Before Coffee

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...
T. S. Eliot

...trudged the grey half mile to the coffee shop after an unproductive morning hour or two at home...waiting in line, glanced at the soup of the day...Sacred Lentil with Spinach...felt impressed...though soon realizing it actually said spiced lentils...which was just as well....not sure if I’d actually want to eat sacred lentils...worrying, wondering whether contact with my dentally-challenged mouth would defile hot soup better offered up to a goddess......though that’s a bit metaphysical for me, particularly before coffee...

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Robert Frost

....unless it were an earthly goddess...the only kind of goddess I believe in, really...(for that matter, really don’t go much for ideas of the sacred that exclude my crumbling teeth)....and might be nice, I think, to buy her some sacred lentils, sip coffee at our little table by the window, and with her watch the first drops of rain make their way to the sidewalk...

Tidings of Comfort, Joy, and Weltschmerz

The jewel of modern consciousness is compassion. But its worms will become confusion, world-view overload, self-doubt, and paralyzing narcissism. The purpose of Yoga will be to dig carefully through the worms to extract the jewel.
yoga 2.0

Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
Stephen Colbert

...wrote something a while ago called Compassion Can Be Complicated...(the title got changed on me)...citing famous Buddhist Pema Chodron on idiot compassion that causes us to do for others only for the sake of making ourselves feel better, without actually helping anybody...

...but things get even more complicated when the goal is to feel worse...(as, contrary to more simplistic views of human nature, is quite often the case)...

weltschmerz {German, from Welt world + Schmerz pain}: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
Merriam-Webster

...there’s a often a fine line between feelings of compassion for the whole world’s pain and a self-indulgent wallowing in a sense of unhappiness-greater-than-oneself...comfortable rapture in a miserable sublime...between making an expansive sense of compassion part of a personal spirituality and forging religion out of depression...

the notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing
T. S. Eliot

...worshipping an egotistical and infinitely resentful deity fed with continual sacrifices of pleasure...our own and that of those unfortunate enough to be close to us...a simultaneously self-righteous and self-lacerating attitude of how-can-you-enjoy-yourself-with-so-much-suffering-in-the-world...as if refusing joy here will somehow ease suffering elsewhere...

...the dominant idea, I think, even if it’s seldom stated, is that we have very limited capacities for either joy or compassion...that the two are separate, and greedy, and one takes from rather than feeds the other...that happiness necessitates callous indifference to others’ pain, and real compassion inherently involves turning away from happiness and toward our own pain...receiving only a booby prize of self-righteousness...which might, paradoxically, make you feel good, in a way...though, ironically enough, it’s the complete opposite of compassion...(if often mistaken for it, in some circles)...(if you feel strongly about how much more compassionate you are than other people, you’re probably not)...

...if there’s a spiritual mode I can get with, it would have to be one that allows the parallel lines of joy and compassion to merge...a love that, in the face of suffering, grows only stronger...

The Critical Importance of Flexibility

Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.
(attributed to John Lennon, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell)

...sleep, I find, is a chore when I need it,
but an indescribable luxury when it’s time to get up...

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever—

this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Albert Einstein

...similarly, nothing makes writing harder
than having good, solid reasons to write...

Almost all of my epiphanies over the previous fifteen years
had been the same one: I don’t know.
Stephen Cope

...the worst thing to do if you’re trying to be more flexible,
it turns out, is to try to be more flexible...

Bored?

...hiking at high elevations reminds me of advice given to people who get bored following the breath in meditation...

Take the thumb and first finger of either hand, clamp them tightly over your nose, keep your mouth closed, and notice how long it takes before your breathing becomes very interesting to you!
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...ten years or so ago, was sitting on a rocky beach in Maine reading To the Lighthouse, a novel in which the most commonplace situations are described with stunning color and intensity...making for a beautiful reading experience, though it made me think that, if Virginia Woolf actually experienced passing moments of life like that, without any kind of off-switch...as, I suspect, she did...it’s not hard to to understand why she filled her pockets with rocks and took that last fateful walk into the pond...

