renouncing U.S. citizenship

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After two years in Berlin, as my separation date from the army drew near, one of the options available was to separate and remain in Europe. Several fellow soldiers had decided to do that. A couple had decided to become mercenaries in Africa. But while I was intellectually capable of seeing the advantages to living an extended and civilian life abroad, there was something in me that longed to be in a place where I could say, "the Lone Ranger" and know that the other person knew what I was talking about. A place where the were shared cultural touchstones, little and large ... a place where the sense of humor was understood ... a place I could feel at home. Up until that time, I hadn't paid much attention to being an "American."

And I felt strangely sheepish when the recognition hit me. The assumption of who I was was so ingrained that I hadn't even noticed the assumption. It was touching and it was real ... and I hadn't even noticed.

This recollection popped up today when reading an article about people who renounced their American citizenship because the American tax code was so intrusive and such a burden relative to their living-abroad lifestyle. Some, no doubt, were trying to dodge the tax bullet. Others stopped short of renunciation and opted for divorce. But one woman who had been brought up in a military and patriotic family, found the renunciation gut-wrenching in a way she had not envisioned.

"I grew up in a military family where patriotic feeling was very strong" Eysselinck says. "I'm amazed at how terrible I felt renouncing. But it was the only way to get them off my back. It's very distressing and time consuming to keep up with all the paperwork. But if it's this bad when I'm 64, how bad will it be when I'm 74?"

Citizenship is a strange and compelling thing, I guess. Makes me wonder how many other 'perfectly obvious' things I have overlooked.
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the limits of tenderness

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My friend and long-ago shrink, Jack Gallahue, once commented gently, "If a man punches you in the stomach, you don't ask if he lives in a rat-infested apartment."

In Georgia (USA), a six-year-old girl kindergartner was handcuffed by police after she threw a tantrum. No one is apologizing.

In my neck of the woods, an area top-heavy with shrinks and pinch-pottery, I can imagine such an event arousing a dismay second only to the up-coming war in Iran.

Children are sweet. Children are innocent. Children deserve a nourishing and safe environment. It is harder (and harder still because it is harder) to admit that children have their less than angelic moments.

How many aspects of life are like that ... so much adored or so much despised that the full and ranging facts are held at bay?

Me, me, me ... I return again to the useful line: Get over yourself.

It puts me in mind of the old joke about the mom in the checkout line when her child has a conniption fit in hopes of getting a candy bar. The mom looks at her child and says evenly, "What are the magic words?" The child stops caterwauling long enough to respond, "You're thin and you're beautiful."
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swimming with sharks

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I went rummaging along the dusty bookshelves yesterday, looking for "The Dogs of War," an entertaining, potato-chip novel about a group of mercenaries hired by a British company to take over a mineral-rich country in Africa. I knew I had the book somewhere, but couldn't find it. For some reason, I wanted to read again, to be entertained and diverted. There were no good movies on TV, so reading would have to do. But I couldn't find the book I wanted so, partly out of curiosity, I pulled out "Brideshead Revisited," a novel that qualifies as 'literature,' I suppose. It was a mild surprise to find myself delighted with the chocolate-mousse writing, so lightly confected and yet dense with flavor. "I can still read," some voice in my head whispered ... and was strangely pleased.

I probably won't finish Evelyn Waugh's book set in early 20th-century England: There is only so much chocolate mousse a man can eat.

The delicate distances that the literati -- especially the Brits and the Japanese? -- can maintain are both alluring and revolting. Those distances, like any other, posit a cultural and social certainty that beckons: It is as attractive to be in the presence of literary certainty as it is to feel the warm embrace of any group ... right down to the Ku Klux Klan, I imagine. To swim in waters uninhabited by sharks ... how delicious and self-confirming is that? Maybe that's what's nice about reading -- the sharks, even when depicted in excruciating detail -- are under control between two covers. It's just a National Geographics show on TV -- a chance to view the wonders and horrors and not get bitten. Things are under control. However unsafe the waters, still I am safe.

Perhaps I am growing up a little, but maybe not. I grew up feeling the full force of the intellectual lash -- the safe haven of intellectual pursuit that tried so hard to make life imitate the sharkless realm of art: If I think hard enough and analyze deeply enough, and mortar the walls of brilliant philosophy or understanding, then the real-life sharks will not take a bite out of my ass. I will be safe. But of course it wasn't true. Sharks don't care whether they take their sustenance from the ass of a wise man or a bumpkin. The distances and delights of intellectual chocolate mousse don't concern life's sharks: They're red meat critters.

But where once I feared the falsehoods of brilliance -- so assured, so distant, so loveless -- now, reading Waugh's book, I felt as if a knot had eased. No need to fend off this pitiless capacity ... no need any more than there was a praise-worthy reason to embrace it. Like all fortresses of certainty or excellence, this was just another distance to use. Holding things at bay -- through delicious wording or redneck bias -- was just a way of pointing out that the function of distance is to point out the failure of distances.

Words cannot capture experience. Philosophy and religion cannot capture life. There is no capturing distance that can keep the sharks at bay and it is useful to remember that shark attacks, while viscerally very scary, are events that some people actually survive.

Distances are not all that bad. They may not be true, but it is through that untruth -- that control, that safety, that group hug, that adoration or horror -- that their fictional nature becomes apparent. It is as if our distances were suggesting gently, "Distances are untrue. It's no big deal. It's just untrue. Relax. And then, without any particular fanfare, notice what is true. Sharks, after all, don't think of themselves as menacing. Why should you?"

