Cultural Mythology: American Notions of Self and Country

Turkeys, feathers, gratitude, and the dark

Hafiz was another great Sufi master, like Rumi. He lived in Persia in the 14th century and his rueful exuberance at the joys and difficulties of life, and the mysterious forces that fill us human beings, are still vibrant and fresh.I love this image of the dark and his relationship to it. You might recall the Rumi poem about the Guesthouse, which is similar. There is the sense that what we call dark, heavy, and painful should be honored and embraced, and also understood as transient. Notice how permeable we are, physically and psychically. This permeability is our nature.

A Strange Feather

                All
       The craziness,
    All the empty plots,
    All the ghosts and fears,

All the grudges and sorrows have
                Now
              Passed.

      I must have inhaled
              A strange
               Feather

          That finally                               

               Fell

               Out.

---Hafiz

It is truly a loss (in addition to criminal) that religious fundamentalists and cynical politicians have colored the relationship between West and Middle East with such animosity. Islam and Christianity spring from a common heritage. Here is another lovely poem by Hafiz, to show you what I mean.

                     I am
            A hole in a flute
That Christ's breath moves through---
               Listen to this
                    Music.

--Hafiz

Hope you had a fine, thank-full holiday. xoxo

Gifts of the dark

Thanksgiving is supposed to be upbeat and believe me I tried, like a good mythologist, to find something specific to this national holiday that truly signified or inspired gratitude. I am blessed daily, and gratitude is essential to any well-lived life, but the common, holiday story--that Pilgrims and Indians gathered together in late fall like one big happy family, to eat turkey and corn ---needs a rewrite. The native Americans did save the Pilgrims from starvation, but Thanksgiving was a one time, secular event that probably occurred in late September. (FDR choose the fourth Thursday in November as the date for a national Thanksgiving celebration and Congress ratified his choice in 1941).

Pilgrims did celebrate religious days of thanksgiving, as did the Puritans (who were not the same group of people by the way). What they often gathered to celebrate was the destruction of the people who were here first, the people who sat at that imagined table of good cheer. That's the pioneer credo again--we create the world when we arrive and nothing existed before-- and something more I think. Fear of the dark, of the thick woods and rustling in the shadows, of the unfamiliar (and uncivilized) people, of witches and wolves and the chance meeting with the devil, dancing round a fire, under the stars. Different times in many ways and it's pointless to critique people long dead, but we can recognize and reflect upon our ancestry, and admit that we are still afraid of the dark.

There is the literal darkness, from which we insulate ourselves with electric lights available at the flick of a switch. There is also psychological darkness, kept at bay through an endless round of activity and the practice of positive thinking. A certain fundamentalism of optimism pervades American culture, an optimism that demands a well-lit self-improvement and progress towards an acceptable vision of the good. This optimism denies the meaning of failure or suffering by insisting that they are correctable mistakes, merely obstacles to overcome or lessons to learn. Through optimism we are often told, all of life's difficulties can be transformed into what they really are, golden opportunities to succeed once again, which means improve one's practice of the positive as well as one's circumstances.

If you, like me, are searching for something particular and inherent to this moment for which to be grateful, let it be the dark. Historically, most cultures celebrated the harvest around the Autumnal Equinox in late September, when the fields lie fallow and we enter the dark half of the year. There is a timeless cycle of dark and light, fast and slow, springing up and falling down, hot and cold, work and rest, life and death. The scales of Libra, the astrological phase that begins with the equinox, symbolize this balance. I think this image of balance is especially important today. If you want an example of fundamentalist optimism, lack of balance, and ignorance of natural cycles, look at our economy, based on the premise of grow, grow, grow as if there could never be a limit, a period of idleness or decline, a crash, or exhaustion. What are we collectively trying to avoid now? A depression. The dark.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that people out of work, foreclosures and bankruptcies and inflation should be met with a shrug because, this shit happens. I am suggesting a parallel between our frantic lives and overheated economy and our collective fear of the dark. I am suggesting that these dynamics create and reinforce each other.

