part one

The Meditation Shack

Prologue

I’ll be in the meditation shack. That popping sound is knots of wood in the heating stove.

***

1. Along a wall of the meditation shack is a drafting table for watercolors. At one end, a letterpress, folio manuscripts.

The solitude of the meditation shack possesses a certain valence; spirits of the cool, earthy air can quite sniff it out.

One of those who sometimes appears is the Grand Duchess Tatiana, forever young, about whom I once read in a book. I know she is present, for her love of animals mesmerizes all the creatures outdoors, and they gather outside the shack, rustling in the snow and dry brush and making little noises, and the tree limbs tap on the slant roof, and the stars start to hum and I have to say Tanushka, you must leave the shack because I cannot concentrate with you around. The G.D. Tanya responds that the shack lacks icons, only a piece of driftwood and a carved fish from my past life as a Christian.

When she finally leaves, however, the forest is so quiet and she sings “Praise Him From Whom All Blessings Flow” and the shack is still and the mind is empty and there is only the popping sound, of the knots of wood in the wood stove.

***

2. The Watching Owl.

Oh, I forgot the Watching Owl. The owl is an icon on an oval panel of wood, an image of lacquer and enamel and paint, not jeweled or in any way miraculous. There is a painted stone at the center. It is basic.

Creativity is a bane.

Thoughts and words are contraindicated in the meditation shack, in lieu of emptiness.

I have found solitude here- almost. Myself, the Watching Owl, and the meditation on a fixed point.

For at last, when mental silence is achieved, or very nearly so, the Grand Duchess Saint Tanya may again butt in with her icons and ribbons and a book of scripture, like some inter-dimensional emigrant Statue of Liberty, with a tremendous floppy summer hat like a steamboat a-sail on her waves of red curls; the grand duchesses remind one of nothing so much as ships far off on a calm sea, and of games of shuffleboard on the tilting deck.

So you see it’s no use.

A spirit like that completely dominates the shack, pointing out every deficiency and tapping out obscure verses of scripture with a forefinger didactically held aloft. She is also, however, the picture of thoughtfulness and naïveté and love.

Saint Tania, bless this shack- on your way out. Amen.

The meditation shack is her pier. Perhaps she will shove off.

Grand Duchess Tyana, higher in rank than the lowly princesses of Europe, angel nurse of mercy, devoted to service, I thought, there are so many in need: wounds to gauze, soldiers in open wards shiver, awaiting your hand, your baleful look. There, through the slots of trees, is their encampment.

A distraction of compassion will send her off, at least for now.

“May the Lord bless you and keep you” said Our Lady of the Swamp Birches.

May the Watching Owl watch over you, I thought, and at this the Grand Duchess Tatiana again abruptly vanished, ribbons and all.

The wood stove’s glowing embers come to life with a breath.

Oh, she left the dog!

***

3. Old Grand Dad

Just when all is serene again I smell a puff of acrid cigar smoke and know Old Grand Dad is near. He likes the prospect of the dark void of woodland and Double Creek Peninsula which is the view from my hatch of the meditation shack.

He stands outside to spit into the forest, and, when inside the meditation shack, stands right at the window and near the stove, which brightens a bit too, at his presence.

Have a seat, Old Grand Dad, I always think.

“No thanks, I’ve been sitting all day,” is his inevitable response.

Old Grand Dad is always welcome, for he brings a tremendous deep reverential silence with him. Even the little embers in the stove seem to love him; he and they exchange jokes in the language of fire.

Once, long, long ago he brought me a balsa wood biplane, propeller-powered by rubber band. “Wright Brothers,” he explained, “in remembrance of the First Days of Flight.”

It hangs by a string next to the Watching Owl. By the stillness of the string I may judge my progress.

I sense his absence when I see the little oak seeds falling like little propellers from the oak tree outside.

And I notice, after his departure, the blank page atop the manuscript table by the letterpress, and remember: “Invisible ink.”

***

4. A Throat Song

“Here my voice as if it were the wind in the trees, or the sound of waves”

-Alan Watts

…as the sounding gong fades, one sound becomes every sound, and so all things come into being.

My Tibet monk friend can do the low vocalizing of throat singing, a deep-toned hum with open throat, that can be very loud and resonant and disturbing and beautiful. Maybe it can be heard outside the shack. I don’t know.

Tibet Monk works in a radio dispatch department of a medical center, and while demonstrating the art of Tibetan throat singing, the radio was left on accidentally to the open channel in the post-anesthesia department.

Staff banged on hand-held radios, thinking it was feedback.

-It was feedback. Like that constant tone, away up in the old monastery, the choir of monks on the other side of the world, everything coming into being.

Tibet Monk received a quiet reprimand and laughed and laughed. Now when we say hello to each other, it is with stupid throat singing.

So, sound laughter silence deeper and deeper and then:

sound of wood crackling in the wood stove. Last night’s storm has passed. Trees are still. Singing tonight to an open channel.

***

5. Hurricane Lamp

Counting breaths down from 100.

Clearing mind of all thoughts in the meditation shack. Night, day. Time doesn’t matter now.

It’s surely a centennial of something somewhere; I’m seeing cannons, flags and banners in the darkness. The shadows from my hurricane lamp behind the press are long, filling the shack with shadow machinery, so one meditates within the dark wheel and treadle of the letter press-it casts long, spidery spokes against the far wall beyond the stove. The shadow of a printing press is the wheel of history but, for the moment, all is still.

I thought the recent storm had passed but it has continued raining on and off outside the shack, a smattering of drops reminding one of the moment, the dark void of forest outside now.

The wheel of history, lovely Grand Duchess Tatiana- ever young, the Archduke and Duchess Sophie, the newsreel as I count, Old Grand Dad, too…the lively shadows are ever appearing and dissolving. The shadow wheel is turning in the stillness.

