Forty years ago today I sat before a Zenith black and white television set, with red magic marker and glossy white paper, drawing the images being sent live from the Apollo 11 moon landing.


            


Those sketches were for my godmother, April Oursler Armstrong (related to Neil, perhaps, only in my five-year-old mind).

April was the "Dear Abby" for the Tertiary Franciscans, with a long running advice column in the Order's magazine, The Franciscan Herald. An issue of The Saturday Evening Post, one with Ayn Rand on the cover, had run April's article, "Don't Want 'Well-Adjusted' Children".

It was her wedding anniversary. Her husband, my godfather, had just run for mayor against the father of whose estate now funds Vast Sky.

What an impact those images of the earth from space have had on us since! So much of our emergent values revolve around our being able to view the planet whole. Today we scale like none before us. I take for granted that I zoom-in to that scene on a living room floor all those years ago, and back out to beyond the earth's horizons, today. From that first nuclear family, to the planetary one.

With the rise of the global commons and even initiatives such as this site, we see all around us the evidence of the influence of those whole earth views, and all the meaning found therein.
 

      In three days,

               come the New Moon, 

                                      Michael "Maxie" Sheppard

                                                                   will be 40 days gone.



Maxie, beloved, and I mean beloved, friend to several of us in the Zaadz/GAIA online community, gave himself to us, to me, as precious few can.



His obituary: as appeared in the Alaskan paper, Homer News.  


His blog: here on GAIA.




We are all richer for his having been among us, indebted to the wild visionary generousity of spirit he brought to our meeting here.





The following is an example of one of our more public exchanges, comments on an entry in this blog.


...about 1 hour later maxie said 
 

Amazing, Kerry.  This piece of son-as-father-to-the-man.  How old were you then?  19 - 20?  What a course to set so young!  I could see myself, having followed such trail that led you to this writing, having written it just so and then as me, proceeded to defy it, to not chop the wood and carry the water of art with such conviction in mind.  This doesn't seem to have been the case with you.  I ignored that part, until now, but didn't miss much of the rest.  You have perhaps missed some of what I have seen, or perhaps not seen it yet.  I can tell you that it does not matter, this part that might have been missed by you, as it, for me, though not regrettable, was still traffic away from the bridge.

Through this writing, I have come to remember my own youthfully "serious" musings and how many of them were subjugated to the immediacy of pleasure and quick reward.  Now, through such painful wanderings, I feel returned to the morning shore where the muse is still the same but somehow the voice is no longer stilted.

love,
Michael

print | permalink | delete about 1 hour later jikishin said  

So it is , Michael,

I put this up and stepped away from the screen, walked across the house thinking of you.

I'm feeling a 'late on-set' of the implications of that early reckoning, re-warding the author with an attention suspended in a long and defuse exile from those convictions.

How happy I am that we are at this, respectively, poised at the habit of begining, following through, picking up where we were left off at our own further entering the world as it further entered us. 

love indeed,  K

print | permalink | delete about 2 hours later maxie said  

Amen, dear brother, amen.

In the first conversation my parents ever had they confessed their love of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man.

I like that I might owe my presence here to a young couple being enthralled with their awareness that each rise of complexity in the great arc of evolution has brought forth a rise in consciousness.

No one of their generation took the work of Teilhard further to heart and deeper into the analysis of cultural history than Thomas Berry, who died this morning at 94, "full of days".

                                          

Fr. Berry, a Passionist priest, alive to the Life which held his living, spent his days attuning his love to the Love which holds us all. Critical of religion's complicities in our long devaluation of nature, he admonished us that our reverence will either be total, affecting our every function, active and passive, or we risk depotentiating even the chance of human reverence.

At a bio-regional conference, I heard him say that, "Wonder World is making Waste World", one of the succinct distillations of his broad studies. The "wonder" of that Wonder World, a world of novel convenience for the short-lived few, was seen to be a by-product of the suppression of our capacity for true wonder, of the ability to be infused with awe at the grandeur and glory of Creation, and to be ready students of our context.

For Fr. Berry the so-called growth of "growth" addicted economies was known to be a cosmic immaturity, the greeds of a rude guest oblivious to stewardship, and ignorant of the host. Ignorant of how the guest is also the host.

