i·tin·er·ar·y
īˈtinəˌrerē/
Dear Reader ~
This same never-ending story in every human culture
always repeats itself, always begins with a 'Search' -
through the Unknown with beginner's skills
that are barely known to a beginner's mind.
Spiritually speaking, that's a very classic way to start.
At one's Core, something got lost - and one goes out
to try'n find it. Don't we all kinda' relate with that ?
__________________________________________This same never-ending story in every human culture
always repeats itself, always begins with a 'Search' -
through the Unknown with beginner's skills
that are barely known to a beginner's mind.
Spiritually speaking, that's a very classic way to start.
At one's Core, something got lost - and one goes out
to try'n find it. Don't we all kinda' relate with that ?
The Road Not Taken / The Road Less
Traveled
Robert Frost, 1926
------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Frost, 1926
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And I'm sorry I could not travel both.
And so being only one traveler, long I stood
And looked down each road as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
-------------------------------------------------
Then I took the other road, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear.
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equal
in leaves no step had trodden black.
-------------------------------------------------
Oh, I kept the first road for another day
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this tale with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence -
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
-- I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the
difference.
______________________________
MYSTERY of
MYSTERIES
I lost my Mom to breast cancer when I was seven.
My whole future relationship with women’s souls and the sweet softness of Yin
changed. So did my relationship with Death. The young potent power-filled
Son with no Mother to come home to proudly protect. A dark home where
everybody’s clothing had the salty smell of tear soaked tragic dampness. For
now, I’m keeping all that good ole' Freudian stuff for me to explore with
Doctor Max Zugger, the Don Rickles of insult psychiatry. His office was
where I heard it for the first time -- 'Shit Happens'. The unarguable,
ever changing, unstable, ever fluxing, 'Impermanence' of it all. Buddha's Dharma
teaching is sort of the Reality Science of Ultimate Absolute Loss - The What Is of
The Way It Is. And There is N o Way That It is Supposed To Be. This IS It. The healthy, not morbid, wisdom that is
experientially developed directly out of insecurity is a prominent
cornerstone of Buddhism's Acceptance teachings on Impermanence.
"Unfortunately for human beings" - said The Dalai Lama giggling,
"Buddhism as a philosophy simply has no need for a Savior, yet many people
still have an fulfilled desire for one -- but they DO have TV ".
At the time though, I experienced a suddenly new phenomena very few
kids get to have: Real ‘Death’ up close. Death lived with my family by the
beach in Far Rockaway, New York. Death had a room upstairs. Death ate at
the table, Death sobbed along with everyone else sobbing. No alternative
weekends with a divorced parent. There wasn't any. No back-button. No click
Undo. No relief from broken hearted stories told half in English, half in
German about “How talented… “How gifted… your Mother was… Ahh, Beatrice was the
maestro Rubakian’s best piano student. She had radiated a young painter’s
delight with our little farm up in Woodstock… and of course, the eminent
reality of a recital in Carnegie Hall and all. I sat on the floor and
watched. I sat on the grass and watched. I was a sullen kid - and overcame
the tedium by taking an uninvolved, yet steady interest in what I was
watching since that was " IT " for what was currently available
in that moment. I was conscious. So I just watched. Not much content. No
‘story’ line with it. I just watched. Watching was all too real for me to be a
voyeur. It was enough for me just to be in the presence of all that. Death
by Default -- Whew ! I was sorta' like Peter Seller's character in the
film "Being There" ~ I was a passive Watcher, not a Doer, a
Watcher. I'm a llife-long meditative, mindfulness trained 'Observer'. I like to
simply watch.
I developed a child’s un-informed notion
that - So maybe there were bona fide resurrection ‘Miracles’ out there. That
would bring Mommy Beatrice back and stop the random outbursts of continual
sobbing. So at ten years old I began to practice and perform stage Magic, to
see if there was such a thing. Anyway, I didn’t like the reedy clarinet or the
clarinet teacher who smelled funny. God forbid, I should turn my back on the oh
so sacred piano. It was funny how all
the music teachers had really flakey dandruff and smelled funny - and no
store-bought, standard hobby took my interest or my heart. I was very good at
being critical, complaining and k'vetchy. Surprisingly, this was the beginnings
of an oddly developing Wisdom - if’ the ability’ was apprehended in time. It
usually isn’t and the kid becomes a ‘crank’. If it is, the kid learns that
‘Wisdom’ Really Likes ‘Wisdom’ - and the kid will search the world over for
confirmation that he ‘Knows’ - and that he is highly desirable and is worthy of
being loved for that. He soon found that nobody gave a shit. Unfortunately the wounded, narcissistic,
gifted kid had become cynical, contemptuous and disdainful - and could simply
get lost out there - go downstairs for a pack of smokes and never return.
Just around the corner of my beingness, as
a Pre-Bar Mitzvah Boy, with a smelly Hebrew teacher, I started hanging
around with some older boys who were local amateur magicians and a few
performing stage 'pro's -- after my Dad would really check them out first. But
wait, there’s more ! Besides being the son of an extraordinarily talented,
almost worshipped, deceased classical pianist and painter -- I was also the
physically undeveloped, seemingly talentless, disinterested, chubby son of an
athletic, muscular NYPD police officer who sang German and Italian opera on Ted
Mack’s Amateur Hour on TV as The Singing Patrolman ( back in the 1950’s you’d
never say ‘Cop’ ). Through Whitey the antique dealer who was a magician, I met
my first real teaching ‘mentors’ in the City, where they clustered at Harry
Houdini’s old shop upstairs near Penn Station. My God, the company I kept ! I
never saw it that way. What I saw was that these guys, they kinda of 'knew'
stuff - stuff that ‘ordinary’ people didn’t know. Esoteric stuff. I found that
I genuinely, thoroughly, wasn’t ordinary. Uncommon or Non-ordinary it was
called. Back in the 50’s I was pretty alone in all this -- all of us magi still
are. Soon, as the teenage Mr.Magic, I got booked to do children’s birthday
parties on weekends, earning pocket and later, gas and date money for college
at SUNY Running In the background to all
this was, of course, a Certified Wicked Witch of the West Jewish Stepmother
that Doctor Zugger has already reserved for a water boarding in Milton’s
Purgatory. I’m currently attempting to share the dharma teachings with my less
resistive clients, students and myself: on boundless appreciation,
unconditional acceptance and the authentic magic of continual forgiveness. Keep
forgiveness mindfully in front of you, and keep try’in …..
At the movies, James Hilton’s 1939 "Lost Horizon" jump started ‘something’ really serious buried deep in my soul when I was sixteen. My first 'contact' with The Dalai Lama. It brings a slight swelling behind my eyes even now as I write this. Weekly, I soaked in a young Jean Shepard’s heady late night, late 50's WOR jazz/talk radio show in the Village ( New York City ), where he read from the "Amazing Adventures of Doctor Fu Manchu" and lots of Tao and Zen poetry. I started to grow a tiny teenage goatee, hung around the Art Room crowd, explored the social dangers of wearing black and read Kerouac. Forget high school sports, me and The Exotic Esoteric were off and running! In 1959 I concluded high school with Paul Reps’ "Zen Flesh Zen Bones", the Buddhist-theories of D.T. Suzuki and lots of Alan Watts "The Wisdom of Insecurity". There’s ‘wisdom’ in insecurity ? Why that title of all things ? It really made me ‘question’ it all. I learned that Buddhists laugh a lot and are still willing to give voice to ‘impermanence' and 'uncertainty in an Age of A-Bomb Anxiety and devastating Hollywood Blacklisting. In 1959 the winter snows were just melting as the young Tibetan Dalai Lama and a small horseback party began the final crossing into exile in India. His Holiness has never been home since.
SUNY, the State University of New York in the heating-up Sixties, revealed to me the tight-assed academia, the ill-conceived struggles for misunderstood meanings of Western philosophy, that I didn’t ‘get’ anyway - and the permissive, easy-going spaciousness of Eastern ‘emptiness’. Emptiness is the ‘joy’ of uncertainty 'realized’. Living in Greenwich Village after being a journalist in the U.S.Army ( Desert Storm: First / 81st Armored Division, PIO information specialist 63’-65’ ) I was right there with another generational shift I witnessed at the poetic heroic wane of the Beat-era -- and my ‘Self’ becoming ‘consciously’ reconstituted with my own beginnings, of my own authentic Hippie soul. The birth of a fledgling Bodhisattva - a few old ones still here - new stock arriving all the time.
My personal archetype was as ‘The Outsider’ -
that was quite clear. I was / I still am an acquired taste for a few - but the
Wunderkind me was soon making expensive visual magic at a TV commercial
production company directing pilot spots. It so happened that I smoked some
outstanding weed one day in ’68, and left for a long sojourn in Europe and
points unknown. "Freedom From the Known" as Krishnamurti deliciously and
disturbingly called it. In Israel I just kept meeting people coming back from
India - and they said “India Man, You gotta go, Man - You gotta go ! - That’s
the ‘real’ Holy Land!.” Further East, the compass pointed the direction I
needed. I met lotsa’ helpful Indiana Jones- types along the Silk Route when it
was still archeologically intact.
I wasn’t aware then, that I was traveling with a
spiritual ‘dedicated purpose’, a mission, a holy 'intent' as Lama taught me
later. I traveled in an old Russian mini-bus, overland thru the thick snows of
Eastern Turkey, the Shah’s Iran and many months of a restorative, recuperative
layover with the Jewish community in Herat, Afghanistan during the brutal
winter 1972-73. I kept observing a subtly different, ‘alternative’ cultural
paradigm out there. Asia was not Kansas anymore, Coney. It certainly wasn’t the
South Shore of Long Island where I was raised W.J.M., either. Here, people
looked right into your ‘mind’. They can read you. In India they had a legacy of deeply observing
and comprehending the human mind - a very complete, ancient ‘science-teaching’
about the true nature of mind. No ‘churches’ that suppressed it.
At the Eastern Pakistani/Indian border in
Amritsar, a seasoned ex-patriot American yogi said to me, unsolicited - “Hey
Man, Just skip Hinduism altogether, my friend, and go straight to Dharamsala
and hang around with the Buddhists” - “You’ll end up a Buddhist anyway, from
what I see in you...” He gave me the address of a very special ‘Teacher’ to
visit there, and literally vanished. Weeks later I ambled down a crooked little
street high up in the thick pine covered foothills of Northern India, past a
flock of laughing Tibetan Buddhist monks full of horseplay, back from their
visit to The Dalai Lama’s residence up the hill -- and ‘Lost Horizon’ became a
reality.
After a plate of mo-mo dim sum, I went to pay,
and discovered the teacher’s address deep in my shoulder bag. As described, I
found an alley, then a door, knocked - and a voice said “Come in”. Sitting in
full lotus on the floor nursing a single-burner propane stove and tea, was the
same yogi guy I met at the border ! He looked up at me, smiled, then laughed
and said “You made it!” - “Good, I have some people for you to go up into the
hills here to meet”…
I said to myself, "Well, Mr. Magic, let me praise you -
Way to go ! You ‘showed up’ for yourself again… Whew ! "