In Pursuit of Ecstasy

By Chuck Smythe

[Editor’s Note: I posted Chuck Smythe’s musing, “Second Monday Music: In pursuit of ecstasy,” ten years ago, on April 7, 2013. I repost it today, on my father’s 118^th birthday, not only in remembrance of my father, but also in recognition of ecstasy as a forever pursuit.]

“The Tao of which one can speak is not the Tao.” Thus Lao Tzu began the Tao Te Ching—then went on to speak of the Tao at great length.

11 Years Ago Today: Spiritual jocularity

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 22, 2010.]

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    “Morris,” he said, “do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?”
    “No, Mert, I don’t believe any of that.”
    Even though [Mert] then said, “Ha! I don’t believe that!,” it’s true. I don’t believe it.

But Mert’s question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were “signs from UIE,” or Universal Intelligent Energy¹ (pronounced YOU-ie [“or YAH-weh?” my son suggested], and aka “God”). Now, I don’t believe that; now, I can just “be spiritual” naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I’m able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say “Praise Youie!” If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won’t make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we’ve been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein’s famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens’s Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

11 Years Ago Today: Oh, where are you, Charlie Thomas?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 21, 2010.]

Yesterday was one of those days when everything just felt wonderful and right and I was on a continual glorious ride of love and laughter and play. Everything clicking, to-do items getting checked off at a good clip. Not possible (I don’t think) to identify the reason or reasons for it. Just go with it and glory in it, enjoy.
    Much of the feeling remains, and I’ve laughed a lot today, too, despite having had to concentrate intensely much of the day on an editing task.
    But I do remember a few of yesterday’s highlights:

• About 8:30, my boss emailed the members of his department to please attend a brief meeting at 11:45. A few of us buzzed about a bit what might be up. I enjoyed asking two or three colleagues, “You’re near the center of the inner circle; what do you think’s going to be announced?” Of course, no one knew for sure. Meeting my boss himself in the stairwell, I asked him, “So, what are you going to announce at 11:45?” He smiled in his utterly boyish way. “Now, what could it be? Maybe someone in the department got arrested? Or won the Nobel prize? Or maybe...someones retiring?” He has worked hard and produced so much of late; we were all glad for him upon hearing the announcement.
• A little later my neighbor friend Bill telephoned with the news, “I got the job.” He’d not been regularly employed for many months. Bill and I go for walks and talks occasionally. He thinks that even though I’m not religious, I’m “spiritual.”
  

• My nephew whose three fine novels we tried to find a publisher for a few years ago emailed me that he was reworking his first one and would I like to help him prepare it for Amazon’s Kindle format? I replied, “I’d love to be involved with your publishing project, and I’m honored to be consulted.”
• When for exercise I was delivering to a friend an envelope from the mail room, I told her I recognized the name of the sender, an intern who’d worked in her office. “What a fine young man,” she said. “In his third year in law school, about to go intern for a judge.” I told her I’d actually been thinking about him, wondering whether he and another intern, with whom I had worked, were still....“Oh, yes,” my friend said, “wedding bells soon, I think.”
• After standing at my bus stop for 25 minutes after work and beginning to wonder whether I was going to have to telephone the commute van’s driver to please come pick me up (never been done before), an express bus that’s not supposed to service my stop (I’d not even attempted to flag it down) did stop for me. I told the driver, “I so appreciate your kind heart!”

So many nice things happened, I’m sorry that I waited too long to remember them all. But I do remember one more, the most jocular one of all.

