Swimming in the Black River of Loss

 

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

And the black river of loss

whose other side

 

is salvation, whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

 

You must be able to do three things: 

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

 

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to let it go, 

To let it go.”

 

-       Mary Oliver: Excerpt from In Blackwater Woods

       

Yesterday was Mary Oliver’s birthday. Had she stayed with us another seven years, she could have passed into the other world in company with Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem. Though I don’t know if they ever met, she had much in common with Mr. Berry, both being poets who held the sacredness of the natural world in their trust and praised it with their words. While not an active feminist in the manner of Ms. Steinem, she certainly represented the autonomy and independence the feminist movement strove for, fully claiming her full humanity in a female body and choosing to love, without fanfare, another independent woman, Molly Cook, for their decades together. 

 

The above excerpt was from an early poem and a good reminder to Buddhists who view non-attachment as being aloof from this impermanent world, which becomes just another kind of armor for the heart to avoid the grief of loss. Here Ms. Oliver suggest attaching yourself deeply to the things you love like a limpet clinging to a rock, even as you know you will lose them. Love as deeply as you can and when the time comes to let go, let go with grace and acceptance. 

 

That sense of having loved beyond reason is somehow connected to our deep disappointments with the world, the betrayals that arrived unexpectedly when we spoke out on behalf of what we hoped to protect, the surprise we felt that others couldn’t see our outrage and complaints came from love, the surprise we felt when we finally understood that that indeed was and is their source. So as we travel onward, we need to slowly let those go as well, to unpack those needless rocks in our backpack and set them firmly but gently on the trail. We will always remember where they are and how they weighed us down, but we don’t need to carry them anymore. 

 

So thanks to Mary Oliver for this and other reminders as I hope to step forward lighter than before, with all my old and new loves settled into my very bones. The fires and black river of loss lie before me and I step forward anyway. 

 

PS Tonight I will watch the documentary about Ms. Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. Check it out! 

Book Report

Amongst a thousand things that have me worried, the old idea (for new reasons) that everyone should stay in their corner with their tribe is disconcerting. The new reasons are understandable. We need to find people who share our experience or race or class or gender or sexual preference or age group etc. to feel more understood in a world where such groups are often marginalized or disdained or dismissed. The rise of affinity groups, women’s groups in the 60’s, men’s groups in the 90’s and more created safe spaces for people to share their experience. They can be important steps towards claiming one’s place in the world and feeling the support of like-minded people. 

 

Yet at the end of the day, we all have to share space on this tiny planet and figure out how to be with whoever happens to board the bus. In my field, the current mis-thinking is that one group can’t sing the songs of another group without being called out for cultural appropriation. Not that such appropriation isn’t real. The entire history of rock and roll where white folks rose to the top on the shoulders of black music often without payback or acknowledgement is just one of many cases in points. But the cultural sharing that has Americans playing taiko, Japanese playing bluegrass, Canadians playing gamelan, Indonesians playing jazz, black artists singing opera, white folks singing the blues, is proof that we are all deeply connected in our psyche’s foundation, all dancing together in what Carl Jung called (110 years ago!) the Collective Unconscious. While being mindful of the reality of power dynamics and histories of marginalization, we should not only refuse to stay in our own tiny corner, but actively cross the tracks to the many other sides of town. *

 

This on my mind having just finished a book that did precisely what I mentioned in the post Unthawing the Frozen Sea. When I finished, I just sat there longer feeling the echoes of these deeply inspiring and courageous characters I had just spent time with, deeply touched and moved by their stories. The book? The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I had seen the movie (which I loved) but never read the book. After finishing listening to The Calamity Club, her latest, it felt logical to read her first book. 

 

When I mentioned I was reading the book, many of my friend’s reactions was typical these days. “Oh, that’s on the bad list, this white woman writing about black people.” How often that happens in our confused contemporary culture. Even a hint of cultural appropriation and the discussion is closed down, the book or piece of music or person dismissed. (Just happened with people writing about Gloria Steinem’s “white feminism.”) Gone is nuance and complexity and changing perspectives and the conversations we actually need to have. 

 

Ms Stockett was well aware of the leap she was taking daring to try to capture a black person’s experience. But isn’t that all of literature? Yes, some get it wrong, bringing too much of their assumptions to the venture, but some are extraordinary in their ability to imagine the other. Men who write about women, women who write about men, black authors writing about white people, white authors writing about Asian people, 20^th century people writing about 12^th century people, young people writing about old people. In Arthur Golden’s book, for example, he crosses three lines as a white man writing about a Japanese woman Memoirs of a Geisha during the 1930’s through 50’s.W.B. Yeats was 28 years old when wrote The Song of Wandering Aengus, his extraordinary poem about an old man. 

 

As a reader far from the culture of Mississippi in the 60’s, I’m not qualified to speak about what details Ms. Stockett may or may not have gotten wrong or what assumptions she brought into her writing. But I felt her love for people on both sides of the tracks and her determination to uncover their deepest humanity, alongside her rightful impatience with those determined to bury such humanity in both themselves and others. How I loathed both Ms. Hilly and Minnie’s husband Leroy, how I loved Minnie and Abileen and Miss Skeeter! 

 

I’ll close with the classic end to the read-out-loud book reports we used to do in 5^th grade: 

 

If you like great characters, a compelling and suspenseful story, people who find their inner courage and undergo big and small transformations, all told in eloquent and colorful language, then I suggest you read this book. 

 

*  When people have been defined by others and their own voices shut down, it is understandable to be skeptical of such line-crossings. My hope is to hear from people who live across the tracks while not forbidding such needed line-crossing. It is a great evolution in culture that more and more previously marginalized authors get to tell their own story in a white male-dominated publishing business— from earlier authors like George Eliot, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Wolfe to Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison to more contemporary authors like Khaled Hosseini, Isabel Allende, Elif Safak, Orhan Pamuk, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Haruki Murakami, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wole Soyinka, Yaa Gyasi, Britt Bennet, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tommy Orange, Louise Erdrich, Sally Morgan and so many more. 

What If?

What if I took the world off of my shoulders for a bit and let it just be, horrific flaws and all? What if I put down my trumpet and let someone else blow it for me— and feel just fine if they don’t? What if I let people be exactly who they are and give up reforming them or wishing them (God forbid!) to be more like me? What if I asked questions in conversations, wholly listened and ceded the floor? What if I relaxed desire and ambition so that each thing that comes my way is a gifted enough? 

Might these be the themes of the 4^th Act of “My Life?” 

 

 

Good Kin

Yesterday I listened to a talk by Wendell Berry where he made the connection between kin and kind. Today I was about to write a little piece about my name when I discovered I had already done so, some five years ago. Here’s what I wrote then: 

 

Oct. 31, 2021—When my grandparents arrived at Ellis Island more than a century ago, they might have carried the name Goodkinsky, shortened to Goodkin or perhaps, Goodkind (the version adopted by my Aunt Flo). I’ve never loved saying my name, the harsh consonants of the paired d and k in the middle like sharp stones interrupting some melodic flow. But last night, I thought about “good kin” and extending my sense of connection far beyond my relatives, felt a certain destiny in my inherited name. My Uncle Harold always told me that family and loyalty to family was everything but failed to mention that our job is to extend that sense of family to include all people and yet further into all animal and plants and even rivers and stones and stars. And indeed, when putting together my 70th birthday slide show and revisiting the photos of so many people I’ve met in my teaching and travels, I felt that satisfaction of feeling akin to such a rich mix of people. All the diverse nationalities, races, religions, economic status, genders, sexual preferences, languages, the whole nine yards of things that people use as an excuse to exclude and dismiss becoming the very fabric of the sense of kinship I cultivated with all of humanity (minus those with the content of character that harms and hurts, though even those somehow having to be included). I now can see my life as my attempt to live up to my name, to see the goodness in my kin and to feel an ever-expanding kinship with all of creation. And then further, taking my Aunt Flo’s version, to myself try to be always one inch more good and one inch more kind until the inches add up to a worthy length. 

 

That’s pretty much what I would have written today. Though there is certainly a great deal of unkindness within blood families and relatives, the assumption is that we are obliged to take care of each other, to be kind to our kin. The Oxford English dictionary traces “kind” to qualities like “compassionate, loving, full of tenderness,” notes “mankind/ womankind/ humankind” connecting those qualities with the greater human family and includes “godcund” as an obsolete Old and Middle English adjective that means "divine," "belonging to God," or "proceeding from God." It’s a short leap from Godcund to Goodkin and I don’t claim any of it personally but happily accept my name as a reminder that we are all gifted with a divine nature and all that remains is to recognize it and act accordingly. 

 

In his book There Is No Other, Ram Dass tells a story similar to my Uncle Harold story above. His father was praising him for a book Ram Dass had published that was selling very well but criticized him for charging such a cheap price for it. Ram Dass asked his father, a lawyer, about a case he tried for his Uncle Henry and asked him if he charged him a lot of money for taking on his case. His father replied, “Don’t be an idiot! It was Uncle Henry. I didn’t charge him a penny. He’s family.”

 

Ram Dass countered, “That’s my problem. If you can find me somebody who isn’t Uncle Henry, I’ll rip them off.”

 

We are all kin to each other. So we might as well be kind to each other. 

 

The Gods of Small Things

 

“When we win, it’s with small things and the triumph itself makes us small.”

                                                            Rainer Marie Rilke

 

This line is from Rilke's poem The Man Watching, that goes on to suggest that we instead should choose to fight the unbeatable forces worthy of our efforts. The poem ends: 

 

This is how he grows; by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

 

The perfect description of me playing Bach or Chopin on the piano, of trying to stay above water in the swirling sea of a masterful jazz quintet, of trying to affect change while the wolves of Wall Street run wild without restraint. You get the idea.

 

But sometimes it feels GREAT to win with small things. Like wrestling with the techno-demon of online UPS payment and hitting the walls of the voice-mail maze trying to get help on phone. I finally called one of the 22 UPS stores in San Francisco and pleaded for help, but of course, it’s not their department. However, an angel named Anthony said that if I wanted to come down, he would see if he could help me. 

 

So today our errands found us in that corner of town, searching for a new spout for our leaky kitchen sink. On the slim chance that Anthony would actually be working and would have time and inclination to help me, I popped in. And there he was and off we went to the computer while he accomplished what I could not. No logical reason why it should work at that moment since I had done many of the same steps many times over, but I think the techno-gods were too embarrassed to not work for a UPS employee. And so after literally hours of my thwarted attempts, I successfully paid the $25 bill. Ah, sweet victory! You would have thought I scored the Super Bowl touchdown and clinched the NBA championship with my last-second three-pointer!

 

And so I continued to hang with the god of small things. Figured out my non-functional left hearing aid simply needed the little cap and dot replaced— and it worked! Looked at sink fixtures at one place and had another angelic soul tell us we could get the same or better for 1/4^th the price at Costco. Bit the bullet and entered that extraordinary land—only the second time I’ve ever crossed its threshold. (I'm sure a post will follow soon about that!)

But shopping there meant becoming a Costco member, which was as easy as signing a little paper form and paying them some money. NOT!!!!! Of course, we had to download the app, make a password, enter the code, do it again, and then again, listen to the spiel of the deal where Karen’s brother would get $40 off if we did it this way instead of that way, back to the app and the maze of prompts and by the end, exhausted, we finally walked out with our membership card and a new (and much cheaper, but good quality) sink fixture. 

 

Then off to the automatic car wash and another drama that is too trivial to even go into, but suffice it to say, it involved driving home and discovering the car had not been cleaned, driving back, getting the manager to let me go through again without paying and finally emerging with the “small thing trophy”—a clean car! 

 

Tonight is the ultimate test as our usually trustworthy TV suddenly won’t open Apple TV (while I just got a notice that the monthly bill will be going up), Prime kept refusing to download the movie we chose, Brittbox has a little circle that stops the actions every 3 minutes and then starts again and then stops and then starts and then…  Small things all, but enough to derail the human nervous system and get us shouting at machines. So tonight, o gods, in keeping with the victories of the day, let me win!

 

Then tomorrow back to the greater Gods of Bach and Chopin. 

Unthawing the Frozen Sea

My theme for hosting this morning’s Men’s Group: 

 

“Books you read in high school or college that changed your lives.”

