Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

It rained hard last night and the Buddha pond was full to the brim this morning. Raining days are good for visualizing what one’s world will look like when the sun returns. This morning we looked at our two big rooms that serve as our living room and photography studio and saw what the Blackstone Yoga Center is going to be like.

I feel an urgency to get the house ready. We need new carpeting so the two rooms can easily convert to either a place for a yoga class or evening meditation. Even the big screen TV, which we never watch anymore, will serve for evenings with various teachers on DVD. The affirmation that stands over the entrance to the LOTUS shrine at Yogaville—Truth is One, Paths are Many—will also be our standard. This will be a place for all seekers of truth, no matter what the path they have chosen.

In a world that has been chopped up like the butcher’s steer into good and bad choices of meat, there is a great hunger to put our world back together again. We have become a Picasso painting full of suffering fragments all crying for the Self they know exists but can’t find. We find this suffering in our friends and in our society and, now with mass media, all over the globe. Our planet is in pain from the burden of all this suffering. Where has our still center gone? Where has the evening on the front porch listening to the night birds gone?

In our panic to find inner peace, we have stirred up our world to such a degree that all remains is noise. The truth is that peace can know noise, but noise cannot know peace. And as with the Picasso painting, the totality of the picture can know the part, but the part cannot know the totality. We have identified with a fragment and called it “me,” built a story around it, made our economy run on it, and set off to find our Self by buying the lastest product. We are all like lemmings going off the edge of the cliff together because we have forgotten how to be.

So the Blackstone Yoga Center is to be a place where seekers can find a small space that is free from the noise of seeking. A front porch, if you will, where one can sit and drink in the fragrance of the present moment.

The only way for noise to know stillness is to become still. The only way for suffering to know peace is to stop seeking.

Posted under General Observations

We can’t get enough Buddhas around here. We have two seated Buddhas that helped build their pond, and now we have a waterfall Buddha to help build the Blackstone Yoga Center. If you are wondering how yoga and Buddhism fit together, they fit together like the inside and the outside of a room. Yoga is the physical and mental form, while Buddha is the space within. As the Tao Te Ching says, “We use the form, but we live in the space.”

So we have another Buddha, this time as a centering piece under a mantel in the yoga exercise room. He has a broken nose where some clumsy customer must have let him fall in the store. The store where we found him was in Brooklyn where my daughter is moving, and its owner, an older man from India, was as laughing and as happy as Buddha must have been before he became all these statues. There is something about Buddha that just loves a statue.

There are fat bellied laughing Buddhas from China, meditating Buddhas both seated and lying down from all over the far East, and Buddha’s from Tibet that seem to come right out of dreams.

For us Buddha is the still space around which all form manifests itself. A Buddha statue helps me remember that stillness within and perceive the world of forms from that place. A Buddha statue never speaks. The teaching it imparts is the silence. That is why Buddhism never became a religion. Buddhism is a path to liberation where the only teaching is the experience of walking the path, or the practice, as it is usually called.

Both Buddhism and Yoga are the same in this way. They are a practice which leads one to stillness and inner peace.

Well, after reading this, I don’t see any difference between Buddhism, Yoga, and the teaching of Jesus. As Swami Satchidananda used to say: “Truth is One, paths are many.”

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Shannon, my daughter shown on left, left home at the age of 17 to become who she dreamed of being. She wanted to sing, wherever, however, whenever…whatever. After the first try at flight, she came back home to grow a few more feathers, and found the feather she needed, ironically, by getting a job in a local sewing factory.

As a seamstress, she took flight with the Barter Theater and toured Virginia taking care of the wardrobe. That led to a part in Hair, and she toured the country until she landed in New York City, where she knew she was home. This is where the song birds flocked to sing their songs and be heard.

There are two kinds of song birds, canaries and wild singers who sing for the joy of singing. Canaries sing for those who give them a home, the wild birds have no home because they live in their song and are free. Of course, Shannon didn’t know about the two kinds of song birds, because everywhere she looked there were canaries in a cages hanging from the New York tree, which came in sizes ranging from bars to broadway castles where the queen canaries lived and huge crowds paid to hear them.

