Lately I have neither composed melody nor lyric, because music, however you follow its fragrance, requires the flower. Simple or complex, the blossom must open, the color be expressive and expressed: if that bud is all-potential, then the hand must wait for later summer, for more sun, for rain; and if the petals have stretched, dried and fallen, then the mind must imagine flowers, and the tongue will wait for spring. Either way, an absence makes the heart redundant, the song oblique, a tangent, and all attempts to coax it hither are nothing less than calling butterflies from the sky, with similar result.

The problem arises from a basic truth of living, that at times the sun rises and at times it sets: flowers open and close to the same cycle and same short season: and while we wish and want after unending opening, still there is a time to close, close the eyes, close the ear, close the mouth, and sleep a while. In between the waking and the dream there is a time of reverie, when real acceptance comes, and we see our best attempts as best attempts, our most blind actions as just blind acts, and the caresses and embraces that came by choice or chance were memories of flowers that will keep us well through night and bitter weather, after-harvest, frost and all the like. there is a time for the sun to rise and a time for it to set, though my star not constant as the one hat rises daily in the east, setting daily in the west... but that's not it: it is I that am not so constant as the earth, that never fails nor forgets to turn toward the bright, warm welcome every day; instead I turn when I remember, or when I can, or when some momentary twist of melody reminds me of a smile, or kiss, or charity that I should not forget, and don't.

I can help certain things, all within my small domain: I can breath and watch my breath. I can listen well, or less well. I can eat that my body be strong. And I can adopt practices that life me to my feet when the world has shaken or water's underfoot. But I cannot fully tell the Doubts depart, or age await my whim to meet it -- some, yes; all, no -- have no power but to watch and learn when a flower opens or a flower wilts, to learn and practice my response, to respond the best I can with what I am, right there, right then.

Tonight I wait for melody but melody does not come. And lyric must be simple prose without a thread to string it on.
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Michael James, on the practice of Sri Ramana Maharshi. From the Introduction to Happiness and the Art of Being.

"Happiness lies deep within us, in the very core of our being. Happiness does not exist in any external object, but only in us, who are the consciousness that experiences happiness. Though we seem to derive happiness from external objects or experiences, the happiness that we thus enjoy in fact arises from within us.
    Whatever turmoil our mind may be in, in the centre of our being there always exists a state of perfect peace and joy, like the calm in the eye of a storm. Desire and fear agitate our mind, and obscure from its vision the happiness that always exists within it. When a desire is satisfied, or the cause of a fear is removed, the surface agitation of our mind subsides, and in that temporary calm our mind enjoys a taste of its own innate happiness.
    Happiness is thus a state of being – a state in which our mind’s habitual agitation is calmed. The activity of our mind disturbs it from its calm state of just being, and causes it to lose sight of its own innermost happiness. To enjoy happiness, therefore, all our mind need do is to cease all activity, returning calmly to its natural state of inactive being, as it does daily in deep sleep.
   Therefore to master the art of being happy, we must master the art and science of just being. We must discover what the innermost core of our being is, and we must learn to abide consciously and constantly in that state of pure being, which underlies and supports (but nevertheless remains unaffected by) all the superficial activities of our mind: thinking, feeling and perceiving, remembering and forgetting, and so on.
   The art of just being, remaining fully conscious but without any activity of the mind, is not only an art – a practical skill that can be cultivated and applied to produce an experience of inexpressible beauty and joy – but also a science – an attempt to acquire true knowledge by keen observation and rigorous experiment. And this art and science of being is not only the art and science of happiness, but also the art and science of consciousness, and the art and science of self-knowledge.
   The science of being is incredibly simple and clear. To the human mind, however, it may appear to be complex and abstruse, not because it is in any way complex in itself, but because the mind which tries to comprehend it is such a complex bundle of thoughts and emotions – desires, fears, anxieties, attachments, long-cherished beliefs and preconceived ideas – that it tends to cloud the pure simplicity and clarity of being, making what is obvious appear to be obscure."

