Thursday, November 22, 2007

Giving Thanks

I give thanks to my parents, for showing me what love is. And, to the ones whom I have broken and who have broken me, thank you for helping me know what love means and for helping me grow up to be a man. Thank you, friends and family and fellow travelers, for your patience and forgiveness. I am learning to love, from facing the harm I've done to others and to myself, and I'm doing my best to heal. Love as I feel it now is a wound that opens in abundance and, lacking nothing of itself, seeks only the good of others and works so that good may always come to others. There is precious little good, it seems, in the world of people, and yet so many good people in the world. There is so much good I could have given the world that I did not give, and the truth is there's a great deal of good I have taken from the world, and taken lightly, with not so much as a word of thanks.

I have more than thanks to give, more than words. I have my work to give, for the benefit of my students and fellow teachers, work that may, in turn, come to benefit the workers who toil and die every day for the benefit of those of us at the receiving end of a supply line that is stripping the world of its resources at a rate unprecedented in all of human history.

I say this with a full, open heart wringing out: I can save my life only by giving it away (though with my son, Eli, and my daughter, Rachel, still in college and debts to settle, I'll continue to accept, with thanks, any honest pay for my honest work). I say this knowing there's work to be done and abundance to be shared, and many years of deep struggle for a great many deep people before any of us can hold ourselves up and say, justice has been served, justice for every child, woman, and man living on Earth. I have my vigor to give, and my sanity, such as it is. I have my courage and my patience to give--lord knows how my courage and patience have flagged.

And, with no claim of possession or sense of entitlement, I have my life to give, as it is given to me. I give my life to each one of my family and friends, to every person in my school community, to my neighbors, to the mountains and forests and deserts and rivers and plains and hills and coastlines of North America, to the wildlife that leap the fences and soar the skies and swim the waters and work the soil, to every human being whom I chance to meet, and, though I humbly and gratefully acknowledge my human limits, I give my life to this beautiful and beleaguered Earth that gives itself to all in such terrific abundance, day in and day out--this one, dear Earth, the only home I've known.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

The Wake

Just when the last fiber of his being vanished in a moment of unbearable pain, just when he'd given himself up for dead, all he'd done in life to force his dreams into being fell away. A shaman of some sort, with a headdress made of golden branches, his lower body a black serpent, spread his arms. The shaman's arms became the wings of an eagle. The dead man's senses, overcome with golden light, became indistinguishable from the shaman, indistinguishable from each particular crystal that glowed dimly from the shadows, indivisible from the formal energy falling out of and rising into being, without beginning or end.

All his friends circling, dancing and laughing, around a body festooned and mounded with pale roses. In spite of mistaking dreams for reality, in spite of holding on to belief as if it were the very earth on which he stood, he loses himself in love and finds that his perceptions had never been ends in themselves, but means to an endlessly expanding end. He could finally witness them for what they were: nothing more nor less than an array of tiny stars created for feeling, and growing to love, the dark.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Tropic of Cancer

Going up a mountain in the Absarokas,
making for the unlikely event
of shade. Scattered there
on the ground, a halo
of orange butterflies, maybe four dozen
amber wing-pairs,
tatted over in black and white, attached
to velvet bodies, tiny black legs
trembling, like hands of broken watches
drawing minutes down
to no time at all, there to siphon
snowmelt from puddles filling
the tracks of a passing bear, a grizzly
from the looks of it, if those terrible
claws & the mud closing in
are any sign.

What are these denizens
of Mexico doing a thousand miles
wide of their regular migrations
way up in the aspens & sage
of Wyoming?
A jaguar stretched thin
as paper
borne aloft & torn apart
by high winds,
coming to rest,
antennae searching for scattered remains,
feeling for the slightest trace
of the jaguar's pulse,
haloed there so close,
so far from their soft beds
in the leaf-shade
of the Sierra Madre.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

The Wind River Mountains

Wyoming's most extensive mountain range, the Wind River Mountains, rises north of Rock Springs and angles to the northwest just short of the Gros Ventres Mountains, thirty or so miles southeast of Jackson Hole. It makes up nearly 150 miles of the Continental Divide and has over 40 peaks above 13,000 feet. Wyoming's highest point, Gannett Peak, lifts its glacier-capped summit to 13,804 feet in the range's northern section. A surprisingly vast area of its highest cirques remains filled with glaciers to this day--more total area, in fact, than any other range in the lower 48--though, like glaciers all around the earth, they are melting faster than they are building up.

The name of the range is a poem itself, allusive to three of the four primordial elements recognized by the pre-Socratic philosophers: air, water, earth. And because the Wind River Mountains are an igneous intrusion that formed over 1 billion years ago--a type of formation known to geologists as a batholith--the range bears the impressions of its birth in the fourth element, fire. Despite its molten origins, the range as it now appears has been shaped most profoundly by rivers of ice. Since its current glacial remnants began receding just over 18,000 years ago, much of its granitic gneiss, bedrock for 2 and 1/4 million acres of wilderness and primitive areas, is freshly polished and striated, with thousands of lakes and tarns filling the declivities and bowls left behind by the retreating glaciers. These lakes, and the rivers and streams that connect them, are surrounded by forests, wildflower meadows, boulderfields, and steep mountain walls.

A couple weeks ago my son, Eli, who turns 22 in September, and I backpacked into the Dinwoody Basin on the Glacier Trail, which wends 12 rugged miles along the range's northeast flank before entering the Dinwoody's U-shaped valley at the lower apron of Floyd Wilson Meadows. A turquoise stream, which gains its color from tiny particles of silt held in suspension in the meltwater flowing down from the glaciers above, meanders in oxbow bends through deep green willow bogs. At the head of the valley is Gannett Peak. We were accompanied by our good old family dog, Sadie, still fit and frisky at age 12, though her muzzle has turned from black to white.

From our base camp just below treeline, at about 11,000 feet, we ventured off on our fourth day toward a mountain that, so far as I know, remains unnamed. We named it Mystic Mountain, in honor of the Greek word mystos, root for the words "mystic" and "mystery." Mystos is a word meaning silence. We both had experiences that were mystical, in the sense that their deepest manifestations may only be expressed, or apprehended, through silence, much like the lines in the Tao Te Ching that read: "She who knows does not speak. She who speaks does not know."

I can say that we were overwhelmed not only by the scale of the Wind River Mountains, but also by the ceaseless movement of every little thing, from the cells in our bodies to the crystals of hornblende, quartz, feldspar, and mica in rocks and boulders and cliff-faces, most of which have not moved appreciably for thousands of years. But just as DNA is known to transmit photons, the flowers, rocks, and pine trees, along with the water flowing from the glaciers and the clouds above, though all bathed in the brilliant light of the barely filtered sun streaming through the rarefied atmosphere, all seemed to give off a light of their own. I felt wounds that had remained open for many years slowly being healed from the inside-out, which intensified my awareness that life is a wound we are given to feel, not heal, a wound through which we have a chance to give birth to our true selves, our souls.

When we returned to our base camp, Eli climbed barefoot along the smoothly polished granite next to the roaring cascades of Dinwoody Creek. From about a hundred meters above him, with the roar and mist of the torrent filling the air, I could see him open his arms to the great valley below, draw forth the sorrows in which his heart had been packed, and heave with sobs of love and joy and gratitude. A resonant, empathic pulse rippled through my heart, and there we stood, our roles as father and son falling away from us, two free souls opening to the world, moved, as Dante writes at the end of the Comedia, "by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Two days later we hiked out of the Wind River Mountains. And two days after that, we returned to our independent lives: he to Colorado Springs where he is soon to begin his junior year at Colorado College, me to my students and fellow teachers at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington. I cannot speak for Eli, but I know our experiences in the mountains have changed me--are changing me--in subtle and profound ways. Those mountains are influencing me, apparently without any conscious will or effort on my part, to open my heart to the world, to find ways to uplift the lives of others, and to listen deeply and humbly to this great living being called Earth, our dear home.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

I'm Not a Doctor

I just listened to an amazing radio story on Public Radio Exchange (PRX). The producer is Lu Olkowski and the title is "I'm Not a Doctor, but I Play One at the Holiday Inn." In 35 hours of taping conversations with Dimitri, an ex-heroin addict who is trying to help active addicts by administering Ibogaine, the illegal hallucinogen that helped him kick the habit, Lu Olkowski never hears him speak ill of those he's trying to help. It's a phenomenal piece of editing and narration, which not only distills 35 hours into 16 minutes, but does it in unfalteringly clear tones. This story has a quality that brings compassion for addicts right down to its aching roots, and Dmitri, a wounded healer himself, is its heart. It's a profoundly spiritual story, probably because it's not trying to be.

