Tradewinds and Wayfinding

Hard to believe that over a month has passed since I wrote a word here. In that time, I did a short good meditation retreat chez moi, traveled to the SF Bay area to attend Tibetan Buddhist empowerments given by the venerable and profound spiritual master Yangthang Rinpoche, hung out in Ashland developing my creative projects and traveled to Oahu for a visit with my longtime friend Shari Sunshine. These photos are from my Hawaii trip. The bright koi in the temple pond at Byodo-In Temple symbolize prosperity, and I wish that for all of us.

We hung out on a beach near Waikiki. This thin, old Hawaiian man really enjoyed himself skillfully out on the water. Shari and I contented ourselves with swimming in the delicious ocean water and sunning ourselves, on days when the sun was out, which seemed to be every other day. I enjoyed the weather, including a dramatic tropical storm with high winds and torrents of rain. The island landscape includes steep mountains that run down its center. There is nothing like the island air, warm and fragrant. We explored some of the towns and villages on the North Shore, famous for its big surfable waves, of which none were apparent when we visited.

The real Hawaii as some people call it is hidden because Only 5% of the population are native Hawaiians. There are many Chinese and Japanese people, as well as Koreans and Filipinos and caucasians. Of course there is a lot of racial mixtures. Hooray! There are Buddhist temples everywhere. We visited two of them, both wonderful in very different ways.



The Japanese Byodo-In Temple at Valley of the Temples Memorial Park is a replica of a temple built in Uji over 900 years ago. It contains a large statue of Amida or Amitabha.

The temple and its gardens are very peaceful, although nobody really seems to go there to spend any time in sitting meditation. Japanese people bow and stand briefly and make incense offerings to the Buddha. Tourists wander. Everyone enjoys ringing the enormous temple bell, taking in the beautiful old architecture and the auspicious big pond with its jeweled koi and black swans.
We visited a delightful art museum whose architecture shows the prevalent Asian influence in Hololulu. This is one of its courtyards. We had some wonderful meals in Chinatown. It was quite a pleasure to eat some good Japanese and Indian food, too. When I returned to Ashland, I realized I would not have that expanse of cuisine choices for awhile.





The Chinese Kuan Yin Temple is located next to Foster Botanical Gardens. In the temple again no real quiet or habit of sitting in meditation was evident. People instead brought beautiful flower and fruit offerings and lit incense, then chattered happily with each other. It was a beautiful place. There are big Kuan Yin shrines all over Honolulu,including in shopping centers, and people stop and make incense offerings as they go about their daily lives. I liked being in a place with a lot of Buddhists though it was odd to be with such constantly active ones. I'm more accustomed to temples where we sit together in stillness.
Of course I took other pictures, too many for this entry. The botanical garden, one of several in Honolulu, was wonderful. It had 24 trees given the designation exceptional because of their size, age, or type. Big beautiful trees, lush and healing.

I met a wonderful guy named Jerry Shapiro. What was wonderful about him? He has had a long happy marriage in which both partners were committed to personal and spiritual growth. (His wife Joan was in Cambodia on a service project of some sort then.) He was a happy and self-aware person. Our two conversations about aging were stimulating and inspiring. I hope I get a chance to hang out with him again one of these days.

All in all it was a wonderful trip, especially because it was a chance to spend so much time with my dear friend Shari. We visited World Medicine Institute, where Shari is studying acupuncture and met with Mike Zanoni, an acupuncturist whose office I shared when he was in Ashland. He showed us the other acupuncture college, where he teaches. Yes, I thought about moving there. I am always thinking about being in a place by the ocean with warmer weather. But Hawaii isn't that place for me.

Now on a gray Sunday in Ashland, I contemplate this new year. I'm thinking about trade winds and wayfinding, both of which have to do more with being than doing. It seems that the term trade winds originally derived from the early fourteenth century late Middle English word 'trade' meaning "path" or "track."Historically, the trade winds have been used by captains of sailing ships to cross the world's oceans for centuries; they enabled European empire expansion into the Americas, and trade routes to become established across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It helps to know about the way the wind blows, and as Bob Dylan says, you don't have to be a weatherman to do it.