Darkness is slow, heavy, intimate, and interior. Think of the Underworld or the hidden processes of the earth, decay and the blind progress of worms. Darkness is an invitation, no, an imperative, to go down into the psychological depths, to brood and reflect and even suffer. Yeats writes "Now that my ladder is gone/ I must lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

The foul rag and bone shop is the garbage heap and place of origin. Not pretty, not pleasant, but Yeats connects these discards with the heart, with life. When I read these words I feel compassion because all of us come from such a place, no matter how high the ladder or how far we climb. Compassion is the gift of acknowledged suffering and the dark. When we embrace our own dark days and give them meaning in our life story, we become sensitive to the cycles that contain us all. We feel our mortality and the fragility of life, the tender mystery, the need for mercy. If we attend to the darkness, to our inevitable death and disintegration, we are more alive.

Compassion and gratitude are spiritual and community values often connected with the light, but that is not their source. They are fruits harvested in the dark.

Turkey-less

This is pretty silly but I got a laugh, and if you aren't already familiar with The Onion, here's an introduction.

Turkey-less

Personally, I think Thanksgiving dinner is all about the pie.

The Earth's good mercy

This week I have been thinking about the human place in the natural order and all of our Sisyphean efforts to get some place or make some improvement and bring about change, or just survive. The struggles are real---millions of people are now out of work and edging closer to the streets, the Iraq War continues, Bush and his cohorts are working furiously to dismantle federal environmental protections. I guess they want to see just how low his approval ratings can get. In the midst of this chaos of hopeful action and outrage, the world goes on. Life is still a mystery, our fellow creatures offer us more than we accept, and kindness heals the wounds of body and spirit. Hisrchfield's poem brings this together for me and I hope you like it too.

Finally, as you make your Thanksgiving plans for family and friends, please extend the circle and make a donation of food or money or time to feed others. Yes, yes, we must "teach a man to fish," but let's not make him do it on an empty stomach.

Happiness

I think it was from the animals
that St. Francis learned
it is possible to cast yourself

on the earth's good mercy and live.

From the wolf who cast off
the deep fierceness of her first heart
                                 and crept into the circle of sunlight
                                in full wariness and wolf-hunger,
                                and was fed, and lived; from the birds
                                who came fearless to him until he
                                had no choice but to return that courage.
                                Even the least amoeba touched on all sides
                                by the opulent Other; even the baleened
                                plankton fully immersed in their fate---
                                for what else might happiness be
                                than to be porous, opened, rinsed though
                                by the beings and things?
                                Nor could he forget those other companions,
                                the shifting, ethereal, shapeless:
                                Hopelessness, Desperateness, Loneliness,
                                even the fire-tongued Anger---
                                for they too waited with the patient Lion,
                                the glossy Rooster, the drowsy Mule, to step
                                out of the trees' protection and come in.

---Jane Hirschfield from The October Palace (NY: HarperPerennial, 1994).

Ground Afire

Last week I camped in Death Valley. The full harvest moon was bright on the rocks and P. and I walked and walked on the road by our solitary camp and talked politics, and marveled at how the world goes on despite us.

The Tibisha Shoshone lived in Death Valley for thousands of years and some of them still do,in a small village in the center of the valley, now national park. Their name for the place is Timbisha, "red rocks," or Tomesha, "ground afire," and according to reports from local native activists, who have fought hard for the continued right to live there, the old people were dismayed and upset to learn of the white folks name for their homeland. Death Valley, which contains places we call Badwater, the Funeral Mountains, and Coffin Peak, contains many year round springs and the Shoshone carefully tended the mesquite trees (which are still easy to find there) for their edible pods, as well as other plants we no longer recognize as food, and hunted. These are things that people who were only passing through didn't know.

I often wish for the old names and the language used by the people who knew the land first, and it saddens me that these names are not regularly included in official explanations and are often damn hard to find anywhere. The words that we use create our world and tell us what is important. The erasure of native place names and language, along with the native people, is part of the pioneer credo--- the world is made when we arrive and nothing existed before---and we all lose something valuable in the end. But no matter what we call them, the land of the red rocks where the ground is afire is beautiful and grand and old, and one of those rare places where you can touch the hard, smooth face of rock shaped by a Cambrian sea, 520 million years ago.

For Molly

This past weekend, I visited some dear friends and saw my buddy Molly, a dog who is pure love and an indispensable companion on any backpacking trip. Molly had surgery recently and I offer this beautiful creation myth from the Jicarilla Apache in gratitude for her continued good health and joyful spirit. This is excerpted from Views of the Cosmos by Brother David Steindl-Rast O. S. B. Here is the link to the myth and his insightful commentary. 

Dog was going around with Creator. Everywhere he went, Dog went, and watched all that he did. When Creator finished one job and moved on to another, the dog went too.

“Are you going to stay around here all the time?” said the dog. “Or will you have to go away?”

“Well, perhaps someday I shall have to live far away,” said Creator.

“Then, Grandfather, will you make me a companion?” So Creator lay down on the ground.

“Draw a line around me with your paw,” he said.

So Dog scratched an outline in the earth all around the great Creator. Creator got up and looked at it.

“Go a little way off and don’t look,” he said. The dog went off a little way. In a few minutes he looked.

“Oh, someone is lying where you were lying, Grandfather.”

“Go along and don’t look,” said Creator. The dog went a little farther. In a few minutes he looked.

“Someone is sitting there, Grandfather,” he said.

“Turn around and walk farther off,” said Creator.

The dog obeyed.

At last Creator called the dog. “Now you can look,” he said.

“Oh, Grandfather, he moves,” cried the dog in delight.

So they stood by the man and looked him over. “Pretty good,” said Creator.

“He’s wonderful,” said the dog.

Creator went behind the man and lifted him to his feet.

“Put out your foot,” he said. “Walk. Do this.” So the man walked.

“Now run,” said Creator. So the man ran.

“Say words,” he said. But the man said nothing. Four times Creator told the man to talk. Finally the man said words. He spoke.

“Now shout,” said Creator He gave a big yell himself and showed the man how.

The man shouted.

“What else?” he said.

Creator thought a minute.

“Laugh,” he said. “Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh.”

Then the man laughed.

The dog was very happy when the man laughed. He jumped up on him and ran off a little, and ran back and jumped up on him. He kept jumping up on him the way dogs do today when they are full of love and delight.

The man laughed and laughed.

“Now you are fit to live,” said Creator.

So the man went off with his dog. 

Psychology defined

We imagine continuously, as a matter of course.

We imagine that what we imagine is real.

To the degree that we are aware of our imaginative products, we may also feel that they are not wholly ours.

That we are imagining is revealed to us.

We think about what we imagined.

This is psychology.

Psyche's logos; the language of soul.

Song for Ishtar

I'm posting this week's poem a couple of days early because tonight (Thursday) is the November full moon. This is the Hunter's Moon, also known as the Sanguine (Blood red) Moon, the Beaver Moon, or the Frost Moon. Look for this full moon to rise shortly after sunset---the extended period of light created by this early rising is one aspect of the name--it's easier to hunt (or finish the harvest) with the extra bit of light.

In the midst of all the talk about political and economic change and endings and new directions, a few minutes with the moon reminds me that we are part of much bigger, and steadier cycles. When I look up into the night sky and feel the ground solid beneath my feet, I know that I am supported and carried by forces far greater than any we can put in motion. It's a moment to revel in what my friend J. and I call "puny glory."

(The image is a painting of mine, "New Mexico Moon").

Song for Ishtar

The moon is a sow
and grunts in my throat
Her great shining shines
    through me
so the mud of my hollows
    gleams
and breaks in silver bubbles

She is a sow
and I a pig and a poet

When she opens her white
lips to devour me I bit back
and laughter rocks the moon

In the black of desire
we rock and grunt, grunt and
shine

---Denise Levertov from O Taste and See (NY: New Directions, 1964)

The speck and the log in your eye

In the minds of many Americans, the recent election is a rebuff of the conservative movement and a setback for the religious right. In his victory speech, Obama spoke directly to non-supporters and said that he would work to be their president too, a pledge that has been met with skepticism and outright hostility in some Christian circles. Rush Limbaugh for example, says this is time to rebuild the conservative movement and that Obama must be met with "principled opposition."

In his post-election analysis, Limbaugh says, "I started laughing uncontrollably during the "yes, we can" stuff last night.  I was having a great time last night.  I actually was having a great time watching all this.  I just flipped around various channels to watch the coverage and I was just laughing.  Can we oppose the belief that one's earnings must be redistributed for the false promise of fairness?  Yes, we can." The rest of this transcript is available here 

If you have a strong enough stomach for Limbaugh's website, you will also find t-shirts that read "Rush Runs America" for sale. Hmm, who has the Messiah complex here, I wonder?

Of course Limbaugh is not the majority view, in attitude, content, or tactics, and the political strategy that he advocates, along with the somewhat gentler James Dobson (Focus on the Family) and others, is being questioned. There are Christian leaders, evangelical and otherwise, who argue that the pursuit of political power corrupts spiritual values. Phil Johnson, for example, believes that the image many people have of Christian conservatives, as "the angry face of Jesus" is proof of their failure to positively impact the culture and develop Christian community. Johnson and others point to the dismal example of Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals who was exposed as a meth addict with a penchant for male prostitutes, as proof that Christians have the wrong standards for their leadership. They point to the teachings of Jesus, who preached a practice of moral example, not force--political or otherwise--, and consistently cautioned his followers not to overestimate their own moral goodness. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says "Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?" (Luke 6:42)

Read Phil Johnson here

Moral decisions are tricky, or they should be, and history illustrates the atrocities committed by people who claimed to know the mind or plan of God. I think the big question facing Americans today, is what, if anything, we can agree to accept as the basis for a shared moral system. We need to understand religiosity and the longing for spiritual connection as human impulses that are active regardless of conscious religious affiliation. We need to unearth the shared mythologies that give rise to ideologies and dogmas; we need to confront the many faces of our god(s). In short, the relationship between morality and government, between spiritual duties and civic participation, concern us all, and not just because many of us on both sides of the "Christian" and the "conservative" lines feel persecuted (irony of irony).

I feel the temptation to leave the conservative Christians to their debates, to simply continue to oppose their legislative attempts to marry church and state with my money and my vote, and avoid, as much as possible, exposure to the rhetoric of hate and bloody bigotry by folks like Limbaugh. But that is not the smart or enlightened path. We are all vulnerable to fanaticism and self-righteousness. And in the specific context of the religious right and their agenda, we have a model for the marriage of secular and spiritual life---Islam.

I've no interest in bashing Islam or Muslims. I do think that the historical and doctrinal parallels between Islam and Christianity are beautiful and terrifying, and I think the history of intolerance exemplified by extreme elements in both are instructive. I offer this as food for thought and future discussion, and some (very modest) edification.

According to Islamic doctrine, the Qu'ran (which means "guidance") is the final piece in the Abrahamic lineage and is the perfection of the Torah and the Gospels. One of the "mistakes" corrected by the revelation of the Qu'ran is the union of religious and secular life. Islamic law, the Shari'ah, governs almost everything in life, and is divided into five categories: duty, recommended, acceptable, disapproved, and prohibited. The great prophet Mohammad, who was granted moral perfection by God, was also a general. The early Islamic community was repeatedly attacked by non-Muslims and the physical security of the community was a major concern. The need for security, and the need to secure traditional institutions that provide societal stability, have been arguments for contemporary Muslim fundamentalist movements and echo arguments advanced by the religious right in this country.

I will post more as I continue to ponder. In the meantime, I recommend the website of Oxford Islamic Studies. Here is an article about the Islamic state.

Finally, my current mantra: "Tyranny is the absence of complexity."--Andre Gide

Strike While the Iron is Hot

If you're like me, you've been inundated for weeks, months, with email and blog posts and youtube videos and news about the election. So many calls to action that the weariness is not merely imagined. Now it's done, the phone calls and contributions were made, the votes were cast. Won't it be nice to settle once again, into the usual routine. Yes, I am going on vacation. But only for a week. Because we have to strike while the iron is hot (a suitably protean metaphor, yes?).

In my post-election post, I said I don't trust hope. I don't trust Hope because, like the American Dream, it is an idea, and ideas cut both ways. Hope can motivate action or replace it. Hope can give one courage to confront the dark and terrible, or it can be a naive whistle in the dark. Hope, according to Greek mythology, was in Pandora's box along with all of the evils of the world. Why, I wonder, was Hope locked up with suffering and death? In his presentation at the Bioneers conference, Michael Meade said that there were two kinds of hope- the naive kind that is little better than wishful thinking, and the sober kind that arises when despair is right at your elbow.

I didn't vote for Obama because I thought he would deliver the change that I seek. I voted for Obama because I want a chance to be part of the conversation, because I want the solutions that I support to get a fair hearing, because I know many, many intelligent and dedicated people who could not get a chair at the table under the old regime. Now we have to use the rhetoric of "change" to insist upon our right to participate. The opportunities are endless. It can be as simple as signing up for email alerts from a few groups you know are important and yes, reading them, replying, and carving out a permanent space in your daily routine for civic action, no matter how modest.

Strike while the iron is hot, for in the words of Edward Abbey, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."