A Death In The Family

If you follow Christin’s Facebook posts, you’ve seen pictures these last two days of the fawn who come onto our porch and stared through the window as if to say “I need help.” She proceeded down past the benches and through the railing began gorging on a bush and berries that we’d seen no deer touch before. Whether she was trying to purge or downing the equivalent of Socrates’ hemlock, we couldn’t guess. Then she curled up against the warm wall of the house to await the inevitable.

 I thought of the old man Silas in Robert Frost’s poem “The Death of the Hired Man” who came “home” to Mary and Warren’s house for his final hours. 

“Euthanize her,” said the biologist when we called Fish and Wildlife. “It’s the right thing to do.” But which of us could pull the trigger? We’d admired and loved this fawn and her brother since they were spotted newborns. We decided instead to keep her as comfortable as possible and talk her through her passing. She finally let go in subfreezing temperatures about 3 am the next morning. 

We took her down the hill to our lower woods at daybreak and settled her remains at the base of a sturdy double-trunked oak. She half disappeared into the fallen leaves, disguising herself as a broken limb in her dark grey coat. 

That afternoon, the mother and her other fawn (the one-spiked unicorn) froze for a moment on our lawn staring down the hill as if they’d caught a whiff of the body. They’d had a death in their family, as had we, for we feel a true kinship with all the wild things who share “our” land. 

Rest in peace, little girl.

                                             -John

                                                                   

Mystic Mountain

We interrupt this blog for a brief commercial. I’ve just published Mystic Mountain: the Ascent to Love. 

 The book’s basic premise is that the current elder explosion has opened the door to unparalleled soul work, the wisdom that comes with age. I’ve tried to use clear, nonacademic language to stir the boundless spirit, the miracle of transformation, dormant in each of us. For those fast upon their wisdom years, yearning to live as closet or cloistered contemplatives, I light the mystic path as it shines through the larger journey from birth to return. General readers will gain a profound introduction to the mystic way. Those already en route as beginners or proficients will find here a practical guide through rising levels of awareness. In keeping with our new era of interspirituality, I draw on wisdom traditions worldwide, from Sufi to Sikh, Shaman to Christian, Buddhist to Hindu, Jewish to Jain, striving to piece into one the fragmented shards held by each while leading readers through a spectrum of spiritual masters. I write as well from my own experience as a Trappist monk and a student of Hindu/Buddhist philosophy.

The print version of Mystic Mountain (grey cover) can be ordered for $9 (plus S&H) from Amazon or from http://www.createspace.com/4435707 The Kindle version (Mystic Mountain Nebula on cover) sells for about $5 on Amazon. Amazon also has free apps called “Kindle for PC” (and Apple) that let you read Kindle books on your computer. If you’re short of cash, but would like to read the book, you can email me at cyberscribe2@hotmail.com and I’ll send you a free copy as an email attachment. Just let me know whether you’d prefer the Word or PDF version.

Thanks for your patience. I’ll also be excerpting from the book in future blogs now that it’s finally finished.

                                                                                                            John

On the Pacific at Brookings, OR

A glimmer of something more this day, the sun at my back, the surf washing thought away, washing the soul clean of sadness and of soil. Intake of breath. That we are part of this; that we are of this; that we are this. 

MY PEOPLE

These are my people. They turn out to be master-teachers, as I discovered when I visited them recently where they live in Minnesota. They are Varrah Claire, Savina Elise, Avari Isabella, Kaleesi May, and David Keegan. They teach not in words so much as by experience. Probably you who are mothers and fathers already know this, but I--not having lived the day-to-day with children of my own--could speak words derived from experience, but seldom did I experience purely, wordlessly.

What makes these children such powerful teachers is that nothing stands between them and the experience of being. Varrah awakened me to my own distances. Looking into her eyes and listening to her talk to me I was suddenly aware that I didn't need to protect myself from anything at all. She wouldn't, couldn't hurt me; she had no thought of it at all. Surprise filled me--I didn't know I'd set a barrier between myself and probably everything and everyone. And the barrier is thought itself. I'm a writer. It's how my mind works -- giving experience form in words. But Varrah and I, we don't need words or barriers.

And little Savina merged with me, falling asleep with her ear above my heart. My tears fell because as I kissed the top of her head I felt the presence in her of my sister, Liz--her grandmother whom I held and kissed the same way when I was nine years old. With Savi I experienced the connections beyond time and space.

Avari and I walked hand in hand. She showed me paradox of which I've written so often. But in her the paradox is real in a person who knows nothing of it that she could put into words. The paradox is pure. I suppose that I could finally 'see' it as it is.

Kali is as her name suggests. Those big eyes of hers can communicate the full range of human emotion. At the Renaissance Fair she sat, a queen, on the Throne of Swords as two knights bent their knees and offered her their obeisance. In the child the beginning and ending is pure, creation and destruction can be accepted as the great round they are.

David is a mystic. Time and again he set a little walking toy on a ramp. Once he could make it walk he entered what seemed a complete ecstasy. Arms straight and stiff, hands clenched into fists, his body trembling with the awe of it. Or maybe he's a scientist. Or maybe an artist. He's what I seem to reach for. And he IS it.

This morning during contemplation the words "My people, my people..." repeated on my breath. The faces of the children, but not only the children, really every person who has wandered through my life and by some grace remains an occupant of my soul. And it came to me that each human being is given a people. It is this People that makes up our individual world. It came to me that though I might have done many things in my life, the most crucial must always have been and continue to be the choice of love for the people I've been given, the choice to serve the People, the choice to honor them and remember them and learn from them. And if I would need to choose one focus to occupy what remains of my life, it would have to be that. The People I've been given.  

Guest Writer: Abraham Joshua Heschel

Yesterday John was reading Hecshel's book, A Passion for Truth, and came across this:

"The greatest sin of man is to forget that he is a prince--that he has royal power. All worlds are in need of exaltation, and everyone is charged to life what is low, to unite what lies apart, to advance what is left behind. It is as if all world, above and below, are full of expectancy, of sacred goals to be reached, so that consummation can come to pass. And man is called upon to bring about the climax slowly but decisively.

Nothing, therefore is accidental. Even an intruding thought does not come at random. A thought is like a person. It arrives because it needs to be restored. A thought severed, abused, seeks to be reunited with its root. Furthermore, it may be a message sent to remind a man of a task, a task he was born to carry out.

All facts are parables; their object is God. All things are tales the Teacher relates in order to render intelligible issues too difficult to comprehend literally, directly. Through things seen, God accommodates Himself to our level of understanding. What a shame it is that people do not comprehend the greatness of things on earth. They act as if life were trivial, not realizing that every trifle is filled with Divinity. No one makes a move that does not stir the highest Heaven."

(Please forgive brother Abraham's use of non-inclusive language. I seriously doubt that he intended to exclude those of us who are "She" and also part of humanity--holding up, as they say, half the sky.)

Before I Die

The hawk rides the air over the hollow, wings fanned, a cry that scatters all creatures small enough to be grasped by those talons. Shiku ducks underneath the deck. Mo growls. We are coming up the hill from the mailbox. The cry. Mo looks to the sky and pulls at his leash. How does he know? Shiku knows because she almost was taken, once, as a kitten preening herself on the railing of the deck, when suddenly the hawk swooped and was on her, wings beating, covering her. She didn't try to move. John believes she succumbed to the inevitable. But he, right there, rose up, waved his own human wings and cried out his own human cry against the bird. Hawk abandoned the kitten crouching under the churn of rising wings and flew away.

Danger rides the air and what are we to do? Terror rides the currents disguised as beauty. Or is it the other way around?

What fragile creatures walk the earth, all of us, even the hawk feels fragile in the current of John's human wings. We are all mere breath and bone. How take it in? How hold it in the heart? Because we must if we choose to live and be full-blown. Bones of glass, sand set to fire, made liquid, shaped with breath.

Before I die may I breathe in everything I see, hear, smell--everything that touches me or is touched. May everything, one at a time, drift on breath through mind and heart and soul and along the pathways of spine and nerves into my emptiness. And may I be formed, each bone, with that spirit, that primordial Breath, fragile as I am, into something clear, something beautiful, some one thing that contains it all. So that I can say in truth:

I am the hawk that cries out,

I am the wind,

I am the small one hiding,

I am the wing,

I am the hunger and the food,

I am the danger,

I am the beauty,

I am the bone,

I am the Fire.

Thunder and Fire

Thunder went silent. We moved back from our doorway to the still interior. August brings danger from the sky where coastal and mountain air currents meet and clash. While thunder reached its hand across the clouds, we opened our sunflower hearts, ready to be shaken by a Thing so far and near we cannot fathom it, nor resist laying ourselves open to its Fire.

This morning I've gone silent too, thinking of the vows I once took while kneeling in full sight of the Eternal Wild, The Awe, The Infinite Wind, The Thunder, The Complete Silence. She who knelt there never rose from her knees. She kneels and her forehead bends closer to earth each morning. Raindrops still adorn blades of grass. The thorn tree weeps.