Easing back into the groove...

Dianne and I had three sweet days away at a family wedding - a lovely wedding, too - and 10 hot hours being together in our 15 year old, non-air-conditioned car riding to and fro the blessed event. It was good: time to talk (sometimes) and lots of time to think. The physicality of being "on the road" is one of our favorite ways of being together and we are almost always up for a road trip. (When we head out to Halifax later this summer, however, we may take the truck which has a most excellent air conditioner!)

Daughter, Jesse, called earlier this evening to wish me a "Happy Father's Day" and when she heard that we'd spent most of the day in the car she said, "Well, you sound great."

I love being on the road - this trip felt long because of the heat but it was all good - for it is one of the few unstructured times I have for thinking. One result will come to pass tomorrow when I work on "Dylan and the Beats: Part Three." Another is this quick posting at the end of the day: if one part of the Beat essence hails from New York (albeit it transplanted to San Francisco) a la Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, it would be wrong to forget the brilliance of both Ferlinghetti and Snyder.

+ Snyder was the key to both a new Americanized Buddhist spirituality as well as a new reverence for Mother Earth that celebrated the eternal link to living that most Westerners are only beginning to grasp at this late date. His earliest poem, "Riprap," laid a foundation that he is still exploring.

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

+ And Ferlinghetti not only wrote sweet and demanding poems of the soul within the body politic, but also brought much of the Beat literature to print through his City Lights Bookstore and Publishing. In 1958 he put it like this...

I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona
And I am waiting
For the grapes of wrath to stored
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on
And I am waiting
for the last supper to be served again
and a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
and I anxiously waiting
For the secret of eternal life to be discovered
By an obscure practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and TV rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

There really is something "spiritual" about being on the road. Sometimes Di and I find we are on a pilgrimage where the journey is often more important than the destination. Sometimes, as Stephen Edington, says, a road trip is the antithesis of Buddhist meditation and mindfulness where you simply live into whatever happens - and sort it out later. And often it is a little of both with LOTS of time for thinking and reflection.

Serendipitously, Adam Gopknik in the current edition of The New Yorker, writes that often the edgy spirituality of Jesus as recorded in the gospels sounds a lot like Jack Kerouac: not some programmatic radicalism of a national revolution, but "the Kerouac-like-satori-seeking-on-the-road" of the Beats at their best. Hmmmmm....