What Happens After You Die

-- By Tom Phillips 

Back in the day when Walter Cronkite was America's Most Trusted Person, he sat for an interview with talk-show host Dick Cavett.  After a couple of warmup questions, Cavett leaned in with an impish grin, and asked:     

"So Walter, what happens after you die?"   

Cronkite brushed it off as mischievous flattery. He was sixty-something at the time, and lasted a couple more decades.  

At 80, the question is harder to dismiss.  Here's what I'd like to know: Do we have any say in what happens? 

Maybe I do, and you do too.  

House on the Water

 -- By Tom Phillips 

It was hard to leave at the end of our annual family vacation on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. On the last day, my sister-in-law Linda and I have a tradition of walking down to the shoreline wearing pure white robes.  

This year we got up at dawn, and sat at the high-tide line watching the surf roll in as the sun emerged from clouds on the horizon, lighting a spark and then a fire across the waves, practically into our laps. We chanted OM three times, took some selfies and shots of each other, and then just looked out into the distance, as dawn went down to day. 

On vacation, I don't read much. I prefer to sit and stare at the ocean, watching people in the water, thinking about nothing in particular. Normally my mind is busy, but by the ocean it rests---in the natural trinity of sky, sea, and sand. If I have a mental focus it's the shifting line where the water rolls up on land, then flows back, sometimes rippling sideways, sometimes just slipping back under the next wave.  

On the verge of 80, life's a beach. It's the borderline between life and death, the known and the unknown, being and nothingness, the light of day and the darkness of the deep.  

John Lee Hooker wrote a blues about it, "I'm Going Upstairs."  It's about an old man, unwanted, with no place in the world to go.  

I got a house on the water, I don't need no land.
When I'm dead and gone, bury me in the deep blue sea.  

--  Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

 
  

Blow the Man Down

 -- By Tom Phillips 

    Come all you young sailors who follow the sea ..
    Way, hey, blow the man down---
    Please pay attention and listen to me, 
    Give me some time to blow the man down.

Midway through a two-week vacation on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, this sea chantey is stuck in my head, along with the crash of waves on the ocean beach across the road.  The waves are strong and steady -- kicked up by Tropical storm Henri, hundreds of miles out to sea in the Atlantic.  And they are crashing much nearer to our door than just a few years ago, when the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the shoreline and rebuilt the beach, vastly multiplying its height and width. That was the official response to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy, which overwhelmed the island in 2012.    

When we showed up for our annual vacation the following summer, the battered pathways through the dunes were festooned with American flags and signs declaring New Jersey "Stronger than the Storm."  This bore the trademark of then-governor Chris Christie, pumping himself up for a presidential run.  That ended quickly, but the illusion of supernatural powers endured. 

Since the floods of 2012, billions of dollars have been spent on new beachfront homes.  The local mayor -- a real estate developer -- boasts that his customers are now venture capitalists and hedge fund managers.  And indeed, I listened to one high-powered bicyclist out for his morning exercise, yakking on his mobile phone to a conference call of investors.  Apparently they're in it for the short term, comforted by federally-subsidized flood insurance which protects their investments.   

It doesn't protect their houses. Henri won't get us -- it's passing by at a safe distance.  But with rising seas and monster storms already baked into our future, eventually the sea will bury this sliver of sand and everything on it. 

Vacationing in such a place -- even as a renter -- is a peculiar experience.  Do you identify with the foolishness of :"stronger than the storm," or do you prepare to mourn the loss of a fragile barrier island?       

My answer is neither -- I'm with the ocean.  Just "give me some time to blow the man down." 

I welcome the victory of the sea, even though it's the end of my vacationland. In time the waves will be rolling over a drowned island and breaking onto the mainland, driving its inhabitants inland, just as the first European settlers claimed the shoreline and drove indigenous people into the western wilderness.  The Lenape, who camped on this island for thousands of summers, ended their trail of tears on a reservation in Oklahoma.  Where we we English wind up?  

 -- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips                                         

On Turning 80: First, You Cry

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash 

--- By Tom Phillips 

First, you cry. 