Wayfinding involves navigating on the open ocean without sextant, compass, clock, radio reports, or satellites reports. The wayfinder depends on observations of the stars, the sun, the ocean swells, and other signs of nature for clues to direction and location. Wayfinding was used for voyaging for thousands of years before the invention of European navigational instruments. In the 20th century, it is still practiced in some areas of Micronesia, although the traditional knowledge and techniques are in danger of being lost because of modernization and Westernization of the cultures of these areas. However, a revival of the art and science of wayfinding is underway among the Pacific islands, a revival led by Nainoa Thompson, the first modern-day Polynesian to learn and use wayfinding for long-distance, open-ocean voyaging.

Beautiful, in my eyes, this kind of wayfinding. Checking the winds and waters. That's what's going on inside this gal as she sails toward 70. In this midst of this wild churning violent Kali Yuga age, in the midst of the extraordinary beauty of this world, sending you greetings. May the way be found and the waters be friendly. If there are difficult passages, may there be strength (and even delight) to meet them. Every day is a fresh awakening, every moment a new vista.

What are your adventures like these days?

Year End Round Up

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what I've covered this year in the Sage's Play blog. Here's a summary, starting in January 2010. Blog posts marked the passing of human potential figure George Leonard, feminist theologian Mary Daly and gerontologist Dr. Robert Butler.

Some of the film and video mentions included:
Elizabeth Gilbert's TED.com talk on creativity
Dan Buettner's TED.com talk on longevity and cultures that support it
A new documentary on the life of local activist/artist Dot Fisher-Smith
The German film Cloud 9 for its fresh take on late life romance
A trailer from the film on women and creativity "Who Does She Think She Is?"

Book reviews included:
The Making of an Elder Culture by Theodore Roszak
The Longevity Prescription by Dr. Robert Butler
Audacious Aging, an anthology edited by Stephanie Marohn
The Measure of My Days, Florida Scott-Maxwell
Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill

I think there were more book mentions and recommendations, but that's good enough for now. I spotlighted well-aged singers and often included film clips of their singing. BB King, Leonard Cohen, Etta James,Yoko Ono, Chavela Vargas and Judy Collins were included. I talked about a grandmother who has become a very popular international DJ-- Ruth Flowers, aka MamyRock and shared news about the work of 91-year old artist Vollis Simpson and dancer Twyla Tharp. Other posts featured 91-year old yoga teacher Tao Porchon Lynch and yogini Iris Lambert, who's a bit younger. I shared news about the theater troupe Crackpot Crones and talked about Peg Rubin's Center for Sacred Theater.

I suggested that we develop an Elder Hall of Fame and noted some of the folks I would nominate for it. The Elder Hall of Fame is still one of my favorite notions. In between all that, I talked about creativity and health, my own creative process and projects, mortality, Buddhism, poetry, friends, relaxing in hot springs, housing, travel and of course the weather.

I am not surprised by how many vibrant, creative, innovative older people I discovered during the year, whose work and lives I shared in this blog. But there are many people who might be surprised. They still subscribe to the Decline Model, and regard aging as a terrible time of life, something to be avoided at all costs. I hope the consciousness-raising music of the Church of the Radically Alive Elders reaches their ears soon.

Here's a quote from Malidome Patrice Some's Of Water and The Spirit, a book I really love. The book itself is about the power of initiation. This quote speaks about the place of elders in society. "Elders and mentors have an irreplaceable function in the life of any community. Without them the young are lost--their overflowing energies wasted in useless pursuits. The old must live in the young like a grounding force..."

This is what we must remember and live into. Otherwise, we will continue to buy into the values of a society where perpetual adolescence is the goal. As I've said before, I was young already. Now I'm in the new growth stage of oldness. It's a good, gentle, powerful, creative, compassionate, wild place to be. Let's "act as if" elders are already valued and respected. Eventually, it will catch on.

