rolled back, and then return to the room with a roguish smile and rake our faces with a fierce loving gaze. He spoke of dissatisfaction, of the suffering of our restless lives. Everything we now struggled to gain would, he told us, eventually be lost: relationships, pleasure, status, belongings, even our memories of beauty. “I love my chocolate! I love this flower!” He would say, holding up an imaginary blossom and nearly swooning with delight. Then his face would fall into melodramatic sorrow as the visualized flower wilted and its petals fell to the ground. He invited us to think not only of our pleasures but our own lives as this flower. This was hard to believe with conviction at twenty something but we tried hard. He talked of a path out of sorrow and dissatisfaction, one he would walk with us if we dared trust him. He challenged us, the children of an age steeped in scientific agnosticism, to try belief and faith. He knew how hard it would be for most of us to accept what he had to tell us at face value. “Eventually, I want you to check everything I tell you against reality, just as a man checks for real gold in the market. But for now, put your doubt on the shelf,” he urged us. “Allow yourself to try out the teachings as if everything I say is exactly true. Give yourself a year, pretending they are true, and see what happens.” It was exactly the key I needed to begin.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I went from that talk to walk alone on a nighttime beach where two years before I had started my long stumble towards Buddhism. My whole body was humming. I felt, as Annie Dillard wrote in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” I went to the retreat at Arrowhead that Lama Yeshe had urged on us and later attended another at Yucca Valley when he returned for a second visit. Though I moved to Mt Shasta for a year after that, as I described in another story, this time I did not forget Buddhism. In 1976, I came south again, and eagerly helped in the first stages of the establishment of Vajrapani Institute and the coming together of the the community that would sustain it. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thus, in encounters ever so unlikely was the ring found. And ever so gently has the ring settled, slipping over my head and onto my shoulders. The turtle found her way home.</span></span></div>
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<br />ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-12090733790166049302015-12-30T17:38:00.004-08:002015-12-30T21:28:01.587-08:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Winter poems</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Muzzled, and the light wavers</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ghosts of sea storms and broken</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christmas </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kathy is dead, gone before me to</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the unknown land</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or the no land</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and the past heaves and the future worries </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and the young skitter past</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Will we ever find spring again?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Look into mirrors at unscarred brows</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and hazeled eyes eager to see and see</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kathy saw and would not look away</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every day, </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from the fracturing of fairy tales,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in that dark cave of unsung endings.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She saw pain like a flooding ocean, </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">weaving rot and acid </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">over young lives turned old,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trapped in detritus and foam.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She burned with love, wrangled cats,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anguished in the corner of her bookstore,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">curled over this computer</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stunned and too human to live to old age. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was too hard to be an angel. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Santa Cruz Dec 27, 2015</span><br />
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<table style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; width: 624px;"><colgroup><col width="*"></col><col width="*"></col></colgroup><tbody>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #ffffff 1px; border-left: solid #ffffff 1px; border-right: solid #ffffff 1px; border-top: solid #ffffff 1px; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Disconnect</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">disconnect at the outset</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">paradigm wiggle</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">setback on the head set</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dreamscapes hit by drumbeats</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">backside to the camera</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and where will the heart rest</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tomorrow</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">where will the heart ...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Earnest concerns for health and exercise</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Volleyball team sign ups</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tulip sales and traffic snarls</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After school tutoring and fundraiser galas</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While far away, yet right in front of us</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a stranger catches a child</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hurtling down a bombed street</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">escaping the blood horror</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of a dying mother</span></div>
<br /></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #ffffff 1px; border-left: solid #ffffff 1px; border-right: solid #ffffff 1px; border-top: solid #ffffff 1px; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Men howl despair </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">looking back on a sea</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that has swallowed a toddler.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the arms of strangers, </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">small bodies shake</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with the shock of all fears</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and the cold of winter </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on an alien shore</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And the rubber boats deflate</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as the hustlers disappear</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We click next on a baby bear</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So cute</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Knives prepare for forks</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">neat chunks of Denny’s two for one breakfast</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bits of pigs so recently slaughtered,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">screaming their panic,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that somewhere</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a truck ride away,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the walls still echo the story</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of each life sealed in </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hard metal bars, </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">filled with black dreams,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now ended in a tempest of pain. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bacon please, </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so tasty. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Santa Cruz Dec 30, 2015</i></span></div>
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-68595219357233353032015-07-22T21:37:00.001-07:002015-07-22T21:40:47.174-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In Memory of Kathy Epling</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">gone from us June 14, 2015</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cesca's talk at her Garberville memorial</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">July 19, 2015</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I met
Kathy in 1964 when we were both students at Santa Monica High School. I
remember being invited to her house – improbably like a poster for
“house beautiful” of the 1950s – and sat on her bed as she excitedly shared
pictures of her childhood in Japan and other places her father had taken the
family in his military career. We became instant friends that day,
We stayed friends through college at UCLA and, as our lives took us to
different places, through a correspondence and occasional visits which
lasted our whole lives. In my life there has been no one else I
could talk to like Kathy, and she with me. I thought of her as my sister.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
hope in all the stories today we will all get a better sense of the whole of
her life, but there is one important thing I do want to say about
her. I believe in her too brief life Kathy Epling achieved something
very rare in today’s world. She became a great soul. A
mahatma. There are many extraordinary things about her life worth
remembering but to me that is the most important.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kathy
was extraordinary even as a teenager and twenty something – according to an
indiscrete counselor, she was the person with the highest IQ in Santa Monica High
School with its thousands of students. But Kathy was also an empath and
sometimes a psychic so sensitive we joked that I didn’t even have to let
her know when I was coming to visit, she would dream it, for she often did. In
her twenties as she and I moved to different places and began a life long
correspondence, she reported she sometimes saw ghosts, heard voices. In her
early and middle years she channeled that powerful sensitivity into poetry
and later essays that are some of the best I’ve ever encountered anywhere,
though they have yet to be put into book form. I hope that can happen one day.
She was published many times in national publications and won one of the
national prizes for poetry one year. An extraordinary collection of her more
recent work is still online in the archives of her two blogs, Outside the
Windows and Jarvenpa’s Notebooks.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kathy
was a quiet rebel who simply would not accept the models and rules society
presented for her. In the normal course of life, brilliant as she
was, she would likely have gotten a PhD in Literature, taught at an
Eastern college, become a prestigious poet, married a professor, gone to
conferences and cocktail parties. She got a taste of that life
following her first love Hillel to Europe and Connecticut in the 60’s, but in
the end, she chose none of it. She followed where her heart lead, to be with
her soul friend and teacher Sally Constantino when she moved with her children
Ann and Frank to Garberville. Kathy came here first to share their life by
the river, and then to live in town cleaning motel rooms at first,
then working in the Orange Cat Bookstore with Garth’s father, John. As with
Paul, she chose not to marry. It simply never made sense to her that the state
should have any say in whom she loved or what their relationship meant.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
know the children she had with John and later with Paul were a
revelation to Kathy. She took total delight in all three, birthing
them at home with her midwife or trying to. She named them as only a poet
could, Garth, Laurel Calypso, Gabriel Merlin. They were with her every day
throughout their childhoods, since she decided not to send them to school where
she feared they might be dulled or regimented. She read them a thousand books.
Showed them how to garden and love animals. She encouraged each step they took
into life, in whatever direction they wanted to go. She nurtured them to grow
and become as naturally as the flowers she planted, finding what interested
them in the wealth of literature and high level conversation that flowed
through her houses. But they changed her even more.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From Outside the Windows blog Feb 2013 “One Starfish at a
Time” </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“When my first child was born after long days of labor, I was
not prepared for the all engulfing love that surged through me as I held him,
small, wide-eyed, fresh to this world.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was like a shock to the heart.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Suddenly the world I had made it through okay for three decades,
careless & wandering—suddenly that world was filled with hard corners and
sharp edges I had never noticed. And threats from things far away (I remember
thinking “must get involved now in anti-draft organizing”). And beauty, of
course. Always beauty.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He was so small, six pounds of determined life, held against my
skin.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He thrived and is thriving and this isn’t really about him, or
about his lovely siblings, each of whom came with their own independent renewal
of wonder and love and their primal reminders of how fragile our life is. His
sister, but for the skills of our midwife, might have ended her life and mine
on that beautiful spring day…we walked very close to the edge, and came back
treasuring this life all the more. His little brother blessed us all with the
peace of a wise, wild, unique soul.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I have been very lucky in my life. But the edges are always
there for me; once your heart has cracked open it’s just no use trying to shut
down again. The world floods through, your love floods out, you try to figure
out…how do you deal with death and war and cruelty? How do you pile up enough
beauty and kindness, enough hugs and “you really are okay” to sweeten an entire
world that sometimes seems bent on…oh, the most absurd, the most terrible
things?”</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">She
wrote her poems during this time one line at a time, between motherhood and
steady hard work. And she did more. She published a unique hand-made
catalogue of books for expectant and new mothers that became a part of the
lives of hundreds of women. In it she shared their stories of motherhood and
her own, wrote loving poems, shared recipes and advice. And began to be
shaped by the experience in ways she never expected. When Gabriel was born, she
never once flinched from the commitment he would need from her: over thirty
years of intense and ever-increasing daily care by the time she died. In
all her letters to me, she never once made a single complaint. What
she did share was her love and delight in him, expanding each year of his life.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
the course of healing Gabe of his many childhood illnesses, Kathy taught
herself homeopathy and worked for years with her friend Dr. Ron to help and
successfully heal others throughout the community. A girl who had
once been labeled by an excited teacher as a future scientist, instead also
made herself an expert in astrology, giving long elaborate readings for others,
not because she necessarily believed in the direct influence of stars and
moon but because she found that in the course of the process of doing a
reading, she and the person she read for inevitably came to a more profound and
helpful understanding of themselves. Astrology became another vehicle to love
and empower the people around her. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">She
was also quietly but adamantly politically aware. She worked with her partner
Paul and others in here community to oppose the draft and fight for the
Headwaters Forest. Too peaceful of heart to be shrill, Kathy told me she did
not enjoy demonstrations per se, but went to them anyway when necessary. She
took the phone calls from Julia Butterfly in her tree, and supported the
many valiant others who used their bodies to protect the forest giants. She and
Paul offered sanctuary to young men evading the drafts of three wars, and, for
years with Paul, gathered articles, wrote articles and poems, did the layout
and printed Greenfuse one of the most unique political voices in America. For
those decades of war, Kathy also went out, rain or shine, to
stand in quiet witness to man’s acts of inhumanity with the Women in
Black. She worked for decades on the alternative medicine clinic
board to keep the clinic open. She went to the Midwest to tenderly help each of
her parents in turn to die, and her relatives to carry on.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But I
think it was in her last years, Kathy became the great soul I described in the
beginning. As you know, her life became focused in the Tiger Lily bookstore she
shared with Paul. Never was nor will be an enterprise more different from the
corporate model. The two had long ago made the conscious choice never to make
enough money to pay taxes that might be used to fund war or governmental
violence in any form. Their store was instead a crossroads of love, shared
stories, joy in literature and history and philosophy and constant unceasing
efforts on behalf of others and the forests around them. Books were shared and
discussed with enthusiasm, as often given away or exchanged as sold. There was
free fruit for the hungry, warm socks or a blanket for someone who arrived
cold, non-existent money somehow found to bail a beloved dog out of the pound.
Efforts were made to find lost relatives, or medical care and shelter for a
baby born to a homeless mother, or just provide encouragement to a sad friend
locked in a distant prison. In her spare time, Kathy took trowel in hand and
went out to plant flowers in every bit of bare neglected patch of earth she
found. Lost animals were taken in and others promoted for homes on the
internet. And so much more.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
these intense last years, Kathy, never closed herself off to the pain others
felt, even when, at times like the recent oil spills in the Gulf of
Mexico, it literally almost killed her. She never ever saw people as
losers or broken. She saw them always as their best selves, working with what
life had thrown at them. She would do anything in her power to help them or
rejoice with them, or just enjoy a passage in a book together or a new rose
growing outside the window. My own path has made me a Buddhist, and there is
much discussion of compassion, loving kindness, and empathetic joy in Buddhism.
But in all my years, I have never met a single person who incarnated these
qualities more than Kathy Epling. She developed her heart over long years in
this community, not through any religious practice, but by the simple practice
of paying attention to each person in front of her. The flashes of
intellectual arrogance or self pity she sometimes, very humanly, showed in her
youth faded away. It was love that simply filled her in her later years.
She became the community’s story teller, social worker, peace maker in
confrontations, wise woman, friend to all. When someone in the community
once called her an enabler, she answered this way,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I want to reclaim the term "enabler", she
wrote. “I want to proudly say "yep, I do enable people, I do
help them, I am not ashamed of this. I invite you to join me." When we are
tiny, someone holds our hands to help us as we take our first tentative steps.
They enable us to dance and run and climb. If we are fortunate, someone sometime
patiently sits with us, and helps us trace letters, and make sounds, and the
whole world of literacy, books, mind-adventures bursts open for us. If we are
lucky, when we find ourselves lost, someone stops and points the way. I have
been very lucky in my life. So now, when a man tells me, though he is a
strapping big kid, that he doesn't read very well, no one taught him, he was
tossed from foster care to foster care and dumped out, and gosh, he'd like to
learn more--I am happy to give him books, simple books, and take a moment. When
a girl trembling with cold comes to my doorway I am happy to give her a warm
coat or a blanket or whatever. When a scared kid who has just tried to kill
himself comes to me, I listen with all my heart and tears in my eyes and if
there is something I can give or some connection I can make, then I do it. I
have been so richly blessed in the opportunities in my life and I am so happy
to be a channel to pass on those blessings, or those cups of water, or those
sweet apples. I want to be the enabler who lets someone see another day. I want
to enable life and love and happiness and connection. Don't we all want this?
So to friends who say "yes, but you know you are an enabler, Kathy" I
say "damn right, and proud of it"</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So
what happens when such an essential human being is torn so shockingly away from
us? Does she go on to another life? Buddhism would say she does – and with
Kathy’s ocean of good karma and strong attachment to this community I would not
be at all surprised to see an unusually radiant child born among you sometime
soon. Does she go to heaven? Christians, I think would say, few people could
have earned it more – and Kathy was a Christian, most at home in the
Society of Friends. Or perhaps it was that stark simple
oblivion we all fear that took her away after a few missed breaths. But I
personally find it very hard to believe a mind so filled with knowledge and
commitment and love could simply become nothing – there is, after all no other
kind of energy in nature that becomes nothing. Everywhere we look, both matter
and energy simply change form, cycle back, renew and reshape themselves
endlessly. But even if Kathy herself is no longer in hailing distance, what is
still very much present is the impact she left behind in each one of us who
loved her. My friend truly was a mahatma, a great soul, in how she changed each
of us, enabled us to be better people, and reminded us how to pay attention to
the beauty in each person in front of us. That is the part of her that is not lost.
That is what we will have of her as long as we live. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-33368145385072512782014-05-09T23:44:00.000-07:002014-05-09T23:44:23.091-07:00<i>A challenge from Fabienne at Vajrapani to create an ultra short story around a metaphor used in Buddhist teachings on emptiness. This was the result. </i><br />
<i>~For Kathy</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>Dew Drop</b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL3KeTFZcmn4YGcsM0atnD9TYlUHUAgVt0UoqTZszQtb8_TGpVXk-H6WKQzDjWwUgb0a5sO6hlMWzXWEvx98Z0XMsJEAbKCgPfD8fAs-a0N0OVgjN-zQmFve_vtUMYAk2ua95w1wlQvFFB/s1600/dew+drop+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL3KeTFZcmn4YGcsM0atnD9TYlUHUAgVt0UoqTZszQtb8_TGpVXk-H6WKQzDjWwUgb0a5sO6hlMWzXWEvx98Z0XMsJEAbKCgPfD8fAs-a0N0OVgjN-zQmFve_vtUMYAk2ua95w1wlQvFFB/s1600/dew+drop+image.jpg" height="320" width="297" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From where she sat in
the mothers chair in the corner of the infant critical care unit, Tara<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yeshe watched as the doctor and the nurses
worked over the basinet holding her newborn daughter. 20% was the meager number
they had offered. One in five chances of living out the night. And this was the
critical hour. By the end of it, her daughter’s organs would begin to fail, or
they would not, and her chance at life would grow better. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tara closed her eyes, trying to calm herself. She had never
been a dramatic person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not one who
screamed and wailed when things went wrong. She was a Buddhist, after all,
admired for her patience, her kind smile, her clear-minded unflappability.
Buddhist training had always come easy to her. Tonight, so far, it had failed
her utterly. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tara Yeshe had never known a person could be so overwhelmed
by emotion. And such <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">physical </i>emotion.
Tremors moved across her shoulders and down her arms to the ends of her
fingers. Quivers of fear spasmed across her stomach, as if she traversed a tiny
wire over an abyss. Her heart felt as if it had expanded to fill her entire
chest cavity and the pressure of unshed tears came in waves that tightened her
throat so completely she had lost the ability of speech. All this for a tiny
pinched creature she had not yet even met properly, her daughter. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
She bit her lip to hold back feeling and looked out the
window of the nursery for some focus to hold her spinning mind. It was a cold
night outside, faint stars visible through the bare branches of a shrub outside
the glass. Tara fixed her mind on a drop of dew forming on a twig, only inches
from her face. How beautiful it was, seeming crystalline, luminous. Remembering
her training in the wisdom of emptiness, Tara forced herself to examine it minutely,
“A star, a visual aberration, a flame of a lamp, an illusion, a dewdrop, a
water bubble,a dream, a flash of lighting, a cloud, see conditioned things as
such.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And as her attention steadied, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she could indeed see the fullness of it, the
exquisitely fine skin of surface tension that kept the shape, even against the
tiny jostles of the night breeze. The drop was growing, she knew, molecules of
water in air gathering there, adhering, creating shape, form, presence. And her
watching mind called it “dew drop” and witnessed the beauty created by the
reflection of the lights in the nursery within its surface, her own face,
watching. It seemed imbued with mystery, pregnant with possibility, alive. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Could she
ever see her own daughter that way? She knew she was experiencing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">attachment</i> fully for the first time in
her life. Industrial strength mother’s love. A baby she had not yet even held
had filled her inner horizons from end to end, limitlessly precious. If her
daughter died, it seemed impossible that Tara herself would be able to take
another breath, think another thought, stand or move or be anything ever again.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She tried hard to imagine her baby’s existence as that same
drop of dew. That clear questing young mind, gathering sensation, impression,
memory with each hour. Her body, so tiny, so infinitely charming in its
tininess, would expand, molecules without becoming molecules within, year by
year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bones would lengthen, muscles
would expand, beauty and form would emerge and that unique mind-woven presence,
her “self” would come clearer with each day. Until her daughter was a woman,
radiant, sure, fully alive. And then, one day, her daughter’s life would end.
All that presence would vanish. The dew drop would fall, and water would return
to air, and then, on another night, in this place or that, would find form
again in a different drop of dew or rain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And her daughter’s life? Outside the window, the dew drop did fall at
last, splashing on the sill. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tara bent double, holding back her pain. “Not tonight,” she
found herself praying. “Oh please not tonight. Let her live.” Around the
basinet, some procedure had come to an end. The doctor had withdrawn to a
corner to dictate some notes. The nurse was swaddling<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the baby in a blanket, lifting her. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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And then she was in Tara’s lap, the soft warm weight of her
baby daughter. “Doctor says she’s doing better,” the nurse murmured. Ever so
tenderly, Tara cradled the small head between her two hands. Delicate as new rain,
she touched her forehead to her daughter’s, and let loose the damned river of her
love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-90748845595642434352013-08-19T21:10:00.002-07:002013-08-20T13:29:30.431-07:00<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><i>from </i>The<i> </i>Overlander Project: Two Monks and a Lady</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I had been
gone from home almost a year in 1973 before I met a robed Buddhist monk. It is
likely a good thing that the second encounter came less than a month later, or
I probably would have been turned aside from the spiritual path that has come
to mean so much to me in this life, for two such opposite men could hardly be
imagined. Nor could I have predicted the unique woman who brought me into contact
with them both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I met the first monk when I
was traveling on a train in Thailand, wending my way northward towards Bangkok
with this woman, a friend I had just encountered for the second time on the
“traveler’s road, the route across Asia from Australia to Europe that thousands
of western backpackers traversed in the seventies and eighties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was a merry girl of 22 or so named Patsy,
a plump blonde nurse from Australia “on walkabout” from her job in Perth with
the odd and single-minded goal of deflowering as many Asian men as opportunity
allowed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I first encountered Patsy
traveling deck class on a freighter from Denpasar to Singapore, enduring
together plates of rice and fish heads, crowds of Indonesians and Malays, daily
thunderstorms, and the blast of Muslim prayers on the loud speaker above our
heads at 5am each morning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I had been feeling quite lost on the day I
first met her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was newly broken up
with an American boyfriend who had been my traveling companion across Australia
and Indonesia for four months, and I was feeling very much alone and unsure of
myself as I passed over my ticket and mounted the gangplank into the rough and
alien surroundings on the freighter. There seemed nowhere to sit that wasn’t
already occupied with Indonesian families on blankets, the frontiers of their
territories stapled down with boxes of live chickens, reeking pyramids of
durian fruit, crawling children and piles of other belongings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then in the confusion, there was Patsy,
beckoning. She sat in a protected outdoor corner on her blanket in the midst of
her parcels and radiated welcome like human sunshine, throwing back her bright
head to laugh with sheer delight at meeting me. She did this, I soon learned
with any new person who happened by, offering those who sat with her a piece of
ripe papaya or a spoon full of the precious peanut butter she had brought all
the way from Perth. She also offered flashes of hirsute privates to stunned
passersby as she shifted position in her short summer dress, for she routinely
dispensed with such niceties as underwear. When, after an hour getting to know
each other, I delicately pointed out this social gaff, thinking she must be
unaware of it, she laughed some more. In fact, she said, she found it fun to
watch the reaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">At first, I was taken aback by this, since I
have always lived by a more conservative code, most especially while traveling.
But the more we talked, the more I came to appreciate this singular woman. I
had never met anyone so casually good-humored about sex. As she explained her
happy goal of deflowering Asia’s young manhood, neither propriety nor the
potential for male aggression seemed to concern her a jot. Nor did any worry of
heavenly wrath cross her smooth tan brow. She was as blonde and generously
voluptuous as a character in a Felini movie. She loved sex. She loved men. And
she was on holiday. What was more natural than to combine all she loved in this
cheerful project? The gratitude of the young men deflowered so far had made her
feel she was doing something useful with her life. And indeed, as I ran into
her in other places, she seemed to be carrying out her program enthusiastically
– and always with the greatest affection towards one dizzy young man at a time.
When it was time to leave, she said good-bye with tenderness, and I am sure
changed many a fellow for life with her ardent “yes!” to what is so often a
“no” in Asian cultures, especially Muslim ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was a good thing, in fact, that she was a traveler, and never long in
one place. Her devotees would surely have lined up round the block if she had
stayed more than those few days. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigH3Po3YT3IAEEqNPamqsjHKzMnOroYF87IjFu_uRXHY-yPH1DrfY2jUsvaAMgcT_dFPngQeisRkqFVTQmFfvPYyz-AVLwVjPiO5aom3G7lA9Thu4tm3C1j-7l9WUrKVY4teFZBRWcCoyh/s1600/Patsy+on+voyage+to+Singapore+.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigH3Po3YT3IAEEqNPamqsjHKzMnOroYF87IjFu_uRXHY-yPH1DrfY2jUsvaAMgcT_dFPngQeisRkqFVTQmFfvPYyz-AVLwVjPiO5aom3G7lA9Thu4tm3C1j-7l9WUrKVY4teFZBRWcCoyh/s320/Patsy+on+voyage+to+Singapore+.tif" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patsy on the freighter from Denpassar</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">She
was kind to women too, kind to me. She went out of her way to cheer me (still
smarting from my recent breakup, even though it had been my own doing). She
made me laugh with funny stories. She guided me into the cavernous bowels of
the freighter, where several hundred higher paying passengers had laid out
their blanket worlds under shelter, to a hidden corner where a cheerful muslim
in a turban served <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kopi susu</i>,
wonderful rich coffee layered with condensed milk in artistic lines of white
and dark. She lent me all the strength of sisterhood; in fact, her helpfulness
later in my journey may have saved my life. But I am getting ahead again in
this already chronologically challenged story. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">In
Singapore, the ocean journey behind us, we hugged good-bye on the gangplank,
each going our separate way. It was several weeks before I ran into her that
second time. This was on Penang Island in Malaysia. I cannot now remember many
details of how it came about, only the timing. It was still early morning, the
tropical air fresh and filled with bird song when the police released me
from Penang Prison, with eighty other westerners they had arrested in the
seaside village of Batu Ferengi the night before. We had had an eventful twelve
hours, rousted out of bed in the dark by soldiers holding rifles, our gear
searched, our passports confiscated, and our persons herded into open trucks
with wooden slats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In these we were
transported under a full moon through the jungle to the prison in Georgetown.
“Why are you doing this?” the more daring among us demanded. But in fact we all
knew. We had been warned when we entered Malaysia not to go to this place, long
a favorite way station on the “traveler’s” trail across Asia. It was an idyllic
fisherman’s village on the eastern coast, with a café that had a pet monkey and
the tropical sea lapping on the beach only yards from cozy seaside huts that
rented for only fifty cents a night. Its forbidden status doubtless came from
the fact that it would very soon present serious competition to a Hilton Hotel
that an American cartel was building with Indonesian co-sponsorship only half a
mile up the road. Future tourists would be confused. Billionaires might lose
money. The situation could not be allowed to continue. And so it wasn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I
had not been particularly alarmed by the experience of being arrested. We were
eighty strong after all, privileged young adults from a dozen western
countries, most from well to do families. No government would dare to hold us
hostage or seriously punish us for such a mild offense. No drugs were found in
anyone’s luggage. No moral turpitude was revealed as passports were confiscated
and ferociously scanned by military clerks that night . All co-habiting couples
actually turned out to be married - to the military’s chagrin and our own
general amazement. In the end, they simply cancelled our visas for not heeding
the warning and gave us 24 hours to get out of Malaysia. “Westerners like you
might <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">streak</i>,” was the odd official
explanation. No attempt was made to expand on why we might streak only in Batu
Ferengi. Indeed most of us had left home before the 1970’s mania to run naked
at public gatherings had even begun. Several of us had to have the concept
explained. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I
was standing at a wharf in Georgetown the next morning, waiting to board the
ferry to the mainland, when Patsy came into my life again. A small motorcycle
driven by a mournful young Malay journalist pulled up. And there behind him,
arms about his waist, was Patsy, with all her gear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The adoring young man tried to be helpful as
she unloaded, but he also kept up a steady stream of argument as to why she
should stay on Penang Island forever and become his bride. At last he appealed
to me to convince her to stay, but I could only smile in sympathy. We all knew
that was not going to happen. Patsy and I waved from the ferry as we pulled
away, and his forlorn shape grew smaller, and for once she looked rueful. This,
after all, was the down side of deflowering virgins. You tended to break their
hearts when you rushed out of their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took the rest of the day and into the
evening to reach the border with Thailand. With only twelve hours left on my
visa, I had to make it at least that far before we stopped for a rest and Patsy
was happy to oblige.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Thailand now, we
continued north on the train again the next day, passing through small towns
and jungled hills, overnighting at last in Songkhla with its seaside cafes. On
the third day we determined to head for Surat Thani and take the ferry to another
favored <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">traveler’s</i> destination, Ko
Samui Island, but it was here that fate had other ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Across the aisle from us, as we jolted
northward that morning, settled a most remarkable character. He was an
orange-robed Buddhist monk in his early thirties, yet he entered the train car
like a king. Or more accurately, he strode down the aisle like Yul Brenner in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The King and I</i>. I think he even walked
with his toes curled upward, radiating imperial energies. Other monks had come
to see him off, carrying a startling array of boxes and belongings for one
ostensibly living a life of renunciation. They continued to treat him like
departing royalty, salaaming backward out the door to the platform and bowing
in a line over neatly prayerful hands as the train left the station. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I
cannot now remember this man’s name, so I will call him Gan, a common Thai
name. Gan spotted us across the aisle immediately, and unlike the normally shy
reserve shown by other Buddhist monks in Thailand, who are constrained by
strict vows to avoid even accepting an item from a woman’s hand, he instantly
began an enthusiastic conversation in broken but serviceable English. He
pronounced himself a famous Buddhist scholar, going home on a break from his
Pali studies institute to his home village of Nakon Si Thammarat. He wanted to
know our names, our nationalities, our purpose in visiting Thailand and our
plans. And as the green miles rolled by, and he gazed into Patsy’s mischievous
green eyes, he grew more and more animated. He would not always be a monk he
volunteered, leaning closer. In fact, he said, he was storing all the many
offerings made to him at the home of his sister against the day – not far away
now - when he could disrobe and run for parliament. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Listening
from behind Patsy’s turned shoulder , I found his torrent of conversation,
liberally adorned with self-serving descriptions of his importance and prowess
as a monk, to be off putting in spite of his charm. Was this what Buddhists
were about? I had glimpsed them before of course, walking in solemn pairs or
groups outside the train windows. I had heard that it was the custom for Thai
men to take robes briefly as youths, often for only a few months, and then go
back to lay life. It was accepted that this common toe dip into religion was more
like an Asian boy scout experience than any real spiritual quest. But this man
had made a true career of it, reeling in donations from awed villagers for what
sounded like over a decade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At last, as
his station grew near, he made so bold as to invite us to get off with him at
his village as his personal guests. Patsy threw a bright glance at me over her
shoulder. “Okay?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I
was startled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Get off with this monk?
Here? What about Ko Samui?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">“It
will be such an adventure,” she urged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“I’m definitely doing it. You <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have</i>
to come with me.” And so we disembarked from the train at Nakon Si Thammarat
station and did indeed begin a remarkable three day visit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>His
sister’s family was there to welcome us as we stepped down from the train, and
with them half the people from his village. And again we watched Gan relish the
role of returning prodigy, accepting the bows of the people lining the roads to
his sister’s house with a masterful raise of the eyebrows and a dismissive nod.
He seemed suddenly swathed in holiness and dignity. Behind came his nephew and
niece, sister and brother-in-law, a tall, massively fat man of Chinese descent,
overseeing the many volunteers who leaped forward to shoulder his donated
hoard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As his venerable western
visitors, we were kept close by his side. We tried vainly to look venerable,
straightening our backs and nodding to the devotees, following his lead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The house
we finally reached was a modest but well made structure of light woods and
bamboo, every piece of furniture with legs sitting atop boxes full of Gan’s
treasures. Proudly he pointed out a picture of himself as the handsome star of
his local high school, taken before he had gone off to become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">an important personage</i>. We were startled
to realize there were two people holding trophies in the picture, himself and
his equally proud and lovely twin sister, for she, he acknowledged with a
raised chin in her direction, had also received highest marks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We turned in astonishment, really seeing for
the first time the pretty woman who had helped escort us. She smiled shyly
back, welcoming but pained somehow. The reasons for this became clear in the
days that followed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Gan’s
enthusiasm for his new role as celebrity host was boundless. He took us
shopping through the outdoor market when the two of us volunteered to make a
spaghetti dinner for the family, not realizing that this could only be done in
Thailand with egg noodles. Gan smilied regally as people stopped whatever they
were doing and kowtowed. He took us to the local Buddhist monastery, where he
sat ramrod straight and crosslegged for pictures, eyes closed, and did his best
to look as contemplative as the statues of Buddha around him. As soon as the
cameras stopped clicking in each location, he grinned and leaped to his feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He took us to a beach, splashing barefoot
along the tide line with dozens of villagers following awestruck behind us as
he gesticulated and pontificated, and also, quite openly, began courting Patsy.
That he was able to do this full voice in public was due to the fact that no
one in the village spoke English except us three. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I found
myself uncomfortable witness to this strange conversation, as he offered every
impassioned reason why she should sleep with him as soon as practically
possible. Mortified for the devout villagers following this charming hypocrite,
I did my best not to show my feelings on my face, and I saw Patsy did likewise,
for once refusing carnal knowledge. “I draw the line at monks,” she confided
later. “That’s just wrong.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was glad
to hear it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnpKs43Ey8yIYVDEpnAhSt1dYfgoKcSNeCcKriZpK0xqD5UpfEx3VQwpIxvZQ41kHwgraKW4GaB3Klt1Rhx0poA7IYGBZcbtX9qLqxWULpxO3V4eW4QYl8CNTYTWTOODpjnpDm3If65-FS/s1600/%22Gan%22+in+prayer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnpKs43Ey8yIYVDEpnAhSt1dYfgoKcSNeCcKriZpK0xqD5UpfEx3VQwpIxvZQ41kHwgraKW4GaB3Klt1Rhx0poA7IYGBZcbtX9qLqxWULpxO3V4eW4QYl8CNTYTWTOODpjnpDm3If65-FS/s320/%22Gan%22+in+prayer.jpg" width="272" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The photo "Gan" gave us to remember him by.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I think in
all that village, only his sister understood what was going on, for she
accompanied us everywhere. And I saw the dismay in her eyes as Gan freely
flirted with Patsy back in the privacy of their home, stretching next to her on
her bed and casually sharing, against his vows, family photos directly into her
hand. Washing the dishes with her back to him, pretending not to notice, his
sister said nothing, but I could see she frowned. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">While Gan
postured at the temple, I had also observed the genuine devotion this woman
showed in the presence of the statues. It pained me, and increasingly, it
angered Patsy that Gan seemed so heedless of her efforts to refuse him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He seemed oblivious of his sister’s feelings,
or more likely they simply did not matter to him. How much more did we begin to
appreciate her as we watched, each day, as she served her family, for they were
quite horrible, all of them. The giant husband was a lout, her two children,
following his lead, rude and self-absorbed. Yet there she was, a radiant,
intelligent, beautiful flower of a human being who had apparently been sold
into marital slavery while her brother, once high school was done, had received
every opportunity and honor. It became clearer, by the hour, that she was the one
who truly deserved honor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She met the
pain of her unchosen life with quiet dignity, and meditated at a small home
altar with true hearted radiance of spirit. And for all we must have seemed
loose women to her, she treated us only with greatest kindness and respect and
never openly criticized her brother.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">We had, in
the end, only one way to show our feelings in this matter. On the evening we
left, leaning out the train window, we offered one token of our thanks to that
family, and it was only for her: an exquisite and expensive silken woman’s
sarong. Her eyes widened at the sight of it and she broke into tears as we
placed it into her hands. She followed the train several yards as it began to
move, thanking us, clutching the beautiful cloth with one hand, and reaching
out with the other as if, with all her heart, she would have liked to come with
us and leave that life behind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The men
behind her, Gan included, looked puzzled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And so the tableau vanished behind us, becoming only another t<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ravelers’</i> dream as so many good-byes on
our journey north had already done.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But that
village had not entirely finished with us yet. By the time we got on the ferry
to Ko Samui, I had begun to run a fever. And on the long choppy voyage across
the strait, sitting on the floor of the small ship with the other passengers in
a low-ceilinged galley, it had begun to rise in earnest. By the time we got to
the island, I was so weak Patsy had to carry the gear for both of us. It took
all my strength and twenty minutes to walk the two blocks to the hotel and up
the stairs to our room. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZUd7OdVdTuKKBdIt60fyjzScHETsaW6gJtnuw6LSffVbNIaZwHJUndvPIrFMHzhxb0ADy-4L0iNtCD6Q8y8aSNGtAXl2A6Mqfz657GyoEMBPO-OkKaxxovwrWREWGMkpzwizSUZMNPHa/s1600/On+the+way+to+Ko+Samui.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZUd7OdVdTuKKBdIt60fyjzScHETsaW6gJtnuw6LSffVbNIaZwHJUndvPIrFMHzhxb0ADy-4L0iNtCD6Q8y8aSNGtAXl2A6Mqfz657GyoEMBPO-OkKaxxovwrWREWGMkpzwizSUZMNPHa/s320/On+the+way+to+Ko+Samui.tif" width="292" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">On the way to Ko Samui island, already feverish</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Here I
stayed, prisoner to my mystery illness, for the next three days, while Patsy </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; text-indent: 0in;">explored the island by motor bike and no doubt continued her international
neighborliness project, though she brought no one into the room. In it, I lay
alone through violent chills and endless baking hours, taking aspirin eight a
day to hold the chills at bay. This was perhaps not the wisest course, for my
stomach began to hurt as well and day by day I grew weaker. It seemed to me I
must surely be dying. But, oddly, this thought seemed not at all alarming,
merely peaceful. I watched the leaves of a palm tree visible from my second
story window shift and whisper in the tropical breeze, scattering light. I
slept, and watched some more. When Patsy came back, she took one look with her
seasoned nurse’s eye and announced we were going to the hospital in Bangkok, at
once.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; text-indent: 0in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I
protested. I did not remotely have the strength for such elaborate plans. I
would stay here and she could go. But, bless her, she was having none of it.
She rolled our few belongings into our backpacks with nursely precision and got
two of her new admirers to carry it all to the ferry. I came behind, just
managing to stand up and weave unsteadily to the departure wharf. Of the return
ferry ride itself I have no memory. I do remember the fight over train tickets
on the mainland. Patsy, it turned out, could be quite ferocious in a pickle.
She demanded that I was to have two seats (I could no longer sit upright). She
would pay for the extra one. No, she wasn’t interested in hearing how full the
train was. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As we
waited for the train to arrive, she urged me to eat, and I remember looking at
the food she offered. I could not have been less able to eat if she had handed
me rocks. I could barely manage to swallow water. And it had been many days now
since I had eaten. My knees threatened to buckle when I stood. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">And so we
boarded the train. I remember feeling guilty as I lay keeled over on my small
hard double seat, but in truth, I no longer had any choice. Passengers forced
to stand all along the aisle looked down disapprovingly, but Patsy glared right
back and prevented all incursions. I had no opinions. Sideways, I studied a
young American sitting opposite in the facing seats, an American soldier on R
& R from the Vietnam War, still underway 400 miles to the east. I remember
his handsome young head raised and twisted to take in the sight of the moon
flashing by through the ranked palms. He barely spoke the whole way, as remote
from us as a wild animal in a cage. He seemed to yearn outward at the beauty. I
was too far gone to think about why. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">He had
disembarked before we reached Bangkok and found a taxi. Our travel across that
enormous Asian city was a blur to my fevered mind. I have no memory of how it
was accomplished. I was focused entirely on the pain in my midsection, steady
and sharp and frightening within the roar of the fever. Patsy got me first to a
hotel room she rented and then to the Bangkok Christian Hospital in a second
taxi. There she left me in the examining room, promising to visit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Those first
hours are almost gone now. I remember wracked anxiety and a fumbling late night
phone call to my mother in California, and an IV that somehow got placed below
the level of my heart for a time. I gazed in uncomprehending wonder as my red
blood started up the tube toward the bottle until a horrified nurse caught the
error. A tray of food came the next morning, and on it was a neat little card
typed “Died Card” above my name. I still could not eat, but I tried to sort out
why they should wish to feed me if they thought I had died, until I realized it
was just a spelling error. Diet Card. I lay and watched the ceiling fan go
round, laughing weakly, and breathed the omnipresent scent of tiger balm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Thai women on the ward around me used it
for nearly every ailment imaginable. The woman opposite was smearing her
midsection against uterine cancer, and reached out brightly, offering some. I
shook my head, but tried to thank her, before falling once more into a deep
sleep.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I was in
the hospital all together five days, a not unpleasant memory in all, because
the Thai staff took good care of me and each day I grew better. My doctor swept
in each midday with a coterie of students, a brisk, no nonsense man more
interested in instructing his followers than saying much to his patients.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, he had them keep the antibiotic drip
going until I began to surface. Gastritis was the diagnosis, from the fever or
from the aspirin I had overused to treat it, the doctor could not say. But in
either case, the fever began to subside and I could eat again. I tried tiger balm. I chatted with
the British girl next to me, the petulant mistress of a Thai businessman whom
she feared losing with her illness. Patsy came to see me, and one day even Gan
appeared, an attendant in tow, and generously blessed all my hospital furniture
before sweeping out again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patsy rolled
her eyes. It seemed he had fallen so in love with her, he was still in
determined pursuit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">She saw me
home in the end, if home one can call it, a genteel old style Thai hotel with
potted palms and geckos on the walls of spacious rooms with ceiling fans. These
were mostly filled with western backpackers like us. There was even a swimming
pool of sorts, and she introduced me to some of the friends she had made there
and we sat in the shade and drank lime coolers with them. And then she left –
headed onward to Burma, or perhaps just away from Gan. She left with that
irrepressible smile and a green-eyed wink and I never saw her again, or heard
what became of her. But I visualize her now as a joyful aging matron at the
heart a large Australian family. May it be so.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And so I
floated alone back into the course of my own life. They were happy days in that
little hotel. There were the new friends for company, and there is a kind of
deep peace that comes after serious illness. Life is washed clean and starts
new again. And in that frame of mind, I discovered one day a small card propped
on the manager’s desk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Lectures in
Buddhism in English” it read. Wat Baworn, Banglamphoon. The first lecture would
be that very evening. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I don’t
remember anyone going with me when I left that night, in sarong and Hawaiian
shirt and flip flops, taking a small <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bimo
van</i>, to a bridge that looked down on the great lighted Buddhist temple in
the grounds beyond. I remember the air as I walked toward it, soft as warm silk
on my skin. I had a vivid awareness of beauty all around me, soft lights in the
windows of the temple, the smell of frangiapani, the flowing curve of water
below. And anticipation, of what I did not yet know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">At
the temple I was escorted to a small unadorned room where a handful of
westerners sat awkwardly cross-legged, looking around curiously. There were
also two Americans near the front, dressed like Thai monks, their heads shaved.
The lecture that night, they informed us would be on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Sila,” morality. And so it was. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">A
tall gaunt long faced Englishman entered at last and sat on a small dias in
front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He smiled at us, and began to
talk. Phra Khantipalo was his name, he said, and he had become a monk eleven
years before, following the rigid code of ordained morality in this temple,
doing the intensive “rains retreats” each summer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember only a little of the lecture he
gave that night, though there was a brief meditation on loving kindness at the
end. But I do remember the solemn, sure dignity of the man who gave it. He
passed on the teachings 2400 years old with quiet authority and genuine kindness.
Speaking as if each word, each idea mattered intensely to him, and should
matter to us. And I remember their effect on me. How could I forget it? I felt,
to paraphrase Annie Dillard in <u>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</u>: I had never
known I was a bell, until suddenly, that one day, I was lifted and stuck. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG9WcyhGmgNIfT0DGEhUx9Fwe92qkMKLAVaEaqqHE2TWmmsDCb54wWL3dBFQolXjH5CHDhOwHmsYwkgNhYveFSeefDXqAFnCxyMWNllxIKqr_nAxjF1-rUO0NCYNhJX61nLqPtvPxUkeAf/s1600/Khantipalo.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG9WcyhGmgNIfT0DGEhUx9Fwe92qkMKLAVaEaqqHE2TWmmsDCb54wWL3dBFQolXjH5CHDhOwHmsYwkgNhYveFSeefDXqAFnCxyMWNllxIKqr_nAxjF1-rUO0NCYNhJX61nLqPtvPxUkeAf/s320/Khantipalo.gif" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phra Khantipalo, about the age I met him. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The
reverberations of his words lifted me </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">weightless a</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ll the way home that night in a state
of exaltation. It was as if I walked in heaven and not on the streets of
Bangkok, now wet and shining with a soft summer rain. I clutched the book he
had given me, and pondered the words the eager American monks had shared with
us as we left. “Meditation is better than an acid trip,” one assured us.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">“It
stops bullets,” another claimed. He had become a Buddhist, he said, after
watching this miracle on a battlefield in Vietnam.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">But
I had no need of miracle stories. It was the teaching itself that had set off
the bell inside me. Perfecting a life of morality, practicing loving-kindness
and the pursuit of wisdom with deliberation, focusing the mind in stillness.
These were the first of many teachings that brought my whole life, and the
lives around me into focus. They laid my path before me, and still do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Many
years later I was shown a picture of Phra Khantipalo standing next to my
Tibetan teacher, Lama Yeshe, and I laughed out loud. Another example of the
synchronicity I have come to expect around Buddhist teachers. Maybe they are
all in cahoots. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">It
is hard to imagine two such opposite men as Gan and Khantipalo. Yet I am
grateful for having met them both. I have encountered or read about many
spiritual imposters since then. They are legion. Most, like Gan are not bad
men, only opportunistic ones, with little real self awareness. They rarely grasp
the harm they may do, the impoverishment of trust they can cause, on a
matter so vitally important to human happiness. By now surely, if he lives, Gan is a portly and
prosperous Thai government official, who, just maybe, keeps somewhere a picture of a
mischievous green-eyed Australian girl who broke his heart long ago. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Phra
Khantipalo, I am told, went on to become a well known scholar of Pali and a
much beloved teacher to westerners in Australia and Europe, some of whom who
also studied with Lama Yeshe<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(hence the
picture.) Eventually, like the majority of westerners who became ordained, he
disrobed and married.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He himself began
studying Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism in his old age. I will honor his memory all
my life. It was this revelation - that <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>genuine
spiritual guides do exist in the world - that was the gift of my 3 trips and 4
years of travel across Asia. But it was my encounters with Patsy and Gan in
1973 that lead,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>after such unlikely beginnings, to meeting my
first teacher. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIgrrRn038fqiX01wMnhg5QDPIJhKI5iDrscptXA4E1Xv3DwL5F63qaL3V9fwUJxhwqWxEmMi3xyCOCQMZ9Gq798v2Dz7_jvcna1S4jf2b6sW-cOYaTLCE4ePgK3KDB0mP3FeyuKF5x6yr/s1600/Cesca+in+Bangkok+1973.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIgrrRn038fqiX01wMnhg5QDPIJhKI5iDrscptXA4E1Xv3DwL5F63qaL3V9fwUJxhwqWxEmMi3xyCOCQMZ9Gq798v2Dz7_jvcna1S4jf2b6sW-cOYaTLCE4ePgK3KDB0mP3FeyuKF5x6yr/s320/Cesca+in+Bangkok+1973.tif" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A self portrait of Cesca taken in Bangkok 1973, the same week as the story</td></tr>
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-28098890951323542912013-06-17T23:58:00.000-07:002014-09-18T15:44:46.087-07:00Excerpt From the Overlander Project - To Speak with Parisians<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I remember well my first impulse to study French. I was 16, frowning at the formidable syllables of Les Miserables on the title page of the book propped on my bed, determined to say it aloud, but stopped dead by the possibilities. I tried them out one way, then another, and nothing sounded at all like the bits of French I had heard – all in an audial blur - in movies set in Paris. My mother claimed some fading expertise in French thanks to the long ago Miss Icks of Fresno, (pronounced, my mother insisted, Meese Eeeks) but her pronunciation sounded suspect to me, and this gorgeous long word just could not be ignored. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">And so, my junior year in Santa Monica High School, I signed up. French is not a particularly practical language in California. Spanish is the useful second language here, and indeed I plodded through five years of it. But German and French were still freely offered in those days, WWII being not so far behind us, and French just has that cachet. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 24px;">My teacher was a precise balding man of forty or so, a preening egotist where language was concerned – “Parisians tell me I speak completely without an accent!” he informed us at regular intervals. He was also a wistful homosexual who plainly fell in love with at least three of the better looking boys in our class over the course of the two years I was with him and only barely managed decorum in their presence, blushing like a girl if they stood too close. I think, I hope, he was harmless on this score, for the boys seemed only to take it humorously, and the rest of us barely understood what was implied and found him only odd. He was indeed a fine teacher though, beginning each lesson with a dialog to be memorized and laying out the entire corpus of grammar and basic vocabulary with authority. Even today, that first dialog plays in my head as reliably as a rock and roll song; </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"> <i>J’entre dans la salle de classe, I enter the classroom</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><i> Je regarde autour de moi, I look around me</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><i> Je vois les eleves et le professeur, I see the students and the professor</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><i> Je dis “bonjour” au professeur. I say good morning to the professor.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><i> Je prends ma place. I take my place. </i></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">The one thing our teacher did not do, however, once we were in our places, was encourage us to speak to each other in French. Language pedagogy of the day held that real language study was a momentous affair of noun genders and pluperfect tenses and the correct placement of <i>accent grave</i> and <i>accent elete</i>. These I more or less mastered but, despite a last minute two week audit of a French conversation course at UCLA before I left for Europe at 23, I arrived in France almost completely without experience at actually using the language to communicate. Indeed, the first Frenchman to address me and my first attempt to answer made me blush to the roots of my hair. Surely this could not be real? It felt like pretending to actually speak with a stranger and have them answer in a foreign language. That first day, it felt so close to farce, my face was rigid with the effort not to laugh out loud and offend anyone. And I am sure my accent, in Paris or anywhere else, was far from perfect. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">This common American shortcoming, as everyone knows, does not sit well with the French. It became clear that I offended almost everyone I met, simply by opening my mouth. And they were never shy about letting me know it. I also found it impossible to understand incoming language spoken at normal speed, never mind the occasional bouts of apparent hysteria afflicting shop keepers and taxi cab drivers. When I was the one speaking I chose, of course, only words I knew. When French people spoke to me, at post offices and train stations, in buses and in odd sandwich shops that required you to stand up hunched over a 4 foot high counter, they were less than considerate on this point. At least a third of their words zipped by me, unregistered, and sense foundered. I did at least manage to order lunch in cafes. There was one thing I knew how to order with confidence: <i>sandwich de fromage s’il vous plait</i>. (a cheese sandwich if you please). And the meaning of coca cola on the bottles lined on the shelves behind was wonderfully intelligible and they were always available.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">Woman cannot live by cheese sandwich and coca cola alone however, and on the third day I tried to enter a proper restaurant near my hotel, ready to splurge a little to sample what I had always heard was the best cuisine in the world. The restaurant was filled with happy diners. A seat and table sat invitingly empty. Shyly, I entered and started for it. Major mistake. When the maitre’d spotted me, she fluttered at me like a hen defending her nest from a fox. Oh non non madame. <i>Nous ne sommes pas ouvrir.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">Not open? The other diners watched me with unsympathetic eyes as she backed me out the door. The following day, when the same thing occurred again. I retreated to my hotel, tried to order a <i>sandwich de fromage</i> and a coca cola, but then gave up even that and went up to my room and wept instead, too perplexed and wounded not to ask What is wrong with me? Clearly I was a person too deeply flawed to be allowed to eat French food. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">The next day, restored to grim calm, I gave up on the French and went to the train station. I had a Eurail pass and no idea at all of where to go next. I turned in a complete circle, reading the information boards. I was determined to take the next train leaving France, no matter where it was going. Within minutes I found myself on my way to Amsterdam, and because of the people I met in Amsterdam and the events that followed, I was led at last to Israel, where I disembarked from a Turkish ferry in Haifa some months later. As I stood in the hot sun, listening to the first guttural muttering of Hebrew around me, I was completely relaxed. Clearly no one expected me to speak this exotic language. I was a tourist, and not even Jewish. And almost everyone I met obligingly struggled to communicate with me in English, some with the fluency of native speakers of it, which they often were since in 1971 Hebrew had only recently been retrieved from the dust bin of lost ancient languages. Only <i>sabras</i>, native born Israelis, had been raised with it. The majority of the country was not native born but had immigrated there after the war, so while Hebrew was the official language of commerce and government, it was almost everyone’s second language. English was widespread.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 24px;">All of this may have left you, dear reader, wondering how exactly this situation could have helped me onward in my ambitions to master French. I will admit that was the last thing I expected to learn there when I arrived. First I set out to explore this new country. I was moderately fearless in those days, and hitchhiked out of Haifa and up the Safat valley for openers, sleeping in an olive grove when it grew dark, I had begun to read The Source by Michener, and lying in my sleeping bag, looking up at the stars and reading by flashlight, I marveled that the characters in the book were actually traveling up the same valley at the beginning of the story. So I followed my characters to Safat itself, an ancient white walled city high on the side of the valley, which had remained Jewish even through the ages of the diaspora. I peeked into the central synagogue there as the sun splashed golden light down the lanes and the men within began to wail and rock, for, by good fortune, it was the evening of Yom Kippur when I arrived. When full dark fell, I found the porch of an abandoned house and laid my sleeping bag there. Somewhere that evening - memory of the details fails me now – I had taken up with a bland young English boy, equally out of place, and equally in need of free lodging. So, strangers in a strange land, we began to travel together for convenience. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">I remember the rest of the great circle we made around the country only in snatches. I do recall I was not entirely pleased with my companion. From a small English town, with limited perspective and interests, his comments were often sweetly inane and his one interest in any place we went was to find and consume a popsicle. He was a helpful presence, however, as we went through the occupied territories. I remember the shock of being dropped off in Ramallah, still wearing shorts and a t-shirt – a standard garb for women in the Jewish areas - and discovering that there were no women at all in sight on the streets and that every man at every outdoor café and through every shop window had turned to stare at me – with lust or stern disapproval. I darted into a restaurant bathroom and changed quickly into a long dress. And was indeed grateful to be traveling as one of an apparent couple. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">Another day, still in the occupied territories, we caught a ride with a craftsman heading toward the Dead Sea for supplies. David – my milk toast knight – was in the back seat next to me as the stocky, aggressive little man drove. He kept trying to catch my eye in the rear view mirror and abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, he stopped, and offered David the opportunity to drive. I tried to send hints to David that this might not be quite the offer it seemed and to please decline, but he missed them all, happily going to take over the driving. Lunging into his place in the back seat, the car’s owner at first leered and then took the liberty of grabbing the long necklace on my chest and pretending to examine it closely. When I snatched it out of his hands without ceremony he reacted in rage. Suddenly we were to stop again. This time, he ordered us both out and left us at the side of the road, next to an elderly man living in an abandoned rail car, and then turned the vehicle in a sharp rubber-burning u-turn, telling us to stay there. He would return. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">David blinked in mild surprise, but saw nothing untoward in this. Lacking a popsicle, he ambled over to where the old man was watching us, stone-faced, and begged a cigarette. I stared after him, thinking hard. To me it seemed a real possibility that the horny angry man who had offered us the ride had now gone back to bring reinforcements for a gang rape. David gazed at me in consternation as I explained this scenario, continuing to drag thoughtfully on his cigarette. “But what can we do?” he asked mildly. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">Sighing in exasperation, I went into the middle of the road and stood there. And the very next vehicle that came by, I forced to stop by refusing to move. Thankfully, crowded as they were, they consented to give us a ride, and with relief I watched the dusty little arroyo with the strange expressionless old man fall behind. I later heard that a Canadian girl was raped and found murdered in that area. And I have wondered. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">Still no French in my story you have noted. I am digressing, I admit. But there is always that temptation to tell about life in the order it was lived, which almost never makes for the kind of coherent tale found in fiction. But I will summarize and hurry us back to the point. After further adventures, a ramble through Jerusalem, a warm desert night as the guest of an Israeli soldier in Beersheba who served us a cup of fresh mint tea so perfectly strong and pure I have never forgotten it, David and I hitchhiked our way back up the coast all the way to the kibbutz of Hanita on the northern border with Lebanon. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">And this is where my education in French resumed, for Hanita was founded by idealists wishing to bring together Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities in a social experiment. The Ashkenazis came from Switzerland. The Sephardics came from Algeria. They both spoke (ah you have guessed before I said it) French as their first language. Few spoke Hebrew with authority. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">There was a bit of Hebrew in my days there. <i>Af Sakah! </i>The overseer would yell in the orange grove when it was time for a break. And we would clamber down, peel a fresh ripe orange from out of the bag slung round our necks, and take our break. I learned to count to ten “<i>Ah hat stein, shalosh</i>…” and learned that the children were the <i>yeladim</i>. But for the rest, the instructions on making breakfast for 30 in half an hour, the daily schedule, the rules for we “volunteers’ who lived in a row of portable buildings at the rim of the kibbutz, all were conducted in French. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;">So each day my French grew stronger. I would listen for some word I lacked and seize it right out of context, like a herpetologist lassoing a passing butterfly, tucking it into memory. It was a matter of survival, for life moves fast and sometimes aggressively in Israel. In bus lines and cafeterias, you are expected to push back, answer strongly with a grin or a witticism, or people won’t like you. And there were fascinating conversations to be had as I rose up to it: a former Israeli general who was angrier at conservative religious Jews than he was at the Palestinians or Egyptians; a wonderful gentle artist, who had fallen in love with an American and wanted to know all about my country; a nearly silent old woman working in the dispensary who had lived through Germany’s horror and carried a black number on her wrist; a child who told me of his nightmares of falling bombs. Indeed there had been several that had fallen nearby in his short life, for we were so close to the border with Lebanon that I could have called out to the Lebanese shepherd on the hill on across from the kibbutz. Men from the settlement patrolled the perimeter each night, and jets from the nearby air base would race up the Haifa valley in the afternoons, so fast and so low, they could not be heard until they were almost directly above us, and several times almost startled me out of my orange tree. Approaching the low hills at the border they coiled upward in twin menacing arcs and raced back down again - roaring warning or reassurance and making all who heard them aware of their presence. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 24px;">It was 1971 and the vibration of wars behind and wars to come was everywhere and no one was allowed to forget this for long. There was talk of landmines planted in the dark, of <i>katyusha</i> rockets that might arc onto us at any time. Taking nature walks was discouraged. There were even spies found among my fellow volunteers. A Frenchman broke his leg in a trench creeping around after curfew one night and when his room was searched, notes and maps were found that he was preparing, they said, to give to the Palestinians. Two Irish girls, adorned with false eyelashes and full cake make up, were found to be a different kind of spy. They had come to learn about the Haganah’s successful stand against the British – for Hanita had a cave behind that had once been a favored hiding place – in order take the information home to help the cause of the IRA. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 24px;">But we were well treated for all that, and each day I had opportunities to practice my French on every conceivable subject On the Sabbath, we were made as welcome as any kibbutz member. There were dances and feasts, one I remember especially was Moroccan style with everyone sitting cross-legged in two long lines rimmed in low tables and dancers and servers coming down the middle. The kibuttz even paid us $12 a month and drove us into town once a week to spend it. Here, I learned how to swear effectively when two men followed me down the beach in Najariya. They trudged after me five blocks in the sand in shiny pointy city shoes, and carefully perched on the other side of the breakwater I was seated on, hissing suggestively. This was an all too common, and to me completely offensive way of flirting with the opposite sex. Somehow, that lascivious hiss was the last straw on what had already been a much sexually harrassed day, I stood up, swore in my most ferocious French and drove them off, wide-eyed. I’m startled to remember that I was so mad, I continued to swear at every innocent inhabitant of Najariya I passed, all the way back to the kibbutz shuttle. No ambassador of goodwill I, not on <i>that</i> red day. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 24px;">But Christmas came at last, and with it a check with enough money to at last fly home. And I had the good sense to stop over for a week in Paris. You will be happy to learn, dear reader, that my position in French society had been transformed. Now I prattled confidently in every café and bookshop and art store and Parisians, amazed and friendly, prattled back. I went to French movies and understood them. I discovered the lunch time schedules of cafes (they close every afternoon) and had my first, and only, blissful taste of gourmet snails. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 24px;">Home again, I was reminded that there are few indeed who speak French in California. This confidence with the Gallic language began to pass, sadly, but it was a glorious week. And French words do still lurk in the dark somewhere in my brain, buried under the edifice of Spanish that was erected later in my career as an ESL teacher. It seems my brain, when asked to speak French, merely opens a “foreign language section” and rummages about for the closest word, and that is nearly always now Spanish first, and French much later. So, should I try to speak French today, the effort is sputtering and filled with gaps. Hand me a copy of <i>Les Miserables</i>, however, and I will pronounce it for you, with elegance, even still. </span></span><br />
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-49414531263387920492013-02-22T22:55:00.000-08:002013-08-20T13:31:39.488-07:00<!--StartFragment-->
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><i>From the Overlander Project </i> </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">Deja Vu</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These
memories are six decades behind me now, and there are not many. Yet those that
remain are vivid, like post cards from another life. They say the young pay
more attention, for everything is new, and there is truth in that, and it perhaps
accounts for the vividness, yet so much has been forgotten. Where does your life
go when it has been forgotten and no one living now remembers? The Tibetans
will tell you that even waking life has the nature of a dream. Such gaps in my
mental inventory make it easy to agree with them. Were there then other lives
before that have been forgotten?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">My
parents and I lived beside the Strand in Hermosa Beach when I was very young, a
sidewalk some ten feet wide, protected from blowing sand by a low wall that
followed the curve of wide Pacific beaches for miles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the low concrete porch of my house, even at four, I
always stopped to take in the bright changeable horizon of sea as I came out.
My days were mostly about little girl things. Giggling with friends, tiny paper
cups of grape juice, roller skates that tightened with a key, scabbed knees,
the Little Swings set on the sand near my house, and the Tall Swings farther
along. We pumped our short legs back and forth, back and forth, gaining
altitude until the gold sky beckoned, and then leaned back all the way, upside
down to savor the sensation of the earth tickling our sun bleached hair on the
downward sweep.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">One day a friend invited me to explore the
attic of her small beach house next to mine. There were several adventuring
children, a ladder, a hatch in the ceiling. I see still in memory the dimness
of the small room, with a shaft of light coming from one window, and mysterious
things stacked in boxes all around. And then there was the old hat she took out
of a box, still redolent of a scent, some ancient perfume that left me stunned.
For suddenly my child’s mind was filled with complex adult sadness and a
profound sense of loss, as if another life echoed in the far chambers of mind,
every detail forgotten except the sense that something or someone once
treasured had gone away, was forever out of reach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
don’t know if the sensation started that day, or if it was only triggered by
the old perfume, but I woke with it searing my mind many days in childhood and
far into my thirties. It was a sensation of something interrupted, something I
must do or find, so strong it felt almost like physical pain. I t would last
two minutes or so, until the present asserted itself. For, rack my brains as I
would, I could think of nothing I could do to assuage it directly.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
were other flashes of deja vu from time to time that left me straining after
the feeling they evoked – the way the peninsula of Palos Verdes descended into
the sea on a grey and windy day – a feeling of …what? Memories of battle? Of
being on the sea? My Viking forebears? I watched the grim grey movie “Sink the
Bismarck” as a young teen and found myself again overwhelmed by the same flavor
of déjà vu. I have often thought the English language is missing a much needed
word for this - mental flavor is the best I can manage. As if one has entered a
door and found oneself in a world different from the world of 1950’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and 60’s Los Angeles. The feeling never
lasted - it had no name, no place to latch onto – yet leaving it was like
waking from a dream with tears running down your cheeks while all the drama
that held you within it vanishes like mist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">There were other glimpses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The brick face of a Victorian house,
seen through trees on a walk, set by a stream, covered in ivy – attached to an
emotional memory of strictness, cloistered living that gave me only an odd
relief at having escaped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">There was a memory of a place perhaps like
southern India, glimpsed sometimes, a warm place with palm trees, white clouds,
strong joy with a “mental flavor” all its own and absolutely beyond my power of
description, except to say that everything seemed right there and when the
sensation comes to mind, it leaves me yearning, for what, again, I cannot say. The pure white tops of thunder clouds can give the same feeling. And high mountains with snow, and a river below on a dusty plain. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
think it was in pursuit of such a memory, such a place, that I started out one
night, at the age of five, on my first real journey. My parents did not take it
personally when I made the announcement I was leaving home. They claimed to
understand a person just has to go sometimes. They helped me pack my cookies
and other essentials and followed discretely at a distance as I made my first
happy exploration of the unknown (a bench a little further down the Strand than
I had ever been before). There I sat and looked out at the moonlit Pacific
Ocean and offered a cookie to a passing cat. Fifteen minutes later I started
for home, journey complete. They welcomed me without comment and tucked me
in with a kiss on the forehead. The seed of the desire to cross that ocean was
present that night, however, strong enough that I remember it still.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when I did arrive, many years
later, at my first airport in Asia, I looked back east across the familiar
Pacific that had always lain to my west. I remember walking outside where small
flags whipped in a sea wind, and tried to compare it with the image I had that
night. Is this the place? Does it feel the same? It did not. Not quite. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
remember when the Dalai Lama made his escape in 1959, setting out at night, in
the midst of a dust storm over Lhasa on his two week run for the Indian border.
I was only ten but I heard about it somehow, and imagined him as a boy king and
conceived a desire to see him. My father, generous-hearted as he was, decided
about that time that I should be honored once a year on a day of my choosing.
