Getting A Better Understanding of Our Lives: What Do We Do When the Unknown Takes Shape and Emerges from the Darkness of the Woods?

Last Sunday, around 2 pm, just as I was beginning an afternoon meditation, a black bear emerged from the woods behind my home. At first, I didn’t realize what it was. It was hidden by bushes and flowers, and all I could see was its massive side. Then it walked right by the door of the den where I was sitting. I went to the door, thinking my presence there would scare it away. It ignored me. It just continued on its way toward the front of the house, where my wife had earlier put out bird food.

 

I’ve seen bears before, several times. Four years ago, in the early morning, one came right to our front door and raised its paws as if to frame the window and look inside at the bird food stored there. I then went to the door, clanging 2 metal rods together; it immediately ran off. Not this bear. I shouted at him and he just leisurely walked on its way. Its presence was almost overwhelming; so, of course, I got my phone and, from inside the house, I followed him around taking pictures.

 

But at that moment when I first saw but couldn’t identify what it was, it seemed like a black cloud was walking through the yard and into my life. It felt like the unknown was taking shape and emerging from the darkness of the trees, a force both beautiful and fearful. All else was forgotten.

 

Maybe what was taking shape was the silence that resides before speech and memory can be born, and it shook me with its immense size. Maybe all such large, wild animals can seem almost mythological to us. Our Paleolithic ancestors, when not consumed by fear or the drive to hunt for food, were likewise overwhelmed when such animals appeared. And instead of taking photos, they drew bears, bison, or elephants, etc. on the walls of a cave. And then they could more deeply appreciate, remember, study, or spiritually enter the awareness of the animal. Such wild animals even today can allow us to touch the ancient lives of our ancestors.

 

When the bear came out of the woods, what message was my life perceiving in it?  Clearly, it took me out of the realm of the usual. And, yes, it was also a great story to share with my friends and family, and you.

 

When it came to the front of the house, I once again got out the metal rods. But it didn’t run off until I walked out the front door shouting and clanging the rods together. It then disappeared—for the moment. Later, I heard a noise, like a window shaking. It was the bear ripping from a window a bird feeder mounted there, and I had forgotten to take down. When I once again clanged the rods together, it grasped the feeder in its arms and ran off.

 

The depth of meaning that any event can hold for us is rarely, if ever, clear. Nor can it be encompassed by words. To truly understand our lives, we need some humility about our ideas. But I did realize one lesson: when we delay doing what needs to be done, we pay a price. And it can come to bite us, or to steal our bird feeders and rattle our windows.

 

One of my favorite books is Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces. This book greatly influenced George Lucas in his creation of Star Wars and other movies. The movie follows Campbell’s analysis of a cycle or pattern that heroic characters have possibly followed in their path to enlightenment, redemption, or saving lives. It can be seen in widely divergent works of literature, myth, and religion such as the story of the Buddha and Bilbo Baggins, Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo to Gilgamesh, the hero of the first story ever written. It can be seen in The Odyssey and ET….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

When All that Remains of Me is A Deep and Gentle Laugh

It was about 9:00 am. I opened my eyes and got lost in colors and sounds, some of those sounds soon becoming voices. The voices were possibly from outside the house or inside, outside my head or inside a dream. They were just sounds, with a hint of something familiar. And I was just there, listening; listening to everything, and not wanting to do anything but lie there in the easy tired warmth that can come at the end of night.

 

I remember one time sitting with one of my cats. She gets so happy she almost talks, her words a language of cries, snorts, and kneading of the blanket. It’s a language I of course didn’t totally understand, but I get the drift. She also loves to rub noses, which always evokes a deep smile in me. I feel so full in her presence that all that remains of me is a deep and gentle laugh.

 

In both instances, I’m right there. But let’s say I want to tell someone about it. I get an urge to write this blog, for example, to talk about my funny cat or my taking refuge in the deep comfort of a warm morning, and I lose it. To write about her, I need to step out of my deep loving laugh as a snorting cat and look at me thinking about, and distinct from, her. But I guess writing can be another way to feel full or immersed, another sort of magic.

