Category Archives: Humanities

In the Middle Was the Word

It’s pretty clear to me that the books listed in my sidebar cannot compete with the siren song of my newfound love. Knitting and I are united. What is this thing, knitting? My hands. Yes, my hands. By manipulating yarn in loops around bamboo sticks and guiding progress with my fingers, stitch after stitch and row upon row accumulate. Something substantial emerges. I’m fascinated. I’m also getting tired and making mistakes. The bright side to that is that I’m beginning to understand the stitches and see how to correct mistakes. Fine, but I need a break. Yet the books in queue — at least, the ones that aren’t novels — don’t draw me. So it’s time to put Beyond the Writers’ Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, and Soul Collage: An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups back in the bookcase for another day. Time to sink into some fiction and give the brain a rest from creating new neural pathways.

Fortunately I acquired several books recently based on reader recommendations. I haven’t given The Master Butcher’s Singing Club a fair shake, so I’ll try again. Along with The Boys of My Youth, Miriam’s Kitchen, and Family Matters.

An Unnerving Stranger

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards … It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, how ever boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

And doesn’t this point to something fundamentally tragic about our way of life? We live under an assumed identity, in an nuerotic fairy tale world with no more reality than the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. Hypnotized by the thrill of building, we have raised the houses of our lives on sand. This world can seem marvelously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?

–Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living & Dying

You Make a Promise

For some reason memory brought up Mary Karr’s second memoir, Cherry, which details her adolescent experiences near Port Arthur, Texas (on the Gulf). At one point she recalls falling into a deep depression around age 13, although like all great writers, she doesn’t call it that; she describes her experiences, thoughts, and feelings. There was one passage that I found wry, sweet, and affirming, and that generated a welling in my eyes — both for the message of the tale and her method of writing. Here it is:
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Hidden Ground

By being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained; the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.

–Thomas Merton, Essential Writings

Eager

I had my second knitting class today, where I learned the purl stitch. It was so very awkward at first, but my fingers are getting more adept. I also decided that I want to make a hat, a sample of which is on a styrofoam head at Commuknity. Nathania found the pattern — it’s a Rowan — and said she’d help me through. It calls for size 15 needles, so I got them. “Pace yourself,” my inner critic says. Well, I am. I haven’t bought all the yarn that’s wooing me from every shelf and cubbyhole in the store!

Here’s a terribly selfish thought. I want to make things, but I only need so many scarves, hats, and hotpads. I’m not sure I want to get into complex projects like sweaters. I could knit scarves until kingdom come, except that yarn — the gorgeous kind that’s fun to work with — can be expensive. I can give them away to loved ones, and I will. After a point, however, they too will have their fill of such things. That leaves knitting for charities. I’m all for that, except — and here’s the selfish part — making a scarf out expensive yarn for someone who may not appreciate that gives me pause. And I feel a twinge of shame for that.

Speaking of yarn, I wish I’d bought three skeins of the Crystal Palace yarn I’m using for my first scarf. I can see now it won’t be long enough, and it’s too wide. I’m going to “reverse knit” and start over to make it less wide. Now that I’m more coordinated, the stitches will be more even too. This should keep me occupied until my last class, which is in two weeks.

There’s so much still to learn! Increases, decreases, stitch holders, yarn types… Bring it on!

Meditating With Community

Here’s an interesting idea. Someone started a comment blog devoted to meditation. It’s called 100 days, and the goal is to commit to 100 days of meditation. You participate by leaving a comment. They are on Day 20, but you can start anytime. Your meditation can be from any spiritual tradition. What happens when they reach 100 days? I hope they start over. And over again.

I like how many ways people creatively use the Internet.

[via Hoarded Ordinaries]

Recommend Something

Finally, finally I have an Amazon gift certificate in hand (from my Amazon Visa account). They mismanaged their reward program twice, and I had to call and write several times. Finally I closed the account and told them why. It came within a week.

So now I have $25 burning a hole in my pocket. I have a wishlist to pick from, but before I do, I’d love to hear from you.

I would prefer to purchase non-fiction books and save fiction to borrow from the library. So… what non-fiction title would you recommend I read? It can be memoir, history, politics, any social science, poetry, religion, or psychology — or any topic that you’re enthused about. What book has spoken to you that you think others would benefit from reading? If you’re wondering what my taste in books is, check out what I’ve been reading for the last few years; that may guide your recommendation.

I’m looking forward to your comments! Please do share. Yes, I’m talking to you (especially if you normally lurk and don’t ever comment). 🙂

Happy Mabon

One day late…

For All

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

–Gary Snyder

via Whiskey River

Even Within Hearts

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Impractical and Immoral

Violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

–Martin Luther King, Jr.

No Such Thing As Sudden Enlightenment

People talk about sudden enlightenment, a sudden glimpse, satori and all kinds of other spiritual attainments. But those things require the conditions for you to pull yourself together. You need to be in the right frame of work, so to speak, and frame of mind to experience such a thing. So-called sudden enlightenment needs enough preparation for it to be sudden. Otherwise, it can’t be sudden. If you have a sudden accident in your motor car, you have to be driving in your car. Otherwise, you can’t have the accident. That is the whole point: whenever we talk about suddenness and sudden flashes of all kinds, we are talking in terms of conditional suddenness, conditional sudden enlightenment. Sudden enlightenment is dependent on the slow growth of the spiritual process, the growth of commitment, discipline and experience. This takes place not only in the sitting practice of meditation alone, but also through the life-long experience of dealing with your wife, your husband, your kids, your parents, your job, your money, your sex life, your aggressive life, whatever you have. You have to deal with everything you experience in your life, and you have to work with and learn from those situations. Then, the gradual process is almost inevitable, and we could almost say quite safely at this point that scholastically and experientially there is no such thing as sudden enlightenment in Buddhism at all.

–Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Library Nerd

Recently I was contacted by Tim Spalding, developer of a new web interface for book cataloging called LibraryThing. I checked it out. What a creative idea! Just the thing for us librarian souls. It extracts data from the Library of Congress catalog. You can share your catalog or keep it private. And there’s a widget (ooo, a widget!) to put on your blog to show people what you’re reading.

I currently use a free computer software called Books for Mac OS X, and it does a nice job of helping me keep track of what I’ve lent and borrowed. What appeals about LibraryThing is the potential for finding what others are reading by using search tags. I’m also drawn to it because I’m a nerd for all things books and libraries.

My only concern with LibraryThing is whether it will exist for the duration. Online applications tend to come and go. AllConsuming morphed and I lost all that I’d previously input. I’m not eager to waste effort. We’ll see. My library currently has 750+ titles. If Tim finds a way to make it possible to import my titles from my current software, then I may just sign up.

Update, 12:06 a.m. 9/13: This is addictive! I started adding my current reads and from there it sucked me in. Whoosh!

Why Should We?

Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?

Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?

–Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit