Hold On Loosely

Hold on loosely

Don’t let go

If you cling too tightly

You’re gonna lose control -38 Special

I love this song. If you’re ever wondering about the philosophy of Taoism, just recall these lyrics – might as well be the Taoist Rock Anthem. Sure, the song is about relationships – romantic ones – but Taoism is about relationships, too – our relationships to nature, to each other, to ourselves, and to the way things are. Instead of constructing our identities as individual billiard balls knocking against others, Taoism rightly, I believe, offers a more nature-oriented, realistic picture of a person as consisting of a meshed web of relationships, a paradigm that meets up nicely with similar anti-Cartesian (dualistic, mechanistic, oppositional) ideas developed out of quantum mechanics theory and remembered from Native American worldviews.

Yes, that was a mouthful. Which is why I happen to be so appreciative of this song – it so simply touts an idea that an academic-prone philosopher-wanna be like myself can so easily and eagerly turn into a complicated spaghetti-tangled mess, getting high off eating up the pasta-carbs of Deep Thoughts. Which is kind of antithetical to Taoism’s simple style.

For instance, my girlfriend asked me the other day how Taoism differs from Buddhism, and these lyrics have a possible answer. I wouldn’t say Taoism and Buddhism are starkly different or at all opposing, more that they strive for the same things and work within the same universe but with a slightly differing emphasis. So, while Buddhism – and I’m being overly reductive here, I know – emphasizes letting go of desire, for instance, Taoism is more about holding on, but loosely.

Life is a Highway…
If you are a rider on a horse, Buddhism would suggest that you let go of the reins and get off the horse and go meditate, give up trying to get anywhere, the effort of expending your energy toward a goal is pointless, you can’t reach enlightenment by riding your horse.

Taoism, on the other hand, would say that you should keep riding the horse and holding on the reins, but you should try to ride with the horse, not on the horse, directing and guiding, not forcefully, but in a flow that matches the pace and rhythm of the horse’s gait as well as your own heartbeat, within the context of the landscape around you. Taoism would say, sure, ride the horse, but do so knowing that it is what it is, don’t make it more than it is. The Buddhists are right, you’re not going to escape death or reach eternity, but hey, you’re alive, might as well have a good time riding the horse… (And yes, so many ancient Chinese poets were also winos…)

And that’s what I like about Taoism vs. other religions. It embraces the philosophical stance of realizing that we as individuals are not at the center of the universe and that clinging to materialistic desires is futile; at the same time – and that’s the key, at the same time - both/and - Taoism encourages the acceptance of reality as it is, with all its transience, pain, and joy.

For many Christians and Buddhists, this life on Earth is something to grit your teeth through till you get on the elevator of salvation or zapped in the microwave of enlightenment. Taoists aren’t looking to the next life or the erasing of life; they look to this life with the ease of someone who has accepted that she belongs here, that this is home.

Do You Realize?
All is sacred; all is mundane. We are made of starlight; we are made of mud. When we can hold both views of reality – seemingly opposing views – in our heads at the same time, when we can take the importance of things lightly, while at the same time understanding everything as valued and significant, then we can fully be alive, with all of our senses, with all of our hearts. This is Taoist enlightenment.

Keep on Moving
When you try to hold onto something, squeeze it to fix it in place, keep it from changing – an idea, a relationship, a person, a situation, a feeling – you kill it. Which is why the Taoist meditation is Tai Chi or Qi Gong – a moving through the world, not sitting it out. It is also why the yin-yang symbol intends to show fluidity of opposites merging into one another. They are not static categories, mutually exclusive pieces, but part of each other, in constant motion.

Finally

a) If you can correctly identify the song titles in my headings, you win a free yin-yang symbol drawn on your arm with a Sharpie.

b) Later I will actually quote the Tao te Ching, discuss the Vinegar Tasters, and rant about Niels Bohr. So watch out.

c) I’m truly not trying to bash the Buddhists.

Idling

Dear Mr. Driver of the Snap-On Tools Truck that Idles in front of my House every week for Hours on End,

You are ruining the environment.

Specifically, you are ruining MY environment.

Your truck is noisy and stinky and I have been wondering for months now why in the world YOU CAN”T TURN YOUR ENGINE OFF WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN THE TRUCK.

Please. Stop. Idling.

