What do you put your attention on? Flowers and candy? Appreciatory phone calls and fond recall?
This morning, I mother Ukraine. I mother women who want to choose whether to give birth. I mother the ideologically suffocating who crave untenable promises of authoritarian political purity by dissipated personalities who are scary and punctilious in their pretense.
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.
The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.
The women who had watched their men march off to war were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. The men who did come home were scarred in body and mind.
Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.
(—Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters from an American, May 7, 2922)
War and deceit are the antitheses of the modern conception of mothers’ day.
Yet, why not celebrate mothers everywhere?
Mine sent me a letter that I found under mail slot in hallway on Mother’s Day in 1981 returning to my apartment in Pennsylvania. I’d just returned from her wake and funeral in New York. And there she was in her words. The last of which were, “Love, and Good Luck!”
It’s a useful reminder the crapshoot of current chaos and cultural violence with its moral and legal ambiguity befogging the stumbling consciousnesses seeking solid ground on which to stand and walk and meet each other.
Being is born every instant.
Consciousness is what Being develops.
Loss, relative and relational, is universal experience.
Then, let it all go! Let loss, and gain, absolute and undifferentiated, go its own way. Fall freely.
"NEVER APOLOGIZE; NEVER EXPLAIN"
A pair of strange new birds in the maple tree
Peer through the windows,
Mother and father visiting me:
"You are unmarried.
No child begot
Now we are birds, now you've
forgotten us
Although in dreams we visit you
in human shape
They speak Homer's language
Sing like Aeschylus
The life of a poet: less than 2/3rds of a second
18:ii :67
(Poem by Philip Whalen)
Stay still, right where you are, everything seemingly fallen away, and you, you in that hallow hollow place with no parameters nor defining allocution to steer you elsewhere.
All of it, without destination or dimension, is there. And, you, aren’t, anywhere, else.
Let the hallucinating mob drink their hopes and ambitions, dreams and purifications, blessedness and salvific specialness. So many ways to go somewhere!
For today, go nowhere.
Arrive where you are without baggage nor further destination.
Be gone.
No forwarding address. No accumulated references. No commendations. No titles. No ribbons. No exhausting obituaries. No obsequies. No thing to memorize nor memorialize.
There you are, nowhere to be, no one to be, no longer longing to be.
Walking Beside the Kamogawa, Remembering Nansen and Fudo and Gary’s Poem
Here are two half-grown black cats perched on a
lump of old teakettle brick plastic garbage
ten feet from the west bank of the River.
I won’t save them. Right here Gary sat with dying Nansen,
The broken cat, warped and sick every day of its life,
Puke & drool on the tatami for Gary to wipe up & scold,
“If you get any worse I’m going to have you put away!”
The vet injected an overdose of nemby and for half an hour
Nansen was comfortable.
How can we do this, how can we live and die?
How does anybody choose for somebody else.
How dare we appear in this Hell-mouth weeping tears,
Busting our heads in ten fragments making vows &
promises?
Suzuki Roshi said, “If I die, it’s all right. If I should
live, it’s all right. Sun-face Buddha, Moon-face Buddha.”
Why do I always fall for that old line?
We don’t treat each other any better. When will I
Stop writing it down.
A Vision of the Bodhisattvas
They pass before me one by one riding on animals
“What are you waiting for,” they want to know
Z —, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me
“Some day you’ll drop everything & become a rishi, you know.”
I know
The forest is there, I’ve lived in it
more certainly than this town? Irrelevant—
What am I waiting for?
A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about?
Who’s to make the change but me?
“Returning again and again,” Amida says
Why’s that dream so necessary? Walking out of whatever house
alone
Nothing but the clothes on my back, money or no
Down the road to the next place the highway leading to the
mountains
From which I absolutely must come back
What business have I to do that?
I know the world and I love it too much and it
Is not the one I’d find outside this door
(Poem by Philip Whalen)
Here’s my bastardized recollection of another Whalen line John Maloney pointed out to me in Cambridge MA about a half century ago:
Invisible, and in
complete control
of everything
