None of us may choose the time and manner of our passing, which is perhaps what terrifies us so much about Death. Not only the unknown, but the utter lack of control—an illusion our pushy Minds cling to like Dumbo’s magic feather. And, knowing that, all we can hope for is to Live such Lives and Love such Loves that our passing leaves traces of music to echo in the wind. And for all that, what is Death, after all? I like to think that our Consciousness transcends Time—that as our sense of Time dwindles and narrows, our Consciousness expands on an asymptotic rendezvous with Eternity. There is no afterlife, but rather, Everlife, or Never-Not-Life, or…whatever, for what can lie beyond Now, when we can shuffle off this mortal coil and wrap our souls around the vastness of the moment? What fear can endings hold for us when Time has lost its meaning, reduced to a deathly emaciated axis on a graph? What is more than Living such Lives and Loving such Loves that timeless Music murmurs warm refrains in the hearts of those we leave behind? I say, let your feather fall, Dumbo, and throw your ears wide to the waiting wind, if only to catch the warm refrains of those who’ve sung before us. If only to free your arms to throw them around the thriving living Moment.
Darren C. Reiley
September, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Fragile Shoots in the Detritus
No matter how staunch my faith is that everything is happening exactly as it needs to, that the World knows what She's doing, the sheer magnitude of the crumbling is still heavy to bear. It’s getting ironic now, how I seem to need to write down my advice in order to remember it, to remind myself.
Ground. Find Stillness. Spend time Being.
I’m surrounded by enormous decay at the moment. Two family members dying slowly from cancer, a grandma and a grandpa slowly dying from old age. Relationships crashing like hailstones—even abstract brambles like the Stock Market and Mortgage Establishment choking in the smog of their own industry.
Ground. Find Stillness. Spend time Being.
‘Find solace in the love you share with others’ are the words that murmur in my inner ear.
‘There are always others. There are always children.’
More than ever I see the absolute necessity of nurturing the small things, like our young ones, our gardens and our wells. It’s in those things, smaller than our dogmas and egos, in those things that our wisdom grows, close to our Love.
And more than ever we need Wisdom. If for nothing else than to speak out against the thoughtless blows of despair’s short vision. To shine into the Darkness.
I say to YOU—whomever the Mystery guided to this page right now—please, nurture the small things. The wells. The gardens. The children.
There are fragile shoots sprouting in the detritus.
Ground. Find Stillness. Spend time Being.
I’m surrounded by enormous decay at the moment. Two family members dying slowly from cancer, a grandma and a grandpa slowly dying from old age. Relationships crashing like hailstones—even abstract brambles like the Stock Market and Mortgage Establishment choking in the smog of their own industry.
Ground. Find Stillness. Spend time Being.
‘Find solace in the love you share with others’ are the words that murmur in my inner ear.
‘There are always others. There are always children.’
More than ever I see the absolute necessity of nurturing the small things, like our young ones, our gardens and our wells. It’s in those things, smaller than our dogmas and egos, in those things that our wisdom grows, close to our Love.
And more than ever we need Wisdom. If for nothing else than to speak out against the thoughtless blows of despair’s short vision. To shine into the Darkness.
I say to YOU—whomever the Mystery guided to this page right now—please, nurture the small things. The wells. The gardens. The children.
There are fragile shoots sprouting in the detritus.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Teaching Peace like Herpes
So I have this crazy idea: I think that teaching young people how to take powerful responsibility for their own choices, learn how to communicate without blaming or dominating, listen deeply, and resolve their conflicts without using violence-- I think those are good things. Isn't that insane? Isn't it radical? If I were Socrates they might make me drink hemlock!
It always amazes me when I tell people that I teach peace and they get defensive; I've actually been accused of indoctrinating the youth. The underlying reason for this (it usually comes out in the ensuing conversation) is that many people automatically assume that "peace" is inherently "liberal," politically speaking, if not outright leftist. Allow me to clear my throat before I rant...
