Welcome to another musing from the hermits’ cave. It’s been a while hasn’t it?
Mind you, I’ve been busy: settling into the new hermitage here in the desert. Actually, it’s been cloudy since we arrived, and raining sometimes. It’s as if the Subtropics have followed us here, except that it’s been freezing.
And I’ve been busy colouring in as well. Not as in filling in a picture book designed for colouring, but in making my own patterns and shapes with the one aspiration of making colour happen.
Japanese calligraphy masters will tell you that God is in the ink, or in my case in the pigment of the colour pencils I use. I draw designs, sometimes complex, sometimes simple, then fill the spaces with colour. Sometimes just one or two, sometimes multiple colours.
Why? Well, the simple answer is because I like doing it. I like to see colour covering the page, seeing it slowly fill that empty space. I’m not good at ‘drawing’ and painting in the traditional sense, but one thing I can do is make colour. So I do.
And it’s a sacred act: God is in the ink remember? It’s the making of beauty. And that is a holy act. There’s that aphorism isn’t there? It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness?
Or, I could say that it’s better to make colour and patterns than it is to be swamped by the darkness.
There’s a Bhagavad Gita verse I like that I came across again the other day:
If one’s thoughts are fully absorbed in the Absolute all his [sic] spiritual offerings also become a part of that same Absolute
Bhagavad Gita 4:24
In other words, all our actions – and we never cease from activity while we dwell in a material body – are not only prayers or offerings to that Absolute (or you can say to God, to beauty, to art, to love, to the universe, to life. Or you don’t have to name it at all. None of the names and forms are relevant) but in fact become that Absolute.
I am a hermit pilgrim, living a contemplative life devoted to the Absolute we just talked about. I have little to offer, but I offer all that I am. And with my photographs, and with my ‘colouring in’, I try to create a little bit of the sacred, a lit bit of colour and beauty to keep us all away from the darkness.
Greetings and Welcome after what feels like a gap of forever since my last post.
Two weeks today since I moved into a rented house way out here Outback in the mining town of Broken Hill, on the traditional lands of the Wilyakali people whose ongoing presence on this country I acknowledge and give thanks for.
And now, it is the location of my hermitage, my safe haven and refuge. But, no, therein lies the conundrum: I love it here; I know I’ve come to the right place to which I’ve been called. But after two weeks, I’m still not feeling grounded; I’m not really here yet.
Culture shock, fatigue, new environment, excitement; call it what you will; something has me not yet settled and in place. Yesterday a small poem came to me that I think expresses exactly the problem.
And now I’m sharing it with you as a way of explaining why the gap, why the block.
Peace and love from me to you.
The call to the desert has been answered. And now, I am here. No, to tell the truth, I’m not actually. Here I mean. So, where am I?
Not there, back there where I came from. Not even sure if ‘there’ really exists, if you know what I mean.
Mind you, when I said ‘here now” I meant it’s been a short now: Now that I’m here. Just. A short stretch – so far.
Here; there; now; so far; it’s all too much. And you know what? It’s all in my head. In my mind I mean.
A wise teacher once taught: First thought, best thought. But for here and now? As in being here now? No thought, more like, is best thought.
Sloth. Its a good word isn’t it? One of those words you don’t have to look up to know what it means. But if you do look it up, you’ll find it has a couple of meanings. One is: laziness, indolence and a reluctance to make an effort.
Is sloth a bad thing? Certainly it gets a bad rap; I mean: lazy? Indolent? Not willing to make an effort? Hardly words of praise. On the other hand we value words like busy, productive, efficient, hard working, and the rest. In our culture, these are definitely words of praise.
Go out and play; Read a book; Go to school; Study hard; Get a good job (whatever that means); How much do you make a year? When are up for promotion? Demands and questions like these are constants in all our lives, and they force us into defining ourselves by what we do whether we are a little kid at school, a teenager trying to sort life out, an adult trying to make our way in the world the best we can.
Yes, it’s true I think: it always seems to be a about defining ourselves by what we do, rather than who we are, or what we stand for. Always we have to be doing something. Ever heard that little identity joke, I’m a human being, not a human doing? I wonder how many of us would feel lost if we shifted from that need to be a doer to another definition of our identity, one less reliant on what we do or on what we’ve done in the past, or will do in the future.
Well, I hear you saying, this is all fine and dandy, but my boss won’t pay me unless I show up, there are meals to cook for the kids, I’m running late for an appointment, the lawn needs mowing and after that I have to write a report for my night class.
All very true, valid, and all of them things that do need to be done. We all have a life don’t we? But perhaps sometimes, even just now and again, and perhaps just for a few minutes at a time, you can stop. Just stop. Thats all. Stop and just do nothing, or rather stop and simply be.
Have I mentioned a favourite little two word sentence I really really like? Just sit. Don’t read, don’t think, don’t try to stop thinking, don’t ‘meditate’. All that’s required is to do nothing. Do No Thing. Actually, I think I’ve found a new favourite.
On, remember I said there are a couple of definitions of sloth? Well the other one tells us that a sloth is a slow moving nocturnal mammal noted for hanging upside down from tree branches. It lives entirely in the trees and is capable of only very slow movement on the ground.
So, I guess you should be very careful when you tell someone else I’m a sloth. Mind you, putting aside the hanging upside down bit, and the nocturnal requirement, it’s probably not such a bad way of being to emulate, do you think?
I don’t remember when I began to collect quotes; my early teens I think. I just started making notes of quotes from books (even comics in those far off younger days), from conversations overheard. Then, later, little excerpts from my own journals and other writings. Even slogans I’d see on t-shirts, billboards, or wherever else.
This doesn’t mean much in these times when you can type in a search for quotes on any subject, for any occasion, by anyone from anytime in history. But, in those long ago days before computers were in our hands, and certainly way before the Internet, it wasn’t so quick and easy.
Anyway, fast forward to the not so distant past;One day I sat at the computer (it was time for computers, thank goodness) and typed up all those collected quotes stored in several boxes full of little notebooks and scraps of paper.
The result is literally hundreds of pages of tightly typed quotes. That typing (which in fact took me quite a bit longer than one day) was in fact the genesis of a book that has remains half written.
You see, as I typed I saw so many great words of wisdom that I just felt compelled to put some of them together somehow. Ive now been at that task for many years: its a very intense process and takes so much energy and, as any writer will tell you, the muse has to strike before we can begin to strike those keyboard keys! Anyway, it will be done when its done; the very notion of presence, of there only being now, is actually one of the major themes of the book.
As I got to the end of that original typing marathon, I noticed that, strangely, the very last quote in that long long list reads simply, If you. Clearly a sentence begun but left hanging. Who will ever know what would or should or could have come next but never did?
Some time ago I remembered that interesting little fact and began to think about its meaning. I decided to do a quick search of the whole collection for that little conditional phrase. The search revealed that there are 139 instances of quotes beginning with If you.
So, dear readers, dear friends and fellow travellers on life’s journey, here are eight (why pick ten like everyone else would?) of those quotes, chosen at random (is there such a thing really?).
No commentary or comment from me; you, the reader, can do very nicely without my two cents worth thrown in. Well, okay, just 2c worth: I have often learned a lot from quotes such as these (not necessarily these ones specifically); sometimes a simple quote has led to a healing or an important insight.
So, I thought it would be a great idea to share some of my collection with you and perhaps there will be one or more that strikes a chord:
If You …
If you allow things to surprise you, you will get easily confused.
If you always do your best, you will be free from regrets.
If you follow the eternal law, you can understand how to love.
When you forget who you are, and dont know what to do, act the way you would if you did.
If you really dont care, you arent going to know if something is wrong. The thought would never occur to you. The act of pronouncing something wrong is a form of caring.
If you have to ask questions all the time, you never get time to just know.
If you are not interested in this, then why are you here?
If you deny even one person entrance to your life, youll never get their uniqueness from anyone else.
So, there you are. Theres much to reflect on here. Lots to focus on, to meditate on, and contemplate.
I wrote this little remembrance about the birth of my journaling life some time ago. I thought it might be nice to share it here on my new Notes from the Hermit’s Cave blog as keeping a journal has been such an important aid to my own ongoing healing, and has been key to my spiritual journey.
For many of us keeping a journal is a key element in our efforts to live a good life, or even to have a life: it can be a tool for healing, a means to bring some order to the chaos in our hearts and heads, and a venue for reflections on life, the Universe, and everything. For me, it’s been all of these things and more.
I guess for most people Henry David Thoreau is best known for the book he wrote about his time living alone in a small cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts, titled funnily enough Walden. And I suppose most people would have no idea that all, or pretty much all, his writings, lectures and so on, came from his Journal. Note the capital: he himself called it The Journal.
A few years ago I read a very cool book called The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer, which is an examination of, yes you guessed it, his life as a writer. What made it extra interesting was the way the author (William Howarth) used The Journal as his way into Thoreau’s writing and life.
Let me tell you one of the many things that jumped out at me from this fascinating book: the reason Thoreau started keeping The Journal in the first place. It seems that one of his neighbours in Concord was Ralph Waldo Emerson (imagine that if you can). Anyway, one day Emerson says to Thoreau,
‘What are you doing? Do you keep a journal?’
Now, it seems that Thoreau had been running around telling everyone he was a writer and that he was examining nature and studying the life of the town. All that writerly kind of stuff. But he hadn’t been keeping a journal.
So, he answered Emerson’s challenge by beginning The Journal. And, as I said, all his writing from then on came right out of that journal. Sometimes, believe it or not, he literally ‘cut and pasted’ from The Journal; he actually tore out pages or cut up passages and stuck them together to form the final manuscripts. Now, that is called having supreme confidence in your own work.
Anyway, after I read that, it got me thinking about my own journal and how I came to begin it. As I sit typing this, my journal is safely stored away in a trunk in my sister’s garage. (See the update at the end. Strange syncronicity indeed)
There are close to one hundred separate volumes, mostly school type notebooks (called exercise books in Australia), some exotic volumes from travel in India and a few odd looking specimens of varying shapes and sizes. Hard to believe really: so many words.
This is my personal journal; my art journals are another matter. Just wanted to make that distinction, though oftentimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
In late 1980, I returned to Australia after a few months in New Zealand. I wasn’t in great shape and was hanging around at my parents’ house and feeling like a ‘wet week in a thunderstorm’ (if you get my meaning). One day, my mother out of the blue said,
‘Why don’t you start keeping a diary?’
Of course you don’t know my mother, but believe me when I say that this is most definitely not the kind of thing I’d have ever expected her to suggest to her son as a way for him to deal with his very poorly mental condition.
But, just like Thoreau after his chat with Emerson, I headed to the shops without delay, bought a school exercise book, and began my diary (I often interchange the terms diary and journal). And I’m still at it, as I’ve said.
And you know what? Thinking about my journal now, I feel a sense of pride. I don’t mean arrogant, ego driven ‘pride’: my heart is glad. I have consistently for over forty years kept a record of my life which goes deep into my psyche and beyond. Well that’s what it often feels like.
Sometimes it’s been an extremely detailed account and written every day; other times there have been gaps with just scant little notes to record my doings, thoughts, feelings, and so on. But, at least it is there. I have a profound sense of achievement when I think of my journal. Maybe I need to adopt the capital like Thoreau: My Journal.
My final words must be then, thanks Mum. I know I thanked you when you were still in this world with us, but it can’t hurt to announce my thanks to the world (as much of it as reads this blog anyway) can it?
Update
The trunk containing The Journal has left my sister’s garage (thank you little sister) and is as I type this update, on a truck heading this way and will arrive late tonight or early tomorrow.
The timing is completely serendipitous: By ‘chance’ I came across the above piece of writing today as I was looking for other things, then a little while later got a call from the shipping company with the news! Pickup wasn’t scheduled for a few more days.
Of course I still regularly spend time with The Journal, perhaps more than ever, and it will be very nice indeed to have the whole thing with me once again.
Yet Another Update
Yes indeed, it certainly is, nice I mean. Here is The Journal in its full glory (one volume missing but will be here soon)
Over the last couple of months or so I’ve been listening on and off to Jimmy Buffett. I like Jimmy’s music, and I have liked it since the late 70s. I have at least ten of his albums in my Music folder.
Anyway, Buffett is an American singer/songwriter who writes and performs songs about beach life, sailing, exotic island paradises, and generally having a good time down at the beach and in and on the water. And preferably in sunny climes.
Yes. Hedonistic is a word that’s been used to describe his music and the lifestyle he celebrates. Still, I’ve liked him for a very long while now, and every so often I get into his ‘escapism’ and his relaxing in paradise kind of vibe.
Something a little rebellious about many of his lyrics too. But let’s not go there just now. What I want to talk about is a song I’ve listened to dozens of times, but when I played it again the other night, it got my attention in a way it never had before.
What I mean to say, is that for the first time I actually heard the song (Love the Now. Have a listen, you won’t regret it). I got what the writer was saying with his lyrics.
All the pain and the pleasure I love the now All the blood and the treasure
Then another verse:
The whole damn world’s gone crazy The moon is jumping over the cow How can you help But not love the now?
It’s like he’s saying, ‘yeah, it’s all good.’ Not just hedonistic but nihilistic as well. Like he doesn’t care, doesn’t want to know. But, then, in another verse he writes:
It’s the only place I’ve ever been It’s the only way that I know how
It is. That’s what he’s saying. ‘All the ranting and Ravin’ and ‘All the cussin’ and cravin’‘ are there for sure. Or, rather, they are all here. And now. But, dig a little deeper, read between the lines (so to speak).
Listen to this:
Don’t talk about your superstitions Don’t talk about your cats meow But don’t talk about tomorrow tonight I Love The Now
You see? He doesn’t want to hear about your belief systems imposed on you by others. He doesn’t want to hear about your fears that have been manufactured by someone else to keep you in line. And he is not the slightest bit interested in your fancy material toys and other stuff (cat’s meow: a great expression coined in the 1920s meaning fancy, flashy, cool, awesome and other similar epiphets).
And don’t talk about some far off distant future (okay tomorrow night may sometimes seem awfully close to now, but you get the meaning).
The bottom line (literally and figuratively): he loves the now. And that’s because that’s all there is: the now.
So, on the face of it hedonistic, nihilistic even, as if he’s shrugging his shoulders in a ‘so what?’ kind of way. But he’s not doing that at all; he’s actually offering a solution to the overwhelming tidal wave of ‘things that are wrong with the world’, and about which many of us feel helpless and sometimes even hopeless. The Now. It really is the only thing you’ve ever known, the only time and place you can ever hope to be. So why not love it? Why not just live it?
This is not resignation; it is not fatalism or a giving up (or in). In fact it is a courageous engagement with the total reality of life as it is right now. Jimmy writes that:
Tomorrow’s right around the corner I’ll get there somehow But I’m stuck in [the] meantime
A couple of days ago when this powerful and important statement in the form of this illustration showed up on my social media, I was struck by something I don’t think I’d noticed before. Suddenly I saw: ‘might not change the world”. Might not? Which gave me the idea: it could as easily say ‘Helping one person might change the world …’.
But, you know, my thinking went even further: I realized that might and might not have nothing to do with it. The reality is that every action we take, and that includes the action of helping other living beings, actually does change the world.
Well, firstly, which of our actions help other beings, and thus change the world, we can’t always know. And obviously we can’t always (actually it’s more like very rarely) see the impacts of our actions. And even if we do, it’s likely that we’ll only directly get to see what happens in a limited and local sense. Nevertheless, all actions have a tendency to result in a domino, or cascade effect that literally never stops.
But, wait, there’s more. I kept thinking about it, and came up with a couple of ideas about why it could be a good idea to change the might not in this marvelous saying, which speaks of a negative possibility, to always will, which points to something definite.
