The Truth in Plenty: Entries from My Journal, Vol. Ii / a Rolling Memoir

By Joe Wise

The Truth in Plenty. The Plenty is minutes. No clock on the pen. The Plenty is the wide scattershot of Grace that permeates our lives, some of which we wake up to, as we open ourselves to the melodic and the unsung, to the lustrous and the plain, to the mostly simple, ordinary and everyday, to the Truth of what is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504377645

Joe Wise

Joe’s music has been played and sung around the world since the mid-sixties. His retreat work spans almost 6 decades, and his travels to speak and sing blanketed most of the U.S. and Canada, along with Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. He holds two Bachelor's degrees and two Master's degrees, with studies in philosophy, education, theology, psychology, and counseling. Recently he focused on integrating therapeutic journaling into addiction treatment centers’ programs. An award-winning painter and published author, Wise is an advocate for living an examined life, while releasing your story. He lives with his wife, Maleita, near Sedona, Arizona, and presents readings of his works, a song or two, paintings, and reflections on the grand mix of life.

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Copyright © 2017 Joe Wise.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Author Credits: author of The Truth in Twenty and Through a Glass Lightly

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-7763-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7764-5 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/07/2017

Contents

Introduction

The Swing of Things

The Gift

Suffer the Little Children

The Grayville Nap

Mug Shot

Joy in the Afternoon

Communion

No Exceptions

Reflections on the Mix

Ocular Adjustment

Street Walker

Give Us This Day

Lord, Teach Us to Pray, Lyrics

Lord, Teach Us to Pray, Song Stories

Our Father

Joni Mitchell’s Illness

The Epic of Peanut Butter and Jelly, Lyrics

The Epic of Peanut Butter and Jelly, Song Stories

BJ and MLK on the Mall

Martin and the Mall

Pumphouse, Orlando

’Becca and the Plants

The Grand Experiment

Christmas in Paris-Prequel

Christmas in Paris

The Twelve Days of Running

Giving and Receiving, ’Tis the Season

Aunt Nellie’s Wig, Lyrics, The Yarn

Aunt Nellie’s Wig, Song Stories

Eraser Day

The Pencil

Prayers…Lately

Daily Prayer for Awakeness

Prayer…More Lately

Sitting…Sometimes

Take Our Bread, Lyrics

Take Our Bread, Song Stories

The Garden

Watch With Me, Lyrics

Watch With Me, Song Stories

A Case for the Heart, Felt-Knowing, Will, and Innocence

Jack and the Young Stalk, Prodigal Son, Song Stories

The Prodigal Son, Lyrics

The Prodigal Son, Song Stories

Starting to Get It

A Man of Substance, Unsubstantiated Substantive Speculations

The Fabulous Mystery

Good Question

Depression

The Condition, State of the Union

Fear

On the Edge

Coming Back/Going Forward

The Old Man and the Sea

Transition, and Isn’t Everything?

Courage? Who’s to say?

Common Ground

Deliverance

The Take

Sounds of Senescence

Longevity’s Lament

Painful Parsing

Earnings Report

Big Nugget / Simple Secret

Nobody in Particular

P. Rex / A Grandfather’s Plea or Final Jeopardy

Skin Deep

Last Writes

My Wallet

Something Unexpectedly Found

Crack

Baskart Buddhas

Love (Is All You Need)

Christmas 1992

Grace List

Redeeming Jesus, A Brief Gospel

By Any Other Name, The Solo Bouquet

Notes

Also by Joe Wise

About the Author

Whatever was said to the rose,

                to make it open,

                                        I feel it here…in my chest.

                                                                                Rumi

To John, my son, easily my best teacher.

                                                            He of the clear heart.

                    And to Michelle, my daughter.

                                                            She of the brave path.

December 2016

Introduction

The Truth in Plenty.

The plenty is minutes. No time limits.

The plenty is the wide scattershot of Grace that has found its way into every fissure and facet of my life by What, Who I sometimes call God, Spirit, or Source, and know best with no name.

The Truth is that felt knowing of what is Real that presents itself when I am ready. And when I’m afraid. Looking, and not. Engaged, and surrendered. Simultaneous with my experience, and delayed. Mostly delayed. Many found with a pen as my shovel, digging in the gold mine, crude ore and all, of my life.

I share some of these nuggets, my findings, here in these pages, with the express intent of stimulating and re-kindling your own hunger for Truth, the Truth of Being, the Truth of Who and What we really are. Available at any moment, in any experience. In any triumph, or trauma, on any voyage, within any quiet.

My sharing. Your life. Not exactly this, but this. From another entry point. Yours.

Scattershot of Grace. Yes, including depression, and addiction. Lostness. Unsought changes. Seismic shifts. As well as the simple, the small, the continuous (what stays) and the magic of ordinary days. Including sunrise.

Truth, as many wise teachers have reminded us, is both absolute and relative. Only one Absolute Truth: I am, I amness. Relative truth: true enough to me, for me—to look for its nexus with Absolute Truth. Absolute Truth is reality before I think about it. It is eternal and causeless. Relative truth is conditional. Human conclusions. Absolute Truth doesn’t come or go. All else does. And all else, including thoughts, words, experiences, emotions, in some way or another points us toward the Truth of Being, even if it’s by the suffering of resistance to what is, or the clarifying of what isn’t.

Emotional truth (relative) for me is the most productive vein in the mine. Emotions are the raw ore that offer me the best ongoing chance, as I take them to my soul (assayer office headquarters) for processing, of steering toward the Truth.

There is something visceral about not doing what fits for me. It hurts. Our bodies are sanity (health) sensors. I ignore the signals at my own peril. Gratefully, choice abides. And all in all, I seem teachable. Many of these pieces reflect and record that. I am reminded of the mature Jesus of Nazareth observing, The Father in me, He doeth the work. My portion, willingness.

The Truth in Plenty. The plenty is form. Prose, poetry, parody. Even psalms, as in songs, ones I’ve written, recorded and performed—and the stories of their birth. Along with some of the intentions I may have noticed I brought to the table with them. Some of these aimed at our young selves, some at our older selves. Some from my inner child (and my new friend Warren Molton reminds me "at one time that is all we were) and some from my inner adult" (whom the jury is still out on).

The Truth in Plenty.

One of the most iconic scenes in all literature, for me, is Pontius Pilate asking the handed-over wisdom-teacher from Nazareth standing in front of him, What is Truth? It is also one of my favorite things that Jesus didn’t answer.

I believe because He knew everybody has to find That for themselves. The I-amness that is before, during and after anything I’ve experienced, thought or felt. The Beingness that all else arises in and disappears back into. The Truth isn’t true until we uncover it, see it, know it. Not with the mind, but with the knowing of the heart, the surrender of the ego, the stillness of the soul. The vibration of the tuning forks of Love and Joy within us. Arising without cause. Rippling out with impulses toward kindness and care. A knowing, a realization, an ongoing awakening that totally includes things none of us think of as Grace or Gift or Truth at the time. But all of us know later, when reflection is possible, is the very Grace of grace.

So……

        May you find herein some echoes of your plenty’s.

        And some mirroring of your truths.

Let’s begin.

9-1-15

The Swing of Things

There was that moment

in the park

when some big person

placed me in the swing.

The chains were

up to the heavens

the ground

feet below

my feet.

He pushed me

for a while

got tired and

played with

other child.

I came to rest

dangling

deprived.

*   *   *

I swung my legs

in boredom

a minute

maybe more

and then a rhythm

took me in

I swung my legs

some more.

I found that I was moving

no help as was before

I flew back,

high as eagles

then up, up, up,

to heaven’s door.

*   *   *

I love this.

7-22-15

The Gift

This has stayed with me for 50 years.

I was sitting cross-legged in the grass one morning, on the campus of Catholic University in Washington D.C. It’s pretty much a concrete campus in a concrete and asphalt city. Rock Creek Park is its glorious preserve and exception. As are these campus patches at CUA.

I don’t remember what I was doing there. Alone. Not with guitar, as I was many times throughout that school year, 1965-66. Singing and leading songs of peace. Songs of humanity. Folk songs.

This was early for me. I was probably missing my lush, green Kentucky. Missing some solitude in my people-crowded, class-full-scheduled, 26-year-old life.

I became aware of walking presences. Folks. A mother, it appears, and two children. One in arms, and one trailing behind. They are not aware, it seems, of me. She keeps a pretty measured pace. Not hurried, but deliberate. I assume they are cutting across campus, as a short cut to the where she needed to be. They do not speak. Suddenly the trailer, a boy, stops. The woman, mother, notices. And stops. Her young one looks heavy. As does her purse and changing bag.

