Month: July 2016

For most of my life, I could not have imagined taking a flock of sheep out to pasture to graze two or three times a day. Life is filled with crisis and mystery, and if you are open to it, it will take you to places you have never imagined. The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of awakening or realization, and then returning to the field of what we think of as normal life.

The first stage is leaving where you are, whatever the circumstances or environment. You may leave because your world is hollow or suffocating or repressive, and you are restless. You know there is more for you.

It may be that  call to adventure draws  you out, and  you venture to an unknown place.

Always the realm of adventure is one of unknown forces, unseen challenges. Many – most – refuse the call, it is too dangerous, too fraught and uncertain. If the call is heeded, the traveler has engaged in a dangerous adventure, and what makes it dangerous is not bad guys and storms or monsters. It is dangerous because he or she is moving out of the known sphere and into the great beyond.

In myth, this is called crossing the threshold. Joseph Campbell calls this crossing from the conscious to the unconscious world.

What is the meaning of this path into the unknown? It is a powerful and evocative image. We live on this side of the mystery, in the realm of the pairs of opposites: true and false, light and dark, good and evil, male and female. The conscious mind returns and closes the door. The idea of the hero adventure is to walk bodily through the door and into a world where the old rules, our very sense of ourselves, our fears and conceits, simply do not apply.

It is also true in myth, and in my own practice, that one of the challenges at the threshold is often the encounter with the dark counterpart, the shadow, where the hero meets the darkness, in his own soul, sometimes in the world. It may be an enemy, it maybe the self, it may be the very beings we love.The struggle has to be resolved or the journey ends.

After this trial has been passed, there is a resurrection and rebirth. Magical helpers appear along the way – spirits, animals, wise men and women, fairies and angels, companions or advisers, tokens and images – to protect the hero and guide him along the way.

This is the journey of awakening, of self-realization.

At the end, I could return to the ordinary world or move forward into the new and the unknown. It is a frightening, wonderful, mystical experience. I could return to my urban life, nestled among countless neighbors, familiar people and convenient things, or I could end up in a green pasture on a cloudy summer day in the timeless experience of herding my sheep.

For better or worse, I have crossed the threshold.

I have been searching for faith and a spiritual life for many years. I am still working on it. I was born a Jew but have never found the Jewish faith one that could give me a way of understanding or looking at the world. My spiritual life is eclectic, one part Thomas Merton, another Quakerism, yet another the Kabbalah, some C.S. Lewis, a touch of Buddhist acceptance.

My faith is a brew, a rich mix, and I have never seen the point of shutting out so many wonderful ideas by adhering only to one. The old Testament always seemed angry and blood-thirsty to me.

A few years ago, I heard of a gifted and charismatic rabbit in Vermont. I went to meditate with him, liked him very much,  I paid him $50 a week for a few months to talk to me about Judaism and see if he might help me get more comfortable with the language, ritual and angry traditions of the faith.  We had our ups and downs, he showered me with dense texts I didn’t like and ponderous books I couldn’t read.

I enjoyed speaking with him, and eventually, we clicked. He began to figure me out, and he turned me on to the Kabbalah, a series of mystical writings about faith that I was able to embrace. I got him to get his first Iphone and think about a blog.

The Kabbalah isn’t exactly a faith, but it is a way of looking at the world. I love reading from the Kabbalah, it is  gentle, loving and mystical. Nobody knows who wrote it – most of it was written in medieval times – and you will not hear a word about it in most Temples or from most rabbis. An outsider faith, for sure.

In it, powerful women angels terrorize God and chase him across the heavens in chariots for screwing up parts of the world and sting environmental polluters in the cheeks with cherubs. God warns the people of the earth that they had better find some joy for the poor, or the world will bleed. There are spirits, wise donkeys, all kinds of angels and prophets.

This is not the Judaism I was taught as a kid. It is much about peace, generosity and everybody seems to be making love.

During one of our talks  (he took a job on the other side of the country one day and left,  sadly, he never said goodbye and I never saw him or heard from him again, this was emblematic of my history with rabbis)  he showed me a beautiful prayer shawl that he wore during services. We both thought getting a shawl and wrapping myself in it might make me feel closer to my religion that I had been able to do myself.

He put me in touch with someone in Jerusalem and some shawl-makers  – their families had been doing it for hundreds of years – agreed to hand weave a rainbow shawl for me. I forget what it cost, it was not terribly expensive. The shawl makers were artists who used special fabrics and colors and I love the idea of a rainbow shawl. In a couple of months, my shawl arrived from Jerusalem, it was beautiful, woven in soft fabric, rich in color, made for me.

I was glad to have it. If I couldn’t be at ease in the Jewish faith, I could at least remain connect in it, wrap myself in it from time to time.

I wore my shawl whenever I meditated for a few months, I loved the feeling of bring wrapped in it, my shawl is big and I can drape it over my head and around my shoulders and feel as if I am in a cave. I feel some very powerful things when that shawl is wrapped around me, I feel grounded and very open. After a few months I forgot about the shawl, during our clean-up Maria came across it and reminded me of it.

