13 minute read
AN OLD WOMAN AND I
Discovering faith in uncommon places
THERE WAS A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POET FROM JAPAN NAMED Matsuo Basho who wrote a short sketch called “A Visit To Sarashina Village”, which begins by saying: “The autumn wind inspired my heart with a desire to see the rise of the full moon over Mount Ubasute. That rugged mountain in the village of Sarashina is where villagers used to abandon their aging mothers among the desolate rocks.”
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By Cody Maxwell Pulse contributor
The name of the mountain, Ubasute, means “abandoning an old woman”. Sarashina villagers would take old or sick family members to Mount Ubasute and leave them there to die. Those burdens, in the old world, could not be carried. This vaguely brings to mind the seemingly inexplicable words of the western world’s Jesus of Nazareth: “If any man comes to me, and leaves not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
In Japanese poetry from Basho’s time, the full autumn moon was often associated with this practice of “abandoning an old woman”. Basho, now accompanied by a servant in his
6 • THE PULSE • FEBRUARY 20, 2020 • CHATTANOOGAPULSE.COM tale, continues: “The Kiso road that led to the village was steep and dangerous, passing over a number of high mountains. We did our best to help one another, but since neither of us were experienced travelers, we felt uneasy and made mistakes, doing the wrong things at the wrong times. Above our heads, mountains rose over mountains, and on our left a huge precipice dropped into a boiling river, so that, perched on my horse’s high saddle, I felt tricken with terror. “We passed through many dangerous places, the road always winding and climbing, so that we often felt we were groping our way in the clouds. I abandoned my horse and went on my legs, for I was dizzy with the height
and unable to maintain my balance from fear. My servant, on the other hand, mounted the horse and seemed not to give the slightest thought to the danger. He nodded in a doze and seemed about to fall over the precipice. Every time I saw him drop his head, I was terrified.
“It occurred to me that every one of us is like this servant, wading through this world blind to the hidden dangers, and that God looking down on us from on high would surely feel the same fear for all our lives as I did for my servant.”
Basho’s tale goes on. He tells of a heavy-burdened priest he and his servant helped along the way, and of the shrines and temples where they stopped to pray. In the end, when they’d finally made it to Sarashina, Basho could not watch the full autumn moon rise over Mount Ubasute because it was obscured by clouds.
He closed “A Visit To Sarashina Village” with a poem:
In my dream An old woman and I Sat together in tears Admiring the moon. Any of the spiritually-minded among us would do well to read Basho. A notable aspect of Basho’s wanderings is that he stops to pray at all the temples and shrines he passes along the way. His writing offers clear glimpses of these places and of ways of life that seem to be gone and has inspired many in Japan to follow in his footsteps and see these strange holy places as he did.
Few of us here could afford the spiritual luxury of travelling to Japan to follow Basho’s path. But
to believe such a luxury is necessary to see life as Basho did is foolish. A peculiar thing happens when you read Basho closely and look back up at our own world today. You see that those old travelers and their ways are not really gone.
On Canyon Drive, in a very modest neighborhood, there’s an old rundown schoolhouse. Passing by the place, you would never remember it. Walking up its worn steps, the old school feels abandoned. The windows are boarded from the inside. Just inside the heavy front doors, there’s a dark room that no longer echoes with laughing children. The floors and walls are dirty inside and the only echoes now are your footsteps. In the back of this darkness is an entryway to another room that is full of light.
This old school has been converted into a Hindu temple called Gujarati Samaj. Those who worship here believe in their devotion to God, “dan” (charity) and “daya” (mercy toward fellow human beings).
The room full of light holds a shrine with seven statues of seven gods. A pool of water surrounded by three golden pitchers is before the gods. In a bowl at the edge of the shrine are fruits, nuts and berries. The wide-eyed, unmoving statues stare down at you standing there in confused awe. It doesn’t matter that you are unable to utter a prayer. Before these gods, it seems that they’re laughing at you and you feel forgiven. Their holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, says: “We behold what we are, and we are what we behold.”
In Brainerd, hidden on a small road that’s nearly impossible to find, is the Society of Friends meeting house. Those who have lost their way in other faiths find their spiritual home here. These Friends meet in a plain room with brown wooden floors. They sit on plain wooden chairs. For an hour every Sunday they gather here to sit together in silence.
“There is no pastor or priest,” they say. “Friends gather here to seek divine guidance and listen to the Inner Light and a living stillness that has great power.” A large, uncurtained window lets the morning light fall silently into the room with them.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, “Believe me, for I know, you will find something far greater in the woods than in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters.”
There are people who gather once a month, hidden in a bamboo grove at the bottom of Lookout Mountain, who believe what St. Bernard said. In this shadowy grove these people meet in prayer and meditation. This gathering, on the fourth Sunday of each month, is called Bamboo Encounter. It was born out of Seminary Of The Wild, a Christian group whose hope is to kindle a “wild awakening to our deeper nature, and to what life truly is.”
Bamboo Encounter holds nature up as the true
temple of God and believes the untamed wild will lead us onto a path where “Earth becomes the doorway to a deeper, wild wisdom of the Incarnated Christ.”
And there’s an old overgrown cemetery near where the county dump used to be. Poor folks are buried here. The tombstones are faded and the graves are sunken. People have dumped old couches and garbage here and thorns and overgrown grass has taken over the place. There’s a pig farm nearby. When the wind blows you can smell the pigs among the wild blackberries.
A concrete statue of Jesus is on the hill. This man, who elevated the poor and demanded we leave those we love behind to follow him, stands among the briars and weeds in this forgotten place. If you stand near this statue quietly, rabbits will peek out of the thorn bushes or from behind the fallen gravestones.
