Insight and meditation - a continuous learning experience

This morning while tidying up a room after a massive (more than 300 books) donation to the Free Library Project in Camden, NJ, I came across several of Pema Chodrin's books. Pema Chodrin is abbot of Gumpo Abbey in Nova Scotia and a practitioner/teacher of Buddhist meditation practice). I credit Pema Chodrin with saving my sanity at one or two of the most difficult/painful periods of my life and what I have disovered over the years is that the seeds planted by the teachings from her books and cd's in the early years grow perrennial crops. I read all of Ch9drin's books as of the period of my discovery of her work which was around the time of the millennium, 2000.

My daughter had quit college in her freshman year and flown to California to become an acress. I was paralyzed by anxiety. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't control the "invasive thoughts" based on fear - serial killers, pornographers, all the rabid predaors who prey on the naive young girls who think they are grown-up and know the world.

My first attempt at seeking psychological counseling was a disaster, and I had no one to turn to, but somewhere, maybe Shambala Magazine, I had come across the writing of Pema Codrin, so I bouht a 5 cd player and her cd's and all of her books - at that time about a dozen with titles like WHEN THINGS FALL APART, IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY, and others, all of which seemed to speak to my condition.

Every night I loaded the cd player and listened for the hours when I couldn't sleep and what that did was it displaced the intrusive fear thoughts with soothing medictation prompts and Buddhist teachings.

Over the years, I picked up more books and cd's of Pema Chodrin's works and they were like refreshers. My experience with her and her works changed my life, saved my life.

This morning, I was thinking of the suggestion "look at your thoughts passing by; don't try to get rid of them, or scold yourself for thinking, look at them like clouds passing in the sky, see them, know that they are only thoughts." That may be one of the mosst powerful recuring lessons I have learned from Chodrin. I meditate throughout the day, on the porch after walking the dog, while walking the dog, or at times of idleness, and that practice has helped to tame and soothe an anxiety tortured emotional creature.

My latest addition to this world of wisdom was a book recommended to me by Friends from Providence Friends Meeting, by author Rex Ambler, a pamphlet book from Pendle Hill Publishers and I think the title is the MYSTICAL ORIGINS OF THE EARLY QUAKERS. In the book, the author describes how Quaker silent meditation is paralell, or related to insight meditation as well as various psychological approaches to exploring our thoughts and becoming more adept at recognizing patterns and allowing us to not be controled by emotions generated by thoughts that are unproductive or unhealthy (monkey mind).

When I donated the 30 or more cartons of my library, I kept out a few books here and there, incuding some of Pema Chodrin's and perhaps in a later post, I will list the title of the few I kept. I hope the ones that left bring some comfort to other tortured souls being ravaged by their own uncontrolled thoughts and fears and the unhealthy emotional fallout from them.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Family History Day

Red Bank Battleield, National Park, NJ

September 21st | 12 PM - 4 PM

Red Bank Battlefield Family History Day brings the Revolutionary War to life from 12 PM to 4 PM! Step aboard a colonial naval vessel and see how sailors once defended America’s freedom. At 1:30 PM, join a guided tour that uncovers the dramatic story of the Pennsylvania Navy and its bold stand at the Battle of Red Bank.

Twenty years since Katrina devastated the neighborhoods of New Orleans

One of the opening disasters of the 21st Century and a harbinger of disasters to come, was Katrina the category 5 hurricane that drove 25 feet of water into the neighborhoods of New Orleans and swallowed up the homes of half a million people and drowned and killed nearly 2000. New Orleans had withstood hurricanes before but this one was different, and this one was the opening salvo of the barrage of natural disasters to come: wildfires, mudslides, rising sea levels, drought - the consequences of climate change.

The Documentary KATRINA; COME HELL AND HIGHWATER, on Netflix gives a comprehensive picture of the before, during and after events that unfolded when that hurricane came ashore at New Orleans. This is superb docuemtary art - it blends the individual human experience with the wider media contxext and societial conditions to give a more fully informed view of the catastophe.

FULLY INFORMED - increasingly, the concept of being 'fully informed' has had less currency and 'emotionally driven' is the more operant fuel. Once an acquaintance and I were talking about how to know what is real or true in this age of misinformation, and I said that I use mulitple sources and compare. So, for instance, I get news from abc, New York Times, BBC, PBS, Cnn, and even the Guardian! Also, I subscribe to a news magazine called THE WEEK which surveys different news sources. She was a devotee' of Fox news and that was her only source of news bolstered by 'facebook' which in her life, as in many of others I have known, had become almost an addiction. Facebook was filling the lonely hunger for human interaction in lives where family, friends and neighborhood, had disappeared.

The power of Katrina took out the levees and canals that protected the low lying areas where the mainly Black neighbohoods were located and since they were in what was kind of a geological bowl, their houses were drowned in a25 foot storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. People took refuge in attics and an rooftops, but houses were lifted from their foundations adn floated away tilting and dropping off the roof riders. Houses hit debris piles and tipped over.

The people who evacuated and took refuge at the SuperDome athletic structure were left abandoned, no food or water or medical assisstance. People who were sent to the Convention Center for promised transport out, were also abandoned there without food or water, to die of dehydration, sickness, and lack of basic medicines for their conditions such as insulin for diabetes.

It is no accident that the horror fell mainly on Black families who had lived in those poorer districts, and no surprise that the government that was supposed to protect and save them was nowhere to be found, left in disarray and chaos except to send in troops to stop "Looting" which mainly consisted of people trying to get water and food from stores to bring to their families. Our own troops paid for by our own tax money pointing their guns at their own people during a disaster.

We all remain woebully unprepared for natural disasters which are guaranteed to increase and eventually come to us all as the government is in chaos and those in charge are not only uniformed but willfully ignorant of the impact of global warning. We have seen that at our New Jersey Seashore towns. Willfully ignorant builders are still allowed to put up and sell structures on barrier islands that are vulnerable to hurricanes and that also destroy the natural vegetation that would protect the sand banks without the developments. Like our politicians, these profit seekers place financial gain ahead of everthing else so that they can buy bigger houes, more cars, ostentatious displays of excess wealth.

It is the end of the summer and once again many of us watched the movie JAWS a summer classic and once again we saw the same contest between greed and the safety of people put into contest. This contest between the impulse to greed and hoarding against the impulse toward protection and care for our fellow beings has played out thorughout human history. It appears that currently, Greed and selfishness are in power. Love and care, however, are always to be found and are powerful forces That's where hope comes in.

Note: there are things we can all do - plant trees instead of poisoning your yard to make a perfect lawn which profits no one and poisons our water supply. Think of paying a little more and using bamboo sourced toilet paper and paper towels. Vote down efforts to transport dangerous chemicals through our towns such as the controversy raging over transporting Liquid Natural Gas on our local small town train lines. And even more importanty GET INFORMED AND STAY INFORMED and don't limit yourself to the emotional hook of the propaganda channel Fox (owned by the greedy billionair Murdock). Rich people do not honor the social contract. They don't pay their fair share of taxes and they don't care about their fellow man, they only care about other rich people and their status in regard to them.

Last comment: family, friends and community. One of the things I took from the documentary was how important these three relationships are and in particular in times of trouble. wrightj45@yahoo.com. People banded together to help each other survive, and in the aftermath, to help build new lives. And the most important things lost was the family connection, people were separated from their loed ones and struggled to locate them again after it was over. It reminded me of the lines of dusty foot traffic after the Emancipation in 1863 where people walked from town to town, plantation to plantation to locate their loved ones who had been sold off from them. If there is a moral, it is LOVE - love our earth, love one another, and pay attention to what is going on around you!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yhaoo.com

Broken Hearted Book Lover

Yesterday was Labor Day and also Metereological Autumn. It was also a day when with my sister's help, I let go of over half a dozen books from my vast book collection. I have been a book lover since my earliest days and I even have the first book I ever bought, a begining reader that I bought at Leary's Book Store off Market Street in Philadelphia when I was just old enough to begin reading. Once I began, it was an endless love affair, my longest and most intense.

But like all my love affairs, this one had to come to an end. Each phase of my life was cocooned in a spun collection of books on the subject. Here is one of my early ones: When I was 16, I took my babysitting money to a book store in the Cherry Hill Mall. There was a 'sales' table and for $4.95, I bought an Art book of the lithographic works of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. I fell deeply in love. Neither he nor I could have imagined that twenty years later, I would be in college studying Lithography as my major towards an Art degree. His lithographic posters were the shining city on a hill, the holy grail, the gold paved streets that inspired my journey. I couldn't help wondering, today, how Lautrec would feel to know that a woman in the far - over a hundred years distant future would be studying lithography because of his poster art. I think he would be astonished and pleased.

The reason I am divesting myself of my huge library is that I am losing my vision to Fuch's Dystrophy, a cornea disease. I can still paint and watch tv on my laptop, and drive, but I can't read without such a struggle (necessitating a magnifying glass) that it has no pleasure. My forlorn collections have sat gathering dust for a decade now, which was surely never their purpose in the world, so I decided to set them free.

Another reason I was divesting myself of my library NOW was that I have a connection with the Free Books Project which was originally located at the Newton Friends Meeting House in Camden when I began taking my books there. They give away gooks for free to anyone who wants them. At the time it was a community charitable venture that allowed Newton Friends Meeting to qualify for an archhitectural grant for repairs to the very very old Quaker Meeting House. The grant required that the building be engaged in a beneficial community program, so The Free Books Project was perfect. The Free Books Project is no longer there. Now they operate as pop-up libraries all over the city of Camden, especially in conjunction with other community events.

