We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Words lost in the wind.The tide was rising,But there we stayed,We had no fear of dyingWe weren't afraid.Anthony Banks, from "Me and Sarah Jane"
In the year 1904, when the Herald office was destroyed in the great Baltimore fire and we had to print the paper for five weeks in Philadelphia, I was sent ahead to look for accommodations for the printers. I found them in one of those old-fashioned dollar-a-day hotels that were all bar on the first floor. The proprietor, a German with goat whiskers, was somewhat reluctant to come to terms, for he had heard that printers were wild fellows who might be expected to break up his furniture and rough his chambermaids, but when I told him that a beer champion was among them he showed a friendly interest, and when I began to brag about Bill’s extraordinary talents he proposed amiably that some Philadelphia foam jumpers be invited in to make it a race.The first heat was run the very next night, and Bill won hands down. In fact, he won so easily that he offered grandly to go on until he had drunk twice as much as the next-best entry. We restrained him and got him to bed, for there had been some ominous whispering among the other starters and it was plain that they were planning to call in help.The next night it appeared in the shape of a tall, thin man from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who was introduced as the champion of the Lehigh Valley. He claimed to be not only a beer-drinker of high gifts but also a member of the Bach Choir at Bethlehem, and when he got down his first dozen mugs—the boys were drinking from the wood—he cut loose with an exultant yodel that he said was one of Bach’s forgotten minor works. But he might very well have saved his wind, for Bill soon had him, and at the end of the setting he was four or five mugs behind and in a state resembling suffocation. The next afternoon I saw his fans taking him home, a sadder and a much less melodious man.On the first two nights there were only slim galleries, but on the third the bar was jammed, and anyone could see that something desperate was afoot. It turned out to be the introduction of two super-champions, the one a short, saturnine Welshman from Wilkes-Barre and the other a hearty, blond young fellow from one of the Philadelphia suburbs, who said that he was half German and half Irish. The Welshman was presented as the man who had twice drunk Otto the Brewery Horse under the table, and we were supposed to know who Otto was, though we didn’t. The Celto-Teutonic mongrel had a committee with him, and the chairman thereof offered to lay twenty-five dollars on him at even money. The printers in Bill’s corner made up the money at once, and it had grown to fifty dollars in forty minutes by the clock, for the hybrid took only that long to blow up. The Welshman lasted much better, and there were some uneasy moments when he seemed destined to make history again by adding Bill to Otto, but in the end he succumbed so suddenly that it seemed like a bang, and his friends laid him out on the floor and began fanning him with bar towels.
Bill was very cocky after that and talked grandiosely of taking on two champions at a time, in a marathon series. There were no takers for several nights, but then they began to filter in from the remotest wilds of the Pennsylvania-Dutch country, and the whole Herald staff was kept busy guarding Bill by day, to make sure that he did not waste any energy on malt liquor in the afternoons. He knocked off twenty or thirty challengers during the ensuing month, including another alleged member of the Bach Choir, two more Welshmen from the hard-coal country, a Scotsman with an ear missing, and a bearded Dunkard from Lancaster County. They were mainly pushovers, but now and then there was a tough one. Bill did not let this heavy going interfere with the practice of his profession. He set type every night from 6 p.m. to midnight in the office of the Evening Telegraph, where we were printing the Herald, and never began his combats until twelve-thirty. By two o’clock he was commonly in bed, with another wreath of laurels hanging on the gas jet.
To ease your suspense, I’ll tell you at once that he was never beaten. Germans, Irishmen, Welshmen, and Scotsmen went down before him like so many Sunday-school superintendents, and he bowled over everyday Americans with such facility that only two of them ever lasted more than half an hour. But I should in candor add that he was out of service during the last week of our stay in Philadelphia. What fetched him is still a bone of contention among the pathologists at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, to whom the facts were presented officially on our return to our rehabilitated printing plant in Baltimore ...
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On a rainy September 13, 1814, British warships sent a downpour of shells and rockets onto Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, relentlessly pounding the American fort for 25 hours. The bombardment, known as the Battle of Baltimore, came only weeks after the British had attacked Washington, D.C., burning the Capitol, the Treasury and the President's house. It was another chapter in the ongoing War of 1812.A week earlier, Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old American lawyer, had boarded the flagship of the British fleet on the Chesapeake Bay in hopes of persuading the British to release a friend who had recently been arrested. Key's tactics were successful, but because he and his companions had gained knowledge of the impending attack on Baltimore, the British did not let them go. They allowed the Americans to return to their own vessel but continued guarding them. Under their scrutiny, Key watched on September 13 as the barrage of Fort McHenry began eight miles away."It seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone," Key wrote later. But when darkness arrived, Key saw only red erupting in the night sky. Given the scale of the attack, he was certain the British would win. The hours passed slowly, but in the clearing smoke of "the dawn's early light" on September 14, he saw the American flag—not the British Union Jack—flying over the fort, announcing an American victory.