When, I ask you, did the notion of trying to avoid war and violence, if at all possible, become a defining political affiliation? And if it truly is one, what does that make the alternative political stance? Pro-War? The Death Party? I would think that the desire for peace (and consequently the effort to learn concrete skills in peacemaking and reasoned negotiation) would be universal. In fact, that's a question I often begin my classes with: "Who wants to walk through flying bullets and falling bombs on the way to school, raise your hand?" Am I missing something here? Shouldn't the effort to teach our young people tangible skills in managing conflict without the use of violent force transcend political lines? Am I naive in saying yes? Can we not rescue the word "peace" from the annals of tween-targeted commercialism and vacuous hippie-speak? (Nothing against the hippies, don't get me wrong, it's just another unfortunate stereotype that gets too often attached to the notion of peace.) Can we not make teaching peaceful negotiation as nonpartisan as teaching health or PE? After all, we teach teenagers how to avoid STI's in Health class, how to choose good nutrition and avoid unhealthy choices. Isn't War essentially a politically transmitted disease? How is teaching nonviolent conflict resolution any different? Anyone?
It always amazes me when I tell people that I teach peace and they get defensive; I've actually been accused of indoctrinating the youth. The underlying reason for this (it usually comes out in the ensuing conversation) is that many people automatically assume that "peace" is inherently "liberal," politically speaking, if not outright leftist. Allow me to clear my throat before I rant...
When, I ask you, did the notion of trying to avoid war and violence, if at all possible, become a defining political affiliation? And if it truly is one, what does that make the alternative political stance? Pro-War? The Death Party? I would think that the desire for peace (and consequently the effort to learn concrete skills in peacemaking and reasoned negotiation) would be universal. In fact, that's a question I often begin my classes with: "Who wants to walk through flying bullets and falling bombs on the way to school, raise your hand?" Am I missing something here? Shouldn't the effort to teach our young people tangible skills in managing conflict without the use of violent force transcend political lines? Am I naive in saying yes? Can we not rescue the word "peace" from the annals of tween-targeted commercialism and vacuous hippie-speak? (Nothing against the hippies, don't get me wrong, it's just another unfortunate stereotype that gets too often attached to the notion of peace.) Can we not make teaching peaceful negotiation as nonpartisan as teaching health or PE? After all, we teach teenagers how to avoid STI's in Health class, how to choose good nutrition and avoid unhealthy choices. Isn't War essentially a politically transmitted disease? How is teaching nonviolent conflict resolution any different? Anyone?
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Mater Sancti
Imagine Darkness.
Utter, tangible, swaddling Darkness.
Perhaps there was an Otherplace before (I think so); perhaps there was not.
Perhaps that darkness is salted with memories that
out-bubbled Cerridwen’s Cauldron, outswam the currents of Lethe.
But even so at best those images lost their light and
swim now in the Darkness that rushes on ears not yet formed but
listening, always listening.
And out of that Darkness, the first sound of a lifetime,
a sound not heard but felt…
Thum-thump. Thum-thump. Thum-thump.
It’s a cadence that you’ll match your deepest rhythms to,
the master metronome for the symphony that is to be a Life.
Sacred Texts have told us much about the Father, about hands that shaped clay
and into it breathed life, about a bearded mouth that smiled for It Was Good.
And blessed be the Fathers, for their gritty hands have hewn out homes
from solid rock and chiseled language on Eternity.
But slowly, surely, as trembling and determined as a foal’s first steps,
we’re remembering the Sacred Space that circles Holy Mother,
Mater Sancti.
For when we look for clay, we find it not in books but in the Earth,
and not so deep that our spades raise blisters on
hands that seek the stuff of life.
And while the sperm may offer sparks, the stem-cell clay that forms our Form
is fashioned by maternal hands.
Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Shapers of the Future.
Imagine Darkness.
Warm, inviting darkness— not the darkness of oblivion,
for that is cold and empty as Terror.
Imagine the darkness of becoming, the darkness that fills a kettle
before the water spills in to brim it.
The darkness of a cave where bears and groundhogs sleep.
The darkness of the Womb.
And in that darkness drums a drum, thum-thumping a rhythm of comfort and love, making promises whispered and sung.
In that darkness hums a Voice. A voice that explains,
from the earliest inklings of Knowing, in the sturdiest depths of Foundation, that
You. (-thump)
Are not. (thum-thump)
Alone. (thum-thump)
Before the world is round, or gravity found,
before hot is ouch or milk is yum, there is
You. Are not. Alone.
And that is Everything.
Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Hummers of the Sacred Truth.
Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Voice in the Darkness of Becoming.
Blessed be the mothers.
copyright 2004, Darren C. Reiley
Utter, tangible, swaddling Darkness.
Perhaps there was an Otherplace before (I think so); perhaps there was not.
Perhaps that darkness is salted with memories that
out-bubbled Cerridwen’s Cauldron, outswam the currents of Lethe.
But even so at best those images lost their light and
swim now in the Darkness that rushes on ears not yet formed but
listening, always listening.