I was made happy myself, running across this eBook on Mr. James' website: happinessofbeing.com. To be reminded that others have walked your path before you, and hear your words before you have spoken them... or hear them echoed after they were spoken, so that the jewel you have found by your own sweat and invention is shown to have been held before, no less a jewel, no less your own, but less owned and more shared. As though the novice miner strikes a stone, pulls it raw from the earth, brushes the mud and grit from its face, to imagine facets and the way light would come from without, shine within, and be reflected... when, over his shoulder, an older voice softly appraises the find: "Ahhh, now that is a nice stone!" You know he or she tells the truth, by the tone in the voice, by the thrill once experienced hidden in the gentle voice, by the absolute certainty of the trained heart.

Your heart can only leap to meet that other heart, over the generations or across millenia, to have your surprise and delight mirrored by another, whom you have met and respected, taken as a mentor, trusted and guarded in the sanctum sanctorum of your library. Really, like a child who has just achieved a new skill, and been recognized by his or her parent: Yes!! I DID it!

Sri Ramana was undoubtedly rigorous in his pursuit of the true Self, though in the more fluid culture and thought of Tamil Nadu, rigor may have worn a different face than its connotation in modern American English might imply. There is somewhere a surrendering, or a transformation, where one no longer seizes upon things, neither with the mind, nor with the body, but opens to them... for years upon years.

There is less noise in a mountain cave; less clutter in a single robe; less distraction in a bowlful of rice...
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From "can not imagine" to "will not accept"; from "will not surrender" to "can never forget". The layers and levels we uncover in meeting this our life challenge our small comforts. If we meet the surface, and draw it aside like a curtain that veils our senses, we reveal richer colors to our sight, intensify the sensation our exploring fingers find, satisfy the brightest/broadest savoring, remind us of a scent that drew us outward and upward, and make the dullest word with renewed connotation charge the mind.

It only seems an exercise of the mind, because it is written in words. The theory of your life is in these coded lines, lines you began to learn when you were very young: trained by those who had been trained, led by those who had been led. Therefore, if you ever say "Now that I know..." you may be living dead. Theory, like language, is alive, is touched by a wave, reached with a sound, and moved from this presumably fixed position to another. Language, like theory, is an exploration, it grows and changes with the time of day or night, the curve of the world or the whorl of a thigh, with loss or with welcoming, with a generation on the rise or a generation gone by.

Therefore, if you say "Now that is done..." you may be dead alive. It is only that your mind has become stuck, or the eyelid fallen over your eye. There is always another layer to the lie, another level to the sky that moves from tangible here to inconceivable there: to where the stars ride, then behind their orbits, below them, inside of them where something of us resides.

The Professor
Possibly the most disappointing lecture I ever attended took place on the East Campus of the University of Minnesota, in a modest lecture hall, circa 1983. The subject was early American literature, the topic Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel we had been reading. Between its lines were passages of harrowing beauty and fear, a depth of darkness among the roots and trees of a new continent; a language and a context which was familiar and yet uncomfortably inaccessible, the reading of which left my mind muddied -- muddied like colonial boots, like sweat and labored harvest, like a storm-clouded new-world sermon. It troubled me a whole week. Or longer, I must admit with a wry smile, as I am thinking about it still, and find in the hurried architecture of my sentences some hesitation of the breath and... slight contortion of the spirit... a quarter-century later.

The professor walked to the board and drew a vertical line near its center, his chalk making a sharp turn and completing the line away to his right. He then slashed the chalk from upper left to lower right, and slashing again, drew another from lower left to upper right, forming an X  between a pair of axes. A puff of chalkdust fell away from his writing: a current of air pulled it outward, then gravity pulled it downward. Where it came in contact with the light, its simple form took on a swirling, complex life that you watched, amazed, then wondered: if you breathed that dust, what would happen to your lungs when you did? Dust on the board, dust in the air. Dust.

