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Meeting Djordje II
Meeting Djordje – Nova Gradiska, Croatia
There is a dreamy quality to my rendezvous with Djordje, the almost Buddhist monk, tea ceremony and meditation master, at his home in Nova Gradiska, Croatia, something almost too real (if there can be such a thing), something so real as to be extraordinary, as if real is magical, which reality surely is. Words are clearly insufficient in a setting where something called “I” is honestly wondering if he even exists. Where as if in a dream I am sitting in a field drinking tea made of individually rolled tea leaves. Listening to the music of stones. Wondering if I created the music or if the music created me? Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. There is no end to ignorance.
Djordje speaks loudly and authoritatively to me. He listens to me. He argues with me. He tells me how ignorant I am. He commands that I listen only and not think of my answer. We discuss consciousness, ego, mind, knowing, not knowing, wisdom. We discuss politics, the real word, meditation, women, and bread. Like every stupid man, I am perfect, Djordje tells me.
Djordje announces we are going to visit his friend Djuka. Naturally we take thermoses of hot water, tea leaves, a tea pot, and cups. Djordje tells me he was 25 when he met Djuka who was then 40. Djuka had been a priest, but saw through the hypocrisy and falseness of the teachings and took off the robes. He lived as a hermit among some hill villagers near where we were now going. Over time Djuka somehow gathered a following, initially young people who he educated. Over time the community provided for Djuka. Djuka wrote an important letter to his followers in 1985. Djordje had a copy of the. We arrive at our destination. Djordje takes the letter and the bag with the tea from the car. We walk into a cemetery, sit on a bench next to a grave with nothing but a simple wooden cross, and drink tea with Djuka who has been laying here for some time, even pour Djuka some tea, read aloud his letter, reflect on Djuka who had had a long torturous imprisonment at one time, talk about my beloved friend Alan Berkman who had had a long torturous imprisonment at one time. Woodcutters on the hillside down talk trees which crash to the earth. I ring the cemetery shrine bell, which, of course, I was not supposed to do. Djordje expected nothing less. Like every stupid man, I am perfect.
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
Meeting Djordje
Meeting Djordje – Pine Hills, NY
Early in 2008 I have the irrefutably brilliant idea that I will go on a silent meditation retreat, something I have never done before (or since), and being the cautious conservative fellow I am I sign up at a Chan Zen center in upstate NY for a ten day session. The meditation sessions master is a ruggedly handsome 50ish looking man who speaks very firmly with a heavy accent that I instantly recognize as Serbo-Croatian. It is possible to speak with the master or the abbot only at specified brief times on alternate days. When my opportunity arises to speak with the meditation session master I trot out the three or four Serbo-Croatian phrases I still remember, tell the man that I lived in Bosnia in 1964 and that I was an anthropologist and he takes an instant interest in me. This is Djordje.
Over the course of the next few days Djordje sees that I am having an immensely difficult time sitting, which has become quite obvious to him because of my relentless fidgeting, sleeping, falling over, and snoring. Have I done a silent retreat before Djordje wants to know. And given my answer, why ten days to start rather than one or two. I’d like to tell him it’s because I’m trying to get over a broken heart but it is beyond our linguistic capacities, so I just shrug. “Listen,” Djordje advises, “you don’t have to sit for each whole session, but each session you must begin, try, and be present at the end. If you are restless just walk slowly in nature and meditate. And you must maintain silence!” Did I say I instantly loved Djordje?
The ashram is located in a spectacularly beautiful setting in Pine Bush, NY. Very remote, mountainous, watery. The snow is melting and there are deer herds everywhere. My days are blissful. The crows my companions. One day, instead of just walking in nature meditatively as Djordje has recommended I even dare get in my car and drive off the grounds – something clearly not permitted – just to get away and get a better sense of where I am. I pause for a while on a fairly deserted muddy dirt road in the woods some miles from the ashram within sight of a farmhouse, get out of the driver’s side of the car, get back in the passenger side, take out my laptop, do some writing without interference from the steering wheel, write maybe twenty minutes or so, realize I have to get back to the ashram and back into the meditation session before it ends, get back out of the car, back in the driver’s side, drive to the ashram, and have been sitting for a while in what I imagine is the remainder of the morning session when I notice Djordje has been called out of the session by the ashram director, something I have not seen happen before.
