-Part II-

Breaking Through the Blues:
or Waking Up, Tuning In,
Paying Attention and Singing Praise

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

“Sometimes,” by Mary Oliver.

All of this is to say: the great drama of American democracy can be at best a bit bamboozling at times. So? So I flick off the boob tube, nix the idiot box, and I sign back out of Facebook and post nothing. I post nothing because I am unsure of where my voice can fit into the conversation and because I have no desire to sow seeds of discord and plant disinformation and to escalate conflict, intensify contest, and participate in partisanship, especially among family and friends.

Also, I do not want to speak and say anything if I cannot be certain what I’m saying is accurate, factual and informed. As we all know, it is exceedingly challenging today amid our endless info wars, social warfare and our grand democratic theater of the absurd to be sure what we believe we know is accurate, factual and well-informed.

Further, I do not want to speak unless I feel the thing I have to share will help elevate the dialogue and elevate the mind, heart and spirit of my fellow man. If I write or speak, I want my reader or listener to walk away feeling better about him or herself as a human being alive on the earth and more hopeful about life and the world, even if it takes hard work to earn that hope and deep ache and break in the muddled muscle of the heart to behold the beauty of humanity and see the sublime in everything under the sun.

The Act of Speaking Less,
the Practice of Listening More

“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin.“

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” by Bob Dylan.

The grace of this world, the beauty of life, and the perfection of all things are here, ever-present and perfectly-eternal, if we can pay attention and tune into them, into the grace, the beauty and the perfection all around us. Mystery and wonder are here, too, palpable and plentiful, and we can experience them and their joy daily, if only we take the time to wake up each day and if only we have the courage to open the doors of our hearts and let mystery, wonder and joy through.

In short: I refrain from posting because I do not want to stand up and sing until I know my song well. I do not want to speak unless I’ve meditated on my words deeply and truly reflected upon the words and songs of others. For in my humble experience on this earth, I learn best when I speak less and listen more.

Attention Precedes Prayer,
Astonishment is the Gateway to Mystery
and the Doorway to Wonder

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed
whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.

For as the poet Mary Oliver reminds us in so much of her work, as the writer Annie Dillard teaches us in her prose, prayer is not the practice of speaking, but the act of standing in astonishment and paying attention to the natural world. Prayer is the moment of attentive silence that comes before we open our mouths and utter our prayers aloud. Prayer is the attentive silence that rings and resounds in the temple and cathedral of our sacred heart, resonant as a golden bell, piercing and poetic as a psalm, pealing as a crack of thunder out of the gathering winter gloom, yet cool, calm and clear as the tolling waters of a summertime river forever running its singing stream toward the sea.

But really, I feel this is true, too: that there is nothing I or anybody could post on Facebook that would be better for you or me than for each of us to turn off Facebook and go outside for a walk or run, have a friendly conversation in person with our neighbor, set the table and make dinner for our mother, admire a green leaf of golden grass or a golden-and-green grasshopper perched and poised to leap like a world-renowned acrobat from the bow of its brilliant blade of grass into the boundless blue.

There is nothing that any of us can post on Facebook that would be better for us than to stop scrolling and to step outside and stand spellbound in awe and wonder before the bright whinnying warmth of the sun by day, the dark majestic beauty of the star-spangled firmament by night.

There’s nothing on Facebook that’d be better for us than for each of us to simply sit and still our hearts, brew a cup of Kashmiri kahwa, take a deep breath and inhale from our nostrils to our souls and soles the rich aroma of spiced green tea infused with sticks of cinnamon, crushed cardamom, flakes of almond and springs of saffron, before we finally plant our face in a real book and turn each delicate paper page with our hard-worn hands, slowly, deliberately, deliciously, with great thought and deep care, as the flowering tree of astonishment blooms within us and plants its own rich roots deep in the soil of our earthen hearts and cosmic souls, and the book carries us farther and farther away into the world and universe of the story.

Living in the Social Media Age Blues

“Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no social media and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.”

