Tiny Bird’s Nest Fungus on Dead Twig
Category: Uncategorized
Strange Fungus
October 21, 2022
And a Hen of the Woods on another overturned tree root system
Haiku and Other Musings
I’ve been making it back to my Thursday morning writing group fairly regularly for a month or so now. It’s great to be back. So much talent, I sometimes wonder what I am doing there….But here were my creations for the morning.
Even Einstein
It is spring. There are
birds chirping from branches bare
or needle spiked.
Spring announces self
with light not temperature.
Light velocity
In four dimensions
Defines the universe that
humans can perceive.
Even Einstein did
Not know this on inventing
relativity.
Comments: I am reading J. W. N. Sullivan‘s book from 1949 called The Limitations of Science. He was considered one of the greatest lay science writers of the 20th Century. I first encountered his writing in The Life of the Spider. What a lovely book! Also worth reading is Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. But back to The Limitations of Science. Mr. Sullivan, just a few years after the publication by Einstein of his theories of Special and General Relativity, explains it in a way that I feel like I understand certain concepts that I never have before. Apparently it was not until others started working with Einstein’s equations that the concept of the velocity of light as perhaps the fundamental measurement in the universe was arrived at and perceived as meaningful in reality, not just useful in a mathematical description of reality.
Why?
Jay hated the question why.
Jay hated the word why.
He told me that he had concluded that there is never an answer to the question why.
Whether this was a result of his training as a psychologist or his personal spiritual search, I never could quite fathom.
Jay is no longer speaking with me.
I don’t believe I did anything specific to end the relationship. Over the years, I have often been wrong, and am usually the first to admit that to myself.
But after not seeing him for a while, and then a friendly unexpected encounter at Meijer, I have never gotten a reply to any attempts to reach him.
So obviously, I ask myself why? He was a good friend and support to me when we had first met. Sure, I can think of things I did that he did not appreciate. But the relationship did not end then. Anyway, at that time my question would have been how did I wrong you, or what did I do, not why are you not returning my calls.
Now, of course, I better understand the Buddhist teaching of dependent arising. However, in my mind, that teaching does not mean that the question or word why is completely useless or meaningless. It simply points to the fact that there is never a simple answer to the question. There are always and always more steps beneath the platform of conscious perception.
A popular manufacturing process troubleshooting method proposes a mere five whys. If perchance we do dig deep enough, we will eventually get to the point where there is no answer. Whether that question is why does God exist, or why the Big Bang happened, we humans will never be able to produce an answer that will be accepted by all humans.
A fellow industry consultant apparently believed that the answer to all whys was “Because of Adam and Eve.” That tells you how old this discussion was. Because now we would say simply “Because…Adam and Eve.”
To get back to the main point, we can’t now and won’t ever be able to answer the fundamental why from within the only fundamental what that we can know. We now know, but only in part, as through a glass, darkly. The promise of the Gospels, that one day we may know in full, is a false one. The Unknowable will always “out-be” the Knowable.
So suck it up.
But keep asking why about the little things. That can only have the effect of instilling an attitude of wonder. Wonder is a help. Wonder gets us through. Whether it’s optimistic or pessimistic wonder, wonder opens our mind to the possibility that things, or at least our appreciation of them, could change.
And there was Joy!
Joy to the world, proclaimed Jeremiah the Bullfrog. Or so sang Three Dog Night back in 1971, on Jeremiah’s behalf. It is funny that they picked Jeremiah to proclaim joy. Jeremiah of course is associated with the Jeremiad. The strong warning of imminent doom. But maybe that is the joke in the art form.
Anyway, those were the days when music was music. It had catchy tunes. At least usually. Those were also the days when Phillip Glass experimented with sounds that were on the margin of what I considered music, but the experts now consider him one of the most influential composers of the 20th Century.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought that music was the only avenue humans had to overcoming the sorrows and troubles of the world. Only through music could joy be experienced. The great composers could presumably experience joy and help to midwife it for others. Schopenhauer thought, and wrote about how, all art could play this uplifting role in human life. But he reserved the highest levels of joy to the potential accomplishments of the musically inclined.
Osho, on the other hand, or maybe we are now in need of moving to the feet, having already used up both hands, between Three Dog Night and Phillip Glass and then Schopenhauer, taught that joy did not ever, and does not now in the present, require music, or any other aid, to manifest in our hearts. All we need or needed, according to Osho, was not even love. Nope, all we needed, da du de dah, is to drop our constant ruminations about what has already passed, and worries about what might be. Just stop listening to the fear mongering of the ego. That’s it. Osho, despite this simple advice, is/was in no way optimistic about the ease anyone will / has encounter(ed) on their path to achieve a joyful victory. But, he teaches, when we truly find ourselves understanding that we are in a hopeless position, and that our ego’s false preachings will never bring us the peace we seek, then, and only then, in the inner silence, there will be joy. Maybe even, I wonder, on looking back on our earlier experiences, we will see that there was then also joy. The greatest joy. Joy to the world. All the boys and girls. Even joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea. I’m so full of joy that I regret that joy was not explicitly allotted to the simpler forms of eukaryotic and archaic life. Why wouldn’t they have joy too? They never had egos to drop.
Bhagwat: Day 1
“The entire week’s events will cost $13000.00,” my friend informed me. It always amazes me how Indians find money for weddings and other rituals, even when things are “very difficult.” Even if he has three sisters living, and two brothers, presumably to share some of the cost. The family lost both their mother and the oldest sister in a few short months.
Well, apparently the bricks used to build the above dais aren’t a big part of the cost, even though such high quality bricks are expensive. Because? you might ask. Because my friend plans to sell the bricks that he bought, as well as return the bricks he borrowed from the new hotel construction site next door, at a good profit, because after a week of blessings by seven priests, these bricks are going to be VERY HOLY and will bring good luck to any building into which they are incorporated.
So what else does the $13k cover? Well, of course the seven “pandits,” or priests. Some are specialized in chanting, some playing musical instruments, some interpreting scripture, some performing ritual. I suppose it must cover the tent, and crew of people who set up the tent, and brought the 85 mattresses to line the floor, and run the electrical and sound systems. Not to mention dig the small moat that the unexpected rain storm necessitated on Day 2. The food (and cooks) for all the relatives and friends, up to 800 expected on the last of the 8 day event. The full time sound technician. The special shawls for Krishna’s birthday that were given out on Day 1. The three copies of the giant plastic banner announcing the event. The steel structures supporting the tent itself, as well as several internal platforms. Etc.
The day started with my understanding that the some of the women standing around waiting to begin the procession to the Ganges to get the holy water were commenting on the fact that I was wearing pink. HAH! I rejoiced that my Hindi was now good enough for me to realize that’s what they were saying. I managed to respond that “Nobody TOLD me I was supposed to wear yellow.” Which was fine. Because I don’t have any yellow Indian outfits anyway.
The morning ceremony lasted about 3 hours, including the walk to and back from the Ganges. I was told we were to fast all day, only eating a small meal in the evening. But then, while the non-mourning guests were being fed a big meal, the fasting mourners were led into a small room and given little bowls of nuts and dried fruit. These Hindus have a different concept of fasting. Or maybe he left out the “e” and really meant feast. Who knows. Because today, Day 2, the “small meal” really was a huge feast. But I didn’t have much, as I was coming for a fasting event. We’ll see how long I hold out.
The afternoon, 3 pm to 6:30 or so, was comprised of the main priest (shown in orange in the top photo) chanting from the Bhagavad Gita, the holy scripture of Hinduism, giving interpretive comments, and musical interludes, of course blasted at full volume on the four banks of three 4 foot speakers each. That made it easier to cover the construction noise from next door.
So that’s my report so far, totally inadequate, of Day 1 of the Bhagwat.
Suddenly
Suddenly, I wept
with joy, the agonizing gone.
Now truth controls tongue.
Daily Promt: Fabric
Isn’t fabric a
better metaphor by which
to live than coin?
Events can be strands
in individual lives,
lives, strands of world cloth.
Both have two sides, but
fabric is flexible; can
be folded, or crumpled, and
so become
multi-dimensional. We
can hold it up to the light
and see right through to
the weaver’s skill.
The dark, the hidden portions
of the strands are just as important
as the clear or easy to spy.
The Life of a Tree
Wind wanders and the
willow weeps green tears of grief
for her lost sisters.
Wind whispers, and the
willow tells a long sad tale
to her green children.
Window wide open.
Willow stands outside, weeping,
wailing in the breeze.
Wild willow weeps
alone. Her roots plunge ever
deeper into earth.
Trump: A Man of Integrity?
What does it mean to be a person of integrity?
Many people think that a person of integrity is one who is honest and truthful, doesn’t steal, cheat or lie. But this is not the real definition of integrity. Integrity means whole.
I recently saw a quote to the effect that the person’s words, actions, thoughts, were consistent. I agree with this definition. Sometimes I find a person of integrity to be a jerk, but that’s simply my opinion of the person, which I arrived at using my own moral and ethical standards.
I was having a discussion with someone and said that by this definition, Donald Trump is a man of integrity. He is who he is. He is not deep or thoughtful, but according to New Yorker staff writer David Owen, who was speaking with Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air, on April 13 (the anniversary of the Titanic disaster), Trump behaved the same way when Owen met him for an interview for Golf Digest, as he behaves now, as president. Terry Gross asked:
How did the man that you golfed with compare with the president you’re watching on TV?
And Owen answered “Very much the same.” You can find the exchange in the transcript of the interview, about half way down, at the link above.
I don’t know if Owen is right, but at least he has spent time with the President. I have not. So I have to leave the possibility open that Trump is who he says he is. That is what a lot of people who voted for him said they wanted.
That does not mean I like his value system. In the end, most of us feel friendlier toward people with whom we share the top levels of our value hierarchies.
Hiring a Saint
“I took the liberty,” Dharmendra said, “of asking a saint to come with us.” I must have looked a little confused. “A saint?” I asked. “Yes, he’s a saint. I asked him to come so he can do a ritual for your mom.”
We were on our way to a thousand year old temple in the Kumaun (click for some maps), a division of the State of Uttarakhand, on the Indian side of the borders of Tibet and Nepal. I had already traveled twice to the Kumaun, and always found myself wishing I used some type of prescription tranquilizer as the taxi travels along the narrow roads, along the edges of nearly vertical mountain slopes. Dharmendra has been my guide all three times. We’ve never actually gone to the peaks of any of the tallest Himalayan mountains. Only the foothills. But the views are fantastic.
During the last trip to India, in 2008, which was a birthday gift from my parents, my mother, who was born in West Virginia, and could not wait to move away to a big city, but who always loved mountains, turned to me at one point, and said “I see why you wanted to come back.”
My mother was quite an impressive woman. She passed the CPA exam in 1956, and the Maryland and DC bars in 1967. There were not very many women lawyers at that time. In any case, she certainly impressed Dharmendra on that trip. He informed me that MAYBE my mother was as good as packing suitcases as he was. But he seemed to acknowledge that she was going to get what she thought was her due, and he learned some skills in that vein from her. I had gotten the news that she had fallen, and was unlikely to survive, a few days before I was to leave Chennai and head to north India, for the “vacation” part of my trip to the sub-continent. There was nothing I could do for my mother at that point, by going home right away. So I continued my trip, with modifications in case I had to cut the trip short, which I did.
An Indian engineering colleague had a question for me at the time I was planning the 2008 trip. “Is it wise to use Dharmendra’s services? Is he accredited by the Government of India?” I said no, but I couldn’t let myself worry. Dharmendra’s tour guide service is no ordinary tour guide service.
Dharmendra is going to give his clients an experience to remember. It’s never mediocre. Apparently, as I found out on this trip, it includes the services of a saint to pray for your mother’s soul, should the need arise. Dharmendra arranged for me to do what he would have done had it been his own mother near death.
Swami Shivachaitanyananda, I found out the next day, really is considered a saint.
After spending twenty years in a cave, he decided to rejoin society. He loves to talk. Making up for lost time, he’s extremely cheerful and active for 70. He is a self appointed concrete inspector. If he sees the wrong mix of sand and cement, he complains to the authorities. Apparently, a large construction in Rishakesh was redone after the contractors were caught cheating by the Swami.
His materials engineering skills don’t interfere with his regular swami activities. He taught me a few Vedic mantras on the way to the mountain temple. He was impressed with my Sanskrit pronunciation, which I had learned at the beginning of my trip at a chanting yoga retreat.
After driving for 5 hours, to get to the town with the nearby temple, we got out of the car, bought around 150 pounds of rice, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, etc., and called the temple priest to send down people to carry the food up the 3.5 km switch backed, gravel, rock, and tree root covered, steep path. I only had to carry myself and my purse. The taxi driver carried my sleeping bag and knapsack, along with his own stuff. As I looked up, and reminded my dear friend and tour guide that there was a reason I brought a cane with me, and that there was a difference between 3.5 km horizontal and 3.5 km vertical, he assured me it wasn’t strictly vertical. I made it. Slowly. The Swami beat me. Easily. Here’s the view from the “guest house,” at the 3.5 km mark. A mere half km from the top of the mountain, where the actual temple is. It was worth it.
Hopefully there will be a photo of the guest house itself in a later post, but for now I will say that we took the room that did not smell like burned plastic. The rest of the amenities? A concrete floor and a metal door, and two small windows with metal shutters. They were nice. They gave the spoiled American 3 extra blankets.
The resident priest made dinner for us. The most delicious dahl (spiced lentils) I have ever had. Dharmendra claimed it was because it was cooked on a wood fire. Despite the hot meal, I had never really warmed up after breaking into a sweat on the hike up. The mountain air was cold.
“No, Dharmendra,” I said. “Narendra (our driver) is not sleeping in a different room. He’s sleeping with us, to add his hot breath and heat radiations to the three of us.”
I asked if I had been snoring when we all woke up, and an affirmative answer let me realize that I did probably sleep for a few hours. Morning light at 7 meant time for me to eat the chapati that the priest had made specially for me so I could take my pain meds before walking up the last half km to the temple.
The last part of the climb to a mountain temple is reliably steeper than the rest. Getting to a mountain top temple is most of the prayer. As one of my companions on the earlier part of the trip, the yoga retreat, said, “The Indians With Disabilities Act has two words: Tough Shit.”
But with the cane, I made it. And the Swami performed the healing ritual for my mom. It turns out that she started breathing on her own, right around that time.
Never underestimate the power of prayer, whether it is from your own tradition or not.
Ultimately, as I already knew would be the case, my mom did not survive. But because she was breathing on her own, they were able to remove the ventilator mask, and my dad got to see her face, and kiss her face, and that meant a lot to him at the time.
Seeing her face, he was able to see that “she” was gone from the physical shell that had housed his wife of 59.5 years. It was still hard to let her go, but I think easier than it would have been otherwise.
Back at the guest house, the priest and Dharmendra had a little disagreement. Turns out that the Swami really is considered a saint, and the priest did not think that we should pay if we brought the Swami with us to bless his facility. Dharmendra had to clandestinely leave the money to pay for our accommodations.
Back at the bottom of the trail, as we got in back in the car, Dharmendra told me “Now you realize you are stronger than you thought you were.”
http://www.exotic-himalayas.com/
Miraculously, my arthritis pain was greatly reduced the day I got off the plane in India. Still, after two years of severe inflammation, my fitness condition wasn’t great. Back in the US for a month now, the arthritis pain continues at a much lower level than it was before I left. Maybe this is part of why old people go south for the winter. And probably why this wasn’t my last trip to India, even though I had said before I left that it was my bucket trip.
It was supposed to be MY bucket trip, not my mom’s.
UPDATE: Back in India for a memorial ceremony for Dharmendra’s mother, who sadly passed away a little more than a year after mine, I found this youtube link of a trip to this Temple, called Kartik Swami. It really give you an idea of the roads and paths and STEPS.
It was cloudier and there were more people there than when I went.
The link here is to another, longer video, that has better views of the far away Himalaya, more like what I saw, but is narrated in Hindi. It shows some other places along the way from Rishakesh to the temple, which are beautiful in their own right.
Spiritually Attached to India
“She won’t like it here,” the good professor wrote. “Westerners never do. There’s no room service, and the food in the cafeteria is all South Indian style.”
“She’s spiritually attached to India. She speaks fluent Hindi. This isn’t her first trip. She’ll be fine.”
My soon to be friend Shankar nailed it. I had never thought about it in exactly those words though. I’m spiritually attached to India. It would be my third trip to the subcontinent. The fluent Hindi was a bit of an exaggeration. I had pretty darn good tourist Hindi, maybe a thousand words. Grammatical mistakes in most of my sentences, but I was usually understood, then corrected, proving that they understood what I was trying to say. (My most used sentence on the hair-raising ride on the 1.5 lane wide roads on the sides of the “foothills” of the Himalayas, was -after correction- Nicche na dekko!!- “Don’t look down!”
sometimes followed by “But Look Down- it’s beautiful!”)
Shankar was correct, but he humored the professor, and asked me if I agreed that the accommodation planned, without room service, would be ok. I assured him that it would, and was very happy to have this new idea of spiritual attachment, and to have had someone who never met me in person realize it was true. I can’t really explain it; maybe I had a past life or three in India.
Really, my main concern about hotels in Asia is that the mattresses are so hard. Difficult on my arthritic joints. But I had resolved to just take extra pain killer, when I needed it. This was my bucket trip. I was acting on my desire to teach a failure analysis class in India, before the onset of my ultimate, inevitable deterioration. The mattress at the University guesthouse was unlikely to be harder, I reasoned, than the one at the rural Christian monastery where I was going to be spending the first week and a half in India on the upcoming trip. And the food was unlikely to be more difficult to enjoy than what the monks and nuns ate. And anyway, I had just returned from Japan, where I became convinced that the more expensive the hotel, the harder the mattress.
If I really hated sambar, rasaam, and idly, I probably wouldn’t go to south India. But I had learned to eat, if not love, the first two items, spicy soups, back in the mid 1970’s, when my South Indian ex-boyfriend moved to a town near my parents, who really liked him more than any other boyfriend I had before or after, and proceeded to teach my mother how to do South Indian cooking. I learned to more or less enjoy idly, a somewhat bland lentil flour based sponge, used to sop up the sambar, on my first trip to India, where they served it at the Hindu monastery (ashram) that hosted the meditation retreat that I was attending in 2001.
So I just had to deal with the reality of the hospitality that my hosts, for what was becoming a four day speaking tour in Chennai, were able to provide. I had offered to teach a two day seminar, give a dinner talk to my fellow members of our international engineering society, and a lecture to the engineering students at the local university. I ended up also giving a longer version of the dinner talk at two private companies, and another presentation to some eleventh graders, entitled “Is a Career in Materials Engineering Right for Me?” I wasn’t charging a speaking or teaching fee, but I thought it was reasonable to ask them to cover my expenses for the four days that I’d be visiting them. They agreed, but were concerned about the budget. It all worked out. I was back to normal food after buying myself four days of temptations at the Radisson Blu buffets.
Back home after a month in India, I feel more spiritually attached to the people and place than ever. After twenty years of trying to get traction exploring new ideas of how engineers can embrace critical and creative thinking, or what I’ve started to call “cultivating clarity,” I am lucky to have developed a small group of local, American people, who appreciate my creative approach to critical thinking. But each of the two Indian companies that invited me to the give the “Thinking Skill Optimization” talk had 85+ people attend. And they participated. And their managers thanked me in unique ways that allowed me to see that they were also paying attention. My new friend Prasad told me “You have gotten pretty close to giving a method for developing intuition.”
Yes, that’s right. And it was very interesting to me that someone who lives in the land of the longest lasting collective consciousness, the very source of intuition, understood that to be a major part of my approach. Of course many engineers would not be attracted to a class on developing their intuition, and even if they were, I imagine they’d have a hard time convincing their bosses to cover the costs to attend. It sure is useful to have a way to calibrate intuition though. When effective, it’s a lot faster and easier than calculations and analysis.
Thinking about it further, I am just realizing how unusual it was that both managers attended the training with their employees. How often does that happen in the USA? Most American managers think that the only thing they need to know how to do is balance a budget.
I think there is more to the success of the contribution of Indian industry to the global economy than low wages.