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and looking forward to more friendship and collaboration in the fields and gardens of positive aging in the coming year.

P.S. I plan to take a bit of a blog break--that's good for the soul from time to time. Happy trails to you until we meet again.

Landscapes of the Inner Life

Music pours out, as if I was born to it, or it was born of me through dimensions, layers, lifetimes. I am searching through dreams, thoughts and memories for the words and soundlines to bring this story through. Long ago, before any maps were made, there were people who found their way across vast oceans, sensing and imagining their way over distances where none of their known ancestors had ever gone before. Of course, the ancient people used their ordinary senses, looking out across the endless water, feeling its currents, the movement of winds and the play of weather, day after day, month after month. Physically traversing those distances, with all the rigors of the body and the elements, they also believed themselves into the space, bringing the other shore to them magnetically. Way-Finding they called it.



We each have our own Way Finding. My own predilections always draw me back to the white marble room, an immense lustrous chamber with high vaulted ceilings and tall arched windows. It is a dear, familiar place, a refuge from the rush of the modern world. I have spent many days and nights there, reading, feeling the sun on my face, looking out at the stars and moon.

Sometimes I wish that I were still living in a time when we could bury ourselves in solitude, when the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge and the work of the soul’s metamorphosis had at least as much collective import as did outer successes. I yearn for that amidst the depredations of the current era. Inwardly, I yearn for leisure, spaciousness, and grace. Outwardly, I yearn for great forests, glens, prairies and all the undiminished richness and variety of Nature to sing out in ecstatic splendor, drowning the sounds of machines, drowning not only their sounds, but their imprint on our lives, our enslavement to them.


In this marble wonderful room there is a globe that stands on a long wooden table. Aside from the table and two chairs, the room is very empty. But it has a sense of space, light, and depth that never fails to refresh and renew me. Texts with gem-like illustrations, their pages edged with gold, fill one wall of the room. The instruments and substances of alchemy are also set out on the wooden table. In that room, I am the woman whose forehead shines with light. I am my own beacon.

My house has many other rooms. From the beautiful white marble room, a heavy wooden door opens out to a narrow hallway. I must take the lantern with me. The hallway winds and turns, its stairs descending deep into the earth. The air here is old and dry. I remember the first time I went down these stairs with this same lantern, arriving at a doorway covered with heavy, deep red brocade cloth. I gently pulled the cloth aside and looked into the room that appeared before me. It was not more than ten feet by twelve feet large, illuminated by votive candles set on a ledge that ran along its walls. Its ceiling was low, its dark walls were hewn from black rock. Three icons hung on the walls-- one of Jesus, one of the Black Madonna, and one of St. Michael. In the candlelight, their golden halos blazed out from the dark backgrounds of the paintings.

I saw all this instantaneously, the way the mind's eye takes things in. At the same time, I saw an ornate, jewel-encrusted coffin in which lay an old King, strong and undecayed. His deep red robe was embroidered with flowers sewn of golden threads. His beautiful golden crown was set with rubies and emeralds. It took me many months to bring back the memory of the Queen who lay beside him like a still flower. She had a perfume, not of death, but of the ineffable.

The sheer wonder of the place drew me in. I was thirsty for the things that showed themselves to me there, though I cannot now put words together to explain what they were, nor would I wish to. I hope you do not want me to explain the subterranean chamber or the marble room. Every definition I fix on them confines their numinous resonance. I do not wish to flatten or inflate them. Let them be just as they are. Let them remain or fade away as they will.

Of course I have a Tower. To my mind, no house is well done without a Tower reaching out to meet the sky. This is a story of my house and my journey. Of course that makes me fall over laughing. Why? Because as Lorca once said in a poem, “My house is not my house, and I am no longer I.” It is not real or solid, none of it. It has no substance. I have no substance. The whole thing is dreamlike, as much a dream as the splendid and transformative marble room to which I return again and again.

As I approach my seventh decade, I return to these landscapes of my inner life and those that comprise my outer story and I reflect on their patterns, meaning and luminous, empty nature. Even when I am washing the dishes in my kitchen part of me lives in these mythically resonant rooms of dream and imagination, in the woods and fields, the white marble room, the Tower. Even when I am deeply immersed in my inner life experience, everyday activities draw me to them, reminding me that they too also have an unpredictable, mysterious depth. In the midst of family and friends, with the appearance of both invited and unexpected guests, the mythic drama of the present moment spills forth. Decade after decade, treasure accumulates.

Bolinas, Village of the Whales

In the early Seventies,my daughter Danielle and I made our first trip to Bolinas. It was the kind of day that makes you forget that there is any suffering in human life, a day defined by brisk air, big blue sky, and all the freshness and movement of early autumn. In our pale blue Plymouth Valiant with the word POETRY painted on the driver’s side, we came over the softly rounded bosom of Mt. Tamalpais, winding down the hairpin turns of coastal Highway 1 until we reached the curved shoreline of Stinson Beach. We drove along the edge of the limpid blue water of Bolinas Lagoon, where white egrets nested in tall eucalyptus groves in a nearby canyon and flocks of pelicans circled and dove into the silky water. Past the lagoon, huge eucalyptus trees lined the road on either side as we approached the town.


Once I saw that place, I was done for. I couldn't resist its beauty. It was the fairytale town I had always longed for. Bolinas had a wonderful scent, a perfume mixed of the sea, pungent eucalyptus, wet earth, chaparral, seaweed, cows, horses, fish and roses. Its tiny downtown boasted a charming white clapboard church. There was an old-fashioned general store, a small cafe, a hardware store, a library, a seedily chic old hotel, a small post office, a bar that never seemed to empty, and a surfboard shop populated with a panoply of beautiful young guys. Bolinas was home to many poets and a mecca for artists, musicians, healers, cowboys, fishermen, craftspeople and unique wanderers. From the start, I felt very much at home there in that village of 1200 people, called by some a hippie arcadia and by others a bohemian outpost.

Bolinas in the Seventies was a heady place. I've been writing about my experiences there in Songs of the Inner Life, my current book-in progress. As part of my research, I thought it would be instructive to re-read The Town that Fought to Save Itself, a book written by Orville Schell and published in 1976. Schell became quite a prominent China scholar in the following decades. Schell's Bolinas book (in which he calls the village Briones--Bolinasians like to hide their town's identity and whereabouts--often taking the road sign down so that motorists can't find the turnoff) chronicles the town's efforts to develop and maintain a zero-growth policy, something Bolinas has succeeded in preserving all these years--an unusual and marvelous feat, to my mind. Forty years later, nothing has changed much, thanks to that zero-growth policy. There is still plenty of open space, natural beauty and wildness preserved there. Nothing can replace that. I wish more towns would do what Bolinas has done. How different Ashland, Oregon the town I've lived in for over 30 years would be now if that were true. As it is, new townhouse developments and impressively large houses continue to be built in fields and on the hills, which changes the natural environment drastically. People who move here from LA and NY think it is a quiet, laid back place, but it is far more speedy, impersonal and congested than it was 30 years ago because of growth.

I've had a fascination with whales since childhood so it was oddly coincidental that I wound up in Bolinas. I didn't have any idea that the name of the village meant whale when I moved there, but when I discovered that, it made me happy. In Bolinas, I became involved with Project Jonah, the first environmental organization dedicated to saving the whales, before Greenpeace began. The time I spent in Bolinas was filled with unusual coincidences and magic, and I've been enjoying writing down the stories.

When I opened Orville Schell's book and discovered one of my poems on a page right before the Prologue, I was taken by surprise. I had completely forgotten that my poem appeared in that book. It's strange to encounter something you wrote a long time ago and forgot about. It's a bit like looking at an old photograph or letter from many years past. Here's the poem.