And since it's Father's Day, and my father is a doctor (now retired), I am given to reflect on his life--as healer and as father. His ontological bearings could be said to be firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, especially his faith in reason (a faith he would describe as "fragile", as any faith should be), along with his beliefs in positivism and a godless universe. Sunday after Sunday, he spent hours tossing the football with me. Sundays were holy days--of a distinctly secular sort, mind you--because, almost without exception, they were the days my dad unstintingly and with rare exception devoted his time and attention to my brothers and sister, my mom, and me.

Relatively late in his career, a career in which he mostly practiced and taught thoracic surgery in academic settings, I realized that I'd never actually watched him perform his art. He and my mom always supported me in mine, often traveling across the country just to watch me run--from a string of Pikes Peak Marathons to various bush league mountain races in Utah or Colorado. So, a little less than twenty years ago, he arranged for me to "scrub" for an operation he would be performing a few days later on a woman who had esophagial cancer.

At first, as you might imagine, I was fascinated by the orchestration of the operating room and how these different parts--both human and technological--were sequenced in time according to algorithms that were foreign to me but almost second nature to the doctors and staff. I remember the anaesthesiologist being somewhat dour, as if he were experiencing some kind of sympathetic response to the drugs he administered. I remember the nurses being lively and quick, their eyes twinkling above their surgical masks. And since this was in a medical school, I remember the resident, capable and steady, though his self-confidence seemed unannealed and therefore welcoming of my father's guidance.

As the surgical team proceeded through their steps, I became less interested in the interactions between and among these human beings, both with each other and the technology they were using; and I also became less interested in how these interactions were structured in time, instead becoming more interested in the choreography of movements and sounds from moment to moment. I initially approached the experience as a sort of structuralist, but found my observations being transformed more and more into those of a phenomenologist.

I was expecting, as I say, to observe Dad practicing his art: his careful hands--at once steady, graceful, and quick--his patient manner with the resident and the staff. But I was moved most deeply by his art as a teacher. He was asking questions of the resident that actually seemed to help the resident clear his thought. Once, as he observed the resident preparing to deflate the patient's lungs, Dad simply asked, "Can you narrate for me the next several steps you are planning to take?" The resident seemed to catch himself in mid-thought, correct himself, and proceed. Dad simply said, "Wonderful! That's exactly right!" I had the impression Dad somehow intuited the resident's blurriness, hovering though it was just beneath the threshold of the resident's own consciousness, leaving the resident free to experience the thrill of discovery and his deepening self-confidence for himself.

Dad's art in the operating room reminded me also of a symphony conductor. He was acutely aware of everything going on around him--asking questions, making jokes, engaging everyone with his smiling eyes and gentle laughter--and also listening intently. I mean really listening, deeper than the sounds you hear with ears alone.

The gift of seeing my father on that day will stay with me for all my remaining days. It was the first time I consciously saw him as a human being, the way his patients, residents, and colleagues had seen him for many years. There I was in my mid-to-late thirties, finally able to get outside my narrow self-identity--my own trappings, really--as a particular son of a particular father. So this is a paean to my father. And I use the word "paean" quite intentionally. "Paian" is the Homeric name for the physician of the gods.

In case you're wondering, why the orthogonal leap to this paean for my father by way of a reference to a radio story, here's where it comes full circle: Just as Lu Olkowski's piece on Dimitri is spiritual without trying to be, my dad may well be one of the most truly spiritual human beings I've ever met, precisely because he's endeavored so fiercely all his life to be anything but.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Changing My Blood

A dream came to me. I was standing at the edge of the sea. The ocean drew back, exposing tidal shoals filled with anemones, starfish, clams, long strands of kelp, crusty barnacles, pronged feet of crabs.

Suddenly, a great wave rose up in a massive green curl, engulfed me, and dragged me under. The current pulled me down, farther and farther out to sea. Everything was upside down. The bottom of the ocean lay above.

The cold clear blue current pulled me past skeletons and skulls, an inventory of lies, every moment wavering in fear and dishonesty a broken skeleton, tens of thousands of femurs and vertebrae scattered across the sea floor overhead. Gems glistened in the eye sockets of crania that looked, from below, like a firmament spread wide with mushrooms and eggshells, in convex position. Long-haired figures resembling human beings crowded around clefts in the ocean bottom, which remained above; they swayed in the shifting currents, like grasses on a sleeping prairie. I made no effort to resist or swim; the current was showing me everything I needed to see.

