Atman: An Attempt At Poetry

Atman

I saw a plastic water bottle
Bobbing on the waves
Of a poisoned lake

We cannot drink from the river
But it’s okay
There’s a bottle for you
And a bottle for me
Just none for the fish.

It’s the best way
It’s the only way
It is God’s way.
It’s the Market’s way.

We cannot share
That is wrong,
That makes us lazy
That makes us unfree

We must work for ourselves
So we can buy a plastic bottle
For our own private use
Or the poison will get us.

We are all bottles of water
Bobbing on the sea
Afraid to spill ourselves into the whole
Separated by a plastic barrier from the all
Our lids snuggly tight
Killing the planet
To save ourselves

The Clipper City Co-Op

Above is a picture I took a couple months ago. Back then, it was hard to imagine being where we are now, basking in the warmth of summer weather.

Two months ago, the first fruits and vegetables of summer seemed so very far away. And yet now my sink is full of the food we've acquired through our CSA and the local farmers' market.

You see, while I was feeling stranded in a seemingly never-ending winter, others were getting ready for the growing season. While others prepared the soil, planted the seeds, and did all of the hard work required to bring a bounty to my table, all that was required of me was a little faith and patience. Now I am enjoying the results of their planning and efforts. It's a pretty good deal for someone who knows next to nothing about growing food.

But I have planted a little seed of my own. If you look once more at the picture of my front yard buried in piles of snow, you can catch a glimpse of it. It is my yard sign for the Clipper City Co-Op. It symbolizes my commitment to community and to a better way of bringing food to our families, a way to help sustain local agriculture.

Oh, I know, the Clipper City Co-Op is not yet a physical grocery store. But the first signs of its growth are apparent in the many signs you see in people's front yards. While others sit in their houses, not capable of imagining anything other than the current season, those who see the need are preparing for the season to come. Even those who are not involved in the work of bringing it to fruition can contribute through a small token of faith. Become a member, the season of the Clipper City Co-Op will be upon us before we know it. Happy Eating.

Farewell, Hartman's

Bella, hoping for a cookie.

There is something sacred about a bakery. That may seem like an absurd statement to you, but you would think differently if you had the smell of freshly baking bread about you. For the last 20 years I have had that privilege, as Hartman’s bakery has sanctified my neighborhood with it’s intoxicating aroma the way a church is filled with frankincense.

There is no better neighbor than a baker. There is no business you would rather have in your neighborhood than a bakery, except perhaps a café or bookstore (fortunately, we have both within blocks of our house). I have lived a block away from Hartman’s for decades now and I only have to step out of my house and breath deeply to be reminded that we are blessed by its presence. There is no bottled perfume at any cost that can be as alluring.

When I was young, we would go to visit my grandmother, who also had a bakery right around the corner from her house. It was one of my fonder memories of visiting her, being sent to buy a loaf of bread and given enough money to buy myself a cream puff, as well. Bread had always been nothing more than bread to me, until I had toast at my grandma’s. The bread was not the type I was used to, did not fit perfectly in the toaster, so that some parts were burnt while other parts still white. But there was a taste to it that could not be compared, especially when paired with boysenberry jam canned by an aunt or friend of the family. The most enduring memories are those that are related to a smell, and to this day I can still vividly recall the smell of fresh bread toasting in my Grandmother’s kitchen.

Moving into a house that had a bakery so close brought back vivid and pleasant memories of youth. More than that, it created many new moments, for my wife, myself and our son. I remember our son being an early riser, and we could buy a few extra moments of sleep by giving him a small amount of change to purchase something from Hartman’s. He always seemed to return with more than he had money for, and I half-suspect someone there had taken pity on the boy whose appetite was greater than the sum of his quarters.

My dog, too, was a fan of Hartman’s bakery. For years we would walk by it on an almost daily basis, and often I’d stop for a dog cookie or two (all right, I might have gotten a cream-filled Long John to go with it). I’d put her cookies in a white bag and hand it to her, and she would carry it home in her mouth as daintily as Jackie Onassis with a hand bag. One of my great pleasures was seeing drivers-by stare at my dog as we walked home. Dogs, too, would stare, sticking their heads out of the car windows as if in envy.