POEM

Words themselves are medicine.
By telling the events of our time
we give meaning to them.
Words themselves are medicine.

It was considered a sacred place.
The mountain is considered a sacred mountain.

It is said that they lived here peacefully
naked, that they hunted quail, rabbit, deer.
By the bay, in the village that is now Bolinas
the people lived. They are
all dead now, sang songs no one remembers
nor can tell the things they danced to
when time was called moon of the black cherries
moon when the ponies shed their hair
moon when the deer shed their horns.
Olema they named, for the coyote.
Petaluma they named, that means flat hill.
Whales, then many whales
swam past the coast in the time
of water, in the time of darkening
light, swam south to mate.

The Miwok tribe lived here.
Before the Gold Rush, before the
lumbering started, when the land
was still people with giant redwoods
when trees still spoke, were revered.
Before Spanish, Portuguese, Irish or
Italians, before Chinese or Japanese
came here, the Miwok lived here,
or near here. Some say this place
was such a sacred place that no one
was bold enough to live here, but
came here only to get strong, be healed.


The wind is blowing here in Ashland tonight. I guess we're in for some weather. I enjoyed hanging out with some old friends yesterday on Thanksgiving. I appreciate my old friends even more as the years go by. I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving Day, too.

Oh, I don't want to forget this marvelous item about Super Mamika, in which a photographer grandson encourages his 91-year old grandmother to dress up as a super heroine. Great photos! You will enjoy them, I am sure.

The Call to Creativity

I used to say that Rolling Stones drummer Keith Richards looked as if he was preserved in colorless nail polish-- but really that description relates more to Cher, whose beauty has remained delightfully smooth and wrinkle-free thanks I am guessing to a fair amount of cosmetic attention. Whereas Keith Richards' years show on his deeply lined face. Richards' just-published autobiography has been attracting media attention, and Cher's role in the movie Burlesque has, too. But of course one does not have to be famous to continue to be creative in later life.

Creativity is a wonderful asset at any age; it provides a meaningful, passionate way to enjoy and engage. The older I get, the more true that seems to me. I have two big projects I want to finish. My involvement with them enriches my life. I have written about my musical revue on aging A New Wrinkle here over the past year. I am also working on Songs of the Inner Life, a book which I began when I was in my mid 50s. I have written several drafts. I wasn't ready to finish it all the intervening years, but now I feel mature enough, and want to complete the book by 2012.

These two projects are very different. The musical revue is full of social commentary that is funny and sometimes scathing. It focuses on the value of aging as a stage of life and presents a more full, accurate view of the later years than our current anti-aging social perspectives allow. The book is much more reflective, exploring peak experiences, dark nights of the soul and persistent life lessons and patterns-- the life of imagination and spirit over time. Both projects are very exciting to me. I love working on them; the experience of bringing them to completion is quite thrilling, as it engages me not only with the solitary work of creating, but also with collaborating, meeting a steady stream of new people, and learning new skills.

It seems wise to me to continue to dream big, or if one never has dreamed big, to pull out the stops and go for it. What is there to lose?

I have a friend who is a dancer and she is holding a 70th birthday party tonight in our downtown community center. A vividly spiritual person who really comes from her heart, she teaches 4-5 classes a week, leads a dance company that offers regular concerts and does ongoing weekend seminars, too. Her engagement with her creative process and everyone she meets continues to be very alive. Her aliveness inspires us all.

The current blog post of IAHSA, the Global Aging Network, had a wonderful report on some older singers, one of them Chavela Vargas. "At 91 years old, Chavela Vargas, a well-known Costa Rican singer, continues to have a thriving music career. Vargas rose to prominence in the 1970′s as a singer of Mexican rancheras, boleros and corridos. These songs are like miniature operas, with over-the-top expressions of tragedy, heartbreak and redemption. For many, her interpretations of these songs are the versions that best define the power of these pieces." What a rich and powerful presence she is in this film clip.