Before long Djordje is back in the meditation hall and I see he is signaling for me to come outside, which I’m only too happy to do, until I get there and see the abbot, the director, Djordje, and two of New York State’s finest highway patrol officers, who have been called by someone presumably in the farmhouse about a suspicious, unfamiliar car parked outside her house, the license plate number of which has been reported to the police who have deduced the vehicle belongs to someone at the ashram, have found the vehicle in the ashram parking lot, have the name and a description of a possible suspect of something, are there to investigate, and will not be thwarted or delayed. I learn later in fact that they demanded to come into the meditation hall to drag me out and that the ashram authorities explained why that would be impossible, an incredible violation of the entire sacred meditation space, and a gross tarnishing of the ashram’s reputation, to which the police responded that they were going in anyway, only until Djordje prevailed upon them not to do so and that he would bring me out.
“And how do you know who we want, there are 60 people in that room,” the police ask Djordje and Djordje says he said, “Why do you think they keep me here? I know things.”
Anyhow, the long and the short of this part of the story is that the police believe I am who I say I am, that I was doing more or less what I told them I was doing, for the innocent reasons I said I was doing it, that there were no outstanding warrants for my arrest, and they drive away. Easy for me, but not for the abbot and the ashram director who are aghast, there have never been police on their premises ever, I am clearly not ashram appropriate material, and that Djordje is to instruct me that I must leave immediately, that my fees will be refunded, and that I am no longer welcome. Which Djordje actually refuses to do. Tells them it would be wrong to ask me to leave, that they may deny me admission any time in the future they so wish, but that he will not ask me to leave in the midst of a session. “Fine,” the director says. “But be assured we will never permit him to return.”
On the last day of the session everyone gathers in the morning to formally break our silence and share some words reflecting on our experience. The abbot and the director are present. When it is my turn to speak I say I have written a poem about my experience that I would like to read. (It can be found here ). After hearing the poem the director tells Djordje that if I wish to return I will be welcomed. Would that all my poetry served me that well.
I say goodbye to the director with apologies for any unwanted attention I may have brought upon the ashram. The director says to me, “Do you think there is any rule of ours you haven’t broken?”
I say goodbye to Djordje and tell him I hope to return one day to visit “my” village of Lijesnica in Bosnia and Djordje says that if I do I come I should visit him in Croatia as well. And here I am. With far more now to tell.
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIESd
Croatia
Text to be added…
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
when spring arrives ice flows out of the bay
when spring arrives
the ice flows out of the bay
but the dead dolphin does not.
something is eating him,
portions of his tail gone,
a fin.
a creature with sharp claws
has opened a gash in dolphin’s soft underbelly
from which still red entrails fall
onto flattened marsh grass
and what was once beautifully poetic
turns macabre,
frightening,
disintegrating,
the promise of resurrection eradicated
in the reality
of what remains,
and what remains
is what is never more,
in spring,
when the ice flows out.
Poetry
Work and Love are What Really Matter: a reunion poem for the BHS class of 1958 reunion
1.
Reunion – a coming together after separation
Of those who have a shared experience.
That would be us.
2.
There are many reunions, of course,
An island in the Indian Ocean,
An arena in Dallas,
There’s Reunion the software program
Reunion the screenplay by Harold Pinter
Reunion, a book of poems by poet laureate Fleda Brown,
Reunion, the steamy novel of bondage and sexual erotica by Laura Antoniou
Reunion the TV show
That follows close friends after high school
Each episode a year in their lives
A mystery of love and loss, marriage and death, triumph and scandal,
The hopes and dreams of 18-year-olds
and the realities that mark their lives decades later.
And perhaps winner of best “Reunion” overall,
the song by Jimmy Webb,
With the lyrics:
“In the mathematics of the soul,
When we’re together
We each feel whole.”
3.
Our union begins at the rectangular city block
Carved into what was once a hilltop meadow in the Bronx
Bounded by Creston Avenue and Morris Avenue
184th Street and Field Place
And the building placed on the meadow
Created nearly a century ago
By craftsmen from a different millennium
Morphed into the Bronx HS of Science
Now the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Junior High School
Near the Grand Concourse
Modeled after the Champs-Elysees
Near a deli named Boxers
A little luncheonette
And a billiard parlor
Where I learned the first proposition of Einstein’s theory of relativity
“Time equals money.”
4.
Each one of us here today
More or less as we were there then,
A composition of fifty trillion cells
A mass of genetic nuclei
The energy producing mitochondria
The cytoplasm
(Who says I didn’t learn anything at BHS,
even if I graduated 703rd out of 746 graduates?)
To be intelligent may be a boon,
Said Henry Miller,
But to surrender without reservation,
Is also one of life’s supreme joys.
5.
So what did we intelligent Science graduates surrender to?
To love, of course
To children
And grandchildren
To pets
To careers
To the folly of our egos
To the search for peace
Interior peace
Familial peace
Peace in the wars with our neighbors
Peace in the wars with our parents
Peace in the wars raging inside ourselves.
Attaining peace,
Now there would be a reunion.
6.
In 1958 our class president, Phil Lilienthal,
Won election on a platform asking,
“How will you know what you want
Until you get it?”
Have we gotten what we want yet?
Phil runs a camp in Africa for teens confronting AIDS.
Ask him.
7.
Did you know that Stokely Carmichael,
“Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party
Who personally helped raise the number of registered Black voters in Loundes County Alabama from seventy to 2,670 in the summer of 1965,
Who I personally threw down the stairway from the fifth floor lunchroom in 1957 and later became allied with
was a Science graduate?
What a different path than our own Bill Taubman: Russian history scholar, biographer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize Award,
And Susan Gilbert Levine – Science HS class of 58 historian, scholar, eternal cheer leader, winner of the Elmer’s Glue Award
Or Angel Martinez, social activist and environmental visionary – who personally asked that I send his love today.
Robert Reeback, fine artist and painter.
John Burke, philosopher, pianist, railroad engineer, union man.
Captain Steve Sperman, once Brigade Adjutant of the 4th Army Division, a Jewish kid from the Bronx being saluted by German officers, a man who did what he believed was right: duty, honor, country.
You know we had three sets of twins in our class:
Jack and Fred Mazelis, Judy and Paulette Lambert,
And Constance and Cleonis Golding, now Elaine and Ellen Golding
Their home in Harlem a hub for friends and neighbors
Their family always generous with their time and compassion
As Ellen and Elaine are, to this very day.
8.
Listen to Ralph Berest Bennett, physician, healer, our valedictorian, who said at our graduation, “Let go of insistence on perfection. Be open to what life brings you – it is full of wonderful surprises.”
Or Marcia Klaster, our class salutatorian, who went on to teach biology at Bronx Science who said, “Work and love are what really matters.”
Work and love are what really matters …
9.
That’s what Liz Scoletis, co-captain of our cheerleading squad, Dean at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, whose sons attended our alma mater, also said, “Interesting work is the most seductive of all obsessions.” The most seductive of all obsessions? Maybe only at the Bronx H.S. of Science do cheerleaders say that. But then again, what more is there really to say?
10.
More than that, my classmates, whatever marks we leave are no more than footprints awaiting the next tide,
That we were traders of oxygen for carbon dioxide, which made some plants happy,
The throwers of balls which someone caught,
The kisses we blew which someone bought
The things we learned, the things we taught
We’ve spun our tales
We’ve called the bet
Our lives were precious
They are still yet
There was a school
Built in the Bronx
Where we learned Science
From hacks and wonks
Where we made friends
Where we found love
The plus the minus
The hawk the dove
A full half century
These fifty years
Of joy and sorrow
Of smiles and tears
You see my friends
The planet’s spinning
And all of time has no beginning
And since that’s true (how else can it be?)