It was to be a day to mark, not my unearned birth, but my talents. I was to
share all those childish drawings not only on the refrigerator door but with
the world. So we went to Aunt Robbie’s apartment in Westwood for this special day I had announced, the day<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>forever after to be called “Cesca’s Day” though we never actually did it
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember large crackling
sheets of butcher paper stiff with water colors, several distracted youngsters
who had no idea why they were there, adults dutifully admiring my scribbles,
proud Hamp (my father) with the classical music on. And a Mr. Potato-head set that occupied
us all for an hour. Though the occasion did not repeat, to this day, I always
brighten a little when March 19 comes, even all these years later. And, as a
Buddhist, I marvel at the synchronicity of choosing that particular day as my
special day. For I know now that March 19 of that year was the very night His
Holiness was leaving Tibet, after making his first steps into exile concealed in the uniform of
a soldier, through the confusion of the crowd outside the Norbulingka, massed to protect him from a Chinese general who was demanding his presence and
planned apparently to kidnap him. Was my choice a coincidence? Almost certainly,
but it pleases me that that is the day I chose. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">What does deju vu mean? Were these
fragments of nostalgia and synchronicity meaningful? I wish I knew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel quite sure I am no former Tibetan. Indeed I
feel little affinity for Tibetan culture at all – however I may admire the
teachings of her religious leaders. But I have heard many stories in this long
life that have lead me to believe we may indeed reincarnate somehow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those childish feelings may really have been
wisps of old memory, past lives as faded as this one already is in many
aspects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cannot say. But I hope
they were. Who I may have been before does not really matter. But it would be nice to
think those remnants of memory are a sign that there may be more to come. I
think it was Voltaire who said, when asked, that he did not find the idea of being
born again any more implausible than having been born once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that had certainly occurred. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-84155937014411848312012-12-14T14:22:00.000-08:002013-03-10T15:09:10.163-07:00Happy to announce, at long last, that my little book of Buddhist short stories, <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/abouttheauthorfhampton" target="_blank">Buddha on a Midnight Sea,</a> is finally available as a Print on Demand or ebook available online at all the major outlets. If you want to know more, just click on the title.<br />
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<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/abouttheauthorfhampton" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuO7d2mq59tGNq8KfUANUM_vMt5yhAgMUpsj-G34rqj5h6cSI57MPnT8yYZTnfMCZ7QMPpuaUezeukz6GHyFBV_nB2rMGMNpAxb2YboYPLj1M8_zgd1R_Mw0BQtdwRgvQcY-O4hgRud-yV/s640/BMS.front+cover.revised.small.jpg" width="476" /></a></div>
<br />ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-1039646893280234792011-12-13T18:24:00.000-08:002013-03-10T15:10:38.351-07:00In Memoriam<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVuZGw3wbhz_AfCB0n29ZpX6FupG16eQawtVNlAU-MSKgidbevD9Mm21NDErgelu-Ho3lEXlIYYYXr0N_ViEivaW71FG13ZnTc9ah2VcpOaiXdaQji8L8jZo_0beGXEM4iE2U5N1t_085M/s1600/Suzee.small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVuZGw3wbhz_AfCB0n29ZpX6FupG16eQawtVNlAU-MSKgidbevD9Mm21NDErgelu-Ho3lEXlIYYYXr0N_ViEivaW71FG13ZnTc9ah2VcpOaiXdaQji8L8jZo_0beGXEM4iE2U5N1t_085M/s320/Suzee.small.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> Suzee Cameron was my friend long ago and far away, when we were not 60 something old ladies, but topless little girls, three something, sitting spraddled in the hot beach sand at the edge of the Pacific in our underwear, vigorously stirring sand soup and shaping sand castles and then going to swing on the tall beach swings of the Hermosa Beach Strand, pumping our short legs in earnest effort, higher and higher and higher, then leaning entirely upside down to feel our blonde hair tickle across the sand as we swung through the arc. As seven and eight year olds, we explored tide pools together in front of Topanga Canyon, naming the baby octopi we captured, poking sea anemones and screaming as they sucked our fingers in with their retreat. We slept all in a tangle with her sisters in a big bed full of sand and little girls as the hum of adult conversations and laughter by the fire in the main room faded from our consciousness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> The Camerons and the Hamptons were comrades in adventure in those days, living in shabby beach apartments, or in the Cameron’s case, even camping out on the top of Mt Tamalpais. I remember living richly with few dollars. I remember classical music playing at top volume, raucous volleyball games, exploring in the mountains, and for us children, a world made vivid, magical, smelling of salt and beer and suntan oil. So very full of possibilities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> There is a long break in my memory. The Camerons went away, and came back. And then I remember Suzee, briefly, as an awakened butterfly, a tall slender thirteen year old emerging from the dark dreams of encephalitis coma and discovering she had become a truly beautiful young woman. Dark haired. Laughing with delight at her new self. We visited. We parted to our now different countries. And for many many years I did not see Suzee again, or very rarely. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> I caught glimpses of her life sometimes as she passed by where I was living, or I managed a short trip to Canada. From her middle years, my mind holds images of Suzee as a pregnant traveling hippie, a frantic novice real estate agent, a happy young wife with Peter sitting in a sidewalk café before a jazz concert, a warm-hearted house mother to foreign students, and friend to a circle of women, and finally a powerful career woman, thriving on coffee and adrenalin and teleconferencing as she organized for the Neil Squire Foundation. But other people know those parts of her life far better than I.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">I can’t say we were close friends in those years. Indeed we only barely knew the outlines of each other’s lives. And yet, for two days, since receiving the news of her death, I have had to fight tears all day long, submerged in tsunamis of grief and trying to understand how this astonishing woman with her tangled wondrous life came to mean so much to me, far more than I understood. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> I did correspond with her in her forties and see more of her in her late fifties. She wrote from solitary campsites in the Canadian wilderness and visited several times to California, sitting on my porch in her white shorts and lace T, smoking her stogies and looking thoughtfully out to sea. Gradually, staying a few days at a time, she filled in some of the rest of her story. I wont tell it all again here. But only try to understand what there was in it that made her so extraordinary, and now, so deeply missed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> Suzee was not always easy. She was strong willed, sure of herself sometimes to a fault, and I often found myself pulling back from her certainties about a spiritual path or an approach to health or finances, too cautious for such exotic experiments. She filled a gallon jug with water on one visit and pronounced it innately pure from the secret ingredient she had added. I was to keep filling new ones from it. She generously urged a low acid diet I was to follow, avocado shakes leading the way. She explained that nearly all that ails a person could be cured with a solution of silver – until I looked up the negative side effects of this on the Internet. She passionately supported causes that left me skeptical or bewildered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">And yet when she arrived it was very much like the sun coming out. Suzee had a presence of joy, of boundless generosity that overcame all doubts in her relationships. She did not enter a room, as her mother writes, she exploded into it. She filled it with radiant charisma, and she did this in the face of challenges that would have defeated a lesser person a hundred times over. She suffered terribly the loss of her beloved son, and yet came to my door still smiling, determined to break the hold that alcohol had on her in a retreat in Arizona. Months later, on her way home, life slammed her down again and she broke her pelvis and much else in an automobile accident on an icy road in the Canadian winter. And yet again she came south with that smile still there. Still wonderful in its power. Her battered body not even limping. I believe Suzee was as courageous in her life as any champion on any battlefield. Fierce and kind and bold in all she did. Generous to all she met. And she had something else that touched me. In fact I think that is the quality that has left me with this grief more than any other. Suzee was free. Half her spirit belonged always to the forest and the sea. Half gave itself passionately and generously, and without reserve or caution, to everything and everyone she came to love. She never succumbed somehow to the velvet traps society sets to capture us, to direct our labor to its purposes. It is determined to name us, define us, number us, bind us with caution and the hope of small salaries doled out each month. Suzee chose a life outside society’s safe walls. In this way she embodied a person part of me yearns still to be. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Suzee, like her father before her, was a free spirit in the truest sense of the word. When she came to visit, she did not save for months first and set out with an itinerary listing hotel reservations in hand. She just came. Living light. Traveling in a trusty ancient car, sleeping in public campgrounds with the least gear possible. She trusted each new day. When she was broke, she would exchange labor for a living. When she was alone, she opened her heart warmly to each new person she met, and made new friends, loved new lovers, tried new roads. Rich or poor, she had style, and elegance. She was self-educated, a poet and a teacher. She was a spiritual wise woman, and she was an ardent mother. She never retreated in fear or found a comfortable home in depression, for all that life threw at her. She was just astonishingly vital and bold. Indeed, when the news of her death came, it truly seemed to me as if a law of nature itself had somehow been violated. How could such a dynamic person ever leave us? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">And yet she has, and I and all who loved her so deeply must live with that. We hope there is a heaven. She surely earned it. As a Buddhist, I hope she goes on to another life, as radiant as this one, and more at peace. My father’s loss six years ago taught me one sure thing we can hold to. What such a rare human being leaves behind is the changes they have made in the people they loved, the inspiration they gave us, the lessons they taught, the sweet memories we made together. Those are not gone. And holding those gifts close, we go on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Travel well old friend. You will be remembered long upon this earth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Cesca </span></div>
ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-44401425220458440132011-07-24T01:12:00.000-07:002013-03-10T15:12:39.786-07:00Twelve Links<style>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Out of the dark</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">we come circling,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">blind and reaching</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">the monkey mind, waking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There in the dark, a light,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">slick wet</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and the potter’s wheel spinning,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">black river flowing, and we reach,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and find we have hands</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">look, and find we have eyes,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">stand within a house with six windows </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and see a world out there,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">birdsong and zephyr</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">lovers embracing,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and we cannot stay quiet,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">with spring in the air.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We run to meet it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We hope we love we wrap</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">ourselves in sunlight and </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">too late learn shadows</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">for we are caught now, devoted to tomorrow and tomorrow and…</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">we <i>can</i> have it, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">so near, just there, beyond, soon,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">try again, drink life dry, hurl the bottle, tear away the fruit,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">fight for it!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is no stopping now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Now we must come again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">A womb will carry us back</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">to be born in blood and yearning,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and then we are here,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">existence required,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">aging with each breath,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">death stamped on our passports,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and dread dark at every exit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">**The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination and their associated imagery on thangkas depicting the Buddhist Wheel of Life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br clear="all" style="page-break-before: always;" /> </span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">1.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Ignorance – a blind person</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">2.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Volitional formation (impulse due to past karma) – a potter making pots</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">3.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Consciousness – monkey leaping</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">4.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Name and form – body and mind come together in individual existence – people in a boat</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">5.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Faculties and objects - the sense organs and their objects – a house with six windows</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">6.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Contact – an embracing couple</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">7.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Sensations, pleasurable and painful leading to desire and aversion – an arrow piercing an eye</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">8.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Craving or desire – a man drinking beer, surrounded by bottles</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">9.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Clinging or grasping to self and to pleasures and to a womb leading to rebirth – monkey or person reaching for a fruit</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">10.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Becoming – forming the next life – a pregnant woman or a couple making love</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">11.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Birth – a woman in childbirth</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">12.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Old age and death </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Dedicated to those who died yesterday in Norway, and all those who now </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>live with the pain of it.</i></span></span></div>
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ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-4775184602241928672011-03-01T10:03:00.001-08:002011-04-14T01:26:49.678-07:00Remembering David Crockett Stuart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQm9sCvAU6hGJH_Y6vBw1t-jIdTGi2Sx7YVQ4rSFcAFWucKVdLiQ0JYGWcoOQorqR2SxaeAxT6xaq9AyUAoIaJ9WLJMM_uWQcctxkkcRbwenw2LxudM96Gdlpu_Ni3hMF05V9HbmW1R1xt/s1600/DC-Stuart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQm9sCvAU6hGJH_Y6vBw1t-jIdTGi2Sx7YVQ4rSFcAFWucKVdLiQ0JYGWcoOQorqR2SxaeAxT6xaq9AyUAoIaJ9WLJMM_uWQcctxkkcRbwenw2LxudM96Gdlpu_Ni3hMF05V9HbmW1R1xt/s320/DC-Stuart.jpg" /></a></div><br />
I am getting to that time of life where it feels appropriate to look back – way back – and finally start reading those old family archives my father left behind. And doing so, a little each night, I am truly sorry I did not do so while he was alive. What talks we could have had! But one story at least I will share with you dear readers, for now. You might find it thought-provoking, as I have.<br />
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My father had two powerhouse grandfathers, patriarchs who survived long lives deeply entangled with some of the most dramatic historical events of their times. One of them, his mother’s father, was named David Crockett Stuart (holding my father in the photo at left) – himself descended several generations before from a dramatic character we know less about, a Scotch-Irish man who came as a youth to serve in the British army in the Revolutionary War as a drummer boy and decided to stay in America when the defeated troops were being reloaded on transports back to Europe – or so the story goes. <br />
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I am a little cautious about those oral stories now. Davy Crockett, for example, I had always heard was a sharpshooter from Alabama for all four years of the Civil War. I was always faintly horrified by this distant man – what would the soul of a man be like after spending four years sneaking up on unsuspecting young men shaving or doing their laundry and shooting them from ambush? Sounded much more like serial murder than noble service. I was also dismayed by the news that his direct commanding officer was Nathan Bedford Forrest, infamous founder of the KKK after the war. Bad enough for my own ancestor to spend years defending states’ right to have slaves. Also, since he enlisted at 18 in the Alabama outback, I assumed he was barely educated. <br />
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What a shock to read his memoir of the war then and discover a wonderful natural narrative writer at work. He wrote detailed accounts of running battles and capture, coming home, enduring innumerable deaths of friends and family members, and going out again to stand with the last embattled few in a lost war. He did indeed enlist at 18 but he came, I discovered, from a mountain family who disdained slave holders as immoral men who were probably bound for hell. And he actually wrote a line or two to put forth his own observation that owning slaves seemed to corrupt otherwise good men. Interesting indeed – and mystifying - for the man actually did spend all four years, from the first week of the war, fighting ferociously to defend their interests. For himself, he offers only an offhanded, and almost tongue in cheek explanation for his enlistment – that a firebrand preacher came to their hamlet a few days after the start and proclaimed in a brimstone speech that if they didn’t all sign up immediately, the Yankees would start arriving almost at once to rape their sisters and mothers. Clearly not something the mature man took seriously. But why then? <br />
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I was also fascinated to discover that he had not, after all, been a sharp shooter. He was a rebel cavalryman from start to finish, who loved his horse as a best friend and was overjoyed to meet up with it again near the end of the war after being captured and incarcerated in Chicago. He barely lived through that experience, becoming so emaciated from dysentery that he could no longer walk without aid on the day the opportunity to be exchanged in an amnesty came. So he hoarded the bread he received that week and offered it to a newer, stronger prisoner for the right to hold onto the man’s shoulders to get into the train south, knowing he would die if he did not. (Odd indeed to take in the thought that if he had not been strong enough to hold onto the man’s shoulder’s and walk, I would not be here to write this.) <br />
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He did much later name one of his sons Forrest, presumably after his commanding officer, yet his descriptions of Nathan Bedford Forrest depict an officer with an absolutely over the top level of aggressiveness, a powerful leader who charged into every battle, to be sure, but at great cost to his men. He ran his cavalry day after day, month after month, until they staggered with exhaustion. He also left my great grandfather behind to be captured when one of his injudicious decisions left them cut off. He did not finish the war under this commander, nor take any part in his activities after the war, thank God.<br />
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Instead he converted – tentatively - to Mormonism and headed northwest to join the wave of settlers populating Idaho after the battles with the plains indians. But that is a story I will expore in another blog.ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-29576548287872102942011-02-19T00:36:00.001-08:002011-04-14T01:27:54.760-07:00Sea shadowsA moment of grace yesterday. When seagulls came to eat the bread I had thrown on the roof across the way. A large black shadow ricocheted across the kitchen, rippling over the sunny table, flicking stove, sink, floor, like a leaf tumbled in a hurricane, barely seen before it is gone. Another and then another. The kitten, Moon, leaped onto the sill, head outside, transfixed by their proximity, for the birds were swooping on bread only 15 feet from his nose, their bodies larger than his. They came in wary, swift, circling in arcs that covered my whole block, coming close, and feinting away, and rising again, taking in kitten, windows, trees, unknowns everywhere, and the bread, the beckoning bread, again and again. The little bright cat quivered in every muscle, his gold eyes luminous with wonder, and the shadows of sea birds shafted through my kitchen.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5MU-Z0B0i_oGxSh2FSdo4SBsJnraSBJiJqxg-Ptee112d-GZIEU_pwcQwvCOrGiCJ47hsrCp0jE-g7n4b_DdUzcHuHhbnQ8syOhGRnRteRGuoWJQgkJXNucbqcL0xnVaLdS7n7HHTWCL/s1600/P1020070.+smalljpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="200" width="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5MU-Z0B0i_oGxSh2FSdo4SBsJnraSBJiJqxg-Ptee112d-GZIEU_pwcQwvCOrGiCJ47hsrCp0jE-g7n4b_DdUzcHuHhbnQ8syOhGRnRteRGuoWJQgkJXNucbqcL0xnVaLdS7n7HHTWCL/s200/P1020070.+smalljpg" /></a></div>ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-34578502019166684222011-01-06T23:25:00.000-08:002011-01-12T21:30:23.273-08:00A Christmas time look back<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKUmVEIsT2F28FgasiTEU-px4FqRRzIhyphenhyphen2VCatruBwxP56WmRe23zdYaSOyXEMu3LboDx-pW2n5Rr1Z8K15h9sIWmw1N81sy8icu7sF0zDb3wwFjEo5MjkNDf8t0bI018nBycBS0bjhIe3/s1600/tree-of-light.small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKUmVEIsT2F28FgasiTEU-px4FqRRzIhyphenhyphen2VCatruBwxP56WmRe23zdYaSOyXEMu3LboDx-pW2n5Rr1Z8K15h9sIWmw1N81sy8icu7sF0zDb3wwFjEo5MjkNDf8t0bI018nBycBS0bjhIe3/s320/tree-of-light.small.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Bright Christmas and New Years rolling around the year again, and dear friends and family are sending beautiful cards, and fascinating newsletters full of family accomplishments. I realized I should bestir my lazy self and actually come up with something more communicative than a Jacquie Lawson e card or a cyber wave on Facebook. Friendship, I am learning, even familial friendship, needs real news to stay glossy. <br />
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So, Cesca’s year. Not quite so entertaining as those of you with large families and/or jet set lifestyles, and not even a kidnapping by good-looking pirates to report, but it was a pivotal year for me nonetheless. Last spring was my last semester of full time teaching. I started off each day, well four days, prying myself out of bed and setting off to a class of charming young to middle age mothers who studied English at Starlight elementary school in a rough but serviceable portable classroom as their children recited their ABC’s nearby. I am not a person who rises early with great enthusiasm, but it was a good way to start each day. We studied grammar and life skills vocabulary, to be sure, but we also shared lives, danced giggling and shrieking each day to 15 minutes of Zumba, watched Supernanny and discussed child raising tips, celebrated baby showers with such intriguing customs as competing to estimate the mother to be’s girth in toilet paper squares and generally became close enough friends that parting in June was truly difficult. My afternoons were a different kind of party in which I pulled out the keys to a different kingdom – I taught computer skills to seniors, and digital photography to those ready to step even further into our brave new cyber world. And wondered that anyone was actually paying me to have so much fun. Evenings, two evenings anyway, I was off to my office at Cabrillo College to prepare for a 3 hour ESL essay writing class. A little more like work, with piles of notebooks to evaluate on the weekends, but also, never dull or hard to do. Teaching has been a good path for me. <br />
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Nonetheless, I had a secret fantasy blooming inside all semester, as rosy a thought as any secret love affair. Retirement! I found myself grinning ear to ear whenever I tried to imagine it – even while swimming laps in the neighborhood pool. Smiling into the unfocused blue under water, I was adding up monthly income sources, imagining travel and writing and above all FREEDOM from the constant interruption of daily obligations as I stroked my way to the end of another lap.<br />
And so the day came. The last spring grade was filed, the last application form sent away. And the first large retirement check sat fatly in my bank account – well large by my standards. And positively exhilarating to think they planned to keep sending them each month, whether I had worked or not. <br />
And bless them, they have continued, and I affirm to the world that retirement – even semi-retirement – is entirely NOT over-rated. My new life requires only 3 half days of work and features four day weekends and a monthly income that may at last achieve middle class standing –though my class assignments are more tenuous now that I am low woman on the seniority totem pole at both schools. Yet so far so good. And now with Winter holidays here, I sit beaming at the prospect of 5 weeks of uninterrupted writing time. <br />
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It very nearly did not come to pass however. This has been a year when the dark angel has come close or even taken many around me – not to mention SO many unfortunates on the nightly news – and even, three times, hesitated at my door as I later learned. In August, I went traveling to see Shakespeare in Ashland with my lifetime friend Kathy and, after the long hours of driving, found myself unusually out of breath. The stairway to the lobby of our antique hotel was steep however, as are many of the hills, so I did not think too much of it. I became alarmed only weeks later, when, going out to pick up my morning paper on my own familiar stairs, I found myself forced to pant for five minutes before I recovered. Reluctantly I went off to check it out and ended the day in the hospital with a diagnosis of triple pulmonary emboli – the diagnosis that took the life of my father’s sister Irene and possibly his sister Bernice – at about my current age. The doctors had found a sizeable clot in my leg – likely a result of the long drive and having had that hip surgery in 2007. It had thrown off three small clots, any one of which could have abruptly ended life as I know it, but did not. They were trapped in my lungs and will dissolve naturally I am told. Indeed it feels like they already have. And I will be taking a blood thinner for at least 6 months to be on the safe side. All my life I have blithely assumed – with my mother’s long lived family and my father’s own successful journey all the way to 88, that I held a free pass deep into old age. I am humbler on that point now. And WAY motivated to find my way back to a healthy weight. But there are no guarantees about lifespan for any of us. How many many people wake up on a fine sunny morning, drink their coffee, start off with to do list in hand and weekend calendar full, and end on that same weekend as ashes in the sea and friends and relatives weeping for their loss? I am trying a little harder to keep that in mind and appreciate the gift of each day now. Though full health and heedless optimism have both returned for the moment. <br />
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There were other adventures this year. I had many fine dinners and/or outings with my cousins George and Patricia and local friends Janice and Elaine and Barbara and Mary and movie buddy Linsey. Dear Kathy came to Santa Cruz for a multi-day visit just last week. Jeanne and Janice came to celebrate a second Christmas after a storm delayed our original dinner. I self-published a children’s adventure novel through lulu.com and have started work on a sequel. I’m putting the finishing touches on a book of Buddhist-oriented short stories that I also may end self-publishing. (Just don’t have the patience to send out all those elaborate packets publishers love to reject with such callous abandon -so far - sigh. Don’t imagine I will achieve fame and fortune through writing, but the spirit still moves me, so we will see what happens). Another grand project is to finish digitizing family photos from both sides, and create photo books that everyone can order. Already did one on Hamp, but then discovered a treasure trove of earlier pictures that should be included. (Tobi and Leslie stay tuned!). And have been fascinated to learn more about my Fretheim and Joint family trees courtesy of my cousin David. Found myself on Google Earth standing inside one of those 360 degree bubble pictures looking down from a mile high cliff top into the immense Norweigian fjord some of my 16th century ancestors once sailed out of. So real I could almost feel the cold wind on my face and breathtakingly beautiful. Must go there some day and stand in that place for real. <br />
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I have the time at last to return to my Buddhist studies with more attention and have been overjoyed to discover two western teachers of real accomplishment (Tenzin Chokyi and Alan Wallace) who both have long years of study and intense retreats – AND degrees in science from modern universities that enable them to discuss the relationship between scientific perspectives and Buddhist insights and methods with real authority and, hopefully, may help nudge me a LITTLE further along in a good direction before I do actually kick the bucket. <br />
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My sweet mother continues to be a major focus in my life, needing a bit more care now than she did, though she is still amazingly self-sufficient and beautiful at the age of 87. Her building is only three blocks from my apartment and has an elevator, and for now serves her needs even better than living with me – though that may come to pass eventually. I have learned to let life unfold in its own patterns – it always surprises me when I most think I know what is coming next. <br />
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One cat, Freckles, has left my life (after being hit by a car on Portola) and another, the kitten Moon, has entered it. Pepper the Maine coon, has become a feline mountain but does condescend to play with the kitten, 5 seconds at a time. It is a start. And spring cometh. <br />
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I hope you too are well dear reader, and continue to be for a long long time. It is an amazing journey isn’t it?ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-50976680831715748142010-08-16T14:39:00.000-07:002011-04-14T01:45:57.762-07:00Travel Notes from the Lam Rim(An essay requested in 2006 - and alas, rejected - by Mandala Magazine; i would like to thank Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel CA for the statue component of the picture) <br />
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Come to think of it, my Asian travels started early. At least a certain westerliness began to manifest. It was a near midnight in Hermosa Beach, California in the summer of 1952 when I got my first yen to travel. I packed a pillow slip with bear and cookies and set out, first bidding a polite good-bye to my parents - who had the unusual presence of mind to wave back. They didn't seem to take it personally that I was leaving, and they said nothing about the lateness of the hour or the impracticability of my plan. Instead they followed at a distance, curious, no doubt, to find out what I would do next. I struck out west, to the edge of the wide beach that fronts LA, and then wandered a good three blocks along the strand of sidewalk that parallels the beach, farther than I had ever been alone at age four. At last I settled myself on a bench, stubby legs swinging, and stared out at the broad star-spangled back of the quiet Pacific. I was yearning, though I had no notion yet of geography, in the direction of Asia. Even now, 52 years later, I remember the faint tug of that view, the sense of something out there, pulling. But childish weariness overcame the urge, When I had begun to keel sideways onto my cookies and bear, my parents carried me home.<br />
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I remembered that midnight journey when I first heard the Tibetan Lam Rim - "path to Enlightenment" teachings on the rarity of a perfect human rebirth. Imagining oneself special, of course, is a common seduction of the star-spangled Tibetan Buddhist path, with the appearance of Western "tulkus" - both those formally chosen or those self-appointed - now a common feature of meditation courses in both east and west. Fortunately for me, from my first days of practice, it was plain as concrete that my cautious, ever prone to doubt mind was anything but a manifestation of tulkuhood. <br />
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The teachings on the specialness of a perfect human rebirth, however, were a little harder to resist. They provided at least a possible explanation for those first yearnings, and as they are designed to, gave me and many of those sitting around me seriously enlarged self-esteem, at least for a time. It was a state of rare good fortune the lamas described, a PERFECT rebirth the ego could pounce on like pastry. To paraphrase their favorite metaphor, "A blind turtle coming to the surface of the world's oceans at random every hundred years has a better chance of accidentally popping his head directly through the center of a single storm-tossed floating ring than your average sentient being has of being born into a perfect human rebirth." This novel thought can produce a certain psychic fatness that has to be whittled down to humility again in long sessions of meditation on endless time and death and hell and other less sanguine topics. Yet even if one has been able to leave self-patting behind, Dharma remains the sweetest and rarest of gifts, for to receive it and make use of it one must be born healthy, in a life with leisure, at a time in which the teachings of a fully awakened Buddha are still remembered, in a place where they are still respected. One must be fortunate enough to encounter a teacher who has the full range of qualifications to teach them, and have the good sense to listen when the Dharma is presented. I guess that is what still intrigues me about my own life and the lives of other Asian "Dharma bums." What distinguishes us, if anything does, from those who do not find Buddhism of special interest, is that unlikely eagerness to listen when the first real teachings are encountered. For many, there a sense of recognition, a coming home. The heart resonates. Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek nailed the feeling precisely when she wrote about her own first spiritual experience, "I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." <br />