And out of that Darkness, the first sound of a lifetime,
a sound not heard but felt…
Thum-thump. Thum-thump. Thum-thump.
It’s a cadence that you’ll match your deepest rhythms to,
the master metronome for the symphony that is to be a Life.
Sacred Texts have told us much about the Father, about hands that shaped clay
and into it breathed life, about a bearded mouth that smiled for It Was Good.
And blessed be the Fathers, for their gritty hands have hewn out homes
from solid rock and chiseled language on Eternity.
But slowly, surely, as trembling and determined as a foal’s first steps,
we’re remembering the Sacred Space that circles Holy Mother,
Mater Sancti.
For when we look for clay, we find it not in books but in the Earth,
and not so deep that our spades raise blisters on
hands that seek the stuff of life.
And while the sperm may offer sparks, the stem-cell clay that forms our Form
is fashioned by maternal hands.
Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Shapers of the Future.
Imagine Darkness.
Warm, inviting darkness— not the darkness of oblivion,
for that is cold and empty as Terror.
Imagine the darkness of becoming, the darkness that fills a kettle
before the water spills in to brim it.
The darkness of a cave where bears and groundhogs sleep.
The darkness of the Womb.
And in that darkness drums a drum, thum-thumping a rhythm of comfort and love, making promises whispered and sung.
In that darkness hums a Voice. A voice that explains,
from the earliest inklings of Knowing, in the sturdiest depths of Foundation, that
You. (-thump)
Are not. (thum-thump)
Alone. (thum-thump)
Before the world is round, or gravity found,
before hot is ouch or milk is yum, there is
You. Are not. Alone.
And that is Everything.
Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Hummers of the Sacred Truth.
Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Voice in the Darkness of Becoming.
Blessed be the mothers.
copyright 2004, Darren C. Reiley
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
“Love” (as if i knew)
So many half-people, scouring the earth,
searching for finger-quoted Love,
for a Better Half to make them whole.
For Band-aid Love to staunch the bleeding,
Prozac Love to offer blindfolds against the dark, rather
than barking shins on the coffee table Tableaus of wounded
youth as we stumble toward the light switch.
The secret is this, i don’t mind telling you:
a wounded heart cannot love freely,
and the best better half we can find out there
Is in here, the better half of our Selves.
Only when you are healed and whole can you love truly.
There is love that seems to make you whole
And then there is Love that proves you already were.
Seal them up, those cracks, those rends, those broken places—
Self-forgiveness makes good glue,
And solitude,
And courage.
And hurry please:
I’m tired of finger-quoting Love.
Darren Reiley
August, 2010
searching for finger-quoted Love,
for a Better Half to make them whole.
For Band-aid Love to staunch the bleeding,
Prozac Love to offer blindfolds against the dark, rather
than barking shins on the coffee table Tableaus of wounded
youth as we stumble toward the light switch.
The secret is this, i don’t mind telling you:
a wounded heart cannot love freely,
and the best better half we can find out there
Is in here, the better half of our Selves.
Only when you are healed and whole can you love truly.
There is love that seems to make you whole
And then there is Love that proves you already were.
Seal them up, those cracks, those rends, those broken places—
Self-forgiveness makes good glue,
And solitude,
And courage.
And hurry please:
I’m tired of finger-quoting Love.
Darren Reiley
August, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Blessed Be the Children
I ran into some friends a couple days ago, a young couple who were basking in the joy of their first baby, a six-week old little girl with a head of thick, soft, black hair and the easy sleepy contentment of the newly embodied. Rosalia, of course, the little one, was enchanting and perfect, but what struck me even more when I saw these two friends was the gleam in both pairs of eyes.
It was True Love and they understood it.
Transported back to those first weeks of my own fatherhood, I dished out the usual platitude: “Now you know what Love is.” And Iana fired right up: “You know, people kept saying that and I was like, ‘well of course,’ but now I get it.”
There’s nothing better than a baby.
As a seeking person who strives everyday (or tries) to be more present and less distracted, more conscious and less habitual, more grateful and less fearful, I value the Buddhist idea of detachment. I realize that things are always changing, perpetually impermanent, and to attach my happiness to anything is to welcome suffering. And the deepest, most twisting fears I ever feel are for the safety of my daughter. It is simply in the nature of deep joy that we want to keep it from slipping away from us as long as we possibly can and cry out in anguish when it does.
And it will. Children die, despite the most ravenous wishes of our minds and hearts. They grow up, they grow distant, move away. Abstractly, we know this, and yet how many of us fall into habitual living, letting the mundane chores of life come to rule over our living? Many people have never known that bliss of being totally present, and so become addicted to their pleasures, mistaking them for joy. Most experience it for those brief, transformative, transient moments and then fall behind as reminiscence weighs our steps. And many of us love so powerfully that we hold fiercely on, letting the fear of future loss choke out our free appreciation of our present gifts.
But rather than move into that anguish before I’ve paid any rent, I strive everyday (or try) to live in the sunlit present. To be as sharply conscious of every moment (especially the only one) as I possibly can. It takes so much more practice than it seems like it should, and I have so far to go. But I thank the Mystery that I have my daughter’s tickling poke, her bubbling laughter, her “I love you Daddy.” These things keep me here and now.
Blessed be the children, and blessed be every moment you have with the children in your life, for they have made it so.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Truth vs The Truth
I recently watched the film "The Invention of Lying" by Ricky Gervais. There were some truly hilarious moments, I thought, but I found myself thinking deeply afterward about the nature of lying and Truth.
Curiously, I noticed in the film that there was a distinction between "lying" (i.e., intentionally speaking "something that isn't") and voicing one's opinion, with which other people may disagree. This is an interesting distinction to me, since I think that speaking one's opinion as fact, or speaking one's Truth, has as much a tendency to shape the perceptions of others as does outright lying. I do think there are plenty of people who purposefully misrepresent what they know in order to manipulate or achieve a personal, perhaps benign, end. However, I also think that many of us become so convinced that reality is a certain way, we tend to assert that view as fact, while it is almost certainly our own perspective. And that's really the crux, and the reason I felt compelled to write about this: what I find most fascinating about the concept of speaking the truth is that we assume that there is one, that the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. Philosophers call this idea "positivism," the notion that reality is the way it is, fixed and absolute, and humans' job is to discover and describe it accurately. It is a fundamental assumption in Western thinking, and THE foundational assumption of science as we know it in the modern world. I tend to take a slightly different view.
We create the truth by speaking it, at least as much as we uncover something that was already there. This idea is most obvious in emotional relationships between people. One person tells another "You're beautiful," that person begins to believe it, and that belief in turn creates a confidence, a radiance that is indeed beautiful in a way that others can perceive. The negative side of this is obvious as well, when one person tells another that they're a loser and will never amount to anything. The statement that "You're beautiful," or "You'll never succeed," are naturally not "truths," according to any pragmatic definition of the word, but rather value judgments, assessments, opinions. And yet, with enough power behind them, or frequency, they can become reality.
We see the same principle in history, which is so often written by those in power. To say that Columbus discovered America-- a simple truth that is taught to most American children in Kindergarten and 1st grade-- is of course deeply problematic. Not only did Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America, you can't really "discover" a place where people have been living for thousands of years. The statement is deeply ethnocentric (biased toward European cultural perspectives) and is fairly inaccurate. And yet it has become "fact," or The Truth for several generations of Americans.
My point in all of this is not just to say that the truth is relative to one's cultural perspective, which is true, (ha), but to go even further to say that the truth is at least half ours to create. We must, however, create it together. As William Stafford put it:
It is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.
The signals we give-- yes, no or maybe-- should be clear;
the darkness around us is deep.
Curiously, I noticed in the film that there was a distinction between "lying" (i.e., intentionally speaking "something that isn't") and voicing one's opinion, with which other people may disagree. This is an interesting distinction to me, since I think that speaking one's opinion as fact, or speaking one's Truth, has as much a tendency to shape the perceptions of others as does outright lying. I do think there are plenty of people who purposefully misrepresent what they know in order to manipulate or achieve a personal, perhaps benign, end. However, I also think that many of us become so convinced that reality is a certain way, we tend to assert that view as fact, while it is almost certainly our own perspective. And that's really the crux, and the reason I felt compelled to write about this: what I find most fascinating about the concept of speaking the truth is that we assume that there is one, that the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. Philosophers call this idea "positivism," the notion that reality is the way it is, fixed and absolute, and humans' job is to discover and describe it accurately. It is a fundamental assumption in Western thinking, and THE foundational assumption of science as we know it in the modern world. I tend to take a slightly different view.