But as various shrinks have told me, one of my learning disabilities is that I forget the things I cannot see, and I had lost all consciousness of my shawl. When Maria reminded me of it, I felt a great wave of joy.

This morning, we both meditated together and I wrapped my shawl around me, and it was like meeting an old friend. I wrapped it over my head, I felt as if I were in a spiritual womb. My shawl  connects me to the faith I was  born in and to the very idea of faith. It transcends Judaism and brings me comfort.

These times feel angry and fraught, and I work to ground myself, my shawl appeared for a good reason, as things do .

Finding it was an  epiphany, and in my reading of the Kabbalah this morning, I read about renewal:

“An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of Creation.”

Everything renews itself. If I can keep it in sight, I intend to keep wrapping myself in my shawl from time to time, whenever I need it.

I went to the hardware store yesterday and bought a new lawn mower, my mower kept clogging and sputtering and failing. Ever time i couldn’t start it, I hauled it into the car and drove it to Bryan at the hardware store, and every time I did that, he started it up the first time. I did this three times yesterday and it seemed insane and frustrating.

I just couldn’t go more than a few minutes without the engine cutting out.

Bryan is a good and patient soul, and ever helpful. We’ll keep at this until we get it right.  He showed me a new mower, and explained many things about the engine I did not understand. Bryan is amazingly patient that way, he doesn’t seem to care that I have no idea what he is talking about, he just feels obliged to try.

My rule is simple, if he says it’s okay for me to buy it, I do. That’s all I want to know. It’s also probably why I have so much trouble getting things to work.

So I came home with a new mower, more powerful and with a vent to expel the heavy grass and turn it into mulch. I am very happy with it, although I had the usual mishaps at first.  I couldn’t start it either the first few times, and had to run back and forth to the hardware store, but finally it worked. I have a strange thing with mechanical devices, I am allergic to them, we do not communicate well with one another. I live out of my head, not in the material world. Maria will testify to that.

Fortunately I live in a town filled with men who love mechanical devices and talk to them well, and have mercy on me.

“You’re wordsmith,” said Bryan, trying to make me feel better, I panic at the sight of a cord or assembly instructions. Bryan has seen this many times, so far he is the model of patience and understanding. My new mower is great, it is strong and fast and did the job.

I love mowing our lawns, they are pretty big and it feels good to me to keep them in shape. I also have a rapt audience when I mow, Fate and Red sit and watch me as if I am about to launch a mission into space. Most likely, they are just waiting for me to let them go to work. The chickens usually appear as well. Chloe comes over to whinny at me and the donkeys bray softly for treats. Most often the barn cats will check things out to see if I have flushed any mice or moles from their hiding places.

We feed our gardens and our gardens feed us, as our flowers spring to life, they enter our house, my office, our life. They brighten my day and lift my spirits and remind me every minute of the beauty and light in the world. Something it is sometimes too easy to forget.

I have never been completely at ease or clear about the idea of patriotism. For me it seems to drive some people to  intolerance and excess as much as freedom and justice. I have lived so freely and openly and safely in America that I have never really had to think about it before.

In my life, the people who shout the loudest about patriotism do not seem to know what it means.

When I think of the word, I tend to think of people who are not me – soldiers, Minutemen rushing through the Concord woods, brave solders rushing into battle, brilliant orators crafting the Bill Of Rights. I am an outsider, I love beyond the tent. Are people like me patriots?

My people were not here in great numbers during the Revolution, or the Civil War, are not much written into the story of the nation, it’s birth or dramatic times. Not too many people wanted them to come here over the years, or welcomed them when they did. My grandmother told of a restaurant in her new country that had a sign on the door that said “No dogs or Jews.” Lots of others were not welcome either, yet my grandmother had a good life here anyway.

The idea of America always burned brightly in her heart and soul. But the fear and hatred never seemed to be the American idea, it was rarely in the mainstream.

For me, one of the great ironies of the American experience is that  the country has always drawn and attracted people who are seen as outsiders and interlopers, then resented them for being here. Patriots are sometimes wary of patriotism, but the outsiders are still mostly given  a chance to live safely in peace. People like Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

That is the promise, and that has been the experience of my family. Patriotism is an emotional attachment for me.  I would not be here today on my farm writing this if not for the idea of America, and I feel quite patriotic about that sometimes, even if I cannot say precisely what the means to me.

When we think of patriotism, we tend to think of sacrifice and bravery, not of self-centered,   bookish or decidedly shy writers holed up in their rooms cranking out their books. This election year, and for the first time I am thinking about how patriotism applies to me, and what love of country means to me, and what the idea of a place really is for me.  I don’t want the politician’s words, I want my own.

I confess that Donald Trump has done that for me.

I woke up early this morning and checked the news, something I have not done regularly for a long time, but am doing now.

I found myself stirred in a very powerful and patriotic way by the story of Khizr  Khan, a Muslim immigration lawyer who spoke at the Democratic National Convention about his 27-year-old son, Humayun Khan, an Army captain who died in a car bombing in 2004 in Iraq as he tried to save some of the soldiers in his command. You can see and hear his speech here.

During his speech, Khan’s wife Ghazala stood silently by her husband’s side. Her sorrow was evident.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump  belittled Khan and suggested Ghazala had remained silent because she was not allowed to speak, am effort to smear her faith. Soon after, she talked to reporters and said she did not speak because she broke down every time she saw a photograph of Humayun and did not trust herself to maintain her control.

The speech by Khan was considered by many to be one of the most powerful speeches in modern political history, it moved me deeply.  Everyone seems to know of it. I believe it will prove to be one of the defining moments of the country’s necessary struggle for its soul.

I felt a great sadness and a good deal of pain when I saw that Trump had ridiculed this stricken couple for speaking against him. How far can we fall, I thought?

It was a shocking thing for me to see that he did that. It seemed so profoundly unpatriotic to me.

In a sense, Khan’s brief but eloquent speech was about the very patriotic idea of sacrifice. He said that Donald Trump had “sacrificed nothing.”  Donald Trump responded by saying “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I’ve worked very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs.” He said he had also sacrificed by working hard to build “great’ structures.

It is not for me to tell you how to feel about this, and I am not writing this to tell you how to vote or think. I have not yet caught the national disease of  needing to tell other people what to do, or endlessly arguing with the growing numbers of people who believe they have a lock on righteousness and the truth. If you support Mr. Trump, good reader, please understand that I am writing about my own reflections on sacrifice and patriotism, we all have to make our own way, anyone can put a blog up.

I believe that everything is a gift, even sad and ugly things, and the gift for me is that I felt closer to the idea of patriotism and me, I am beginning to understand it. I see that you don’t, really, have to wrap yourself in the flag to be a patriot, or tell other people what to think. You don’t have to give up your life. You don’t even have to be the very brave Humayun Khan who died in a way that would almost certainly be far beyond me, my strength or courage.

I shiver when I think of it.

His parents, both immigrants who have built successful lives in America, were patriots to me, speaking their minds in the context of a movement that might have banned them and their son from even being here. I know it is much safer to be quiet than speak out sometimes. I am proud that I speak my mind but well aware my risk and sacrifice is nowhere near theirs.

I will never know, but I doubt that I could have done it what their son did, or even what they did.

I have never had to sacrifice for my country, I cannot imagine challenging or ridiculing parents who lost a son in a war most Americans believe was unjust and unnecessary.  All I can do is try to honor and respect them, and those who do not share all of my views, and do them the courtesy of listening to them.

I am not a warrior, but I am a father. I can’t imagine…

Mr. Khan was showing me what a patriot really is, and what sacrifice really means.  Perhaps only an outsider can see what we take for granted. I wanted to take his wife in my arms – the pain was etched all over her face – and tell her I am sorry for her loss. I did not wish to belittle or diminish  her, and it turned my stomach to see someone else do it.

I could see quite easily how much courage and sacrifice it took for her to be on that state, a giant screen image of her dead son glowing right above her. I am sorry that a person who wants to be President could not see it. Empathy is precious and important.

Perhaps this is the point. I have lived all of my life in a country that has accepted both my idea of patriotism and my idea of sacrifice.I know that is rarely true in other nations.

And I feel, for one of the few times in my life, the necessity of confronting a kind of evil.  Philosophy, wrote the moralist Hannah Arendt, knows the villain only as somebody who is in despair and whose despair confers upon them a certain nobility.  She might have said the same of politics and media. We seem to elevate evil for money, bless it with respectability, and give it voice.

But the greatest evildoers, she wrote, are those those without remembrance, those who don’t remember and cannot empathize because they have never given thought to the matter, and without remembrance, nothing can restrain them, hold them back, or require them to think about what they say and do.

In rootless evil, there is no mercy, no compassion, no empathy. There is no person left whom one could ever forgive or listen to.

The greatest evil,  wrote Arendt, is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.

Many times this year, struggling with the angry divisions in our country and so many hateful thoughts, messages and comments, I felt lost in America, disconnected from my idea of the place,  the raging of demagogues echoing in my ears.

This morning, reading about the remarkable journey of Khizr and Ghazala Khan and their fallen son Humayun, I felt that I was beginning to understand the idea of patriotism, and even of sacrifice. I began to feel like a patriot. It was a strange but powerful feeling.

It isn’t that I am strong enough or brave enough to do what Humayun Khan did, or even what his mother and father did. It’s more that Mr. Khan helped me to see what being a patriot really means, and that I can be one. It is, after all, not only about battles and death, patriotism is a very personal and emotional attachment to a place, or at least the idea of a place.

Mr. Khan spoke to the heart of that, and his idea of patriotism is something that I can do, and have done, and will do. You can be patriotic just by seeing the truth of something, by loving the idea of your country, it’s hope and it’s promise, even if it sometimes, and often,  fails many people. There is no perfect system, only better ones.

Mr. Khan and his wife gave their son to this idea of patriotism, and he still loves the idea of America and asks us to be better.

My country does not have to be perfect for me to love it, and I do not have to be a war hero to be a patriot. Mr. Khan confronted a kind of evil when he gave his speech, and simply by writing this, so can I. think that makes me a patriot in my own way, I hope so.

I thank Mr. Khan has helping me to find America again.