THIS IS THE SECRET. THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TRIED TO DO.

“If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in “The House of Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.” —Carl Jung from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude (pp.198-99).

The key word in the preceding passage is “projections”—a psychological term for the mental phenomena by which we project our own subconscious onto the world and its inhabitants. Where we see evil, we are the evil. Where we see wrong, we are that wrong. It means, in other words, that we “are what we see” out there in the world, forcing the molds from our own minds onto the formless world. Each of us creates the world he sees. I do understand that when we have caught a rapist in the act or do know that a child is being molested, we are not the doer of those deeds, but we do, in all our judgments and manipulations of others create the conditions from which other’s harmful acts grow. We lay the seeds for our own destruction with our ignorance of ourselves. When we know ourselves we can’t help but add to the world rather than subtract from it. I can’t think of a more important lesson for each and all of us to understand, for it is, if you will allow me to be so bold, the beginning of a truth we can all live with.

The osprey couple…
busily tidying up
their summer timeshare.*


*Osprey go south in the winter and return to nest in the spring.
They are birds of prey who eat fish.
One of my walks down by the Columbia River passes
a couple of man made nesting platforms
to which osprey return each year. My haiku should now make sense.

My bathroom reading is May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. She must have been in her sixties when she wrote it. And I get this picture of a crabby, pissed old biddy whose religion has made her narrow, but she has openings too, like when she enjoys the musical in New York with the kids in it. I feel the same way about Walt Whitman as I plow through Reynolds' cultural biography of Whitman—crabby and narrow. Suffering individuals who roll in their suffering to prove their worth or mettle. Or their patience with those of us less cultured than they are. These two were very much like I was in my depressed, drinking years.

Now, on the other hand, there's Hass's book on The Essential Haiku. According to him, three of the basics of life for the Japanese sensibility are impermanence, suffering and contingency. Yes suffering, suffering for all of us as a regular condition of life, but there is a difference, I think, in the emphasis that a Japanese haiku writer and these two Americans (and O so many others) place on suffering. To the American Christian, mired in his lot, suffering is a way of earning his place in letters or, in the church, in God's eye. To the Zen master (and I know very little here), suffering is a condition, not to be employed to one's benefit, but to be observed, and when possible, transcended.

At my own age of 70, I'm moving into this acceptance of suffering as a natural condition, not to be endured to prove one's worth and artistic value, but just to be observed and accepted. Quite a difference between east and west, and, believe it or not, an acceptance that yields quite a bit of tranquility. Below, you'll find a little haiku I've come up with that I think meets the essentials of the haiku.

Garden party —
the slugs getting drunk
in the beer saucers.*

*Putting out saucers of beer is supposed to be an environmentally friendly way to kill the slugs who so love one's hostas. All those years in Spokane, toiling in my flower garden, is paying off in some haiku.