Whispering Tree

 

A while ago I co-teaching an elementary math class, and yes I am just a substitute, and the gen-ed teacher had just finished a little song and dance about polynomials.  She asked the students to go and work on the problems, and then they were going to do some complicated long division with integers, and I told her I didn’t remember anything from my school days about polynomial equations, and she said “Well, I’m going to go over it once they finish their exercises” and then she pointed a finger at me and said sternly, “So pay attention with the rest of the class.”

And one part of me was taken aback that was speaking to me as if I was an eleven year old.  And another part of me wanted to shed tears of joy that this teacher was talking to me as if I was a student in her class, and that she forgot I was also a teacher.  And that’s the greatest advantage of being a sub is that I get to be a child again, and learn with fresh eyes and fresh ears.

I’ve mentioned before in a post that I was sitting in on a high school Spanish class and the teacher was reading out a story in Spanish that was also projected on a screen and the first sentence was, “Mi mama murio a darme a luz.”

And I interrupted the teacher with my raised hand and she called on me and I asked her,”Ma’am, I know what “mi mama murio” means- it means my mother died- but what does “darme a luz” mean” and she told me that it means “she brought me to the light” and that it is the common phrase Spanish speakers use instead of “gave birth to me”.  “My mother brought me to the light” is used instead of “she gave birth”.  And I was just so astonished that Spanish uses such a beautiful phrase in place of the cool clinical observed fact that we use in English.

Last week I opened an English class by reciting the opening lines from Macbeth:

“When shall we three meet again

In thunder lightning or in rain?

When the hurly-burly’s done,

That will be ere set o’ th’sun:

Where the place?

Upon the heath!

There to meet with Macbeth!

I come graymalkin!

Paddock calls anon!

Fair is foul and foul is fair,

Hover through the fog and the filthy air!”

 

Then I led the class into a discussion on reading and writing poetry, and I told them that, from my experience, we need to read and also to practice writing poems every day, without fail if we wish to become good poets.

And I received an email message from the teacher the next day thanking me for opening the class with lines from the “Scottish Play” and also for sharing with the students my life as a working poet.  She told me that they found the discussion very inspiring.

But what’s the Scottish Play?  And I had to actually, shamefully, google it, and google ai told me that in theatrical circles, the play is never referred to as “Macbeth”.  There is an old superstition that just uttering the name “Macbeth!” will bring bad luck and calamity.   So teachers and actors call it “The Scottish Play” out of an abundance of caution.

Okay!  Lesson learned!

I mentioned in my last two blog posts about my experiences writing letters to prisoners.  I write daily, and I also get letters back almost daily.  So, I feel like a juggler with many balls in the air.  But it’s not stressful.  Each letter I write is an opportunity for self-examination.  I do take stock of my life as I share my triumphs and tragedies (and foibles and comedies) with these guys.  And in fact, I structure my day around writing letters.  So every day I have a chance to look in the mirror, and ask myself questions: What do I really want?  Where am I really going?  What are my real needs?

I think I had an experience with my Guru, Sri Chinmoy, recently, that also involved questions and answers.  I’m saying “I think” because I can’t state with absolute certainty that it was real.  But in the moment, and even now, the experience felt and feels real.

I sometimes go to the local jjimjilbang, or Korean bathhouse and spa.  The attendants there are very skinny old Korean men who also administer the massages.  But they look like they actually enjoy beating people up, and I’ve never allowed them to “massage” me, especially not with the wooden flail that’s supposed to release tension but looks more like aggravated whipping.  Anyway, I do enjoy the traditional Korean décor, and it reminds me both of a Japanese Zen monastery and a Chinese scholar garden, and I’m always very happy to go there.

Anyway, this past June I was relaxing in the hot tub.  I had just finished a discussion with a young man who has never read The Lord of the Rings but has only seen the Peter Jackson movies.  And I told him that a man named Ralph Bakshi had animated them long before Peter Jackson made his famous interpolations.  And yes, people say that you can only enjoy the Bakshi films if you are high on acid.  And there is much truth to this, as the film tries to compress material from all three books into a two hour film, and it is a casserole of delirium.  But for all that, the characters sometimes freeze in place and deliver some of the most beautiful lines from the book with utmost heartfelt sincerity, and it melts my heart.  And that’s what I want in any adaptation of Lord of the Rings- that deeply felt sincerity.  So, the Peter Jackson film is better in special effects, but the Bakshi film prevails in terms of soulfulness, in terms of capturing the sweetness of those stories and also the sweet language in which they are clothed.  And the young man, a very rich young investor and trader, told me he would check out the Bakshi versions.

After he got out of the hot tub, I was alone and I was mouthing silently poems from Sri Chinmoy’s collection My Flute:

“Before my green-red journey’s earth-bound flight…”

“If you but knew Father, what I have done for You…”

“Heaven is afraid of me- what can I do…”

And soon a man with Sri Chinmoy’s features got into the hot tub and sat across from me.  He looked Italian, and the skin-tone was lighter than Guru’s, but the build, the face, the forehead, was very close to how Guru looked in his later years.  And I looked and looked at the man, and I got the feeling I was looking at one of Sri Chinmoy’s emanations.  When I see Guru’s emanations, they usually come for one of two reasons: To bless me, or to encourage me.  But this man was different.  He looked very serious and very sad.

I recited under my breath Guru’s famous poem from his Golden Boat series (1974):

““Lord, Your sadness
Immeasurable,
How can I relieve?”

Think that I suffer,
Feel that I suffer,
Love humanity as I do.

Lo, half of My suffering-night
Has captured your oneness-love
With its Reality-Height.”

I meditated for a few minutes on his face, and I also closed my eyes and tried to visualize the Transcendental Photograph of my Master, where he is one with God.  The man did not look at me, but he maintained that serious and somber aspect.  I felt that his sadness is more properly understood as an expression of concern.

After a few minutes, some questions formed in my mind, almost in a whisper:

“Do you still like my path?”

“Do you like me as your Master?”
“Do you love God”
“Are you still interested in the soul?”

Looking back on this experience, I see now that a real seeker must ask himself these questions from time to time.

This is because love of God, spiritual aspiration, deep feeling for the spiritual life, considering the soul and the Master as absolute unparalleled treasures- all these realities, all these qualities are never to be taken for granted.  They are NOT a given.  Just because I am on the path, does not mean that twenty-four hours a day I am prepared to feed and nourish my highest, purest, deepest aspiration.  But, this is after all, what is expected- twenty-four hour aspiration and twenty-four hour dedication.  And Guru, by asking me these questions, was giving my aspiration-tree a vigorous and richly deserved shake.

Again, just because Guru asked me those questions does not mean, necessarily, that he is dissatisfied with me.  It could mean that he is telling me that real seekers have no hesitation in starting their spiritual lives over from the very beginning, if that is what it takes to renew their love of God.  And that’s all that matters!  We can make millions of mistakes, but when the examination comes we have to be prepared to tell God, “All I want is You, You are all I want, I want nothing but You, I want only You.”

So, since my voice was drowned out by all the loud fountains, and I was alone in the room with the emanation, whether real or imagined, I just sang Sri Chinmoy’s songs for Mother Kali for two hours, and the man listened.

Arjuna, when Krishna asked him if he wanted his whole, magnificent army to fight against the Kauravas, or just Krishna himself to assist him as his humble charioteer, chose just Krishna, Krishna only.  And in moments of struggle and uncertainty, I pray that I may follow Arjuna, and choose only God.

“The road goes ever on and on”, says Tolkien.

“I am the eternal warrior, I am the eternal war” says Guru.

 

Today I was coming back from a teaching assignment on the far south side of Chicago.  I was at the Chicago Vocational School which started out as a military installation, and the façade consists of many reliefs of soldiers and armor and machines.  It is an architectural treasure.  And an old homeless Black man got on the bus, lugging two big plastic trash bags full of clothes and food, and he sat next to me.  I don’t know how much his face resembled Guru’s face, but his eyes looked just like Guru’s eyes from photographs I have seen in the early Seventies.  And his expression was deeply meditative.  Most of the time emanations do not talk.  I said hi to him and he just nodded at me, but his consciousness was somewhere else.  I just looked and looked at his beautiful eyes, opals set in amber.

Last Saturday I attended the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, which is co-hosted at the University of Chicago, among other prestigious venues.  And I listened to a beautiful Palestinian ensemble perform haunting music accompanied by the buzuq, an ancient Near-Eastern lute-like instrument.  And I struck up a conversation with a young man, next to me, and it turned out he is a visiting Professor from another state who came just for the festival.  He looked Indian, and when I asked him, he told me that his parents are from Bangladesh but that he was born and raised in Los Angeles.  I started speaking to him in the soulful Bengali that I have learned from Guru’s songs and the man was so surprised!  And he asked me what my connection with that part of the world is and I told him that I am a student of the spiritual Master Sri Chinmoy.  And he said, “Oh, really!  I did my undergraduate thesis on Sri Chinmoy Ghose’s poetry.  I am an ethnomusicologist, but for my honors thesis I set seven of his poems as cantatas.”

He told me that he chose the kundalini to be the theme of his senior seminar, and just through googling discovered Guru’s book Kundalini: The Mother Power and after digging a little deeper discovered that Guru had written poems numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and that is what drew him to set Guru’s poetry: the incredible output from his pen which indicates a divine source.  He sent me the link and I listened to it and oh God, it is beautiful and haunting.  He really captured the core of each poem through his own musical imagination.  He was surprised when I told him that Guru is also a composer on top of being an incredibly prolific poet.

Guru said that someone would break the two hour marathon barrier, and this past April, two men did it in London: Yofim Kejelcha and Sebastian Sawe.  They were running four minute miles even after the twenty-mile mark!  And Guru said that people would study his poetry one day at the University level and devote their lives to his literature.  And now this prophecy is also beginning to come true.

The road goes ever on and on…

If you have just the tiniest cottage in the Shire, no harm, but keep your map and your courage handy, when your time comes to travel.

 

I write to prisoners every day.  This has become one of the facts of my life.  I started writing to prisoners out of sheer loneliness, but as their letters have started to come in, I find I am not lonely anymore.  And the prisoners and I make a strange community.  I am handicapped, and process the world differently from most guys, and I am solitary.  I’ve used these truths in my life to be points of connection with these men, and they appreciate the fact that I am therefore relatable.  But at the same time, they have become supports for me, and I can tell them anything, and I find in them a listening ear.  Interestingly enough my spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy said that daily writing is a way that we can perfect our spiritual lives, and I’ve definitely felt the truth in this statement through this daily practice of letter-writing.  I do find comfort and resolution in this practice.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how letters are like talismans, objects of power?  I keep all the letters in a big folder, but when I hold the folder or even an individual letter in my hand, I can feel the energy and power in those words.  It’s like the people who write back send a fraction of their own existence with their letters, and I receive both what they write, and the essence of the writer.  Letters are powerful.  Emails and texts do not carry this kind of power.  Sometimes I will choose to wait a day or two before opening a letter.  It’s almost like disarming an explosive.  I will put the letter on my shrine to my Guru, and wait a few hours, or a few days, until my Guru tells me it’s okay to read the letter.  I need time for the power to diffuse.