My dog would want to stop at the bakery every time we passed by it, and often times when it was closed I would have to drag her away. On one occasion, the owner was outside and noticed my dog’s intent. He told us to wait where we were, and in a moment returned from inside with a handful of cookies for my very grateful dog. And—I think it’s okay to say this now—on several occasions, he permitted my Bella into the bakery itself in order to have a look around.

I can tell you everybody’s favorites. My wife likes the peanut squares, my son likes the frosted cookies, and I like the cream-filled Long Johns. Or the cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. Or the seven-layer squares. My mom’s favorites were the apple fritters and the glazed croissants. I can’t recall how many times I stopped at the bakery to grab donuts on my way to my mom’s house. I always brought extra because my mom loved to share. It was a real treat for her neighbors on the south side of town.

I like to walk, and in the 20 years I lived in the neighborhood, I’ve easily walked past the bakery thousands of times. I have seen countless people go in to Hartman’s and come out with arms full. I have bought donuts to bring to work for my birthday, seen parents buying cakes for their children’s. I have seen the happy faces of those who walked up to the door, and have witnessed their secret suffering when they saw the Closed sign on the door and had to turn away empty-handed. I have seen the misfortune of a child who dropped his cookie on the sidewalk and the good fortune of my dog who was not at all shy about eating off the ground.

There are certain things that make a community unique, and for many years Hartman’s was one of them. Hartman’s is closing, and it makes me very sad, but I understand that nothing lasts for ever and I wish all the best to those who have given so much to the neighborhood for so long. You have touched many people in positive ways, and the smell of baking donuts will linger forever in my memory. Thank you.

The Beggar Who Blessed Me

I was recently in Columbia, spending time visiting loved ones and seeing the sights. When travelling somewhere for the first time, especially for someone who doesn’t have the opportunity to travel much, figuring out how much cash to bring and how much to convert to local currency can be a guessing game that doesn’t go very well.

So after a couple of days bumming around I was out of pesos. Which, added to the fact that my credit card wasn’t working, left me in a rather foul mood. It wasn’t because of a compulsion to shop and consume, but because I felt a bit of a drag on those in my company because I didn’t feel like I was contributing my part. Worse than that, I wasn’t able to give a pittance to help the local economy. In Columbia there are a lot of street performers and vendors who aren’t shy about looking to do business. On two separate occasions I had street rappers decide to do their rap in front of me. It would have been convenient to throw them a few thousand pesos and have them move on to the next sap. More importantly, it would have made me feel good to support those vendors who are out there all day hustling to earn an existence. Buying an arepa from a local for the price of a U.S. dollar would have been a mutually beneficial exchange. But there was an even greater reason I was feeling bad about not having cash on hand.

Coming from a small city in the United States, I am not used to witnessing homelessness and poverty so close up. There was a fair amount of that on display in the areas of Columbia I visited. And while I’m past the age of believing I am morally obliged to fix every bit of suffering, I am also past the age where I'm comfortable turning away and pretending I don’t see it. But having no cash on hand, I had no other choice. It made me feel bad.

The first time you turn away from the misfortune of others is hard, but it becomes increasingly easier thereafter. It is a habit that forms quickly, and pretty soon you are able to walk past those people in need as if they don’t really exist.

There are plenty of good explanations and rationalizations for doing so. “They’re just playing upon your sympathies.” “They’re not really that bad off, they’ve just found an easy way to make a buck.” “If you give to one, the others will take you for an easy mark.” “You’re not really helping them, you’re just contributing to their problems.” And there are plenty of people who are eager to share these explanations with you, those who have experienced the same discomfort and found easy explanations in order to relieve themselves of this discomfort. People you trust, people you like, friends, family. But it’s just a way of avoiding real problems in order to live in a more comforting, imaginary world. I’ve come to realize this is not a good way to go through life, that reality can only be walled off for so long.

