Conversations With My Father

By Dennis Herbert Green


Prologue

As I’m writing this, Christmas Day, 2005, I’m very clear about my purpose. My father died at the age of 90 two years ago this morning, “Taking,” as I said at the time, “Christmas with him.” And it’s taken me all this time to put his death into perspective, but in the meantime, I’ve had to learn a lot about his life, and my own, and the one you’re probably living too. My focus is a series of remarkable conversations we had during the last five years of his life, when he knew he was dying.

Chapter One

My father was a solitary man. A trout fly caster from Montana, he favored the Gray Hackle, store bought, as he didn’t have the patience to tie his own lures. He liked a split bamboo rod, and an old fashioned aluminum casting reel.

I can see his fishing gear clearly if I close my eyes, probably because I had to fetch and carry its components so he wouldn’t have to pull off his big hip boots. The woven reed creel, those rubber hip boots, the precious rod ‘n’ reel rig itself, the heavy, dark green fishing line, wrapped up on the reel, the nearly invisible, (soon to be so in the water), leader, knotted near the end, and the lure, it’s hook embedded in the thick coil of line to keep it from catching stray noses.

And that’s how I’ll remember him, my Dad, that silhouetted figure five hundred yards ahead of me down river, lost in his own fisherman’s mind, thoughts, no thoughts, meditations, one part of the mind, the conscious part that notices external realities, the more ordinary kinds, keeps an eye on the river, the current, the nibble, the strike, the fish, while the other brain, the subterranean mind, the primate primitive resevoir of tribal and racial and species memory, going all the way back to the beginning, Big Bang, the impacts, the etchings, the imprints, the fossils, the DNA, the archives we’re now re-building, all knowing, the entire universe of matter since the Beginning in the record, there inside the brain of the First Fisherman, and the last, and as he fishes, so does the unconscious mind review, renew its mission, the maps, the choices, the Journey.

All I know is that he taught me how to fish, something his own father had taught him. In fact, the very first time I went fishing, it was behind a beaver dam in southwestern Montana, not far from my grandfather’s homestead on the Madison River, just outside Coram, not far from Kalispell. My first expedition wasn’t even my idea. “Herbert,” said Patriarch George Green to his seventh son, “I think it’s time for the boy to go fishing.”

Chapter Two

“I never tried to tell you what to do, because I knew you wouldn’t hear it anyway. How do I know that? Yep. You’re just like me.

“Was I a nurturing father? In my own way, in my own way. I let you hang around. I let you watch me. How I did things, how to do things. We didn’t have to talk much. Nuthin’ much to say. Just a man going about his life and his kid tagging along.

“You got a lot of Fred in you. [My maternal grandfather.] He and I learned to get along, but in the beginning, it wasn’t easy. Here I was, a 26 year old, broke, fresh off a boxcar from Montana, working at a sawmill as a trash picker. Plus, turns out I was married, and got a kid. Plus, I’m divorced and on the run from a court order posted back in Kalispell. Plus, you’re French Catholic, and I want to marry your youngest daughter, LaReine, who isn’t even out of high school yet, so there!

“As you might imagine, son…it took Fred and me awhile to get things settled down a bit between us. I had a lot to prove. Marry the girl, be a decent husband and father, breadwinner. Then you were born, and that helped a lot, the way he doted on you, and I understood what he was doing, trying to confer this little Prince-of-the-DuValls status on you, his firstborn grandson. Yeah, that helped a lot, although it also set up a conflict, because your last name ain’t DuVall. And then your sister came along, and that sealed the deal. I had a new daughter. And hell, after one awful divorce and public skinning, I wasn’t about to go through that ever again. No, I was there for keeps. Besides, I love your mother. And Fred knew all that. I told him so one night we got to talking late after the women went to bed.

“Anyhow, I knew you had so much Fred in you, I’d have to get to know you the same way I got to know him. With Fred, I’d sit around sipping a beer and listening to the ball game, or a good prize fight, on the radio. Don’t have to talk much, although Fred likes to talk, still does, but you get these moments, these occasions, breaks in the action or a beer commercial, or one for Gillette razor blades, to say a word or two. Fred would tell a joke he’d heard at the jewelry store, or the bank, and we’d laugh. I’d tell a story on the boys at the sawmill, and we’d laugh. After a few years, it just got to be the most natural thing of all, and a real affection rose between us.

“If anything, sometimes they stuck up for me instead of your mom — you know, me being the wise older man with the flighty young party girl — and that didn’t really help me much at home.

“So I decided I’d do the same thing with you. I’d spend some time with you, the two of us doing one of my favorite things — in this case, fishing — and you’d either like the fishing, and me, and learn something from it, and if you did that would be fine with me and I’d see at least a little spark of me in you, which I did, and off you go. You’re part of me, enough a part of me to contend with all that Fred.”

Chapter Three

See what’s happening here? Simultaneity. As I’m writing about an extraordinary experience I had with my father during the last five years of his life, I’m also imagining that he’s looking over my shoulder, the conversations continuing from the Beyond, and he’s just being helpful, you know, but also wanting me to get his story straight. It may be his voice from beyond the grave, or merely my overactive imagination, and frankly, my dear, it doesn’t matter.

Archetypes are true in part because human behavior isn’t infinitely variable, and inevitably, certain patterns of behavior and types of personality emerge, cluster, converge and eventually get reflected in myth, symbol, masks and archetypes. My dad was the “Wounded Knight,” to borrow a chivalric character. (He was nearly killed, seriously injured and left partially crippled in a sawmill accident when I was just four.) And as his only son, I was his semi-reluctant and only choice as a successor. But I was also “too much Fred” to be any straight-forward replicant, and besides, my entire generation was charged with changing the world, and to do so we often had to do a one-eighty on our fathers’ expectations. He have to plant the seeds of decency and hope they eventually emerged, for the sake of a truly Green lineage, that is.

For he was the bearer of his own family tradition, the Seventh Son, the one who would carry the flag further from Montana than anyone else, exile and explorer both at once.

One brother, Joe, his favorite, died young in an auto accident on a dark country road, going from one Saturday night dance to another, running into the back of a stalled truck carrying metal pipe, the one pipe impaling Joe’s forehead. For years he carried Joe’s pocket watch, the hands stopped abruptly at 9:37, the time of his brother’s death. He gave it to me, eventually, and I lost it one year to a burglar.

Another brother, Charlie, helped build the Hungry Horse Dam, wrote a five-volume personal history of the Montana frontier, was married eight times, and spent most of his time chasing women. Too much Fred.

Brother Don stayed I Kalispell, had two girls and prospered, buying a second home on Flathead Lake. Brother Neil made it as far as Spokane, only to lose his son and only child, Stanley, And so forth. It was to him that the chief anointment fell.

Tomorrow, more on the meaning of fishing.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

First Fish

When my father and grandfather decided to take me on my first fishing expedition, and taught me how to fish, they were teaching me how to live — steady, with patience, and a deep attachment to the natural world The fish itself was not the point. The fish, invisible, but surely there, is like a mantra drawing the attention in upon itself until it loses its natural illusion of separation from all this. Existence. The mind opens and becomes a part of everything.

We exist then in the same moment as the fish. We share one of the five magic dimensions, and a critical one at that. The moment. We here now, can’t be anywhere, anywhen else, but good at creating illusions of this or that, me not me. First few years, we think we are the entire world, and that when we leave a room it ceases to exist; we knew better then.

For the fish has no such illusions of great uniqueness. Fish just is. Goal of fishing: just be here now, as Baba Ram Das reminded us. “How can I be in two places at once, when I’m really nowhere at all?”

Fish is anonymous. So too is the mind of the fisherman. Humble, unremarkable, old.

I remember the big willow rod, my grandfather’s. I remember snagging the fly, over and over again in the reeds and branches behind the beaver dam, until — Kerplop! — I get it, get the lure into the deeper, darker water, just behind the dam, their favorite fishing spot.
This magic glade in the Montana woods, just off a muddy old logging road, and I remember how they found it, taking a wrong turn one day.

Kerplop. And, Bang! That fish hit that fly and swallowed it right down. I didn’t even have to set the hook, but, so surprised was I, squealing like a girl, I pulled that fish out of the water and up on the bank of the pond.

It was the Holy Grail, alright. A rainbow trout, glistening in the morning sunlight, gasping for breath, lying there across my knees as I knelt there on the ground. I felt like I was glowing, like the fish, its iridescent colors still a’ shimmer in the open air of day. Everywhere I eat and I am eaten.

I was so excited, but so calm. I stared into the fish’s eye, the frantic dislocation of its senses as it felt its life force drain away in gulps, drowning on air. That baleful, subterranean eye, you see how this world goes? I see it swimmingly. Aha, Amen, Ahab. The white whale tasks me.

“Ya know,” my dad speaks up reluctantly, breaking the spell hanging over my first caught fish, “that trout is a little on the small side. About an inch under the limit. The ranger might be along. Maybe we should throw it back.”

Throw it back?!? My first trout ever? I remember looking, instinctively, imploringly, to my grandfather, big George Green.

“Nope, Herb,” he said to my Dad. “Let him keep it. You can see how excited he is, how much it means to him. I’d let him keep it, but you’re his Dad. It’s really up to you.”

I had no idea at the time what they were conferring on me, but it wasn’t just a trout.

“Okay,” my dad said finally, rubbing me gruffly on the head with his big paw, “You can keep it.” Then he looked at me appraisingly. “Son, you’ve just caught your first fish.” I remember thinking that my grandfather was pleased, both by my achievement, and by my Dad’s words. He whistled all the way back to the house, slamming that old Ford pickup of his down the rough logging road, sliding in and out of the petrified ruts from the last rain. Drove like we were all on fire. It was 1952, and I was twelve years old.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Call Me Jonah

In some deep, profound way, the sailor home from the sea is even more primal than the hunter home from the hill. When he is at sea, the sailor, the ancient mariner feels THAT enormous body of water, living, heaving, having its way with man, ever beneath him. Especially the fisherman, the angler, the diver, the harpooner, the first mate, the Captain. The Ahab. Jonah.

In the biblical tale, Jonah is trying to escape his destiny, God’s Will, to preach to the good burghers of Nineveh, and instead is running around the Mediterranean, trying to escape his fate. That Nineveh must be one tough gig.

The ship he takes flight on encounters a terrible storm, the crew casts lots and the chicken bones, or whale bones, more likely, indicate that the problem is with Jonah, and so the sailors throw him overboard, where he is swallowed by the whale. Now, the whale Himself, Leviathan, is held forth elsewhere as one of nature’s most profound mysteries, for He isn’t even really a fish, but somehow closer to us on the great chain of being, a mammal who suckles its young.

And yet, profoundly non-human, remote, subterranean, a total mystery. What does a whale dream of? Anyway, He is an instrument of the mystique, of the supernatural, of a world so alien to man that we can no more comprehend His will or nature than we can be confident we know the will of God.

The Internet is like that, like the ocean depths. Vast, fathomless, swarming with life forms of all kinds, and itself containing, ultimately, the universe itself, not to mention the human unconscious. We fish it at our peril, to some degree.

When Jonah is finally vomited up on land, he finds himself in Nineveh. What do you know? His purpose here is inescapable, it would seem, and is at some danger until he devotes himself single-mindedly to getting his task successfully completed. If it were my task to preach to Nineveh, I would be hard-pressed to refuse.

In fact, when I was in my twenties and teaching as a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara Campus, I thought I’d found my calling. Well, drifted into it, more like. I had earned my Master’s Degree in English Lit, and was working on a PhD and writing my thesis on Ezra Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry and the Confucian Odes. I thought my calling, my purpose, was to teach the impressionable youngsters who came my way in classrooms, which I did manfully for nearly ten years, and had during that time an enormous influence on many a fresh-faced freshman student, and even an out-of-state senior transfer or two.

But I was wrong. A painful divorce in 1968 put an end to that career, and gave birth to another, closer to home and where my heart is, as a writer. After June of 1973, I earned my living with my writing, and devoted all my ambition to getting better at the craft, and finding wider venues to apply my talents.
I said to myself, “Self, you’re a helluva lot better writer than most of these kids will ever be. Why not stop teaching them how to write and see if you can make a living with your words. Der reste ist history, as they say. No regrets.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Fishin' the Mad with M'Dad

After that Montana initiation into trout fishing in America, I went fishing often with my Dad, on the Mad River near Blue Lake, California, eight miles east of Arcata. The Mad at that point had begun to widen for its rush to the sea, a few miles short of the rich delta farmland known as the Arcata Bottoms.

I’ve done a lot of hiking and camping further up the Mad, off Kneeland Peak, near Cable Bridge, and there, it’s a maniac, a crazy old prospector gone nuts over elevation. It leaps and bounds about between huge granite boulders and rocky cliffsides, plunging down, down, down the mountain slopes and foothills, tearing the heads off frogs and tossing trout in the air.