The current carried me along toward two trees. Nearer and nearer, and there I saw a tall Douglas Fir and a twisted Bristlecone Pine, their roots anchored in the floor of the ocean, arching above my head, the ocean's dark deeps below. Closer now, and the fir transformed into an old man with a shock of white hair; the bristlecone turned into an old woman with grey-green eyes. They turned to me with open faces of recognition, as if they'd been waiting. I could hear singing. He rolled the harmony around deep in his chest, and she sang lyrics that stayed with me as I woke up: “Grow down as rain, wounded healer. Grow down like rain, and the rivers flow through ye.”

Lo and behold, she was right. I woke up needing to pee.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Commencement Address

The following is the transcript of a speech delivered to the graduates of Charles Wright Academy's Class of 2007. There's a tradition at CWA of having each year's senior class elect a faculty member to deliver their commencement address. This year's seniors invited me, an honor for which I am deeply grateful.


Charles Wright Academy Commencement Address
June 9, 2007
Creighton King

Some of you may have noticed that for many high schools, colleges, and universities across America, graduation rituals such as this one are called “commencement exercises.” A few years ago, I became curious: why “exercises”? And whenever you encounter a familiar word—like “exercises”—used in an unexpected way—here, coupled with “commencement" to form an expression that’s close to a compound noun—you can often discover something interesting. It turns out the word “exercises” is derived from the Old French verb exercere, which means, “to drive farm animals out to pasture.”

Fortunately, other than my referring to it here, you’ll find scarce mention of the word “exercises” at this commencement. Here, the word “ceremony” is used, a word derived from the Latin caerimonia, meaning “religious worship.” The word “ceremony” also contains the root cera, which is Latin for “wax,” a substance upon which impressions are easily made, like the seals historically used to authenticate documents—such as diplomas—or like the seal Hamlet melts so he can replace the letter his treacherous uncle has written with a letter of his own design.

As you know, Hamlet is soon carried off by pirates out roaming the North Sea’s dark waters, there to experience his fabled sea change. So it is that this ceremony celebrates a sea change in the course of your lives, albeit without the aid of pirates. You enter this ceremony with the waxen impressions of your childhood and adolescence still upon you; you leave as a fledgling grown-up, free to discover for yourself both the difficulty and fulfillment that come from creating not merely a letter, but a life, of your own design.

Looking back, you can sense how your journey from a zygote to the person you are now has shaped you—quite unlike, let us hope, the impression Hamlet’s father’s ring makes on the wax seal commending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their fate. In physics you learned the theory of gravity. Isn’t it astounding that gravity remains a theory? Was there anything theoretical about the bloody impressions your knees and elbows got the first time you fell off your bike?

In mathematics you learned that to find the area of a circle you had to square the radius and multiply by pi. Yet pi is an irrational number, and if you give a computer the task of solving for pi, it will . . . run around in circles indefinitely. In biology you may have learned that the largest living thing on Earth is an aspen grove somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. [By the way, people from New Mexico think that this aspen grove can be found in New Mexico, and people from Colorado think it’s in Colorado, and people from Utah think . . . well, I won’t go there . . . except to say I’m from Utah, and I’ve noticed that some people from Utah develop a sense of irony . . . and tend to move somewhere else.]

Anyway, back to the aspen grove. What you see when you look at an aspen grove is made possible only by what you don’t see: a vast root system hidden beneath the ground. And similarly, from neuro-science you have learned that your conscious mind arises from countless neural pathways that remain invisible to consciousness itself—which may be reason enough not to believe everything you think.

And perhaps, while on your Outdoor Ed trips, on a clear night you gazed at the stars and took on the impressions of photons that had been streaming through space for millions and billions of light-years—only to end their journey abruptly upon impact with your retinas.

From noticing changes of weather, you’ve learned that trillions of individually insignificant interactions can blow down trees and cut the flow of electrons to your microwaves and television sets—and close down school for the day. From economics you’re given to understand that if the supply lines replenishing the seeming cornucopia at your local grocery stores were suddenly cut off, you’d run out of food in a few days. And from gaining the privilege of driving a car, you’ve learned that the price of gas generally keeps going up—up in smoke, so to speak—as do carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

