Winter Haiku

Silent snow and ice
Are everywhere--how noisy
My heartbeat, my breath!

Little House on the Prairie

OK--if you're my wife (or anyone else who harbors strong positive feelings for the Little House on the Prairie TV series), STOP READING NOW!!!!

You have been warned.

For the rest of you, here are "10 Surprising Wholesome Values Discovered in Old Episodes of 'Little House on the Prairie.'"

Two kinds of belief

I recently indulged myself with a series of comments on my friend Serenity's post about church-going and communion. Oddly enough, I found this quote that seems pertinent to those comments in the front of a paperback mystery I am reading. There are several Jim Corbett's, including a famous hunter and a famous prize-fighter, but I'm assuming that this Jim Corbett was the Quaker activist who was a co-founder of the Sanctuary movement.

There is a faith that is primarily belief. This kind of faith calls for definitive doctrines from which guiding objectives and priorities can be derived. And there is a faith that is primarily trust. This kind of faith expects to be guided by a unifying presence that enlivens each moment, breaks all borders, gathers us into communion with one another, and addresses us in all we meet. For faith as belief, it makes sense to ask how all we presently encounter can be used to achieve our (or God's) objecives; the present must be sacrificed to the future. For faith as trust, the future we hope for must emerge out of a fulfilled present; to treat any being or situation we meet only as a means to be used or as an obstacle to be eliminated attacks the historically unique liberating power with which every person and every community is endowed.

--Jim Corbett

Listening

Listening is one of the most powerful things we can do. It's also one of the hardest things to do, partly because its intimacy leads to responsibility and partly because it requires us to set aside what we have to say.

I see the power and the difficulty of listening at work all the time. People on two sides of some issue lock horns, hearing only what they say themselves. Sometimes a third party can come along and find a way through the impasse just by listening to what both sides are really saying.

I'm slowly learning to do this with my kids too, to listen not just to their words or their attitudes but to the hurt or fear or concern (however silly it seems to an adult) behind them. It's difficult because I have to think of them rather than myself, to set aside my own hurt at what they have said to me in order to listen to their heart, and to believe that what they have to say is at least as important as what I have to say. It is, of course, powerful for those same reasons.

This understanding of the power of listening is behind the StoryCorps project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to listening to, and recording, what everyday people all over the country have to say. These stories can be heard on public radio, read in a book called Listening Is an Act of Love, and will be archived in the Library of Congress. StoryCorps has declared November 28, the day after Thanksgiving, the National Day of Listening, an opportunity for us all to take time to listen to the people around us, to remind them, and ourselves, that everyone matters enough to be heard and remembered.

So, if you can tear yourself away from the after-Thanksgiving sales for a little while (who has money to spend anyway, right?), take some time to listen to someone, whether a grandparent, a child, a neighbor, or the person taking your order at a restaurant. Who knows? When you give the gift of listening, you just might walk away with an unexpected gift yourself.

Heaven and Hell

I stumbled across this on an internet forum:

A big, burly samurai comes to a Zen master and says,"Tell me the nature of heaven and hell."

The Zen master looks him in the face and says,"Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you? A worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?"

Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword and
raises it to cut off the master's head. The Zen master says, "That's hell."
Instantly, the samurai understands that he has just created his own hell- black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment. He sees that he was so deep in hell that he was ready to kill someone. Tears fill his eyes as he puts his palms together to bow in gratitude for this insight.
The Zen Master says, "That's heaven."

If you like Blue Man Group...

...you might enjoy this very creative video of three high school students performing on their PVC pipe instrument!

Smallness

I thought Felicity's comment on my last post about gorillas in the Congo deserved a whole post. Felicity said, "I was also strangely encouraged by that story when I saw it this morning! I felt small (in a good way)." Feeling small--now there's something we don't usually celebrate!

I know I've posted about this before, but I think one of the tragedies of modern life is that we've insulated ourselves enough from the "wildness" of the world that we've forgotten how small we are. And, yes, I'm just as bad as anyone in this area, maybe worse (just ask my wife). I think I may have linked to the post on Living Small about bear season on a previous blog, but this story (and Felicity's comment) made me think of it again. Here's a quote from the author about her response to an encounter with a grizzly near her home in Montana:

Although I won’t be heading up Suce Creek alone for another month or so, until the bears’ food supplies have started to kick in in the high country, knowing that the bears are here is one of the reasons I choose to live in this part of the world. I like living among people who know we’re not the top of the food chain, and who are working so hard to keep it that way. My encounter with the bear last year, while terrifying, was deeply thrilling. That’s the paradox — it’s those things that scare the wee out of us that keep us sane, that keep us in touch with what’s real. The world is real — its not actually in our heads — and sometimes it takes a big old bear standing uphill and woofing at us to remind us of that.

Perhaps a combination of fear and the basic hubris of humanity, the outsized view of our own importance, lies behind a lot of our difficulty with seeing how small we are. Maybe this author is right: we need big grizzly bears and great white sharks and man-eating tigers to remind us that we are not quite so mighty as we like to think. These predators (along with tiny viruses and massive natural disasters) certainly make me feel tiny!

I think another reason western culture in particular is uncomfortable with human smallness may come directly from the way a largely christian society has understood god's blessing to humankind in Genesis 1:28. Here's the New American Standard version of this verse:

God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Notice the language used: subdue, rule. It's the kind of language that produced the crusades, colonialism, and slavery. More recently, we have carried on that tradition by wiping out animal and plant habitats and generally shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally speaking. Ever been on a cruise? Did you know many if not most of those ships still dump all of their waste at sea? Who cares? The ocean's big, right? We're the rulers; it's all here for us, right?

I don't pretend to understand the original languages, but I like Eugene Peterson's more nuanced version of this in the Message:

God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image, make them
reflecting our nature
So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea,
the birds in the air, the cattle,
And, yes, Earth itself,
and every animal that moves on the face of Earth."
God created human beings;
he created them godlike,
Reflecting God's nature.
He created them male and female.
God blessed them:
"Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth."

Wow. "Be responsible for..." That's so different! Or is it? Doesn't a good leader truly see themselves as the servant of those they lead? Why do we get this so wrong when we consider the world we are a part of? How did we go from "be responsible for" to "use up"?

Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors, wrote a bestselling novel called The Poisonwood Bible about an American family's misguided missionary adventure in the Congo during the 1950's. Her fictional family definitely went there to subdue and rule. One of the daughters of this family grows up to study parasitology (which she experienced firsthand in the Congo!) and tells how she comes to terms with what she learns:

As a teenager reading African parasitology books in the medical library, I was boggled by the array of creatures equipped to take root upon a human body. I'm boggled still, but with a finer appreciation for the partnership. Back then I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning. Five million years is a long partnership. If you could for a moment rise up out of your own beloved skin and appraise ant, human, and virus as equally resourceful beings, you might admire the accord they have all struck in Africa.

Regardless of what you think about creation, evolution, or original sin, there is just a lot about this world that does not seem to be here for our benefit. I suspect this is what the writer of Genesis was getting at when he wrote down the story of the garden of Eden. This god sees not only human suffering, but knows when a sparrow falls. It makes me feel small, but it also makes me feel part of something big.

Some good news for once

Sometimes listening to the news can be quite depressing (OK, most of the time listening to the news can be quite depressing), so an occasional bit of good news is always welcome. I read this morning about a recent survey that found an undiscovered population of western lowland gorillas in the Congo which meant a dramatic increase in the total estimated numbers remaining. How often do you get to hear that?

I know some people won't understand why this report makes me happy given all the awful things happening in that part of the world (gorillas are just animals, aren't they?), but I felt a tremendous lift of my spirits. There is still great danger of extinction for most primates across the world, but one has a little better chance than we thought. It is a triumph of life in a world where we humans tend to forget (or ignore) how interconnected all of life is.

Rain

Well, we didn't get twenty inches of rain like south Texas, but we have gotten enough in the last few days that dams on ponds and lakes are in danger, basements are flooding, and roads are closed all over northeast Missouri. One of the little towns I pass through on my way to work appeared to be on a hill in a large lake. When I reached Kirksville, the highway patrol had a roadblock setup and sent me back down the road to find another way into town due to flood fears.

I would say I have about a 50-50 shot of being able to get home from work tonight. Ugh.

Pooh, the sage

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "What's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

"It's the same thing," he said.

--from Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Maturity

"Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults."

--Peter De Vries

Chicken soup for the Luddite soul

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

--Swiss playwright Max Frisch

Audacity's Reward

A few weeks ago, Amy had a two-day class in Jefferson City for her position as a breast-feeding peer counselor at the health department. I tagged along for a mini-vacation. While there, one of the things I had the chance to do was visit the Missouri capitol for the first time. I admired the solid construction, the attractive statues and decorations, the elegant interior (one of the nicest public restrooms I've seen!), and visited the museum that fills the central hall. From all of this, I came away with three strong impressions: the beauty of the capitol building, the predominance of weapons and war in the museum, and the shame of the legacy of slavery in Missouri.

In particular, I was struck immediately by the juxtaposition of violence and slavery in the museum. The most common exhibits were guns, uniforms, models of ships and cannons, and other remembrances of the war and death, from battles with Native Americans, the horror of the Civil War, and the immense machinery of the World Wars. The most moving exhibit, on the other hand, was easily the room that was filled with both written and oral accounts from former slaves of their everyday lives, a room which I left blinking back tears and filled with horror at man's ability to hate. Could it be that there is some relationship between a culture that has so embraced violence and a culture that found it possible to justify the atrocity of slavery?