Lying in bed, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, I would suddenly start to cry.  Nothing dramatic, just a few deep, soft waves of sadness that came and went, with few or no tears shed.   Still, it felt like a good cry. 

My mind went back to senior year in high school.  I'd been determined to goof off and take a minimal academic load, so I could concentrate on basketball and girls.  But my guidance counselor told me that wouldn't look good on college applications. So I  reluctantly signed up for a fourth year of Latin.  And along with a handful of fellow scholars and goof-offs, we read the Aeneid of Vergil, an ancient epic that mixes Gods and humans, history and mythology to tell the story of the founding of Roman civilization, by wandering refugees from the Trojan War.      

With the very first phrase, you know you are in the presence of a great writer: Arma virumque cano, writes Vergil -- "Arms and the man I sing."  A hero, a war, a song -- all promised in three words.  And delivered, in thousands of lines of dactylic hexameter without a false note or a misplaced syllable. 

And somewhere in the middle, I came upon a phrase that stayed with me forever:  

Lacrimae rerum.  "The tears of things" is the literal translation -- but rerum means more than things.  It means what all things have in common, the common ground of existence.  

At the ground of existence, we cry.  

At 80, I hit the ground and cried.  I cried for everything I loved, everything I had lost, for life from beginning to end.  I saw my life and all lives flashing into emptiness and uncertainty.  I began to prepare for my own epic journey.  

First, you cry.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

  

The Strangest Dream

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to see my new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared en route, probably somewhere in the TSA security gauntlet.  I went to bed, prepared for a rough night.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase "forty years" kept echoing in my head, like an anvil chorus, like an indictment, like a sentence imposed by a merciless court.   There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror.  Trained to see dreams as an extension of myself, I thought -- can this be?  That drugs to help me sleep have been repressing the real me, a sadistic wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

And I saw this was only partly true.  The real me was a bystander, one who has stood by and watched for forty years as men with purpose took sledgehammers to a civilization -- deliberately destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.  

In brief:  

The bursar began with a blast:  "No one's entitled!"  

Money replied -- God Bless the Child!

A burning Bush stormed the desert -- read my lips, read my lips.  With a giant sucking sound, he was consumed by a clown.  H. Ross Pierrot said I told you so.   

In came Billary, a two-faced monster.  Not asking, not telling, ending "welfare as we know it," defending, defining, defiling marriage as we knew it, signing a bill of rights for bankers to do it.  The Bill came due.  

An archfiend had been laden with a plan to attack America.  It worked even better than he dreamed. 

Another Bush took arms against a sea of troubles, an Axis of Evil with heads in three directions.  Mission unaccomplished, the Bush was consumed.  Exit Axis, rising sea.  

Enter Mr. Noh Drama, with "greatness thrust upon him."  He purred, he demurred.  Single mothers took third jobs, fathers were hounded to Honduras. The archfiend was shot and thrown into the sea.    

Finally came the Beast, slouching through Bethlehem down the Capitol stairs.  A mob seized the palace.  Four years later, "the carnage ends here." 

In comes an old man, been Biden his time. Joe and Jill run up the Hill, to fetch a pail of oughta.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

In the Nursery 

   

Sis-Gendered

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Portrait of Thoreau attributed to his sister

Most men, wrote Henry David Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation."  I read these words as a teenager, and immediately resolved not to be one of those men.  I was desperate, haunted, frustrated, insecure, confused, irrational and contradictory.  But quiet?  Not while I could draw a breath.  The world soon began to hear my complaints against injustices large and small, personal and political, real and imagined.  

There was just one subject that cowed me: sex and gender.  I participated gingerly in what was called the sexual revolution, but couldn't bring myself to speak out for sexual freedom.  Quickly and prematurely, I slid into a lifestyle of a heterosexual, cis-gendered, homophobic husband and father.  I opposed same-sex marriage on linguistic grounds, telling my children that you couldn't just change the meaning of a word that goes back to biblical times.  But of course, you can.  

