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I just don’t like claims about Truth (big T) because they seem so often to be oppressive and inaccurate and arrogant – and they try to encompass too much while they’re carving things up. Truths (small t) are more humble and gracious and approachable, as I think humans ought to be toward what can only be pointed to and not possessed. Maybe the problem is more than just that we seem to want Truth to be about facticity and controls (and less about openness and infinity).

Truth is composed, inherently, of veils and unveiling, covering and discovering and uncovering – layers and shapes unending. Sometimes I think that Truth is like a lover. One that I have only just begun to know (and may never reach, watching him float always away over a sea of projections and fantasy and fears and habits and all the rest). The lover is on the other side of it all – almost close enough – but always ghostly, beckoning, like a Muse. The lover is the impossible depth (or height) – what can’t be divided, the path of Xeno’s arrow. The metaphor of the lover has helped me a lot over the years, but it is kind of… well.. loaded.

Is there another way to explore this – for me, from my own experience and insights, and not only just through traditions and religions and philosophy?

What is there that reorients and attunes?

My experiential brushes with Truth have some commonalities among them, after all.

Calm. Truth is complex and fractal and mysterious… but calm.

Time slows way down – but does not completely stop – in those truth-y peak moments. Truth is a kind of almost-pause – but there is time, time to think and feel and reach out or close in.

I used to think that slo-mo was just a filmic effect. Maybe it is, and we’ve all just trained ourselves to experience the world we navigate as though it were a movie.

There is a kind of pause –
the momentous
pre-moment
before the moment
in which further movement can occur
or is either real or possible.

Before the iterative patterning.
Before the fallback of the pendulum.
Before the flash of the lake freezing.
Before the car crashes.
Before you’ve leaped.
Before the roller coaster lets – go.

The skipped heartbeat before the longed-for kiss.
The silence about to be broken.

Whether it’s with anticipation, relish, dread –
With clairvoyant foreknowledge or with the beauty of uncertainty –
There is – there – no escape from the movement in and through
a blur, a pivot point, the counterpoise, the attractor.

Dive, run, fight, observe – it doesn’t matter so much
– all the responses come later
and break that eternal shard.
What can’t yet be articulated, categorized
and what is also inevitable –
shimmers, slows, lingers – heavy.
Stops the breath.

People have compared the moment of orgasm
to the moment of death for centuries,
but maybe it’s that nanosecond before either one
that resonates and rings through eternity –
and ties them together somehow.

The moment of being-destroyed / being-created
When everything is possible, and yet only one thing inevitable
And for just that almost-blink, you can’t discern the difference.
But you know you will – and soon.

For a sliver of time (because there is still time, and space enough)
there is still – at once – no time
And it’s filled with a calm and shimmer
that overlays even the strongest of emotions.

And maybe, that’s something like Truth:

Complex, and simple – like death, like loving.

I had a vivid dream this morning about death and destruction, perhaps as some weird dream way to continue processing the thoughts from yesterday. I was also affected by the many images of destruction from the storms and tornadoes in Atlanta yesterday.

In the dream, I was in some sort of high-rise building with three or four other people that I didn’t recognize. We had gathered to play 45s on an old record player – the kind that opened up like a box.

As the theme from Scooby-Doo was playing in the background (really), I looked out the window to see that a huge crane was trying to add an entire wall to the top of an unfinished building. It was so high in the air, and the crane was using some sort of wire to hold the whole thing up. Across my whole line of sight, I observed several other buildings were unfinished at the top, as though an entire city were being constructed upwards in a never-ending project.

At first, the wall – really a total wall, with appliances and everything – swung out a little too much. Then it seemed that the crane lost control of the trajectory altogether. The hanging wall knocked some bits off another building, and it seemed to create a domino situation. I could see big bits of the jigsawed building fall down. People down on the street were screaming.

Now I was on the fifth or sixth floor instead of something like the 20th, sitting in some sort of darkened restaurant. I could see that everything around us had become unstable. Everything was trembling and then shaking, like in an earthquake. I felt like a fool, because it seemed that I was somehow over-reacting, but I screamed out, “Run!”

I ran down the stairwell, and got out of the building, and starting running just as fast as I could. My shoes fell off but I kept running. And then, there was a cold shadow over me, and I heard someone shout out, “Goodbye Ralph. I’m sorry!”

I looked up, and a whole building was tipping toward me like a giant tree. The waffle-patterned concrete looked very heavy and dense, and it was already halfway down, falling far too fast to outrun.

I looked up at it and thought, “Well, at least it will be quick.”

And then the building hit the ground, crushing me.

And I felt it, in the way that you can sort of feel things in dreams sometimes. And I lived for another moment or two after that, wondering if I would live long enough to need air, and when my consciousness would be gone.

And I thought, “That wasn’t so bad” – and woke up.

My arm was asleep, and I had a crick in my neck. It was so warm and windy last night that we left a window open.

I looked out my window at the sky behind the big oak trees, and imagined one of those big trees coming down on the house (something I worry about from time to time). An entire building would be better.

I used to have dreams of my own death a couple of times a year. This is the first one I’ve had since my son was born.

Spring flowers are blooming, and the air smells sweet. Glad to be alive.

We all die. I don’t know whether or not there is an afterlife, and neither does anyone else.

People have a range of beliefs. Some people believe in a heaven of fluffy clouds. Some people believe in a hell of unending torture. Some people believe in a gray space of limbo.

Some believe that one’s place in the afterlife can be purchased with money or obedience or membership or works or sacrifice or mantras.

Some believe that your spirit rejoins the energy of the cosmos, or that you will sing with the stars. Some believe that souls return to the timeless space of eternal Dreaming. Some believe the afterlife will be a difficult journey of some kind, or an entrance into an eternal perspective where all times and places exist together.

Some believe that death is a transition into another realm or dimension, or a pause before starting up another life here through reincarnation.

Some believe that in death, everyone wanders around in an underground cavern.

Some believe that necromancers (the more accurate translation of the biblical “witch”) communicate with the dead, so there must be a place where individual consciousness continues. Some believe that sacrifices or homage ought to be paid to ancestors because they get more energy and can continue their existence that way.

But nobody knows.

We can comfort ourselves with the notions that someone who has died is now with God, or in a better place, singing with the angels, carrying messages, dancing a skeleton dance with us, guarding us and looking down from the stars.

But nobody knows.

It is understandable that the thought of our ultimate non-being causes anxiety.

It is understandable that we want to feel more important when we contemplate the sublime majesty of the universe – and all its possible parallel universes.

It is understandable that comforting mythologies exist that attempt to mitigate the pain of loss and grief and injustice and feelings of powerlessness and meaninglessness that confront us.

Thomas Aquinas proclaimed that one of the sublime joys of heaven had to be witnessing the agonies of those who have hurt us.

When I am sad and anxious about death, I imagine an ideal afterlife. I’ve imagined it in great detail – my fantasy living space, with a community of loving friends and family who are now everything they were meant to be, and surrounded by wonderful smells and tastes (note that I’m not willing to give up a sensual existence of some kind). There is a part of me that persists in the hope that whatever is sufficiently envisioned may exist.

I pray, yes I do. I entreat benevolent entities at all levels of whatever hierarchical or distributed spiritual systems could possibly exist. Male and female and beyond gender. Sure. But I don’t know.

We are the only beings that we know of who live with the knowledge that someday we all – without exception – will die. Heidegger called it Being-towards-death. We can repress and cover-up this knowledge, but that is an inauthentic kind of living.

I taste eternity, but eternity – well, it isn’t human. It’s an everything-ness that overwhelms me, and while it may bring a kind of ecstasy that is beyond language or explanation, it doesn’t seem – to me – to promise an afterlife.

I have a very difficult time believing in consciousness without mind. Perhaps mind can somehow extract itself from the brain’s electro-magnetic impulses, like bees leaving a hive, and find some other form of containment. I don’t know (pause… and neither does anyone else, got it?).

