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

The pond is cool and hushed this Saturday morning as a thick hazy sky mutes the light and shields us from the usual bright shafts of morning sun. Birds and trees hardly move, as if something were about to happen.

I was thinking about the letter Chris Ellington wrote to the Courier-Record (posted here Friday), and his playful dig at my needing some “outer direction.” I remember well my struggle to fit into the externally directed conventions of newspaper writing while I was at the Courier from 1986 to 1994; each week as I unfolded my features stories—starting with a seed and nourishing it until it flowered—I then had to cut and strip, squeeze and compress, my beautiful flower into a “newspaper story.” If I got a “nothing wrong with that,” from my editor, I knew I had gotten a passing grade for that week.

And this was a good and needed discipline for me because my unbounded subjectivity needed someone to put his foot on my neck and hold me to the ground, rubbing my face in it until I got the smell of the earth and the taste of the grass.

Words need wings and want to soar with the spirit, but words also need the ground, and like birds must walk around a bit and appreciate the existence upon which all of us stand.

My goal, now that I am freed from the “editor,” is to find that thin point of balance between the outer and the inner, where words are allowed to fly but always with a hand reaching down to take the reader along for the ride.

Posted under General Observations

Some brides are staging photo sessions (according to an article in the online magazine Salon) where they trash their wedding dress, or at least do something in the dress that liberates them from the stress and strain of having to “measure up” to our cultural ideal of the Bride. As  a wedding photographer  of 20 years I’ve seen hundreds women cram and squeeze themselves into this rigid ideal of perfection—where the least spot on the wedding dress would wring out enough tears to wash the darn thing—and at the bridal photo session I notice that most feel somewhat disconnected and “not themselves” as they slip into this gown and feel the “power of the bride” for the first time.

And as I photograph the bride’s wedding and capture the glowing faces of friends and family as they come within range of this “power,” I can literally see the Cinderella myth come down to earth and take a form. Suddenly your average Sally and Jack are transformed into this gorgeous and celebrated Bride and Groom, —this larger than life couple, this pair that have come down from heaven to grant us poor mortals a boon and a little relief from the humdrum of our everyday existence—and the old TV show Queen for a Day reinvents itself. There should be a game show called Bride for a Day, where the winner could just be a bride without having to take home a husband and all the suffering that entails.

But there definitely is something odd going on here in our culture, where one is expected to spend the price of a new car to say, “I DO.” Most women come to me a year in advance with their plan book all laid out, and no day in that entire year will pass without some fret and worry that her wedding won’t be just perfect. Somewhere hidden in this myth is the inscription that if one flaw is found in your wedding, your whole life will unravel, and you will be returned to the kitchen where you will spend the rest of your life in rags and taking order from a mean step sister.

I always tell them, “Make your plans and then let go when the wedding arrives. Your best memories will be of those things that didn’t go as planned.”

Posted under General Observations

(a letter to the editor in the Courier-Record)

Can the Courier-Record please rehire Ed Conley, or at least assign topics for him to discuss in his frequent—very frequent—letters to the editor? It seems that Mr. Conley’s  immense talents as a writer are better served with outside direction.

Mrs. Conley, Ed’s wife, was an amazing English teacher, so she can help with the editing. I love Ed and his unique points of view, but his recent letter about “God giving birth to himself” was a little out there for me, and I’ve lived in Hollywood since January 1989.

(And here is my response which I’m submitting to the paper. I thank Chris for giving me that much needed “outside direction”)

Thank you for the unsolicited plug. Let’s hope you have started a groundswell that will gather in strength until I am swept onto the pages of the Courier-Record, my one-time island where my writing learned its craft, and I discovered that good stories can also point to something that conventional newspapers often forget—that (to quote an old poet) “no man is an island unto himself.”

As for your little dig about “God giving birth to Himself” as being “a little out there.” Just let me say this: are you not giving birth to yourself all the time? Haven’t you since you left your island home of Blackstone given birth to yourself again and again? With each stage of your journey you have unfolded yourself out of all that you have learned and all that you dream? Who is it that is unfolding itself? What is it that contains all your potentials coiled up like a spring, ready and hungering for release as your old self surrenders to the new?

Perhaps it is God giving birth to Himself. After all, where can one go that God is not? Is there any place that is not existence? And are you not existence—an island as well as the whole? Are you not the whole of existence unfolding itself in a part of existence? Are you not God giving birth to Himself as You? Are you not God in this present moment reading this letter as you? God is what is—what else can He be?

Even those in Hollywood can recognize that.