Trash Talk of 2020: The Year in Quotes

-- By Tom Phillips 

 America survived the Civil War with the gravitas of Lincoln's speeches and the caritas of  Whitman's poetry to bind up our wounds.  We fought World War One -- "The War to End all Wars"-- egged on by Woodrow Wilson's visionary slogans.  We slogged though the Great Depression and World War Two heartened by Roosevelt's radio chats, and First Lady Eleanor's newspaper columns.  Kennedy and Reagan pictured castles in the air, and Obama could be stirring, when stirred.   

In 2020, we were on our own.  Rhetoric was barely a memory, giving way to the grunts of combat:   Curses and challenges, defiance and dares; trash talk, mayday calls, last gasps and pleas for mercy.     

What they said:   

"It is what it is.."  Donald Trump on August 31, downplaying US deaths from Covid-19 ".. because you are what you are."  Joe Biden, blaming him in the first presidential debate September 29.

“I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd, as he lay dying under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin May 25.  When Biden was declared president-elect November 7, CNN commentator Van Jones broke down on camera, weeping for his children and friends.  "It wasn't just George Floyd," he said through a flood of tears.  "A lot of people …felt they couldn't breathe."

 "Kill me!"  Luis Vasquez, a neighborhood resident who fired gunshots into the air in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, following a Christmas concert on the Cathedral steps December 12.  Police shot him dead.  The gunman's sister said he'd been "damaged" by prison time in the 1990s, and his mental state had worsened in the pandemic. 

"Please, call the cops." Spoken and recorded by Christian Cooper, a black man birdwatching in Central Park, on the same day George Floyd was killed in May. Cooper had asked a woman to put her dog on a leash. She responded by calling 911 and telling police that an “African-American man” was threatening her. The birdwatcher knew such white lies have meant prison or death for many black men.  Still he challenged his accuser and was vindicated by the video.

Future Bible Stories: King Donald and the Bugs

The manuscript fragment below was recently discovered by Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's campaign to develop a vaccine before election day.  Sources say the project had accelerated to several times the speed of light when engineers realized they were in a time warp.  The manuscript was discovered at a point corresponding approximately with the year 4525 CE.  It was damaged during the rapid deceleration that followed as crew members worked frantically to restore their present lives. It appears to tell the story of the 2020 presidential campaign, in the language of a latter-day Bible.  

In the fourth year of the reign of King Donald, in the second month, the Lord sent a bug to plague the people of the earth, as a sign against the king because he did not love justice.        

The prophet Woodward went to the king and he was afraid.  The king said, "You just breathe the air and that is how it is passed.  It is also more deadly that even your strenuous flu.  This is deadly stuff."  And the prophet wrote that in his book.  

Then the king went to tell the people. He stood at the gate and told them, "When it gets a little warmer it miraculously goes away.  The King of China is working hard and it's going to work out fine."  And the people went home and did not fear the plague.  

Then God sent the plague from another direction, because the king had not warned the people, and many were sickened and died. They covered their faces, but the king was proud and would not cover his face.  

My Life with the Cops

                     Run chillun run, the pattyroller git you --                                                                                  Run chillun run, it's almost day. 

                     -- Slave song 

One evening in the 1940's, a young James Baldwin took the subway downtown to 42nd Street, just to explore midtown Manhattan. A policeman asked him what he was doing there, then told him to go back to Harlem where he belonged.  

One evening in the 1950's, a young Tom Phillips walked out of a bar in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, in the poorer section of town around the railroad station.  Emerging from a parked patrol car, a policeman asked me what I was doing "in there."  I said I was having a beer.  He informed me that everyone else in the bar was black.  "So what?" I said.  At this he grew defensive.  He had nothing against black people, he'd "worked with them for many years."  It was just that I didn't belong there.   

Neither of these events would be likely today.  Black people are welcome on 42nd Street, which has become an urban extension of Disney World.  And the poor section of Roslyn has been torn down to make way for a parking lot.  My classmate and teammate Sam Brown, whom I saw in that bar that night, now lives in Roosevelt, a poorer town farther out in a suburban sprawl that has become more segregated as it has grown more affluent.  Such are the changes over time, but the basic principle remains: Each race has its place.  And the cops will let you know it.  

Tom Phillips's 116th Dream

-- By Tom Phillips 

Irreparable 

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the rebel force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight? 

At this point I woke up.  

Before military commanders go out to fight, they look at the balance of troop strength in a document called the Order of Battle.  Under my pillow, I found the current Order of Battle for the conflict between the Powers-that-Be (PTB) and The Movement (TM).  

Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

Old Movie, New World

-- By Tom Phillips 

Omar Sharif as Dr. Zhivago 

With nowhere to go until the Pandemic is over, we've been watching old movies we failed to see the first time around.  I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because it sounded like sentimental claptrap, and it is.  But it was a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation.  Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a sentimental movie about love during the Pandemic of 2020.  

No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic.  It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic.  Paging Dr. Zhivago... 

Then as now, politics comes first.  The pandemic will be over in a year or so.  The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery.  But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.

Devils Fall in Shootout: Bucket List Cut by One

Newark, February 5, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips

Tomas Tatar at full tilt 

The Montreal Canadiens defeated the New Jersey Devils 5 to 4 last night in a thrilling overtime contest decided by a shootout after the Devils tied the game in the final minute. No one in the crowd of 15.000 was more thrilled than a gray-bearded New Yorker in the fourth row behind the goal, attending his first professional hockey game at the age of 78.

Thus did one item get crossed off my bucket list.  I had always had a passing interest in hockey, along with every other kind of game covered in the sports pages.  But it was a game I never played.  Not having grown up with frozen ponds at hand, I can barely skate, much less juggle a puck through a hostile crowd at 50 miles an hour. So I was a pure fan; and I was agog.

The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                      
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting. 

India Ink: A Reporter's Notes

-- By Tom Phillips

A lot has changed in India since I first went there in 1978.  But its psyche feels the same: Driven.

India is the only place I know where the energy is higher than New York.  In New York, motorists are warned not to honk their horns, on pain of a $350 fine, which deters even though it is never enforced.

In India, everyone honks their horn continually, 24 hours a day.  You honk when passing, turning, speeding up, or just getting angry.  Indian drivers keep themselves at a boiling point.  On our first night in the country we hired a car to go from Delhi to Jaipur, a 250 km straight shot that took five hours, from midnight to five a.m.   Nearly all the way the four-lane road was clogged with brightly painted, heavily used trucks carrying cement and other materials for India's never-ending national construction binge, honking their way around each other, jockeying for position.  In India, the preferred position is the center of the highway, straddlng the white line. Here you are King of the Road.

Our driver was Surinder Singh, a Rajput warrior from Jaipur, who loves his car and defends it against threats and slights, real and imagined. Half-a-dozen times he stopped the car and leaped out to wipe the windshield, scold the driver behind, dispute with a toll collector, or drive home a point to the guy next door.  (The Encycledia Britannica notes the ethos of the warrior Rajputs includes a "mettlesome regard for personal honour.")  He told us proudly that he lives in a part of Jaipur open to Rajputs only -- no other caste allowed.

Surinder takes tourists all over India, and sleeps in the car when his customers check into a hotel.  The passenger seat folds flat like a first-class airline chair, so he made it up as a bed for Rusty, after his marathon flight in economy class.

Halfway to Jaipur, at three o'clock in the morning, we passed a noisy parade of pilgrims, in buses and on foot, waving a flag and blasting music from boom boxes. It was the start of a Hindu festival honoring Lord Krishna, right on the heels of a national veneration of Lord Ganesh, the elephant god, the hugely popular remover of obstacles. The Times of India reports Ganesh is so beloved that the cast of a hit TV series took time out to perform the climactic pageant of the festival, right on the set.  Fake news, celebrity news, pictures.

Behind India's energy is religious devotion, sectarian rivalry, and a fervent desire to make money.  New York has only one of those three, how could it compete?

--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

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