What Draws Us To Wonder?

Originally Published in the Herald-Zeitung, November 19,2022

Who has not occasionally paused to wonder about something or someone, some circumstance, some situation, that gathers mystery around it? For over 30 years I have written in my journal most mornings. As a prompt, I write about what wishes to be remembered from yesterday. It takes only a few seconds, after I have brewed coffee, lit a candle in my study at 4:30 a.m. and sit with that question, that the remembered events line up.

At the end of each morning’s writing, I ask myself: “What did you wonder about or become curious about yesterday?” Sometimes no answer steps up; other mornings two or three emerge, competing for attention.

I sense that wonder has its own way of knowing. A deeper form of learning is often evoked through wonder. Not seeking the right answer but paying attention to the questions that grow naturally from wondering, like the fruit that emerges from a well-tended seed that blossoms into a plant. That is wonder’s pathway.

Curiosity is also a form of wondering. So can questioning what we believe, value, and even what we sense might be time to discard in our lives. In one of his Dialogues, the Greek philosopher Socrates questioned his student on what he thought was the nature of knowledge. When his student grows dizzy trying to answer this question because it sets him wondering, his teacher saluted him: “this sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher,” namely, the love of wisdom (Philo-Sophia). I sense that it grows directly from being curious.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested that one of the primary functions of myth is to stir in the individual a sense of awe and mystery. I don’t think we have to travel any farther than what is valued in an ordinary day to find illustrations of either; but there is no such thing as ordinary, especially when events in our lives encourage or provoke wonder.

Wonder gains traction when it emanates from the heart, not the head. One experiences something or someone that is heart-felt. Wonder does not seek the right answer, the fixed fact; it is more nuanced than that, more pliable, more oblique.

In wondering we run the risk of touching what is mysterious in life, what gravitates toward a sense of awe. It brushes against what is both ineffable and sacred. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “what we cannot comprehend by analysis we become aware of in awe.”

As an example: In these blessedly cooler mornings, my wife and I step out early, before daylight, and gaze for a few moments at the stars that appear so brilliantly against a black sky. There, in the stillness of 4:30 a.m., we stand for a moment in silence.

Gazing up at the night sky full of brilliant lights, we are inevitably drawn to wonder what this new day will bring, how it will both shape itself and be shaped in part by our plans, our schedules and our obligations. Wonder then seems to dissolve under the weight of duty.

In this early moment, however, we sense the power of wonder implicit in the ordinary. Wonder coaxes what we call “ordinary”—a word so inadequate to our experience, so we remain for another moment, silent in the immensity of the early morning sky before it dissolves into the day’s birthing sunrise.

In the cool dark air of the morning, we don’t stop to think; we stop thinking. For wonder seems more intimate with a felt sense of what is real and mysterious. In wonder we are allowed to exist in that narrow hyphen between them.

I sense that such fleeting moments are what poets and artists seek through their creative imaginations: to capture the beauty exposed by wonder and how, for instance, the moon’s shadows will spread across another day, shaping itself, already, from darkness into light.  

I end by wondering if these moments of closeness with the natural world serve as bridges to the ineffable mystery of the sacred’s presence, suddenly there in front of us if we open ourselves to its terms, not ours.         

Trout Fishing is Not About the Fish

Co-authored by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Roger Barnes
Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News on October 26, 2022

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing
that it is not fish they are after.
—Henry David Thoreau

We have been fishing for rainbow trout in the Missouri Ozarks for 30 years. It is an annual pilgrimage from San Antonio to a rural fishing lodge in southwest Missouri, 1600 miles round trip. We recently returned from our pilgrimage with reflections to share.

Over these three decades our friendship has strengthened on each excursion to the point that we now admit the week together is not about fly rods, reels, dry flies and nymphs. Nor is it about the fish we hook.

So, if the trip is not primarily about the mechanics of fishing, then what is the through line of this adventure?  We now realize that fishing has become a rich metaphor for what matters in our lives.

It is about camaraderie and friendship, undertaken in one of the most ancient of human activities, the journey, and what we discover each time we enter this vessel of adventure.  

In our younger days we fished early in the morning, then again late in the afternoon for hours on end. No longer. Our time on the stream has shortened considerably.  

Our pilgrimage has assumed a more contemplative, less active rhythm where the fish play a smaller role than they once did.  Emphasis has shifted comfortably from the fish and the size of the catches to our shared friendship.  

Catching three fish per day, not eight, is more than satisfying. Something more valuable is caught now in the nets of our imaginations, like a return to the value of an ordinary day and the treasures which invite a sustained feeling of gratitude.

Preparing and enjoying our meals together in the house we rent has become a sacred ritual.

Now, it is about sitting on the porch and feeling dusk descend. We enjoy hearing the crickets and other critters that stir in the thickening shadows, creating a chorus of sounds as the day curls into its own darkness.     

Our time of stepping out of the regular rhythms of our lives allows for remembrances and giving story form to memories of previous trips and to our lives more broadly.

Now in our 70s, we fish for stories to pull from the deep waters of memory. The stories allow their shiny, colorful hues, like those of the trout jumping into sunlight, to illuminate our present identity.

We have become more conscious of the reality that where the water runs most swiftly, and especially in the shadows of the stream, is where the invisible trout are clustered.  

It has become our way of reconnecting to the natural order, with its own wondrous rhythms and shadings.

Our fishing excursions bring much of our individual lives to the surface. Our life events are for a moment fixed in the telling, which is itself one of the richest elements in a long and sustained friendship.

Our fly lines have, over time, morphed into our story lines. We read more now on our outings and fish less.  It has become a shift in awareness where we now sense there are bigger fish to fry.

It is a time for rich conversations about what we have read or films we’ve watched. We are now, at our age, casting our attention at the meaning of life itself. These trips are the occasions for taking stock of the bigger questions that life poses.  

A shift in our collective attitude is itself a migration from quantity to quality, an important observation to consider because it includes the very journey of life itself in its constant flow, eddies and currents that attend our lives.

What we now grasp is the importance of connecting our stories.  They are the mythic underpinnings of our lives, offering us coherence, cohesion and camaraderie.

But, to be clear about the trout we do catch: yes, we take them home and we eat ‘em!

Meditation Has Lasting Benefits

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, September 6, 2022.

A renewed interest in meditation practices is growing in our country. It is being used to increase consciousness, to improve health and vitality, to deepen one’s spiritual life and to offer a counter way of being conscious of our everyday experiences. It is also being evoked by more individuals pausing in their lives to ask: What kind of world is being shaped and insisting we accept its terms, values, assumptions and prejudices, as well as its beliefs, all of which can indoctrinate us into a world view that we may not be aligned with?

If we fail to pay attention to these often-subtle changes and shifts, we can become victims of the illusion of freedom. Pausing less to analyze, which is often ego-driven, one sided and reductionistic, and more to meditate, which draws us closer to our most authentic selves and to the implicit holiness of the ordinary, can improve our understanding. It coaxes us beyond information to a deeper transformation of who we are and are becoming.  

