THE WAY IT WAS, Journal Excerpts (1980’s), The Clearing

We write journals only to discover years later (if we’re still around) who we were, what held our interest, what we were moving toward or away from. Any kind of notes jotted down and kept for whatever reason always have value, interest, some sense of history.

In this instance, since I rarely read anything I once published, I’m not even sure when I wrote the journal that became the book, DOOR STEPS, the second in the Door Trilogy, published in 1983, and couldn’t find the original ms. today if I tried. I remember I wrote it primarily as a writing discipline: Put something down on paper every damn day of the year! Without fail! It was a task master. But worth all the frustrating days when I would rather be working on something else.

I let the day, the time of year determine the direction of the entries: nature/the seasons, of course; the writing life, travel, family, etc. And when I came to June, there was always that week (always since the 70’s) when I ‘returned’ to teaching---teaching writing at The Clearing, where I have been, more or less, one week every June for going on or beyond thirty years.

So, what follows, is who I was, and where I was then. Somewhat revelatory to me today to re-discover my interest in Eastern religion (which continues), the haiku as poetic form…art-that-can-teach-the-beginning-writer what he needs to know about image, the thing itself (which I believe even more so today); Jens Jesen’s philosophy of land, his sense of ‘being’ in place, in the natural world—and how all this fit perfectly into my growing sense of all that writing encompassed meant for me, and why I have never found a more perfect setting ‘to teach” (introduce) writing than Jensen’s Clearing.

Wherever I traveled (that year of this particular journal) I always took the journal with me and recorded from ‘that’ place, ‘that’ state of mind. And though the major part of DOOR STEPS is set in the county, I see in these particular Clearing entries that I had just returned from Santa Fe again, which had become kind of a second home for me in the 70’s and 80’s…a place I had seriously considered moving to when my ‘writing life’ here had turned sour, in conflict with some of the same crap (dead-end publications, insane development/exploitation of the land) that plague this setting even more so today. Though I’ve learned to “rise above it all”—he said.

I’ll save a whole other file of “Clearing stuff” for another book I intend to publish some day. But I would add that my preparation for teaching my one week class goes on all year. I might also add, that the one week of teaching also costs me the week before (intense preparation--where I find myself this very moment) and the week after—trying to re-adjust to reality. Nobody understands this. And nobody pays you for it. But I wouldn’t be doing it (and won’t be much longer) if I didn’t think it mattered. The entry before my first actual teaching day (June 15, not quoted below) and after the last day (June 22, printed), shed a little more light on this transition.

I would add one other revelation in reading over my old notes: The Clearing is no longer what it was. At times it seems to be something else—more like an increasingly dense forest. But the best part…what Jensen understood, preached, celebrated, remains--in spite of whoever and whatever the next guy’s attempt to “leave things as Jensen would have wanted”—which, of course, inevitably involves ’meaningful’ change, for the good of…

Well, we all know how that story ends.

June 16 The Clearing
Entering the Clearing yesterday evening for my week’s teaching stint, lam instantly aware of Jens Jensen’s subtle communion with the landscape in these parts. And now this morning . . . stone stairway, stone path, stone lodge, the root cellar built in his 90th decade, the Oriental orange poppies glowing in front of the cook’s cabin, the greenness of all things, fuzzy moss on the cedar roofs, the dappled light raining through the trees, the water in sound, in sight ... all speaks a man whose vision is one, is mine, is anyone’s who enters his clearing and breathes the stillness of the territory within.

June 17 Empty
“The way to do is to be.” Lao Tzu. To begin with a class of writers (ever so doubtful, always so insecure) with a variation of Lao Tzu: The way to write is to write, I tell them. Emptiness and the landscape of the Clearing. Does the space not shout out in stillness? Emptiness as awareness. The revelation of things through the very emptiness within them. “Cease striving and there will be transformation.”

June 18 A Door Half-Opened
A haiku morning . . . the perfect expression of nature, in a Zen-like way. Stillness. Insight. Gensha, the Zen Master: “Do you hear that stream?” ’’ Why yes.“ ” There is the way to enter.’’

The white peony;
At the moon, one evening,
It crumbled and fell.

“A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language.”—Blyth.

The concrete image, I tell my students. Just so much and leave it be. Stevens’ “the thing itself.”

Alan Watts on haiku: “To my mind this is beyond all doubt at once the simplest and the most sophisticated form of literature in the world, for the invariable mark of great artistry is its artlessness. It looks easy. It looks almost as if it were a work not of art but of nature ... It seems to be a poem just begun but left unfinished. But with a little more familiarity you realize that haiku poetry excels in one of the rarest of the artistic virtues, the virtue of knowing when to stop; of knowing when enough has been said. And there are other respects in which this is the secret not only of art but of life itself. Haiku represents the ultimate refinement of a long tradition in Far Eastern literature which derived its inspiration from Zen Buddhism . . . The unique quality of Zen Buddhism, and of all the arts which it has inspired, is a profoundly startling simplicity. There is a complete lack of the unessential and a marvelously refreshing directness.”

June 19 The Clearing
Rising early each morning this week, practicing yoga at 6 a.m. in Jensen’s schoolhouse under the tutelage of one of my students, M.B., skilled in the yoga way. Some ten of us each morning assemble quietly, carrying our blankets, establishing our place on the floor before him, before Jensen’s grand window facing the waters of Ellison Bay, the cathedral-type window of which he was so fond. His feeling was that such a window should put a man immediately in touch with earth and sky, as this one does.

The Yoga Man, his back to the window, moves in the blueness of morning shadows. Sunrise time. Eastern music (Zen meditation music and the flute music of Paul Horn) fills the air, settles one comfortably inside oneself. We lie still, empty. I concentrate on silence, listening. Prana-brea.lh-fom. Stilling the mind—but not too consciously. Letting whatever positions itself there, flow through. Not to reject thoughts, to let them be ... to dispense themselves. We begin then with the sun salutation, standing, in a position of prayer, palms clasped together, fingers extended upwards. I see and hold, ever so briefly, Jensen’s own vision through the cathedral window of his schoolhouse. This morning will return to me forever. “Faith is built on knowing we have listened to the voice of the living world.”—Jens Jensen.

June 20 Zen Images.

Sabi... the pond outside Jensen’s schoolhouse. The empty rock path, wet
with rain water. The essential loneliness of things. Myself, the pond, the, stone, the fish. ... |

Wabi. . . knowing a moment’s desperation, depression, blackness of mood . . . and then, the orange poppy. The surprise of “in-ness.” In that revelation, wabi.

Yugen . . . mystery . . . the unknowingness of all existence . . . Jensen’s own cliff house of meditation. Yugen in the horizon he faced . . . water/sky ... a gull hanging in the universe outside the window. No attachment.

June 21 Change
This week has passed in green, gold, and blue water. In the emptiness of teaching I am full. In the fullness of students I am empty. The white birch tree neither points nor roots, but bends. Change. “Life is lost in all forms that last.” The final lesson: “If you meet the Buddha on the road—kill him!”

June 22 Place
In transit once again. Still the feeling of never having quite landed from New Mexico. Images of people, streets, moods, persist. Merging into that, the past week spent teaching at the Clearing. That landscape—North Woods, Eastern—contrasted with the desert Southwest. The East in both places. All of this placing me, holding me, in some state of suspension as I drive with wife and children to attend a wedding in the west suburban area of Chicago at 3 p.m. The feel of Milwaukee/Chicago urban humidity begins seeping into the car. Stickiness. Dirty air. Crowded highways. Exhaust fumes. Through much of the journey I doze, I sleep, I see again . Santa Fe, the Clearing, the faces of people I love. Nothing stays in place.

--from DOOR STEPS, Ellis Press, 1983