Thank you,

Me plus all the little creatures (even the snakes) that live around here

UPDATE: I finally met the owner of the auto-body business next door. Turns out the Snap-On guy has an on-truck computer that he’s running on a generator the whole time he’s visiting. I don’t feel totally comforted but at least it’s not just pure laziness. And I think my complaint may result in the guy idling somewhere else.

Still.

Bugs and Meditation

Dear Strange Gnats that Fly Together Over the White Line on the Riverview Trail and Get in My Eyes,
The other day I was running and one or two of you – who can tell, you’re so small and swarmy – ran into (or I ran into you) my contact lens, causing my eye to smart and spill with tears. I had to stop running, remove the contact.

I’m pretty blind. So when I took out the one contact, the trees around me smeared into Impressionistic-type drools of color. I felt a bit dizzy. I kept walking , but slowly, and the chirping, heavy-scented throng of leaves on either side of me pushed in closer, it seemed, and I felt utterly enveloped.

And alone. And alive.

It was kind of like meditation, or sleeping – senses distorted – colors turned up to a scream -I could feel my whole self trembling and present, and I could almost, it felt, utterly dissolve right there and never reappear.

So, Strange Flying Creatures Hovering Over the White Line,

Thank you.

You disrupted my run, you made me slow down, you blinded my eye, you gave me a moment of purity, a purity of a moment,

oh you may not be very attractive or sweet but your annoyance oh, what a gift it gave me.

Dream

I’m dreaming.

I have a bucket of dirt, grass, muddy water.

A woman thrusts her hand in the bucket, swirling the thick water so that I can see – “There’s fish in here,” she declares.

This is a surprise.

She shows me that two are dead, two are living, one yellow, one blue.

“You’ll need a fishbowl, and a filter,” she tells me. We’re in a pet store, I suddenly see. I also see they are beta fish – the kind that have to live alone, because otherwise they fight and one always kills the other.

“Won’t I need two fishbowls?” I ask. Since I have two fish.

“Oh no,” the woman tells me. “This one – ” she points to the biggest fish, the blue one – “this one ate those other two, and it will fight and eat this yellow one, and it will get even bigger.”

I’m a little horrified. She’s cheerfully encouraging the homicidal urges and dominance of this fish. This doesn’t seem humane.

End of dream.

What does it mean? The elements that stick out to me:

- That in a bucket of seemingly useless dirt water, there’s something alive – hope and promise in the muck?

- To survive, some promises have to beat out others – this reminds me of the Elizabeth Lesser quote – you can have what you want, but you can’t have everything you want. For a potential to become an actuality, choices have to be made.

- The process of natural selection can seem harsh.

I had a beta fish once. It was a beautiful flashing blue.

I wonder what is in my bucket!?

Wild Animals

I live near the river. I guess that’s why this summer I’ve seen, in my front and backyard, a deer, a family of grey foxes, a possible skunk, a tiny snake (and yes, I made someone else get rid of it) and last night a -

barking possum?

I was standing on my back porch, admiring the mist against the black shapes of the mountains, when all of a sudden this large, hairy, chunk of a thing came barreling around the corner, leaped onto my porch, caused us both to yelp.

Then it ran a few feet away and started barking at me – like a seal with a sore throat – as if I were the intruder (well, historically speaking, I am).

What the heck was it?

The person with the best ideas wins a special Into the Park t-shirt! (Though if you’ve ever seen one of my handmade t-shirts, you might want to lose this one.)

And while I’m asking, if a tiny grey snake dies on your back porch, do you need to worry about mama snake showing up?

Actually, I have to say that the way my friend gently took the little snake, invited all the children to touch it, and then congratulated it on a beautiful life and buried it with the failed sunflowers was much better than my stay-three-feet away approach.

She taught the kids to be fearless and kind; I taught them to be squeamish and ridiculous.

I’m working on it.

A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…

A Call For Poets of the New Reality

When I went to the Ani DiFranco concert a couple weeks ago, I didn’t expect

a) to fall in love with her as a performer, or

b) to find myself moved deeply, reminded of a passion born within me years ago in graduate school that I had somewhat forgotten about.

Yet both (a) and (b) happened when Ani and her band played the song “The Atom.” The lights seemed to get misty and the song had a husky quality to it as she sang:

the glory of the atom

begs a reverent word

the primary design

of the whole universe

yes, let us sing its praises

let us bow our heads in prayer

at the magnificent consciousness

incarnate there

Not only was a someone offering musical worship of a “scientific” particle of matter, but later in the song our troubled relationship to nature through the cause of science connects to our environmental crisis:

human beings are a cross

between monkeys and ants

you can see us from your spaceship

melting the polar ice caps

with our arroagance

summon a congress of angels

dressed in riot gear

we’ve got ourselves a serious situation

down here

It was gorgeous, moving.

Years ago, in graduate school, I took a class with Robert Nadeau, a historian of science who, along with a noted physicist, has written a number of books on “the new science,” quantum mechanics and new biology, that argue that what we learn from these new studies undermines the dualistic Cartesian and Newtonian thought that still dictates our philosophical concepts – in the humanities and elsewhere. They show that principles of nonlocality and complementarity that appear in the latest science give us new models for understanding humanity’s place in the world – we are a part of the whole, quite literally. And they stress that without this new understanding, we will continue to erode this world, and ourselves.

But Nadeua, in class and in his work, feels strongly that our culture is not going to change through intellectual argument alone. He calls for “poets of the new reality” to infuse scientific revelations with spirituality, knowing, it seems, that reason alone won’t have the heft to shift such imbedded ideals and behaviors. He and Kafatos say, speaking about the ecological crisis, that

the global revolution in ethical thought and behavior that is prerequisite to human survival may not occur unless intellectual understanding of the character of physical reality is wedded to profound religious or spiritual awareness… central to this vision would be a cosmos rippling with tension evolving out of itself endless examples of the awe and wonder of this seamlessly interconnected life… the astonishing fact of our being.

I found this quote in one of my papers, in which I tried to show how some contemporary poets seem to be attempting to use scientific fact to create a new theoretical landscape in which to consider ourselves no longer dominant masters of a subjugated earth, no longer alienated outcasts caught in Nietsche’s prisonhouse of the mind, no longer either separate and in opposition to the physical world nor completely, Romantically merged with it, but existing within it, and it within us, in a complementary, “both/and” framework.

Reading what I wrote about this reminded me how inspired I was at the time to write poetry that could do this important work… and how later, I felt like I found in Unitarian-Universalism a possible foundation for the spiritual piece of  “the new reality”…

But in the midst of things, I had kind of forgotten about those idea. Listening to Ani the other night, I was heartened to feel that she, too, is a poet of the new reality. A song about the atom could have been a goofy They Might Be Giants anthem; instead, there was a loving, mystical quality to the music that made her words powerful.

And while I like The Streets’ song about our environmental crisis, “Dodo,” I believe that human beings aren’t going to be motivated to do what they need to do to save the planet by being confronted with a pessimistic dismissal of our value. It has the same empty effect as telling a kid that smoking a cigarette will kill her. Of course,she doesn’t want to die; but death is so far off, and so inevitable, and the wagging finger so chiding, all she does is light up another one.

When that same kid gets pregnant, though, and becomes aware of what smoking will do to the baby she feels kicking inside of her, she might be more motivated to stop smoking because of the hope of new life present and heavy within her. Hope and love will encourage her to change where a picture of doom only added to her nonchalance about her health.

I had a book of stories as a child that included one with what must be a common theme. It’s about some grimy old guy in a shack who gets saddled with an orphan baby while working in a mining camp. The baby’s sweet beauty makes the guy realize she needs a clean blanket; then he sees she needs a clean bed; then he sees she needs something pretty to look at, so he puts out flowers; soon his shack and his clothes and everything is spotless, clean, beautiful – his transformation spurred by beauty, adoration, love, and the sense of responsibility that such love imbues.

How does all this relate to The Park, you ask? The litter challenge. People aren’t going to stop tossing their Dorito bags on the oak tree roots because of a posted admonishment, even the threat of a fee. So what about the beauty of the place? Can we write poetry about it, recite with missionary zeal? Should Ani DiFranco do a song about it, preaching its glory and divinity?

Those of us who want to “save the environment” yearn for “everyone” to feel that we belong to the earth, to experience the special relationship, so that we treat it as we would a mother – this is familiar language.

In the microcosm of a small little park, how does that larger vision translate to the concrete space? How can we save the earth if we can’t even have enough care to stop littering on one square of grass and trees?

One thing I have noticed about this park, which saddens me greatly. There aren’t very many visitors to it. I happen to know there are plenty of families with kids along the surrounding streets – I’ve met some of them; I see their abandoned toys in their front yards when I take walks. But the park is more often than not empty. Why?

Is it that people just play in their own little squares of owned turf? Are they afraid of mingling with others?

If people felt ownership of this common space, perhaps it wouldn’t be neglected, trashed. Someone would care about it. It would shine proudly, like all the gleaming cars in our driveways…but maybe we are too isolated in our single family homes these days to know how to have a common space. Maybe we can’t understand and live out a harmonious relationship to the earth because we can’t even find a way to heal the split between ourselves and our communities, our neighbors down the street.

I don’t have much of an answer for how to get people in the park, how to get people loving it, like it is a baby in a shack.

All I know is, I believe that we have to start where we are, with what’s before us.

Each piece, each park, is part of and reflects the whole.

I have some reservations.

My friend and I were talking about Native American reservations last night. Reservation is an odd word:

reservation

Noun

1. a doubt: his only reservation was, did he have the stamina?

2. an exception or limitation that prevents one’s wholehearted acceptance: work I admire without reservation

3. a seat, room, etc. that has been reserved

4. (esp. in the US) an area of land set aside for American Indian peoples: the Cherokee reservation

What a strange idea – reserve a piece of land, corral, fence in, set aside, here’s your pasture…

My thought today was how the Park is also a reservation, only it’s not fenced in, because what’s being kept there can’t exactly move: What’s being reserved here is Nature.

Kind of like the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation – the park is not a place people visit for an hour’s recreation – Nature is something you go to, something separate, an entertainment arena, it’s not the environment you live in, the reality that circumscribes your life.

What strikes me is that when you set aside nature, you are not only restricting, delineating the appropriate area or zone for nature to exist, but in the same act restricting the experience of the people, too.

When we put human beings on a reservation, when we encircle animals within a fence, when we jail a prisoner, when we bound any population with restrictive demarcations, keeping something in, keeping something out, we effectively do to the thing on the outside what we’re doing to the inside.

We enclose the reservation; we are cutting ourselves off from that land, those people, too. It’s the inverse property of enclosure.

By saying of the world within the park, “Here is (public) nature,” I am conversely saying of my property and experience across the street, “Here is not nature, here is something else, here is something private, here is something managed for a different purpose.”

My friend was talking about the role of social workers on reservations, how oppressive the ideas can be that get enacted about what’s considered to be appropriate behavior for the wider culture, what’s defined as mentally and emotionally healthy, etc.

It is also interesting that the park represents the ideas of beauty and aesthetics of a small number of humans who decide what’s enjoyable in the park, what elements should be fostered or eradicated, what plants should grow, what trees get to remain, what makes it a nice setting. Seems like an odd arrogance, really.

We come from a basic assumption that our judgments have an almost godly justification to them, because they are based on science and study and learning. We can point to a book and say to a Cherokee child, You are out of line, or to a thorny bush, you don’t fit our strategic vision.

It’s been our problem from the beginning.

And because I feel when we slice and dice to make things nice we effectively hack away at ourselves, as well, I feel an empathy with the park. I feel like my humanity has also been corralled. I have been cut off of from Nature, I have been kept from the wisdom of the Native Americans, I have been circumscribed by conventions of propriety applied to society with the stamp of unquestionable authority.

We were talking about how people long for connections to old tribes, awkwardly so. It is a cliche to mention one’s Cherokee grandmother; it’s cheesy to put up a dreamcatcher in your window; it feels ignorant and condescending to want to read and hear and learn about the ways of people that had their world ravaged by our predecessors. It feels arrogant to want a neatly chopped and bug-free lawn for personal pursuits of peace, while not making any major sacrifices for the salvation of an environment we are continuing to desecrate and destroy.

But deeper than that is the fact that when the earth goes down, so do we (if not us before it); and the spiritual paucity we have inherited as consequence of the reservations we created for others has crippled us already…

This is a shared world. May we learn to share it, so that all of us can heal.

Patterns, and Weather Events

The trees in the park had been longing for snow.

You could tell – the irritation of the pressing cold – that kind of feeling of wet bluejeans rubbing on your skin – it gives a person a pinched look, and the trees were looking like that, burdened by the holding pattern of the weather.

I was feeling it – days and days of one kind of air – sometimes the patterns need to be busted – unclench the hold.

Which made me think about how patterns can be helpful or restraining, depending on how we use them.

We can let a pattern carry us, raftlike, through turbulence. It can be sustaining – like the daily pattern of breakfast, lunch, and dinner can provide a comforting structure to a person in crisis, eliminating the burden of a person having to wonder when she will eat, coordinate a mealtime with others, etc. Patterns provide expedience for repeated requirements of existence. (Though for things like urination, working on an as-needed basis remains a good idea.)

Patterns allow returning. We come again and again to a table, to a curve in the line, to a church service, to a holiday, to a practice – and the similarity of the occurrence reveals distinctly the elements that are not the same. We can see how we have grown and changed, feel time’s efforts and effects, so much more clearly when set against the unchanged, familiar scenery; this helps us come to know ourselves, our relationships.

On the other hand, patterns can also carry us away from raw experience, burying our senses in habit (cloaking us in a nun’s habit!), so that we don’t even feel our own hunger or thirst or desire or delight. And then we can’t recognize these feelings when they occur outside of the patterns. Caught in habit, or ruts, we  become desensitized  to  realities both interior and exterior, not noticing  subtle changes,  unable to respond creatively and appropriately to life.

I noticed recently, for instance, that I was caught in a pattern of tension in dealing with my children. I had needed a certain pattern or ritual for dinner and bathtime at one point, but the pattern existed past its utility – and I was tense about maintaining the pattern, but this persistence interfered with my ability to be myself and enjoy time with my kids. Just noticing the pattern’s stranglehold allowed me to relax, let it go, and be in the moment.

How welcome this rain, ice, and snow! I feel interrupted and refreshed.  Schedules are disrupted, expectations unmet; but I scrape my windshield joyfully, because I needed a break from the sameness, before I forgot to notice the weather all together.

The Dog

The dog runs off constantly, any time he can. There’s too many smells – and squirrels – in the world for his poor soul to resist it – when the leash goes slack, or a weakness in my grasp, when the door is ajar, when a jerk will unjam his body from my arms – he’s gone.

And usually I’m spitting curses between my teeth.

The dog reminds me of this poem, “The Invitation,” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (I know) which says:

I want to know if you can

disappoint another

to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal

and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless

and therefore trustworthy.

It’s not that he doesn’t love us. Sometimes he does saunter back home of his own accord, paws the front door, wags a tired tail like a ragged flag to say Hello. But our damn dog’s allegiance has and will always be to himself, not to us.

I have several thoughts about this – beyond the first flush of crass cursing, that is.

#1: Born to Be Wild: I truly wish I could let the dog come and go as he liked all the time. Animals aren’t meant to be yoked at the neck, regulated by a master’s desires. I hate how we treat “pets.” Not to disparage or demean the intimate and mutually beneficial relationships built between many animals and their ‘owners’ – just to say that part of me cheers my dog’s disobedient bent because really, he didn’t ask to be cowed and cushioned. He wants to chase squirrels and piss on plants. Laying around on our bed all day, lounging under the dinner table waiting for tidbits to drip down in the waterfall of baby drool, obviously depresses him.

But what’s the current realistic alternative? I wish he could be wild and free. He can’t, because he’d get stolen or run over. Or would he? What if I took him to a field in Iowa, let him go? Would I be unleashing him into a fantasy dream of thrills and real living? Or would I be abandoning him, crushing his heart? Are those his only options – to live alone and free or together with us and jailed?

Thought #2: It’s called “domestication” and is also used by us humans when talking about things like marriage – that living with other people is much like being leashed, imprisoned, dominated, coersed, like a dog.

Yikes.

What do I think about the other humans with whom I live? Is freedom antithetical to living with others?

#3: If our dog had been better, more thoroughly trained, he might have actually achieved more ‘freedom’ by being more trustworthy. He could maybe go off leash here and there. Let out in the porous back yard. Sometimes discipline and training are tools for the kind of strength and endurance that true freedom requires.

I was made aware of this in my ballet training. To become strong enough to go on pointe, and then to be good enough to be amazing going free-form, required years and years of rote, routine, highly structured, disciplined exercises.

Or: If you want to fly on a basketball court, better tie your shoelaces nice and tight.

#4: I wish we had a dog park in our park. That would make life so much easier.

#5: We need to fix the holes in our fence. Good fences make good dogs.

#6: As a metaphor for my own life, what calls to my wild heart so that I break free from all other ties? Am I brave enough to risk disappointing others in order to satisfy the needs of my soul? Will I dare to be labeled as bad and disobedient because my behavior upsets others’ expectations for me? And if I do – if I can – won’t that be a wild romp – and don’t we all need these moments to break away and chase down our bliss?