Rites of Spring

-- By Tom Phillips  

Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 

One problem in dealing with the world’s environmental crisis is that it’s composed of so many interrelated problems, most of them difficult to picture. Science does a lousy job of dramatizing climate change – so by the time people are forced to recognize it, their homes may be gone and their lives in danger.  And so it falls to the arts to show what business-as-usual is doing to us.  And Earth Day is an annual opportunity to seize the outdoor stage. 

Unfamiliar Quotations

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Hakuin Ekaku

Like most people I have my familiar quotations – the 23^rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer -- but I rarely use them.  I rely mainly on a small collection of private quotes, proven effective for getting through the day.  None of them shows up in a google search – these are stray quotations, scraps of poems or conversations, possibly misquoted or misattributed, but tried and true.   So here they are:

1. “Most mistakes that people make aren’t that important.”   

This was the last line of a poem, a lost poem from a defunct magazine of the 1960s, written by a teacher of mine.  The poem was about a bric-a-brac shop full of useless items.  It ended something like, "We should be grateful for these things, because they teach us / Most mistakes that people make aren’t that important.”  The author was Sheldon Zitner, professor of English at Grinnell College.  A Brooklyn native sojourning on the prairie, he later drifted north to the University of Toronto where he became known and loved as a "Canadian poet," though he was about as Canadian as an onion bagel.  When I knew him he was an intense young American poet and playwright, and a brilliant teacher of literature.  For Prof. Zitner every class was a performance – a meticulously prepared improv with students serving as props, foils, dunces, and occasionally co-teachers.   

One day he seemed to be holding forth as usual when he suddenly slammed his fist on the desk and apologized --- “I just can’t teach today.” Somehow he felt he was having an off-day, and was furious with himself.   He couldn’t abide anything less than brilliance.  The poem may have been an act of kindness to himself –- forgiveness for being less than great.  When I'm angry with myself in that way, I mumble the last line, savoring its calm rhythm, its modest internal rhyme, its soothing sentiment.  

2.    “Now is not the time to be in a great hurry.”   

This is from another beloved teacher, Zen Master Soen Nakagawa from Japan.  In the 1970s he would fly in periodically to lead intensive retreats for the Zen Studies Society, bringing wisdom and spontaneity to the often solemn and plodding practice of American Zen students.   I loved the personal interviews he would give during retreats at our Zendo in the Catskills.  His dokusan chamber was on the second floor; we would line up at the foot of the stairs, and go up one by one as he rang his little bell.  At one sesshin I had so much to say that I would tear up the stairs as if the place was on fire, making a terrible racket.  On the last day, I tore upstairs again.  But this time he sent me back, and made me walk up calmly and quietly.  “Now is not the time to be in a great hurry.”  

3.    “He knows the heart for the famished cat it is.”  

Here is another fragment of a lost poem, also from a little magazine in the 1960s.  All I remember is that one line and my image of a cat foraging in alleyways, desperate for food.  I remember this while walking the streets late at night, with my chronic recurring deficit of unmet needs, “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, with what I most enjoy contented least..”  I can’t remember who “He” is in the poem, except that he knows the heart for the famished cat it is.  That lets me know I’m not the only one, in fact we are legion.  “Everybody’s got a hungry heart,” says the pop song, but I prefer my feline image: inarticulate, driven, not just needy but desperately so, famished.      

4.  "Steer in the direction of the skid."   

This is from Driver Education in high school---what to do if your car goes out of control on ice or snow.  It was re-purposed by American Zen master Alan Watts as a way to deal with temptation.  When you feel drawn to one of the seven deadly sins, don't try to yank yourself back to the right path.  You'll just continue to skid, or spin out of control.  Instead, set out to fulfill your desires -- and you will immediately see the consequences you'd been trying to ignore.  Only then can you make a reasoned decision---to sin or not to sin. 

