4 | The Cosmic Individual?

 

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

I’ve been exploring the nature of “place”. It all began with a simple question about myself, “where and when did I begin?” That took me to the “quantum entanglement” of everything and everyone…and to the reality that there are layers in it all: thinking still just about places: where we are conceived, where we are born, where did our earliest memories take place? 

 

Words Mean More than We Think

Can I just say: language is fascinating and revealing: I have used two common ways of speaking already and for some reason until this moment, I never thought of them the way I am now. I will start from this one:

“…where are we conceived…”: normally when we refer to conceiving something, we mean a sort of mixture of “I thought of this” and “I imagined this”…and imaginative thinking process…’I began to conceive of an album that would tell the story of how a locket and chain connected otherwise disconnected people to each other”. So, where WAS I conceived…imagined, thought of…? Are we conceived in that way…by whom or what…when…how? The way the language is used allows a question about the divine to leak into the conversation even if subconsciously.

I will resist that detour for now…

Then there is another turn of phrase, “where did our earliest memories take place?” I know we use the phrase to mean “where did they happen”. But interesting isn’t it, in light of quantum entanglement…to think about where our earliest memories “took place”, as in, literally, taking places into themselves, changing them. Doing so of course along with everyone else’s memories and lives, through the history of a place, everything which “took place” there. 

Maybe to take place is to make place? And if we are entangled, of course that place takes and makes us as well.

The place my earliest memories “took” was not Phoenix, place of my conception, nor Arcadia, where the hospital I was born in was located, nor any of the other cities in the greater Los Angeles area where I have been told my parents rented in the early years.

It is Granada Hills.

 

Granada Hills, California

I am told we arrived sometime in 1961, I would have been 3 years old or nearly so depending on when exactly we moved. My parents purchased a long rectangular house, with a garage attached forming an L shape. It was new construction, no grass or bushes or trees at first. The outside walls were stucco, with sections created by thin wooden dividers running up and down, and the sections painted in alternating grey and a dull pale green. It was very much like all of the new houses in the neighborhood.

It was in that house, on that plot, in that city that several lines of my psychic entanglement came together: the line beginning back in Phoenix, deeply entangled now with my parents and a divorce which was already brewing, and lines stretching back to Granada, Spain, after which Granada Hills was named.

I want to start with the family that brought me there…and the house they brought me to. In that house was my room, which I remember as yellow. In that house I had an imaginary friend, named Jim Midnight. And in the grassless backyard was, for some reason, an old rowboat where I remember playing. I am told, but do not remember it myself, that on one occasion I jumped from the rowboat and turned back to my mother saying, “don’t worry mom, I won’t get wet, I’ve got towels in my pockets.” That brief event has taken on greater importance for me, as we will see later.

This is a poem I wrote years later, a way of traveling back to that house in my memory, a poem I called “This is Prayer”:

 

This is Prayer

There is a boy in a house lying silent

Painted in sunlight from windows in a yellow room

It is nap time, a time for sleeping, a time arranged

In keeping with an eye to his good

And, also, to his mother’s need

 

He is not sleeping, lying on his side

In the yellow room, face away from the door, his head full of stories

                  The man in black is Jim Midnight

                  That freckle is a gunshot wound

                  Towels in his pockets will keep him dry out in the raging sea

 

A world is alive inside the heart inside the boy inside the yellow room

Whose back is to the door that opens to the grey house

The grey hallway leading to the grey rooms

The grey window where his father is a grey shadow against a pale light 

The grey kitchen where a grey shape, his mother, is leaning against a grey stove

The grey and empty room where they watch T.V. in black and white

In the deepening grey of the ending of the day

 

There are stories inside a boy inside a yellow room inside a grey house

Inside the memories inside the chambers inside the heart 

Inside the body of a grey headed man 

Whose greying hand is scratching out these words

 

It is 3 a.m.