I once read that when a swimmer enters the ocean, before the water reaches his thigh, something more that 50 species of wildlife had checked out his advancing legs ... including two or three kinds of sharks. I don't know if this is true or not, but I like the imagery, irrespective of whatever the facts might be. Sharks and sea urchins and crabs and minnows and no swimmer is exempt ... even one who reads Evelyn Waugh or belongs to the Ku Klux Klan. The water offers up its cool blessing irrespective of who's doing the swimming.

Blessings are nice.

Not imperative in any sense ... but nice.

Chalk this post up to a poor swimmer dipped in chocolate mousse.
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Patriots' Day

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In the Midwest, residents are licking their wounds after an onslaught of severe weather left five dead in a swath from Kansas to Minnesota. The damage is no joke.

Somewhere or other, candidates for the presidency of the United States and their deep-pocket backers are no doubt planning speeches about the deficit or their philosophical differences or where to start the next war and how they will make America a more habitable and righteous nation.

Today is "Patriots' Day" where I live, a theoretical recollection of the Revolutionary War battles at Lexington and Concord. These days patriots are people who call themselves "patriots." They have lapel-pin flags to 'prove' it.

It is hard not to see the aptness of the observation, "There will always be an asshole."
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fitting in

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What an interesting conflict -- dying to fit in, to be warmed at the edges of some agreeable social fire, and then realizing that no matter how hard anyone might try to fit in, there is some element that simply does not fit in and, more, rebels at the notion.

How wonderful to be holy ... as the unholy refuses to be stilled.

How wonderful to be expert  ... as the inept and uninformed remain unstilled.

How wonderful to applaud where the applause is deafening ... as the catcalls wait patiently in some shadowed corner.

And how annoying it is, after all the religionizing and philosophizing and beard-stroking and heart-felt emoting to realize that a stupid T-shirt wraps up the case without ever breaking a sweat:

"You're unique ... just like everyone else."
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doing some good

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There are good-hearted people the world over who yearn to do good and are willing to put a little or a lot of energy into actualizing that yearning. Really, sometimes it is pretty amazing.

And yet, equally amazing perhaps, is the willingness to screw the pooch and imagine they were or could be doing some good.

Why anyone would make up a bunch of koans blows my mind in view of the koans that are plainly in-your-face all the time.

Shakyamuni Buddha -- the buddha most often credited as the go-to guy of "Buddhism" -- was said to have said: "Do good, refrain from evil and purify this mind."

That's "do" ... never mind the accolades and despair.
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my parents were abducted by aliens

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Tuning in to the middle of "Road to Perdition" on TV yesterday, I found myself willing to suffer the insufferable ads in order to reach the conclusion. The 2002 movie, beautifully photographed, tells the tale of a 1931 mobster (Tom Hanks) who, with his son in tow, seeks vengeance on other mobsters (including Paul Newman) who have murdered his wife and other son. There is actually a plot. There are actually people with mixed, human characteristics. There is actually some character development. I enjoyed it.

And the movie gave rise to the question, "was there ever a child who did not think in one way or another, 'My parents were abducted by aliens'?" Inexplicable visitations of disappointment, fear, frustration, anger or denial ... and the only explanation (using whatever words) is: My parents were abducted by aliens.

And it's barely a hop, skip and a jump to suggest that adults aren't all that different: Somehow the vicissitudes of life have deprived me of or short-circuited some deepest wish, and an imagined parental benevolence "was abducted by aliens." Something, someone, somehow ... there's an explanation and a meaning and even if it's not exactly aliens who robbed the scene, well, how about god ... god's a pretty good alien and a good repository for all the good and peaceful and hopeful stuff that was mysteriously withheld or the ugly stuff that was painfully inflicted.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this strand of DNA, if strand it be: 1. If everybody's parents were abducted by aliens, then where the hell are they? and 2. While there is no problem finding the negative effects of alien activities -- the loss of my good parents, the ones who would let me go to the movies or buy me a bike, or land me a perfect job or a perfect spouse -- still the exact description of what things might be like if my true parents were around is never precisely defined. How things wouldn't be is easy; how they would be is hard. It may be easy to imagine how my good parents might be if I got the bike I wanted -- the instant gratification -- but envisioning how that satisfaction might become more generalized and long-lived leaves me uncertain and confused.

Perhaps this is one reason that some religions kill off their offspring as a means of delivering a long-lived promise: If you drop dead, everything will be better ... 77 virgins, heavenly companions, etc., but you have to drop dead first... and in the meantime you have to suffer the slings and arrows of parents who were abducted by aliens.

It's a rock and a hard place ... no one wants to die and yet dropping dead is the price of admission to the place where your good parents were abducted to. And so the beat goes on, the stories get more and more complex, the promises become more and more ornate and, since no one wants to die, it is easier to believe -- in god or the intellect or the emotions -- than it is to investigate the scene and actually find the place to which your true parents were abducted.

My parents were abducted by aliens.

But were they really? Are my parents and your parents off in some far corner of the universe playing bridge? Is this the best I can do with my life, weaving tales and explanations and meanings that will put meat on the bone of some alien abduction? Is there really an 'out there' where all true parents gather and grin and I'll get there too if I live long enough or die soon enough or act virtuously enough or ... some damned thing?

I'm not just chiding religious frameworks. To me, this is a human framework and human frameworks precede the human fairy tales that anyone might tell: My parents were abducted by aliens. Well, who are these aliens and what do they do with all their kidnap victims?