There is no you, there is no me
There are our lives
The biosphere
The large, the small
That we hold dear
There was a time
Within our line
When you’d your life
And I had mine
We’ve known the small
We’ve known the great
There was a class
Science ‘58
Come my friends let us continue the conversations we have yet to begin.
© Bruce R. Taub
Poetry
Mesquite Dunes
The sun has set behind the Panamint Mountains
Before me are a pair of well-worn shoes,
A blanket,
The finest sand eons ever created,
Just this side of fairy dust
Outside of Stovetop Wells
Having chewed on the lord’s finest blue veined mushrooms.
The moon, did I say that it was full, arisen
The sand still fine
People speaking foreign languages disappearing
Those picnicking by the light of the moon gone back to their rental vans
Children no longer somersaulting down sand dunes
Outside Badwater the lowest point on the continent
And the Artists’ Palatte
Where god glorifies form and color.
Perhaps a memory here
Three years old
Wanting mother to know as much about me
And my needs and limits
As I knew of hers.
Perhaps a beautiful woman
Perhaps a distant auto slowing
There was a sign down a way,
Obviously placed there for me.
It read, Restoration in Process
Only there was nothing needing restoring
And then I was again alone.
Poetry
Crow’s Songs
1.
Ancestor crow hear me:
fire of black crow wing,
dragonfly.
What wonderfulness is life,
that I and thou in each others’ presence
pick hungrily at dead animals
in needle pines, in the forest of the city
Soaring with our altercrows
over freeways to the sand dunes
Singing our rhythmic song.
2.
Gathering forces we glide,
black crowfeather carries us
on air and prayer.
Maybe we will espy some matters delicious:
dead flesh soft and fragrant
colonels of corn naked in the furrows
some water at somewaters edge.
Easy pickings.
Lovely.
3.
My father was crow and my mother was too
all my sisters and brothers
and, of course, me and you
all our entire nation
vast jet black infestation
we must wed midst our kin
meet our needs from within.
4.
In the airwaves we flutter
dipsy doodle and mutter
this is all that we know
as we go to and fro
there is nothing to strive towards
all we’re given are rewards
simple foods, airs, and waters
and the love of our daughters.
5.
I love to eat me grasshoppers.
6.
We crows are the first to greet the dawn
And we like being first,
Being awake
Talking to one another
Hearing ourselves talk
Waking other songbirds
Song?
We are a murder
And proud of it.
7.
In large flocks we gather,
the cawing of our species fills the air.
Our movements ponderous and gracious
we hide in tall grasses
from treetops we call,
the fat cat, the red winged, the human.
Still we multiply.
8.
Time is to flight as shoreline is to sea
Altercrow calls from branch site
Bouncing over stones I press air beneath me
Working hard my wings I lift off
The currents carry me to tall tree.
I am clear and invisible.
Hey you. Caw.
brtaub – 1978
Poetry
Salton Sea
I discover my whitened bones in the desert
where they have resided for decades.
My head is detached from what was once my body
and lies some distance away from my ribs and chest cavity,
which have been gnawed upon by wind, wild animals,
grains of sand, and the passage of time
until naught remained but bone.
And although the bones were scattered
reconfiguration was easy.
We estimate this to have been a male,
an older specimen,
who weighed approximately 85 kilos and was 190cm tall.
Evidence suggests the cause of death
to have been starvation or perhaps a blow to the heart.
Several natural teeth showing signs of wear and care
are still embedded in the mandible.
Six thin metal springs each the size of a blood vessel
are discovered behind his breastplate.
We know no more.
Poetry
Insects in Amber
We are as insects trapped in amber
Last alive in the Eocene,
Which makes us very old,
Moths perhaps.
Our resinous coffins shaped, shined, and fondled
By Cro-Magnon and Baltic men and women
Who burn with wonder
That we were and are and aren’t.
I don’t want to be a bug in amber I cried
And it is hardly being a bug that troubles me
It is being stuck in this terminal goo forever
A prison
A shiver of fear
The terrifying reality of sticky feathers.
