Dear Friends,

There is not too much that is new to report on my body's realities. We continue to notice slow declines in energy, balance and sometimes in appetite. I now travel up and down about 3 blocks of our wonderful neighborhood with my trusty walker. Yesterday, on New Year's Day I had my first fall. I was standing up for just a few seconds in the bathtub where I always faithfully use my bath chair. I think I stood up to get some shampoo off the shelf. Next thing I knew I was lying on my left side beside the toilet seat. Sharon heard the noise and came instantly. I got up on my now power and felt no pain anywhere, although later there was some aching in my left (lower!) cheekbone. I shrugged my should and had the thought, "New Year's Day. It came right on time." There was some matter of factness, even a bit of shoulder shrug in my response, which I was glad to see.

My normal does keep slowing down more and more and I seem mostly at peace with this for which I am grateful. I spend time writing letters, making whimsical art, and watching too much television. Sharon continues to cook wonderful meals which is certainly one of the reasons I have lived this long. Our wonderful hospice nurse Carly Manweiler comes for abhor every Wednesday at noon. We spend the first 45 minutes reading poetry together. (We've been reading the poetry of Washington State poet Alfred Lamotte. Look him up if you have not met him). Ginsberg the cat continues to teach me about being in the present moment.

We had a great holiday season.  Master chef and son in law Max brought a magnificent stew in a new crock pot, then left us the crock pot as a Christmas present. We went to a Christmas Eve service in a large conservative Presbyterian church and I was able  to mind my manners the whole time. On Christmas Day we had a great zoom visit with Hattie, now 6, Henry now 10, son Andrew and daughter in law Lindsey who live in Florida. They watched while we opened the presents they has sent us. Andrew and Hattie even did a Christmas dance for us. I was proud of a dancing frog painting I did for Hattie. She is now high on muskrats, so I am trying to learn to draw one.

We had black-eyed peas and cornbread on New Year's Day and I watch football, wall to wall.

Today I want to share some excerpts from all the wonderful poetry many of you sent back in October for my birthday. You sent enough to feast on for a lifetime! Thank you again.

Below are some of the lines you shared. Some are part of longer pieces, so please imagine everything here as resting in an even larger vessel of treasures.

There are many more. I hope to send another batch later.

Love,
Randall



PRAYER PANTHER
by Jeffrey Batstone

Swirls of colors
stalk the people
with prayers.
Then, now and later
the dancing rainbow persists,
resonating to our aha moments,
in our mumbles and cries
in the grooving twisting limber
lines of our flapping slapping
hips and lips.
Hungry to lighten up
the heaviest for burdens
with a flood of foolish delight.


WE GO SO BRIGHT AT NIGHT
by 
Cameron Haramia
(I first met Cameron during one Holy Week in Memphis in about 2011 at a foot-washing service. Washing one another's feet was a great way to begin a friendship! Cameron has created a home of dancing, poetry, and teaching in a number of places in Latin America) 

We go, so bright at night.
We go. 
We dream, we fall we rummage.

...I relive 
what immeasurable measure was measured,...
doled out.....,
like a dolly whip of cream,
the cream of the crop off friendship,
creme dee la creme of brotherhood.

Here we are, standing, lying,
wrapped in some way across geographies.

Overflowing from specific sights, sounds
of memory, 
however, overshadowing are the silent glances,
silent greetings and overjoyed shouts of
soul,
from one another....


Haiku by Jonathan Pickett, friend and filmmaker

Speaker, not through words
Tie-dye doer, loving Earth
Among trees, in church.


from our daughter, Lauren Greenheck, who did difficult heart work
along with son-in-law Max 
over many years to welcome me and love me into being family.
These are excerpts from a longer poem:

His picture is tucked inside a seashell
that she tucks in the palm of her hand.
Curly haired, friendly-eyed stranger.
Who is this that makes her brighten like the sun?

He is passionate about God.
Not just a small Sunday idea of God,
but one that "can't fit in a box."

