​That’s what the late Fr. Raymond O., an Anglican priest, called our shared spiritual practice, Subud. The concept to be sure is presumptuous. How can anyone snap their fingers and have God? It’s not a matter of adding hot water and stirring.

​The concept of transaction is probably value neutral. After all, the verb transact means to make an exchange of equal value. I give you this; you give me that. We each walk away happy. Business is all about transactions. Your money for my good or service. My good or service for your money. It’s all perfectly legal, not to mention American. As Calvin Coolidge famously remarked, “The business of this country is business.” We’re a country built on transactions.

​If I were czar of U.S. Education, I’d require every American under 25 to spend a year abroad. Some American colleges, especially well-regarded liberal-arts schools, have such a requirement for bachelor’s-degree candidates already. Of course, there would need to be scholarship funds or work-for-travel arrangements—the Peace Corps and peace-time overseas military deployment come to mind—to ensure that working-class kids and not just the better-off get to go abroad. Then there are nearby places like Mexico, French Canada, Puerto Rico, and Indian/First Nations reservations that are less expensive to get to yet still culturally and/or linguistically diverse enough to make an educational difference for the study-abroad participant.

​“The essence of philosophy is that a person should so live that their happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” Thus said Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher who lived from c. 50 to 135 C.E. He was born a slave in modern-day Turkey, later lived in Rome, and was banished to northwestern Greece, where he died at the ripe old age of 85. One of his students wrote down his ideas in several books. According to Wikipedia, Epictetus taught that “philosophy is a way of life and not just a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control; we should accept calmly and dispassionately whatever happens. However, individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.”

​Zoe, our ten-year-old calico cat, is monumentally unbothered by the pandemic. She lives in an alternate universe where, so long as food miraculously appears at 7 am, noon, and 5 pm, all is well. When the spirit moves her, she goes outside. In the evening she’ll decide whether to make a night of it or stay in my home office instead. Weather is generally a consideration. Wind and thunder are big deterrents. During the day she’ll find just the right spot in the house to take an extended nap. Sometimes, though, she’ll go out, even if she’s already been out all night. She catches the occasional bunny in the interest of keeping their overweening population in check. She’s nothing if not environmentally conscious. 

​In response to the Black Lives Matter protests, we white people have answered with the truism, “All lives matter.” In fact, with a bow to the Green movement, all life matters, or should. But that’s the point. All life doesn’t and all lives don’t. Not at least to those of us who have lucked out to be born with cultural silver spoons in our mouths: money, two-parent families, a nice neighborhood, the best public schools, and—by a total quirk of fate—white skin. There’s not much room at the top, the thinking goes, and those of us, through no virtue of our own, who happened to be born in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy have little incentive to make room for those below us, let alone to give them a hand up. In a society based on social Darwinism, your win is paid for by my loss. We white Americans live in a gated community of the mind if not of heart and soul. Stay in your place so I can stay in mine seems our belief.

Okay, English majors of the world: For $100, what’s the literary allusion here? The opening line of Melville’s Moby Dick? That’s right! Send that contestant one hundred crisp new greenbacks! Melville’s classic begins with the narrator advising the reader to call him Ishmael. So, what’s that got to do with the spot price of coffee in Brazil or anything else? Nothing and everything. Read on.

​I was just at a church-related monthly meeting. Seven of us had gathered on the patio of one of our members, socially distanced, to help the eighth person discern whether or not to go forward with becoming an Episcopal priest or deacon. In the Episcopal Church nationally, this is a required process at the parish level for an individual to determine whether their call to ministry is solid enough to proceed.

In 1992 HarperCollins published my first trade (versus academic) book: A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom. Compiled and edited with a former student, it was a collection of 1,000 proverbs from all over the world. (Hence the title.) My collaborator and I placed ten each in 100 alphabetically arranged categories, from Adversity to Youth and Age. Our rule was never to have more than one saying per country or culture in a category. This was a challenge since sometimes we had five great proverbs from the same country but could select only one. Furthermore, we made sure to recast the sayings in inclusive language. All the many “He who’s..." were strictly forbidden. With 20,000 copies bought, this book became my bestseller.