I got a letter from someone I did not write to.  I will call him “Paul”.  He told me that his cell mate got a letter from me, but only wishes to correspond with women.  So, he asked Paul if he would like to write to me instead.  And Paul wrote me a lengthy handwritten letter in beautiful penmanship, and also sent to me a photograph of himself and his wife.  He told me, and I cannot verify the truth of this, that this is the last photograph he has of himself as a young man.  He wanted me to have it.  And I thought that the idea of a life-long prisoner, sending me his last photograph of his youth, in the hopes that I might possibly write back to him, was indicative of a level of emotional deprivation that I cannot wrap my head around.  I sat in my room and cried helplessly for hours.

When I regained my composure, I realized that I could not fully comply with Paul’s request.  He asked me for my phone number, and also my email.  He wanted to correspond with me mostly electronically.  And I cannot do that.  I have three ground rules for corresponding with prisoners: I do not send money, I am not looking for romance, and I only correspond through snail-mail letters.  This is because I need the distance of time and space when I am writing to these people.  Many of my correspondents are deeply troubled, angry and hurt.  Snail mail gives me a moat around my inner castle, and it lets me receive visitors on my own discretion and time.

So, I have sent off three letters to Paul so far, and have not heard a response.  I know it can be difficult for these guys to scrounge up money for stamps, and I do send money for stamps and stationery if prisoners simply cannot afford it.  But that is the only condition under which I’ll throw a few dollars into their commissary.  I can tell from Paul’s penmanship and word choice that he is a very intelligent man.  To be honest, I feel in Paul’s letters a difficult, troubling energy.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I left his letter on my shrine for a week, and I just let Guru bathe Paul’s letter, and Paul, with his divinity and light.  Most of the assistance and service that these people will get from me will be a direct function of my relationship with my Guru.

What strikes me about all the letters I’ve received is just how grateful these men are that I took the time to write to them.  I mean, in all of their profiles they mentioned how they want to correspond only with women.  I’ve written forty letters so far.  Almost all the prisoners I have written to have replied.  Really!  And who writes letters these days?  And it’s such a nice feeling, inexpressibly nice, to get letters again.

I’ve also started writing letters to my friends and family.  I think they are sometimes bemused when they get my letters.  They must think I’m a Luddite.  But actually my friends love getting letters from me, and they have also started responding.  It’s really interesting.  People used letters for millennia to share their inmost thoughts, and to discuss their problems, and to talk about different philosophies of life.  Exchanging letters has been a staple of the intellectual life for millennia.  We lost something when we stopped writing letters.  Receiving letters from prisoners has brought this something back to me, so foreign and so strange, that I never realised how much I missed it.

If I can point to one way letters have helped me, then I would say “balance”.  Writing letters has helped me find balance in my life, and to discover a progressive natural rhythm in my days.  And in fact, structuring my day around writing letters means that I always have time, every day, for self-reflection.  I can’t overstate how much this has helped me.

Also, as a substitute teacher, one way I can engage with a bored or restive classroom is to tell them about my prisoner-writing project.  That grabs their attention immediately!  I’ve had great discussions with students about justice and punishment, and how to weigh public safety with the ideal of rehabilitation.  They are often shocked to hear that these men write me back.  Of course, I advise them NOT to write to incarcerated people until they are fully adults and have a mature sense of the risks and benefits.

Shortly after I started my prisoner letter-writing project, I was cleaning and dusting my room, and I saw that all the pictures of my Guru were alive!  They were moving!  Guru’s eyes in all the pictures were beaming with joy!  I mentioned this to one of my fellow substitutes, who is a spiritual seeker, and she said that serving God is an intense form of loving God, and this is why I see the pictures moving, smiling.

It’s been an interesting journey so far.  And it has definitely impelled me to write many, many thousands of more words than I otherwise would have!

It doesn’t feel right to write letters to these people on my computer anymore, because even though I type out the letters, and print them, I don’t want computers to be involved at all.  But my penmanship is terrible!  So, I think my only option is to get a typewriter, and to learn how to type with as few embarrassing blunders as possible, with no hope of auto-correct.  God help us all.

 

 

Life is a difficult proposition.  Sri Aurobindo wrote that “Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls.”  This echoes what the Vedic seers said:

Nayam atma bala-hinena labhyo

“The soul cannot be won by the weakling.”

 

Sri Chinmoy always said that his best quality was poise.  It is through his poise he was able to brave the buffets of life.  Poise is a warrior quality.

I was praying in front of my picture of the Master, and I confided in Guru that I was lonely.

He said, “Write to prisoners.”

So I went onto a “Prisoner Pen Pal” website (there are many) and just clicked on a profile at random.  He had a nice face.

I read the crime and I turned pale.

He must have known there were children in the house when he poured gasoline around the entrance and lit the match.  He thought someone in the house had stolen his cell phone, so that prompted him to kill the family.  But he must have seen the toys out front.  He must have known.

I stopped myself.

Guru told me to write to prisoners.  He didn’t tell me to adjudicate their crimes.  He just said to write to them.  I do.  I write them real letters, and I mail them.  No letters back yet, but it’s only been two weeks.  I tell them funny stories.  I tell them about my problems, my past mistakes, my hopes.  I tell them how I met my Guru, and what it means to follow an Indian-based path.  I offer my friendship and my listening ear.  What I look for most of all are profiles with similar interests.  For example, one inmate is a very talented poet.  I wrote to him, offered my reflections on his excellent work, and sent him a folio of my own poems.

Many of their profiles have a romantic cast.  They’re trying to find women when they get out.  And the very last thing they’re expecting is a letter from Mahiruha!  But maybe someone will write back.  Even if they don’t, I will continue to write.  I like this as a sadhana (spiritual practice).

Some of the people I write to are serving life sentences for crimes they committed when they were children.  One man I wrote to is twenty years into a life sentence, for killing his grandmother.  It was a horrendous crime, but he was only eighteen years old.  I know that’s not a child, but can’t sentencing guidelines include provisions for mercy, for personal growth?  Is that possible?  He’s a different person now.  He has something to offer to society.

One prisoner pens a monthly column about prison life, and how the constant surveillance of prisoners is spreading to other segments of society- especially low wage workers who are being watched like a hawk by their companies.  He also writes about how some of the recent arrivals in the prison system haven’t committed any identifiable crimes.  The charges are vague, ethereal, at the level of cognition and speculation.

That made me think about an article I read recently in the London Review of Books.  The journalist was reviewing a book that presented a relatively favorable view of the Spanish Inquisition.  Yeah, I know.  Publish or perish, they say.  Specifically, the writer under review played down the auto-de-fes (public burnings of heretics), saying that this happened only rarely.  And the reviewer, understandably, threw a fit: He said that the occasional nature of these mass executions is a testament to the Inquisition’s effective terror!  It didn’t need to happen every day.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I write these letters.  I am not political.  But there are two and a half million people warehoused in US prisons.  That’s a lot.  To be a prisoner is to be a non-person.  They have no acknowledged human rights, can be forced to work for free and many have no future even if they get released.  They are ghosts.  The shrinking circle of who deserves to be a person concerns me.  I want my correspondents to feel that they are still people.

Maybe that’s why I am open with these guys in my letters.  I don’t mind sharing my history with them.  They might be able to shed some light on me, and give me a new perspective.

One man learned how to play Chopin’s nocturnes after ten months of practicing for twelve hours a day.  He had never played the piano before being incarcerated.  But the time, the available piano and the sheet music inspired him to learn.  I think the prison authorities even arranged for him to have a teacher.  But then Covid intervened, and the piano was taken away, along with the music.  I want the prison to give him back his piano.  I will try to make that happen.

I’m happy I have a new opportunity to write.  And Guru is absolutely correct in telling me to write to prisoners.  It is in self-giving that we cure our loneliness:

 

“Be not lonely

Like the night.

Be lovely

Like the moon.

Be not expensive

Like a diamond-sun.

Be expansive

Like the silence-light.”

–Sri Chinmoy

 

Post-script:

I wrote the above article about a week ago, but yesterday I got my first letter from a prisoner.  I actually burst into tears when I saw the letter in my PO box.  I haven’t received a letter in twenty-seven years!

 

I saw the name on the letter: “Harrison”, incarcerated in Kentucky, and I couldn’t remember who he was until I went home and pulled up my letter of introduction.  I remembered his profile: he’s a twenty-eight-year-old man who is serving a combined state and federal thirteen-year sentence for dealing fentanyl.  He mentioned in his profile that he is gay, that he spends a lot of time alone by choice, and that he likes to read.  I wrote to him and told him that we have a lot in common, and I shared some of the outrageous experiences I had with customers at the grocery store, my favorite authors and books (like Russell Banks’ Affliction) and I also included some of my Guru Sri Chinmoy’s poetry.  I mentioned in my letter that I do not date, am not looking for anything romantic, but would Harrison be interested in a friendship with me through letters?

I took the letter home and put it on my shrine and meditated for twenty minutes.  I cut it open (the guards at the prison had opened it to read and inspect it and crudely resealed it with a single piece of packing tape) and pulled out the eight small pages covered in Harrison’s handwriting.  I read it and chuckled in spite of myself: “I am Sir Lancelot!”  But I was not offended.  I was honest with him, and he was honest with me.

He asked me for money for his commissary (a prison bank account).  I just worry if I send him money then I’ll be a benefactor, and that would change our relationship.  It’s important for us to be equals, and so I told him in my reply that I cannot send him money.  I go to thrift stores and food banks myself, and so I am not a good candidate to support these men financially.

I had asked him in my first letter if he has to hide being gay.  Harrison replied that being gay is fine, but being effeminate is not.  So, feminine straight men and “flamboyant” gay men are targets, but masculine presenting gay men like him are fine.

He told me he liked the lyrics from a British band “The Irrepressibles”  I had sent him (more on them later), and he also liked the poem of Guru’s I included from the book You and I Are God : “When the answer does not seem to come…”

He asked me to send him more poetry.

He said he likes reading westerns, murder mysteries, John Grisham, Nora Roberts, Steven King and Dan Brown.  He said, in response to my question as to whether the prison has a library, that his current prison has just a small library, but his last prison, Lil Sandy’s had a library larger than a McDonalds!