To cultivate a practice of meditating opens us to experience the daily round of our lives in greater depth. Each day we are asked by a variety of sources—news outlets, shows, movies, advertising, podcasts and political maneuverings, to remember and accept certain circumstances and conditions, and to forget others. We can then fall asleep in this din of forces to what is truly remarkable. I have discovered that meditating can cultivate a different attitude as well as a fuller way of imagining the world’s ordinary particulars as tinged with the sacred qualities of life.

In contrast to egoic, one-sided thinking, in which power is accumulated under the guise of analysis, meditation is more wholistic; it does not explain, it illuminates understanding. Meditation leans toward recognizing the interrelatedness of all parts of what at first glance seems so diverse, even antithetical to one another. Meditation allows, even welcomes, paradox, contradiction, as part of the fabric of life; it is closer to the image of weaving, of creating a tapestry rather than reinforcing the independence of life’s complexity with no underlying unity.

One of meditation’s most important qualities is that it can lead us to wonder, that is, to envision the ordinary happenings of each day—a brief contact with a stranger, an act of courtesy, a moment of self-forgiveness or forgiving another, the sounds that gather around one during a morning walk—as instances that evoke gratefulness for what might have seemed trivial before.

Meditating slows us down, even for the space of 20 minutes if one chooses to find a time each day for silence and solitude. Even taking a moment to become aware of our breathing, and to notice how often each day we move breathlessly from one task to another increases our conscious awareness.

Meditating awakens us to the beauty of our heart and to our sense of being embodied. It reveals how we might take in the world we inhabit at a single moment, with all of our senses and to feel joy in the process.

Meditating can also reveal where our lives are unlived or possibly needing renewal and revision. We may imagine how our inner life is disconnected from the outer social world we traverse daily.

It can also assist us during times of illness, misfortune, loss and grief by finding a place for such suffering within the larger fabric of who we are and to what we are destined.

A meditative practice can shift us from skating across the surface of posessions, distractions and future plans and promotions by reminding us of what we all paossess in common: this very moment of vulnerability and promise. We can be present only to the present. That itself is a gift worth acknowledging in meditations of gratitude.

Journey into Space and the Mythic Imagination

Originally published in the Opinion page of The San Antonio Express-News, September 3, 2022.

Human beings possess a deep hunger to explore, to leave the familiar known world and reach out to mystery, to what is uncertain and to gain new insights that deepen our understanding of who we are as a species. Myths have revealed this  for millennia.

With NASA’s announcement of a new series of 8 exploits called Artemis, the mythic dimension is once again front-and-center. The moon will serve as both destination and way station in the Artemis project, whose goal is to eventually reach Mars named after another Greek divinity, one of strife, but also of ambition, excitement and drive.

The Apollo program is no more. Next in line is Apollo’s divine sister, Artemis, who is associated with the moon and its illumination, as well as with nature and especially animals. Her favorite was the bear. As a huntress she possessed, like her brother, deadly accuracy with her arrows, especially as they travelled long distances to their intended mark.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell reminded us that myths use the language of metaphor for their energy and durability. Based on two words—meta=across or beyond—and phorein=to carry--a metaphor, like a myth, is “a transport vehicle” that encourages us to move out of the boundaries of the known and familiar into unknown worlds. By introducing Artemis, a goddess, NASA adopted a new metaphor, a new mythic figure, for such a transport.

This is a healthy sign both mythically and imaginally; it complements the earlier masculine presence of Apollo to establish a greater presence of feminine energy in space travel.

I sense in the “Artemis” naming for the next eight space flights—which includes the goals of sending a woman and a woman of color to walk on the moon’s surface—a mythic expression of integration with the masculine in the service of a greater wholeness and completeness. Her name is no small matter for our national imagination. A new analogy ripens with her presence, for both Apollo and Artemis are known in the wisdom tradition of myth for their healing powers. They are curative forces that promote healing wounds of infection, strife, dissension and disorder.

Mythic thinking has a strong poetic element,  and NASA rises in our imagination as a witness to this presence. Mythic—or mythopoetic thinking—rests on the power of analogy in creating a new story by reviving an old narrative and fabricating it in modern clothing. The space program is once again the launch pad for the imagination; it allows us to see ourselves withing a larger cosmic frame.

The power of myth is then twofold: First, to see ourselves anew within the frame of epic and vast terrain; the space program yields to something far greater and grander than us, yet includes our greatness as a species. Second, to see and imagine from a double perspective by retrieving from ancient history, as filmmakers Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas have done, stories and figures of earlier wisdom traditions, and reinstating them within our cosmic dreams.

The ancient past, then, coalesces with our dreams of a distant future. Such is the power of mythic imagination. We all need the mythic world to refresh us as we gaze skyward at the future. Let Artemis show us the way as our new guide, joining  the constellation of earlier figures on our trajectory deeper into the universe and into our knowledge of ourselves.

Theft of a National Narrative Harms Us All

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, July 23-24, 2022.

There is an Irish saying my friend, Phil Cousineau included in his book, The Oldest Story in the World: any journey one takes is not complete until one tells a story about their adventure. So, the story about the voyage is as crucial to its meaning as the adventure itself.  In mythologist Joseph Campbell’s classic work of 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he illustrates three “moments” of a journey: 1. Departure from the normal and familiar; 2. Meeting with both adversaries as well as helping companions; 3. A return home with “the boon” or the story of what one has learned during their quest.

The boon or story surveys the knowledge and perhaps the wisdom that expands and deepens the storyteller’s vision of themselves and the world traversed. When shared with others, the story may deepen the level of their self-and-world knowledge; stories look both within one and outside to the world they inhabit. Many of you know that Twelve Step Recovery Programs are guided in large measure by stories, personal narratives told to and received by others. Some healing power emerges in narratives that one can experience imaginally, not necessarily literally.

We can connect with strangers and friends more deeply when we share our tales with them, which is to share our identity, our history, with others. Telling our narratives and listening to others’ plots satisfies a deep hunger in both speaker and listener. Our stories voiced is one of our most creative acts; sharing our stories can be a generous way of relating deeply to ourselves and with others on a level far more profound than those offered by statistics, surveys and other forms of facts that don’t reveal the contours of a coherent narrative on a deeper level.

When someone asks who we are, our response often takes the form of a story. Each story we tell or hear carries a mythic resonance. We remember that the word “mythos” means story.

When we identity deeply with our own story, we tap into closely-held beliefs, prejudices, shadows, values, assumptions and aspirations. In a sense, we language ourselves into our present being through the stories we tell. Narrating ourselves in the world seems to be essential to our nature as a species. This deep hunger reveals the impulse to present ourselves both as a story and in a story.

Storyteller Richard Kearney observes in his book, On Stories, that “each nation discovers it is at heart an ‘imaginal community,’ a narrative construction to be reoriented and reconstructed repeatedly.” Forgetting one’s narrative origins, he goes on, is dangerous, because it can lead to “self-oblivion” when the disease of a community takes itself for granted or becomes so narcissistic it believes it is the center of the world and therefore entitled to assert itself, to the detriment of others

In this light, Democracy is less a noun, more a verb; it is a story in motion. However imperfectly, an origin myth or story, embodies shared values and stabilizing meanings that promote the following in the collective imagination: 1. participation, 2. integration and 3. aspiration.  It shapes our past into formed memories that guide us as a people.

I am therefore more concerned with the theft today of our origin story, our founding narrative, that largely defines who we are and wish to become as a people sharing a communal narrative that aspires to benefit all its citizens.

Such a theft--to be replaced by a groundless fiction that is self-serving and just next door to wishful thinking—is felonious. If we allow our founding narrative to be eclipsed by a story-as-scam, we lose something essential to our identity as a people. Such corrosion unmoors us from a shared history and more painfully, perhaps, from one another.      

Betting on Fantasy: A Modern Allegory

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung July 9-10, 2022.

Not long ago I bought five lottery tickets for a total of five dollars. When I realized that the date was 6/22/22, my fantasy thinking kicked in and I made the investment. I believed the date had special significance conducive to my ability to win. So long as I didn’t run the lottery numbers through the machine at a local Pit Stop, I could maintain my belief that I might have won. Thus far I have side-stepped the “reality machine” waiting to read my ticket.

My desire to win, as well as my belief that I might have won, teamed up to allow me to sustain the myth of being a winner. So long as I don’t expose my numbers to the “reality” machine that will reveal whether I am a winner or a loser, I am able to sustain the fantasy of having won.

However, when I finally do run my ticket through the “reality check” and it reveals those dreaded words, “Not a Winner,” I have the option of rebuffing the machine’s fact by accusing it of malfunctioning and that I did in fact win. The accusation allows me to sustain my magical thinking.

I can further accuse and so deflect the fact that I lost, by accusing the store employees of rigging the machine so they can profit off my “winning ticket that my own fantasy thinking has manufactured. I can then override what has been called by D. Stephenson Bond, “directed thinking” (Living Myth), which is rooted in facts, in what can be proven, in order to maintain my magical belief.

An important shift in interpreting experience enters here. “I bet I won” subtly shifts into “I believe I won,” so now my magical belief is the new subject matter, not the fact that I lost.

When we live in a myth, writes Bond, we encounter experiences through culturally formed ways. If enough people can be persuaded to replace the “myth of fact” with the “myth of fiction,” then an empirical reality we once shared is dismantled under the mythic pressure of a new belief system—an alternative universe—a galaxy far away from the grounded reality that once prevailed that proven facts provide. They hold us together, like a bonding agent, so that while there is space for differences, there is an infrastructure that we collectively believe in and share.

What Bond calls “a functional adaptation to our cultural environment,” is ruptured, becomes dysfunctional and our connection to a shared empirical world “is thwarted.” No one escapes the infection of this maladaptation. Myths die when their balancing tendencies are disturbed, deflected and dismantled. Then dissociation may soon lead to fear, anger and violent disruptions in some of its participants.  

Myths, both personal and collective, are formed in just this way. This new myth can keep the “winner/loser” dis-oriented and disassociated from the truth of directed thinking. Perhaps, I think, I can persuade others that I have won so they too purchase my winner fantasy with their own “buy-in” belief that I did really win.

For the time being, I will continue to carry my lottery ticket in my possession. Each morning I wake a winner in my mind’s eye. I also suspect that all our beliefs ultimately return to the originary myth fanning life into them, be they rooted in reality or in fantasy. Someday soon, however, I need to face the “reality machine” at Pit Stop to close out my fantasy. Or collect my winnings!

Service Above Self

Building Community: Answering Kennedy’s Call by Harlan Russell Green.

Writing a memoir can be tricky. It poses several complex questions: What do I include? What do I leave out? What do I lean on most to best capture the sense of my identity-in-formation? Am I remembering accurately? Harlan’s engaging biography of his life-long call to service finds a fine balance to the questions above. It also reveals through particular instances that transformed his life, the call of a soul to a context and to a contract with himself and with something larger than himself; it propels his myth forward as well as recollects it in hindsight.

Close in age to Harlan, I related to his call to serve after he graduated from Berkeley and joined the fledgling Peace Corps. His decision took him to a remote village in Turkey, Ismet Pasha. These life-changing years were followed by working for the Environmental Protection Agency; he also found himself assisting with and filming the plights of farm workers that Cesar Chavez helped to organize for safer and more equitable working conditions.

As a film maker, he found creative ways to migrate the suffering of marginalized people and communities into national consciousness. One of his most recent ventures was to spearhead efforts to raise the city of Goleta to the status of a city, but only after working on and organizing many groups with the capacity to tackle multiple deficiencies in its boundaries before it could be considered sustainable. Everyone of Harlan’s callings reveals the workings of his own soul-scape that were reflected in his efforts to improve livability standards, a soul-work-in-depth. One of the many mantras Harlan has lived by is “finding ways” as a central path he spiraled back to repeatedly. When he hit a dead-end, he found a way.

His memoir follows the deep grooves of so many written before his. Memoirs are mythic utterances wherein the author retraces their living vision revealed in the many particulars of a recollected plot. What surfaces is the creative genius of the person in accord with life’s circumstances that often appear as mysteries on the path of submission. These events appear to the memoirist as hungers or yearnings of the soul to be satisfied in living by a code of meaning and purpose; for Harlan it was centrally to make the lives of others more livable by transforming their daily circumstances into places of safety and equity—in short, social justice.

In such a template, a memoir like Harlan’s is a form of recreation. By that I mean a form of re-creation, wherein his creative muses nudged him from one series of life’s opportunities to another; he would eventually return home to work on Santa Barbara’s nearby relative, the city of Goleta, where my wife and I lived for 12 years and where we saw so many of these improvements Harlan organized and brought to fruition in that developing city.

What he tracks so admirably in his series of recollections is the interior changes in himself as he organizes positive and humane changes in the lives of others. At times, he will insert one of his poems to give aesthetic voice to a dramatic moment on his journey. As I read it, I realized once again that our interior lives are often expressed in what we do in the external world that mirrors one’s interior landscape. I can hear him asking, along with “What is a Livable City?” another question: “What is a Livable Life?” His memoir italicizes that there is no real space, no gap, between these questions and their responses.

I found his writing eloquent, impassioned, poetic and revelatory as he unfolded his own myth that was churning below the plotline of his achievements. For me, the greatest triumph is the quality of life so well-lived, guided by the perennial motto: “Service Above Self.” Harlan gets it: the path to the Self is in fact the same path to Serving Others.

Attempted Scam is a Lesson on Fraud

Originally Published in the Opinion Page of the Herald-Zeitung, May 21-22, 2022

My goal was simple: to cancel a rent car in another city because I no longer needed it. When I called the number that I assumed would connect me with those who could assist in my canceling the rent car, I had no idea what a vortex of fraud I was to enter.

I cannot relate here the intricacies of those who professed to be employees of the car rental company, but who in fact were scammers, skilled in how to disarm their victims by encouraging trust in them and their deep concern for quickly refunding to my checking account money I had spent for the car. So the extortion had begun but I was initially deaf to its shape and pattern.

The upshot of such a slick scheme was that my bank, smelling something foul about a request for funds from the scammers, sent me a notice even as I was still on the phone, growing only slightly suspicious of their propaganda. I told the scammer that I wanted to call my bank first before seeking the refund further. A bank employee asserted that our accounts were to be shut down immediately and that my wife and I should come in to begin the process of opening new accounts. The old ones were frozen.  