​Although I didn’t support Bernie Sanders this time around—I did in 2016—I am none the less a democratic socialist. Who knows but I might actually join the party of that name and become a literal capitalist, that is, capitalize the D and S. Here’s why.

​My wife and I just got back from a weekend workshop. It was our first in-person event since the Covid lockdown. There were five couples plus a husband-and-wife facilitator duo, or 12 people in all. We were at a small retreat location out in the country, some 12 miles north of Boulder, Colorado, our home. For the most part we wore cloth masks or face shields, had many outside sessions, and practiced social distancing as best we could. The workshop, focused on helping couples live more effectively together, was excellent and well worth the risk. All this by way of context.

​My wife and I are almost through the third and final season of the Canadian Broadcasting Company and Netflix’s “Anne with an E,” the wonderful latest dramatization of the first of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables” books. In an episode we saw the other day, Anne and her classmates are at a beach to celebrate the completion of the college entrance exam they have taken earlier that day. Sharing a bottle of white spirits of some kind that has launched them into high hilarity, they begin playing Red Rover. So that particular kids’ game is in my head right now.

​When I was afraid I was allergic to our lovely calico cat, Zoe, I went to the local allergy clinic to find out. Some 120 pin-pricks later, the doctor told me I wasn’t allergic to cat dander or anything else. I do have some allergies, though, that pin-pricks can’t detect. For example, unphonetic words make me sick. I go into a negative alternate state when I discover a word, especially a foreign one in a language I’m learning, that doesn’t sound like the way it’s spelled.

​How can a born Jew, a baptized Christian, and, in order, a confirmed Lutheran, Catholic, and Episcopalian be a Moslem? There’s a literal and a metaphorical answer. First, the literal one. When I was in Morocco in 2001 as an adult facilitator at the World Congress of Youth, our local hosts took a busload of us to see the great Mohammad II Mosque in Casa Blanca. Most mosques are open to people of all faiths but not this one. You had to be Moslem to get in. Since as a non-Moslem I knew a lot about the religion Muhammad had founded, our main host, a young woman, said to her male colleagues, “He’s Moslem enough for this place. Take him in by the men’s entrance.” So, in I went. Minutes later a mosque official stopped me: “Excuse me, Monsieur. Are you Moslem?” I recited the Moslem Confession of Faith in Arabic. “Ah, welcome to our mosque,” he said. Since I had offered that short sentence in the presence of three male Moslems—the official and my two hosts—I was both physically and officially in.

​It started right outside my window, about 50 feet away, where there are two half-dead cottonwood trees. The taller, more westward trunk had a bark-free area close to the top at the place the tree-man had sawed off a dead section. Several inches below the top, a perfectly round hole started to appear. No, it wasn’t magic let alone a massive rear-end invasion by a swarm of angry bees. But in a way it was magic and flying critters were involved. I doubt, though, that they were angry. What happened is that a pair of persistent flickers, wood-pecking birds, had decided on making a nest there.

​The pandemic has caused us, like others, to up our TV screen time. So now, instead of watching the PBS Newshour only on Fridays, mainly to hear Brooks’ and Shields’ latest wisdom, we tune in every night, even sometimes for the half-hour Weekend edition. Then, we’re finding our way to our Apple TV clicker way more than in the good, old pre-Covid days. Mainly we go to Netflix. First there was Outlanders—who can resist the steamy romance of Jamie and Clare?—then Unorthodox, and now we’re a third the way through Season 2 of Anne with an E, the newish CBC-Netflix screen version of Anne of Green Gables.