Throughout the streets of the City she could hear them singing, some young and fresh with hope, others whose voice was cracking with age and the bitter realization that they would never reach that huge cage draped in blinking lights that flashed the words FAME. The canaries all knew that the only way to fame was to keep moving from one cage to the next because you never knew when someone would discover you and take you to the largest cage where everyone would love your song. Then the canaries knew they would finally be who they wanted to be.

For 15 years Shannon worked the cages, singing for whomever came by, always hoping, always dreaming, yet always realizing that something was wrong. The song bird that needs a cage is not free. A canary does not own its song because it must give it to the cage maker for the promise that he will make her who she wants to be.

Now the cage is empty, and the canary has grown its final wing feathers, which are much stronger and full of all kinds of colors.

She is a wild song bird now and the whole world is her home, because she has become her own song,..which is all she ever wanted to be.

Posted under General Observations

Life is much simpler in Blackstone (or any small town America). “Where I live, I can go to the post office and the bank on Friday afternoon and be back home in ten minutes,” I say to reinforce my observation. In Blackstone, when I have to wait in line I think its time to move on. That’s what the pioneers did when the lines began to form. “Let’s go West,” they said.

But there are no more open spaces to discover anymore. The world is fast becoming the City, a busy place where life becomes an alternating current of rushing and waiting. Even in Blackstone were the choices are few, the stress of life is evident. The more we try to create our separate little world, our safe harbor of peace and contentment, and live behind gates that keep out the stress of rushing and waiting, the more stress we feel. The rule is, the more we separate from the world, the more stress we feel. Separation is another name for fear.

What we need to do is take the movement to create our physical safe harbor one step further. Instead of stopping at our house, our living room, our entertainment center with surrounding speakers and wide screen, we need to find our safe harbor within the city of the mind.

When we actually look within to see what is happening in our inner city, we discover that it looks just like the big city outside. Instead of people and machines bumping into each other, it’s our thoughts moving around like bumper cars at a carnival. We also discover that looking at our mind’s contents with just pure curiosity and no judgment pulls the plug that supplies the current to the bumper cars of thought. With the looking, the mind begins to grow still. This looking within is meditation.

And with the absence of rushing thoughts comes the safe harbor, the peace and contentment, we so desperately want. When the safe harbor become portable and doesn’t depend on external conditions, we can be home and at peace every where, even in the rush hour of the city.

The new frontier that modern man is entering is no longer out there, but in there. We have no place else to go.

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Life in New York is fuller and richer than it is in Blackstone, or I should say more flavorful. The smells, the sounds, the movement, the seemingly infinite shades of the human species all meet here in one cup of life. In Blackstone— while the cup in not any less enjoyable—the choices of flavors and colors are reduced to just a few, namely, black or white. Some brown is moving in, but just a little.

In New York there is no dominant shade of skin color for it seems that the cups of pigment God was using to paint his creation was spilled and he was forced to dip his brush in the mix. “Ah,” God said with a smile of knowing,” sometimes my mistakes are exactly what I needed to complete the picture. Life is not black and white but a continuous blending of opposites.”

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Letter to Dean
Moving Shannon off the island and into the city of her dreams has been doing the right thing at the right time and at the right place.

I want to thank you for taking care of my daughter these last 15 years. In a way, you have been for her what I neglected to be, and so you have helped her complete her journey from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence, and from doubt and fear to confidence and fearlessness.

You gave her these strengths and now she must use them… like a bird ready to fly, like a song ready to sing. You sent her out of her safe nest and said FLY! BE WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

In your own way, and certainly not the way you thought it would happen, you made her a star as you promised you would when you met. Now she is a star in her own light.
That is what love does and is. Love says: “I will be whatever you need me to be in order for you to be free…even…if it means being free of me.

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Now I know why New Yorkers are so proud of being themselves. “We just keep driving, no matter what,” said the man on the Staten Island ferry when we told him of our great drive through the city with our daughter that evening.