That fire in the stove is my companion for now, once it hissed at me and popped again for fuel.

96, just breathe normal, 95, ninety…Wait. What? 100…

“Arf!”

– The Grand Duchess’s dog!

***

that ends part one

art by axel craig

The Meditation Shack

Chapter 6.

A brief intermission: Leave Your Mind Alone!

Everything gets tedious and people think they know who you are and put you in a box -not literally (at least not yet)- and so I say

Leave your mind alone!

You need a break to just listen to the fire crackle and take long naps and let the creativity gift/curse go for a while, I would say

Leave your mind alone!

You’re not sure whether your best thinking has you out in the weeds somewhere spiritually, or how complicated things are about to get, so you might wish to

Leave your mind alone!

You don’t know how all this is going to end up, so simply

Leave your mind alone!

In the silence that ensued after this little personal outburst- an in-burst really, but that sounds like bad digestion- I noticed Tatiana’s French bulldog snoring away by the stove, and a languid series of lazy smoke rings from a cigar, drifting through my closed door, demonstrating quiet mind with no effort whatsoever.

So I just let go.

jk

***

The Meditation Shack Part Two

Chapter 7. The Speaker

Its a lovely morning, almost springlike, in this year 2019, with abundant daylight coming through the slats that I call skylight in my meditation shack.

It’s a commonplace of our modern metaphysic that there are Speakers about, carriers of wisdom, guides at the bedside, walkers within a cane’s length from your curb, less than a mind’s eye’s blink away.

Maybe she’s one of those, a spirit spy from the Other Side, I wonder. I’l look within for an answer, utilizing a traditional form of contemplation, involving images and silence and fixed point meditation. While staring into space, I believe my leg fell asleep.

***

The mind sees an image and a door within opens:

In the mind there’s a chute and a ladder, a bathtub of bubbles, a series of sunrises, a trumpet blast, a conch shell sounding the birth of a succession Dalai Lamas, a 78 rpm recording of a scratchy string band, a rugged cross, eggs frying on an electric range, a resurrection, transfigurations, and a couple of world wars and millions of human lives and generations as yet unborn-

-and every generation has Speakers to whistle and whisper all those ancient sweet nothings in human ears:

-“Here doggie!”

It’s the Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia, hair cut pretty short now, just a kid with a simple wool sweater on, barging in without knocking, clapping her hands, calling to her bulldog Ortipo over by the warm stove.

“He’s unbelievably adorable!” Tanushka, ever young as in 1917, is clapping and bowing, and the bulldog does a rotational shake and runs- if you can call that waddle running- to Tatiana.

“Why?” is not actually a spiritual question after all, I’ve concluded.

***

…So, here we are again, a usual morning in the meditation shack; I pray my nonsense prayer for empty mind, and the grand duchess from another time commences to pray, moving her lips and so fervently, mentally, so very intently, prays like this:

”As I rise from sleep, I thank Thee, O Holy Trinity, for through Thy great goodness and patience Thou wast not angry with me, an idler and sinner, nor hast Thou destroyed me with mine iniquities, but hast shown Thy usual love for mankind; and when I was prostrate in despair, Thou hast raised me up to keep the morning watch and glorify Thy power. And now enlighten my mind’s eye, and open my mouth that I may meditate on Thy words, and understand Thy commandments, and do Thy will, and hymn Thee in heartfelt confession, and sing praises to Thine all-holy name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.”

Wow! And, with that doozy of a prayer first thing in the morning, my secular mind became still with an emptiness that surpasses my usual lack of understanding.

Now we can take Ortipo for a walk.

***

Chapter 8

Prayer for the Dead

I’ll tell you a secret. Sometimes in the hospital, when we transport a person who has just died, as soon as the elevator doors close in front of us, and the elevator descends, carrying us, and the body borne on the blue canopied gurney, downward, Tibet monk rapidly opens his arms, palms upward and says the Tibetan Prayer for the Dead. Very fast. We have only a few seconds to pray. It’s barely a mumble.

Out of respect, I mirror his posture, palms upward, head bowed, eyes open, not knowing Tibetan language, pause in stillness. When he’s done mumbling, he nods to me and we go.

It’s not a joke, and it’s not serious, either. We just happen to be the two people in the situation that are alive.

We laugh and joke all day, but for a few minutes during this trip we are not total idiots.

Elevator door opens and medical staff may say “How’re you boys doin’ today?” and we say oh we’re doing great and we roll along to the morgue.

This is going somewhere I promise.

***

9. Moving Forward in Darkness and in Light

Paper, water, brush, on a plank, a simple shelf, placed along one wall. Materials. Stove is fired up, there’s morning coffee and morning light.

Watercolor: Here, from a glass of water, a horizon line, the searching colors, yellow and green and blue; brown for a faint wagon rut; darken a bit the vertical trees, the birches of white, and shadow and dapple with brush the foot prints of fallen leaves. Here you can see the roots at the edge of the water, which reaches out like fingers into lines at its edge, and ruffles the paper’s surface slightly.

That’s the Four Brothers Mine, where one night, at almost daybreak in 1918, the bodies of the Romanovs were brought, one hundred years ago last summer.

It’s a murder ballad of the most intense degree: captivity, false hope- which must be, at times, the bread and water of life- and, finally, twenty or so steps to the basement, and the long ride out to unmarked graves.

During the Russian Revolution, the former tsar and his family were detained and ultimately killed in July, 1918: Grand Duchess Tatiana, her sisters Olga, Marie, Anastasia. The parents were Nicholas and Alexandra, and the young invalid son, Alexey, was the heir to the what became a Lost World.

