May Flowers

Saturday in Columbia Missouri. Is it like Saturday where you're from? Probably but the Holy Road House is hushed in anticipation of the return of its favorite son and daughter: Lizzie and Baba are coming back this week.

Prepare to join us this Wednesday evening for a potluck and jammin' and laughin' and kickin'. Much to do to get ready, much more to do once they're back. We have some serious playfulness coming up.

Meanwhile, our own lovely mistress ultra hostess Firedancer bought and installed some flowerage that is, for the moment only, nearly as beautiful as she is.

Karma

One of my favorite zen stories:

There is the story of the man who had murdered ninety-nine people before he met a holy man. Thereafter he retired to sit beneath a tree beside a well traveled path. One day a warrior on his way to conquer the next town stopped before the man and demanded he move from his place beneath the tree. When the man refused, the soldier drew his sword, and the man rose from his place and murdered the warrior with his hands. He had killed a hundred men, but in killing the last he saved a hundred souls who would have died in the town. Immediately upon killing the soldier, the murderer was released from the karma of his acts and achieved satori.

So it goes.

Stories About Stories

Everyone knows I'm crazy for stories. Can't get enough of them. What is it that makes them so irresistable? I know I'm not alone -- our whole culture, our whole species is crazy for stories. We need them like we need air and water. I'm not at all sure we could live for very long if we somehow totally lost access to stories.

Our lives are stories, and we tell those stories to ourselves and to each other constantly. Virtually every conversation anyone has is a story or part of a story about ourselves and about others. Stories validate us, they remind us we're alive, but they're even more than that. We're creating our stories as we go, on the fly, moment by moment. This episode, now this one, and the next one, and this little complication, and now this huge dramatic moment, and our recovery from that, and the story goes on. And on.

So, although I have dedicated myself recently to the task of making up stories, of creating them for amusement and entertainment and maybe even enlightenment, it turns out I'm only one of many. One of billions, as a matter of fact. Which is quite all right with me.

One of the things I have bumped into, trying to learn how to tell stories, is the idea that it's possible to reflect on our lives and see them as unfolding stories, and that we have the power then to rise higher and higher into our real roles as storytellers of our own lives. We can, and probably should, get good at creating our own stories.

Psychologists call it "scripting your life". That's only one phrase to describe it, but it's a useful one. Cast yourself as the highly likeable and wonderfully competent lead in your own play: the play of your life. Then script it every day, every moment even. It's fun being a playwrite. Try it!

Okay. I want to indulge myself for a moment and share a story I just wrote (rewrote, actually - I drafted most of it long ago. It just needed to be completed). You can fine it here.

Love from the Holy Road House.

Remembering Stones

Consider this:

That all of your knowledge is like stones lying in a field. Where did they come from?

You didn't put them there. They erupted -- are continually erupting -- from the earth's bowels, from the soil itself, which is a fine matrix of crushed stones, old knowledge, edges worn away by endless exposure to the light of the sun, the pressures of water and wind, and the ceaseless, restless shifting of the earth itself.

Pick them up and build with them. Build a castle. Build walls, build mills and line wells, build your homes. Live in them, raise your children and animals in them. Line your gardens with them and shape your tools from them. They are endless and they are yours.

In time they will crumble back to the earth and with the help of the sun and moon, they will feed you. Know that they are the substance which feeds you, the substance that protects you. Know that they are the substance of which you are composed and to which you return.

Lay no store in knowledge. It is nothing. Like the stones, it is only earth and sun and moon. It is only the all of everything and only emptyness. You may value knowledge, but only for a moment. More than that disallows it, prevents it, subverts it into something other than its origins. Knowledge is only consciousness. It is the field itself in which you lay. Cultivate it, then forget about it.

As the poet says, "Work without doing."

Out Of My Mind

A fantasy:

   ”Hello Doc?" On the telephone.
   "Yes, Dr. Finster here."
   "Oh, okay. Say doc, I want you to do something for me. Do you think you would?"
   "Well, give it a try. What do you want me to do?"
   "I want you to declare me mindless."
   "What?"
   "I don't have a mind, doc. I want you to declare me mindless. Got it?"
   "I can't."
   "Why not?"
   "Wait a minute. Is this a joke?"
   "Not unless it's on me. Yesterday I had a mind. Today I don't. I've lost it. It's gone. Just, poof! "
   "Are you trying to tell me you're insane?"
   "Sorry doc, I really don't know what 'insane' means. I know that I don't mind at all that my mind has disappeared. Quite a burden lifted, if you ask me. But it would really help me out if you would go ahead and fill out a paper declaring me mindless. I can probably draw some sort of social security benefit or something. After all, it won't do any good to go to my job now, will it."
   The doctor had an idea. "Why don't you come down to my office and I'll examine you and if it looks to me like your mind is gone, I'll sign you into the state hospital." That'll do the trick, he thought to himself.
   "Can't you take my word for it? Who should know better than I?”
   "If you're mindless you're not going to know anything, are you."
   "Oh, you've got that all wrong, doc. See, I'm not my mind. I'm me."
   But that doesn't convince the doctor and he hangs up. What can I say? There's nothing mindless about modern medicine, is there.

Troubadors Weekend

Alisa and I tripped over to Bellville Illinois Saturday to visit our great friend Suzibird and her menagerie of parrots. Then up to Edwardsville to the oddly named "Stagger Inn" cafe and bar for what turned out to be a wonder show featuring the Duct Tape Duo Trio, this time as a quartet with our buddy Jeff Wheeler, and following them, the amazing Troubadors of Divine Bliss.

Folks kept buying me drinks and despite that, I had a great time. The next day we enjoyed a fine breakfast of scrambled eggs with pepperjack cheese and bagels, then went to an art fair and were fully awakened finally by Roscoe Beano and seven of his friends and family (again featuring Jeff Wheeler on djembe). Incredible wild energy all around, especially for that time of day.

Sad to say, I accidentally deleted all my photos of the Troubadors, but they will be back. I look forward to hosting them at the Holy Road House this fall. I believe they are hosting Lizzie and Baba as I write this at their place in Indiana. They completely blew me away, even though I was prepped to expect that to happen. Two of the smartest and bravest women I've met.

Long Bet and Spiritwalker

"The Long Bets Foundation - make long-term predictions and hope someone will bet against it. Winnings go to the winner's choice of charities. This is a partial spin-off from The Long Now Foundation, which is building a 10,000-year Clock and tools for a 10,000-year Library. Long Bets is one of the Library tools. A Stewart Brand project."

and

Hank Wesselman, Spirit Walker: Messages from the Future (and related books)

"Hank Wesselman is a physical anthropologist (UC-Berkeley) whose career activities include research with teams in Africa’s Great Rift Valley where Lucy and other early human ancestors have been discovered. His background as a physical anthropologist concerned with long-term ecological change plays a role in these books, but their real import has to do with a very different path--one of spontaneous and then deliberate shamanistic experiences that reveal a dramatically different future for humanity." (review by Michael Winkleman. quoted without permission)

More later.