 

Why high school or college? While it’s true that a book can deeply touch you at any age— from The Little Engine That Could read at 5-years-old or Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste read at 75-years-old— high school and college feel like particular windows of opportunity for life-shaping forces to enter. They certainly were for me. My heart was ripe with emotion, my mind for ideas, my soul beginning to look for clues as to what I was meant to do in this life. 

 

But can a book really change a life? What do I mean by that?

 

It starts with a sense of opening. That which was previously closed or hidden away or wrapped tight in a bud awaiting light and water to blossom is drawn out by the miracle of language and stories. At the end of such a book, you have the deep feeling that you’re not quite the same person as the one who began reading the book. You enter into the reading as a caterpillar and in the process, your cells are re-arranged and you emerge a butterfly. Once opened, you are transformed and inhabit your new shape until the next awakening. Just as no butterfly ever becomes a caterpillar again, you can’t go back to who you were. 

 

That’s the power of art. Like a book, a painting, a piece of music, a film, can also transform you in that way. You know it by a sensation of aesthetic arrest, of time stopping, of a different thickness to the moment. When you sit in the movie theater or concert hall when the show is over or close the book and feel reluctant to get up and return to the workaday world, that’s a sign that something important has just happened. That’s when art moves from entertainment to metamorphosis. It’s rare, yet essential. 

 

Emily Dickinson described it like this: 

 

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

 

Kafka like this: 

“A book must be an ax for the frozen sea within us.”

 

When a book— or a film or a piece of music or a painting— hits you in that way, you see the world with new eyes. The way you think about the world changes, the way you feel things is different. All of it points you to the next needed opening. That’s how we develop a life with meaning, shape and purpose. One awakening after another. And then you have the capacity to help awaken others —through your own writing or speaking or singing or teaching or simple presence. You embody an authentic life which invites others into their own sense of authenticity. 

 

My list of books from high school came in pairs and each was a doorway into the life I was meant to live— and with the help of blessed grace, mostly have lived. Each book posed a question and helped shape my life around trying to answer them. Amongst them: 

 

Walden (Thoreau)/ Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman) Solitude and Nature are worthy lifelong companions. How can we keep them alive in us amidst a busy, social, urban life?

 

Manchild in the Promised Land (Claude Brown)/ Autobiography of Malcolm  X: Social justice matters and turning things around begins with understanding how they got that way. How can we perpetually awaken ourselves to such understanding and help awaken others?

 

How Children Fail (John Holt)/ Summerhill (A.S. Neil): Schools can put us to sleep, are too narrow, content with simple answers using a small part of the brain. Might we also educate the body and the heart and the imagination? How can we teach the whole child using the whole of our intelligences in places that welcome our whole curiosity and give us a sense of genuine welcome, meaning and fun?

 

The Three Pillars of Zen (Philip Kapleau)/ The Wisdom of Insecurity (Alan Watts): We are not born into an original sin, but come “trailing clouds of glory” and arrive as spiritual beings. But our original Buddha nature is clouded over by ignorance and requires our attention, intention, and practice to realize. Not belief, not faith, not blind acceptance of dogma, not prayer to an omnipotent Being, not dutiful attendance at a weekly service mouthing platitudes one ignores the other six days, but the direct experience in this body, in this mind.  There is no God in Buddhism, yet God is always with us. How to experience this first-hand?

 

Travels with Charley (Steinbeck)/ Dennis the Menace Goes to Mexico

The world is large and fascinating and alive with music and food and forests and cities and sounds and sights and people wholly different from me, yet profoundly the same. How might we travel without the baggage of our known self to meet an enlarged future self?  (PS—That Dennis the Menace book was a comic book, but I believe that, along with Ricky Nelson’s song Traveling Man, a was a benevolent virus that infected me with the urge to travel and sent me to some 65 countries on every continent— except Antarctica.)

 

Listening to the other men’s choices, it struck me how many of us read the same books— and probably also saw the same films and listened to the same music. There were just so many fewer choices, but that meant that we were united by shared cultural references. Amongst those books were Catch 22, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, Zorba the Greek, the Teachings of Don Juan, books by Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse and more. 

I worry that young people don’t share the same cultural references and if they read at all, it’s more entertainment than transformation. I’ll start by asking my daughters what high school/college books influenced them.

