EXCERPT FROM SOMEWHEN #2

Gardens of light are better than gardens of darkness, rows of nourishment better than sloughs of toxicity. How much nicer to turn the deep and living soil, watch it gleam in the sunlight, alive with tomorrow, than to foster shadows of past illusion... When you till your garden you till yourself; when you seed the earth, you grow; when you nurture life, you live the more.

THE CURSES OF YOUNG CROW

Anybody who still believes that crows don’t swear was definitely not in bed with me this morning. I was there, though, savoring the peaceful ambiance of a morning dream until it was shattered by a long, loud repetition of America’s most popular curse word, coming from a high branch of the chestnut tree. It's a term not much used out here in the Japanese countryside; it's mostly used in the big cities, where it has far more utility. I recognized the word at once, even though it was in Crow.

It had to be Young Crow. He probably picked the word up while strutting in the chestnut tree waiting for his mother to feed him, while I was down below, splitting knotty oak. (It has to be knotty to get a good swearstream going.) Crows are excellent mimics; they also use tools, and words are tools, so need I say more. Come to think of it, Young Crow must be the only crow in Japan that really nails the rhythmic and tonal niceties of the term. Lacking lips, he can’t quite get the F, but the enunciation is close enough to be effective, especially at that volume.

And in a bird so young! Until recently he'd been a big mama’s boy, strutting local summits like the chestnut tree, complaining about his hunger and lengthy solitude, calling over and over to his mama for more more more food, which she fetched to him as quickly as she could, back and forth from the vast larder that is my garden and its neighborhood, while she - much smaller than chubbyboy - got thinner and thinner as her tubby darling scarfed the general vicinity. Now he was grown enough to finally be on his own, and he was not pleased with the new arrangement.

On and on and on he went, cursing at all the ground around, much as my boss and later my drill sergeant used to do, and with nearly the same sharp and steady rhythm. I’d never heard any crow do this before, no matter what age or mood. It was damn impressive, I must say. And in a bird so young!  Just confirms my long-held belief that cursing is an elemental drive.

Young crow has got his own life to live now, in any case, and should be given the chance to tarnish it a bit, just as we humans do, take some of the glare off. As the more experienced party, though, I'd advise the lad to spend more time on his delivery and, over the years, be sure add a bit more salt.

Life does have its needs.

Spirit Line

When you talk to yourself - and we all talk to ourselves, especially when we become elders, having improved over the decades into scintillating conversationalists - you're generally after clarity or understanding, working out an idea or seeking resolution, somewhat like traditional prayer in many respects except for one key point: it is not other directed. It is not not a plea for help from elsewhere, but a conversation with the closest presence of what most folks call god. 

When we talk to the god in ourselves, however, we are talking to an entity we know to be extant; no need to conjure faith out of printed matter. It feels comfortable and comforting to talk this way-- it feels natural, and there is a listener; it is also something to do in a tight spot, an action to take, if only to say something. What's better, it can guide us toward a solution that arises from all the tomorrowstuff our bodies in their ancientness know like the back of our hands.  

We spend our early lives asking upward, looking to our elders for such answers as we can find there, and when at last we have no elders but are the elders, we keep on asking upward, though now we ask of the height in ourselves, of the spirit that embodies us, that in every living person reaches directly back to beyond the start of time. 

We can speak to spirit about anything - and without reservations, since it is our own - most often about the lower, immediate emotions that ever trouble the bodied. It is best we ourselves deal with our own problems, to the extent we can, learn from them as we have evolved to do. We grow strongest without leaning.

The strength we have gained of ourselves is of greatest value, worthy of passing on down the spirit line.

THE CLARITY OF DISGRUNTLEMENT

Last night on Japan tv I saw one of those health programs, there seem to be a lot of them these days, there were no such programs back when I was younger in the West and there was only one channel (and when "health faddist" store clerks dressed like doctors and nurses!). These are programs on which some hip-hyper expert shovels out heaps of information that is soon proven to be more or less inaccurate - who really knows until the last pitch - but this claim was pretty convincing; what's more, it was right up my alley (that's an elder idiom from a time when alleys were a big part of life).

This claim was convincing because I could tell it was true. In fact, I'll bet it is true. I sure hope it's true. Be good if it was. It declared that elders who are "grumpy" (i.e., emotionally discerning), "cranky" (sensitive), "opinionated" (knowledgeable), "fussy" (tasteful), "disgruntled" (perceptive), or as we used to say, "testy" (not many truly testy folks around anymore), are less likely to become senile or develop Alzheimer's, there being some significant iota of laboratory correlation between discontent and mental acuity; I can certainly see why that would be the case.

The fact is, that if you continue to actually grow with age, you naturally grow more discerning, and by the time you reach the early levels of the life summit you have had so much experience, acquired so much concise and incontrovertible judgmental ability - overall awareness on so many fronts - that you can easily tell, for example, the difference between wisdom and its absence.

For this and other reasons, it would be a massive loss to humankind and its evolutionary potential if there were not always sufficient elders to nurture the Big Germination. It would be disastrous if disgruntlement, the surest sign that one knows what is right, was not viewed as a good and necessary, even laudable quality, as good for the world as for the individual, like all the other laudable qualities mentioned above.

Indeed, the older I become the more apparent is the urgency for those at the summit to point out the facts of these matters with a forcible forefinger, providing detailed explication to these wisdom-starved whippersnappers! Why, we elders haven't even touched the surface of staying sharp in today's world; I'll get on with my part as soon as I find my glasses.

THE NEXT GIFT

When in your life you have finished with the task of raising the child you've been-- the child we all begin with being-- when you are at last mature enough to move on, ready to bring a child of your own into the light of your experience, the moment that child is born an ancient door is opened to a place you never knew your heart could hold.

The difference between you then and you now is like the difference between a seed and its tree: neither at all like the other, yet each being the other, in the most secretly invisible and magical of ways. Thus we live and grow through stages with which life itself is deeply familiar, but to which we ourselves, at each advance, are utter strangers, entering new galaxies of being.

Raising a child is its own distraction: you have so few moments in that dense procedure to fully step aside, sit aside, think aside, stop and love as deeply as you can-- until, the moment you can, the child is grown and gone, loving on its own.

Then, if seasons follow, from that child is born the next gift: grandchildren. And on these new beings, now that you are free of the rush of child rearing, you can spend your love as freely as sunshine falls on green leaves. And when those grandchildren are far away, the question becomes what to do with all those warm rays? Thus is more indiscriminate goodness and warmth borne into the world.

Not long ago I came across a snapshot of my daughter when she was ten years old or so, a delightful little person I remember well, and realized I miss that 10-year-old very much; I tried to explain my feeling when she came to visit, now a mother, with my granddaughters, but I could tell she didn't really know what I meant. She hasn't been here yet. She'll understand one day, decades from now, when as a grandmother she's going through some old photos, and the past tells her what it told me, what it tells us all, if we stop to listen: open your arms to this moment and its children.

ALONE ON THE MOUNTAIN

I spend great stretches of time alone up on the mountain with the sky on my hands, tending soil, seeds and plants, rearranging rocks the better to suit their natures vis-a-vis my need for stone walls, gazing out at the Lake and its majesty, getting as involved as I humanly can in thunderstorms and hurricanes, learning from them the many small things about myself, my past, my path, and the vortex of truth and illusion.

There is no greater teacher than solitude, as anyone who makes it back from the desert knows. Not solitude in the negative standard 'loneliness' sense, but in the aboriginal magnificent spirit-quest uplift sense. In the city, when you are alone it is a societal matter; when you are alone in the country you are alone, you realize, with everything. In persisting, you learn to listen at last to the symphony of all. You learn the geography of silence, find your way at last to the gate at its heart, and pass beyond into the secret garden. You learn there are places where the soul does not grow.

The need for such knowledge is the reason children leave home and go hungrily into the solitude of their own lives, to learn what is to be learned there. Too often, though, this quest is stifled at the start, even before the start, by societal and parental agendas, derivative teachings diluted to local purpose and contemporary assumptions of morality.

And so in the same nature of things are parents given a second chance when the children leave home, leaving the parents alone at last to learn (or not) what is now there for them to learn. Too often, though, because they have always followed a prescribed path, they do not know what to do with newness, and now is as opaque to them as tomorrow. It will take time, and changes, for them to truly grow from here. But to those who have never stopped growing, there is no change involved; one simply continues becoming.

ON THE WAY TO THE BIG GARDEN OF EVERYTHING

I was making lunch and had just trimmed the greens off the first of the radishes I'd harvested, when the radish rolled off of the cutting board and then underneath it, as though trying to get away and hide. Then the next radish did exactly the same thing!

So I said: Hey little radishes, you runnin' away from me? You don't have to run away from me, I'm the one who grew you, I'm the one who bought the seeds, I'm the one who planted them in the ground and watered and weeded them so you could grow into round red radishes. Then when you were ready I pulled you from the ground into the light and now we're gonna become each other! You're gonna become me and I'm gonna become you!

You'll have eyes and be able to walk and talk and I'll have roots in the earth and green leaves reaching to the skies! So just calm down, radishes, 'cause we have a distance to go together on our way to the big garden of everything.