That very obliviousness was witnessed as seeding eddies of oblivion in the greater flowing fields of immaculate immensity and precious particularity.

Meanwhile, he arose, prayed, celebrated Mass, taught, wrote and spoke giving voice to what makes us possible, and imploring us to make all this no less probable from here on.

On this the 40th anniversary of the passing of Thomas Merton, and the second anniversary of my first online post , I'd like to bring part of that first post here.

"Seeing this post/call for quoats of Thomas Merton gave meback a memory of the first time I cried in a zendo. That warm morning, as a fan was turned on to cool the room,( reminded of how he went ) I sobbed with thankfulness for being reminded of him there, for an invocation of his influence.

Turning to what he called "Antipoem I" I recalled his friend, Jacques Maritain, writing something about the power of a poem, or artwork, being in the prophetic relation to the destiny of the poet, or artist."

               Antipoem I

O the gentle fool 
He fell in love 
With the electric light 
Do you not know, fool, 
That love is dynamite?

Keep to what is yours 
Do not interfere 
With the established law 
See the dizzy victims of romance 
Unhappy moths! 
Please observe 
This ill-wondered troth.

All the authorities
In silence anywhere 
Swear you only love your mind
If you marry a hot wire.

Obstinate fool 
What future we face 
If one and all 
Follow your theology
You owe the human race 
An abject apology.

                                                -Thomas Merton ( '67 )

                                                             * * *



Today, another poem of his. One from a year earlier.


            The Night of Destiny


In my ending is my meaning
Says the season.

No clock:
Only the heart's blood
Only the word.

O lamp
Weak friend
In the knowing night!

O tongue of flame
Under the heart
Speak softly:
For love is black
Says the season.

Red and sable letters
On the solemn page
Fill the small circle of seeing.

Long dark -
And the weak life
Of oil.

Who holds the homeless light secure
In the deep heart's room?

Midnight!
Kissed with flame!

See! See!
My love is darkness!

Only in the Void
Are all ways one:

Only in the night
Are all the lost
Found.

In my ending is my meaning.


                                                  - Thomas Merton



The phrase, The Night of Destiny, may have been a reference to the end of the fasting of Ramadan, a celebration of the penning of the Koran. Merton's official biographer, John Howard Griffin, saw "something of the Spirit of Christmas" in the poem, "...a feast when the heavens open and the 'Word' is heard on earth."

Come New Years Eve, this year, I hope to be with Fr. Richard Rohr, who was living in Merton's hermitage back in 1985, about the time I "first cried in a zendo".

To begin this entry where the previous left off...

I'd like to remember Eileen Egan on this, not a date of death or birth, but an anniversary of a survival.

It was on this day in 1945 that a plane crashed into the Empire State Building. Eileen, out of that 79th floor office at the time, lost all ten of her colleagues in the U.S Bishop's War Relief Service. The war was about to end and that effort of healing from war that became the Catholic Relief Services fell to it's new nucleus, one spirited little lady.

             

In these last few moments of this years Holocaust Rememberance Day I see that the final surviving member of the 'July20' attempt on Hitler's life has died today. Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager.

I'd like to remember another contributor to that "plot", someone who, as a youth, attended the Union Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan, who would then share in the worship services of the (Afro-American) Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the spirit of social conscience he was exposed to in the sermons would influence his later stance before the National Socialists.

I'd like to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

                                  



Bonhoeffer's experience in Harlem, and his long freindship with Karl Barth seems to have balanced and blended liberal and conservative theologies, a balance which saw through and over-rode the simplistic or reductionist defaults of his time.

How is it that a pastor who wrote, "We are to serve our enemy in all things without hypocracy and with utter sincerity. No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy. If out of love for our brother we are willing to sacrifice goods, honour, and life, we must be prepared to do the same for our enemy."  could have willingly taken part in assassination?

He continues, "We are not to imagine that this is to condone his evil; such a love proceeds from strength rather than weakness, from truth rather than fear... " .

The injunctions to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who persecute us... are offen taught as contrasted with the easy, common affections and care that anyone might feel toward their own kind. I believe that Bonhoeffer countered the Nazi mentality, the nationalist-'socialist', developmentally Amber consensus with those injunctions of The Sermon On The Mount.

