A GRAND EXISTENCE

“But Lydgate’s discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

"St. Augustine Gate", watercolor, by Chris Ousley

I’ve often had the feeling Eliot describes here, the feeling that something sprawling and powerful stretches out from me on all sides, something as full of force and grandeur as the gatherings of stars above us. It feels sometimes like I’m living at the center of an infinite field full of life, and the fullness is all mine to love and enjoy. This is “the grand existence” that Eliot speaks of, and that I so often miss in my life, although it’s always there, around and beside and inside me. I miss it because I’m usually making such a fuss over my so-called “personal” issues, trying so hard to be helpful to my little disadvantaged self, that I snub the spectacle surrounding me. In taking such good care of Hamilton Salsich, I thoughtlessly brush off the splendor that lives in all things, from the lighthearted sparrows in the bushes beside our house, to the stones in fields I sometimes pass, to the gangs of stars roving above us.

FOOTLOOSE AND FREEWHEELING

"Moon, Lake, Stars", oil, by Tom Brown

“Ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision.”
    -- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

As the years pass, Ive been getting more and more use out of the magnificent gift of imagination, and now, in my 70’s, I often feel like I’m “afoot with my vision” in this sweeping and lavish universe.  My body must make do with wherever it happens to be, but my real life -- my inner life where imagination manages things  -- can let loose at any time and rove freely among far-off stars.  You might see me sitting on a couch with a cup of coffee, but as surely as I’m sipping the coffee, I’m probably also footloose and free in a universe with no borders. My body might be in a place named Mystic, but my spirit might easily be soaring across cities and hills to any place I pick.  Someone might say, “Yes, but you’re really just in Mystic”, but that would be saying that my seasoned, somewhat shriveled body is stronger and more important than my limber, fresh-faced imagination. Who is me -- my body with its confines and manifold failings, or my mind that’s made for freewheeling, limitless travel?  What will last longer -- this body that’s been slowly diminishing and slumping for the last few years, or this mind I’ve been given that seems to grow fresher and more fervent each day -- this mind that has been spreading itself, through its thoughts, into the swelling universe for 71 years? Just in these past few minutes, sitting at this table and typing, I’ve been in St. Louis with my brothers and sisters, at the seaside on a summer morning, and out among the stars and the silver moon I saw above our house last week. With travel of this kind so easily accessible, who needs cars and trains and planes?

THE PUZZLE OF PUZZLES

"Puzzled Cow", oil, by Robin Weiss

“… to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.”
-- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

     My wife and I enjoy putting jigsaw puzzles together -- seeing the pieces slowly but surely slipping side-by-side into their proper places -- , and I also take pleasure in occasionally pondering what Whitman calls “the puzzle of puzzles”, the mystery of who, or what, in the world I am. Cracking the code of a jigsaw puzzle is a fairly simple task compared to the task of solving the grand puzzle of me. Jigsaw puzzles have maybe 2,000 pieces, but the mystery called me is  composed of strange and disparate building blocks beyond numbering. As many stars as shine in the sky is perhaps the number of mysteries that make up what I curiously call “my” life, as though it’s somehow owned by little me instead of by the boundless universe. Like Whitman, I don’t worry about solving this puzzle, because I know it's bigger than the brightest star system. I just enjoy sensing its mystery inside and beside me, and bringing it along with me wherever I go, like a private and unfathomable gift from somewhere far off.  

PRESENT PERFECT

According to one dictionary, something is perfect if it “lacks nothing essential to the whole” and is “complete of its nature or kind”. By this definition, every present moment is perfect. Each one contains everything necessary to make it what it is. Each one, we might say, is flawless and pristine for that particular instant in history. I may wish a particular moment was different than it is, but it’s foolish to wish a moment was better than it is. For that specific point in time, a moment is just right, just the thing, just what the doctor ordered, just what it is. What’s wonderful is that all I have stretching ahead of me into infinity is one perfect present moment after another.

SIMPLY WATCHING

It occurred to me this morning, during a short sitting meditation, that what I was doing was astoundingly easy. I was simply watching. I wasn’t actually doing anything or trying to get anywhere or attempting to improve myself. I was simply observing what was happening in the present moments as they passed by. It also came to me that I could do this easy task (if it can be called a task) at any time of the day or night. In fact, every moment of the rest of my life could be beneficially spent simply watching – just sitting in the grandstands of life and witnessing the seamless show that is reality. Of course, I will also be part of the show, carrying out my various roles as husband, father, and friend, but the delightful truth is that the other me – the real one, I think – can be leaning back, folding his arms, and effortlessly following the action.

THE GRAND ESTUARY

"Maine Estuary", oil, by Candy Barr

“I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea.”
-- Walt Whitman, “To Old Age”

I am pleased to say that I am now sailing in the splendid estuary of the senior years, moving ever so slowly and easily toward “the great sea”. Living as we do on a scenic estuary, my wife and I have often observed the peaceful flow of water toward the ocean just a mile or so away, and it sometimes seems to me that my life is moving with a  similar serenity. I started on my 71-year journey as a small trickle of baby-life, and the trickle, over the years, has slowly increased in strength and depth, and, in a leisurely and mostly pleasant way, has spread out to become, now, a still spirited but easy-going stream of elderly life. My days are not all filled with joyfulness, of course, but they are definitely filled with the reliable waters of an old life lived with a fair amount of steadfastness and fulfillment. I’ve usually, as we say, “tried my best”, and now the best years lie just ahead, where the flow of life lingers and loiters as it streams toward the measureless sea which some call death, but which Whitman and I call “the great sea”. Like estuary waters that don’t end when they finally flow into the sea, but just change and adjust and start fresh as a new kind of force, so will I transform at some time in the future and fold my way back into this immense and curious universe from where I came crying into my mother’s arms in 1941.     

THREE CHEERS FOR FAILURE

"Vivas to those who have fail’d!"
     --  Walt Whitman

    Having grown up giving cheers only to winners, it’s uplifting to hear Whitman encouraging us to cheer also for failures -- for people who, like all of us, sometimes fall flat. Or perhaps I should say seemingly fall flat, for isn’t success always somehow present with us, even though it might be disguised as defeat? In fact, don’t we have the best chance for growth when our spick and span lives somehow collapse, in small or significant ways, and new signposts spring up to show us new roads to travel? Can’t failure actually find us fresh ways to triumph, to take life by the arms and let it know who’s in charge? Perhaps I should actually praise failure when it comes along. Perhaps I should pay tribute to this new chance to choose growth over complacency. Maybe an occasional collapse in my life is just what I need to know a new truth, just what I need to walk farther and higher and with a little more majesty. Maybe I should salute my next failure, praise it and ask it what gift it has in its hands.

Walt Whitman

I've been reading Walt Whitman lately, and loving his work all over again. It takes me back to my bright and happy days at The University of Kansas in grad school, when I first discovered this wild and loving poet. Reading him these past few days, I feel again the sense that the universe is a large and spectacular place, and that I need to forget about my own bothersome concerns and focus more on the amazing details surrounding me on this vast planet. Reading his poetry makes me feel way more alive, more alert, more surrounded by small, fascinating wonders. 

YOUNGSTERS OF THE COSMOS

"Evening, Kahana Beach", oil, by Don Gray

     I take for granted that the sunshine I see most days is similar in its essential features to the sun from which it comes, but I don’t often consider my own similarity to the forces from which I come. Sunshine is made by the sun, but I am made, you might say, by the entire universe.  The atoms that my body is made of were fashioned countless eons ago by a strange and immense explosion, and before they came to compose a life called Hamilton in November of 1941, they had swirled through the universe on many missions, perhaps helping to make old oceans and mountains and zebras and songwriters. The oxygen atoms I’m taking into my lungs this moment might have been breathed out by a man in far off Morocco just yesterday.  I was made – am made and re-made each moment – by the forces that flow through the universe, the same forces that send flames from volcanoes and make midnights sometimes full of stars.  Instead of being separate from the stars and rivers and rolling ranges of mountains, I am part, with them, of the dynasty of the universe. We are all the youngsters of the cosmos, made by mighty forces and composed of powers we can’t begin to comprehend. Sunshine comes from the sun, and thus is similar to it, and the sun itself comes from the same measureless universe that makes me moment by moment, and thus is similar in composition to that universe, and so am I.

PERFECT FITNESS

"On Track, Holland", oil, by Rene Pleinair

“Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things...”

     -- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

     There’s much talk these days about physical fitness, but I’m also interested in the kind of fitness I often find in my life, at those charming times when everything seems to fit as perfectly as pieces in a puzzle. In this seemingly disordered world, it seems like this type of fitness, this cohesion and togetherness, is usually only a distant hope. There seems to be far more chaos than accord, far more pandemonium than peacefulness. However, what I’m slowly discovering is that this view of life as being totally topsy-turvy is as untrue as the belief that the sun circles the earth. There is, I think, an order and aptness – a gentleness, you might say – at the center of things, if only I could see through the disorder to recognize and appreciate it. All things, I think, are always where they must and should be, and all events unfold in a secretly cohesive and well-ordered pattern. What we see as bedlam and wickedness is the world’s way of saying the earth is the center of the universe, or train tracks meet at the horizon. I know those are illusions, and I know the belief that life is a loose cannon ready to create chaos is just as illusory. Somewhere at the center of all mayhem and mischief beats the heart of wholeness and harmony, and it is my stirring task to discover it, day after day, moment by moment.     

 

SEAS INSIDE

"Sealight II", oil, by Carmen Beecher

“You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you,
fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.”
    -- Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”

    Sometimes, when I’m sitting on the beach in front of breaking waves, I feel something like an ocean streaming and spilling inside me. I’m sure we all feel this sometimes, this sea of feelings and thoughts throwing itself around inside us, so many breakers of ideas dashing against us. In a sense, this ocean inside us is vast and unrestrained, for who can see where it starts or where it ends, where our feelings flow from and where our thoughts have their start? I’ve sometimes tried to trace a feeling back to something solid, some certain source, and all I’ve ever found are more feelings, all flowing from somewhere unseen and evanescent. My ideas, too, seem to simply arise, like fish flashing out of the sea for a few seconds and then disappearing, leaving no trace of their origins. It’s almost scary, this feeling that all-powerful forces are flowing inside me and may break loose in liberty at any moment. All of us are singular and incomparable in this world, and all of us have these “unprecedented waves and storms” inside us that Whitman speaks of. He seems happy to have them there, and happy that they are stirring. So should I, and so should all of us be pleased to have immense and mystical seas always inside us.   

WHAT IF?

"Daylight", oil, by Liza Hirst

I’m often puzzled by how trustingly I embrace all the beliefs my culture has created for me, as though they are the authorized, requisite truths that simply must be believed. These are beliefs that were born in the distant past and have somehow been shared through the generations and disseminated as the irrefutable facts about life. They say, for instance, and with utter assurance, that the body is more powerful than the spirit, that things are stronger than thoughts, that, in the end, death always and inescapably dominates life. These beliefs are so imposing, so unassailable, that they seem to make us fall to our knees in a dopey kind of devotion. It’s hard to ask “What if?” in the face of these seemingly irrefutable beliefs, but this morning I’m going to give it a try: What if the human spirit has secret strengths that can create far more power than the human body? What if thoughts can actually transform troublesome situations of all kinds into useful learning opportunities? And what if what we call death is not a disappearance of a life, but simply nature’s way of surely and systematically transforming one type of life into another, like leaves letting go of their trees to turn into wholesome soil? What if death is as natural and indispensable as darkness turning into daylight? What if forces like love and kindness can always and easily defeat death -- tell death it’s never the end but always the start of something new and fresh and essential?      
  

NOISE AND SILENCE

“One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.”
    -- Sarah Orne Jewett, “A Dunnet Shepherdess”

    This world is such a noisy place, what with the whirring of countless kinds of machines and mechanisms and the everlasting chatter of most of us, myself included, that it seems, this morning, that Sarah Orne Jewett was right: a reasonable increase of silence in my life could carry me along in a more tranquil and enlightening way. There’s something soothing about silence, especially when I work hard to hear the silence, so to speak -- to see and appreciate stillness and listen to what truths it can acquaint me with. All too often I’m fearful of silence, of the feeling of isolation and uncertainty it sometimes seems to create, but when I turn toward silence with acceptance and inquisitiveness, it consistently causes a breeze of reassurance to pass through me, as though I’ve found, finally, a place of peace. Sitting by myself in the early morning in a room where only the sound of the furnace and the restful clicking of a pendulum clock can be heard, and doing nothing but simply appreciating the surrounding silence, can cause the new day to seem like it’s doing a slow and soothing dance. Or standing in silence outside under the peacefulness of winter trees and just listening to the mild, light-hearted sounds a breeze is making among the branches can make a whole day be a helpful gift. It’s good for me to sometimes turn away from the turmoil of this rowdy and rackety world and simply be with silence for a time -- simply trust the truths that can be found when the only sounds are my breath coming and going and the good noise of nature doing its unruffled work.