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For me that moment came in Bangkok in 1973. I was alone one afternoon in the palm-fringed patio of a low-end hotel, recovering from a fever that had landed me a week in a hospital. In those years I had become one of those modern gypsies who cross Asia overland, traveling rough. We called ourselves "travelers" and did our youthful snobbish best to break free from the banal parade of ordinary tourism for more adventurous, not to say impoverished and perilous modes of travel. More frequent illness was a price we were willing to pay for experiences of otherworldly intensity. And like me, many of us traveled alone, seeking comradeship or help as needed from those we met along the way. When I had become ill on the island of Ko Samui halfway up the Thai peninsula, an Australian nurse I had met on the deck of a freighter from Djakarta made sure I made it to a hospital and loyally stayed through my crisis. Once it was clear I would be okay, she and other friends of the road moved on, leaving me alone to recover in the hotel. <br />
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Two days later, I spotted a small card propped against the hotel cash register. "Lectures in Buddhism in English" it read. "7pm Tuesday." Since it was Tuesday, and I had nowhere else to go, I memorized the address on the card. The words remain carved in my brain to this day. When the sun had set, I left the hotel to find "Wat Baworn, Banglamphoo."<br />
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What is it about one short lecture that could have so altered my life's course? Phra Khantipalo, was the name of the lecturer, an angular bald-pated 30-something Englishman in the saffron robes of a Thai Buddhist, supported by an amen chorus of robed American ex-soldiers who beamed through his talk and confided when it was over that they had seen Buddhist mantras stop bullets in Vietnam and that meditation was "better than acid." But it was not their colorful company that moved me so deeply that night. It was the Dharma itself, a simple classic teaching on Sila, morality, followed by a few minutes silent contemplation on loving-kindness toward all beings. The hour left me vibrating with joy. I walked home through the tropical dark, looking frequently back at the white bulk of monastery's pagoda beside the river, laughing out loud as a soft warm rain began to fall and soaked me through. It felt like an essential beginning. I did not yet know of what. <br />
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Over the next 15 years, I would complete three world-spanning trips all together, each lasting from one to two years, each more intensely focused on Buddhism and eventually on Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet in general than the last. Yet oddly for all this, it was the teachings I was to receive in America that helped me move forward most after that first essential, riveting contact. <br />
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Now that I seem as rooted to one spot as a barnacle, I can see that life as a "traveler" is a rich and even dangerous state of life, for your moorings have been cut. You can end anywhere. Wandering the back streets of the big cities of Asia, idling in villages that had rarely seen a western face, I flowed down my life like a small craft on a powerful river. No day was predictable, and a myriad of other lives could have been lived if a choice here or there had been different. <br />
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Not that I made any more helpful choices that first trip. From Thailand, I kept my nose deep in a book lent to me by the kindly Khantipalo, I managed to miss entirely the two men would become my most important teachers. I ignored Lama Thubten Yeshe's 1974 second course for westerners, which was in session as I passed through Kathmandu, Nepal. I remember hearing, and ignoring, advice to visit the Dalai Lama's hill station in Dharamsala. Home again, the year that followed was a lost year, life as a shadow, without direction. But karma had a second chance for me. One day an article in the LA Times caught my eye, an interview with Chuck Thomas, a "traveler" who had just returned from Kathmandu. He had become a Buddhist there he said. The lamas he studied with were in LA to give a complete introductory course in Buddhism at Lake Arrowhead. <br />
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The seed planted in Bangkok took hold, and finally I did not hesitate. I went to listen to Lama Thubten Yeshe speak, and the impact of two weeks with a fully empowered teacher on my beginner's mind was a hundred times as "resonant" as that first glimmering in Asia. More courses followed. I joined with other students of Lama Yeshe to help found centers in LA and Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek CA. We invited teachers by the dozen and the years passed in a state of dreamlike intensity as we practiced, created courses for others, and built Vajrapani Institute. It was a revolution in my normally cautious and skeptical approach to life, and I could never have thrown myself so fully into the exploration of any religion if it had not been for one key idea Lama Yeshe gave us early on that first course. "Just for awhile, pretend it is all true," Lama Yeshe advised. "and pay attention to what happens." It was permission to put aside skepticism, to live in the "now" wide open and trusting. And what a time "now" was.<br />
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Looking back with a better knowledge of history, I see there was some desperation about those first Tibetan teachings to eager westerners. Fresh from the horrors of invasion and exile, expecting cultural extinction before the end of their lifetimes, the Tibetan lamas held back almost nothing. They handed us Dharma whole, like a mother in a burning village tosses her baby into the arms of a stranger in a passing train, trusting fate that someone will love and care for it when she cannot. I compare this with the hard won opportunities of 19th and early 20th century westerners to obtain even a taste of "forbidden Tibet," and it's clear this avalanche of teachings and initiations in the 1970's and 80's was a priceless opportunity. Yet sheer bounty created its own unique aftershocks. "Hasten slowly" in learning Dharma, Milarepa warned. In those first frantic years it was impossible to go slowly. <br />
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"The motivation for practice must not become entertainment," the lamas tried to warn us over and over. Yet Tibetans can hardly avoid their own dramatic and over-awing effect on western disciples. Who can resist consorting with kings or having tea with monks who still celebrate their conversion of Kublai Khan? The Tibetans came to us out of a medieval world still echoing the legends of Shambala, trailing tales of 16th generation tulkus and flying lamas, goddess consorts and rainbow bodies, and yogic hands that burn pure love into stone. In the summer corn fields of Wisconsin in 1981, Tibetan monks raised their 10-foot long horns before dawn and lifted sleeping farmers straight out of their beds as the Dalai Lama himself came to perform the Kalachakra tantra for four days - something until then done traditionally only once in his lifetime - and awed a Midwestern community unused to the scent of incense or the sight of fellow Americans wearing the black wigs of ancient Indian goddesses, or summer storms changing their course to create a perfect circle of rainbows and thunder around the God-King of Tibet as he administered tantric vows to his awed disciples. <br />
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And yet Dharma as entertainment will not hold, and the Tibetans know it. "What you will keep in the end," Lama Yeshe warned us, "is what you have actually experienced for yourself." He was right. <br />
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I returned two times more to live in Asia after I had become a Buddhist. Researching a novel, I lived among Tibetans in both Nepal and Dharamsala, I even made my way across Tibet itself and saw the steady devotion and fearful lives of the monks and nuns left behind. The effect was to gradually release me from the spell of the exotic - though I have not lost my admiration.<br />
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I found Tibetans at any level of society, no surprise, can be as cantankerous or ordinary as the rest of us. Yet among them, Like pearls out of the abrading sand, they still produce true saints who have realized bodhicitta, and more. Travel just taught me I must wait and listen to know which they are. The Dalai Lama loves to tell the story of Atisa who waited 12 years to be sure of the caliber of a man he thought to ask to be his teacher.<br />
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I think that was what has held me. I stayed not only for my own transient glimpses of understanding, but because of the bodhicitta shining in my teachers' eyes, and the Olympic caliber humility of those who have genuine religious insight to share. Tibetans, bless them, firmly believe anyone who puts up a shingle announcing sainthood is likely to be anything but. After 13 centuries of seeing it all, they should know. "I am a simple monk," the Dalai Lama tells reporters, and despite all his clearly evident attainments, means it. <br />
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The presentation of Dharma in the West is calmer these days, more deliberate and deeper. Those who come to it now are not given quite such a magic carpet ride, but perhaps their practice will be closer to the sane pace the Buddha intended. The journey, after all, is not about the thrill of novelty, or finding oneself a bit player in the drama of history, or entertaining former royalty, still less about a fancy new way to feel above others or develop an interesting wardrobe.<br />
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These days, when I walk beside the great Pacific and look out toward Asia, the urge to go there has nearly gone, though the urge to keep following the path of Dharma has not. My manner of progress, however, is very different now. Years ago, the stretching rubber band of "pretend it's true" finally needed to relax. There came a day I knew I had to stop receiving more initiations and advanced teachings for a time. I had built too high on concepts I didn't understand well enough to remain intellectually honest. I needed to absorb and practice what had been given before accepting more. "Check everything you have heard," Lama Yeshe also told us, "as if you were buying gold. Challenge this old monk as long as he lives." When new students wonder aloud why an "old student" still asks basic questions, I wonder why they do not ask more. <br />
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My life today is so prosaic it would have terrified my old gypsy self to hear of it. Not even a Buddhist bureaucrat anymore, I only rarely visit centers. I am a teacher, writer, and photographer. A daughter to an aging mother. A friend to my friends. A frustrated Democrat and environmentalist. Yet because of what the lamas finally were able to give me, as I live the hours of each day, I try to apply the teachings on emptiness, to be aware of the processes of mind that solidify my world out of infinite possibility. I read the news and try to notice if I begin to demonize another human being. I too rarely take time for sitting practice, but when I do, I apply ton len, giving and taking on the breath to those in pain - and there are SO many, in SO much pain. Surely it does nothing for them yet, but little by little I know it will make compassion easier, more familiar. Mine is the simple imperfect practice of an ordinary laywoman right now, trying to live with morality and patience, trying not to be too selfish, trying not to harm. And trying above all trying to keep alive some semblance of dharma practice in this great Monopoly game of midlife. "Nothing will happen," the famous western nun Patricia Zen advises her students, "if you don't practice every day." And now I can see in my Dharma community that those who have lived this path daily for many years with real energy and integrity are developing truly wonderful inner qualities. And that is my goal now. Before this jewel-like opportunity of Perfect Rebirth is lost, before the next life with all its confusion comes, I want to learn to love and help others more selflessly. I want to see deeply into the way mind creates reality in every moment. I want to wake up.ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7284886175156164909.post-49990691261645129382010-06-24T23:36:00.000-07:002019-03-16T13:08:04.529-07:00Listening to Trees<link href="file:///Users/francescahampton/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Clipboard/msoclip1/01/clip_clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Walking more in the woods these days. Early summer woods, filled with grace, and I try to take in fully, as I have before, the existence of trees. All my life, the part of my life that joins in the shared reality of modern humans, I have been assured that trees are simply wood. Wood is simply what? Useful. Non-sentient certainly. Western culture views trees entirely as a resource – like corn and oil and cotton. Even Buddhist lamas are, in the main, uninterested in trees. I think we may be missing something. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As I sit in the spangled green and gold web of light and shadow that forests create, breathing the full resonant silence there, I marvel, really marvel at how much we have forgotten to notice about these remarkable living beings. Consider dear reader, how trees quietly offer so much to other species – more than any other living creature on earth – without demure or resistance. Just endless provision. What bodhisattva could do more? </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Trees provide humans with wood to burn to keep us warm and cook our food, wood to fashion cups and toys and weapons and sculpture and boats and tools and pencils, and the daily comfort of furniture. Paper is the gift of trees. Paper to tidy our tender bottoms, paper to preserve our stories, our memories our collected wisdom and the vital instructions on what we have learned about how things work to all the generations to come. And of course wood provides shelter, and not only to us - trees provide protected nooks or sheltered boughs to house a myriad of small birds, insects, and animals. More anciently, trees offered hiding places, climbing places, protection from enemies and from weather. Trees provide fruit to eat, medicines to heal, shade from the hot sun. They cool the air, and bring rain where deserts would be without them. Indeed it is trees who give the energy of motion and life to every species on this earth - directly or indirectly - where there would be none without them, for it is they and other plants who weave sunlight into digestible sugar and pass it down to those on the ground. Their buried remnants coalesce into carbon and oil, still holding the energy of two billion years of sunshine behind us, and now power our cars and electric lights and planes in the sky. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Staggering isn't it? Without them our planet would not have even a livable atmosphere. This Garden of Eden we have inherited would be a rocky cold desert with a nitrogen atmosphere without trees. Without them there would be no ozone layer to protect us from solar radiation; there would be no greenhouse effect to keep us warm. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Even now, in this disintegrating, over-crowded, and over-synthetic civilization we have so unwisely made, trees provide balm for the troubled spirit, filling forest space with endlessly varied beauty and an intensity of healing quiet not found in other spaces. Our species was birthed in trees. And now trees make possible our civilized life. They have guarded and protected and fed and soothed us. Trees in a profound and real way are the mother of life on earth, and now they even do their best to filter out our massive overload of carbon from the atmosphere to keep us from killing ourselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">They do all this for us and other creatures and yet they pollute nothing, harm nothing, destroy nothing – save the rare incidents when a tree, pushed by wind, may fall and, without volition to do so, harm someone in its path. Even in death they offer their bodies to insects, feed a few more bears, house a few more small mammals, and finally enrich the soil. How can it be our culture never thinks of them, thanks them, honors them. Nary a tree deity to be found in any old pantheon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yet what amazing beings they are, standing quiet and uncomplaining through the millenia, broken in terrible storms, or radiant with bird song in the warm days of summer, whispering tree secrets to the wind that moves through their branches, reminding us below to listen, listen. And these beings are alive – sometimes striving upward for as long as 2000 years and more, and now known to send chemical messages of support and nurture to other trees around them. Why are we SO sure a tree is insentient? Julia Butterfly reported a tremendous increase in sap production in the tree Luna as she moved about barefoot when sister trees were being felled nearby. Have we truly bothered to check? They may be sentient. Or they may not be sentient in the way we understand sentience. But it is definite that they are SOMEthing alive and something to notice and honor; indeed, they are central to all life on this earth. The heartsong of this place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It wounds something in me when I hear trees referred to so cavalierly as board feet, or lassoed by pencil lines into cutting lots for timber companies to bicker over. The presence within a forest is something so much more powerful and graceful than any museum I can think of, A forest is truly sacred space, offering its wood and fruits to all living things to take what they truly need, but NEVER to desecrate into clear cuts or tree farms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Trees would teach us to be alive inside again if we will stop and listen to what is really here before us, gentleness incarnate, and such benevolent mystery beyond. Will you go out into the trees again and listen with me?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
ocean ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05355301202779440807noreply@blogger.com2