You will miss the mundane

 

I can so relate to this excerpt. I am an ardent lover of the mundane, it defines me like nothing else does. 😊 Maybe because I take nothing for granted. Every change of the light is a gift.

Jack Gilbert also expressed it so beautifully, in this poem:

"I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember."

"You'll miss the mundane walk from the post office to the store to the house--the dog greeting you; the neighbors waving; the breeze on your face. You'll miss the slow woman who disrupted your pace.

You won't know this until the walk is difficult or impossible.

There is something to loving the mundane--Thornton Wilder, I believe, dealt with this, to great and roaring cynicism. Be awake and alive and present, because this is your own great and gilded age, and it's going to slip away with brutal swiftness.

People pay small fortunes to see a whale for three seconds or an eagle fly ahead, but they race through their one and only life. I'm fairly positive that I'll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness."

Alec Guinness, Interview with James Grissom

The Love of your Fate

 

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. 

If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. 

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. 

Joseph Campbell, Book: Reflections on the Art of Living (I have yet to read this book)

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Audible Audiobook

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage

 

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage.

So I sat still for three days
and God came to me.

Kabir, in 'Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West'

A Gift

 

The middle of June, and I awake
to rain - gentle, persistent, enough
to soak the  ground and clear  the air.
 
Isn't this the best kind of surprise-
the thing you wanted but couldn't get
for yourself and didn't know
that you could have? Already
the frogs are singing and the grass
stretches its roots in rejoicing.
 
And here am I, with my damp hair
and empty hands, and nothing to say
but "Oh!" and "Thank you!"
 
Once again the world - my one
true love - has brought me flowers.
 
Lynn Ungar, 9 Jun 2023

I am part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking

'Thinking like a mountain' was one of the books recommended by Malvika Solanki during an amazing permaculture course I did with her in June, a birthday gift to myself. From philosophy to science to ecology to poetry - increasingly all my reading is resulting in a blurring of the lines, the understanding of how we need to see everything as a whole, whether it be our own bodies, or our existence in the world. The source of much of our conflict is seeing ourselves as separate, not a part of an intricate web. 

"When humans investigate and see  through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognized as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. 

What is described here should not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined, and the easiest one to communicate. For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions on behalf of Mother Earth. "I am protecting the rainforest" develops to "I am part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking." What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like  a mountain, sometimes referred to as "deep ecology". 

Page 35, 36, Beyond Anthropocentrism

From 'Thinking like a Mountain' , by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess

Photo: Bandipur, Nilgiris range of mountains. Near Malvika Solanki's farm, where I did the permaculture course. Life-changing. This was one of the books recommended by her. 

Swayyam: https://swayyam.org/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/swayyam/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swayyam_permaculture/ 

A Conscious Return to Simplicity

"Speaking as a Chinese, I do not think any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life's tragedy and then life's comedy. 

For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening and out of awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot."

'The Importance of Living'​​
Lin Yutang

Imagination

"..The greater the imaginative power of a man, the more perpetually he is dissatisfied. That is why an imaginative child is always a more difficult child; he is more often sad and morose like a monkey, than happy and contented like a cow. Also divorce must necessarily be more common among the idealists and the more imaginative people than among the unimaginative. The vision of an ideal life companion has an irresistible force which the less imaginative and less idealistic never feel. On the whole, humanity is as much led astray as led upwards by this capacity for idealism, but human progress without this imaginative gift is itself unthinkable.

...Some dream a little more than the others, as there is a child in every family who dreams more and perhaps one who dreams less. And I must confess a secret partiality for the one who dreams. Generally he is the sadder one, but no matter; he is also capable of greater joys and thrills and heights of ecstasy. For I think we are constituted like a receiving set for ideas, as radio sets are equipped for receiving music from the air. Some sets with finer response pick up the finer short waves which are lost to the other sets, and why, of course, that finer, more distant music is all the more precious if only because it is less easily perceivable."

'The Importance of Living'
Lin Yutang

Grace

Anne Lamott wrote this in June 2018, but so relevant to the present!

"The world can feel like an alcoholic father sitting in the living room in his vile underwear, tranced out or abusive; and the world can feel like your favorite auntie who thinks you are just great, still likes to hike, always brings trail mix, and knows her wildflowers. 

