This morning I’m with the power of words. Though I was raised to think of a rib cage, I now view it as a basket, a beautifully woven and flexible container for my lungs and beating heart, always in motion, always playing, and being played with in the movement of air. Pure joy is there!
We celebrated the day with food and friends, and then walked up the hill to watch the fireworks which turned out to be an astonishing display. We were in awe as locals set off fireworks in the school below on one side of the hill, and other neighbors set off their own full display on the other side. Both equaled the professional displays we saw in the distance. Clapping with gratitude and awe, there were chants of USA. It was a celebration of what this country is and can be when not taunted by an administration determined to divide.
This morning my son installed Claude on my computer and explained why I should be using it.
I came home to read a fascinating article in the NY Times, The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by Benjamin Wallace. I recommend it. Here are some excerpts.
Most of these thinkers appear to be digging into how A.I. will affect people. But a handful are focused primarily on the possibility of A.I. consciousness. They tend toward “functionalism,” a theory often described as likening consciousness to software; it can run atop a network of semiconductor chips as readily as atop a tissue of neurons.
Mr. Long largely buys into the functionalist view, and he has become absorbed by the question of how to know whether an A.I. is sentient. He and his colleagues are now looking in artificial minds for processes similar to those found in human and animal minds: preferences, introspection, metacognition (thinking about thinking) and so on.
Friday night, I watched the movie “Project Hail Mary” about how we might learn to communicate with an alien species. Communication is my focus for this second half of the year.
Yesterday we drove down early to my son and his wife’s home and then journeyed to nearby New Almaden to the Almaden Quicksilver County Park because I’d recently learned that a book I love, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, is partly set there, I wanted to see the area in person.
The New Almaden mines are the oldest mines in California and were one of the most productive mercury mines in the country. The indigenous Ohlone people utilized the area for its cinnabar, which they used in paint production. You can see photos on-line of their decorated faces. But then, others came in to mine the cinnabar, the most common source for refining elemental mercury.
I can’t step into the debacle that Trump created to celebrate this country. It seems Mother Nature agrees with me since so many of his plans aren’t working or are cancelled.
Today I watched pieces of the Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening Ceremony. I watched and listened to Jennifer Hudson sing The Star-Spangled Banner, and To Dream the Impossible Dream. I watched and listened to Christina Aguilera sing What a Wonderful World, and Bruce Springsteen Land of Hope and Dreams. Four former presidents gathered there with their wives, Barack Obama and Michelle, of course, and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden. Unification. Celebration. Offering. Gifts.
Tomorrow I’ll celebrate the Fourth of July with one son, his wife and friends. We’ll walk to watch fireworks from all over the Bay area from a hill near their home, and it will be a gathering to honor, refresh, and inspire not tear down, steal, and destroy. It’s a weekend to feast on what’s been built, and what can be.
Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast calls haiku “sacred sensuousness”. He says “The haiku is a scaffold of words; which is being constructed is a poem of silence; and when it is ready, the poet gives a little kick, as it were, to the scaffold. It tumbles and silence alone stands.”
I enjoy reading different translations of well-traveled poems. Basho’s haiku on the frog jumping into the pond plays with sound and silence. It leaves us panting, then resting in the pause of meaning.
Eliot Weinberger’s book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei gives 19 ways of translating a four-line 1200 year old poem. Some I resonate to, and others not so much.
If, like me, you continue to look for ways to counteract the news of Trump’s daily corruption, I suggest reading, and even writing haiku and poetry as a spiritual practice, as a way to plop like a frog into a pond and ripple in what comes.
Yesterday I was by the bay at low tide, awaiting a medical appointment. I looked out and thought I saw a mother swan carrying babies on her back, but when I took the photo and magnified it, I saw it was sticks popping out of the mud. A visual haiku! Plop. I’m new!
Because our weather here is out of alignment with the heat in so much of the world today, I’m reflecting back, drawn to files of the past. I come to a poem I wrote years ago about an evening on a month-long trek in the Everest region of Nepal. It was a day where I’d crawled, literally crawled to the altitude sickness clinic to have a doctor who comes from America as a volunteer lecture me on the insanity of what I was doing at altitude. He gave me a shot of antibiotics and sent me on my way. He said in one more day, I would have been carried down on the back of a yak.
Today I read an article on the wisdom people my age know, on what we’ve lived through, and how important it is to convey the transitions we’ve lived through to the young. I offer a time when I saw how simply one can live, and also the value of medical care, something not available, even now, all these years later, to all. This was the fall of 1993.
We leave our tent to huddle inside a hut for warmth.
A child dances naked, the wash hung overhead.
The child has no age, no birthday, only grace.
Prayer flags wave, clothes washed in the stream,
A stream wheeled in prayer.
We tramp through their home like a park,
celebrate and denigrate our day of birth,
as we try to pack their religion
in the wood and dung smoked scarf
we wrap around our throats,
like a crown, slipping down to our knees
where prayer might be
as we kneel to cleanse
in the movement of air
circling mountains and clouds.
I’ve now had quite a response on bedpans. Who knew there was so much change, creativity, and adaptation in the modern world, so that women can enjoy an easier time eliminating when bedridden.
All of this has brought me back to the words and inspiration of Jacques Lusseyran. Blinded at the age of 7, he didn’t slow down and at 17 became a leader in the French Resistance against Nazi Germany’s occupation of France in 1941. His book And There Was Light is a gift to be re-read over and over. From the book:
“I began to look more closely, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside.”
“Immediately the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there.”
Light and joy are one for him. If he loses one, he loses the other. May we all bathe in the element of light, especially now as we resist what’s happening under Trump’s illegal, criminal, and unconstitutional regime. It’s about how we meet what comes.
As Elsa Gindler said: “A person can get heart disease by climbing a mountain, but can also get rid of heart disease by climbing a mountain. It depends on how you climb.”
My friend has now been in the hospital and a skilled nursing facility for almost two weeks. She is still using a poorly designed bedpan. Her spirits are good, and yet, there is this one issue. She’s looked on Amazon for possibilities, but so far, no luck. Is there anyone out there with the creative skills to find a solution to this very important problem?
What I’m seeing in her healing confinement is the reminder that though we might feel we’re not contributing when we’re stuck in one place, we actually are. When I was going through chemo and radiation, a friend pointed out I was a still point for those around me.
I was the eye, the calm, the center of the hurricane that life can sometimes be. My friend in her bed is truly present for her friends, for all those who come around, and as we rummage around in life’s emotion, distraction, and confusion, she offers clarity, humor, and insights.
Thank you Patty.
Tonight I sat outside with the light of the almost full Strawberry moon. Creatures scurried around in the ivy below the deck.
I thought of the words of Hafiz:
What does light talk about?
I asked a plant that once,
It said, “I am not sure,
but it makes me
Grow”.
That brought me to the words of Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
And then I came to the words of Nelson Mandela:
It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.
The summer issue of Orion magazine is all about whales. Reading about how we were born in the sea, came to land, and then, some chose to return to the sea is thrilling in showing our need for exploration, adaptation, community, and diversity.
Reading the news today, I contrast killing and greed with the Southern Resident orca named Tahlequah. In 2018, she mourned the death of her newborn calf by carrying it on her head and pushing it through the Salish Sea for 17 days. She covered 1,000 miles.
Each day, we’re exposed to a need to grieve. Each day we read of more people hurt by the policies of the Trump administration and other leaders around the world. We share one planet. Can we learn from what surrounds us, our ancestors, our kin, the birds, the sea, the whales?
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