His father's pioneering in psychiatry, his time abroad, his singing spirituals in a charismatic congregation, must have contributed to planting him firmly in a world-centric broadly embracing mode of conduct and moral disposition.

Shortly before war's end Bonhoeffer was hung in the Flossenburg concentration camp. A few months before his death he wrote of his desire to go to India to visit Gandhi. I tend to see those two men as having already collaborated: kindred beyond kind, satyagraha and 'the power of truthfulness' lighting the way they lead.

Reflecting on Michael Garfield's interview with Ken Wilber (parts 1,2, and 3) I want to post an entry on visual art as I've practiced it so far. My medium, charcoal.



                                                     detail at ~300% actual size

The first, and to date most recent, artist statement that I'd drafted was this from 2001: 

There was a time when I found people, in general, so absolutely beautiful that I could scarcely rest my gaze on a face without ascent into some subtle ecstasy. Learning that elation required radical grounding, turning to portraiture offered shade from these suns on the horizons of shoulders. It wasn't enough, to be astonished at the  resplendent topography of the human countenance. I had to reciprocate. I had to give this miracle back.

Perception dictated technique. I came to disbelieve in lines, seeing instead, fields of variance and texture-scapes of gradation resulting in contrast. This shift of scale revealed the equal relativity of surfaces called smooth and flat. This was the recognition that the sky begins here. Papers are mountainous, cavernous terrains. These strata, receptive to the weathers of breath and touch, are fertile ground for celebrating us as the crest in this wave of carbon-based life. The medium, that same element shared with every organic form that supports us.

Exposing the conventional fictions, of line and two-dimensionality, allowed me to treat charcoal on paper as sculpture of slight recess and relief. Through intensive resolving of tonal quality, I watch each piece for the appearance of parallax at stillness, a single-frame cinema.

Today, I see my Charcoal Portraits as invoking three distinct primordial experiences. The way moonlight lends a reduction of hue to the eye. The way we are designed to comprehend the face, then expression, as the most meaningful locus within our visual field. And, especially, the way representation links memory and imagination.

One of the few pieces I have good record of is the 1988 portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev, shown here with the cover letter that accompanied the portrait when sent to him.




The letter reads:  Dear Mr. Secretary, 

In gratitude for your creative leadership I send this one, small gift: a charcoal portrait entrusted to Fr. Luis M. Dolan of the Center for Soviet-American Dialogue... 

As an artist, a student of religion, and a person with friends of many nationalities, may I express my intentions in the following hopes. 

To share a singular craft in the commitment to a universal work of art: Peace. 

That the fact of your receiving this token of acknowledged inspiration testify to our inter-dependence, and celebrate our essential relatedness. 

That this portrait demonstrate (however metaphorically) the will to perceive humanity as we are, and to portray ourselves with even a generous accuracy.  

That ever truer perception occur on every level, in every direction. 

So that future generations actualize potentials made possible through the steps we presently take for their sake. 

Let us offer this gesture together to those coming heirs of the accomplishments born of our crisis/opportunity. 

Respectfully Yours, ...




It was my habit, whenever possible, to be reading the books by the person I was drawing while the work was underway. Also, to be listening to the musics of their countries or regions of origin, and to have some societal involvement that I could associated with the person/subject happening during that month or so it would typically take to complete one piece. For the Gorbachev portrait the involvement was volunteering for the Soviet-American Citizen's Summit. For one of H.H. the Dalai Lama, the completion coincided with the first seven of the nine days of the World Parliament of Religions (Chicago, '93, where we were both in attendance). For one of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, I drew the entire portrait in the middle of a Native American reservation.

To the extent that all quadrant factors could be aligned in accord with my immersion in the subject I've tried to accomplish that, as well as a kind of watching those factors fall into place, or be presented as option as the work unfolds in 'concentric' contexts.


Aware that I'm just skimming the surface with this first entry on my visual art I'll let it stand as such for now.

To be cont. ...

I've been enjoying recollecting the idealism and positive orientation of my youth.

Having recently 'sent home', across country, for the notes and journals of my teens I want to share a page written 25 years ago this week.




February 11, 1983                                    Ultimate Art

1.  manifests the (a) direct impression / expression.

2.  comes from and is for the present.

3.  is really alive.

4.  is Holistic.

5.  is Universally lawful.

6.  is Naturally appropriate.

7.  is indenpendent of limitation.

8.  is dependent on Blessing.

9.  is beneficial to local and global conditions.

10.  exists only in service of Humanity [arrow] Divinity.

11.  is an ever immediate challenge belonging to practical reality.

12.  always involves utilizing comprehensive responsibility.

13.  happens in significance.

14.  effects life when and as necessary.

15.  helps expand and extend the capacities and capabilities of its experiential participants.

16.  is not necessarily placed in or on a vehical to facilitate its (solely) material passage through time other than its experiential acquirement and retainment by intelligence.

17.  is presupposed by Empirical Engineering though unforeshown by such instrumentation, calculation and structural methodologies, thus characterized by Synergenic Revelation, the individual and collective sensing/perception of Glory.

18.  in immediate retrospect exemplifies the Mystery of Birth/Growth.

19.  augments, teaches, sanctions and fosters LOVE. (unity, wholeness-holiness)



The reverse of that page reads:

As if true Philosophy were Joseph, and true Religion, Mary, and Science and Technology the dream warning and burro in flight from Bethlehem, Ultimate Art can be likened to the arrival of Jesus Christ.

"As experience is directly related to religion, so observation is correlated to philosophy"  
                                     - Hall - The Culture of the Mind, pg. 23


Was that Edward T. Hall, or Manly P. Hall ?

                                                                               ....................


I find it humbling to notice how powerfully formative that phase was for me, and how, in revisiting earlier writing, I recall the authentic audacity of setting a course and embarking.

It might have been Wordsworth (who I haven't read since then) who said, "The child is father to the man".

On this the 60th anniversary of the assasination of M.K.Gandhi

I'd like to recall Dick Gregory, a serious student of Gandhi's methods and champion in his own right of our continuing collective leap to post-colonial worldspace.

In an Integral Health thread I briefly recount the time I worked for him.

As a black who ran for the U.S. Presidency twice (through the write-in ballot, 1968, and '76) I think of him (as I do Barbara Marx Hubbard in relation to Hillary Clinton's candidacy) as a cultural forerunner to the candidacy of Sen.Obama. By one analysis, if Dick had not run in '76, Carter would not have won. Rather than remember him as only political I want to express my appreciation for his modeling important aspects of Integral Life Practice.

Through hunger strikes he was able to wield his celebrity for the systemic sake of raising public awareness. Working with all quadrants, the practice of fasting was always accompanied with prayer. He taught this. A balancing of being politically active with spiritual practice; and of tending to the vessel, the body, in ways that reflect one's own degree of freedom from the myriad, subtler colonialisms still woven tightly into our increasingly post-colonial era. For instance, the rare form of cancer that he was diagnosed with in 2001 he is now free of, and which he treated with a thoroughly holistic regimen.


One lesson I Iearned from Dick is that revealing and examining our relativistic ruts and comforts is a valid instigation of Second Tier perspecting. I found him to be a reliable master at "highlighting our fixation to the green meme", which, as KW wrote in A Theory of Everything (English, page 29), "By highlighting our fixation to the green meme, I believe that we can begin more readilly to transcend and include its wonderful accomplishments in an ever more generous embrace."

After a screening of the movie, Gandhi, at the Whole Life Expo (Plaza Hotel, Manhattan, '83), Dick spoke to the packed house of holistic health practicioners and enthusiasts ( a sea of green? ). The crowd was aglow with the triumphal, romanticised depiction of their hero. Dick said, "That ain't nothin' but a vicious movie", and went on to point out a few consecutive scenes. In one, the Indian populace is affirmed in their capacity to accomplish their liberation on their own, in the very next, an altruistic white woman appears as a necessary catalyst for the movement. Implicit meanings of such a reading (of that scripting and editing) may not have been conscious, even for Attenborough, its producer, but the nuances of colonialism and its transposed perpetuations were recognized by Dick. And he still does that these days.

Dick is good at deconstructing the "golden shadow" of Green, prompting the members of his audiences to start with their own empowerment, thereby actualizing the Gandhian slogan, "Be the change you wish to see...".

He does have his far out side, and I don't agree with many of the statements he makes. But as someone who has long used their own position in society to reflect that society back to itself, I consider Dick Gregory an exemplar of the full richness possible for a single human life.