Month: October 2020

I have been struggling with names. I don’t mean the normal effort it takes to remember people’s names. I struggle daily to remember and recognize names such as Sphenacondontiodae, Sinoconodontidae, and Procynosuchidae. Almost every day I struggle with a whole assortment of names that have been given to ancient groups of early mammal-like animals. All of these creatures lived a couple hundred million years ago, but they now enter into my daily struggle to recognize them by their true names.

The instructor of the course, Fossil record of mammals, rattles these names off as glibly as if he were talking about his young children or his assortment of cousins. I am amazed how someone can be so at ease and struggle so little in referencing these ancient lineages of mammal ancestors. He shows no hesitation in coming up with an assortment of syllables that are familiar to him and that concur up concepts of unique animals with recognized traits. I meanwhile struggle to pronounce the names and vaguely associate the names with certain kinds of animals.

It struck me this morning how I might do the same thing as my instructor if I would lead him through my garden. With little hesitation, I would point out plants, giving them both a common and a scientific name. In my garden, my common speech would easily be littered with names such as Lysimachia, Kirengeshoma, and Filipendula. As I spoke their names, I would have a clear concept of my association with that plant. Their name would remind me of certain traits of the plant, perhaps be a reference to other plants of the same family.

I still have a reasonable recall of several hundred names of plants, all of which I learned to recognize. I could, with little effort, call them by their proper and real name. Now, as I struggle to remember names of animals I will never see face to face, I think of how every discipline has a language of names unique to that area of familiarity.

The language of common speech is amazing enough in itself. Humans have come up with so many different sounds and words to describe what they experience. On top of practical common speech, there are so many unique names that describe individuals or groups of individuals.

I once went beyond my daily experience and learned to make sounds rising out of the Greek alphabet. I learned the names of many things in Latin, French and Spanish. Besides learning the names of ancient animals, I now struggle with a whole new group of names as my native culture embraces immigrants whose names sound nothing like those familiar names I grew up with: Tom, Nancy, and Charlie.

While names might be a struggle for me, they also are a kind of shorthand. It is useful for me to speak of a dog instead of four-legged animal with fur, a wagging tail and a bark. I can even speak of a specific animal as Jet, and people will know exactly which being I mean and what kind of being they are.

Learning new names seems like a good thing for me. My world of names is growing slowly in spite of my considerable struggle. I am happy for that growth, and so I work every day at learning new names. I am determined to force a few more names into my brain, and I am convinced that a few of those ancient mammals will become almost as familiar as the plants in my garden.

It has become a daily practice for me to spend at least a few moments thinking of my ancestors, typically welcoming them to be part of my day. However, just “who” those ancestors are has changed dramatically.

I keep a photo of my Mom and Dad on my dresser, and that photo is a routine stop in my morning routine. It is a photo of them before they had children, and I like to think of them as simply Mary Lee and Henry. To me, they have a reality in that photo that otherwise gets distorted by the later varnish of parenthood. They are in an intimate sense, my ancestors, and I like to feel how their presence as a woman and a man continues in me.

That is changing. For a month, I have been immersed in a university course on the Fossil Record of Mammals, and my notion of my ancestors has been stretched way beyond that photo on my dresser. I notice that I have a couple hundred million years of ancestors to account for.

My hallway upstairs is a photo gallery of some of my ancestors that go back several generations. I sometimes pause and look at them. My parents, my grandmother, my great grandparents all remind me that I have identifiable roots that go back more than a century. But my ancestors go back much further, and I carry traces of them all.

I have been aware that I have ancestors who lived in Europe. I don’t know what their faces looked like, but I suspect I see something of them when I look in the mirror each morning. If I turn my imagination loose, I can imagine those ancestors who might have been struggling to become “human” some 20,000 years ago. Even they would be easily recognized as someone who looked just like me if they walked into my garden, dressed in modern clothing. I would not have trouble being identified as their progeny. They would easily pass as my ancestors, and I am acutely aware that I carry traces of them.

However, the humans who lived 200,000 years ago probably didn’t look just like me, and they had not yet begun to act just like my contemporaries. However, there were many similarities, and it is not at hard to recognize them as my ancestors. I am one of their distant children, and I carry in my bones unmistakable signs of my lineage.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. As I am learning in my class on Mammal fossils, I have ancestors that were running around 200 million years ago. They exhibited traits then that I clearly share with them, even though they ranged in size between a mouse and a medium sized dog. They were eaten by larger dinosaurs and they included small dinosaurs in their diet. The modern humans that I know might not have lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but my ancestors certainly did. They just looked a little different than I do now.

It is a new experience for me to be thinking of these ancient precursors of humans as my ancestors, but I am beginning to occasionally invite them into my day. I am who and what I am because of them, and for me that is enough to make them my ancestors.

I am slightly aware that the reptilian part of my brain goes back in time even farther. My brain development and activity reflects my reptilian ancestors that go back well beyond 300 million years. That is an awareness that still seems a bit slippery to me. But I suspect that some day I will recognize, even welcome reptiles as my ancestors as well.

For now, it is enough for me to think about the early mammals. They were my very ancient ancestors who scurried around a variety of plants I would scarcely recognize. What was part of them is now part of me. It is enough for me to recognize them as my remote ancestors and occasionally thank them for making me the kind of individual I am.

I’ve developed a very narrow view about the value of teachings. I’m convinced that most teachings are not valuable for their content but for the validation they give to my personal experience. Most teachings do not convey much intellectual content, but they can validate what I experience.

Teachings seldom offer something that I want to yield to. However, they can provide an intellectual framework that gives permission for me to accept and follow my own experience. I do not pay attention to teachings that contradict what I experience. But I do value those teachings that validate my experience, perhaps put my experience in a helpful framework.

Even when I am reading an instruction manual for assemblage or operation of some item, I always examine the item carefully after reading the directions. I check whether the instructions, as I understand them, make sense. I follow the directions only after examining the piece of furniture or the mechanical tool I am trying to figure out. If the instruction makes sense, based on that examination, I follow the instruction.

Even teachings on theoretical things have limited instructional value. Teachings are useful because they help me to trust and rely on my own experience without resistance from my mind. For me to accept it, the teaching has to make sense to me, and that means correspond to my experience.

I carry a whole lifetime of cultural and academic teachings that I am constantly examining, sometimes challenging based on my experience. Especially when I was in theology classes, I was often told “You just want to have it your way.” I was told that often during my training, and I think that is true. I do want to accept only that which corresponds to my experience, or at least validates it.

Even the Buddha is reported as saying about his teachings, “don’t take my word for it; discover it yourself.” I suppose that I follow that way of thinking, and challenge even the teachings of the Buddha. I will accept only the teachings that correspond to my experience. I trust my experience, which is not something I can say about all teachings.

I’ve gotten weary of seeing the word “natural” on the packaging of foods. It is a word that has deep significance for me. Now I cringe when I see it printed on food and used as a distracting ploy of advertising with little meaning at all.

I am natural. I am part of nature, and noticing that is to be invited to a stirring intimacy with all things natural. I am part of an evolutionary process that has gone back many million years. I have a dependent relationship with nature that is beyond my control, even if I should try to resist it.

For me there is no escape, but there is the opportunity to enter deeply into a living relationship with the whole world around me. The interdependence of all things in this world includes me, and the more I recognize it the more I can enjoy my place in this wonderful embrace.

I trust my nature. I trust my mind to glow with insight when I discard all the clutter that I and my culture have added to my thinking. My challenge is to relax and yield to my nature. My intent is to live a natural life.

Most things make sense to me only in the context I have created. This is what I have been doing since I was born. I shape the context so that I can relate to what I experience.

I noticed that when I dictated a text message to someone last evening, Siri wrote down a word both I and the recipient knew was not correct. We each inserted the meaning of the correct word. We knew to do this only because of the shaped context both of us brought to the reading of the text message. We both knew what I meant, even though a literal reading of the written world was something else.

This happens constantly. It happens when I am interpreting, actually deciphering the meaning of something I have earlier written in longhand. My handwriting is notoriously hard to read, even for me. My scrawl is more like shorthand and is only remotely accurate in forming enough letters to spell out words. But I am still consistently able to understand the meaning of the partially-written words because I am aware of the context. My mind supplies all the form that the lines on paper only suggest or remotely represent.

This is like most of my life. Things I experience typically make sense to me because of the context I supply. I often see what I expect to see. When I notice a neighbor in their yard, I typically see whom I expect to see. This happens spontaneously until I become aware of information that contradicts what the context provides. I might realize that the person I noticed actually isn’t my neighbor but someone else.

When I visit with a neighbor or other friend, our whole conversation is awash in the context of our past association. We each bring context to a conversation that could be very brief in duration. Context fills in many gaps and expands the meaning of much that is said.

I am increasingly aware how my body brings context to most of what I encounter. It is a context built out of many years of experience and practice. A body that has learned to be anxious or cautious shapes my experience of people I don’t know, especially people of color. A relaxed and receptive body creates a whole different context when I meet friends or walk through my garden. The context shapes the experience.

The world I walk in every minute has meaning because of the context my life has shaped. Learning to see things as they really are requires that I be able to somehow put most of that context aside. It demands that I quiet a body and a mind that is eager to provide an abundance of context and meaning.

Learning to shed the habit of context comes from practice. Learning how to quiet my body and mind is neither easy or rapid. Learning to shed my habit of creating context happens slowly, but it requires surprisingly little effort. That is the way that letting go of habits is for me. Letting go is not effort. It is not acting.

I think it helps when I have the intention of creating a different kind of context. Sometimes that means creating a context of no presumptions. It helps to have the intention of living in a daily world of unlimited possibilities. This is a context I find attractive. This is a context I would like to live in.

I noticed that I smiled when I heard that Thomas Keneally describe himself as a “mad, ruined monk.” That too could be said of me. It is true that I folded and put away the clothing of a monk many years ago. I stepped out of a life I had been immersed in for a dozen years. Perhaps I was ruined.

What monkness I took with me must surely cause some people to think of me as “mad.” Certainly those monks I left behind must have thought of me that way. It was a radical change I made when I walked out of the monastery. I was no longer young, and I stepped into a world I had so little knowledge of. It must have looked like madness to some. As I look back, I see a boldness that even I consider to be slightly mad. So I smile.

But I knew there was a world I had yet to savor. The reality and intimacy of that world was already a small part of me, and I wanted to experience it more deeply.

That was many years ago, and I still find the reality and intimacy of the world ardently attractive, no matter how much I have already experienced. I smile when I think of all the possibilities I have yet to experience.

In so many ways I still consider myself a monk, though I probably have ruined all the common trappings and constraints of that life style. I continue to choose a new and changing life style that I embrace every morning. I smile when I think of all the possibilities the world holds for me each day. I think I smile a lot. I think that I am still a smiling monk.

The past seems so elusive to me, even though its shadow seems to show up and somehow enter into every day. Sometimes it shows up at my invitation, sometimes by chance. Perhaps that is just fine. It is just fine that my grasp of the past is so fleeting and only seems to have a moderate influence. It is probably better when I am not grasping at the past at all.

I’ve been aware lately how much fragments of the past are woven into the zig zag fabric of my dreams. Memories and images in my dreams even go back to my youth and become the stuff that my dreams are made of. Memories from the past that show up in my dreams always appear in contorted and tangled fashion, but they still contain the illusion of a distorted but vibrant reality. Those traces of memories show up in my dream world and seem to be happening right now.

In some ways, my waking memories are like those in my dreams. The waking memories are not so obviously contorted or fragmented as they are in my dreams. My memories of past experiences still can seem as vivid and real to me as an observer as they do in my dreams. I am also aware that my waking memories of the past are altered by the experiences of the intervening years.

What I think I so clearly remember is, at least in part, a fabrication and distortion of my creative mind. I suppose that is not very different from what I think I directly experience on a daily basis. My creative and orderly mind is shaping and giving meaning to what I remember from the past and what I experience here and now.

What I observe and seem to experience today is shaped, formed and made to appear real right now. How much more must my memory of the past be shaped by my active, creative mind. It all gets more complicated when I try to hold on to the past. It becomes a source of discomfort and dissonance when I attempt to grasp the past and bring it forward to now.

There are times when I not only remember the past, but also long for those moments, those experiences to be part of me right now. I can ache with longing for the past. I grasp for the past, and I forget, perhaps ignore, that there is only the present. The past is only a distorted, selective memory. It becomes almost easy to yield to the sadness and the longing for something that is a fabrication of my mind.

Actually, I have more of an inclination to try to live in the future than in the past. But the past still calls to me for attention and engagement. I forget that the past is no more real than the future that has not yet arrived.

Those are the times that I hope to remember that both the past and the future are with me right now. It is a good time to remember how the passage of time is something of an illusion . If there is a reality to be absorbed, it is the timeless reality of now. I live in a moment that has no real past or future aspect. And I also live in a moment that contains all the fragments and elements of both past and future.

Daily, I remind myself that the past is with me right now. I consciously welcome into my daily life all those individuals who have been an important part of my life. Welcoming the past is a notion that is comforting and helps me relax into the present.

There is no need to grasp what I seem to recall from the past. There is a now to be experienced, shaped as it is by the past and all the fragments of the past, those remembered and forgotten. The past is with me in a real way. I don’t need to fret about a lost past because it is with me to enjoy throughout the day.