But near Blue Lake, the river pacifies itself, sliding lazily under railroad bridges and past Highway 99 and its parade of logging and lumber trucks, white-knuckled tourists and locals driving home at night from one of the many bars, saloons and road houses that line the streets and highway. Places like the M&M Club, adjacent to Dad’s sawmill, where he often stopped by after work for a boiler maker or two, a game of shuffleboard or pool, or listen to some songs on the jukebox. Those mill workers could put them away.

Sometimes, after getting off work at 4:30 on a lazy summer day, Dad would pull his gear and tackle out of the trunk of the work car and cast a few flies just below the mill. But we tended to go trout fishing on Saturdays, in the early morning, occasionally in late afternoon, parking the old car on a flat spot overlooking the river, and climbing down a path that descended the face of the embankment.

I got the hang of fishing right away, but the knack of keeping up with my Dad, I never mastered. He was always at least 40 yards further downriver than I was, sometimes a hundred yards or more. He would wade right into a pool, flick that Gray Hackle, once, twice, and move on. I spent most of my time scrambling over the rocky shoreline in my Keds. But just being out there on the river…”Hey, Dad! Wait up!”

There were also narrow rapids, channeling ‘round upon themselves into deep, contemplative pools. A pool, there, deep and dark like an eye cut into the rock, spills and swirls behind a log. Another courses between three boulders. There, in the eye of the still water, lurks the trout. One, sometimes more, but this day only one that counts, he one you’re going to catch. Every trout fisherman is after that trout.

Today, there is only one trout in this river, and I’m gonna catch him.

For you soon learn that this dance you do with the trout is an act of rivalry, beyond mere predatory survival. It is the prized and the obsessed, circling each other, in the most ancient dance of awe there is. Will you outlive me? Or, will I outlive you.

Everywhere I eat, and I am eaten.

Water cunning vs. the cunning of a critter that lives above water and above ground. The cunning of the fish may be greater, for the fish has already escaped a thousand death threats, from egg to grub to adult trout, water temperature and pollution, not to mention the hawks and owls and big brown bears, raccoons and Boy Scouts with fishing poles tucked up in their backpacks. The striking, stalking, whispered death threat, a promise yet, barely undelivered.

And yet, each death that doesn’t take, the fish becomes more cunning. Or is it that the quick and cunning always survive, from the proper birth to the proper end?

And then, when I least expect it, the fish strikes. Is it whim or calculation? Instinct or bold decisiveness? By now I’m using the Super-Duper lure, which in my hands is lethal, and a new-fangled spinning rod. I’d learned a thing or two from my peers about up-to-date fishing gear, boy. But of course my Dad just snorted. His bamboo pole and casting reel and Gray Hackle were still pulling in three fish for every one of mine — and his were plumper, juicier and more crispy fried up by Mom for dinner.

But my trout now, the only fish in the whole damned river, has just hit the lure, and I get that solid shock up my arm and through my entire being. We connect. We hold. We stick. Solidly. And all I have to do is play my line around that snag there, out from under that boulder, and into my world, the world of oxygen and sunlight and empty, thin air.

This one is mine. Twelve inches at least, maybe fourteen. Be good eatin’. I can’t help but notice his struggle, and give it more than a passing thought. The gasping for breath, the flopping, that baleful eye that says, Look what you’ve done to me. I hide him away in my creel, which, after the last feeble flop of the trout, I lower into the river so my catch won’t dry out.

Hey, I can’t help it. I’m human. I’m animal. I’m life. I’m a predator.

And that’s my Dad’s great secret. You just do what you have to do to live a decent life. You get over on yourself. That’s of course also the problem. If I were only my Dad, just like him and nothing more, that native stoicism that served him so well might have saved my ass some bacon now and then. Too much Fred.

His stoicism resembled nothing so much as Zen austerity, a determination to accept the inevitable instead of flopping around at the slightest threat. So austere it contained no real principles, just that heartfelt conviction, and that’s the wrong language, call it something more like simple awareness that life is the way it is. No speculation about how it might be, or even s’posed to be. Oh, he didn’t think the world was perfect, and he railed against injustice, and the govt., all the time. But he was also aware somehow that it was what it was, and that it was important not to bullshit yourself otherwise. Big part of surviving.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Green Family Values

Don’t you get tired of thinking about your family? It’s enough to make you nuts, all the little quirks and foibles, the ancient, and usually petty resentments, the dynamics running like sharks just below the surface. Or not.

ll happy families are the same. Only the dysfunctional families are all different.

And as a friend of mine once said, “It’s the one you don’t talk about, or even think about very much. The parent you take for granted, or who is a complete mystery to you. That’s the one you’re carrying around inside uncomfortably.”

I’d always focused on my Mom, and her family, or at least her Dad, my granpa Fred. He was a scrawny little bird-like man, but he was way much larger than life. He was full of piss and vinegar, as they say. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, of French-Canadian, (and rumored Cajun), stock, he remembered meeting Mark Twain when he was a boy of 12, when the great man came back that one time to re-visit his old home town. He pushed through the crowd, Fred did, and shook Twain’s hand, and never forgot the “bright white suit” Twain was wearing.

I remember an old photo of Fred, a double exposure with Fred sitting on both sides of a card table playing five card stud with himself. He’s about 19 or 20, wearing a fancy, three-piece suit with subtle plaids in the fabric, his legs crossed, his feet swathed in high button shoes and spats. His dark hair is slicked back, and he looks like a riverboat gambler. The mere existence of the photo, let alone its conceit, reveals a lot about the man and his sense of self-irony. At the same time, he’s quite a dandy dude in his finery. A typical DuVall, that French aristocracy from the northern province of Normandy, he simply never doubted his self-worth.

And I was the first born grandson, so it was natural that he took me under his special, protective wing, told me the stories he’d heard from the descendents of Crazy Horse, the Lakota survivors of the Little Big Horn, turned me on to baseball, prize fights on the radio, the harmonica, country songs, picking cherries, motorcycle races, cemeteries, Hollywood Wrestling, and the joys of life. But especially, he taught me a saucy insouciance that served him well, and has gotten me in trouble more times than I can remember.

He was my first mentor, and more than that, the Warrior Teacher who took me and taught me how to be tough and how to be tender, how to dance and sing, how to fight for what I believed in, how to speak up sometimes and say the one thing that must be said that no one else in the room will say, precisely because I’m aristocracy and I don’t have to give a shit.

But I’m not DuVall. I’m a Green, the Green Man, and that is my primary path. I have a cousin somewhere, Kermit or Robin, who will have to carry the DuVall flag into battle on the Astral Plane.

My father was more modest. One of his grandfathers, I believe, was a Methodist minister. They were British, or was it Irish from County Tipperary, Protestants in the midst of all those Celtic Catholic disciples of old Saint Paddy. Came across the border from Canada, settled in the Kalispell Valley on the edge of what was to become Glacier National Park.

