My Detour to Germany

 -- By Tom Phillips

Frankfurt Airport

I hadn't meant to go back to Germany so soon after my first visit last year, but Pakistan and India are playing games of "gotcha" again, and the Paks closed their airspace the day I was to fly.  At least that's what United Airlines told me, so I wound up flying a different route, with a twelve-hour layover in Frankfurt Airport.

Last year's Tour of Fear cured me of my Germanophobia, convincing me that the Germans have done a much better job of repenting for their past crimes than we in the US.  But nothing prepared me for just how comfortable I felt among the end-of-summer German holiday crowd in Frankfurt.

My Passage to India: Prologue

-- by Tom Phillips

Just last year on the Road to Dotage, I began a Tour of Fear -- to places I've always  been too scared to visit.  My road to Germany was a revelation -- seeing how a great civilization can renew itself, even after a descent into Hell.

My next planned destination was Texas, the land of big hats, big hair, big boots and big shots. When I worked as a TV newswriter, many of the network anchormen were Texans, and I've always been afraid to go to a place where such personalities are the norm.

Once I was working with a well-known Texan anchorman in New York, when he came across an AP  story about the "hippest cities" in America. "NEW YORK!" he cried in disbelief. "New York is not the hippest city in America!"

Timidly, I inquired what city he thought was most hip.  He looked at me as if I ought to know.
"Why, FORT WORTH!"

I'm probably not hip enough to appreciate Fort Worth. So this year, in a detour, I'm going back to a place I've been, but one where a westerner always carries a frisson of fear.

In 1978 I spent two months in India, traveling with a fellow seeker after truth and adventure -- Arnold "Rusty" Glicksman.  Each of us has written a memoir in which that trip plays a life-changing part.  (Rusty's is still unpublished -- watch for it.)  In a few days, right after Labor Day, we're going back.

Rusty's red hair is white now, and he is winding down the jewelry-making business he's had since the 1980s, with gold and stones he buys in Rajasthan.  I'll spend a few days with him in Jaipur, and then head out for adventures in new places.  First to the Caves of Ellura and Ajanta, ancient temples carved out of moutainsides, with some of the finest and best-preserved religious sculpture in the world.  My must-see deity is a reclining Buddha carved in a wall.

According to legend, the Buddha didn't sleep -- his mind was so clear that he had no need to knit up "the ravel'd sleave of care."  He would just lie down and rest for a few hours.

My other most-desired deity is this sexy female in Ellura. Though present-day India suffers from a hangover of Victorian prudery -- kissing in public is still a crime -- its gods and goddesses cavort freely with one another and love every kind of sexual pleasure.

How I wish I could rest like the Buddha, and romp like Lord Krishna with his consort Radha!

That was back in the Axial Age, when human wisdom and vision reached its zenith.  I'm touring today's troubled world, and India is no exception.  Still, with God all things are possible.

More later, God willing.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

Circumambulation 4: Turn, Turn, Turn.

-- By Tom Phillips

Dervishes   

Saving the airfare to Istanbul, I went yesterday to a one-day workshop on Sufi whirling in midtown Manhattan, hoping to learn the best way to turn. In a large, airy, second-floor studio, about twenty New Yorkers showed up -- mostly young and female, plus a few young men and middle-aged women. Most had some dance training, and many were spiritual seekers. I was by far the oldest student, and at 77 the senior person in the room. The teacher was 73.

A dumpy, grandmotherly presence, she introduced herself casually by her Sufi name, Khadija -- also the name of the Prophet Mohammed's first wife.  It didn't take long to recognize her as a quintessential New York intellectual, well-traveled and well-versed in several esoteric traditions, liberally seasoned with kosher salt. Look her up and you'll find she started out as a modern dancer in New York, then to San Francisco where she encountered Sam Lewis, the father of Sufi dancing in America. This sparked a pilgrimage, overland from Europe to India and back in search of true whirling -- which she found with the Mevlevi order of dervishes in Turkey. Forty years later, she runs an upstate retreat for devotees of whirling meditation and cleansing diets, and returns periodically to Turkey to teach.

