Holliday Park Is a Hidden Natural Gem

Saturday afternoon, hot and muggy as it was, I decided to veer off my way home from Half Price Books on the West Side down Spring Mill Road to check out Holliday Park. I found a trail listing for the park in my $1 copy of hikes in Indiana and had planned to check it out some early morning and take pictures of the river where the trails ended. The park was a favorite decades ago when I would take out-of-town visitors to see the "ruins," a weird collection of walls and columns that at one time spouted water. There was no water on the unusual fountain when I first visited the park in the 1970s. I would enter by the south gate and park close to the ruins. I think I took pictures of the fountain although goodness knows where those pictures are now. I never explored the rest of the park.
 
Saturday there was some kind of gathering of African-American families at the park. I didn't want to intrude into their activities so walked toward the nature center. It was closed. Behind it was a path that led to overgrown wildflowers taller than a man. A trail led out of the sunlit wildflower area into the trees. I didn't expect the trail to be the beginning of a system of trails, sometimes dirt, sometimes stone and concrete, sometimes wood that became stairs up steep hills and down into the White River. I spent more than hours exploring the trails. I was a little leery of being alone in the woods. An evil-minded stranger could easily have mugged me. There were few others on the trail. I asked a young woman who was there with her boyfriend where a trail led. She told me it went under the bridge to the other side of Meridian Street. This was the trail I had intended to check out.
 
Down at the river I saw this other young woman who had loosed her two dogs to play in the shallows. At the other side of Meridian, I chatted with a woman who had brought her two boys there to play barefoot in the mud and water. They were about six and eight years old. While other people were thronging the malls, these people were in the middle of wilderness that looked unlike the city most of us know.
 
I took 233 photos while at the park. Many of them were blurred. I was using my Lumix pocket point-and-shoot, the camera I use most of the time nowadays for being small and light enough to tuck into my back pocket when I went on a walk or hike. The resolution is not great but I've taken more photos with this tiny camera this year than I have with my Canon cameras. To think that I didn't use the camera for over a year after I bought it. I couldn't get the hang of composing on an LCD screen rather than in a viewfinder. Now I love it! I can hold the camera near the ground or above my head. This was what made me fall in love with digital cameras many years ago with my tiny 1 MB Sony. I still mourn losing that camera when someone broke into my office in Broad Ripple. I could tilt that camera for a view of the light that totally changed the picture I was taking. The Lumix does not seem to allow this but its small size makes positioning the camera in versatile ways that makes up for the stability of a tripod.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Bishop Spong's Reinventing Christianity

A participant in the life and struggles of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. for more than a decade, I heard of John Shelby Spong many years ago. I first heard of the controversial former bishop of Newark when the media trumpeted his debunking of the dogma of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I was caught up in my own struggle with my Christian faith and didn't look up the bishop's views. 

Half Price Books here at Castleton has been my serendipitous source of books. Last week it yielded me a dollar clearance copy of Spong's Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. He was scheduled to retire from the bishop's chair in 2001 so this was in effect a manifesto summing up the 21 years he had spent as bishop (from the Greek, episkopos, from epi 'above' + skopos '-looking') and defining his faith for himself and his flock. In particular, he addressed the book to "my audience of seekers and searchers, to those who are either members of the church alumni association or who still hang onto their Christian identity by the skin of their teeth."

Today if forced to categorize myself between these two groups I would have to say I am a "church alumnus" but perhaps like the bishop himself since this book was published I don't merit even this category. I feel I have moved out completely from the two categories the good bishop addressed in 1998. What I am hanging onto by the skin of my teeth is not Christian identity or even  theistic belief in God but religion itself.

For years the people who have entered my life tell me they are "not religious but spiritual." These are largely educated, worldly sophisticated and materially successful Americans and Europeans whose fundamental stance was profoundly challenged on September 11, 2001 when the U.S. was attacked by Islamic fundamentalists. Islam is still largely a religion of people who like the minority but vocal Christian fundamentalists cling to outdated notions about God and religion in the face of scientific and technological discoveries they nonchalantly use daily without seeing their incompatibility with what they believe.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

The Annual Rediscovery of Summer

I was walking to the car intent only on getting out of the heat again when I saw my neighbor, Kelley, leisurely watering and deadheading his border. We exchanged pleasantries and the topic quickly devolved into the hot, humid weather.
 
"I love it!" Kelley said.
 
"This heat, this humidity? Even walking is a struggle!"
 
"When it's summer I want to feel summer," Kelley explained.
 
In the evening, he sits on his deck looking out on the lake. "Maybe I won't enjoy it as much if a pleasant breeze did not blow in from the lake. I've seen owls flying by with their prey in their beaks. One time I saw a hawk fly so low I felt the air stirred by its wings."
 
After saying goodbye, I hurried on into the refuge of my air-conditioned car. Kelley's words kept echoing in my head. He's right. We should be so lucky. Our senses are intact and we can feel life on our skin, our eyes, and our ears, an ever-changing cornucopia of sensations we take so for granted.
 
Kelley's words finally hit me today. I stopped at the community beach when I saw this pontoon boat moored in the lake. Oceans and seas are what I dream about when I think of water but this tiny bucket of water, this little backyard lake, is as pleasant to the senses, and imminently here now.
 
