I had another dream... As you might recall, a few days ago I wrote about a dream, a dream that deeply moved me to remembrance... Once more, I have been so challenged...
In this dream, my sons Donovan and Devin were with me (aged around six or seven) and we were visiting with Joan Baez. Most of you are certainly unaware of my nearly life-long love for Joan: I have loved her music, her great and grand voice, her political activism, her personal witness and commitment to nonviolence, and last but not least, her exceptional beauty... Many years ago, I shook her hand and we spoke briefly about my work in starting a Catholic Worker House and Soup Kitchen...
What we didn't talk about on that occasion was the conversation we had in my dream. As the boys looked around her house and wandered off outside, Joan and I wandered about as she showed me her home: I noted its warmth, simplicity, along with an appealing "raggedness". (I have no idea as to her real home!) As we were walking about, and with another friend of hers suddenly present, I took the time to explain the impact and importance of her book Daybreak in my life and in my spiritual and political development...
Right off the bat, she dedicated her book with love, admiration, and gratefulness to the men who find themselves facing imprisonment for resisting the draft. The line I went to jail for doing civil disobedience at the Army induction center compelled a youthful boy to consider the consequences of a radical faith... Not easy stuff with a war raging in Vietnam... Joan blew me away with her chapter on Ira.
I met Ira when I was sixteen... He talked a lot about Gandhi, and something called nonviolence, and we read from a book by a Chinese philosopher named Lao-tse... I began to grow very fond of the bearded guru with the goat laugh...
As Joan, her friend, and I continued to wander and talk, I reference the importance to me of one certain line in her book, "Gandhi, the rat!" (said Ira) "He ruined my life!" Right there: there it all was, all nice and neat in a nutshell! Exactly so for me as well... I read Joan's Daybreak at break-neck speed! When finished, I rushed to the library and read everything I could on Gandhi. When summer came along, a friend invited me to go to a Carmel Valley bookstore. His mom kindly bought me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita (although now that I think about it, I think instead that I got a copy of the Tao Te Ching by, of course, Lao-Tse...
"Well," I said to Joan, "Gandhi the rat! He ruined my life, too!" There was the obvious war resistance, but like Gandhi, that was sort of like a flower: the plant was always ashram or intentional community, and the roots were always spiritual practice. Resistance is futile: without what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the strength to love... If only in a dream, I was able to acknowledge the impact that Joan Baez has had in my life and to say thank you!
And what of Gandhi? Come the last years of his life, he reckoned himself a failure: sure, he liberated India, but his vision was denied and his heart was broken... and me? It is true enough that I instigated, agitated, and organized for some thirty years: assumed responsibility for serving over two million free meals to folks in need, but in the end, I walked away: exhausted in the continual battle over a vision that hungered for serving and finding a mutual liberation with the homeless, something so much more than feeding "them"... To my Board of Directors who insisted that "our mission was feeding the hungry" I could only reply "Ah, but the food is just to get them to come in the door. That's when the real work begins..."
Now, on any given day, I might listen to Beautiful Joan, a CD or on the radio... I search for poems... I ponder our garden and little projects... I write... I read... I drink my tea... I revere my family... and as opportunities arise, I teach what I can... And you know what? Time is an illusion: nothing more than an organizing principle. At the very same moment in time, a river is at its source, in its flow, and in its self-emptying, whether into a larger river, or directly into the sea... We are as a river: at all times, source, flow, and self-emptying... the one real reality are the opportunities and the moments in which we simply disappear into our choosing to love... May it be so.
Thank you, thank you, thank you Joanie... (and you are still a rat, Mr. Gandhi!)
In this dream, my sons Donovan and Devin were with me (aged around six or seven) and we were visiting with Joan Baez. Most of you are certainly unaware of my nearly life-long love for Joan: I have loved her music, her great and grand voice, her political activism, her personal witness and commitment to nonviolence, and last but not least, her exceptional beauty... Many years ago, I shook her hand and we spoke briefly about my work in starting a Catholic Worker House and Soup Kitchen...
What we didn't talk about on that occasion was the conversation we had in my dream. As the boys looked around her house and wandered off outside, Joan and I wandered about as she showed me her home: I noted its warmth, simplicity, along with an appealing "raggedness". (I have no idea as to her real home!) As we were walking about, and with another friend of hers suddenly present, I took the time to explain the impact and importance of her book Daybreak in my life and in my spiritual and political development...
Right off the bat, she dedicated her book with love, admiration, and gratefulness to the men who find themselves facing imprisonment for resisting the draft. The line I went to jail for doing civil disobedience at the Army induction center compelled a youthful boy to consider the consequences of a radical faith... Not easy stuff with a war raging in Vietnam... Joan blew me away with her chapter on Ira.
I met Ira when I was sixteen... He talked a lot about Gandhi, and something called nonviolence, and we read from a book by a Chinese philosopher named Lao-tse... I began to grow very fond of the bearded guru with the goat laugh...
As Joan, her friend, and I continued to wander and talk, I reference the importance to me of one certain line in her book, "Gandhi, the rat!" (said Ira) "He ruined my life!" Right there: there it all was, all nice and neat in a nutshell! Exactly so for me as well... I read Joan's Daybreak at break-neck speed! When finished, I rushed to the library and read everything I could on Gandhi. When summer came along, a friend invited me to go to a Carmel Valley bookstore. His mom kindly bought me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita (although now that I think about it, I think instead that I got a copy of the Tao Te Ching by, of course, Lao-Tse...
"Well," I said to Joan, "Gandhi the rat! He ruined my life, too!" There was the obvious war resistance, but like Gandhi, that was sort of like a flower: the plant was always ashram or intentional community, and the roots were always spiritual practice. Resistance is futile: without what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the strength to love... If only in a dream, I was able to acknowledge the impact that Joan Baez has had in my life and to say thank you!
And what of Gandhi? Come the last years of his life, he reckoned himself a failure: sure, he liberated India, but his vision was denied and his heart was broken... and me? It is true enough that I instigated, agitated, and organized for some thirty years: assumed responsibility for serving over two million free meals to folks in need, but in the end, I walked away: exhausted in the continual battle over a vision that hungered for serving and finding a mutual liberation with the homeless, something so much more than feeding "them"... To my Board of Directors who insisted that "our mission was feeding the hungry" I could only reply "Ah, but the food is just to get them to come in the door. That's when the real work begins..."
Now, on any given day, I might listen to Beautiful Joan, a CD or on the radio... I search for poems... I ponder our garden and little projects... I write... I read... I drink my tea... I revere my family... and as opportunities arise, I teach what I can... And you know what? Time is an illusion: nothing more than an organizing principle. At the very same moment in time, a river is at its source, in its flow, and in its self-emptying, whether into a larger river, or directly into the sea... We are as a river: at all times, source, flow, and self-emptying... the one real reality are the opportunities and the moments in which we simply disappear into our choosing to love... May it be so.
Thank you, thank you, thank you Joanie... (and you are still a rat, Mr. Gandhi!)
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