At the entrance to her current show of drawings and sculptures at ArtSpring, Jeanne Lyons greets the visitor with a verbal introduction as dense and suggestive as the visuals lining the gallery’s labyrinthine walls:

¦ the pieces in this exhibit portray portals, doorways into other realms, of one kind or another. Compassionate curiosity and a willingness to suspend what we think we know can lead us into unknown lands where we discover a much vaster world. Anything that we experience in the moment, whether we consider it “positive” or “negative,” can be a portal when approached in this way.

Following her direction, at the bottom of the stairway leading downward my gaze was drawn by “portal #4,” an image I recognized from the tiny version I’d seen on the Gallery’s website.

Its flat bilateral and concentric symmetry focused on a blank pink central bullseye. But soon the cool geometry of curved and pointed shapes gave way to a thick surface texture of scratches and hand-applied pigment. Then, as another passage of the artist’s statement came to mind, the whole image popped into three dimensions:

I have been a midwife for over 30 years. Currently I am an instructor in the Midwifery Program at the University of British Columbia. Midwifery is an art and a science. In this field, an area of particular interest to me is incorporation of the arts into the teaching of health care.

Whether intended or not, this “doorway into other realms” struck me as the portal between prenatal and postnatal life, regarded from either side. (more…)

[Published here July 2017 pp. 9-10]

It was only the reduced ferry service leaving two hours to kill before the departure from Earl’s Cove that finally convinced me to pull off the main road and take the driveway marked by the sign: “Iris Griffith Nature Centre.” I had passed it many times on our annual road trip from California to Lund, intrigued by what I imagined was a little old lady’s back yard with labels identifying plants. But that was never enough to get me to delay entering the final stretch of the three-day drive to our home away from home at the end of the road. This time, alone with our nine-year old grandson, Lucas, I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

The gravel track through the forest opened to a large clearing. Through an artfully designed gateway I saw a bunch of kids engaged in some kind of race on a groomed lawn, egged on by college age counselors. (more…)

An address to the White Heron Sangha, November 29 2015

Four years ago, at a series of workshops conducted at Crow’s End in San Luis Obispo by White Heron Sangha members, June Kramer and Nancy Hilyard, I was introduced to the technique of concentration meditation, as adapted from the teachings of the Burmese monk, Pa Auk Sayadaw by Tina Rasmussen and Stephen Snyder. Concentration, or Samatha meditation is claimed to have been favored by Buddha himself as an approach to elevated states of consciousness known as the Jhanas, which are precursors to true insight and eventually enlightenment. This form of meditation was long considered an esoteric discipline reserved for monks and initiates, but in recent years it has become accepted and popularized for lay practioners by a number of Buddhist teachers. (more…)

Note: See earlier posting for backstory

Testimony at Architectural Review Commission at hearing October 5 2015

My name is Steven Marx. I live in San Luis Obispo and am a retired Cal Poly Professor. I testify today as the President of the Board of the Non-profit, Central Coast Grown, which holds a 20-year lease with the City of San Luis Obispo for the City Farm Property to implement the General Plan requirement to preserve “the signature agricultural landscape at the southern entrance to the City.” By the terms of that lease we are tasked with assuring that its nineteen acres are used for organic production of locally marketed crops by small local farmers and with creating educational programs about sustainable agriculture for schools and the general public. In our first year and half of operation, we have done that, staffed by one paid employee and volunteers and funded by small produce sales, grants, and contributions.

Unfortunately the matter at hand today has proceeded beyond the preliminary stages without our input, as a result of a failure of notification. It is surprising that nobody at the City who received notification long ago forwarded it to CCG or to its other neighbor, San Luis Ranch, and it’s also surprising that none of the earlier staff reports to the ARC gave adequate consideration to the larger issues stated in your Community Design Guidelines: “Scenic views and natural features around the site, and a site’s location should be considered early in project design.” (more…)

An address at “SLO Faith Communities Respond to the Pope’s Message,” sponsored by People of Faith for Justice, October 1 2015

About a month ago, I went to the annual potluck picnic of the White Heron Sangha”a Buddhist meditation fellowship I’ve been attending for several years. It took place at a beautiful home and retreat center in Squire Canyon, and during the meal I was asked by a couple of people if I would be willing to substitute for one of the Sangha’s leaders in representing the Buddhist community at tonight’s program. He couldn’t be here because he was heading off to a retreat in India.

Being only a marginal Buddhist myself and a burnt-out former climate activist, I was reluctant to agree, but I found myself saying “yes” as I recalled recently hearing about Pope Francis’ wholehearted willingness to take on the issue. (more…)

Introduction

The signatories of this letter, consisting of all of the Board Members of the licensed non-profit, Central Coast Grown (http://centralcoastgrown.org) urge the San Luis Obispo Architectural Review Commission not to grant a Mitigated Negative Declaration for the Calle Joaquin Hotel Development at its meeting of October 5, 2015.

This Declaration was recommended by the contract planner hired by the City of San Luis Obispo in an “Initial Study” dated July 31 2015, but we oppose it for the reasons detailed below.

We also request that 1)the project be either rejected or thoroughly scaled back and redesigned and 2)the project be required to submit for public review and comment a full EIR with sufficient time for consideration and response. (more…)

I procrastinated until early this morning to look closely at the speaking assignment in the program that Tai had given me:

Tell “Why this reunion and the community of Lund is so important to me.” You have three minutes.

She’s a born teacher and the project which she’s taken on”making a film about this community then and now”is an educational endeavor on a grand scale.  Using the medium that’s most powerful and most accessible to the widest audience, she’s telling the story of young people desperate about the direction that the society they inherited was going and hopeful about creating alternatives for themselves. This is a largely forgotten story that the whole world can still learn from today. This is our story, and she’s brought us together here this weekend to participate in the project, and by so doing, to re-educate ourselves.

Like a good teacher, Tai designed her assignments to tap into the individual concerns of students. The topic that she’s given me, I realized as I thought about it, resonates with what I’d stated in the invitation we sent out last December:

For the last couple of years a number of present and past residents of Lund have tossed around the idea of organizing a reunion of people whose memories of the place go back to the late 1960’s and 1970’s, along with their descendants and friends.

We thought 2015 would be a good time for a couple of reasons. Sadly, the number of us who can share those memories is shrinking.  Happily, Sandy Dunlop has been encouraging people to submit articles about their recollections for publication in The Lund Barnacle and Tai has been working on a documentary film about that time and place, including in-depth interviews, archival movies and photographs, and present-day footage.

A gathering of people who shared the adventure of coming to the End of the Road 35 to 45 years ago would allow us to pool interesting tales of the past, to catch up on what’s happened since then, and to reflect on the role of that place and time in the stories of our own lives.

As I did my homework this morning, the words of another teacher, Henry David Thoreau, came to mind–words which stirred me into undertaking that adventure in 1970 and which today close the great gap of time between then and now:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

It ain’t necessarily so
It ain’t necessarily so
The things that you’re liable
To read in the Bible,
It ain’t necessarily so.

The psalmist says three score and ten
Is the year that it’s when to say when
But some disagree
And say age seventy
Is just time to start over again

It ain’t necessarily so
It ain’t necessarily so
Our days may be numbered
But we’re not encumbered
With twenty four hours to go

So here’s a small something for you
To keep track of them in all you do
La Grande classique they call it
Cause it’s classy and above all it
Grows old and yet always stays new

1. Wendy’s “Water”

On May 24 last year, I went to the Steynberg gallery on Monterey St. to attend a concert by Shadowlands, a new local musical group consisting of Bob and Wendy Liepman and their collaborators Mark Davis and Karolyn Hausted. They were introducing songs they’d written in preparation for recording them on a CD to be released early in 2015. I’d made a contribution to their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter because I admired Wendy’s dedication to feeding the Homeless and because I enjoyed her earlier songs, many of which seemed to me more like religious hymns than folk tunes.

Their first piece was the album’s title track, “Shadowlands,” a dark evocation of the mental condition we usually call depression, but which in earlier times was known as melancholia”a state associated not only with illness but also with deep thought, fertile creativity and spiritual awakening. (more…)

There are not many people in the world I feel close to, and Brian was one of them, even though my relationship with him was formalized and very brief.  Shortly before receiving the news about his death I was thinking about contacting him to talk about a noticeable falling off in my meditation practice during the last two weeks, partially due to a cold that kept me up at night and disrupted my early morning routine.

I thought of Brian as my personal teacher, since he conducted most of the sessions at the three-day retreat I attended last February and agreed to have regular phone consultations with me afterward. Those conversations were always serious but also punctuated by laughter and irony on both sides. During them I felt I had much to learn and nothing to hide. At one point he mentioned that he was looking forward to a long retreat in September with anticipation and some apprehension. That was typical of the frank way we communicated, despite the distance I felt from the variety of samatha experiences that qualified him as a teacher and that he described with such scientific precision.  A few months later we both agreed to forgo the conversations until something I needed to talk about came up. Now it’s too late.

But then again, maybe not, since he remains present to me often during my practice, repeating the assurance that if and when I find the time to attend a longer retreat, a door to the reality he knew would undoubtedly open for me.