An Eagle Circles

An eagle circles
O’er river islands where shells
Once became buttons


Just down the hill is the grandmotherly Fox River. Undeterred by the height and mass of the hill she simply made a turn to the west for a mile, nicely detouring before returning south on her path to the sea. The detour is occupied by five islands, which at one time were a site where early white settlers gathered shells which they used as the raw material for the manufacture of buttons.

My daily walk through the woods gave rise to the sight of an eagle (or maybe a hawk) flying circles over the islands. I stopped, the entire better to see, but through which eyes?

The eye of flesh sees the river with its water and islands; and the creature overhead –the colors, the smells, and the earth pressing up and air pressing down. It, like the eagle or its prey, knows nothing of time. This eye is mostly instinctual and by definition pre-rational.

The eye of mind takes all that in and more. It sees the connections through time -the settlers of old harvesting shells, and the plastic buttons, zippers, and the myriad of connectors of this day –physical, emotional, and mental. It sees that the number five is symbol of mind. It sees that birds may symbolize spiritual forces, and that the circle of their flight in its perfect form is symbol of endless spirit too. This is the eye of the rational or thinking mind.

The eye of spirit takes in all that and reaches for that which is the same regardless of the passage of time –psychological, cultural, or geological. It’s the eye of the Eternal; it is clearly trans-rational and open to those insights that originate from beyond duality.

Each succedent eye is held within the other. Like this!

The river, like us in life, meets obstacles on the path to the sea. Being undeterred means taking up a practice. There are many. Here’s one that works for me.


Karmayoga

Each thing for it’s own
Sake and time, without reward.
Obvious, Unseen!

Crossing the Bridge

I have a very simple view of the terms soul, body, and spirit. The body must die; the spirit cannot, and the soul is akin to a communication device, like a telephone, a possible link between the two. All too often the phone is off the hook; we suffer a busy signal. This simplicity can get complicated, mostly as a result of a missed communication or faulty interpretation of events -something unpleasant occurs. This unpleasantness, typically a negative emotion, tends to get buried; and so we construct a subconscious, which we carry as an inhibitory burden; body and spirit are at cross-purposes. This makes our life, ‘our crossing the bridge’, difficult –even painful.

Allow this illustration: I remember, at age 26, being in a meeting room of the old Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago. It was not my first time to meet there. I had joined with a group of others to listen to tape recordings of chats by Nathaniel Brandon –the guy whose book, The Psychology of Self Esteem, awakened our culture to the problems we suffer through its lack.

But this Sunday afternoon was different; Nathaniel’s voice was on the tape only to introduce to us a psychotherapist friend from New York. The tape unwound, and the therapist put forward his thesis on how development of the psyche is possibly altered by meeting a bump in the road of its healthy unfoldment. At this point in my mid-twenties i knew nothing of the workings of the psyche, for i was just a cigarette smoking office worker who felt anxiety at making phone calls; whose habit demanded a lighting up before dialing.

The therapist’s voice continued intoning theory. I listened with split attention; simultaneously i searched memory for some clue, some incident in my past on which an understanding of his theory could be based. In this dual state of awareness, came recall of this story:

I was perhaps a second grader on my way home from a day at school. It was a long walk, and this day i happily skipped along sharing it with a classmate whose home was about halfway along my route. Children were few in my neighborhood, a circumstance of the low birth rate caused by The Great Depression. This meant that outside of my immediate family i had little contact with kids my age. Happily then i accepted this classmate’s offer to stop at his house and play. I was having a great time, playing in the sun that had not yet robbed his sand box of all dampness. After a while our play was interrupted; his mother appeared. Like all adults to a seven year old she was a towering symbol of authority. And with the voice of same, she spoke from on high, “Won’t your mother be worried about you?”

In a flash, i was up and about to dash for home. I really loved mom deeply, and would not have done anything to be purposely hurtful to her. Again spoke the voice of authority, “Why not phone her, to let her know where you are?” That stopped me in my tracks. My internal dialogue, spoke to me, “You mean i can have my cake and eat it too –continue to play and NOT worry Mother?”

I jumped at the chance. My playmate’s mother invited me inside, questioning me on the way. “Do you know your phone number?” “Yes.” I replied, “MULberry 2994” Mom had long since drilled this and other vitals such as my address into my young head. We entered a room with a curtained bay window, where a small table held a telephone. It was unlike the black party line instrument we had at home, which was a dialess affair. Its requirements were simple. Un-cradle the handset, hold it close to ear and mouth and listen for the business-like but feminine voice responding, “Operator.” Saying to her the number desired, she was then mysteriously, able to make the proper connection.

The bay window phone was different. It stood upright, about a foot or so tall with a mouthpiece pointed at potential users. Connected by wire to it was an earpiece, a sort of truncated cone shaped thing that hung from a cradle of its own aside the upright stem that joined the phone’s base to the mouthpiece. But the biggest difference between this upright model and the phone at home was that the one staring me right in the face held a dial. In the center of which was neatly printed the number needed to call to ring the bay window phone.

Up ‘til this day i had never made a phone call. But somehow i was able to figure out that the dialing was done with a finger, where a digit could enter the assigned place for each bit of alpha-numerics in order: M-U-L-2-9-9-4 was the proper sequence. Rotating each in turn to the finger stop.

Alas, i failed at this, having been sort of Mesmerized by the newness of the experience and the fateful number on the dial, so awfully staring me in the face –which in my inexperience i had dialed. Obviously perplexed at hearing what i later discovered was a busy signal rather than the reassuring sound of Mother’s voice, the towering surrogate mom, filled with a need of her own, said, “Here, let me do that for you.”

In a flash i realized that i had failed at a very simple task, a thing that could easily be expected of anyone who was to grow up in this world. From that flash came a thought, expressed in inner dialogue. “How seriously flawed i must be, that i could fail so miserably at so simple thing!” What a painful conclusion! The prospect of having to go through life carrying such an inherent burden was very painful indeed. I didn’t like it a bit.

Reconnecting with the voice of the therapist, his theory continued to outline how a trauma turns into a hang-up. The memory of the unpleasantness of trauma begins to burrow its way into the psyche, rodent-like, hiding there from the light of day. Spurred on by the phenomenon known as re-enforcement, went the explanation. In me it worked like this. The next time, and indeed every time thereafter, when life conditions presented me with the option to make a phone call and i postponed doing so or even refusing to do so, re-sent the terrible message of my awful flaw deeper and deeper into my psyche; creating on the way a world known as the sub-conscious.

Shrinks aptly call it repression. A process that leaves only the barest of trails to the conscious mind, a course seemingly as fragile and unsubstantial as the crumbs left by any Hansel and Gretel –surfacing in my case as the unease of an addicted cigarette smoking office worker who felt anxiety at making phone calls, who had to light up a Pall Mall in compensation before dialing.

Looking back on the experience, i might have been better served by some more apt parenting than that given by the bay-window mom. Instead of offering to do the task at which i failed, it would have been much better to ask what was the trouble, explain the situation and allow me to try again. Had she done so, facilitating corrected contact to Mother, subsequent occasions to make phone calls would have provided re-enforcement of an innate ability to overcome obstacles through learning.

Yet, i find no fault. Seen in retrospect her compassion mustered out at the highest level of which she was then capable. She did the best she could and so did the young Charles. The best result of the event and its consequences is that i am now armed with valuable information

Fixing hang-ups turns out to be a process of reversal. The whole picture is seen and serially reenacted in actual life situations, over and over again, each time with a happy result. Re-enforcement is now employed as an agent of healing. Perhaps it's implementation is why psychological health tends to either get worse and worse or better and better.

'Water' under the bridge

red bridge genesis

The beginning was a long time ago; when at age twenty, i made a turn and deliberately set out to find some meaning for my life. How strange it seems now to recall that then i had only the slimmest of hints; a clue buried somewhere in history. Being ever practical, self taught, and a book lover i found, Herbert J. Muller’s, Uses of the past.” This find launched a 12-year campaign i now call ‘the book yoga.’

Later this yoga, this ‘quest’ turned again. Walking down a busy street, with no business at hand, innocent and motiveless, i was attracted by the energy of a strip mall; crossing the road i went to it, entered a bookstore, where armed with the élan formed in 12 years of seeking, i circled the racks, reaching out and touching many of the gems previously made known to me. To my surprise i came upon the very same text, Muller’s, Uses of the past! In that moment something inward shifted, a polarity had reversed, seeker became finder; books now came to me.

One of the central themes of this voyage of discovery was the sometimes-painful realization that the cultural world into which i was born (the West) had only part of the story. The West was good at seeking, at making stuff, at coursing along on the surface and blithely denying the value of the East and any sort of interiors. Direct experience had taught me that any view of our world and the human condition not based on the play of the opposites was self-limiting, partial, and not worthy of serious consideration; i looked East.

As Western thought and practice had moved over the millennia on an east to west geographical trajectory, Eastern thought and practice had been moving from west to east, eventually meeting here in what used to be called the new world. Buddhism, for example, had been chased from its birthplace in India, spread to Indonesia, Tibet, China, and Japan; changing form but not essence; and in the 20th Century crossed the Pacific Ocean; where filtered by California, its form changed again and swept East; coming full on with the corresponding counter thrust from the West.

Move forward several decades; where joined with friends, but armed with a similar innocence, i entered the Anderson Japanese Gardens, in nearby Rockford, Illinois –here in the heartland of the United States. The garden holds a sort of inner sanctum, crossing over into it had an immediate and profound effect; my close friend and i were immediately transported into an altered state of being. It was obvious that this shift was intended –deliberate; later i was persuaded by the view that only an illuminated evocative consciousness was capable of such design and practice.

The effect on me was stunning; it triggered an immense sense of gratitude. I experienced it to be an honor to be part of such a marvelous worldwide integration of thought and practice and felt a deep need to honor the traditions that made such realization possible.

Ever practical, i set to work on my one-third acre on a hill overlooking the Fox River; a full quarter of which had been left untouched and wild. Separating these two areas is a swale, a natural device to carry away excess rain. Crossing it was a perfect site for the Red Bridge. What fun! I had never built a bridge single handedly; but i got right into it. It turned out that i already possessed all the skills that i would need to do so; even untried things like laminating the wood for the handrails. Full engagement in a creative process is a wonder; simply contemplating such a thing is apt to produce a literal thrill in me.

Not content with building the Red Bridge, and being ever practical, it had to lead somewhere. Across the Red Bridge a snake like path was cut through the wooded area; into which 50 rounds cut from a previously felled dead branch of a black walnut tree were placed like stepping-stones. And as in a traditional Japanese garden, entrants to the path bow low to pass under tree boughs, and take only small, slow inducing, steps from round to round, emerging down the hill at the previously established fern garden.

The crest of this wave moved on, carried by it i found my way to a favorite library; where, assisted by a librarian friend i found Shenk’s award winning book on moss gardening. This led to yet another turn; plans for the swale changed. Gone was the previous notion of a pond at it’s high point and a pond below, with pumped water recycling between the two. Ah, but taking a (metaphoric) page from the text i was informed that moss gardening likely had its beginnings in the gardens of Zen Buddhist monistaries. So now transplanted moss simulates water under the Red Bridge.

charles on red bridge

Perspectives

Little understood is the importance of perspective, view, or vantage point. I’d go so far as to say that everyone lives in their own space, a space determined by the interplay between three basic factors: the culture into which they are born; their genetic makeup; and the influence of the unseen world -as a subset of this unseen influence is the process of human unfoldment, a process that happens in both stages as well as states of development. Altogether it makes for a complicated picture, but one that is useful if not vital in any deep consideration of why there are many more ways to get off track in understanding ourselves, our world, and the other, than ways of getting on track.

Once this notion of the importance of perspectives is entered, then it’s possible to begin to consider two basic possibilities: perspectives can be fixed or fluid. Fixity of any sort, of perspective, or purpose is surely a marvelous quality; yet in the long run it is dependent on direction.

It’s roughly akin to trying to hit the moon with a ballistic rocket, a device that takes aim only once and then it’s fired like a bullet from a rifle. So complicated are the relative soli-lunar orbital motions that this is a practical impossibility. Mid-course corrections are vital, else our rocket will fly right on by, missing its target; falling into the Sun or into uncharted expanse.

Why bother with such questions? Well, i have a dream for my life. It’s quite simple. A four-year old could understand it. Plainly put, i’d like to live in a world where folks are nice to each other. Obviously, we humans have not been quite up to such a thing; and i suggest that any penetrating analysis of this shortcoming is tied to this business of perspective.

It’s not just a simple matter of flexibility, of taking aim; but the acquisition of views based both in depth and in breadth. A great deal is at stake, and failure to move in this direction will, in my view, produce more suffering. Our world calls for succor.

I’m a big fan of the traditional 17-syllable form of haiku. Pardon my occasional lapse into rhyme, as well as a sneaky penchant for naming them.

Hidden in the Open

Teaching as it goes:
Greatest depth for greatest span;
River as it flows.