Here, on paper, in 2019, in my place by the crackling fire, where one can sit and contemplate and create, the swamp is restored to swamp, no longer a gravesite; the birches are still, and the sky, well, that’s where heaven is, for believers.

The watching owl watches over us, that simple icon made of wood, hung on a nail above.

Which side are you on, and you, which side are you on- in this strange tale of Russian interference? On the side of the living, the here and now.

On paper the earth is undefiled; in contemplation we create the new moment, the acknowledgement of the possibility of peace, somewhere where it isn’t.

Can the present moment ever be a source of power over a helpess past?

photo: Olga, Tatiana and Marie

Tatiana looks over at the painting as it dries and laughs with a frowning smirk, ”what is that?” -Because she actually knows how to paint.

That popping sound is knots of wood in the wood stove.

***

10. A Walk with Tatiana.

(for Marilyn Matevia)

****

Walking with Grand Duchess Tatiana is just like walking with a friend, but one that is much higher in rank than a meager baroness or plain duchess or all the princesses of Europe put together, or anyone you or I might know.

Walking with Tatiana’s French bulldog is a slow meander. We walk along Double Creek Peninsula, along hidden paths through choke cherry and the thorny thickets of blackberry bushes, brushing along through little maple groves and beneath a seeming infinity of green leaves high above and everything chirping and clicking and rustling with life. Little gifts of seeds were raining down, as gifts from the birds.

No, they did not hurt. They fell gently here and there, although you could sometimes hear a buckeye hit the dirt with a thud.

The Grand Duchess saw animals I never knew lived around here. I saw the usual, mostly squirrels and chipmunks. Tanushka saw a red fox, a badger, a ground hog, a weasel, muskrats, deer, including a buck with antlers, rabbits, mice, a mole, a vole, a family of racoons, looking out from a den in a tree because, for them, it was the middle of their night.

It adds a whole new dimension to bird watching, to be walking with a beloved Nature Saint of the Passion Bearers. It’s nice to be out of the meditation shack, for a while, too.

The little birds up in the leaves flit from branch to branch, the many sentinel scouts posted at distances chirping the news of the arrival of the grand duchess.

-It is not magical thing, she says, her Russian/ Scottish accent coming through. (Yes that is strange- the Euro influences in the Empress’s household were myriad).

“When you look closely at birds every day, you notice behavior, that’s all. Just be patient and observe.”

I think to myself, “notice also how birds don’t shoot each other, or bash each other in face with rifle butt, or poke with bayonets.”

Though I am silent, Tatiana glanced icily in my direction and then softened her gaze.

Holy Scripture also benefits from the out of doors, the grand duchess affirms, out of the immense quiet of the woodland wind’s rustle.

Tatiana reads very flatly, but every word sounds godly when read by the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who knows five languages, and whose mother, the tsaritsa, was brought up as an English noblewoman at Balmoral.

-Wait. The grand duchess wished to stop and say prayers again.

The path broadened to an open meadow with a wagon rut and swamps and birches. She planted a rude icon, spread holy water around, hither and thither, and she was lost to prayer.

***

Snap go the knots of wood again, my awakening to pleasant zero of absolute blank mind in the meditation shack.

With a buckeye in my coat pocket, a sanctified souvenir.

***

This ends part two.

James Koehneke

Feb 27, 2019

art by axel craig

part three

The Meditation Shack

Chapter 11.

Please Explain Everything

-Morning is a good time to stumble down the gravelly path to the shack with a cup of coffee a-sloshing in one hand and the other on the wood railing, so smoothed by time and many hands.

…Is it a shack, or a studio, or a little house? One wonders. If you have that art stuff in there, that would require space and proper ventilation, and the art works must be stored somewhere, so wouldn’t that imply that the shack is more like a little house in the woods?

Is it actually circular, like I imagine it to be, like an empty water tank, with yellow walls and a shingle roof? Is it rather tiny, with just a hammock, and octagonal in shape, with barely room to stand?

Are there many windows, or just the hatch you mentioned? Is that window filthy, as I imagine it to be?

Is one wall tiled with fractured shells, and, if so, are they iridescent and lovely, with innumerable distinct regal colors, spectra of purples and pearl? Do they reflect natural light in a supernatural way, as I would expect?

Is there a sand-art mandala, like the monks of Tibet create way up in the monastery in the mountains, but is your sand-art mandala significantly smaller, about the size of a place mat, and, if so, where can I get beautiful colored sand like that? How far along is that project, or any project, for that matter? Would a breeze from the screen door blow the sand about, messing up your sand-art?

How about pebble art? Wouldn’t that be a practical alternative?

If, indeed there is sand present, and driftwood, as referenced by the driftwood icon in the shape of a holy fish, is there a body of water nearby, besides just the swamp? An ocean, a river? Are there plunging waves or rapids?

Are there any religious books: Chuang Tzu, Walden, the Holy Bible? Or just one book you swear by, like The Secret Doctrine, by Mm Blavatsky? Is there WiFi out there, or would that be inauthentic?

Is the fire hazardous, and do you have a carbon monoxide alarm so you don’t end up like that lady on the commercial, whose dog saved her life when she dropped off into unconsciousness, or would that actually be ok with you?…

-The screen door slams behind me every time but I’m careful as I step over the sill down one half step and in, with a cup of hot coffee held steady in both hands. It’s cold inside at first, but bracing.

You set the cup down and rub your hands together and exhale.

You’re in.

“The Breathing Ball” Marlene Aron 2003

***

Chapter 12.

The Tatiana Effect:

-Do you two know each other? Are you cousins?

Perhaps the Tatiana effect is like the Princess Diana thing. It was her Special Day- I mean, the day she expired in the wreck in Paris; I was shocked as was everyone the world over.

Should I tell you this story? No. It’s an eye-roller, I admit it.

It was on the 10 o’clock news that I heard the news of the death of Princess Diana. I know, let the eye-rolling commence.

I had just locked the doors at the haunted bookstore and drawn the shades and turned off the lights and breathed in the perfect peace of a bookstore at night.

Let’s stop right there. A bookstore at night is like church.

Ok.

I had no interest in Princess Diana whatsoever. Took the rattling streetcar home. It was a lovely warm summer night in San Francisco.

So, at home at midnight, I watched the pale dawn in Paris and London on television, and saw the beginnings of flower memorials outside the palace gates. The world was awakening to the sad news and blanket coverage was just beginning.

Then, lo, there was Di standing over by the window in the corner, just a step out of the light of the 60 watt overhead bulb of my room- which was a mess, as usual.

There she was in Appearance, an Apparition. Right there in my disorderly, usually cold low-rent room in San Francisco. I think I was eating a sandwich at midnight. Maybe it was a burrito.

-Then, she Wasn’t.

She’d completely disappeared from that ambient imaginative space. Could not reimagine her. She was gone.

So I asked The Great Whatever why a nobody like myself would have an Experience like that and TGW answered:

“The Princess acknowledges every person who has a thought for her everywhere the world over, and brings a message of peace to everyone who remembers her this night.”

So, there you go. I received an unearned gift of grace of some sort.

In the following days there was a great global outpouring of feeling for Diana Spencer, and the Royals were blindsided and had completely underestimated her now charismatic appeal for the masses, the whole world over.

I knew that the spirit probably touched everyone as The Great Whatever had explained.

Am I saying that the Grand Duchess Tatiana from another time is a ghost?

No. She’s not a ghost.

But the world keeps turning and something ancient and venerable is always at work, and when a person stops and thinks, time stops and thinks too.

As Isaac Newton says:

“Time is it’s own thing.”

***

Chapter 13 The Life of Mortals

The life of mortals is like grass,

they flourish like a flower of the field;

the wind blows over it and it is gone,

and its place remembers it no more.

-psalm 103

…time passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in the world

-views of Sir Isaac Newton

***

Right now history is a floppy-hat processional, and here they all come, the Imperial Family from another time.

It’s a thought-intrusion, here in a quiet space exactly a century away, based on a few seconds captured on film, circa 1915.

Starting with the Tsarina of Russia Alexandra (batshit crazy), nodding her perfunctory bow as she passes, bowing stiffly (sciatica) to the endless void of onlookers of all time; a plane of shadow across her austere face, below that enormous hat brim.

Followed by Olga, Grand Duchess, age 21, also nodding, bowing, prim in her clinical depression; her saintly attribute is forsight and truth.

Tatiana the Beautiful One, of the fingerpainted handcrafts; the hand maiden to all, the carrier of the Book, and main subject of our Meditation.

Anastasia, the talented one, who just crossed her eyes at me, laughing and acting like a complete goof.

-and Mariya Middle-Child the “normal” one, the child most-likely-to.

Animadversions aside, these are the thought forms as they pass, sequential and annual as an Easter parade, and just as mystical and just as mythical; and certainly as empirical, in the very imperial sense, that, for every year near this time a procession returns, out to the site where their remains were found. A discovery, like finding Titanic.

The reality, the images of memory as a unifying force, that wouldn’t disappear.

And the wind over the grass, without regard to anything that happens in this world.

***

I watch as the images wend around the gravel path, and right through the shack and into the forest and out to the swamp birches. All the while they redefine all space, as a religious idea, as Holy Ground.

And my little fireplace crackles with life.

According to the history, they “bore their sufferings in a Christlike manner”, this party of seven- that is the meaning of the term, and their spiritual status, as the Passion Bearers, sainted, esteemed, iconic.

Now they proceed through the mental space of the meditation place, bearing tragedy as in a samovar, with cartloads of icons and men’s choruses a-trailing behind.

The camera chamber of the cameral mind is image-appropriate, that the camera is the space through which they proceed.

In fact, the girls were shutterbugs, with their box brownie cameras ever swinging from a cords at the wrists, the available techies of their time.

They took snaps at every private moment.

“Here we are aboard the yacht, in the Crimea; look at Papa: what a dork!”

(Easy to imagine the Grand Duchess

Tatyana, she squints at me, shaking her head, using some modern slang.)

“Ah Here I am looking butch for the crew” she’d continue, opening a massive photo album.

Tapping her finger approvingly at her own image leaning against a rail, on shipboard, short hair blown slightly back, clad in a plain wool sweater and plain heavy skirt for warmth-utterly serious, the distant look, of a twenty- year old of 1917, holding her chin, posing, thoughtfully. Magazine style.

***

I’ve heard it said that the first reactions to film back in the 1910’s was laughter. And yet, still photography was so very serious.

Film was so strikingly close in mimicking reality that it was seen at first as a comic depiction. And of course film was off-speed and unregulated and ungovernable.

And here have we the Imperial Family, the Great Empire’s organic and organizing principle, in a newsreel, orderly, following the Tsar and Tsarina like dignified ducklings. The girls were just children, although higher in rank than the princesses of Europe, by definition, of course.

We are told that the belief in the family, the veritable image, was a governing force in Russia.

Without the tzar there’d could be no empire. Or revolution. Without the Russian Revolution, there would be no World War Two, and perhaps no me and no you. Who can say? Who would’ve changed anything, or could’ve? Wars and wars to follow, and here finally a pocket of peace.

Wind, grass, again.

***

Via newsreel and home movie footage, which measured and neatly cut a length of the thread of time, (which passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in this world) we see them passing, ribbons and bows and military uniforms amid a vast crowd of history.

How they were seen in your mind, the Imperial Family, was so very very important. Images and belief held an empire in abeyance for three centuries, we are told. Until it didn’t. What happened, Tatiana?