We create the truth by speaking it, at least as much as we uncover something that was already there. This idea is most obvious in emotional relationships between people. One person tells another "You're beautiful," that person begins to believe it, and that belief in turn creates a confidence, a radiance that is indeed beautiful in a way that others can perceive. The negative side of this is obvious as well, when one person tells another that they're a loser and will never amount to anything. The statement that "You're beautiful," or "You'll never succeed," are naturally not "truths," according to any pragmatic definition of the word, but rather value judgments, assessments, opinions. And yet, with enough power behind them, or frequency, they can become reality.
We see the same principle in history, which is so often written by those in power. To say that Columbus discovered America-- a simple truth that is taught to most American children in Kindergarten and 1st grade-- is of course deeply problematic. Not only did Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America, you can't really "discover" a place where people have been living for thousands of years. The statement is deeply ethnocentric (biased toward European cultural perspectives) and is fairly inaccurate. And yet it has become "fact," or The Truth for several generations of Americans.
My point in all of this is not just to say that the truth is relative to one's cultural perspective, which is true, (ha), but to go even further to say that the truth is at least half ours to create. We must, however, create it together. As William Stafford put it:
It is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.
The signals we give-- yes, no or maybe-- should be clear;
the darkness around us is deep.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Details
This life is so full of lessons about humility and the limits of my power. I feel strongly that I've been put on this planet to heal, to use my tongue, my words, my craft to bring people together. And yet I get hooked all the time, lose patience with those who believe differently than myself, feel that self-rewarding righteousness of indignation when I can see the flaws in the logic of other people that clearly lead to greater harm in the world. And it's all crap. Even when it's true, it's still crap.
The Gulf is still choking.
The Religious Right is still pounding out "pro-family" rhetoric (meaning, f course, pro-a-very-narrow-definition-of-family).
The unmanned drones continue to fly.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been visiting my family in Arizona. I've been fortunate to be able to visit my aging grandparents, my mother, my sister, my nieces. Much of my family stands in a very different political space than myself. I've also been blessed to spend a small amount of time with an old family friend-- the kind for whom the term "friend" has long since dropped off and only "family" remains. He's an uncle, really: loving, kind-hearted, generous. And he's dying from metastatic bladder cancer.
The fact that he's not just a staunch Republican, but one who's always held Ronald Reagan to be one of the great American Presidents, has never really come between us. He and I both have a strong sense of our own opinions, but he's always shown an easy tolerance for my leftist craziness. And now, in the past week when I've been able to catch a few spare moments with him, all of those details seem even less important.
What's important is sharing a smile, a chuckle, or even a comfortable silence. What's important is sharing that simple humanity. The healing that comes from that is deep, nameless.
And it's helped me to remember that it's the details of living that often drive rifts between us. The details are important, don't get me wrong. It's the details that drive our daily decisions and dictate how we live our lives-- how much to consume, how we get our energy, how we build our homes, how we judge other people's appearances. And those decisions are invariable the source of conflict. But in those sublime moments, sitting with an ailing uncle, enjoying the presence of a grandparent, swimming with your nieces, the details fall away, and all the remains is the mystic glow of one spirit reaching out to another.
The Gulf is still choking.
The Religious Right is still pounding out "pro-family" rhetoric (meaning, f course, pro-a-very-narrow-definition-of-family).
The unmanned drones continue to fly.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been visiting my family in Arizona. I've been fortunate to be able to visit my aging grandparents, my mother, my sister, my nieces. Much of my family stands in a very different political space than myself. I've also been blessed to spend a small amount of time with an old family friend-- the kind for whom the term "friend" has long since dropped off and only "family" remains. He's an uncle, really: loving, kind-hearted, generous. And he's dying from metastatic bladder cancer.
The fact that he's not just a staunch Republican, but one who's always held Ronald Reagan to be one of the great American Presidents, has never really come between us. He and I both have a strong sense of our own opinions, but he's always shown an easy tolerance for my leftist craziness. And now, in the past week when I've been able to catch a few spare moments with him, all of those details seem even less important.
What's important is sharing a smile, a chuckle, or even a comfortable silence. What's important is sharing that simple humanity. The healing that comes from that is deep, nameless.
And it's helped me to remember that it's the details of living that often drive rifts between us. The details are important, don't get me wrong. It's the details that drive our daily decisions and dictate how we live our lives-- how much to consume, how we get our energy, how we build our homes, how we judge other people's appearances. And those decisions are invariable the source of conflict. But in those sublime moments, sitting with an ailing uncle, enjoying the presence of a grandparent, swimming with your nieces, the details fall away, and all the remains is the mystic glow of one spirit reaching out to another.
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