"I'm Dying"

A friend said to me recently “I'm dying.” She's ninety years old and in precarious health, so it's likely that she will die any day now. She said it in that sober way of people who have done a lot of thinking in preparation for the event. I recognized what she was saying immediately because dying has been the central question of my own life for over fifty years now.

What surprized me was how good her statement felt. It was true, and she was sharing it with me, and it was helping us both to hear it said, to acknowledge it, to deal with it. We would help each other with dying, help each other out at the end, like God's spies, a phrase that she has used with me. It felt good to hear her say “I'm dying.”

Conversely, I now see what a down, what a drag, what a frustration, it is to be with people who don't believe they will die.

Dyer and Garnes "Memories of Heaven"

Wayne Dyer's last book (written with Dee Garnes) “Memories of Heaven:Children's Astounding Recollections of the Time before They Came to Earth,” has so much behind it that I felt overwhelmed by the time I finished reading it this morning.

The authors explicitly built it around Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, collecting thousands of anecdotes via their Facebook appeal for accounts of young (mostly under five) children's memories and visions of heaven. Dyer and Garnes then made a selection of those accounts, wrote them up and present them in this astonishing book.

We are all pretty much familiar with the main points of such accounts - the heavens of light and love, loved ones who have gone on, angels, choosing one's parents-to-be, etc. – and it would be easy to say as many do, “OK, we've heard this all before, there's no proof, it's all wishful thinking or fraud, it's all so simplistic and naive and childlike and dangerously unrealistic.”

I think it's as equally dishonest just to dismiss these accounts as it is to believe them uncritically. These children's reports may well be true and the materialistic scientist's view untrue.

The “a-ha,” the “click,” the “eureka,” that sense of opening and solution and release that comes with discovery, seems to be part of the scientist's experience as well as the non-scientist's experience. It's certainly one of the acid tests of when you've finally discerned what a dream is trying to tell you.

Dyer and Garnes like good quotes, from poets as well as scientists, and here are two of them from the book with which you may feel that “click:”

p.195, Albert Einstein:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

p.198, William Blake:

      “The angel that presided o'er my birth

      Said 'Little creature, form'd of joy and mirth

      Go, love without the help of anything on Earth.”

Wayne Morse of Oregon

Senator Wayne Morse spoke the truth when it was needed, not just quietly coming around years later to say it, sheepishly, when it was safe to say it, and only when prodded, mincing words about it as much as possible.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon (1900-1974)

I once went to a speech he gave in the middle 1960's in which he said these words:

My grandchildren will be proud of me that I was one of only two people in the Senate who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Ernest Gruening of Alaska was the other Senator who voted against it.

I see videos from time to time of the abuse Muhammad Ali took when he spoke out against that war, refused to participate in it, and lost his job and more for doing so.

I experienced the same kind of thing for telling the truth and refusing to participate in it: infinite abuse, subject to arrest every night I came home for years, wondering what the hell is wrong with everyone around me that they supported the horror with such superior fervor – I think you have to have lived it, experienced it yourself, in order to understand and to believe that it is even possible, never mind so very real.

It's been a long time since then – fifty years – and probably very few USA'ers remember Wayne Morse's name. But I remember his face when he said his grandchildren would be proud of him for voting against that resolution, against all those people posing as patriots around him. I can see his face as he said it, even now. Just to remember it brings that thrill of recognition of reality.

Grandma Moses Was Good with Snow

There is currently (21 Nov '15 through 21 Feb '16) an exhibition of her paintings and her needlework at the Dayton Art Institute, and seeing her delightful treatment of snow is still in my mind. There was a lot of old-time New England in her paintings that also went deeply with me.

There is a continually-running video at this exhibit of the Edward R. Murrow interview with her in 1955, during which you can see her painting snow into trees with pure delight. She was, by the way, 95-years old at the time of that interview and Murrow was 47 – twice his age – but she is far more youthful, alive, intelligent, exciting than Murrow. He sits there chain-smoking, unutterably sad, asking stupid questions while she is bright-eyed, full of fun, and painting snow with sprightly dabs into her trees.

But what struck me most at the exhibition was a stitch sampler done, not by Moses but by an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Sharpe, in 1809. There were several old samplers like that which the museum used to build context around Moses' needlework. Eizabeth Sharpe's piece had some faded samples of the letters of the alphabet and the following words:

By this piece of work you will see

The care my parents took of me.

When I'm dead and in the grave

This piece of work may you have.

I looked at that, came back to look at it twice again, and keep coming back to it in my mind as being right at the heart of the truly human life.

Making A Mark On The World

A very intelligent, able, enthusiastic student whom I admire very much said it to me exactly this way: “I want to make my mark on the world.”

Her words struck me as strange, even as incomprehensible, although I've heard them for seventy years. I've heard the expression many times and the sentiment is commonly held to be  good, normal, healthy, a sign of good promise and respectability.

It's not clear to me what “making a mark on the world” means. It could mean putting graffiti on a wall, or putting up a building in a beautiful field where there was nothing but green grass and trees and sunshine and vistas. It could mean getting yourself a tattoo or getting your name in the news or donating money so that your name appears on a building. It could mean getting noticed by others by some outrageous dress or act. It must be related in some way to “fame,” being “famous,” recognized, like becoming President of the United States of America. It could mean bringing children into the world who “amount to something.”

But if you take a large, long, perspective on things, say of one million years, it's obvious that any “mark” on the world that one makes is going to be erased without the slightest trace left. Actually, it will take very much less time than a million years for every trace to be erased.

Now, I can't believe that something this obvious escapes my bright young student. Yet she nonetheless acts as if it were not so, as is so very commonly done.

So, why is this? Why should the goal of making a mark on the world be so resistant to correction? 



My own best guess is that love is at the center of everything, including human consciousness!

Bernie Sanders' Age

Senator Bernie Sanders is the same age I am, seventy-four, so I always notice very quickly when someone comments on his age as if it were something negative about him. I think it is probably the standard, most widely-accepted, position in the U.S. that being young is better than being old.

I was accordingly surprised, for example, when I visited a warehouse in Houston a few times not long ago that was staffed entirely by Chinese people - not only “Chinese-Americans” but people native to China. Their respect, or lack of disrespect, for my old age was quite striking to me, and my first thought was “What’s this?!”

It has also been surprising to me to have found, and contrary to common expectation, my old age to be far better than my youth, in every way, even physically.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of old age is that you’ve had the time to integrate those aspects of your own life that are unique, differing from common interpretations. Coming to know yourself, and believe it, takes long experience and reflection. Noting down your dreams every night for fifty years and conscientiously working out what they are telling you are invaluable. Listening over a long time to what the fairy tales symbolize by “the little people” or “animals” or "those in need" is definitely helpful, too.

Then there is this matter of what I think of as an accumulation of burden and accumulation of strength. There is an accumulation of error and malice over the course of a lifetime, each lie or crime entailing a subsequent lie or crime, so that the burden after seventy years does in fact make one “out of it,” a mentally and spiritually deficient monster. And conversely, there is an accumulation of strength that follows every genuine act of love or truth, that brings astonishingly strong, delightful, helpful clarity with age.

Look at Me! Look at Me!

I was awakened one morning last week by loud, repeated shouts of “Look at me! Look at Me!" I got to the window and saw that it was a young boy of about six-years-old performing dare-devil maneuvers on his bicycle, for a somewhat distracted audience who was not paying close attention to his feats and person.

This group of children consists of five or six members, ranging in age from about three to ten years old. They all live within twenty-five yards from my house and run around the neighborhood wildly without any adult supervision or even knowledge. They seem to be very much on their own and get into whatever adventures and explorations or experiments present themselves. They have a really admirable curiosity about everything, lots of energy and no inhibitions that I can detect.

I always find them to be fascinating but what struck me strongly on this occasion was the great familiarity of the shouts of “Look at me! Look at me!” There was the immediate association to the Republican candidates for President of the United States who have been saying the same thing, although in different words and in their actions. “Look at me!”

I note in this connection how Bernie Sanders absolutely refuses to do the shout, and immediately tells the provocateurs and the audience that it is the issues, not himself, nor who is the greatest nor who is ahead in the horse race, that is important.

There is this fact, that I mentioned in a previous post, that the way one comes to know his or her self - the basic project since the Greeks of “Know thyself” - that the only way we can discover who we are is by taking a point of view outside of ourselves. The only way a point can see itself is from outside itself. That’s very basic, but usually completely dismissed or overlooked.

Children need to have someone look at them in order to find themselves. It has often been noticed that children’s attempts to have someone look at them are dismissed as “just trying to get attention,” and that they find it necessary to get in trouble rather than not to be noticed at all.

I also saw this last week the mother of two of these children - a little girl of about four and boy of five - yelling at them in a shrill, high-pitched voice: “Get in the fucking house!” She then slapped the side of the boy’s head. He put his hand on his head, looked down, and was about to cry and then she said: “Well? You fuck me over like that, what do you expect?”

I know, I know. The whole abuse of children thing is just too much for us to bear so I won’t go on about it.
 
It seems to me equally obliterating to think of all the reputed, assumed “adults” around who have never grown up and who are still desperately crying out in all but the exact words “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s not just the young man seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.