Saturday and Sunday turned out to be one forty-eight hour day for me, so I'm writing one blog post combining the two days.
1. Weather conditions in Kellogg on Saturday kept me indoors all day. The temperatures climbed back into the 90s. Smoke from local timber fires seemed heavier to me and made its way into the house enough that it made my vision blurry, making it difficult to read.
Difficult, but not impossible.
I needed to prepare for Sunday's ZOOM meeting with the Westminster Basementeers and our continuation of our exploration of literary comedy. Because in literary comedy, the plots of stories move toward togetherness and reconciliation, toward some kind of social consummation, literary comedy pushes me toward the mystical. Mysticism invites us to experience the interconnectedness of all things in the world, to surrender our attention to the wholeness of existence rather than its fragmentation. Mysticism can be religious or secular, experienced in terms of divine spirit or human spirit.
Our Sunday exploration of literary comedy would move toward the mystical and I spent Saturday rereading poems written by the 13th century Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks).
Rereading Rumi transported me mentally back to when Rumi's poetry was a personal highlight of the Intro to World Literature syllabus I created back in my teaching days at Lane Community College. I'm not sure any poetry I assigned had a greater impact and inspired more gratitude in my students than Rumi's. On occasion, I ran into former students at, say, Trader Joe's or a local taproom in Eugene, and, years after they'd been in the World Lit course, these students would stop me and thank me for introducing them to Rumi's poems.
A lot of great memories returned today as I prepared for Sunday's ZOOM time. We Basementeers have a google site devoted to our study of literary comedy and today I posted a short outline of what I planned to bring up to kick off our discussion on Sunday and listed the poems I'd be reading aloud.
This was a most satisfying way to spend a day indoors. I nourished my mind and spirit and enjoyed a host of sweet memories inside while the heat and smoke made things difficult to bear outside.
2. It's difficult to sum up our ZOOM meeting on Sunday morning -- except to say it was glorious.
To my way of thinking, as we've explored features of literary comedy like vitality, goodness, the idea of home, to name a few, we've been moving away from discussing the form or structure of literary comedies and delving more deeply into the spiritual richness of this literature. That's why we explored some of Rumi's poetry today. If we were just looking at the form or structure of literary comedies, we wouldn't explore these poems. But, literary comedies point us toward experiencing union, whether through marriage, reconciliation, forgiveness or other means, and Rumi's poems explore how we, as humans, long for union, not only with one another, but with the Divine.
So, this morning, Bill, Diane, Bridgit, Val and I dove into the great ocean of mystical union, of spiritual mystery, of aspects of life that exist beyond the capability of denotative language to define them. Rumi explores them through images and metaphors, helping us see that even the simplest of experiences like a dog sniffing its food before eating or loosening the knot on one's robe, can help us experience what it is to live in the eternal presence of the Divine.
I realize what I'm about to write might only make sense to me, but I want a record of it in this blog.
Our discussion today about longing brought to mind Robert Hass's translation of this haiku by Basho.
Even in Kyoto --
hearing the cuckoo's cry --
I long for Kyoto.
3. My Sunday took quite a change in direction around noon as Bill, Diane, Bridgit, Val and I signed off of ZOOM.
Sunday was Ed's birthday and to celebrate it, we piled into his Camry and blasted down to the CdA Casino and spun some reels.
It was a lot of fun. I had the experience I have every once in a while of having poor luck for couple of hours and then having things turn around, having some machines pay off, and ending the afternoon having won a very modest amount of money.
Ed and I wrapped up our celebration of his birthday in the Red Tail Lounge where we split an order of onion rings and had a drink. Ed loved his margarita and I deeply enjoyed the refreshing pint of Georgetown Brewing's Roger's Pilsner I drank.
Talk about experiencing the whole of life, the union of opposites. That's what I got to do this weekend.
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