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S. Eliot

...maybe twenty years ago, was backpacking in the Weminuche Wilderness in southern Colorado, just north of Durango, and, one afternoon, was in kind of an...ummm...ahem...altered state....things got kind of intense...way too much happening in mountains or groves of trees or the sky to keep looking at them....so, decided to simplify things....told myself I’m just gonna look at this rock here...nothin’ too intense or scary, there.....except there was...once I bothered to see...

Look: the sun gods, the gods
of fire, dawn, sky, wind, storm,
wonders that no mortal has ever
beheld...
Bhagavad Gita

...boredom, it occurs to me, is really a defense mechanism...guarding our eyes from the truly dazzling nature of everything around us...

Springtime Ebbs and Flows...

April is the cruelest month...
T. S. Eliot

...or maybe it’s just me...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 126:97

...when spring first hit...felt an awful lot like summer...went out and overexerted myself, ending up exhausted, sore, and sunburned...banged up my knees after catching a bike wheel in an old trolley track that still exists, far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of catching bike wheels...

...more lately it’s been wetter and colder, if greener...been feeling uninspired...not writing much...apart from being virtually eco-conscious by revising, refurbishing and reincarnating old Yoga for Cynics posts*...

...do I understand your question man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
Bob Dylan (in as crappy a mood, apparently, as T. S. Eliot)

...then, perhaps it’s really all a matter of ebb & flow—old-school well-worn zen-like metaphor in progress—and the only trick is to realize it...meaning not just in the sense of hey, maybe it’s all just a matter of ebb & flow—think I’ll write something about that on my blog...but to really realize it...take it in...accept it...stop expecting the world to stand still long enough to make sense...

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide

...but, maybe the not being able to believe in that...the suspecting it’s all bullshit...is simply part of that ebb...faith and doubt not pulling in a tug-o-war, but operating more smoothly in a kind of dialectic tide...unceasing movement avoiding the stagnation of self righteous surety, fanaticism and fundamentalism, as well as the dry sand of fatalism and despair...nothing definite...except that wherever ya end up, ya won’t be there for long...


*...like this one...about the haiku Allen Ginsberg wrote for me...which I then spilled something on...posted earlier today...

Words, Words, Nothin' But Words...

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject.
Michael Pollan

...a strange collection of self-defeating words, often expressed by students of writing, as well as some bloggers, is I’m not a writer...which is absurd...particularly if expressed in written form, or in reference to something one has written...since, by definition a writer=one who writes...

...and, contrary to popular romanticism, everybody has to work at it...

...T. S. Eliot told aspiring poet Stephen Spender I can understand you wanting to write poems but I don't quite know what you mean by 'being a poet'...because he knew the high-falutin’ identity of the poet was a conceit...kind of like being a yogi...

...you write poems or you don’t...you practice yoga or you don’t...though, of course, the ways in which we define poetry or yoga may vary widely...which is kinda true of words in general...

...have long been an expert bullshitter, enjoy trash-talking before, during, and after Scrabble games, and would rather tell an amusing tall tale than a boring but factually accurate account...and, in all honesty, believe there’s a meaningful difference between all of the above and dishonesty...

...Seeing Eye Chick...not her real name, but that’s okay...was kind and generous enough to pass on the Honest Weblog Award...which is greatly appreciated...even if it makes me feel a bit self-conscious...



...that Pretenders song starts such a drag to want something sometimes...which, I think, is about as honest as anything you’re likely to hear...might even say it encapsulates the first two of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths in seven short words...but I’m not even quoting the lyric correctly...the last word is actually sometime...no s...which doesn’t make sense...grammatically, at least...then, much of the time, neither does the truth...

Flowers In the Ruins...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins...
T. S. Eliot

...for a little while, worked on a trail crew in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia...where some hundred and thirty or so years earlier John Brown tried, and failed, almost single-handedly, to free the slaves....since it was late fall, rapidly turning to winter, the Park Service let us use an building in the old section of town...people crammed three or four to a room, and, when I showed up, the only available bed was in a room with an older guy who snored like a rhinoceros with a bad case of gas....as it turned out, though, there was another room...practically a suite...with its own bathroom...and a couch...empty in the basement...apparently somebody’d drowned a hundred or so years earlier, and everybody said it was haunted....I dragged my mattress down there without a second thought...

...we were dragging these massive slabs of rocks down a hill to build this great big staircase on the Appalachian Trail, right below an old graveyard overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers...where Thomas Jefferson said something really impressive...and, a few years after I was there, Bill Clinton and Al Gore pretended for the cameras to lay the final stone for the project we’d actually completed that winter....what I liked, though, was the way the ground was like waves, swallowing up the gravestones...just like they’d eventually end up swallowing our gigantic slabs...and all of Harper’s Ferry, and every last trace of John Brown or the guy who died in that basement, and me...

The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time, that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been so dammed up by the Blue Ridge of mountains as to have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that, continuing to rise, they have at last broken over at this spot and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base.
Thomas Jefferson

...I’ve always had a thing for ruins...ghost towns...cliff dwellings...pyramids....is it morbid of me to find it kind of comforting to see peoples’ proudest accomplishments gradually crumbling into dust...the best laid plans of mice and men reclaimed by dirt and grass?

...when in Rome...this was the spring of 1987...I loved walking around the Forum...seat of the Roman Empire...where, according to Shakespeare...who I have no reason to doubt...Mark Antony, standing over the multiple stab wounds of Julius Caesar, yelled Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth...by that time, though, it was nothing but ancient ruins covered with wildflowers...revealing that, though sticking flowers into gun barrels may not have ended the war in Vietnam, flowers will, in the end, win out...

...it's all too easy to become anxious about being anxious...just as I can become depressed worrying about getting depressed...all in all, it all comes down to lingering remnants of the past....the question is, what kind of flowers am I letting grow out of my ruins?

One More Cup of Coffee....

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee ‘fore I go
to the valley below...
Bob Dylan

...ran my bike into a concrete fencepost on the way to a yoga class downtown yesterday....actually, if yer gonna run yer bike into a concrete fencepost on the way to somewhere, a yoga class is a pretty good somewhere for that somewhere to be...as you pick yourself up, feeling somewhat dazed and unsure of whether you’re merely a bit scratched up or actually injured...one of the many uses for a yoga class is that you'll work out any minor trauma, and, if there’s anything seriously wrong, you’re probably gonna know it before the class is over ...

...and, as it turned out apart from a couple bits of skin lost on the right pointer finger and a slightly bruised right knee, no harm was done...

...but how, you ask, did this misfortune occur? I’ll give ya three different versions and let you decide which ya like best:

Version A: Going at incredible speed while doing a headstand on the seat, I suddenly hit a patch of black ice. A less skilled cyclist would have been killed.

Version B: There I was riding along when a little girl ran out onto the path. Having to make a split-second decision between possibly injuring this sweet, innocent child and the likelihood of grave injury to my own person, I of course turned valiantly toward the fencepost.

Version C: Riding along with a general lack of mindfulness, I didn't notice I was riding into a concrete fencepost until it was right in front of me.

...to those of you unimaginative and ungenerous enough to choose Version C, allow me to point out that this lack of attention might be attributed to a recent decision to cut down on coffee....as of about three days ago, I’m only having approximately one cup...or, at least, not-much-more-than one cup...per day...and my stomach’s already thanking me for it...

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, morning, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons....
T. S. Eliot

...the people at the coffee shop rolled their eyes and said oh god, not again! when I told them that....I generally quit completely for a month or so every year or two...just to let my insides recover from the general rich, full-bodied, incredibly tasty onslaught...oh god, just writing about coffee makes me want some...though my daily quota was filled hours ago...damn, I can hardly wait for that post-Saturday morning yoga class coffee tomorrow...which is why I have no desire to quit permanently...at this point, at least...some of the good things in life remain good things even when they’re not actually good for you....

