Posts filed under 'Beauty'
February 12th, 2008
One thing about being flat-in-bed sick for four days is that, after you’ve grown weary of reading and television, it gives you time for something like a mind search. The imposed silence and solitude of my sick-bed cloister gave time, outside of episodes of feverish unconsciousness that is, for picking through my soul’s innards. And what I found as I began to trudge along through all those coils were cysts and pustules of worry. Larger and more lethal than I had realized.
The joke that worry pays because 99 percent of what we worry about never happens exposes a shadowy truth about my mental makeup. I worry as a way to control outcome. Someplace inside I believe that sifting through every unhappy consequence of a given situation steers the outcome away from the cliff-edge. When I examine the logic I see the lie, but worry countenances no logic. Even when it does, I still keep the fret-practice because I believe it will at least prepare me for disappointment…or worse.
I thought I would worry less as I aged. It hasn’t happened. I’ve been conspired against. I lay the blame on layers of responsibility, but in reality the additions have been marginal. What I have is a well cultivated habit. That’s what I found as I went inside.
Hating the fact that I lose so much vital juice on stewing I wanted to (again) curb the thing. I’m not stupid enough to believe I’d ever put a stop to worrying, but reining it in seems doable.
That’s why this line from Psalm 51–that I read sometime while being ill–seemed to hold promise: “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” This spoke to me of a specific kind of displacement.
Mystics from all traditions say that the “inward being” or the “secret heart,” is where God resides. Christ said the Kingdom of God is within. God, as Wisdom, as truth and beauty and peace and freedom and Love waits within. Most often God is crowded out by a blimp full of ego and anxiety. Crowded out that is, by what’s not altogether real.
It seems to me that worry is a shell game, it puts on a show but it’s a swindle. To worry is to live within an unreality. That’s why, ultimately, it’s so useless. If it was a real thing it would be useful. So to displace the unreal with the real, to replace what’s fraudulent with what’s faithful is Wisdom’s education. Wisdom effaces worry. Sophia/Wisdom is resting in God’s presence.
But how do you find God’s presence within which you can rest, worry free? To long for it always, say the Saints, is enough. Failing that, long for the longing. Longing leads the search and the search shows that because God resides within in profound silence, God’s mystical presence can only found in silence. I suppose my imposed silence and solitude taught me something close to this. At least it rekindled in me the importance of meditation or “centring prayer,” which has been far too sporadic for too long.
A kind of conclusion: The way, then, to worry worry is to meditate.
January 18th, 2008
This morning I was in conversation with my muse. Well she’s not really a muse, but I don’t know how else to describe her. Still, I want to name her after Erato, the muse of lyric and love poetry, but she’s far too impulsive and precisely imprecise. But then, maybe I’ve just described love poetry. In any case I hadn’t seen her for such a long time so I asked her what happened and where she’d been. She said,
Oh, it’s going to be a long walk back, but the walk must be taken, and frankly, I could use the air. You see, somewhere, last year, I don’t remember, fall perhaps, I lost my bearings. There at the foggy conjunction of worry I lost my power to observe. I was assailed and even seduced by anxiety and drawn shallowly inward, taking nothing with me except a tin shield. A kind of day to day shell-shocked existence took root.
Well, I had forgotten that every perfect outward gaze is also a look deep inside. I lost the connection. And with it I lost the courage, the force, the energy to gaze. Lost the taste for it, and so the ability to blend and produce new flavours, new shapes and colours. So now I’m going to trace my steps backward–which how ever you cut it, is forward movement–and walk as long as it takes to find that murky crossroad. If all goes well, I’ll then emerge from the mist on a new path.
With this, her coffee only half finished, she left the table and walked out the door. But not before hooking up with the tall thin man. I had barely noticed him sitting silently in a corner. He gathered himself, a bit stiffly I thought, got up and took the offered hand of the nameless muse who is not. He straightened visibly and as they left they shared a laugh.
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Muse,
Erato
January 12th, 2008
I feel the pressure of accepting coffee cake because the barista is enthused about it. And so it begins.
I want a day without pressure. I want a day that is kept at bay. But how? How do you keep the blur of it from flooding your early morning and washing away a delicate form in the snow, the alive sharpness of frost in air, the dark trail of wood grain in an empty chair, or the familiar smell of espresso? How do you release yourself and become intimate with a moment?
The right song can wrap you in its arms and stop time. Also, a black and white photograph of an empty street, perhaps in Mexico, save for a bicycle, sews up a second. Too, the red sweatered back of a reader and her book and coffee, and above her the play of neon light on a window across the avenue. And now the mocha voice of Ray Charles in Georgia, slows the blur. A second of swagger here would break the rhythm but there is none from Ray, not on Georgia.
But then, I suppose, it’s not time stopped in its tracks that we crave. It is rhythm. Because rhythm is the willing handmaiden of awareness. And noticing is living.
It is possible that the big reason we have been dropped into this world is to simply notice it, notice it in all its radiance; and to be mindful of all its creatures, in all their broken glory.
Noticing…like the very same barista who anticipates my direction and hands me the washroom key without me asking. Not a moment pressure there.
,
January 4th, 2008
By a bus stop on Saanich road we set up our furniture. A sofa, arm chairs, a pole lamp–humped through the sagging front door of our listing bungalow, carried across the street and placed on the sidewalk under a ‘no parking’ sign. And there we sat drinking and smoking for half a day until the police came and watched us drag everything back across the asphalt past the stumpy caraganas releasing it all onto an overgrown front yard. In those days we stole time without trying or noticing. In those days time went nova and nothing escaped notice; nothing 
was lost or wasted or in need of redemption. We marked our lives under the shade of maples on boulevards and measured them by park boundaries and benches and cracks in concrete and tangles of driftwood. And we were never far from being in love. And when love ran out we fell in love with the idea of being in love. We were of no fixed address but never displaced. There was always space, place, and time. No one suffered and died under the weight of headlines. When the world grew large and unmanageable we sought out the islands. When the islands shrank we rowed out on books. When books sailed us too near the falls above the jagged rocks we berthed and hiked back to the buskers on Government street. Because on Government street mixed among the pretentious pillars breathed the mercy of their music. And beneath the egregious steeples lived the mercy of artists playing out scenes on cinder. And drifting above the sleeping poets, the laughter of office workers at lunch. All this we counted on, as I count on still, that mercy will always mix in, always recline within steel’s speed, always park itself under ‘no parking’ signs and twine its tendrils up and over the hard surfaces of life.
January 2nd, 2008
Yesterday I again came upon the thirteenth century Sufi, Jalal al-Din Rumi. My encounter with him was through the book "The Islamist"–which is Ed Husain's story of his early fascination and adoption of Islamic fundamentalism, his subsequent disillusionment, and finally his journey away from indoctrination.
During his move away from that extremist form of Islam he began reading Sufi literature and while visiting Turkey he "met" Rumi.
His story reminded me of this particular poem of Rumi's. Perhaps it can act as a kind of launch pad into the New Year. If and when it fits, consider it your Grow Mercy New Year's blessing.
Be with those who help your being 
Be with those who help your being.
Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.
A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don’t try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it’s too late for all you could become.
Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots
and makes them green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?
Happy New Year!
December 20th, 2007
It’s early and dark. In the south-east there is a place were the sun will come up, should it choose. Indications are good. So I wait for the first signs of brightening behind the city-scape.
Winter waits too. The soil of summer-fallow waits, bulbs wait, bamboo is excellent at waiting, geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, waiting for its equinox.
But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait and will never care to wait. And we use them and anything else we can think of to train the waiting out of our lives.
The world of industry is bringing waiting to an end. Commerce keeps company with the future. Companies race each other to see how far they can project themselves into the future, or how much of it they can drag into the present. A destruction of both.
There is madness here that we’ve normalized. We forget that this life, our second womb, has something to do with waiting. Waiting, not like Estragon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now.
Advent is the season of specific expectation. A time for rekindled waiting. A rendezvous with a midwife.
In Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. But as people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection, in the knowledge that there was a birth and that the son has risen. We wait as one waits for dawn.
I can’t see it yet but soon the east will grow lavender. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan river, the trees high on the bank will become skeletal as behind them the light strengthens.
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Advent,
Waiting
December 17th, 2007
Bob MacLaughlin died Dec 9, 2007. His funeral was held this past Friday in Clyde, Alberta. The hall was full.
Instead of flowers, people brought musical instruments and laid them beside the urn containing Bob’s ashes.
Here’s the eulogy I gave Bob.