He told me they are all locked down in their cells sixteen hours a day.  They are let out for meals, and for three hours of evening recreation, but at 8:30 they are escorted back to their cells until 6:30 the following morning.

The silver lining is that they have a nice gym with a lot of equipment.

He was moved that I work with autistic children because he has a brother with mild mental retardation.

He told me that in April he was sent to The Hole (the solitary confinement unit).  I think he was there for the whole month.  Many human rights organizations designate solitary confinement as a form of torture, which it definitely is.  When he got out, he saw that all his possessions, his TV, nice shoes, watch, had been stolen.

I had asked him what was the strangest job he ever had and he wrote in response “Dealing Drugs- that’s why I’m in this mess.”

But it looks like he didn’t have any other options.  His hometown in Kentucky had “2 red lights, 3 dollar stores, post office, McDonalds, KFC, Dairy Bar, a saw mill.”  And that’s it.  He got a job working as a roofer one summer but said it was too dangerous and hot.  He worked at McDonalds for a year when he was 16.

There are many reasons why rural America has been hollowed out, and the people left with nothing.  I won’t go into them here.  But it’s not a surprise that the government invests so little in these communities and then throws people away in prison when they misbehave.  Harrison is obviously intelligent and curious, but I don’t think he went to good schools or ever got the chance to develop his mind.

The disinvestment from the people helps explain why both white and black men are dying in such large numbers- black men in gun violence and diabetes, and white men from deaths of despair, alcoholism and suicide.

He told me his shoes are falling apart, has only two prison outfits and wants to buy a TV, and asked me again for money.  And I can’t give Harrison money.  But what I can give him is Guru’s poetry, stories of my life, and my open heart.  I don’t think he’s ever gotten a letter in prison before, and he seemed really happy to get mine.

In my response letter to Harrison I told him about how our path uses chastity as a tool of spiritual development and transformation.  I also told him about the day my cochlears were turned on in late 2020, and I could hear people talking on the other side of the office door!  They were women walking past and I could hear them!  I also told him that because of my life-choices people tell me that I can’t really claim a certain identity anymore because I have ‘transcended’ that.  I said to Harrison that these people mean well, and when people mean well we should give them a lot of grace.  But this is at the level of being, and not at the level of doing.  It is who I am, and every part of me is interpenetrated and permeated by every other part of me.  I am a unity, I am a whole.  I told him about my experiences on the Harmony Run in 2005 when a woman in a denim dress ran out of her trailer with her baby girl when she saw me running past with the Peace Torch, and she screamed with joy.  I will never forget that.  And I sent Harrison some of my poems, like “David and The Diamond.”

And I am happy to get letters again.  I write to these guys every day, or every day I can, and I just tell them stories about my life.  And this is very helpful and clarifying for me.

Today I got an automated message from the post office that I got two new letters today in my PO box, and I saw from the screenshots they are from other prisoners I’ve written to- one man in Kentucky and a guy in Arizona.  I never thought any of them would write me back, but I was wrong.

 

 

“When the answer does not seem to come,
Do not give up.
Try to wait a little more.
When the answer does not come at all,
Do not give up.
Start a new beginning.
This time
Smite your heart with your throbbing cries,
And
Break your face with your illumining smiles.”

 

–Sri Chinmoy You and I Are God

 

I am relating the following story from my own memory, from hearing Guru tell it:

—

A few days after his beloved sister Lily passed away, Sri Chinmoy was sitting by himself in an airport lounge, weeping for her.  She stood in front of him in the spirit and said, “Why do you weep so bitterly?  My soul is eternal.”

Sri Chinmoy responded to his dear sister “But the physical also has its supreme importance, and this is why I am shedding tears for you.”

—

As a corollary to this experience we can remember this exchange that the Master had with God:

—

God, I wish to hear from You something significant about the soul.

“My son, the soul in the body is a drop, and the soul beyond the body is the sea.”

(From God Wants To Read This Book by Sri Chinmoy)

—

I want to explore these two concepts: the soul as an ocean vs the body as the drop, and also the supreme importance of the physical body.

 

I want to relate the following experience from March 1^st 2006, that I’ve never shared before, and I think I can possibly relate it to the two concepts I just enumerated. I wrote it for an audience of people who may not be Sri Chinmoy’s disciples:

 

————–

I lived with my spiritual Guru Sri Chinmoy for the last ten years of his life in his little spiritual community in Queens, New York.  Every year, around Christmas, the Master and some of his disciples would go on excursions to different parts of the world to offer meditation classes and also to get away from the hustle and bustle of New York City.  These vacations usually lasted eight weeks or so.  I never went on these trips because of my work commitments.  Also, I’m something of a homebody!

Anyway, during the 2006 Christmas trip, Sri Chinmoy got word that one of his dearest disciples from Europe had passed away.  So, on his return, on Wednesday March 1^st, 2006, we had a special memorial service for this very humble and devoted man.  My Guru meditated most soulfully, up on the stage, in a big easy chair, wearing a blue dhoti.  I looked at his face, and I felt that he was a child looking up at the moon, and at the same time, he had become the moon, just emitting a very soft, gentle light.  I entered into my own kind of trance but I kept my eyes slightly open.  I was surprised to see, through my half closed eyes, that I was not looking at Sri Chinmoy anymore but at someone wearing a purple shawl, seated in a big dining hall.  Under the shawl this man wore several layers of long shirts that were too big for him.  He was wearing something like a dhoti, but wrapped differently, more tightly, and it was white.  He did not wear sandals, but shoes, but they were big shoes.   He had big feet.  He had shoulder-length red hair and a wispy beard.  Fascinated, I noticed that when I opened my eyes all the way, I saw Sri Chinmoy in his blue dhoti.  When I closed my eyes almost all the way, I saw this man in his purple shawl and white “dhoti”.  I did this several times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.  Then I kept my eyes half open for a while, and just watched this stranger with red hair and bookish, studious features, meditate in the place of my Guru.  As I watched him meditate, I saw that his eyes began to move back and forth, and then started climbing up and up until they were all white!  Then they came down again and began rotating, vibrating.  His mouth hung open, slack.  I saw he meditated the same way Sri Chinmoy did, because my Guru’s eyes moved the same way.   There was nothing particularly striking or arresting in his appearance, with the exception of his eyes.  I just looked at his eyes, at the volcanic intensity of his eyes.  Everything was in the eyes.  I saw this man during the whole meditation, but at the end Sri Chinmoy came out of his own trance and I didn’t see him anymore.  When I passed in front of Guru after the meditation, Guru saw that I was very excited and transported.  He raised his eyebrows for a brief second, and then looked away.

I’m calling him “the man” but I am sure I saw Jesus Christ as a living reality within Sri Chinmoy.

——-

That experience I had in March of 2006.  But I’ve written many times about an experience I had six years prior to that, in August 23^rd of 2000, when we were all gathered at the Riverside Church to hear Sri Chinmoy give a Peace Concert.  Guru was playing the organ, and all of a sudden, hundreds and hundreds of us had intimate, intense experiences with Jesus Christ.  I just remember the temperature in the room dropped by about twenty degrees, or that’s what  it felt like, and I felt this very gentle breeze.  But the breeze itself was a manifestation of love.

How can a breeze, a soft wind, be an expression of divine love?  But I felt in my bones the presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus.  It’s as if she took the form of a very gentle, cool wind to bless us.  I remember hearing a voice within me whisper, “Look- it’s an Avatar- it’s an Avatar!”  I felt this Consciousness or Divinity that I can never describe.  I felt within Jesus a universal Eye, an Eye that was flooded with Power and Vision and Divine Intention.  I kept thinking, “Oh my God, he is another Buddha!  He is another Buddha!”  I don’t know why his presence made me think of the Buddha.  His presence and consciousness just reminded me of the Buddha.  After the concert had ended, and we walked into the bright New York City sun, we were all so dazed and awestruck!

That experience at the Riverside Church in 2000 was the ocean.  I felt Jesus Christ as equivalent to God in knowledge, love and power- an absolute Avatar.

The experience I had six years later was a drop.  I saw Jesus Christ as another man, a ginger with an academic demeanor but intense eyes.

Through my Guru, I experienced Christ the ocean before the Jesus the drop.  I think this is good because if Sri Chinmoy had shown me Jesus the man before giving me that experience of Christ the God, I might not have appreciated the man properly.

I remember Sri Chinmoy quoted Nolini-da, his mentor at the Aurobindo Ashram, who said something along the lines that “We saw only Sri Aurobindo the man, but not Sri Aurobindo the divine, and this is why our lives remained unchanged.  We had the opportunity, but we did not take it.”

Maybe my Riverside Church experience was more significant than my later “vision” for a couple of reasons.  First, I did not see Christ at Riverside- I felt him.  Feeling is deeper than seeing.  Second, it was a collective experience.  Hundreds of people felt it, and experienced the Christ’s divinity.  I think Guru says somewhere that the ultimate victory of the Divine must be a collective victory.  And the fact that the experience was collective means that it was more than just an experience: it was a manifestation of divine light upon earth.

What does that mean?  Once again, feeling is deeper than seeing.  For hundreds of people to feel the Christ together, means that this feeling was a kind of embodiment.  We embodied something of his divinity, and we received it.  To feel is to embody.  To embody is to realise.  And to realise is to manifest.    I am not talking about God-realisation proper!  I’m just saying that when you have an experience of that caliber, you can never again be the same person.  You’ve been touched by Something.  An occultist or a spiritual Master would see this.  So, with Guru’s gracious and compassionate mediation, we manifested together something of Lord Jesus Christ on earth.

Of course, it was Sri Chinmoy who made that experience possible.  But I like to think that us disciples, through our aspiration and oneness, also helped our Guru to bring Jesus Christ back to earth, if only for three or four minutes.  That is an achievement.

Again, even if my Riverside experience was higher, I am happy I saw Christ later on as a man, as a so-called “drop”.  I can approach a man and ask him questions.  I would not have approached that disembodied supreme divinity that I felt at the Riverside Church.

As Guru said, the physical has its own precious value.  Maybe that’s why Guru showed me Christ’s form, to remind me of the importance of manifestation in and through the physical; it is through the drop that we must manifest the infinite sea.

In 2006, I saw Christ inside Sri Chinmoy, so Guru was reflecting Christ.  But, six years earlier, the moment Christ came into the Riverside Church, my immediate reaction was “Oh, he is another Buddha!  He is another Buddha!”  Christ reflected the Buddha to me.  This is very interesting- how the Avatars enjoy playing each other’s roles, they reflect off of each other.  I cannot comprehend their oneness.