Anyone who my wife or I have told about our close encounter of the fiendish kind, almost without exception were eager to share their own story of facing fraud without knowing it, and how stupid, even ashamed, they felt afterward. I do not believe it has anything to do with being stupid. But I do sense that there is something pornographic about fraud. Its intention is to play off a person’s basic sense of trust and often their generosity, as they fall victim to helping someone they know who needs financial help, which is a false claim by the scammers. Such a violation of these human virtues takes the shape of bilking individuals of their savings.

A recent AARP Bulletin is devoted primarily to “The Bad Guys: Who They Are and How to Stop Them.” Immensely helpful. And painful to read for many of us who see in their reporting the very scam pattern leveled at us. Its main article begins with a quote from the classic text, The Art of War by Sun-Tzu: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.” A tall order given the intricate, sophisticated and well-practiced fraud schemes that have netted those in the counterfeit game hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting victims. Those 60 years or older are particularly vulnerable.  

The large caution for all of us is to be wary of divulging any information to solicitors by phone, email or other vehicles of transmission. The Bulletin goes on to outline the 8 most prevalent “fraud pitches” being used in accelerating numbers across the US—and suggestions for how to avoid their quicksand pitches.

Over 700 years ago the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, outlined in his Divine Comedy the face of fraud: “Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail. . . /Behold the one whose stench fills all the world.” And then to fraud’s visage: “The face he wore was that of a just man,/so gracious was his features’ outer semblance; and all his trunk, the body of a serpent; . . . And all his tail was quivering in the void/while twisting upward its envenomed fork” (Inferno 18).

His figure is an unnatural amalgam of a stinging scorpion with an innocent human face. Be aware that such an appetite for wealth, driven by deceit is only a telephone call or email away.  

Why Write? Writing as Healing

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, April 9-10, 2022.     

For the past 35 years I have kept journals and written in them at least 5 days a week. I have always felt it sometimes soothing, sometimes painful but certainly valuable when I hone in on topics that go beyond simply recording my days; my expressions go deeper, bearing down on losses, challenges, financial and physical limitations as well as hopes for a productive and purposeful future. When I write more intensely about what conveys in my life a sense of bliss as well as what events have sprouted blisters that needed more attention, I gain new levels of understanding.

But in my readings of late, I am discovering how medicinal writing about discomforts, challenges, or places where life has entered to hijack my best plans can be.  Several books have attracted me to this topic, but none more grippingly than James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth’s Opening Up and Writing it Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. It has been out since 2010 and is in its third edition.

I have  frequently experienced such a healing quality to my journaling, but now I see from these psychologists, whose research has revealed with various groups how the immune system is boosted, how memory improves, how clutter in our often traffic-jammed mind can be lessened, how understanding can be gained on a deeper level of awareness, and how a new focus to our lives can be installed—all through what he calls “Expressive Writing.”

His method is as uncomplicated as it is profound, Essentially, he calls for remembering an event such as a loss, a failure, an unexpected turn in the road of our life’s journey, or any impediment that stops one short; we know these incidents because we feel their power to arrest us, to swallow us, and to force us into reassessing what our true purpose in life is.

Pennebaker suggests not writing about it immediately, but to let some time pass. When we are ready, write about it for 15 minutes a day for 3 or 4 days to allow it to unfold. But he also cautions that self-reflection in writing is not the same thing as self-absorption; the latter takes over when we simply relive the experience repeatedly to the point of madness. Instead, he encourages writing about the event in detail from a detached point of view, where we can see ourselves with some objectivity. In this expressive writing we ask how we felt at the time of the event (critically important) and how we feel now in writing about it.

When, after research trials with large numbers of writers following this simple but effective way of understanding what happens to us from a writer’s point of view, he asked them months later what they had gained. A common response was “It helped me think about what I felt during those times. I never realized how it affected me before.” Another: “Writing deeply and thoughtfully about what happened to me and the feelings that accompanied it, I was able for the first time to let it go completely.”

Expressive writing can also include a persistent story we tell about ourselves that can be either demeaning or uplifting. In the former case, one may want to edit and revise those stories that shame or belittle one, and to create a contrary version that can change the story one lives by.

His book’s wisdom may encourage others to begin writing into what ails or encourages them, in order to locate its deeper sources of contact with who one is. It is a form of what another writer referred to as “writing for your life.”      

Words Define, or Destroy, Democracy

Originally published in the Opinion page of the San Antonio Express-News

As a nation we have recently recollected the insurrection of January 1, 2021. Yes, there were competing narratives of what occurred that day, contending words that vied for prominence in the American imagination; comparisons to historical events like the caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the House Chamber in 1856 for his opposition to slavery, and the Civil War itself, are examples.

What is shared in the above is a marked intensity of what most of us thought was a pure and founding goodness of an admittedly imperfect democracy. But such a human aspiration is defiled more openly and viciously today in the wake of the attack.

Recent political impulses appeared to ban books, under the deceptive goal of keeping students safe from discomfort over ideas in books that challenge their beliefs. Trying to preserve innocence, a form of purity, is itself a form of defilement.

But an even greater pollution, or defilement, is gaining more traction in defiling language itself. Such an insurrection against what words mean or the reality they are grounded in is a more primal attack on meaning itself, both what words reveal and what they conceal. Words are the most shared reality that binds us together, ostensibly. Thus their defilement is more alarming. Words in several quarters of our country are losing their respect and integrity in both their denotative and connotative meanings. Weaponizing words creates a deeper wound in the national psyche, perhaps even more than on democracy itself.

 Lewis Carroll’s memorable tale, “Through the Looking Glass,” offers this outrageous assertion:  “’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’” Here the integrity of words and their history are shuffled to the dust bin.

The French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, reveals even more malice through his study of defilement in The Symbolism of Evil. Words may fall under the tyranny of pornography when they are seditiously distorted and so alienated from their fidelity to a shared reality. My sense of pornography is that it expresses a desire or impulse to overpower and control the lives of Others.

For Ricoeur, words themselves become the weapons “of a ritual suppression.” This form of “defilement, insofar as it is the ‘object’ of this ritual suppression, is itself a symbol of evil.” I acknowledge here that culturally we don’t often address the symbolic order of anything, so incarcerated are most conversations by the tyranny of literalism.

Such an attack on language now descends to a total fabrication without physical referents; however, such orphaned words can provoke physical and psychological trauma. “Nevertheless,” writes Ricoeur, “the defilement that comes from spilt blood is not something that can be removed by washing.” The stain, he implies, is much deeper than the physical blood; it is also symbolic.

The stain of insurrection and the physical assault’s consequences are built into the language that exacts such physical violence as well as the language that suppresses its real and felt impacts. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the capital building itself is symbolic language, erected to house the document that founds us.  We are founded on a congress of words that offers our lives symbolic and literal meaning and purpose--in short, our national myth.

Our words, used to remember January 6, 2021, have their own syntax and rhetoric connected to history through their etymologies. Defiling the capital was a rite of defiling the language of democracy and of words generally. “It is the rite that exhibits the symbolism of defilement, and just as the rite suppresses symbolically, defilement infects symbolically,” writes Ricoeur.

Suppression as an act of pornographic aggression can be no more primal than this.

Trust’s Presence or Absence Will Make the Difference

Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald Zeitung February 19-20, 2022.

Many will remember Ronald Reagan’s famous and oft-repeated mantra, “Trust But Verify.” He was taught this Russian proverb by an American Scholar, liked it and made it a signature slogan in many of his talks. Trust is a virtue worth exploring at a historical moment of its corrosive weakening. “In God We Trust” is printed on our currency. In money’s circulation Trust is also shared and exchanged. We see the word in “Boards of Trustees,” in “Bank and Trust” logos, in setting up a “Trust Fund,” or in entrusting what we value to another. Security and good faith underpin many formats of Trust in our society; it is verification that that something or someone is in good hands.

I think of Trust as the heartbeat of any authentic relationship. In our exchanges with others, a fundamental question we might and should ask is less “Is this person loyal?” but more deeply, “Is this person trustworthy?” From the response to this central question, all other elements of that relationship ripple out. Along with the virtues practiced by many—Faith, Hope and Love—I would add Trust as the fourth term in a virtuous life.

Trust is also no stranger to Truth; they are intimate first-cousins. Truth suffers a hit when Trust is attacked or dismantled. When Trust is beaten down, we may both gasp and grasp for certainty anywhere it appears available.

Further, Trust is also sacramental; it creates a sacred way of being with ourselves and others, including our social and political institutions. Belief too shares with Trust a sacred partnership; what and who I Trust I can believe in. They are mutually supportive and nourishing. Without Trust, a host of demons can invade the gap opened by Trust’s absence. Here are a few that come to mind:

Suspicion of others

Lust for power

Uncertainty that breeds fear and anxiety

Extreme obsession with safety and security

Tribalism

Rigid us/them splits

Magnified inequities towards Others pushed to the margins

Intolerance

Rigid control

Extremism

Self-doubt

In Trust’s absence our horizons may narrow, suffering severe constrictions.  Without Trust, generosity loses its vitality as largesse and courage diminish. Without Trust relationships suffer malnourishment and anemia, their vital affection suffocated.

Trust is a compilation of all of the above and more as they assemble a world view, a life perspective, a way of being. Seeing the world through the lens of Trust offers a differently textured world than one envisioned through the filter of Distrust.

When the very young French visitor to the United States in 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote deeply and thoughtfully about our way of life, the role of citizens within our political institutions and other topics, he penned many insights about the nature of our government that remain relevant today. In his massive  Democracy in America, he observed, “The will of a democracy is changeable, its agents rough, its laws imperfect. . .  But if it is true that there will soon be nothing intermediate between the sway of democracy and the yoke of a single man, should we not rather steer toward the former than voluntarily submit to the latter?”

He concludes his chapter on “Maintaining a Democratic Republic” by asking us to consider this question: “And if we must finally reach a state of complete equality, is it not better to let ourselves be leveled down by freedom rather than by a despot?” Despotism creates an antithesis of Democracy; what separates the two rests on the vital and vigorous presence of Trust; when mutual Trust is organic, and robust, Despotism scuttles into the shadows. Retrieving mutual Trust could begin a lasting national Peace.

The Kore Goddess: A Psychology and Mythology

 On Saturday, December 4th I began a conversation with Dr. Safron Rossi, author of her new book above. After speaking of images and themes that interested me, we invited in Drs. Joanna Gardner and Stephanie Zajchowski, who expressed additional themes and ideas in the book that Dr. Rossi amplified; as the conversation progressed, we all found connections with one anothers’ insights, making the conversation a true engagement of ideas and images. The next morning, and as one of the areas that I found most fascinating, the quality of hiddenness that the Goddess cultivates, the following poem began to take shape.

I share it with you now and will post on this blog where one can visit to witness the rich conversation we had that afternoon.

Virtues in Hiddenness
“Listen to presences inside poems
Let them take you where they will” Rumi, “The Tent”
Can we feel when
our identity wants to hide from us—
a hedonist of hiddenness?
Save part of your illusion of self
deep in the closet of what you think
your life means.
That itself is a means
to an end.
When speaking with others
keep some treasures back
for safe-keeping.
Don’t tell all to make a good impression;
once your past leaks out of you
it can never be retrieved.
So don’t let your words
become warriors that turn on you
in the darkness
demanding to return.
Impossible.
We don’t need others
to dig holes for us
to fall into.
We can do it ourselves,
only much deeper.
Peer into its depths,
see if shards of your myth
are buried there,
in the emptiness.

Engaging Aging as a Spiritual Practice

Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News Opinion page, October 2, 2021

I never really imagined what aging would be like. Yes, an older body subject to disease and limits, a memory that needed kick-starting more often than when I was younger. Perhaps less mobility and more a sedentary life as my default position each day. Would my attitude gravitate towards what South Wales poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) cautioned in his poem I read as an undergraduate:

“Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The refrain in the last line ends each of the stanzas as a defiant posture towards aging. But here I am, at age 77, continuing to teach a variety of audiences, writing, publishing books, traveling, and enjoying family, friends and fortunes both good and challenging. I am not alone; we are living now in an unprecedented era of an entire population living longer than ever before in human history. How are people using that extended time to refresh what purpose their lives allow for?

But there is another entire galaxy of interior possibilities as retired  psychotherapist Connie Zweig eloquently expresses in her new book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul. As I continue to read it, I recently heard her offer a zoom talk on the book’s central features, which made me realize how nuanced and complex aging can be. It is a time for new discoveries of one’s central myth, namely, the core values and aspirations that give our life coherence, meaning, and purpose.

She believes, for example, that aging is a spiritual practice, one that invites a deepening into our interior worlds. And far from an individual suffering a mid-life crisis, she notes that as a therapist she witnessed a “Late-Life crisis” in those she worked with. So what paths may open up within our aging journey? For her, aging into elderhood is an opportunity to awaken to deeper dimensions of ourselves that ego-consciousness has suffocated or deflected, in order to have some control in the wheel house of our lives.

Many books on aging and retirement stress new tasks to perform, like volunteering in service to the common good, or painting or dance classes—all admirable activities. But Zweig takes a different tack in asking: “What do you long for in your aging?” “What is your promised land?” as she recalls the end of Moses’ life after leading his people to the edge of that terrain of milk and honey. “What is falling away from your life that you may have clung to for decades?”  She believes as well that as we age, our dream life can offer us wisdom in our exploration.

As a practicing Buddhist for most of her life, Zweig offers that cultivating the art of meditation can be a life-preserver. “Meditation also appears to slow age-related degeneration in our brains. Citing a neurologist’s studies at UCLA, she reports that “On average, the brains of long-term practitioners appeared to be seven and a half years younger at the age of fifty than the brains of non-meditators.”

Finally, as author/editor of two very popular  books on the shadow in our psychological life, Zweig believes that as we move in age to the sage within, we would can benefit from engaging the shadow: “the shadow is our personal unconscious, that part of our mind that is behind or beneath our conscious awareness. . . . The shadow holds the key to removing the inner obstacles that block us from finding the treasures of late life.”

Readers will find in her wisdom book many case studies from her practice that provide a host of narratives to further ground her observations and insights about not raging “against the dying of the light,” but rather to welcome and connect with the shaded terrains of our aging pilgrimage. In moonlight, for instance, our perceptions soften to a less sharply-chiseled world; we may then rejoice in the knowledge that a life that honors the shadows of our being can complement all that we have become and achieved. Gratitude may then host our most favored attitude.

From Act Your Age to Think Your Age

Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung’s Opinion page October 26, 2021

Unfortunately, most images of aging citizens thrust at us in our youth-inflected culture are outer-directed. These images advise us on what to take and what to do to maintain some semblances of youth at a time in our lives when letting those images go more authentically honors our aging processes and our emerging Elderhood.

Little, however, is offered to our population for the inner work of aging because our extraverted culture scarcely recognizes honoring the inner life. A new book seeks to address this imbalance: The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul by retired analyst, Connie Zweig.

Her book contains dozens of stories from her practice dealing with individuals who feel lost in the often uncharted territory of aging from within. I will focus here on her suggestions about moving into Elderhood. Her claim is that little is offered to the aging population to help us transition from aging to eldering wherein we are invited to pass our wisdom from a well-lived life on to the next generation. Having recently celebrated my 77th. birthday, I was all eyes and ears reading her book.

Eldering is a natural impulse arising as we age, but she points out that while someone 55 can be considered an Elder, someone 85 may not be. Eldering is both a noun and a verb. But what is an Elder? In Part III of her book devoted to this presence that wants to be recognized in our lives, and because there are innumerable faces an Elder can assume, “we must take care not to define Elder too tightly,” the author cautions.

An Elder is one who has let go of old patterns of thinking and being that have held them hostage in life, preferring instead to seek a greater, deeper sense of self-awareness in their inner lives. An Elder transitions from the role of the heroic ego, who invests in doing, achieving, striving, working, and grasping, but “whose mission is over,” Zweig asserts. As Elder, one cultivates a more nuanced, quieter, more reflective attitude towards life. Being takes precedence over doing, but that does not eliminate continued becoming who one is destined to be, even late in life.

Further, an Elder “knows how to listen because we know how to quiet our minds and be present.” An Elder turns one’s attitude towards their remaining days to include feeling “committed to life in the face of immanent death,” she writes. Like the Heroic ideal that called us earlier in life, the Elder’s reality calls to us later in life; the Elder lives in the contours of gratitude, generosity, a deeper spiritual and emotional life, as well as a lessening of being right. An Elder more flexibly accepts what is that we align ourselves to, not what might be.

The author is also clear about what an Elder is not: “an Elder does not resist change or impermanence” and does not “live in the past “or an anxious future, denying the portal of presence”; an Elder is not shame-based nor succumbs to cynicism, bitterness, or resignation.” Neither does an Elder “avoid facing fear, suffering, and loss. . . by losing connection to shadow awareness,” which tries to discourage us from our continued deepening into our unique selves.

She cautions her readers to beware of “the inner ageist,” who scolds us for wanting to live our unlived life, with prohibitions like “You can’t do that” or “You’re too old to try that” or “You’ve lived your life, now stay home.”

Aging happens on its own; but within that matrix Eldering can open up new corridors, new interests and new risks that continue to give life meaning and purpose.

Spectacle Over Substance in the New Myth

This op-ed was published in the San Antonio Express-News on July 14, 2021

When we take a well-earned break from the onslaught of news that bombards us daily, we might wonder, as we should, how fantasies of reality have gained such strength and support in these past years and seem to coagulate today with greater concentration?

I returned to a book I had read in 2012, published in 2009 by foreign correspondent of 20 years and a New York Times writer for 15 years, Chris Hedges: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. His cultural diagnoses have become more prescient and more ubiquitous with time.

On the inside dust jacket is a pair of steely sentences: “A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying.” His book then details carefully and with abundant supporting sources how this stark diagnosis can be grasped. His bibliography carries a cargo of 120 sources.  

I chose just a few of his insights to share in this article.

1. “We are a culture that has been denied or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality.” As an educator of 53 years, I have found the most challenging and rewarding task with students to encourage and foster critical and imaginal levels of discernment with the material we are studying. Reading and thinking with discernment are both challenging and rewarding gifts to ourselves throughout our lives.

2. In the vacuum created by #1 above, “television has become a medium built around the skillful manipulating of images, ones that can overpower reality.” It is not only our primary form of mass communication, it is more: a large segment of the audience receive not just their news from television news but their reality as well.

3. In the engineered new power center of our culture, “propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology.” For many, Hedges continues, “it is the final arbitrator for what matters in life.” Anyone who knows and enjoys the rewards of reading understands the often pale representation of television over the written word, where one can pause, consider, not be told what to think and draw conclusions from a base line of the material read.

4. “My feelings” become the acid test of what is real and true. But we might ask if one’s feelings are in fact largely composed of my assumptions, fears, prejudices and fantasies that create a virtual Parliament of emotions that one construes as a true reality and not a private feast of fetishes and apprehensions.

5. Hedges proposes that “it is style and story, not content and fact, that inform mass politics.” He goes on to cite another writer’s term, “junk politics,” a phrase that “personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them.” Again, the emphasis is on the private feelings and baked-in beliefs that largely have as their ends security and safety, whatever that might cost.

Such a posture can shield one from the ambiguous and unknown future as well as insulate one from the past, from history, from the wisdom of our ancestors, and from a more panoramic view of one’s present reality. Such a condition can be reinforced, Hedges argues, by those seeking power and self-interest to create an appearance of intimacy with one’s supporters while not actually possessing the qualities they boast about possessing.

Lastly, an important question for any of us thinking critically about these issues might ask: Who in fact is creating or recreating our “public mythology”—Hedges’ term—and for what ends?

Pornography Does Not Stop With Sexploitation

Sometimes a word gets stuck in a groove of familiarity and is then limited to just one definition or description. But we learn from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary that pornography can also refer to “a depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.” It goes on to affirm that in the early 1950s the phrase “the pornography of violence” gained wide-spread usage.

This connection between pornography and violence leads me to the outrage felt across the United States and 18 other nations at the brutal killing of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis Police Department.

In just one photograph showing a prone defenseless Mr. Floyd is an image of such power, what I am calling a pornographic image, which has incited a global protest movement for change. As many have said, the knee of a white man on the neck of a black man has been replaying infinitely for 400 years.

Each of us is outraged in shared ways and in individual reactions by the pornography of the photo. My own response, shared by many is deeply visceral; the image inflicts a deep moral wounding on any human being who has the capacity and will to feel compassion for the suffering of another. Unfortunately, and for a myriad of reasons, that compassion can be suffocated by anything from an ideology that stops human feeling to self-loathing, to self-alienation, to greed for power and control.

My other impulse to recoil from its brutality came from the particular detail of the officer’s hands in his pockets, his casual posture,  his demeanor, as well as his body language that bespoke “I’ve got this; no worries. All is under control.” His hands in his pockets expressed the behavior of a monster out of control. He seemed to me to be enjoying making another human being suffer as he looked with indifference into the eye of the camera.  This too expresses the grim face of pornography.

The pornographic imagination seems to seek a number of common goals: turn the other into something less-than-human; dominate that other, be it an individual, a race, an ethnic group, or those who disagree with you. The pornographic need—and for some it is a need that is a distorted desire to love--spreads its wings and can cover a host of subjects, all with one objective: master the other in no uncertain terms. Call it what you will: restoring order, following orders, getting the job done. But dominate.

