Blogcritics Author: John Spivey

More Getting There From Here

John Spivey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:34:40 EDT

Einstein, the fabric of being, the internet , and the mind.
Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. Albert EinsteinEinstein was famous for his thought experiments, so let’s do something of that sort for a moment. ...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Can We Get There From Here?

John Spivey — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:11:12 EDT

I’ve been gone from BC for a while now. There were reasons, some of which I may discuss later, but not now. There are bigger fish to fry.Let me begin with a story. Those of you who have followed my writing in the past know that I always tell stories. I turned 60 a few weeks ago, which brought on a whole host of things to consider, some pleasant and some unpleasant. Among the unpleasant were the regrets. I was particularly brought down by my regret as regards my academic, intellectual achievement. As a teenager my dream had been to go to Cal Tech and become a physicist. I wasn’t accepted however, even though well qualified. Since that time my interest in life has become trying to understand what it means to be fully human on this planet and pass it on if I can. Now I believe in synchronicities. There are rational underpinnings for that understanding, but I won’t get into it here. The other day I was sitting at Peet’s Coffee when I chanced to overhear a conversation near me. The man seemed familiar and I knew I was supposed to pay attention. He mentioned that he had recently been at Cal Tech where a physicist had told him that we cannot possibly create enough alternative power to meet the scale of the world’s coming demands. At the moment I was still in my post-60 funk. What this moment of overheard conversation told me was that even physics of the highest order is not what we need at this point in our existence. We still don’t understand what it means to be fully human and what our responsibilities are to that knowledge. Without some sort of mass realization of our place in existence we are lost. (I have to insert a disclaimer here. I am not a New Ager. I cringe at the general reductionist simplicity in the thinking.) We are running out of time and the attempts to create alternative power sources, though noble, are the proverbial rearrangement of the deck furniture on the Titanic. As I was leaving Peet’s I suddenly realized who the man was. It was Donald Johanson, arguably the most famous anthropologist in the world, discoverer of Lucy, and noted explorer of our human origins. Without knowing it, he was causing me to regain my bearings and to get back on course in exploring the nature of what it means to be fully human.In a post a few years ago I wrote about my hopes for the Internet and the cyberworld. I also noted my disappointment at how we were using it. When I look at the Internet I see a physical manifestation of the collective unconscious of human kind with all the good, the bad, and the ugly inherent in the collective mind. This great cacophony cannot be really controlled or corralled, but it can, however, be guided. In this fact lies our greatest hope, however we are using the great power of the cyber-medium to play mindless word games on the deck of the Titanic and to otherwise numb our minds to our impending fate. Our only hope lies in this aforementioned mass realization of our place in existence. This direct awareness of being is something that can be passed from mind to mind. The question is, how can we use this electronic medium to create a virtual mind-to-mind transmission of this direct awareness of being? This transmission is the only thing that can operate at the speed that life on this planet requires. The underlying motivation of all that I do, whether it is building a piece of furniture, teaching in a classroom, or writing, is to manifest this direct sense of being. My hope here is to somehow, in mind-to-mind fashion, fire that same sense of beingness in you and have you carry it forward mind-to-mind. This is what life needs from us in this moment in our history of fear. We are asked to stop and see clearly. It is the least we can do. Can we get there from here?I hope to provide a place for questions and dialogue without diatribes and polarized opinion. Pleas join me.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Embrace Separation, Return to Whole

John Spivey — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:31:58 EDT

In my last post I talked about how for some people writing is a necessity, as much so as eating or breathing. I also mentioned the impasse my life seemed to be at with regard to writing and sustenance. A few nights ago I had several puzzling dreams. As I talked them over with my wife I realized they were indeed pointing me in a direction.A Jewish mystic once said, “Every dream unexamined is a letter from God unopened.” Now I realize that the word God is problematic for many people, including myself, but let’s move on. For me, dreams are letters from somewhere gloriously mysterious, and I just have to leave it at that. I do pay attention to them.The dreams, in their own symbolic fashion, were pointing at my educational experience and telling me to enlarge on it with my writing. Several times I have contemplated writing about my teaching experience, but I never have been able to get a handle on how to approach it. Suddenly ideas began to enlarge in my mind and I could feel the nature and shape of the book. My writing is guided by both a symbolic vision of the book and the feel of what I am doing. The writing doesn’t yield to outlines and strict reportage. Though I mainly write nonfiction, the writing guides itself and reveals itself as if I were writing fiction.I have begun to dive into this new project and I believe that it is a commercially viable piece of writing. Education is a hot topic. Many people write opinions about it, but how many can say they’ve actually taught within a school that works, a school where kids would rather go to class than stay home sick? So I’m going to write about it in my own inimitable style and see what happens. My hope is that a quality independent publisher with integrity like Beacon Press picks it up. Beacon Press was founded by the Unitarians, and the school was housed by the Unitarian Society here for the first ten years of the school’s existence. Having the spiritual companionship of Emerson and Thoreau would be nice.Because this is going to be a large undertaking, I will have little time for random posts. Instead my posts will mainly comprise excerpts from what I’m working on. That said, here are the first introductory pages of what I call The Heart of the Wheel. You read it here first.SEPARATIONTwo crows hop around in the neighbor’s Chinese elm tree. Both crows are of nearly equal size, but from their actions I can tell that one is an adult and the other a juvenile. The adult holds a bright orange-red morsel in its mouth and tries to evade the desperate maneuverings of the juvenile to grab it away. The juvenile loudly squawks in protest.I’ve watched these birds for several months as they fly to either our Chinese elm tree or the neighbor’s. I’ve watched the juvenile as it has grown from a bird nearly incapable of flight to a bird virtually indistinguishable physically from an adult. The juvenile would sit in the tree by itself as the adults went off to forage. When either of the adults returned, the juvenile would set up a near deafening racket in a demand to be fed. The adult would come over and force regurgitated food down the youngster’s throat accompanied by the loud gurgling, gagging sounds of juvenile pleasure of demands being met.Now the situation is different. It’s time for the juvenile to learn to fend for itself and the adult is choosing to ignore all the racket and protest. The protest is so loud and grating that I momentarily think of throwing a stick at the juvenile, but instead continue to watch the drama. The adult flies to another limb and the juvenile follows, demanding its entitlement of food. The adult vainly looks for a moment of peace to tackle the orange-red morsel. We are seated in a circle with my daughter’s five seventh grade teachers. She is actually my stepdaughter, but my daughter nonetheless. In addition to her mother, her biological father is also present to hear what the teachers have to say. This is a yearly November ritual for the new school that she now attends. We had enrolled our daughter in this new school to begin a gentle process of separation, to allow her to begin to stand on her own and gain confidence. We were also confident that the teachers at this school would draw her out into the world, would provide a guidance that would enlarge upon what we had already provided.As the teachers finished the go around, I found tears coming to my eyes. They had seen the girl so clearly and at such depth. I suddenly found tears for myself. How different might my life have been if I had been seen so clearly and so deeply as a flailing junior high student? I looked around me. There were also tears in her mother’s eyes and her father’s eyes. We were all sincerely proud of her accomplishments, but all of us were also reminded of something that had eluded us a long time ago. Even if we couldn’t identify what it was, the sense of that something was now mysteriously palpable.I didn’t realize at the moment that in a year I would become part of this ritual, that I would be sitting on the other side of the circle in the teacher’s seat, watching the tears flow down the faces of hundreds more parents, watching their faces register the patterns of their own remembered losses.“Why wasn’t there a place like this for me?”The other crow parent soon arrives. After a few minutes of the unbearable clamor, the new arrival quickly disgorges a bit of food to the maw of the noisemaker. There are momentary gagging, gurgling sounds, and then there is silence. Blessed silence. The first adult returns to its bright prize. The lesson goes on.Crow says, “Embrace separation, return to whole.”

