Here's a couple of things I found scribbled on a scrap of paper recently. Must date back to 1999 or so. The first of them is my response to one of the ERMHA
workers, who had just written their very first poem. (it became a bit contagious, with me writing
poems left right & centre) ...
I loved your poem. I thought it was a wonderful effort for a first-ever poem and I'm sure it came right from the heart (& soul). It reminds me of my vision of the ERMHA
village, where everyone sits around writing poetry and eating jam.
I love the part about "next time round" you can be the client and I'll be the support worker. Hopefully, it will be in a time when services are well resourced and funded and in a world which is much more compassionate and understanding and enlightened. Hopefully, we will also have tapped into profoundly better ways of healing people and helping them understand their journey.
This second piece must be the start of a poem I was intending 2 write about John Bingham. I suppose he did feature in one of my bedtime
stories
...
Something also about no guile ... or pretence ... or any of the other 'features' that seem so essential for survival in the world as it exists today ...
In a quirky coincidink, here is the Leunig cartoon from this morning's 'Age' newspaper ...
Okay, here's another little treat ... I have had this CD for quite awhile but last evening I was reading the details on the little booklet ...
ABOUT ZEN
This superb record is not only a delight to the ear but an event in musical history. For it took Tony Scott, Western jazz clarinetist, to coax two of the greatest masters of traditional Japanese music to join him in an unrehearsed session of purely spontaneous playing. Ordinarily, Japanese classical music - as performed on the koto (table harp) and shakuhachi (bamboo flute) - is extremely rigorous and formal, but Scott, like the Pied Piper, charmed Yuize and Yamamoto into this free-floating improvisiation by his skill in playing the clarinet in the mood and style of the bamboo flute. In some ways, the result is more Zen than Zen - in the sense that, today, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the many arts associated with it have settled too firmly into the rigid - though nonetheless expert - ruts of tradition. Early Chinese Zen, so close in spirit to the Taoism of Chuang-Tzu was much more spontaneous, and this record recaptures its feeling quite remarkably.
Zen is a way of living (not a theory) through which people experience themselves, not as separate beings, but as one with the whole universe, of which every individual is a unique expression. The Zen artist, therefore, puts both his skill and his instrument - flute or harp, brush or potter's wheel - at the disposal of the Tao, the Way of Nature, so that his art becomes as natural as the clouds and the waves - which never make aesthetic mistakes. As a Chinese Zen poem says:
Doesn't it make you wanna rush out and buy the CD ...
I suppose I could plug 'music zen meditation tony scott' into
Google & see what comes out ...
And speaking of 'letting go' ... here's an article from this morning's
'Age' newspaper ...
In the scenery of spring there is nothing superior, nothing inferior;
This new and serene experience of being is nurtured by meditation (zazen) - a way of letting go one's thoughts and feelings, whatever they may be, and allowing them to settle into quietness, to the point where the sensation of the separate "I" gets rid of itself. An old master became enlightened in this way while hearing the sound of a flute, and said, "I just let the player play whatever tune he likes." Meditation is letting your mind go until there is no one to let go of it, but only
Flowering branches are by nature some short, some long.
Waters flowing on and on by themselves,
Flowers of themselves growing red.
THEY HAD A TEMPESTUOUS RELATIONSHIP BUT AMY TAN AND HER MOTHER, DAISY, PARTED AT PEACE.
The most hateful words I have ever said to another human being were to my mother. I was 16 at the time. They arose from the storm in my chest and I let them fall in a fury of hailstones. "I hate you. I wish you were dead." I waited for her to collapse, stricken by my cruel words, but she was still standing upright, her chin raised, her lips stretched in a crazy smile. "OK, maybe I die," she said. "Then I no longer be your mother!"
We had many similar exchanges. Sometimes she actually tried to kill herself, by running out into the street, holding a knife to her throat. She too had storms in her chest. And what she aimed at me was as fast and deadly as lightning bolts.
For days after our arguments, she would not speak to me. She tormented me, as if she had no feelings for me whatsoever. I was lost to her. And, because of that, I lost battle after battle, all of them: the times she criticised me, humiliated me in front of others, forbade me to do this or that without even listening to one good reason that it should be the other way.
I swore to myself I would never forget these injustices. I would store them, harden my heart, make myself as impenetrable as she was.
I remember this now, because I am also remembering another time, just a couple of years ago. I was 47, had become a different person by then, had gone on to be a fiction writer, someone who uses memory and imagination. In fact, I was writing a story about a girl and her mother when the phone rang.
It was my mother, and this surprised me. Had someone helped her make the call? For three years she had been losing her mind to Alzheimer's disease. Early on, she forgot to lock her door. Then she forgot where she lived. She forgot who people were and what they had meant to her. Lately she had been unable to remember many of her sorrows and worries.
"Amy," she said, and she began to speak quickly in Chinese. "Something is wrong with my mind. I think I'm going crazy."
I caught my breath. Usually she could barely speak more than two words at a time. "Don't worry," I started to say.
"It's true," she went on. "I feel like I can't remember what happened a long time ago, what I did to you ..." She spoke as a person might if she were drowning and had bobbed to the surface with the force of the will to live, only to see how far she had already drifted, how impossibly far she was from shore.
She spoke frantically: "I know I did something to hurt you."
"You didn't," I said. "Really, don't worry."
"I did terrible things. But now I can't remember what. And I just want to tell you ... I hope you can forget just as I've forgotten."
I tried to laugh, so that she wouldn't notice the cracks in my voice. "Really, don't worry."
"OK, I just wanted you to know."
After we hung up, I cried, both happy and sad. I was again a 16-year-old, but the storm in my chest was gone.
My mother died six months later. But she had bequeathed to me her most healing words, those that are as open and eternal as a clear blue sky. Together, we knew in our hearts what we should remember, what we can forget.
Amy Tan is the author of several books including 'The Joy Luck Club' and 'The Bonesetter's Daughter'.
Also from the same edition of 'The Age' ...
click
Also on the subject of letting go ... I received the following quote in my email recently ... From the TV series 'Northern Exposure':
"The sane man forgets the odd unexplainable events that DO occur in a lifetime, the insane man cannot or willnot block them out or forget them. they fester and polute the normal day to day way of life."
... yes, and while you're at it ... why not let go of the entire state-of-mind that seeks explanations at all ...