I happen to live in a small, rural community with almost no ethnic minorities. As recently as eight or nine years ago, I had neighbors who referred to all black people using the "n-word." Rumor has it that many people in town opposed bringing in new industry (there really isn't any "old" industry) because they didn't want "those damn Mexicans" coming in to work the factory. My older son came home from school last year with stories of his teacher talking about "the black people trying to take over our country who should all go back to Africa where they belong." Amy and I were livid when we heard this and spoke to the teacher. It turned out that the teacher said nothing of the sort, and that he heard it from some students in his class (who doubtless heard this from their parents). We were relieved...sort of.

All of this makes me by turns sad and angry and ashamed. It also makes me worry a bit since our youngest son, adopted from Kazakhstan, has dark skin and Asian features. This may not be the easiest town for him to grow up in. In general I'm somewhat of a pacifist, but the mindless hate that sometimes rears its head here brings me as close to considering violence as anything., and yes, I see the irony in that. Of course, most of the people of this town are welcoming and more tolerant; but even some of them unconsciously use language that is demeaning to minorities without realizing it.

Considering the legacy of hate that lingers so stubbornly in our hearts sometimes makes me almost despair. Amy had a conversation with someone in our area last fall who said they thought the country might be ready to have a woman president, but surely not a black man. Last night, Barack Obama leaped the first hurdle to prove them wrong, and I felt a swell of pride. Whatever you think of Mr. Obama or his politics, I agree with the post my brother-in-law wrote: I am thankful to be alive to see this happen. I am thrilled by the thought that we can rise above our past, that we can make our hearts bigger than they were, that we can say no to bigotry and hatred.

Barack Obama is just a man, with all of the failures and frailties common to our species. He is not the savior of America, and I don't expect him to make everything turn out right if he wins. Even so, I am immensely proud of him. He has managed to overcome the race barrier that is part of our nation's shame, and he did it not through recrimination and anger, but through reconciliation and hope.

Good for him.

A poor excuse and a good poem

I'm afraid it has been a ridiculously long time since I have posted here. I have no other excuse than that I just haven't felt like it. Now, I'm breaking my long silence with someone else's words. In this case, a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that I heard on the Speaking of Faith program on Approaching Prayer. I don't know that it really describes how I'm feeling right now, but I find it very beautiful all the same.

I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake
off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,

on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now
and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

At the Lake

There were no chanting Tibetan monks,
Only the wind whistling overtones
Through the corrugated metal roof
And whipping the surface of the water
Into a thousand white, frothy peaks,
Each one an eye blinking in the midday glare,
Watching as the waves tried to shake the
Dock off the lake into the bottomless blue sky.

Lost Things

I lost my bottle early on,
Followed by my wordless innocence.
Hard on the heels of this tramua,
I lost the services of those
Who bore me effortlessly
Wherever I needed to go.

I adapted, of course;
I'm nothing if not flexible.
I ate; I talked; I walked.
But it didn't end there.
I lost countless days in the
Forced pursuit of education.

It never stops, you know,
This continuous litany of loss.
Toys and friends,
Money and jobs,
Certainty and delusion
All get misplaced eventually.

There's more to come,
Or so I've heard--
Memory, eyesight, bladder control--
Until, finally, my last breath
Escapes me, and I find
I've misplaced myself.

Spin

Today I ran across a blog entry entitled The Sustaining Narrative on a blog I had never read before, Crunchy Con. Here is an excerpt:

I heard a very sad report on the BBC over the weekend. Their correspondent visited a Vermont family that backed the Iraq War foursquare. They had lost a son in the fighting, and the young soldier's mother said she hoped Americans didn't forget what our troops were sacrificing so that America could still live free.

This is heartbreaking. We're not asking young men and women to die in Iraq to protect American liberty. But this grieving mother needs to believe that so her son will have died in some greater cause. When I contemplate the possibility that my brother-in-law might die in Iraq -- a member of his unit was killed last week by an IED -- I can't hold on to the thought for more than half a second, not only because it's so painful for obvious reasons, but because I can't see the moral justification for it. I mean no offense to you who do, and God knows the courage of those young men and women is unquestionable. It's those who sent them to Iraq in the first place I question, and I don't see why we have to pretend the war is about American liberty to justify the decisions those leaders (with our support, it must be said) have made.

What the author is getting at is the way we construct narratives around social or political issues to help cover the tragedy that would otherwise threaten to overwhelm us, the way we sometimes become good at lying to ourselves about (or at least distracting ourselves from) uncomfortable truths. Of course, politicians have long made use of "spin doctors" to make the truth seem better than it really is, but this sort of thing is not limited to politicians.

I remember the funeral of a friend I had in college, a young woman who had been married for only a year when she was killed in a car accident. At the funeral, the preacher went on and on about how my friend had died for a reason, standing up for what was right, a martyr of sorts for the Christian faith, an example to all the sinners in the room who had better take notice of her sacrifice for their sakes. I'm guessing the preacher didn't know how, when all her fellow Holiness church members were away, my friend and her husband would put on their forbidden wedding rings, turn on a little forbidden music, and dance the night away together. If she had known, maybe the funeral sermon would have been about the danger of worldly pleasures that lead you to an early grave.

Either way, I resented the preacher's need to use my friend's death for her own ends, to bolster her appeal. My friend had not died for the audience's sake, and she hadn't died for her sins. She had just died--a wonderful, vivacious, happy life snuffed out. Maybe there was a bigger reason, but it just seemed arrogant to me for that preacher to pretend she knew what it was in order to get a response from her listeners.

Looking back, farther away from the grief of that moment, I wonder if that preacher might have been overwhelmed with grief herself--she might have been related to my friend for all I know. Maybe like that mother who lost her son in Iraq, she felt like she had to attach a deeper purpose to her tragedy so she could stand the pain, weaving a concealing narrative around the hurt to distance herself from it. I think we all do this, with our meaningless platitudes when someone loses a family member, with our sour grapes when we don't get our way, with our excuses when we fail.

And so I have to say, as my looking outward turns back inward, that, no, this isn't healthy, that it isn't helpful. Some things cannot be allowed to hide behind the protective coloration our invented narratives provide--self-pity, arrogance, hatred, prejudice, greed. If we hide these things, if we deny them to ourselves and others, we risk acting out their stories over and over again. But this propensity for spin that I find inside myself also serves to remind me of the humanity, the ache, the loss that is often behind it. It is all to easy too despise in others what lives comfortably in me, to see the lie but forget the pain that created it. This too is a kind of spin.

I am reminded of a verse from the Bible:

Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed. --Psalm 85:10

I don't know exactly what this would look like, but it is what I think is needed: compassionate truth that is able to pierce the lies we tell ourselves and others without piercing the broken heart mourning within. Perhaps generosity to our own hearts and those of others is where we must start in order to strip away the tangled narrative threads we have wound around the truth. Only when we can look unflinchingly at the painful realities we so fear can we deal with those realities and turn from the stubborn pain that imprisons us in the failures of the past to find hope and redemption in the present.

Analog

One of my favorite NPR programs is This I Believe, a program where people from many walks of life share their beliefs or core values. One of my favorite essays on This I Believe was entitled The Imperfect Traces Left by Human Hands, by T. Susan Chang. Here is a short excerpt:

I am a child of the digital age, but I believe in analog.

I love the hiss and pop of vinyl, and the black splotch in the corner when a movie changes reels. I enjoy the hushed, uneven ticking of a windup watch. I love handwriting.

I believe in analog because it captures the imperfect traces left behind by human hands — smudges and echoes that can't disappear with the touch of a delete key.

My job involves responsibility for computers, networks, database reporting, and the software we use for medical practice management and electronic medical records. In spite of this--or maybe because of it--I find myself drawn to "analog" living outside of work. Yes, I use email; yes, I blog. But I do most of my personal writing, note-taking, and scheduling using pen or pencil and paper. I am strangely delighted by sending and receiving actual letters. I love physical books, the way my memory of the story is somehow tied to the spaghetti sauce stain on the upper right hand corner of page 112. I gravitate towards acoustic instruments; it's not that I haul them to mountain tops for impromptu unplugged cloud concerts, but I could.

Ms. Chang has captured it perfectly--analog is an antidote to perfectionism, a manifesto of humanity, a record of the touch of actual hands. It's also the possibility, the inherent unpredictable nature of real life in all its messy, complex, surprising glory. Analog contains the truth that reality isn't always divisible into discrete categories or bits of information; everything is intertwined and interdependent, a continuous whole. Most of all, it's a reminder that we are all connected; and, if no one can claim to be completely in control of their lives, neither must anyone feel completely alone.

Poetry abuse

Billy Collins is one of my favorite modern poets although you should not infer from this that I am particularly conversant with the full spectrum of modern poets or their writings. I am reading his anthology, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and one of the poems caught my eye as relevant not only to art but also to my prior post. I want very much to post it here, but it is under copyright and connected to a living poet. It is short and, to my mind, quite worth a quick read. You can find it online at the Library of Congress under the title Introduction to Poetry.

Truth, consequences, and a new vocabulary

For the past several years, I have been on something of a spiritual journey. As I travelled, I discovered that the religious vocabulary familiar to me was inadequate to describe the new places, people, ideas, emotions, and stories that I encountered. I have found help with this language problem in many different places, some of them quite surprising. I have found that Zen and Taoist concepts caused me to see the life and teachings of Jesus with new eyes, for example. Once upon a time, I would have been afraid to even look into such things; but, as God grew larger to me, fear suddenly seemed a silly thing to adopt as a guide on this journey.

