tales of copper city

Awareness as deepening self-acceptance

Steven Batchelor's book Buddhism Without Beliefs has this wonderful definition of acceptance:  “Awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance."  He goes on to say why this seeing can be so deep and radical…”There is nothng unworthy of acceptance.”

Acceptance is a big deal in A.A. I have tended to see acceptance as the adjustment to reality; acceptance of what is and learning to deal with it honestly without self-deception or the deception of others.  What is more we are learning to see ourselves and life itself more deeply.  In this way Batchelor turns acceptance back on ourselves:  When we learn to accept we are not just seeing reality or life itself with a clear set of glasses, we are learning to see ourselves more clearly.

This is a new idea to me, or it is an old idea I have forgotten. Nevertheless it is truly important.

Waking up in Singapore with a beard

In 1969, I entered the basement of a small Lutheran church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to attend my first meeting of that famous alcohol recovery program.

For the next 35 years I didn't have a drink.

The program saved my life, our marriage, and our future together. 

Life in the contingent (funky) dimension.. redux

I once wanted to write a short story about a man who moved to a town like Bisbee and bought a blue house. In the story, the man didn't truly understand why he came to that town and bought such a colorful house. He only knew that the life that was now behind him, a life of striving, was finished. What he wants now is a life lived differently. While the man cannot live his life over, he can at least live the rest of his life, long or short, awakening his heart to another world.

I didn't know how the story would end, but I knew what I wanted to name it: "The Blue House." I never finished the story but I knew it was important. And then I saw a painting in a gallery in Jerome, AZ titled, "The Blue House." The house was on the side of a mountain, like so many in Bisbee. And the gallery itself looked out over the vast valley that lay stretched out below another town that housed a Phelps Dodge mine. Seeing the picture began to open me up to the mysteries of the story and why I wanted to write it.

photo of Old Bisbee by Ted Weller

For nearly all of our lives we live in a kind of flat, horizontal dimension, the dimension of efficiency, of having and of getting, and of achieving. We live mostly in our heads. Our hearts are asleep. Cities on the plain surrounded by endless suburbs stretching mile after mile to the horizon are the perfect symbol for this way of life.

When we see Bisbee for the first time, we sense the possibility for living another way. This is in no small part because Old Bisbee is built on the walls of two canyons. Life here is lived more in the vertical than the horizontal dimension. Philosophers have long used the vertical as the symbol of relationship and belonging, of love, of art, of our connectedness to the world and others. It's not just philosophers who grasp this difference.

Why do kids love houses up in the air, tree houses above the ground? Isn't this their way of creating a special community, a magical world governed by the mysteries of love and the imagination perched above the boring flatland down on the ground? Aren't our myriad of Bisbee stairs another sign that life here is lived in another dimension, that the mysticism of everyday life lays closer to the surface here?

In the vertical dimension, the nature of having can be transformed, softened. We must have shelter for protection and ease, but all too often houses in the wider world of getting and having become our masters, symbols more of success and status rather than places for companionship and affection.

The ecologic confession

Here we are on another Sunday and once again we probably won't go to church.  I'm not protesting anything; many of my friends attend the church I love, and so it's not that either. It's just that it seems that our devotion, our ethics, about "church" are too small, way too small.

Devotion should be about gratitude and if there is anything we ought to be grateful for, it is life itself.  That's true for almost any age but its really true when you are 77.  Life itself for we humans is personal but we also sense that we are members of something larger, something far more significant. Our understanding of life ought to be expressed in an ethic, an ethic that expresses to what we mean by our membership in the community of life.

The best statement I have found for this view of an ecologic ethic is Wendell Berry in his book of essays, Another Turn of the Crank. Berry argues that health is a communal and ecological concept, referring to our membership and participation in communities, both civic and ecological. As Berry says, 

I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction of terms.

I believe that at bottom our most important ethic should reflect how we view life---how we view life itself underneath it all and what this means for membership in the body politic.

Headquarters, Idaho

The stories in newspapers a year or so ago about the foiled kidnapping in western Idaho, near Cascade, Idaho, take me back.  I know that part of Idaho, and especially the area further north, where Pierce and Headquarters are located. I first worked there in 1956, having hitchhiked there from San Antonio to find work with Potlatch Forests.  I returned several years later and worked a summer for a timber protective association, in brush clearing and fire protection.

