Category: Musings

Ethics For a Whole World

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I just have to share this excerpt from the Dalai Lama’s forthcoming book, Beyond Religion: Ethics For the Whole World.

“. . . Any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate.  What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: secular ethics.  This statement may seem strange coming from someone who from a very early age has lived as a monk in robes. Yet I see no contradiction here.  My faith enjoins me to strive for the welfare and benefit of all sentient beings, and reaching out beyond my own tradition, to those of other religions and those of none, is entirely in keeping with this.

I am confident that it is both possible and worthwhile to attempt a new secular approach to universal ethics.  My confidence comes from my conviction that all of us, all human beings, are basically inclined or disposed toward what we perceive to be good.  Whatever we do, we do because we think it will be of some benefit.  At the same time, we all appreciate the kindness of others.  We are all, by nature, oriented toward the basic human values of love and compassion.  We prefer the love of others to their hatred. We all prefer others’ generosity to their meanness. And who among us does not prefer tolerance, respect and forgiveness of our failings to bigotry, disrespect and resentment?

In view of this, I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion.  The development and practice of this new system of ethics is what I propose to elaborate in the course of this book. It is my hope that doing so will help to promote understanding of the need for ethical awareness and inner values in this age of excessive materialism.

At the outset, I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values.  Doing that would be of no benefit.  To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by commands, can never be effective.  Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence and happiness we all seek. Of course, all the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness, can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate.   This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion.”

 

Dating

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I was reading Advice From a Single Girl’s blog on dating–she’s very charming, by the way–how the blind date/online date meetup/meeting a stranger thing doesn’t work for her (quick aside here, meeting a stranger? so she can only date people she already knows?).  Nonetheless, it struck me that I’ve only been on three dates in my entire  life, the way I define dating, anyway: a specific request from a stranger or friend and being driven/walked/bicycled/carried/flown to a destination.

I’m not counting my two marriages, seems like I just slipped into those: the first, I was too young to date, my dad’s belief that all boys were untrustworthy assholes, after just one thing–like I would become smarter when I got older?  Anyway, whatever it was, the times or both my parents’ vigilance, I was actually a virgin when we married.  My second marriage was a chance meeting at Malarky’s Irish Pub for Taco Tuesday and that was that, together “forever.”  Or so it seemed.

So, my first official date was when I was 17, about to become engaged to my first husband–who was doing his military service in what is now Zimbabwe–when this “older” guy, around twenty, told me he couldn’t let it happen.  He couldn’t let me marry someone else before giving it his all to change my mind.  A couple of things to note here, I was in two minds about the engagement anyway, plus I was flattered all to hell, I mean, I barely knew the man: I’d caught him staring at me at Nkana Swimming Baths a couple of times and then he walks over and tells me this.  Whew.  Heady stuff.  Anyway, so he picks me up in his MG convertible, just for a “ride.”  I guess I could rationalize that.  And then he asks me to go to Chingola–another copper mining town about thirty miles away–for dinner that Friday.  It didn’t happen.  I got the guilts and that was that.

So my second date was when my first husband and I were separated four years after we emigrated to the States.  A stockbroker from Los Angeles.  He took me to Five Crowns, a swanky restaurant in Corona Del Mar and spoke of flying me to Las Vegas in his private plane the following week.  It was positively mind boggling to bushbaby super-hick me.  But I never got the chance, my husband picked that night to reconcile.  I still loved him so that was that.

My third date was a couple of months ago with someone down the street.  Nice guy, Thai food, convivial and all.  And that was that.  Maybe I’ll cook him that lamb curry, I mentioned, maybe not.  Thing is I can’t imagine actually “dating.”  I love my life just the way it is: empire of one (and two dogs).

Santa Ana Winds

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The Santa Anas blew into town yesterday, with winds up to 100 miles an hour in LA; we fared better down here in Orange County, only about 40 MPH.  Raymond Chandler once described the Santa Ana’s as “those hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

I must admit I can relate to the carving knife and the husband’s neck part, but I digress, that has nothing to do with the Santa Anas.  Thing is, I love the Santa Anas (well, except for all the bamboo leaves I have to sweep up when they’re done); they sculpt the clouds into amazing snowy shapes while blasting away that murky layer of smog that obliterates Catalina Island and turns the LA basin into a landscape straight out of the once futuristic movie, Blade Runner.

Not only that, but they set off the wind chimes around my house, especially the barrel-sized handcrafted Soleri brass bell suspended between the garage and the house, with a sound that celebrates my empire of one (and two dogs).  And then there’s the strange otherworldly light that illuminates the sky as the winds die down, and the sun sinks down toward it’s destination; the hills around me glow with a soft apricot light and a breeze wraps me in its warm embrace.

Later, the winds return with a vengeance and whip through the three different kinds of bamboo around my yard, tossing the elegant canes and leaves about; I fall asleep to the sound of creaking, rustling and sighing.

 

Silkies

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Check out these chickens. They’re actually Silkie bantams: one of the oldest of the rare breeds of poultry. Marco Polo wrote about seeing them in the Orient in 1200 A.D.  I included the photo at the very bottom of this blog, just so you can see their fluffy little legs (and toes!), from a website run by a guy who raises them. It was his contention that Silkies are one of the most docile, sweet tempered chicken breeds he’s ever kept.

I’ll go along with that.  Not that I’ve ever raised any, I’ve just had the pleasure of seeing these two in the photo above float around the perimeter of this guy’s yard at the end of Llewellyn Drive even with my dogs and their kinetic energy around. All the Silkies do is stop for a moment, raise their magnificent little white feather-duster heads and stare down at the dogs. Their eyes are surprisingly large and dark and winsome, kinda like those of the Olsen twins. No, wait, I take that back, an Olsen stare has been called vacant and bored, the Silkies’ eyes are filled with curiosity. There’s no fence around them. And I’ve never seen them stray. Way too cool.  Don’t they just make you smile?

 

All Creatures, Great and Small

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I’ve always had this thing about animals, all of them, including birds.  Actually, even insects, yeah, spiders too.  But that’s another post for another day.  Pisses me off when I hear someone call a chicken stupid, or a crow malevolent, etc. Henry Beston–1888-1968–says it best.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Over The Hill And Faraway

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Yesterday afternoon, instead of taking Fergie and Jake on our usual three-mile hike up the dirt road that winds up to the Top of The World (yup, it’s called that), I decided on the “other” hill, the one paralleling Laguna Canyon Road.  Haven’t been there for awhile.  With all the rain, the meadow on the left of the steep tarred road glows with a spring-like green.  A single house halfway up, perches above the canyon.

The end of the road flattens on the left into a spot that looks like a helicopter landing pad, but is actually the remains of a foundation of a house that burned down; a white slat-backed bench and two Adirondack chairs arranged just so sit under a tree complete with rope swing.  There’s a lot of history here, evidenced by the words “1947, Don” carved into a low cement wall.  The property is now owned by someone who, unable to get permits to build on it—access problems—gave it to his dad to maintain as a kind of little park for those who discover it, or so I hear.  I’m grateful for this.

At this point, I usually let the dogs charge around while I admire the view, one of Catalina Island on a clear day, and part of Laguna’s main beach; from this angle and height, the breaking waves look like white brushstrokes.

But then I realized that the hills around me had lost their thick summer shag, revealing that path that leads up to Bermuda Hills Drive.  I’ve taken it a couple of times.  Today, I’m going left.  There’s no path.  I do love an adventure.  Though, with those giant houses peering down from the hills above I’m not exactly in unchartered territory.  It’s the feeling I’m after, the feeling that I found a new path to try.

Jake and Fergie soon take the lead; it’s grabbing-onto-bushes kind of steep.  I pass what looks like a mini acacia, Africa’s umbrella thorn tree.  Trying not to slip as I angle across the incline, I find myself thinking about the time I was nine, looking for gold in the hills around Barberton, South Africa, where my dad made bricks for a short stint.  This is an area that contains some of the oldest sedimentary rock formations in the world, site of a gold rush in the 1880s.  I didn’t find any gold.  Instead, I discovered an abandoned mine shaft filled with vines and a couple of parrots swooping in and out.

I didn’t find anything like that today, not even close, unless you count the acacia look-alike.  Still, I enjoyed an invigorating hike until I came to a gully, newly formed by the looks of it with Jake and Fergie perched on the edge looking back at me.  There’s a way around but it’s getting dark.  Another time.  I turned back, satisfied.

Beginnings, Endings and Crackling Grass

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If you’ll remember I attended an essay workshop up at Lake Tahoe.  Turns out it was actually at a house in Squaw Valley, site of the 1960s Olympics, the entrance complete with Olympic rings and the famous flame:  six women, a massive stone fireplace, hammered iron balconies, and a dining room table that belonged in King Arthur’s court.  This was where we dined, but mostly where we wrote.  I’m not going to tell you about how I stalled time and again on the page in response to the writing prompts.

Instead, I’ll tell you about the desperation run I took in 25-degree weather that second day to clear my head.  Dressed in my winter clothes—Laguna Beach style—blue jeans, a sweatshirt and gloves, I tried to ignore the cold as I charged down the road and into the meadow that is Squaw Valley proper, evergreen trees not yet dressed in their winter white.  It was only at a point where the trees converged into a dark narrow path, lowering the temperature by a couple more degrees that I finally turned around.  By now, my nose was dripping, my toes about to snap off and I was shivering so hard I veered drunkenly off the path.

There’s a soft crackle and I stop.  Around my feet, a carpet of tiny frozen spears of grass pokes up this way and that.  I drop to my haunches and press down on an untouched area with my gloved hand, feeling the resistance there.  Another satisfying crunch.  Feeling a sense of wonder, I grin.  Moving around, I press down on another spot, then another and another.  I finally have to stop; the cold has become unbearable.

I run back to the house, feeling some kind of reintegration beginning to take place inside of me, something I vaguely recognize.  I’ve undergone this experience before when beguiled by nature, whether it’s here in my adopted country or my native Africa.  I’m reminded that as in nature everything in its own time and that I have to trust myself.  The words will come.

I wish I could tell you I aced the rest of the writing prompts.  I didn’t.  But I did come up with a killer ending to an essay I’d been working on.

Ah, the writing life.

 


Essay Workshop

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I leave tomorrow for a four-day essay workshop up at Lake Tahoe with six other women, which includes our leader, the brilliant writer and teacher, Ana Maria Spagna.

Yess!  That ought to get my butt in gear, ay?  With this weird mode I’ve been in I’m just a teensy bit worried that I’m going to freeze up, you know, like what on earth am I going to write about, why aren’t the words streaming onto the page?  As to the latter, who am I kidding, the words have never streamed onto the page, especially, not when I’m on the spot to perform.  Just as long as I don’t come up completely empty.

But hey, at least I’ll have fun.  This is about the seventh workshop I’ve taken with Ana Maria, mostly on memoir while I was writing Loveyoubye, in different places from the tiny community of Stehekin, gateway to the North Cascades National Park where she lives to Cannon Beach, Oregon, to Molokai, always under one roof.  Other than the very serious, illuminating learning that goes on, it’s truly fun.  I make new friends and reconnect with old.

We start out by buying groceries together–one time, we overbought and ended up stocking Northern Washington’s food bank for a good long time; we’ve gotten better at it.  Then there’s the drawing straws for rooms, communal cooking, sharing our writing, wine drinking, hot tub soaking (Stehekin), jogging on the beach (Cannon Beach, Molokai) and delicious late night discussions about writing.

It’s all good.

 

Another Take on Writer’s Block

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I had another realization about being blog blocked.  I’m afraid of writing crap.  Not that everything before this in my books and essays wasn’t first crap–might still be–but I had a chance to revise, revise and revise before it hit the light of day.  Blogs aren’t quite like that, there’s a time element, it’s pretty much writing on the fly.

But here’s the thing, this is the task I set myself and as Dennis Palumbo, in his fabulous book on writing says, “Every hour you spend writing is an hour not spent fretting about your writing.  Every day you produce pages is a day you didn’t spend sitting at a coffee shop, bitching about not producing any pages.

. . .Writing begets writing.

Not writing begets . . . well, not writing.

You do the math.”

 

 

Illustrating Monkey’s Wedding

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I got the idea from YA author and illustrator Catherine Stine’s October 11th blog where she posted an illustration that she’s in the process of refining for the YA futuristic novel she’s written.  Seems the illustrated YA is coming of age, what with the popularity of graphic novels.  There are so many classic African scenes in Monkey’s Wedding that makes this an exciting proposition, from the old witch doctor’ Anashe’s hut, to the jackal dragging a dead body from a shallow grave to this scene: Three hundred yards to the left of Elizabeth and Tururu, five eland buck appeared out of nowhere and floated on a heat wave past the jagged outline of his people’s ruins. 

The process continues.