The Wisdom of Fall

A circle has no beginning and no end. It is ceaseless motion, an endless orbit around the still-point of the center. As the earth spins around the sun and shifts on its axis, shadows lengthen and the halcyon glow of summer grows dim. One by one the seasons take their turn, bringing us here again to the season of surrender. All the hallmarks of fall are upon us – school, football, and the turning of the leaves. With the certainty of death, things that once seemed so invincible – bright fields of ripening corn, hot July sun, the flush of summer love – fade away and lose their luster. It is time to settle down into the wisdom of fall.

            Let go. “All forms arise and all forms fade,” taught the Buddha. Embracing the inherent impermanence of forms is the work of all who would be wise. Autumn wastes no time on subtlety, loosening the dry leaves from the trees with callous abandon, tossing them to the street where they flow in long rivers of red, gold and amber, clattering like bones, gathering in eddies against walls where they slowly turn to dust and slip back into the soil. We see the sky anew through the bare branches and feel in our gut its infinite reach. We come to know that in our lives too everything we have built, cultivated, nurtured and grown will come to an end and be taken from us – a slow fade followed by a sudden gust. Renunciation or letting go is the hardest lesson to learn. We understand it intellectually, but to actually do it? Nothing requires more courage. But in the low light of autumn, we see from a fresh angle the inevitability of change and loss, and we choose to say yes.

            Be Grateful. Fall helps us shift away from the agitation of grief and toward the serenity of gratitude. We see how graciously the earth releases its grasp on the forms of summer and allows the withering to begin. We know that we don’t own any of this, all of it is borrowed, and the tighter we cling and grasp, the more painful the separation. Loss is certain. Our only choice is to grasp or release. We set the tone. Will our losses be graceful or wrenching? Instead of clinging and craving, we choose the consciousness of gratitude, the open-hearted joy that we even got to touch any of it, that we had these hands to hold, these eyes to see, this beautiful laughter, that afternoon when we walked on the beach and finally had the chance to say those important things to each other, these sweet late summer peaches, the blue moon of August rising through the pines, all of it a gift, none of it ours to keep. In the face of this great and ongoing loss, the only sane stance is deep and boundless gratitude for the infinite generosity of our lives.

            This is beauty too. Beauty isn’t just the flowers of spring or the green fields of summer. This tawny grass and the brown ferns and the bare trees of autumn hold their own beauty – empty, clear, simple, provocative, pure in form and deep as the ocean. Holding the spotted, wrinkled hands of our elders, wiping the drool away from the mouths of the dying, carrying our old dogs that can no longer walk out to the car for that last ride to the vet, the pale distance in the eyes that no longer see us or know our voice, this is beauty too. One of my favorite memories of my father, the last time I saw him at his house, was the day I shaved him out on the patio. He sat quietly in a chair and jutted out his chin as I ran the electric razor over his sunken cheeks and the loose skin of his neck. At 90 he no longer fit the youthful stereotype of beauty. But I saw an amazing man there behind the fog of his Alzheimer’s and the veil of his grizzled face and wrinkled skin. Autumn shows us that there is beauty in every stage of form, from conception to dissolution. Why should one moment be more valuable than any other?  Every moment is a window into the infinite, and the infinite is the source of all beauty.

            Nothing ends. “There never was a time when you did not exist, nor will there ever be a time when you cease to exist,” said Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. In the perennial philosophy there is a deep and unshakable conviction that while outer forms come and go our essential nature is timeless. As Eckhart Tolle wrote in Stillness Speaks, “Death is not the opposite of life.  The opposite of death is birth.  Life has no opposite.” And Joseph Campbell asks, “Are we the light bulb? Or are we the light, of which the bulb is a vehicle?” All around us the Grim Reaper takes his harvest, but Life itself is unharmed, and is in fact served by the pruning, just as a rose bush blooms best in spring if last year’s dead wood is removed. Flowers blossom and fade, but the rose goes on.