Along the X axis, the professor wrote numbers, beginning with one, and rising step by step to enumerate the chapters of Mr. Hawthorne's text. He hesitated, then declined to identify the units of the vertical measure. Then he turned to face the class. "This," he said, gesturing to the graph with his left hand, holding the chalk like an extra finger, "is Hawthorne's work."

Many people call darkness light. We all do, in fact. The wandering text above is my attempt to find a bit of light, though darkness prevails. Your attempt to drink this water, drawn from a rather deep well, shows your desire for light. My professor taught me absolutely nothing about Hawthorne, but a great deal about light and its absence.

The Laboratory
Between there and here, unceasing water runs. And if your Self has this interest - to know Yourself in this incarnation, as completely as It or You may - then every veil is already understood to be a veil, and beneath it some knowledge that is broader, understanding greater, and ability to love that is deeper. No matter that today you did not smile, or that tomorrow you will not live that love (because today you did not practice your smile): there is always a layer beneath what has just been, or what is coming into being, and beneath the layer, more light.

Walk in the woods: you are involved in your walking. The trail is a path of your making and remaking. Every moment you reinvent "Trail", and place yourself upon it. And every moment, after the first thrill of newness, the Trail becomes more and more a trail, this step the same as the last, until at the end of the day, you stop, look around, and admire how the sun has sped without your notice, your feet are tired, some passage made.

What if...

You walk along the trail and suddenly, without premeditation, stop in your tracks. Look: what do you see? In that moment our mind records a litany of images already catalogued and distinguished in your personal history. Look again. A movement, an insect, a trickle of sweat, the quickened breath, a scent of... what? Light through the canopy of leaves; stillness. Look again. A motion of one leaf against the next and the sound they make, the return of woodland noises your passage chased to silence, the desire to kiss someone, water over stones far away, the solid presence of one and then another and another until uncounted trees. Look again.

Surfaces
Once I read a text on loving, on making love, that described practices handed down through the ages. The authors drew on kama-sutric variations, and tantric ways to weave two bodies. I remember other such titles I was ashamed to pick up as a youth: the G-Spot, Your Erogenous Zones, and a multitude of other technical manuals whose goals I discovered were, generally speaking, to teach the mechanics of  physical pleasure and (sometimes) how to use the physical to embrace the heart as well. (There are some quite notable exceptions, such as The Art of Conscious Loving, by Charles and Carolyn Muir).

And how does my swirling thought arrive at this earthy, if not tawdry, destination?

Well, exactly. You want to rest on a thought, on a combination of words. Don't. What if there is a way to offer more pleasure to a lover, or to instruct greater pleasure for yourself? Excellent, and look again. What if a simple physical practice could be a pathway into the woods, a way to surrender more deeply to one another? Beautiful, and look again. What if your connecting and touching is larger than your two bodies, or your two desires, or your joined love? Look again. What if the deepest part of your partner, there where you are subtly, gently reaching, is the Spark of Life - if you are opening and offering your Spark to be lit and relit by that Spark? Look past the graph, and past the words, and past the light through the leaves, and past the emotional waves and misspoken words, and past the faces, past the five senses, look again, and again, and again, and again and again and again and again.

Until you feel your eyes open.

A bit wider.
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The back of the Canadian $10 note bears the motto "In Service of Peace", and below it, a poem.

Although Lieut. Col. John McRae had been a doctor for years, and had served in the South African War, he could never dull himself to the suffering, the screams, and the blood, and had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient, one of the more horrific battlefields of WW I.

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, was killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain. The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem.

Doctor McRae died in the year 1918 at the age of 46.

How does an Eagle holding arrows compare to a human lament?  Do we trust in God, yet trust far more in ourselves? What if the vision of our country were to be in Service of Peace, as one imagines the Tibetan population led by the Dalai Lama must be... what if our Vision were strong enough to hold back our fear?


