Received an email from a chapter assumed forgotten, a page written before the days of laptop computers, I-phones, texting and Twitter. A simple connection reintroduced through the powers of Face Book…the son of a radio friend, a man I spent my early years of broadcasting admiring not because he’d been to the top and stood on stages so large Hannah Montana would step back and whisper, “Whoa.” But rather his approach to creating a common ground between the disc jockey’s side of the radio speaker and those who happened to pull in a for a quick bite of ear candy.
The conversations we host on these invisible canvases mimic nothing. No other generation before us can fathom what’s taken place or where such a journey is leading our trickled trails quickly becoming mountain passes and highways.
If Grandma Bakken suddenly reappeared she’d sternly stand above me demanding the box with funny pictures and no Carol Burnett be turned off and my tail would be in the garden collecting ripened raspberries. Mom still has a rotary telephone and types on a machine I hope and pray will sit next to her picture inside the Bowling Hall of Fame she entered a few years back.
Thanks to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniac, Microsoft and Apple have created dressing rooms for us to step inside to slip into an array of bird clothes to do nothing more than soar through personal valleys once thought to be covered by earth shattering events, reasons to grow and or flat out modern day boredom.
Most unexpected connections begin with, “You might not remember me.” That’s ok because through continued conversation the human brain figures out ways to regurgitate the canals that once played an important role in making sure your fields were properly irrigated. Once achieved, the ditch seems overgrown with weeds twelve feet high yet the base of the feeder still has the strength to pass a new memory by.
Wouldn’t it be great if the masterminds of technology could figure out ways to connect to inner transformation? Gaining access to a GPS system that softly says, “Turn right at the eleventh grade and go two miles to your first guitar.” Wait! I purchased that Ibanez Flying V with the money received after my birth father passed, feeling totally guilty because I had no clue who the dude even was.
Such computer connections would instantly land us in a pair of Michael J Fox shoes, enabling us to shoot back to the future in ways that paint the origins of hidden adventure turned mud. We live in the past as it is…why can’t we come up with a full proof plan to physically pick up the bumpers of our Fred Flintstone car and tear off toward a horizon that fate forgot to let us touch?
In terms of reality, practicing inner transformation is far more approachable than waiting for near invisible computer chips to lift the tips of our imagination toward a destination we were naturally supposed to leave behind.
In 2003 Buddhist Monk Thick Nhat Hahn sketched out his views of turning arrows into flowers. Not an art but rather a decision to locate peaceful paths that may or may not have been barely living in stored caverns buried deep below the surface of your skin.
Being from war torn late 60’s early 70’s Vietnam, he’s been forced to digest personal vision quests that have led his feet toward destinations not pictured as a child or young adult hoping to seize the hull of ship to scream, “I’m the king of the world!” His world resembles that of the History channel and it’s black and white or off colored films that represented a place many of us couldn’t relate with yet felt tremendous compassion for those who were forced to go through it minute by minute, hourly and in his case even today.
Thick Nhat Hahn’s experiences are timeless, like a song, a favorite Hollywood motion picture or magazine story that puts focus on crime and within its storytelling way it paints the picture of something that could easily fit within today.
Turn on any television set or pick up any newspaper in 2009 and without a doubt you’ll see violence is never far. We identify the seeds of violence in our everyday thoughts, speech and actions…seeds that are given to us in our minds and attitudes and in our fears and anxieties about ourselves and others. Thick Nhat Hahn wrote during the Vietnam War, “When we believe something to be the absolute truth, we have become caught in our own view.”
A view we tend to share via computer links, cell phone conversations and or coffee pot cookers where the java is always free.
Thick Nhat Hahn continues to write, “We think of violence and war as an act with a beginning and end. Yet when you study the true act of war, whether it breaks out or not the seeds of war are already here. We don’t have to experience an act of war to know of its presence."
Look around us…
Like the battle between a smile and frown, no matter which expression appears, the other is required to use just as much if not more facial muscles to exceed the limits of its purpose. War and peace live inside the same channels of communication.
Inner transformation begins when you learn to recognize that seeds of peace survive daily on the very roots violence requires to reach through soils often so thick it’s been dubbed granite or bedrock. Cultivation is your only requirement. If a bad day has reared its ugly head give its face that of a velvet rose. Mindfully create in newer ways to think, speak and act while waking up a side of you that’s been hidden and or silenced by a society that hasn’t allowed you….to be you.
You have the ability to stop a war where it begins…in our minds.
Sometimes the greatest act your Broadway production can pull off is doing nothing more than sending something positive via an email. Rather than living in a past you can’t change, maybe the voices that are coming back via Face Book are the reasons why trees are given leaves each new spring... Look at the number of flower bulbs and roots that sit in the ground during unpredictable weather changes and still have the courage to share with human stick figures a blossom or two on days filled with so much warfare you’ve become blind to all other living things except a simple weed that happened to sprout a purple flower in a place you forgot to mow.
The voice from the past, the son of a radio mentor…a single breath of wind that lasted no longer than two letters. Today I find myself worrying about him…he is a soldier in the United States Marines stationed in Iraq and through technology a long forgotten path happened to cross. Did he reconnect because he’d soon pass? Until he writes again, I will never know. Until that computer is created, the only thing we have is prayer.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
No comments:
Post a Comment