So I’m the Green Man, and it’s about time I came to appreciate just what that means. For most of my life, I’d convinced myself that I didn’t even know my father, let alone have a seed of pure veneration for him, even love (!), just within reach. Ha! Thought never crossed my mind. He was “inaccessible.” He was “Still waters run deep, (so don’t disturb them.)” He was “clinically depressed” or “all bottled up” or “traumatized by life.”

The real problem was that he never bothered to explain himself. In all those years, I never once heard him refer to any “operating principle” or code to live by, or one he could use to justify, or feel guilty about, his actions.

It’s taken me sixty-five years to get it, to figure him out. Oh, well, as Dad might say, “Better late than never, son.”

It wasn’t a philosophy or code of the west or anything like that, but the stoicism that arises naturally from continuous adversarial circumstances, (like 16-foot snowdrifts to dig through in winter just to get to the barn), and having, perfecting, improving, mastering your personal resources, your inner strengths, to overcome all these adversities.

The biggest adversity of all is a terminal illness, and for the last half dozen years or so of my father’s life, he knew he was dying. He suffered a dozen critical illnesses over the years, but it was a lung disease, related to emphysema, that did him in. For those last 5-6 years, he sounded as if he were drowning, gasping for breath like one of those beached trout of his. There was speculation that the years of inhaled sawdust was a factor, and the work he did in Eugene at the sand and gravel plant. Smoking Camel unfiltered cigarettes probably didn’t help.

His death, in short, was painful, a horrible lingering, awful, drawn-out dying. And when he died, my first impulse was relief for him and an end to his suffering. Of course, I didn’t want to face what his passing away really meant to me, and so I focused on the merciful aspects of it all.

But during his dying, I realize now, my father had a lot of time to think, and feel, and remember, maybe to figure out a bit of what his own life had been all about, the early joys of growing up in the Montana wilderness, the first love, the disappointments, the second chance and his determination to make the most of it with my mother. The sawmill accident and its aftermath, what it did to his ego, the sense of being ever after, damaged goods. A freak. An accident of nature. A crippled man who had to stifle a crippled song.

But he also achieved satori lying there dying. I could hear it in his voice when he began, this man who’d never dialed my number, telephone calls to me in the mornings, while mom was on her walk, I could hear the equanimity, the perfect peace he’d found, with himself, with my mom, with life itself. A separate peace, but one he wanted to share with me. He had, you see, a mission, and he was subtle enough to sneak it by all my many defenses, and believe me, my detection and defense systems put Starship Enterprise to shame.

He found a balance inside himself that is much to be wished for, and rarely granted. He reached a point where his whole life fit together, made perfect sense, and was of obvious worth and value, worth the candle, the pain, the sacrifice, the suffering, those pangs of guilt, the wear and tear, the tumble, and he could see the value for himself, no bullshit, no religion, no ministers, no priests.

And in that spiritual, mental, emotional state of perfect peace, the last five years, he started calling me every few weeks, or months, and we’d talk and talk, and laugh, about inconsequential things. Just “visit.” He’d tell me some story about one of his cronies, and we’d laugh. I’d tell him some outrageous thing I was going through down here in Alameda, and we’d laugh. I’d tell him a joke. We’d laugh.

Nobody breathed a word about how extraordinary this was. We’d never talked like this in person. He’d never called. I had maybe two letters he’d written me in his entire life, and they were all less than half a page long, in his careful script. Once he’d written to tell me he wished he’d been a better father, more outgoing to me, but that his crippled arm had left him feeling withdrawn so deep inside himself he couldn’t reach the surface. But these conversations were extraordinary, because they were so ordinary. So natural, at ease, relaxed. You’d think we’d known each other all our lives…

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

The Obvious Man

There is a village in Africa where the tribal elders perform a healing ritual designed to get the next villager off to the right start. While the child is still in the womb, the elders gather around and inquire, “Who are you? What are you coming here for? How can we help you?” The unborn child replies, and from that moment on, the chief responsibility of the tribal elders is to hold the new human being to that purpose. We all come into this world with a purpose, these people believe, and if it is frustrated, unwelcome or denied, we will suffer from various illnesses and misfortune until we get clearly back on the path to its achievement.

I was teaching Camus at the University, to several classes of freshmen, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” to be exact. In it, Camus starts with the notion that in modern times, nothing is certain, everything is in flux, we live in an age, not of absolute, but relative values and truths, and that this changes everything. His philosophy is called, “The Absurd,” because he feels there is no objective meaning, nothing makes any sense, and the rules are all up for grabs. Humanistic secularism if I ever saw it.

One of my students, a tall, dark-haired young boy, had been educated by Jesuits, and appeared to have a hot line still to the rectory. Every class meeting we spent on Camus, he brought in one sort of rebuttal or another, and I began to learn how seriously the Jesuits had taken the 20th Century crisis of faith that had swept the developed western cultures. One of the more memorable arguments was their concept of “The Obvious Man,” who doesn’t have to question life, or the universe, or existence, because it’s so OBVIOUS after all. Well, duh!

Life is long and hard. Well, duh. The wind blew and the shit flew and we couldn’t see for a day or two. You don’t say. Some people live better than others. Now, how could it be otherwise? The obvious man doesn’t have to question which way the wind blows; he wets a finger and holds it up. What do you believe in? I believe in every breath I take. And that was Mr. Dylan, obviously an obvious man.

I gave the kid an “A” for he deserved it. Gave me a great run for my money.

My grandfather Green pulled my Dad out of school at the end of the 8th grade to work in his sawmill. It was the only sawmill in the valley, and many a barn or shed or cabin got built from the lumber it produced. But my Dad wound up feeling a little inferior with so little schooling, for after all, my Mom graduated high school. In those days, you wanted the daughters to get as much education as possible, for it would be their only fallback if they didn’t find a man. Or so the mythology went.

So both my Dad’s sisters went to college, teaching college, to be sure, but a higher education nonetheless.

So my Dad didn’t think he was very smart, or not in that league at all, the well-educated, the intellectuals, the reflective, contemplative types. He rarely joined in any rarified conversations about the imponderable aspects of life. Oh, he had opinions, as we all do, but often didn’t regard them as worth expressing, and when he did, there was a passionate diffidence in his voice suggesting that although he was letting himself get all riled up, none of this would matter in the morning. I never noticed that he always had his nose in the newspaper, or a book. Swore when I was born that I would go to college, and that, on his sacred honor, I would never work in a sawmill. (And it almost killed him one summer when I did.) And then, one of the first things he did when he retired was to serve as president of the Eureka AARP several terms, A rowdy bunch, I’m sure.

And my estimation of his personal powers of persuasion and leadership went through the roof.

What do you know? My father was the obvious man for the job. My father was an obvious man.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

The Wabi-Sabi of It All

“Sometimes achieving perfection robs you of all character.” Philosophy 1-A? Nope, this comment comes from a plastic surgeon, commenting on the actress Jennifer Gray, (“Baby” in “Dirty Dancing”), who got a nose job which ruined her career.

How very Wabi-Sabi. It’s a Japanese philosophy of aesthetics and useful beauty that glorifies, if that’s the word, in simplicity, incompleteness, imperfection and irregularity. Started in the tradition of the tea ceremony, as a rebellion against an over-refined elegance introduced from India to the Chinese and then to Japan. Rikyu, the ceramicist, was one of its chief proponents. It was sort of like the Craftsman Movement in America and England, the architectural revolt against Victorian filigree. But it also applies, besides its relevance to tea implements and décor — to people.

Ah! The Perfectibility of Man! The perfectibility of the Ford Motor Car! God, what a dreary theme.

If our destiny is aging, decay and death, then setting ourselves up for an arc to perfection is at best an unrealistic goal, wouldn’t you say?

Always live in a house that’s older than you are.

The real “spiritual values” of Wabi-Sabi, as related by author Leonard Koren, called, “The Lessons of the Universe,” are these:

1. Truth comes from the observation of nature.
We’re all scientists and researchers.

2. All things are impermanent.
Well, duh, but we knew that all along, and never got what it means.

3. All things are imperfect.
Starting with our lovely selves.

4. All things are incomplete.
The universe is unfinished business.

Corollary One: “Greatness” consists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details.
Corollary Two: Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness.

As you can see, the framework for being merely human is all there, and in the land of the rising sun, no less! There’s a part of me that’s always been a little Zen bum, so this stuff all feels quite familiar.

More later.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

They'll Still Be Dead in the Morning

The Dude abides.

And yet, of all people I certainly don’t pretend to have a fix on death and dying. Maybe something lingers. Maybe there’s another side. Maybe something lives on in a different form, in a different dimension. Maybe something returns. I honestly don’t know.

But I think I’ve had some spirits linger. Granpa Fred, a couple dear friends, a wife, and now my father. Caught occasional glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye. Felt them looking over my shoulder. But as I’ve said here before, I have a really active imagination.

All I know clearly is that death, I’m sure, ‘brings on many changes’ as the old song goes. I look forward to it, dying, all in its own good time. “I swore that if I were to drink from the cup/I would drink it to the lees,” sings Robinson Jeffers in, “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones.” I must wear mine.

Mostly, I know, death frees us up to take our personal energy and anti-matter somewhere else. And no, I don’t believe in eternal rest, as least as a reward. If any kind of heaven does exist, it better be Wabi-Sabi, or it’s going to bore the living hell out of me.

But I can riff on Thanatos with the best of them. Yes, I think we humans have a death wish. Having self-destructive thoughts and feelings may even be merely human, and no doubt ranges from the pipsqueak voice of the Imp of Perversity, to the howling of the Serial Killing Pervert Maniac, who destroys himself even as he hacks apart his victims.

Try and keep your self-destructive impulses to a dull roar. That takes effort. You have to work real hard — not to be pissed off, or anxious, all the time. Not to be so addicted to TV or food or money that you become one-dimensional. And finally, annihilate that voice of superiority inside your head, even if you’re the smartest, richest, sexiest, most powerful and influential and wealthy guy in the room.

As for me, I’m at peace already, and ready to go anytime. For the final word on death, I like Mr. Yeats' epitaph:

"Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!"


©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Mind Games

Mind games. We all used to play mind games, and then we noticed ourselves doing that, and how smarmy and unsavory it is, and so we couldn’t do it anymore, and then we stopped. John Lennon even immortalized the phrase on vinyl. Remember any of this?

What is a “mind game”? Where does that phrase come from? Well the phrase itself comes from, not so much “game theory,” as a book called, “Games People Play,” the sociological epic by Eric Berne. His theory even became the basis for “Transactional Analysis,” something my psych major spouse calls “pop psychology.” Whatever. “Games People Play” is also a seminal work — theorizing that we all learn to fit into the society we live in in part by learning “scripts” common to particular interpersonal situations, a common sequence of statement and response that often governs the outcome of navigating tricky social situations, where there may be some doubt about where the real power resides.

Such negotiations can reveal power, enhance it, or diminish it.

We become, all of us, particularly adept at manipulating weaker members of the pack using only certain verbal, and hence emotional, cues.

People loaded on grass or acid or any other psychedelic substance usually notices such social interactions, and their undercurrents, and apparently, some of them were sociologists.

Does having an acute perception of reality mean you’re crazy? Can it make you crazy?

So, “mind games” began to be used in pop culture and social situations to refer to the obvious, and the more subtle, even psychic variations on this phenom.

Let me give you an example of a mind game. It’s called “Uproar.” It’s usually initiated by an evil sister-in-law, for example, or a supervisor who is in truth a petty tyrant. That person creates an uproar in an office or a family situation, suppose. Some emergency or deadline or tragic circumstance or conflict that isn’t real, an arbitrary delivery date, say, that has everybody working overtime — of the burned edges of the Thanksgiving turkey. Apocalyptic moments, life hanging in the balance, a BFD.

And then, once Ms. or Mr. Uproar has gotten your attention, sucked all the air out of the room, made you dance, made you sweat, made you duck and weave, and then, the situation gets resolved. Sometime magically. The turkey is only scorched; it isn’t burned! The client gives you another week to get that brochure to their mailing house. Sometimes, with one phone call, it evaporates. But in the meantime, Uproar has proved his or her point. See how much power I have? Over you.

Sound familiar?

Another game you may have played is called, “Ain’t It Awful!” and it is practiced most commonly by older and curmudgeonly people or prematurely matronly school marm types, complaining endlessly about how terrible world events are, and the neighbors, and their family and friends, and generally getting everybody so good and depressed, and then walking from the room whistling “Dixie.” A rampant Super-Ego know-it-all.

So anyhow, recognizing a mind game can be a very useful skill to cultivate, my son. It goes well beyond the sheerly critical capabilities the handy dandy daily bullshit detector gives you, because the Gamester can reveal family dynamics, institutional politics and even the motivation behind social movements, not to mention govt. policy and the propaganda required to sell it to us, the ever-gullible public.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Perfect Pictures

I’m a triple Virgo. Sun in Virgo, Moon in Virgo, Virgo Rising. Yikes. As anyone will tell you, we Virgos can be relentless perfectionists, demanding, overbearing, imposing our will and expectations on other people left and right. And that’s on our good days.