5.  "There is nothing in the world so beautiful as a healthy, wise old man." 
This is a Chinese proverb, from a culture that respects old age.  I've seen old men whose wizened features glowed with vitality and joy.  Sometimes I feel that way.  W.B. Yeats makes a carving of two ancient Chinese men come alive in his poem Lapis Lazuli:  "..One asks for mournful melodies;/ Accomplished fingers begin to play./ Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/ Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay."   

6.  "The highest that man can aspire to is wonder."  

 This one I remember as being from Goethe, although I can't find it in a long list of his famous lines.   Wonder is appreciating without wholly understanding -- because some things are beyond understanding.  It reminds me of Whitman's poet who walks out of a lecture by a learned astronomer and gazes "in silent wonder at the stars."  It's a simple truth, one I remember when I am baffled or overwhelmed by life, yet delighted to be alive.      

5. "What do poets do between poems?  We prepare for our death." 

This came from Gilbert Sorrentino, another Brooklyn poet from the 60s and 70s.  In my picture of it he's asked that question at a cocktail party, and gives this answer.  The radical simplicity of it -- he doesn't even mention eating, drinking, or sleeping -- feels uncompromised.

The founder of Soen’s teaching line, Hakuin Ekaku, had an even briefer, breathtaking summary.  I saw it in an exhibit if Hakuin's calligraphy at Japan Society, a one-word koan, the character for “death.”  

That's all he wrote.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips

The Strangest Dream

 -- By Tom Phillips 

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to meet our new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared enroute, probably somewhere "in security." I went to bed, prepared for the worst.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase kept echoing in my head, an anvil chorus, an indictment, a sentence imposed by a merciless court.  There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror. Trained to see people in dreams as fragments of myself, I thought -- can this be?  My meds were repressing a wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

But no, most of me was a bystander, one who watched for forty years as men took sledgehammers to a civilization -- destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.   

The Passion of George Floyd

George Floyd 

Have you ever wondered why the events of this week are known as the Passion of Jesus Christ?   I always thought the word referred to the strong emotions Jesus felt during the last days of his life. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates in Christian Theology, and its primary meaning is “the suffering of pain.. the fact of being acted upon.”

---

Most of us think of our lives as what we do. But what is done to us is probably a greater factor — all the ways we are acted upon at work or school, by the government and the media, medicine and the law, other people, the police.

Those of us with comfortable lives occasionally have a chance to act for ourselves — to do what we want, or tell others to do what we want. But for poor and marginalized people — the homeless, dispossessed, people with disabilities, those in prison — - what is done to them is nearly all of life.

The great African-American theologian Howard Thurman saw Jesus in these people — the masses who live “with their backs against the wall.” He called them the Disinherited.

Jesus was a poor, disinherited Jew — lacking status or even citizenship in the Roman Empire. His people, Israel, were surrounded and oppressed by a dominant, controlling state. Their only freedom was how they would respond.

Some — like the Temple authorities — chose the way of accommodation. They accepted Roman supremacy, and tried to live with it. Others — the Zealots — wanted to fight to restore Israel’s glory.

Jesus rejected both ways. Instead he preached a radical change in the inner attitude of people. He told his disciples to follow him, and not be afraid… of persecution, torture, even death. “Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you … for your reward is great in heaven.”

In 1949, Thurman wrote that Jesus knew: “anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny… It is a man’s reaction to things that determines the ability of others to exercise power over him ..”

Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane is the turning point from action to passion. After years of speaking truth to power, he is handed over to his enemies. Things are no longer done by him, but to him. He is tried and convicted, flogged, mocked, crowned with thorns, spat on, stripped and nailed to cross to die. This is his passion, and in his passion he fulfills his vocation — he drinks his cup.

Fast forward to our own time — to the murder of George Floyd, and the legions of disinherited people whose lives have been squandered in prison, or snuffed out by official violence. The Passion of Jesus Christ represents our power over the rulers of this world — our freedom to react and respond, as individuals and communities. Today we see the face of George Floyd painted larger than life on city walls that define the lives of the disinherited. 

That face — like the image of Christ — has become an icon.  It has the power to change the quality of our inner lives -- to transform humiliation and death into liberation and new life.

Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips