Posts
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| Northwood Sacred Ox: 5/30/20 Jean Stimmell©2020 |
To Buddhists, the ox symbolizes the ultimate, undivided reality, which is the ground of all existence.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Getting Real
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| Cannon Beach OR: 9/9/13 Jean Stimmell©2013 |
Getting Real
I’ve written previously about not being able to shake my formative experience as a child, reveling in being outdoors and working with my hands, which lead to my first career as a stonemason.
Perhaps I needed that hands-on, physical release because, like many men of my generation, I was divorced from my feelings. I loved theories and ideas, living in my head most of the time. I needed the physical escape of lifting rocks in the here-and-now to release the pressure of countless competing thoughts, swirling in my head.
Due to occupational infirmities as I approached 50, I enrolled at Antioch New England Graduate School to learn a new trade as a psychotherapist. This experiential program, discounted my 1950s-male, analytical mind in favor of opening up my body, starting the process to teach me how to feel.
It goes without saying that this was a necessary adjustment: Joining with a patient in session requires being in the here-and-now, not lost in abstracted thought.
While at Antioch, I started a meditation practice, which allowed me to see my mind in a new light, what Buddhists call “monkey mind:” A cacophony of rushing, thoughts, like an overactive troupe of monkeys swinging wildly from one axon tree to another in my brain.
Chop wood, carry water, Be real. John-Paul Sartre and Joseph Campbell, among others, agree that we create meaning through our actions – not our wildly gyrating thoughts. Nietzsche, too, exalted in the active life.
Philosophy for him wasn’t something to be contemplated from an armchair but an act that sprung from physical exertion. While young, Nietzsche felt most alive trekking up mountains in the Alps, while I built stonewalls. But, with age, as is often the case, the exploration moved inward.
For me, meditation has become a crucial tool in my investigation. I look at it as an active, intentional exercise, not the passive activity popular today, where folks simply observe incoming experience. Active meditation is what the Buddha intended, according to Buddhist author and teacher, Peter Doobinin,1.
“The Buddha’s mindfulness is highly proactive…. we are involved in a conscious intentional effort to put our mind on an aspect of our experience. We aren’t passively noticing experience. We are making a choice about where to put the mind and following through on that choice. We are doing something, with a sense of purpose.”2
My meditation practice has changed the course of my life, despite only doing it on an irregular basis. Rarely at first and more frequently as time goes on – as I listen to my breath and keep returning to it when thoughts pop up, as they always do – it happens! A wide smile spreads across my face, beyond my control, and I feel an oceanic sense of bliss: A mystery beyond words, transporting me to a higher realm.
Since the pandemic struck, meditation has become my solid rock in a sea of unease. However, that can lead to the paradoxical situation, often encountered in Eastern thought, where the wisest action may be no action.
The Tao Te Ching, the most translated book in the world after the Bible, is about that kind of wisdom. It was written around 400 BC, during 300 years of rancorous fighting between competing petty kingdoms in China.
Whereas now, we live in fear of our community being attacked by Covid-19, back then, the ever-present danger was marauding invaders of a different sort, intent on raping and pillaging.
The key practice of the Tao involves becoming still, like a mirrored lake. According to the Tao, taking action by doing nothing – until the time is right, which is beyond our conscious control – is the gateway to the wisdom of the universe. Or in the Master’s own words:
“Do you have the patience to wait
til your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
til the right action arises by itself?
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
She is present, and can welcome all things.”3
To my way of thinking, that is good advice to follow during this pandemic: Get real. Chop wood. Carry water. Be humble. The future is not ours to foresee.
xxx
3 The Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation: Chapter 15.
Monday, May 18, 2020
Ominous Clouds are Gathering
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| Seapoint Beach, Kittery Maine Jean Stimmell©2014 |
No more excuses! Forced into isolation by the pandemic, we now have the time and space to “to think what we are doing.,” as Hannah Arendt long ago urged.
Arendt, perhaps the foremost political philosopher of the 20th century, observed that in the past we didn’t have to think: “tradition, religion, and authority told us how to behave and defined our moral options of right and wrong, the mass of humanity did not need to think for themselves…”
However, nowadays, she wrote, its a free-for-all, with no guard rails on how we should act. “Adrift in a world in which everything and anything is possible, thinking is the only activity standing between ourselves and the most heinous of evils.1”
Today, many different worlds exist, depending on which lens we look through.
One lens, promoted by the medical and health professionals, sees our first duty is to protect our community, the body politic. Under this view, individuals should be willing to forego certain liberties during a deadly pandemic, like self-isolating and wearing masks, to safeguard the greater whole. That’s one view of reality, in step with most religions.
Another lens revolves around the idea that the world is a dangerous place, like a cage fight with no rules, where only the fittest individuals survive. Proponents of this view believe that’s the way it should be, with little or no government restraint.
During the pandemic, some proponents of this view have suggested sacrificing some of us in order to achieve herd immunity, a term from veterinary practice, meaning letting a disease play out throughout the herd without intervention. The end result is that the weakest are culled from the herd, leaving only the fittest.
I hope most would agree that there’s a fundamental distinction between how we should treat human beings and animals bred for slaughter.
On top of that, the odds are unfairly stacked against us. The massive income inequality that exists today would, to a large extent, determine who would pay the ultimate price: The losers would include minorities and the poor without access to adequate healthcare; the elderly, who have compromised immune systems; and working people, first responders, and essential workers in nursing homes, grocery stores, factories.
Meanwhile, the more well-to-do can work safely at home or self-isolate at their secluded, second homes. Defining herd immunity in terms of who is the most affluent is an insult to us all. On top of that, the toll would be catastrophic: John Hopkins estimates, without any mitigation, the price for herd immunity in th U.S. could be 500,000 excess deaths.
Finally, I want to present Joanna Macy, eco philosopher, Buddhist, and general systems theorist, who sees the world through a different lens, similar in many ways to that of the medical and religious communities, but with a modern touch.
She uses the human brain as an analogy for explaining systems thinking and how it contrasts with other approaches: She points out that human brain cells would die if they tried to compete to gain “power over” neighboring cells. Instead, to be effective, nerve cells must ensure maximum flow between cells to communicate and form collaborative networks.
According to her, in microcosm, that is how life works. Natural scientists now understand that what appears to be separate entities are interacting currents of matter, energy, and information.
Using a poetic metaphor, she says, “we are flames that keep our shape by burning, by the act of combustion—matter in and matter out…So action isn’t a burden…It is something we are.”2
Why is that important? Because if action defines who we are – if we are bright, burning flames by our very nature – then we are meant to be engaged, vibrant actors in life, not couch potatoes dozing through the evening news.
As political polarization inches closer to civil insurrection in these times of Covid-19, we need to heed Hannah Arendt’s warning about the imminent danger we face. And be empowered by Joanna’s call for action.
Do we want to insist on unfettered individual freedom during this pandemic, unwittingly advancing the interests of the strongest and richest against the rest of us? Or do we want to come together as a united community for the greater good of us all?
xxx
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Monday, May 11, 2020
Old People: Expendable or Carriers of Wisdom?
A version of this essay published in the Concord Monitor 5/12/20
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| Old Man Crossing the Street in San Francisco CC Jean Stimmell |
I never took a writing course, but when fired up, my first choice is to respond with words. The urge grows stronger as I age. I hope Sam Beckett was right when he said that, paradoxically, the impairments that come with old age, actually tend to make one a better writer.
“With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence—what you, I suspect, would call ‘brain damage’—the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is… A child needs to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense to him. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility.”1
When I read that statement, it fired up the few sand grains I have left. True, we no longer have the raw brainpower of the young, but our old noggins resonate with a deeper consciousness, connecting us to our community, the earth, and the cosmos beyond.
That’s my take on what Beckett meant by “greatest possibility.” Most would call this wisdom, and all would agree it is not universal — just look at some of our leaders.
The wisdom of the elderly has been crucial to society’s survival throughout human history. Yet, today, that flies in the face of how many people behave: Shunting old people aside like relic computers with obsolete operating systems. Of course, it’s all come to a head now with at the advent of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only are we useless relics, but now we are told, point-blank, to leave the stage.
Ageism is alive and well.
The chief of the U.N. has condemned the rising tide of hate around the world, which includes attacking the elderly as useless and expendable: A good example came from Texas where the Lieutenant Governor argued that stores should stay open and, if, in the process, many older adults die, it is their patriotic duty to save our capitalistic way of life.
Nuba Kohn wrote recently in the Washington Post: “we are losing our elders not only because they are especially susceptible. They’re also dying because of a more entrenched epidemic: the devaluation of older lives.”2 .
James Hillman, the well-known psychologist, wrote, "It's a central issue in our culture. We don't have adults, mentors, elders. We have fixed ideas of seniors as benighted, almost embalmed,"3
We have been headed down this road for some time with our fetish on youth and obsession with productivity. According to Hillman, society has been arranged to sideline the elderly, giving, by example, the rise of retirement communities which “reinforce the exclusion of the elderly from participation in society.”4
And now, nursing homes, the final retirement home for many, have become death traps. Nineteen old people died in New Hampshire nursing homes from Covid-19, just on the day I write this! And so it is across the nation and around the world. The World Health Organization states that “as many as 50 percent of all the deaths in Europe occurred in such places.”6
This should be no surprise. For decades, government data has shown that nursing homes can be “infection tinderboxes,”7 Just in the last three years, two-thirds of all the nursing homes have been cited for violating rules on preventing infections.
Wisdom, on average, accumulates with age and that is why the elderly have been venerated in cultures throughout history. For that reason, although we may slow down and have to retire from material productivity, our ability to be good citizens blossoms.
Hillman would like to see the elderly restored to the role they’ve had in many tribal cultures “as caretakers of the traditions, stories and crafts, and as intermediaries between the natural and supernatural.” But all is not lost.
I want to thank the Concord Monitor for doing its part to restore us to that role by publishing so many of us regularly. Paraphrasing Lord Tennyson, old age has yet its honor and its toil.
xxx
1 Shainberg, Lawrence. Four Men Shaking (p. 71). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
4 ibid
6 ibid
7 ibid
Monday, April 27, 2020
Living the Good Life
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| Russet tending our garden |
Living the Good Life
“What a wonderful life” a time traveler unfamiliar with our world might exclaim, seeing me tilling my garden on a sunny spring day, as robins peck for worms. But we all know it isn’t.
Like the rest of us, I’m sequestered at home, sheltering in place, because of the Coronavirus pandemic – which has already killed in 9 weeks, almost as many Americans as the entire Vietnam war. I’m sheltering here alone because my partner in crime, Russet, has been in California for the last two months and will be there for the foreseeable future, caring for her son who has developed a life-threatening condition.
I feel like one of the characters in Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach, who might appear, at first glance, to be blissfully happy, taking an evening stroll down a breathtaking beach in Australia. But, once again, things aren’t always as they appear.
The protagonists in Shute’s book aren’t thrilled vacationers, but scared souls looking inward, mulling their mortality, as they await the arrival of a deadly radiation cloud circling toward them from a nuclear war on the other side of the world.
Like them, I mull my mortality. And, in the process, find myself reviewing my past.
The soil I am tilling today, I know intimately. I built my house here on this 21 acres in the 1970s, part of the Sixties back-to-the-land movement. That was a time, like now, with intense polarization brought about by the endlessly festering Vietnam War, coupled with an explosive cultural war between establishment figures and the counterculture about what we should believe and how we should live.
The back-to-the-land movement wanted to escape that political turmoil and the cookie-cutter, suburban malaise of the 1950s. Personally, I was worn out for being both a participant and protester in the Vietnam war. Parts of the country were an environmental disaster zone with major cities made toxic by thick smog and rivers so polluted they caught fire.
I was a disenchanted graduate sociology student, chafing at a department that valued statistics more than people. I was sick of ingesting abstract theories in my cubicle and craved the here-and-now reality of the real, physical world.
Following counterculture guru and farmer Gene Logsdon, I saw success in terms of the independence that comes from “how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy.”
I was a perfect recruit for the back-to-the-land movement, inspired by “Living the Good Life,” by Scott and Helen Nearing; they had quit their professional jobs in NYC and moved to Vermont to live a sustainable life, building a simple house from rocks found on their property and growing their own food.
My mentor in the garden was J. I. Rodale, a major advocate of organic gardening in the sixties and rightfully considered to be the godfather of the locavore movement. He despised industrial agriculture with its reliance on mono-crops and pesticides. His motto was, “we must go back to nature, if we wish to live long.”
And, I can’t leave out Steward Brand, visionary and creator of “The Whole Earth Catalog.,” a counterculture magazine and product catalog, that covered topics like self-sufficiency, ecology, and learning how to do things yourself. But, his primary focus was on “access to tools,” for which he had a broad definition, including clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds…anything that promoted independence.
Brand was intent on building a more ethical and sustainable world. He did not sell any of the products he listed, only simply listing the vendor’s information, along with a review of the product.
But that altruistic 1960s ethic, as with other positive aspects of the 1960s, soon went the way of the passenger pigeon. By the 1980s, a new mantra ruled the day, attributed to Malcolm Forbes: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
This new transactional model soon spawned Amazon. In a very distorted sense, this internet supplier resembles the Whole Earth Catalog. But rather than promoting sustainability and empowering local businesses, Amazon encourages over-consumption and creates value by pitting one supplier against another in a race to the bottom. The ultimate winner is the owner, Jeff Bezos, who is now the richest man in the world – undeniably the guy with the most toys.
Pondering the state of the world, waiting for my peas to come up, I have to question society’s judgment that our sixties generation were self-indulgent and self-absorbed losers.
Just imagine, if our values had triumphed over materialism and corporate greed, there would be no climate crisis today – and possibly no pandemic. We would all be having fun together. What a wonderful life!
Just imagine.
xxx
Saturday, April 18, 2020
We Are Small, Wet Miracles
Reflections 2011
Note: You can see the reflection of me, the observer,
at the back, as I snapped the shutter
Defining Who We Are on Earth Day – and Beyond
“We are survivors of immeasurable events,
Flung upon some reach of land,
Small, wet miracles without instructions,
Only the imperative of change.”
Astronomer and poet, Rebecca Elson wrote this poem while contending with cancer that killed her at age 39. Just as Rebecca was confronted with her mortality by a life-threatening situation, so are we now forced to face our own impermanence in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
From her vantage point, spanning the worlds of science and art, she brings a unique perspective on what it means to be alive on Earth Day.
Although we humans may imagine that we are in control of our destiny and rule the Earth, when the moment of truth arrives – like the coronavirus – the blinders come off and we see ourselves as we really are: small, wet miracles without defenses or instructions.
While the old gods have been largely consigned to the dustbin of history, new gods continue to mutate into existence through science. At each stage, humans as spiritual, flesh-and-blood creatures have been pushed further to the periphery.
Galileo robbed us of the illusion that Earth was the center of the universe. Newton replaced God with the concept of universal laws that control the planets in an orderly process, like a giant, mechanical clock. Next, Darwin came along to show that, rather than being created in God’s image, we climbed out of the mud to become the crown jewel of evolution in an epic battle of survival between ourselves and all other species.
Then along comes quantum theory which defines existence in terms of sub-atomic quarks and neutrinos whose nature is a matter of probability. At each paradigm shift, science has pushed spirituality, community, and what it means to be living, breathing person further off center stage.
As an antidote to this, I was gratified to read Kate Brown’s recent piece in The New Yorker presenting a scientific model, which, at first glance, appears the most radical of them all. The crucial difference is that this biological model celebrates community along with the squishy, realness of us humans in all our glory: sweat, snot, amniotic fluid and all.
Brown presents a wealth of scientific evidence, demonstrating that the human body is not the self-contained vessel we think it is – just as a chair from the standpoint of quantum physics, is not a solid seat. Instead, a human being is more like a porous cloud: A microbial ecosystem swept “along in atmospheric currents, harvesting gases, bacteria, phages, final spores, and airborne toxins in its nets.”1
Rather than being a distinct, separate entity, we are more an assembly of species. In other words, each of us is a community! This notion has added relevancy in the age of Coronavirus.
Throughout evolution, the fact that each of us is a community within a community promoted health. In indigenous cultures, sharing microbes with other people, along with all other forms of life, was a good thing: the more we shared the healthier we got, the better adapted to our environments and more fit as a social unit.
But that all changed with the industrial revolution and the resultant explosion in the human population. Pandemics become more frequent when living things are forced together in denser proximity, allowing novel microbes to jump to new species.
Perhaps most crucial, pandemics like the coronavirus are striking more often because of climate change. Warming and changing weather patterns shift the vectors and spread diseases. Heavily polluting industries also contribute to disease transmission.
Studies have linked factory farming — one of the largest sources of methane emissions — to faster-mutating, more deadly pathogens. “The same corporations that exacerbated the climate crisis are literally helping to create deadlier diseases, more quickly, in a world that keeps changing how they spread.”2
So, under the cloud of the coronavirus, how do we celebrate Earth Day? First, buy local and support local farms. And, at the policy level, push Congress to generously fund climate and environmental justice in upcoming economic stimulus packages.
For ethical and moral guidance, perhaps it’s time to “go back to the future” and meditate on the wisdom of Indra’s Jewel Net, a revered metaphor in Buddhism, illustrating the interconnection of all things. The metaphor is as follows.
Indra’s realm is a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each "eye" of the net is a single brilliant, perfect jewel. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel effects them all.
This Earth Day, let’s remember each of us, and all beings, is a jewel in her net.
xxx
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/opinion/climate-change-covid-economy.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_200416&instance_id=17680&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=30753738&segment_id=25284&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Cry of the Earth
 CC Jean Stimmell |
Last year, under the sway, of spring, I wrote in these pages about building a small pond and waterfall in my back yard and what pleasure it gave me: calming my rushing thoughts, easing me back into nature and into the here-and-now.
Quite unexpectedly, two big, green frogs found themselves to my landlocked pool and liked it so much, they took up residence. They hung out, usually at the edge of the pond, but when I arrived, I could count on them jumping in with a splash.
They reminded me of Alan Watts translation of that famous Zen haiku, a perfect example of how to directly observe nature without intervening thought:
The old pond
A frog jumps in:
Plop!
Recently, noting spring was coming again and had already melted the ice in my little pond, I started skimming out a winter’s accumulation of leaves. When the water still smelled foul, I pumped the water out, only to uncover, sadly, the corpses of my two frogs, bleached white by their watery immersion.
I am still mourning the loss of my loyal frogs. And feeling guilt as I reflect on my hubris, thinking I could recreate Nature. Instead of being sustainable, my pond, lined with an impermeable, high-tech rubber liner and covered during the winter in thick ice, became a sealed coffin, suffocating my friends from lack of oxygen.
The way I see the world, the pond I built is a microcosm of what we are seeing today with the Corona Virus. I’m disturbed about how this pandemic is being described by our leaders and the news media as a war. And all this prattle about how we are being invaded by alien beings!
I don’t see this as a war, but humankind refusing to accept our earthly limits, imposed, since the beginning of time, by a power infinitely greater than own. That power is Mother Earth, who operates according to her own terms and timetables. Sometimes she serves up something unexpected, like the devastating Japanese tsunami for which we humans played no role.
But more often, Mother Nature gives us fair warning when we start exceeding our puny human authority. Certainly, that’s been the case since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when we started spewing ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.
We have long known the effects of carbon dioxide on our planet. Remember Al Gore’s best-selling book, back in 2007: An inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming? Yet we did nothing.
Time has marched on. A third of all our fellow species are in danger of extinction and billions of individuals have already died as the result of climate change from global warming. The polar bear is the poster child of those who soon will be gone. Yet still, we do nothing.
The shifting climate has resulted in droughts and food shortages, resulting in escalating conflicts over increasingly scarce resources around the world. Yet we have done nothing except send arms to the side we want to win.
Killer hurricanes, tornadoes and floods are becoming the new normal, while devastating fires are wiping out whole towns like Paradise California and are now threatening whole continents like Australia. But yet we still do nothing.
Sometimes pandemics arrive on their own like the deadly flu pandemic of 1919. Yet for years now scientists have warned that rising temperatures caused by man-made climate change are causing shifts in animal populations, putting them in closer proximity to our burgeoning human populations, making new pandemics inevitable. Yet we do nothing. Actually, less than nothing, as we see by the recent disbanding of a pandemic task force.
Last week, the New York Times revealed the existence of an October 2019 government report, proving our leaders were “aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.”[1]
Yet, once again, we did nothing. But this time, Mother Nature finally lost her patience and now Covid-19 is coming for us.
We will get through this, perhaps at a heavy cost. But hopefully, on the positive side, we will learn to be humble and respect our limits. Perhaps we will come to understand that we are mere mortals, not gods: Just another species, among a staggering number, all interdependent, all reliant on each other for our common survival and the health of our community.
xxx
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_200320&campaign_id=2&instance_id=16925&segment_id=22412&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92®i_id=307537380320
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