“If you think you’re enlightened,” spiritual teacher Ram Dass famously said, “go spend a week with your parents.”

No matter how tough we may think we are, the ultimate test of faith often comes at the ruthless hammer of our parents’ judgement. Whether our belief shatters to pieces or stands like a rock depends on one simple thing — the ability to let things go and let them be as they are. This subtle art of moving on without regret is what beloved author Jack Kerouac explores in a portion of his autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums.

“Days tumbled on days, I was in my overalls, didn’t comb my hair, didn’t shave much, consorted only with dogs and cats,” Jack Kerouac writes while describing his tranquil spring days at his parents’ house. And then he adds:

Sunday afternoons my family would want me to go driving with them but I preferred to stay home alone, and they’d get mad and say, “What’s the matter with him anyway?” and I’d hear them argue about the futility of my “Buddhism” in the kitchen, then they’d all get in the car and leave and I’d go in the kitchen and sing, “The tables are empty, everybody’s gone over” to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “You’re Learning the Blues.”

“I was as nutty as a fruitcake and happier,” writes Kerouac. However, this carefree existence is interrupted when, while meditating under a tree, an astonishing thought pops in his mind, “Everything is empty but awake!” Feeling exhilarated, he decides the time has come to explain everything to his family. “You and your Buddha, why don’t you stick to the religion you were born with?” says his mother. “If things were empty how could I feel this orange, in fact taste it and swallow it?” adds his brother-in-law. To which Kerouac replies:

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it’s actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don’t you see that? By itself it’s a no-thing, it’s really mental, it’s seen only of your mind. In other words it’s empty and awake.

“Well, if that’s so, I still don’t care,” is all he hears after his impassioned speech. Forgoing the futile attempt at breaking through the brick wall of ignorance, Kerouac writes:

All enthusiastic I went back to the woods that night and thought, “What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I’m a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I’m empty and awake, that I know I’m empty, awake, and that there’s no difference between me and anything else. In other words it means that I’ve become the same as everything else. It means that I’ve become a Buddha.”

Complement The Dharma Bums with Jack Kerouac’s meditation on the golden eternity, silence, and emptiness.

“The art of reading on any level above the elementary consists in the habit of asking the right questions in the right order,” wrote Mortimer Adler while teaching us the essence of active reading in his timeless manual How to Read a Book.

What is the book about as whole? What is being said in detail, and how? Is the book true, in whole or part? What of it? These four active reading questions, as well as Mortimer Adler’s magnum opus itself, have helped countless people to rediscover the lost art of immersing themselves in the pages of their favorite authors. But there is one special book category where these questions and rules do not apply — “canonical” books which can also be described as “sacred” or “holy.” Mortimer Adler writes:

A prime example is the Holy Bible, when it is read not as literature but instead as the revealed Word of God. For orthodox Marxists, however, the works of Marx must be read in much the same way as the Bible must be read by orthodox Jews or Christians. And Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book has an equally canonical character for a “faithful” Chinese Communist.

The readers of these books must read reverentially, Mortimer Adler notes. They can not question the authorized or right reading of the book that to them is canonical. As such, the faithful are debarred by their faith from finding error or nonsense in the “sacred” text. Mortimer Adler writes:

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word “orthodox,” which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning “right opinion.” These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an “A” [on an exam] to the damnation of one’s soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of “true.” If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered to him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books.

“Here we must stop,” concludes Mortimer Adler. “The problem of reading the Holy Book — if you have faith that it is the Word of God — is the most difficult problem in the whole field of reading.” Complement How to Read a Book with Alan Watts on how we gained the world and lost our soul and Albert Einstein on the essential qualities of a pious person.

“The vital function that pets fulfill in this world hasn’t been fully recognized,” wrote spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle while praising our four-legged companions. “They keep millions of people sane. They have become Guardians of Being.”

There is a profound wisdom in these words, for just watching a dog or a cat can be a deeply healing experience. It takes us out of our mind and brings us into the now — the only place free of chains of the past and unknown void of the future. That’s where an animal lives all the time, surrendered to life, enjoying it with every fiber of its being. When you pet a dog, your thinking subsides for a moment… that is until you realize that it has chewed your favorite book! This is what Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) explores in her tender poem “Percy” included in the collection Dog Songs. Read here by the poet herself and steeped in boundless love for her favorite pet. Please enjoy!

PERCY
by Mary Oliver

Our new dog, named for the beloved poet,
Ate a book which unfortunately we had
Left unguarded.
Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita,
Of which many copies are available.
Every day now, as Percy grows
Into the beauty of his life, we touch
His wild, curly head and say,
“Oh, wisest of little dogs.”

Do you have a dog or plan to have one? Then you absolutely need Dog Songs in your life! Complement with the growing collection of deeply stirring poetry readings that include Billy Collins’ “The Lanyard” and “Dharma,” Emily Dickinson’s “I Dwell in Possibility,” Pablo Neruda’s “I Like for You to Be Still,” Gregory Orr’s “This is What Was Bequeathed Us,” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.”

Reader, you may call what you see here my blog, but the truth is that what I create here is not a blog, not exactly. It’s rather my ruminations and conversations, which are lively, kindly even in their silliness, and which are built always upon the bedrock of my devotion to the written word as it expands, as it is lit by my unguarded honesty. I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation on what I read and what relates to the experiences of my own life, illuminated by the path made by living rather than planning.

So what you’ll find here is a house I built out of words, words selected and sourced by the process of pure curiosity and reverence towards life in all its mystery and wonder. This is a house filled with conversations and letters which I send to you, and which become a part of your own house, both physical and metaphysical. As we lay down the foundation, build, and rebuild the dwelling place for our body and mind, we can’t help but notice a subtle interplay of the conscious and subconscious that fills the blueprint of our life. This delicate weaving of seen and unseen, the dreamer and the dreamed, is one of many subjects the beloved poet Mary Oliver explores in her essay “Building the House” included in the meditative Winter Hours.

Houses built of words, thoughts, and dreams — more than houses built of bricks and stones — can serve as a measure of a life well lived, a life examined. Mary Oliver writes:

Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man — refuge, comfort, luxury — surely it is as much or more to the spirit. Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imaginations! Sometimes these are fearful, gloomy, enclosed places. At other times they are bright and have many windows and are surrounded by gardens combed and invitational, or unpathed and wild. Surely such houses appearing in our sleep-work represent the state of the soul, or, if you prefer it, the state of the mind. Real estate, in any case, is not the issue of dreams. The condition of our true and private self is what dreams are about. If you rise refreshed from a dream — a night’s settlement inside some house that has filled you with pleasure — you are doing okay. If you wake to the memory of squeezing confinement, rooms without air or light, a door difficult or impossible to open, a troubling disorganization or even wreckage inside, you are in trouble — with yourself. There are (dream) houses that pin themselves upon the windy porches of mountains, that open their own windows and summon in flocks of wild and colorful birds — and there are houses that hunker upon narrow ice floes adrift upon endless, dark waters; houses that creak, houses that sing; houses that will say nothing at all to you though you beg and plead all night for some answer to your vexing questions.

But houses built of bricks and stones, houses worth living in, can only spring out of a mind clear of inner turmoil and conflict. Mary Oliver writes:

As such houses in dreams are mirrors of the mind or the soul, so an actual house, such as I began to build, is at least a little of that inner state made manifest. Jung, in a difficult time, slowly built a stone garden and a stone tower. Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond, ten feet by fifteen feet under the tall, arrowy pines, was surely a dream-shape come to life. For anyone, stepping away from actions where one knows one’s measure is good. It shakes away an excess of seriousness. Building my house, or anything else, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery. Building my house, I was joyous all day long. … When my house was finished, my friend Stanley Kunitz gave me a yellow door, discarded from his house at the other end of town. Inside, I tacked up a van Gogh landscape, a Blake poem, a photograph of Mahler, a picture M. had made with colored chalk. Some birds’ nests hung in the corners. I lit the lamp. I was done.

Essential and necessary, Mary Oliver’s prose, prose poems, and poems will warm you during these long Winter Hours.