 

I was reading Zen master teacher Dainin Katagiri’s book, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight. He talked about there being a subtle feeling that exists before we decorate, expand, separate from or bury it with words. Before we move to approach, avoid, or stay still; before like, dislike, or feeling neutral arises. There’s a subtle state, he says, that we usually zoom right past. In that state, there’s “a oneness of our feeling with the object of our feeling.” A oneness with no sense of someone looking at it, no impulse to speak about it. His words shook me up and felt so alive and fresh. But as soon as I wrote them down

that life of meaning disappeared.

 

Back in February, I wrote a blog about re-discovering a leonine version of a Teddy Bear that I was given back when I was 5 or 6 and now lives on the back of the couch in the den of our home. That lion has seen so much of my life.

 

I look out my window at an apple tree that has been living outside our front door since we first built that door in 1972. That tree is so old, and so many limbs have fallen off, that what remains is a shell of what it once was, hollow, seemingly held up only by history and memories. And that tree goes back to other trees, a maple that had once lived in front of my ancestral home in Queens, NYC, back to when I was gifted with the lion. It goes back to pre-school, to a drawing of a tree that was used to formally teach me the word. It goes back to when I first spoke any word, probably Mama— Mama maybe being the root of all words. It goes back to ancient Sumeria and the roots of written language. It goes back to prehistoric caves like Lascaux in southern France and maybe the first symbolization. It goes back to the first humans or first hominids or first creatures to draw a breath. Or back maybe to the wind.

 

The tree isn’t me. Yet, without me and my wife and cats, who would know it, enjoy it, tell stories about it?  When I see it, a universe of me can appear….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project:

A Trip to Paradise: Where Do We Meet Ourselves?

What does paradise mean to us? Heaven? The garden of Eden? A place of perfection, or of beauty and wonder? The end of war? Safety and security? Justice? A political revolution? Or a moment of peace and quiet?

 

Maybe the yearning for paradise has accompanied humans ever since we came to exist? Or, more likely, since we first created art and language, and expanded our ability to think abstractly or to mentally journey into the future and past?

 

To enter some of the paleolithic art caves required crawling through tight passages or tunnels and leaving behind the sun-lit world. They were not dwelling places. In the famous cave at Lascaux, in the Dordogne area of southwestern France, there was evidence of oil lamps, rope, scaffolding, as well as sophisticated paintings. Were the ancient caves not just places to create art but temples meant to take people beyond time and into eternity? A place for performing hunting magic? An expression not only of a drive for artistic creation but for paradise?

 

One of my favorite books of the Bible, and best known generally, is Genesis, which begins, of course, with the beginning, with creation. And soon takes us to the garden of Eden.

 

Gardens have long been associated with, or used as living metaphors for, paradise. Journalist, author, and travel writer Pico Iyer’s book, The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise, begins with traveling to Iran, continues to North Korea, Kashmir, Ireland, Jerusalem, Ladakh, India, Japan, etc. and ends with realizing the most important journey is within himself. The New York Times comprehensively reviewed the book and recently listed it as one of the 100 notable of the year.

 

Modern Iran was once Persia, central to the Fertile Crescent where human farming and larger-scale societies might have begun, and where humans might have first left Eden. The word ‘paradise’ itself is from Persia, old Iranian, ‘paradaijah.’ The Farsi word for garden means paradise. Iran is a land of beautiful poetry and traditional architecture, as well as gardens of physical poetry pointing our eyes toward divinity. It is place of reverence for the “unseen life.”

 

Yet, today, Iyer shows us a place where the government tries to watch and record all that its people hide, think, and do, while the people try to find out what the government is hiding. One motif of the architecture is the inclusion of tiny mirrors, hints of an infinity of reflections and creations. But the mirrors, today, also might remind the people to keep a perpetual watch over their shoulders.

 

Maybe all nations have such contradictions. Iyer describes the “People’s Paradise” of North Korea as a place where people “seemed beside the point and perfection was the ruthless elimination of every imperfection.” Or I’m reminded that in the U. S., the “land of the free,” and leader of the democratic world, one of the two probable presidential candidates in the 2024 election promises to end democracy and rule as a dictator.

 

We must be careful with our yearning for paradise….

 

*To read the whole blog, please go to The Good Men Project.