Susan Griffin’s brilliant study, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (1981) reveals that when the pornographic imagination silences voices of dissent, something alarming happens: “Language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.” We can all be grateful that the outrage and generally peaceful demonstrations across our 50 states and in numerous countries were not silenced, not muzzled, not muted by the vigor of pornography. Justice demanded a peaceful recoil; compassion for others insisted on a fully human response.

While in no way diminishing the sea-change in attitude and awareness that Mr. Floyd’s death has catalyzed in the most decent and constructive terrain of our human nature, other forms of the pornography of violence include: trafficking in children, separating parents from their children and placing the latter in cages, stifling increases in minimum wage as a means of keeping entire populations at a level of intolerable existence; voter suppression, governors denying federal assistance to bring millions of Americans into the health care system because the program was designed by an opposing political party; cutting welfare programs that may include school meal vouchers; over-fishing the oceans and lakes of the world until the earth gasps, exhausted.

What is just below the skin of pornography is lust: a lust for power, for control and for accumulating wealth at the expense of others’ well-being. That “wealth” may be monetary, social, spiritual, or physical. The excessive lust is an addiction that like any-full blown sickness, will, without intervention, destroy the host carrying the malady. 

The “natural” response to Mr. Floyd’s assassination was to sing out in protest, to rebalance the natural order from a culture that has become self-consumed by its own desires. Compassion and a clear path to justice can equalize and restore a proper balance between nature and culture, placing compassion well in front of pornography. To allow this order to be reversed is to dehumanize all of us in the process.  

Lying and Violence: A Nobel Lecture by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Published in New Braunfels, Texas newspaper, the Herald-Zeitung’s Opinion page, June 12-13, 2021.

One of the many values of knowing history is that it often reveals how the present is often a close iteration, even a repetition of the past. History also gives us a perspective on our current social challenges that we might think are happening for the first time. History helps us shake off our naïve “in-the-moment” perspective and widens out to larger patterns that we mortals repeat with great fidelity.

In 1970 a Russian novelist and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), was awarded the Noble Peace Prize for his unwavering study of and contributions to the tradition of Russian Literature. He sent his speech to Stockholm to be read, fearing that if he left the Soviet Union, he would not be allowed to return to his family.

His idea in the speech was to promote what artists and writers of a culture could contribute to the social and political realms of their time. Artists are the ones, Solzhenitsyn writes, who offer us old truths that endure and that can aid us in understanding “the modern world.” “And when the old truth is told us again,” he affirms, “we do not remember that we once possessed it.” So,  like history itself, classic works of literature return our memories to us, both nationally and internationally; they allow us to see ourselves through evocative prisms of what has gone before .

His speech is rich in its variety and in its depth. However, I was particularly interested in his insights at its beginning and its end, on the relation of violence to lies. In contrast to the truths of art, “a political speech, a hasty newspaper comment, a social program can. . . as far as appearances are concerned, be built smoothly and consistently on an error or a lie; and what is concealed and distorted will not be immediately clear.” Art reaches in the other direction, towards what our American writer, William Faulkner, called those “eternal verities” that inform of us the ways the human heart is in conflict with itself.

Towards the end of his thoughtful analysis of the truth of art and the forces that work as lies pretending to be true, he asks us to consider: “What can literature do against the pitiless onslaught of naked violence?” Not an easy question, but he asks us to consider the following: “Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with Lying.”

His comparison leads him to this insight: “Nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence.” They are, within his personal Russian history, in which he spent 8 years in the Gulag for speaking out against the purges of Stalin, then 3 more years in exile, intimately related. He ends his speech by offering a tighter relation between lying and violence. “Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD, must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE.”

Perhaps many forms of violence, he muses, especially if they are to be sustained, “cannot go on without befogging themselves in lies, coating itself with lying’s sugary oratory.” Then, by an indirect move, violence may not move in a straight line, but by indirection; “usually it demands of its victims only allegiance to the lie, only complicity in the lie.” The place and power of the arts, including writing but not limited to it, is that they have the power “to vanquish lies.”

To dispel lies is at the same time to curtail or eliminate violence; they are inseparable in gaining traction; both could be dispelled or modified if the artists’ wisdom were invited into the conversation.        

Incarcerated But Not Imprisoned: Joseph Campbell's Hero Myth

When I was invited by a faculty member at my Institute in California to volunteer to teach a correspondence course with inmates from a California state prison, I responded with a course on personal mythology using mythologist Joseph Campbell’s classic text, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. A notice to the inmates went out and five signed on. Now, 18 months later, I am grateful that I did not refuse her call.

In reading their essays, I discovered that one shared experience the inmates  write about is that Campbell’s mythic narratives as well as his own reflections in Hero have given them a story in which to place their own woundedness within a larger frame. One student was attracted to Campbell before we began working together, through the Bill Moyers’ series, The Power of Myth. The  course offering, he said, created an opportunity to explore Campbell further through guidance from the course’s structure and my writing meditations they responded to. But more importantly, many wrote that what they sought was a purpose in prison that the Hero as well as other courses encouraged and helped shape in them.

Resentment, hostility, a sustained anger and feeling out of control—all emotions that placed some of my students in prison initially--yielded to a search for meaning through rekindling a spiritual life they had left behind, or exploring the practice of Buddhism, or attending recovery programs on addiction. In their essays they expressed how Campbell’s stages in the hero’s journey illuminated their own histories wherein they either refused an earlier calling, or had listened to and assented to their revised calling within the confines of prison life. Readings in the Hero volume validated many of their choices.

One student in particular wrote of how his inability to forgive himself and others who misled him in life resulted in his imprisonment. He used the language of being turned into a monster through his unforgiving attitude. Reading Campbell, he saw with increased clarity his life path and realized that he could reauthor the plot of his story by using the stages of the hero’s journey: Departure, Initiation and Return. This template tempered his behavior and moderated his outbursts in prison.

Most dramatic, however, were those who admitted that Campbell’s authentic and compassionate prose softened them and taught them to write more deeply about their own self-annihilation and recovery. They also found meaningful parallels between the 12-step programs of recovery and Campbell’s stages of the hero’s journey. One student phrased it this way: “working with the 12-step program and Buddhist teachings, along with Campbell’s insights, helped me understand myself better and to live in a more peaceful, healthy direction.”

On one assignment I asked: “Where in your own life have you found yourself following the pattern Campbell lays out in “Departure, Initiation, Return?” Their profound, insightful and authentic responses to this mythical pattern opened each of them to their own personal myth. In a word that Campbell uses often in his writing, they discovered “correspondences” with their own story.

I in turn realized more fully how myths can be aspirational by offering students an ancient narrative that they grasped as universal but lived out with great personal particularity. Some mentioned that they were learning to write with more clarity as a result of studying Campbell’s own style of expression, especially his humanity and ability to connect to them.   

Writing on the hero archetype consistently  affirmed  their change in life direction and reinforced their transformed life’s purpose. Two of them wrote that initially they reluctantly attended an AA meeting. Now they host them. One discovered that he had talents as an artist; he sent me one of his paintings to share this newly-found form of personal expression. 

From this rich set of experiences, assisted directly by Campbell’s classic work, I became more aware of the power of myth to incite explorations into one’s own venture.  I have also noticed that, yes, they are incarcerated-- some for life--but they are no longer imprisoned. By this I mean that imprisonment feeds the victim archetype, but within incarceration they located a level of freedom that sustains them. Incarceration is physical while imprisonment is psychological and mythic. Through reading and writing on sections of the Hero image, they envisioned their own narratives in a different, more complex light. Some remarked that in prison they found a level of freedom never experienced before, in part because they felt they had reclaimed parts of themselves heretofore buried.   

While meditating on their personal myth, prompted by Campbell’s insights, they expressed how they discovered their basic goodness, that the mistakes they made, often accompanied by substance abuse, no longer defined them. They ceased totalizing their identity with their crime.  Several admitted that assisting others in prison has gifted their lives with joy and a more generous direction. The Hero’s journey affirmed and further supported their own life’s direction, a greater self-awareness and the value of being in service to others. 

Incarcerated, they nonetheless stepped out of their cocoon of self-imprisonment in anger and resentment. One student admitted that he began once more to love who he is and to connect with others in similar compassionate ways. This latter may be the most valuable consequence of their development and  several faces of the hero played an instrumental role in achieving such self-acceptance. 

The Power of the Personal: Flight of the Wild Gander

This essay originally appeared in the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth Blast in February 2021 and appears here with their permission. Contact Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Anytime I read, and especially reread, Joseph Campbell’s books, I feel like I am in a personal conversation with a priest, a confessor, one who understands the need for the transcendent in our lives and is prepared to point me in the right direction. I think this feeling emerges because Campbell’s storytelling gene is part of all of his utterances, but especially when he works a concept by morphing it into a narrative.

In this collection of essays he states his purpose as shaman and guide: “to lift the veil, so to say,  of the that Goddess of the ancient temple of Sais,” who confirmed for all time, “no one has lifted my veil” (xi). This metaphor is one of the constants of Campbell’s entire heroic writer’s journey, to enter that terrain where the veil thinly separates the phenomenal world from the treasures of the mythic structures that support it. Bird and Goddess, flight and veil, oscillate and communicate throughout the essays. The wild gander is a rich metaphor for “Hindu master yogis” who in their trance states go beyond all the pales of thought and are best known as “hamsas and paramhamsas: “’wild ganders’ and “’supreme wild ganders’” (134). This and other comments brought me years ago to write a piece on “Joseph Campbell: Irish Mystic.”

Such an image serves as a still point in a rotating circle of themes, but the one I find most captivating is that of “brahman-atman, the ultimate transcendent yet immanent ground of all being” in order to make possible the yogi “passing from the sphere of waking consciousness. . .to the unconditioned, nondual state ‘between two thoughts,’ where the subject-object polarity is completely transcended. . .” (135).

The mythic motif Campbell spirals back to repeatedly is the quest for the crack, the gap, the thin membrane that allowed him to glimpse and discern the symbolic, transcendent nature of the world winking back at us with not a little seduction, through the mask of the sensate realm of the human and world body in their fragility and mystery. Such is one of the many masks of gods that reveal the yearned-for archetypal compost of myth.

Follow Campbell’s thought like one starving for nutrients would track the thin line of bread crumbs that, if followed with humility and curiosity, will lead one to this realm of mystery, while feeding one’s soul in the process. One of his constant nutritious repasts harbored the belief that myths allow us to move as-if in a transport vehicle from the sensate order to one where we become transparent to transcendence. The veil lifts ever-so-slightly in this moment of meaning, but not before, as he points out throughout his writings, having the rich human experience; the residue or after-burn, is meaning-making.

I have sensed, as have other reader-lovers of Campbell’s work, that his rich mythodology is syncretistic, gathering and clustering, then clarifying the connective tissue between disciplines to uncover the vast complexity of the human and world psyche in their arcing towards unity. He is both hunter and gatherer, spanning centuries of development in human evolution.

Which persuades us to glance with double vision at both myth and history, one inside the other, one connecting and transforming the other. We might, in Campbellian fashion, play with our own metaphor at the end here. Here is my image: the invisible lining of a jacket or coat is what I would call history’s inner myth; it gives shape and contour to the outer sleeve, which is history itself. Yes, the sleeve can be turned inside-out to reveal the hidden myth and that is part of Campbell’s mode of excavation: he turns the sleeve inside-out in order to explore the mystery outlining history. Ok, not quite a veil, but certainly another form of fabric-ation.

Nor can myths be divorced from the inventions and discoveries of the time in which they surface. Myths, on the contrary, I sense in Campbell, survive by accommodating such discoveries, especially those of science. This discipline has knocked down the walls “from around all mythologies—every single one of them—by the findings and works of modern scientific discovery” (81).

And then the wild gander takes flight once again to accommodate the new mythic template. Let it not land too quickly.

Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Published in the “Opinion” page of the Herald-Zeitung, March 4, 2021.

Who and what we choose individually or as a nation to remember reveals our own character. One of those being remembered today is the “Beat Poet” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died Monday, February 22nd. in San Francisco at the age of 101. As a poet, he revolutionized what poetry can sound like and what subject matters it might expand the boundaries of what had been expressed in poetry before him.

He is also remembered for co-founding one of the most famous bookstores in the United States and beyond: The City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. It became a gathering center for artists and writers where ideas were debated, expanded and made to feel important for the life of a culture. In 1953, the year of its founding, it became the first all-paperback bookstore, selling quality books at reasonable prices. In 1955 Ferlinghetti inaugurated “The City Lights Pocket Poets Series” to encourage people to read poetry for enjoyment and insights into being a human being.

Of course Ferlinghetti was writing and thinking and being an activist outside the pocket or pocketbook of conventional mores. As an homage to him published on the website of City Lights states: “His curiosity was unbounded, and his enthusiasm was infectious.” His energy was also directed to publishing fellow Beat poets like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, whose famous title, On the Road became a national classic in an era of restlessness. But publishing Allen Ginsburg’s famous “Howl” brought Ferlinghetti heated charges of indecency because sex and drugs were part of the poem’s subject matter.

He was later cleared in court and brought to the fore the sticky subject of censorship. It became one of his causes, right up there with commenting on social ills and mass corruption. He and his fellow poets were writing at a time of social upheaval by questioning the status quo; his and their poems pushed deeper into the American fabric to expose topics that were considered forbidden to discuss publicly. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/poet-lawrence-ferlinghetti-death/index.html

Born in Yonkers, New York in 1919, he eventually found his way to the West Coast and to a more relaxed and tolerant cultural terrain. He arrived there in 1951 and admitted: “When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than first of the beats.” He had over time, formed the idea of “poetry as insurgent art.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Obituary

His most famous collection of poems a generation kept close by in our college years, was A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). From it, the article above included these lines from one of its poems:

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time

In 1987 my friend Tim and I drove from Dallas up to North Texas State University to hear Ferlinghetti. Read? It was more like a performance. One of the poems that has stayed with me, one that has become most loved by many, is
“I Am Waiting.” It is too lengthy to publish, but this is its second-to-last stanza:

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did   
to Tom Sawyer   
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting   
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder