By Ramsey Tietjen

Wonderful, uplifting experiences have a way of turning into ideas and becoming dead. The stuff in your head is all yesterday and tomorrow, all dead stuff. If you read and study mystical things, you may find yourself thinking about the path to liberation, realization, illumination, enlightenment: things that somebody experienced yesterday and you hope to reach tomorrow. A real teacher, a guy like Joe Miller, is always trying to bring you relief, NOW! After all, if something uplifting is going to happen, it will have to occur now, to the first person in the present tense. When else can it happen, and to whom?

Many spiritual teachings tell us that we are not the physical body; yet the body is your present tense. You don’t have to be an acrobat, Olympic weightlifter, or master of the martial arts to live in it. The thoughtless present tense of the body, out of the vortex of mental babble, is waiting for us when we remember to drop into it. It is a simple remedy for an overheated, uneasy state of mind. There are no special qualifications, no ideas like enlightenment or self-realization, required to find relief there.

The following excerpt from “Balanced Man” by Fritz Peters struck me as a beautiful exploration of this immediate, practical, and uncomplicated nature of mystical truth:

What I think most of us came to understand (and I am not speaking primarily of the children at the Prieuré) is that life is an incredible adventure and that death – whatever else it may be – is also at least a potential miracle. Man’s impulse to fly into outer space, climb Mount Everest, hunt man-eating sharks, go around the world in a sailboat alone, dive to the bottom of the sea, etc. seems to me to be only the physical counterpart of the search for and development of a higher self. So I find the daily risks of life anywhere (why freeze to death in the Alps, when you are just as likely to drop dead if you fall off a ladder in the bathroom?) as exciting as any other hazardous occupation; and it’s a lot less expensive.
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SFTS Secretary’s Note: The life of the SFTS Lodge has been enriched by many musicians and poets. Here is a sampling from the work of one of our poets, Peggy Tahir. In upcoming SFTS Journal entries, we’ll post some more of Peggy’s poems, as well as selections from some other Lodge poets. We will also be posting, as time goes on, selected minutes of Lodge meetings both recent and from the distant past.

EASTER SUNDAY LEMON CURD

I bring the bag of meyer lemons home.
Nearing Easter, nearing revelations
I decided on angel food. The stones
In the yard gleamed. A quiet summation

Of ingredients: check cupboards and fridge.
A robin sings on the back fence. I leave
To buy eggs and pastry flour. The bridge
Across the river is raised; small boats weave

Through the channel toward the turning basin.
I break eggs using the three-bowl method.
After the whipping and folding, no sins
Emerge. The yolks, the grated zest, the melted

Butter. I stir as the finch sings, and brings
To the maple its twigs and fluff and string.

2002

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