It's Not Easy...

...there’s nothing more clichéd to be said about green than that it’s the color of spring...though that might be a perfect example of the dictum that a cliché becomes a cliché because it works...though that, as somebody pointed out in a movie...though I can’t remember which...is also a cliché...and, by now, the point that the cliché is a cliché might be as well...and thus far more old and tired than spring-like and green....I’d better start over...

...spring, like green, is more complicated than we might think...April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire...rising fresh and green from the comfortable dirt can be painful...things get buried for a reason...but spring brings it all back up...

...I tasted green for the first time in April 1983...seventeen and far too alienated and miserable to be too bothered that, according to all I’d been taught, green would quickly lead to heroin and death...it didn’t, was actually rather refreshing, for a while ...even if it ended up a dead vine that held on tight for far too long before finally peeling away....nowadays, I’d rather do yoga...

...or take a walk in the woods...consumed in luxuriant green....it’s hard not to be clichéd here, too...might as well give in to my inner muppet...why wonder, why wonder I’m green, guess that’s the way I wanna be...though it might never be the same after I ate that deep fried frog at that Chinese restaurant back in November...like chicken, but a lot more bones...so you're right, Kermit, it's not easy bein' green...

...even worse, though, would be talking about the environment...the green of photosynthesis, mountains, meadows, and life in general squaring off against the most all-consuming green of all...and guess which wins almost every time?...“green” labels seeming to represent the first serving only to bring more of the other to oil and pharmaceutical companies...

...god, is it possible to be more cynical and morose in writing about green?..those reading this in the archives, or the tropics or southern hemisphere might wanna note that it’s February in Philadelphia...my 43rd birthday rapidly approaching...(as mentioned previously, my sign of the Zodiac is Charlie the Three Toed Sloth...though I also share the day with the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea)...and green seems far away...

...in the end, though, green is a state of mind...I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin wrote Walt Whitman...knowing, even though 37 back then was a lot older than 43 now, that a person can begin at any time...and, however misused, let’s face it, green will outlast us all...

Talking Books

pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven...
Jack Kerouac

...my dad had a flirtation with radicalism in the late 60’s...apparently....as far as I can tell, it never went beyond buying the books that, at one time, lined the top level of our living room bookshelf...before I found them, that is, and, deciding they’d be a perfect alternative to whatever crap was being assigned by my teachers in high school, took them: The Autobiography of Malcolm X and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, providing an angry, alternative history badly needed in the days of morning in America...Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and other poems, introducing the notion that reading and writing could be really, really cool, particularly in the midst of endless road trips, cheap wine, tea-smoking, jazz, radical politics, and sex...Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (gotta confess, actually, that, at that point, I didn’t get the nonattachment thing at all...and, actually, I’m still workin’ on that)...and, most insane and influential of all, Woodstock Nation by Abbie Hoffman...We shall not defeat Amerika by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation—a nation as rugged as the marijuana weed born from the seeds of the Woodstock Festival...sounded cool to me, never mind that most charter members of the Woodstock Nation had cashed in a decade earlier, roughly around the time the draft ended, and helped create the Reagan Nation I was then so desperate to rebel against....

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot

...more recently, when visiting my mom, I comb through the shelves in my dad’s den...finding, to my surprise, in the midst of countless volumes on psychoanalysis, Quakerism, and the history of Christianity, things like Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs and Elaine Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels, along with Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, and Jon Kabat Zinn...often featuring copious underlining and notes, which, along with the very presence of the books themselves, feel like a special kind of posthumous communication...with areas of surprising agreement, as well as the same old arguments, which had something to do with why we talked so little during his last years...so, I underline and make notes myself, but always make sure to do it in pencil when he used pen, just so it’s clear who said what....