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

A Writer's Lot

John Spivey — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:05:46 EDT

Over the last weeks I have moved as if in a fog, unable to do much more than the basics of survival. When I picked up the sharp chisels in my shop I didn’t feel the old feeling of connection to wood and the task at hand. Occasionally I would write some short piece and the world brightened for a moment -- the different worlds seemed to merge and coexist -- only to fall away.I happened to pick up a book my wife had recently given me for my birthday, Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. I recognized myself in the preface.“Not to write, for many of us, is to die.”Yeah, that’s true. That’s me. I really have been avoiding being a writer. I have been suffering that fact.“But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.”But, it actually goes deeper than that, a lot deeper. So why don’t I write everyday? Because I’m damned, squeezed by competing failures. If I write and stay sane, I can’t make a living. Then, I get crazy because I’m not paying my share of the freight for living.If I try to not write so I can make a living, I can’t stay focused enough in my non-writing induced craziness to even really be safe around my tools. How did this happen?I envision us all living at the coast, between the land and the depths, at the border between the conscious and unconscious. We pump our dark effluent of fear and desire out into the ocean where it is pummeled by the wind and surf into a black froth. Any being that rises from the great depths to our world to inform us will be encrusted with this dark toxic waste. All we will see of the gift of knowledge is our own black face of fear.As writers we focus on different aspects of this tossing shit-strewn sea. Some focus on the effluent and go no further. Some are only aware of the vapor tossed from the foam at the tip of the wave. Some of us hold our breath and go as deep as we can, down below our personal fears, down below our cultural fears, down into a realm freed of this pollution. The world is suddenly as alive as that encountered when diving off a great reef. Everything seems clear and apparent. Below the dark surface mask of fear is a body of teeming life that bears the deep knowledge. Sometimes it seems you can even begin to breathe in this realm.When I write, I live at the heart of the overlap of the worlds. I am at once of the mountains, deserts, and valleys and also of the many depths of the sea. I am no longer a creature of one world. If I don’t write, I am left searching for water in the desert. So, some of us have to write. It is our calling. But I haven’t been writing out of fear for my survival. It seems it would be better if I only wrote about the vapor off the foam off the wave on the shit-strewn sea. I’d maybe make more money, but I’d never taste the depths. We once served a purpose in the lives of the people, but it no longer seems true. I need a change; we need a change.“For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, and reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.”I have been flopping like a dying fish on land. I once dove along the great reef and swam through teeming life. I breathed underwater. I have to get back to writing, to my real life. At my keyboard the worlds align and overlap, passing over and through each other to weave a fabric. What is this fabric worth in this world?

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Adventures Beyond Belief

John Spivey — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:18:51 EDT

While growing up I attended a small fundamentalist church. I found I could never follow the sermons and in fact I generally fell asleep before they were over. Memorizing and quoting Bible verses never had much appeal for me as it made me feel more like a parrot or trained seal than an intelligent human being. Even as a child I wanted to ask the more probing questions, but I knew they would get no satisfactory answer outside of more Bible verses.Back in the late 1950s two things happened as I sat in my fold-down seat and struggled through the sermon. I was maybe 11 or 12. The first thing was that I tried to imagine who I was before I was born. What characteristics did I have, and where did I come from? Who am I, who am I? As I pursued the questions in my mind I fell into such a void that I recoiled in fear and struggled to come back home, come back to my small home and alcoholic family, come back to the drone of the preacher and the monotony of the Bible verses. Sunday after Sunday I would fall into that void and then fight to come back home. I never talked about it because there was no one to talk to. I realized that no one was large enough to know the answer, let alone entertain the questions. My only solace was to try and hang on to the reality I had as best I could. As bad as it was, that reality seemed better than falling into a place where beliefs had no anchor and where there seemed no ground beneath my feet.In addition to my trips to the void, I also began to imagine a child like myself, an Arab child sitting in his mosque somewhere. He was being instructed that he was being told the true belief. I was being told that what I was being taught was the true belief. How were we to know what was true? We were both being guided by hearsay, asked to trust and believe in the hearsay, then asked to build our realities around it. I wanted some way of direct knowing, of being able to determine for myself the nature of true reality without being told to just memorize verses.Though I write about spiritual matters, I’m at heart a scientist, a person who attempts to probe beneath his own conditioned beliefs about life and beneath those beliefs held by the cultures around him to find out what may or may not be true. It probably all started with those trips to the void, as I needed to know what had happened to me.So, after many years of experiences both mysterious and mundane, I have managed to put some things together. I ask you to consider them, to think about them, and reflect. I don’t ask you to believe them. Belief diminishes the deep spiritual, relegates it to the realm of rote learning and clever semantics. If you follow these questions long enough you may bump into something so vast, so penetrating, so beyond description, attributes, and qualities, that it stops the world for a moment. Should we call it God, Yahweh, or Allah? But names are just attributes. Is it fearsome, jealous, just or unjust, loving? But these are all attributes. If I perceive fearsomeness, it is because I am fearful. If I perceive love, it is because I am loving or in need of love. Qualities are of the beholder.How do we approach that which has no attributes? How do we embrace that which is too vast to embrace, communicate with that which has no ears or voice? Sometimes when I meditate I hold an image of my grandfather in my mind and speak to him. Sometimes I hold an image of my teachers. I deliberately use my imagination to give the Great Vastness a face and ears and mouth. These are my symbols. Symbols are like tiny doorways that open to the Great Vastness, a portal for the flow of energy and the chance to hear and be heard.I choose my symbols carefully, though some just appear. Everything that can be named is only a symbol. Even God, Yahweh, and Allah are only symbols, doorways, to that which lies beyond. Every symbol carries it’s own impurity. Our task is to purify every symbol, make each symbol larger and larger, assign each symbol less and less attributes as our own minds expand. If God is jealous, we need to move on. If God is love, we need to move on. If God demands vengeance, we need to move on. To do this our minds cannot be rigid with belief, our symbol clutched tightly in our cold, dead hands. Symbols are tools, tools like sharp chisels and planes, tools that we use to craft the spiritual life. But then, eventually, even the word spiritual falls away till there is just life.Every god is a limited doorway. Every holy book is a rigid document, more about social, cultural control, and hegemony than it is about the truly religious mind. I can only tell you about symbols, their use and pitfalls. I cannot tell you which symbol to choose, but I can talk to you about the wisdom of choice. My words are not for belief, but are fuel for your own direct experience. I can point in a direction, but the path is not fixed. This is not rote learning. This is life. Be alert, be nimble.How do you react to all this? Are you angry? Are you indifferent? Why? We are dying from our beliefs, and our beliefs won’t save us. We act like silly, lazy children waiting to be saved, rather than growing up and saving ourselves. What will you do about it? Can you sacrifice your beliefs for the sake of life, for the sake of what lies beneath it all, in the name of that which cannot be named? Please consider this deeply and pass it on.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Floyd Landis -- You Like My Socks?

John Spivey — Sun, 6 Aug 2006 22:48:39 EDT

In Daniel Coyle’s book Lance Armstrong’s War, the author devotes a chapter to Floyd Landis entitled “The Book of Floyd.” The book provides an interesting character study of the former Mennonite from Pennsylvania.Much has been made of Landis’ Mennonite roots, roots that provide a dose of Old Testament Biblical prophecy to combine with elements of Greek tragedy and possible Faustian bargains. When fifteen-year-old Floyd Landis become enamored of the bicycle as a means to escape the narrow strictures of farm and church, his parents gave him a choice. He could stay at home and lead a good Mennonite life or go straight to hell as a bike racer. His father gave him an unending list of chores to do that included digging out the bottom of the outhouse in midwinter. This was done so young Landis would have no time to train. He ended up riding his bike through the fields and hills in the middle of the night, even in the ice and snow of midwinter. He told friends that one day he would win the Tour de France.Landis started as a mountain bike racer and eventually left the farm for good as a twenty-year-old. Stories abound as to both Landis’ skill and an intensity that bordered on what some would call insanity. In one race, beset with mechanical problems, he hurtled downhill on a bicycle with no tires, running only on the metal rims, passing startled racers with sparks flying.In a twenty-four hour team relay mountain bike race, Landis trashed his front wheel at the top of a mountain. Unlike the Tour de France, there are no sag vehicles and mechanics immediately at hand. Landis’ solution was to ride a wheelie all the way down the mountain through all the rough terrain. In fact, he had been known to ride wheelies all the way up a mountain with no hands.When Landis reached California as a twenty-year-old, he was indeed a “stranger in a strange land,” a child in the ways of the world. After his arrival, people were forced to take notice of his talent. When he was tested for VO2 max, a measure of lung capacity and ability to process oxygen, Landis tested one point higher than Miguel Indurain, the five time winner of the Tour.When Landis arrived for his first road race, it was a race open to all categories. Since he had no history of road racing and no racing license, he was relegated to start with the Category 5 racers at the end of the pack. He had also arrived wearing the visored helmet of a mountain biker, a garish jersey, and bright argyle socks pulled high. He was trying to tweak the sensibilities of the snobbish road racers. He had to endure merciless ribbing about his attire. He constantly warned the other riders that they shouldn’t make him mad. As the race started Landis slowly made his way toward the front of the pack, sometimes having to ride in the dirt at the side of the road in order to pass the mass of the peloton. As he arrived at the front he made an announcement.“If there is anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner.”Everyone laughed at the garish fool. He warned them again in the spirit of an Old Testament prophet, “You shouldn’t laugh, because that makes me angry. And if you make me angry, then I’m going to blow you all up.”As Landis pressed the pace and the others began to strain, he yelled out, “You like my socks? How do you like them now?”He won the race by fifteen minutes despite having to stop and fix a flat tire.We fast forward to the 2006 Tour de France in the aftermath of stage 16. Days earlier Landis had announced that he would soon have his hip replaced. His right hip was held together by three four-inch long titanium screws through the femoral neck. During Stage 16 the race had traversed two beyond category climbs. In the course of pursuing a long breakaway, Landis, the Tour leader, had missed connections with his team car to take on food and drink. In the course of a mountain stage like Stage 16, a rider needs to take in about 10,000 calories. On the final climb of La Toussuire, Landis “bonked,” totally run out of fuel, and finished over ten minutes behind the winner. He was now over eight minutes behind the new leader, with only three meaningful stages left.Facts desert us here, for at this point we can’t really know what happened. We can only ask questions. Did Mephistopheles appear to make an offer? Landis had worked since he was fifteen to reach this summit of leading the Tour de France. He had risked his eternal soul in the pursuit of what his parents, community, and religion had damned. By all reports Landis is a pretty black and white sort of guy, biblical in his judgment of many of the ways of the world. His is not the temperament to undergo long-term doping. But what if Mephistopheles tells him, “Just this once. This may be the last time you have the chance. This is your dream and you just may have to sell your soul to save your soul.”Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If he doesn’t try enhancement his dream is gone. He had been humiliated on La Toussuire. What a laughable thing. He had forgotten to eat, to drink. The basics. He had come so far to be cast down into this pit of ridicule, this hell, still being laughed at for his socks. If he accepted this offer he might still win, saved from laughter by selling his soul.The next morning Landis told his trainer, “I’m going to go ape shit on their heads.”I wonder if, as Landis came to the end of his fabled breakaway on Stage 17 into Morzine, he didn’t yell out in his mind, “You like my socks? How do you like them now?” Were sparks flying from his wheels?If he made the deal, he can’t tell us. It would make his father right. It’s all hell you know, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Beyond The Crack In The World: I'll Meet You There

John Spivey — Sat, 5 Aug 2006 00:40:15 EDT

When we look around ourselves at the sad state of our existence, we have to ask, “Why isn’t it better than this?” After three to four thousand years of civilization, the bulk of humanity still processes information in the same fashion, responds with the same prejudices, and glorifies the same sort of limited viewpoints. There exists a fear of becoming something larger, wiser, more profound. We cling to our frailties like the Church clung to the notion of an Earth-centric universe. It is as if we are afraid we wouldn’t exist without our fears and desires. We need a universe that circles around those fears and desires and makes them hauntingly real. This is our identity.Can you imagine living in a universe that does not circle around those fears and desires? Your culture would want to reel you in, your religion would want to reel you in. “You must share our fears and desires, loathe what we loathe, cheer what we cheer. That’s what it means to be one of us. You must be one of us.” This can be a lonely path, punctuated by a few good friends. It’s also good to find more.Last week was my 59th birthday and an unexpected gift arrived, an email from a young man who had stumbled on to one of my articles here on BC. He expressed his great feeling of separateness and how sometimes it made him feel superior. Most of the time though, the feeling made him feel full of doubt about himself. He wanted to “stand tall” in terms of spiritual experience. He asked, “What else is there, or what else should there be?” I sent him the following reply.“The best reply really is the shortest. In a Zen way I could say, "Just this!" and it would say everything, but not enough.When one encounters the Great Largeness of existence, the proper reactions are both humility and awe. Both qualities are in short supply in this world. If you were to really grasp the magnitude of the process that has made you, the billions of years of the formation of the universe and suns and planets, the millions of years of human evolution, then you have to ask if the life you lead is worthy of all that great effort. I do not know what things cause you to doubt yourself, or what things cause you to perceive the crack in the façade of the world and make you feel different. It is necessary to see the crack, but it is easy to be overcome by the separateness from the ways of the world. We are wired to be social creatures. Many spiritual traditions solve the problem by living apart in cloisters and monasteries, but that creates its own inbred problems.Seeing the crack and seeing the delusion by which most people lead their lives can foster several different reactions. One can feel superior to the deluded or one can fall into despair at the sense of isolation. One can also simply feel compassion. I believe that compassion is rooted in a deep sense of sadness at the way humans choose to live in the delusion and ignore all the effort that has gone into creating them.Standing tall. How do we stand tall with great humility? That is the real challenge. It is good to have some disciplines, good to have a teacher. Compassion is not the last step. When you can stand tall with humility, maybe you can then move on to extending your core energy, your core being to touch another. This is what I call real love. This is the core of why I write, my small attempts to extend what I have learned and cultivated from the old men who loved and helped me.I have the notion of creating an online community for these things, for community and friendship are at the core of the solution. Separateness and isolation are killers. They also promote ego inflation, for seeing the crack is nothing special. I posted a comment on a friend's blog yesterday to that effect. The core of the comment is to, "Find a friend to learn from, find a friend to teach." The teaching, though, is one that comes from modeling rather than telling. Beyond the shrinking of your ego is life, not what we imagine or merchandise or fear, but what IS. It's not easy, but it's necessary.How can we exist in this world beyond the crack? What do we say to our friends when there is nothing to boast, jeer, or gossip about? When I see one of my best friends after an absence of a year or two, we simply touch foreheads and smile. This world is full, but for most, it’s rejected before it’s even encountered.Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”don’t make sense any more.- Rumi

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Zeus and the Practice of Loss

John Spivey — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:23:42 EDT

Last week my wife came up to me after she arrived home from work. “Zeus has left us.”Zeus was one of my daughter’s rabbits. She has had a procession of rabbits in her life since she was about six years old. A friend had given our daughter a female Rex and sometime later we decided to get a male rabbit (neutered) for bunny companionship. Thus began a series of male/female companion rabbits that have spanned the years. The older female died, then she was replaced with a younger female. Later the male died and was also replaced. This rabbit pair has had many overlapping incarnations since that first root couple in the years-ago past.Every death has been met with its own grief, an ongoing practice of loss. Loss is a difficult thing to understand, especially for a child. Ching Man Ching in his treatise on T'ai Chi Chuan counsels, "Learn to invest in loss. Who is willing to do this? To invest in loss is to permit others to attack while you don't use even the slightest force to defend yourself. On the contrary, you lead the opponent's force away so that it is useless. Then when you counter, any opponent will be thrown out a great distance." In my daughter’s practice of loss with her pets, she has loved, lost, grieved, loved again. She is a strong and resilient young adult for her learned practice of loss.I dug a hole in the backyard beneath a Japanese maple where we could bury Zeus. He had been with us the longest of any of the rabbits. As a young rabbit he had been full of himself, taunting us to catch him and put him back into the cage at night where he could be kept safe from the predations of the raccoons and possums. As an old rabbit he delighted in eating peanuts and fresh veggies from our hands, then waited for his head to be scratched and stroked. I removed him from the towel shroud in which we had wrapped him, then placed him fetus-like in the hole. Barbara placed a few roses from the front yard along with a few fresh sprigs of basil within the cup formed by the fetal-arced corpse. Fresh basil is a rabbit’s delight.Tears came to my eyes as we paid our last respects, for the last sight of Zeus conjured up many memories. Rabbits are the cannon fodder of the animal world, surviving only by their fecundity. Why would the sight of one rabbit bring tears to my eyes? He had become a symbol. Just looking at his empty shell brought up full memories of our family and our life together. I had come into this family when my daughter was five years old, so this bunny history spanned nearly all of our time together. I remembered consoling our daughter through her times of loss and helping her celebrate her triumphs. She hasn’t lived at home for four years now as she has been off at college and has just graduated with many honors.So, the body of Zeus has a great power to conjure up all these memories. Thinking of him can lift me from a depression because of the power of memory and gratitude. The rabbit is still a rabbit, though, with no meaning outside our little family, with no power apart from us to heal the blues or provide comfort. Symbols can provide a doorway to the deepest place or to the infinite nameless force, but symbols are not, and cannot be, the deepest place or the infinite force. You will have your own version of Zeus. In our tears we covered the body, but kept the symbol alive.The next morning we looked out into the backyard. A skunk was standing by the gravesite. I then noticed a patch of downy hair scattered on the ground. A raccoon had probably dug into the grave and now the skunk was looking for something to scavenge. We found the bones of a leg, but the rest of the body was still in the hole. We matter-of-factly covered the hole with dirt once more, then placed a board and one of Barbara’s sculptures over Zeus’ fragmented remains. The body is scattered and digested but the symbol, the memory, remains whole. The practice of loss. When the memory wanes, life will bring more symbols as doorways.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Synchronicity and Grace