I love the pattern on my wings
my dusty pigmented scales
that evoke
female pheromones
and pheromone receptors
sensory neurons
olfactory sensilla
male antennae.
I did not intend this amber fate
He says, as they rest atop one another
atop the branch
on which they are delirious and invisible.
Oh blessed entomology
What is possible
What is true
There is me
And there is you.
Poetry
99 Gratitudes in 3 Minutes – A Yoga Chanting Poem
At the end of my first thirty day yoga teacher training course (which I took with Anna Forrest in Santa Monica in the 1990’s) the attendees were offered the opportunity to speak for 3 minutes and I offered this “poem,” which is meant to be chanted at a pace to be completed in under 3 minutes. Out loud. Try it. Mean it. Or not. Even disobedience deserves a gratitude.
Gratitude is an attitude
Not a platitude.
Be Gratitude.
See Gratitude.
Sculpt Gratitude.
Wear Gratitude.
Where’s Gratitude?
Here’s Gratitude.
Practice gratitude.
Standing. Gratitude.
Death. Gratitude.
Breath. Gratitude.
Downward dog. Gratitude.
To the injured. Gratitude.
To the healers. Gratitude.
In suppression. Gratitude.
For expression. Gratitude.
Courage. Gratitude.
Caring. Gratitude.
Not caring. Gratitude.
Wish it were different. Gratitude.
Wish I were different. Gratitude.
Accepting what is true. Gratitude.
Openness. Gratitude.
To pain, to pleasure, to change. Gratitude.
To jealousy. Gratitude.
To crow pose, to lion, to life. Gratitude.
To the teachers. Gratitude.
To their flaws. Gratitude.
To the slights. Gratitude.
To the mind. Gratitude.
To the heart. Gratitude.
To muscle, sinew, joints, and bone. Our gratitude.
Electrons. Gratitude.
DNA. Gratitude
Our spirit. Gratitude.
Ancestors. Gratitude.
Continuity and flow. Gratitude.
To distrust. Gratitude.
In trusting. Gratitude.
Pranayama. Gratitude.
It’s a feeling. Gratitude.
It’s all thought. Gratitude.
Love of beauty. Gratitude.
Look before you leap. Gratitude.
She who hesitates is lost. Gratitude.
No matter how much I try … Gratitude.
It will never change. Gratitude.
In the rocks and in the stones our gratitude.
Step in the stream. Gratitude.
Don’t give a damn. Gratitude.
I’d give my life. Gratitude.
For our genitals. Gratitude.
And our effort. Gratitude.
Inspiration. Gratitude
Transformation. Gratitude.
Warriors I, II, III. Gratitude.
To the liberators. Gratitude.
Thinking. Gratitude.
Don’t know mind. Gratitude.
Fish, fire, phoenix. Gratitude.
Mother, brother, straddle. Gratitude.
Tomorrow. Gratitude.
Bird of paradise. Gratitude.
In beauty. Gratitude.
The hoop of our people. Gratitude.
Loved and lost. Gratitude.
Humility. Gratitude.
Futility. Gratitude.
Magic. Gratitude.
Tragic. Gratitude.
The arrival. Gratitude.
The departure. Gratitude.
The explicit. Gratitude.
The unstated. Gratitude.
In the Word. Gratitude.
The inversions. Gratitude.
The unconscious. Gratitude.
All the dreams. Gratitude.
And the dreamers. Gratitude.
To be small. Gratitude.
To be huge. Gratitude.
Active feet. Gratitude.
Chanting. Gratitude.
To the monk. Gratitude.
To those present. Gratitude
And those absent. Gratitude.
To our graces. Gratitude.
For the dolphins. Gratitude.
Tears and fears. Gratitude.
Competition. Gratitude.
To the guys. Gratitude.
And the goddess. Gratitude.
No one asks. Gratitude.
Bring it on. Gratitude.
Forward bend. Gratitude.
In the dark. Gratitude.
In the light. Gratitude.
Namaste. Gratitude.
Blessed silence. Gratitude.