One source of help that I have mentioned on this blog before is the NPR program Speaking of Faith, hosted by Krista Tippett. When I found that Krista Tippett had written a book (also called Speaking of Faith), I immediately put it on the shortlist of books I wanted to read. I finally picked it up at Hastings yesterday, and I am finding it to be enormously helpful. The only bad thing is that I am devouring it so quickly I will not have time to post all of the quotes I like on my blog before I am done!

One issue that arose when I began to explore the world with less fear was the relationship between science and religion, a relationship that a very vocal minority on both sides would like us to believe must be oppositional, frightening, and even apocalyptic. The closer I looked, however, the less I believed that this antagonistic approach was necessary. Here is part of what Krista Tippett has to say about faith and reason in the chapter of her book entitled "Rethinking Religious Truth":

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart is poetry. Music is a language of the spirit. The metier of religious ideas is parable, verse, and story. All of our names for God are metaphor--necessary license, approximation, and analogy.

...we can't compare faith flatly to reason and declare it intellectually inferior. Its territory is the drama of human life, where art is more precise than science, where ideas are lived and breathed. Our minds can be engaged in this realm as seriously as in the construction of argument or logic, but in a different way. Life and art both test the limits and landscape of argument and logic.

I think the debate about science or reason vs. religion is largely the result of confusion about what science and religion have to tell us. I'm aware that there are lots of people who disagree with me on this, but it seems to me that truth comes in more than one guise with more than one way to get at it. Science is one way. It uses tools like measurement and observation to explore truths that are measureable and observable. Those truths are defined, in fact, in terms of what is measured and observed. I agree with Krista Tippett that religion is more closely tied to art, using tools like metaphor and symbol to explore truths that are difficult to measure or observe, truths relating to mystery and emotion, humanity and God.

Of course, if we mistake one for the other, things can get confused. When we see the Bible, for example, as a book consisting only of literal historical truths, we tend to bump up against measurements and observations that suggest different conclusions about reality. Imagine someone trying to use Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall as a practical guide for stone masonry. Just because this is a bad idea does not mean that the poem contains no truth, just that the truth it contains is different from that being sought. On the other hand, the manual on masonry would likely have little to say on whether you should build the wall between you and your neighbor or why.

Krista Tippett expresses part of her perspective on the Bible below:

The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolutes, as its champions sometimes imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with God in the darkness as well as the light of human experience. Like all sacred texts, it employs multiple forms of language to convey truth: poetry, narrative, legend, parable, echoing imagery, wordplay, prophecy, metaphor, didactics, wisdom saying.

I think our confusion about the kinds of truth we are dealing with can have serious ramifications. When we treat all of the Bible, including poetic imagery, as presenting literal facts (a tendency that is comparatively modern, by the way), we open our truth to legitimate criticism through measurement and observation. We then either have to believe something that does not match observable facts, and therefore marginalize ourselves, or we have to abandon our claim of truth and stop taking the Bible seriously. When, instead, we realize that religion is the caretaker of a different sort of truth, we can pursue that truth in concert with other kinds of truth in a kind of symbiotic dance, science and philosophy and religion and art all twirling and leaping together to the music of the universe, more closely unified, ironically, than if we perceived all our truths the same.

This realization is a part of the new vocabulary I am learning. It does not make God smaller to recognize truth wherever we find it. On the contrary! The small God is the one held captive to human understanding, to our limitations and the boundaries we draw to keep out those who make us uncomfortable. The Jesus I meet in the Bible seemed to be constantly crossing the boundaries drawn for him, confounding human understanding, and opening eyes to the limitless love of God. That's the Jesus I want to know, the one who opens my eyes to the far horizons, far beyond my understanding, my failures, and my comfort.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi - 13th century

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes...

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.... I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

I am very much in agreement with Mr. Thoreau about avoiding enterprises that require new clothes, but I must confess that I am quite glad that he did not choose to direct his disdain towards those enterprises which require new notebooks and writing utensils (ie--all of them). Simplicity and common sense are all well and good, but one mustn't, after all, succumb to fanaticism. Prudence and careful consideration are important qualities to cultivate if only for their usefulness in diverting criticism from one's own faults to those that can be safely identified only in others.

Depression's good side?

Our culture has an interesting relationship with depression. Some pundits lament what they see as the overmedication of America. Eric Wilson wrote a book called Against Happiness, in which he talks about a vital need for sorrow as part of the human condition which we medicate away at our own peril. I have heard some people in religious communities refer to depression as a product of selfish thinking, a lack of faith, or simply a "trial" we must walk through. Depression has become the malady du jour for artists, writers, and thinkers. Somehow we think that the darkness that some people descend into holds important insights into the human condition. If they had not fallen into darkness, what would become of their works of genius? Sometimes I think it is an unwritten rule that only dark, depressing novels (paintings, songs, movies, et cetera) can be taken seriously as real art that has something to say.