The holiest person I’ve ever known was an old white-haired woman who used to take me to pick the blackberries in this cemetery. She made cobblers in the summertime. She could name every wild plant in the woods around there. She taught me nearly everything I know but never
once spoke to me about faith in God.
She lived in a cabin in the woods. Black bears would come onto her porch. She put apples out for them. An unknown number of young and old cats lived under her house. She cussed them all the time but made sure they had food too.
Often she would make you be quiet in the dark to hear a sound that was never there. She’d shush you harshly and look around at the silence. She’d look away into the dark for a moment, then look back at you with eyes that asked, “Did you hear it?” You never heard it, but she did. Words were always spoken softly after this and it was soon time to sleep.
Outside in her garden one morning, I asked her what she was going to do when she gets very old. What’ll you do when you can’t take care of yourself? She laughed and said you can just take me up to the mountains and let me die. I smiled back at her and she kept tending her flowers. I was just a child then. I didn’t understand and felt ashamed of what I’d asked her.
Life goes by fast. I grew out of the boyhood I spent with her, passed through young adulthood and survived everything I did to myself only be
8 • THE PULSE • FEBRUARY 20, 2020 • CHATTANOOGAPULSE.COM cause of the things she taught me. Eventually I became whoever I am now and very often, like Basho’s desire to see the full autumn moon rise over Mount Ubasute, I want to go see her again. But I can’t go see her again. She died one night in those woods where she put out apples for the bears. She died in the dark, alone. No one was with her.
It was drizzling rain the day we buried her. She’d asked for her body to be wrapped in a white sheet and for her coffin to be closed. The last time we saw her was the last time we would ever see her.
A preacher nobody knew wore an old suit and stood before us all when we gathered at her grave. We sat before this nameless preacher waiting for him to comfort us. But he was not there to comfort us. He told us that he had spoken with her not long before her passing and she’d asked that he not offer us any comfortable eulogy. She had left a message for us instead:
“Go, and do something good for somebody.” That was it. The preacher left. We couldn’t stay there either. Her goodbye to us, as we left her behind, was as simple as that.
Getting Crazy In The Cosmos
Universal updates around the world...and way, way beyond
LONG-TIME READERS KNOW THAT space news is my favorite kind of news. Well, it’s been a fairly crazy month for space-related news so rather than pick just one story, here are three of the biggest:
Steven W. Disbrow Pulse columnist
Steven W. Disbrow is a programmer who specializes in e-commerce and mobile systems development, an entrepreneur, comic-book nerd, writer, improviser, actor, sometime television personality and parent of two human children.
Voyager 2 Gets Patched
Remember Voyager 2? It was launched back in 1977, went on a “Grand Tour” of the outer solar system in the 1980s, and has been sending back data ever since. A couple of years ago, it became one of only two man-made objects to ever leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. (Voyager 1 is the other.) It’s been sending back data non-stop for almost 43 years now!
Well, in late January of this year, Voyager 2 experienced a little hiccup and failed to execute a planned rotational maneuver. One thing led to another with the end result being it shut off its scientific instruments to save energy. This was not good. Fortunately, the mission specialists at NASA felt they could fix the issue and get everything working again…and they did! As of now, Voyager 2 is once again sending back data on the void between the stars, providing us with some of the most unique information in human history.
What makes this story so amazing is Voyager 2 is almost 14 billion miles away. That means that it takes over 17 hours for a signal to get to the probe, and just as long for a return signal to reach us.
If you’ve ever tried to trouble-shoot a computer problem long distance for your parents or grandparents, you know how frustrating that can be. Just imagine doing that over 14 billion miles, with the possibility of “bricking” one of the most unique and valuable computers in existence. It’s absolutely incredible that the folks at NASA regularly pull off this sort of thing. Kudos to them.
FRB Phone Home
Last year, I wrote about the existence of Fast Radio Bursts, or “FRBs”, coming from outer space. These radio signals are so named because they are very powerful and very fast, usually lasting less than a second.
As of now we still don’t know what they are exactly, precisely because they are so short and fast. They also tend not to repeat themselves which makes detecting them something of a crap shoot.
That changed recently however, as scientists at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope in British Columbia, Canada, announced that they found an FRB that repeats every sixteen days.
This FRB, which is the closest one yet discovered (just 500 million light years away), presents regular bursts for four days, then nothing for twelve days and then starts again.
Of course, such an odd pattern might feel like it has an intelligence behind it, but scientists are about 99.9 percent certain there’s a natural phenomena at work here. They just don’t know what it is…yet.
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!!! Betelgeuse is a star in the constellation of Orion. Usually, it’s one of the brightest (and largest) stars in the night sky. Last year however, astronomers noticed that Betelgeuse was getting dimmer. A lot dimmer. Plus it’s been shedding material and
changing shape. All this has led some astronomers to think that maybe, just maybe, Betelgeuse is about to go supernova. Large stars go supernova when they finally burn through all their nuclear fuel. In that moment, the force of gravity wins the day and causes the star to collapse. This results in a massive series of shock waves which bounce off the center of the star (which, at this point is usually pure iron) and cause the outer layers of the star to explode back out into space.
If this happens to Betelgeuse, it will quickly become almost as bright as the moon in the night sky and will cast actual shadows at night. It will be years before the light from the Supernova fades and the night sky returns to normal.
Or, it might not happen at all, at least not in our lifetimes. Betelgeuse has a history of dimming and getting brighter but the shedding of material and shapechanging is new, which has astronomers literally buzzing with excitement for what might come next.
If you want to check it out yourself, just step outside and look up at Orion’s belt. Betelgeuse is visible to the naked eye and you never know…you might just happen to catch the largest, most spectacular firework anyone has ever seen!