Master Ma Yonghao-zi, Part-Time Bard of Gansu.
(After W.H. Auden’s Refugee Blues)

Social media, invented to make us happier and more connected, supposedly, is making us anxious, irritable, miserable and leaving us lonely, isolated, and divided. We scroll, we scroll, we scroll. Swipe left, swipe right. Occasionally we click.

Finally, when hunger hits our guts or our urge to piss can’t be pacified any longer, when our eyeballs can no longer bear the electronic brutality of our screens or our poor backs and butts the harshness of our chairs, when our legs begin to atrophy, we put our wretched gadgets down. We sigh a deep breath of relief. And when we hobble up and walk away, waddling into the kitchen or scurrying to the toilet, we often find that instead of feeling inspired and renewed we’re shot through and through with the blues. Gloomy, depressed, dejected. Our souls sink, our hearts hang on the floor.

And so we live, backs bowed, head-down, eyes glued to our gadgets, moping through our lives and the modern world, wondering when on earth the zombie apocalypse is finally going to arrive.

And so we trudge on through the drear cellars and rock-bottom basements of our glum souls, struggling in the depths of our gray days to recall some other world and some other days, that, though we can now only faintly remember them, sing to us from a shining merigold past with an inspired poignancy that stirs our souls and makes us at once want to laugh and to weep, a luminous poignancy so radiant and so palpable that it dazzles our eyes and sends aching ripples of delight through our bodies and bones, until finally we do laugh, aloud and uproarious, the mad din rattling our ribs and gutting our stomach, as we throb and tremble with the pangs of yearning, with the pangs of birth, death and rebirth.

The World Beyond the Window

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, 
the mountain and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.”

“Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver.

We roar until our bellies ache and our eyes well up and our laughter turns to muddled tears of joy and sorrow; we roar until, finally, our animal bodies can’t bear anymore, and we break.

All the while, outside, in the world beyond our windows, life and the earth go on. The sun shines, rain falls, rivers run, squirrels play in the daffodil and dandelion daylight, even as bumblebees buzz in the flaxen air, floating pollen-like through the ether, alighting on blossom after blossom, doing the work of the world freely, not out of fear of future poverty or the thirst for profit, but out of the bounty of their bumblebee hearts, out of their intrinsic and indelible love for life, yet all the while enriching themselves infinitely, and birds fly through the sapphire sky, winging their wild way home, light-hearted, heavenly and free as the rarefied air through which they fly, weight-less as the air that buoys their feathers and fills their hollow bones.

Who, we might ask ourselves, are the rational, intelligent and civilized ones? And who, we might wonder, better embodies the being of God, a man or a bumblebee?

Praise, Presence and Joy
in the Perfection of All Things

“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

“Fern Hill,” by Dylan Thomas.
Listen to Dylan Thomas read “Fern Hill” here.

What I’m struggling to say is: our childhoods are gone. We can’t go back. Those long-ago summer days when the leaves of the trees rippled in the breeze and played green and golden in the sunlight live now only in our memories. Our first kisses, first crushes, first loves. They’re all gone, lost. But that doesn’t mean they still don’t resonate, resound and live within us. But this doesn’t mean that the world today is any less full of wonder than it was when we were children, apple-eyed and grass-kneed, fresh and new to the earth.

Back then, in the beginning, all life seemed to shine in an awesome miracle, a strange and wonderful parade and pageant of life. Well, friends, the wonder was never really in the world. The wonder was in us. And there will never be any more or less wonder under the sun than there is now. The miracle of life is ongoing, ever-present and eternal, renewing itself each time a fresh leaf of grass sprouts forth from the cold muddy spring earth to face the sun and the warm windfall light of the new day. The miracle of life on earth is renewed each time a flower blooms and a child is born.

As for us, the parents, our own lives are renewed by the aching joy that wells up in our hearts and fills us to the brim when our babies are born, when we welcome our sparkling children into this world and make a silent vow to love and care for them forever, a vow that is surely a kind of prayer. In this way, we participate in the ritual of being, we play a role in the great drama of existence, and our work, at once common and profound, humble and exalted as the bumblebee’s, lives at the center of creation and at the heart of the ongoing miracle of life on earth.

The Work of the World is Love,
and Our Job is to Follow our Bliss

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been
there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is
the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will
open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

Joseph Campbell, Mythologist, Writer, Teacher.

And for those of us who have no children, our work in the great drama of life is the same. Whenever we love somebody or something more than we love ourselves–whether that someone is a sick spouse or an aging parent, a desperate friend or a lonely neighbor, or whether that something is our vocation or an ideal to which we aspire–we are doing the work of the world and participating in the ritual of giving and receiving, the awesome drama of living and being, and so our lives become both blissful and blessed. A blessing to all those whom we love and to all who love us in return, a present to them, and a blessed gift to ourselves.

The work of the world is love. And our work is to participate and play a role in the great drama of life. Our job is to follow our bliss, and our vocation lies where the world’s great, deep need meets our deep love and great joy. That is: where the world’s hunger and your passion converge is where your work on earth resides, and it is in this holy marriage where you’ll find your bliss and experience what it is to live a rich and meaningful life.

Here and Now,
saith the World

“Do not dwell on the past, do not dream of the future,
concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

Siddhārtha Gautama, The Buddha.

Here and now, friends. The world beyond the window beckons. Neither rue nor yearn for the past, for the past is gone. Likewise, don’t fret or fantasize about the future, for the future does not exist, and it never will. Praise, presence and joy in the perfection of all things. This is the eternal prayer of the earth and the daily prayer of every wild winged thing that sings in its white-hot flight under the sun or walks with great slow loping grace on its four holy legs upon the earth.

We’d be homo sapiens, wise men, indeed, friends, to hear this wild prayer, heed its holy song, and to love and learn from all of our neighbors on earth.

Breaking Through the Blues

Trouble in mind.
I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always.
The sun’s gonna shine through my backdoor someday,
The wind’s gonna rise and blow my blues away.

“Trouble in Mind,” by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bluesman.

Social media, created to make us all happier and more connected, they say, is making us all miserable and leaving each of us less connected. Go figure.

But the fact is that social media is merely a medium, and we can use that medium as we choose. As the writer and my friend, Lisa Horiuchi, reminds us, “Your beating heart is the material that is carried through that medium.” This is what is important in social media and this is what matters: our minds, our hearts, our spirits, and the ability to share our unique thoughts, individual yearnings, and original visions of the world with one another. Vanity may always remain, and that’s fine, for good and bad we’re vain creatures, but if we share in this way, there is the real chance of resonance and the awesome possibility of sincere and meaningful connection.

Thankfully, the national conversation going on in our country is not all deranged drama and absurd theater, all sound and fury, inflamed insanity. There are indeed many wise, thoughtful, compassionate, clear-eyed and calm-voiced, determined people in our nation working hard to break through the incessant Info War and Social Warfare and shed some real light on the current events unfolding in our country and throughout the world. For me, these enlightened voices are a source of inspiration and a pealing psalm of clarity and steady stream of lucidity amid the riotous din and the dim, roiling flood of our turbulent times.

Transcending the Info War
& Breaking Free of Social Warfare
and Partisan Politics

Unfortunately, we rarely find these voices in our corporate mainstream media, and we must look elsewhere, far beyond our pundits, politicians and partisans, to the rising independent media movement in our nation, many of whom use social media thoughtfully and beautifully, with intelligence, creativity and humanity, if we truly desire to understand what we’re witnessing in our world today and if we hope to rise up and break free, lotus-like, from the info wars and the societal warfare in which we found ourselves forever mired.

Please hear me: this is not a partisan post. In fact, one of the primary reasons I refrain from commenting on politics in social media is because in January 2020 I’ve come to despise the Democrats and the so-called left in our country as much as I abhor the Republicans and the so-called right.

It is not either party alone I scorn, it is partisan politics that I rebuke. And it is the degrading lie and illusion of partisanship in America to which I would now like to turn a meditative mind and an eviscerating pen.

-Friends-

Part III of An Open Letter
to My Fellow Americans

Continue Reading Here

Part III of this essay and open letter, “A Bipartisan American Rebuke,” has been published. You may read it here.

Thank you for reading and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project. If you’re new to the Long West, you may learn more about the project and the author here.

Hope to see you again in the Land West of Long Mountain. Best to all.