Always remembered, always cherished
Sable Ridge Reunion…
December 16th, 2007
I watch evening’s documentary on Rumi and find my morning in his poetry.
Be silent, like a fish,
and go into that pleasant sea.
You are in deep waters now,
of life’s blazing fire.
Why do you worry?
And at morning coffee I find myself in a Psalm watching for love.
Singers and dancers alike say,
“All my springs are in you.”
Technorati Tags:
Rumi,
Psalms,
Springs
November 29th, 2007
Poets and mystics have always known that beneath the skim of the observable lies a schema, a web, an indefinable something, that ties us all together in ways that precede reason and our very “selves.” In other words, they have always known that the “autonomous self” is a phantom.
Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire uncovered more than a corner this “something,” and his eminent disciple and interpreter James Alison–Grow Mercy’s inspiration–gave us ways to speak of and begin to integrate this social-constructing-something, this unifying-like-principle-in-need-redemption into our faith.
Fields converge. Now, (giving scientific credence to Girard’s anthropological/psychological soundings) three Italian neuroscientists have lifted the hem high.
In 1996 it happened that a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma, Italy, were studying premotor neuron dynamics. They had run electrodes into a few individual neurons in a macaque monkey’s premotor cortex (in humans, centers for pain, empathy, language) to monitor neural activity as the monkey reached for different objects. The eureka moment came when one of the scientists walked into the room where the monkey was and reached out and picked up a raisin. As the monkey watched, its premotor neurons fired just as they had when the monkey had picked up the raisin. They were astonished. What they had witnessed was a sort of sympathetic, observation-driven firing of neurons. It had always been held that these neurons fired only in action. But after replicating the experiment many times and many ways they realized they had discovered something new. The team, Giaocomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi later named these mirror neurons.
Much has happened in a decade and the research is finally filtering down.
Researchers, using brain imaging rather than electrodes, have found human mirror-neuron systems more robust and numerous than those of monkeys and existing not just in the premotor cortex. (i.e. The inferior parietal areas, the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus, and the insula. David Dobbs)
What is the relevance of all this? Here’s a thought from V.S. Ramachandran, professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Director of Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California:
The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution is the single most important “unpublicized” story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
Of course mystics didn’t need proof, but neuroscientists may now be giving us cause enough to finally put the autonomous self out of it’s misery. And this is only one humanizing benefit coming out of this breaking discovery.
More to come…
November 20th, 2007
They’re playing James Taylor in Starbucks these days. Always good to be reminded that “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Yesterday I bought a hot chocolate for a young man who obviously spent the night outside. He was in Starbucks occupying himself with a glass of water. Beyond the obvious incongruity of looking like you live outside, try sitting in Starbucks without a drink and see if you don’t stick out?
He sipped the hot drink through the topping then retrieved a straw to spoon the whipped cream into his mouth. When he spilled a few drops of chocolate he instinctively bent to lick it off the table top.
This morning I read about a place where everyone will have a home. A place where, we are promised, “there are many dwelling places,” and that, “if it wasn’t so we would not have been told (G-of-John).” A promise kept, regarding housing. How refreshing is that?
The day before that I read Jesus’ comment that we would always have the poor among us. Charge me with heterodoxy but remember who Jesus was talking to when he said this. It was of course the fastidious Judas. The cunning keeper of the books. Is it any wonder with people like Judas keeping accounts that poverty flourishes, that the poor remain?
It has started to snow. I watch as headlights round 109th and see a sudden swirl of luminous flakes brought into relief and mirror-ball the entire intersection. It’s early Tuesday morning but Taylor is singing “Steamroller” and I can almost imagine a dance breaking out under the new incandescence of Jasper and 9th.
What say?…one cold snowy December morning we beg or steal all the patio gas heaters, set them up on their poles all along the downtown streets and avenues, then call all the libidinous young men who always have sub-woofers in the trunks of their cars, give them only Taj Mahal CD’s to play, and take a conga-line to work.
(By the way, you can blame the snow on me, I wore sandals today.)
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Mystics from all traditions say that the “inward being” or the “secret heart,” is where God resides. Christ said the Kingdom of God is within. God, as Wisdom, as truth and beauty and peace and freedom and Love waits within. Most often God is crowded out by a blimp full of ego and anxiety. Crowded out that is, by what’s not altogether real. 
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