Tag Archives: spirituality

The North Pond Hermit

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He was just arrested on Tuesday, but already they’re writing ballads about the North Pond Hermit:

Nobody seen his face in twenty-seven years,
Since that day in ’86 when he up and disappeared.

The story has travelled around the world, and unless you are living in the woods, you’ve heard the rudiments of Christopher Knight’s story:

At the age of 19, he disappeared and set up a camp in the woods near Rome, Maine, where he lived for 27 years by stealing sleeping bags, food, propane, and books from nearby vacation cabins and a summer camp.  He spent the long winters wrapped in multiple sleeping bags and never made a campfire for fear of being discovered.  He spent his time reading and meditating.  His only conversation in 27 years was a greeting exchanged with a hiker he met on the trail in the ’90’s.

Christopher Knight

Christopher Knight

When he was arrested, Knight was neatly groomed and clean shaven.  He’s up on current affairs thanks to a transistor radio he used to listen to rock music, news, and Rush Limbaugh.  That’s about all we know, since Knight politely refuses to talk to journalists or explain himself to anyone.  This guy is going to pass on his 15 minutes of fame, his shot at a spot on Letterman, and the chance for a best selling ghost-written bio!

He walked away into the pines to live out in the woods
He turned his back on everything and he was gone for good.

I think the story resonates so deeply because part of us too, wants to walk away from all that crap.  “Lives of quiet desperation” in the words of Thoreau, who lived for two years in relative solitude at Walden Pond, but never made or intended to make a break as complete as that of Christopher Knight.

Into an unimaginable mystery like this, each of us will project our own biases.  For me, Knight’s practice of meditation aligns him with spiritual seekers who have sought out caves of one sort of another for millennia, but they never threw off all human connections.

The Hermit, from the Tarot

The Hermit, from the Tarot de Marseille

Christians have maintained a hermit tradition from the desert fathers through Thomas Merton, but none of them relinquished all human company.  Milarepa, a famous Tibetan yogi, lived in a cave for years eating boiled nettles, which gave his skin a greenish cast, yet once he attained awakening, he returned to teach what he’d learned to others.

Did Christopher Knight intend to return someday, to tell us what he’d discovered about the mushrooms and eagles who were his only companions?  We don’t know and won’t unless he decides to tell us.  In a way, I hope he doesn’t.  Whatever his story may be, it will be trivialized and forgotten a week after the tabloids get ahold of it.  I don’t want Christopher Knight’s tale to be forgotten.

Some of his old friends have said he was “intelligent, quiet, and nerdy” in high school – just like millions of us, in other words.  What could make an intelligent man who is one of us, simply decide to walk away, to opt out?  I hope we will wonder about that for a long, long time.

The North Pond Hermit, livin’ in the woods,
The North Pond Hermit, they’d catch him if they could.

You can listen to The North Pond Hermit Song here.

*** UPDATE after posting the original article ***

Troy Bennet and his dog, Hook, who brought you this great ballad, have posted a link to an MP3 version we can download for an optional contribution via Paypal.  Bennet says it isn’t his very best song, but it’s the one he’s written about a hermit this week.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho: a book review

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I started reading The Alchemist soon after its publication in 1988, but I didn’t finish it then, for reasons I don’t clearly remember. I picked it up again after author and writing friend, Amy Rogers, recommended the book for its affinity with the folk and fairytales I’ve recently spent so much time writing about.

She was right.  This time the story drew me in with its “Once upon a time” feeling.  It is not a fairytale by any measure; it’s far too sophisticated, yet it’s filled with folklorish magic.  The hero, Santiago, is named just once, when we meet him.  Through the rest of the tale, he is simply “the boy.”  Ironically, this generic quality, so typical of fairytales, allows us to identify with his journey, project our own yearnings into his far more closely than a modern, “three dimensional” characterization would have allowed.  In addition, the plot twist that ends The Alchemist is drawn directly from a folktale that appears around the world.

The Alchemist is a tale of spiritual self-realization.  From the start, Santiago tries to follow his “personal legend,” a term taken from alchemy.  At first, it is an instinct.  His search becomes explicit after a gypsy tells him his treasure lies near the pyramids.  A “chance” meeting with Melchizedek , the mysterious priest and king mentioned in Genesis, sets him on the path after he witnesses the unrequited longing of those who abandon the quest for their legends for the sake of expediency.  In order to follow his personal legend, Santiago learns to listen to the Soul of the World in his heart.  The world soul, or Anima Mundi is one of the key principles in the alchemical manuscripts that survive.

Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, in alchemy

Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, in alchemy

Paulo Coelho was born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro.  When he was a teenager and told his mother he wanted to be a writer, she praised the steadiness of his father, an engineer, and asked if he knew what it meant to be a writer.  After research, Coelho concluded that a writer, “always wears glasses and never combs his hair” and “has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation.”

At age 16, because of his introversion and refusal to follow a traditional career path, his parents had him committed to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before his release at age 20.  He agreed to attend law school but dropped out to become a hippie and travel through South America, Mexico, North Africa, and Europe.  Upon his return to Brazil, he worked as a song writer, an actor, journalist, and theatre director.

In 1986, he walked the 500 mile pilgrimage road of Santiago de Compostela to the cathedral where St. James the apostle’s remains are believed to be buried.  Since the middle ages, it has been one of three major Christian pilgrimage destinations, along with Rome and Jerusalem.  On the way, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described in his autobiographical novel, The Pilgrimage, 1987.  He published The Alchemist the following year, with a small Brazilian publisher that ran 900 copies and decided against a reprint.  Sales now total 65 million.

Paulo Coelho, 2012, by Sylvia Feudor. Copyright free.

Paulo Coelho, 2012, by Sylvia Feudor. Copyright free.

I do not clearly remember why I disliked The Alchemist when I first read it more than 20 years ago.  I suspect, to put it in Santiago’s language, that at the time, I feared I’d lost hold of my own personal legend.  I’m glad I picked up The Alchemist again.  Our world is darker, harder, and more cynical now, and more than ever I think we need Coelho’s gentle parable.  However difficult it may be, it’s good to try to remember this conversation between King Melchizedek and Santiago:

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.

“It’s this:  that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.  That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

A retreat with Anam Thubten, January, 2013

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Thanks to a recent comment by Sara Lier, I have the correct attribution for one of my favorite quotes.  It was Muriel Rukeyser, the American poet and activist, who said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

I think Anam Thubten Rinpoche  would agree.  In his latest book, The Magic of Awareness 2012, he says enlightened consciousness is available any time we can let go of our story lines.  He talks a lot about meditation as resting, as a cessation of effort including all efforts to meditate, to get enlightened, or collect any other spiritual goodies:

“Deeply resting is the point where we are no longer looking for anything else.  As long as there is an act of searching for God or truth  or eternal self, it is not only that we haven’t found it; we are actually moving away from it with great speed.”

The magic of awareness cover

We can all remember moments when we were “no longer looking for anything else.”  They are often our most joyous moments.  Anam Thubten’s teaching centers on this experience, on the deep truth and joy it contains.

The illusion of separation of self and other, self and the world, lies at the heart of all our troubles according to Buddha’s teaching, which Anam Thubten restates for the 21st century.  Good or bad, any concept of “I” leads to a friend-or-foe, fight-or-flight relationship with the world.  Yet “this ‘I’ is a fictitious entity that is always ready to whither away the moment we stop sustaining it…All we have to do is simply sit and pay attention to our breath, allowing ourselves to let go of all of our fantasies and mental images.” (from No Self, No Problem, 2009).

There’s nothing dumb about statements like that, since the teachers who make them never confuse the relative and ultimate levels of truth.  This is my car and that one is yours, and things work out better between us if we remember which is which.  The problem comes if I decide your car is better than mine.  If I conclude I’m the kind of person who never gets what he wants.  Maybe I’m undeserving…

The ego, the sense of a separate self, can spin such stories forever.  Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to glimpse the alternative vision.  “Try this,” says Anam Thubten.  “Pay attention to your breath in silence.  Look at your mind.  Immediately we see that thoughts are popping up.  Don’t react to them.  Just keep watching your mind.  Notice that there is a gap between each thought.  Notice that there is a space between where the last thought came to an end and the next one hasn’t arrived yet.  In this space there is no “I” or “me.”  That’s it.”  That, he says, is our ultimate and eternal nature.

Ideas like this do not demand belief, just consideration and perhaps later exploration.  The books listed here are a good place to start, as well as the website for Anam Thubten’s Dharmata Foundation, located in Point Richmond, California.

Einstein once said the only important question is whether or not the universe is a friendly place.  It is, according to Anam Thubten, as soon as we let go of our conditioned ideas that it is something else.  That realization, or at least a glimpse of it, is always closer than we think, no matter who we are and what we are doing.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

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This line from King Lear is part  of the title of a 1999 lecture by Dr. Joanne Stroud, one of the founders, along with James Hillman, of The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Lear:  Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Fool:  Lear’s shadow.  (Act 1, Scene 4)

The exchange is a fitting lead in to Stroud’s lecture which centers on ideas of identity in the western tradition, especially in Jungian psychology.  For Jung, “the shadow,” comprised of the disowned parts of a person or culture, is one of the first archetypal energies we encounter when we begin to look within, hoping to find out what and who we are.