I never told Guru about either my Riverside experience or my vision six years later.  I felt he gave me those experiences, and he knew.  I didn’t need him to interpret them for me.  I could feel their significance and meaning.

It’s interesting how, in Sri Chinmoy’s play on Christ “The Son”, the Father recites some slokas for Jesus in Sanskrit and Jesus becomes thrilled by the very sound of the words: “How strange is Sanskrit!  How sweet is Sanskrit!”

I get the sense the Savior Christ had an incredibly deep feeling for language, for words.  Maybe this adds another layer of context to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.”

I am also interested by Sri Chinmoy’s statement that one day people will use his own poetic utterances on Christ in their prayers, or at the end of their prayers.

But why was Jesus wearing a purple shawl?  The Romans mocked him by making him wear a purple mantle and called him the “King of the Jews.”  Did I see the same mantle?  Did he decide to keep it because it was the last nice garment he had to wear before his Crucifixion?  Does he wear it in the inner worlds?  I wish I knew.

The drop and the sea…

You decorate my bed

With masculine flowers,

With birds of paradise-

You tell me

I am not pieces

Of a puzzle

But a rainbow

Reassembled of tinsel

And gold.

You call me by all the names of the moon:

Opal of the auction,

Second-hand beauty,

Broken son

Of the night.

You solve crosswords by my side

But in my dreams

You are a parrot

On my shoulder

Repeating to me

All the riddles

I can think of.

You call my disease

My fatal flaw,

Impurity in the rock

That turns the diamond red.

We were always

Solitary dreamers,

Holding umbrellas

Only for ourselves

Until we took shelter

Under one giant tree

In a terrible storm.

We took a final tour

Of the archipelago

Of our youth-

A ring of fire

Which I now see

As a pinprick

Of light,

And in that light

I see us:

A moth

And a butterfly.

I could never tell them apart

But they  circle the same flame

Somewhere in the night:

We do

You did

I do.

 

-24 May 2026

Revised 15 June 2026

 

Jenni Diski wrote a cancer diary called “In Gratitude” which is a dispassionate diary of the progress of the disease, the relationship with her life-partner who she calls “the Poet” and also includes snippets on her relationship to her parental guardian, who was, unbelievably, Doris Lessing, one of the greatest writers of the 20^th Century.  I like it because it’s not sentimental, it’s funny, lighthearted, and probing.  The writing is superbly accomplished.  In its musing, meditative tone it reminds me of “Religio Medici” Thomas Brownes’ 17^th Century anthropological study of global funeral practices and how he, as an aging doctor, comes to terms with his own mortality.  Like Diski, Sir Thomas Browne is very funny.

I try to emulate people like Diski and Browne, who keep themselves out of their writing- who are more concerned with sharing ideas than overwhelming the reader with sentimental slop.  Alas, I am a sentimentalist, and I have to work hard to prune the weeds in my personal essays.

I just got back from the Sri Chinmoy Centre’s April Celebrations, two weeks of joyful commemorations of the arrival of spiritual Master Sri Chinmoy to the West.  I divided my time each day between meditating at the court (also known as our outdoor meditative garden “Aspiration Ground”) and visiting my favorite museums in Manhattan.

During the April 8^th celebration for Guru’s mother, we had a walk-past of her bust, placed reverently on a chair and draped in a sari.  I’m not really receptive or perceptive enough to convey the experience I had at that moment, but I felt she blessed me.  It was odd- because I was blessed by Sri Chinmoy so many times when he was in the physical, but this blessing felt different- like it was so soft, affectionate, overwhelmingly kind and sympathetic.  I felt like I was on another plane for at least half an hour afterwards.

When I performed Guru’s poems and songs with my small group, when we ended and bowed to the audience, I felt Guru himself blessed me- but once again it was different from how he blessed me when he was physically on earth.  I remember performing in front of Guru when he was alive and him smiling or clapping, and feeling his loving presence.  But when he was on earth, I felt that his very presence, so full of light and love, just emanated blessings for all, like the sun.  I didn’t feel that the blessings were particular to anyone, it was just light that I could take and receive, as much as I could.  These days, in the Master’s so-called physical absence, I feel his blessings in a different way.  It’s no longer like standing in front of the sun and just soaking in the rays.  It’s more like, whenever I perform, Guru blesses me with a personal gift that is meant only for me.  And this gift is offered to me in an envelope of absolute purity.  So, the blessings I get from Guru now are more intimate, more personal, and somehow more special.  It’s as if Guru is able to do things for me from the other side more easily than when he had to deal with the burden of a physical body.  That’s just my own personal take!  Also, I think it means so much to the Master when we meet and rejoice when he is not outwardly there.  We know he’s there inwardly.  And our conviction of this fact gives him joy.

On my last day full at Celebrations we took a bus ride to Philadelphia, my home town.  That morning I had a lot of laundry to do before I got on the bus.  I went to a local laundromat and the Chinese guy was so helpful and  eager to serve.  His English was poor, but he had a nice smile.  I noticed an old woman, a fellow disciple, sitting by the window.  I noticed that she had a very spiritual aura, full of simplicity and silence, and that the light around her was smiling!

Our laundry got done at the same time and as we folded the laundry, I started singing one of my favorite chorales from the St Matthew Passion “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so Scheide nicht von mir.  Wenn ich mein tod soll leiden, so tritt du den herfur”.  She knew it, and we sang it together while folding our socks:

“When I someday must leave,

Do You not leave me!

When I must suffer death,

Do You step forth, be by my side!”

 

Jyotipriya, the late manageress of our old “Newness-Brightness-Happiness-Fulness” laundromat on 84^th drive, told me she had seen the St Matthew Passion performed in Oxford many years ago, and that it was so beautiful it actually hurt!

In spite of my frequent cultural excursions, I took almost every one of my meals at the court- which I’ve never done before.  Even though I don’t meditate much inside our hallowed space, I felt like I got some spiritual light just from eating with all my spiritual family members who do meditate for many hours.

There is a once in a lifetime exhibit of the works of Raphael at the Metropolitan Museum of art.  I saw it many times.  Raphael  was from Urbino, Italy, and lived for just thirty-seven years.  Urbino is special because a lot of Renaissance popes and noblemen come from there.  It’s also a center of art and culture.  Raphael was born very well-connected.

I knew nothing of Raphael until about a year ago when a YouTube video popped up on my suggestion queue, and it was all about the way he drew the human eye.  And I was spellbound.  There’s something haunting about Raphael.

 

In this painting of Christ showing his stigmata we see that haunting quality:

This picture is breathtakingly beautiful.  The eyes are expressive, haunting, alive.  The emotional complexity on the face is unique to Raphael.  The sheer perfection of the anatomy came from Raphael’s exhaustive studies of the human body.  The expression on Christ’s face is that of sorrow, disappointment, but also resignation and acceptance.  That’s what makes Raphael special.  Even in his drawings, all the human faces are alive.  They have souls.  He captured a sense of personhood more than any artist before or since.  His faces have layer after layer of feeling.  He is the most influential painter of all time.

 

I love this painting of Mary, Jesus and John the Baptist:

In this portrait, look at how Christ, Mary and John are all locking eyes!  And look at how Christ is looking at the Cross, holding it aloft, with a look of heroic determination.  The fact that he’s the only naked figure adds to his sense of vulnerability and sacrifice.

Michelangelo had power.  We see this power manifested in the Sistine Chapel, in the iconic “Creation of Adam”, in “The David”, in his “Ignudi” and “Unfinished” statues.

Da Vinci had vision.  The Mona Lisa is unique in all portraiture.  Sri Chinmoy referred to it as “Eternity’s Pride.”  His investigations into science, and every field of human inquiry, attests to that vision.

Raphael had sweetness.  These days Raphael has been taken down a notch or two from his pedestal. He is a “runner-up” genius to the two first class geniuses, Da Vinci and Michelangelo.  His paintings are two perfect, too smooth.  But I feel Raphael is not a notch lower.  Sweetness is a spiritual quality.  There are cities in India called “Madurai”, or “sweetness”.  Of all the Renaissance artists, Raphael is the most haunting.  He reaches me, man to man, across the centuries.

I got the chance to meet the curator of the exhibition.  She was happy and moved to hear my thoughts on Raphael’s sweetness, and also my reflections on his eyes, his way of conveying personhood so intimately, and his unparalleled beauty.

—

On the bus ride down to Philadelphia, we passed by the town of Bristol, Pennsylvania.  The guy behind me remarked that he is from Bristol, England, and I said, emotionally, “I used to live in the Pennsylvania  Bristol!   It’s a hole in the wall filled with cockroaches!”

On the way down I listened to an episode from the “Fresh Air Archives”, a project of WHYY radio in Philadelphia, from 1989, where the host, Terry Gross, had her guest, the poet Adrienne Rich, read out some of her poems.  Rich always read her poetry with a deadpan delivery.  One poem, “From A Survivor”, really spoke to me.  Trigger warning: This poem is about her losing her husband to suicide.

 

“The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next”

 

She read it in a deadpan voice, and the poem is flat, deadpan, without a single image.  I had read it many years ago, but it did not affect me.  Hearing her read it, in her deadpan delivery, also did not affect me.  But it touched something in me, and I looked it up on my phone, and I memorized it on the way down.  I’ve learned it by heart now, and it is a part of me.  Maybe the message of this poem is in the last lines “A succession of brief amazing movements…” In other words, life is movement.  Movement is change.  It is what it is.  Life always demands us to move or change.  This requires poise.  My Guru taught me “Poise is our Eternity’s treasure” (from his collection Seventy-Seven Thousand Flower Flames).

When we arrived in Philadelphia, all the disciples went sightseeing, but I went off by myself to my hometown of Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, some thirty miles outside of the city.  I wandered Bryn Mawr College, an old women’s school, which has the hugest and most beautiful trees I have ever seen anywhere- hickory, cherry, catalpa, beech.  Huge, looming, twisting giants, full of wisdom and kindness.  I think people can realise God just by loving trees.  During the Celebrations, my dear friend Surashri put on a program of Guru’s writings and songs all about trees.  It brought tears to my eyes.  He quoted Guru who said “many large and old trees are deeply conscious of their existence.”

I visited the Ludington Library, where I had studied so much during the nights and weekends in high school.   I went up to the information desk and the librarian said, “Welcome back!”

“It’s been thirty years!” I said.

“I’ve been here thirty-five!” she answered.

We spoke for a while and I told her about my life, my running and poetry marathons.  She was delighted to hear how I have progressed.

I was so happy she remembered me after all these years.  What’s the point of going home if nobody remembers you?  She made my trip mean something.

Even if life is change, it’s nice to go home.

It’s also nice to travel the world.  I signed up to go to Guatemala, to Lake Atitlan, this winter.  It will be my first Christmas Trip with my spiritual family, and I am very excited.