Knowing my books were going to such a worthy cause, helped me part with them. I liked to think that someone who didn't have the money to buy a book or access to a book store or a library could have a book to read. So many of my passions were between those covers.

Gone With The Wind: The film had such a powerful effect on me for so many reasons it could be an essay on its own. I loved it so much that I read the book many times, then the biography of Margaret Mitchel, then all the sequels written to follow the characters after the ending of the original book. Then I found a very old copy of the Civil War novel that inspired Margaret Mitchell. I can't remember the title now, something with "Drums" in it and if I remember correctly it was written by the granddaughter of a Confederate General, inspired by his memories of his war experience.

My years as a volunteer at Red Bank Battlefield in National Park, inspired an entire shelf in my floor to ceiling and wall to wall bookcase in my bedroom. First I read all the traditional histories, then novels of the battles, then diaries of the veterans like Joseph Plum Martin, and even two or three memoirs by Hessian soldiers, and I was inspired to seek out the three or four burial sites of some of the Hessian soldiers who died on the retreat after the Battle of Red Bank in October of 1777. And the WOMEN! I read the historical accounts of the "Camp Followers" and the memoirs of loyalists who lost everything, and female spies like Patience Wright (maybe she was a relative, maybe not) who was also a renowned sculptor.

For several years after retirement and during my long love affair with history, I gave talks for the Camden County Historical Society on the Underground Railroad. The Civil War and the Underground Railroad filled another 12 foot long shelf with stories of escape and valor, of suffering and success and led me on many hunts to spirit haunted places in my South Jersey landscape, like Saddler's Woods, or Ambury cemetery in Othello, Greewidh, NJ.

All these friends, companions, fire-starters got boxed up into cartons from a local liquor store and carted off to the Free Books Project. Goodbye to Harriet Tubman and Quakers serving in the Union Army, and Abraham Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln and her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley and Ona Judge who was never caught.

On the way home along Kings Highway from Clarksboro, I had a sudden squall of emotional pain and broke down in tears. But, I had to keep reminding myself, what is the use of keeping all those dusty books on the shelf when I can't read them. Surely that is both greedy and sinful.

S, now, the bottom shelf of all my collection of health books of the type of BLUE ZONES, and books on vegetarian cooking, heart disease, and other ailments like diabetes and kidney disease, are all out on the streets hopefully finding their way into the hands of someone who needs them. Now, all my Revolutionary War books are gone, and my Civil War books. And my Irish Literature books are all gone incuding a really old hard back of the works of Lady Gregory which I hated to part with. It was falling apart and I was afraid no one would understand what a treasure it was. I can still feel the damp, wet fog of the Irish night as the prisoner of one of her majesties torturous prisons makes his escape and cautiously ventures his signal to the dark figure waiting by the river, whom he hopes is the fellow rebel sent to help him. That scene is from one of her plays.

My novels went early and I can't even remember when I boxed and sent them on their way down the river of life. They may have been the second offering.

With foreboding I think there may be a bookcase in my dark and dreaded attic with all my poetry books in it. My Women's History went some years ago to the Alice Paul Institute Library.

The last to go will be my Art book collection in the floor to ceiling shelving unit my father buit into the wall at the foot of the attic steps. Those books I hold onto with the hope that the South Jersey Art Alliance will flourish in the Underwood Building of the Woodbury Friends Meeting grounds and that I can bequeath those books to them.

There are still three full shelves twleve feet long with New Jersey history, and a half shelf in the back room with coffee table books on Scotland and Ireland from my trip there and the following years of fascinating with all things Irish (my mother's people, after all, came from there!)

Well, now that I have gotten that off my chest, I feel a little better. I am reminded OFTEN of the Catherine Davis Poem, "After a time all losses are the same, and we go stripped the way we came."

When I left home at 18, I burned my yearbook in my family's backyard 'trash burning can' which we were allowed to have in those days, and when I left Philadelphia for New Jersey, I left all my college art portfolios and sketch pads. When I got divorced, I lost all my record albums and my entire collection of the books and magazines of the Second Wave Feminist Movement, books like The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch and dozens of one-of-a-kind magazines printed on University presses and early copies of Ms. magazine.

Well, pets have died, romances have faded, and even my daughter has grown and moved far away. Grandparents die, parents die, uncles and aunts and cousins die. Old schools close, I have lost my beauty and my agility, my youthful vigor and my vision, and I am losing my hearing. As I approach the toll gate on the last road before the final big adventure, I suppose it is natural that I leave all these things of the material world behind. It is like a sinking ship; who cares for gold and silver, fine clothes and furnishings when the sea is about to swollow you. Still, it is just as natural to mourn the passing of old friends and my books were old friends, really old lovers, and great companions. I wish them all loving discoverers on their journey into the wider world outside my dusty shelves.

Happy Trails - in ink and on paper.

wrightj45@yahoo.com