​W. T. Stace in his writing about mysticism offers a helpful definition. Mysticism, says he, is “first-person religion.” As I wrote the, uh, first word in the last sentence, my fingers played a trick on me as they frequently do and capitalized the first TWO letters. The result: MYsticism. Well, that’s the point. Sometimes you just have to go there yourself. Tom Paine in his Age of Reason takes this concept a step further. Revelation, he writes, is only for the person who received it and mere hearsay for everyone else. (No quotation marks here since I’m quoting from memory, but I’m sure the wording is at least 90% accurate.)

​Or so we hope during this new year of the plague. In any case, Cedar, my wife, and I schedule in a walk every day. It usually lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, although once a pressing need—I can say no more!—caused us to return home after a mere seven minutes. Yesterday in fact, Mother’s Day Sunday, we stayed out a whole 80 minutes, 20 to be sure while standing at a safe distance from one of Cedar’s Earthsong friends, whose house we were passing, to discuss and solve affairs domestic and international. One of Boulder’s many benefits is that, as a small city of 110,000, it’s hard to go anyway, even in these days of Safer at Home, without meeting someone you know.

The Twelve-Step slogan “One Day at a Time” has taken on new meaning for me during the pandemic. Briefly, I have begun to do a number of the same things every day. I don’t mean the regular daily things like meals, showers, biology breaks, etc. I still do those, of course. Life requires most of them. No. I mean things like daily walks of 30 minutes to an hour with Cedar, my wife. Today’s, for example, lasted 50 minutes. We take turns devising our itineraries and compete with each other not to repeat prior routes.

By Reynold Ruslan Feldman (April 2020)
(sung to the tune of “Matchmaker”)

MASKMAKER, MASKMAKER, MAKE ME A MASK.
NO NEED TO ASK—JUST MAKE ME A MASK.
MASKMAKER, MASKMAKER, MAKE ME A MASK.
​PLEASE MAKE ME A PERFECT MASK.

​In the Name of ADA, the Child to be born is the child of East and West, Psyche and Somos, Night and Day. The first stirrings of Life are already there. East is forgetting itself and becoming West. West is forgetting itself and becoming East. East is abandoning tradition in the face of progress. West is abandoning progress in the face of tradition. In the East old Western techniques are new. In the West old Eastern techniques are new. Yet in both worlds there is no balance. In the one, the poverty of body mocks the richness of spirit. In the other, the poverty of spirit mocks the richness of body. All nations are haves; all nations are have-nots. There is no balance, for the World is awaiting the Balancer.

​Lost in the wilderness of Mind and Heart, deep in the desolation brought about by its own unerring cleverness. Humanity is at an end. The Old Human Being, dominated by heart and mind, full of its own cleverness, is finished. There is nothing left. The inner pollution has become outer pollution. The inner selfishness has become self-centered nationalism. The inner anger has become war. There is no way out but death. Only death can lead to new life.

​They say all good things come in threes. Given the widespread symmetry in nature, the same probably holds true for all bad things too. Right now, we are living through three pandemics. The first two are pretty obvious: the global Covid-19 epidemic and the related universal financial crisis. Though less newsworthy, the third, once mentioned, will seem equally obvious: the worldwide abuse and misuse of power, whether personal, professional, status, collective, or institutional. From localized domestic abuse through sex trafficking to abuses by people in authority (e.g., some Catholic priests and sports coaches) to flourishing authoritarian governments.

In my last years of teaching at the university, I created a new course called The Literature of Wisdom—A Cross-Cultural Exploration, which I then taught 12 times to some 300 students. The first unit was Proverbial Wisdom. In it we studied maxims and saws from a diversity of countries, East and West, North and South. We were also required to create a proverb of our own. I say “we” because I considered all of us, myself included, as both teachers and students. So, I had to do all the work the official students did, even as they shared their wisdom with the rest of us. One of my proverbs went, “You can’t outrun the Devil, only outwait him.” 

​This week we’ll begin a series of blogs based on an unpublished book I wrote in 1972 while teaching college courses on U.S. military bases in then West Germany. The book is written in the prophetic style of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) so it will be quite different from any of my weekly blog essays of the last eight months. I hope you enjoy it. RRF