Sunset Meditation from an Old Canopy Road

It has been a long day. We arrived at the cancer center 15 minutes early this morning. Daddy absolutely hates to be late so we’re always well ahead of schedule when we arrive. About 20 minutes later, the nurse calls my Dad to take his blood. He is finished in five minutes, the samples enroute to the in-house lab for examination.

And so we wait.

About 45 minutes later, we are called back to the doctor’s office. She is a personable woman, Indian in heritage, bearing the last name of a Hindu god, Rama. She is pleased with the blood reports. No signs of lymphoma cells, the indicators for internal organs which can be damaged by chemotherapy all normal. Of the 25 lymphoma caused lesions with which he began three months ago, there are now only three. They are shrinking, not at all “angry” anymore she says with a smile.

The treatments from here on out will be reduced to one day. After three rounds of back-to-back two day chemotherapy sessions with a third day of treatment provided by an attached automatic injection device he wears home with him, Daddy is now 2/3 of the way through his treatment regimen. The doctor remains optimistic the remaining lesions can be healed by the end of the treatment period in July. I am hoping she is right.

We reward ourselves with a lunch at Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, one of my Dad’s favorite places famous among locals for its soul food. Daddy gets the chicken gizzards. He’ll need a lot of hot sauce to finish up the dozen pieces plunked down on our table by an ancient black woman who calls everyone honey and smiles revealing gold capped teeth. She fishes the hot sauce and ketchup packages out of her apron pockets. Daddy will leave Ruth a tip at the end of the meal, a rarity in this fast food joint. Ruth will thank him and bless him repeatedly as we depart.

My sister’s house is close to the restaurant so we go to there to await her arrival after work. Her boys come in after school about 3:30 waking both of us from our naps. They adore their granddaddy and will even watch the Fox channel with him. He is intent on hearing the business report.

The older boy graduates from high school in two weeks and we rode by the Livestock Pavilion on the north side of town to make sure we knew where to go. The ceremony begins there at 8 AM which means Andy and I will need to leave Orlando by 6 AM to pick up Daddy and get there on time. The younger boy is trying to find a summer job and is working on getting his soccer skills in shape for the coming school year. He’ll be a junior next year.

With the arrival of my sister, it’s time for supper. We head to Aunt Fanny’s, yet another soul food joint frequented by the locals, where the vegetable plate with lima beans, fried okra and greens and a big chunk of cornbread is often the favorite meal in the house. Tonight we all enjoy a round of fried green tomatoes before our dinners arrive, swilling down iced tea served in plastic glasses big enough to take a swim in.

After dinner, as my Dad and I head home, we drive down the local back road to Sumter County, a canopy road that snakes through horse country and patches of rare surviving Central Florida highland woods. The sun is setting through the limbs of the live oaks on the west side of the highway, the Spanish moss swaying in the breeze sending alternating flashes of light and darkness down the grey worn two lane roadbed.

We talk about my Dad’s desires for cremation and internment with my Mother in the VA Cemetery near Bushnell. It’s the town where he was born and I was raised. He talks about his bequests to his children and grandchildren, about what he wants me, his lawyer kid, to do as the personal representative of his estate.

He even talks a little about dying, how he doesn’t fear death, it’s just the natural end of the life cycle. And I think to myself of how the setting sun amidst those moss draped oaks so perfectly symbolizes this reality, my 89 year old father, talking about end of life issues with his oldest child who loves his father dearly, as we drive along a stretch of country road we have both traveled and loved all of our lives.

Tonight I smile as I reflect on all of the happenings of this day, my empty wine glass with the dregs of the Malbec now consumed just to the left of my keyboard. I’ll soon be headed to bed with my dear husband hoping to somehow claim a spot between him and our beloved hound dogs, the dachshund who has tunneled under the sheets into his make-believe badger hole and the beagle who prefers to lie diagonally across the entire bed.

I think about how grateful I am for this unusual, unpredictable but inevitably grace-filled life that I have led. And I bow my head momentarily to give thanks to a very generous G-d for the many unearned but never unappreciated gifts like these I have been given this day and all of my life.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Ages, Commentary on Micah 6:8

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The Door at the End of the Hallway

“When the pupil is ready, the Master appears”

Herald of the Star, Theosophical Society (1914)

“What you seek is seeking you.”

Rumi 

I spend a good bit of time these days trying to engage in contemplative prayer and meditation. I say trying because as an extravert, neither of these come naturally to me. Historically, my own mystical inclinations have played out in my engagement with nature. I regularly lose myself in the natural world, a rather Franciscan way of experiencing the divine.

But the goal of contemplative prayer is to let go of the dualism that most of us operate out of on a regular basis – the experience of an independent self encountering an existence that is separate from my own. I do experience that as I touch the good Earth in my garden and let my imagination run wild during my walks around the lake, swimming the shimmering depths with the fish and soaring through the sky with the many birds there. But I also recognize the need to sit quietly, become still and open myself to the divine within, a divine which is always present all the time but of which I am not frequently conscious.

My dream life has become very rich over the past few months before and after retirement. But fully formed dreams don’t always wait until I am unconscious to come to me. My participation in a Jungian projective dream group since last fall has prompted me to become much more aware of the flashes of visions that periodically come to me unbidden at times when I least expect them. When a particular dream or vision becomes persistent, I take it seriously.

What follows is a vision that has come to me several times in the past week, trying to break into consciousness in various venues and circumstances. Clearly this is something I need to consider and so I honor that vision by telling it here.

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The Wise One came to me as I walked through the woods, shrouded in a brown habit. Perhaps this was a Franciscan but nothing outwardly identified the figure as such. I had to remind myself that not every brown robed figure is a Franciscan much as that beloved Order plays such a major role in my own life.

The face of the Wise One was not fully visible. It was not possible to know if this was a human figure or what sex it might have been. But the voice was soft, warm and strangely comforting.

“What do you seek, my Son?”

“I seek the Truth, Wise One.”

“THE Truth? Just one?”

“Yes. I want to know The Truth. Capital T. I want the answers,” I insisted.

“Come with me,” the Wise One said and we soon found ourselves in an aging city walking down a cobbled street.

“There are some places I can take you and people who can help you in your quest.”

After we had walked awhile, the Wise One stopped and pointed toward the entrance to a structure. It was a beautiful, elaborately decorated entryway and the lights inside suggested it was open.

“Go in,” the figure said. And so I entered.

It was a temple from one of the Hindu traditions. Inside, a celebration of one of the Hindu deities was occurring. There was incense, candles burning, many flowers and chanting. After the rite was completed there was food which the community readily shared with me. They allowed me to ask a number of questions which they were happy to answer.

The Wise One was waiting for me as I exited the Temple, hands full of books.

“Well, do you know The Truth now?”

“I certainly know what these folks have to say about it. And while it was very interesting, I have to think there has to be more than just these answers.”

“Ah, you are beginning to learn,” the Wise One replied as we continued walking down the street, silent but for the sounds of feet striking the cobblestones.

“Here is another place that can help you. Go in.”

This time we had stopped at the doorway to a mosque. It was intricately carved and decorated with geometrical shapes. I was fascinated.

Then suddenly, my western prejudices arose unbidden like curdled milk in my stomach. I froze in place, paralyzed with fear.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Wise One said. “Historically it has been your culture which is the greater danger to them than theirs to you. Go in. They have much to share with you.”

And so I entered. I was directed to remove my shoes, wash my face, hands and feet and sit on a mat on the floor in a large room filled only with other men. The women had their own space, I was told. A religious leader read from the Quran in Arabic and then began to expound upon it in English. Time sped by. I found it all intriguing and noted the number of parallels in Islamic thought to my own Christian tradition.

At the end of the service, I was invited to share a small meal with the community. And, once again, after asking questions,  I emerged with another handful of reading materials to add to the first set I had collected from the Hindu temple. The Wise One produced a woven bag from under the robe and placed them all inside.

“So, do you know The Truth, now, my Son?

“No. I’m even further away than before. I have a whole set of possibilities but no definitive answers. I thought you said you were going to help me.”

“Come with me.”

Before the day was over, doorway after doorway would appear. We would stop, I would enter, spend some time inside with each new group of people. 

The beautifully decorated entryways of cathedrals and synagogues gave way as we left the city 

to simpler homespun churches in the countryside with fascinating names  like The Church of God in Christ with Holy Spirit Anointing.

Many of the groups gave me materials to read over food we shared though some had no printed materials available. But these readily offered me conversation over coffee, tea and fruit juices.

It had been a long day. 

The daylight was waning and our travels had led us to an imposing university gleaming on a hill, aging buildings covered with manicured creeping vines, bright lights shining from the windows of classrooms and labs. Once again we stopped.

“Where should I go?” I asked.

“Anywhere you choose,” the Wise One replied.

Passing into a quadrangle under a doorway with VERITAS inscribed into its granite portal, I entered The University. I soon found fascinating seminars I was welcomed to sit in on where professors and students discussed the latest findings of the genome project (“All life is more related genetically than not? What does this tell us about the uniqueness of homo sapiens?”) while others held heated discussions about Pontius Pilate’s question to Jesus: “What is truth?” (“Ah, NOW we’re getting somewhere…”) 

But the discussions raised many more questions and provided no definitive answers. After a short stop at the cafeteria to conclude our discussions over coffee, I finally emerged from The University, weary, a bag on my back loaded with yet more books, these heavy and costly.

“Tired, my son?”

“Oh yes. Wise One. Exhausted. And I have way more reading than I can ever do.”

“Yes, I know,” the robed figure said, the woven bag containing the many sources of Truth I had collected now bulging as it lay at the feet of the Wise One.

“We only have one more place to go.”

“Do we have to?”

“Yes. It is important.”

The road we trod had become narrower and less well maintained. Soon we followed two tire ruts in the dirt and finally just a footpath through the woods. In the distance I could hear a small waterfall. As we reached the top of a hill I saw the source of the cataract, a small bubbling spring in a hollow. At the rear of the hollow was a manmade cave, an ancient post and lintel structure covered with earth, now overgrown with trees and vines. In the interior of the darkened space a small flame flickered.

“Go in.”

All of my apprehensions about things that go bump in the night suddenly sprang to life.

“Do not be afraid,” the Wise One said, “They have been waiting for you for a long time.”

 And so I entered the structure, leaving the safe and the familiar behind, entering into the darkness of this ancient site, taking my place in the circle of those sitting around the fire in the center of the room. Once I was seated, the rite began.

I emerged what seemed like days later. The Wise One stood by the doorway, patiently waiting.

“So do you have your answer now, my son?”

I shook my head.“No answer. I just have a lot more questions.”

“Ah, you have learned, indeed, my son. Now it is time for me to go so you can begin digesting all you have learned this day. But before I depart, is there anything else you wish to ask me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m curious about something. In every single place I visited this day, there was a hallway off to the side of the main room in which I met the people who were present in each place. At the end of the hallway was a door. I did not think it was my place to ask any of them where the door led. But I am very curious.

How could that same hallway and door be at every single site? And what’s on the other side?“

“Why don’t you go find out,” the robed figure said.

And so I reentered the ancient structure out of which I had just emerged. I walked past the people sitting in the circle around the fire. In the dimly lit distance, I saw the door. I turned down the hallway lit by a single exposed electric light bulb, the modern technology at complete odds with the torch lit interior of this otherwise ancient structure. There at the end of the hallway was the plain wooden door.

I was hesitant to touch the door at first. What would I find? Where would it lead? Would I be too afraid to step through?

Finally, I summoned my courage, reached out, took the door knob, twisted it to the left, and the door opened easily.

Inside I saw…something….incredible......

 

When I finally emerged from that ancient structure in what seemed like years later, the Wise One stood patiently waiting.

“So, did you find your answer?”

“Yes.”

“So, tell me, my son, what did you find?”

“All that is.”

There was a long pause. Then the Wise One said, “Ah, my son, now that is Truth.”

“But what does it mean? How can I ever explain to anyone what I have learned? What words will I use?” I asked.

Silence.

I turned to see that I was alone. The Wise One was gone, the woven bag full of books left behind, the gurgling spring and the rush of the waterfall nearby the only sounds.

It would be a long journey home.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Ages, Commentary on Micah 6:8

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Storm is Coming

Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

– Old rule of thumb for forecasting weather

One of the sites I follow on Facebook identifies itself as Storm is Coming. Ostensibly it is a site devoted to all things Bernie Sanders. But the title of the site and the tenor of the postings really points toward something different, something a bit more ominous.

There is a sense in the posts on this site that America, perhaps the world itself, is headed toward some kind of devolution into chaos. I also get the sense that while the Storm these folks see coming could be preventable, it’s unlikely that we Americans will turn away from the precipice prior to hurtling over the rim of the abyss.

In all honesty, I do not want to believe that. But I am not able to convince myself at this point that these prophets of doom are wrong. And I am not alone with that discomfort.

Yesterday’s blog post by UC Berkeley economist Robert Reich puts it well:

I just got off the phone with a former Republican member of Congress who says he “can’t believe” Trump won all of today’s primaries. “I don’t get it,” he said. “The Republican Party is completely out of control.”

Earlier today I spoke with a Hillary supporter who asked me to urge Bernie to get out of the race. “He can’t win, and the longer he stays in the harder he’s making it for Hillary in the general [election],” she said. “I just don’t get it.”

Neither of the people I spoke with “get” the biggest single force in the 2016 election: a furious revolt against the political establishment.

The revolt has taken two very different forms – progressive populism (Bernie's "political revolution") and authoritarian populism (Donald Trump’s bloviated bigotry). They are the positive and negative sides of the same coin.

Both should be wake-up calls for America’s two major political parties and the corporate and financial elites that have sponsored them for decades. Unless or until the establishment responds to the growing frustrations of a shrinking and increasingly insecure middle class, the populist revolt – its reformist zeal on one side, and its hatefulness on the other – will only intensify in coming years.

Reich’s final paragraph bespeaks much of the apprehension I feel at the moment. What we are seeing in this election should be a wake-up call. The level of violence at the Trump rallies including the confrontation of demonstrators with police outside the Orange County, CA event last night is alarming. The tone of the campaign rhetoric has become equally alarming with the former Republican Speaker of the House saying of the second place candidate for his party’s nomination that he’d be elected “over my dead body.” I almost find myself pining for the early days of the campaign when penis comparisons and menstrual references were the common fare.  

As a friend described it, this is much like watching a looming train wreck. We are unable to bear the impending sight but we are too fascinated with it to turn away.

 

They simply don’t get it

One of the things I do out of love for my 89 year old Dad is endure his obsession with Fox while I am at his house. As much as I try to ignore the loud chattering (my Dad keeps the TV turned up so he can hear it) of the talking heads on Fox, a few of the comments managed to get through my defense line of crossword puzzles and online solitaire Tuesday night.

One of the commentators noted the exit polling in Pennsylvania where a majority of Republicans there felt the current activities of Wall Street hurts the country as a whole. The polling data demonstrated that voters in Pennsylvania, who were considerably less likely than those in states like Connecticut and Delaware to earn more than $100,000/year, were also much more likely to see Wall Street as injurious to their daily lives. Most of these folks voted for Trump.

I was amused by the flummoxed Fox pundit who repeatedly asserted something to the effect of “How could anyone think that the greatest economy in the world’s history is harmful to their interests?” as if it were revealed truth. It was Lou Dobs who continually reminded the sputtering spokesperson for free market fundamentalism that one’s socio-economic location makes a great deal of difference in how one sees the economic status quo.

Cui bono? Good for whom and at whose expense?

I am hardly surprised that conservative ideologues are shocked to discover that the economic system which has provided them with often largely unearned privilege at the expense of many whose largely undervalued labor produces that privilege could be seen as harmful. As social critic Upton Sinclair observed at the height of the last Robber Baron era during the 1920s, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” 

What was striking in this exchange, however, was the vehemence in the denial of the reality the polling data was revealing. As Reich notes in his discussions with both Republican and Democratic loyalists, these are people who simply don’t “‘get’ the biggest single force in the 2016 election: a furious revolt against the political establishment.” And it is precisely that cluelessness and denial that prompt folks like the Facebook posters to warn us that a “Storm is Coming.”

Institutions past expiration dates

The “furious revolts” that Reich observes confirms my sense that the US - and perhaps the world generally - stands on the brink of a major transformative stage in its history. As I have said here previously, while many are prone to construct this point in history as a time when our institutions are broken or failed, reacting in anger and furiously seeking others to blame, in fact those institutions have simply reached their natural expiration dates. The time for change has come.

Clearly, the status quo has served at least some of our interests in the past or it would never have come into being and remained intact. But all innovations have their points of inception and their points of decline. It is when the expiration date of an institution has been reached and the parties who are accustomed to that status quo fail to respond that the potential for “furious revolts” arises.

As I see it, virtually all of our institutions are beyond their expiration dates.

·         Our system of electoral politics  - with its barriers to participation, its money-driven interminable media campaigns and its hierarchies of power proxies from super-delegates to the nameless and faceless members of the electoral college – no longer serves “we, the people.” America has ceased to be a functioning democracy as former President Jimmy Carter has observed.

·         Our educational systems with their obsessions with assessment, the standardized test driven pedagogies it produces and the standardized – but largely uncritical and uncreative – minds it produces, no longer serve our children. A generation of bottom liners who learned early on to hate the schools and universities that served corporate needs at the expense of their own developmental needs will spend a lifetime recovering from this abuse and resenting those who heaped it upon them.

·         Our economic system has produced the most unequal society in American history. With that inequality has come social instability, the breakdown of social cohesiveness and the crime and acrimony that self-focused individuals inevitably in conflict generate. Our workers do not make living wages and our higher education graduates spend lifetimes enslaved to debt. This paradigm clearly no longer “serves the common good.”

·         Our religious institutions no longer inspire hope or provide meaning. Both science and religion have lost their way in largely contrived conflicts between them resulting in dueling fundamentalisms that have provoked terrorism on the one hand and mass exits from institutional expressions of religion on the other. Rabid refusal of religious bodies to confront the confusion of social prejudices with religion and the dogmatic understandings that inform them has disenchanted those with the capacity to think critically and feel compassionately. They have voted with their feet. The time has come for a new way of being homo religioso.

·         Our willingness to ignore the changes in our planet’s climate is no longer a luxury humanity can indulge. The challenges of sustainable energy sources and confronting the collateral damage of the war already waged on our planet’s ecosystems must command humanity’s attention for the foreseeable future. The time has come for a new way of being human vis-à-vis “this fragile earth our island home.”

What people like Bernie Sanders recognize is that our window to act, to avoid the Storm that will surely come should the current crisis in legitimacy in virtually every aspect of collective human endeavors be ignored, is rapidly closing. An old classmate of mine from high school who, like myself and Reich, has supported the Sanders campaign noted yesterday on Facebook, “A coup can happen overnight. A revolution takes a little longer.”

I think there is wisdom in that observation. Indeed, I think the revolution has been underway for a while now. But it has fallen well short of its desired goals.

Wasted opportunities

The 2008 Obama campaign focused on two ideals: hope and change. Indeed, I type these words below my framed copy of the famous HOPE poster of Obama hanging on my office wall. Like many Americans, I had enormous hopes when he was elected that change would come to America.

In all fairness, some change has occurred. My marriage to my partner of now approaching 42 years is one aspect of that change. The drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the resistance to the saber rattlers' calls to invade Syria and to bomb Iran are also aspects of that change even as the liberal use of weaponized drones continues to wreak havoc around the world. America got by with only a moderate depression caused by the latest failure of the free market fundamentalist model in 2008 only because Obama negotiated a largely rotten deal to bail out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. And while a majority of people in America are not happy with the Affordable Care Act, the truth is that many people who previously had no access to medical care now do, almost like in a regular first world nation.

But, like many of us who dared to HOPE with Obama’s election, our hopes have largely been drowned in a tidal wave of mindless Republican opposition  that announced the day of his inauguration that their only focus would be to thwart anything Obama proposed regardless of what it was or how it impacted the American people. As a result, Washington has essentially shut down – once quite literally – for the last eight years.

There is a reason the revolts Reich observes are furious and I fear they will be increasingly so.

With the soft revolution of Obama largely stopped in its tracks, I had hoped that Bernie Sanders might offer a way out of this morass. His willingness to articulate the places where our current electoral, economic and educational systems have reached their limits and must be transformed connected with many voters. His appreciation of the increasing role diversity in our population will play in determining our future was always palpable. His vision of the future connected with the Millennial Generation which as of yesterday became the largest cohort in our country surpassing the Boomers.

But, it appears Bernie’s revolution, struggling to appeal to voters beyond his base of largely well educated white folks and Gen Y Millennials, will not be coming to a polling place near you in November. Instead, we will have two representatives of the status quo facing off in what is likely to be the nastiest and costliest election in US history.  

This is where I begin worrying about a coming Storm.

One place I disagree with Bernie is his summation of Hillary’s qualifications. She is certainly qualified to run a government under the status quo system. But if the status quo is the problem, as I and many other furious revolutionaries see it, that is not an adequate answer to the problems we face. It is simply more of the same, a prolonging of the current agony.

But I am not at all certain that Hillary Clinton can win this election. Mr. Trump has an enormous war chest at his behest and his corporate buddies will spare no expense in soft money painting Hillary in demonic tones. She will be absolutely unrecognizable before the campaign is over and frankly after the experience with George Bush, I no longer have a lot of confidence in the American voters to see through that haze. Even if she wins, unless there is an unforeseen sweep of Congress by the Democrats, unlikely given the gerrymandered House districts, President Hillary will face a Congress at least as determined to shut down her presidency at all costs (including to the American people) as her predecessor’s.

On the other hand, Trump will be a disaster if elected. His track record as a businessman is currently in the black but it also includes a long list of failures from an airline to his own brand of vodka. One wonders how many failures America can absorb under a Trump regime after eight disastrous years of Bush followed by eight years of near lockdown with Obama and his Teapots under the Dome. Trump will immediately engender mistrust from our allies and confrontation from our current foes as this American version of Vladimir Putin takes the field. And he has already dramatically polarized an increasingly diverse America that in just a couple of decades will have no single majority ethnicity.

That leaves the Storm….

I do agree with my classmate that revolutions, unlike coups, take a long time. Transformations take even longer. It is when the dominant paradigm of the status quo reaches its expiration date and refuses to relinquish its hold that conflict arises.

Last Tuesday night as I listened to the increasingly anxious voices of the guardians of the status quo who refused to see the new reality that was being revealed in  polling places across the northeast, it occurred to me that conflict and chaos may be the only way forward for America. We have rejected the soft revolution of Obama and now have turned down  the invitation from Sanders for a more direct and thoughtful revolution. 

That leaves the Storm. 

I shudder to think of what that might look like. But transformation is surely coming. The only questions remaining are how, how soon and how furious the Storm.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Ages, Commentary on Micah 6:8

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