All is one on the physical and the non-physical levels
We’ve all had those moments when we sense a connection with the rest of the world; we feel that we are part of nature, part of something bigger than just the one of us.
But, have you ever felt you were even more than just a ‘part of’ the world or nature? Have you ever had a sense that you are nature? Maybe this sounds a bit esoteric: we are one Self; we are all manifestations of the divine; we are all sparks of the one light, and so on.
And of course we can’t know for sure what goes on beyond the physical world. But, even at the most basic level of the material world, especially as we get down to the microscopic and even atomic levels, it’s hard to see any ‘separation’ between any individual and another. Atoms merge and cross over, interact, and change, energy fields collide and mingle, between all living and non-living things.
So, who’s to say that one small action on my part, one small change, won’t have a cascading effect as the ripples (that’s a good way to put it isn’t it?) from that action spread through the world and beyond?
The ‘What can One Person Do?’ Dilemma
Our Sydney Smith quote partially answers this agonising question for us as we’ve seen. Still, you might think that one person can’t do a lot when the needs are so many and so vast, and when most problems in our world seem to be so intractable. Mr Smith says that there is always something you as one person, as an individual can do, even if it’s a small thing you do.
Just think how many people everywhere are asking this same question: ‘What can one person do?’ If even a tiny percentage of those individuals answered that they could do something, then you would start to see changes taking place for sure. How could all those actions not add up to a changed world?
The Multiplyer Effect
Just now I used the words ‘add up’. Well actually it’s more like a multiplication effect isn’t it? If we say we change the world by helping just one person, then there has to be a Multiplyer at work I think.
We have all heard that aphorism that if you give food to a hungry person then you feed them for a day, but if you teach that person to produce their own food, then you feed them for a lifetime. Another truism definitely.
Still, once again, I think we can go further. Is it possible that by teaching one person to produce their own food you can help the whole world eat properly? Let me tell you a story I heard on an online video just a few days ago.
A man was traveling in a poor part of a country he loved. He’d spent the previous few years in another part of the same country building a house and growing his own vegetables and fruits.
He met a local person who was renting a small block of land, and that person asked him if he could help them build a house and teach them to grow their own food. It was a poor area, and the land was pretty much a little slice of jungle.
Anyway, this man agreed to help, and has been there for a few years now. He showed that local person how to grow various fruits and what looked to me to be a huge variety of vegetables. And they didn’t forget the flowers either. As the seasons passed, seeds were gathered and more land turned over to growing food.
Apparently from the very start they had a surplus of the fruits and vegetables they were growing, so they began offering them to neighbours, most of whom were also very poor.
Our traveling friend then showed them how to collect seeds from the food they ate (and the flowers too) and began to show these neighbours how to plant, fertilise, care for, and harvest what those seeds produced. In this way they too were able expand the amount of food they could grow.
So, already there is a growing area of this one slice of one country, that’s becoming self sufficient in fruit and vegetables. Now, that’s not the whole world obviously, but you’d have to agree, it’s a good start.
Anyway, just think: those people now have skills and surplus food and seeds to share further afield. Who can say how far such action might spread? It all sounds quite simplistic put like this, but it is the way that many grassroots movements for change have worked. And remember, nobody can reliably predict the ongoing impacts of any actions.
So, yes it is true, helping one person does indeed change the world for that one person. But whatever we do for one person, it also does definitely change the world beyond. As we’ve said, we may not see how or that it changes everything in the world and certainly not all at once.
We may think of ourselves as just one separate little individual, but we are united with all life. We may think that it’s all too much; too many problems; what can I do? The road to changing the world seems to be blocked, seems to be impassable.
Well, one teacher I admire is Swami Ramdas who founded Anandashram in India. Among the many great things he said, this one stands out for me above them all. I may have the wording a bit wrong, but basically the message is:
Once you have set your feet upon the path, then you are already at your goal
Which is another way of saying that if you help one person, then you have already changed the world.
Over the years I’ve tried many types of meditation. But I always come back to the same method. I call it The Third Eye technique.
Once I’ve settled quietly, perhaps having taken a few deep breaths to relax a little, I bring my awareness to the centre of my forehead, the spot between my eyes. Traditionally, this is where the Third – or spiritual – eye is located.
(Actually that particular spot is in line with the Pineal gland which is located in the centre of the brain between the hemispheres, and its function is to help regulate sleep patterns.)
And then? Well, I know I’m not alone when I say that, no matter how hard I try, it seems a lot of the time nothing happens. Well, thoughts happen. Anxieties and memories intrude their pesky (and sometimes ugly) presence. So much for emptying the mind and having transcendental experiences.
Well, in fact despite evidence to the contrary, I – along with all of you who ‘try to meditate’ – do sometimes achieve a state of no thought, of total quiet. The problem is, of course, in a state where there is no thought it’s impossible to think: ‘Hey, I’m having no thoughts.’
As for the (rare) transcendent experience referred to: on those occasions something other than a thought, memory, anxiety, comes up; something that transcends those mundane ‘normal’ things.
See the tenderness. See the tenderness. See the tenderness.
These words seemed to come right after I’d thought for the millionth time ‘nothing’s happening’ while I tried to meditate one day a while ago.
Not spoken by a voice exactly, yet heard with my internal or mental ear. Clear and distinct; the same fully formed injunction repeated three times.
But, see the tenderness? I’m not sure where these words came from. The truth is I am a gentle person by nature; I am not naturally ‘tough’ or ‘aggressive’ or anything like that. But it’s also true that I’ve been all those things over long periods of my life. Nature vs nurture you see.
Anyway, what tenderness? Where? Does it refer to the tenderness that exists in the world?
Perhaps it’s to do with what I am supposed to be reading or otherwise taking in? Books, movies, and other story sources that speak of tender things and people?
Or might it be an injunction for me to redouble my efforts to turn away from the wold? To turn away from the horrors and the nastiness of Maya or the material and essentially illusory world?
And by this turning away from the world, perhaps tenderness is to be found and seen in a turning to the interior world, in the spaces of contemplation within Self.
This injunction (repeated emphatically three times. Sorry I already said that didn’t I?) does seem to have come from some part of my Self that longs for a gentler way to be, for a more tender way to relate to others and to Self.
Ideas and questions to contemplate and to reflect upon. Meanwhile, it’s a good start to know that even if my mind tells me otherwise, when I meditate, something is happening. Sometimes.
Let me share with you some random thoughts that came up as I sat to meditate one recent morning. As I settled, a thought struck me.
One among many of course, but this one got my attention. It went something like this:
‘I am where I’m at today because of the life I’ve lived: my choices to travel, my continual need for change and variety. And not to forget the impacts of my health on decisions over the years.’
It was a bad feeling coming on as you can tell.
So, I guess (the thoughts kept coming) I’ve had the fun and adventure and now’s the time to pay the price.
This particular thought train is an antique I’ve been run down by many times. And the way it going this time was downhill fast; it was one of those ‘poor me, what a horrible life I’ve got’ trips. Then, the next thoughts were a bit more truthful:
I live with my life partner and soulmate in a Pacific Coast town, literally five minutes walk to a spectacular beach and some special coastal scenery. The town isn’t too big, and not too small: it has everything we need without the crowds, traffic, noise, pollution, shopping malls, and other paraphernalia that goes with a materialism gone mad.
We live in a very comfortable small house in a Subtropical paradise of a holiday park resort flanked by a beautiful creek and forest. Every day we get to see and watch nicely many species of birds.
Each night literally hundreds of bats fly over on their way to feed, and very often we get to see wild kangaroos up close. Not to mention the lizards, ranging from tiny Geckos to metre long beauties.
It’s true: I did make that mental list. No, I thought, this is no price I have to suffer to pay for past decisions and actions. These are gifts I’ve been granted. Oh, did I mention that I get to pretty much spend all day every day doing more or less exactly what I want or feel lead to do?
This was one time when I was able to divert that ‘poor me look how I’m suffering’ thought train, and let the ‘I’m really and truly blessed’ express to roll on through.
Notes from the Hermit's Cave 