She turns fully back toward the boy. And waits.

I am close enough to the bush the boy is squinting at, that I eventually hear—a cricket. Singing away. Now that I’ve noticed, he’s quite loud.

We are all frozen, suspended, present. At some point in earth time the cricket hits his final note for this song. The boy turns and runs toward his mother. And they proceed. As before.

I am moved. By the simple magnitude of each gift. The gift the boy gave the cricket in his attention. The gift the mother gave the boy. The gift the cricket gave us all. He, who had the only speaking part.

The one that really got me was the gift the mother gave the boy. It would have been so expected and sadly natural for her to say, C’mon Charlie, we’re late for the bus. She did not. She said nothing. And she said everything.

*   *   *

I have many times wondered where that boy is, that man is, and what he is doing. And more especially how he is doing what he is doing. He who had his mother turn and wait. And wait. And wait. While he experienced, maybe for the first time, the sound of a cricket, in the bush.

7-8-16

Suffer the Little Children

Reading Between the Lines

Unless you become

    Beginner’s mind

As a little child

    Beginner’s heart

You shall not enter

    The Queendom

The Kingdom of God

    Which is

Within you.

7-23-14

The Grayville Nap

Out beyond all ideas of wrong-doing

and right-doing

there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down

in that grass

the world is too full

to talk about.

Ideas, language,

even the phrase each other,

doesn’t make any sense.

                                  Rumi

The Grayville nap.

It has become the standard for all others. Shy of Demerol in a hospital procedure, which is assistance in the extreme, there is no rival for such complete surrender to rest, in my life. Of course I have to omit the most powerful contenders, those from my babyhood and early childhood, before anything was up to me. Before responsibility (even if not yet in my vocabulary) became a player in my life. I am also not including end-of-the-day sleep. Circadian-rhythm sleep. This is a big assist and lessens considerably the trust needed to capitulate my conscious consciousness to out-of-my-control forces.

In my incarnations as animals (I’m assuming we’ve all had them) at least, as say, a tuned-in owner’s golden retriever, I had all the practice I needed at even spontaneous napping (non-narcoleptic of course) as well as the glorious planned ones. But maybe we evolve the other way, and that’s in front of me. In even more surrender.

David Steindal-Rast, a Benedictine monk, noted, for among other things, his work on the interaction between spirituality and science, speaking at an event I was also invited to, asked us, "Do you take the nap, or does the nap take you?"

The most it’s ever taken me, was on a day of severe weather at the edge of Illinois, in a town I knew not of. Grayville. Here, the universe hosted a conspiracy of events that led to my unlikely capture and ultimate conditionless surrender. I had been running long, and wild. At home. At work, which was mostly away, and sometimes way away, from home. In my mind, as a writer. In my body as a singer. And speaker.

I had this window. Scheduled as soon as I got word she would be close. She is my daughter, Michelle. And close is closer than Denver, where she is the costumer for the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Troupe. In this case close was Kansas City, where they were booked for a week. An easy day’s road-trip for us, Maleita, her mother, and me.

We pulled out of Louisville, our home, on a clear, crisp winter’s morning. Juiced on being away, seeing Michelle, experiencing the troupe. And all at our own pace. In our own vehicle. With space (days) on either side of the meet. This is pretty much 100% more control than I have on all my other trips. Those serviced by, and dictated by airlines and shuttles and taxis and such. Usually about a hundred thousand miles worth a year. So my inner traveler was having a big time holiday. With my favorite travel buddy, and wife.

We took our sweet time. And our Sweet Baby James, and sang our way through the tip of Indiana. And a magical thing happened. In the middle of the title tune, just as we all (J.T. [James Taylor], Maleita, and I) were singing, the first of December was covered with snow… and the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting… this crystalline, flakey, white white snow-show appeared for us. Seemingly out of the audio play-ground, dream-ground we were already in. Like a sound track. Zhivago-esque. Flocking the trees. Shaping the bushes. Ignoring our road. Some days are just… you know…

We’re only two more songs in, and the whole scene clicks into fast-forward. Flakes seem bigger. They are no longer falling.