If we sat long enough to find ourselves looking down instead of up on our large star, we may remember why we build so much to keep us off the place we come from. We are soil, we are star dust on our way back to the ……….
Sunshine
Category: Spirituality
Original Sources
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The Growth of Wisdom?
The urge I have that needs turning to words is almost to big for prose,
It is to big, it is an ache slightly below my sternum
A picture of my small self and my first encounter with an orphan that needed me,
we were both smiled on by the early 50’s, we were the off-spring of WWII
We cared for each other, the orphan and I, we made sense to each other, but then
I heard my mother crying that day with dad, he said, “we will know by morning if they turn around at the ships or not”. He was talking and she was crying “Cuban crisis”
He trusted Kennedy but Khrushchev we did not know.
You see my dad helped oversee a detail of Japanese soldiers doing clean up in post-nuclear Hiroshima, before he set up farming with my mother
Very early after the bomb drop when the trees were still shadows on the ground, early after the blast when my dad’s patrol watched over the Japanese clean up crews with out weapons, only shock
My dad knew nuclear, my dad dreaded all night long the Cuban crisis-he did it by radio and pure fear-he had to go to work the next day either way
One way, he would be going back to war, the other delivering fuel to farmers
He died of a brain tumor you know
My dad of WWII.
But! We were safe in the early sixties, getting ready for the potential blast to our nearby town housing a B-52 base- 32 miles away from me and my calf.
We had school desk, thank God! My safe place!
That’s right, unlike the Japanese school children who were vaporized in their nuclear episode, we were taught to get under our desk and shut our eyes
(I wager they were having similar school drills with the Russian children)
We were told the best chance of keeping plaster off our heads was under our school desk! That’s right-and we drilled it week after week till I forgot rumors of radiation, vaporization, and worst of all dad’s stories….
We would have been 30 miles from ground zero of the impact of a Russian nuclear war head-plaster?
I’m 65 now, I’ve seen many an orphaned calf, and I’ve seen some weak-gened animal specimens survive the selective process , but my specie astounds me!
I’m not so much upset with my country, as I am myself-I forgot some of dad’s stories
Please find another story for the children in South Korea?
I heard a military man the other day addressing Korean children say, “and children, you never want to look toward the blast, put your head down”.
Give the kids, if they are young, some hope-give em the desk strategy.
Put your head under-shut your eyes. Give em a damned desk if we adults can’t find sanity.
For the older kids that can’t get underground, maybe some type of breathing exercises
Some brand of truth for the older ones of age
This is not one of my happiest aches-it’s worse
But for 65 years nuclear annihilation has plagued the world I inhabit
For God’s sake can we, the “smart-caretaking specie” come up with a better way?
I don’t want to tell my grandkids how to get under a desk!
And don’t look at the “mushroom”.
I get it, we are humans and humans have done this shit to each other from the beginning, but—-
Maybe if enough of us who promised to change the earth from our day
Would stand and turn toward those that would employ “mushrooms”
Our grandchildren could play in the sand in peace ..
Footnotes:
1. Desk-in the 1960’s made of heavy duty 3/4 plywood with steel frame. In 2017, a desk is usually particle board with plastic frame and cover.
Have we gotten smarter in our preparation for nuclear wars? I think not-let’s revisit our schools and get them better desks?
This seems to be my specie’s line of reason
We need some type of evolutionary quantum leap…until then, us older ones need to turn towards who and what we are, and sit with it, and sit with it, and sit with it, and right before we blame another–sit with it some more…\
Starting with myself comes to mind—
Pax
Strength of the Myth
My people on one side, paternal side, were drawn to books and writing letters and such. It seemed to be good therapy for abandonment and shame in that day. Their myths, their inner gods that kept them together, could only be found high in the trees. The low hanging myths were not potent enough for the burdens they brought with them from Missouri, a potent variety of abandonment and shame.
The things written for treatment were of the most mundane and everyday, and that seemed to be right on target for getting better–“Sy went to town with the cotton”, “Felix cut wood all morning long”…..and such as this. It was good though, this work of writing the ordinary and looking to the “letter” for strength. The work, dancing, worshipping, church going, birthing and burying this seemed to center this bunch. A new axis mundi was found for my folk, Watterson, Texas.
Those things-myths, archetypes, leprechauns, prophets, demons, and angels-lived high in the pines that grew on the marginal soils along Sandy Creek, Texas. They were strong myths, all of them, that lived high in the trees, strong enough to start a journey out of shame. The journey wasn’t started by magic, but by looking high up where ever my people were at their time of looking.
My people from the”book side”-paternal, they have a tendency to be buried along a line from Missouri to California by way of Texas-most would say they had looked high up in their time, just because they felt the need to do so, as if it was a calling.