My high school best friend, John Feeley was already in Idaho, working in the Potlatch Forest logging camp at Headquarters, and he called me and told me I ought to get up there. The pay was good, the logging camp food was tremendous, and it would be an adventure.  So, after much debate with my father and mother, in the summer of 1956, I quit my summer job at J.C. Penney and set out. Dad drove me up to Comfort, Texas, about 25 miles north of San Antonio, and I got out and stuck my thumb out. 

The Serenity Prayer and acceptance in everyday life

The Serenity Prayer is one of the best known prayers in the world.  Written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to serve as part of a sermon during WWII, it soon became a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and all manner of recovery groups.

I have written about the Serenity Prayer before here and, on the origins of the prayer, here.  Niebuhr's daughter Elizabeth Sifton, in her book The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, traces the origins of the ideas in the prayer to the famous Deportation Strike of 1917 in Bisbee.

Step-Children of a Lesser God, a little desperately

(I have written about hearing loss several times, over the years, the first time for The Bisbee Observer, and then once before in this blog. My hearing loss had stablized; now it seems worse. Hearing with hearing loss is work and it is a skill, and skills can go rusty. And the environments you hear in change, and I've been teaching again, and I need to always keep on the students, to get them to speak up, and to speak to me. Students often think a classroom is like a church; one must speak softly. I constantly remind them that their voice will be a primary part of their professional life. It's working but it's still work. I will soon see if hearing aid technology is really progressing, as I've heard it is. I attend a small recovery meeting once a week and people there speak in almost a hush. I sometimes can't hear someone sitting next to me.)

I bought the hearing aids I now wear, in 2010, probably my fifth set in almost 20 years, and each time I get new instruments, it takes me back to Austin and the Texas School for the Deaf. This was 1959.

"The Palestine Pit Barbecue and Beauty Salon"

"The Palestine Pit Barbecue and Beauty Salon," the sign read. A sign we always saw when we were driving home to see my family in San Antonio, driving home from North Carolina. That sign always brightened our trip.

Palestine, Texas, south of Jacksonville, and Tyler and Texarkana, East Texas towns I once lived in.  Not Palestine, however, although I had relatives who lived there, Nelda and Jack, cousins, and I'm sorry I don't remember Jack's last name. I think it was Cole. Nelda was Ronnie's older sister, a sweet woman, rather plain looking but still pretty, freckled, and I liked her a lot. She always seemed glad to see me, glad to see Mom, her aunt, and Dad, "Beach."

"Flapsville"

I don't want to get into it over Gay marriage; it never has seemed to me as anything other than sane or sensible.  Why shouldn't gay couples be married? Why shouldn't we admit the diversity of sexuality and extend committed and legal relationships like marriage to gay couples?

But what drives me nuts is that we've turned this issue into another huge "flap." We love it, that is to say the media loves it, because another flap starts and the public turns on their laptops and spends huge amounts of time reading and view what others are saying, and on and on it goes for about four or five days, and then it dies down. And the media uses all of that coverage and public attention to justify advertising revenue.

Politics increasingly seems to be one episode of "Flapsville" after another. We no longer have any kind of extended, sustained comment or criticism of President Obama, the GOP and the House of Representatives, the upcoming election and its importance. What we have is a series of "flaps," each one vying with the last for maximum attention, the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

Frankly, I've lost my place. I have no idea any more where we are as a nation or a society.  I'm waiting for the next "flap" to tell me.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

I'm finishing up Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry. I don't know why it's taken me so long to finally read it. McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave, another book of his essays, is one of my all-time favorite books on Texas. Another book of McMurtry's that I'm fond of, and have read several times, is Leaving Cheyenne. And I have read a good many of the rest of his famous, wonderful books, like The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove.

You might wonder, "books on Texas?"  Well, yes, for those of us who grew up there at about the same time as he did, it was a terrific place to be, particularly Austin. Texas in the 1960s and even early in the late 1950s was beginning to wake up to what was going on in the nation, particularly culture and writing.  McMurty and I are the same age; he's a year older.  He went to Rice Institute as it was called back then, one of the best schools in the nation, even then. I went to the University of Texas.