It is the news reel I see, fleshed our imaginatively, and yet so real a part of this moment -before it’s gone.

***

“Here I am with the heir to the empire pulling him in the sled. We hit a lot of bumps” said the grand duchess, turning a page.

The knots of wood popping in the stove over there. I’m alone with the Watching Owl who watches over us, and shadows and empty mind of emptiness.

***

Chapter 14

“Camera Obscura”

Carry your coffee down the gravel path through mottled forest void and carefully step down one and a half steps, that last step trips a lot of people up, then opening the screen door with your little finger so you keep your cup steady, it’s ok, the door slams behind you no matter how careful you are and you’re in.

It’s not really a shack it’s more like

a camera obscura-within it’s chamber walls: rolling surf, fleets of pelicans, sunset of amber with the coolness of stone;

a quiet meditation place like the jellyfish room at the aquarium, a watercolor watercolumn of dancing squid trailing ribbons of tentacles all around you, pulsing with life as it was for a million years;

or warm as the inner chamber of the glass conservatory of flowers, perhaps the tropical greenhouse of drooping fern and blue tiled pools of shimmering water and heat with the surface tension gently broken by silver ribbons of light and deepest darkest green and the droplets go echoing bloop…bloop…bloop…

or the widow’s watch on the cloud house on the hill above the rooftops, with a view all the way to the lake;

or the chamber of fallen vines out through the forest void to Double Creek Peninsula not far from here -a place naturally occurring, that kids call The Fortress;

Is it an aviary, a reliquary, a temple, a chapel, a mosque, when you are there?

-or a shadow puppet theater, of colored paper, enacting a text of Taoist tales? In the tale, are you the Empress, or Mourning Dove, or Talking Snake? or the one who rattles the drum for the sound of rain?

And whoever comes, Old Grandad with his curling smoke and watch and chain, or the Grand Duchess Anima forever young, carrying the world like a Faberge egg, or who?

Whoever comes chooses you.

***

Chapter 15.

“Boat Without Paddle”

Would you be so kind as to write ten sentences, please, that explain what is going on? For example.

Q: Why did you choose to write about the grand duchess?

1. I saw a picture of the daughters of the last tsar, taken in 1911. The image was colorized by an artist, so looked absolutely contemporary. It was as if time were suspended. The girl on the right was smiling.

2. I was so taken by the sweetness of the image, of the girls in their dress uniforms, just kids, full of life, around 14 and 15 years old in that photo, that I opened a history book to read about the tragedy which occurred just one hundred years ago, when the tzar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.

3. When I looked at the picture of the Romanov sisters, I saw Tatiana, the younger one on the right, unable to suppress a smile, she was so happy, about to inspect her honorary troops in review, her favorite thing to do, and she’s obviously stoked. She’s in her dress uniform of royal blue with silver piping and is wearing a plumed helmet with a chin strap. She’s the picture of happiness.

Q: Does that have anything to do with Russia / US relations today?

– Yes.

Q: What about the meditation shack?

4. At night I sometimes listen to recorded lectures about early Christianity and Buddhism and one lecturer speaks via recording from an electricity-free shack of meditation, out somewhere where there’s a lot of snow, and his dog barks incessantly outside the shack of meditation at the wolves or whatever, but he says it’s ok because she’s a husky and the snow and cold doesn’t bother the dog at all. There’s a fireplace inside with snapping logs.

5. And then I wondered to myself what my meditation shack would be like and I could picture it immediately, though my concept changes, depending on the whimsey of my imagination, but during the time when all is still within my mind it exists fully for me and it tests the philosophical conundrum of what is the difference between reality and dream.

Q: What about Old Grandad? Is he real? Or is he dead?

6 My grandfather was the first person I heard use the word “meditation”. I was sitting next to him in the pew of St Paul’s Lutheran Church, in Lakewood, Ohio back around 1966. Pastor Uffleman officiating. I was about the same age as those Romanov kids, I guess.

7. In the middle of the service, after the sermon, Grandpa leaned over and whispered earnestly in my ear: “I’m not sleeping.”

Q: What about narrative?

8. Well, when I encountered the character of Grand Duchess Tatiana, she was older than in the picture. She was serious and grown up. I was going to ask her about the tragedy of her life, and try to find some meaning in the violence of her final hours, as part of the story as a narrative force.

9. But she only turned to me with that look that meant

10. “There is only the now”

Or it could have meant “you are having a hard time with those noodles”, as I was slurping some delicious reheated soup out in the meditation shack.

Wood was popping in the fire as usual. Listening for wolves out in the silence.

***

Chapter Spring

This morning we have red sky but look: the gray cloud reflects more light across the hill heaped with green grass and the sagging gray fence and the unfurling cala lilies.

It’s spring, now, from Cloud House with the widow’s walk, all the way to the lake and the Heron’s Roost. The hill of heaped grass is Poet’s Hill, where the poems come from, poems seem to sprout right out of the ground there, so have a notebook ready.

The forest void is all wakefulness of course, and the gravel crunches so satisfyingly under your feet. It so sharpens your hearing, that crispness. That, and the robin’s clarinet warble in a nest in an echoing glade.

Yes the morning is fresh with birdsong and remembered daybreaks of fresh bread- by that I mean that somewhere there’s toast popping out of a toaster and then a couple of poached eggs on top: That’s “Adam and Eve on a Raft”, according to Old Grandad.

It’s hard to leave that behind even for a minute but meditation means dropping everything so be it.

I have a “meditation moment” over this when I see Old Grandad coming out of the empty forest just in time for prayers.