Posted under General Observations

The rains came last night and this morning the Buddha pond feels refreshed, filled to its lip with the cool drink the storm poured into its cup. But whether there is water or not, wetness or dryness, hot or cold, my two pond Buddha’s sit unmoved at the edge of a peaceful presence. Try as I might—clapping hands next to their heads, shouting, waving my arms—nothing can make them move for that matter.

Eternally at peace, the Buddhas show the way and  point to my destination in the heart with their right hand, like signposts by the path where God seekers come on their way to the place of peaceful presence.

We all have a silent smiling Buddha within, sitting on the edge of the peaceful presence in the heart, where a soft brook mummers over a still mirror of mind in which we can see the face of our innocent soul.

We think that place is outside when by chance we come upon an experience of peace; maybe it’s in nature or in a church or even in a dream, and when it is gone, we feel lost and abandoned once more to the noise and turmoil of the world. Like children our souls cry when our blissful mother turns away.

But the Buddha reminds me that the blissful mother has not gone, nor can she, because the peaceful presence of the heart is who we are—before the ripples of the noisy world came to dance on our face.

Posted under General Observations

Last evening we finally got one of those late afternoon thunderstorms that have been promised for the last two weeks, and when it came, it brought with it an 8-hour power outage. It’s amazing. When the power to our houses goes off, guess what comes out of the closets: sitting on the front porch and watching the rain (that’s a big one); reading without the television going in the background (in fact there is no background of noise); talking without the next chore hounding you like a partner who is prematurely anxious to leave the party when you are just beginning to enjoy yourself; and, lastly, enjoying an unplugged state of existence that man has always lived in—until the modern age, that is.

A power outage is God’s way of giving us a taste of meditation, whether we want to or not. When the television, AC, stove, radio, and power tools all fall down useless, we are left with a big, big hole in our reality fabric of “things we should be doing.” Most of the time we do all these power dependent things from force of habit, like watching television even though we’re really not interested. Power blinks wake us up to the “thing connections” that rule our lives. Remember Emerson’s warning: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” And he was writing before there was any power to go off.

“So what’s in that hole exposed by the power outage,” a mind might ask? In that unplugged space, we can discover the silence and emptiness in which we swim like fish swim in water. Because of our mind’s bondage to things, we have no knowledge of the space in which the things exist. And in our addiction to noise, we have no ability to hear the stillness that floats the noise.

And so we are lost on our rafts of things and activities with no idea of the ocean that supports and surrounds us—this eternal ocean of joy and peace that some call God.

Thunder storms say like fire and brimstone preachers from the pulpit: “Pull the plug on your thoughts, disconnect from your support systems, drop out of time, hear the roar of thunder, see the flash of light, and feel the grace that pours down on you—and you can experience God as yourself.”

Posted under General Observations

Today, I had a hearing test, part of the process to find out what caused the extreme vertigo last Friday, and it took me back, back to the days when I was a sonar man on a submarine. The test, for those who have never had a hearing examination, asks you to punch a button when you hear a faint sound.

Suddenly, I was back with my sonar headphones on letting my ears search the ocean within a 50-mile radius for any sounds of a ship’s propellers. Now the target sound was not a churning shoo, shoo. shoo of a ship’s screws but the faint pitch of a test sound. And I noticed that thoughts are a mask over our ability to listen. As I let myself extend into the silence searching for the coming sound, a thought would interrupt, “Are you still yet?” and, of course, the stillness was broken. Every time I just became the listening, thought just couldn’t stand it, and like a child whose mother withdrew her attention it just had to shout out to remind me of its importance.

Have you ever noticed this irritating habit of thought? Just when you are getting really concentrated, thought comes is like some idiot leaning over your shoulder and asks the dumbest question: “Are you focused?”

“Well, yes, until you showed up.”

Posted under General Observations

Clarence Roark was here having a formal letter edited by my wife, and I asked him if he would look at an outdoor faucet that has been leaking through the fittings for the town’s water bypass meter for lawn water. Clarence was always the man to call when my pipes leaked, and I even wrote a feature story (when I was with the Courier-Record) about his success in living with and overcoming illiteracy. It was good to see him again since he retired, and it felt like old times with Clarence coming to fix my leak.

On the way out he said, “Let’s look at that faucet,” and with his soft whistle purring like a cat, he set about finding the bad washer, and then almost dragged me to the town garage where we spent the next 30 minutes running down the man with the parts, saving me a week of wasted energy going through channels. “Okay, turn it on,” he said after the last turn in the wrench. Perfect. No leaks.