In fact, if I hadn’t spent a few years back there as an unrepentant, laid-back Hippie living on an avocado ranch, I’d be impossible to live with. As it is, I can come perilously close.

But as a lapsed Catholic, I’ve always known I had a lot of baggage to carry, and I’ve done my best to jettison as much of it as I can, using the many New Age resources that flow from the coming of Buddhism to the West, an event which even Toynbee noted as the most influential cultural infusion since America’s founding. I’ve practiced meditation since 1967, and T’ai Chi for the past eight years, and along the way lots of stress reduction and mindfulness classes, just for fun, seeking to level out my perspective.

Five heart attacks and quad by-pass surgery intensify the motivation to reduce the stress of daily living.

I took a yoga class back in the early Eighties, from a guy named Donovan who taught classes out of his little cottage in Oakland just off Telegraph, and at Mills College up Macarthur Blvd. He made a lot of sense, and besides the postures did a lot of work with us on visualization theory, moving our minds around. Donovan did a lot of work with what he called “Perfect Pictures,” our notions of the way things s’posed to be.

Once he convinced us that our notions and opinions were worth just about as much as the next guy’s, and hardly worth prosteletizing to the savages, we felt a little silly even harboring such thoughts, let alone pushing other people to see the world exactly the way we did, a task better left to the Pope.

He began with the thesis that we are all players in an elaborate social game, without quite knowing the rules, the board and the other pieces. We’re not even sure of our own. And we are like little cornfields, sewn with seeds of images of the reality that the other players want us to see, absorb and conform to. We are intended to rely on this information when we make our choices, usually in a highly-charged context of universal and absolute morality.

As often as not, we are threatened with dire consequences should we stray. “If you do THAT, you’ll go blind!” And of course, when the more bold among us experiment, do that forbidden thing, and don’t go blind, we begin to distrust the entire matrix of meaning. It is unreliable in predicting consequences, and therefore useless to the pragmatic person who prefers a reality that is so authentic it actually works.

These notions come to formulate our own value system, but it may not be “ours” at all. It may be untested. It may not even serve our purpose if it does work for someone else. If the pictures in that value system are images of perfection, chances are it’s working against us.

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

Take marriage, for example. The magic transformation most virgins seek. The perfect man. The perfect courtship, the perfect engagement, perfect wedding, perfect reception, the perfect wedding night and honeymoon, and they lived happily ever after. As if.

And then he or she spends the rest of his or her life in frustration when the expected spousal changes are slow or never in coming, disappointment, resentment, even bitterness — if those perfect expectations don’t match up with the reality. Without a lot of stress and strain and nagging and pretense, that is. A shaky house of cards, indeed.

So, Donovan says, get rid of your perfect pictures before they bring you down. Say goodbye nicely, because they’ve been such a part of you so long, their departure’s gonna hurt. Blow a rose or use the pink balloon.

Visualize the perfect picture — say that bride and groom on top of the wedding cake — perfect love — and now let it turn into a big red rose hanging in midair about six inches before your closed eyes. The rose has a long green stem that reaches all the way to the center of the Earth. Take a deep breath, and blow out the rose as if it is a flame. It will collapse in upon itself.

Or put the perfect picture inside a pink, helium-filled balloon, and just let it float off into space until it vanishes. Let it go where it will. Trust that if it isn’t yours, and doesn’t help you live and achieve your purpose, it wasn’t yours to begin with. Imagine all this happening, as you are sitting quietly with your eyes closed.

“A broken heart is cumbersome baggage.”

Why get rid of perfect pictures? If you see things clearly, you’ll be better at dealing with them, like your marriage, pal.

Perfect pictures just get in the way.


©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Destiny Rides Again

Destiny. Predestination. Fate. A meaning, a purpose, a process, a direction, to one’s life. One of the deepest mysteries of human existence. Do we have free will? Or are we prisoners of our instincts and conditioning?

The old nurture/nature debate continues, of course, and will never be finished or resolved. More and more evidence emerges from the studies of brain chemistry, learning, recall, memory, imprinting, DNA and other determinant biological and chemical influences to suggest that our range of choice is somewhat limited by natural necessity. Such instincts as fight or flight are so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that they are as autonomous as breathing. The release of chemicals in our brains and bloodstreams, some that are helpful, or were at an earlier stage of development, like adrenalin, and which can now be, in the absence of real danger and strenuous effort to escape or defeat it, self-destructive.

There’s also something antagonistic in the very notion of limited choices, something repugnant to the human spirit, to believe that our actions are hemmed in, controlled by unseen forces, or futile.

So along comes nurture. Surely the influence of homelife, parents, siblings, extended family, neighbors, the community, teachers, leaders and people we admire can have a major influence on how we grow, how we turn out, what we value, what we enjoy, what we despise or are annoyed by..?

Well, what Freud and others teach us is that we are virtually programmed by these experiences, by the lessons of life. That they also become lurking, buried, unseen forces pushing us this way and that, pushing our buttons, determining how we see the world and feel about it, what we do, who we marry, where we work, how we succeed or fail at the everyday, when we sicken, how we die. Few of us can examine our own programming without smiling with chagrin. The best laid plans of mice and men, indeed!

So where is it hiding, this phantasm of Free Will? What does it mean to be free? Free of violent suppression? The police state? Free to speak our minds, free to choose our destinations, free to acquire wealth, and long before that the resources to obtain it. But free of inhibitions? Free of shame? Free of pressure and expectations? Free of the yoke of existence itself, this too, too solid flesh?

No, I’m afraid the harder we look for it, the more it scoots away. The more we examine our freedom, the more ephemeral it appears. Perhaps the drive to free ourselves from various entanglements, social, emotional, physical limitations — the arc of flight — comes so powerfully into our lives precisely because we sense how much we are truly hemmed in.

But it’s that urge, or demi-urge, which makes us human. Aspiration. It might be tiny, a gleam in a boy’s eye when a pretty girl walks by. Granma saving up to buy a new radio for the kitchen table. A steel worker teaching himself how to read.

We love routine. We don’t like change, for the most part, especially after we turn thirty. Spare me your surprises, we plead with the Void. Give me ten minutes of boring.
But we chafe against the boredom. We re-assert ourselves, re-invent ourselves, get divorced, get married, have a kid, buy a house, take a job on the other side of the country. We stretch our tethers, pretending they aren’t even there. But as the old saying goes, “Everywhere you go, there you are.”