From history you’ve learned that many great civilizations now lie in ruins and that the earth is as much a killing field as it is a place where human cultures can flourish. You’ve learned that you share this earth with upwards of six and a half billion fellow human beings, most of whom are a lot worse off than you are for no other reason than they happened to be born in places like Darfur, Addis Ababa, East Timor, Baghdad, Kabul, Peshawar, the West Bank, New Orleans, or the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Take a good, long look at this place that has given shape to the brave and honest human beings you are now. Notice your family, friends, classmates, and teachers. Feel the air, soft and redolent with the vapors of your various exertions in the Dome, or of the sumptuous repasts at the Headmaster’s Picnics. And just outside the Dome, at this moment, you can imagine the soft rain in the trees, the birds singing, the cars going by, the occasional sound of gunfire over at the shooting range. There’s not a particle of it that isn’t leaving some impression on you, no matter how faint or imperceptible that impression may be. And you are leaving your impressions on the world around you as well. Everything is connected to everything else. With each breath, you become both more and less than you were the moment before.

Even though you have done much of the work yourselves, you are surrounded by parents, teachers, extended family, and friends who have given some varying measure of their lives to prepare you for receiving your diplomas today. But can anyone really prepare you for creating your own destiny?

If you feel like it, try taking a deep breath. Has anyone prepared you for how good even one breath can feel?

Each one of you is a miracle. You have been given one, precious life, which you cannot possibly have created all alone. It is not enough simply to accept this gift. You have to make something of it for yourself. The wonder of it is that you get to share this gift with others. And you get to delight in others’ delight when they share theirs with you.

Looking ahead now, take another deep breath, if you wish. Remember that the Latin word for “breath” or “wind” is spiritus. From taking to heart the many impressions that have shaped your life up to this moment, you may now emerge from your waxen chrysalis, the cera of this ceremony, and feel the wind urging your wings toward flight, the caerimonia of this ceremony.

As extraordinarily difficult as it is to be just one human being, as difficult as it is to look unflinchingly upon a world beleaguered by political corruption, social upheaval, natural catastrophes, and the threat of terrorism, you can also look within yourself. If it feels right to you at this moment, try reaching down beneath your attention deficit, down beneath your thoughts of tonight’s graduation party or how much longer this speech may run, down into the deep silence of your own being.

And there, in the tender goodness of your own heart, you may find a truly radical possibility taking root. Maybe you feel it? Could it be that what you’re feeling is the living spirit of hope, which ceaselessly renews itself, without beginning or end, in the core of each one of your hearts? Are you prepared to give your hope to the world, even though the world may sometimes give you good reason to feel bereft of hope?

[Turns to graduates seated behind.]

O my goodness! I look at you now and realize I have rarely beheld anything so beautiful in all my life. Who you are right now has never happened before and can never happen again. I feel each of your spirits unfurling, like a slow, beautiful poem, an exquisite flower, a magnificent eagle, a golden sunrise. To see your bright young faces, to sense the worlds of possibility opening within you, to imagine the possibilities the world is offering to you, fills me with hope. It inspires me to do my very best with all the life remaining to me.

You and I have much work to do together, not merely the kind of work teachers do for students, or healers do for the wounded, or the privileged do for the unprivileged, but as equals caring for equals. The gowns we are wearing today are symbols of this equality. Moreover, the words “human,” “humus,” and “humility” share a common root, a root anchored down deep in the earth itself. That root is our shared humanity; it is our sense of equality, empathy, and justice that includes all things great and small and excludes no one.

Until we befriend that within ourselves which makes us prone to aggression, complacency, sentimentality, or cynicism, we have work to do. Until every human being feels hope brimming from the core of her or his humanity, we have work to do. We can accomplish nothing of enduring worth by force, nor can we hold back and wait to follow someone else’s lead. Radical hope is gentle and persistent; it brooks no illusions and understands that change happens neither in the past nor the future, but only now. It is fed as much by disappointment, heartbreak, uncertainty, and failure as it is by patience, humor, courage, and truth.

With all my heart I hope that your lives be abundant, great, and unforgettable. Work hard, yes, but take time to laugh, take time to smell the roses. Carry your own weight, have faith that others can carry theirs, but go light so you may remain free to offer a helping hand—as a friend and equal to all. Look to the stars, but learn the flowers. Care for children and old people. Trust yourself.

To each of you in the Class of 2007, I extend my best wishes. And my deepest thanks. Thank you for making this day among the happiest days of my life.

And now, Mr. Camner, Mr. White, esteemed colleagues, parents, family, and friends, isn’t it time for us to get some exercise? Time, perhaps, to make like shepherds and get the flock . . . I mean drive these beautiful souls out to the abundant pastures of this great and glorious Earth?