            Returning to our roots. As the brash colors of summer seep from the world leaving a hundred hues of beige and grey, life’s essence slips beneath the surface. Plants and trees withdraw their energy and settle down into their roots. No longer outward turned, we too go within and touch that sacred center from which we and all things come. Tending to the source means leaving aside our busy lives and growing quiet, trusting the world to carry on without us – we won’t be missed as much as our egos think we’ll be. This is the paradox inherent in the deep realization that we are at once nothing and everything. The quiet music of our eternal nature is easily drowned out by the noise of the world. But inward turned, we gradually hear the one song of the universe playing in us, through us, as us. To be liberated and returned to one’s essential nature is the yearning of every soul, and only in the stillness of autumn can we feel in our hearts this ancient longing, and heed its gentle pull. As we learn to be still, we return to our authentic being, what Zen Buddhism calls our Original Self. It is a sacred homecoming of healing and restitution.   

            The joy of surrendering. Autumn is commonly met with melancholy. This needn’t be. Only from the perspective of spring and summer does autumn seem sad. From the still point at the center of the circle, each season has its place in the great turning, and is in itself a celebration of the whole. Autumn is a time of freedom. It is joyful to be free of the old forms that encased us. It is delightful to walk on unencumbered, beholden only to the yearning in our heart for what’s next. So insidious is the process of attachment that we never realize how heavy our load is until it is taken from us. As the Zen saying goes, “How refreshing, the whinny of a packhorse unburdened of everything.” With open hands and open hearts we walk on, grateful for the blossoming of spring, the bounty of summer, the liberation of fall and the restoration of winter, knowing in our bones that each season is a stage in a great and infinite unfolding. This is the wisdom that each of the seasons gives us. This is the secret for which we have so long toiled. These are the best days of our lives. These are the hours of our amazement. This is the moment of our awakening. We are grateful, and head over heels in love with every drop of rain, every budding branch, every falling leaf and every flake of snow. We stand in the center of it all and say yes.

The Mark of Paul

[A version of this article under the title "Sinners and Saints" first appeared in the September/October 2012 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The centerpiece of the Christian narrative is the concept of human nature.  Are we inherently flawed and in need of outside assistance or imminently sacred and inherently unified with the divine?  How the apostle Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ teachings shaped the Christian view of sin.

The Early Years

Although they were contemporaries, Jesus and the apostle Paul never met.  They never walked together down a dusty road, sharing figs and dried fish as they talked.  Paul, the Pharisaic Jew, never had the privilege of sitting in the shade of an olive tree and listening to the teacher share his fresh take on the Kingdom of God, a vision unmoored from the teachings of the Temple and rooted deep within his own experience.  Paul never felt the loving gaze of his teacher’s eyes, or the touch of his hand, or the way his wordless presence awakened others to their own divinity. 

If Jesus and Paul had met, things might have turned out differently.

Instead, in the heady years that followed the state execution of Jesus, long before the first word of the New Testament was written, Paul did his best to cobble together a set of doctrines and practices from the scattered recollections of Jesus’ students and his own insights. 

Paul became a follower of the nascent Jesus movement, known simply in those early years as “the way.”  It is Paul’s understanding, some say misunderstanding, of Jesus and his teachings that shaped Christianity more than any other source.  Paul pulled the movement together by writing letters to fledgling groups scattered around the Mediterranean in places like Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus and Rome – letters that set the tone for everything that was to follow.  Four hundred years later those letters were canonized by the bishops of the Church and became the inerrant word of God.  It is impossible to overestimate Paul’s importance in the formation of Christianity.  Almost half of the New Testament was written by Paul.

The Nature of Sin

Jesus spoke a regional dialect of Aramaic.  For him, the word sin would have been hob or hobha, a term borrowed from a commercial context meaning “debt.”  In Greek, the language of the New Testament, hob or hobha became hamaratia, meaning “internal flaw.”  For centuries, ancient Greek tragedians had employed hamaratia as the driving force of their plays, the plot element that brought down the protagonist in a paroxysm of pride and obstinacy.  For the Greeks, the most common internal flaw was hubris, a destructive, self-obsessed arrogance. 