For various reasons (and no reason), it’s a good time to note of some of the thoughts that have been helpful to me, and which have given me some alternatives to the pathological visions that I was imbued with when young.

Living, learning, and navigating around through the admittedly limited form of our existence has been deeply improved and enriched for me with the following attitudinal choices:

Focused Attention. Curiosity and Questioning. Appreciation and Gratitude. Compassion and Caring and Kindness.

They are momentary choices, of course, but the more often you can really pay attention and observe, allow yourself to be curious and to ask questions, feel appreciation and gratitude, and open yourself up to receiving and giving kindness and feeling compassion for self and others… well, the better life seems to be: more real, more textured, more meaningful, more everything.

Tomorrow we may die, but no-one and no-thing can ever take away that we have existed.

The universe is unimaginably large, but our bit of life and history has its place in the timeline and we all help to create and uphold the rich fabric of the cosmos. In our human niche, bound by space and time, we are ourselves – and we affect others and we are all affected by one another and we are all together (Koo koo ka-choo).

The fact that I once saw the sun shining over ochre cliffs is not erased because it was a momentary event. Although it has passed, it is not gone. Although I may misremember or reinterpret it, the very value of that experience is that it happened – on that day, with someone dear. The light was just so, I was in a particular emotional state, I paid attention to it, I was curious about ochre because of its beauty, I was grateful to be there in that moment, and I carry that moment with me. I even have a photograph, but it doesn’t capture the spirit of that moment. It is only a reminder. The aromas, the feeling of the wind, the high-altitude mood, all of it – it happened then, and then the moment was gone (ok, yeah, a little reference to “Dust in the Wind” but stay with me here).

The bits of our lives that we most value are transitory by their very nature.

Everything changes, and if it didn’t, we really would be in hell – and never out of it.

Without passing through (and within and as part of) our human streams of time and space, outside of the ever-moving lines and processes of chaos meeting order, we would have nothing, nothing at all.

While you move in time and space, while you can perceive and question and appreciate, be just as authentic and kind as you can.

Value that spark of eternity in all of us, and dwell there from time to time – alone or in communion – but know this: We exist on the borders, moving, changing, living and dying.

Our lives are so special because we each have our own ways of experiencing, our own limited perspectives, our unique – and yes, transitory – associations and configurations of memory and projection and imagination and meaning-making.

We are human. We have a niche in this cosmos, and it can be very very complex and rich.

Even in pain and suffering and injustice, there are moments of bliss and celebration and laughter and love. With the knowledge of death, and the fundamental ignorance about life after death, be grateful for your span of days.

Our limitations are precisely what enable us to experience and construct our context, our meanings, our lives and our loves.

My father died four years ago today. I’ve been thinking of him a lot, remembering that terrible last week. He had been in and out of the hospital, and we had just finally been able to place him at a local nursing home facility. He was going blind, and he couldn’t keep up the situation at the independent living center anymore – not even with the help of my brother and myself.

His dream had been to retire to the heart of the Smokey Mountains, and he moved there from Massachusetts some years before. He had managed to eke out a very minimal living there selling “computerized” photos on mugs and tee-shirts. It was cold in the winter, though, and healthcare facilities that he could use weren’t nearby. He needed supplemental support. His longtime companion Lorraine finally moved back north to live with her family because of her own health issues. Living alone in that environment wasn’t a good choice for him. Harrah’s Casino moved in and changed the dynamic, and it was harder and harder for him to survive. He moved to Atlanta about a year before his death.

I am grateful for that last year, although I also have some regrets. He was always good to our son Ben, and that covered a lot of ground with me. Somewhere I have a video of him pulling Ben in the red wagon – patiently, over and over, circling the front yard. We spent some uncomplicated time together, and that was a priceless gift. We didn’t really work through any issues or anything like that, but somehow just spending some time together made many of them somewhat irrelevant.

He had been on dialysis for a few months. Initially, he was opposed to it. He was more than ready to go and his images of what it entailed were a bit outdated. We talked about it, and he finally agreed to try it – but on the condition that he was absolutely free to stop anytime he wanted. I think it was the only time we ever came to an agreement about something (smile).

He had multiple heath issues by then. He’d been in critical – and a whole team of doctors were needed even to delve into the mysteries of all that was going on in his body. Still, he lived longer than anyone thought he would. When his doctor would say, “Now, be careful of what you eat or you could have a heart attack” his response was always something like, “Promises, promises…”. That was typical of his dry (and sometimes cruel) sense of humor.

In the nursing home, the telephone hasn’t yet been connected. I visited him there and found that his bed didn’t go up and down properly. I asked them please to replace it, because he needed to be able to control that after the dialysis. I don’t know whether they did, and I suspect not – but it can’t be helped now.

Then, I got that deadly flu. I was at death’s door myself – it certainly felt like it. I was out for the count. Even if I could have stirred myself, it wasn’t a thing that one would bring through the doors of a nursing home. I had been planning to bring Dad come to the house for Christmas, but I couldn’t even reach him to let him know that it wouldn’t work. The people at the desk wouldn’t even pass on a message. It filled me with rage. I regret not asking a friend to go over and tell him. I should have done that, but I didn’t think of it.

I talked to him, finally, on the 27th. His phone was finally connected and he called me. He could tell by my voice that I was really sick. I told him that I was so sorry to leave him all alone on Christmas with no word. He just said, “well, that explains it then.” We talked for a few minutes, and then he told me that he loved me. I still smile thinking about it. It’s not something he said easily or often.

That night, he was found unresponsive in his room, and rushed to a hospital about two miles from my house. My brother got the call. He had just returned to town and was exhausted. He says he didn’t call me because I was too sick to have gone to say goodbye. Reportedly, my dad’s last words were, “What’s a guy gotta do to get a cigarette around here?” (He hadn’t smoked cigarettes in some years, but he liked a cigar.)

The next day, my brother Michael showed up at the house dressed all in black. He didn’t have to say anything. My defenses were immediately up and running. I vaguely remember being flippant. I’m a bit like my dad that way; when things are overwhelming I tend to become inauthentic. I shut off. I become darkly humorous. I don’t really connect to the people around me. It’s something I’m working on, but for me it is so hard to be in the moment with another person when things are difficult.

Daddy wasn’t someone who showed his emotions easily, or dealt with them well. For much of my life I thought that he didn’t have them, but now I think his emotional life was so overwhelming to him that he just buckled it down. He was a bit of a control freak. I never thought I measured up to his standards (whatever they were). I wasn’t the perfect child he had tried to raise as a Jehovah’s Witness. That I was female was always a problem, too; he didn’t really like or understand women.

I wish that I had finished the Ph.D. before he died. I was almost there.

Our relationship was complex, ambivalent, frustrating, confusing. We could never get the right closeness, the feeling of authenticity. Everything always seemed awkward. Just awkward. Part of the problem in our relationship was mine. I didn’t really understand until recently the extent to which I had kept him at arm’s length, too. He always remained the archetypal father to me. I never really had much insight into him as a person.

“Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” Renee Stahl’s version of the Elton John Song

I am so grateful to his family and some of his friends for sharing some of their experiences, insights and thoughts with me. Through them, I found out that he actually was proud of me and bragged about me all the time. His friends knew everything I was up to – they had the details.

I think of my Dad, ultimately, as a tragic figure. He had his faults and they helped to destroy the glimmering possibilities of who he might have been. What he was given and what he chose made his life a hard one.

I have some good memories, even so, to call upon. I miss him terribly.

I regret my own lack of insight, compassion, and maturity in communicating with him. I hope that he found the answers he was looking for. I hope that now he understands. I hope that some part of who he might have been is clearer now.

Today, I honor my father, and I let go – finally – of all the issues and negativity. I light a candle in his name, and I send prayers to cosmic benevolence and love to care for his spirit. God and Goddess, bless his soul.

Maybe there is an atom or two floating in the back yard…

I call upon the someone that he was and the someone that he could have been. That energy and those bits live on through his children and grandchildren – sending love back into the webs of being and non-being. He lives on through us, and we accept him as part of who we are. I miss you Daddy, and I love you always.

“Hushabye Mountain,” Stacey Kent’s version

Chuang Tzu (Master Chuang) was a witty and profound writer – and a bit of a curmudgeon sometimes. I love his parables, and his humor, and his mystical – yet very pragmatic – approach to attunement and freedom from conventional obsessions. He lived in China sometime around the 4th century B.C.E.

He’s my favorite.

You may run across different spellings of his name. This is how I saw it when I first started reading, but you will also see Zhuangzi, Chuang Tsu, Zhuang Tze, Chouang-Dsi, or Chuang Tse, depending on the conventions being used. (Traditional: 莊子; Simplified: 庄子, Pinyin: Zhuāng Zǐ, Wade-Giles: Chuang Tzŭ)

If you’ve never read Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton’s personal readings in Way of Chuang Tzu are a friendly gentle introductory bridge to some of the writings of one of the most important classical Taoists.

My copy is covered with underlining and notes from my thoughts from many (many – early 80’s) years ago. I reread it last night – what a treat! I would occasionally stumble across a comment that made me choke, trying not to laugh out loud (everyone else was asleep).

For example, in the introduction, Merton compares Chuang Tzu to St. Paul; that almost blew the whole thing for me right there at the time. I won’t tell you what I wrote in the margin. (hee-hee) How things have changed.

Now I can see a certain degree of similarity in the emphasis on inner virtue as a virtue above “virtue” (rules) and something a little like grace in the Tao – maybe. I still think the analogy to Paul is really stretching it.

Still, this was Thomas Merton, and one must make allowances for a Catholic monk who tried to bridge West and East, especially when this book was published (1965). Merton admits that it is a personal reading. He likes Chuang Tzu

“because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me. If St. Augustine could read Plotinus, if St. Thomas could read Aristotle and Averroes (both of them certainly a long way further from Christianity than Chuang Tzu ever was!), and if Teilhard de Chardin could make copious use of Marx and Engels in his synthesis, I think I may be pardoned for consorting with a Chinese recluse who shares the climate and peace of my own kind of solitude, and who is my own kind of person.”

It’s telling that he foresaw objections… and that he defends within the parenthesis of not-defending….

Favorite bits:

You cannot put a big load in a small bag,
Nor can you, with a short rope,
Draw water from a deep well.
You cannot talk to a power politician
As if he were a wise man.
If he seeks to understand you,
If he looks inside himself
To find the truth you have told him,
He cannot find it there.
Not finding, he doubts.
When a man doubts,
He will kill.

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Harms no other being
By his actions
Yet he does not know himself
To be “kind,” to be “gentle.”

My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it. My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness: and this, in the minds of most people, is the worst possible course.
… If you ask “what ought to be done?” and “What ought not to be done” on earth in order to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have an answer. There is no way of determining such things.
Yet at the same time, if I cease striving for happiness, the “right” and the “wrong” at once become apparent all by themselves.

And my personal favorite:

When Chuang Tzu was about to die, his disciples began planning a splendid funeral. But he said, “I shall have heaven and earth for my coffin; the sun and moon will be the jade symbols hanging by my side; planets and constellations will shine as jewels all around me, and all beings will be present as mourners at the wake. What more is needed? Everything is amply taken care of!”

But they said, “we fear that crows and kites will eat our Master.”

“Well,” said Chuang Tzu, “above ground I shall be eaten by crows and kites, below it by ants and worms. In either case I shall be eaten. Why are you so partial to birds?”

That’s a case where I wish I understood the original Chinese. I think the last line should probably be translated as something closer to “so why are birds in particular to be feared?” or even “what have you got against the birds?”.

I’m going to start rereading Burton Watson’s translation of Chuang Tzu – Basic Writings tonight. I remember that my favorite text was on the last page – I admired the placement.

The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?

I’ve got still another Chuang Tzu text around here somewhere… where could it be? I remember the cover is white, with light-blue text for the title. I think the translator was A. C. Graham. Hmmm. Well, it’ll turn up –