I’ve been sick recently.  I like to read my Master’s books and sing his songs even when I’m sick.  But this last sickness was hard!  I did not read.  I did not pray or meditate or do anything except sit in bed and watch silly but adorable cat videos.  I like cats.  Unfortunately, cat ownership is linked to a two-fold increase in the incidence of schizophrenia.  Of course I don’t have time for a cat.  I also don’t have time for schizophrenia.  I will settle for just watching them on YouTube.

Shortly after my recovery, I walked two and a half miles to one of Chicago’s “Cat Cafes”.  I have never been to a cat café before.  You sit down, order a coffee, and then a random cat will come and sit in your lap and you can play with it.

When I got to the café, I saw forty people standing in line to get in.  The sign in front said that the café was booked for the day.

I have to make reservations a week in advance to go to the cat café.  But I was able to look in the window and see people playing with the cats.  One woman had a black cat sleeping in her lap and was waving toys in front of another cat, who looked unamused.  A third cat was “making biscuits” on the carpet next to her.  It was worth a two mile walk.

Interestingly, Sri Chinmoy writes that when a patient goes to a doctor, the doctor has to determine what percentage of the problem is in the body, versus what percentage is in the mind.  Many diseases are based in thought, whether hypochondria or just something as simple as a negative thought patterns.  In my case, when I get sick, I try to pick up my physical activity as quickly as possible.  So, after four days of being bed-ridden I biked to the local Costco- a very good discount supermarket.  I noticed that everyone was extremely kind and friendly to me.  People were smiling and smiling at me!  I never have that kind of experience.  I think the reason is that people sensed I was recently returned from the land of the dead.  I don’t mean that literally, but I’m not being completely figurative either.  I think every time when I get really sick, and all activity stops, then I come face to face with death.  I’m over fifty.  The Big Croak is not that far off.  My life is definitely more than half over.  Every time I recover from an illness, no matter how minor, it is a victory.  I think that’s why people gave me such beautiful smiles.

I had surgery yesterday, unrelated to my earlier sickness.  It was just a routine colonoscopy.  I had to fast for two days, and eat a very restricted diet for two days before that, and also drink over a gallon of a very yucky solution before the morning of the surgery.  On the way to the hospital, my friend Pradhan told me something very interesting.  Pradhan and I both study meditation under the guidance of our Guru Sri Chinmoy.  Pradhan was telling me about a famous track athlete who is very close to Guru spiritually.  Guru told Pradhan that he (the Master) had placed a special force on this athlete so that he would do well in his race the following week.  Pradhan asked Guru how Guru could do that if the race hadn’t happened yet.  Guru said something like “I put a force in the Universe, and it is triggered by the race.”

When we got to the hospital waiting room we saw my dear friend Shaher, whom I swim with at the University pool.  Shaher is from Pakistan but traces his lineage to Lucknow, India.  He belongs to a class of extremely well educated Muslim intellectuals who can quote poetry at will in Farsi, Hindi and Urdu.  Shaher is the director of a prominent archeological museum here in Chicago.  We spoke with him for a long time about politics, poetry and religion.  After a while, his son, Rahman, joined us, and I asked them if I could recite one of my own poems and they told me they’d love to hear it.

I recited a couple of my short poems for them, and then Rahman told me that he works in the Visitor Services department of the Field Museum, and he recognized me because he had checked me in once, and he and I had had a long talk about Russian literature.

When it was my turn to get my procedure done I waved goodbye to Pradhan and he promised not to laugh too much at the hilarious things I would say in my post-op delirium.  The nurse took me to the pre-op area and I exchanged my clothes for my hospital gown and I was alone for a long time behind the curtain.  I just sang the Invocation softly and tried to be in a nice consciousness.  I recited some poems for the doctors and the nurses, and they told me they don’t often get poems from their patients!  I recited John Keats’ “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, Sri Chinmoy’s “Your thoughts divine are in my heart” and Joyce Kilmer’s “A thing so lovely as a tree”.

The anesthesiologist was a very nice man who looked like a football coach!  I remember feeling the cool throbbing when the propofol went into my veins.  I actually had time to recite one last poem!  It is a short aphorism I wrote a few years back:

“I do not need forests of nouns

But only a grove of action verbs,

And not where future leaves

Or even future flowers may grow-

But give me tender shoots

That say “I can”

And ancient trees

That say “I did!”

Then I felt everything around me shimmer, and I said, “I can feel it!”

Then before I blanked out I said, “Nothing.”

When I woke up, I was really out of it!  The first thing I did was to ask Pradhan if he had read “Savitri” by Sri Aurobindo.  Then I insisted to the nurses that Pradhan was my dentist.  Then I asked Pradhan if I was a giraffe.  He told me I was not.  Then Pradhan called our mutual friend Pulak and I asked Pulak to get me a pizza with anchovies!

But a half hour later, as Pradhan was driving me home, when my head began to clear, I felt that Guru had done something nice for me while I was under anesthesia.  I don’t remember it, but I just had a feeling that I had some inner contact with Guru while I was undergoing the procedure.  I think anesthesia takes me into a deeper kind of suspended state of consciousness than sleep, it is almost like death.  And in that state I think we can have experiences.

It’s interesting- I felt that Guru was with Pradhan and me in the hospital.  It’s like when disciples do something together, even if it’s not Centre related, that we still get some of Guru’s divinity just because we are his children.

—

A couple of weeks ago, I saw “Carmen”, Bizet’s immortal opera, performed at a local college.  I paid a pittance and sat in the very front row.  I remember when the title character entered from a raised platform, and looked down on the action, and in her silent gaze she expressed so much. Some people are able to act and portray a character using just their silence.  This young woman was such a person.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.  Perhaps she was a famous opera singer in her past life, and I saw that capacity come forward, expressed through this silent presence.

And the music was glorious.  Carmen is a through-composed piece.  By “through-composed” I mean that the music is carved, as it were, from a single block of marble, and you can trace veins in the rock that run through the whole composition, but nothing is ever repeated; it is just that the music evolves, both in time and in your mind.  The music is constantly original, and yet everything is connected.  Also, I detected tremendous contrapuntal genius in the music, as if Bizet had absorbed Bach and Haydn at a deep level.  It is performed in French and portrays a band of Spanish gypsies, but the contrapuntal organization gave it a German seriousness and depth.  I loved sitting in the front row and watching the conductor and seeing all the instrumentalists.  Also, I got to see all the costumes up close.  The college spared no cost or expense to lavish every care on this production.  And these are all young people, at the start of their musical careers.  But their commitment to the music and the pageantry made me feel I was watching veteran virtuosos with decades of experience.  Really unforgettable!

Alas, a week after seeing Carmen I got sick, and I spent all my time in bed, watching cats making funny faces or demanding extra treats or pets at 3 in the morning.  I also listened to lots of podcasts about UFO’s and how some people feel that these unidentified objects may perhaps be poking in front a different dimension.  Perhaps they’ve always been here.  I think my Guru said that in India they saw those UFO’s in the times of the Mahabharata, and they are also seeing them now.  They are basically beings from a different plane of consciousness who come here out of sheer curiosity.  Sometimes when I write poetry I enter into a flow state where I feel I may be interacting with beings on a different plane.  I don’t really pay much attention to that as an artist.  My goal is to write good poetry, and I don’t really care where it comes from.  We can have spiritual experiences while creating art, but we also have to keep our poise and balance.  Sri Chinmoy says that “Poise is our Eternity’s treasure.”  I fully believe this.

My friend Johnny teaches music theory at the local college where I go to lift weights (read: talk).  He actually conducted a splendid Handel opera a few years ago, “Alcina”, which completely knocked my socks off.  It features a viola da gamba concerto smack in the middle of the opera!  Anyway, recently Johnny conducted Bach’s St Matthew Passion yesterday at an old church here in Chicago.

The performance was special for me for a few reasons.  First of all, in the same way that this local college lavishes so much attention to every detail in their operas, so did Bach spare no effort in creating the most beautiful poetry in music ever created.  Every second, every scintilla of the oratorio adds something to the listener’s heart and consciousness.  Johnny made some interesting artistic decisions that made the performance even more special for me.  For example, he trained the chorus to really identify with the music, and to add subtle, delicate shadings of color.  But the color was natural and heartfelt.

Also, he conducted from the organ!  The organ continuo requires a player of great virtuosity, and Johnny has it!  It was pretty neat seeing him conduct while providing the continuo, and he’s a fantastic organist!  It was as if he was conducting from inside the piece, from the very viscera.

A third thing that made it special is that because of my hearing loss I always sit in the very front row.  Bach uses three choruses in the St Matthew Passion.  One chorus handles most of the Protestant chorales.  The second chorus adds drama to some of the orchestral numbers.  And the third chorus is a children’s chorus.  I sat in the front row, and the girls’ chorus was just a few feet away.  And during the monumental chorales- the “Komm, Ihr Tochter” and “O Mensch, Bewein Dein Suende Gross!”  And “Wir Setzens Uns Mit Traenen Nieder” all three choruses sing together.  Because I was sitting by myself in the front row, facing the soprano in ripieni chorus (children’s chorus) I felt that I was on the prow of a ship, trawling the waves of this measureless sea, rising and falling with each swell.  And I noticed the girls were superbly trained- they added coloratura to their lines!  Coloratura means coloring or shading and is usually something we only expect from soloists.  But these girls had it!

The fourth thing that struck me were the soloists.  The Evangelist sang from the pulpit which was about six feet off the ground.  He had a delicate voice, and his lines showered over us like a soft rain.  The alto, who sings some of the most dramatic arias in the piece, like “Buss und reu”, “Erbarme Dich” and “Konnen Traenen meinen Wangen So Nicht’s Erlangen”, was special because her voice contained unexpected depths.  I remember when she sang her arias, and suddenly her voice opened, like a lily or a lotus, and became so open and tender.  The soprano was special as well for being such a superb dramatic voice actress.  The tenor had an unexpectedly rich voice.  It is very unusual for a tenor to be so deep.  I liked it when he sang “Ich Will Bei Meinem Jesum Wachen” (I will stay awake with my Jesus), and there is a part in the score  where the tenor drops off, and the chorus takes over his lines and it’s like you’re in outer space, the music becomes so otherworldly.  I can tell that Johnny rehearsed the chorus endlessly to give it that ethereal, delicate quality.  The gentleman who handled the bass arias had an absolutely haunting voice, from another century.  I felt I was listening to Dietrich Fischer Deskau in his prime, that remarkable hollow baritone voice that is so capacious and so vast.