These are excruciating times, and this is the kingdom. It’s two, two, two mints in one. 

So yeah, some of us are a little tense. But we are not flattened. Nor do we look away from the suffering of others. And no matter how bad things look and how long change is taking, we don’t give up on goodness. Here is proof: we still take care of each other in ways that are profound, loving and sacrificial, by the bedside of our most beloved, and in the streets. We show up: the secret of life. 

We gather in cities to rise up, and at local parks for live music in the sun, where we and our cranky neighbor end up doing the old tribal hippie two-step in the same shaft of light. We are still laughing—some of us perhaps a bit maniacally—and people are creating the greatest, most live-giving routines and cartoons and responses. 

This is what saved me during the Cheney years. It was chemo. So, great laughter, community, joyous and/or sacrificial love. We can work with this! It is more than enough.

 Here’s the one fly in the ointment: we have to do this in dim lighting, what with a political fever dream, and our own failing memories and overwhelm. 

Life is always like E.L. Doctorow’s great line about writing, that it is like driving at night with the headlights on—you can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way. 

You still have to buckle up, no matter how slowly the car is moving. Put on the radio and sing along, loudly and off key. You just have to trust that, as John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” 

I heard a story last week from a sober friend that almost completely captures my understand of goodness and life, a story that has been medicine for my worried, worried soul: Caroline stopped drinking 30 years ago, at the age of 40, with zero interest or belief in any kind of higher power to whom she might be able to turn when cravings overcame her. 

But after a year of white-knuckle sobriety, contemptuous of a higher power, hanging on through will power, she one day heard and then found a frog in her shower. She lifted it and gently carried it in her cupped hands through the house. She could feel and, of course, imagine its terror. She took it out to the garden, where there was a moist patch of earth over near the blackberries, and set it down. It sat stock still for a bit, and then hopped away into the bushes. She said, “My name is Caroline. I’m that frog.”

 I am, too, and I am also a big helper. When I have felt most isolated and lost, I have always ended up being carried back to the garden in people’s good hands, to where I need to be, afraid and not breathing. for much of the way. And I have helped carry scared people, the best I could. You have, too. 

Isn’t that what grace is, when some force of kindness, against all odds, with unknown hands, brings us from fear and hard tiles to a moist patch earth, and sets us down? If I were God’s west coast representative, I would speed up the process a bit, and hand out klieg lights but I can’t. 

All I can do is to try and help you get back to where there is moist soil and fresh air, and let you help me. And those happen to be the two things I most want in life."

Joy is a function of Focus

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. 

Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. 

If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. 

Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. 

So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem 

“The Weighing”

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

From here thanks to Maria Popova

I must be the sun

Solar

On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.

I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky.  I must be the one

to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.

When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.

I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.

On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
one stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination.  Even on a day

that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.

I have to make all the difference.

Thomas Centolella

Views from along the Middle Way (yet to read)

We must travel on our knees

Watching the Jet Planes Dive

We must go back and find a trail on the ground
back of the forest and mountain on the slow land;
we must begin to circle on the intricate sod.
By such wild beginnings without help we may find
the small trail on through the buffalo-bean vines.

We must go back with noses and the palms of our hands,
and climb over the map in far places, everywhere,
and lie down whenever there is doubt and sleep there.
If roads are unconnected we must make a path,
no matter how far it is, or how lowly we arrive.

We must find something forgotten by everyone alive,
and make some fabulous gesture when the sun goes down
as they do by custom in little Mexico towns
where they crawl for some ritual up a rocky steep.
The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.

William Stafford, 'Ask Me'

We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all

We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all

But then when we started to lose one thing after another,
Each day became
A memorial day --

And then we made songs
Of great divine generosity
And of our former riches.

Anna Akhmatova, tr. Ilya Shambat

Thank you, Joanne Zeni. I first read Anna Akhmatova in my twenties. The fiery Russian poet whopassed away in 1966. It feels like something written now...

No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! :)

"You probably believe that when somebody tries to tell you something about yourself that is a little ticklish and a little uncomfortable, they are attacking you. They are not. They are trying to make you into a better person. And we don't tend to believe that this has a role in love.

