WHAT IS HOLY IS THE WILD

All the deep, true feeling that kids feel fully and naturally when they go into a forest, to any wild place: it is a wild feeling, true and familiar as hunger. It elicits the heights of spirit, for above all it is holy. It embodies the sacred. We know this in our natural selves.

For what is holy is the wild; what we call our spirit is the wild in us. Even our cultural manifestations are wild and earnest yearnings to bring the wild into social presence, such as for community, companionship, progeny and fulfillment; the cultural trappings, from creative to monolithic, are collective efforts to organize and externalize the fruits of wild passion...

All these things are there in force each I time go into the forest around, the mountains above, even into my garden, and there behold leaves pushing bright up from the dark plain ground, stems reaching, reachers climbing toward the sun of their own desire, sprouts pushing up and seeking their inborn heights in power and nourishment they spin from nothing but earth and its companions...

What could be closer than these things to the true yearnings of the heart, that beats its solo rhythm in this world, that like ourselves stems directly from the source, that is no citizen, needs no passport, depends upon no government... Like the seeds, we are each our own, self contained, accepting no more than we surrender.

SPIRIT BREAKFAST

This morning I had the huge dawn fortune of going out into snow-cleared air and walking past all the fence posts with their high snow caps and beyond them the views of frosted mountains, the Lake like wet granite glazing off to mountains on the other side, then mountains beyond them, and beyond all the unrisen sun casting pastel glows and purple charcoal shadows out over everything as the mountains allowed, all hanging still in the silence of the air, just hanging all around out there, timeflake by timeflake: Lake, sky, mountain, air, all that spectacularity just being there and doing nothing in particular, just the everything it always does, seen or unseen, praised or unpraised, loved or unloved, the same everything that matters to the seeker who is the living soul within a body that, just risen from the winter of night in deep need of a spirit breakfast, to feast upon such colors and lights, scents and silences, distances and shadings, nearnesses and brilliances, topographies, delineations, and so in snow boots I alone in all that majesty walked, slowly, down, through, white, toward something that had to do with - a matter, I was sure, that in other moments I have deemed important somehow, and when I got to the car, which was mine, I opened the door with the key I happened to have at hand and started the engine as I remembered, shook my head to get back closer to this life of time and moments, having just been for some immeasurable measure among heavenly things...

A Cure You Can't Refuse

As you get ever elder and a bit more solitary, ever more fixed on the path toward perfection of your fine-tuned ways, grandkids are an excellent cure. 

With no effort at all they get you out of what you didn't even know was becoming a rut, lift you back to the surface of the Big Road you've always been on - the road you now and then dare to call your own - and when you're back up at your natural perspective, with all those natural wide-ranging prospects arrayed before you and those naturally broad horizons beckoning, your eyes return to seeing what they have grown to see, your ears to hearing full scale; your nose sampling the air for even more reality, your feet stirring with the old stride, where did I put my highway shoes, and before you know it you're on the road again, at least in your head; but plans are simmerin' in there, are they not, had a fire goin' all along, you sly dog... 

But for now you just stand there, new in a new way, savoring the true surface, source of all directions...

Grandkids are great.

Never Forgotten

The Days of the Dead (Obon) are with us again, as are the dead themselves, the beloved dead, and its good to have them around in spirit, visit their graves, pour water over the stones to cleanse the weathering of the past year, then give the beloved some of their favorite life snacks, leave a sip or two of sake, everyone so busy at these nationwide spiritual tasks during this time of year that once all have returned to their own home towns and their own home graves, the trains are empty. 

I get on in the morning and there are only 3 of us in the car; the streets are 'empty,' the offices too. Nothing much gets done there except the dead-end stuff, finalizing all the done-deals. Apart from the many renowned and WOWy firework shows and the lively nighttime Obon dance, it's quiet everywhere, as though we're getting a taste of death itself, which is a good thing for the living to experience every year, a few-day span of focusing beyond what we know; that's part of life too, after all, that soft wall. 

Living is dying and vice-versa, we can't really draw a precise line between them; sure, we pretend to, we have various stages and levels, phases and definitions - legal, medical, common sense - but we don't really know of a true beginning or end to any of it, the reason for our ignorance in this regard being simply that we haven't sufficient perspective in our merely living lives; we can only weigh what we can prove. 

This what we living conjure up, returning once more to the Days of the Dead: not just the memories of the beloved-- how they lived, what they looked like, their personalities, good and bad points, how they talked, what they spoke of, what they valued, their strengths and weaknesses... We do all that as in a mirror of memories, seeking a glimpse beyond into what must be the truth of it, but that is not vouchsafed to us in the special narrowness of being alive; we must wait to learn what is not forgotten...     

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.

JOURNEYS OF THE SPIRIT

In the morning there are trees everywhere, as though they crept up on my consciousness during the night. They shine green in the window, welcome me into the day. Warblers warble in them. Sunlight twinkles through them. Out in the morning, the farmers are at work early, readying their paddies.

Yesterday the farmer who owns the paddy across the road spent most of the day fortifying the paddy wall, using the long hoe made for the purpose, in a rhythmic dance with the earth. All the paddies in their eachness fit together like perfect facets on the vast green gem they make of the mountainside. The farmer's work is thus a matter of beauty, as compared to the manufactured concrete or metal paddy wall units more modern farmers use to achieve the same purpose.

The traditional mud wall has to be tended more often, like any work of art, but the rice no doubt appreciates the attention in some vegetably emotional way we know nothing of, is more contented rice, and so offers more content to the consumer. The farmer as well is no doubt the better for it in body and mind, lives better, sleeps better, has better generations, and is less out of pocket.

I can imagine the rationalizing arguments for the new ways: how they save time, even though they cost way more than mud and must at some point be discarded and replaced. Commerce, as a science, knows nothing of the spirit or its journey through time, a journey that is impossible when time is money.

THUNDERSTORM

The power, the spirit-magic of thunderstorms-- how reminding they are, how kin to our own ancient feelings, the dark and the light in ourselves, the storm and urge of being, the torrents of our passions-- we relate. We are close cousin to thunderstorms, back from the beginning of being; we're family.

Since the dawn of our story, we've led the same electric, fiery, fluxing lives; we generate. So arise those great columns of cloud-- white softnesses tumbling upward into gold at the top of the sky as the rumbling begins, when on the far dark-blue water emerges the blur of white mist, frothing the calm surface like the tip of a broad brush dipping to a waiting page, then writing the long word of rain on the water as the sounds around you deepen, the air itself thickens and closes in and the motion of wind is large, though you remain still--

Nearer and nearer draws the skywide Niagara, branches of light reaching out to all sides in faraway flashes to touch what they must, then the thunder follows-- Your own spirit rises into the roar to receive the first wave of the blessing that comes pouring down...

WHERE LIGHT PLAYS

That bit of a haiku I posted yesterday was prompted when I stepped out the door onto the deck in the morning on my way to some work in the garden and was surprised at how bright it was out there, the light itself was different, until I looked around and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, they were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting ginger I thought about how every year around this time the whole mountainside is a mirror that remains at max brightness for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the whole mountainside is sky, even at night when it fills with starlight, until the rice is planted and the light of the mountainsky diminishes day by day, week by week as the rice stalks grow and replace light with life, the whole mountainside changing in shade toward imperial jade at the pace of a rice plant's growth, the ambient light changing as well all along the way of the process, light thus traveling at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, stirring interesting yet calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking that all is just as it was, and so perforce comes to do its job and realize reality, which is good, by and large, especially out in the countryside, where light plays... and grows...

HAPPY HOLINESS

To celebrate the holiday season and the visiting grandies, we decorated the tree by the stone stairs with all sorts of ornamentations that made a bright celebration out the big window. Yesterday, the festive days being over, while I was out working in the garden Echo began to take the decorations down. She removed them to the extent she could reach and asked me to take down the rest before I came in for lunch.

So just before the grandies arrived to share our noonday meal, as I was taking down the long festoons of gold, red, blue and silver beads and twinkly strings of all sorts, I had to put them someplace safe for the moment, so I just looped the red fuzzy strings and the blue and green twinkly frillies around my neck; then there were the ornaments, which were too big and many to hold-- not into the pockets of course, or down on the stone steps, so I hung them on their loops from my shirt front and pocket buttons, and kept on looping the bright other strands over my shoulders, so by the time the grandies arrived and I headed up the stone stairs with gold, blue, silver and red garlands of sparkle and frilly twinkles high around my neck, over my head and down over my shoulders, loopy festoons of bright beads of all colors reaching to my knees, big round shiny ornaments in both hands and dangling from all the buttons of my shirt, I had come to embody the holiday spirit itself, and as I made my necessarily stately holiday way up the stone steps and into the house there wasn't an icicle of humbug anywhere, so as I opened the door it was impossible to hold back even one of the loud "HO-HO-HOs" that suddenly emerged from that ancient place we all know in the spirit. That's what holidays are for: to bring out the happy holiness in us, each and every one.

As it is in delighted children.

VERGING

The sky darkens, the birds call low in the still air, the islands are shapes barely visible in the lowering mist, like memories of islands that once were there... Errant brightness from the south intensifies the stillness here; the leaves hang limp, the trees themselves stand waiting, as if something important is about to happen... Nothing moves... The sky hangs... The dragonflies are all in hiding... The world around is one vast verging...

What stimulus to the spirit, that knows the verge so well...

VICTORY

I like a religion where anybody can walk right in to the establishment and in a good, open, non-infidel spirit buy one of the talismans-- in this case a "Victory" (in whatever may be your endeavor) omamori.

I could in this instance have bought instead a Hello Kitty general purpose talisman (photo a few posts below), butI don't really have any cartoonish aims, or objectives whose achievement could reasonably hinge on minimalist cat depictions.

I saw the Victory ones and I thought yeah, this red one on white is for me, this fits how I trust in the basic premise that religious hierarchy has coopted over the millennia, the original spiritual understanding that if you will it and keep it in mind it will come to pass, the automystery "magic," that is your own, that is born in you and that you should never surrender to another...

If you have with you at all times something to constantly and subtly remind you, preferably in a beautiful way, of your wish to be, for example, victorious in your honorable endeavors (forget about taking the thing to Vegas or winning the lottery with it, these things work from the inside, not from the outside) then keep this on or about you at all times, let it interrupt you, let get in your way, let it redirect your wandering thoughts, let it re-mind you of the summit of yourself, until one day you arrive there...

BEANS IN THE DEVIL'S EYE

On Friday night - which was Setsubun, the first day of the Lunar Spring - in keeping with an ancient Japanese tradition the visiting grandkids got the chance to shout "Out with the devil! In with good fortune!" at the top of their voices over and over while throwing handfuls of roasted soybeans out into the darkness from all the doorways of the house. It was interesting to see how they handled it.

A lot of folks are cynical about the rituals of tradition, especially ancient tradition, such as Setsubun is. Cynicism is one of the cheaper philosophies, requiring no real experience or thought (indeed, it is diminished by both). But anyone who has actually lived and perceptively experienced what is out in the world knows full well that there is value in traditional metaphoric/symbolic reminders of the ideal, and worth in speaking out for it.

There is uplift to ritual (the other side of science) as well, in thus asserting - as in Setsubun - that we have a measure of control over the presence or absence of "the devil" and over our own fortunes. It is of deep worth to remind ourselves of this and to teach our children that they too have individual power (not surrendered power, as to a political or religious organization) that can be personally brought to bear on behalf of goodness and bright fortune not only for themselves, but for their entire household and all its members, and by extension, society itself.

Setsubun is an anciently tacit – though noisy - erasure of animosities and a rebuke to the untoward. By flinging hard beans in the face of misfortune you are showing the night your strength, shouting out to the darkness without as well as within (the house and yourself) that you care about the entities that reside here, that you are responsible for and will defend this place, for this household and its members are shared in your charge.

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.