It was so nice to be so close to the soloists, because I was lip synching every aria, and I was smiling from ear to ear even though tears were flowing down my face.  It was like we were reflecting the music back to each other.  The soloists approached me afterwards and told me that they really appreciated the fact that I inhabited every single number.  They told me that my involvement in the music helped them to connect more deeply with the piece.  I told them that I am the one who owes the deepest debt of gratitude!

I really saw Guru’s face right in front of me, and I felt he was mirroring my joys and my tears!  I also felt his face became my face, which is not inconceivable.  I often quote what St. Augustine said to Christ, “You are more deeply in me than I am in me.”

The whole piece is about offering devotion to Christ, different moods and postures of devotion.  We are encouraged to think of Christ variously as a Father, a Son, a Friend, a Lover, a Confidante.  I kept thinking of my Guru, Sri Chinmoy, and I offered him all my devotion and gratitude.  I thought of the first time I saw him in Philadelphia at the big 1996 Concert.  The whole hockey arena was flooded with his light!  Or when he inaugurated the Madal Bal Bakery in Queens, and afterwards, when he was riding home, he saw me and flicked his fingers at me as if flinging divine dust and I felt it in my heart.  Or when I was running down Union Turnpike while Guru was away during the Christmas Trip and I got a premonition that Guru would call us at the Annam Brahma meditation that night, and I was right!

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, while deeply inwardly and outwardly Christian, transcends the borders of religion and reaches out to people of all faiths and all paths.  And I felt that in connecting me more deeply to my own Master and my own divinity, that I received a precious gift that day, and Bach did achieve the goal he had set for himself in writing it.  Because of my ill health I have not been able to maintain the level of spiritual discipline I would like. But it’s nice know I can still connect with God and my Master through music.

Deep thanks to you, Johnny!

Recently I’ve been giving tours of the Art Institute of Chicago to schoolteachers that I encounter in my job as a sub.  Teaching full time is hell.  Subbing’s no picnic, but at least at the end of the day I loosen my tie and I’m free.  I try to be useful to public school teachers by sharing my love of art with them.

A teacher asked me a while back if we could go at the end of February.  He asked me sometime in early January, and I said sure.  I spent about a month preparing for his personal tour of the museum.  I decided as long as I’m giving tours, I may as well learn about artists I know nothing about.  So, I decided we would focus on Seurat and Caillebotte.  I spent all my prep periods as a sub, my downtime, just watching YouTube videos on these two Impressionist Masters.

We went to the museum last Sunday, and we spent three hours there.  We looked at two paintings.

Yes, I watched a LOT of videos and I had a lot to say about these paintings.

They are not just paintings- they are absolutely icons of Impressionist art- treasures that people come from all over the world to Chicago to see.

 

We started with “Rainy Day In Paris” by Gustave Caillebot:

We stood in front of the Caillebotte painting- “Rainy Day In Paris”.  It’s so moody, but not in a bad way.  It’s not moody as in “depressing”, but rather it communicates a kind of mood or feeling.  Caillebotte’s painting might be the first major painting to depict collapsible umbrellas, for they had just been invented the year before in England.  Similarly, this painting might be the most important painting of the “new” Paris following its renovation by Napoleon the Third and his architectural deputy, Hausmann.  Before Hausmann, Paris had been a medieval city of narrow boulevards and small houses and shacks.  Hausmann demolished all the tiny streets and shanties and decreed that the streets must be wide enough for the portage of multiple carriages  at a time and that all the buildings must be at least four stories high.  So, that’s why everything in this painting is so clean and new.

Caillebotte used the Golden Section to great effect in his work.  I don’t fully understand the Fibonacci Sequence or the Golden Section because I’m not a mathematician but you find the Golden Section everywhere in nature, from the curl of waves to the shape of clouds to the slope of mountains.  It’s a certain ratio that creates a harmony which is pleasing to the eye.  That’s why our eye travels in a counterclockwise spiral while looking at this painting- it draws us irresistibly inward.  Until it slaps against the green streetlamp in the middle right of the canvas!  Caillebotte deliberately interrupted the Golden Section ratio to make remind us that this Paris is new.  The colors in the painting are so muted, they are mostly washes of black and white.  That’s why the green of the streetlamp is so shocking.  Apart from a little orange facade by the well-dressed couple, it is the only color in the painting.  Also, green and orange are complementary- so withholding all color except for those two makes them crackle.

I love how tactile the painting is.  I like how I can feel the umbrellas, the lovely blouse of the lady and the blue overcoats worn by the mysterious figures in the background.  I love the slightly melancholy yet peaceful air.  I also like how the painting suggests that the couple does not see the viewer, and we’re about to crash into them, with mutual exclamations of apology and surprise!

After the French Revolution, there was another revolution in 1830 and one more in 1848.  But there was never another revolution after Hausmann reorganized Paris, widening the streets.  In part this was a cynical military move to allow for the quick transportation of arms and men, but on the other hand the wide streets made it possible for people of different classes to socialize!  In old Paris, mixing between people of different classes would have been unthinkable if not impossible!  But by making transportation much easier and more centralized, people of different backgrounds could associate, hang out and people-watch.  While this painting might point out the danger of atomization and human isolation which accompanies urban life, I don’t think the people here look unhappy.  They are of different classes, as shown by their attire, but they are also woven together, and sharing the same space.  With urbanization we get museums.  Museums are a source of democratization and freedom.  I’m happy I get to live so close to a great museum so I can see great paintings like Caillebotte’s.

Caillebotte’s father sold mattresses to the French army, made a killing, and then became a fabulously wealthy rentier, and died young.  So his son, Gustav Caillebotte, didn’t need to work.  Caillebotte was an athlete, a stamp collector, a yachtsman, a great painter, and a shrewd sponsor of other artists.  He actually paid the rent for Monet’s and Renoir’s studios!  He wouldn’t take money from them, but he would stop by from time to time and say “I want that painting!”  And they would give it to him, and so it was win-win.  He was paid with art.  At his death, he had over ninety masterpieces in his collection.  Renoir, his executor, followed the stipulation of Caillebotte’s will and offered the entire collection to the French state.  The French government didn’t want it!  They referred to Impressionism as “degenerate art!”

Renoir tried again for the next decade to GIVE the art to the state, without success.  Finally wealthy American robber barons like Bartlett and Carnegie and Rockefeller started buying up all the Impressionist artists, sometimes for a song, and the silly officials finally realised they were sitting on a gold mine that was quickly being sent overseas.  So, finally they took half of Caillebotte’s collection, which eventually formed the core of the future Impressionist Musee D’Orsay.

“A prophet is not honored in his own country”- how appropriate.

I did not like Caillebotte until a month ago when I started watching YouTube videos about his life and work, and I got a sense of how serious of an artist he is, and how great is his achievement.  He was overshadowed by his contemporaries because he made no effort to sell his work- because he didn’t have to.  Also, he was known as a collector and promoter of other artists rather than a great artist in his own right.   From knowledge we acquire love.

Mozart said that the first condition of great music is that it must be pleasing to the ear.  Caillebotte’s work is definitely pleasing to the eye.

The Art Institute of Chicago acquired “Paris Street Rainy Day” in 1964 and that set off a reappraisal and rediscovery of Caillebotte that continues to this very day.

After looking at the Caillebotte painting for a little over an hour, we went to the other bookend of Chicago’s Impressionist collection: Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte: Sunday Afternoon.”

I think, like Caillebotte’s painting, Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte” is musical.  Like Caillebotte, he uses the golden section to make the eye travel in an ever narrowing spiral, deeper and deeper into the painting.  Also, he was a follower of the French chemist and color theorist Chevreul, who came up with the concept of complementary colors, that when placed next to each other, literally pop.  Seurat said somewhere that he did not want to mix the colors of his paintings on his palette.  Rather, he wanted to place his colors side by side, and let them be combined in the viewer’s eye.

He spent a full year on this painting, building up the canvas with tiny vertical brush strokes.  He originally painted it with no people, and added them methodically one by one, according to an almost mathematical schema.

Then, he spent another year adding hundreds of thousands of tiny dots of pure color, in complementary patterns, rhymes of blues and oranges, networks of reds and greens.

Then, he spent another year painting an inner frame around the painting.  To do this, he had to have the canvas stretched with a special device, and then he spent months painting the purple-green-blue-yellow border.  He did this because he wanted a pleasing transition from the actual painting to the physical frame.  He wanted to make the colors absolutely alive.

Then, for years afterwards, in subsequent paintings, he would reproduce earlier studies of “La Grande Jatte” in the background of those later paintings.  For example, he would paint models posing in front of the “La Grande Jatte.”  The Barnes collection in Philadelphia has the greatest example of this kind of painting-within-a-painting.

So, Seurat spent three years working on this painting, and then years more including it in other paintings!

Seurat’s father was an aloof, emotionless man who managed a factory and came home just once a week to have dinner with his family in silence.  When Seurat grew up and moved out, he would come home every day to have dinner with his mother, likewise in silence.  He contracted a terrible throat infection, alas, and asked his mother if he could recover at her house, with his mistress and son.  His mother was shocked because she never knew that he had a lover and a child!  His friends were also all shocked because he had never told any of them!  He died of the throat ailment a week later, most probably it was diphtheria, and his child and his father followed him in death one week and one month later respectively.

He was only thirty-one years old!  But it doesn’t feel like his career was incomplete.  He created one indisputable masterpiece, “La Grande Jatte”, but many other fine and remarkable paintings.  His career shows an evolution of style, discreet periods, an assimilation of available scientific knowledge of optics, as well as the clear influence of other masters like Monet and Pisarro.  Interestingly, he was fascinated by Egyptian temple hieroglyphs and paintings as a child, and his figures in “La Grande Jatte”, almost all in profile, clearly show his energetic engagement with ancient Egypt.

Someone once remarked that Impressionism took an instant out of time, whereas Seurat took time out of an instant.  And “La Grande Jatte” feels eternal.  It is neither happy nor sad, but it testifies to Seurat’s overwhelming need to establish order and harmony in his world.  I like how you can find patterns after patterns in this painting- like how the soldiers’ colors are the exact inverse of the couple on the opposite side of the painting.  I like how it captures a sense of the motion of the rowers and the spinning happy little girl, but they are still at the same time they are moving.  It is a remarkable achievement.  I told a museum guard yesterday that every time I see “La Grande Jatte” I feel it is my first time engaging with it, and she just laughed and agreed.

I guess Caillebotte and Seurat were both fortunate in coming from wealth, and unfortunate in being misunderstood.  As I touched on in my last essay, Caillebotte to this very day is controversial for daring to depict men in art, especially the homosocial world of athletes, and Seurat was accused of creating unfeeling, inimical paintings.  I suppose that’s why artists have to follow their own vision.  As humanity evolves, it will eventually offer gratitude to the art that helped its consciousness.