I think it was Baba Ram Das who wrote something about, in “Be Here Now,” like “From God’s point of view, everything is determined, all laid out, all known, from the back end to the beginning. But from the point of view of the individual, nothing is fated, nothing is revealed, nothing is known before it happens.” For God substitute the Great Computer, the Universe, the Void, The Process, or Mr. Happy. I don’t care.

All I know is that the interplay between the given and the chosen is an incredibly complicated dance. It’s like a sand painting, this life, and the minute it’s finished, the grains of sand all get swept away, but as the design of it emerges, (nothing so simplistic as an “intelligent design”), and maybe it’s a Mandela, maybe it’s a picture of Donald Duck. But it’s ours, and maybe we saw it coming, lined up there in heaven waiting to be born. Maybe it’s the one we pulled out of the art drawer. “Gee, this one hasn’t been done in a thousand years. Last time, it was a shoemaker in Prague.”

“What a joy to be human! To be born a human being! How rare it is!”

So why would a little soul choose a body plagued by kidney stones? Or a drinking problem, or an inability to get along with other people? Or, especially, that corner apartment in the high-rise ghetto in Detroit? Or in the midst of famine, plague and civil war?

Perhaps we like a challenge.

After all, it’s one thing to succeed in America if you’re born to the manor proud, and quite another to pull yourself up from obscurity, grinding poverty, adversity, violence, distress, hopelessness and constant fear. Many a custodian has every right to a feeling of self-worth, achievement, even triumph, sometimes more so than the CEO.

But what about injustice, you say? How could a child possibly deserve, or choose, to die of starvation and Malaria in Darfur? Why do bad things happen to good people? And even worse, why do good things happen to assholes? It’s never been much consolation to me, personally, but I can understand an angle at which “God moves in mysterious ways,” just might make perfect sense, with that same caveat about the name of it, the Ultimate Field of Being.

It could also be that only the truly strong survive such adversity, in spirit if not in the flesh. We have no idea what it does to the inner life to suffer, unless we’ve suffered, and while it may not be required of all souls, the fire, sometimes maybe it is. When someone tells us that the meek shall inherit the earth, why do we assume that the meek are the Poor? The truly meek may inhabit the Temple, and Nob Hill, and Burlingame and the Vineyard, or the Bahamas. The bold and the reckless business tycoon may be cowering behind his piles of gold, so let’s not confuse courage with ambition.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

You're On Your Own, Pal!

“People are buried, people decay, in their own separate cities.”

And, yes, while we are all part of the great tapestry of existence, and connected in many ways, the dominant paradigm in the life of any one person is this: Ultimately, we’re on our own. If we want to change the world, we have to start with ourselves, modeling the sort of behavior we would like to see in other people.

If you don’t want other people to judge you, don’t judge them. It’s as simple, and as impossible, as that.

“Hope for the best, expect the worst, and you won’t be disappointed.”

But pessimism is such a drag. It’s hard work, never trusting anybody. Kinda difficult to get a creative, productive collaboration going with someone you distrust, like marriage, a business, joint ownership of property, a political party or movement, even an artists’ colony.

At some point, too, we are not our brother’s keeper. If we prop him up, in fact, we weaken his own resources. Nevertheless, we feel a fundamental obligation to practice hospitality, to comfort the poor, to sucker those in misery, even to share our wealth. Whether these impulses are heartfelt, or the product of our socialization, remains to be seen. But that’s just part of the complexity of how things fit together.

In one sense, while we can help other people reach their goals and even achieve their purpose in life, we have quite enough reconstruction to do on ourselves, thank you very much. For that reason alone, we should follow the proverb: Mind your own business. But very few of us do. It’s far more fun to gossip about the foibles and shortcomings of others than to examine ourselves in the mirror. But everything starts at home — revolution, repression, fear, hatred, envy, distrust, scorn, prejudice, racism, violence, murder and war.

In one sense, we can’t assume responsibility for another person’s journey down this path. The child will take that first step on his own, make his own mistakes, learn his own lessons, go by trial and error, correct his ways a hundred times before the reforms take hold, and still mess up his life. He will be miserable sometimes, be wracked by guilt or sorrow, be destroyed by love. He will know failure, and disappointment and loss.

If you’ve ever had a dear friend spiral out of control, in some addiction or other obsession, and done everything you could think of to help him pull out of it, and failed, you know the limits of togetherness. We may all be in this same boat together, but some of us get seasick, some of us fall overboard, and some do not. Ultimately, we all of us have to find our own way.

And I’m reassured by that, I’ll tell you. I have enough to do keeping my family together without having to save your marriage too. I love my solitude, and I can learn to regulate my own behavior quite nicely, thank you very much. And you! In that greenhouse! Before you pick up that stone…

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

How I Became a Writer

Writing isn’t a profession, it’s a calling. It takes a story teller, to begin with, and though most of us tell stories, we don’t spend all day in a room alone, at the keyboard or with pen and paper, scribbling them down. The writer is a monk of sorts, a hermit, a loner, an isolated, solitary human. He or she positively feeds on solitude.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid, and have made my living with my writing now for over thirty years. I’ve written everything from novels and short stories and poems to ad copy, storyboards for TV spots, radio commercials, annual reports, brochures, newsletters, press releases, teasers, speeches, presentations, sales kits, fact sheets, newspaper columns, articles, country songs, bumper stickers, blogs and squibs.

But I’d forgotten what prompted all this activity, who delivered the Call to me, until just the other night, or rather very early morning hours, when I saw on TV the old Technicolor classic, “Hans Christian Anderson,” starring Danny Kaye, story by Moss Hart, directed by King Vidor, 1952. An unlikely mentor, ol’ Danny, who sings “Everywhere I Wander” and “No Two People Have Ever Been So In Love!”

A little too homely, with that schnoz, to be a movie star, let alone a romantic leading man, although he attempted the role whenever he could, Kaye was a comic, a mugger, a dancer, a whirlwind of silliness who never quite got off the ground. One of my former wives once worked in a camera store in Westwood, L.A., where he shopped, and she confided in me that he was not always a very nice man.

Nevertheless, he did the trick. In a stripped down, stagey, thoroughly corny faux-bio of the Danish storyteller’s life, the movie features a critical scene where Hans’ first published story comes about, “The Ugly Duckling.” Hans comes upon a shy and homely little boy, and tells him about the ugly duckling that grew up to be a swan. In the movie, the boy’s father, who owns a newspaper, prints the little story on the front page, below the fold, but prominent enough. Hans announces excitedly to his young friend, “I’m a writer! I’m a writer!” Now, I was twelve years old, had no idea what it meant to be a writer, but if it made Hans Christian Anderson that happy, maybe being a writer was worth a look.