Around two-thirty, I answered my phone and the voice sounded familiar, if perhaps a little older than the last time I’d heard it. “I just called the first person I was able to find at UNC.”
    Of course, my old IBM colleague Charlie would have lost my telephone number and would need to search a website or something to locate me. The wonder was that he could remember where I worked.
    “Charlie,” I said, “how wonderful to hear your voice!”
    “Charlie?” he said.
    “Yes, Charlie,” I said. “It’s you! And it’s so good of you to call. How long has it been? Two years, three? How are you?”
    “This isn’t Charlie,” he said.
    “Of course it is! You sound just like you!”
    “No, really.”
    “Are you sure?” I said. “The last time we talked, Charlie, you said you were getting Alzheimer’s. Are you finally to the point you don’t remember who you are?”
    “You don’t have to have Alzheimer’s,” he said. “But I’m not Charlie.”
    “Well,” I said, “okay. Then, who are you?”
    It was a complete stranger, calling from Pennsylvania. He said his name was Mert, which I guessed was short for Merton. He was trying to get in touch with an “old Army buddy,” who he thought might have gone on to be a professor of geology at the University of North Carolina.
    I took the particulars and promised to help find his old friend, if he could be found. I told him that Charlie, the last time I’d spoken with him, was herding Alpacas in a town in Ohio, next door to Pennsylvania. I told Mert that Charlie was about the same age as him and the friend he was trying to find – around seventy-five.
    “How old are you?” said Mert.
    I told him.
    “I didn’t think you were a young guy. Most young people, you ask them for help, they don’t want to spend more than a minute with you. Anytime I ask a young person for help, I get a geography lesson. None of them is willing to help you to the end result.”

Before nine o’clock this morning, I had a telephone call from Mert’s geologist. The secretary of the Carolina Geological Society, whom I’d emailed, had called him last night.
    It had been fifty years since the geologist and the man from Pennsylvania served together in the U.S. Army. The geologist thought he recognized Mert’s last name, but he thought his first name might be Mervin rather than Merton.
    On the van ride home yesterday, I enjoyed telling Donna and Ina about “Mert’s” call, and about my whackiness about Charlie Thomas’s Alzheimer’s. Today, I enjoyed telling them that I’ve already found Mert’s old friend.
    The van arrived at the Lowes Foods parking lot, where my wife and Siegfried waited for me, in our only car until we take delivery of our new Volvo. I said to today’s van driver, “Hope, thank you very much. You are the best driver in the fleet.”
    A few of the others looked at me. “I mean, besides Chris and Melanie, of course!”
    General laughter. “Hey, I’m ‘crazy.’ It’s fun.”
    Donna said, “We who have admitted we’re ‘crazy’ are on the road to recovery.”
    What a day! Another one.

13 Years Ago Today: All in or All out

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 9, 2007.]

I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Søren Kierkegaard’s view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as more accurate) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of accuracy, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.

Interview: Martha Sink on making pots

Inspire • Create • Serve

Interviewed by Moristotle

I became acquainted with Martha Sink in her role as a librarian with Alamance County Libraries. Questions would arise when I tried to use the libraries’ website, and I was directed to Martha as the person who could answer them for me. Indeed she could, and she was also quick to act on suggestions I made for improving the website. My wife and I even made a special trip to the libraries’ main location so we could meet her.
    When I emailed her recently just to say hi, she told me that her 37 years as an employee of the Alamance County Libraries system had been “a long time” and she had “a new career lined up and underway.” She said that she “figured that when [she] was more interested in throwing pots than coming to work, [she]’d know it was time to retire!”
    I told her I thought my readers would like to hear about her plans, and she agreed to do an interview. My questions are in italics.
    Photographs of some of her creations are interspersed throughout the questions and answers.

Ten Years Ago Today: All in or all out

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 9, 2007, not a word different, same image as then, but with an author’s note at the very end.]

I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Kierkegaard’s view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as more accurate) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of accuracy, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.

The Trump sex scandal & spirituality

Edited by Moristotle

Novelist blogger Peggy Payne pointed out yesterday something else that Donald Trump has sullied besides the level of our political debate. “Among his other sins, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is using a previously-respected political position to tar the reputation of the, at best, sacred and ecstatic act of sex.” (“Spirituality, Lust, Trump Sex Scandal,” Peggy Payne: Novels of Sex & Spirituality)

Did you do anything sexily spiritual at 12 last night?

Peggy Payne on that sort of thing

Noted by Morris Dean

With novelist Peggy Payne’s kind permission, we recommend her article, “The Sexy Spirituality of New Year’s Traditions,” published yesterday on her blog, Novels of Sex & Spirituality. Excerpt:

Thor's Day: A poem from the heart

Fetus

By Felicia Zapata Finnegan










They claim that I'm just a ball of blood
without any shape or form
they called me by the name of fetus
cause I'm not yet a human formed

Thor’s Day

Pentecost at Chimayó 
(a short story)

By Bob Boldt

[Foreword: Last Sunday I attended the Catholic mass memorial service for a dear friend, Tony Barnicle. As readers know, I am no fan of any organized religion. I attended the mass out of the deep love and respect I had for my old friend. I must confess to being deeply moved by nearly all forms of worship. I feel the psychic force present in all such events, be they Santeria drummings, Baptist revivals, or the Catholic mass. This service was no exception for me. About the time the communion was being served, something released a memory from three years ago when I attended another distant mass with Tony and his wife, in the Sanctuary of Chimayó in New Mexico. I subsequently described the experience in a short story. The communion liturgy last Sunday somehow brought back all the sensual experiences of that other special mass, in Chimayó.]

Thor's Day: What’s Your Story? What’s Your Landscape?

By Bob Boldt

In Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” from the collection Crossing Open Ground, he states that the purpose of storytelling is

Thor's Day: Thanksb’giving

Sacramental

By Morris Dean

A friend told me recently that he’s looking forward to Christmas, because he so much enjoys choosing the perfect gift to put under people’s trees – something that says “thank you” to each person in a way he or she can recognize and appreciate: giving as a way of saying thanks, or saying thanks by giving.

Thor's Day: Riding the graces

Not in this world

By Ralph Earle








No one who has gone there has complained.
It is simple and obvious. No one denies it.

Thor's Day: Night's open door

And why not?

By Ralph Earle






On the edge of sleep
again the door opens, that door
through which light pours.

Thor's Day: The mythological dimension

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

Where words do not reach

By Morris Dean

The mythologist Joseph Campbell enthralled many of us when we were exposed to his views surveyed in Bill Moyers' 1988 PBS television program, The Power of Myth. You may remember Campbell's advice, "Follow your bliss," though what attracted me was the mysterious sense of our connection with the world that birthed us.

Thor's Day: Spirit in the mountains

A tale of two hemispheres

By Edward Jarvis

High Sierra: September [2004]

Heavily stepping at
altitude toward the meadow, a vast
award notched in the mountain,
I notice late lupin squatting,
lingering at the trailside
like so many tiny blue urchins.
The aspen have already begun
their brightening, the wind-flicked
yellow shimmy that dazzles.
A rubric of baneberry lines

Thor's Day: Spirits

By Morris Dean

It's thrilling to suppose spirits alive
    and circling us in rocks and stars and trees.
Poets have fancied clouds could not but thrive
    to see daffodils dancing in the breeze,

Thor's Day: Trinity

Lego churches

Three churches

By Morris Dean

Because it was Sunday, our rendezvous with my wife's cousin and his family was going to be at their Church of Christ a few miles south of Baltimore. To get there by 1 p.m. from where we live, we got up at 3:30 and left the house at about 5:05. We had been making good time when I took the wheel for another turn at driving, so it looked as though we were going to get there on time despite the growing apprehension I was feeling at the thought of having to darken the doorway of a hard-core Christian church. For surely they weren't just going to come out into the parking lot and we all just drive off together. We were probably going to have to go in and mill around for a while, especially since it had been about ten years since we'd been up to see them.

Thor's Day: Something to it?

The King of Spades?

By Ed Rogers

There has been much ado about religion on "Thor’s Day." While here and there I have added my two cents, I have tried to stay out of the sure thinking that goes on by those for and those against.
    Is there a God? The non-believers say NO. The true believers say YES. I say I don’t know.
    I do not believe there is a God as depicted by the Bible, but that does not exclude the possibility that there could be something out there or over there that could be called God.
    The sixties were a time not only of upheaval, but also of searching. Young people were looking for their own truth. Having been lied to most of their life, they turned to drugs, religious cults, Ouija Boards, mediation, Indian folklore, and psychic powers...At least, these are the ones I tried.

Thor's Day: Let's find our common ground

A non-traditional approach

By motomynd

This column’s June 6 survey, “Thor’s Day: How does belief in prayer affect how you regard the here and now?” was most thought-provoking.
    That people often live outside the official doctrine of the religion they claim to follow has to me always been the most baffling aspect of “organized” or “official” religions. It is like saying one is “anti-gun” while walking around armed. How someone can drink or use drugs, and say they are a devout member of a religion that is against both, just makes no sense. Ditto for adultery, lying, cheating, stealing, and on and on.