Peter D. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of several books on depression. I stumbled across a 2005 article he wrote for the New York Times magazine called There's Nothing Deep About Depression, in which he examines more closely this odd sort of reverence we seem to hold for the depressed state. Here is a little excerpt:

Audiences seemed to be aware of the medical perspective, even to endorse it -- but not to have adopted it as a habit of mind. To underscore this inconsistency, I began to pose a test question: We say that depression is a disease. Does that mean that we want to eradicate it as we have eradicated smallpox, so that no human being need ever suffer depression again? I made it clear that mere sadness was not at issue. Take major depression, however you define it. Are you content to be rid of that condition?

Always, the response was hedged: aren't we meant to be depressed? Are we talking about changing human nature?

I took those protective worries as expressions of what depression is to us. Asked whether we are content to eradicate arthritis, no one says, ''Well, the end-stage deformation, yes, but let's hang on to tennis elbow, housemaid's knee and the early stages of rheumatoid disease.'' Multiple sclerosis, acne, schizophrenia, psoriasis, bulimia, malaria -- there is no other disease we consider preserving. But eradicating depression calls out the caveats.

I have a bit of experience with depression, both personally and with family members. It isn't, so far as I've been able to tell, a mysterious fount of inspiration, but, rather, a debilitating disease. I sometimes wonder if, in our enchantment with the dazzlingly depressing in various art forms, we have mistaken despair for realism, sickness for courage, and darkness for insight. I suspect our fascination with the thoughts of the deeply depressed is just the most socially acceptable form of voyeurism available outside of reality TV.

Now, I don't deny sorrow a place in our lives. There is certainly a difference--however disputed the line may be--between clinical depression and sadness. Neither do I suggest we only allow happy endings (although I admit to being inordantly fond of them). Life can be brutal and horrific. Denying that suffering exists does nothing to alleviate it. But perhaps it is time to recognize that depression is not a higher state, a nirvana from which to bring back gems of truth, a normal thing for those of an "artistic temperament." Depression is a sickness every bit as real and every bit as dangerous as hypertension or diabetes, and I think we ought to take it seriously enough to separate it from the complex, brilliant creativity sometimes found in those who suffer from it.

What if this is as good as it gets?

We live in a society that encourages discontent as a path to happiness. "What? That's crazy," you say. Yes, it is. But think about it: we work 80 hour weeks and never see our children so we can have it good when we retire; we go into debt so we can have a little more now; we regularly buy things we didn't know we needed until we found them. Capitalism itself is based on supply and demand, or, to put it a little more forthrightly, creating demand for what you are supplying. Make enough people think they need something, and you can make a living selling it to them!

But what if right now is as good as it gets? What if it isn't going to get any better for me down the road? That thought can produce several possible responses in us. The first is denial. "Hah! I'll show you; I'll pull 90 hour weeks and get to my dream after all!" The second is to despair. "But I was pinning all my hopes on a better future; now I have nothing! I might as well give up."

Neither of these responses seems terribly helpful, but there is a third way. This third way, oddly enough, also involves a kind of giving up but without the despair of the second response. You see, if the past is over and cannot be changed and the future is uncertain and cannot be guaranteed, then all I ever really have is this moment. Right now. If I stop comparing the present moment to a made up, artificially enhanced, imaginary future, I can see that this moment, with all of its joy and sorrow, is a gift. I am alive in this moment, breathing in and out; and it is enough.

From every direction, I am bombarded with messages telling me what I need to be happy, whether it be a vacation on a secluded tropical beach, a home in a bigger town with more to do, a car that uses less motor oil than gasoline, a fancy electronic doodad, or a creative life as a professional novelist. The problem with all of these things, however, is that they are external and can bring only temporary pleasure, not lasting contentment. Contentment does not move from my outside to my inside. It begins in the only place it can: in me. It begins at the only time it can: right here, right now, in this moment.

I forget this a lot, but I am slowly learning to bring myself back from past recriminations or future fantasies to this present moment. This isn't fatalism. It doesn't mean not trying anything new or going anywhere new. It is freedom from the tyranny of the past, with both it's regrets and accomplishments; freedom from the tyranny of the imagined future, whether better or worse; and freedom to live fully in this present moment, the only moment I have.

Living in the moment could take a lot of forms. It might mean making do with less so I can spend more time with my children. It might mean leaving work to watch the sunset. It might mean I don't get to live in Hawaii and be a writer. It might mean not doing what everyone thinks I ought to do all the time. It might mean learning to give more than I take.

Whatever it means, living like this is as good as it gets isn't about circumstances. It's not about what I do or don't do. It's about living and sharing the gift of now right here, in the place of contentment.

Some (really old) thoughts...

...from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu which struck me as rather appropriate for our time:

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the way,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow the he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the way,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

The great way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the way.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn--
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the way.

