Marijuana

In his new autobiography, Neil Young comes clean.  Because of his recent brain surgery, and under the advice of his physicians, he quit smoking marijuana.  He put down the pipe in January 2011 and hasn’t smoked since.  Not bad for a guy who’s been stoned since the sixties.  Inspired by his adult daughter’s journey into sobriety, he also gave up alcohol.  Any good child of the sixties is naturally drawn to experimenting with altered states of consciousness.  And when you’ve been stoned and drunk for forty years, sobriety is the new high.

            At first he worried, will I be able to write songs?  Will I still want to make music?  But the dam soon broke – he returned to his craft with renewed zeal and ferocity recording two albums in a row with his long time and distortion drenched rock band Crazy Horse.  The first was a collection of folk standards called Americana.  The second, released on October 30, is the first ever collection of originals by the clean and sober songwriter.  Psychedelic Pill put his worries to rest.  Neil Young’s star has never shined brighter.

            I quit drinking eleven years ago, and put down the pipe many years before that.  The pursuit of music was so deeply interwoven with those two activities, I too wondered if I would ever again write and perform music with the same conviction and abandon.  My fears were mislaid.  In fact, the opposite occurred.  When I came out of the fog, I began to write much better songs.  And I became clearer about how to record and perform those songs more effectively.  My entire recording career as a solo artist and the success I enjoyed with my band The Coyote Problem, including all the San Diego Music Awards, happened after I got clean.  It’s like I awakened from a dream, walked outside, and found the courage to take my place in the sun.  The stoned and drunk me was always too tentative, too wracked with self-doubt, too stuck in my own head to dare to live out loud.  I sometimes wonder how many opportunities I let slip by just so I could stay hidden.    

            Marijuana and alcohol are tricky.  One is legal and one is not.  Anyone can see the indefensible absurdity of drug and alcohol laws.  It makes no sense that alcohol is legal, widely available and socially sanctioned while marijuana is not.  It’s perfectly respectable to drink three glasses of wine as your eyes glaze over and your cheeks turn red.  Police officers, judges, governors, mothers and priests do it all the time.  But smoke one puff of a plant you grew in your own backyard and you’re a criminal.  None of it makes any sense.

            Yet marijuana use is not without its personal costs.  It may not be as benign as its advocates proclaim.

            Last year one of my students came to see me in my office.  She was a brilliant, articulate, well read and thoughtful young woman.  I wasn’t sure what she’d come to discuss.  After fidgeting and staring at the floor for a long, uncomfortable silence she said, “I have a drug problem.”

            Then it all spilled out.

            The drug was marijuana.  Not only was she a daily smoker, she stayed stoned from the moment she awoke in the morning till the moment she went to bed.  There was never one single moment of one single day when she wasn’t stoned.  As she told me her story, one word kept cycling around in my mind.  More than anything else she seemed brokenhearted.

            She wasn’t interested in counseling or therapy.  As a college professor I had all those resources at my fingertips, and was ready with phone numbers.  She shook her head.  She only had one question.  “What should I do?”

            “What do you want to do?” I asked.

            “I don’t know.  I don’t think I want to quit,” she said, “but I can’t keep going like this.”

            And that was the crux.  Her restlessness, her anger, her dissatisfaction, her discomfort were powerful messages in and of themselves.  Sometimes suffering is a gift.  It’s o.k. if you don’t know what to do next, I told her.  Sometimes it’s enough to know that you can’t stay here.

            A particularly poignant part of her story was the fact that her mother, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, has a medical marijuana card and smokes to dull the edge of her chronic pain.  It’s easy to see that marijuana is a remarkably effective medicine for certain chronic conditions and used judiciously it can be a highly beneficial component of palliative care.  But every medicine is also a poison.  Her family home was filled with clouds of marijuana smoke.  For everyone in the house, including her two younger siblings, marijuana consumption was as commonplace as breathing air.  How was she going to find the courage to put down the pipe under these conditions?  It’s easy to support medical marijuana in principle, but our passionate public discourse on the issue rarely considers the long shadow cast by these clouds of smoke.

            We talked for a while and looked at it from every angle.  I didn’t preach or tell her what to do.  It was enough to simply be present with her confusion and frustration.  The only suggestion I offered was experimenting with a temporary hiatus.  Why not stop for a week or two, just to see what happens – just to see who you are without it.  Marijuana powerfully and effectively shifts one’s emotional and conceptual frameworks.  It might be instructive to see what the options are.  It might be helpful to see what it feels like to not be stoned.

            When she left I felt frustrated and a little worried.  I wished I could have been more helpful.  But the best we can do for each other is bear witness.  I cannot choose for her.  Her authentic freedom is a Holy Grail only she can find.

            She said she would try to quit for a while just to see how it felt.

            The next time I saw her she was stoned.

            It’s funny.  When you first begin drinking and smoking, you do it because it lifts you over your adolescent awkwardness.  It helps you overcome fear and sets you free to connect with others.  It softens the pain and clears out the clutter so you can more immediately experience beauty and joy.  Then it turns around.  As the consumption becomes habitual, it begins to have the opposite effect.  The life of the addict and alcoholic is a life of increasing isolation and disconnection.  You get stuck in your own little world.  Things lose their luster and turn dull.  It just stops working.  You feel anything but free.  And a small voice inside of you starts asking for something more.

            Drugs and alcohol are neither good nor evil.  I seriously doubt the criminal justice system has any significant role to play, apart from the obviously sensible prohibitions against driving under the influence.  What we put in our bodies is by its very nature a very personal and private decision.  Each of us must bear the burden of our own choices, and take responsibility for crafting our own best lives.  That some are more competent in this task than others is clear.  But we must never dogmatize about how others are to live their lives.  It is hard enough to live our own.  Human beings have sought out consciousness altering substances since the beginning of time and no set of laws or social conventions is going to change that.  But the deeper and more pressing question remains.  What role do these substances have in a fully realized, vibrant and joyful life?  There’s only one person who knows the answer to that question.

Obituary ~ Hilbert Bolland

This obituary originally appeared in the Ventura County Star on Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Hilbert Bolland (February 19, 1922 – October 26, 2012)

Hilbert Bolland of Ventura, California died peacefully on October 26, 2012 at the age of ninety.  A memorial service will be held on Saturday, November 10 at 11:00 a.m. at Unity Church of Ventura, 740 E. Main St., Ventura, California.  He is survived by his brother and sister-in-law Hans and Ida Bolland, his wife of sixty six years Amy Bolland, their three sons and daughters-in-law Eric and Patty Bolland, John and Lourana Bolland and Peter and Lori Bolland, along with eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Named after his grandfather, Hilbert Bolland was born on February 19, 1922 on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.  His father had taken a position as a school teacher with the government of the Dutch East Indies.  His oldest sister was born in Holland, but Hilbert and the rest of his siblings were born there, growing up in the shadows of volcanoes, running barefoot through rainforests full of elephants, tigers and orangutan.

After Hilbert graduated from high school at the age of seventeen in 1939, the family took the long sea voyage back home to Holland as they had done every six years for their father’s customary six month leave of absence.  As they sailed away, they didn’t know they would never see their tropical home again.  A few weeks after their arrival in Holland, Germany invaded Poland.  Soon after, England and France declared war on Germany.  The nightmare of WWII would engulf everyone’s lives.  The peaceful islands of Indonesia became a distant memory.

Life became even more challenging in May, 1940 when the Germans invaded Holland.  The next five years of Nazi occupation brought horror that would haunt Hilbert the rest of his life.  But it was also a time of tremendous personal and professional growth.  Despite the challenges of wartime occupation, Hilbert completed three years of typographical school setting the stage for his lifetime profession in printing.

 

In 1943, as life in Holland grew increasingly dire, Hilbert was taken by the Nazis to Germany to work as a slave laborer in a print shop.  Despite the unimaginable terror of war, Hilbert often spoke of the kindness he received at the hands of the everyday Germans who lived and worked alongside him.  It deeply shaped him to realize that even in the midst of chaos and madness there was a spiritual core of goodness in everyone.

When the war ended in 1945 Hilbert returned to Holland.  Soon, in September 1946, he and his young sweetheart Amy Van Niel were married in the Rosicrucian Temple in Haarlem, Amy’s hometown.  Unaccustomed to the cold northern climate after a long childhood in the tropics and eager for an adventure in the new world, Hilbert convinced Amy to leave war-torn Europe.  The newlyweds sailed for America in 1950 with their two year old son Eric and another one on the way.  Their second son John was born in their new home town of West Paterson, New Jersey.  Hilbert found work doing what he loved as a typesetter at the New York Daily News.  Eight years later their third son Peter was born.

In 1962 Hilbert and Amy bought a trailer and a Chevy station wagon and moved their young family across the country to California.  They were aiming for the San Francisco Bay area, but after a swing through Los Angeles they stopped in Ventura, a quiet town just south of Santa Barbara.  Pulling over to rest at Plaza Park downtown, Amy noticed the newspaper building right across the street – the Ventura Star-Free Press (now known as the Ventura County Star).   “Why don’t you walk over and see if they need a typesetter,” she said.  Hilbert came back a half hour later.  “I start on Monday.”

Soon they bought a house on Clemson Street.  Hilbert planted two palm trees in the front yard to remind him of his childhood home in Indonesia.  He lived in that house nearly fifty years – most of his life.

Hilbert was a peaceful, contemplative and spiritual man with an ear for music, an eye for beauty and a deep love of the natural world.  He took great pleasure in being a family man and was steadfast and constant in his love for Amy and the three boys.  He greatly enjoyed his daily cup of tea with Amy every afternoon, as well as the nightly ritual of gathering the family around the dinner table for the evening meal.  Hilbert also took the family on countless camping trips and day trips exploring the America he had loved since he was a little boy in Indonesia where he had seen his first travelogues about the far-off mysterious land of grand canyons and sky high mountains.  His lifelong love of film led him to shoot and edit hundreds of hours of home movies.  He also wrote long letters home to his loved ones in Holland and enjoyed gardening and the quiet life.

Hilbert and Amy greatly enjoyed their decades of service as volunteers at the Ventura County Fair and took particular pleasure in their roles as docents at the Dudley House Historical Museum.  A lifelong learner and a natural born teacher, Hilbert often spoke to civic groups about the experiences he recounts in his self-published autobiography The Nightingale Sings Forever.  Hilbert loved Ventura very much, and gave so much back to the city he called home. 

We are honored to call him our husband, our brother, our father, our grandfather, our great-grandfather and our friend.  We will carry with us his quiet, endless love throughout the rest of the days of our lives.

The Bolland family would like to extend a special and heartfelt thank you to the entire staff of Glenwood Care Center where Hilbert was lovingly cared for during his lengthy stay, and the Rose Room Hospice staff for their compassionate end of life care during his final months.  We are deeply and eternally grateful for their constancy and kindness.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, http://www.alzfdn.org/.

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.