Meditation on the Sun

I sit here at the picnic table on the square and let my pen pray
As I hold my face to the light, letting the sun warm me,
Letting the brightness fill me, letting the beauty rise up
And overflow, spilling carelessly where it will in extravagant
Heaps and piles. After all, compared to my small life,
The sun is an inexhaustible source, indiscriminately flooding
The universe with light, a fiery lesson in how to live.

The ANSWER!

In Douglas Adam's classic series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional philosophers builds a computer that can once and for all deliver to them the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. After ruminating for seven and a half million years, the computer finally gives them the answer.

It turns out the ultimate answer is 42.

Flabbergasted, the philosophers realized they never had a clear idea of what the actual question was. The computer (named Deep Thought) then helps them design another, more powerful computer to figure out what the question is. They call it Earth.

One of the reasons I find this series of books so laugh-out-loud-funny is that they contain a lot of truth. You can find Answers anywhere really. Preachers, gurus, self-help books, politicians, activists, scientists, scholars, and a million other sources all claim to have the Answer. We seem to be hard-wired to want the Answer. We think it will make life easier if we just knew. It's nice to believe there is a clear, unambiguous source of absolute truth, an external standard that elucidates all of life (as well as the universe and everything). Once we have the Answer, other people's opinions no longer matter; we know! Once we have the Answer, hard problems go away, replaced with blind certainty.

Some of us think we actually do know. There are fundamentalists (both religious and secular) who believe they know the Answer, that everyone could know the answer if everyone would just listen to them. Of course, the question arises, which group of fundamentalists truly has the Answer, since they don't all agree?

Answers are funny things. They have a tendency to depend on the questions we are asking, and there are a lot of different potential questions out there, even within the bounds of religion. For example, if your question is, "Why is life so hard and unfair?" your answer might have to do with being part of a special group or a final reckoning in the afterlife, with intangible rewards, in fact. If your question is, "How do I find meaning in my life?" your answer might have to do with social justice or service. If your question is, "What can I know for sure?" your answer might look a lot like atheism. The point is, I wonder if we don't often wind up arguing about answers when maybe we would be better off discussing questions.

So what question are you asking? How does your question affect the Answer you come up with?

Bon Appetit

I really enjoyed Jim Haynes' essay for NPR's series "This I Believe," Inviting the World To Dinner. He discusses his love of introducing people to people and his belief that we can love each other even if we do not understand each other.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Harry Potter

I recently finished the final book in J.K. Rowling's unbelievably popular series. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was actually better than I expected. I had read some well-it's-OK-but-not-as-good-as-such-and-such kind of reviews, so I went in not sure what I would think. Now? My enthusiasm for the series has been completely confirmed.

The thing I like about the series more than anything else is that I find in it what recently deceased author Madeleine L'Engle felt was missing from the Harry Potter story: meaning. I enjoy a good story, but more and more as I get older, I like to take something away from the story: some grain of hope, a deeper understanding of myself or other people, some insight into the world. I do not, however, have any fondness whatsoever for allegory or morality tales. They tend to oversimplify the complexity of life and to be preachy. I think when an author tells it like it is, meaning will arise from the story.

Anyway, until the end, I'd have been hard pressed to slap a meaning or theme on the Harry Potter series. Now, looking back, I do see a theme running all the way through; and, ironically enough for all the Harry-Potter-is-the-devil religious uproar over the books, it is perhaps best expressed with a verse from the Christian bible.

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. (Matt 16:25)

I'm not suggesting this theme was J.K. Rowling's purpose for writing the books or that there aren't a million other themes to be found in the books, only that this is the one that stands out to me.

I can hear the fundamentalist sputtering starting already: "But--but--but--" Spit it out. "But, Jesus said, 'for me,' and Harry Potter doesn't say anything about Jesus!" Oh? And what about Jesus' statement that whatever we do for "the least of these" we do for him? Kind of broadens your perspective doesn't it? The fact is that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection were a simple testimony of the power of this idea of finding life by losing it and losing it when we are too busy trying to save it.

I know that reading such terrible books was supposed to lead to my sacrificing my firstborn by a full moon and calling for the devil to possess my soul, but instead I found myself lost in contemplation of the wonderful mystery of the resurrection. It reminds me of a part of a verse from Carrie Newcomer's amazing song, "Holy As A Day Is Spent":

Holy is the place I stand
To give whatever small good I can
And the empty page, and the open book
Redemption everywhere I look

Your mileage may vary, but in this particular open book, I did indeed find plenty of redemption.