She had a gig near the World Trade Center site, and we were going mid town to visit our friends, Lee and Santi, for the last time before they moved to Las Vegas. “Bring me eight dozen of those huge Blackstone eggs,” Lee had asked, and there we were, holding two boxes of eggs flying over the Verrazano Bridge at sixty miles an hour, dodging pot holes and other racing cars.

Shannon’s throat was shedding phlegm as she did her voice exercises at full throttle in the car, and she had spit out the window. “Crap,” said Shannon, “I’ve got a luger in my eye. Give me those eye drops, Mom.”

So there we were, two parents from Blackstone holding on to whatever we could find as our daughter, one hand on the steering wheel and the other putting drops in her eye as we careened from lane to lane over the bridge into the city. We no longer cared what happened to the eggs, we just wanted to survive. As we pulled up to a stop light and I rediscovered my mind, I said, “Didn’t I ever teach you not to spit in the wind?”

Then we were in the city where all eyes of newcomers look up and the eyes of its inhabitants look at newspapers that they fold up into halves so they can control the pages. But she was running out of time and wasn’t going to be able to drop us off and get back to lower Manhattan for her gig.

“I’ll get you a cab,” she said, pulling over to the curb, jumping out in her red dress and cowboy boots she always wore to her gigs, and running across the street to stop a cab. “You never know what you’re going to step in here in the City,” she would say. We didn’t even have to tell the cabbie where to take us.

New York and New Yorkers take care of their own, I always say, especially after yesterday’s descent into the glorious madness that is New York City.

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How many times do we hear or say that these days? But how many times do we take the time to reflect on what it really means? Everything changes, nothing is permanent. So, in that sense, we always have change. In our world today as time seems to speed up, so does change speed up.

Now, the mantra of survival is: If you don’t embrace change when it comes, you will just be swept to the side of life and left in the wake of your own existence.

This weekend has been a time for change; and in New York City, it is change that gets you through the gate and to your destination. My daughter has change as she fearlessly leaves a safe relationship for the discovery of who she really is. This weekend we came up here with our truck to move her from Staten Island and her home for 15 years to an apartment in Brooklyn. As she embraces her new found freedom, she finds that she has embraced change.

My two dear friends, Lee and Santi, who have lived in Manhattan for 40 years, are holding onto change as they prepare to move to Las Vegas and a new life. By leaving all that they held dear in the City, what they feel as loss now will bloom for them in the desert. Santi has a book of New York photography ready for be put together, and Lee already has a domain name for his new web site and baking business. Dessertotropolis.com.

And me….I bought a $400 stone Buddha face that will be a water fountain on the mantel of the Blackstone Yoga Center. It is Buddha who made the realization that all form is impermanent the center piece of his path to liberation. And so it is right that Buddha should be the center piece of my new life as a yoga teacher.

So when someone asks, “Do you have change?” always say yes, even if your pockets are empty. It is only by having change that we can pass into the fullness of life.

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For the past 15 years our port of entry to New York has been Staten Island where my daughter’s boyfriend/manager has a home overlooking the Hudson River. Their relationship started out as manager and singer but evolved into to singing partnership of Shannon and Dean. “He dreamed of us being the next Sonny and Cher,” Shannon said. We came up to Staten Island—for the last time—to help Shannon move her belongings to Brooklyn, where she is sharing an apartment.

And in a way they were like the famous singing duo; they broke up. And now Shannon is her own manager and her own singing act.

Here in this house with its magnificent view of the river, I look toward the ocean and the Verrazano Bridge that links the island to Brooklyn. From here the bridge is so peaceful and majestic with its two twin towers reaching to the clouds. At night its graceful drape of lights hang like a necklace across the river’s throat. One can dream about what and who you want to be here on Dean’s deck as your gaze disappears into the mist beyond the bridge.

But dreams, when seen as something to be reached in the future—if just given more time—will become like an island where the surrounding water that was once so beautiful turns into the wall of a prison. How different the perspective of the beautiful San Francisco Bay is to the prisoners of Alcatraz.