A time for sleeping

 

He is not sleeping

 

He is awake in this house, in this room, in this chair, in these drying bones 

Facing through this window towards an eastern sky, 

Watching

Waiting for the sun to paint all his rooms and stories

With a warm and yellow light

 

A young boy, processing the impending explosion of his parents’ marriage and the implosion of his world…and my attempts to metabolize it all…then through my imaginative world and the man in black and the towels in my pockets…and now…sitting and waiting for yellow light and a healing dawn. 

 

All Our Inner Stories

The poem says, “There are stories inside a boy”…. 

I will come back to what we might think of as the more personal the threads in the story.  

But I know now what I did not know when I wrote the poem, that the story tells more than what happened “inside a yellow room inside a grey house, Inside the memories inside the chambers inside the heart … Inside the body of a grey headed man”. And a lot of what I know now I know because I began this podcast, because I did not know it before I began…(though looking back at older poems and songs and journals,  I think in a way I have always known?).

That room in that house on that plot was in Granada Hills. And so, the story of the boy in the yellow room is entangled with the story of that place.

Originally, the area was inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people, who lived in villages scattered throughout Southern California and who had relied for sustenance and medicine upon the very local plants and animals which had presumably been cleared and chased away to make room for the housing developments.

Of course, between the Tongva and our arrival there was a lot of history. Spanish colonization in California began in the late 18th century and much of the land in and around what would become Granada Hills became part of large Spanish land grants. All of that was done away with as well, as California was taken over and taken into the United States.

In the 1920s, the Granada Hills region was subdivided and began its transformation from vast farmlands into what I read some called a “suburban paradise” though in my memories is was a bleak, grey, barren place. 

The area was initially named “Granada” after a city in Spain with “Hills” added later due to the community’s rolling landscapes.

What about Spanish Granada? 

 

Granada, Spain

That city was located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in an area settled in various waves by Iberians, Romans, and Visigoths, before becoming a major city in the Islamic period of Spain’s history, for several hundred years, before Granada was conquered in 1492 (the year “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” according to the rhyme many of us learned in school), ),  and progressively transformed into a so-called Christian city over the course of the 16th century.

Why go into all of that? I never lived there. My memories did not take place in, nor “take” the place called, Granada in Spain. But the history of Granada, the namesake of MY Granada Hills, and my later interests and experiences in life, and my growing realization that quantum entanglement is not limited to space and time has caused me to include Spanish Granada before I go back to Granada Hills and California. Why…two things:

First, the Sierra Nevada’s…

 

The High Country

I am sure this will come back later in a later Episode or two, but I have been entangled with the California Sierra’s ever since my very first backpacking trip at the age of 12…hundreds of miles, weeks and weeks of my life…trails…mountains…meadows….streams…vacations….backpacking with friends, with my daughters, with other family members….and many solo trips. The Sierra’s have a unique place in my soul, and maybe my soul has a place in them…I have pages and pages of journals as witness at least to their impact upon me and my worldview and my experience of life.

So, when I read that Spanish Granada was at the foothills of the Spanish Sierra Nevada’s, it rang with more reverberations than a mere coincidence. How does entanglement really work? Did a mere naming have such an impact? Were some of the Spanish who settled in California from Spanish Granada…did they carry the spirit of the Sierra’s with them…was it sown like a seed into the ground where a house would be built and boy would play? Would that boy breathe the dust into his lungs, and would tat turn into a longing for the Sierras? Did that longing echo the nostalgic ache of a Spaniard from centuries before, who in the evening would remember the Sierra’s of his youth?

These are questions…and I suppose they are hunches.