I recommend Stroud’s transcript for its outline of Jung’s ideas as they bear on the western imperative, “Know Thyself,” which was inscribed at the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi.

Temple of Apollo at Delphi by Navin Rajagopalan, CC By-SA 2.0

I’m guessing that the question “Who can tell me who I am,”  is an undercurrent in the lives of everyone who has read this far.  In addition to our own introspections, don’t we ask friends, teachers, novelists, religions, therapists, books, and even politicians in certain election years?

There is much to be learned from these sources, information that’s useful when choosing a career, a spouse, a place to live, or when plotting a novel or writing a poem.  But that’s not what Lear asked or Apollo demanded at Delphi.  The answer to the question of identity is like a rainbow, sometimes visible on the horizon, but elusive no matter how we chase it.  The time comes when we have to ask the Dr. Phil question,  “How’s that working for you?”  Could it be that “identity,” as it is commonly imagined – as a kind of cosmic birth certificate – cannot be found?

That’s very good news according to Anam Thubten Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master I have written about before.  I’ve taken some half-dozen daylong retreats with him since 2005, most recently in January of this year.  I’ve wanted to write about the event, but it isn’t easy.  Rather than add to our store of beliefs and concepts, Anam Thubten suggests we try letting them go.  In his second book, The Magic of Awareness 2012, he says, “Good concepts are like a golden chain.  Bad concepts are like an iron chain.  They all equally bind you in the end.”

Reading that, I always think of meeting new people in social settings.  “What do you do?” is usually one of the first questions.  Do you ever resist being pigeonholed when that happens?  At such moments don’t we understand that “I” am more than my roles and my vital statistics.  Anam Thubten would add that we are greater than all our ideas of identity, which are just more sophisticated pigeonholes.

Anam Thubten

Next time I will try to describe the simple ways he invites us to drop our stories long enough to glimpse the reality that lies behind them.  If that’s biting off much more than I can chew, at least it’s easier than trying to answer Lear’s question.

Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales by Max Luthi

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Why do fairytales continue to fascinate?  Why do we  think of Red Riding Hood when we find ourselves alone in the woods or even a city park?  Why does Hollywood still reap profit from retelling the old stories?  Why do they move us so deeply?

On the Nature of Fairy Tales by Max Luthi (1909-1991) is a wonderful place to begin to look under the surface of these deceptively simple tales.  The eleven essays gathered in this book explore different features of fairytales such as structure, symbolism, and meaning.  Luthi views the tales as a unique literary genre.  He knew and referred to the major schools of folklore research – the sociological, the psychological, and the comparative historical approaches – but he always returned to the stories themselves.  The meanings he found there were more than enough.

Fairytales have “a crispness and precision” in part, according to Luthi, because they eliminate most descriptions.  We hear of a dark forest, a cottage, a witch, but any and all details come from our own imagination.  In a similar way, there is no real character development.  “The fairy tale is not concerned with individual destinies,” but this lends the tales a universal meaning.  The prince or princess stands for all of us, “as an image of the human spirit.”

At its core, the fairytale is about our “deliverance from an unauthentic existence and [the] commencement of a true one.”    Prince or princess, goose girl or goatherd, all have lost their way.  Their radiance, which is our radiance, is hidden.  The kitchen lad wears a hat to hide his golden hair.

Sometimes the hero or heroine sets off into the forest alone.  Sometimes they sit and weep.  “Crying, the sign of helplessness, summons assistance – again a feature recurring in innumerable fairy tales.  Precisely as an outcast can man hope to find help.”  The caveat is that one must be kind and compassionate to all living creatures in order to find the right kind of help at the right time.  Even ants will repay a kindness that can save the hero’s life.

Luthi quotes Mircea Eliade who said that fairytale listeners experience an “initiation in the sphere of imagination.”  In Luthi’s view, fairytales echo the truths of the great spiritual traditions – both we and the world are far more than what we seem.

Are we there yet: apocalyptic yearnings

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The Last Days of Pompeii by Karl Briullov, 1827-1833. Public Domain

The Oakland Hills Fire which broke out in October, 1991, was a major disaster by any estimate: 25 people died, 150 suffered injuries, and 3300 homes were destroyed. What I remember about the event, however, was an account by an independent journalist (whose name I have forgotten) who covered people arriving at evacuation shelters.

He said that a few were upbeat, almost giddy, as they talked of starting over.  The journalist said they were the first to be taken to counselors.  On-scene mental health triage workers assumed they were hysterical, most in need of hearing how terrible it was that they had lost everything.  How sad you must feel.  Have a kleenex.

I’ve always wondered about that.

The first historical accounts I know of that detail people waiting for the apocalypse date from December, 999, when groups across Europe trekked to high ground to wait for the millennial rapture.  The name, “rapture,” says it all.  It’s not the kind of disaster you read about in the papers.  It’s a chance to start over for true believers.  This is the hope picked up by new age proponents of the Mayan apocalypse, since the Mayans themselves left no hints of when the world will end.

The apocalyptic dream is the hope for a new heaven and earth that are better than this one.  Who wouldn’t like one of those, especially this year?

All the worlds religions tell us this world is not our home, but the mature voices in those religions do not hold out the hope of a cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card reserved for some chosen group.  They tell us that heaven and earth are transformed when an individual turns transformation.  Like Dante at 33, understanding he’d lost his way in a dark wood.  Like Rainer Maria Rilke who was viewing an ancient statue of Apollo when he heard an inner voice say, “here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

So tomorrow when we wake and the world looks the same, we can remember that it is not.  The sun will have turned from it’s southern trajectory, beginning its road back to summer.  And as we savor the morning coffee and the good things in our lives, we can take a moment to contemplate that turn toward a new heaven and earth.  The first steps lie with each and every one of us.

Reflections on Story Water

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My second post on this blog, on July 1, 2010, featured a poem called “Story Water” by the 13th century Persian mystic, Rumi.  It came to mind in the light of recent events.

Friday morning, as I worked on post #420, I got up for coffee and flipped on the radio.  The post concerned what folklore can teach us about living in difficult times.  After I heard of the murdered children, I put it aside.  Some events seem too much for stories.  Yet reflection later reminded me that stories are always with us, one way or another.  Rumi knew this.  He knew how the stories we hear feed our inner tales and the importance of choosing wisely where to place our attention.

On friday night, hundreds of people in Newtown, Connecticut went to church.  As I heard how they turned to a story of hope in a dark time, I thought of one of the first such stories I told myself.

One day in first grade, a classmate went home sick.  The following monday, the teacher told us she died.  I had seen dead birds in the woods behind our house, but that was the first time I realized death could visit at any time.  It could steal our friends and loved ones away in a heartbeat.

The dead girl’s name was Cindy Erwin, and she was the minister’s daughter.  I figured her father’s vocation gave her an in with Jesus, and she would be fine.  I never worried about Cindy, although I’ve never forgotten her name.  I knew it was the rest of us who were in trouble.

Stories like this, the ones we tell ourselves, shape our lives in ways we can barely imagine.  Everyone young or old who lived through events at Sandy Hook School or watched them unfold on TV will remember the day as long as they live and tell themselves stories about what happened and why and what it means.

According to Rumi, few of us know the answers with certainty.  That’s why we have stories.  That’s why they matter so much.  I think he would have agreed that in the end, the world is made of stories, so it matters very much which ones we tell each other and ourselves.  In ways we don’t understand, they shape the world as it unfolds.

STORY WATER by Rumi

A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,

and then not.

The Life of Pi: A movie review

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What you’ve heard about this movie is true: it’s the tale of a boy who winds up in a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. It’s also true that most critics have praised The Life of Pi. I’m with them; this is a magical film.

Pi Patel livess an idyllic childhood in Pondicherry, India.  His father owns a zoo, and Pi develops a love for the animals as well as a spirituality that embraces the Hindu gods, Jesus, and Allah.

As he tries to practice all three faiths, his father, convinced of the supremacy of reason, warns that “If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all.”  Pi’s father also demonstrates graphically that tigers are not your friend, a lesson that shakes Pi’s trust in nature.  The real blow falls after economic hardship forces Pi’s family to relinquish the zoo.  They sail for Canada with all the animals on a freighter, but a storm sinks the vessel, and Pi is the only human to survive.

What god do you pray to and what do say when your way of life and your family are suddenly gone, and you’re alone in a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger named Richard Parker?  Initially, there is little time for prayer in the struggle to survive.  Soon it’s just Richard Parker and Pi.  There are cans of water and boxes of biscuits for 30 aboard the lifeboat, as well as a book on survival and a pencil that Pi uses to journal in the margins.

An optimist, Pi’s spirituality returns with expressions of gratitude and surrender as the ocean moves through her various phases, with deadly storms, cornucopias of fish and rain, and scenes of unearthly beauty.

Einstein once said the only important question is whether or not the universe is a friendly place. The adult Pi, who narrates the tale, believes it is. Was his ocean a friendly place or not? Both and neither, his story seems to say; it’s far more vast than that.

The western fantasy of objective truth leads us to believe there are true stories and false ones. The eastern view, shared at least in part by novelists and movie makers, is that our stories create our realities.

What does your heart say?  What does it lead you to believe?  That’s the question the grown-up Pi seems to asks us with his story and a half smile on his face.  It’s the same enigma the ocean and Robert Parker put to him.