So Shannon is leaving her Staten Island and the dreams that held her here. Now the bridge, no longer this mythical highway to the future, becomes a rushing river of reality, where you have to focus your attention on the present traffic if you want to keep your life.

The bridge leaving Staten Island is really two bridges: it is a highway to one’s dream, but it is also the awakening up from one’s dream. As one leaves the island and heads into the great city where the energy moves with the rhythm of a fast beating heart, the bridge pours you into the present moment and the palpable feeling of life’s potential.

But one cannot leave Staten Island and one’s dream until all the island’s perimeter has been walked, and you come back to where you began. When you see and recognize your own footprints in the sand, the mist clears. “I have been imprisoned on this island by my fear of my own dream,” says the realization, and the dreamer suddenly is awake. There before her stands the open gateway of the bridge to her city of opportunity.

“Goodbye Staten Island, my dream of who I wanted to be is now here,” says the dreamer who no longer is.

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I never knew what that line meant until last night at my daughter’s place in Staten Island when I met her best friend, Denise. Later that evening on the deck that overlooks the Hudson River, she talked about her grandmother, Nanna, who was a gypsy.

“Oh, tell me about your grandmother,” I asked with great interest, because what little I knew about the gypsies was almost mythical. I had never met someone who actually knew a gypsy, let alone be related to one.

Denise’s grandmother must have been an extraordinary person. Just this one facet of her life tells me that. She and the tailor of Kaiser Wilheim of Germany fell in love and, because anyone connected with the royal class could never be with a gypsy, they fled to America, where she had 13 children, all girls except one.

One thing I know about the gypsies is that they chose to only put one foot in Western culture. The other foot they kept anchored in the ground of being, the unknown from which the mysteries and power of life spring forth. And because they refused to put both feet in the dominant culture, they have been ostracized and forced to live on the culture’s edge, like an outcast forced to the outside rim of the camp’s fire. But because they lived with their back to the dark mysterious unknown of existence, they— unlike those who huddled next to the artificial light of culture and it’s security—had a “back mind.”

“That’s what I told my Nanna I had,” said Denise, as she talked about the wisdom her grandmother taught her, much of which she is beginning to understand now. “I have a front mind that thinks about things, and a back mind, which tells me what is real or when things are going to happen.” Her grandmother told her to always stay grounded in her back mind.

“Once when my husband and I were driving in the mountains,” Denise said, to describe how her back mind worked, “we were passing between two buses, and I felt this tremendous compressing inside and a screaming urge to move. Floor it! I yelled to my husband, who did, and as we broke free from the buses and looked back, they collided and were spinning on their sides in the road. “Oh, my God,’ he exclaimed. ‘We’d be dead if we hadn’t moved.’”

“When my Nanna said it was time for her to die, she took my head and pressed hers to it. ‘What are you doing, I asked?’ and Nanna said she was giving me all her memories.” This was another thing I remembered about the gypsies. It is through the women that the power from the ground of being comes forth and is passed down through the generations. I briefly had the thought that this is one of the reasons the Western church and the culture it spawned didn’t recognized the female principle. They were afraid of it because of the “back mind.” All the priests and their theology are useless if you have a “back mind.” But for the back mind to be strong, the front mind has to be still.

Denise went on to tell me about her traumatic experiences at 9/11 when she was at the base of the Twin Towers as the planes hit, and fire rained down on her and burned one side of her head. “Since then I haven’t been able to hear my back mind,” she said. The front mind had become so filled with fear and stirred up thought from the aftermath of 9/11 that she could feel herself putting both her feet in the rushing current of our present civilization. “I don’t trust my back mind like I used to,” she said.

We then talked about Yoga and how that is a practice discovered by ancient masters to quiet the front mind so one could hear the back mind. And we talked about how 9/11 came into her life at this time so she could use this event to bring the memories her Nanna gave her into full consciousness.

We all have a gypsy in our soul, and when disasters come, either personal or collective, their meaning and purpose is to awaken us to this powerful ground of our being. We cannot be who we really are until who we are not gets shaken loose and broken up.

That is, if we so choose that to be.

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