I guess this is the time to consult the bathroom mirror.
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dry earth

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The other day, Greg, a man with landscaping savvy and machines, came around and "over-seeded" the backyard, which looks a bit like an unkempt baseball lot in Texas. Overseeding involves a machine that cuts small furrows into existing lawn and deposits both new seed and some dried nourishment.

Once finished, Greg counseled me: "You have to water it every day for a couple of weeks. Once it gets damp, it has to stay that way in order for the seed to germinate. Right now, the ground is the way it might be in July."

Dry. Very dry. The winter provided little snow -- which makes me wonder about drinking water supplies. But the earth has also not received much rain. Farmers are feeling the pinch. And my laziness, combined with a desire not to be wasteful, means that watering the lawn sits like some barrier reef of I-don't-want-to in my mind.

Dry earth. When it comes to serious stuff, water is right up there with the best of them.
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intellect and arrogance

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With an IQ of 159, four-year-old Heidi Hankins has been inducted into Mensa, an organization premised on the intelligence of its membership.

According to Mensa, the signs of a gifted child include an unusual memory, reading at an early age, intolerance of other children and an awareness of world events. A gifted child will also ask questions all of the time.

"Intolerance of other children." What a curse for an adult to be intolerant based on intelligence. What is intolerant will only grudgingly be tolerated. But for a child ... what an added curse ... lacking the skills to find friendship ... always smart but standing outside a circle of love that lacks all explanation or limitation.

I guess excellence of any sort implies a loneliness, but what a bitter fetter and how hard to integrate.
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cultural appreciation of Buddhism

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I went to the lecture braced for my own revulsion and came away quite happy to have been gently chastened. Intellectual appreciations of Buddhism are aspects I am wary of because they cannot and do not ameliorate the screams in the night -- the suffering that human beings actually experience, the edginess that can make life uncertain and unsatisfactory. To my mind, Buddhism's approaches to such dis-ease are what make it worth more than piss in a snowbank. 

The lecture pointed out to me that I am just an old Zennie who felt as if, somehow, he had been brought back, full-circle, to a time when how-it-fits, how-it-works, and where-is-its-place were matters I cared about because I was uncertain and didn't want to get caught flat-footed by something out-of-the-ordinary, weird, and conceivably insane.

For an hour and a half yesterday, the speaker, Jeff Wilson, never mentioned "enlightenment" or "suffering" or "compassion" or "The Four Noble Truths" or "The Eightfold Path." Much to my surprise, I didn't mind a bit. Instead, he talked about regional and cultural impact on the Buddhism that might spring up here or there. Wilson acted as a reporter and his reporting was very good. Not that I can remember it chapter and verse or do it justice, but the effect his talk had on me was pleasantly corrective. My view of Buddhism was and probably remains too simplistic. True, perhaps, but simplistic ... living under a bell jar. Wilson may have been making a living along the intellectual and sociological periphery of whatever "Buddhism" might be, but those peripheries are interesting and important. What is beside the point is never exactly beside the point. Cultural disquisitions on Buddhism still do not get to the point as far as I am concerned, but ignoring cultural concerns is not much good either. As Vimalakirti was said to have said,  'The companions of passion are the progenitors of the Tathagatas: I fear that people will destroy the worldly aspect to seek the real aspect.'

Anyway, I cannot do justice to Wilson's talk, which was nice and straight and will no doubt provide him with an income. I wasn't taking notes and have no intention to read his several books, but it had an effect that might be summed up as getting a sense of what a curio lifestyle (my own included) Buddhist practice can be. Buddhism in the United States is pretty insular (East Coast, West Coast and a couple of places in between). And not just geographically insular ... serious practice also seems to be limited to what James Ford once described to me as "a bunch of smart, rich white guys." No doubt this is a vast generalization with exceptions aplenty ... but still, that's the feeling I got based on Wilson's talk. A world of unintended arrogance.

Not to do Wilson's talk the injustice of sieving it through my limited mind, here is the p.r. blurb that preceded the lecture:

"Dixie Dharma: Regionalism in American Buddhism," a talk by Professor Jeff Wilson (University of Waterloo). Professor Wilson will discuss the importance of regionalism as a category in understanding Buddhism in America by focusing on a multi-denominational temple in Richmond, VA.

From the talk, I came away feeling the weight and impact of cultural considerations ... what an uphill battle Buddhism might be for anyone seeking serious understanding of their lives and misperceptions. When no one else (or anyway a very few) is doing what you are doing and when the comfort of society is pivotal to human existence, who will have the daring, the outright insanity, to set out and keep going? How lonely and uncertain. It is touching beyond words in my mind.

I guess Wilson's talk made me feel lucky and also reminded me that my good fortune was not something either to take for granted or stuff down anyone else's throat. I am too old now to pick my nose over the cultural considerations that impinge on or inform whatever it is that "Buddhism" might be. That's a young man's sport. But I was grateful for an elbow in my ribs ... hey, asshole, there are 84,000 gates, not just something called "Buddhist" gates.

The lecture was interesting and, as anyone can see from this flimsy posting, something I found affecting without much explanation of how or why. Anyway, I didn't run for the exit.
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relief ... the woo-hoo and the oh-dear

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One of the greatest incentives and greatest barriers in spiritual adventure (sometimes more simply referred to as "this life") is the longing for relief. There are gazillions of examples, but using Buddhism as one example, a person would have to look no further than one of its cornerstones, The Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths are:

There is suffering.
There is a cause of suffering.
There is an end to suffering.
There is a way to end suffering.

Nobody needs to be a Buddhist to feel such observations reverberating in their lives, so Buddhism is just a format within which to state what is obvious to mugwump or holy man. And within that four-part observation, the cockteaser that may really stand out is, "there is an end to suffering." Anyone who is alive might like a piece of that action: Gimme some relief!

What a promise! What a hope! What a bright light in a dark hole!

No kidding ... who wouldn't like a little relief, be s/he Buddhist or bawdy house musician? When I am honest, you bet your boots I would like some of that!

And it's a great inspiration. Suffering, even by the most mundane of definitions, seeks surcease and in that surcease, relief.

The fly in the ointment is that seeking for relief from one situation or another never quite pans out. Today's relief leads to tomorrow's search for relief. Don't believe me -- check it out: See if it's true. But the habit of seeking relief is so normal, so human, and so compelling that it seldom occurs to the relief-seeking mind that seeking for relief doesn't seem to supply the relief that is sought ... something that will honestly create an "end to suffering."

Since old habits die hard, such a recognition may creep up slowly, in actual-factual experience or in something called "spiritual endeavor" ... same stuff, different day. Slowly, imagining that relief is merely the opposite of suffering or sorrow (eg. peace is the absence of war) just doesn't pan out. It may inspire some very healthy actions, but an end to suffering? Forgetaboutit!

And so, perhaps, the question/assertion may pose itself: What are things like when the frantic search for relief is laid to rest? Without relief, what need for relief? If there is no need to flee the inescapable, gussy up the unpleasant, praise what is praise-worthy, camouflage the obvious ... well, what might that be like?

Maybe it would be something of a relief.

Not.

This, to my mind, is the true promise of spiritual practice: Relief is neither necessary nor the point.
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adjectives in search of a noun

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Floating without any particular mooring in this mind ....

Perhaps we are all like the myriad particles flying through a distant and inescapable space ... endless adjectives in search of a mythical noun.
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the old warriors

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Whether personally or globally, the old warriors, then young and vigorous, pass into history, leaving those in their wake to praise or condemn. What was unusual and daring in their time is now 'settled' ... whether it was the rise to the top of a corporation, an attempt to undo the horrors of some addiction, or a revolution to reshape the governance of a country.

The praise and blame assigned to their efforts -- or my efforts -- grow wispy and contrived. That was then, this is now. It is the effects that weave the tapestry of now.

But their best legacy, I imagine, is to suggest that making an effort on behalf of something worthwhile is ... well, worthwhile. Looking back makes some sense. Dwelling in the past, while comforting, doesn't compute very well, no matter what the praise or blame.
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landline telephones

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The return to a feudal system finds wider and wider support as economic upheaval leaves behind those who do not qualify as "the fittest." Lords and ladies shape the realm while peasants sweep the streets and cower in darkened corners.

And now comes the suggestion that landline telephones are archaic and denude the telecommunication companies of the revenue they feel they deserve. A third of Americans currently use cell phones exclusively.

If landlines are discontinued ... welcome to ancient times and the rise of dictators.
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broken bird's egg

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On the inky blackness of the painted, concrete front stoop, the pale-blue shards of a bird's egg lie scattered today.

Once they were whole and rested in the sparrow's nest beneath the eave of the porch. Now they await some wind that will blow them who-knows-where.

I am sorry in those tiny shards. I am sad in some small and yet enormous way.

Sadness is not so bad.
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atheists' convention

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Today, a friend sent along a news story about a Global Atheism Convention in Australia. "Within two generations, religion in Australia will be a non event," David Nicholls said. But, he also conceded, religion will always be present in Australia because some people "need fairy stories to survive."

I don't have enough energy to get my titties in a somber twist about who thinks what about religion or the gods, but since I have habituated myself to spiritual jimcrack, I am vaguely interested in both the hallelujahs of a Louisiana tent revival and the proud and precise dissections of atheist surgeons. I do hope that neither will visit too much harm on others, but I don't imagine that is possible. That's what the gods are in business for ... harm.

I agree with Mr. Nicholls, but would go further: It's not just some people who need fairy tales to survive. Everyone needs them ... or at least cleaves to them with the desperation and delight of a man at sea who has found a life preserver.

What I don't agree with is the notion that living life according to "fairy tales" and the implication that fairy tales are somehow lesser tales, is appropriate or accurate. My guess is that everyone lives according to his or her tale -- "fairy" or otherwise -- and the attempt to supplant one tale with a better or more delicious or more sensible story is, to borrow from the Zen Buddhists, heading East when you want to get to the West.

My fairy tale is that everyone's got his or her fairy tales and, in the end, "comparisons are odious." True, some tales are less harmful than others (or at least they are put forward that way), but tales are tales and the endless comparison or contrast, while human and sometimes a lot of fun, cannot unravel the knot.

My fairy tale suggests that rather than supplanting one tale with another, more rosy, one is not especially useful. What is useful is the willingness and courage to examine my own fairy tale, whatever it may be. First of all, this fairy tale is the only fairy tale anyone could have adequate knowledge of. This god is my god and it is my god that gets me through the day. It is my god that ties shoes, changes diapers, is brilliant or dim at work, goes clubbing, visits faraway lands, noodles about the nature of fairy tales and gods, lays claim to atheism or profound belief ... the list is endless.

My fairy tale, my god, is on hand 24/7, through and through. I may say that I understand this format is the same for you, but I don't, in truth, know. My god does not honestly extend to knowing your god, however much I may speak of "empathy" or "understanding" or "revulsion" or "love." We may play in the same sandbox and build magnificent castles together ... that's nice and kind and fun. But who built that castle that is clearly not a fairy tale at all?

Oh well. Have a god, have a fairy tale. Don't pretend you don't. Be honest. Snoop the terrain.

Creating gods and fairy tales is hard work ... maybe it's time for a break.
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trust and hope

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Somewhere in the human mind are well-trained symphony orchestras ready to weave paeans and well-lubricated harmonies that appreciate the words "hope" and "trust." I'm not against it ... just sayin'.

But when I read the two words in close proximity the other day, I wondered how much the one differed from the other ... how it distinguished itself as something separate. Was there a symphony that played Beethoven while another played Haydn?

I couldn't readily find an answer. Instead I got stuck on the fact that both trust and hope carried with them an implicit and mostly whispered doubt. Each held within its DNA a statement of contentment and assurance based on what could not be known for sure. The sun will rise in the East. Water is wet. War is a heinous business ... beyond horror. And Beethoven is to die for.

And perhaps it is that very uncertainty that makes the music so loud and sweet in the first place.
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dream time

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Generally, when asleep, I don't dream much, or if I do, a return to consciousness seems to have a built-in suppression mechanism. It's as if dreaming, with all of its open-ended, chuckling panoramas might be too much nakedness for this conscious, much-dressed beast.

But yesterday, during an afternoon nap, I had a long and detailed dream I was unable to forget when I woke up. Old people dream more when asleep, I think, because there are fewer dreams in waking life. Anyway, this dream seemed to pivot on the fact that I had somehow gotten the wrong car from the parking lot. The keys fit and the car (a Nissan Maxima station wagon) worked, but it was the wrong car and I was trying to get on the highway to go home. But re-finding the parking lot, and hence the right car, went on and on and on and on. There was one effort after another. The tenor of the dream was not desperate or especially sad-making. It was just that the efforts didn't work. I had the right keys and the wrong car and ... where the hell was the parking lot? There were corners to turn, hills to climb, people to ask, scribbled Buddhist drawings ... but no parking lot by the time I woke up.

The whole thing left me somehow edgy as dreams sometimes can. I can imagine interpretations that would bring the panorama under the control of some 'explanation,' but what interested me was the challenge it seemed to present -- a challenge to a bedrock assumption that when doing something or thinking something, I needed to know what I was doing and be somehow assured that I knew why I was doing it.
Assured and reassured ... meaning.

But the edginess remaining after the dream was compelling enough and undispersable enough to make me feel that trying to get away from it was going in the wrong direction. Why the bedrock insistence on meaning and explanation and 'knowing what I am doing?'

Would the world fall apart if I didn't know where I was going and if the results were endlessly for nothing? As long as I didn't become a serial killer or some other harmful agent, what was wrong or unsettling about not-knowing, not-succeeding ... with going forward without pretending the future might cough up some satisfactory and gratifying success? Perhaps a thoroughly symphonic fart in the present made a lot more sense than all the vast philosophies that attempted to tame the future, to find meaning, to be in some self-serving control. Maybe having the keys is enough and needing the car is just icing on an already-iced cake.

The edginess that dreams can impart is informative stuff, I imagine. It's always naked. Defense mechanisms don't work. The edginess may be uncomfortable-making, but it's a good advertisement ... what's wrong with naked ... the 'naked' no one can escape?

The car keys are on the hall table. Have a nice trip.
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Buddhism talk

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I got a follow-up nudge in email yesterday and thought I would post it here for anyone in the neighborhood who might have some interest ... a prof talking tomorrow about Buddhism south of the Mason-Dixon line. I'm going out of curiosity. Here's the p.r. for it:

"Dixie Dharma: Regionalism in American Buddhism," a lecture by Professor Jeff Wilson (University of Waterloo). Professor Wilson will discuss the importance of regionalism as a category in understanding Buddhism in America by focusing on a multi-denominational temple in Richmond, VA.

4:30 Friday afternoon, April 13th, Neilson Browsing Room, Smith College

Free and Open to the Public
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"it is better to give than to receive"

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Sometimes I think spiritual life -- the kind that involves some practice and effort -- amounts to little more than learning how good it feels to stop banging your head against a wall. Of course spiritual life has to get beyond relief if it's going to mean much, but it's nice to have a bit of relief along the way.

What lit this fuse of mental cud-munching, was the Christian touchstone, "It is better to give than to receive." Like all touchstones, this one presents the one willing to consider it with a possibility ... a door marked "entrance" so to speak. Like other possibilities, it is an entrance anyone might choose to employ or ignore -- your choice, your life. Any imaginative, free-standing mandate to put the possibility to work ... well, that's just do-gooders looking for income or elevating their own status.

Socially and ethically, greed receives a two-edged welcome. On the one hand, its effects and effectiveness are not very attractive. On the other hand, since men and women are in fact capable of greed, it is applauded, a matter of rejoicing (see Hollywood, Wall Street, wishful lottery players, etc.) Greed asserts that I deserve to get ... and keep on getting, often at the expense of others who are clearly (because I say so) not as deserving of getting.

Socially and ethically, giving is held up as an antidote to the cruelty and sorrows that follow in greed's wake. And the fact is that giving, like getting, feels pretty good. To help a friend in need -- or in fact to help anyone in need -- touches some nerve within. When it is not just a manipulative maneuver, giving feels good ... and is sometimes elevated to the status of being "right."

