Lenten Diary 8

Can We Outgrow War?

     Now that I’m taking a few vacation days off from my job—my grueling 10-hour work week cleaning our neighborhood Methodist church—I have extra time to practice my poetry for a number of performances coming up 

     It’s an instructive experience. One thing I’ve learned is how little I’ve changed my mind in the last ten or fifteen years.

     The earliest poem on my refresher list, “Letter to an Activist Friend,” was written in 2002. In it I apologize to an anonymous activist for turning down an invitation to join him in Washington, DC, for “an exuberant uprising against the politics of fear and the policies of greed.”

     I main point I make in this poetic essay is that fighting—violently or nonviolently—will never bring peace. But perhaps peace can bring peace.

     My most recent poem, which I’m currently committing to memory, is called “Expand Your Mind.” Its main idea is that the contentious bickering among human beings across society has never changed and never will unless we consciously make ourselves outgrow it.

     The only thematic difference between the two poems is in degree. Both find confrontation ineffective as a strategy for peace. But the current poem is more urgent in its call for a cease-fire.

     I suppose I can give myself some points for consistency. I grew up anti-war and I’m anti-war still. I only defected for a few years when I lived in the country in a house of ruffians who liked to pick fights with other ruffians, and for those years I became a ruffian, too, and enjoyed a few scuffles with people who pissed me off.

     But I found no lasting pleasure in it. I usually got hurt, for one thing, even if I came out on top.

     For another, I found it was a backward way to make friends.

     And for a third, I didn’t write any poetry then. I didn’t write anything. I was creative sludge.

     It became clear to me that peace was the better way to go.

     But of course we’re not trained to make peace to anywhere near the extent we’re trained to make war. Life is a battle. Isn’t that what we’re told? We can’t let our guards down.

     Or can we? Is it possible to face the world with no defenses—and survive?

     So many of my poems, I realize, talk about this. If we would just make up our minds to live in peace, there would be peace. I don’t know if it’s true. It may be too hard—even impossible—to accomplish. Can we outgrow war?

      Aren’t we obliged to try?

      I’m sure the brilliant minds who designed our total war machine, if given that problem to solve, could find a way for people to live harmoniously with the rest of this planet. Maybe they’re working on that now, in some west coast think tank funded by an anonymous donor.

      But until their results are announced, I must find my own way through the killing fields, through the urban jungle, on the road to my own Jerusalem at the start of this fifth week of Lent.

Lenten Diary 7

Remembrance

      There’s a New Moon today at 2:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It will begin a lunation cycle that ends April 29, with the next New Moon. It promises to be one helluva ride, the most significant New Moon “in decades,” according to one astrologer I consult.

     I’m a mere dabbler in the planetary arts myself, but from what I can tell the most intense times will be leading up to the full Moon (“true Easter”) on April 15, then doubling down for a major assault on Easter Sunday and the few days after.

     Rapturists, take note.

     I’m not a rapturist, but I do believe in higher dimensions of consciousness than I normally experience during my waking hours on Earth. So I can kind of see the rapturists’ point. But I’m with those who say our average human awareness is but a sliver of all that’s going on around and within us in worlds we’ve only glimpsed in dreams and thought streams we barely notice or remember. Traditional Heaven and Hell are only two of those possibly infinite dimensions, and it’s odd we spend so much time speculating on just those two.

     That being said, I can feel the pressure building. It’s no exaggeration to say we’re in a crucible on this planet. Just turn on the news. Meanwhile, the astrologers are saying April is the month when tensions will peak. I’m inclined to agree.

     In other words, it’s put-up or shut-up time.

     I’m putting up. It must be part of my Lenten work. I’m helping to organize a month-long event of grass-roots poetry and music at The Venue here in Norfolk. We’re featuring social issues, to let local artists let off some steam and share their visions of a better world.

     That project has led me back to my own work over the last several years–poetry I’d written but only read in public once or twice, then moved it to the back of my notebook. Turns out I had three of those notebooks with many poems I’d nearly forgotten I’d written.

     I found some real winners in there. I mean, poems that animate me, that I know I could perform and bring an audience with me.

     Fortunately, with National Poetry Month on the horizon, I now have that chance.

     I also have my work cut out for me.

     But I have backing. The other night my original guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, came to me in a vision. I thought he’d forgotten about me long ago. But there he was, in the most beautiful, glimmering, colored lights, smiling. Simply smiling. He reminded me of all the teachings that I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but I couldn’t find a place for them in the world any more. He brought them up-to-date.

     This was not a big revelation, like seeing God on acid. But it was a deep one, reminding me that when I can’t see where Divinity is in the world or in myself, I need to take a toke on my pipe, pour myself a glass of Carlo Rossi Paisano, sit down in my rocking chair, turn on the jazz, and close my eyes.