And secondly, there is the Islamic history of Spanish Granada…

 

Islam and Muhammad

I am not sure how much to go into here, much of this aspect of who I am belongs in later episodes. But the headline version is that I have felt drawn to Muslims and to Islam and to the Quran in a deep way since I was 22…which is when I met Muslims while doing college campus ministry as a young youth minister in Southern California. My understanding of Islam, and Muhammad, and the Qur’an, as well as my ways of seeing Christianity and Jesus and the Bible, have undergone radical changes since that first day, a process of change I could summarize as moving from conversion to my religion, to no conversion, to a hope for mutual conversion…of myself, and of all people…not in terms of religious conversion but in terms of personal and communal transformation, together, 

But for now, I am interested in beginnings, and in entanglements. Similar to my questions about naming Granada Hills, and the Sierra Nevada’s, I wonder: were some of the Spanish who settled in California from Spanish Granada…did they carry the spirit of their region’s Islamic past with them…was it sown like a seed into the ground where a house would be built and boy would play? Would that boy breathe the dust into his lungs, and would that turn into a sense of connection for me the boy, alive inside of me the man, years later every time I met a Muslim? Did that echo like the heart chambers of a Spaniard from centuries before, who in the evening would face Mecca and perform his prayers?

And deeper…why this affinity I would feel especially for the young child Muhammad? Was that sympathy already there in the soil of Granada Hills, left by ancient predecessors, awaiting my arrival like old fossils in the dust, waiting to be discovered? Did it find its way inside of me, and become something like a factory setting in my hard drive?

What about that boy, Muhammad, born about 570 in Mecca. His father died before he was born, his mother when he was six. As a result, he was raised “by committee”: a wet nurse and foster mother among the Bedouins in the desert, a grandfather who died when Muhammad was eight, an uncle. 

What drew me to this person emotionally is the sense of dislocation, isolation, the compounding losses of anyone who cared for him. In addition, Muslims trace his genealogy back to Ishmael, the son of Abraham: Ishmael also experienced (for different reasons) dislocation and loss, and rejection when his father sent him away (did Muhammad feel rejection when he was sent to the Bedouins…yes, it was a normal custom then, but a child doesn’t know that).

To me it makes Muhammad’s later sense of the divine nature all that more astonishing: compassionate and merciful are the two most common names he would employ to describe God. And he once heard the divine voice say to him, “did I not find you and orphan and take care of you?” In fact, let me present the full poem as it is in the Qur’an. I can’t recapture in English the rhyme and rhythm of the Arabic, which is part of the power I am afraid, but here is my attempt at a somewhat poetic version:

1. As surely as each new day unveils the brightness of the dawn,
2. And as certain as the curtain of night returns in silence,
3. Your Creator has not abandoned you, nor has He rejected you.
4. There is goodness waiting for you, what is yet to come is better for you than what you know.
5. Your Lord will provide for you and bring you into joyful abundance.
6. Think back: did he not find you an orphan and give you shelter?
7. Did He not find you unsure of your way and lead you to your path?
8. Did He not find you in need and give you what you needed, and even beyond?
9. Keep this in your heart, and when you see an orphan treat them with generosity.
10. And do not be harsh if you turn away the beggar.
11. And tell everyone about the generous bounty you have experienced.

 

Now, I knew nothing about Spanish Granada, nor the Sierra Nevada mountains, nor Islam nor an orphan named Muhammad when I arrived in Granada Hills, barely a three-year-old, at the empty grey house on the bare dirt plot of ground. But was it all waiting for me there, entangled in the place? Did I take it into my psychic DNA?  And later, were my first friendships with the Sierras and with Muslims the conditions that would cause those dormant seeds to sprout and come to life? Is that why these have been such life shaping dimensions of who I am?

 

The Cosmic and the Individual

But wait, Kevin…LOTS of people lived in Granada Hills…and do now. We didn’t all end up following the footsteps of John Muir into the Sierra’s, or falling in love with the poetry of the Qur’an and going off the live in South Asia. 

How does my life history as an individual, which I am suggesting is in large part due to my psychic entanglement with places, end up so uniquely and distinctively unique to myself, while being so deeply and cosmically entangled with so many other lives who have been entangled with the same places?

If psychic entanglement is universal, cosmic, in scale, all encompassing, how and why are we also each so distinctive, unique, one of a kind?

