I got up to embrace him, feeling the span of thirteen years dissolve in an instant; the thirteen years since we had last met. We had run all over Europe together every year for ten years or more in the 80′s/90′s, when I had organized his retreats there and in England. When we weren’t sitting in some retreat center we were floating down the Grand Canal in a gondola in Venice, taking the waters in Vichy, or lounging in a country hotel in Englandsitting in some retreat center we were floating down the Grand Canal in a gondola in Venice, taking the waters in Vichy, or lounging in a country hotel in England, He is more.sitting in some retreat center we were floating down the Grand Canal in a gondola in Venice He used to enjoy beating me at tennis. “Are we having fun yet?” He would say.

He seems to be having fun now.

I’ve become an island boy, he says, his smile growing wider. I’ll never leave here again. I can go all over the world with Skype, he adds, with a hint of mischief.

A young man from Connecticut, one of a team of volunteers who have stepped up to care for him, walks in and hands us each a glass of water. Ram Dass’s appeal is not just to the 60’s generation. His books and talks reach all across the country and the generations. He is 82 now, teaching online, and reaching as many people as ever.

He’s been in a wheelchair for fourteen years or so, after a massive stroke that almost left him for dead. He’s been stroked by grace, he likes to say. The stroke struck a blow to his pride, to his self-importance, and to his identification with the story of Richard Alpert, the first professor to be sacked from Harvard back in the day when he gave his students little white tablets of LSD for their homework. It challenged his subsequent role as spiritual guide and mentor for a whole generation; a mediator for countless seekers to find a way through to the essence of Eastern spirituality, to the experience of genuine devotion and a lucid mind, free of the need for the short cut of drugs.

When the stroke happened, his first thought was of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who had left this earth many years before. Where were you when I needed you most? Ram Dass heard himself screaming inside. Were you out to lunch somewhere?

Just you wait, the answer came. You do not know what any one thing may serve.

Ram Dass’s guru is alive for him as ever, perhaps even more so, right here in his heart. As far as Ram Dass is concerned, he is in continual and mostly non-verbal communication with his presence; an unceasing prayer, you might say.

Over time, he has come to see that his stroke has given him the opportunity to let go of his grip on life; to let go of the idea that he can control his future. It has coaxed him toward surrendering fully to the reality of being human; to embracing the inevitable passage of all of us toward old age, sickness and death.

The stroke has given me another way to serve people, he says. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. Death is perfectly safe, I like to say. Today I see my stroke event as a visitation of grace, courtesy of Neem Karoli Baba. It has landed me more deeply in my heart. People come here and they say they feel immersed in love. That’s good, but I don’t know what that is. I’m not doing anything. It’s all Maharaji’s grace. He laughs.

But tell me, he says, turning the conversation back towards me. You are writing a book called Keeping the Faith Without a Religion. Tell me, do you think the Buddha had faith?

Ram Dass always cuts through to the heart of things. He is still questioning, even today. He continues to question his own answers and assumptions, and now he’s encouraging me to do the same. Life remains a mystery for him. He seems profoundly content, at this stage of his life, to rest in unknowing.

Which doesn’t mean you don’t have questions, he said, when I voiced my thought. It means you don’t settle for easy answers. Neither does it mean your mind remains restless. You can be still and still moving. Content even in your discontent.  I’ve  never  been more content in my life than I am now in this wheelchair. He laughed again. I believed him.

An hour flashed by. He swiveled his chair again. Got to go, he said, flashing that smile. I have a doctor’s appointment.

A hug, a quick photo, and he was gone. When you’ve got to go you’ve got to go. We were left gazing over the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, a deep blue stretching off into another blue. So – I asked myself Ram Dass’s question again – did the Buddha, The All-Knowing, All-Seeing One, have any need of faith? Can you have faith, without having faith in something?  This, I suspected, was where Ram Dass was headed with his question. As we got up to leave, I was reminded of some lines from the poem, For The Anniversary of My Death, by W.S.Merwin. Merwin happens to be a neighbor of Ram Dass on Maui. Yes, the poet says. It is indeed possible to be

Bowing, not knowing to what.

Well, what would you say?

No I don’t mean in the vein of Jack Kerouac, who you can see portrayed with Neal Cassady ( Dean Moriarty) in the movie On The Road, just out now, a sad, even tragic display of adolescent narcissism, even though it resulted finally in a groundbreaking, brilliant book. But was Kerouac’s book worth all those broken lives, broken promises, betrayals, overdoses, alcoholic stupor and early deaths? History is full of-larger-than life characters striding the world stage with steam pouring out of their ears and sometimes a masterpiece or two to show for their gargantuan energy. It’s a sobering fact that creative people often burn out, and even self-destruct in an obsessive frenzy that, especially since the advent of Romanticism in the 18^th. Century, has frequently been considered essential for creativity.

Is it necessary, though, to burn like a fuse wire in order to be given utterly to life? I don’t think so. A leaf holds nothing back when it finally falls from the tree. It is wholly given to the wind that floats it free. There is a wildness and a passion in that freedom, in the abandon to life as it is. Jane Hirshfield, in her poem Lake and Maple, says that

In the still heart,

That refuses nothing,

The world is twice-born.

The stillness Hirshfield refers to shimmers with aliveness. Eliot reminds us that

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance…

This stillness too is a kind of passion, one full of intensity in its quietness. It’s the vibrant ground of everything that is, including your own mind. That’s the kind of wildness I want. The one that lets me fall back into the great open spaces behind all my strategies and thinking; that lets me attend and give voice to the muse that is always whispering if only I have ears to hear. That, I believe, is where the world is twice-born. This is the kind of “writing wild” I hope to inspire in my workshops. They are a community in which to discover your truth and beauty in your own words, in your own life story. They encourage you to reclaim and embrace the voice that speaks from the soul.

He had, after all, recently become the best-selling author of Iron John, the book that did much to launch the men’s movement when it was published in 1990. He had been a cult phenomenon for years in the States, where he had already moved through several lives, notably that of the anti-Vietnam war figure, the unruly and brilliant poet, ever the rebel and iconoclast, always too wild to take the usual poet’s career route of a safe seat in some university.

But we were in London now, where I had invited him to come and recite his poetry in those gruff and rumbling tones that originated somewhere below his belly. That, he said, would be on the third reading of a poem, when I mentioned my appreciation of that trademark gravelly deliverance. The first, more cerebral reading would usually come from somewhere behind the eyes; the second, he would say, from the heart. But the third reading, down there in the depths, or so he liked to think, incorporated all three, and would issue from his bear-like body like a decipherable yet distant thunder.

Relatively few people had known of him in London before the publication of Iron John. That was the book that moved him from a cult figure to a cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, and gave his poetry and translations the room and the air they needed to be fully appreciated for what they are – great songs of the soul in all its colors – despair, longing, love, melancholy, ecstasy, silence – spiritual sustenance in a secular age.

That’s what I wanted him to share with the English public, unfamiliar as it was not only with his poetry but with purple waistcoats and what I sometimes thought of as gruff and guttural throat-singing. But the English always love a character, as they call someone with more than the usual dose of eccentricity. Bly is not only a character, he is a character with brilliant and penetrating intellect, and that combination is a sure thing in England. They took to him in droves; took to his informal recitals, complete with ukulele and three repetitions of the same poem, as a long overdue contrast to those readings where someone stood before an audience and bored them to tears for an hour. When you went to hear Bly, you went to an electric performance, not a reading. I brought him back every year for several years, and grew to love him, despite his frequent scowl, his occasionally diminishing and irritated responses to participants in the men’s groups I also organized for him there; despite his sudden changes of mind and mood, his deep inscrutability.

I came to see the complexity, the tenderness, the fragility even, of a character who could often strike people as formidable or daunting. Once he took me to the home of a Persian Sufi Sheikh somewhere in London – after all, Bly is the translator not only of the great Spanish poets, Machado, Lorca, Jimenez, but also of the Sufi mystics, Hafez, Rumi, Kabir – and there we both were, in that room full of Persians, sitting with glass cups of tea before us, chanting the zikr, the names of God, the tears rolling down Bly’s face as he swayed from side to side. No wonder so much of his work, both his own and his translations, is fuelled by a deep longing that no words can adequately convey.

It was Bly who first brought me to those great Sufi poets; Bly the inspiration for my reciting them publicly. Ultimately it was Bly’s inspiration that, when I had moved to the States, led me to write about them and also contemporary voices like Mary Oliver, in Ten Poems to Change Your Life, the first of several books I came to write on poetry.

On the one hand, his own poems convey a poignant honesty and humor – the poem Wanting More Applause At a Conference begins with these two lines:

It’s something about envy. I won’t say I’m envious,

But I did have certain moods when I was two.

And on the other, they carry a deep tenderness, an abiding awareness of our brief span here on earth; a rich spiritual sensibility that can appreciate and feel the touch of spirit on the body. I have loved his poem The Third Body since I first heard him recite it that first year he came to London. Like the touch of ice, it gives off an unusual heat, for all its apparent quiet and coolness. Nothing happens between the couple in the poem; and yet, in the silence between them, everything happens:

A man and a woman sit near each other;

As they breathe they feed someone we do not know,

Someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

And now he is eighty six, frail, rarely seen in public, the bluster and bravado gone, the spirit as present as ever. And this week Robert Bly, a comet through the sky of American poetry, was finally was awarded America’s greatest honor in poetry, The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Foundation of America. A film, News of the Universe, is being made about his life www.robertblymovie.com Thank you Robert, for your life, your work, your words, your purple waistcoat, your irrepressible spirit.

So here we are today, in the latest era of the Wall Street Raiders. If it has always been thus, then our notion of progress seems to be missing something. For all our technological sophistication, there are ways in which we seem to be no more morally or ethically wise than humanity ever was. Yet the neo-Darwinists and the acolytes of Ayn Rand together would brush the moral argument aside. In their view, the unfettered activity of the market will let the fittest survive, while the less agile will gradually be discarded like so much junk DNA. This, they believe, would lead to the progress of society in general.

The gaping hole in the middle of this argument is there in plain view: it assumes we are no more than pieces of animated meat bent solely on our own survival and on that of our species. Yet the laws of the observable universe and of evolution do not apply to the invisible world of being. If you deny the existence of such a world, how do you account for the fact that something is born and eventually dies?  What is this extraordinary something that animates a bee or a dragonfly or a human being?

See more on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-housden/materialism-a-failure-of-imagination_b_2994206.html

Job had no answer to that, except to bow to the loss of his possessions, the deaths of his ten children, and the ravages of the boils that afflicted him from head to feet. His health, his wealth, and his family – the foundations for most people’s identity – were all brought low for no apparent reason. His friends, adamant that he must have sinned greatly to have merited such ill fortune, represent the common view that people suffer for the evils or injustices they have brought into the world, and that honorable men are protected from misfortune by their good deeds. And yet we have only to look around us to see how specious this argument is. 

The story of Job has lived on in the collective imagination for so long because of Job’s response to his misery. Unlike his friends, he did not question why his fate had turned so dark. He knew he had lived an honorable life and had committed no great sin. He had a profound faith in the way life appeared from moment to moment. Not that he knew there was an underlying reason to whatever happens – he didn’t, and there isn’t – but that there was, indiscernible to his eyes and to ours, a pattern of intelligence that was at play in every moment that had its own rightness.

Job’s response to his suffering gave us these famous lines:

Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Job 1:2

The poet Jack Gilbert borrows these lines to begin his poem, The Lost Hotels of Paris:

The Lord gives everything and charges

By taking it back. What a bargain.

Many of us are given everything in life – meaningful work, a beating heart, loved ones, shelter, beauty – and it is still a bargain even though it is all taken back again along the way and ultimately, in death. It is a bargain not only because of the joys and beauties and loves that life provides on the journey, but also because of how we may be shaped and honed and clarified along the way.

It’s not that periods of darkness and suffering are ‘good for us’ and should be looked for. That would be another posture or strategy of the ego, or some institutional madness as can still be found in the Catholic Church. No; suffering sucks. No one wants to suffer, even as everyone suffers. No one would choose to go through what Job did. But given that we do all go through periods of darkness from time to time, we might ask how such passages just might deepen our faith in life even as they seem to be bring into question the very meaning and purpose of life itself.

Until recently, my own sense of the world included the idea that I inhabit a vibrant, healthy body. My body image was an integral part of my own positive regard for myself. After all, I had lived into my sixtieth decade and never had a day’s illness to speak of. I had never been in a hospital. Unconsciously, I had constructed a self-image that I imagined would last forever. When I went for a routine check-up a few months ago, the cardiologist noticed I had a large aneurism in the aorta. It is a life—threatening condition, since the aorta wall can burst at any time without warning. Open chest surgery would be necessary soon.

Over the next few days, I could feel my idea of myself gradually adapting to take in the news. It took me some time to register the gravity of it; to let the reality seep into my consciousness. I realized how much pride and vanity as well as gratitude I had felt for the strength and health of this body that had served me so well. I felt grief at the realization that it was going to change; that it was going to come under the surgeon’s knife. I felt vulnerable suddenly, and very mortal. I knew from the inside now what Naomi Shihab Nye meant in her lines,

Walk around like a leaf,

Knowing you could tumble at any second.

But I also felt more deeply part of the human race. When I went to meet the surgeon at my local hospital, he told me he had a waiting list of a couple of months. People of all ages undergo the same operation I need to have every day of the week. Suffering is normal. Physical pain, or even the prospect of it, brings us down to earth. It humbles us, and in a good way. Humility, humus, humor – they all have the same etymological root. I was not used to pain, and open chest surgery meant that I would get to know it well. And yet the whole experience has softened the edges of my known identity; opened me to feeling more deeply the pain and also the beauty of others. It has opened me too to the preciousness of this life that is moving through me, now and now and now; not its conditions but to the glorious and simple fact of being.

Ultimately, what is in danger of being excluded from the cultural conversation is not the old gods, but the quality of imagination that gave birth to them; an imagination that sees and feels humanity to be part of a living, breathing world with an intelligence that we will never fathom; full of presences and qualities that our ancestors gave names to, but that live on as always even as their names have fallen away. William Wordsworth gives voice to this imaginative faculty in this excerpt from his poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of thought,

And rolls through all things.

Perhaps you have felt something similar yourself? Wordsworth articulates a profound human experience that many of us know but few have the words to express.

Who made the swan and the black bear?

asks Mary Oliver in her poem, A Summer Day. She does not ask casually. Her question arises from a genuine sense of unknowing; from sheer wonder. The questioning that emerges from unknowing differs from conventional inquiry, Stephen Batchelor notes in his book, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, in that it has no interest in finding an answer. Perplexity keeps awareness on its toes.

Who made the world? Who made this hand traveling across the page in the slanting light of an August afternoon? I look and I wonder and I sit back and I gasp as I realize that I do not know what a single thing is; what this is before me that is known as a table and who this is that sits breathing softly by my side, her legs crossed and her eyes down. It is a wonder we are here at all and a greater wonder still that I can wonder at it, and yet the more I wonder the closer I feel, the more intimate I feel, to this throbbing wild and passionate world. I wonder, and I come alive as the world comes alive before my eyes. Can we wonder the world alive, in spite of everything?

Think of all the beauty around you and be happy, Anne Frank said. She should know, if anyone does. Anne Frank was sixteen when she died in Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Before she died she must have known – she must have seen – to be able to say such a thing in those darkest of hours – that matter can be illuminated and clarified by a quality of grace beyond its merely material form; beyond even circumstances that would normally be considered so horrific as to be unredeemable. Matter transformed  – either of itself or in the light of our imagination – opens our hearts and minds and joins us to the living miracle of the world.

At the heart of beauty is the union of spirit and matter. Spirit: the ineffable ungraspable quality that brings something alive. Beauty is a unity beyond rational apprehension, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is a lens or a window that offers a glimpse of a greater dimension of reality; one that brings us closer to the source of being. It was the window that was open to me this morning on my way up Mount Tam. It is both objective and also partly in the eye of the beholder, made conscious through the eye of the individual imagination. We may see even the most banal and humdrum thing – a plastic bag dipping and diving in the wind – and like the characters in the movie American Beauty, be in awe at the inexpressible beauty they can see there dancing before them. Beauty is one of the saving graces of being alive.