In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row,
that mark our place;
                                            and in the sky
the larks, still bravely singing, fly
scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.
                                      Short days ago
we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
loved and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
to you from failing hands we throw
the torch;
                       be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
we shall not sleep, though poppies grow
in Flanders fields.
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Fri-Sun., Aug. 22-24 Journey as Destination Earth-You-Sky (B3B) Bring yoga and awareness practices out of the studio and into the woods for a third-eye-opening weekend in the Whites. Crawford Notch car-camp promises great food, good company, and intermediate hikes to surrounding peaks; higher altitudes mean good phys. cond. is important. Cost of $55 includes 2 nights, dinn & bfst. Info about JAD series or to reg. contact L Mark Schultz.

You needn't go anywhere to find your center; you might travel around the world -- that's 24,900 miles -- and arrive at the same You who left, some 53 million footsteps later, a tad weathered perhaps, certainly wearing your second or third or fourth generation of shoes.

Ramana Maharshi, the silent saint, spent most of the years of his life within the physical confines of Arunachala, the Red Mountain, while exploring the limitless space of his Self, connected to all selves and all things. Sometimes, diminishing the number and complexity of the world's external expression, makes it easier to cultivate the stillness and peace required to go in and in. We can use a stillness practice to examine our physical self, moving into the body, that we might release it; as well as to examine and tame our mental self, moving into the workings of  the mind, that we might distinguish our Self from it, and release it .

Yet sometimes the path doesn't lead in, but out. The tantrikas know there is value in Shakti, the manifested world. If we learn to polish its mirror, if we are not fixed in our perception of Tree, Rock, Other, but instead see in the interplay of energies reflections of ourselves, see facets of the universal, then the world becomes a beautiful classroom whose lessons, simple and difficult, teach us what it means to be alive. When the complexities of interpersonal relationships become overwhelming, the empty fullness of the forest is a colorful and lively balm. The pure physical experience of the trail, with its hours of simple decision and consistent direction, clears the body of its knots and tensions, and eases the mind through its singular focus.

(But isn't that monotonous?  Monotony can never last: boredom is the product of a dulled mind, not of a dull exterior. To one practicing awareness, an hour of Nothing can be a life-changing swirl of Everything!)

So I take to the fields and the trails to be with all that is not Men and Women. The world is so large! When I leave the small-minded politics of human settlements, I remember -- thank goodness! -- how unlimited all of creation actually is. Me, this miraculous confluence of blood and breath, organic electric wiring, unlikely channel for thoughts larger than myself... this six-foot, moving cage of bones and organs, with a definite if undeclared date of expiration... will climb a mountain with my companion creatures, and in so doing, take some rest, and open wide.

Me, one more living channel connecting the tangible earth to the unbounded sky.
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An echinacea blossom sits in a vase on the kitchen table, slightly to the left of center, bowing in my direction. Some of these wildflowers are sturdier than most, and even cut retain their bearing, their color and form, for many days. There are people like that as well, keep blooming when the root is severed, because water is enough.

This particular beauty has nineteen split-end petals, in a variety of shades of pink, lateral veins and ridges changing saturation and hue and they reach out toward the tip. Nineteen petals, if a lover counted, arrives at "She loves me": an advantage when plucking, to seek out odd-petaled plants.

Then there is the flower's firework display at the seed head. Had I left it in the garden, a few hundred of possible tomorrows would have fallen to the ground, and next year there would have been more of the same. There is a deep orange red, almost black, at the center, with flashes of color radiating out, small tongues of fire. One of the petals has been partially eaten by an insect (She loves me not); another falls away toward the stem like a pink arm lowered in a curtsey (Why don't women curtsey anymore? And why don't men bow?).

One split stem of lilac shares the vase. With its frequent detours from cut to leaf, the angular stem reminds one of a Japanese drawing, the foliage lobed and pointed, large green "spades", their faces turned this way and that, denying the importance of the flower's fixed gaze, unpretentious, back-up vocals in the band, green beneath rose, brown brown-black of the wood.

All this takes place in still life, slight breeze from the window in, the breathy hum of the refrigerator is the song, I guess, the striped tablerunner their temporary land, the books and dishes digital devices belonging to the scene, the collecting clouds, the wind outside, the early-August birds and insects busily far away, while a few short words hope to contain them all, and let them go.
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My cats, of course, obey another set of spheres, and while I quiet into the solitude and the slightly muffled end of the day (even the blue TV glare has left the neighbor-houses, and the most convicted night birds have for the most part decided that sleep is good enough) as I write a few lines as exercise, or as a ladle dipped into the Well, my friendly, black, male cat, Shadow, has wandered into the influence of the front door, guttering a deep and slightly swallowed yowl, the one I have come to recognize, in the language of cats, as being a call to his mate (platonic though their mating is, no less Love, ranging to if not attaining the coital: embracing the familial, the time-worn, the touch-comforted and the understood), his call announcing Success in the Hunt, as evidenced by the flesh of a creature smaller and less offensively appointed than himself, and accustomed as a species to being prey, now prey again, a rabbit.

I heard the yowl and thought to myself, but perhaps not, and went to the door to let him in, if he were merely hungry, or uncommonly desiring to spend his night indoors. I opened the door a fraction and found the hunter looking up at me, a small rabbit draped in his jaws: he was like a miniature lion, with the body of a miniature man balanced in his maw, he was the Cat of Death and carrying his fated assignment for the night. The female, Minstrel, had of course heard the call -- it was a call to her, after all, and had nothing to do with me, but for my official function as doorman. I looked at her and said Well, he's out there waiting for you. I suppose you want to go... We speak and we are heard, if not in all the human particulars. Off she went.

I returned to my writing exercise -- my practice of stillness, an etude with neither review nor editing, nor direction but for whatever the moment presented. A few words written, and then that sound again: not the guttural sound of Shadow announcing his trophy, but one I have heard other times and in other places: the sound of a young, live rabbit having its life torn from it.

It is not a sound easily ignored.

Maybe it is like the scream of birth, but in place of rejoicing, the ultimate despair: my life is being torn from me.

One imagines that rabbits make no sound, and it is true they do not, except in at least this one, very specific occasion. Then the mistake is evident.

I had tried to separate the cat from his prey, when I first opened the door to find the Shadow of Death, but the creature was limp -- I assumed, already dead.

It is not the first time and certainly it will not be the last, that I am presented with the incredible tenacity of life, the will of the body refusing, absolutely refusing, to allow peaceful departure of the spirit; instead, the body, jealous of the Soul's capacity to travel, to pass through that doorway while the poor dust of living must be left behind, shouts and fights and curses and screams and ultimately fails... just as this rabbit I thought dead screamed again and again... until finally my cats its deliverers ended its struggle.

Do animals have souls?

They had better. If their body is taken from them, and there is nothing that remains, then, my friends, the same will be my allotted end, being a creature of this earth alike to any. If the strange coagulation of atoms that is a body will simply dissipate, be recycled like so many other bodies, and be gone, then all cells and all atoms will obey the same set of spheres.

But no: you see in the simplest creatures the most complex responses: love, certainly; loss, certainly; a Being dancing with the rest of creation. The soul as our expression and connection to the One, experiences this life through the confines of a physical form, cat or rabbit, woman or man. Let them be as alive, then, as I am, for now; as eternal and connected as I would hope to be.
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Under the gauze of midnight, where the mirrored starlight wanes
boughs of the aging branches range in the city's floodlit lanes
like the arms of assembled sentinels, who saluted you as you came
then recruited the shadows in your wake to softly hold your name

Softly they hold your name, my love, as a breeze will hold the song
two smiling, gently sighing lips released to the game of alone
like falling stars, the words reduce the dark, if not for long
but a flash of light is enough for a sight of the ground and the path to home
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