I am not sure…but I recognize and accept and want to welcome the beautiful and mysterious reality of it. Within myself. And in all whom I meet. We are somehow, mysteriously cosmic individuals, both individual and cosmic all at once. 

We are not isolated individuals. That is the understanding of human nature presented by much of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious heritage, and by much of so-called western philosophy and psychology. We are not individuals in the way we might normally assume.

But neither are we fully defined by saying we are all just expressions of an ultimately indistinguishable whole, which is how some popularized versions of so-called eastern philosophy and religious tradition describes human nature. The views of the human self as expressed in the teachings of the Buddha or the Bhagavad Gita are in fact much more complex than their popular renditions. 

My point here is just to say that psychic entanglement is my way of presenting my realization that we are in fact both “cosmic” and “individual”...we are cosmic individuals.

By the way, when I add a “so-called” in my mention of western or eastern philosophy and religion, I do so because such labels reveal an assumption of a starting point. To say something is from the west or from the east assumes I am standing at the center…west of me, east of me. Buddha was to the west of anything east of him, and Descartes was to the east of everyone to his west. I don’t know how else to refer to these things however, so I usually will add the “so-called.”

But I digress…

 

Getting Personal

And so, to come back to the thread of the discussion, as a cosmic, entangled individual I will get more personal here.

I want to bring all this together as best I can, in relation to my mother, who passed away in 2023, and with whom my earliest memories of the house in Granada Hills are of course entwined.

It is only more recently that I have been able to process the events in that house…my imaginary friend, and the towels in my pockets which as you may or may not recall I referenced briefly in my earlier poem. I have been able to see and feel, experience, my mother’s own entangled, lonely, threaded story. And give her grace and offer her compassion. 

One day I was driving down a highway when a phrase wrapped in a melody dropped into my mind and heart and came out of my mouth. Spontaneous, without conscious craft, seemingly from nowhere.

“I’ve taken all the towels out of my pockets”.

Inspired by that, I worked on a song for the next few days, “Towels in My Pockets,” which I hope to record and release soon. This is a home made recording: 

 

Towels in My Pockets

Mother in the gray light of the kitchen, sleepy smell of morning in your clothes

Already at the age of three, your anxious aching swallowed me

Even then I knew I was on my own

 

There was a shadow at the edges of my daydreams, dressed in black with his six guns and his spurs

Jim Midnight was my constant friend, from morning until dreams descend,

He was always with me, and never said a word

 

That old rowboat in the dirt-skinned backyard waiting, You thought it was all just make believe

When I said “don’t worry, I won’t get wet, I’ve got towels stuffed in my pockets”, yet

Mother those towels were more than real to me

 

And now after a lifetime of pretending that my own pockets could hold everything I need

I’m in that boat again, I’m rowing back, to the empty house and the man in black

A setting sun, the evening sky is bleeding

 

And I’ve taken all the towels out of my pockets, laid them soaked and dripping at your feet

I throw myself over the side, content to drift now with the tide

I know now out there I’ll find all I need

 

Mother in that rowboat do you hear me singing? I know now how much you also felt alone

Did you have something in your pockets too, you though could save and rescue you?

Did it break your heart that life drenched you to the bone?

 

I’ve taken all the towels out of my pockets

 

That song is a way of expressing the experience of entanglement that I believe in. By embracing psychic entanglement, I believe we become alive, more aware and awake, and also that in so doing we add something into the entanglement, contributing elements that can heal…heal others, ourselves, perhaps affecting in a healing way the vast entanglement of the cosmos through the tiny winds of our souls.

For me, to do so required going back to the house, the barren yard, the old row boat…and it required I take the towels out of my pockets….all the ways I have sought to protect myself…and throw myself over the side out into the wide open ocean which might be terrifying, but is where, adrift on the tides,  I will find all I need.

 

Next

I think I have one more autobiographical reflection on “place” as I continue to press further into the question “where and when did I begin”, and my exploration of the nature of the universe around us, where it came from, for that sheds light on where all our where’s are found…and when.

Until next time…