His usual greeting is like this:

He stops in silhouette outside the screen door, blows a smoke ring or two, and spits into the woods, stubs out the cigar on the rail. Then he raises a forefinger and says dryly and quietly

“Excelsior!”

which can mean “Here it is!” or “Superior!” or “Ever Higher!”

It was also the name of the place he worked in Chicago. Packing materials.

“Excelsior!”

***

art by axel craig

***

Chapter Iconostasis

Icons have proliferated here.

This is the driftwood Fish. That’s my Owl.

This is the armored Alligator in a river of gold glitter, wearing a crown, hands and feet of a man, and a Mayan temple, to boot, in a golden frame from Goodwill. Beads of luminous ink of purple and deepest green adorn a background field.

Here is Crying Prophet, scratched out of wax.

Here, the Whale, of hollowed glaze.

There’s Piano Jesus with a hat like Tom Waits, the tears of paint leaping off bony ridges of his face, the tipped martini glass and the banner, Take This Cup.

Here’s one of The Twelve Disciples With Menu. They can’t decide.

Here is The Door scrawled from an array of colored pencils. The board on which the image is pasted is in the shape of a peaked chapel door and so represents a door within a door .

There’s Lao Tzu, the old boy of the Wayless Way. He’s a little old statue carved of dark wood. One and a quarter inch.

Now, thinking just in pictures, in images, the Way and the Door are meant to lead somewhere, I suppose.

I wonder where.

The old screen door I haven’t the will or the skill to repair. Or anything else in this place. The shack is a mess. Cut paper calamity.

Oh, here are Saints of the Forest. Yes, they look like trees in a paper chain. As an accordion book they stand quite nicely. Each saint so very tall, so thin. But where is the heaven? The sky is nowhere to be seen.

**

I read that icons are gospel spelled out in image. Nothing left out. Bearing the whole account.

Painted on wood, clasped in copper, like a book.

They come from another time. A time before time. These paintings scrawled on wood, paper, glue, shellac.

Some, I read, are even dated from the beginning of time. Can that be true?

One might wonder at all the kneeling and praying, eyes fixed on the rough image, of centuries of ardent desire poured in, and the wood so porous.

And that, for some, they are a portal they simply walk through. My Tatiana, Old Grandad.

-They’re always around. Drawn to prayerful circumstances. They like that kind of thing.

A sacred image would be mother of god, could be the owl of prehistory or the sacred fish of the times when books began: the gospel codex, the bound books of the desert caves.

To modern eyes, as one account reports, the icons were “gingerbread”, a folkloric artifact.

Sacred eternal image to ponder on the way to emptiness. Eyes open, a wafer that simply melts away.

Well. You are like the floating frame, the empty mirror, so, as Old Grandad says, just “reflect”.

Tatiana, as icon, looks like an eagle, her face elongated, medieval.

“I bring peace- but remember you are still a stranger in this world. Don’t be afraid.”

***

***

MS

Chapter: Grand Alliance OTMA

a leaf fragment of history

In the corner of the eagle eye of the icon of grand duchess Tatiana, daughter of the Last Tsar, I can see a little light of a memory.

(She has, in a very timely way, seemed to have butted into the middle of a current controversy concerning the US and Russian presidents, both of whom shall remain nameless in this account, but we will leave this aside for a moment.)

The little memory’s light:

A long time ago in Old Russia- once upon a time, in fact, the grand duchesses were just children of the tsar. They had kid routines, tutors, ladies charged with their upbringing.

They were isolated in the palace, and so formed alliances to get by.

The grand duchesses were actually in a super-secret club, with four members: Olga, Tatiana, Mariya, Anastasia. They used passwords and furtive looks; they had unspoken understandings and agreements and inside jokes and winks and signs.

The sisters didn’t fight much, although one winter day in 1903 Anastasia did clock Tatiana with a frozen snowball, so they had to rush up and make sure she was still alive. The governess was fired and all was well again. Whew.

The girls would thunder down the palace steps, OTMA- Olga, Tati, Mariya, Anya- and the Alexander Palace amplified every sound, so the girls were usually sequestered upstairs most of the time. Supposed to be doing needlework, idle hands etc. Yes.

Olga was the oldest, but the sisters found her useless in many respects, and she gladly deferred to Tatiana who was delegated to represent OTMA before the tsar, papa, with Mariya and Anastasia looking from a far corner. Tatiana often did special pleading, as the OTMA regional representative, age ten, bailing out Anastasia (see above) and requesting rare junkets and adventures.

For Tatiana has a challenging look that even the Emperor of Russia, ruler of one sixth of the planet earth, found persuasive. A furrowed brow, and eyes of extreme blue, like his own, the tsar of all Russia would stub out his cigarette, relight another, and instruct aides accordingly, leaving all the specifics up to Tatiana.

That would not be on anyone else’s resume, I would think.

It jumps out at the casual historian, turning a page and of a sudden confronted by the image of the Level Gaze of the grand duchess, even as a kid.

They had an aunt who taught them how to shop. They girls were excited, but like other wealthiest people in the universe they had never learned how to buy stuff. They forgot they needed to bring along money to shop with. Money? How do they make change? What do you say, and then what do they say, at the shops? First time shopping? Praise God!

And on feast days, special days, like the girls’ birthdays, political prisoners would be released.

Praise God!

***

(thank you, Dr Helen Rappaport, author of The Romanov Sisters.)

***

Chapter. Contemplation

William Blake:

“What do we do when the visions cease, Mrs Blake?”

-“We pray, Mr. Blake, we pray.”

***

The forest void is dripping rain, mind void full of thought pictures, the mist clings to the grass on that hill where the lilies are unfurling. The grass sparkles with rain. That can’t last the hour, but what does?

Poems sprout right up between the railroad ties; put a penny down and a train will come, flatten it down.

**

Space with thought forms, that’s what we have, in my theosophical world.

You, I can picture most clearly; you and I, ambassadors from our time zones.

Technology has connected us now and everything is full of life. Thoughts are things, glorious.

Look: reach out with your mind and really consider, we are more than voices on a wax cylinder, subjects of photographs that have been colorized, digital files translated, in the stillness transported, by means of mental telegraphy.

Like those soldiers of World War One, captured on wax, prisoners of war, recording the Prodigal Son, for linguists to study, now speaking to us from a recently discovered archive in Germany. How did they sound? Would they ever be heard a century beyond their own time?

The Grand Duchesses whom I began to study, daughters of the last tsar, also were prisoners of 1917. And so too the many millions of lives in that epoch that seems to precede ours by an exact century. Free, now, as they must be.

“They are right…there,” my Tibet Monk would say, just an arm’s length away in the space of this room.

We inhabit our lives, not the other way around. Memory is sense and experience.

(Memory is real: Remember the rules of the road set out from the first.)

Life inhabiting memory, creating myths of meaning, gospels in the retelling, the recording.

***

Here is a romantic touch, for those that may wonder:

That once, when in public at a dinner, at Tsarskoe Selo, the Imperial palace, before the Great War, the grand duchess of Russia Tatiana, a young person, after all, kicked a guest under the table saying “how dare you speak to me like that!”

The guest had spoken to her in the most formal mode of address.

What seemed royal hauteur, I had totally misinterpreted. She was saying that she wished to be addressed as a person, just as a human being. Just human, for once to not be singled out due to an accident of birth, a fortune, which had become a burden. To be able to join with others, to enjoy a moment together.

Please God grant me a normal life.

The agonies of our public selves in our too short lives.

We, perhaps unconsciously, have become like the grand duchess Tatiana Forever Young and Old Grandad, floating majestically like ships or boats on space, but with an even greater longing; we now send digital signals, decoding and encoding experiences, always longing for life in all its normality, its beauty, its beads of rain, its poetry, its simple necessities.

Can it be, as Old Grandad says:

Heaven is among us. In our midst. Or. Within you.

***

Chapter Ascension

So we follow the path’s ascent to the old Dinosaur Rock, up beyond the Twelve Disciples, which is a shaded grove with an old falling-apart picnic table, and then one walks up a winding climb to Cloud House at the top, following a track you can hardly discern through the trees: maples and elms and oaks and saplings and may-apple and little open meadows of golden rod and milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, with butterflies and white moths flitting about and magnificent little grasshoppers and I hope you don’t have hay fever because everything is Ecstasy of Spring green right now.

Cloud House disappeared long ago, but we imagine it however we’d like it to have been. It’s mythical, like everything else in our alternating universe of sunshine and dapple and views that open out over a vast forest land to the lake. The lake away out there from the highest point is a distant plain of blue all the way to the horizon.

All of our forest-rules and tales of yore are all mythically and happily made up out of imagination, and so all of our favorite prospects and stopping places are iconic and symbolic and holy.

The story we tell of Cloud House is all about a lost soul waiting for her captain out on the lake. Now all that remains of the house is a platform on the topmost hill, nothing there but myself and the view of all creation. Tatiana comes up with me avidly interested in everything and stops at all her usual prayer stations. You can often find Old Grandad there by himself, way up at the top.

Sometimes the woods is like our old Jerusalem, and we have our own wailing wall. There’s also an empty cave of rocks we call holy and no one is allowed to touch any holy relic on the way to Cloud House.

Near the Cave of Winds is where the centurion stood and dropped his bloody spear- according to Tatiana. And here, she informs me, at precisely six pm, the Lord passed away and went to paradise. The cross which we regard with reverence at that spot is simple: a few dry branches placed into soft earth at our feet.

Instead of centurians, we have ravens patrolling about.

Holy Ground is anywhere or everywhere. Who can say.

In the old days, girls liked to go up to Cloud House and tell stories about their tragic boyfriends, their lost loves. Guys would usually just go to old Dinosaur Rock, almost at the top of the ridge, specifically to pee over the edge, but hopefully not on the Twelve Disciples, the trees where the old picnic table is-almost immediately below. Usually a rock is thrown down as a warning, in such cases. Sometimes rocks are thrown down for no reason, also.

I often tell the grand duchess the completely made-up story about the lost captain and the widow’s watch and the Cloud House, and her eyes fill with tears, as she crosses herself and places an icon of a saint and says her lovely prayers. Although the story is made up, and the prayers are all for naught, and the disciples are merely trees, it’s the most beautiful religious experience, to be with, and quite next to, a believer like she is.

She looks like a nun, in this appearance, young, long-limbed, malnourished, in a rugged white nurse’s garb, the cloth-wrap wimple covering all but her eyes like a burka, all just as she did when she worked in the hospital, caring for the wounded in the First World War.

The grand duchess did a crappy job at nursing at first, especially with the bandages, but she quickly improved. After all, half of her family back in Russia was chronically ill during all the time she was growing up; her mother, the Empress of Russia, was a wheel chair-bound complainer, and the sisters’ childhood diseases were almost always nearly fatal. So she took to soldier-care bravely. And the soldiers, few as they were at the make-shift clinic at the palace, all loved her, and it’s a big part of her sainthood now.

It’s all remembered, and can be found in books.

I like to sit out on the nose that juts out from Dinosaur Rock in the sun, look down out to the vast distant lake, and down across the ridge, and think of these things, our wonderful myths and paths and holy prayer stations throughout Forest Void.

I tell you what Old Grandad likes to say- a favorite verse in all the gospels -as long as we are making up the gospel of Spring- He says that, from ‘way up on the cross, with the two thieves on either side, one asks, will you remember me? and the Lord says:

“Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.”

Grandad especially likes the word “today”.

“Today you will be with me in paradise: Today.”

And, if we look out from the highest ridge top, we can see so very far in the stillness of our daylight. And hardly anyone knows we’re here.

***

Chapter divine amnesia

It’s peaceful, the brink of summer.

Sun laden hillsides greening along our cool dirt path to the little shack studio where art and inspiration gather in the spidery corners and everything’s just the way it’s supposed to be right now.

Wait what is that?

krk zszsz krk krk zszsz

Rolller skates! On the wooden deck outside.

Yes, roller skates, their metallic rattley scrapes were heard in a cool echoey space, in shade in the very heat of summer. The only cool place to be.

And now there goes, unaccountably, clomping and rolling, the Grand Duchess Tatiana from another time; willowy and skinny, an austere and strangely juxtaposed adult, serious like her mother the tsarina, arms waving horizontally like a tightrope walker or perhaps a heron about to take off

Grim determination ever on the lady’s face, airy muslin and gravity at odds- and I’ve heard Russians don’t smile without a reason. No.

The language of skates across time. Sometime before the year 1918.

Down a street in St Peter, the palace at Tsarkoe Selo, or roller skating on the tilting Royal yacht- somehow impossibly on the cold floor of this summer shack, the Grand Duchess Tatiana rolling by is a magazine fashion plate on wheels. The beautiful one, sure.

The way to stop is to run right into something, she demonstrates, arms forward with a somewhat accidental flourish, not smiling. She stops at the edge of the watercolor table, puts her chin in her palm, light muslin now still, like a painting of a lady in white.

She is here to listen.

I pray, and Grand Duchess Ever Young from Another Time, with her prayers and roller skates and icons trailing like kites in the air, comes with the ultimate grace bestowed.

To have forgotten her own death on this sweet summer day.

An answer to the awakening question that brings one into life for the living.

Tatiana relates, through her impassive expression, the following message:

I have to tell the reader that there must be no death, for where would I be, if not here in painterly ribbons, even looking out from photographs: there is a knowing presence there. Do you see it, can you know it, can you remember, in the age of amnesia? You remember. I’m here to remind you.

Those you’ve known, all the people through your time, now passed: there is a presence there.

***

It is so still in the trees, with our cool path calling.

…Everyone Tatiana had ever known on earth is now gone, long ago: violently, peacefully, barbarically, too soon, too late, horrifically, or with barely a final perceptible breath- well, only a few have not winked out from the earthly year 1919.

What would you change, if anything? History?

I wondered,Tanushka, about the terrible tragedy of 1918, your famous final hour, and the forgotten years that ensued, the whole awful century-

…My sporadic unpredictable uninvited companion, my guide Tatiana listens with her chin in her palm, still be-skated, one toe forward rotating slightly back and forth like a little watchwork.

I think of friends, too in my Time, and show my little pictures to the GDT with her ribbons waving in the breeze:

-And my friend the painter who was killed crossing the street, a presence there? The one who makes a painting of earth out of honey and wax?

Tatiana listens.

And my friend the busker, who knew the history of the town, and leapt from the bridge? A presence there?

Tatiana listens.

My lovely flute player, and her noisy parakeets, the self-inflicted gunshot under the beautiful spreading tree in California?

The sound of her skates like the Cyrillic alphabet: hard and soft sounds. I keep talking as we clomp out the door to the trees and out to the sacred birches.

And practice the impossible alphabet.

***

end of part one

***

.

Chapter Train Prayer, or The Tatiana Sutra (the unfolding novel of morning, voice and flute)

-When you pray, do you whisper? I see your lips moving.

Listen. Hear the wind?

(improvising flute, you have to imagine it in your mind)

-In just the first breath of the prayer, heaven is mentioned twice; once for Supreme Being, and once for us.

(flute, imagine)

-Heaven, and heaven.

Where you are, divinity. Where am I?

(flute, creating within your aural imagination)

-And, then, “as it is”, in heaven. On earth.

(flute, your solo circling above like a seagull)

-Heaven, and then heaven again, and then holiness and then earth.

In, and then on.

On: Earth.

(flute, your favorite low tone, as in an ancient cave by the sea within you, echoing harmonics)

-I am, you are. The beautiful here and there of it all.

You are in heaven, us on Earth. So simple.

(flute, pure you)

-But earth, as it is in heaven- that is love’s intention.

Love of the earth, of the river, of every animal.

What gives, forgives.

(flute, like this morning’s robin singing on a high branch)

-And then forgiveness is mentioned twice:

Forgive us, as we forgive.

Forgive, forgive

…And so:

Heaven / heaven

Holiness / earth

Forgive / forgive.

So easy!

(freely flowing the improvising flute)

Daily, affirms Time. How lovely is time, Tatiana?

The forest is burning, the White Army is coming.

Here’s my stop.

***

Interlude

Canticle of the Sun

***

Resume.

I’m learning to imagine simple things.

I’ve gotten rusty.

Can I really picture a color, a piece of fruit?

I experimented today.

I attempted an apple, an orange, a lemon, a pear, a peach. Then I got bold and visualized an apricot, which to me is exotic.

I found everything fuzzy, but improved with practice.

Then I must ask whether the pieces imagined are individual, or are they generic?

Is it the same apple, pictured twice?

Can I maintain “apple” over time?

Do the pieces endure? If so, where?

I’m not at a level of imagining crystal blue pavilions, or ruby-red electric fire, or cosmic wheels or whatever. Maybe someday.

But this skill, this practice, I could see could be life-enhancing.

So, half-unaware, I’ve indulged the practice of resolutions for the coming year.

To imagine. Not in any deep sense, but as in simple imagination. Can I do that? Yes. Imperfectly. That’s a start!

I’ll let you know what happens.