I've been tagged!

I've never been tagged before! (And it's not because I'm a fast runner.)

Serenity tagged me; my mission is as follows:

• Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
• Open the book to page 123
• Find the fifth sentence
• Post the next three sentences.
• Tag five people.

OK, here goes. The nearest books to my computer are in the kid's school library basket (as opposed to the county library basket--sometimes we even manage to keep them separate!). This doesn't bother me at all because I still secretly (OK, openly) read middle grade/YA fiction. This also happens to be where a lot of my own fiction ideas would probably fall if sorted by the publishing world's magic marketing eight ball.

The top book is Ella Enchanted, a Newbery Honor Book by Gail Carson Levine, a funny and worthy selection that I happen to have read.

The fourth and fifth sentences (for context, as Serenity says) are:

This had to be Lucinda. There was every sign of it.

The next three sentences:

She had probably bestowed a gift on the newlyweds that was as gladly received as mine had been.

"Lady..." I called, my heart pounding.

She didn't hear me.

I'm hoping that these lines do not hold secret meaning for me as Serenity's sentences did for her. If so, I sense doom, sarcasm, and failure. Oh well.

In any case, I tag Amy, Dennis, Andrea, Trish, and Tom.

For my wife on Valentine's Day

Three poems of love from the Sufi poet Rumi:

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
they're in each other all along.

__________________________

When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

__________________________

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

Free Rice

Sometimes I just need a one minute break from what I am doing, to step away, unhook my brain, do something else, and relax. Being a word lover who cares a bit about what happens in the world, my current favorite one minute break is to go to freerice.com. The idea is that you try to match vocabulary words to the word that has the closest meaning in a list they give you. For each one you get correct, they donate twenty grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. The money comes from the advertising revenue generated by refreshing the site each time you win. Of course, twenty grains of rice isn't much. But then, yesterday, with everyone who participated, Freerice.com was able to donate 150,137,840 grains of rice. This is, by my calculation, in the neighborhood of 150,000 large servings. So play. Learn. Give.

Speaking of the magic of writing...

Some writers are really good planners. They research, plan, plot, make character reference sheets, and compose detailed outlines of their story. I, on the other hand, am more the I'll-know-what-it's-about-when-I'm-done kind of writer. Well, yesterday on my lunch hour I was thinking I would write a sort of diary entry by the main character of a story I've been thinking about for a couple years. When I picked up my pencil, I had an urge to write instead from a secondary character's perspective. When I was done, I suddenly realized that this character should actually be the viewpoint character, with their story as the main plot. How cool is that? I love it when totally unplanned things happen and change everything for the better!

Morning Pages

One of the ways I've found to deal with depression, confusion, frustration, anger, and a variety of other potentially harmful emotional states is through writing. For some reason when I put pen or pencil to paper and start writing whatever comes to mind, the waters of my mind grow calm, the mud settles, and things get a little clearer. I've even found that writing is, for me, a way of praying in ink.

Unfortunately, life sometimes has a way of short-circuiting the very things that make life livable, the things that keep us more or less sane. Jobs, children, weather, sickness, depression itself--there are all kinds of factors that make it hard for me to keep writing. I've been trying to use my lunch hours to work on a story that's been ping-ponging around my head for a couple years, but I find I still need the unstructured dialog between myself and a blank page for the sake of my mental health. Enter morning pages.

Morning pages are an idea promoted by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and her idea has been picked up and propagated by all manner of writing and art teachers, bloggers, and other creative types. You can read a pretty good description here, but the basics are pretty simple:

• Sit down every morning and write three pages longhand.
• Keep writing, letting your thoughts (or lack thereof) tumble out stream-of-consciousness style.
• Don't worry about style, punctuation, or even making sense. Don't stop, edit, or correct.
• The goal is to unload the clutter, confusion, and baggage from our minds so that we can enter the rest of the day with clarity and unobstructed creativity.

Of course, most of us have encountered this idea somewhere in school as "free-writing," a technique I have made use of off and on throughout my life for the purpose of brainstorming, journaling, or working through something. The idea of morning pages is to use free-writing as a daily practice. If free-writing is going to the mechanic when your car overheats, writing morning pages is performing regular oil changes and checking the coolant. Being, to use a complimentary term, a "free spirit," I am not much good at anything that requires a daily practice. Even so, I am going to attempt to establish this daily practice of morning pages, for the sake of myself and my family.

I see this intimate time with my thoughts as my own version of meditation, letting me breathe onto the page, focusing on the breath, observing what comes, nurturing it, letting it be transformed. It is my medication, written Prozac, free therapy. It is my connection to the creativity within, clearing the passages that allow that creativity to flow into the visible world, to birth something bright and alive. I may or may not ever make a living by writing; but it is enough if, by writing, I can live.

Listen! a frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond!