 

 

The other day I accepted a substitute teaching assignment at a school for children with intellectual disabilities.  The school offers them a very detailed and comprehensive curriculum.  This particular day, I mostly taught science classes.  Since I’m a “fill-in”, I don’t really have either a global or granular view of what the teacher wants.  I mostly showed the kids “Sci-Show” and “Nat Geo for Kids” episodes.  I actually learned a lot from watching these shows with the kids.  I jotted down all the strange things I learned: for example, the 1889 eruption of Krakatoa was heard over three thousand miles away- the approximate distance from New York to California.

No matter how severe the disability, all the children exhibited a sense of self and personhood.  This is the immutable core of being human.  The intellectual or academic mind has nothing to do with that core.

After I showed the videos, it was time for our daily exercises.  The teaching assistants asked me to select a song for the kids to dance to, and I chose Dan McLean’s lively but poignant song “American Pie”: “The quartet practiced in the park/And we sang dirges in the dark/The day the music died.”

And one of the girls, a seventh grader I think, stood up and began dancing, her feet moving like crabs, her elbows jutting this way and that and I saw she was actually doing a dance from the late Sixties.  Maybe her mother or grandmother taught her?  But she knew the moves cold!

Later in the day, after having watched many science reels, I sang Guru’s beautiful morning song, “Usha Bala Elo” for the class.  I sang it twice. The second time, the young girl, the dancer, joined in, she sang in perfect tune and also remembered all the words, and she sang with real feeling.

I spoke to a young woman a while back who had been involved in a car accident, that left her with some brain damage.  She described the experience she had while she was on the operating table- an encounter with divine Light.  As she was describing the light, I saw her face change, her whole body became enveloped in light.  Her voice became calm and resonant.  I felt like I was listening in on Beethoven’s mind as he was composing his late quartets- I had the feeling of privileged eavesdropping.  One thing she said I wrote down:

“It makes so much difference in a mentally challenged life to get a smile, not to be overlooked and laughed at. And they [people with mental “disabilities”] might have hidden inner capacities treasured by the Supreme.”

As she was speaking, I got the sense I was in the presence of an old soul, someone who has walked many thousands of miles in the inner life.  I felt the same way about this young girl, who could identify with Guru’s music so deeply after hearing it just once.

I feel America is going through an identity crisis at the moment.  We are trying to figure out what kind of country we want to be, and the answer isn’t clear yet.  So, it’s a moment of existential self-reflection.  “American Pie” with its gracious and sad lyrics, was the right song for the children and I to dance to.

I’ve noticed that a lot of us substitute teachers are quirky anarchists.  Many of us wear black, dye our hair outrageous colors and wear 1980’s “hair band” t-shirts, like from “Twisted Sister” (I don’t do any of these things).  We don’t fit in society, so substitute teaching is the right job.  Yesterday, I was subbing for a “push-in” special education teacher in the Latin south side of the city.  On my way there, I saw lots of beautiful “Che Guevara” murals on the abandoned buildings and underpasses.  A “push-in” just means I help the main teacher and support the students.  But all the teachers told me they didn’t need any help, so I just went to an empty classroom and watched art historians on YouTube give lectures on Caillebotte, an Impressionist artist I have recently discovered.

 

Gustave Caillebotte fascinates me for a lot of reasons.  I love his self-portraits.  I like the intensity of his eyes.

 

 

This is an interesting painting.  I like the random potted plant on the left side, with the drooping leaves.  I like the unidentified friend sitting on the couch behind him reading a newspaper.  I like the August Renoir painting in the background.  I like the haphazard easels lying around.  I like how I can see each brushstroke, just because that tells me that Caillebotte considered the methods of painting as important as the end result.

Caillebotte’s face is half in shadow- maybe indicating that we can never know anyone entirely.  I recall the exchange in Shakespeare’s Hamlet between Horatio and the prince:

 

—

Horatio: [referring to Hamlet’s recently deceased father] I saw him once, he was a goodly king.

Hamlet: He was a man- take him for all in all…

—

We have to take Caillebotte “all in all”.  Caillebotte’s legs are uncrossed, his posture is a bit stiff, he’s balancing his palette colors on his right hand and painting with his left, he’s not looking at the canvas but at someone to our immediate right.  Our line of sight goes straight to his strong jaw and slightly opened mouth.

Caillebotte’s studio was his “man cave”.  He wasn’t strictly speaking an Impressionist- but he was one of their first collectors, and left over eighty works of Impressionist art to the French government in his will.  He also supported these great artists by buying their paintings when they were in financial difficulty.  The son of a wealthy businessman, he had all the time he needed to paint and also to arrange Impressionist exhibitions.  His contribution to the art world was considerable.  It’s interesting that in this painting, his greatest self-portrait, he backgrounds it, not with one of his own paintings, but with Renoir’s “Bal du Moulin”.  He really valued his friendship with these great artists.

Caillebotte’s great painting “Paris Street; Rainy Day”, was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964.  People flocked to see it from all over the world!  This painting cemented his reputation as a great painter, and Chicago as a destination city for Impressionist art.  This great painting, monumental in its execution and Caillebotte’s largest painting and his masterpiece, is the front piece for the museum’s Impressionist collection.    During his lifetime he was known primarily as a collector and sponsor of art.  It took the museum’s acquisition and promotion of this work, as well as shows put on by museums from Texas to Paris, to solidify his reputation as a great artist in his own right.

 

 

We can see the contrast between this painting and the self-portrait immediately.  The 1879 self-portrait is more impressionistic, more occupied with the effects of light, and shows the brushstrokes, whereas this 1877 street scene is more illusionistic.  You want to look at this street scene because it’s beautiful and yet feels real.  Also, the perspective places the viewer right in front of the gentleman and his wife; we feel we’re about to crash into his umbrella!  The painting forces us to be a participant.  These two paintings show us that Caillebotte was a master of both classical and impressionist painting styles.

One thing that strikes me about the couple in the foreground is that the woman is rather stylized and the man less so.  The lady looks almost ethereal in her ruffly dress and bright red lips.  Caillebotte lavishes a little more realistic detail on the man- the slight wrinkles in his trousers, the buttons in his vest and shirt, the mustache, his searching, alert expression.  Caillebotte was something of an outlier among the Impressionists for painting primarily men.  The male body was not considered a fit subject for representation in that era.  But Caillebotte challenged that idea through his dignified and monumental depictions of men.  I like the painting “The Floor Scrapers” especially:

 

Scraping and refinishing a floor is painstaking work.  Caillebotte is removed full two social classes from these men, and outranks them in power and privilege, but depicts them honestly and signs his name right below them as if to indicate some possibility for friendship.  This painting isn’t a pretty picture of a haystack!  There are wood shavings on the floor, the men are shirtless and sweaty, we see the tools and the open wine bottle and the full glass.  But the men are angular and even heroic in the hard light.

Modern critics sometimes struggle with how to classify Caillebotte.  Last year, the Getty Museum, the Musee D’Orsay and the Chicago Art Institute put on a great once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of Caillebotte’s work, entitled “Painting Men”.  French art critics responded with rage, implying that the curators were attempting to contort the narrative around Caillebotte to suit some political agenda.  I’m sorry Messrs, but the work speaks for itself!  We know that Caillebotte lived with a woman for the last eleven years of his life, and left his estates to her.  It was obviously an important relationship to him.  We also know that his figure paintings almost exclusively feature fraternities of men- either competing in rowing or yachting, or relaxing in his salon with a newspaper, or as pedestrians on the newly constructed Parisian bridges and walkways, or, like here, working together doing manual labor.  He was fascinated by images of camaraderie and brotherhood among men.

It’s interesting I think that in his day Caillebotte’s work was rejected from the Parisian Salons for depicting working class people, who were not considered a fit subject for serious art.  And today his work inspires fierce debates over his representation of gender.  It looks like every generation has to reinterpret Caillebotte for itself.  I prefer not to evaluate Caillebotte through a Marxist lens, nor through queer theory, but to simply take him as a great artist and to focus on his formalistic achievements.

The Chicago Art Institute, hoping to avert controversy, simply retitled the exhibition “Caillebotte: Painting His World”, which is a fine title, if a little anodyne.  They wanted to offer the widest possible field to interpret his work, even if some art lovers over here felt that it was a capitulation.

But never fear!  We got to see the paintings and I found the show spectacular.  Once again, I think Caillebotte’s work speaks for itself, as one of the most successful attempts to blend impressionism and realism.  Only one thing struck me- that many of the paintings on display come from private collections.  Some of these paintings had not been seen in decades, and now that the show is over, we may never see them again.  What do I feel about private collectors?

On the one hand, by “collecting” them, these wealthy connoisseurs deprive the public of seeing great masterpieces.  On the other hand, by keeping them out of sight, on the rare occasions when we do get to see them, we treasure these works of art much more.  I like the idea of private property, so I do not begrudge the Warbucks and the Rothschilds their private museums.  I would just ask them to be generous in lending them to major shows and to please bequeath them to public museums upon their death (the Chicago Art Institute is an especially worthy candidate).

—-

To switch gears entirely, I’ve been attending the wrestling tournaments at our local colleges, and I enjoy them immensely.  Recently, our local D1 University hosted Penn State, the premier wrestling program in the country.

We got slaughtered.  51 to nothing.

We have a great 157 lb wrestler named Gunner, a sophomore, and he’s the most talented wrestler on the team.  I saw him pin a guy last month from Maryland, using a particular hold called “The Peterson” which is strictly an academic pin.  I’ve never seen it executed in real life.  But Gunner turned his back to the Maryland guy and then reached behind and grabbed him blind with one arm and one leg and brought him down to the mat in a lightning flash.  They were facing away from each other- back-to-back and Gunner pinned him!  That’s the Peterson.  You don’t see it outside of the practice room.

Alas, Gunner went up against Penn State’s  PJ Duke in our most recent bout.  PJ Duke, in middle school, defeated the best high school wrestler in the country.  Mr. Duke is now on the senior world team- as an eighteen year old!  He won bronze at the Under 23 World Championships.  So Gunner was facing off against a freight train.  I was happy Gunner did not get pinned immediately.  It took all three rounds, if I remember correctly.

But for me the highlight was seeing Penn State’s Marcus Blaze.  He’s a tall, skinny 133 lb wrestler.  While in high school he beat the NCAA champion Matt Ramos.  He’s insanely gifted.  He has no showy muscles.  In his case, it is all speed, all mechanics.  When I even say his name “Marcus Blaze” I feel something intuitive and illumining, as if his very name connects to some inner aspiration-fire.

