Day: July 21, 2015

More than 15 years ago, when my daughter Emma was 14, I took her to a baseball game at the old Yankee Stadium. At this point in my life, I went to Yankees games as often as I could, I even got a limited season pass ticket plan.

They won all of the time, but beyond that,  there was something very soothing, very meditative to me about sitting and watching a baseball fame. The odd thing is that I don’t really love baseball – I don’t really love any sport – but I love watching baseball, if that makes any sense. The rhythms and rituals of the game felt so peaceful and timeless to me, and at that point, it  grounded me, it was a peaceful place for me to go.

I knew my life was about to change, and needed to change, I just didn’t know how to do it. Emma was even less interested in sports than I was, she was a brainiac, an obsessive reader. I think she read every major work of fiction in the Western World when she was a kid, but I thought she might like a baseball game. I remember little about the game, other than that I showed her how to score the game. I remember she was more interested than I thought she would be, and she seemed to love keeping score.

I think we may have gone to another game or two at the stadium together, I’m not sure. I didn’t think much about that night, Em and I went to a lot of places together when she was younger.

Emma went off to Yale a few years later and we have not been to a baseball game since – at least not until tomorrow night, Wednesday night.

Our lives diverged. Emma moved to New York City after Yale, I came up to the country, bought my farm. My life did change, it suddenly became very different from hers, I ran away from almost everything that was familiar to me and baseball faded from my consciousness. Sports seemed so corporate and big-money to me, baseball lost it’s charm. I rarely watch TV.

Then there was the divorce. Our family broke up. Today,  Emma, who majored in film studies at Yale, is the Senior Editor for baseball at Sports Illustrated, the most prestigious sports publication in America. It doesn’t quite square with the quiet kid reading Tolkien up in her room, but she is very good at what she does, I love reading her writing about baseball. And she loves baseball very much.

I haven’t been to a baseball game in more than a decade, I’ve never been to the new Yankee Stadium. Emma says she is a baseball writer because of me and the game I took  her to when she was 14. That is humbling, it blows my mind, for sure. I learn every day that I know little and see almost nothing.

Emma and I have worked hard to stay connected to each other. We were talking a month ago and I said I would love to see the new stadium. Baseball is no longer a regular part of my life, but it has a powerful hold on my history and memory. My father and I did only one thing together in my life with him, and that was go to Fenway Park in Boston to see the Red Sox once or twice a season.

I knew I had to – wanted to – go to another game with her at the stadium. I guess my memories of it are painful as well as elegaic, I often went alone, and lost myself in the crowds and the din. But this is about me and Emma, not baseball or the Yankees.  Emma wants to go with me, I think we both want to revisit that experience in the new context of our lives. She is married now, her husband Jay, also a baseball writer, will join us during the game.

Emma and I had some struggles after the divorce,  I think my  brilliant and very urban daughter thought I had lost my mind when I moved to the country. We could not relate to one another for a time. But we never let go of one another, we never stopped trying to communicate. To stay in touch. We never gave up on one another.

That was one of the most painful experiences of my life.  Neither one of us really knew how to do it, but it was my fault, I should have known and done better. So we are doing better now, much better. I am delighted to be going to a baseball game with my daughter.

Maria is driving me to the train in Albany in the morning, Emma and I will probably go see the new Whitney Museum together, wander around the new West Side,  and then go to the new stadium. I am excited to see it, happy to have her show me around. It is her turn, I think, to bring me into her world and show it to me. I know nothing of the Yankees now, of their staff or record or struggles. She has become the father, I have become the child. I accept the new arrangement. She will be showing me around.

Maria and I never love being apart, but she does not care for baseball, and wants to stay behind and take care of the farm. I think she also wants me to have some of this time alone with my daughter, that kind of time is rare for me.

I imagine the seats will be great, Sports Illustrated has some weight in those circles. Emma says there is no healthy food at the stadium, but I will have some hot dogs, for old time’s sake. This time, I’ll be bringing my medicine. And wearing some heavy-duty sneakers for my feet. I’m bringing my wide angle lens. I am expecting some blisters.

For me, the circle turns and turns. You never really leave your life behind, you simple give birth and rebirth to it, again and again and again. I’m taking the camera. Let’s play ball.

I left my home and family one day and went to the woods because I wished to leave meaningfully, and not in fear and obligation. I wished to confront the natural world, and re-connect to the world of animals, to find out what they might teach me. I came to see if I could learn what life had to teach, I feared that as I neared the end of my life, I would not have lived.

And living is so dear. I wished to renounce resignation, which was the ethic of my life. Resigned to live in an ugly world. Resigned to work for money. Resigned to a loveless life. Resigned to live without perspective or understanding. Resigned to forego a spiritual life.

I wanted to live deeply, to be authentic, to chase life into the farthest corner, and reduce it to it’s most elemental and simple terms. I wanted to understand that it meant to love, and to find it. I am not there yet, I have just begun this hero journey, I think. Every step I take reminds me of how far I have to go, how short a distance I  have come.

I am beginning to be old, the end may not be close, but it is not far, it gets closer every day. Each day is precious to me, and I value it with ferocity.

I no longer live in resignation. I accept that my work may or may not be important, I have foregone the hope of results. My work may be worthless and achieve nothing, it may be forgotten. As I learn this lesson, I am able to concentrate less on the results of my work and more on it’s value, it’s honesty, the truth of the work itself, and I begin to be free. Because I am free, I may yet be creative.

 In the end, it is connection that means everything.

 

 

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live, wrote Thomas Merton. Mithra Katalunga seems to know this, he did not need to make himself a slave to a life and work he hates in order to find out. His work in his garden at Blue Star Equiculture speaks to the power of a spiritual life, and to it’s importance.

This summer, Mithra is sleeping in his garden at Blue Star, living alone among the beautiful flowers and vegetables he has planted in his mystical and very beautiful garden. This is the third in a series of posts. about him.

Mithra rejected the culture of materialism he saw all around him. He accepts the reality of human suffering and death. He rejected a life built around making money and scrambling for security. “The more you try to avoid suffering,” wrote Merton, ” the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”

Our culture has become a fear one, dominated by lawyers, warnings, an abundance of caution, and a refusal to accept the nature of life, it’s crisis, mystery and suffering.

In Palmer, Massachusetts, in a beautiful and rapidly growing garden there is a  young man who seems to know this and who is not an elder, a guru, a monk or a priest. Yet his spiritual self is carving out a summer of great meaning, and perhaps, a life of the same. He is a young Thoreau for our times, he has found his own  Walden Pond, we need his message even more than we needed Henry David Thoreau’s.

In his encyclical, Pope Francis challenges all of us to ask “what is it we really need?” To recognize that what we take and buy comes out of the land and lives of others, and is bleeding Mother Earth to death. Mithra knows what he needs – a camping chair, some shovels and trowels, a tent, a piece of wood to write on, some fresh vegetables to eat, a cell phone.

In Sri Lanka, where Mithra lived most of his life, and in the United States, where he lives now, no one he knows says they want to be a farmer. “Everyone wants to be rich, to make money, to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer,” he says. “I never hear anyone say they want to be farmer, and it is such a beautiful thing to be.”

Mithra has always wanted to be a farmer. He wants to be a farmer still, only one educated in modern farming, in sustainable and environmentally responsible food growing.

Mithra wants a life that is humble and simple. He wants his garden to be self-sufficient, he wants his life to be the same. “Life is suffering,”he says “desire is suffering.” He does not try to hide from suffering, he accepts and embraces it as part of the sacred circle of life.  He wants to treat his farm workers well, much the way he has been treated at Blue Star. “They are a community here,” he says, “they have my back. I don’t have to worry about getting fired or not earning more money, I just have to worry about my garden.”

I have learned in my own life that anxiety and fear is the hallmark of greed, anger and spiritual insecurity. Spirituality is the antidote to anxiety and fear, it requires us to look inward and ask how it is we really want to live, and challenges us to turn away from a life of fear and anger and enslavement, living in barren and ugly places doing work of no meaning for people who care nothing about us. Our culture teaches us to sacrifice a life of meaning for a life of what they call security, a ghost life, a false vision. Visit any nursing  home where the elderly are hidden away without purpose and ask if they are secure, if their great trade-off of life for the safety they told they must have was worth it.

Mithra has made some of the same choices I  have made, some I wished to make but could not, some I have come to make later in life. He does not live a life in fear, anxiety, anger or regret. Perhaps this is the beginning of his search for Nirvana, a state of true enlightenment. He says Nirvana is his ultimate goal.

Some people, I have seen, understand that we will all die, and that everyone and thing we love will die. Some people seem stunned by death, in their lives, their families, their dogs. What, I always wonder, did they think would happen?  A garden is a circle of life, perhaps this is why Mithra is drawn to it, why he says he has learned so much from it.

“I suppose this summer that I want to live like a monk,” he says, and he does. Thomas Merton would have loved the life that Mithra is living this summer at Blue Star. His visits to the Peace Pole by the river, his evenings writing at his small home-made desk, his days working alone in the sun with flowers and vegetables, the sense of inner peace and contentment that he evokes. The wonderful garden he has brought to life.

How is it that Mithra Kulatunga knows the power of the horses, the importance of keeping animals in our every day lives, and the mayor of New York and his angry supporters who say they support the rights of animals do not? Perhaps because Mithra grew up with elephants working on his farm, and he knows how much the working animals need and love to work, and he knows how much people need to live and work in connection with animals. He knows things we have forgotten. The elephants, he says, were not belittled for doing cheap tricks for humans, their hard work with people is valuable and precious.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism and alarm, and solitude is what most of us have never known or will never know. That is a tragedy, Mithra’s life reminds us of the great beauty of solitude, rather than a live of devices  and pressure. I find some solitude every day, it is my salvation and my defense against the roar and rage of the world.

Mithra does not, I am sure, have a perfect life, nor does he crave one. He is not a saint, but young man who has thought about how he wants to life, and is already living a life of meaning.  He knows that a perfect life is not a life without suffering, but a life where suffering and struggle bring us to the great awakening, a life of  grace and peace and freedom and authenticity.

It is a great privilege to have met and talked with Mithra, I will make sure to visit him often. He is 24 years old, he intuitively understands so many things I am just beginning to grasp. He is my brother in the search for a life worth living.

Border collies are supposed to watch the sheep, not the sheepherder, and Fate has very good focus. But she is very young, still a pup, subject to distraction. Red never takes his eyes off of the sheep and can never be distracted. It was hot out there today, she sheep are getting calmer around her, and Susie isn’t charging at her nearly as much. Like Red, Fate keeps her composure, doesn’t overreact. She isn’t strong enough to move the sheep yet, and her eye isn’t powerful enough to back them off, and I  haven’t seen  her take a nip at one of them yet.

All this will come. She is doing everything she could and should be doing, somethings she should be doing at her  young age. She’s a great dog and will soon be a great working dog. When she gets this tired, I just pull her out, she gets a little woozy.

We went out to the pasture early this morning, it was already hot, the flies were awful, it was humid. Fate and I are working on staying, hard for her to do, give all of her impulse and instinct and energy. I told her out there, “a herding dog that won’t stay is worth shit,” and she blinked at me. I think she is trying.

She worked on directionals with me for ten minutes,and was so tired she actually did stay for five or ten minutes. She is teaching me patience and calm. We are getting there. She is sleeping in Maria’s studio right now.