Canyon Time: A Love Story

Today is Good Friday. For us, for Lorry and me, this marks our 46th year together.

We do not celebrate the day we were married in June, 1969, but rather the day we met and had our first date in the Gallinas Canyon outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Some friends had a campfire by the river but we chose to climb above to the bare rocks where the ancient flume wound around the cliff walls. We sat inside the flume, the old water-carrier, which was built like an endless trough. We sat holding hands watching the campfire burn below and hearing the laughter of our friends.

We watched the moonrise. Then we heard voices, singing. It was hard to tell what it was at first. It wasn't our friends. The singing came from far far away. At last, we knew. There was a morada on the other side of the canyon. Hidden away, secret. The singing came, it seemed, from somewhere, nowhere. A song from the Dark Ages etched in stone, in flesh.

Once again on Holy Thursday, the Penitentes were re-enacting the crucifixion. Devout, strained voices came and went on the wind. Moorish chants from another time, a world away. We sat quiet, listening,
penitents ourselves. Holding hands, in love. In canyon time.

The Power of Right Thinking

It's not about thinking on the right. Or on the left. Or hitting it dead center. It's about seeing clearly and thinking clearly, for it is as Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

In 1922 Dr. Frank Crane, a Presbyterian minister, wrote an essay entitled "The Power of Right Thinking." He followed it up with four other essays, each published separately, and each one dealing with another aspect of living.

With very little effort you can trace a timeline from Emerson (On Self-Reliance) to Crane, from Crane to Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), and from Peale to Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich). From Hill you can go to The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

What do all of these thinkers and their books have in common?

Dr. Crane tells us. Get rid of the enemies to right thinking and you're in the clear. Here they are, we all know them, but in the course of a day, we can easily forget them. My favorite "enemies" are --

Egotism
Fear
Prejudice
Ignorance

Of course Dr. Crane doesn't stop; he goes on prophetically. He states that Mind is everything. Love is everything else. And the belief in a higher power (call it life force if you will) joins the two as one. Using wisdom instead of unbridled passion, Dr. Crane comes to the conclusion that only through lack of Mind, Love and Wisdom do we err.

Easily said, you might say. So how do we . . .

Dr. Crane lays out a four-fold, eight-fold, sixteen-fold plan.  "The secret is simple," he says, "and as old as philosophy. It is that by repeating an action one can gradually induce a desire to repeat it, and by refusing a desire one can eliminate it.." So, what is the formula? Dr. Crane explains that Right Thinking is the answer. That means thinking without egotism, fear, prejudice and ignorance.

How do we accomplish this? Dr. Crane answers that we have to pay attention, we have to listen to others, we have to turn off our busy-body mind, and calmly surrender to truth.

What is truth? Truth is not what others say or what you think you say. It is not what others have told you to say or what great philosophers have said. Truth is in the center of all of these, but it stands alone. And it, alone, is pristine, unvarnished, and real. Truth stands in the middle between the arguments on either side that try to win it over to their side. Truth doesn't budge; it is what it is.

How can one live in the truth?

Dr. Crane suggests: "Eliminate the pronoun "I" as much as possible. Don't talk about yourself, what you did and what you like and what you're going to do. Encourage the other person to talk about himself."

The golden mean, the golden compass, the golden rule of Dr. Crane's amazing thinking is that it's so simple. So basic. "Watch your thought life," he advises, "and don't neglect the little things."

Please, excuse me, thank you. These expressions of grace are still useful. They still work.

"Everything counts," says Dr. Crane.

And he ends his 88 page masterpiece by saying, "You are not alone."

More on Maurice Sendak

So many people have written me in the past couple of days saying that they too had a meeting with the Master. 

A bestselling children's book author told me that his career was actually launched by Maurice because he sent out his first book in manuscript to a bunch of authors he admired and only one responded. That one was the one. Yep. Maurice. And his letter made up for the missing others. 

Catherine Balkin (Balkin's Buddies) wrote the other day: "I wore the Wild Things costume a few times, once at an event where Maurice was speaking. When I came up on stage, Maurice bent toward me and whispered, "I bet you're hot in there." He was right." 

Then a friend who was a both a children's author and an actor sent me this: "Did I tell you how we met? He had a condo in the same building where I was staying and one night after the ballet or opera, I saw Maurice getting out of a cab. He held the door for me,  but I told him no thanks. He seemed a little put out that I had pretended to want a cab, so I explained to him that I had wanted a cab, but now I was more interested in meeting him. That cheered him up and we strolled around the neighborhood. He pointed out where he wrote Wild Things and we said we’d keep in touch. We did, and had lovely days in Ridgefield every now and then." 

Maurice Sendak may not be an angel but he is a saint.  In my book, and I mean book. He has helped so very many people that I know and so many more I have only read. For instance, once he told me that when Edward Gorey was not very well known and still wearing a WW I airman's hat and goggles around the streets of New York, Maurice asked him if he'd like an introduction to his editor. Gorey said, "They wouldn't be interested in me." So Maurice took that as a challenge and asked his editor if the firm would be interested in Edward Gorey. And the answer: "He wouldn't be interested in us." I don't think Maurice got EG to take off his leather airman's skullcap, but he did get him published by a major house. 

There is a tendency today for authors who've "made it", as we used to say in the 70s, to forget how it was coming up. They forget -- some of them -- how much it means to a young author, would-be or not, to hear a word of cheer. Maurice, despite the curmudgeonly play-acting, is one of the few who always lent a hand, and, thankfully, still does.

the aliens among us

A friend just emailed and said another friend said, "The times are changing and they've never been worse." I decided I'd see how much worse. I time-traveled via Google, to 1978.

Back then the headlines read THE GREAT GOD GASOLINE.

So I traveled back another 100 years to 1878. The headlines read FIRST TELEPHONE DIRECTORY. I looked at the fine print and it said there were 50 names in the book.

What else was going on in 1878?

Well, the Standard Oil monopoly was just getting started, which is to say, just getting omnipotent. There were the usual strikes, wars, famines, and hair-raising homocides, so I decided to tick the time clock forward to 1883 and see what things were like.  That was the year the U.S. Supreme Court decided that, by birth, American Indians were aliens, and dependents.

I flipped forward to 1978. The aliens were in the news again -- new aliens, ones from other galaxies. People were seeing them everywhere.

Forward . . . back, as they say, to 2012. Aliens still in the news: illegal, once again. And what about the aliens behind podiums, they were plentifully in the news but not named as such.

"Are things worser or betterer?" my grandson asks.

George Dawson, a grandson of slaves, said only a few years ago, "Things are getting better, I do believe."  If you agree, maybe you might want to do what he did -- try going back to elementary school, learn how to read, how to be polite, how to share, how to be nice. Wouldn't that be something you could call news? Mr. Dawson did it, but then again, from what I've read, he was always a nice man.

So -- worser or betterer?

Doesn't matter if we can just learn to be nice.

From Lorca to Dylan

I read The Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca 47 years ago and I have been carrying them in my head ever since.  Sometimes I wake and they are there.  The myrtle and lime. The three hundred crimson roses. The trail of tears and tinny lights. The moon by sounding water. And then I come to this, and it always stops me:

Green as I would have you be.
Green wind. Green boughs.
The boat on the sea
And the horse on the mountain.

I remember reciting these lines to my professor, Dr. Richard O'Connell, translator with James-Graham Lujan of Five Plays by Lorca, and he smiled. "Whose translation is that?" he asked.

I told him, "Rolfe Humphries."

Doc, as we called him, looked a little uneasy. "Rolfe will forgive me if I say he got it wrong. It needs to be more like, 'Green, green, I want you green.'"

He emphasized it with his hands, clasping the air, grabbing at the invisible but palpable green. "Maybe desire is a better word than want," he said. "Have you heard it better?" he asked.

"Maybe I said, and I recited:

Green green rocky road
promenade in green
Tell me who you love
Tell me who you love

"That isn't Lorca!" Doc said.

"It's Len Chandler, folksinger-poet. I heard him sing his green song at The Gaslight in Greenwich Village in 1962. Len played the 12 string and he could really get you going with that song. Bob Dylan was usually in the audience."

"Who's that?" Doc asked.

Federico Garcia Lorca

All Is Beautiful All Around Me: Navajo Ways and Ceremonial Stories

I've done a post on this book earlier, but today it comes out as a digital book on Amazon.com and Nook, so I feel I should say something about this new edition.

What can you get out of a book like this?

The stories, all of them oral renditions of Navajo healing Ways, are evocations of a culture that as Tony Hillerman says in the Foreword deserves to be called "The Enduring Navajo" . . . he also adds that this same culture is "engulfed by a dominant materialistic society."  Guess which one.

Frederick Turner (Beyond Geography) said this book was "a useful map of the cosmogony of North America's most populous tribe."

Frank Waters commented: "This oral equivalent to our Christian Bible loses none of its power and significance in its easy readability."

So, I believe you could read this book to heal yourself, to remember yourself, to bring yourself back into harmony with all things, which is the Navajo Way.

You have only to look at the last line of some of the stories to understand what All Is Beautiful is about:

"And all was well."

"And his wish was done."

"But his spirit is always there on the Wind's breath."

"And life was restored to the village."

These endings are merely beginnings -- to your own well being. Don't take my word for it, read this book of beginnings wherein all things merge and are one.

The Lion and the Scorpion

I still think kids are the best storytellers.  Here's a story told by my grandson, Taj, when he was six.  He called it "The Lion and the Scorpion."  And he said it very fast and I had to really race with my pen to keep up with him.  Such stories have been called "Yo Mama" but basically they're just one-upsmanship word-plays called out on every playground in America.  Taj said it, I scribbled it down in my journal and then Taj illustrated it, all done -- story and drawing -- in five minutes.

The Lion say, "Can't you be my friend?"

(The scorpion raises his tail . . .)

The lion he say, "I am going to eat you for breakfast if you sting me!"

The scorpion say, "Hey, you, what are you lookin at, Turtle?"

The lion say, "Hey YOU, what you lookin at, Bird?  I will eat you for BREAKFAST and LUNCH and SNACK and DINNER!"