He has a way with words,
one that grows even as he struggles to speak them.


from good friend and artist Sybil Macbeth. We had lots of dinners at Sybil and Andy's beautiful house in Memphis, some of them during the time I was still learning to "have my meals" by way of a stomach tube fed by large syringe. On 2! occasions  I had one of my famous accidents and squirted my dinner across the room at Andy and Sybil's,"baptizing" Sybil both times. She laughed, we cleaned up the mess and the feast went on. Sybil wrote:

He is a Welcome Prayer,
Open arms to God's sketchiest.
And to all the harsh and cruel turns
Life has thrown his way.
He says, "Welcome to the table. Drink wine, eat bread --
but Beware! There are also angels and saints and joys seated here."



The Canavese-Naffziger family are dear friends who were also close neighbors during our 5 years living in Alameda, CA. Their household always includes a vegetable, garden, fruit trees, beloved cats, and more recently a dog. Meadow is one of the cats. Here is a story about Meadow getting her first taste of chicken:

Sweet gentle Meadow
Fearful of dogs half her size
Grabbed an escaped (baby) chicken
And got a crazed look in her eyes.

The hen screeched and squawked, but didn't survive long
Meadow returned to us panting innocently, "What's wrong?"

The sisters of the deceased
Have moved to a retirement home
Making space for seven new chicks
Who'd best not fly the coop to roam!


from Dickie Bacon, a much-loved brother in law and real rock star, now pushing 70.
At Ruthie's 50th birthday party, after a strong lead-in on the drums, Dickie exploded the room wide open with James Brown's great words: "I FEEL GOOD!!!!"  Dickie is one who knows that no matter how many others, even with lesser sins, don't make it into heaven, all the great rock stars will!
Among the generous lines he wrote about me were:

This hippie with a servant heart, lives at life's end, placing his brother and sister in front...as taught and modeled by the Father's Son.
Soon lifted above, we can rest assured, he'll save a seat for us at this Holy Destination.


Sharon and I have fallen into a wonderful on-line Buddhist sangha that meets 4 or 6 times per week depending on how you count. William Gentner is the teacher and friend who started it all from his home on the edge of the jungle in Southern Costa Rica. Sometimes we can hear parrots outside his house singing in the background during our sessions. 

William sent the following poem that he wrote:

It's Okay to Be human

It's Okay to die;
to cry,
To sigh,
At a pink gold open sky
Of days' dawn and 
At the diminishing of its demise.

It's Okay to be old;
To mold, to lose hold,
To feel cold so deep in the bones
That they crack open; reveal the gold.

It's Okay to be sick;
To hear the click of
thick phlegm in the lungs,
Feel the prick of fever
And know the wick, longing for body's ease.

It's Okay to be born;
to be torn from womb,
to be shorn of worn raiments of the stars,
So earth may adorn with her radiance.

It's Okay to desire;
To be mired in the fire of passion,
to admire and acquire
Until greed and clinging expire
Under the weight of nothing.

It's Okay to avoid;
By what has annoyed,
To avert, to push away,
To even hate until efforts exhaust
And dissolve in pure love's void.

It's Okay to be deluded;
For awareness to be muted
Secluded from the present, Ignorant of the mind
When it's denuded of thought.

It's Okay to suffer;
To not buffrer
From the rougher patches on the path
Or acquire tougher bootsw
To protect the soles
Already untouched by stony obstructions.

It's Okay to be enlightened,
To experience nothing as heightened and
This life untightened, lightened and
brightened, to not be frightened
by suffering
by delusion
By hatred
By greed
By birth
By sickness
By old age
By death
To be all or none in just this.

It's Okay to be Okay
With being just me and thee and we
As is
It's Okay to be human.



My organization of my papers is not very good at times, so I got the following separated from its sender. I don't know who sent it but I like it, and her's why: It seems to me that the earliest beginning of our lives as babies, and the time near the end of our lives, often as dependent frail old people, both have a lot to do with poop, feces. In the 300s BCE, Taoist teacher Chiang-tzu was asked "Where is the Tao?" much like we ask, "where is God?" Chiang-tzu answered: 
"It's in ants and crickets...
It's in grass and weeds.....
It's in tiles and shards......
It's in urine and feces."

One of you wrote the following:

The purpose of life could be
found by sitting in the
same spot each day,
Watching, Listening, Sitting again.
So we sit and we shit,
same spot each day.
Sounds are different.
Smells are familiar.
Sit Spot. Shit Spot.



Long-time friend, mentor and poet Esther Elizabeth wrote:

You made it to here, to now
With meaningful things left to focus on
Being kind
Grateful
Affirming the other
Laughing
Dancing
Letting people know how much they contributed to your world
Writing poems
Choosing to see old as a delight, not as a sentence
And always returning to being grateful and kind.


Beloved Illuman brother Gilbert Fernandez wrote from El Paso:

Drink water, all day long
And piss all night
Beloved, why are you waking me up so often?
You plan these stupendous surprises
and you can hardly wait to spring them on me.
Whoever thought of using the moon as a wedding cup?
Is our wedding that grandiose to use such a vessel?
You spiked the drink and had me drink it all night long.
You offered it to me lips until
my cup was overflowing and could drink no more.
You knew I had to be heavily intoxicated
to survive living inn Her presence.
As it is I think I passed out when she appeared.


Friend from the past and poet Joe Aprile wrote:

Surrounded by the matrix
of the living world, passengers aboard this fabulous spaceship 
Earth, caressed by capricious winds,
greeted by morning mist
tossed upon perilous water,
enlivened by sunlight,
subdues by nightfall,
intimidated by fearsome storm,
delicate intricacies of nature's tendrils
that reach into every corner and crevice.

Life is a voyage and a journey,
blinded by explosive birth
and the finality of death....
Life is to be affirmed
by wrapped attention,
possessed from moment to moment and
neither squandered nor abandoned.



From Fayetteville, Arkansas in the Ozarks, Illuman teacher and brother Glenn Siegel wrote:

When I follow the path
Of waning vitality
To its thinnest arc
I am barely alive

Wispy presence trembling
Like the last vestige 
of the waning moon
before its Newness.

But once the emptines
of this newness
has been traversed
Another crescent re-emerges
Out of the opposite
terrain.

Waxing brightness from
darker edge
now gaining with each sunlit
confrontation, steadily growing
into Fullness.

But I am dimming, leaning 
into darkness
closing in on my own
Newness, my own emptiness

Once reflecting brightness
Promise brimming and
ever-present eros
leading me
often recklessly

I now take refuge in the subsiding,
in the weakening
in the feared realms
I dared not visit
when gibbous times 
had dominion.

Newness is nearing
and rapidly so
No more
Fullness eclipsing denial

I too will become invisible
faithfully following the parts of me
that have already done so.

When re-emergence inevitably 
comes there will be
light
in another
sky.


From about 1995 until about 2010 a brilliant engineer named Bert Sacks became (there is no finally sufficient name for him) a kind of Jewish, Buddhist monk on behalf of the children of Iraq who were dying by the hundreds of thousands as a result of the U.S.-U.N. sanctions of policy. I was raised in a strong anti-Semitic setting. When we became friends and I told Bert about this, he joked that he was sent to me as a not-very-smart Jew who was also poor. This, he said, should strip me of the stereotypes I learned as a child! It was far from true, of course, although Bert did give up his good-paying job and his car to work on behalf of Iraqi children. I was on the second of about 10 delegations of U.S. citizens that Bert led taking bags of medicine for children's hospitals in Iraq in open violation of U.S. sanctions law. (Yes, it was against the law to take medicine to children who had none. Most U.S. citizens never learned this). We all received notices of fines which we never paid, and Bert received them many times over. He did not stop there. He found pro-bono legal counsel a filed suit against the government for it genocide of Iraqi children.

In the 1997 delegation to Iraq with Bert that I was part of, Bert met me in Amman, Jordan after he spent a week meditating with a Buddhist group at Auschwitz. His impact on my life remains very large. He occupies one of the most elaborate guest rooms in my heart.

Bert is living with Parkinson's disease in Seattle. So we are on a journey together again as old men living with life's great gifts of tenderness and love.

But Bert did manage to dictate a poem and note to me.  The poem he is one of Bert's favorites and says so much about his life and about all of us. It comes from Jelaluddin Rumi, Sufi master and minstrel from the 1200s:

Out beyond the fields of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field.
When the should lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
Language, ideas, even the phrase "each other"
don't make sense any more.

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That's all for now. Love and blessings to all,
Randall