Pared down a bit, the 18th century moral philosopher Immanuel Kant, suggested, "Act so that the maxim of your action may be taken as a universal law." And which philosophy or religion hasn't sought to raise their generalizations to similar heights -- providing all-pervading nostrums such as "it is better to give than to receive?"

The only problem with universal laws, of course, is the fact that laws are limited. The capacity of human beings to live within social and ethical structures (laws) is everywhere and always counterbalanced by a sometimes delightful and sometimes horrendous capacity for illegalities. This mind, this life, may weigh the fallout from "it is better to give than to receive" but, by necessity as well as a dancing capriciousness, it simultaneously weighs the possibility that "it is better to receive than to give." Socially and ethically, laws are very good things. But the depth and breadth of human experience cannot be fully expressed or limited by laws. Laws limit, but an actualized peace beckons.

These are matters that are not terribly interesting until they become personal ... as in a spiritual endeavor that has consented to walk through one door or another ... as for example the door marked "it is better to give than receive." Ethically and socially, it's a nifty, legalistic saying. But personally, it requires a bit of effort ... and honest effort can be a pisscutter because honest effort does not exclude anything: Being nice and being naughty are a package deal, not two, conveniently-separable entities. Socially and ethically, human beings obey the law. But human reality is much more imaginative than that ... a wild, wild west of gunslingers and parsons, school houses and whore houses, peaceful farmers and rapacious land barons.

"It is better to give than to receive." As anyone nudges that door open, the first notion on the road to some understanding may be to give all your possessions away...to create some imaginative, Shangri-La of 'the simple life.' The greed or acquisitiveness that led to all these material possessions needs to be banished and the way to banish them is to get rid of the couches and vases and television sets and fine clothes and wrist watches and stock options: If I get rid of this stuff, then magically I will be free of greed and its downside fallout. Anyone is welcome to try this, but those who have tried it know that the accumulated stuff is not the problem; it is not the cause -- stuff is an effect. And the effect is an effect that comes from a gun-totin' wild west mind, a mind capable of damn near anything, a mind as wide open as a prairie, a place where giving and receiving graze and are nourished together.

Having walked through the door and consented to look into things a little, the complexities of "it is better to give than to receive" present themselves. In a land where no-law is the-law, how is anyone to cope? How is anyone to find a bit of peace, a bit of relief? Repeating the law -- mantram-fashion -- over and over again has a limited effect, although spiritual life as a limiting exercise is often popular. But delving deeper and deeper, there comes a time when the limitations of the law are simply not enough. What does this really mean, "it is better to give than to receive?" In what way does it assure a steadied peace on this wild-west stage?

The questions are personal and compelling and there is no singular, mandated, pleasant-to-the-ear answer. There is only one answer -- your answer or my answer or his answer or her answer. In a lawless, juicy, exciting, depressing world, you are the law.

To me, "it is better to give than to receive" means that giving and receiving are how things work. Giver and receiver are intellectual conceits -- convenient in conversation, but incomplete and inept in reality. There is no relief to be had ... giving and receiving are just the way things work. But, in one sense, the way things work is something like a relief after banging my head against some divided, giver-and-receiver, lawful and lawless world. Set aside the "me" and "you" and "them" and it's just what happens. Sure, it's hard work setting such things aside, but it is the only viable course I can see when it comes to giving and receiving. Lawlessness is confusing and painful. Lawfulness is painful and confusing ... if pleasant to the socially-acceptable ear. "Better" and "worse" may be important, but what is true will always beckon and dance and tease in a world that is "better" and "worse."

Once upon a time, I was telling Soen Nakagawa Roshi, about collecting the gingko nuts sitting in a bowl on a table between us. I said a bunch of us learned that he liked them, so we went out and collected and prepared the nuts for him and others at the tea-gathering we were attending. As soon as I had finished telling him this small story, his hand shot down into the bowl of nuts between us and grabbed a fistful. He extended his fist to me and I held out my hands to receive what he was offering. "As you gave them to me, so I give them to you. Do you understand?" he said. And, at the time, I did not. But looking back I think I am willing to say that he was just standing as an example of the obvious ... it was just giving and just receiving ... it was just the way the world went around ... lawless, benevolent and assured... no need for "better."

What could be "better?"

Isn't "better" for head-bangers?
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testing old waters

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On Friday, I plan to go to a lecture on Buddhism -- some professor talking about Buddhism in his southern habitat.

The lecture sounded mildly interesting, so I will try to go.

But my main reason for going is to assess my own lack of interest.

Buddhism, specifically Zen, took up a lot of my time in the past. A lot. In the past, by turns, I loved it, hated it, practiced it, talked about it, pondered it, grew depressed or elated in its environs ... blah, blah, blah. These days, the fires are banked a bit and going to a lecture is like taking a sick person's temperature -- how hot does this ancient demon remain? Have you recovered or is more bed rest warranted?

The lecture is no big deal. I just think it's a good idea to take the temperature of old angels and demons.
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girl with umbrella

A girl plays with an umbrella during the closing ceremony of the XIII Ibero-American Theater Festival in Bogota, April 8, 2012.
REUTERS/Fredy Builes

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superiority

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Is there a spiritual persuasion that does not proclaim itself to be superior?

Maybe so, but I am not familiar with it and there seems to be a clamoring throng in my mind, each member chorusing, "This way is the best spiritual way, the superior way, the way that trumps all others."

Intellectually and emotionally, this is enough to make a sane man snap, "A pox on all your houses!" Spiritual, cultural, financial ... let 'em all crash and burn... get thee and thy superior ways behind me, Satan! But that's just the sane man in anyone: Superiority, including the superiority of humility and virtue and clarity, is exclusive and the world around us seems to include everything without distinction. Life does not thumb its nose at life. It just lives.

A friend sent me a note this morning pointing out that in his later years, D.T. Suzuki, an early expositor of Zen Buddhism in the United States, contended that the Japanese culture was a superior culture in which to find a true understanding of Zen. I am not well enough read or versed to know if my friend's observation is true or not, but I certainly know of other expositors of Zen who embody this approach. The note depressed me because I could imagine it was true ... not that I knew it was true or planned to use a whole lot of time finding out. I don't approve of sticking my head in the sand, but I also don't have the energy for a meticulous examination of something I can recognize and address in myself: A superior man simply reflects an inferior capacity.

The best-est with the most-est. Intellectually and emotionally, superiority can be picked apart ... and with good reason. Intellectually and emotionally, such dissections make sense ... knock yourself out.

But in spiritual adventure, I think, the heart leads. Yearning, grasping, controlling, explaining, believing, loving ... the heart has its ways and dissections be damned. And (initially) what the heart loves is -- because it is my heart -- superior. I don't think there is any getting around this, so denying it is a fool's errand. In spiritual effort, a pedal-to-the-metal effort is the only effort I know of that is likely to produce an antidote to milquetoast results. If the thoughts and beliefs of the past could not produce a peace that honestly worked, then thoughts and beliefs, while not precisely bad, could not accomplish what the heart wanted to accomplish.

In the midst of a pedal-to-the-metal effort, the habit is strong at first: My way is the best way because, well, it's my way. The danger, of course, is that what is "best" is ipso facto "better" than some other approach. Mine is better than yours or yours is better than mine.

If, in the experience of the heart, superiority is a mug's game and yet the heart demands its superiorities....

And if moral relativism, in the experience of the heart, is another mug's game, rife with a cowardice that the heart will not put up with ....

Then perhaps there is just one choice: Pick your superiority AND get to the bottom of it. If every way and every culture is, in one sense, The Superior Way, The Supreme Path, The Ultimate Answer, The True God or whatever, then go for it. Prove it!  Don't lollygag about, persecuting others, flonging your spiritual dong whether overtly or covertly, building towering spires that are bigger and better, trumpeting "enlightenment" or "heaven" or "hell" or "compassion" ....

Every way is the superior way IF there is a willingness and determination to prove it. Otherwise it's just another case of debilitating, much-praised superiority... and lord knows we've all gone that route in the past. Maybe it's time to embrace the superiorities of the heart instead of just asserting them. Embrace and cling and assert and believe and ... get to the bald-faced bottom of it all.

Who, after all, is the "superior (wo)man?"

I haven't got a clue, but isn't it the clues that have screwed the pooch in the past?

I bow to your superior wisdom. :)

It all strikes me as something worth examining, however badly it is expressed here.
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a revised perspective

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Passed along in email

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Carne Ross ... after the governmental train wreck ...

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How nice it is to hear a former governmental insider take responsibility and apologize for the damage he did. And nicer still to hear a coherent vision of what the politics of the future might be in a nourishing sense. Carne Ross may seem a bit of a dreamer, but he strikes me as anything but an airhead. Incorporating the Occupy Movement, Gandhi and a practical ability to think in practical terms ... well, I think this former diplomatic whiz kid is worth listening to.

   
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avoid 'socialism,' move to Somalia

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With intellectually-lazy-but-formidably-loud politicians and voters dotting the landscape in the run-up to the presidential election in November, this tongue-in-cheek video was passed along today:


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living well is best

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The 17th century poet and priest, George Herbert, once observed that "Living well is the best revenge."

George Herbert

Born into a well-heeled family, Herbert went to university with the thought of becoming a priest, rerouted his course into intellectual pursuits, served in the British parliament and only later returned to his earlier desire and became an Anglican cleric. Before his death at the age of 39 in 1633, he sent a letter to a friend and described his writings as "a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master." He was depicted as a priest devoted to his parishioners in very concrete ways, bringing the sacraments to them when they were ill and providing food and clothing to the needy.

"Living well is the best revenge" is a pointed and witty and apt observation, but it is hard not to think that in his less witty personage, Herbert might have dulled the blade a bit (or sharpened it, depending on the point of view) and said simply, "Living well is best."

How many, I wonder, are like Herbert, holding up an exciting ideal in youth, being led in directions that do not seem at all to dovetail with that ideal, and finally returning, a bit bruised and a bit wiser perhaps, to the original course? I cannot help but think that it is the bruising that makes a sweeter, more credible and more useful upshot. In spiritual endeavor, it's only half a joke to suggest to the very young who are hellbent on heaven, "Go out and sin some more."

On the other hand, which one of us, at whatever age, who decides to take spiritual endeavor seriously is not as green as a maple leaf in early spring -- young and clumsy and unsure and loud? And when, at whatever age, can any of us claim to have escaped that clumsiness?

Living well is best, but how such a thing is achieved is utterly personal -- morphing and shape-shifting in every moment ... a responsibility that no other man or god can shoulder. Actualizing a brilliant dream is not a job for sissies.

I guess a piece of the answer is to be gentle but firm with the children who stare back at us from the bathroom mirror.
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"Olivia"

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Driving up to New Hampshire today to have lunch with my son, Angus, I popped in an old CD and sang along as I drove.

I wasn't entirely sure what the CD contained, but suddenly a piece of music a friend had written and sung about my then-young daughter came on and I found myself touched again ... so spunky, so humorous, such a blast from the past ... it made me weepy: "Olivia."