After that, the rest of the radishes just smiled those round red radish smiles that radishes smile and lunch was great. Now I have new radish roots in earth and sky, and the radishes are enjoying writing about "radishes." They really seem to like the word.

SLOW LIFE

How like our own rooted life, the slow life of the land. The paddies are all shorn now, the gifts of sun, rain and earth have been taken home. The fields lie golden in the slanting light of the last of day, the cut stalks yet sending up new shoots in timeless green hope, vested in the same faith we accord tomorrow.

Their shearing marked the end of summer, now their turning marks the end of fall. All the more beauteous for their loss of glory, the paddies gild the mountainside.

They are done now, these fields, unattended but by the wood doves, who come in pairs to search for overlooked grains, until soon the long white sleep of winter begins again to ready the land for spring, as it readies ourselves.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PANTS

Until his mid-forties, pants had always played a passive role in his longstanding and uneventful wearer/garment relationships, for example his various pants over the decades slipping on, buttoning, zipping and belting like a breeze though summer air, with a minimum of effort and no concentration, leaving him free to think about what stylish shirt, what fancy tie, with no unsettling stomach muscle contraction, no semipermanent exhalation, no extended dancing on one leg and then the other, no forcing last year's pantslegs up slowly over thighs like filling a sausage skin with another sausage (it wasn't all new muscle) until one day the sausage complex threatened to split in the advent of ubersausage and he had to get new pants.

He was who he'd always been; how could there be this much more of him and who else was he kidding? It was all some kind of temporary quirk; in the cellulite of his mind's eye he kept ordering the same size pants he'd ordered the previous time, but they kept getting smaller and smaller until let's face it he couldn't stay dressed unless he didn't breathe. So he didn't stay dressed. Gave it up. T-shirts. No need to sacrifice himself upon the pyre of fashion, at least in a permanent pants kind of way. He needed another way, a temporary sacrifice, on the prominent altar of himself.

So at last he did what any man in his situation would do: he thought about running. Not away, not from, but toward: toward a future more like his distant past, toward the slim trim him he once was and would be again, the him that awaited still, somewhere inside that belly ahead on the jogging path; no need to buy all new sizes, he was the same dimensions as before underneath there somewhere and that's where he was going: beyond, to within; back into the lightness of being, of being containable by a waistline that wouldn't have to run anymore, he'd think about it after dinner.

This is not autobiographical.

ARTIFICIAL DOLDRUMS

So often these days I hear, even from men a decade or more younger than myself, who are looking forward to retirement, "Oh no, I don't want to have (for example) a woodburning stove; I'll be getting old and it will be too much for me."

What an conditioned attitude, to give up on the strength of a half-thought, to avoid what may be too much for old age decades before they even reach old age-- they destine themselves never to learn that such things as woodstoves, and the necessary related activities, interest and physical exercise they require, will strengthen their bones, keep them young and strong beyond their years!

Whatever happened to that inborn attitude that says "I'll just go ahead and find out how and what, and alter my path as necessary!" The very attitude by which we learn to walk, play a piano, dance, sing, string out formulas, make cabinets, whatever we take pride in. And here that spirit is dying by the day, right before the eyes it was meant to nourish!!

No discoverer ever had such an attitude. No one who ever advanced on behalf of humanity ever had such a negative conviction. Pioneering is inborn in us all, then carefully taught away...

The genuine reward of practical physical labor such people seek to avoid in their old age (thereby ensuring the old age they anticipate), such as extensive gardening, firewooding or general maintenance, comprises not just the harvest or the firewood or the improved living conditions, so much as the genuine sense of fully and worthily occupying your time, as compared to, say, treading a treadmill in a city gym for an hour or two three times a week.

The former exercise is free, it is done outdoors, it is natural (as opposed to artificial 'scheduled' exercise), it is balanced and universal (all muscles in the body, not just pecs or delts or abs, all fastwork fastterms), it is dictated by the requirements of the world out there, with which one must therefore synchronize, and it is utilitarian.

Collectively, these qualities combine to lift the spirit to its natural elevation and broad perspective, where problems take on their true tiny proportions in the big picture. Not synthetic uplift, as from a drug, some habitual pleasure or one more checkmark on the workout schedule, but the natural stimulus of your heart pumping your blood through your body as you perform your own tasks, whose progress is a measure of your own achievement, your own involvement with the genuine details of your life and therefore of life itself.

Nothing will lift your spirits from artificial doldrums like a long walk through forest along a mountainside, followed by a couple hours of chopping firewood and tilling the garden, fostering appetites that yearn to be.