 

Meanwhile, dear reader, what’s on your list? Have you re-read any of them? Did they hold up?

Heavenly Council

Feminist Gloria Steinem. Jazz Singer Cassandra Wilson. Poet, essayist, novelist Wendell Berry. Actor Tim Curry. Country singer-songwriter Dolly Parton. It has been a rough week in the obituary column. At a time when we need their voices— whether their heart-opening singing voices or their mind-opening speaking-out voices— they have left us to keep grappling with the evil people in power using their precious life to hurt and harm. What’s going on? 

 

If you’re of the Heavenly Afterlife club, all I can imagine is that the angels are converging emergency meetings to try to make sense of the havoc down here on our confused and chaotic planet. And they need these people’s help. I can imagine Jesse Jackson, who left us this past February, heading the committee, welcoming the new guests briefly, asking Cassandra and Dolly to lead the group in the song (with recent arrival Sonny Rollins sitting in on sax) and Wendell to share a poem and Gloria and Tim to say a few words and then saying, “Okay, let’s get down to work.” 

 

Maybe they’re hoping that the attention brought to their lives will remind us lesser mortals of what they stood for and inspire us to step forth to fill the vacancy, in our own voice and our own way. 

 

Or maybe they all just shrugged their shoulders and admitted, “We did what we could as best we could. Time for a little rest.”

 

Who knows? 

 

Meanwhile, I wonder if Mitch and Lindsay are pissed off that they have to stoke the burning fires while their criminal cohorts are still gallivanting around in ballrooms and spaceships and getting such pleasure out of bringing the planet down to its knees. I hope they’re plotting to get them all to join the fire-stoking crew and finally leave the rest of us alone to get on with the business of building a heaven on Earth. 

If so, I hope they get to it soon.

Music Jeopardy

Alongside my Friday piano play at the Jewish Home for the Aged, I’m starting to get on the circuit of other homes for the elderly— the Redwoods in Marin, the Sequoias in San Francisco and another in Portola Valley. Yesterday at the SF Sequoias, I decided to play a music Jeopardy game and wasn’t that fun! The theme was classical music used in movies or TV shows. Want to play? Well, not quite the same without hearing the music, but courtesy of Spotify and Youtube, you can listen to the piece before answering. Good luck!

 

1.    Funeral March of a Marionette was used as the opening them of this TV show. (Bonus points: Who composed it?

2.    The William Tell Overture was the theme of this TV show.. (Bonus points: what three words did the main character say at the end?)

3.    The Merry Widow Waltz played in the background of this Hitchcock thriller. (Bonus points: Where was it filmed?)

4.    La Cumparsita was the music playing when Daphne and her fiancé were dancing. (Bonus points: What did the fiancé say when Daphne revealed she was actually a man in drag?)

5.    Also Sprach Zarathustra was the opening music to this famous science fiction film. (Bonus points: What was the name of the robot?)

6.    A famous waltz was also used in the above movie. (Bonus points: Who wrote it?)

7.    Rhapsody in Blue opens this Woody Allen film. (Bonus points: What airline also uses this theme?)

8.    Sleeping Beauty Waltz was used in this Disney cartoon. (Bonus points: Who wrote it?)

 

Of course, there’s more, but this is a start. (Answers below).

 

Meanwhile, on I went to play recognizable themes and then had fun re-naming them. In revenge, American Patrol is now officially renamed Canadian Patrol, The Stars and Stripes Forever is heretofore to be called The Maple Leaf Forever and Scott Joplin’s The Maple Leaf Rag will get to keep its name in perpetuity. The Emperor’s Waltz will now be known as The No Kings Waltz. And so on. 

 

Hope you had fun playing!

 

ANSWERS

1.      The Alfred Hitchcock Hour/ Charles Gounod

2.      The Lone Ranger/ “Hi Ho Silver!”

3.      Shadow of a Doubt/ Sonoma, California

4.      Some Like It Hot/ “Nobody’s perfect.”

5.      2001: A Space Odyssey/ Hal

6.      The Blue Danube Waltz/ Johann Strauss

7.      Manhattan/ George Gershwin

8.      Sleeping Beauty (of course!)/ Peter Tchaikovsky