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Nov 04, 2000
An Autumn Funeral
The Eulogy for My FatherNov 01, 2000
My father died this day
in the first hour
as All Hallows Eve
slipped into All Saints’ Day.
Sainted his memory.
Hallowed his name.
The Love he lived
will power prayers for him.
He who taught me
now has learned
the Mystery.
Be at Peace.
Oct 31, 2000
Between the Living and the Dead
Oct 21, 2000
Falling...
Oct 09, 2000
Columbus Day
Columbus Day is a confused Holiday, but an important one.It's the New World Holiday.
It's not Traditional, but it honors the idea of Tradition, by connecting us with our ancestors. It commemorates the arrival of Europeans in America, at least in theory. Here in New York, it functions largely as a celebration of Italian ethnicity, disregarding the fact that Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, and Italian power waned as the New World opened. The Pope presided over the division of South America between Spain and Portugal, but there were no Italian colonies in the West. Come to think of it, there was no Italy. The creation of the nation, and the flow of emigrants to America, were both 19th Century phenomena. In the meantime, the "Age of Exploration," of which Columbus is an exemplar, rendered the great port of Venice increasingly irrelevant. His voyages coincided with Italian decline, but our memories are short, and it doesn't seem to bother the paraders of today.
Not so sanguine are the so-called Native Americans, for whom this date marks not just decline, but decimation. Their story deserves to be told, but I have not the viewpoint to do so. My heritage is bound up with the conquering Europeans, though really with those from the North, not the Mediterranean. They came a century after Columbus, and their deeds were no less shameful than the Latins', but the true history of the peoples that they found here remains obscure. No one is really native to America, and controversy surrounds the debate over who came here, and how and when. We do know that Columbus was not even the first European, the Vikings having made it to Newfoundland five hundred years earlier. That knowledge was lost, or relegated to legend, like the history of the "Indians" (or "Skraelings," as the Norse called them) who wondered at the coming of the strangers.
We have only grown stranger since then.
We tend to think more about our Americanness than our Old World ancestry. This is not unfitting, but it may be incomplete. Incompletion is basic to the American identity, which holds out the promise of a dream yet to be realized. We are a people unsure of who we are, yet hoping still to become something more.
In this we embody the Mystery of Being as forcefully as any humans ever have.
The Land does not belong to us.
But by living on it,
and loving it,
we forge a bond that makes it ours in spirit.
Just as we belong to it.
Always it has new secrets to divulge,
teaching a Tradition of discovery.
The edge of the World is here.
Oct 06, 2000
Tutti Frutti
Sep 29, 2000
Passing Unseen
I’ll have to ask for forgiveness.I came in a little short of twelve hours for the Equinox,
but the DMTree feast was waiting, and instructions had been issued.
And it was raining.
Not a hard rain, but a fine mist permeated the afternoon. Morning wasn’t much drier, just not quite coalesced.
Not a glimpse of Sun the whole day.
You’d like to see some Sun on the Equinox, just to know the difference between the twelve hours of day, and the twelve hours of night. This was twenty four hours of gray.
It was a day like a Catbird, which is also gray, and which was found throughout the Park. But the day was gray and quiet, while the Catbirds were gray and loud, mewing their feline calls in defiance of the sound dampening dampness.
Catbirds are common enough. They breed in the Park, but numbers must be moving through on migration just now. They were ubiquitous.
For all it’s familiarity, the Catbird has a hidden feature seldom seen: it’s got a red rear. The undertail coverts, (to put it technically), are rusty red like a Robin’s breast. The area is generally shadowed by the tail, and the bird skulks in the brush, supplying few ventral views. You know the red is there, but it’s rare to get a good look at it.
That was the Sun, on the first full day of Fall; a Catbird’s butt; somewhere behind the clouds, but never showing. Slipping out the back door with Summer; off to Southern lands, leaving the burden of yellow to the Goldenrods in the Meadow.
Color without fire,
Fall without precipice.
Under the overcast,
seasons in passing
touch.
Sep 22, 2000
Autumnal Equinox
This day is the last of Summer, and the first of Fall.Autumn is Traditionally the season of consolidation, of harvest, and preparation for the hardships of Winter. We have made of it something different, another kind of New Year. Back to school and business; the new season of television; even the Federal Fiscal Year, turning over on the 30th. Actually, the fiscal year goes back to a time when harvest meant more than it does today, and accounts were settled in the Fall. Now it's just another incongruity in a world of overlapping systems.
Looking for an underlying system, I will spend the twelve daylight hours in the Park. At least I'll do so tomorrow, as I cannot take today off. The day should be more agreeable than the one I spent on the Vernal Equinox. It's a matter of thermodynamics: the heat of Summer lingers, even as it dissipates into the Fall, but Spring must bask in lengthening days before it fully warms. Sustained by the prospect of a fairer future, I made it through that day in March. Tomorrow should be nicer, yet it looks ahead to colder climes. Such is the balance of the year.
Maintaining balance is the goal.
A goal, anyway.
To balance is to center, or to offset.
The first works with, the other works against.
However built, a place of rest.
We need a balance point so that we will have someplace to take off from.
Like the Flycatcher, haunting a leafless snag, sallying forth to catch a bug, returning repeatedly to the same perch, we, in search of that which feeds our spirit, will go beyond balance, to a place where, unsupported, we must fall or soar.
And even soaring,
We need somewhere to return to.
Tradition provides this perch, and Tradition is a kind of ritual: ritual expanded to a way of life. In our fractured World, we need to rebuild our Traditions, and rituals are a beginning. The ritual of daylight, in honor of the Equinox, this I have learned simply by being in the Park. It balances the Year, between two equal spheres of dark and light.
And that’s a place to start.
With a place to start from, and to return to, we are in position to learn other, transient, rituals, ways of addressing Life’s vicissitudes, subjecting them to the balm of pattern. That, I think, is what happened to me at Point Pelee, and why I went there, though I did not know it.
To do a proper thing, and to do it unselfconsciously,
is to be in balance.
Half way between the poles,
this is the Wisdom of the Equinox.
****************************
Well, I see the weather forecast is deteriorating. Sixty percent chance of showers. Showers I can put up with. A certain amount of rain, in fact, can be beautiful on a misty, moisty morning. Being soaked for twelve hours, however, is not on my agenda. I’m dedicated, but not crazy. I’ve seen a lot of days turn out better than predicted, so we shall see. If we have to cut to the DMTree wine and food ritual, that shouldn’t offend any gods I know of.
(Late update: Forecast now looking a bit better, chance of rain down to 30%, here's hoping...)
Sep 18, 2000
The Late Summer
Ah yes, reassembly.I'm slowly returning to what passes for equilibrium, but there's precious little Summer left to piece back together. August took with it most of Summer's hopes. One fine day that I wrote of a month ago turned out to be the only one falling on a weekend during the entire month. Last year: drought, and the "hottest summer on record". This year: persistent rain, and consistently below average temperatures. I suppose "average" is the operative word. Put the two years together, average them out, and all looks perfectly normal. That's not much consolation when you have to live with the particulars of time and place.
Still, persistence does pay off. I've been in the right place at the right time to have seen most of the season's best days, as well as some less pleasant. I will not, however, call any of them bad days. That's for psychological projection. I'm trying, rather, to receive. My only projection is the project you are currently reading.
I receive signs that augur Autumn. The sunlit hours are contracting; the rays arrive at a declining angle, draping morning and evening with a golden haze. Change is in the air. Fall begins on Friday, and many a year I would be glad, wiping the grimy sweat from my brow, welcoming a crisp new wind from the North. But not so now, at least not quite yet. Let me float for one more moment on the receding sea of Summer. And if Summer is an Ocean, Autumn is a froth of surf that crashes on the Winter shore.
I lost my focus,
but that's what Summer's for.
Unfocused, or focusing too closely, one knows not what one sees, nor who sees you.
Girls were observed, sunbathing topless on the margin of the Meadow. I didn't mean to look at them, but when you're looking closely you sometimes see things not meant for your discernment. I suppose these young women knew what they were risking, but I couldn't help feeling a twinge of embarrassment.
I'm not sure if it was on their behalf, or mine.
Nevertheless, I kept looking.
A similar feeling arises when I look into a bird's nest. There is something naked and fragile about the chicks, all straining necks and gaping beaks.
Wanting, asking, waiting,
till finally they receive…
what? Regurgitated bugs and worms.
An easy life, at first, but they must learn
to find their own food.
A pair of Green Herons nested successfully in a Pin Oak along the upper lobe of the Lake. The little drama was one of Summer's highlights. One egg failed to hatch, but four fuzzy gray balls did emerge, growing faster than we, with our long childhood, can fathom. Now they have left the nest, and, like the parents they will never know again, they have dispersed.
The same for Mocking Birds, and Wrens, Catbirds, Cardinals, Woodpeckers, and others that I may have missed. As for the Swans, four of five cygnets survived. Bigger than their parents now, but still gray, they remain, patrolling the Lake as a family.
They will not linger through the Winter.
I will stay.
When the crisp breeze turns bitter,
I will be here.
I love the land no less in diminution.
Perhaps I love it more.
But first, Fall brings the magic of transition.
Oh, Summer moves, but beneath the level of perception,
or else we are distracted, or just ignore it,
as if the sun were riding high forever.
Just so, Winter seems interminable and static.
The seasonal poles, states of extreme, protest that they are everything,
no in-between, no mixed-up way of being.
But the months that blur and blend bring the wisdom of change,
connecting where we've been,
with where we'll end.
Perhaps it’s time to talk of endings.
Much of the vegetation seems tired, withering early, despite, or maybe because of, the wet Summer. Many of the low lying Willows have a fungal disease, bred of the damp conditions. Usually, their green lingers longest of all the trees, but now they are sparse, brown and shriveled.
They are ready to end this cycle,
rest,
and try again.
But not all are afflicted.
At the West end of the Pool, a young Willow appears healthy, and next to it, a little Hackberry. These trees have had a better Summer than some, their first in sunshine. They had been shaded by a female Ailanthus, but it fell last year, and now they are released from suppression. The fast growing Willow will surely overtop the twisted Hackberry, in a rush to replace its ever falling fellows. The fall of one tree is the opportunity for another’s rise.
Another cycle.
Meanwhile, under the woodland eaves, Time seems confused. Thinning foliage allows late blossoms to return to the forest floor. Wood Aster abounds, the white clusters at once a reminder of Spring’s flowers, and a mirage of snows to come.
Today remains a day in Summer,
but not for long. .
Sep 11, 2000
Turn, and Return
Home.I did get home.
A process of reassemblage.
Reassembling a Self torn asunder by too much caring, too much concern.
These take us out of ourselves, which is the path to ecstasy, but we are tethered to our flesh, and to the facts of Life. Encumbered by the pain that caring costs us, and which being alive guarantees us. The Self is both a shield against this pain, and the focal point for it.
But if we know pain, we also know joy.
These two are but the extreme ends of a continuum of feeling.
To live is to feel it all.
We like to say the joy outweighs the pain.
Somewhere between them, a numbness which also serves us well. Habits of enjoyment that are less than Joy, but better than pain. There the reassembly begins. I listened to a baseball game on the car radio, the broadcast like a beacon, drawing me back across the onion fields of Ontario, back to the tumult of America.
Back to endless noise and news.
Back in New York, I flick on the news,
I fall back into habits,
reluctantly, at first,
but soon relaxing into routine.
You might say the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to make the routine extreme.
Or vice versa.
It’s another way of saying,
Everything All At Once In One Place Here Now...
the Unique become ubiquitous.
But here I’m reduced to the usual play of opposites.
The true object of spiritual practice does not conform to words.
Easier to forget, falling into routine.
Forgetfulness is the best anesthetic.
It is my goal not to forget.
Not to ignore.
Not to miss the thing that’s right in front of my face
(which has been know to happen,
even in the Park).
My practice in the Park is a sort of hyper-routine.
If we look closely, and consistently, routines reveal irregularities, and auguries of the origin and the ultimate may be found therein.
That is one sort of practice, and easier to follow than the sort I went through at Lake Erie. The penetrating moment, the condensation of spiritual crisis, I suppose that is what I’m asking for, after all, and all the time,
but Life is not really lived that way.
That sort of moment is a vision of something beyond this Life. A glimpse earned more through circumstance than practice. But the circumstance is simply being alive, and practice can help us to manage Life’s coruscating moments, which are all ecstasies, though we may call them griefs or joys.
Tears are the ecstasy of grief,
and tears I’ve known,
but let them fall in ceremony,
taught by the intersection of Life and Land and Love.
Such a gift I have learned to elicit, but only through a humble practice,
offering all my attention,
receiving,
(though I do not ask it)
attention in return.
****************
Back in the Park I notice, for the first time this year, a retraction of the foliage. This is not a projection of my inner state; this is real. The lowering angle of the sun’s arc reinforces the sense of change. I’ve been away, and the turn towards Winter has begun.
Sep 04, 2000
Labor Day
Well, here’s what I have so far. I put it on its own page, as it’s a bit on the long side. With more to come, perhaps. I’m pushing it a bit, but I’ll edit later, if need be. I wanted to have a post on this day, late though it is.And I promise to find a way back home.
You know I wouldn’t leave my faithful readers stranded on the shore of Lake Erie.
Aug 25, 2000