There, as the water flowed through the tight system, I discovered what makes plumbing such a satisfying vocation. We are all in the business of fixing leaks and finding the breaks where our energy drains into the ground. Whether one goes to a doctor, a meditation teacher, an electrician, it is all the same fixing, all the same energy loss that is repaired—just in different forms of body, mind, and spirit, that’s all.

“I can fix anything,” Clarence said as he got in his car, as we were talking about how he had overcome his illiteracy. “I focus on nature and something just clicks inside, and then I know what to do.” Watching Clarence move through the various stages of fixing the leaking maze of fittings and washers—several of which had stopped me cold and looking for an expert—provided a lesson in how he “focuses on nature.”

Clarence flowed like water around every obstacle in the process of fixing the leak, until he found a way around it. At several points I was ready to let the town fix it, but Clarence just kept whistling and meandering to his goal, never a doubt in his mind that the faucet wouldn’t be repaired.

Here’s Clarence’s key to fixing leaks: Ground yourself in what God has given you (our nature), and never doubt that you can’t do what you set out to do.

Posted under General Observations

The catbird keeps checking the bird feeder every few minutes to see if the seeds have arrived. A cool breeze wanders through the yard and all the leaves and plants around the pond dance, their movements sending ripples across the water of the pond. Green leaves are falling as the trees thin themselves to bear the dry days of summer that have all too quickly arrived.

Last night a regular at the Wednesday yoga/meditation session and I talked for an hour about the question that begins the Great Search of the spiritual path: “Who am I?” Here is the primary thought that breaks the night like a laser beam of light and shakes the universe with its revolutionary cry. Like the little bird in some children’s tale I remember, who fell out of his nest and went looking for his mother, the spiritual journey is a path of negation. Looking at the steamroller, the little bird said, “This is not my mother.” And so he traveled through the book eliminating one false mother after another, until finally he and his mother were reunited. “This is my mother,” he happily exclaimed.

Just so we begin our search for our true identity with the surgeon’s scalpel of meditation that cuts away at all our attachments, all our false identities and idols, all the boundaries that we had arbitrarily framed ourselves. When spoken by the soul in the face of infinite darkness, this question is the dawning light of our freedom. Only those who follow it’s beacon to the end—being both pulled and pushed by this light of awareness—come to the world shattering conclusion to the Great Search.

When the great tree of illusion has been felled and the ground is littered with all one’s fears and hopes, one just looks up….and the catbird is back, and while he was gone I had filled the feeder with seeds, and he stays on the perch, satisfied. A breeze sends the wind chimes into a spontaneous song that floats its notes across the pond where fish make with their mouths rings upon rings of silent ripples that break the surface of this awesome stillness.

Posted under General Observations

The pond pulls me back out of my thoughts and into its world of suchness and timeless being. A dance ensues between noise and silence, between stillness and movement.

The red color moves, stops, and move away. My thoughts say, “A cardinal, how beautiful and bright he is.”

The grey form runs, stops, runs, stops, and runs again across green. My thoughts talk about the squirrel and how fat he looks from eating all my birdseed.

Bits of flashing red turn and dart beneath the liquid light and into the shadows. “My how the gold fish are active this morning,” my thoughts go, oblivious to the great being that surrounds and penetrates them. They shudder at the presence, like letters must tremble when they tread upon the face of paper.

The pond pulls me to my death
and my body of thoughts clings with frantic fingers
to the dying words
that fight the fading
into the stillness that is God.

Posted under General Observations

(from I Am the Door by Paul Ferrini)

You want to be free, but you want your security too. Try telling a person who is in prison getting three meals a day that freedom is its own security. S/he wants those three meals a day no matter what. Then s/he will talk about freedom.

When you are attached to what you already have, how can you bring in anything new? To bring in something new, something fresh, something unpredictable, you must surrender something old, stale and habitual.

If you want the creative to manifest within you, you must surrender all that is not creative. Then in the space made by that surrender, creativity rushes in.

If the cup is full of old, cold tea, you cannot pour new, hot tea into it. First you have to empty the cup. Then you can fill it.

If you want to give up your drama, first find out what your investment is in it. What is your pay-off for not finding, not healing, not living happily ever after?

And then be honest. If you don’t want to move through your pain, tell the truth. Say, “I’m not ready to move through my pain yet.” Don’t say “I wish I could be done with my pain, But I can’t be.” That is a lie. You could be done with it, but you don’t choose to be done. Perhaps you enjoy the attention you get being a victim.

You can’t be on a spiritual path until you are done being a victim. When you learn to accept responsibility, there are no excuses. When you are not ready, you say, “I am not ready.” When you are ready, your actions flow from that readiness, and actions always speak louder than words.

Posted under General Observations