-- Matsuo Basho, Spring Days, 1686

This is the sort of thing that makes me despair of ever writing a decent haiku--a perfect, irreducible observation of nature.

Matsuo Basho was a Japanese poet in the 1600's and one of the first haiku masters. He is best known for his masterpiece, Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Interior, a chronicle of a five month journey through Japan told in a combination of haiku and prose.

There is a lovely article about Basho by novelist Howard Norman along with some beautiful photos taken along the route of Basho's journey in the latest issue of National Geographic magazine. You can read the article, view the photos, and even read a travelogue of Howard Norman's trip retracing Basho's steps on NationalGeographic.com

Progress!

I've been trying to get my budgies used to my hand in their cage: talking softly to them, moving slowly and deliberately, not reacting when they freak out. The ultimate goal, of course, is to hand-train them to step up onto my finger so I can take them out for free flight and return them safely to their cage.

Today, I took a little millet spray (their favorite treat) on a string and held the string between my fingers so they could kind of reach the millet, but it wasn't very comfortable from the perch. Kiwi, in particular, just couldn't contain himself; he had to have that millet! Pretty soon he was perched happily on my finger, flinging millet everywhere. Calypso couldn't handle being left out. He (she?--not sure yet!) tried to move onto a little branch jutting from the perch, but I slowly moved my hand until he had to step up if he wanted to keep eating too.

So, after only a week, I had two budgies perching obliviously on my hand, devouring millet like there was no tomorrow. Woo-hoo! The picture above shows the hungry birds. I'm sorry about the quality; it is a tiny portion of a picture Amy took from about six feet away.

Unfortunately, toward the end of this session, the perch I was partly leaning my hand on shifted, and they freaked out a bit. Still, I think we made definite progress tonight. It won't be long before I can let them out to poop on the rest of our bedroom.

Everyone a Healer

For those who don't know, we get exactly zero television stations where we live, and we don't have cable television, so radio is kind of my TV. Over the past few months, Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett has become my favorite radio program. It bills itself as "public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas," and covers a delightfully huge range of topics within that conversation.

The most recent episode I heard was "Listening Generously: the Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen." In this conversation, Krista Tippett explored the humanity and spirituality of medicine with physician and educator Rachel Naomi Remen, who also happens to be chronically ill herself. They spoke about the importance of listening, loss, and the difference between curing and healing.

From the link above, you can read a transcript of the show, listen to or download the audio of the show, or listen to an extended interview with Rachel Naomi Remen. Here are a few quotes from just one portion of the conversation that spoke to me:

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident*. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It's a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It's the restoration of the world...

...And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world. And that story opens a sense of possibility. It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It's about healing the world that touches you, that's around you.

* The "accident" refers to a story from the Kabbalah in which the wholeness or light of the world was broken and the fragments scattered and hidden in all events and people.

I love Rachel Naomi Remen's emphasis on understanding the world through story. I love too, the idea that there is a bit of wholeness, a bit of light, a bit of God, if you will, everywhere, waiting to be discovered. Her conclusions from this story are the same as mine. We are all healers, but we don't have to fix everything, just explore and nurture those bits of light in us and around us, the ones we touch. To me, this is compassion: seeing the light (or wholeness or divine spark or image of God) in every person and situation and responding accordingly.

Good to Eat

For some time, I have been interested in pet birds. I have even had a campaign going that, as the only family member without a pet, it's only fair that I should get a bird to keep me company.

My original thought was budgies, which are more commonly called "parakeets" in America. Of course, there are many kinds of parakeets, so budgie, or budgerigar, is perhaps a more meaningful name. Apparently, the name comes from an Australian aboriginal word which means "good to eat." Tastiness was not what attracted me to them but rather their energy, intelligence, and ease of care.

However, budgies, like most parrots, require regular out of cage time for exercise and stimulation. Amy wasn't sure she could handle a bird flying around and pooping in her house, so we decided finches were the way to go. Their pretty, chirp nicely, and are generally content to live in a large cage. I purchased an appropriate cage with some Christmas money and started preparing a home for the finches. This weekend I was planning to go to Quincy and bring them back.

About three days ago, Amy surprised me by saying she thought budgies might be OK after all. I was thrilled! I think finches would be wonderful birds, but budgies have such pretty coloring, and they are incredibly smart and playful. To make a long story a long story with a short ending, above is a picture of my two new budgies. Kiwi is the normal green on the left, and Calypso is the pastel yellow and pale green on the right.

Wasted

In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year's gadget and replacing it with this year's model - do we end up tempted to think of people and relationships as disposable? ... If we live in a context where we construct everything from computers to buildings to relationships on the assumption that they'll need to be replaced before long, what have we lost? ... God is involved in building to last … God doesn't give up on the material of human lives ... and God asks us to approach one another and our physical world with the same commitment ... God doesn't do 'waste'

From a New Year's message by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury