Jun

27

Death Thursday


This morning, not feeling especially lighthearted, I came across a Yahoo News headline: Fans Moonwalk, Hold Worldwide Vigil for Jackson, and I laughed so hard my hair became electric. I laughed so hard my sides ached and my eyeballs almost popped out of my skull.

Does this make me a cynical, insensitive slob? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I was tearful yesterday as I read Deepak Chopra’s beautiful remembrance of Michael, his longtime friend, and became quite emotional again as I read an article about the fate of Jackson’s children.

I don’t think I’m lurching from one emotional extreme to another, so what is it? Why was I laughing? I’ve always held with Byron that ‘I laugh so that I will not weep,’ but it’s not that, at least not that completely. No. All through an intense yoga class, I contemplated this small mystery, and something came to me.

Where, I wondered, were all these mourners and moonwalkers during Jackson’s last decade or so? Except for diehard fans like the small, loyal group that communed outside Neverland every day during his last trial, where was all this worldwide support and love? In many quarters, Jackson was a joke, a punch line, a pariah. Until the day he died, when had the media last sung his praises as the King of Pop? How long ago was it?

What is it about us as humans that we can turn so quickly from malice to worshipful mourning? Why do we hold our love, if that’s what it is, so close to the vest? I’ve tried to come up with things we gain by doing so, but it all just feels like loss, disappointment, and missed opportunities.

Later this afternoon, as I walked along a country lane, I passed a county marker on which someone had written I Love Tina. This discovery made me smile, and my immediate reaction was We All Do. Rather than sweep the thought from my head with my rational broom, I invited it to stay with me, and through it, with it, I felt connected, compassionate. I smiled. I felt…love.

Whoever that road marker Tina and her admirer are, wherever they may be, I know they felt something good at that moment, too.

Maybe that’s what the world’s moonwalking mourners are up to. Failing to stand by or comfort Michael Jackson in his last decade filled with one personal disaster after another, perhaps they’re spontaneously doing what they can to ease his launch on his new journey. Fair enough. Some say it’s only human. But I wish we could release and share more of this compassion with others who so desperately need it  while they’re still traveling paths among us, with us. Wouldn’t that be a sweeter, grander thing to do than withholding our love and tenderness until after they’re gone?

 

June 27, 2009 | 2 Comments

Jun

19

Volunteerism


I’m writing from the Starr Marriott Resort in Tucson, Arizona where I’m representing the Institute of Noetic Sciences at its 13th international conference.

Yesterday, I led an indoctrination meeting for nine volunteers I’m leading. We are one of several set-up crews for the conference’s closing luncheon tomorrow, which will entertain 650 people. Our job tomorrow morning is to follow hotel staff around the dining room. As the staff completes a table’s appointments (linen, silverware, dishes), we are to follow them and place a program and a packet of seeds atop each napkin.

Our job will be relatively easy, and some of my crew members were almost apologetic yesterday about the fact that they weren’t doing more.

How we tend to whip ourselves in America!

I thanked them with deep, genuine emotion, and I awoke this morning with even deeper gratitude that these strangers from around the U.S., South America, Asia, and Africa would make themselves available to help us, the IONS staff, prepare a very important event.

I realized that all volunteerism is a Mother Teresa moment, an act of selflessness. Spiritual practice teaches us not to judge, and that’s a useful lesson when we find ourselves measuring the quality of our selfless acts.

In truth, there is selfishness, and selflessness. No matter what you do, if you volunteer you are joining St. Francis on the road at the moment he’s startled by a leper staggering out of the bushes directly in his path. In giving of yourself, you are getting out of yourself to kiss the leper full on the lips with infinite love and gratitude.

I celebrate you and acknowledge you for every act, small or large, that you are able to do in service to someone else.  I hope that others do the same, and that you acknowledge yourself for your service.

Bless you!

June 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Jun

9

Remembering Bakersfield Poet / Teacher Lee McCarthy


I remember so many things about Lee McCarthy. I remember her irreverence, of course, her vulnerability, loving-kindness, and generosity. I remember and continually return to her talent, which shimmers in her published poems and unpublished prose manuscripts. I remember a thousand intimate, funny, and unfunny things she said, did, and shared with me, but mostly I remember her fierce love of principles. When she thought she was right, she was a warrior to the end. This ferocity informed her devotion and love for her only son, who truly was the brightest, most important person in her life. Her concern for my own children, who were much younger than her son, made me a better parent. That’s a beneficial act one doesn’t talk about much when adding up the ledger of someone who has moved on. Wherever she arrives next, those who know her will be blessed.

June 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Apr

21

Writing Is an Explosion


Writing Is an Explosion 

Jack Kerouac wrote that “writing is an explosion of interest, it is not something that gets done one by one gravely, and the explosions of interest arrest themselves with a crafty expectant grin.”

I have been thinking of this as I go through what feels like an arid writing stretch, and in the last few days I’ve experienced a few ‘explosions’ and have been delighted by that “crafty expectant grin.” 

It’s like seeing someone clear for the first time, or after a long time, or like noting the smallest details all around you—the odd nodes of a tree, the impermanent shape of a wispy cloud, the feelings that rise as you listen to a tape a dead friend made for you twenty years ago—as you make your way. 

And so, I celebrate the explosions of interest, the crafty expectant grins, and I wonder what your own are like, what you make of them and why. 

April 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Mar

4

The Green Hills, the Rain


I’m beginning my third week as a resident of Marin County and Sonoma County—I say both because I am right on the border—and for someone who has lived for most of the last twenty years in Oregon, I’ve been amazed by the torrential rains here!

It’s good, of course. Drought conditions were terrifying Californians who dreaded summer not so far off in the distance, and so every day we’re pelted by nail rain, by windblown rain, by sideways, umbrella-defeating rain, we’re thankful. Well, mostly! I’ve grumbled every now and then, and so have my co-workers.

But this morning I remembered a poem by Langston Hughes:

 *

April Rain Song

 

Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullabye.

 

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.

The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

 

And I love the rain.

 

*

 

Is the rain for you a messenger of gloom? Of worse than gloom? Is it God crying? Or do you dance in the rain? Do you lift up your face to the rain and laugh? Do you love the rain?

Add your thoughts, or a poem here, or a fine intention.

 

May all sweetness and blessings be yours!

Robert

 

March 4, 2009 | 1 Comment

Feb

8

Palestinian/Israeli Conflict


Isabelle Alzado is working on a theatre event for Oregon Stage Works in Ashland, Oregon on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. She wrote to me about her experience:“This poem may come from the violence of the news, the wounding head lines, the tangible deaths behind the words. It is my inner, painful contortion wanting to scratch it all - as though my bloody fingers could change a thing… But I do see - and yet, in my silent, anonymous soul I need to  infuse some Light on these enormous sufferings, I need to blow some warmth on the aching hearts.

Just a quiet, unknown breeze of love traveling so far away to reach one child’s hope and wonder.”

 

Here is her poem. After you read it, please share your thoughts in any form you wish.

 

*

 

When The Written Words Ache

 

I want to catch those words

Those cathedrals of emollient faith

Those steels that break my heart

 

I want to pamper their corners

Calligraphy adorned

To calm the pain behind.

 

I want to scratch the bars

That make me stumble

Against a human throb

 

A hidden cry in sullen cave

A lost scroll of flesh

Covered in dirt and sorrow.

 

I want to catch those words

Those bridges and sirens

Consonants in my third ear

 

Pulling my head to their toes

To pray and kiss their day

To erase and wash their sounds.

 

I want to squeeze those words

Those signs of terror

Those majestic black inks

 

I want to dislocate their vowels

To render some other news

Alchemy forbidden on the page

 

 

I want to add some peg legs

Deviate the design of the phrase

And slice those words into dots

 

And close my eyes

And run into dictionaries

To create the new parchments

 

 

 

I want to scream invented words

Those fairytales with feathers

Those galloping hopes

 

 

Licking my wounds behind my heart

With a penholder and a nib

And the tongues that don’t know me.

 

I want the colors’ inks

To blend into races

And open a new vortex

 

The strident nature’s cry

To remind me that life is safe

And that God wrote on my knee,

 

Pulling my soul to His eyes

To chant and dance His day

To revive with love, my words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Jan

15

2009: Dying? Or Divine?


2009: Dying? Or Divine?

 

New Year’s Dawn, 1947

 

Two morning stars, Venus and Jupiter,

Walk in the pale and liquid light

Above the color of these dawns; and as the tide of light

Rises higher the great planet vanishes

While the nearer still shines. The yellow wave of light

In the east and south reddens, the opaque ocean

Becomes pale purple: O delicate

Earnestness of dawn, the fervor and pallor.

Stubbornly I think again: The state is a blackmailer,

Honest or not, with whom we make (within reason)

Our accommodations. There is no valid authority

In church nor state, custom, scripture nor creed,

But only in one’s own conscience and the beauty of things.

Doggedly I think again: One’s conscience is a trick oracle,

Worked by parents and nurse-maids, the pressure of the people,

And the delusions of dead prophets: trust it not.

Wash it clean to receive the transhuman beauty: then trust it.

 

This poem, written by Robinson Jeffers to commemorate a new year sixty-two years ago, is all about temperance, and it has eerily echoed in me for a week or so.

Even stranger is the fact that I keep thinking of this poem as I consider the crumbling world economy. Fingers are pointing everywhere, and I really don’t want to dissipate energy by joining in. I’m more interested in facts. Don’t we all know now, for example, in situation after situation in the last ten years, that greed trumped common sense and measured conduct? We observe, if we are paying attention, that banking officials, despite steering trains off tracks, off cliffs, continue to receive unjustifiable perks and huge bonuses (presumably coming from the first giant bail-out package, meaning our tax dollars, because where else could it all come from?). We can see that our elected officials still have shown no moxie or mettle, not really, in offering any solutions or startlingly new paradigm. These are facts, not speculation, and they should be clicking into place in our consciousness as surely as the vacuum-sealing, scything sound of closing coffin lids.

When you’re already dead (and aren’t you, if the system you continue to serve is dead?), it’s ludicrous to point bony fingers at the contentious corpse lying to the right of left of you. Isn’t death the end of right or left? It’s certainly the end of wealth and poverty. It’s the end of money! Perhaps we’re all just getting a head start on that new paradigm so many like to imagine coming soon.

If it does, it will have to come from us. Not from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi, but from each and every one of us who refuses just a little, then a little more and more to be mute slaves of a system that rewards the few with insane riches while grinding everyone else into paste, until a global momentum lifts us up to a new place.

The French Revolution ushered in a paradigm shift accompanied by bloody retribution (some would say “cleansing”). And though we have many heads in high places today that seem to be worthy of the guillotine, again, what good does finger pointing do? Acts of retribution turn us into our enemies, but sustained spiritual practice transforms us and positively changes everyone we connect with.

Isn’t this what we hunger for? We need businesses and corporations to do more than nod and say, yes, we need to change the way we’ve been doing business. They need fewer studies and reports. They need to take fewer meetings and take a leap of faith instead. We need them to talk the right brain talk, and we need them to walk the right brain walk! We need this now, not next year or ten years from now. We don’t have time to wait, and neither do businesses and corporations.

            Nor are our leaders exempt from the kind of new thinking that’s required of all of us. I pray that the spirit of poetry blossoms in the hearts and minds of our elected officials, and that it leads them to discover the courage they’ll need to create and launch new models for business, service, and diplomacy. We are in the midst of a very public dying. What takes its place is in our hands.

 

January 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

Dec

12

Many Ivory Mansions


A friend wrote to me the other day asking what I thought of University and government patronage of the arts. “Do you think that art, well, changes when it comes from that system?

Since the 1970s, it’s true that university patronage of the arts has created an insulated cottage industry in which many writers, visual artists, and musicians create art mainly for each other.

Many who are subsidized in this way lack any true connection to larger communities and realities outside the Academy. So, if we care to tune in by reading university journals and visiting university and government sponsored art exhibits and recitals, we may observe art created by artists slouching towards tenure and merit increases, dreaming of more leisure in which they may create even more art.

As a result, a lot of the art that’s produced takes on a paint-by-numbers, going-through-the-motions quality that falls far short of art’s goals to enlighten and entertain.

Art is more vibrant and more necessary when it’s spiritually and intimately connected to communities beyond the Academy, and certainly beyond the government for that matter!

 Weigh in on this topic! Share what you think!

December 12, 2008 | 6 Comments

Dec

10

Happy Or Unhappy Holidays?


A woman I know was happily writing poems and working at a hospital when she was suddenly laid off. Her husband had been laid off a month earlier. Suddenly, she felt that writing poems was a guilty pleasure, something she should only be doing when things were going well!  Another friend reported that she was just beginning a free-lance job for a client when the client phoned to say Stop! She couldn’t afford it. My friend said that had never happened before.A third friend insists on seeing the glass half full rather than half empty. “This is a great time for opportunity! One has to be smart enough to make something new come together!” Who is wrong? Is everyone right? Or? Our economy is in a state of free-fall. Millions of people are out of work, isolated, and many are sadly close to being bereft, out of hope. Of course it can feel awfully cruel, this state we’re in, as we stagger through the holidays.  How many of you feel optimistic, even grateful for these opportunities, however mysterious and vague they may be? I’d love to hear your opinions and stories! Perhaps a little healing can come of sharing! Meanwhile, bless you all as you persevere! Robert 

December 10, 2008 | 6 Comments

Dec

6

AN INVITATION!


Please consider joining me for a workshop at Esalen in beautiful Big Sur next month!  

WRITING & PRAYING POETRY: POEMS IN DAILY

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

 

Week of January 25-30, 2009

 

Robert McDowell

 

Why is poetry the most common language of devotion

and the richest expression of spiritual practice in prayer,

chant, and song? How can we awaken ourselves to poetry

as the pure sound and shape of the spirit?

 

Together, participants will practice reading, writing, and

using poetry in their daily rituals, aspirations, and

intentions. The workshop will explore poetry’s

sound and language, its rhythms, meters, and

forms, in a reflective writing process that leads to

deeper awareness and daily enjoyment.

 

Participants will experience a wide range of well-

known poems (good and bad) as well as their own work

as they create a treasury of poetry that holds deep, abiding

messages from all historical eras and all religions and

faiths. All levels of writers are welcome!

 

Writing exercises, guided meditations, free writing, sharing

work, and group discussions will help participants create a

practice that integrates poetry into their daily path and spiritual journey. All that’s        

required is your 

December 6, 2008 | 1 Comment


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