For Shelter, the World

What a difference a week makes

When I left for Dallas on May 17, the Pacific Northwest had just turned the corner fully into spring. White blossoms were showering from the apple trees, the forget-me-nots and wildflowers I planted in late April were beginning to sprout, and there was new green all around, tentative and vulnerable.

Arriving home on the 24th, I drove up the steep driveway into a paradise of purple ... tall columbines, blooming in indigo beside my front deck and everywhere else they've taken root since last year; rhododendron bushes covered with soft lavender and vibrant magenta blossoms; and lilac-hued flowers spiking out from the chive plant that has over-wintered in its pot for two years.

The apple and plum trees are completely leafed out now, casting shadows on the lawn, which at this moment is greatly in need of mowing. A large flock of bluish-gray band-tailed pigeons visits my birdfeeder every afternoon, and frogs chirp and croak their mating songs all night long. By 5:15 each morning, the sun is peeking through my bedroom window, a reminder that the summer solstice is a little over three weeks away.

I've taken the week off from blogging to dig in the earth (I've got a plot at the local community garden, and this is planting time) and to absorb what this season of change has brought for me. 

Bridges

I'm taking a trip tomorrow to Dallas to visit my Dad. He doesn't have a computer and I'm not bringing my laptop with me, so I'll be offline until I return home next week. We're going to spend some time in my parents' hometown in northeast Texas ... scattering my mother's ashes in her family's cemetery plot, visiting some relatives, and driving around the areas where my Dad grew up. Listening to him talk about his childhood during the Depression in the 1930s, of our family ancestors, and of his service in the Army Air Corps in WWII has been both fascinating and healing for me over the past few years.

I''ve got a lot of photographs of the Pacific Northwest to show my father and my friends in Dallas who've never been here. I took this one recently while driving across the Bridge of the Gods, which spans the Columbia River in the western Gorge. The view is downstream, toward the west, from a height of around 150 feet. This is a "Mom and Pop" kind of bridge, being owned and operated by the tiny town of Cascade Locks, Oregon. There is a wood frame toll booth at the Oregon end of the bridge, and there's someone there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No matter what time of the year it is, they've usually got some sort of seasonal or holiday decor displayed. You can see the toll booth reflected in the car's rearview mirror in the lower righthand corner of this photo.

Mystical identity

A random chapter of the Tao Te Ching for this sunny and breezy afternoon in early May.

I'm presenting it in four versions: the first from the Stephen Mitchell interpretation maintained by Brooklyn College-CUNY; the second, the Jane English and Gia-fu Feng version; the third by the translator Red Pine; and the fourth by Taoist scholar Ellen M. Chen.

You'll notice that each interpretation refers to the subject matter in different terms. Mitchell calls it primal identity, English calls it primal union, while Red Pine says "dark union"; "dark" perhaps being a reference to the feminine, receptive, and/or that which is not easily perceived using our ordinary senses and intellectual processes.

Chen's reference to "mystical identity" pulls all of the interpretations together. While at first glance the differences seem confusing and contradictory, in fact that's what mysticism is all about ... union, the interconnectedness of all things, which is our primal characteristic. ("Primal" in its meaning of first importance or fundamental.)

As this chapter demonstrates, popular misconceptions notwithstanding, mystical can also be quite practical.

56

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.

Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.
It can't be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

56

Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.

Keep your mouth closed.
Guard your senses.
Temper your sharpness.
Simplify your problems.
Mask your brightness.
Be at one with the dust of the earth.
This is primal union.

He who has achieved this state
Is unconcerned with friends and enemies,
With good and harm, with honour and disgrace.
This therefore is the highest state of man.

56

Those who know don't talk
those who talk don't know
seal the opening
close the gate
dull the edge
untie the tangle
soften the light
join the dust
this is called the Dark Union
it can't be embraced
it can't be abandoned
it can't be helped
it can't be harmed
it can't be exalted
it can't be debased
thus does the world exalt it.

56

One who knows does not speak.
One who speaks does not know.

Stop the apertures,
Close the door;
Blunt the sharp,
Untie the entangled;
Harmonize the bright,
Make identical the dust
This is called the mystical identity.

Therefore with this person you cannot
    get intimate.
Cannot get distant,
Cannot benefit,
Cannot harm,
Cannot exalt,
Cannot humiliate.
Therefore such person is the exalted
    of the world.

Long journey home

I met an Internet friend "in real life" for the first time yesterday. (By "the first time", I don't mean just this specific person, but anyone I've met online. That is a phenomenon worthy of an entire post of its own, which shall come later.)

At any rate, this friend has been visiting family in Seattle and took the train down to Portland for the day. It was a glorious spring day, sunny and cool after almost a week of cold and rainy weather, and we spent the afternoon walking around downtown Portland. Newly emerged from my post-Katrina cocoon, I'm ready to explore new places, and I got to see several yesterday.

On the west bank of the many-bridged Willamette River, which runs from the south through Portland to its confluence with the Columbia River, there is a lovely waterfront park on the former location of a four-lane highway. Between the Burnside and Steel Bridges, the city maintains the Japanese American Historical Plaza, dedicated to the American citizens of Japanese ancestry who because of fear and ignorance were forcibly deprived of their possessions and confined to internment camps during World War II.

In the memorial garden designed by landscape architect Robert Murase are sculptures and large stones inscribed with poetry about the Japanese settlement of the Pacific Northwest. This one in particular spoke to me:

Living the questions

... I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1903)

This quote from the poet Rilke has been one of my favorites since I first read it, early in my adult life. It became almost like a mantra to me. In a time when analysis, control, and the need for certainty seem to be cultural obsessions, these words remind us of the value of not knowing and of proceeding from that standpoint. This applies to the creative process as well as to our individual and collective lives. It recognizes the mystery of life, and points out that something vital is lost when we try to plan, understand and control every step of our existence.

I don't know if it's a function of my age, or whether it's my own personal path, but I've reached a point where some of my early questions have lived their way, at least partially, into answers. Along the way, the questions have metamorphosed, many times over. Things now don't look at all like I thought they would. Much better, in some respects, but it's a bittersweet realization, and requires a good bit of grieving and letting go of what was, and what could have been.

It's as if I've spent so many years observing and experiencing things from so many different angles -- or to use another analogy, it's been like gazing through a kaleidoscope, continually changing the view -- and finally I've come to a moment where the pieces are all lining up into a coherent and simple image of perfect clarity.