October 9/Full Moon
My Dear Reader,
Thank you for being here. The light of the moon is full in the sky and it is the anniversary of my dad’s birth 82 years ago. He had become a student of the moon along side me these last years so it makes perfect sense to me that this first birthday after his death falls on a full one. It is the time to let the pull of the moon enhance those things you want to manifest in the world. And hence this post.
But first the podcast link:
This one is longer than usual, as such it will allow you to really sink in and ground. Enjoy.
Onwards:
I had a busy week visiting two different schools in two different states for my data collection job. I went to Des Moines and North Dakota. I like the traveling to small communities, the unsexy stuff of staying in a tiny windswept prairie town, and just being out where people live and work. Traveling is taxing on your body and being in sterile hotels makes it easy to fall into the trance of self-indulgence. I’ve taken to doing my own travel yoga podcasts and thus have lots of plans to make them more what I need. I stand by the sequences tho, great for a tired travelers body.
My leaving home to hit the road to these uncommon destinations, makes me think of Bob Dylan. We recently watched No Direction Home, Scorcese’s account of Dylan’s first years until going electric. It was great. A study of an artist’s process of absorbing sounds through his folk work and through the controversy when he went electric. He went from Hibbing to New York, perhaps opposite what I am doing from Minneapolis to country towns, but it has all brought Dylan back to more regular listening rotation in the household. It seems to me, he went out into the world to really feel what was going on, on the ground, in real time. He took all those originals in and then spit out his own poetry, with a little edge to it. Is there a reporting aspect to it? That is what I want to emphasize with this full moon here today. A need for local reporting. The veneration of truth.
“That he not busy being born is busy dying” If that isn’t a comparison between Great White Sun energy and Setting Sun energy, I don’t know what is.
Josh says he thinks the edge comes from the Jewish background (He proceeded to pull out other philosophical examples, Camus, Heschel, and Arendt (where this whole Songs of Forgiveness thing started). I don’t want to debate that here and now, but it did bring me to Josh’s family mythology with Bob Dylan.
Josh’s dad’s family moved to Cloquet in 1950 and then on to Duluth about three years later. Although I never knew Josh’s dad, I was lucky enough to visit those haunts with his Aunts in 2017. It is from them I gathered the details of this story. Josh’s dad, Paul, who was several years older and the youth group leader, played guitar very well. Bobby Zimmerman, as Dylan was then known, went to Herzel Camp with Danny Kosoff from Superior who hooked Paul and Bobby up. Bobby, who could really play piano, was known to play a lot of Buddy Holly at camp, came over to their house on a Sunday afternoon where Paul taught him some chords on the guitar, and we all know what happened after that. (Watch No Direction Home if you don’t.)
One thing I found in my notes from that trip back to these old realms is that Paul wrote Bob at one point, reminding him of that day, with no reply. Paul was a great letter writer so I do not doubt this. I wonder very much what it said. No Direction Home shows how crazy the world went as Bob Dylan’s art diverged from their expectations of it. Josh’s Aunt Ruth, who was a wonderful supporter of my work, died suddenly earlier this year. Aunt Dana, who is still out there and reading this newsletter, was a great friend and close cousin to Paul. Dana, this was such a meaningful trip that we all took together. Please let me know if I left anything out or got anything wrong. Thank you so much for your support.
Hannah Arendt turned up for me another place this week as the waxing gibbous grew to full. In a recent October second newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson said this to explain abandoning the rule of law and taking “refuge in cynicism” to remain in power.
After World War II, political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained that lies are central to the rise of authoritarianism. In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.” Ordinary people embraced such lies because they believed everyone lied anyhow, and if caught trusting a lie, they would “take refuge in cynicism,” saying they had known all along they were being lied to and admiring their leaders “for their superior tactical cleverness.” But leaders embraced the lies because they reinforced those leaders’ superiority, and gave them power, over those who did believe them.
This above quote was part of the reason I decided to dedicate this moon’s energy to truth.
Those years that Josh’s aunts lived in the Northlands of Minnesota they experienced much discrimination. More information claimed from those notes said that Josh’s grandfather, Abbo, was excited that he could buy the house in Cloquet on a Veteran’s loan. Aunt Dana’s Uncle Irving got him a job as a manager of a men’s clothing shop. The first winter that Paul and Ruth were there, they got a lot of snow and made a big fort. They loved the freedom after leaving Manhattan. But they were immigrants fluent in many languages and knew how to negotiate systems. They had fled the Nazi Regime, Josh’s grandmother leaving Cologne, Germany for Finland, and then from there to New York. Cloquet seemed primitive, unsophisticated. Aunt Ruth remembered how they didn’t fit in. The original resort that Hertzel Camp had bought in 1955 to make into a Jewish camp, hadn’t allowed Jews or Blacks. And the nearby lake, run by AAA didn’t allow Paul and his cousins to swim because they were Jewish. They moved on to Duluth and eventually, after the kid’s graduated from high school, back to New York, where they would all feel more at home.
We have come a long way from those years of segregation. And we continue to live in years of big change. And there is pain that comes with it. I will use Resmaa Menakem’s metaphor of clean pain and dirty pain here. We can choose the pain that brings us closer to the truth. The clean pain of breaking from the path of least resistance. Over the dirty pain of stifling our better selves to go with the status quo. We all need evidence of our own awakening to break with the powers that be. This Plot Summary of the Lotus Sutra has become foundational to my spiritual practice. It is the first chapter of a biography of the historical text written by Donald S. Lopez Jr. It is filled with stories that the Buddha used to teach skillful means. Skillful means, the ways to be skillful in times like these. The ways to stay heart open and do what truth calls you to do. One foot in front of the other. As best we can.
Years ago, Josh and I ran across this quote pictured below in the book called Awakening the Buddha Within. My encounter with the prophesy of my own awakening.
At the time, I had been staying afloat with lots of hot Corepower yoga. It was my meditation practice. The book goes on to say, that this was not only the prophesy of the awakening in the post-colonial west(I might have added the post colonial part myself, for truths-sake it needs to be distinguished) but also a prediction of future transportation. It is also the poetry of how awakening really happens. It happens in our small towns, in the woods and the villages, in the places we are not looking. In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha’s emerge from the earth like ants from the soil.
For now I bring it back to voting.
Deena Winter in the Minnesota Reformer email praised local reporters because of the ability of future reporters to more easily go back to fact check current races. She references research that says “taxes go up and voter participation goes down when places lose news outlets.” And we have lost a ton of local news outlets in recent years and the battle against reporters continues. So I ask, how do you pay attention to what is going on locally for you? Who is it you talk to or what is it that you read?
Many readers here are from my own neighborhood, but readership goes out in ever increasing circles into the great large world. That is the nature of the way we live. Of how we are connected and interconnected. My sister Becka recently moved from California to Oregon and has to relearn her election landscape. But other’s I know have to do that even with a small leap across town. She has shared with me some of her research. Rachel regularly shares with me some of her city planning board experiences and has her kids still in the school system that my kids have grown out of. I learn about their local things from talks with them and other friends. Are you having them too? Do you have anything to report about your local races and what is going on in your neck of the woods?
Hopefully this isn’t too much of a disjointed ramble through the weeds of my philosophizing. Thank you for reading.
Much love, Tina.
Resources for Further Study:
Here is a link to Charles Eisenstein’s recent essay on a experience in Kansas on a trip he took. It’s a beautiful story about what he witnessed in the heartland of the US and it touched me with hope and recognition. Charles Eisenstein’s sharing through the pandemic was a test for me because he shied away from taking sides and therefore was not to be pinned down as pro-vaccine. In fact I don’t know where he stands. And I think there is this balance in the yoga world between taking care of yourself as an individual and taking care of the greater good, which all comes back to the relative and universal truth. I loved, loved, loved his book The Yoga of Eating and still do. And the following article is reminiscent of that love for me.