Some people have the natural knack for enjoying the physical world. They glory in their bodies. Some of us, like me, spend our lives in our minds. There is no dichotomy here but shouldn't I enjoy the body, too, as I enjoy the mind? Summer gives precedence to bodily experience. The sun, the heat, the scarce and precious breeze, the laboring breath as we walk briskly through soupy air: instead of fighting off the sensations we can glory in it.
 
Five times a day Muslim imams invite other Muslims to acknowledge the glory of the one God. God is all this, and heaven, too.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Michigan Summer Paradise of the Senses

Still and video photography are coming together in the same device. Witness the amazing Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Nikon D5000. But for older camcorder owners like me, the old truism prevails. Forget taking a good still photograph on a video camcorder! Today I scrounged around for the USB cable for my Sony HDV HC7 to download the accumulated images I've recently taken with the camera when it was the only camera I had to take still photos. Processing these on Photoshop also showed the limitations of the camcorder for taking still images. Nonetheless, I would not have had even these images if the camcorder didn't have a still photo option!
 
Michigan in the summer is my closest heaven. I love the sound of crashing waves, the fine-sand beaches that seem to stretch forever, and dunes to climb, feet sinking into warm sand that turn surprisingly cold as the feet sink under the sun-warmed surface. Michigan is sensory paradise for someone who grew up on islands surrounded by the wildly blue Pacific.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

This Morning's Practice

This morning’s practice involved additional readings from Meditations from the Tantras, a collection of essays centered around the teachings of the Dashnami sannyasin, Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Preceding the core of the book, a collection of specific meditation techniques taught by the swami, were essays introducing the teachings at the Bihar School of Yoga that he founded in 1964. Satyananda was a student of Sivananda whose books I have enjoyed through the years. This book on tantric meditations is  more recent than Sivananda's books although it was published in 1983. Its teachings are decidedly more ecumenical, including in its broad statements about the efficacy of technique all the major religious traditions of mind-cultivating practices like Christian mysticism and Zen.

My practice is largely founded on the Theravadin scriptural and oral traditions. The bulk of my study has focused on the various Buddhist schools in Asia, and more recently, the translations and commentaries by European and American scholars. My work in yoga has been largely based on Patanjali's synthesis and teachings from Thakor Patel, a disciple of Shri Kripalvanandji. Satyananda's book blurs the distinction between Buddhist and Yogic teachings. The book proposes an end goal of practice not dissimilar from what Buddhism teaches: the elimination of ignorance. Ignorance, as also taught in Buddhism, is ignorance of who or what we are and the profound ramifications this has on how we perceive and live life.

In describing "the experience of dhyana," Satyananda waxes poetical: "Life becomes so joyful so that it needs no ambition, no justification, no reason: it is sufficient just to be."

Manuals of style recommend that the writer avoid hyperbole. To make statements of exaggerated truth makes the whole work suspect. Ordinary life is imminently ordinary. Only in poetry is hyperbolic sweetness condoned. Perhaps only in poetry and in what to me is a similar state, the experience of the sacred, do our minds shift from immersion in the ordinary to be torn free to experience a fuller, more vivid reality unhindered by rationality and intellectuality. Bach's music is intellectually mathematical and perfect but its real impact comes when we forget the architectural construction of the pieces and lose ourselves in the music itself. Living the music is a different function of mind. Dhyana is understood as approaching the limits of mind itself. When consciousness breaks out of the confinement of mind, subject and object become identical. In that union is unlimited space and time, both aspects of experience dissolving into the simplest terms.

I remember a Japanese Zen monk at Barre when I was there to study the elements of Pali. The monk was not in his robes but had not yet given them up. He was seeking a way to return the robes, gifts of a community he was no longer in touch with. He described why he was not sure he wanted to pursue the practice. In his meditation practice, he felt he was losing himself and that was sheer terror. 

The majesty of freedom is an amalgamation of all the possible emotions a human being experiences. Like flour, yeast, salt and water, they unite into a common substance, dough, although this metaphor too is flawed. Substance exists when there is someone outside substance that apprehends it. The agent that apprehends is what we refer to in ordinary, unenlightened life as "I". The concept is so ubiquitous that we don't see "I" anymore. We become absorbed in the delusion. This is ordinarily what we call being practical.

Satyananda writes that someone who touches and lives in the nameless still operates in the world of forms. There just is no longer identification with the forms. The forms, whether self or other, are shapes of eternity passing like the shadows of numberless days, numberless years, centuries and aeons beyond count.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

The Season's Highlight Surprise

I came out to water the plants on the deck this morning and found that the endive has sprung a handful of flowers. Yesterday's one bloom had shriveled up. The flowers apparently live just a day. Dozens of buds continue to sprout on what now appears to be an extended flower stalk for the normally low-growing endive. Its surprise flowers are certainly among this season's most pleasant discoveries!

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Endive's Surprise Purple Flower

Lighting and the unusual make for interesting photography. This morning while watering the plants on the deck in anticipation of another sweltering summer day, I discovered that the endive that had grown an unusual foot-long growth from which extended strange appendages was actually blooming. This was the first of the buds to bloom. A discovery like this is one of gardening's chief pleasures, and coincidentally, photography's as well.
 
I do want to resume doing tutorials in both Photoshop and the craft of taking photographs. I feel I've rested long enough and need additional processing skills to advance my photography work.

Posted via email from Duende Arts