Thanks to my folk for looking higher than the low branches. It seems you were right, the deepest glory is behind the darkest shame. It is hard to look that high much of the time.
In There, Like Here
Not Just Relief(going to the woods):
Sometimes one needs to go to the deep woods for a prolonged period just to learn, nothing to accomplish, and bringing as little as necessary. Then find a way to be there, be it 4 or 40 days. seems this can be done in your backyard or the ends of the earth, all required is to get in ones body and out of ideas about getting back to your body.
Some of us come from a place really close to the dirt because of the time and place we were born, just our lot in life. 
Maybe it’s time for us who can sleep on it, the dirt and like it, to treat it like our grand babies depended on it.
There has been a long lapse in notes on this site since I came back from the PCT the second time. It has taken a while to heal my body and my head. The body was straight forward-sit let the displaced toes, blisters, and giardiasis heal-they did. The head was a different item. I want to know what I saw there for the first time in my 64 years was as real as i thought? I’ll get back on that-seems it was.
Code
What is needed is found in the code, the reason for coming out of the ground is in the code. The code has come from eons of mystery under the sway of evolving (man labeled it time). It’s the flow of creation.
All code is dependent on all the other code ever written, we are all tied up in our essence.
It is in this very small window of time we occupy that the new great work introduced by the late Thomas Berry is available to us all.
Spiritual Practice: before I purchase, log on, take a bite, scroll down, make a dollar-I ask, do I need to do or buy this shit,no matter how good it seems, or am I fearful of the void. The code was written out of the void.
Some say there could be time to re-write our story, the purpose of man. The way we see ourselves in relation to all other sentient and non-sentient beings will be the start.
It just about being where I am-planting peas and okra.
It’s Time
The Bend
I’ve been gone a while now—school and all. It is finished, 5 years of seminary and well worth it, the 5 years.
It is time to sit on the farm for 30 days and see what is, write, pick veggies, drink coffee and beer at different times of the day, and pray—above all dialogue with Life that is here until it isn’t.
It is also time to go to Big Bend, the closest desert. I think I will do it by bike this year, or some other slow way of getting there. I hate to miss the smells in a car-the flowers, diesel fumes, and dead stuff in the ditch (no one ever sees it-it just rots, but a biker can smell it).
It’s time…….
and yes thank to the one who said, start blogging again. I so want to get back on the PCT, but first I need to sit!
How to Get Lost
It can be reverse thinking, but if one knows how to do something well enough, maybe one can find ways of not doing it- the contra thinking.
I’m not an expert in this area, but I have experienced lostness more times than I would like to confess. The episodes have ranged from slight disorientation resulting in more distance and time in the woods than planned , to server bile producing panic with near death consequences from prolonged disorientation in the raw elements.
There are several underlying themes in the etiology of getting lost, the most paramount is the lost one doesn’t know he/she is lost until-he/she becomes aware(if they do). I suggest even in the state of not knowing you are off course, one is indeed off course in a time and place of lostness, and when one realizes they are lost, feelings come in literally screwing your day.
I have trouble seeing my own blindness to new ways of though, doing, etc., but I really have trouble listening to someone who is fundamentally different from me. I know how I’m supposed to be with others even those contra, but I have walls between how I am and what I imagine I am.
It’s much like getting lost, as soon as I get over my anxiousness and panic, I can hear and for the first time have a chance of getting unstuck. There can be great assets in times of lostness and in facing persons poles apart from our view of the world. Both require not being other or outside focused and staying centered in where and who you are in the moment. It could be that Life presents both as learning opportunities to practice saving your own ass, when faced with the worst of destabilizing conditions.
Go Green
When your arugula is to mature, stir it in with the beans and chicken that you were going to eat anyway(as if you were). Let the mix sit till it comes to “itself” , the spiciness of the asian arugula will set your mouth free.
The saints that I admire highly recommend sitting in your “weeds” till you come to yourself, once stewing in your own juices you thought would do you in, flavor comes. Something other than yourself-yet it’s been there all along. What was thought to be to old and to bitter has come to flavor our whole dish– it was in the DNA of our makeup the whole time. Let us embrace our crap, sit in our weeds, embrace the bitterness that can flavor our whole lives in to meaning.
Let’s cook our bitterest herb and show it off–in weakness is life. Get it.
Simple
The picture is my paternal grandparents house. It was very simple, all the contents could have been put in several travel trunks-the way they traveled to the old homestead from Missouri.
It seems our culture will have to work doubly hard to get to simple and include our progress, but it also seems doubly important for our sanity’s sake and the globe we do so.
Living out of a backpack for a few months of your life, where you unload all your possessions daily in a pile, could help us in getting a better picture of what we really need to live. This same few months may even give us space to re-define live.
Spiritual Formation 