Blogcritics

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.

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.

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.

Did You Ever Get the Blues?

John Spivey — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 21:28:13 EDT

In his latest book Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut declares that the blues is his favorite form of music. A jazz historian friend of his told him that during slave times, the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was higher than that of slaves. Vonnegut and friend surmised that the slaves had a way of dealing with depression the slave owners did not. The slaves sang the blues. As Vonnegut stated, "The Blues can't drive depression clear out of the house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where the Blues is being played."Last week I read a post about the Native American poet John Trudell and of the movie of his life being played on Independent Lens on PBS. Intrigued, I made a point to watch, then immediately downloaded one of his albums from iTunes. As a writer and poet I find myself at a loss for words to describe my reaction to the movie. As a poet, Trudell has married his spoken word to the blues and traditional Native American music to achieve a stunning result. I'll get back to that soon, but first the back story.Trudell was one of the original leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the seventies. He was involved in the occupations of Alcatraz, the BIA offices in Washington DC, and Wounded Knee. The FBI declared Trudell especially dangerous because of his eloquence and compiled a 17,000-page dossier on him. In 1979, 12 hours after he burned an American flag in Washington to protest the treatment of the Native population, his house on a reservation in Nevada caught fire under mysterious circumstances. Trapped inside were his wife and unborn child, their three children, and his mother-in-law. All perished.Trudell went into a freefall. Imagine such a loss to a person for whom the family is part of the core of existence. He ended up, in the words of his poem "Did You Ever Get the Blues?" (from the album Bone Days), "...going through the crack in the looking glass." Did you ever get the blues, when dream and reality collided and you fell through the hole in your soul finding yourself looking for something you lost and you don't know what it is?Trudell's suffering was translated into a vision of his connection to life itself, to the Earth, and to the human spirit. He found words coming to him that became a poetry that helps provide vision for not only his own people, but for humanity at large. His performance career began as an opening act for Bonnie Raitt in 1982 when went he onstage to perform his poetry backed only by the voice of Quiltman, a traditional Native singer.Trudell's latest album, Bone Days, combines the blues and rock, Quiltman's voice, slide guitar, sitar, and Hawaiian slack key guitar to convey the essence of his spiritual vision. The music transcends in inexplicable ways and conveys the essences of sorrow and anger amidst love for the human spirit (as opposed to what he calls "the predators," those who feast on the earth and human suffering) and for the energetic flow of the mystery of life.There were moments when I was moved to tears because I recognized a brother who had touched the same vision. In such moments, the veil of aloneness is lifted and there is exultation. There is a great deal of loneliness attached to trying to preserve a vision of the fundamental essence of life and give it away to the world, when the world is busy doing other things. Searching the eyes of people around you, seeing that they didn't see it, so where does that leave you... did you ever get the blues, did you ever say it, and there was no one to hear? Once the mirror is cracked and passed on through, there is no going back. We are continually startled that people around us can't see it too. We may be accused of being Nature worshippers, but we simply find out that we are Nature. We find we have to express that essence in every way possible, because it's who we are. It's the only job there is in this disintegrating world.For myself, I lay no claim to Native American blood, but I have paid attention to the ground on which I have walked. I have paid attention to the grasses and the trees, the bird songs and the sky. That's all that I can claim.Bone Days shakes my world and inspires me to carry on holding to the vision. You can't go back. I bow to this version of the Blues for driving depression into a corner for the moment. I bow to John Trudell with gratitude and offer this in return.SPEAK Who will speak for the ground outside waterlogged after two weeks of constant rain, the water seeping down to aquifers emptied by years of drought and decades of greed, if not me, then who? Who will air the strivings of the new grass, the paper white narcissus backdropped by the new redwood fence, if not me, then who? What of the air heavy with the sweet flower smell burdened by the sounds of too many cars on the U.S. highway a half-mile away. what of my daughter's child thoughts, her delight in her cats, my erotic thoughts of her mother, if not me, then who? This house, this family burdened by debts to things that we did not create, this neighborhood uneasy with the future, fearful of its visionless past. Lovers contemplate their bodies, the chance for a child, a life together without any knowledge of the true nature of things. And my parents and grandparents dirtied and torn by forces with no human face. And our Elders, the knowledge, the visions of the true ways slaughtered for a greed and a power, an arrogance that has no human face, if not me, then who? Who will give voice to this breath, this moment, and in this moment a glimpse of an old man, an old woman who beckon me to them and say, speak the words will come to you, just hold to the vision and speak.

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.

The Coyote Dance of Things

John Spivey — Fri, 7 Apr 2006 18:56:52 EDT

Old Man Coyote decided that life would be a lot easier for him if all the easy marks in the world would announce themselves. He wouldn't have to work so hard at finding all the suckers that he could dupe. He thought long and hard about it and finally in a flash of sheer inspiration he came up with an answer. He invented the smiley face. Now all he had to do was look for the bumper stickers or lapel pins or that cute little face that people draw by their names, and he could easily go about his business.I call the Sierra foothills above where I grew up Coyote's landscape. In more primal times there were four main predators apart from man. They were grizzly bear, wolf, mountain lion, and coyote. Grizzly bear and wolf have been eliminated, although grizzly bear ironically still appears on our state flag. Lion keeps to its secretive ways. I know that I am being watched, but I don't quite know from where. Coyote just keeps on keeping on through guile and perseverance. We're never quite able to put our finger on him. Coyote of course is the trickster of Native American myth, along with Crow. Ethnologists have always been trying to pin him down. He is this thing, but no, he's that. Coyote is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the mind, the quantum trickster. In the past, I have had an uneasy relationship with Coyote. I found it difficult to maintain a close relationship with a God that can allow Coyote to exist in the infinite wisdom of things. Where in the realm of love is there justification for some scurrilous Coyote who would just as soon take your money and laugh and run as do anything else? How do you maintain a relationship with that? Where are love, compassion, and kindness when Coyote is always lurking around?I'll tell you what I now know of old Coyote. Coyote represents our own capacities for constant self-deception and also represents God's attempt to shock us out of our stupor of predictability. As soon as I think that I know something fully, Coyote will quickly, unceremoniously let me know that I don't. If I am unawake, Coyote will steal me blind, but it is only because I am blind and asleep. He will always bite me in the ass if I am not aware. Always.When I form an opinion about reality it turns out that I leave a whole sector of the compass ignored and unexplored. Because I'm not even aware of the existence of that region of reality, Coyote stalks me from within my own shadows, reaches up and gives my balls a yank and runs back into the darkness laughing. So wearing an opinion is about the same as wearing a smiley face when it comes to being duped. The more opinions I have, the less aware I am.Now these opinions can be of any stripe: political, religious, racial, or maybe just a personal opinion about teenage pop singers. It's all fodder for Coyote. The real trick is just to watch and see like a hunter, not fantasize, opine, and discourse about what you want to see. Watch in all directions unflinchingly.Sad to say all our leaders operate in this opinionated fashion, and we have a President who is guided by his opinions of reality, formed by wealth and politics and religion. He hasn't bothered to sit by the trail and watch history, watch the patterns of other cultures, watch their joys and sorrows. He hasn't really watched his own culture. He thinks he is safe within the fortress of his opinion and thinks to watch in all directions would be some kind of retreat or sign of weakness. His unidirectional fixation creates opportunities for attack from a multitude of directions, and old Coyote is having a field day. He simply has to sneak up at will and give the Presidential testicles a pinch, then listen and watch in glee at as the man suddenly chokes on his syntax and stares vacantly into space wondering what in the hell just happened.I've studied several different martial arts. In Aikido I had to do a randori for my black belt. In randori, three or four attackers come at you from all directions. There is no time for opinions. Take care of this, watch, take care of that. The attackers are neither good nor bad. It all turns into a fluid dance and direct awareness is both the music and the step. Without venom, posturing, and anger on my part, even the attackers are changed, yet I've also taken care of myself. In T'ai Chi I've done push hands. In push hands, you remain connected to your attacker by touch through the back of your hand. By doing so, you can read his intentions, even on a minute level. To break off contact means a loss of knowledge of your opponent and it becomes more difficult to know his next move.Through these things I've learned several things. Watch in all directions. Always keep Coyote in front of you and, if possible, stay in direct contact with him. You might get your feet stepped on, but it leaves other more vital areas of your anatomy intact. On a seemingly strange note, I'm going to mention God again. But be warned that the God of which I speak is not the God of which you think I am speaking. I also must always keep God before me and stay in direct contact. It's neither worship nor supplication. It's pushing hands with a flow of Energy that resists definition, conforms to no opinion, and cannot be possessed by any person, place, or thing. It's just a fluid thing, a randori with life.

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.

Energy and Imagination

John Spivey — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:24:04 EST

"Energy is eternal delight."--William BlakeAbout 15 years ago I met a Native American medicine man. He was a half-breed Choctaw, one of the Five Civilized Tribes that had been forced on the genocidal Trail of Tears by Andrew Jackson. He was basically a nomad and had settled here in town for a short time before moving on. During that time we became friends, and in our conversations he would sometimes tell me of what it was like to grow up on the reservation, learn the traditional ways, and then leave because that world was too small.When I first met him he took a look at me and said, "I see the Energy has been beating you up." By Energy he meant the vital force of my life, what the Chinese call Chi, the Japanese call Ki, and the Hindus call Prana. Though his talk of the concept of Energy sounds a bit New Ageish, he was anything but that. As he worked over my body he kept up a stream of interesting non-precious conversation. He was as matter-of-fact as if he were tuning up a car engine. Sometimes he would step outside his house for a smoke; not the nervous habit I normally saw in smokers, but one of simple release from world-weary experience before he returned to his healing trade.What he meant by his comment to me was that my Energy was running amok. He described how in his tribe the Elders would watch the children, and when the children were five, would select those with the greatest Energy for training in the Medicine Way of the tribe. Without this training and discipline, the selected children's Energy would run amok and they would end up crazy, alcoholic, or dead. I thought of my alcoholic father and his sprawling, catatonic, deadened binges. I said, "I bet the Energy beat up my dad so bad that he drank to kill the pain. I bet a lot of drunks do."He replied, "If you were to round up all the winos in L.A. and wire them together, you could blow up the whole goddamn town."While talking to him I could picture the beating I felt inside, and had felt inside since I was a child. I knew that I had needed someone to show me how to construct banks for the river that coursed through me. As it was, the flow just flooded my internal landscape and left devastation in its wake. I asked him how I had managed to survive all those years without guidance. He replied, "You used your imagination."Now the real imagination is based in myth and symbol. It creates the banks for the river and creates a map of the internal landscape. Imagination is the connection that we establish to the mystery at the heart of things. Fantasy is imagination's doppelganger, the ghostly apparition to which we resort to grasp at a semblance of meaning for our lives. I resorted to science fiction and fantasy worlds to stay alive. I hadn't really used my true imagination, only its doppelganger, but it had helped me to survive.Fortunately I had been stopped in my tracks by this crusty old man and shown how I needed to do things differently. Imagine a life that dances with the ghostly apparition all the way till the end without awakening. How sad and how hollow would that all be? Merely surviving the pain does not make a real life, a fully human life.Most of us dance our lives out in that ghostly world. Most of our creations -- our electronic games and pornography, our romance and opinions, our blogs and pop culture -- are products of our fantasy mind striving to save us from the pain of our repeated beatings. We grow so numb we scarcely remember the beating. We place great meaning on apparitions that have no inherent meaning. What inherent meaning does Blogcritics have other than a place to hide out from the storm for a while and find some company for the duration? The great potential of the Internet is used only to dance the dance of apparitions. We become so used to this ghostly existence that we never want to wake and get angry with those who do. Energy without awakened imagination is eternal damnation.I'm a bit like that old medicine man. If you don't get it, he just moves on. Last I heard he's off in Alaska somewhere wandering from place to place in his old Toyota Chinook. As for me, should I stay or should I go? Don't know yet. Pretty ghostly around here. Lonely too.

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.