Fortunately, my wife woke up early one morning and managed to find an ATM, allowing me to carry some pesos along with me. The first thing I did was to give a meager amount to a man sleeping in a doorway across the street from our Airbnb. I thought at first that he was one who had so tugged at my heartstrings the night before when he pled with me for a little something and I had nothing to give, but it turned out to be someone else. There is no shortage of the truly needy. Nonetheless, I gave this man a few dollars and he gave me a “God bless you” in return. It was a greater blessing to me than any that could have been given by any spiritual or religious leader, and I have no doubt as to who got the better of that transaction. I was not expecting that. I was expecting a strictly financial transaction, but found myself dealing with a real human being capable of touching me as I did him.

  

It wasn’t much, and I certainly was no one’s savior, but I was now able to give a few coins to the indigent I met in the streets, was now able to see them as human beings, part of the same community and world I inhabited. The pull to resist such an attitude was strong both from myself and others, as if I was threatening to pull apart the very fabric of reality. And in a way, it was. It was the smallest participation in the message that Jesus delivered two millennia ago, it was the faith of a mustard seed which moved our perception of the world undiscernibly but undeniably. The mountain hadn’t moved much, but it had shifted, at least within my understanding. It’s an understanding that is threatening to the accepted way of viewing the world.

Cast your bread upon the water and you will anger those you call family and friends. Embrace ever so slightly the vision that our hope for security rests not in what we can gather for ourselves and loved ones from a harsh world but instead in our shared humanity, and you will witness just how radical Christ’s example was.

I can understand why people are afraid of Christ’s teaching, because it rips you away from all you’ve known, takes you away even from the security of family and friends and offers only the unseen and unproven community of humanity. But even the smallest taste of the reward of seeing Christ even in the eyes of the humblest among us will have you desiring more. And I understand the fear of believing in a sky god, so if that’s your hang-up, get rid of it for now. Embrace instead the idea of loving others as yourself, fearlessly. There is something to that notion that is real as gravity, though both are invisible forces. “Ah,” you say, “but science has proven gravity exists, it has not proven Christ’s message.” That may be true, but gravity did not require science’s blessing to exist, it had been doing its thing long before Sir Isaac Newton. It existed when man’s scientific understanding of the world they lived on could not fathom the Earth as a sphere but merely a flat plain. But the laws of gravity were obeyed despite the fact they were not understood, were intuited though not explored.

I invite you to investigate the radical notion of Christ’s teaching as a scientist would an unexplained natural phenomenon. With an open heart and an open mind. Not with a preconceived idea of what it is or is not, but with a curiosity for a force that has existed for millennia, an undeniable though as yet unexplainable something. I do not ask you to believe, in fact I think it is preferable that beliefs be left behind for this voyage. I ask only that you leave yourself open to the possibility of the experience, the seeing of the divine in even the least of your fellow human beings.

I could have done more, should probably always be doing more. Like I said before, I wasn’t anybody’s savior. But I do think perhaps we can all be each other’s saviors, each of us helping to save one another and humanity as a whole. And we can do so by always making the effort to see the humanity that exists in even the least of us.

Think Twice Before Finding Something To Do

Hamlet Contemplates Doing Something

It has come to my attention that the less tasks I undertake the less busy I am and the more time I have for other things, such as relaxing. As a matter of fact, the only logical explanation for doing anything at all is to get it out of the way so that later you can relax. And the truth is, most things don’t need doing in the first place so you’re just putting one extra step in between you and relaxation time.

Always put off until tomorrow what can be done today, because by tomorrow conditions might change. If they do not, you will it least have an extra day to come up with a reason you shouldn’t have to do it tomorrow, either. If you follow in this advice long enough it is very likely that some busybody will tire of waiting for you and do it himself, or else people will adapt and forget a problem exists at all. People adjust rather quickly once realistic hope fades from the equation.