As soon as they were written down, the teachings of Jesus were altered by the unavoidable distortions of translation.

            When the Bible was rendered into English, hamaratia became sin, derived from the old English word synn, an archery term meaning “to miss the mark” – yet another layer of meaning.

            So what is sin?  Is it a temporary debt we can repay?  Is it a permanent stain no self-effort can alleviate?  It is a deeply rooted psychological flaw that will inevitably spell our doom?  Is it a simple mistake, quickly corrected when we release another arrow from our bow?

            And how do we repair the damage?

            How do we climb out of the hole and get back on level ground where we are no worse than anyone else, and no better than anyone else?  How do we restore our original status as beings of infinite value?  How do we lay bare the lie of our unworthiness and in the light of forgiveness walk across the bridge that spans the chasm of our alienation?

War and Peace

Paul and Jesus characterized our relationship with sin quite differently.  In Paul’s dualism, the material world and the spiritual world are locked in an eternal battle.  In The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell writes, “For Paul, the moral life is difficult, muscular and perilous.”  In Paul’s often violent portrait of the human predicament, we must cultivate the vigilance of warriors and gird our loins against the weakness of the flesh.  Declaring that “nothing good lives in me,” Paul seems to loath his own humanness and pines for the triumph of his spiritual nature, a transcendent force that comes from above.  The cancer within is “our sinful nature,” a power so great that we cannot overcome it with our will, yet struggle against it we must.

            In his letter to the Romans (7:21), Paul writes, “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in my own members.  What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  Two thousand years of traditional Christian dogma take birth in this single passage – the claim that this world, including our own bodies, is hopelessly mired in sin, that sin is a condition, not an event, and that we’ll really only be free when we’re dead.

            Jesus paints a startlingly different portrait of sin and the means of our release from its grasp.  Instead of battling against an adversary we can never conquer, Jesus asks us to abandon the entire paradigm of life as a struggle and move instead into a condition of consciousness characterized by surrender and ease.  “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” he says in Matthew 11:28.  “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

            The Sanskrit word yoga is etymologically linked to the English word “yoke”, and it is no accident that Jesus employs this potent agricultural metaphor to describe a deep psychological state.  In the same way a yoke channels the vast and undirected energy of oxen toward a specific aim, the disciplines of yoga seek to channel the vast and undirected energy of consciousness toward a specific aim, a fruitful harvest of awakening.  We’re always yoked to something, whether we’re aware of it or not, because our thoughts bind us to words and actions.  When we are bound, or yoked, to selfish, destructive thoughts, we are led down a path of suffering.  When we choose instead to follow our higher nature, our Christ-consciousness, we feel the struggle slipping away, replaced with serenity and divine alignment.  Conflict is replaced with cooperation, agitation with contentment. 

Mitchell puts it this way: “For Jesus, there is no drama.  The more we surrender, the more we are carried along in the current of God’s love.  Not that good and evil don’t exist, but when you see into the realm beyond good and evil, where everything is pure grace, we are much less likely to be caught up in our own judgments and moral categories, and much more ready to experience every action as easy and natural.”

           

Know Peace, No War

By emphasizing the dualism of good and evil and our own inherently sinful nature, traditional Christianity bears the mark of Paul.  But what if Paul got it wrong?  What if the early church’s reliance on Paul set Christianity off on the wrong foot? 

What if Jesus and Paul had met and become friends?  Perhaps Paul’s strident self-loathing would have softened in the loving gaze and unconditional acceptance of the master teacher.  Maybe he would have seen himself differently and written some very different letters.

Guitar Solos That Made Me Cry

I love guitars.  And I really love a good guitar solo.  In the history of recorded music there are so many good ones.  We could argue all night about which are the best or the most important.  But I want to take a more personal angle.  You would no doubt write a very different list, but for me, these are the guitar solos that break me down and start the water works.

            A guitar solo is a funny thing.  Commonly sandwiched between verses and choruses of sung lyrics, it’s time for the singer to step back and let the music shine.  A good guitar solo comes in many forms.  Sometimes it’s a primal, pre-cognitive scream.  Other times it’s a homey, back porch hug from grandpa, all pipe tobacco, flannel and Old Spice.  But no matter what shape it takes, its wordless language speaks to the deepest part of us, that part so few things ever reach.  In “Yellow Ledbetter”, an outtake from the first Pearl Jam album Ten, singer Eddie Vetter invokes Mike McCready’s guitar solo with the words “Make me cry.”  Indeed.  Here are the guitar solos that make me cry, even now, after all these years.

            I have to start with David Gilmour’s iconic, whammy bar infused Stratocaster manifesto at the end of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”  This is as good as it gets.  A rich, gorgeous tone, long fluid lines, ice hard flurries, and long shafts of tonal light reaching deep into the chasms of the unconscious – this is what all electric guitar solos aspire to be.  Gilmour doesn’t play over the song – he inhabits it.  This is the mistake so many lesser guitarists make.  They see a guitar solo as an opportunity to stand out and shine.  But Gilmour knows better.  He knows that a guitar solo is a chance for one pair of hands to lift the whole song into transcendence.         

            There are many outstanding Neil Young guitar solos, but the one that really gets me the most is the one from “Words”, the last track on his essential album Harvest.  Like so many other Neil Young songs, this song is a meditation on the cost of fame and the strange isolation that world adulation creates.  With its loping time changes and syncopation, “Words” is one of Young’s most sophisticated arrangements, yet it still retains its rustic recorded-in-a-barn charm.  In the middle he builds up a slow solo on electric guitar over a bed of bass, drums, piano and pedal steel.  Some critics have compared Young’s guitar work to Coltrane, and no other song makes the point better.  The halting, stuttering stops and starts of his lines perfectly embody the uncertainties of any life, let alone the life of a young man on the cusp of wealth and fame in the patently insane world of pop music, a life Young has never comfortably embraced.  His confidence in the midst of awkwardness becomes our own.

            For sheer minimalist brilliance, let’s turn to guitarist Keith Scott’s work on Bryan Adams’s power ballad “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” from the 1991 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves soundtrack.  Scott and fellow Canadian Adams met in 1976 and began recording together.  They’ve been together ever since.  In this solo, you can almost feel the trust they have for each other, the way Scott lets each note hang, waiting patiently for the song to shift beneath him.  This solo is a perfect example of one of the most difficult things for any guitar player to do – nothing.  Wielding silence and emptiness as masterfully as sound and fullness make’s Scott’s solo one for the ages.

              At the age of fifteen Neal Schon landed a job as a sideman in an early formation of Santana.  It was either that or accept Eric Clapton’s invitation to join Derek and the Dominos.  Not bad for a kid.  But Schon really made his mark a few years later as a founding member of Journey.  Schon’s solo at the end of “Faithfully” is a masterpiece forever schooling guitarists on how to support and stay within the bounds of a pop song while simultaneously elevating its themes to celestial heights.  Following a fluid jazz idiom, Schon first anchors the melody, then varies it, then goes completely nuts taking us all with him.

            David Lindley is a multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire with countless album credits to his name.  But his work with Jackson Browne remains his most powerful.  In “These Days,” Lindley finds the beating heart of Browne’s paean to lovelorn sadness and lays it bare for all to see.  Every time I listen to this solo it seems brand new again.  Lindley makes it clear: a solo, like a work of literature, should have a beginning, a middle and an end.  A solo is not just noodling around or stringing a bunch of notes, lines and figures together.  And a solo should never be about the guitar player and his or her prowess and technique.  A great guitar solo burrows so deeply into the soul of the listener that the guitarist and the band disappear leaving only a wide open expanse of beauty, space, light and redemption.  That Lindley accomplishes this so effortlessly ranks him as one of the finest instrumentalists of our era.  And don’t get me started about his violin solo on “For a Dancer.”  Different column.

            “Gypsy”, a Stevie Nicks composition that didn’t fit on her solo album, found its way onto Fleetwood Mac’s thirteenth studio album Mirage.  Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar solo, echoing the format of their earlier masterpiece “Go Your Own Way”, doesn’t appear until the end.  Employing his trademark finger style approach Buckingham creates a cascade of shimmering notes that pour down like stardust and build upon the magic spell that Nicks created with one her most personal and powerful vocal performances.  When you hear a song like this you kind of feel sorry for all the other bands that will never in their wildest dreams reach these heights.  Buckingham’s solo plays the song out in a long, slow fade.  Woe unto the DJ who talks over this solo.  I will find you.

            The history of pop music is filled with great partnerships and the sub-genre of Americana is no exception, from Buddy and Julie Miller to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.  On “Barroom Girls” from Welch’s 1996 debut album Revival Rawlings plays a plaintive and heartbreaking solo that deftly encapsulates the world-weary pathos of this lament – so simple, yet so rich.  Who knew two unadorned acoustic guitars could create such a flood of emotion.

            Over on the mainstream Nashville side of country music, Paul Franklin’s pedal steel guitar solo on Vince Gill’s “When I Call Your Name” perfectly exploits the inherent ability of a pedal steel to create a shifting, sliding, fading, falling, slippery slope where you can’t find your feet and you fall powerless into the dark heart of the song.  I’ve listened to this a thousand times, and never in a million years will I understand just exactly what Franklin is up to.  But it breaks my heart every time.

            There are others.  I could go on.  And I know you have yours too.  Some other time we’ll argue about “best” guitar solos, or “most important” guitarists.  So many of my favorite players aren’t even on this list, like Angus Young of AC/DC, or unquestionable greats like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.  But in the end, the solos that grab me the most are the ones that keep me in the car in the driveway, unable to turn off the radio and go inside.  And besides, you don’t want your wife to see you crying. 

Ten Truths from the Kitchen

I’ve been studying cooking for a few years with Chef Bernard Guillas of the Marine Room in La Jolla, California.  When he isn’t running a group of top-tier restaurants, writing award winning cook books, flying off to New York for a Today Show appearance or Paris for induction into the prestigious Maître Cuisiniers de France (Master Chefs of France), he shares his boundless love of food in bi-weekly cooking classes at the Macy’s Home Store in San Diego.  Each class costs a whopping five dollars, every penny of which goes straight to the San Diego Food Bank and helps feed thousands of families in need.  My wife and I and a few friends have been attending regularly and it has really boosted the quality of our dinner gatherings, to say the least.  But something surprising and unexpected happened along the way.  Whether he intended to or not, while Chef Bernard was teaching us how to cook, he was teaching us how to live.
 

1.  If your process is chaotic, your results are chaotic.  Before you begin cooking, clean and organize your entire work space.  Gather all of the tools you will need.  Assemble and measure your ingredients.  That way, once you begin cooking nothing will interrupt your flow and you’ll be able to feel your way through the process without having to constantly stop and go looking for something.  And clean up as you go.  Your kitchen should start clean, stay clean and end clean.  The French phrase for this is mise en place.  It means “putting in place.”  How much easier would our work lives be, how much smoother would our homes function, and how much richer would our creative output be if we applied this principle to all the processes of our lives?

2.  Do one thing at a time.  When you are mincing shallots, mince shallots.  When you are filleting a salmon, fillet a salmon.  A divided mind is the enemy of awareness.  That’s when you burn the butter, drop a glass or cut your finger.  In every task we must be present and in a state of relaxed focus.  Only then do solutions and pathways appear.

3.  Keep it simple and let the ingredients speak for themselves.  As you create your own recipes or adapt the recipes of others, don’t over-think it.  Never let flash obscure substance.  When possible, eat in season, eat fresh, eat local, and let the natural flavors, scents, textures and colors of your ingredients suggest combinations and techniques that bring out their natural beauty.  And just because you have every ingredient in your pantry doesn’t mean you have to use them all.  Less really is more.  As in life, when in doubt, leave it out.

