Quarantined Qontemplative

9/30/20

SEPTEMBER NONREQUIRED. The start of this month’s NonRequired Reading List begins with this story….“there is a famous Zen story about a teacher who was asked about the highest teaching of Zen. He wrote the word ‘Attention’ on a blackboard. But isn’t there anything else, he was asked. Yes, there is, he said, and he wrote the word ‘Attention’ again. But there must be something more, insisted the student. Yes, there is, the teacher said. And he turned to the board and once more wrote: ‘Attention.’ Now the board said, ‘Attention. Attention. Attention.’” (from Instructions to the Cook, p.104-5) Read the whole thing here or sign up to receive the next one here.

9/29/20

HIKING AS MIRROR. Trekking in the mountains with the misty clouds overhead or the sun warming my ears is a healing practice in contemplative participation in the unknowns of planetary existence. The story of Philip Carcia is one of hiking as contemplative immersion. Read the snippets below to gain his perspective or read the whole article here.

“I’m interested in all of it,” Mr. Carcia said of the solitary nature of hiking — and of life in this uncertain moment. “The human experience and all it encompasses — the good, the bad, the light, the dark.”

“Hiking, Mr. Carcia said, “is hard, but not for the reasons people tell you it’s hard. It’s hard because these mountains are mirrors, just like Covid is a mirror, and they force you to look at yourself. But I love that. I love getting into that underbelly and still having the grit to keep moving forward.”

9/28/20

SAINT COLTRANE. On the first Sunday of each month the Coltrane Church in San Francisco offers A Love Supreme meditation. Love this. I read a story about the church here and we’ve touched on John Coltrane’s influence on Thomas Merton in my conversation with Robert Hudson. Art and spirituality are stitched together in ways impossible to undo.

Here is a description of A Love Supreme Meditation (and if anyone has attended, let me know what it was like!):

“Come calm the mind and tune into the spirit as you are guided through a meditation on the testimony and music of Saint John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Great for old time Coltrane lovers and new listeners as well. Join us and experience the power of this anointed sound…the music and wisdom of Saint John Coltrane.”

9/27/20

RESILIENT. Lot of music in my ears these sweaty (at least in ABQ) Autumn days. This tune was another gear-stopper and heart harmonizer. (h/t to Cliff)

9/26/20

MOTH & MOHTER / NEW FOUNDATIONS. Hey ya’ll, a new podcast musing is up…get it wherever you get podcasts or here.

9/25/20

THE SOIL. The American west burns, an American president signals his grips on power, and the stank of American injustice is all over the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor.

Americans need to lament. Loudly and bravely to tremors we have caused. Below is a song of lament. It holds hope at the fringes, at the return to matter. If you are feeling what I am feeling, turn this one up. Let us lament together.

9/24/20

HEROES & SHEROES. This one goes out to the parents plopping kids in front of educational screens, curating art projects, and sprinkling opportunities for awe and wonder in the days of their young marvels. There is a free activity packet called ‘K-5 Heroes & Sheroes Activity Packet‘ put out by the Corita Art Center. Founded by Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, was an artist with an innovative approach to design and education. By the 1960s, her vibrant serigraphs were drawing international acclaim. Corita’s work reflected her concerns about poverty, racism, and war, and her messages of peace and social justice continue to resonate with audiences today.

I have no words to speak as I carry with me the lack of justice for Breonna Taylor. Many thoughtful pieces are being published and and cries for embodied action are taking place. I encourage you to read those who have the words and those taking actionable steps. Lord have mercy.

9/23/20

TEMPORAL BANDWIDTH. How big is your now? Does it speed skate by? Or thunk to ground like a narcoleptic elephant? Alan Jacobs has a new book out now called Breaking Bread with the Dead and Harper’s shared an excerpt (some highlights below). Jacobs names the feeling that many are bound in as a ‘frenetic standstill’ within a short ‘temporal bandwidth’. He recommends you spend more afternoons with the words of the dead. Take flight to another time so you can step back into the present refreshed and with perspective.

“What do I mean by “temporal bandwidth”? I take that phrase from one of the most infuriatingly complex and inaccessible twentieth-century novels, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Fortunately, you don’t have to read the novel to grasp the essential point that one of its characters makes:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.

Increasing our temporal bandwidth helps us address the condition of frenetic standstill by slowing us down and at the same time giving us more freedom of movement. It is a balm for agitated souls…

Because when the storm—the storm that carries what Rudyard Kipling called the “wind-borne Gods of the Market Place,” the gods who push us about but are themselves pushed by still greater forces that they don’t control—blows the fragile dinghy of your self across the great sea, one day you’ll wake up and wonder how you ended up where you are, where you never wanted to be, where you’d rather not be. No, you’ll think, the purely situational is no way to live. You can’t make a virtue out of that necessity, no matter how quickly things change, because those currents will always be more agile than you are, and more purposeful too. (There are many, many people paid very well to write the code that determines what your situations will be and how you will respond to them. They are highly placed among the Gods of the Market Place.)”

9/22/20

ZERO COST HOUSE. Do you need a dose of theatrical moral philosophy during the pandemic, social turning, and election season to keep a semblance of sanity? Zero Cost House might be the ticket. This play grabbed me by the graying whiskers. A production on frustrating times, chaos, uncertainty, and self-reflection with two versions of the playwright in dialogue. And somehow Thoreau shows up too. Quirky and potentially profound. I am in. Read on to get the fuller story and buy tickets for the Zoom performance (last show!).

The backstory: “Back in 2010, Pig Iron commissioned Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada to create a new play with us. As we began to work on the piece, the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster reordered life in Japan, and Toshiki’s life as well. So Toshiki changed course–in life and in the script he was writing. He left Tokyo and moved west with his family to Kumamoto…’the Columbus, Ohio, of Japan.’ And this was at a time when radiation levels, and contamination of food sources, in Tokyo were fairly unknown. So, like now, there was a lot of confusion and disagreement about safety, about responsibility to your family, and to your city.”

Zero Cost House charts Toshiki’s physical and ethical journey through that time. And Toshiki’s writing–as deeply interior as Samuel Beckett’s, and with a flair for the super-casual that reminds you of Annie Baker–seems ideally suited to Zoom. Toshiki’s company in Japan is called “chelfitsch”–a play on the English word “selfish.” His characters always have one eye on themselves–which, when you think about it, is what we all are doing on Zoom these days.

9/18/20

RULE OF LIFE. A rule of life is a committed path of intentional living in and with God, neighbor, and the whole of creation. Perhaps you have heard of a ‘rule of life’, experimented with cultivating your own, or maybe you have even donned the habit of following in the rhythms of monastic living. If the concept and practice of a rule of life has nipped your curiosity, I encourage you to check out what the fine folks at the Community of the Incarnation are conjuring up. They are offering a session on Exploring a Monastic Rule of Life at 12pm (ET) and 7pm (ET) (same program offered twice) on Tuesday, September 29th. Read more about it here and register here.

9/17/20

CONTEMPLATIVE ECOLOGY. This is an incredible opportunity for those of you interested in the intersection of contemplation, justice, and ecology. Wake Forest is hosting a series of dialogues on contemplative dialogue. It is free to register (do so here). I was present for the first one and am eager for the next two! Questions being pursued in this series:

~ What role can contemplative spiritual traditions play in thinking about and responding to our current ecological challenges?
~ How does contemplative practice and spirituality affect the work of racial justice and healing?

Through a series of dialogues with leading practitioners, scholars, and writers, this series brings together action and contemplation, resistance and restoration. Join us as we host these crucial conversations about how our inner and outer lives can become more aligned to sustain life in a threatened world. Again, sign up for free here!

9/16/20

YOU’RE NOT ALONE. This song was introduced to me by my friend Cliff, whose music suggestions always rattles my bones into dance. This tune is by Our Native Daughters.

9/15/20

A LETTER WRITTEN. Today I share an episode of Contemplify that has been 20 years in the making. It all started when I received a letter that would serve as a North Star for me over two decades. You can listen to this brand spanking new conversation here.

9/13/20

MAKE EACH DAY. It can be so easy to slip in the zombie state, a banal stupor thanks to lazy eyes glued to screens. It helps me to re-member to peel my eyes from the screen to look towards the mountains, water the garden, and walk to the park. I think of filmmaker and photographer Jeff Johnson who makes sure to plant his bare feet on the earth each day. I think of the tactile musing of Theodore Richards in his little book A Letter to My Daughters: Remembering the Last Dimension & the Texture of Life.

“I try, in the world we make each day, to be human, or to do things that will make us human: stay form the screen; read books; get my hands dirty; make food; walk; carry things. But the world conspires against my humanity.” (p. 42)

May you find your humanity outside of a screen today.

9/12/20

HOLD ON. This song is church. That is what Bobby McFerrin does. And this time with The Kuumba Singers (hat tip to Bartunde).

9/11/20 (Additional)

LAST WORDS OF LOVE. I was moved by Ian McEwan’s reporting on the September 11th attacks. Read the full article here and a snippet below.

“A San Francisco husband slept through his wife’s call from the World Trade Centre. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again.We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you. 

She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers. 

Last words placed in the public domain were once the prerogative of the mighty and venerable – Henry James, Nelson, Goethe – recorded, and perhaps sometimes edited for posterity, by relatives at the bedside. The effect was often consolatory, showing acceptance, or even transcendence in the face of death. They set us an example. But these last words spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by the bereaved, are both more haunting and true.”

9/11/20

INEXORABLY EXPOSED. Thomas Merton wrote in The Hidden Ground of Love, “The injustice and cruelty which are by now endemic beneath the surface of our bland and seemingly benign society are too deep and too serious to be cured by legislation, even if by some miracle the legislation were to mean anything in practice. This is all going to have to come out the hard way, and in my opinion (forgive the slight twanging of those apocalyptic wires) the un-Christianity of American Christianity is going to be the inexorably exposed and judged: mine, perhaps, included. The form this Judgement will take will, first of all, be the panic, the hate, the violence, and the fanaticism of people who, calling themselves Christians, will resort to killing in “self-defense” because they are so obsessed with the fear that what they believe in—the affluent society—is being menaced by revolution. It is significant that the TV set, fancy clothes, furniture, liquor and of course weapons are so central in the rioting and looting of the ghetto. This is a religious war over what we all, white and black, really believe in!”

9/10/20

FEET MUST FOLLOW. The poetry of the Zen creature Jim Harrison is shock treatment. Brings me back to life when the woes of the world bowl me over, I turn to Jim. I have now renewed The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems five times. The library tells me no more. Before I return it, let me share the poem, Kobun. Top shelf work.

KOBUN

Hotei didn’t need a zafu
saying that his ass was sufficient.
The head’s a cloud anchor
that the feet must follow.
Travel light, he said,
or don’t travel at all.

9/9/20

SNOW HIKE. The first snow of September and I was in the mountains. My soul was scrubbed of all the barnacles of frivolity.

9/7/20

SUN KIL MOON. The soft potency of the song, “Ocean Breathes Salty”, is best strewn through the filter of Sun Kil Moon. Modest Mouse wrote the song, Sun Kil Moon perfected it. It is a compliment to Modest Mouse. The timeless beauty of a song can be resurrected when another artist passes through, picks it up, and channels it anew with distinction. Take a gander, see if this song wrecks you as much as it does me. A few of the lyrics are below to read through as you listen.

“Well that is that and this is this.
Will you tell me what you saw and I’ll tell you what you missed,
when the ocean met the sky.
You missed when time and life shook hands and said goodbye.
When the earth folded in on itself.
And said “Good luck, for your sake I hope heaven and hell
are really there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste death?

9/6/20

NEVER NOT FLOWING. I am troubled by fathers who document their experiences in books. They read like charades rather than life. So today’s reflection goes out to all of the fathers who have felt this way. This one is for all the dads out there seeking refuge from dull books and demand sharp edges. Read These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letter to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home by Bayo Akomolafe. My recommendation may be premature as I turn the pages of chapter three. But damn, Bayo is a seer on the adventure of home-making and fatherhood. Bayo is alive in his fatherhood and with a sharp poetic pencil he tells us all about it. Check out this passage.

“Do you feel the gravity of things? The way the ground feels beneath you? The tension in your chest as you pull in oxygen and dust, thereby disturbing the boundaries between the inside and the outside? Life and death? Feel the gentle drumming of your heart within, its music rippling through your entire body so that you—in almost imperceptible moves—are never not dancing. Never not flowing. You are moving, even though you sit still, here at the precipice.” (p.20)

This book fills me up like dusty air does my lungs. Be forewarned, I will be exhaling further reflections from this good man soon.

9/5/20

IDEAS.…

9/4/20

HE KEPT PART OF THE FOREST ALIVE. The fires in California are devastating. Fires of that magnitude can be hard to imagine from afar until a story opens a porthole to that reality. The life and death of Tad Jones was that window.

I am drawn to people on the edges. The roughnecks and wanderers who set up shop outside the common order with an examined intent. For three decades Tad Jones had lived in the woods near Big Basin Redwoods Park. Jones lived inside a tree for a spell, took a vow silence to tamp down his temper, and wrote letters to the editor of local papers about rising bus fares. Here is a snippet of the article,

“Up in the mountains, Mr. Jones spent much of his silent days feeding the animals, scattering food in myriad hiding places. He took monthly trips into Santa Cruz, often walking eight miles to the entrance of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, where he would catch a bus to town….Much of the money he received from government benefits or occasional odd jobs seemed to be spent on feeding the animals….“He kept part of the forest alive,” Ms. Rhoads said.”…He delighted in feeding the California quail, peacocks, blue jays — and foxes in the evenings.

“His companions were the animals,” said his sister, Jill Jones. “When you take a vow of silence — and he was pretty much a monk — what’s around you is critters, and other people are not necessarily going to understand who you are and what you’re doing.”

The pace of the fire and the overstretched fire department was a dangerous combo that created the conditions for the folks on Last Chance Road to receive the news late that the fire was headed their direction. Mr. Jones ultimately died in the fire that ripped through his home land. May he Rest In Peace.

9/3/20

FUTURE PERFECT. The Future Perfect Podcast comes highly recommended to me from two excellent sources. Here is the rundown. “Future Perfect explores provocative ideas with the potential to radically improve the world. That’s never felt more urgent than it does today. But the truth is that humankind has faced crises throughout our history, leaving behind rich wisdom for us to draw from.” To see the full list of available episodes, check it out here.

9/1/20

GLEAM. Music is an integral part of my personal ecosystem. It keeps the spirit ready and soul squeaky cleans. The Avett Brothers just released an album called The Third Gleam. Songs like ‘Victory’, ‘Back Into the Light’, ‘Untitled #4’, ‘I Go to My Heart’ and ‘The Fire’ are imbued with a contemplative swagger. You can watch their Red Rocks Concert from last year on PBS for the next week as a part of fundraiser. For now, take a break to recalibrate the soul by previewing their song ‘Untitled #4’ below.