A friend was good enough to park the song on his web site so it could be available ... if not to all, at least to me ... for sniffling and laughter purposes.
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resurrection day

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Later today, after sitting, I'll drive to New Hampshire and have lunch with my college-student son. I asked him to pick someplace interesting and he replied that he had a Thai restaurant in mind, a kindly concession to my sometimes-oriental tastes. The other day, he threw the discus 138 feet, a new personal best and something we can both delight in over lunch.

It's Easter ... another day for resurrection.

I hope everyone enjoys this resurrection. It is, when you consider it, pretty nifty.
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should and shouldn't

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The sun was bright and warm along the peace picket line yesterday. Many of the regulars were there. Frances Crowe, the petite 93-year-old grande dame of the peace movement in these parts, showed up with a big smile and a sign she said she hoped would move people out of their comfort zone, a sign that said something like, "Arrest the serial killers in Washington." Usually she is not so loud, but her big smile and long experience gave resonance to what otherwise might have been a somewhat lookit-me-virtuous sentiment.

To my left stood a 50-something family lawyer whose schizophrenic younger son was at last on a medication -- legal in Europe but hard to come by in the U.S. -- that kept him on an even keel. The lawyer said he had tried to encourage his younger son, in his twenties, to study something that would provide him with a job, but the young man had decided instead to take a couple of history courses -- hard ones -- at a local university. The older son, in his 30's, lived at home as well and paid rent ... which the lawyer said he could use: His profession, while heartfelt, did not pay well... defending poor people with few means and a basketful of problems. This week, he was defending a 14-year-old boy who had been abused by his father. The boy's mother had acceded and today was jealous of her son's sexual hold on her husband. And besides the facts that were enough to rip your heart out, the lawyer had been in his game long enough to know that the perpetrators, up close and personal, could be pretty nice people, people hard to wrap up in a righteous and indignant wrath. It was a scenario that might make an adult out of anyone.

Also on the picket line, as usual, was a young man, in his 20's perhaps, with shoulder-blade-length hair, an unprepossessing beard, green sweat pants, and a large rectangular sign that listed (in clear print) every country in which the United States had military involvement. There were so many, that the countries had to be printed small ... although the sign, tacked to wooden legs, was perhaps two feet high and six feet long. The young man stood, as he always does, near the Main Street curb so that passing vehicles could get a better look at his version of the peace protest. Most of the others in the group stood back from the curb, along a fence outside the courthouse, wearing simpler but more easily read signs.

The young man is one voice among many and the peace protest finds many different voices in its midst. Most of the people are older and less strident. But the young man is full of intelligent talk, which he unstintingly shares with anyone unfortunate enough to listen. Not to put to fine a point on it, the young man irritates the shit out of me.

I missed the interchange when it occurred, but caught enough of it so that my irritation boiled over yesterday. Briefly, a man in a black SUV across Main Street must have called out something like, "My son is over there," meaning in one of the American-sponsored war zones, Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps. And the young man called back -- and this is the part whose specifics I missed -- "if America hadn't sent him, he would be safe." Those were not the exact words, but the impact was similarly, if not more, insensitive.

Several people on the peace line took umbrage. At least I was not alone. "Don't say that!" they called out in one form or another. And my mouth spoke too: "Have your own son before you spout that bullshit!" The young man defended himself. What he said was logical, he pointed out. And that is what is so irritating about him ... his logic may be spot on, but his understanding is full of shit.

It was a young man's sport -- intelligence unleavened with heart -- and I recognized in the young man something I too had done at his age... sought to overcome with intelligence the insurmountable and fearful specifics of this life: If I am just intelligent enough, I will be in control, I will be able to explain and, as a result, be at peace. And more, life will listen to me as currently it seems disinclined to do. Life is scary and uncertain and I have not yet marshaled the experience or mustered the courage to be afraid.

In the moment I yelled at the young man, I was angry. Later, I saw myself in him. And while, in that seeing, I was sympathetic, I was not about to retract or back away in imagined 'compassion' from my anger. Horseshit is horseshit. The fact that I have been and continue to be capable of horseshit idiocies does not mean I have to refrain from calling it out.

But I thought about the incident later -- as now -- and think I have devised a plan. Next week, much as I dislike discourse with dickheads, I think I will suggest to this young man that, for one hour each day for a week, he refrain from speaking the word "should." Just one hour each day. The mind may fill up with the word "should," but for that one hour, simply refrain from speaking it. Practice for a week. See what happens.

Will my plan 'work?' Will it cool this young man's fearful jets? Who knows? I certainly don't. But it strikes me as a plan with possible upside benefits. "Should" is such a fearful word, such a searching word, such an ineffective word. So prayerful and impotent. And yet the underlying longing to be heard and to be at peace is very touching, very understandable, very human. To use the word "should" is to bite the clouds of a future that no one can see. It is to seek peace where there is only war... and thus contribute to the war. "Should" says between this young man's lines, "I deserve to be God. I deserve to be in control. I deserve to be heard and to rule .... and thus find some elusive peace." And of course he is God ... but saying so doesn't make it true, any more than saying "peace" brings an actualized peace.

Before next Saturday's peace picket, I will try to practice a little myself. I don't expect it will be easy. The "should" habit is pretty strong. Not speaking the word "should" is, of course, a starting point. Not imposing it in the mind comes later. One step at a time. Courage isn't born overnight.

Yes, I think I 'should' try it.
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