4.  You eat first with your eyes.  When you plate food, pay special attention to the way things look.  Every meal begins as a visual image, followed by aroma, then flavor.  But it all begins with the eyes.  So too in life, don’t discount appearances – of course inner beauty matters, but so does outer beauty.  Make your homes, offices, gardens, indeed your lives beautiful.  Follow and amplify the natural lines of your raw materials.  Celebrate the splendor of the visual dimension.  Take a tip from nature.  Look sharp.  Let your personal appearance be your primary art form.  Make it easier for others be drawn to the treasures within.

5.  Follow your senses.  We are cerebral creatures.  The name of our species, Homo sapiens, means “man the thinker.”  We are justifiably proud of our intellectual and rational accomplishments.  But we are still animals sensing our way through a world of bewildering sights, sounds, scents and textures.  As you assemble the earth’s bounties into dishes that feed and delight, allow the authority of your senses to speak.  And as you struggle through life’s challenges, let intellect guide your steps, but let your senses show you the path.

6.  Practice.  Cooking requires the mastery of a core set of techniques – knife handling, heat management, traditional prep processes, culturally specific ingredients and the regional methods that accompany them.  There is no short cut to mastery.  Simply begin cooking everything you can.  Then do it again, and again.  Eventually mistakes fall by the wayside, instincts sharpen and results improve.  So too in life, how can we demand mastery in any endeavor without a long and arduous apprenticeship littered with failure?

7.  Let the mystery be.  Food is energy embodied, made from the elemental substance of the earth just as we are.  When we eat, we commune directly with the mystery of existence and with our own deepest nature.  When we break bread together we enact a ritual that grounds us in the fundamental unity of all life beyond the veil of birth and death.  Don’t turn eating into an intellectual puzzle.  Embrace your animal nature.  All eating is killing, and as such, involves loss.  Eat mindfully, compassionately and reverently.  Honor the earth’s gifts.  And honor your heart.  Each of us must draw our own ethical lines and avoid imposing our views dogmatically on others, for in the end it is only a matter of degree between the omnivore and the vegan.  We vote with our forks and with our dollars.  Support growers, ranchers and fishermen who share your values and treat the earth with dignity.  Still, no matter where we draw the line, we all must participate in the sacrifice of life.  Trust your gut, and do what you feel is right.

8.  The process is the outcome.  Don’t put all your stock in the end result.  Make every step of the journey a destination in and of itself.  “Sometimes it’s better to travel than to arrive,” wrote Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he’s right.  Sometimes the dish you slaved over all day doesn’t turn out right.  But you have most certainly not wasted your time.  There is joy in the stages of becoming that the end result doesn’t know anything about.  Let the path itself be your reward.

9.  Cultivate gratitude.  After your mise en place is complete and you’re ready to begin, check in with yourself.  Don’t touch anything until you have a grateful heart.  Respect the plants and animals who gave their lives for your table.  Work with them consciously and compassionately.  Respect the fishermen and farmers who dedicate their lives to bringing you the fruits of the earth from every corner and continent.  Feel their passion and their commitment to excellence.  A sacramental offering is placed before you on the altar of your kitchen counter.  Don’t poison it with resentment or self-pity.  Preparing food is not a burden – it is a sacred ritual.  Really see.  You are surrounded by miracles.  Let gratitude fill your heart and guide your hand.

10.  Let your work be play.  Cooking shouldn’t be a chore, it should be fun.  If you cannot cook with love and an open-hearted sense of wonder, step away from the stove.  Slap yourself in the face and get it together.  Your mom was wrong.  You should play with your food.  Get your friends involved.  Lead your kids into their own life-long love affair with food by your example.  Explore the myriad wonders of the earth together.  Food is communion that erases all boundaries.  A chef is a shaman, a priest, and an alchemist who uses fire to turn the base elements into the Elixir of Life.  Cooking and eating binds us to ourselves, to each other, and to the sacred source from which all things come.  Learning how to work with food teaches us how to work better with the whole world.  Who knew all of that could begin in the kitchen?