She's also been a Zen student for decades, with Sasaki Roshi of Los Angeles.  But turning is better meditation, she told us. Sitting on a cushion one can look like a little Buddha, all the while obsessing  about work, sex, or lunch.  But whirling requires utter mindfulness. Think lunch for a half a second and you're in danger of falling.

My Road to Boston

-- By Tom Phillips  

After sixty years of puzzlement, I finally got it. The cartwheel logo of the Boston Bruins, with a capital B at the center, refers to Boston’s traditional nickname, the Hub. I talked to five Bostonians and to my surprise, none of them knew this.  This gives me the courage to analyze Boston for them.

I’ve been trying to understand this place since my first visit in 1952, when I was ten. My father brought me up from the New York suburbs to see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.  I was excited to see Kenmore Square, which I envisioned as something like Times Square. Nothing prepared me or my father for its sepulchral drabness. After two days in Boston he concluded, “This is a small town.”

 

It still is, but not like any other small town. As the Hub, it is the biggest small town of ten thousand small towns that make up New England civilization. The wheel is not geographical but conceptual – showing the place Boston occupies not on the map of New England, but in its mind.  

Circumambulation #3: Turning Left

-- By Tom Phillips

 Whirling Dervishes in Turkey 

Last year I took up whirling as a physical and spiritual exercise. After a while I drifted away and forgot about it, until something jogged my memory this year and I began again.  It's different this time.

Last year I turned clockwise, recommended for beginners. Clockwise whirling can give you a groove, a feeling of centeredness and calm. But counter-clockwise is the real deal.  It takes you out of your "comfort zone." This is my new practice.

The 13th-century Islamic poet Rumi wrote: "Do you know what whirling is?  It is escaping one's existence continuously tasting the everlasting experience."  If that sounds like nonsense, remember what the Talking Heads advise -- "Stop making sense."

To whirl counter-clockwise is to stop making sense, to step out of the patterns your mind has made for your life.  We humans have a primitive area of the brain that if left unchecked will make sense of life by killing it  -- that is, reducing it to routine tasks rewarded with mindless pleasures. Anyone can fall into this.  Housewives are encouraged to do it, as are civil servants.  But professors can do it almost as easily. This is why Rumi says we have to escape our existence.

Turning left instead of right, against the ordinary drift of life, I feel my outstretched hand is wiping dust off the table, knocking objects off the shelf.  This dust and these objects are the detritus of habit and routine. What is beyond them? A whirling cosmos, spinning too fast for the mind to do its job of categorizing and judging, picking and choosing. In this state the mind has no choice but to move toward what Rumi calls the everlasting existence, i.e. the present moment.

I say "move toward" rather than "enter into" because I'm still a beginner, doing it wrong. I know there's an ecstatic spiritual continuum out there, but it will take practice, refinement, and guidance to whirl my way to it. These days I can turn for five or six minutes at moderate speed, and the effect is energizing, refreshing to body and mind and spirit. Taste and see...

To be continued.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips




   

Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people saying things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

I Liked It Better When ... #6

-- By Tom Phillips  

Beach Haven, 2018

I don't like to rail against modern conveniences and comforts – don’t want to go back to washing dishes or clothes by hand, or typing stories and correcting them with white-out.  But I liked it better before beach houses were air-conditioned.  

Our guest blogger Linda Given makes the case for a salty air and the sound of surf:  

My parents both grew up in New Jersey and as a result, I’ve spent time at the Jersey Shore since I was a very young child.  One of my first distinct memories being there is of sleeping in a little bedroom under the stairs of a rental house, with my window open, feeling the ocean breeze and listening to the waves rolling back and forth along the shore.  In the morning, I heard seagulls and footsteps and the occasional car. Some sixty years later I’ve just returned from a beach vacation and things have changed!