Thinking about doing something is okay, but it's a step in the wrong direction. If you do it properly, it is a nice form of relaxation to contemplate actually accomplishing something. But sometimes such flights of fancy lead to inspiration, which is quite dangerous, in that it leads to actually start something, and that is the kiss of death. Starting something is like signing a piece of paper an Army recruiter puts in front of you: you’ve committed to a long stretch of time in which you will suddenly find yourself wed to work you have no interest in performing.

There has never been a time when I started a project that my inspiration has outlasted the task. 15 minutes into even the simplest job will reveal complications I never imagined possible. But there’s no stopping at that point: even stopping will require work just to get back to where you were before you started. If you quit and walk away then you’ll be left with a mess of tools lying around that were neatly packed away before motivation got the better of you. Not only will you have yet another messy area in your house, you will have that sense of failure hanging over you as you settle into your place on the couch and try to watch television. There will be a sense of guilt you cannot shake, and guilt is a very dangerous thing, because it will lead in the future to you trying to redeem yourself by starting some other unnecessary project and seeing it through to completion.

And say you do carry a project to completion, what then? Say you’ve found the intestinal fortitude to build a garage or a swimming pool: it’s only going to lead to more work. That pool will have to be cleaned frequently, that garage will need painting and repairs. Whereas if you had simply sat on your couch for the amount of time it took you to accomplish something, you would now have far more time to sit around now. Not only that, you’ve established a very bad precedent, one which others will then try to hold you to.

Now you may ask me if it was worth all the energy it took me to write this. I would say that if it stopped a single person from doing some unnecessary task, then yes it was. And writing about work is really no different from talking about work, and as we know talk is cheap. I would go so far as to say that thinking about work is the finest ways to react to work. One has never dirtied one’s hands thinking about work, never had to make multiple trips to the hardware store, never cracked one’s knuckles or made a mess by thinking. As a matter of fact, the more you think about doing something, the less likely you will find the time to actually start on it. Just ask Hamlet. It was thinking too much that prevented him from killing his uncle. More than that, he thought himself out of killing himself with a dagger. And that would have made a mess which someone would have had to clean up.

Improving On Miracles

I wanna love you and treat you right
I wanna love you every day and every night
We'll be together with a roof right over our heads
We'll share the shelter of my single bed
We'll share the same room, yeah! - for Jah provide the bread
Is this love - is this love - is this love
Is this love that I'm feelin'?

-Bob Marley

Is This Love? By Bob Marley was playing in my head at work today, and as it did I contemplated the innocent joy contained in the lyrics. And whether or not it was intended, the impression I got was that the life the singer was offering to his lover was one of modest creature comforts: a roof, a single bed, and daily bread. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Doesn’t sound like the American dream, that’s for sure. How many women nowadays would accept such a meager proposal, and how many men would be comfortable offering no more. Women are expected to view themselves as princesses, and men as conquerors.

But I couldn’t help getting the impression that what Marley was singing about was love in its purest form, the simple idea of two people coming together and appreciating the other and wanting to commit their lives to each other. This is one of the true joys in life, and all else is adornment. More than that, I would say it distracts from the miracle which is best experienced when stripped of all baser elements. Love without expectations of other things is love unadulterated, is love fully experienced. It is participation in the miracle of existence.

Love is not improved by silken sheets, it is made decadent. It is no longer the merging of two souls but a sensory experience augmented by material possessions. It is not a miracle found but a hunger never to be satisfied.

Our problem is that we are always trying to improve those things which by themselves are miracles. We are given gifts and experiences of inexplicable beauty and we ask ourselves how we can make them better.

We pride ourselves in creating a society where we can purchase asparagus at our local supermarket any time of the year, but we have lost the connection to the season, have no idea what it must have felt like to have survived a long winter and experience the first blessings of spring. There was a sacredness and connectedness in our existence that we can no longer begin to imagine. We have created for ourselves a reality where words like sacredness and blessings and miracles are alien concepts. But they were words that were created to express genuine human feelings and ways of seeing and being. We use the word awesome when so few of us have ever come close to experiencing awe. We experience the most profound of miracles and all we can think of is how can we improve upon them.

I can’t help thinking the lowliest peasant in the most backwards of nations has experienced life’s true joys more than most of us ever will. Surely there was something life offered to primitive humans to make them want to endure and reproduce, because they lacked all that we hold most dear and yet it seems we ourselves are barely holding on to any sort of happiness, any sort of hope for future generations.

Think to the times when you felt happy, content, connected. Think of those moments when you were closest to finding real meaning and joy. I’m willing to bet such memories are accompanied by the smell of something your grandmother was cooking, the sound of waves lapping on the shore, or the touch of the sun upon your skin. I’m guessing they involve staring up at the stars and contemplating life with friends of your youth, or staring at the daytime sky and wondering if you’ve ever seen it so blue.

Our lives are non-stop explosions of miracles, each instant a potential connection to both mystery and contentedness. And the more simply we live the more connected we are to such miracles. A bowl of vegetable soup or a discovered patch of strawberries gives to us a gift we can never repay, and in feeling gratitude and an awareness of being blessed, our joy is increased yet further. Yet we continue to seek ways to augment our experience, pile up more blessings not only in fear for the future, but because we cannot sufficiently appreciate the present. And in wanting, in desiring, we reach past what gives us true happiness. We endlessly chase our own misery, even as miracles abound.

Like my writing? Please follow me on Twitter, sign up for my newsletter, or check me out on Amazon. 

You Have The Power To Choose

When the seas can no longer support life, when the last forests have been clear-cut for timber and agricultural interests, when climate change becomes an undeniable catastrophe and nature a ravaged monstrosity we shun, remember that this was your choice. You chose it in the smallest of ways countless times. It was a choice you made with every plastic bottle of water you purchased. It was made every time you said “plastic’s fine”, “I need a bigger car”, “I want a big family”, “I’m building a new home in the country”, or “I’ll take a bacon cheeseburger”. It didn’t just happen and you weren’t powerless to make a difference. You matter, but you chose to listen to those who told you you didn’t.

But just as your bad choices can doom the planet, so can even your smallest choices and actions help to save it. Every time you have a choice to make, you have the opportunity to choose a revolutionary one, regardless of its individual impact. For each positive action you take, you will show to yourself and others that change is possible, desirable, and not so very difficult. Each refusal to accept the status quo will make the next choice not quite so difficult. Soon you will realize you are not living in fear. Soon you will realize you do not have to subject your will and your hopes and dreams to some greater authority, but are in fact an agent of change capable of helping to make the world the way you want it to be. You will not be a slave but a free man. For God’s sake, you might even find yourself feeling joyful.

You can find yourself not merely rushing through life but actively connected to each moment. You will experience the feeling that you are where you are meant to be, living the life you were meant to live, rather than feeling you have to accept the lot handed out to you by a cruel and ugly world. You won’t have to foster idiotic and immature fantasies of what your life might be because you will experience happiness as a real, mature, human being. You might even catch yourself thinking something like “Holy fuck, life is beautiful. I never thought it could be like this. This is what I’ve been working for my whole life, and it had nothing to do with a big house and an expensive car and a fake-titted wife.” You might find that happiness is not something the outside world rewards you with if you sacrifice yourself to it but instead something you feel when you get in touch with your real desires and motivations.

You have the opportunity to choose joy over desperation, hope over resignation, improvement over hopelessness and resignation. Because you are not only powerful but good. Because you want both what is good for you and good for everyone else. All you have to do is believe that a better world is possible, just like a junkie can begin to see that his addiction doesn’t have to rule him.

Just remember, the only argument you have against what I am saying is “I’m powerless, there’s nothing I can do.” It is the argument the addict makes again and again. It is what leads him to rock bottom. We are all there now. We have reached the point where there is nowhere to go but up. Let us, like the addict who seeks to turn his life around, no longer lie about the reality of the situation. Let us make the first steps back towards life in the only way possible, in faith that there is a better tomorrow out there for us. And once you do so, once you take that first step, you will realize that it isn’t about the destination at all but the joy you will experience walking the path. You will feel happy, you will feel empowered, and you will wonder why you have not taken this path long ago.

The choice, and the power, is yours.