He moves up the social ladder, has “The Little Mermaid” staged, and gets the pretty girl, as if I needed any added incentive. It’s a corny story, alright, with this humble cobbler turned published writer and acclaimed national treasure, but it moved me when I was twelve, and I felt an echo as I watched it again recently, fifty-three years later. I remember how, after I saw that movie, I went out and bought a little toy printing press, really just a big rubber drum with slots in it to hold the lines of letters, but for a toy, it produced a pretty decent page of print.

We lived in house in the middle of a neighborhood in Eureka called “Henderson Center,” one of those clusters of the essential retail storefronts — a grocery, a liquor store, hardware store, record store, drug store, hair salon, bank branch, camera shop, wallpaper and paints, a drive-in fast food joint and a deli. I went around the neighborhood interviewing people for little tidbits, some gossip, biz news, even got a quote from the Catholic priest at the little chapel nearby. We were three miles from downtown, and the Center served most of our needs.

I even assigned myself a title, and, finding “editor” a little weak in the knees, called myself simply, “Dennis Green, Boy Genius.” Modest to a fault, even then. And I left copies of my little “Henderson Center News” on people’s doorsteps and car windshields, and got a call from the Daughters of the American Revolution with an offer to enter a speech contest they sponsored, which I won, along with a scholarship that helped with schooling. But most importantly, I discovered that plunging ahead on my own was fun, rewarding and left a deep sense of satisfaction behind. I spent the entire summer as a journalist.

Many years later, at my 20th high school graduation class reunion, one of my old classmates, the son of the town mortician, greeted me at the doorway of the ballroom in the old Eureka Inn, “Why it’s Dennis Green! Boy Genius!” We had a good, long laugh. And I probably don’t have to tell you, but I will anyway, that my favorite story by Hans Christian Anderson isn’t “The Little Mermaid,” but rather that barnyard epic, “The Ugly Duckling.”

©2006 Dennis Herbert Green

The Love of a Good Woman

Ain’t nuthin’ like it. Even the good lovin’ of a bad woman! Does my enthusiasm show yet?

You know a good woman won’t give up on you, no matter how severe the symptoms you may show of bad judgment, poor taste and rank insensitivity. Not to mention that part about “in sickness and in health,” but she’s there for you through 18 hours in the E.R. anyway.

You know with a good woman you’re going to have fun no matter what the two of you do with the time. Any time with her is a good time. You could be sittin’ in the dirt drawing circles with your fingers, for that matter. It must be the pleasure of her company.

You know a good woman’s going to keep you on your toes too, at the top of your form, paying attention to her, yes, but also to yourself. A good woman makes a man want to look good, feel good, show it, show off, show up for work every goddamned day, show and tell and do his very best stuff.

That’s what a good woman’s for, just for starters.

And I have had, my friends, way more than my share of good loving times with good loving women, and it appears I’ve saved the best one, Diane Lazzari, for last.

She and I went up to Eureka fifteen years or so ago, for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was the first time Diane had met my family, and at one point during the festivities of the big anniversary party, she danced with my dad. “Have you ever been married before?” he asked her, (a natural enough question considering how times yours truly has been married and divorced), as they tripped the light fantastic, (and my Dad was one of the best dancers in Humboldt County). She answered brightly, “Why yes. Shit happens.”

As she told me later, “You should have seen his eyes fill with respect!”

You know a good woman when she talks back.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green

Coming to Our Senses

Suppose for a moment that the average waking life is a nightmare of fear, tension, anxiety, envy, distrust, hatred, resentment, scorn, pain, conflict and ceaseless, restless striving.

“A little too abstract, a little too wise,/ it is time for us to kiss the earth again,/It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,/Let the rich life run in the roots again.” But how do we do that? Robinson Jeffers would go down to the Big Sur River and plunge his arms into the icy water up to his shoulders, just to shake himself awake. But what do we do?

For some of us, it begins with a change of mind, regarding our notion of our relationship to the universe. Most of that existence is beyond our control. But humans are control freaks. We don’t like feeling helpless, and even the most shy person may well have an aggressive streak a mile wide down his heart. But suppose we reconcile ourselves to the nature of what we know from observation about the world:

Acceptance of the inevitable.

Simply that. If we observe the cosmos as having a natural order, and continue to resist what we know, we drive ourselves mad. Fantasy, imagination, wishful thinking, all disguise the soul, masking it like a protective cuticle. And the soul is the seed of the persona we present to the world, often distorted as if seen in a funhouse mirror, but under all our guises waits what the Buddhists call our “Original Face,” the person we really are.

In the search to know ourselves, then, we need to let the scales of blindness fall from our eyes, use the eyes we are given, and truly see the world as it is. Scientific inquiry is something most of us are doing all the time, comparing what our senses tell us about the world against what others tell us we ought to be seeing. Without the human agenda, which is usually based on a relatively pathetic solo urge for survival and dominance over others.

Our senses, after all, are reliable if tested. We may need the assistance of an electronic microscope or radar telescope to see into the mysteries, but see into them we will. We may even achieve a new, and practical perspective:

An appreciation of the order of the cosmos.

“Let heaven and earth go about their changes.”

If we try vibrating at slower frequencies, we may even hear the music of the spheres. Most of us are so dialed-in to the pace of modern living that we can’t slow down, and we trade time, that precious and limited commodity, for money, or status, or simply let it slip through our fingers, bored out of our skulls, watching mindless TV. Slowing down doesn’t even occur to us.

But when we do, when we slow down, cock our heads to one side, and listen, sitting quietly perhaps, or even moving in super-slo-motion, practicing prayer or Yoga, dance or chanting, tantra or aerobics, T’ai Chi or Qi Quong or some other meditative art, we open up to that order. We feel our boundaries melt away and disappear, feel our connections with all existence, and know a peace that passeth understanding, shantih, shantih, shantih.

Mindfulness is all about learning who we are, and recognizing our connections to the rest of the creation, what we have in common with all existence. The connections are already there, but ordinarily we are oblivious to them. If, however, we slow down, sit and listen, let our minds run free, without the infernal, eternal plinkety-plink jukebox in our heads, bring our thoughts back to the center, we will dissolve into It. That. The all of it.

Meditation is certainly one way to get there, and brain scans show that in a meditative state, our brain waves change to Theta patterns, a heightened awareness combined with a great sense of peaceful well-being and relaxation. Most people run on Alpha waves or Beta wave brain patterns, which produce a sensation of either aggression or anxiety, which both cloud the judgment and perceptions. Many other practices which encourage mental focus can have, over time, the same beneficial results. Even washing dishes, gardening and building model airplanes.

©2005 Dennis Herbert Green