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I'll be coming again like an old dog in painBlown through the eye of the hurricaneDown to the stones where old ghosts play.Ian Anderson, from "Old Ghosts"
I can hear you calling mePrettiest girl that I've ever seenRonald David Wood, from "I Can Feel the Fire"
So you think your schooling is phoneyI guess it's hard not to agreeRichard Davies, from "Bloody Well Right"
Some of them were dreamersAnd some of them were foolsWho were making plans and thinking of the future
Jackson Browne, from "Before the Deluge"
Asking questions can be a treasure for you guys because you have a lot of knowledge around you. Use it to your advantage. Nobody is going to knock on your door and say, 'Hey! I'm going to teach you something.' You actually have to knock on the door and say, 'Show me something today.' When you crave for learning, you learn. That's really what it is ... get the knowledge and then have fun."
Joy, as we typically understand it, is passive and reactive; it’s caused by something else. A new promotion, a “yes” to a marriage proposal, or a sudden fortune makes us feel joy. Then with time, that joy fades into a dull memory. That type of conditioned happiness is part of what the Buddha called dukkha, or suffering.But there is another type of joy, a much subtler and more sustainable joy that we can uncover. This joy—which I will refer to here as innate or unconditional joy—cannot be exhausted because it resides within us at all times, though it is often hidden. No external stimulus can evoke it, but as we expand our awareness, our joy is revealed to be increasingly vast and exquisitely infectious. This innate joy is a radical act, because once we learn to recognize it, we can begin to toss aside the everyday understanding of happiness at the heart of our culture as well as any harmful systems that depend on or benefit from our underlying dissatisfaction.As with many Buddhist notions, the subject of joy can be taken up philosophically, or it can be understood through direct experience. Here, I will do both. I’ll begin by discussing how conditioned and unconditioned joy look in the world, and then I’ll lay out a meditation practice that can allow us to uncover innate joy over time.Sure, you may think, joy sounds great, but how, in a society founded upon the “pursuit of happiness,” is it radical? The term radical typically conjures up the image of a political extremist or a progressive revolutionary, but what really makes something radical is the extent to which it challenges conventional paradigms. In order to make a radical change, we first have to return to the root of the problem: our fundamental understanding.In this sense, supporting a political party or lobbying for a cause is not radical. That doesn’t mean that both sides are the same or that activism can’t be important, righteous, and noble, but when we fixate on our views and contract into our limiting beliefs, we are accepting the underlying framework of the conflict itself. A truly radical act, on the other hand, goes deeper, uprooting the whole system of how we perceive ourselves in the world in order to start anew. Innate joy does just that. It changes the game.Finding unconditional joy is especially subversive in modern Western culture, where the dominant paradigm equates happiness with conditional joy, which often means material or social gain. I know that in my youth, the idea that inner contentment could be cultivated was totally foreign. I looked for happiness the way the people around me did—in things. Yet, no matter what delicious food I ate or video games I played, a sense of hollowness and disconnection seemed to follow me.This experience is neither rare nor unique to our era. (During the Buddha’s time, the dharma wasn’t exactly common sense. Otherwise his enlightenment would have been no big deal.) But as our technology advances and makes the world smaller, our conditional view of happiness is accelerating toward its ultimate conclusion: if joy depends on consumption and the things we consume are limited, then there is a finite amount of joy in the world and we must take from others in order to have more for ourselves. Some systems try to redistribute this commodified joy evenly, while others give a disproportionate share of joy to a select few (who do or don’t deserve it, according to one’s worldview). What makes innate joy radical is that it denies the basic idea that happiness is a zero-sum game. Instead of joy being fleeting and dependent, it is revealed to be ever-present and unconditional. By cultivating innate joy, we can turn scarcity into abundance and undermine the whole economy of commodified happiness.It is in this way that joy is also an act. We tend to only consider something to be an act when it exerts an external force. And while joy can effect change, even before it does, it is already an act—an internal motion that flips the proverbial chess board. We place a disproportionate emphasis on figuring out external solutions to the world’s problems, when it is just as important to consider how we approach life from within. That said, a joyful person will be almost incapable of keeping their compassion from overflowing, whether it is through charity or advocacy or through subtler and smaller kindnesses in everyday interactions (more on this in the practice portion). Joy is also an act in another sense: we need to cultivate it. For most, inner joy is developed over time through regular practice.
cultivate (v.)... from Latin cultus "care, labor; cultivation," from past participle of colere "to cultivate, to till; to inhabit; to frequent, practice, respect; tend, guard," from PIE root *kwel- (1) "revolve, move round; sojourn, dwell."