As Gene Cohen wrote in his terrific book The Creative Age, creativity can have a Big C or a little c. The call to creativity embraces the whole spectrum, whether it's making jam, painting a room, writing a poem, praying or creating a pottery bowl. Creativity means opening our senses to the present moment. It gives us the opportunity to climb out of any boxes we may be habitually sitting in and simply play. Play and creativity involve spontaneity, letting go, being seen (to ourselves and others too), pleasure and enjoyment, a delightful bath in the immediacy of the moment. What calls you to creativity?

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving time. There is so much I am thankful for.

Autumn Splendor

When I saw these gorgeous photos of Lithia Park taken recently by fellow Ashlander Jeffrey Weissler, I was so taken with them that I asked for permission to share them here, with Jeffrey kindly gave.



This photo at left is of the Japanese garden, beautiful gem set in Lithia Park.


I took a walk in the park today, since we were graced with another marvelous sunny and refreshingly warm day. The autumn foliage has already moved past its most showy phase, but in the bright sunlight one big oak tree's leaves blazed golden.

Autumn is often described as a melancholy season, but this one has defied that portrayal. Still, I can't resist sharing three of my favorite Japanese poems about autumn, just to honor the elegiac tone.



Autumn has come
to the lonely cottage
buried in dense hop vines
which nobody visits.
--the monk Eikei

In a gust of wind the white dew
on the autumn grass
scatters like a broken necklace.
--Bunya No Asayasu

Deep in the mountain
trampling the red maple leaves
I hear the stag cry out
in the sorrow of autumn.
---the priest Sarumaru


I am still not over the cold I caught a week or more ago and am headed to bed to read and rest. So enjoy these three wonderful images and poems until we meet again.

Recommended Reading: Two Memoirs on Aging

When Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell was 82, she began to write about the experience of aging in a notebook, not intending to share it with anyone else. Eventually, however, her reflections were published under the title The Measure of My Days.



I loved reading these ruminations, which are beautifully written and deeply insightful. "It has taken me all the time I've had to become myself, yet now that I am old there are times when I feel that I am barely here, no room for me at all..."

She notes, "So one has ample time to face everything one has had, been, done, gather them all in: the things that come from outside and those from inside. We have time at last to make them truly ours."

And in another note, she writes about the intensity of age. "But we also find as we age we are more alive than seems likely, convenient or even bearable." This book, published in the 1960s, is considered a classic. It gives a glimpse of the rich inner life of a very self-aware, spiritual woman as she confronts her experience of aging and mortality. Full of instruction.


Diana Athill's book Somewhere Towards the End, written when Athill was 91, is a vivid, compelling read. Athill talks about aging, illness, how the importance of sex declined for her. She describes wondering about when to stop driving, shares what it was like to care for her mother, describes relationships with old friends and what it was like never having children and talks about approaching death with a great deal of candor and humor. "Book after book has been written on being young...but there is not much on record on falling away," she writes.


For many years, Athill was an editor at a big London publishing company, and her clients included many famous writers. She didn't start writing herself until she was in her seventies. She has written several well-received memoirs. As soon as I finished Somewhere Towards the End, I read another of her books titled Yesterday Morning, which begins "Oh my God," said my mother, can I really have a daughter who is seventy? And we both burst out laughing.

In Yesterday Morning, Athill writes about her upper class English childhood from the vantage point of age. Both Yesterday Morning and Somewhere Toward the End are delightful reads from a very alive writer.

P.S. on The Artist's Life: Been feeling not very bloggish lately. Sometimes the darling blog just starts to feel too much like a duty. Know what I mean? I have been happily immersed in working on the manuscript for my book Songs of the Inner Life and am also working on another song for my musical revue A New Wrinkle, which I hope will be done by the spring. My composer collaborator Laura Rich just went to India for a month! What an adventure. Hope that you are all well and happy. Stay warm and enjoy this time of inner light and gratitude.