John Spivey — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:33:59 EDT

I met a ghost a few days ago, touched hands and minds with one of the most influential men in my life. He’s been dead for twelve years.I grew up with a father who distrusted anything that smacked of education and intelligence. He grew up in a poor family in the rural South with eleven siblings. As his father would beat him, my father would constantly be told how stupid he was. My father dropped out of elementary school during the Great Depression when his father was killed in an auto accident and all the children had to suddenly support the family.My father was cursed with two very intelligent sons. When I brought home my report card with its straight A’s, he would tell me that I had no common sense and how he had seen all the college educated kids die first during World War II. It is one thing to fail in life with bad performance or lack of effort. It is quite another to fail with efforts that few people can match. I ended up graduating from high school as one of the top two math and science scholars in my county. My father only slipped further from me into his drinking and depression. He died when I was 22.I feel like I lived my life in a haze for a long time, not from drugs or drinking, but from the experience repeated over and over endlessly, the experience that nothing I could do would ever be good enough, not even near perfection. My own depression sprang from this. Why try when the best of efforts was insufficient?It’s difficult to have a deep relationship with a woman in this state of mind. When I was 42 and returned to my 25th high school reunion I met a woman whom I hadn’t seen since my high-achieving days of high school. It was a synchronistic event that deserves an entire story of its own. I knew without a doubt that I would spend the rest of my life with her after we first said hello and then passed on by. We didn’t fall in love as much as choose to become friends who would help each other down the road.After I had moved to live with her and her five-year old daughter, my past began to rise up to meet me again. A friend of hers gave her the name of an old man, Robert Blakemore, who was supposed to be a good counselor. When I went to see him my life changed forever. The magic was that he saw nothing wrong with me, nothing to fix. He enjoyed every aspect of my particular genius and beamed with a paternal pride as I undertook being a father myself. His depth and wisdom penetrated me as he encouraged me to take on those same aspects for myself. His very being encouraged forward.One day Blakemore sat me down and told me the story of Parsifal and the Holy Grail as he was trained in the mythic tradition of Jungian psychology. Within this symbolic tradition, the Grail is not a thing — not a cup or a womb — but rather the place within each of us whence our own vital energy, our true life, springs. Soon after he told me this story, Robert A. Johnson, the Jungian therapist and author of the book about Parsifal and the Holy Grail, He, came to town for a presentation. Blakemore encouraged me to go see Johnson, told me that something interesting might happen. He also told me to make an effort to talk to Johnson.I went with my wife to see Johnson’s lecture. We entered a crowded hall and miraculously found seats in the second row, slightly to the left of center. After his lecture, which enfolded aspects of the Grail Legend, I turned to my wife to talk. There was a break before the next presenter was to come on. As I turned toward the front again, I found Johnson sitting directly in front of me. I fought for words in my mind, something I could say, but I couldn’t move my lips. He turned to look at me. “Did you say something?” he inquired. I fumbled for more words. He explained that he had trouble giving talks, so he relied on advice that Marie-Louise von Franz had once given him. He picked out someone in the audience that he liked and spoke directly to that person as he lectured. He said he had chosen me and asked if I minded. Here was man who had been a close student of Jung himself and also a close student of Krishnamurti. He was asking if I minded. From this encounter Johnson became another mentor who helped guide me on the quest toward my own personal Grail.When I went to see Blakemore days later, he again listened with a smiling face as I recounted my story of the encounter with Johnson. “I knew something would happen,” he said, and then laughed deeply. Blakemore died suddenly soon after. I wept profoundly at the depth of my loss. I wept with gratitude at the depth of my gain. I loved him deeply and I loved Johnson. I had thought I would never experience such acceptance of who I really was and am. I had just started the first pages of a book when Blakemore died. At his memorial I pledged that I would finish the book in his honor as the book wouldn’t have any existence or merit at all without his interaction in my life. I envisioned finishing the book in a year or two. It took ten.I was at Home Depot a few days ago for a last-minute exchange of parts before I headed to a job. I heard a voice. “Hello there.” I looked up into Blakemore’s face, into the same beaming smile that had left me years ago. Of course it wasn’t him, it was his son who carried the same name. I hadn’t seen him since soon after the funeral and in the intervening 12 years his hair had become white. He now looked much like his father.When he asked what I was doing, I replied that I had just published a book that was dedicated in part to his father. I told him that the book wouldn’t even exist without his father being in my life. We looked at each other as tears moved to our eyes. I can scarcely talk of his father without tears of gratitude springing forth unbidden. I asked if I could give him a copy of the book to complete the circle, the circle of energy returning to its source in order to go forth once more. This is the essence of the Grail. “Of course,” he said. He is a big-hearted man like his father.I don’t know where this interaction will go. These synchronicities guide my life, have shaped and given depth to me. It is grace in action. This grace will have its own life and lead to its own end. In life we are taught to grow strong and beat down the doors. Either that or we walk away in angry frustration. Sometimes if you just sit and just watch, the door momentarily opens and you can walk on through. Grace. Patience, awareness, gratitude. Grace.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

Stretching Rainflies in a Storm

John Spivey — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 17:05:12 EDT

When I was teaching we used to take the kids out three times a year for trips into the outdoors. The shortest trip lasted five days and the longest lasted ten to fourteen days. The idea was to take the kids away from their learned definition of themselves and away from their distractions, take them away from their electronics and their comfortable beds so as to encounter something more elemental, more profound. I lived for those moments in the outdoors, for those moments when my own clarity and profundity had a clear, untrammeled stage.In the middle of a three-day rainstorm once, I went from tent to tent adjusting rainflies, showing the kids how it was done in the process. I had good equipment for myself and knew how to take care of myself. I was dry and operated in a zone of joy that couldn’t be dampened by the deluge of rain. I knew my job was simply to pass on knowledge of how to live in these circumstances and there was completeness in the act. What to most would be a cause for discomfort and grand complaint was to me primal, elemental, and transfiguring. There is great power in this elemental state and much to learn from it.We spend a great deal of money and energy to avoid our elemental state, find myriad ways to distract ourselves. One of the things we had to confront as teachers was the fact that many of our students came from very wealthy families where they could normally purchase any level of distraction they wanted. Why learn to properly pitch a tent in a storm when one can book an expensive room, even buy the hotel? Indeed, one of my students was an heir to the Hilton fortune. Once my headmaster said to me, “John, I’ve come to the conclusion that money is a detriment in these kids' lives.” When Christ said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven, he wasn’t knocking money as much as he was talking about money’s ability to buy distraction from the elemental real nature of life. In our present age, though, we have suffered a democratization of distraction so that distraction from the elemental real is not just the province of the rich, but is something attainable by us all. It is our way of life and something we view as an inalienable right.I have been gone from posting for a while as I pondered my relationship with writing. It is sometimes disheartening to have little feedback or a sense of effect. I’ve found, though, that teaching is a long-term proposition. One student of mine who was on the above trip came from a very dysfunctional family that was rife with alcohol and drug problems. He himself descended into addiction when he left our school. One day, six or seven years later, I looked up from my desk as this young man entered the room. His eyes were clear and there was a smile on his face as he came over to embrace me. He had gone through recovery and come out the other side. I realized that in his days with us, we had provided the only family and stability he had known. Even in his darkest days he had drawn on that memory to help him toward clarity. We couldn’t save him from his circumstances, but we had been able to provide him with a light he could use if he so chose. So I have to write in an untrammeled way without knowing the impact of the writing. Let’s call it stretching rainflies in a storm. I do it to pass on the knowledge of encountering something elemental and of the joy that can be found in not being too distracted. Passing it on is simply what I do. Will I look up from my desk someday to see your clear eyes?Imagine we are in the forest somewhere, far from your distractions. Here is how you tie the knot. Don’t let your rainfly touch the tent.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.