In the same way that runners are getting faster, so are wrestlers becoming more skilled and dynamic.  In music also we see violinists and pianists achieving proficiency at younger ages.

I just got back from a two day wrestling tournament hosted by a local Christian college, on the D3 level- which is the level most small colleges compete at.

Towards the end of the first day, I saw a young man who was bleeding from a couple of gashes on his face.  He was breathing heavily and looked exhausted.  He was putting on his cross-trainers and I asked him if he was going back to the hotel to rest.  He said, “No way- I finished all my matches, so now I’m going to go running and then wrestle with my teammates to make weight for tomorrow!”  I told him he was mad and he thanked me.

Then I saw another wrestler in the hallway preparing for his last match of the day.  He looked really tired and I asked him how he was feeling.  He told me he was okay, but just okay.  He wasn’t thrilled with the idea of wrestling again that day.  I told him that life is a constant battle- we have to be divine warriors.  I recited Guru’s translation of one of his own songs:

 

“You have given me eyes,

But You have not given me sight.

You have given me a heart,

But You have not given me love.

Around me is the hope of the false city.

In this life-game, whichever road I walk along,

In the twinkling of an eye, that road is closed.

I am the eternal warrior; I am the eternal war.”

(https://www.srichinmoylibrary.com/pgr-40)

 

He closed his eyes and said very seriously, “I needed to hear these words.  God sent you to tell me this.  I can do it, I can definitely do it!”

 

I am very grateful that I live in Chicago.  I may get tired, but I never get bored.

 

Right now school is out for Christmas break.  Which means I get two whole weeks to do…basically nothing.  I think having a lot of free time is like having a lot of money.  If you are very wise and very grounded, money can be a great blessing.  But frivolous people will misuse money.  I feel the same way about time.  Time is money.  And time that is not dedicated to anything higher or deeper is dangerous.

I knew that this two week break was coming up.  On the one hand, I relished the idea of two weeks to rest from the drama that is my life as a substitute teacher.  On the other hand, I did not know how to fill my time.  I pray each day for guidance as to how to use my time.

Maybe my prayers have been answered, because I’ve been going every day to the Field Museum, one of the greatest natural history museums in the world.

As soon as I enter the big hall, I see the fossilized skeleton of the titanosaurus.  It’s big.  They put a Christmas stocking cap on it.  Even a T-rex could not have come close to taking down a Patagonian Titanosaur.  And they put a red stocking cap on it.

I’m not trying to be negative.  I love the Field Museum.  As I said, I am going there every day.  But sometimes the holiday kitsch gets to me.  Yesterday I went to the “Evolving Planet” part of the museum.  At the entrance the attendants ask if you want to have your picture taken in front of a diorama that features ancient Jurassic vegetation, like ferns.  They didn’t tell me why, but I consented.  They told me they would give the developed photograph to me at the end of my session.  I walked through the hall and learned a lot about dinosaurs.  I stood in front of “Sue”, the most complete skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered.  At the end of my quest, the attendants handed the photograph to me, and I saw, digitally superimposed behind me, rearing above the ferns, ready to lunge with her cavernous mouth open and showing all her teeth, Sue. They told me I could keep the photograph for forty dollars.

I’m a fifty year old man.  I’ve seen a lot in my day.  But I never expected a museum would take my picture, not tell me what the picture was for, and then show me the developed photograph, which features me and the dinosaur, and tell me that the photograph is mine to keep for forty dollars.

“Forty dollars for a photograph!  Do you think I’m made of money!”  I screamed.

“Guess not,” said the bored attendant and threw it into the bin with hundreds of other rejected photographs.

“You’re gonna shred my photograph aren’t you?”  I kind of don’t want a photograph of me posing next to a dinosaur to follow me around in life.

“Sure,” he said non-committally.

Anyway, I learned that the Field Museum houses some of the best fossils of dinosaurs in the world.  I went from room to room, just fascinated by the variety of shapes and sizes of these ancient beasts.  I was especially awed by the Quetzalcoatlus pterosaur, which is the largest flying animal to have ever lived.  It absolutely towered over me.  If it were alive, I would not offer it a cracker.

I also spent a long time in the Pacific Island section of the museum.  They have one of the greatest collections of artwork and artifacts from Papua New Guinea, which is at once the most linguistically diverse place on earth, as well as the home of most of the last uncontacted tribes.  The New Guinea people are Melanesians, like the Australian aborigines, and were cut off from the rest of the world for sixty thousand years.  I’m fascinated by their ceremonial dancing masks and also their wooden and stone sculptures, which are unlike anything I have ever seen.  Interestingly enough, in traditional Melanesian societies, the men lived communally in a huge “Men’s House,” with roofs made of woven bamboo and sago palms.  The women and children lived separately in smaller dwellings.  The men spent their time rehearsing symbolic dances, initiating boys into the responsibilities and privileges of manhood, and exchanging stories.  The men with black and white face paint and feather head dresses and nose rings were the ones who had successfully taken the heads from an enemy tribe.  I like immersing myself in this strange and unknown culture.  Their languages are to this day very poorly attested or understood.

The Chinese hall nearby holds many statues of the Buddha, including one, inexplicably enough, from the Gandhara people of Pakistan.  That Buddha shows clear Hellenistic sculptural influences.  The Chinese collection is thrilling for the variety of its scrolls, statues and calligraphic artwork.

I’m just scratching the surface of the museum’s holdings.  It goes on seemingly forever.  Not to mention the building- a stunning example of architecture in the classical Greek style, with replicas of ancient Greek statues adorning alcoves between the first and second floors.  The Field Museum really is a wonder of the world.

So, I’m off for fourteen days, and I’m going to the Field Museum every single day.  This gets me out of my mind.  I am not alone.  I am happy in the crowd, amazed every day by these iconic and priceless treasures.

—

I’ve written about the St. Matthew Passion many times on this and other forums.  How can words ever do justice to this music? When I was still working at our Chicago breakfast house, Victory’s Banner, I had a frequent customer from Austria, who practiced meditation under the guidance of another Guru, who gave him the name “Sudha”, which I think means purity.  He told me he listens to the St Matthew Passion at least once a week as a form of Bhakti Yoga.  That’s quite a commitment, as the whole piece lasts three and a half hours.  But it makes sense.  Guru said of Bach, “You can go dive deep, deep, deep, deep into him.  Deep well.”  Guru implies here that Bach is himself a journey, a way.  Guru said elsewhere about Bach that “…His [Bach’s] music has helped mankind immeasurably.”

I recently met a young man at my college rec center who graduated from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I told him that I understand that at St Johns there is a set curriculum of classics that all students must study, and among them is the St Matthew Passion.  He told me that that is true, and they spend three months just studying the St Matthew Passion, listening to it, fathoming its depths and majesty.  I told him I get goosebumps just considering the idea of studying this piece for three months.  He then told me that at St Johns computers, cell phones and internet are banned, so the students have plenty of time to devote to study and introspection.  I was so pleased and surprised to hear this!  A school where people read actual books and the internet is banned!  It makes sense, because, a few years ago, when I went to look up the email address of a great Tolkien scholar who teaches there, I couldn’t find it!  [He does have an email address after all, but you have to basically call the school and ask for it]

After my daily forays at the Field Museum, I go home and listen to my vast and largely untapped collection of LPs, on my trusty and overworked Rega P1 turntable.  Tonight I have Haydn and Mendelssohn on the docket, though after writing this little missive I think I’ll try to sneak in a Bach cantata or two.

—

Yesterday at the Field Musuem I was in the Indigenous American wing, and I met a very lovely American Indian couple.  The husband had an American name, “Will”, and his wife had a more traditional First Nation name: “Standing Red Sky.”

When they told me their names, I said to Will that one of my favorite mantras has the word “Will” in it and I recited the immortal phrase of Sri Aurobindo: “Fate shall be changed by an unchanging Will.”

And Will took a step back and said, “Wow!”

And I turned to standing Red Sky and I recited this poem from Sri Chinmoy’s incredible collection Transcendence-Perfection:

“The sun is dancing,
The moon is dancing,
The stars are dancing.
I am dancing this moment
With the sun, moon and stars.
Next moment I am sailing
With the sky.
The sky makes me feel
That I am the vastness of Infinity’s Heart;
The sun, moon and stars make me feel
That God’s creation is for ecstasy’s beginningless birth
And endless journey.

(Sri Chinmoy, Transcendence-Perfection, Agni Press, 1975)

As I was saying the poem, Standing Red Sky nodded very slowly and I saw her identify with the poem.  I bowed to this Indian couple and they bowed to me and I felt they were the ones who drew those poems out of me, they wanted to remind me of my own inner depth.  Also, as I was reciting the poems, I felt America’s vastness, the blue skies that I remember running under during my stint on the 2005 World Harmony Run.  American Indians after all can have a very deep connection to the soul of America.  This may seem contradictory because they lived here long before the United States of America was known as such.  But Guru approaches this topic from an interesting perspective:

Question: At what point in history did the soul of America enter?

Sri Chinmoy: “As soon as God creates anything, there is no history, there is no earth-bound time. The day the Supreme created the soul is not and cannot be bound by the time that we see and vision that we consider as human time.”

(Sri Chinmoy, I need my country: Beauty’s Soul, Agni Press, 1975)

“There is no history…” Very interesting observation.

—

I received my spiritual name from Sri Chinmoy in November of 2006, just before he embarked on his last Christmas Trip, to Turkey and Thailand.  When he got back a few months later, when I would walk past him during meditations, he would smile at me.  I counted seven smiles in total- smiles of affection, compassion and oneness.  I’ll never forget them.

I still remember when I got my name- November 16^th, 2006.  One of the guards called me at the restaurant where I was stocking sodas and told me to come to the court immediately.  I got in my car, drove down and ran inside the tent in my not-recently-washed server uniform.  I ran up to the front of the room, and Guru told me to meditate for a few minutes.  I just sat down in one of the front rows, and Guru wrapped up some of his activities, giving instructions to some disciples and then he fell silent.  He was leaning his arm on the armrest of his chair, with his finger pressed to a corner of his mouth, then he switched positions, with his finger of his other hand pressing down on the other side of his mouth or chin.  He looked at me for what seemed a long while.  He didn’t look happy or sad, he just looked contemplative, reflective.  I never went to Guru’s house.  I wasn’t outwardly in his physical orbit every day.  I did not talk to him.  So, I was excited that Guru was looking at me.  I felt that we were communing with each other on a level that I do not really understand outwardly.  But those few moments, before he called me up on the stage, those minutes of his silent gaze, were the greatest gift I ever got from my Master.

—

Tomorrow I will be going with a Polish monk to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, featuring the art of ancient Mesopotamia and the greater Near East, but that will be a tale for another day.