Skywriting

Looking out at the sky and noticing the complete change, in the course of an hour, from sunrise to now – from a clear bright-green horizon and a great flying wedge of dark cloud streaked with rose-orange, to this scatter of soft cold clouds against a glaring white ceiling – the gray cloud pattern appears suddenly as a sort of writing. Literally a message. The sky is a constantly changing series of new messages we’re meant to interpret. The interpretation is not a set of words but just the taking in, as much as possible, of that moment. That moment as written.

Letters From Surprise & Delight: ‘Askfulness’ and Thankfulness

Surprise & Delight is a name attached to a source I’ve been occasionally hearing from over a period of about 25 years. I don’t know what or where it is. I’m not a big fan of the term ‘channeling’. However, when I write down stuff ‘from Surprise & Delight’ much of it has the trappings of channeling, often to my discomfort. Surprise & Delight is a name ‘they’ (it) suggested to me almost from the start, claiming it represented a sort of collective or corporate entity. I don’t know. It could be anything.

I do know that as strange as it sometimes gets, there’s something to it. Usually while I’m writing it, I’m thinking how outlandish it is; then later I have to admit I learned something. For example, while I was writing the material below, my conscious impression was that ‘askfulness’ was one of the stupidest words I’d ever heard, much less committed to paper by my own hand. When it was over, I had to completely reverse that opinion. I was also struck by the definition of happiness.

The following is from January 2010, after one of our big snowstorms.

Askfulness is the way toward receiving things worth being grateful for. It’s basically the state of knowing that you are not the source of everything you need. There is indeed a paradox here. Askfulness means you acknowledge the greatness that is so much larger than yourself. It also means you are the source of everything you need when you open yourself to it, that is, when you ask for it.

You can practice this sort of thing in reverse, by contemplating something you’ve received that you enjoy and realizing that if you’d thought of it, you would have asked for it. For example, a beautiful snow-covered landscape all around you with a brilliant blue sky and, inside, a warm fire. You might take it for granted in the rush of being preoccupied with so many ‘important’ desires and goals in your life. But it – the simple beautiful day – is also important to you, and a help to you, a real blessing. Realize that you wanted it, and you have more awareness of the need to be grateful, which is, to be happy. To be grateful is to be happy and to be happy is to be grateful.

On Getting Slapped Across the Face by a Pine Bough

The trees are in their branches, the sun in its rays. Bullfrogs and buntings are in their songs. The divinity we congratulate ourselves on having the faith to believe in, is obvious.

Incidental Meditation

Clouds are high blurry white against a bluish sky so glaring it’s almost gray. If I look into the pattern long enough it becomes a mandala that cancels thought and opens me to something – something I can’t quite identify. I can’t even tell if it’s coming from within or from outside. It makes me breathe, once, very deeply. Then I see (just after I write “It makes me breathe, once, very deeply”) somehow within and without are meeting, as if at the perimeter of my mind. They’re meeting and merging and I have nothing to say about it. I am merely a convenient venue for the merger.

Remnant Habitat in a Graveyard

NPR’s Morning Edition on Tuesday aired a story about wildlife biologists and other researchers in the Midwest exploring cemeteries, some with acreage that’s remained undisturbed for centuries, to find and study native species of plant and animal life that have otherwise disappeared. (“Scientists Stalk Cemeteries for Signs of Wildlife.”) One researcher says, “The future of conservation is in fragments” – meaning fragments of territory, which the story refers to as “habitat remnants.”

Although my interest isn’t scientific, I’ve long been drawn to these kinds, or other, similar kinds, of places – vacant lots, forgotten borderlands between developed areas, vestiges of natural landscape on the verge of being bulldozed, wild margins of tamed tracts. I can’t say when this attraction started, because it goes back as far as I can remember.

To me these little pockets of nature are as noble and as vital as any national park or monument. In dwelling on them (or, at my current location, in them), I’ve realized something further. All habitat is a remnant, and has been from the start. All territory is marginal, just as all time is limited.

In fact the first name for this website, in the idea stages, was “Marginal Existence” – except ultimately I felt people would have to work too hard to figure out how I mean this. Every place is fragmentary, and every second is fleeting – but they also live forever. Any experience in time and space – ‘moment’ and ‘horizon’ – is both marginal and eternal. How fitting to look for life in the graveyard. 

Ways and Means of Meditation

Three people have written to me recently, independently of each other, about what they regard as a ‘Zen’ or meditative quality of this daily ‘practice’ – the ritual or practice of painting the sunset. One person, an art consultant and Buddhist, expressed surprise that I’m not Buddhist. Another, someone I lived with when we were in our early 20s, wrote, “In Zen they say that the Universe is Scripture, and I sense that it is much the same for you.” A fellow artist now says, “Making a commitment to loyally paint the everchanging sky ... somehow reminds me of the Tibetan monks and their intricate sand mandalas.” 

These three friends make me realize, first of all, how much I have yet to learn about what I’m doing. An interesting thing for me is that I never thought about it in anything like these terms. I feel an affinity with eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but have never felt drawn toward formal study or exploration. I’ve never even read my age- and peer-group’s required Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, although, like just about everybody else, I have a copy somewhere. I’m not sure which deterred me more, the ‘Zen’ part or the ‘motorcycle maintenance’ part. (I’ve always been mechanically challenged.)

Yet I realize there has always been what might be called a meditative center to my experience, a homemade, routine sort of meditation without a system or a name. 

Lately I’ve been writing in these posts about having to cut more firewood at the end of the day, and this has been going on pretty much every day in fact. (It happens late because most of the day is spent working toward an editorial deadline.) What I realized, standing next to some dead tree and watching the sky approach sunset, is the ‘Zen’ state that can sometimes be produced by sheer physical exhaustion. Maybe that’s part of the reason for the physical labors of certain Buddhist monks – I don’t know.

I found myself thinking of a painting that used to be popular as a print, “The Song of the Lark,” done in 1884 by the French artist Jules Breton. The image is now in the public domain:

Some people would probably say it shows a peasant woman transported at sunset by a bird’s song in spite of her physical exhaustion. From my own experience, I would suppose it shows someone transported because of their exhaustion – because, in that state, you can easily find yourself drained of all thought and wide open, with no defenses against the beautiful world everywhere around you.

I wrote about this sort of thing almost exactly 15 years ago, without realizing that’s what I was writing about. I hope you’ll cut me some slack – I was a mere kid of 46 (and I mean that quite seriously). The style, I now realize, was somewhat like a chant belonging to the state of being either too tired or too absorbed to stop a sentence and start a new one.

February clouds, streaks of water-blue in among them, the sun suffusing down, winter turning warm finds me on my knees in the woods, chain saw quiet and resting, I’m looking up through the brown and green vines, through the network of fallen cedar branches and logs that nearly has me trapped, I’m tired and it’s difficult to move, while the sun and its light falling through the woods turns me silent, saturated, I have no words as I look back up along the avenues of light coming down, along the golds, browns, greens, branches dead and alive, buds, gray cedar bones, gray brushes of dead cedar needles, briars of every kind that have torn my jacket apart, the ground and my knees wet, the air becoming soft, and I’m suffusing into the light of the woods, into the woods themselves, until I know I have become invisible, someone looking into this little hollow beyond the vine-covered humped barriers of turned-up cedar roots would not see me, unless they were another native looking for the part of the woods that resembles a person who has become the woods. Without moving I move easily because I am everywhere I see, although I don’t see so much as refrain from seeing, from looking, I am absolutely absently gazing at all that is and is not me, so many vines, so much light moving and becoming woods. Sun becomes light, light becomes woods, woods become me. I become the woods, the light, and the sun shining back through the circuit of light.