We tend to believe that true love means accepting the whole of us. It doesn't. No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! You really want the whole of you accepted? No, that's not love. The full display of our characters, the full articulation of who we are, should not be something that we do in front of anyone we care about.

So what we need to do is to accept that the other person is going to want to educate us. And that it isn't a criticism. Criticism is merely the wrong word we apply to a much nobler idea, which is to try and make us into better versions of ourselves. But we tend to reject this idea very strongly."

Minute 11, 'Mating Minds — Alain de Botton on Attachment Styles and the Art of Compromise'

Duration: 15.58 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLNaKCk_Pjo 

Mutual Education

 "And for the ancient Greeks, the whole notion of love is that love should be a process of mutual education. In which two people, under the auspices of love, undertake to educate one another to become better versions of themselves. And they do this not to be cruel, not as a way of bringing each other down, but because they have the sincerest best interests of the other at their heart. And therefore love is a process whereby a teacher and a pupil are constantly rotating roles. Everyone is the teacher and everyone is the pupil at certain points and has lots of things to take on board.

This is not a sign that love has been abandoned. It is the proof that love is in action."

Minute 34.39, Alain de Botton, 'On Love' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-iUHlVazKk)

And the darkness is not complete

Indeed. "Though much is taken, much abides."  And there's more to admire in men than to despise. My faith has been tested, but remains. :) Wishing you all a great holiday season and fresh beginnings. Thank you for all your kind words. It's been a tough year but it has carved me deeper to receive even more of the world's kindness. As always, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. 

Solstice

These are dark times. Rumors of war
rise like smoke in the east. Drought
widens its misery. In the west, glittering towers
collapse in a pillar of ash and dust. Peace,
a small white bird, flies off in the clouds.
And this is the shortest day of the year.

Still, in almost every window,
a single candle burns,
there are tiny white lights
on evergreens and pines,
and the darkness is not complete.

Barbara Crooker

Down Hysterica Passio! The Stirring of the Beast Beneath

I used to write down interesting things I read, in notebooks, pre-internet days. I have 5 of them, I think I started in 1982, while I was at school - shy child whose only interactions were with people in books. I copied down this passage at age 21. I did not know then how true it is!

Later on in life I learned the hard way about the need to be angry at the right time, to use rightful anger to initiate positive action, make things better, ensure self-preservation, safeguard one's self-respect. I was surprised to hear myself tell someone recently - you don't have to show anger or be destroyed by it, you can use it as fuel to do amazing things. I wish I had that wisdom earlier, but better late than never. :)

"We all have something within ourselves to batter down, and we get our power from this fighting. I have never 'produced' a play in verse without showing the actors that the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence, or madness - 'down Hysterica Passio'.

All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath. Without this conflict we have no passion, only sentiment and thought."

W.B.Yeats, in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley. From 'Yeats: The Man and the Masks', by Richard Ellmann

Notebook 5, 12 June 1989

Related post, on the importance of discovering one's rage: https://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2010/08/enkidu.html

Picture: Angry Samurai mask, from here.

Now I am becoming my own tree

“In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put faith in travel

now I am becoming my own tree.” 

W. S Merwin

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/variations  

But sometimes restriction creates more freedom

This gave me goose pimples.

How Did Hokusai Create The Great Wave?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEubj3c2How

I had used the image in here: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-matters-that-you-care.html

It matters that you care

"The great Katsushika Hokusai was an artist, a Japanese one but ironically least like a typical Japanese artist.  Japan's best known woodblock print, his Great Wave, is also typically un-Japanese. "

Hokusai Says

Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing

He says look forward to getting old.

He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.

He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive --
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.

He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn't matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn't matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.

It doesn't matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.

He says don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

Roger Keyes

Listen to this poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1joKzx7-M_k

Caretake This Moment

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.
Quit the evasions.
Stop giving yourself needless trouble.

It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
You are not some disinterested bystander.
Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.
Ask yourself often, How may I perform this particular deed
such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will?
Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut and your room is dark you are not alone.
The will of nature is within you as your natural genius is within.
Listen to its importunings.
Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.
Give your best and always be kind.

Epictetus (Epictetus: The Art of Living a New Interpretation by Sharon Lebell)