This Being Human is a Guest House

"This being human is a guest house. 

Every morning a new arrival. 

"A joy, a depression, a meanness, 

some momentary awareness comes 

as an unexpected visitor."   Rumi

To see the book containing the complete poem, The Guest House, click below:

The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition

The Goal

“Let go of body and mind, until you reach a state of great rest, like letting go over a cliff ten miles high, being like open space"— Huai-t'ang

What is REALLY real?

When working with my clients, I often tell them the old story of the three blind men and the elephant: Three blind men encounter an obstacle (an elephant) in their path. The first blind man reaches out and feels the trunk of the elephant and declares it is a hose; the second blind man feels the elephant’s tusk and thinks it is a sword; the third touches the elephant’s leg and insists the elephant is a tree. They end up in a hopeless argument, not being able to agree on whose reality is really real.


I use this story to point up a major tenet of postmodernism: Our sense of what is real depends upon our perspective. Indeed, we all have our human truths that are vital to us and our socially constructed reality—that’s fine and the way it should be. The point is, we should be extremely leery of declaring these human truths absolute Truth with a big "T." 


I recently ran across a wonderful quote by Robert M. Pirsig that illustrates this same human conceit of taking a partial sampling (the extent of our human reality) and declaring it everything. I combined the Pirsig quote with a photograph I took at Ogunquit Beach many years ago.

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

Have We Become A Media Mind

Last night I attended a Poetry Society of N.H. public reading, War and Remembrance, at the University of N.H. with Paul Nichols, best friend, Vietnam combat veteran, and one of the featured poets. The poems read vividly depicted the brutality, immorality, and soul-sucking destructiveness of War–along with addressing the causes of this abomination.

I was particularly struck by the words of Burkhard Hoene who died in 2006 at the age of 46.  Some of his poetic journal entries were poignantly read by his brother last night from the Poetry Society's anthology, The Other Side of Sorrow.  An excerpt from his poem, what package is this? accompanies  my photographs below:

just who are we when we become

a media mind?

what is it that builds the power

of a such a country as ours?

similar resources, similar

television, similar people,

similar topography.

yet we have become the 

cause and barometer of how 

the world feels a about itself.

Is this an open society?

What is an open society

when it behaves as we do?

what values do we accept

and what values do we

impose on ourselves?

what values do we impose on others?

can we remain

indifferent?

can the blind remain

indifferent?

forgive them for

they know not what they do

The important things in life are beyong our control

Diary entry: March 27, 2010
Spring will come when Spring will come

After the unseasonable warmth of an early spring

Temperatures plummeted last night

Creating mosaics of new ice in the vernal pools.

The chill causing blue herons to hunker down, nest left undone.

And mayflower blooms arrested in the bud...

Gentle reminders that the important things in life are beyond our control.

Reality Hunger

A quote to think about:

"Anything processed by memory is fiction." *

An image to think about:

• Is this an example of biomimicry?

• An artful representation of the human brain?

• Or just a photograph of fungi growing on a stump of a tree chewed down by beavers? 

* quote from "Reality Hunger" by David Shields, p. 57. To read a review, click here

Do we have a plan for the revolution? Sustainability.

"Do we have a plan, people?"...

"We have thousands of them being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers' markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something human, local and accountable–anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits everywhere...and is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could answer a lot of urgent needs the depression brings."

Click here to read the rest of Rebecca Solnit's article in The Nation 3/23/09.