All The Infinite Space Between

 

Because there otherwise might be silence,
the stones cry out,
mind you on your way!

Freedom is economy,
rather than autonomy;
choice is not license,
but responsibility.

This walk,
through the valley of the shadow,
is about all our meetings with other
so as to see divinity—and also self
—reflected, as in a pool of infinite love.

Would it be a surprise
to know each being
is responsible even for the air
—which seems free for all to abuse—
and all the infinite space between?
How best to use it?

The veil over perception parts
with the realization that
agency is the abeyance of will
to meet subjective moment
objectively.

Otherwise, how is the cultivation of Eden possible?

© Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

To Be or Not To Be ... Anthropocentric

Are we for or against ourselves? 

Perhaps the better question is: If we are for us, when will we start acting like it?

If the questions above seem outrageous, out there, or confusing, let me pause for a moment to offer some brief foundation on which to pin these questions.

I was born in 1961, in Berkeley, CA, a city known for radicalism and protest, then and now. My parents took us on marches. We belonged to the Co-Op. We participated in early ecological efforts. (If anyone can now remember the 1971 oil spill on San Francisco Bay, my mother took my sister and me on AC Transit to San Francisco, so we could all help in the rescue of birds and beach cleanup. This was a very low-tech process at the time. I remember lots of hay being spread about, to absorb the oil. While the beaches and bay were eventually cleaned, despite the efforts of hundreds of people, many birds perished.) We had family friends who had opted out and gone “off grid” by retreating to communes. My parents were more on the side of opting in.

Being a child of the television era, I was acutely aware of the news. Among my very earliest memories is of watching the funeral of JFK on our small, black and white Motorola portable TV. Time inched forward through strikes, assassinations, War, famine in India and Ethiopia. I knew that a war had been declared, by our President, on poverty in our nation. I knew that the Peace Corps, Red Cross and other groups were actively working to help people in other nations stricken by illness and famine. I knew there was war against illiteracy. Unrest was all around. Sometimes, I did not feel safe, but I always felt that most people were working to make the world a better place for everyone. That is a little about my background and those events that informed my understanding of the world.

Today, I look back and see that the Progressive ideas, which had their roots in three and more generations before my birth, have largely failed. We can look at the history that has been written since and find a few overarching reasons for these failures: Military Industrial Complex and rampant, unregulated Capitalism. Progressivism and citizen activism have been undermined by those moneyed interests that prefer maintaining hegemony over influence and power to partaking of an equal share in human rights and justice.

War to bolster hegemony and claim on resources has cost more lives and more money than could ever be imagined. Unrelenting capitalism has enslaved entire populaces to create and exchange worthless junk, designed for rapid failure, that quickly becomes refuse, littering our world with toxicity that threatens to endanger the health and safety of all living beings.

What few people seem to realize, here in 2018, is that the world economies are no longer tied to nations, but to corporations that wield enough wealth and power to actively avoid the attempts of any governmental body that would control them. My proof of this lies in the movement toward privatization of the security sector, and to some extent in the numerous recent wars/conflicts that seem to have been unilateral manipulations by certain governments, but which have profited corporations engaged in “rebuilding efforts”.

It is apparent to me that nationalities and governments no longer hold the keys to human destiny, and this is why terror organizations and nefarious cyber disruptors are currently so successful.

It is also apparent to me that no one at the top is interested in civilization or social wellbeing.

What shocking things to say!

If only humans could be accused of being anthropocentric! But, alas, we cannot.

If we were truly anthropocentric, we would realize that anthropocentrism is a state that must be cultivated. The principal flaw of capitalism is that it can only survive when people buy. But if the world is populated by a few haves, the rest being have-nots, ultimately means that that having is an endgame. If the captains of capitalism don’t get to work cultivating larger groups of haves (people who will be capable of buying because they have knowledge, jobs and health, affordable housing, adequate access to food and water), the “free-for-all” marketplace will die, along with great swaths of the world’s population.

After that, all that is left is warlord military might à la Mad Max. And then, you capitalists, watch out!

The solution, to my mind, lies in a benevolent anthropocentrism, one that buys into a central notion that to keep the world going, you need smart, cultured, engaged, and empathetic people of all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, genders and cultural affiliations; caring people. Such people know that the earth and all life must be stewarded, and that this cannot be accomplished by stealing, cheating, lying or bullying, but by cooperation toward a common good for everyone and everything. We need to demilitarize the populace. We need to find the root causes of violence, isolation, depression, misanthropy; we need to weed them out by healing, hybridizing and nurturing wellbeing, by loving. We need to dismantle predatory thinking and practices, and replacing them with innovation that breeds life and purpose. We need to cultivate citizenship and personal responsibility that is manifest in every action built from the bottom up, and (as business consultants never tire in speaking of) resonated in the tone from the top.

Evolution, that is I am talking about, folks. We need to evolve. We desperately need to become something we clearly right now are not. We need to become truly human and anthropocentric in the sense that being good to the world around us is the path toward both meeting all our basic needs and providing spiritual fulfillment.

It is a simple idea, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “costing not less than everything.”

Or, as Voltaire has his eponymous hero ultimately declare, “repondit Candide, ‘Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

A Flower in the Garden of Delight

My Master hath a garden

Full-filled with diverse flowers,

Where thou may'st gather posies gay

All times and hours.

Where nought is heard but paradise bird,

Harp, dulcimer and lute,

With cymbal and timbrel,

And the gentle sounding flute.

O Jesus, Lord, my heal and weal,

My bliss complete,

Make thou my heart thy garden plot,

True, fair and neat,

That I may hear this music clear,

Harp, dulcimer and lute,

With cymbal and timbrel,

And the gentle sounding flute.

~ Anonymous

While I have been trying to process the passing of my friend, Raymond Martinez, the words of this anonymous Elizabethan poem sang themselves through my head, and suddenly the enormity this sorrow became clear to me, even dear to me –

But, of course, I must explain. (You knew that was coming.)

I don’t quite remember what year it was that I first met Raymond, but it was at a concert of French Baroque music in West Marin; other singer friends had invited me to come hear the program. I remember that when Raymond sang his solos, it was spine-tinglingly beautiful. And the inevitable duet, trio and choruses. I was introduced to Raymond after the concert, and we chatted for a while and then I was swept along to the reception. Before long, Raymond said, “You know, you should come sing with us.” And that was that.

That was that. For years and years and years, I would show up and it was “Oh, goodie!! I get to sing with Raymond, again!” And it was always a delightful time, whether it was sublime or ridiculous. We shared so many musical experiences that were sublime [Purcell: I was Queen Dido and Raymond was Aeneas, and it was exquisite!] or ridiculous [if you weren't there to see Raymond, dressed in a toga-esque costume with breastplates, head topped with a ten-gallon hat, make his grand entrance for "Oedipus Tex" roaring in on a forklift at Toby's Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station, you missed a singularly triumphant moment of ridiculousness in the annals of chamber opera], or even a somewhat disconcerting mixture of both, I can’t begin to catalogue them. But Raymond remembered all of them, and as the catalogue of your history with him expanded through time, so did a small, highly personal language develop between you and he. Heaven help you if you sat or stood near him during rehearsals, because he was a merciless sotto voce jester to whatever comedies evolved in the rehearsal process. He had the most deliciously wicked sense of humor, and he was always pushing the envelope of what he could successfully pitch into the room. Many were the times when I could feel my face burning red, as I struggled to keep myself from exploding with inappropriate laughter. Raymond would toss a cue word, a code phrase or a little sound from the personal language over his shoulder toward you; each of these was a golden thread woven, by means of the shared history, into the ever-unrolling carpet of fun and music.

One might think, reading this, that Raymond was frivolous, but no. Raymond took everything seriously, though he might not always be willing for people to see his serious side. There were glimpses of it, and it was revealed through intimate conversations.

Seasons came and went. Flowers of all kinds came in and out of season. But singing was always in season. We sang church services, memorial services, sunrise services for Easter, and midnight services at Christmas. Summer festivals; winter concerts; Sunday afternoon salons; the odd pick-up gig, here and there; and weddings. Raymond sang at my wedding, along with three other beloved colleagues. Someone else has written about how welcoming Raymond was to everyone he made music with in ensembles; music was never about competition, always about collaboration. Singing and musicking, the moveable musical feast, always and ever in season. And where there was music, there was Raymond, your colleague, confidant, collaborator, even co-conspirator in and of beauty—and fun! And when he wasn’t singing, he was taking in the opera, the symphony, friends giving recitals or concerts, edifying trips to museums of every kind [one day, as I was heading into the Legion of Honor, I heard my name called—there was Raymond! He'd already seen the exhibit and was waiting for a friend to come meet him for lunch. "Come this way— I know a terrific spot for getting pictures with the bridge in the background" So, I followed him. Indeed, it was a breathtaking spot, and he pulled out a film camera and snapped me with the bridge. Then his friend arrived, and after introductions, they went on their way, and I went on in to see the exhibit].

He loved nature; hiking; places of both cultivated and uncultivated beauty. God only knows how many miles he walked during his lifetime. He loved architecture. Life was all about being immersed in the ever transforming and informing experience of beauty. The back garden at Crescent Avenue was his hortus conclusus, a personal cloister of shade and green. He tended that garden, for as long as he was able, like it was a shrine, and shared it with friends as often as he could. As much as he loved this private sanctuary, he loved to happen upon beauty everywhere, and I truly mean everywhere.

Raymond may not have been all that handy with a computer, but his favorite piece of technology was the digital camera a singer friend gave to him. The right size to shove in a pocket, he was always prepared to experience and record his random encounters with beauty. Many of the subjects of the resulting photos were transformed into his superlative artwork, known to most of us through his business, Watercolors of the World. The last time I saw him, he told me about the condition of his health, asked me to pray for him, and then sought to soften this horrible blow by pulling out his camera and showing me the snap of an unbelievably gorgeous spray of flowers on a tree and a photograph of his latest painting, a giant succulent or cactus he saw in Golden Gate Park. “Do you know what species this is?” He asked me. I didn’t know. He knew far more formal names of plants than I did; he had to tell me that white flowers I’d photographed were freesias, not crocuses. But knowing the proper name doesn’t make the aroma of blooms sweet; they manage that on their own, whether we name them or not.

So, this brings me back to the Elizabethan poem. Those words were positively singing themselves through my head this morning, and I realized that Raymond, colleague and confidant, collaborator and co-conspirator, had also been the master cultivator, and of a garden much larger than the one at Crescent Avenue. Raymond spent his life cultivating a very great garden of friends. You and I, dear friends, each of us is a unique flower in Raymond’s garden; family, singers, poets and instrumentalists, all of us are in that great garden!

I think we can honor our friend Raymond’s memory best by being continually in season, blooming to bursting, and spreading, far and wide, our joyful noise of sweet and ever sweeter music.

© 2016 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen